The Other McCain

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

On ‘Economic Terrorism’: It Pays To Under-React

Posted on | March 23, 2011 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

The blogosphere seems to be catching fire concerning Stephen Lerner at Pace University. It sounds like really ‘spooky dude’ stuff. Combined with JounoList, it makes conspiracy theories about the 2008 economic cratering seem tempting.
I’m wondering when the counter-sting will occur. With the Left reeling from Beck/Breitbart/O’Keefe, one of the things I’d expect, if the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy is as virulent as it seems, is some kind of red-herring event. Try to entice the usual suspects into an event, and go way over the top. Then discredit the new-media journalists when they try to break the story. Use the one screw-up to discredit the rest of their work.
In the blogs, we sure dig linking everything, but kicking the tires on the story is a good test. If the wheels come off, much crow-eating is avoided.

Category: Ace of Spades

When The Police Showed To Break Up The Party, Stacy McCain Personally Requested Some Brutality

Posted on | March 23, 2011 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

And I, for one, could sympathize:

dont_your_cops_look_like_this

Oh, wait: that's an umbrella handle, not a nightstick.


I am, of course, taking egregious liberties with facts in that title. Thanks to M. Joseph Sheppard for a link to a jolly good online album.
And if that’s not enough reading for you, check out Sir Jimmie of Bise for his ‘Clearing the Browser Tabs‘ post.

Category: Blogging, Rule 5

LIVE AT FIVE – 03.23.11

Posted on | March 23, 2011 | 2 Comments

TOP NEWS
Obama Indifferent To Latin American Criticism Of Libya Intervention

President Obama is greeted by children in El Salvador

President cites international support, UN resolutions

Asian Stocks, Emerging Currencies Drop On Japan Quake
Oil prices over $105, Euro weakens



US Expects Wider Arab Role In Libya Coalition
Only Qatar on board so far
F-15 Crashes In Libya, Crew Recovered Safely



POLITICS
Census: Detroit’s Population Drops By 25%

Everybody's leaving the Motor City

At least they’ll have the Robocop statue

Indian Point Nuke Plant Top Priority for Quake Review

Congress Headed Toward Deal On Spending?



N. Dakota Passes Tougher Abortion Regulations

Tennessee Bill To Curb Teachers’ Unions Advances

Administration Calls On UN To Support Gay Rights



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Judge Scuttles Settlement; Dooms Google’s Digital Library Plans
After Quake, Uncertainty About Priuses, Silicon Chips, Other Japanese Exports
Stocks Mixed After Three-Day Rally
RIM’s PlayBook To Match Apple IPad2 In Price
Amazon Launches “Appstore” Despite Apple Suit Over Name
Windows Phone 7 Copy & Paste Update Arrives



SPORTS
Opening Statements In Bonds Perjury Case

Barry Bonds arrives for the second day of his trial

Are the Feds’ disgruntled witnesses telling the truth, or is the home run king?

NFL Modifies Kickoff Rule

Owners Express Optimism, But Warning Shots Fired (Video)

Semin’s Shootout Goal Clinches Playoff Slot For Caps

NASCAR Goes Round And Round On Changes



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Chris Brown Explodes After GMA Interview

Chris Brown and Robin Roberts during the GMA interview

“This album is what I want people to hear and people to really get into, so definitely this album is what I want them to talk about and not stuff that happened two years ago.”

Behind The Row: Meet The Olsen Twins


“Cleopatra” Conversation Turns To David Fincher

Mock Rebecca Black All You Want, She’s Laughing All The Way To The Bank

Who’s Reading For “Total Recall” Remake Gals’ Roles?

