The Other McCain

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

Actually, Sprinklerman Has A Straighforward Play

Posted on | April 26, 2011 | Comments Off on Actually, Sprinklerman Has A Straighforward Play

by Smitty

Morrissey makes it sound as though the Speaker of the House was ‘a young apprentice / caught between the Scylla and Charybdis’ when it comes to the debt ceiling:

Of course, most voters don’t want the debt-ceiling limit raised, either. That gives Boehner a lot more political leverage than he normally would have, since he can claim to represent the mandate of the electorate — and a broadly bipartisan mandate at that. Even a plurality of Democratic voters don’t want it raised again (48% to 36% supporting an increase in the CBS poll). But that’s also a trap for Boehner even if a deal is finally struck that includes both entitlement reform and a debt-ceiling hike; the result will be unpopular for both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

That means that Boehner has to get entitlement reform and take ownership of it while putting the blame for the debt-limit increase on the White House, an effort amply assisted by the Obama administration’s early hysteria strategy on the issue. He can’t afford to come out of the battle with nothing but the debt-limit increase and some assorted discretionary-spending caps that save just tens of billions of dollars like he did with the FY2011 budget. There are no real ways to win in this fight, but plenty of ways to lose. Boehner’s latest warning is a recognition of that fact.

Lacking GOP control of both chambers of commerce, it seems that the sucking wallet wound is going to continue to extract lifeblood from the American people.
One route Boehner could take would be to play the Simpson-Bowles card:

The plan would reduce cost-of-living increases for all federal programs, including Social Security. It would reduce projected Social Security benefits to most retirees in later decades, though low-income people would get higher benefits. The retirement age for full benefits would be slowly raised to 69 from 67 by 2075, with a “hardship exemption” for people who physically cannot work past 62. And higher levels of income would be subject to payroll taxes.

But the plan would not count Social Security savings toward the overall deficit-reduction goal that Mr. Obama set for fiscal year 2015, reflecting the chairmen’s sensitivity to liberal critics who have complained that Social Security should be fixed only for its own sake, not to help balance the nation’s books.

Substantially leverage the entitlement reform pieces of that, and serve it up as the President’s own work. For added snark, publish the legislation with a watermark based upon the Hawaiian long form birth certificate. Then, the President has to defend, again, the old panel he’s blown off. VP Biden would feel the heat, too, on his new panel. Oh wait, he has no clue.
After that fracas, the debt limit can be raised by enough to bring the issue up again in another month. If we’re going to talk about the President like a dog, let us ensure he returneth to his vomit, say, monthly. It will help mellow him out, for caustic values of ‘mellow’.
Cubachi points to Sen. Mike Lee at The National Review preaching the Balanced Budget Amendment. Ho hum. When you’ve got a drug addict running the pharmacy, what good are promises? Tell me what you’re doing to separate the junkie from the pills, where ‘doing’ means ‘stripping power’.

Category: Hot Air

Rhetorical Question Day at The Corner

Posted on | April 26, 2011 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

Steven Hayward and Jonah Golberg have questions, and I have answers.

Hayward quotes Kinsley, emphasis mine:

If the deficit doesn’t matter, why have any taxes at all? And if there is some point at which the deficit does start to matter, and become dangerous, when is that point if $1.6 trillion isn’t it?

Three reasons, for starters:

  1. Behavior shaping. Individuals may or may not have freewill, but the population as a whole gets mighty sheepish. For example, Washington can bait a lot of people into electric cars, then turn around and tax them. Brilliant!
  2. Class warfare. The assumption of eminent domain over every American wallet is a fantastic divide-and-conquer tool. The poor get a kickback every spring from the Treasury, the rich can be conveniently demonized for not paying that ‘fair share’, and the middle class feels nutty there in the nutcracker.
  3. ‘Job’ growth through complexity. The less intelligible the tax code, the more staff required at all levels to manage it, and the more secondary opportunity there is. Before Gutenberg, literacy was a full-time job. The tax wonk is the modern scribe. Who says Progressives are not conservative, after their sick fashion. If the IRS added to the economy, instead of taking, it would be such a Good Thing.

