Category Archives: Political Commentary

Rogues’ Gallery

Here is a list of the bribes that Harry Reid paid with our money to buy votes on this monstrosity. At least lobbyists use their own money. As Mark Steyn writes:

You can’t even dignify this squalid racket as bribery: If I try to buy a cop, I have to use my own money. But, when Harry Reid buys a senator, he uses my money, too. It doesn’t ‘border on immoral’: it drives straight through the frontier post and heads for the dark heartland of immoral.

And when you see things like this, the blood just boils:

Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.), Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.)

—Exemption from the non-profit excise tax for Michigan insurers. Michigan and Nebraska were the only two states so exempted.

Is such blatant favoritism to particular states even constitutional? Is there precedent for it? Don’t other states have a right to protest this inequality under the law?

[Update a few minutes later]

Five reasons it still may not pass. Let’s hope.

[Late morning update]

Why the Reid bill is unconstitutional. Even without the payoffs to Michigan and Nebraska.

If anything resembling this planned man-caused disaster passes, I expect to see lots of legal challenges, many of them successful.

[Early evening update]

The ostensible beneficiaries of Senator Nelson’s corruption don’t seem to be very happy about it, especially after he tried to deflect blame onto others:

Gov. Dave Heineman “contacted me and he said this is another unfunded federal mandate and it’s going to stress the state budget, and I agreed with him,” the Nebraska Democrat said. “I said to the leader and others that this is something that has to be fixed. I didn’t participate in the way it was fixed.”

But Heineman expressed anything but gratitude, saying he had nothing to do with the compromise and calling the overhaul bill “bad news for Nebraska and bad news for America.”

“Nebraskans did not ask for a special deal, only a fair deal,” Heineman said in a statement Sunday.

That criticism is only a taste of what Nelson has received since announcing Saturday that he would become the 60th vote needed to advance the landmark legislation.

I wonder if this could influence his vote in the final after reconciliation? Unfortunately, it will be hard to change without looking as craven as he undoubtedly is, unless what comes out of conference is different.

Oh, and here’s a perfect example of the false choice fallacy that I talked about last week:

The Nebraska Democratic Party chairman called Nelson’s decision “courageous” and dismissed Republican criticism of it.

“Whatever he did, they would be critical,” Vic Covalt said. “They have no program and they have nothing to offer us other than more of the same.”

Just as I said:

There is a variation on this fallacy, in fact. It goes: There is a crisis; something must be done! What we propose to do is something. Therefore, it must be done!

This invalid argument is otherwise known as false choice, of course, because the alternative to the particular something being proposed is not nothing (even if one accepts the initial premise that there is a crisis about which something must be done) — it is a variety of other somethings, some of which may be the something that is actually key to solving the problem, even if their own is not necessarily.

We saw this last January when many of the same people promoting AGW hysteria also used it to ram through the failed “stimulus” bill without reading it. It is now being used to justify taking over the sixth of the US economy represented by the health care industry. All the while, these people have been lambasting their political opponents who offer more sensible alternatives as proposing that we do “nothing.”

Liars.

More Exploding Watermelons

Here’s the latest from the fruit salad, over at The Independent:

The most progressive US president in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speaker-phone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that could challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation that put a man on the Moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantle of a religion.

I’m long on record of opposing the idiocy of inappropriate comparisons of the crisis du jour to Apollo. Is he really comparing a massive technological achievement of engineering to “summoning a collective will” (i.e., social engineering)? Apparently.

And when it comes to “taking on the mantle of a religion,” I can only suggest that he and his gaze long into a mirror.

The War Against Christmas

by the Nazis:

“The baby Jesus was Jewish. This was both a problem and a provocation for the Nazis,” explained Judith Breuer, who organised the exhibition using the items she and her mother collected at flea markets over 30 years. “The most popular Christian festival of the year did not fit in with their racist ideology. They had to react and they did so by trying to make it less Christian.”

The regime’s exploitation of Christmas began almost as soon as the Nazis took power in 1933. Party ideologists wrote scores of papers claiming that the festival’s Christian element was a manipulative attempt by the church to capitalise on what were really old Germanic traditions. Christmas Eve, they argued, had nothing to do with Christ but was the date of the winter solstice – the Nordic Yuletide that was “the holy night in which the sun was reborn”.

The swastika, they claimed, was an ancient symbol of the sun that represented the struggle of the Great German Reich. Father Christmas had nothing to do with the bearded figure in a red robe who looked like a bishop: the Nazis reinvented him as the Germanic Norse god Odin, who, according to legend, rode about the earth on a white horse to announce the coming of the winter solstice. Propaganda posters in the exhibition show the “Christmas or Solstice man” as a hippie-like individual on a white charger sporting a thick grey beard, slouch hat and a sack full of gifts.

But the star that traditionally crowns the Christmas tree presented an almost insurmountable problem. “Either it was the six-pointed star of David, which was Jewish, or it was the five-pointed star of the Bolshevik Soviet Union,” said Mrs Breuer. “And both of them were anathema to the regime.” So the Nazis replaced the star with swastikas, Germanic “sun wheels” and the Nordic “sig runes” used by the regime’s fanatical Waffen SS as their insignia.