Ja Rule Pleads Guilty To $3 Million Tax Evasion

Five Useful Organizations You Think Are Evil (Thanks To Movies)



FOREIGNERS
US Sees Key NATO Role In Libya, But Questions Remain
Yemeni President Saleh Threatens Civil War, Calls For Dialogue
Syrian Security Forces Kill Six In Attack On Daraa Mosque
Karzai Details Security Handoff
UN Warns Of Forgotten Humanitarian Crisis In Ivory Coast
NDP Joins Grits, BQ In Rejecting Conservative Budget; Canadian Elections To Follow Soon



BLOGS & STUFF
Allahpundit: White House Reassures Congress We’re Not At War In Libya
Weasel Zippers: President Cancels Vacation Plans To Attend Conference Call On Libya
Ed Morrissey: Obama Mission Du Jour In Libya – “Installing A Democratic System”
Moe Lane: Methinks The Lady…
Jawa Report: Chavez Says Capitalism May Have Ended Life On Mars
American Digest: Wishing The NYT Editorial Board Had Just One Neck
JammieWearingFool: Judge Decides NJ Isn’t Spending Enough On Public Schools
Cubachi: Brown Joins Murkowski In Opposing Planned Parenthood Cuts
Atlas Shrugs: CAIR Sought Qaddafi Money
NRO Corner: Pawlenty’s Iowa Trap

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Category: Live at Five

Three Cheers For Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

Posted on | March 22, 2011 | 12 Comments

by Smitty

Via CNS News:

The chair of the U.S House Foreign Affairs Committee said Monday she will introduce legislation that makes U.S. funding for the United Nations contingent on reform. It also calls for the U.S. to withdraw from the Human Rights Council.

I understand what Humans are, and Rights. I also know what a Council is. But when you say ‘HRC’, the image formed is a relatively useless old bag of wind.
Later in the article. . .

The U.S. provides 22 percent of the U.N.’s regular operating budget. The administration’s 2011 budget request for contributions to the regular budget was $516.3 million, part of an overall $1.18 billion for the U.N. and affiliated agencies (the World Health Organization, International Atomic Energy Agency etc.)

It is likely that if the US wants the UN to be more than the low-point drain of the World Anti-Semitism System, we’re going to have to elect somebody with a clue, like The ‘Stache, or Sarah ‘Headsploder’*, or maybe Tim Pawlenty.

*I was eating breakfast the other morning, and some civilians were at the next table. A guy facing me says ‘Sarah Palin’, and the grey-haired bint with her back to me proceeded to vent her spleen. “I hate that woman. She’s so divisive. She’s got a disabled child and she’s running around the world. . .”
I had to move to another table. It would have been equally offensive to have heard such a diatribe about, say, President Obama. Only, like the Israelis, it’s OK to blast Sarah anytime, anyplace.

Category: Politics, Sarah Palin

Bigger Breasts: By Any Means Necessary?

Posted on | March 22, 2011 | 20 Comments

Professor Glenn Reynolds has called our attention to a New York Times story reporting that breast-enhancement surgery is becoming more and more popular — a 40% increase in the number of such surgeries during the past decade, with more than 300,000 women undergoing such procedures in 2010.

While I have not consulted my colleague Dan Collins (co-founder of the world-renowned Collins-McCain Institute for Therapeutic Breast Staring) I must say that I personally oppose this trend. Read more

Category: humor, Instapundit, Piece of Work in Progress, Science

Multilateral Retardation

Posted on | March 22, 2011 | 13 Comments

What slapped me upside the head in Obama’s press conference yesterday was his insistence that an “international consensus” justified the attacks on Libya, and that multilateralism was a “core principle” of his foreign policy. Nothing could be more harmful, more calculated to infringe U.S. sovereignty. This undermines the proper goal of foreign policy, namely the pursuit of our national interest.

If hostile foreign powers know that the U.S. cannot go to war without an “international consensus,” then they will seek to influence or intimidate potential allies. By denying America a “consensus,” they will thereby render the U.S. military impotent, so that our interests overseas (whatever those interests may be) are at the mercy of any aggressor.

The best way to defeat a hostile coalition, as Winston Churchill pointed out in The World Crisis, is to attack its weakest member. And this is exactly how America’s enemies operate when seeking to deprive us of the “international consensus” that liberals insist is necessary for the United States to take military action. Ace of Spades points this out:

My main problem with “multilateral efforts” is that what these are always all about is France. What’s the major difference between Bush’s Coalition and Obama’s? France. France was the big hold-out in the War in Iraq. They’re on board with this one.
So while the liberal media dances in joy over this terrific new coalition, they’re really just dancing that France is on board.
Further, they get the active agent and passive object reversed — Obama did not persuade France to join the coalition. France persuaded Obama.

