Say Anything Blog

Over on the Reader Blogs, there’s the post: A Basic Difference Between Conservatives and Lefties : 

“Conservatives think in terms of July 4th, while lefties think in terms of April 15th.”

I was reading Jay Nordlinger’s Impromptus this AM, when another difference hit me. Jay was quoting from a New York Times magazine piece on Rush Limbaugh.

(William F.) Buckley died a few days after my first visit to Limbaugh in Florida. Limbaugh mourned him on the air and off. But he also had a sense that, with Buckley’s passing, he now became the movement’s elder statesman. Jay Nordlinger, a senior editor at The National Review, watched Limbaugh’s tutelage under Buckley, and he takes Limbaugh seriously as a polemicist and public intellectual. “I hired a lot of people over the years, fancy kids from elite schools, and I always asked, ‘How did you become a conservative?’ Many of them said, ‘Listening to Rush Limbaugh.’ And often they’d add, ‘Behind my parents’ back.’ ”

So, there is, I believe another difference between liberals and conservatives. While people find the message of conservatism appealing, to the point where hundreds if not thousands of people admit to becoming conservatives after listening to Rush, do you think you could find even a Corporal’s guard who would admit to becoming liberal after listening to Al Franken?

Me neither!

Cross posted at Proof Positive

Sound familiar?  Everything that is not convenient to Obama’s campaign is a “distraction.”

One gets the idea, though, that if the war in Iraq weren’t going so well it wouldn’t be a “distraction” any more.  It’d be a serious campaign issue that Obama would talk about all the time.  As it is, one gets the idea that Obama would just as soon not talk about Iraq.

Obama is also saying that Iraq is a distraction from the other threats facing America.  Which is more than a bit disingenuous.  Right now the biggest threat facing the world is the radicalism and terrorism springing from the middle east.  The only way to combat that radicalism and terrorism is to have boots on the ground there to drive back the oppression so that the people of the region can leave in peace and prosperity.  We’re doing that in Iraq.  We’re doing that in Afghanistan.  Those two operations have, and will continue to, make a world of difference in terms of the threat the middle east poses.

No amount of schmoozing with the President of Iran is going to change that.

Best historical marker I’ve ever seen:

Ladies and gentleman, Jim McLaughlin:

Is it just me, or is Obama taking nastier shots from the left than the right of late? 

Who would have thunk it?

On Monday, The New Yorker magazine tried dipping its toe into broad satire involving Senator Obama with a cover image depicting the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and his wife, Michelle, as fist-bumping, flag-burning, bin Laden-loving terrorists in the Oval Office. The response from both Democrats and Republicans was explosive.

Comedy has been no easier for the phalanx of late-night television hosts who depend on skewering political leaders for a healthy quotient of their nightly monologues. Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and others have delivered a nightly stream of jokes about the Republican running for president — each one a variant on the same theme: John McCain is old.

But there has been little humor about Mr. Obama: about his age, his speaking ability, his intelligence, his family, his physique. And within a late-night landscape dominated by white hosts, white writers, and overwhelmingly white audiences, there has been almost none about his race.

“We’re doing jokes about people in his orbit, not really about him,” said Mike Sweeney, the head writer for Mr. O’Brien on “Late Night.” The jokes will come, representatives of the late-night shows said, when Mr. Obama does or says something that defines him — in comedy terms.

Is the aversion to mocking Obama really to do with his race?  Or is this just swooning liberals refusing to cast their messiah in anything approaching a negative light?

I suspect it’s a little of both.

Four times.

Barack Obama specifically voted four times in the Illinois Legislature to allow criminal charges against a homeowner who used a firearm in self-defense of their person and home — specifically what the Supreme Court says is a constitutional right. Obama may say he supports it, but his record says exactly the opposite.

Obama, a self-proclaimed “constitutional scholar,” expressed support for the recent DC vs. Heller Supreme Court ruling which concluded that the 2nd amendment is an individual right, yet clearly that expressed support was little more than a campaign lie intended to make him look less like a far-left liberal than he really is.