Goldberg is right behind Hayward, again, my emphasis:

Why have a debt limit at all? I mean, if it should automatically be raised the second you reach it without precondition, isn’t it a purely arbitrary and fictional barrier? I tried to make this point last night on Special Report, and it came out a bit clumsy, in part because I used the mathematically rigorous term “kuh-trillion.”

Jonah is playing coy about this. He knows that we need to have political theater. Theater is a bi-partisan device whereby the Ruling Class Overlords generate a vast hue and cry and demand we move in a sane direction, then go the opposite way.
The federal government has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted and is incapable of internal reform. You don’t have a choice, Tea Parties: you’ve got to continue to pressure incumbents, vote them out, demand change, and take the required haircut like an adult.

Fiscal boot camp ain't no frickin' beauty contest, mister.

If you’re still too peppy after all that, then step over to Piece of Work in Progress for a hit of financial gloom from Meep. Truly, our government is a sucking wallet wound.
Now, it would be an ill thing to go with such an entirely down post, so let me finish on a Rule 5 note, with Stacy’s patron Twitter saint:

Now, don't you feel better already?

Category: Budget, Taxes

‘The Return to TV of One of America’s Most Gifted Thinkers and Communicators’

Posted on | April 26, 2011 | 12 Comments

Which is to say, a new cable show for Keith Olbermann:

Keith Olbermann’s new show on Al Gore’s Current TV will have the same name as his old one on MSNBC — Countdown With Keith Olbermann. It will also air in Olbermann’s old 8 PM slot beginning June 20, 2011. Olbermann abruptly left MSNBC in January and joined Current in February as Chief News Officer and producer and anchor of a primetime show. “Countdown With Keith Olbermann will showcase the return to television of one of America’s most gifted thinkers and communicators,” said Joel Hyatt, co-founder and Executive Vice Chairman of Current.

The Washington Post has this video announcement:

Category: Keith Olbermann

To Hell With ‘Gender Equity’

Posted on | April 26, 2011 | 6 Comments

That’s my reaction to a New York Times story about how universities are faking their way around Title IX, which mandates an artificial “equality” between men and women’s sports programs.

Americans have for too long been tortured on the Procrustean bed of “equality,” which aims to destroy all custom and tradition — indeed, to destroy liberty itself — in order to render individuals as atomized and interchangeable units in a one-size-fits-all regime.

As the denunciation of Larry Summers proved, recognition of actual differences between people, or between groups of people, is permitted only to those radical egalitarians who propose to eliminate those differences in the name of “social justice.” And if you question the wisdom of their project, either in its ends or its means, you will be demonized as an apologist for oppression.

To hell with “gender equity” and to hell with Title IX.

(Remember: National Offend a Feminist Week starts May 2.)

Category: Education, Feminism, Sports

And Yet, Instapundit . . .

Posted on | April 26, 2011 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

Insty links Pilon at Cato on the Barbour exit, and finishes with a rumination:

. . .when you have a system of government so demanding at top levels that few normal people care to participate in it, you will get few normal people at the top levels.

Two points:

When normal people, e.g. the Tea Partiers, do participate, the ruling class reviles them, and calls them everything but honest citizens.

When a normal person, e.g. Sarah Palin, does strive for the top level, she takes a non-stop napalm shower.

Forget these ruling class creeps. If Americans back down now, we can join with the invertebrate Left in feeling that we deserve what we get.

Update: linked by Don Surber, at some expense to the byline.

Category: Instapundit

Carl Salonen & the Left-Wing Trolls Who Smeared ‘Advice Goddess’ Amy Alkon

Posted on | April 26, 2011 | 10 Comments

Yesterday I blogged about Amy Alkon’s encounter with the online Left which, taking offense at something Alkon had written about unwed motherhood, organized one of its characteristic “Two-Minute Hate” campaigns against her.

