MORE SILLINESS FROM THE LEFT!

Judge Susan Bolton displays a total inability to follow the law or precedence in her decision to put an injunction on Arizona's attempt to slow ILLEGAL immigration.

Rich Lowry at National Review Online explains her "cheekiness."

Andy McCarthy at The Corner explains the speciousness of the argument.

Both worth the read to try and understand BHO's, DOJ's and the judges logic!

I will bet even the Ninth Circuit will reverse her, if the assigned judges have any self respect. If they don't, they will be reversed by the Supreme's without a doubt.

Trouble is it takes TIME, and that is all BHO and his cohorts want. Can you say "Chicago".

A Description of Current Washington Politics

Steve Chapman summarizes the "Chicago" style of politics and it is a sad commentary on what the country has brought to Washington.

Read it and weep for your country!

THE ROOT CAUSE?

Powerline reports on a Rasmussen poll giving economic opinions from the "political class" versus "likely voters". Results of their preference for a free market economy:

75% of likely voters prefer it over a government managed economy.

37% of political class voters prefer it, while 44% perfer a government managed economy.


MIND BOGGLING! Aren't we supposed to govern in the United States with the consent of the governed?

"The New Racial Mess"

Victor Davis Hanson explains the origin of the racial discord rising up in our country. BHO is the problem as he clearly explains.

Why BHO will lead us into war with Iran!

Walter Russell Mead explains BHO's philosophies and why they will lead him to war with Iran. A good read to understand where this administration is coming from!

Mr. Mead, along with Victor Davis Hanson, is becoming my reference point to understanding the motivations of our President.

RATIONALITY

Neil Reynolds in a Globe and Mail column explains the facts presented in The American Scholar Magazine this summer by Professor Robert Laughlin, a physicist at Stanford.

Calm and factual, which is what we need! Please read if you are concerned about global warming.

It reminds me of an exercise I did a few years ago that relieved my concern. It is not scientific, but I think adds a little wisdom to the discussion.

The world population is 6 billion. I thought that is a lot of people, no doubt, and it will be double that in not that many years, so maybe there is need for concern.

To effect the climate of the earth these 6 billion - heading for 12 billion - must have a significant impact, so I could get a feel for this by calculating how much of the surface of the earth man touches directly - 6 or 12 billion is a BIG number!

So I said let's allow 1 square yard - 3' x 3' - for each person, and have them stand shoulder to shoulder just to see the physical size of this "direct human footprint" on the earth.

The result: the entire population of the earth would fit in 1/2 of San Diego County, California, where this is being written. When it doubles to 12 billion, they will still all comfortably fit in the county!

Think what a small area this is in relation to the earths entire surface!

I know, this is not our entire "footprint", but let's assume each person effects the atmosphere 100 times his "personal footprint". Correlating with area this would still fit inside the four Southwestern states - California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah.

Still a minute part of the earths surface, and I find it difficult to believe we could have any effect on climate with all of the other forces in the universe.

Food for thought!

A BRITISH CRITIQUE OF OBAMA

Janet Daley writes in the London Daily Telegraph about the class resentment that BHO promotes.

I agree with her. Not only is the column thought provoking, but the comments following are very enlightening - both those in agreement and disagreement. Read the column and the comments and see where you stand!

Here is one comment that caught my eye - harsh - but I am totally in agreement with most of HostileLogic's thoughts - note my exception below:



"The idea that there is no access to medical care in the U.S. for 11 million people is a pernicious lie. Some may not like the idea of getting medical care at an Emergency Room, but it’s there and people with no insurance and/or no money have a guaranteed right to get medical care. And they do. As well, there is an almost endless variety of programs that deliver heath care to the needy.

The realities of poverty should be understood by everyone. If you are poor, you won’t be driving a Mercedes. You won’t have a yacht, you won’t live in a mansion and you won’t be wearing designer clothing. [Or receive equivalent medical care, but you won't die! - poliblog]

That’s life.

The constant whining of “progressives” (Marxists) about the travails of the poor is like listening to the tortured howls of straitjacketed lunatics emanating from the padded cells of an insane asylum.

Progressives are the world champions in the promotion of class warfare. And in their efforts to promote class warfare, there always exists their necessary victims. Of course, the poor are typically the first casualties.

Telling the truth is something that progressives are totally unfamiliar with. If you listen you them closely, you will also notice they all say pretty my much the same things. Even at the top of their pecking order, do you ever notice how they parrot each other?