I expect a lot of moaning and groaning about the “weak dollar” and such from the protectionists over this, but the reality is that the international mingling of economies is good for overall prosperity and peace.

The way I see it, InBev just invested $46.3 billion in America.  The company made that investment so that they can gain greater access to the American marketplace, not so that they could shutdown Budweiser which is one of the most recognizable brands on the planet.  We should view that as a positive.  Foreign companies want to do business in our country.  That’s a testament to the strength, stability and resilience of our economy.

And this buyout is likely to have little impact on American beer consumption, thus there will be little impact on those currently employed by Anheuser-Busch.

There always seems to be a bit of flag-waving nationalism when foreign companies move in on American business, especially when the business in question is as iconic as Anehuser-Busch is.  But really we should want these sort of takeovers to happen.  The promote greater corporate efficiency and better business practices, which ultimately result in better products at lower prices for we the consumers.

Probably a good move for Fox given that Huckabee has a lot of appeal among religious-but-not-very-fiscally-conservative part of the GOP tent, but personally I got about all I can take of the Huckster during the primaries.

How much do you want to bet that Congress will go ahead and spend our tax dollars on those bailouts anyway?

About the only part of Phil Gramm’s argument that I’ve taken exception to is the idea that Americans are whiners.  I don’t think Americans are whining so much as they’re being deceived into thinking things are worse than they are. 

If anything Americans are simply naive in that they believe far too much of what they see on television and/or read in newspapers.

Well, maybe pigs do fly.

The Nevada chapter of the ACLU has broken ranks with the national organization and is backing the Supreme court’s recent decision on the Second Amendment, AKA the Heller decision:

Gun rights are so popular in Nevada that they are backed by even the state chapter of a liberal group that conservatives usually love to hate. And Republicans are in clover.

Nevada’s pistol-packing Gov. Jim Gibbons, a Republican, welcomed the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada to his posse in the gun debate after the group broke with the national ACLU to champion the Second Amendment guarantee for an individual right to keep and bear arms.

Let’s see...what’s wrong with this picture?

The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) is an organization that supposedly defends citizens whenever their Constitutional rights are usurped or challenged. So, out of all fifty states, the Nevada ACLU are so far the only ones who are stepping up and saying, hey, it’s Constitutional. The Supreme Court says so. Therefore we will defend our citizen’s right to keep and bear arms.

The rest of the organization seems content to cherry pick what they support and what they don’t based on ideology instead of the Constitution.

Even the NRA is applauding the Nevada ACLU over this one.

Maybe the rest of the ACLU will look at this and come around to the facts of the issue instead of looking at it through the twisted lens of liberal ideology. Yeah. Okay. And maybe there’ll be world peace and flowers for everyone and we’ll all live happily ever after.

Regardless of what the rest of the ACLU does, though, my hat’s off to the Nevada folks. They got it right.

Faced with losing out on $900,000 worth of revenue after they were caught illegally collecting certain traffic fines the City of Fargo is now wondering how they’re going to squeeze that money out of citizens anyway.

Here’s a thought: Maybe municipalities shouldn’t be so reliant on fines as a source of revenue.  After all, why do we have traffic fines?  Is it for revenue, or for public safety?

Byron York:

Why hasn’t Barack Obama revealed how much money he raised in June? A number of his supporters are a bit antsy about it — is he still pulling in those record-breaking numbers? If so, why hasn’t he said anything?

The Obama campaign has said anything because they’re embarrassed by the June fund raising numbers, especially coming after Obama’s high-profile rejection of public campaign financing.  Which is turning out to be a bit of hubris the liberal messiah is going to end up regretting.

What’s particularly interesting is that Obama is running one of the most bloated campaigns in the history of Presidential politics.  His campaign staff is twice what Bush’s was in 2004.  He is outspending McCain nearly 5 - 1 on staff salaries, 2 - 1 on office rent and 25 - 1 on advertising.

