No, not Sully — I mean the other creep:
Excuse me for reminding you that Charles Johnson is still on the Internet. He hasn’t done anything useful in so long, you might not realize he used to be somebody important.
New Motherf–ing Tone 2.0
Because liberals hold a patent on Civility™ they are the sole arbiters of who is or is not in violation:
Andrew Brietbart’s ad hominem attack on Van Jones in The Daily Caller — right down to calling him a “commie punk” and “a cop killer-supporting, racist, demagogic freak” — violates the tenets of debate and civil discourse we have strived for since the day we launched. As a result, [Huffington Post] will no longer feature his posts on the front page.
Dave Weigel notes (a) Breitbart helped develop HuffPo in 2005, (b) the “ad hominem attack” was not posted at HuffPo, and (c) if such remarks in other forums are disqualifying for front-page status at HuffPo, “Boy, good thing Breitbart doesn’t have an army of contributors who can comb HuffPo authors’ published and spoken work to see if they’ve done that.”
In other words: We can fact-check your ass.
UPDATE: Wow, that was quick: HuffPo contributors Ed Schultz and Jason Linkins both have a history of “ad hominem attacks.”
Conrad Is A Knob, And We Need To Attack The Lousy Assertions Behind His Ideas
by Smitty
Hot Air has a post on Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) idea of implementing a mileage tax.
You can’t fault a Progressive, I suppose, for wanting to build on the resounding success that is ObamaCare. By ‘resounding’ I mean ‘utter’, and by ‘success’, I, of course, mean ‘debacle’.
But it’s worse than that. Hot Air goes after the particulars, emphasis mine:
A “practical option” for whom, exactly? Perhaps for the IRS, but certainly not for taxpayers. One shudders to think what happens when the IRS gets your annual mileage wrong and a taxpayer disputes the record. Where were you on the night of April 19th, Canarsie? We show you drove 6.3 miles to Bada-Bing Strip Club in New Jersey. Even if exact destinations aren’t recorded (earlier suggestions were to use GPS devices), the taxpayer would get hit with a massive bill during the annual tax-preparation ritual with little or no chance to dispute the claims of the government.
Plus, let’s talk about equipment costs, both private and public. This new tax system would require tracking equipment in every vehicle, which would mean retrofit costs for current vehicles and higher prices for new cars immediately. What are the unemployed supposed to do — stop driving? That should help when it comes to looking for work.
The government will either have to use GPS devices (that will track and record destination data) or install tollbooth passes every few miles on every road in America. The IRS will also have to set up an enforcement bureau to ensure that drivers don’t disable their tracking systems. In California, this meant that every driver had to get semiannual emission-control equipment inspections, an expensive waste of time and money for most drivers. Will the IRS, which is just now branching out into the health-insurance inspection business, add a national DMV bureau as well?
Finally, do we really want to live in a country where the federal government virtually follows you everywhere you go? Growing up in the Cold War, that’s what we were told the Soviet Union was like. It will be the high-tech version of internal travel documents, or at the very least puts that power in the hands of the federal government.
Well, I’m certain that Conrad himself is rich and connected enough to afford privacy.
The real deal is that the Senate no longer represents the interests of individual states, or their citizens. He, and the rest of that sorry lot, are looking at the Federal Ruling Elite Club, and figuring out what they have to do to squeeze more loot out of We The People to fund the Club. The velvet entitlement handcuffs both manage the votes and serve as a source of propaganda about how they are crafting the socialist Utopia. Beyond the propaganda, the country is a debt shambles.
So we need to tell the Conrad variations in every State to just get stuffed. Vote them out. Expose the truth that, even if they’ve taken a few phrases of the Constitution as a fig leaf to cover their lousy ideas, they have effectively urinated on the document and the graves of the Founders.
Liberty!
You’re Supposed to Be Shocked
The Republican governor of Alaska has nominated a conservative for the panel that approves state judges. Democrats want you to scream in horror to learn that Don Haase thinks sex outside marriage should be against the law:
One blog post on the Eagle Forum Alaska site praised efforts at criminalizing adultery in Michigan, and [Democrat state Sen. Joe] Paskvan asked Haase if he thought it should be a felony in Alaska.
“I don’t see that that would rise to the level of a felony,” Haase said.
Paskvan: “Do you believe it should be a crime?”
Haase: “Yeah, I think it’s very harmful to have extramarital affairs. It’s harmful to children, it’s harmful to the spouse who entered a legally binding agreement to marry the person that’s cheating on them.”
Paskvan: “What about premarital affairs — should that be a crime?”
Haase: “I think that would be up to the voters certainly. If it came before (the state) as a vote, I probably would vote for it … I can see where it would be a matter for the state to be involved with because of the spread of disease and the likelihood that it would cause violence. I can see legitimate reasons to push that as a crime.”
This is really shocking, right? Except for the fact that, within living memory, most states criminalized non-marital sex:
Prior to the 1950s and ’60s, most states had a network of laws, well-rooted in the Anglo-American tradition, that had the cumulative effect of outlawing every manner of sex except between husband and wife.
Adultery, fornication, sodomy — one way or another, if you were messin’ around with anyone except your lawful spouse, you were outside the law. Frank Sinatra was once arrested on a charge of “seduction,” a New Jersey law that made it illegal for a man to use a false promise of marriage to entice a woman into sex.
