An essay by Virginia Postrel. I’m pretty indifferent and immune to glamour and charisma, which is one of the reasons I saw through Obama right away, but many otherwise smart people obviously aren’t, so glamour is more important than many think.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Faith-Based Deficit Reduction
Note: I’ve been continually updating this post, and will probably continue to do so all day, and keep it at the top. New posts are below it.
Thoughts on the health-care deform by Jimmy Pethokoukis.
[Update a few minutes later]
Nationalizing health care by proxie:
Insurance companies are now heavily regulated government contractors. Way to get big business out of Washington! They will clear a small, government-approved profit on top of their government-approved fees. Then, when healthcare costs rise — and they will — Democrats will insist, yet again, that the profit motive is to blame and out from this Obamacare Trojan horse will pour another army of liberals demanding a more honest version of single-payer.
The Obama administration has turned the insurance industry into the Blackwater of socialized medicine.
Like the financial crisis, it’s right out of the standard fascist playbook. Screw up the market with government regulations, then claim that government regulations are required to fix it. Rinse, repeat, until they control every aspect of our lives.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Is the tax power infinite?
Americans today are not bound to meekly accept the most far-ranging assertions of congressional power based on large extrapolations from Supreme Court cases that themselves come from a short period (the late 1930s and early 1940s) when the Court was more supine and submissive to claims about centralized power than was any other Supreme Court before or after in our history. American citizens, in the political process and in their personal lives, will ultimately have the final word on the Constitution.
Let’s hope that ultimately comes soon.
[Update a while later]
“Every power grab is the base camp for the next power grab.”
[Update a while later]
Ten Obama promises that reached their expiration date this morning.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Americans: the health care debate wasn’t about health care at all.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, but not all of them.
[Update mid morning]
Dennis Prager: the Cold Civil War has begun:
Thank God this civil war is non-violent. But the fact is that the Left and the rest of the country share almost no values. The American value system and the leftist value system are irreconcilable. If the Left wins, American values lose. If American values win, the Left loses.
I like his idea of calling the Democrats “Social Democrats.”
And Mark Steyn has some depressing thoughts on our accelerating journey to Declinistan.
[Update a while later]
Awakening a sleeping giant:
Instead of being discouraged by passage of health care reform, tea party activists across the country say the defeat is a rallying cry that makes them more focused than ever on voting out any lawmaker who supported the measure.
“We’re not going to stop. Obviously, the whole tea party movement started because we’re about smaller government and less spending and less taxes. There is absolutely no way we can pay for this,” said Denise Cattoni, state coordinator for Illinois Tea Party, an umbrella group for about 50 groups from around Illinois.
Cattoni says the health care defeat doesn’t deflate tea party activists. “We couldn’t stop it because of the shenanigans that went on in Washington,” Cattoni said. “People are definitely more driven today than they were yesterday without a doubt.”
Actually, the giant awoke last year, as we saw in Virginia, New Jersey and (most of all) Massachusetts. And it’s not going back to sleep any time soon, contra the fantasies of the Democrats. It’s not only awake, now — it’s enraged. The retribution in November will be huge.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I just noticed this quote at the end of the article from an idiot:
While tea party activists have made themselves heard, University of North Florida political science professor Matthew Corrigan said the movement alone won’t be enough to oust incumbents.
“Do they have energy? Yes. Have they been getting into the media? Yes, but they still haven’t sold me on the fact that they can swing elections,” Corrigan said.
Tell it to Martha Coakley. If I were one of his students, I’d want my course tuition back.
[Update a few minutes later]
Kevin Williamson says that ObamaCare will never happen. Unfortunately, it’s not as good a news as it sounds:
Our budget deficit is currently about 10 percent of GDP and going higher. Greece’s is 12.7 percent of GDP — significantly higher, sure, but not outrageously so. At the end of fiscal 2009, U.S. federal government debt equaled 83 percent of GDP, 53 percent of which is held by the public. (Another 30 percent is “intra-government” debt, meaning money owed to the mythical Social Security trust fund and the like. The usual approach is to talk only about publicly held debt and to pretend that the rest does not represent real obligations, which is malarkey.) But even that does not tell the whole story: Official government debt figures do not account for the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac obligations taken on by the government, and those amount to $5 trillion, i.e. more than all 2009 federal spending. They also don’t count remaining liabilities related to the Wall Street bailout.
So here’s a prediction for you: Obamacare is not going to happen, regardless of the fact that the president is going to sign it into law today, regardless of what happens in the 2010 and 2012 elections, and regardless of any speech given anywhere in Washington. The government’s ability to simply say “Make it so!” and ignore economic reality is coming up against its limit. If Nancy Pelosi thinks the Republicans are obstructionists, wait until she wants to borrow money from people who don’t want to lend it to her and don’t have to run for reelection.