Plus, Obama’s roughly 700 campaign staffers are seven times what McCain has.

Obama was the fund raising master in the primaries, no doubt about it, but with many of his biggest-money contributors having already maxed out the amount they can legally donate to him and with Hillary’s backers balking at forking over any cash he’s in serious trouble given the above spending levels.

With his choice not to take public funding complicating the issue further, Obama is faced with either keeping his fund raising at the herculean levels he enjoyed throughout the primaries, which is bloody unlikely, or having to cut back on campaign expenditures. 

With staff cut backs likely to make the candidate Oprah is now calling “the one” look a bit less messianic than we’ve become accustomed to neither option is all that good.

The White House has announced that President Bush will rescind the Executive Order banning off-shore drilling for oil.  The president’s announcement will be carried live on CNBC at 1:30pm EDT.

It’s a start. 

Because Republicans are fascists, I guess, and not merely people with a different ideas about how government should be run.

In a speech in Madison, Wis., Obama told his supporters that rallying to his cause was today’s equivalent of the “greatest generation” rallying to defeat Hitler and Tojo. Oprah merely calls him, “The One,” saying he will help us “evolve to a higher plane.”

Someone get that man one of those “I’m Kind of a Big Deal” T-shirts.

It takes a special kind of hubris to compare the campaign of a one-term Senator who barely got his own party’s nomination to be their Presidential candidate to the global fight against fascism.

In the New York Times today Obama has an editorial called “My Plan For Iraq.” Now, given that even liberals in the media are begging Obama to update hid outdated notions about Iraq so that they reflect the success we’ve had in the country over the last year, the fact that Obama’s plan for the war remains essentially unchanged from what it was back in 2004 is a bit surprising.

As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.

This seems a bit arrogant, no?  The situation in Iraq is not the same as it was in 2004.  Everyone has admitted this.  We’ve had huge amounts of success in stopping violence, beating back the terrorists and letting the Iraqi government and security forces take control.  Even now Iraqis want to take over control of Baghdad, and beyond that want to take over full and autonomous control of other parts of their country as well.

That should, and will, happen.  But who is to say that it will happen within this arbitrary time line Obama is setting?  What if the Iraqis need a few extra months?  Are we going to deny them that at the end of the mission?  After all we’ve been through with them?

I realize that Obama needs to placate the left-wing hordes who pushed him to his marginal victory in the primaries, but this is hardly an issue where it’s ok to pander.  We’re talking about a mission in Iraq that countless Americans and Iraqis died for.  To see that mission tarnished because Obama wants to meet an arbitrary deadline set not because it’s the best policy but rather to pander to a political constituency would be hurtful.

To the military men and women who have worked so hard, and risked their lives and health, more than anyone else.

Throughout the years, the NYT has repeated what it was fed by the Palestinian propaganda machine: Israelis kill innocent children in cold blood. A highly publicized example of this, was the 12-year-old boy Muhammad al-Dura, supposedly videotaped being shot by Israelis as he crouched behind his helpless father.

“Like every child here, they are haunted by the image of Muhammad al-Dura,” he continued, referring to the 12-year-old boy shot dead as he crouched behind his father—film that is repeatedly shown on Palestinian and Arab television stations. “I have never had a gun in my life. But my children—who are doing pee-pee in their beds—want me to buy one, because obviously Muhammad al-Dura’s father couldn’t protect him well enough with his bare hands.”

-Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. NYT Dec 10,2000

In 2002, the NYT noted that “… Muhammad al-Dura, the 12-year-old boy from Gaza whose father could not shield him from a hail of Israeli gunfire” had become a “household name”.

A ”household name”. Funny what a good propaganda campaign will do for you! But, a French journalist named Philippe Karsenty noticed that something seemed wrong about the video. The absence of blood and blood spatter among other things. He started badgering France TV 2 to provide the footage before and after the so-called shooting, so it could be proved or disproved that the video was genuine. Karsenty was so persistent in pursuing this story and denouncing France TV 2 for not seeking the truth, that they sued him for libel!