Read the rest of that and think about it. If France wanted to attack Moammar Qaddafi, would we have objected? I think not. But instead of fighting the Franco-Libyan War of 2011, the French recruit the U.S. to bear the heaviest burden of the war — and Obama can’t even be bothered to ask permission of Congress! An article at National Journal addresses the anger over this high-handedness:

Why is everyone so mad? Because lawmakers, like everyone else, have war fatigue, NBC says. Also, lawmakers really don’t like being left out of the loop. (Obama sent a letter to Congress notifying it that America had joined a war — two days after bombing started.) And as Robert Stacy McCain points out at the American Spectator, a lot of liberals thought Obama would restore pre-9/11 norms — Obama has held onto many Bush-era policies most hated by the left: Guantanamo Bay, secret wiretaps, the Patriot Act, etc. The controversy also shows, though, just how hard it is for presidents to give up new powers claimed by predecessors.

I don’t know whether or not this Libyan intervention is a good idea, but that’s not what the debate is about as far as I’m concerned.

What bugs me is that American public opinion seems to have drifted, almost unnoticed, into a belief that what counts most in U.S. foreign policy is whether France (or Germany or Russia, etc.) approve of our actions. When an “international consensus” has more influence over how we use our nation’s armed forces than the United States Congress . . . dude, that’s trouble. As with so much of the Obama agenda, his “core principle” of multilateralism amounts to a repeal of the American founding. After all, what did the Founders sign in July 1776? The Declaration of Independence.

While it is always best to pursue military action with the support of allies — Churchill understood that England’s foreign policy had always rested on the concept of a “Grand Alliance” to restrain aggressors — if our ability to pursue our national interest is dependent on an “international consensus,” then our nation is not truly independent.

Category: Ace of Spades, Barack Obama, France, Libya

Troubleshooting ‘Beyond the Welfare State’

Posted on | March 22, 2011 | 14 Comments

by Smitty (hat tip Monty at AoSHQ)

Yuval Levin’s essay at National Affairs is quite well written, and well conceived. Furthermore, it’s a more reasonable conversation starter than I would produce, because it accepts the historical fact of the welfare state as a given, and proceeds to argue the case from there.

Monty moves in the direction I’d go, emphasis mine:

But one thing has become clear in the western nations since the welfare-state started in earnest after World War II: it spreads like kudzu, it encompasses and infantilizes ever-larger percentages of the population, and it beggars even the richest and most powerful countries. Leave aside questions of morality and efficacy for the moment — it is dreadfully clear that the main problem with the welfare-state is that we can’t afford it. No one can, no matter how rich or powerful.

This is the paradox of the welfare state: it will surely ruin us if left to run unchecked, yet so many people now depend upon it that we can’t stop.

However, I submit that a fuller analysis will be crucial to doing two things:

  1. Coming up with a remedy. You can talk about the flooding all day long, but you aren’t patching much until the leak is isolated.
  2. Obtaining buy-in to implement that remedy. Everybody hates change, especially when it involves pain, even though we all know that our welfare state buzz ends with a mother of a hangover.

On my to-read list is Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic. A brief summary mooched from Volokh:

The book argues that the Madisonian system of separation of powers has eroded beyond recognition and been replaced with a system of executive primacy (which others have called the “imperial presidency”) in which Congress and the courts play only a marginal role. Most scholars who have recognized this development have called for a return to the Madisonian system, but we believe that the rise of the executive has resulted from a recognition among political elites that only a powerful executive can address the economic and security challenges of modern times.

Not a thesis to make anyone happy, on the left or right.

How in the world is this collapse into an Imperial Presidency tied to the welfare state?
My theory is that the 1913 trifecta of:

  • Implementing the income tax (Amendment 16),
  • Turning the Senate into the Big House with every state composed of two ‘districts’, and diminishing the States as such as political entities (Amendment 17),
  • The godforsaken Federal Reserve (Ugliest Legislative Christmas Present Ever)

These three items were the core seeds of DOOM. Later chestnuts like the New Deal, National Security Act of 1947, Great Society, and the War Powers Resolution of 1973 are also bricks in the wall.
Among the problems to be worked in parallel are:

  • A large collection of weaklings who think dependency on the State is a feature, not a bug.
  • A national debt that we should start measuring in Astronomical Units, for all anyone can conceptualize the actual amount of money.
  • The notion that running a peacetime budget deficit is both somehow not a bug, but is in fact a Really Good Feature.
  • A vast standing bureaucracy, that, if Wisconsin is an indication, will cheerfully see the country sink in progressive debt flooding rather than let a shoring team get in there and patch anything.

