The Other McCain

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

Rule 5 Sunday – Cancun Edition

Posted on | December 5, 2010 | 5 Comments

First out of the gate this Sunday (or first into my in-box, whatever) is Soylent Green, with a fine collection of reasons to drop by Cancun that has nothing to do with wealth redistribution and everything to do with global warmening.

Next, Left Coast Rebel presents us with the bootylicious J-Lo, the 2011 TSA pinup calendar, and the TSA Bikini Girl.

Taylor Harris offers the genteel Alice Faye.

The Mind-Numbed Robot’s circuits light up for Gemma Atkinson.

Finally, from The Camp of the Saints come these impressive packages of pulchritude:

Thanks to all for their submissions! Please remember, all Rule 5 Sunday links should go to the Rule 5, Wombat! mailbox, lest they be confused with other porn cheesecake and immured in my own stash for eternity.

Category: Rule 5

Everything You Need to Know
About ‘Tax Cuts for the Rich’ . . .

Posted on | December 5, 2010 | 5 Comments

. . . was written more than 200 years ago:

“The characteristic essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of acquisition and conservation, is to be unequal. The great masses therefore which excite envy, and tempt rapacity, must be put out of the possibility of danger. Then they form a natural rampart about the lesser properties in all their gradations. The same quantity of property, which is by the natural course of things divided among many, has not the same operation. Its defensive power is weakened as it is diffused. In this diffusion each man’s portion is less than what, in the eagerness of his desires, he may flatter himself to obtain by dissipating the accumulations of others. The plunder of the few would indeed give but a share inconceivably small in the distribution to the many. But the many are not capable of making this calculation; and those who lead them to rapine never intend this distribution.”
— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

There is a world of wisdom in those 150 words, beginning with the blunt statement that inequality of wealth is inherent and inescapable. Nothing government can do will abolish inequalities of wealth (or income), simply because people vary in their abilities of “acquisition and conservation.”

We can therefore discard at the outset of our considerations of political economy any notion that redistributionist policies aimed at achieving “social justice” (which Hayek called a “mirage”) would bring about an egalitarian utopia.

“Inequality” is not a synonym for injustice.

Not until we have grasped that concept, and eschewed the fallacy of thinking we can bring about an ideal condition of “fairness,” can we meaningfully discuss economic policy. Idiots who want to go chasing after egalitarian will-o’-th’-wisps are free to do so, but we must refuse their invitation to join them on The Great Social Justice Snipe Hunt.

It was as true in the 18th century as it is today that the rich — those with “great masses” of wealth — were the objects of envy, and that irresponsible demagogues prey upon the ignorant, to “lead them to rapine,” promising a fairer “distribution” of the wealth of others. 

When our latter-day Jacobins rail on about the need to raise taxes on the “top 2 percent” (“wealthy Americans . . . who take far more from America than they give back,” to quote Frank Rich) they fail to overcome the obvious problem that the “plunder of the few” would do no good for anyone else, who would receive from this thievery “but a share inconceivably small” — if, indeed, they get anything at all out of it.

Burke’s criticism of French radicalism is equally applicable to today’s debates about tax policies, yet his insight is ignored not merely by commentators, but even by those who report the news:

Senate Republicans blocked two Democratic measures Saturday that would have eliminated the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, forcing both parties back to the negotiating table if they want to avert a tax hike next year for all Americans.

It’s like listening to a trained parrot: “Squawk! Tax cuts for the rich! Tax cuts for the rich! Squawk! Blame Bush! Blame Bush! Squawk!”

Let’s see if we can recast that lede, eh?

Senate Republicans blocked two Democratic measures Saturday that would have raised taxes on people with higher incomes, forcing both parties back to the negotiating table if they want to avert a tax hike next year for all Americans.

Regardless of the fact that current tax policy was enacted during the Bush presidency, the discussion in Congress now is over legislative proposals either to continue the current policy — which Republicans propose — or to increase taxes, which is what the Democrats propose (as they always do). What is being debated is a tax increase, not “tax cuts for the wealthy.” Republicans are not proposing further reductions in the taxes paid by the rich. Democrats are proposing a return to the higher tax rates of pre-2001.

It is worth asking: What were the pre-2001 rates for the “rich”? What exactly are the “Bush-era tax cuts” that Democrats propose to repeal?

The 2001 legislation reduced the rate for the top income bracket (which currently applies to households earning $373,651 or more) from 38.6% to 35%, and reduced the rate for the next-highest bracket (which kicks in at $209,251 for a married couple filing jointly) from 36% to 33%.