And now, Philippe Karsenty has won that suit. The libel case has been thrown out. There is definitive evidence that the video uses to inflame the emotions of anti-Semites around the world was a fake. A fraud. Propaganda in it’s purest form, even though it was ultimately poorly staged.

But you would think that somewhere in All the News that’s Fit to Print, there’d be a least a passing mention in the NYT, wouldn’t you? I mean, they did publish a story about the controversy back in 2005, but even then, the tone of the piece still accepted the premise of cold-blooded Israeli killers as fact.

Now that Karsenty has been vindicated, wouldn’t you think that the NYT who had been duped along with many other media outfits would have the slightest interest in wanting the record to be set straight? *Sigh*

Hat tip Stop the ACLU
Cross Posted at Proof Positive

The Bismarck Tribune has an editorial today about child support collections I can get behind.  After several paragraphs of niceties about how important it is to pay your child support (wouldn’t want to run afoul of the health and human services gestapo) the Tribune gets to the meet of the issue:

...one child support enforcement program that seems to cross a line is license suspension.

It was recently reported that more than 1,000 North Dakotans have had their driver’s licenses suspended after failing to make child support payments. Another 688 people are reportedly subject to losing their licenses if they don’t comply with payment plans.

The suspension laws not only take away the privilege of driving, but also can revoke hunting, professional and occupational licenses, as well as business permits and vehicle registrations for cars, trucks, boats and airplanes (usually for those in serious arrears).

That seems foolish for a couple of reasons. First, there are plentiful methods of collection without unleashing the license police. Second, a non-custodial parent might need a driver’s license, or car registration, or professional or occupational license, or business permit to make money so they can pay child support.

Taking away such licenses seems more like punishment than a deterrent or collection method. What message does this send?

The message sent is along the lines of “you’re little more than a paycheck to cash to us.” Which isn’t exactly a great way to engender a desire for cooperation and support from the person getting nailed.  Not to mention the obvious: If you take away a person’s drivers license, and possibly even his/her occupational license, you seriously inhibit their ability to work.  Especially in a state like North Dakota with next to nothing in the way of public transportation.

If a person is already struggling to make child support payments does anyone really think that making it harder for them to go to work and earn money is going to improve the situation?  And what about putting those in child support arrears in jail?  The Tribune article doesn’t mention it, but it happens.  I’ve known people it happened to.  Now I’ll grant that the people I’ve known who were put in jail because of this weren’t making great financial choices, but putting them in jail - something that caused these people to lose their jobs - didn’t do anything to solve that problem.

Now I’ll grant that people have got to pay their child support to support their children.  There’s no getting around that.  But while we recognize that, we also need to recognize why the state engages in such draconian tactics to collect that money.

It’s not because the bureaucrats care about collecting the child support.  It’s because the the federal funding state human services bureaucrats receive is based on the amount of child support they collect.  The federal government takes the total amount of child support funds collected and distributed in a given state and then sends the health and human services bureaucrats a check worth 66% of that total.

That is why divorcing parents aren’t allowed to figure out their own child support arrangements.  That is why the human services bureaucrats go to such draconian measures to collect child support. 

It’s not about what’s best for the children or the families, its about what’s best for the health and human services agency’s bottom line.

A billion dollars in revenue. They don’t pay taxes. They receive $330 million in tax dollars a year. They contribute millions to politicians (97% to Democrats). They had over $100 Million surplus last year.

Why are we giving them so much money?

US taxpayers…shouldn’t have to pay taxes to an organization that uses your money to politicize, yes in upcoming elections, candidates who’ll give them more of your tax money. This is unconscionable.

-Michele Bachmann (R-MN)

Oh, and Michele for VP!!

Hat tip Hot Air
Cross Posted at Proof Positive