What I did not know was that the Left attempted to destroy Alkon’s career as a journalist, by posting defamatory fallacious Amazon “reviews” of her book I See Rude People.

Nor did I know that Alkon had named Carl Salonen and Loretta Serrano as key perpetrators of that smear campaign.

Donald Douglas has an excellent post summarizing this shocking story, of which I was previously unaware. And this is the kind of vicious behavior in which self-proclaimed “progressives” now engage routinely. These destructive tactics are the radical offspring of what Frankfurt School intellectual Herbert Marcuse advocated in his notorious 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.

Elsewhere in the same essay, Marcuse denounces “pure” or “non-partisan” tolerance, which he describes as the “active, official tolerance granted to the Right as well as to the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity.” Is anyone so blind or so ignorant of history as to miss the significance of this? Read more

Category: Conservatism 101

‘When You Give in to Thuggery’

Posted on | April 26, 2011 | 8 Comments

The situation with King & Spalding dropping its client — Congress — in defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) before Supreme Court was not something I felt co?mpelled to write about yesterday. But it is pointed out that King & Spalding dropped the case under pressure from gay activists, which means that there will be further such intimidation: “That’s what happens when you give in to thuggery,” as Professor Reynolds says.

And it’s the thuggery that is so obnoxious. Gay rights activists are so full of their own righteousness that they don’t give a damn about what means they employ to achieve their ends. Generally speaking, honorable ends are not advanced by dishonorable means. If you have to lie, steal, cheat and kill to achieve your goal — if it cannot be achieved without such methods — this is kind of a large flashing neon sign to warn you that there is something wrong with your goal.

There is something very unusual about the rapidity of this political shift, as Byron York points out:

Amid all the threatening and the name calling, one thing was clear. In the furtherance of its political position, the Obama administration has abdicated the Justice Department’s traditional responsibility to defend laws passed by Congress, and now King & Spalding has abdicated the lawyer’s responsibility to represent a client. And they did it over a law that passed with huge bipartisan majorities in a Republican House and Senate, was signed by a Democratic president, and was defended by two Democratic administrations and one Republican one.

Just 15 years ago, in other words, there was a massive majoritarian consensus against same-sex marriage. Then came the Lawrence v. Texas ruling in 2003, then Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage in 2004 (thanks, Mitt Romney!)  and then . . . well, the deluge.

The fantastical project of yesterday, which was mentioned only to be ridiculed, is today the audacious reform, and will be tomorrow the accomplished fact.
— R.L. Dabney, 1897

The stunning rapidity with which the gay-rights movement has vanquished all opposition — so that now one cannot speak against their agenda without being accused of “hate” — is perhaps unprecedented. It  is certainly remarkable, and all the more so because the “rights” asserted are without any basis in Anglo-American legal tradition, as I explained in my 2008 American Spectator column, “Gay Rights, Gay Rage.”

In abandoning the mooring of the common-law tradition, we have pulled up anchor and set sail into uncharted waters, where the legend on the map reads, “Here Be Dragons.”

UPDATE: Dan at Gay Patriot engages in a thought-experiment about anti-discrimination laws.

It is important to understand that the heart of the question raised by the King & Spalding decision is not whether we approve or disapprove of homosexuality, or even whether we support or oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage. What is at issue is whether the concept of “gay rights” should empower advocates of that agenda to bully and intimidate their critics. You may wish to compare this to how the Left smeared Amy Alkon.

Category: Gays

‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’

Posted on | April 26, 2011 | 4 Comments

Obama sees the writing on the wall (click to enlarge):

Photoshop by Aaron — based on Belshazzar’s Feast by Rembrandt — and if you don’t get the Bible reference, it’s from Daniel 5: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

Category: Barack Obama
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