What is important to note here, then, is that the reductions which Politico‘s Carrie Budoff Brown and Shira Toeplitz tendentiously call the “Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy” weren’t enormous — a rate reduction of 3.6% for the top bracket and 3% for the next bracket — and yet look how Harry Reid demagogues the issue:

“The majority of the Senate like the majority of the country believes the middle class deserve . . . tax cuts,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said. “The minority of the Senate, against all evidence to the contrary that millionaires, billionaires and these big CEOs who ship jobs overseas deserve this giveaway.”

This is but a repetition of the message communicated in tens of millions of dollars’ worth of Democratic Party attack ads, which were employed against Republican candidates everywhere, that the GOP is in favor of tax cuts for companies that “ship jobs overseas.” So wedded were Democrats to this message that they even used it here in my hometown against a Republican candidate for the Maryland state legislature, as if national tax policy were decided in Annapolis.

That message was overwhelmingly rejected by voters on Nov. 2. Not only did my local GOP candidate, Neil Parrott, decisively “rout” his Democrat opponent by a 62%-38% margin, but nationwide Republicans scored their biggest congressional gains since 1938, picking up 63 seats to achieve their largest House majority (242 seats) since 1949.

Given how relentlessly Democrats attacked Republicans on this “tax cuts for the rich” theme during the 2010 campaign, they cannot claim “We Didn’t Get Our Message Out” (which is No. 2 on Jay Haug’s list of “Liberal Excuses for Conservative Victory”). The Democratic message was heard loud and clear, and decisively rejected.

Democrats have lost the argument, and Harry Reid’s attempt to claim that “the majority of the country” supports his party’s position is nothing but a damned lie. Perhaps this is why, as Brian O’Connor notes at Red Dog Report, opposition to the economics of envy seems to be increasingly bipartisan:

Voting nearly identically, the Senate twice failed to meet a 60-vote threshold necessary to move forward on both proposals. Meeting in a rare Saturday session after agreements fell through for a Friday vote, the results were widely expected. They were also somewhat premature, as the White House is still negotiating with congressional leaders on an alternative compromise proposal.
The first proposal by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) would have extended the cuts only for individuals with incomes of up to $200,000 and families with incomes of up to $250,000. That failed by a vote of 53-36, with all GOP senators in opposition as well as Democrats Russ Feingold (Wis.), Joe Manchin (W.V.), Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Jim Webb (Va.) and Independent Joe Lieberman (Conn.).

Feingold got beat in November, and Manchin won by distancing himself from Democrats. Nelson, Webb and Lieberman all face re-election campaigns in 2012.

Amazingly, it seems Democrats have managed to prove Edmund Burke wrong. Whereas Burke believed that “the many are not capable of making this calculation” — i.e., most people in 1790 didn’t recognize the fallacy of redistributionist policy — in fact, American voters in 2010 overwhelmingly rejected the class-warfare arguments of the Left.

Someone should break this news to Harry Reid, whose economic ignorance is so complete that he can’t figure out why the Democrats’ neo-Keynesian stimulus-and-bailout policies of massive deficit spending couldn’t stop unemployment from rising to 9.8% — or why 1,800 Democratic congressional staffers will soon be unemployed in the worst U.S. job market in 30 years.

Category: Economics, Election, Harry Reid, Taxes

Allen West: DADT Debate ‘Crazy’

Posted on | December 5, 2010 | 4 Comments

Video interview with Newsmax:

“The mission of the United States military is not to accommodate behavior, and definitely not to accommodate sexual behavior. But right now, what is most important for us to be talking about?
“In this past week, we had the Taliban infiltrate a gentlemen into the Afghan security forces who shot six American soldiers. Killed them. What we should be talking about are rules of engagement and the strategic objectives that will lead to our victory and our success against this enemy.
“Instead, we are worrying about who is sleeping with who in the military. That’s crazy. So I think right now don’t ask, don’t tell is not the thing the American people expect the House and the Senate and the senior military leadership to be talking about. What they want to know is how do we protect our sons and daughters on the battlefield, how do we make sure that we are promoting victory, and how do we make sure that we take this fight to the enemy and not allow them to bring the fight to us.”

You can read the rest of the interview with LTC West here.