Of course, people found many ways to circumvent those laws, which in general were only enforced when someone complained. (Sinatra beat the rap because the woman who accused him was a liar.) Our modern idea that all sex between consenting adults must be legal comes from two sources: (a) Alfred Kinsey, who in 1948 claimed that a majority of American men commited sex acts then regarded as crimes, and (b) the 1957 British “Wolfendon Report,” which recommended that “homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence.” (Emphasis added.)
Over time, laws were “reformed” to do away with the old common-law tradition that treated all non-marital sex as illegal. And among the consequences of that change is the great difficulty of prosecuting what we nowadays call “date rape.” In the old days, all that was necessary would be to prove that (a) they had sex and (b) they weren’t married, and the accused party would be guilty under one of the various laws. Whether that legal regime was altogether fair is one question, but it certainly avoided the “he-said”/”she-said” disputes over “consent” that surround so many date-rape cases.
Don Haase’s arguments for returning to the old common-law tradition will, no doubt, cause head-exploding reactions among liberals (and also for many conservatives unfamiliar with the legal history of the “consenting adults” standard), but it is not really so bizarre as it seems.
Lawrence v. Texas — now that’s what I call truly bizarre.
Separated At Birth, Plus A Couple Of Generations?
by Smitty
I saw this, courtesy of Design Milk:
This prompts a bit of thinking about Teddy and The ‘Stache:
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The Nyquil Worked
Just to update y’all on the illness I announced Wednesday: I took the NyQuil about 1 p.m. and by 3 p.m. was asleep. I woke up about 11 p.m. and took another dose of NyQuil. Some time Thursday afternoon, I woke up long enough to do one brief post, but was still feeling very woozy, so I went back to bed.
When I got up this morning, I said to my wife, “Well, I got a good night’s sleep.” She said: “No, you got a good two days’ sleep.”
NyQuil, or, as it is soon to be known, “all of the state-of-the-art medical care you can afford under ObamaCare.”
Hey, not that it’s all bad. Another commenter recommended this Dennis Leary riff on NyQuil (foul language warning):
Dennis Leary – NyQuil – watch more funny videos
So the good news is, I’m not dead yet. Still not 100% however. My head is still stuffy, but the coughing and sneezing have abated significantly. Then again, I’m only on my third cup of coffee this morning. Thanks for all the kind expressions of sympathy, and especially thanks to the tip-jar hitters Joel in Indiana, Robert in Colorado, and Mark in Minnesota.
Housing Sales Data ‘Badly Flawed’?
What if we were in the second dip of a double-dip recession and, because of inaccurate measurements, we didn’t even know it? That’s one possible interpretation of John Schoen’s story at MSNBC:
Two high-profile reports on home sales this week confirmed that the housing market is still mired in a deep slump with prices still falling and sales activity sluggish at best. In fact, the market may be in much worse shape than even those numbers suggest.
Figures from the National Association of Realtors that are among the most closely watched indicators on the housing market have been called into question by economists who say they may overstate existing-home sales activity by up to 20 percent. . . .
According to the Realtors, sales of existing homes fell nearly 10 percent last month, snapping three months of gains. Sales of new homes, which are tracked by the government, plunged in February for a third straight month to the lowest level in records dating back nearly 50 years.
Analysts have theorized that new-home sales have been hurt because prices of existing homes have fallen more quickly, making them relative bargains. But analysts have been unsettled by data suggesting that the housing market is headed into another leg down for sales and prices.
Read the whole thing. Accurately measuring economic activity isn’t easy — just ask the U.S. Commerce Department:
Gross domestic product growth was revised up to an annualized rate of 3.1 percent, the Commerce Department said on Friday in its final estimate, close to its initial estimate of 3.2 percent published two months ago and up from its tally of 2.8 percent made in February.
The fourth quarter ended in December and, in January, Commerce made an initial estimate of 3.2 percent growth. But when it came time to publish the actual data in February, they could show only 2.8 percent growth. Now, however, they’ve had time to accumulate better data and so the numbers have been revised upward to 3.1 percent.
“Close enough for government work.”
Dear ManBearPig: We Know, Climate Is Not Static
by Smitty (via Bluegrass Pundit)
Yes, Al, we’re cereal. Via The Hill:
“Not since the dark days of the Bush administration have we seen a Republican-controlled Congress that is so intent on pushing their agenda in Washington — protecting tax breaks for oil companies making record profits, attempting to roll back environmental regulations, and not only refusing to pass climate change legislation in any form but refusing to acknowledge that climate change even exists,” Gore wrote in a fundraising pitch for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).
Ah, yes, those pre-financial crisis days were indeed dark. And the thought of Congress doing its job, instead of letting the EPA go APE with its PEA brain on the economy is indeed terrifying. We could actually stave off economic collapse if there was enough energy to run the country.
Everybody knows that climate is not static, and good stewardship of resources and the environment is common sense. The problem you have, Mr. Gore, is that you are viewed as a slightly slenderized version of Michael Moore, the image of a hypocritical, self-serving buffoon who regularly urinates down the public back while congratulating himself on his rain-making capacity.
So, yeah, this post is rather harsh in tone, but your actions either merit an extended public apology, or a retirement in silence with your Oscar and your Nobel. No one envies you or likes what you have to say or views you as other than an economic predator. Begone, or face increasing ridicule.