The Ryan Budget

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I’m tempted to call it “The Savage Young Ryan Budget,” but seriously, folks: House Republicans did the smart thing yesterday, and don’t let worry-wart Allahpundit tell you any different.

Not a single Democrat voted for it, and DCCC Chairman Steve Israel’s boast that this will help Democrats recapture the House is nonsense. Let the Democrats spend the next 18 months trying to demagogue entitlement reform all they want — the pressure is now actually on Senate Democrats for 2012.

The willingness of the House GOP to lay down a marker — take a vote on a definite proposal for fixing the entitlement mess — shows they’ve learned the lessons of 2005-06, when Republicans botched the entitlement-reform debate.

Here’s what most people miss about that: The Republicans controlled the House, and Tom Delay could have rammed through any proposal that the White House wanted. But the GOP wanted to play defense, so it was decided that the thing to do was (a) to send Bush out giving a lot of speeches about entitlement reform, and (b) let the Senate do a lot of debating about entitlement reform.

Talk, talk, talk — and the Senate never passed anything, so there was never any specific plan on the table, with numbers and stuff, that people could look at see what was actually being proposed. Democrats got an opportunity to do their usual demagoguery — “Those evil Republicans want to take away Granny’s Social Security check!” — without ever being forced to vote up-or-down on anything.

The House vote to approve the Ryan budget changes that. Now the Democrats who control the Senate have before them a specific plan, already approved by the House, upon which they can now be pressured to act. And with Democrats defending lots of vulnerable Senate seats in 2012, the question becomes: Where’s Harry Reid’s budget?

No more “talk, talk, talk,” you see. Reid can’t just kick the can down the road like he did last year, when he and Nancy Pelosi decided not even to pass an FY 2011 budget, because they wanted to play politics instead. Paul Ryan and the House GOP just called Harry’s bluff.

Obama’s gimmicky and unrealistic “framework” for deficit-reduction won’t work as actual legislation. Harry Reid and the Democrat-controlled Senate are going to have to come up with an honest-to-goodness budget, and the House is going to be sending over appropriations bills that will require senators to take votes, if the federal government is to be funded for FY2012.

Actual legislation. Actual votes.

The fun-and-games of just talk, talk, talking is over. And I’m convinced that Harry Reid can’t match the determination of the House Republicans, so there’s no way the Democrats can “win” this part of the process.

The American people aren’t as stupid as Democrats think.

The Savage Young

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My hometown friend George Hall occasionally used to say he’d like to start a band called “The Savage Young.”

George and I had both been caught up in the second wave of Beatlemania that swept over teenagedom in the middle and late 1970s, years after the Beatles had broken up, and a lot of us “inherited” record collections from older brothers and sisters. (I got the Beatles Greatest Hits 1962-66, a double-album, when my brother went off to college in 1975.) Second-wave Beatlemania got a boost in 1976 from the release of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Music album (with great old classics like “Long Tall Sally” and “Slow Down,” as well as Beatle-written tunes like “You Can’t Do That”), and another boost in 1977 from their live album recorded at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964-65.

At some point in 1976, I read Hunter Davies’ The Beatles: An Authorized Biography (published in 1969), and was fascinated to learn the early history of the group: Playing “skiffle” as The Quarrymen, a series of name changes, early personnel like Pete Best and Stu Sutcliffe, the tiny clubs in Liverpool, then the pivotal period when they traveled to Hamburg and had to play multiple sets every night in rowdy bars in the Reeperbahn district. It was during their Hamburg period that the Beatles wore leather jackets and, under the influence of art students Astrid Kirscherr and Klaus Voorman, adopted their soon-to-be famous hairstyles. But they were still a bunch of tough-looking greasers when Astrid first took their photos in the Hamburg rail yards (above).

It also was while in Hamburg that the Beatles, performing as back-up group, recorded several tunes with Tony Sheridan, including the single “My Bonnie.” Tracks from the Hamburg sessions were eventually released in 1965 as an album called The Savage Young Beatles, and it was from that title that my friend George got the half-joking idea that there should be a rock band called “The Savage Young.” Continue reading The Savage Young →

Allow Me To Disagree With Sen. DeMint

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by Smitty

Cubachi has Senator DeMint’s proposal for three terms for members of the House of Representatives and two terms for those in the Senate.
Here is a better idea: repeal the 17th Amendment. Let the Senate return to representing the States. The States can treat Senate nominations like the President treats Supreme Court nominations. If the citizens want the Senate to change, let them tell their Governor/Legislature when their terms are up.
I submit that admitting that 1913 was an abso-effing-lutely suck-tacular year for the US Constitution, and unwinding the ill deeds undertaken by Woodrow Fascist Wilson is crucial to letting the Progressive State of America experiment die its dismal death.
On a related note, Hot Air wants to know where the 5 minute tax form is. Going back to 1913, we need to repeal the 16th Amendment. There is no hope with the IRS. None. Nothing but byzantine pettifoggery there. We nix the IRS, and let the States figure out how to raise their allotted portion of the Federal tab. Doughty co-blogger Wombat will no doubt find gainful employment in Virginia, whose tax system will also grow burdensome. But the knuckleheads of Richmond are far more accountable than those within the Beltway.