Further, none of us with a modicum of common sense and self respect should ever be afraid to say what is on our minds. Political correctness is nothing more than an attempt to by the left to herd people like sheep into slavery. Nobody should ever expect anything resembling freedom of thought and action from the left. They talk about social and economic justice, but what they deliver is slavery, misery and premature death.

How can you tell when the left is lying? Answer: when they open their mouths. [This last sentence is unnecessary and out of place, but the other sentiments are right on! - poliblog]



Not every progressive is concious of their "goals" as listed above, but the "road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Another less controversial comment from Snowman who believes human avarice is the root cause of the left's goals:

"It all boils down to human avarice.

Over roughly the last century, the UK has seen the virtual demise of class division. Working class lads now wear ermine and sit fidgeting in the House of Lords. The monarchy is an institution that is no longer venerated, but tolerated- nobody would be surprised to see it dismantled within our lifetime.

The vast majority of adults own cars, large wardrobes of clothes, luxury items, even houses. They grumble if they can't take a foreign holiday each year. They grumble because they have to wait in line for free medical attention. They grumble because the politicians they've freely elected had better educations than they had.

Per capita income is the highest it's been in the history of the world. Nobody need suffer from tooth ache any more, let alone die of tuberculosis or plague. Unions have ensured that workers (mostly) no longer have to work unreasonable hours, or suffer danger in the workplace.

If we break the law, we no longer have to endure being whipped, or starved, or mutilated, or having to perform hard labour. We can even murder one another with the sure knowledge that we will not be executed or transported to some malaria-ridden swamp in another hemisphere.

Our children all enjoy free education, can (if they choose) all read and all share in the vast pool of knowledge that is available to them. If they are unable, or simply unwilling, to work, the state will pay them a stipend, perhaps even provide them with accommodation.

We can worship, or refrain from worshipping, just as we please, without fear of being burned at the stake or suffering eternal damnation. I could go on and on.

But it's never enough, is it?"



That all sounds like a lot of progress to me!! But it is never enough. I would suggest the progressives sit back and contemplate this progress and how it has happened, rather than demanding more until it all comes crumbling down!

Note: this entry is for a good friend KK who is wrestling with my attitudes and the right. Hope this helps explain my positions.

More Berwick; an interesting sidelight!

The Washington Times discovers Donald Berwick's "arrangements" with the "charitable" organization he works for.

I don't know about you, but I would rather have a "non-elite" - that is, one who has not received total medical coverage for he and his wife for the rest of their lives (and from a "charity"!) - running Medicaid and Medicare!

And his salaries - $2.3 million in 2008! - seem generous, also!

Read the column and understand what is being done to us by BHO and his cronies.

Daniel Henninger Explains Berwick Problem; It Is A BIG one!

In "Berwick: Bigger than Kagan" Mr. Henninger explains with disgust the maneuver of BHO to get this British National Health Service fan as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). His last three paragraphs summarize the problem clearly:


"Barack Obama, Donald Berwick and the rest may fancy themselves philosopher kings who know what we need without the need to inform or persuade us first. That's not how it works here. That is Sen. Baucus's point."[The Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, was taken aback at the end-around: "Senate confirmation of presidential appointees is an essential process prescribed by the Constitution that serves as a check on executive power.]

It should be clear why Berwick is bigger than Kagan. We need a large public debate over these views, over what Mr. Obama has said his health plan would and would not do. We need to find out if every Democrat in Congress and every Democrat writing newspaper columns and blogs agrees with Dr. Berwick about clinical and individual autonomy and about leaders with plans.

Then we need to build an election around whether we want to go down the road Dr. Berwick has planned for us, or start dismantling the one that President Obama paved through Congress on a partisan vote."


Read Mr. Berwick's comments in Mr. Henninger column and make your own decision. It is truly disgusting!

We All Reach Our Limits!!

H/T: Steve Kelley, a great cartoonist!

Kagan Watch #7

Tony Blankley writes about Elena Kagan's testimony versus President Lincoln's beliefs. Interesting comparison - and scary! Excerpt below:


The very reason for the American experiment was -- and is -- to establish the principle and the reality that no man or government may alienate a person's life, liberty or pursuit of happiness.

Anyone who has experienced the expectation of the imminent loss of any of those conditions knows profoundly their value -- and thus the value of our form of government, which exists to protect those rights.

It does not take a legal scholar to know that. But it could be said that no one can rightly be called an American legal scholar who does not understand that the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the animating purposes of all our laws -- of the law. They are the soul of our Constitution. Without those rights, the body of law is a corpse -- a soulless, purposeless, manipulable, disposable, dead, material thing. If Ms. Kagan does not know that, then she knows nothing of our law.