Back to Levin, he is more interested in broaching discussion than going to the mat with ideas (emphasis mine):

Conservatives should therefore not expect to ever simply win the argument. Our challenge, rather, is to dominate the argument — to offer the vision that implicitly sets the tone for our common life. The key to doing so is the emergence of a policy-oriented conservatism, one able to make gainful compromises not because it is ambivalent about its own aims or tentative in its commitment to them but because it knows exactly what it wants — a thriving free society with a market economy, strong families, a devotion to country, and a commitment to the value of every life — and knows that this can (indeed must) be obtained gradually, by a mix of persuasion and proof. Such an approach must always remain grounded in the principles of American life — the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, of the Western tradition and of classical liberalism. But it must also translate those principles into policy particulars. In our politics, battles over ideas are won in practice, not in theory.

Recent decades have offered some examples of such an approach — from welfare reform to the urban policing revolution — but they have been too few and far between. There are good reasons to hope that just such an approach is now emerging more broadly on the right, and good reasons to encourage and foster its emergence.

Truly, I look to see a revisiting of 1913 with some DC plugs

no_these_are_not_suppositories

Damage control plugs are for those who's prefer to stay afloat

and a large sledgehammer. If centralization is deemed the problem, then de-centralizing will be a component of the solution. Give each State its own bank, like North Dakota, and let them manage their own housing. Let them manage the welfare of their own citizens. Let them tax their own citizens. Let the States figure out if they want to appoint or popularly elect Senators. In short, let the Federal government be federal, and quit treating the country like a single state.
I’d say that is the goal, and then be moderate in the implementation. We can’t unwind a century of error overnight, or even within two terms of the Paco Administration.

 

Category: Ace of Spades

LT: Hall of Fame Sex Offender

Posted on | March 22, 2011 | 9 Comments

 

When this story first caught my attention last spring, I wrote:

Wait a minute. You’re Lawrence Taylor, considered by many football commentators to be the greatest linebacker in the history of the game, and you’re meeting a pimp named Rasheed at a Holiday Inn to pay $300 for a hooker from the Bronx?

Taylor copped a plea to a misdemeanor, and his 16-year-old victim says LT got off too easy:

The underage girl who Lawrence Taylor admitted having sex with before a guilty plea to a sex charge said Tuesday that the sentence of probation given to the Pro Football Hall of Famer was too lenient.
The girl . . . told reporters after Taylor was sentenced to six years probation in a New York court that she wanted to see him got to jail.
“I am not a prostitute,” she said. “I am a victim and I am hurting. I don’t think the sentence given to Mr. Taylor is fair.”
The girl was a runaway who was sent into a hotel room with Taylor in May 2010. Prosecutors have charged Rasheed Davis with being the pimp that sent the girl into Taylor’s hotel room.
The Hall of Famer admitted paying $300 for sex.

The girl is being represented by famed attorney Gloria Allred.

If someone finds the video of LT’s Fox News appearance this afternoon, please post a link in the comments. Because watching him defend his habit of frequenting prostitutes was one of the most pathetic things I’ve seen in a while. Because I remember what LT used to be — a guy who played the game with an intense ferocity:

Watch that video: 6-foot-4 and 300 pounds, so fast, so strong, physically overwhelming the linemen who attempted to block him — dude hit so hard he broke Joe Theisman’s leg.

And now? A shameful disgrace.

The media should re-think its enthusiastic embrace of celebrity whore-hoppers like Eliot Spitzer and Charlie Sheen. Law enforcement should more rigorously prosecute men involved in prostitution, both as clients and pimps. And guys need to wake up and realize that, if you have to pay for it — whatever you’re paying for it — it ain’t worth it.

Category: Celebrities, Crime, Football, Sex
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