The Other McCain School Of Career Planning: Online Degree In Game Art

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by Smitty

Just in case you are, or know somebody who is young and needs a very little bit of direction in life, as in, not enough to go too far, point them to the Full Sail University, where they can get a degree in Game Art. I have no idea of the price, since I thought the ad too silly even to click.
The chief virtues of this hot growth industry are:

  • Saving yourself from repetitive strain injury by wasting your life helping design the games, instead of wasting your life playing them.
  • Construct fantasy heroines with vast. . .tracts of land.
  • Most importantly, study medieval subsistence farming, since you’ll be doing a lot of that after the economic apocalypse.

Having said all that, if your name is Carmack, you are no doubt laughing at me instead.

The 1970s In NYC: Something Else

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by Smitty

Ed Driscoll, one of those great bloggers whom we don’t link enough, has a post about people waxing nostalgic for NYC’s seedier days. Admittedly, that was a little before my time, but it did bring to mind a funny bit from Our Dumb Century:

Ah, those days.

Some humorless git seems to have left the funniest page of the book of the tubey-nets: Aug. 20, 1969: Apollo 13 Astronauts Drown as Ted Kennedy Flees Splashdown Site
Oh well, we celebrate our victories where we can.

And then the BlogProf has the video:

Lawrence O’Donnell May Be A Knob, But That’s Not A Crime On Its Own

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by Smitty

I couldn’t agree less with O’Donnell’s thesis that Americans are Socialists, not rugged individualists.Rather than just reject him entirely, though, we need to allow that there is a healthy chunk of the population with an unhealthy taste for the socialist whip. They exist. Stupid people. Fortunately, their stupidity often extends to their mating habits, with predictable non-results.
To the extent O’Donnell has a point, I submit that arguing the Socialist/individualist question at the national level is itself the problem. Let Massachusetts or California be as Socialist as they want to be, and don’t mess with Texas. We must halt the redistribution of wealth that lets the federal government be the collection agent for fools. O’Donnell may lack the intellectual honesty to deal with the results of prying Socialist states away from the federal tit. Enforcing sanity on O’Donnell is not our task. Protecting our wallets from the idiocy of O’Donnell and his ilk, however, is.

Vodka Pundit Grievously Insults Famed Omega Theta Pi Bluto Blutarsky

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by Smitty

Things have gone way too far in the dextrosphere when the POTUS is compared to John Blutarsky:

Remember in Animal House, when John Belushi’s character yelled “Food fight!” in the cafeteria, got a good one going, then made himself a quick escape from the ensuing chaos? That’s right — we have John Blutarsky as commander-in-chief.

I am sure that the Bob Belvedere Chair of Applied Blogwhoring at Faber College will agree to my objection on the following grounds:

  • Blutarsky represents the finest in the American Falstaffian tradition, and should not be denigrated by comparison to the likes of BHO.
  • Leaders are people with followers. BHO, attempting to start a food fight, would throw like a girl, resorting in much pointing and laughing, but only at him.
  • Blutarsky would never appoint Biden to screw up anything that Bluto couldn’t better tube himself.

In defense of the Vodka Pundit, he may still be in insulin shock over the last speech BHO gave.
Now, while BHO may be less of a leader than Blutarsky, Tim Pawlenty is more:

Pawlenty, a former Minnesota governor who oversaw a state shutdown during his tenure, said Wednesday that the $38 billion in cuts agreed to in a last-minute compromise isn’t enough. He says that number isn’t accurate and the deal is “wholly unacceptable.”

Last week, Democrats and Republicans narrowly averted a partial shutdown of the government by agreeing on a spending plan for the rest of the current budget year, which ends Sept. 30. Final approval of that plan is expected this week.

Pawlenty has announced a presidential exploratory committee and is scheduled to speak at anti-tax events in Concord, N.H., and Boston on Friday.

I liked T-Paw’s book, and I’m sad to see the haters have driven it down to three stars. However, something at a detail level between that book and the full Paul Ryan plan would be interesting.
These GOP overtures, while not nothing, are still too centrist for my right wing reactionary self.

A History Lesson for Janelle Harris

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“It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. . . . I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.
“That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! . . .
“All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. . . .
“On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order.
“On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations or can spare to them from his own private interests.”
— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

As soon as I saw Instapundit’s link to a column titled, “Chivalry is dead, and you killed it, ladies,” Burke’s famous eulogy for the Age of Chivalry came to mind.

A great shame of modern education is that Burke’s philosophical reflections are now taught — when taught at all, which probably isn’t often — from excerpts in annotated anthologies, or studied from Cliff Notes. Students are presented with prefabricated interpretations of Burke’s meaning, rather than being required to puzzle it out for themselves. The result is a shallow understanding that deprives them of a full comprehension of Burke’s subtle meaning. It is far better to take the time to read the whole thing, to study the history of the French Revolution (including its philosophical influences), and patiently construe the larger signficance of the intended criticism.

What Burke denounced as a “barbarous philosophy” was the spirit of modern radicalism — Liberté, égalité, fraternité — that rejects all tradition and custom as oppressive superstition. The mob that invaded Versailles in October 1789, insulting the Queen whose honor Burke thought should be avenged by “ten thousand swords,” was acting in accordance with this radical “scheme of things,” wherein “a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman [and] a woman is but an animal.”

If a queen deserved no respect from the common rabble of Paris, Burke recognized, why should anyone be expected to obey any law, except the law of brute force? And why should anyone be expected to act on anything other than the most selfish motives? Continue reading A History Lesson for Janelle Harris →