Even more to the point, the right to remove those conditions from a man must always lie exclusively in the power of Him who gave them. The judge or politician who does not understand the source of those rights is ever likely to presume -- at some useful moment -- that a mere man or woman or government may act to deny such rights. Indeed, they are not rights if they are not so created -- but mere temporary grants of privilege from an all-powerful state."


Seems clear to me!!

"THE BIG GREEN LIE EXPOSED" - 2

Walter Russell Mead writes on the problems with the green movement. An earlier post quoted one historical analogy - prohibition - and below is another quite appropriate analogy:


"The green movement’s strategic failure is also reminiscent of the Peace Movement of the 1920s. Chuckleheaded do-gooders correctly recognized the problem of war. In the conditions of the twentieth century, great power wars like World War One were radically unacceptable. Unless war could be stopped, scores of millions might brutally die. Whole nations would be devastated; millions of children would starve. Given the rise of aircraft, great cultural monuments would be destroyed as the world’s greatest cities were razed to the ground. New and more terrible weapons would be developed under wartime conditions, weapons that potentially could lead to the destruction of all human civilization or even of life on earth.

Again, the Peace Movement of the 1920s was completely right about this — we know to our sorrow today just how right they were. Yet the strategies they proposed — a treaty to ‘outlaw war’ in the 1920s, and appeasement of dictators and revisionist powers in the 193os — were utter disasters and made World War Two inevitable. The Nuclear Freeze movement in the 1980s repeated the mistake: confusing the identification of a problem (nuclear weapons) with a workable policy solution (a unilateral western freeze on nuclear weapons deployment that would have given the Soviets superiority in Europe). There are fewer nuclear weapons today than would have existed had the Nuclear Freeze people had their way; there almost certainly would have been fewer wars and fewer war deaths if the policy recommendations of the pre-World War Two peace movements had been greeted with the obloquy and contempt they deserved.

You can diagnose a disease but have no clue how to treat it. You can be an excellent climate scientist and a wretched social engineer. You can want to do good and end up furthering exactly the evils you most deplore.

That is where most of the organized green groups stand today."


Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it! (Wish I had said that first!!)

MORE ON GREEN: MICHAEL CRICHTON EXPLAINS WHAT IS GOING ON IN SCIENCE

"Aliens Cause Global Warming: A Caltech Lecture by Michael Crichton" is a great summary and a must read for believers and skeptics of global warming. 12 printed pages and worth the time if you want to understand what is going on! (The lecture is from January 17, 2003, and nothing has changed!)

"THE BIG GREEN LIE EXPOSED"

Walter Russell Mead writes the best explanation I have read of the problem with today's green movement. An excerpt follows, summarizing his analysis of their activities by comparison with Prohibition:


"In sum, the mainstream press seems to be swinging around toward the views expressed on this blog: that the scandals may not discredit or even really affect the underlying scientific arguments about climate change but they do cast doubt on the perspicacity of the movement’s leadership — and that a fundamental rethink is called for.

Greens who feared and climate skeptics who hoped that the rash of investigations following Climategate and Glaciergate and all the other problems would reveal some gaping obvious flaws in the science of climate change were watching the wrong thing. The Big Green Lie (or Delusion, to be charitable) isn’t so much that climate change is happening and that it is very likely caused or at least exacerbated by human activity. The Big Lie is that the green movement is a source of coherent or responsible counsel about what to do.

The greens claim to be diagnosticians and therapists: that they can both name the disease and heal it. They are wrong. The attitudes and political vision of a group of NGO pressure groups may work when it comes to harassing Japanese whale ships in the Antarctic; this vision and these people come up short when set against the challenge of moderating the impact of human industrial activity on the earth’s climate system. Many leaders of today’s environmental movement are like the anti-alcohol activists before Prohibition who convinced Americans that the problem of alcohol abuse was real, destructive, and likely to get worse unless addressed. These farsighted activists were absolutely correct: with the introduction of the motorcar alcohol was more destructive than ever; with more than 500,000 alcohol related highway deaths between 1982 and 2008, more Americans have been killed on our roads as a result of drunk driving since 1915 than have died in our wars.

The problem is that the remedy proposed, Prohibition, not only failed to solve the problem — it made the problem of alcohol abuse worse, and it also reduced respect for the law and led to the rise of organized crime in the United States on an unprecedented scale.