Category: Allen West, Gays, Military

You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself

Posted on | December 4, 2010 | 18 Comments

What kind of misogynistic pervert would collect seven women, dress them in nothing but lacy underwear, call them the “Cup Size Choir” — labeled A through G — and then compel them to sing “Deck the Halls” in order to create a video commercial for La Senza™ lingerie? What sort of blogger would post that sacrilegious video on his site? And what kind of readers would click the link to spend two minutes watching such a disgusting sexed-up travesty? Read more

Category: Christmas, Rule 5, Video

Sexist Racist Hate Group Exposed

Posted on | December 4, 2010 | 3 Comments

Yeah, I’m talking about al-Qaeda:

Back in 1949, Sayyid Qutb, the ideological father of al-Qaeda, spent the better part of the year studying education in Greely, Colorado. Greely, at the time, was the kind of town you’d expect neo-fundamentalists to approve of: its puritanical city government, notably, had outlawed booze.
But it wasn’t conservative enough for Mr Qutb. In his memoirs, The America I Have Seen: In the Scale of Human Values, which were published in the Egyptian journal al-Risala in 1951, Mr Qutb railed against what he saw. “The American girl,” one passage reads, “is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, in the expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs – and she shows all this and does not hide it.”
He also hated jazz – “music”, he explained, “that the Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other.”
It seems to me that Mr Qutb had issues with sexuality that transcended the purely ideological. . . .

Read the whole thing. Strange how those of us in favor of blasting violent Islamic extremism out of existence are the ones who constantly have to defend ourselves against accusations of “hate.”

Category: Islam, Racism, Sex, Terrorism

Blogger Gets 2 Million Hits Because of His Insightful Commentary and Lucy Pinder’s Enormous Breasts, But Mainly . . .

Posted on | December 4, 2010 | 8 Comments

. . . it was the insightful commentary. Given his current average of more than 3,000 visits per day, he should record his 2 millionth hit sometime Sunday evening, or earlier if he can score an Instalanche. Congratulations to Professor Donald Douglas of American Power for his successful implementation of The Rules.

UPDATE: In case ginormous tatas aren’t your cup of tea — like maybe you’re gay or something, NTTAWWT — Piece of Work in Progress offers a video tribute to studly matinee idols.

Category: American Power, How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog, Rule 5

If Charles M. Blow Never Wrote Another Word About Sarah Palin . . .

Posted on | December 4, 2010 | 5 Comments

. . . it would be nearly as good as if he never wrote another word, period:

This is it. This is the last time I’m going to write the name Sarah Palin until she does something truly newsworthy, like declare herself a candidate for the presidency. Until then, I will no longer take part in the left’s obsessive-compulsive fascination with her, which is both unhealthy and counterproductive.

The biggest problem with these useless overpaid pundits is their arrogant belief that nothing really matters until it’s written up by the New York Times.

(Via Memeorandum.)

Category: Election 2012, Media Bias, New York Times, Sarah Palin

BREAKING: Rumored Secret U.S. Weapon Causes Taliban Surrender

Posted on | December 4, 2010 | 23 Comments

Shocking news from Afghanistan:

KABUL — Thousands of Taliban fighters have surrendered to Allied forces after rumors spread among the militants in Afghanistan that the United States was prepared to deploy a devastating new secret weapon, NATO commanders said Saturday.
As frightened former members of the Afghan insurgency streamed into Allied encampments, tearfully pleading to be rescued, NATO troops noticed that many of the surrendering Taliban were covered in urine.
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said one U.S. official in Kandahar. “They are quite literally pissing themselves in fear.”
Pentagon sources say the panic that led to the mass surrender was inspired by rumors — spread virally over the Internet — that the U.S. Navy was prepared to unleash a weapon that could permanently disrupt the Taliban’s online command-and-control channels, exposing the terrorist insurgents to complete destruction by the Allied forces.
While details of the Navy weapons program are classified, rumors circulating in Afghanistan say that it would switch jihadist Web sites from easy-to-use Blogger software to a WordPress custom platform, which the primitive Pashtun tribesmen could not possibly understand or use effectively.
Employing sophisticated technology, the weapon would then install the Disqus commenting system, inhibiting the ability of Taliban site owners to moderate comments. It would further impair their communications network with a barrage of disruptive messages, urging the Islamist militants to cease using Twitter.com and instead install the high-tech TweetDeck program, which is incompatible with antiquated computer systems used by the insurgents.
Several jihadist Internet sites featured a photo of the so-called “REMF Stealth Ninja” system, although officials in both the U.S. and Afghanistan denied any knowledge of . . .

Read more

Category: Aghanistan, Jim Moran, Military, Terrorism, Uncategorized
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