[Bumped]
The Most Powerful Woman In American History?
I don’t think that Nancy Pelosi is. I think that Edith Wilson would still claim that title. And like her stricken husband, she likely felt no constraints on her power in the White House.
Compare And Contrast
Ares I versus Falcon 9. The vast majority of the Ares hugging and SpaceX bashing comes off as lunacy. Much of it is driven, of course, by pecuniary interests. But not all of it.
More Space Misreporting
There’s a story over at the Grauniad today about the dotcom space millionaires, featuring Elon Musk and SpaceX. As usual, the reporter doesn’t understand what Constellation is/was:
His confidence has been boosted following last month’s decision by President Barack Obama to drop funding for the Constellation programme – the Nasa spacecraft intended to replace the space shuttle, which is to be grounded later this year.
Once again, Constellation is not now, and never was, a “replacement” for the Space Shuttle. If anything, it’s a replacement for Apollo. It’s an architecture of vehicles designed to get humans back to the moon, including launchers, capsule, earth-departure stages, and lunar lander and ascent vehicle. And the only parts that are really being cancelled are the Ares I launcher and the Orion crew module, because none of the rest of it was scheduled to start development for years.
Beyond that, the reporter doesn’t seem to understand the difference between suborbital and orbital, saying that Falcon I went to suborbit. Well, the first one did, but the other four went to orbit, albeit only the last two with full success. And all five were intended to.
You Know What’s Worse Than Being A Racist?
Falsely accusing others of racism. Even if Clyburn did hear the N-word, (I think he’s probably lying), it doesn’t justify tarring (and I choose that word deliberately) everyone at the protest. This, and similar comments by Janeane Garafolo, is contemptible. And I and a lot of other people are getting pretty damned tired of it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I agree with Dana Loesch:
I mean, if you’re going to smear a group of people by claiming that they were shouting slurs, perhaps make sure you don’t post video that completely refutes your claim and makes you look like a race hustler. Just saying.
That’s exactly what it is: race hustling. Identity prostitution and the Democrat party is the biggest pimp of all. To say nothing of Al Gore’s fleecing of the Cheyenne and Arapaho (I take interest in indigenous affairs because of my family’s proud heritage); the evisceration of under-privileged kids in DC to go to better schools via vouchers; Obama bringing in Sharpton to quiet the black community’s concerns that the administration’s economic policies are hurting them; or the cover up of the Gladney hate crime (and the socialists who called him an array of slurs); Democrats use minorities as nothing more than tools to claim power. It’s disgusting and as many, including Jay Stewart, Andre Harper, Charles Lollar, Stephanie Rubach, and others have said, inherently racist. These activists have spent so much of their lives asking the Democrats where is the progress? and pointing out how certain policies destroy their communities.
Socialists go about their concern for civil rights in the same manner that fake Christians go about their faith: they only take it out for the times they think people are watching or when they think that they could gain something from it. They hang it up in the closet when not in use.
And they keep them on the “liberal” plantation. Where they want to put all of us, and this bill, if it survives the vote and the courts, will be a big step in that direction.
When You Lose Howard Stern
…you’ve lost…well…OK, I’m not sure just what you’ve lost. But whatever it is, the Democrats have apparently lost it.
Real Journalism
I didn’t watch the whole thing, but reportedly, Bret Baier showed the rest of his colleagues how to interview a president tonight. Or at least this president. All it takes is a real journalist who doesn’t get a tingle up his leg to be in the presence of The One. Even A. B. Stoddard said that he was on the defensive. And it was nice to see someone call him out on his ongoing Medicare legerdemain. You can reduce Medicare costs, or you can reduce the new entitlement costs, but you can’t do both with the same dollars. And Baier was kind enough not to ask him about the “3000% decrease in employers’ costs for health insurance.”
[Thursday morning update]
Roger Simon: Obama must be desperate.
It does seem to me that despite the brave front being put out by her Highness and Hoyer (and Reid) and the White House, that they still can’t wrangle the votes, even for the Slaughterhouse Rules. There’s an excellent chance that this atrocity can be defeated, and it’s no time to give up. But the waverers in the House have to hang together, and not let themselves get picked off separately.
The Health-Care Talking Points
…versus reality. A lot of those talking points are familiar, because the supporters attempt to deploy them here, in comments.
The New Republic
As a commenter there notes, in its early days, it was a cheerleader for Mussolini and other fascists. So nothing has changed.