The Prohibitionists were brilliantly, scientifically correct about the problem: they were foolishly and destructively blind about how to deal with it."


If you have time read his rather lengthy post. If not, I will be posting some interesting parts of it over the next day or two!

Kagan Watch #6

Orrin Hatch clearly explains his decision to vote against the confirmation of Elena Kagan to SCOTUS. A good summary of his concerns and the problems with her.

Obamacare: Sarah Palin was prescient on "Death Panel"

As a follow up to yesterday's post on the recess appointment of Donald Berwick to head Medicare and Medicaid, I find this IBD column titled "The President's One-Man Death Panel" and documenting some of his beliefs, a great summary of the problem.

It is amazing! The last three paragraphs of the column:


"The push for ObamaCare involved writing legislation behind closed doors by an imperial Democratic majority. Only through outright bribes to key senators and congressmen did it pass, voted on by politicians who didn't even read it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said we had to pass the bill to find out what's in it."

With the recess appointment of Donald Berwick we find more secrecy and gimmicks from an administration as transparent as a concrete wall.

The American people deserve better. They also deserve a healthy democracy."

Obamacare: Obama makes repeal a real possibility!

John Podhoretz explains the suspect politics behind the recess appointment of Donald Berwick as head of Medicare and Medicaid - he is a promoter of the British style single payer Government healthcare.

The final paragraph:


"By running away from this fight, Obama is signaling that the possibility of repealing the health-care monstrosity before it really begins to sink its teeth into the American system by 2014 is very real indeed."


Let's hope his conclusion is true and we can repeal Obamacare and avoid a disaster!

Kagan Watch #4

The Washington Times analyzes some of the dodges Elena Kagan used during her hearing. It is amazing to me. Can you spell:

T O T A L I T A R I A N I S M!

That is what her attitude sounds like to me. Am I wrong?

Kagan Watch #3

Jacob Sullum in Reason points out a disturbing aspect of Elena Kagan: she refused to acknowledge that natural rights exist beyond the Constitution! Mind boggling!

THERE ARE JOBS, AND THERE ARE JOBS!

As I've aged and become wiser it is clear that most of our political disagreements are semantic problems. The words we use mean completely different things to each side of the arguments. Our politicians do nothing to resolve this problem, either among themselves or with the nation as a whole. This is becoming increasingly detrimental to our system and our country.



Jobs is a fine example. I posit the following:

• There are two types of "jobs":
• INFRASTRUCTURE JOBS - jobs that exist to support the free market economy while it creates WEALTH. Examples: City, County, State and Federal employees including police, fireman, public school teachers, administrative positions, armed services, et al. They consume taxes from the WEALTH CREATING JOBS and do no WEALTH CREATION.
• WEALTH CREATING JOBS - jobs that are created by the free market economy to support the creation of WEALTH. These are all jobs that support the WEALTH CREATION segment of the economy - not just direct producers, but including all of the direct support. Example: the person on the Ford production line, the accountant in the accounting department, the janitor cleaning the production line, the cook in the cafeteria who cooks lunch for the production worker that he can buy. My practical definition is anyone controlled by a Profit and Loss Statement (this excludes all the INFRASTRUCTURE JOBS - as all are not P & L controlled).

When a Republican/Conservative says "we need jobs" he is referring to the second type job above - this is the "economic" or "monetary/tax" sense of the word "job".

When a Democrat/Leftist says "we need jobs" he is referring to both type jobs above, but tends to emphasize the "INFRASTRUCTURE JOBS" because it is easier to take action and it "feels good" to help people immediately.

They - the politicians - and we talk right past one another, and no one will stop and explain this to their opponents or to us because of the potential of PANDERING to the voters.

We MUST cut back on the INFRASTRUCTURE JOBS (which has increased significantly since the beginning of this downturn) and we MUST increase the WEALTH CREATING JOBS in order to increase the tax base, thereby allowing us to replace and increase the INFRASTRUCTURE JOBS!

DISCUSSIONS OF THIS WOULD BE APPRECIATED!

Hastings Case Sets a Dangerous Precedent

Cathy Young points out the silliness - sorry to be hung up on that adjective for the left! - in the Christian Legal Society v. Hastings case that was decided this Monday.

A good analysis with much food for thought. An important read! Think about the following paragraph:


"Moreover, the question of public subsidies may have far-reaching implications beyond college campuses. A city could argue that any group which benefits from municipal services such as police and fire protection or even electricity is "publicly subsidized," or that public parks should be off-limits to groups whose policies are deemed discriminatory."


Think about that!