Housewives were encouraged to bake biscuits in similar shapes. One of the exhibits is a page from a Nazi women’s magazine with a baking recipe: “Every boy will want to bake a sig (SS) rune,” proclaims the accompanying text.

The Nazification of Christmas did not end there. The Christmas tree crib was replaced by a Christmas garden containing wooden toy deer and rabbits. Mary and Jesus became the Germanic mother and child, while dozens of Christmas carols, including the famous German hymn “Silent Night”, were rewritten with all references to God, Christ and religion expunged. At the height of the anti-Christian campaign, an attempt was made to replace the coming of Christ the Saviour with the coming of Adolf Hitler – the “Saviour Führer.”

“We cannot accept that a German Christmas tree has anything to do with a crib in a manger in Bethlehem,” wrote the Nazi propagandist Friedrich Rehm in 1937. “It is inconceivable for us that Christmas and all its deep soulful content is the product of an oriental religion,” he added.

This kind of thing would be a palliative against the historically ignorant who think that Nazism, or fascism in general, is a “right wing” or “Christian” phenomenon. But they won’t read it — it conflicts with what they were taught in government schools.

Conflict Of Interest?

Mark Matthews and Bobby Block have the most in-depth reporting on Chairwoman Giffords’ too-cozy relationship with NASA and Constellation defenders that I’ve seen to date. But is it actually a conflict of interest? I’m not sure about that. As the article notes, her husband is unlikely to fly on anything resulting from the POR, and while he may have a job lined up with one of the usual suspects, he’d probably be able to get it regardless. If anyone is aware of a more quid-pro-quoish possibility on this front, I’d be interested to hear about it, though, in light of the history of the Horowitz revolving door with ATK.

But what I do think is happening is that her husband is a big supporter of the POR, and he has no doubt influenced her to be one as well. I’m not excusing her behavior toward the committee or Chairman Augustine, or her apparent ignorance or flawed understanding of the issues about which she has oversight responsibility, and I wish that someone else had her job, but I just don’t see it as corrupt. I do think, though, that the criticism of her husband for romancing her with taxpayer resources is fair and legitimate.

Avatar

Is one of the stupidest movies ever made:

If Avatar were drawn like a regular cartoon, or had been made on soundstages with sets and the like, would it be interesting? Would it hold our attention? The answer is, unquestionably no. There’s no chance anybody would even have put it into production, no matter that Cameron made the box-office bonanza Titanic. So the question is: Does the technical mastery on display in Avatar outweigh the unbelievably banal and idiotic plot, the excruciating dialogue, the utter lack of any quality resembling a sense of humor? And will all these qualities silence the discomfort coming from that significant segment of the American population that, we know from the box-office receipts for Iraq war movies this decade, doesn’t like it when an American soldier is the bad guy?

Podhoretz’ review is chock full’o’spoilers, but when something is as apparently ridden with PC cliches as this, it’s pretty hard to spoil it. Let’s hope they can apply the film-making technology to a good movie soon.

[Monday morning update]

Kurt Loder over at MTV has similar thoughts:

Cameron is a great action director. There’s a lot to look at here: the luminescent glow of the jungle in which the Na’vi live, the ancient Tree of Souls with which they commune, a spectacular range of mountains hanging high in the sky up above Pandora — and there’s a lot going on. The director and his battalion of digital technicians have cooked up a fantastical bestiary of Pandoran creatures — futuristic hammerhead rhinos; dogfighting battle dragons; and, in one virtuoso sequence, a vicious six-legged thingy that chases Jake through the jungle and off the edge of a cliff (see trailer). The meticulous detail in which these creatures have been rendered, and the complexity with which they’re arrayed in the film’s exotic environments, are undeniable marvels of moviemaking art.

Unfortunately, whenever the action lets up and we’re returned to the piddling story, the picture slumps like a failed soufflé. It’s also heavily laced with political instruction of a most familiar sort. Cameron, who’s now 55, is a self-acknowledged aging hippie, and his boomer worldview is strictly by-the-numbers. Quaritch and Selfridge are evil Americans despoiling the Na’vi’s idyllic planet in exactly the same way that the humans have (we’re told) trashed their own native orb. The invaders are armed with deplorable corporate technology (an odd animosity in a major-studio movie that reportedly cost more than $300 million to make), and they speak the familiar — and here rather anachronistic — language of contemporary American warmongering. (“We will fight terror with terror!” “It’s some kind of shock-and-awe campaign!”)

The Na’vi, on the other hand, with their bows and arrows and long braided hair, are stand-ins for every spiritually astute and ecologically conscientious indigenous population ever ground down under the heel of rampaging Western imperialism. They appear to have no warlike impulses themselves, and they live in complete harmony with their environment. (They even talk to trees.) Why, the movie asks, as if the question were new, can’t we be more like them?

No one argues that it’s not a brilliant technological feat. It’s just a shame that it seems to have a cliched, politically infantile story line.

I Love The Sound

…of exploding watermelons in the morning:

Polly Toynbee is blaming the whole fiasco on false consciousness.

…Sometimes we’re inclined to dismiss Polly as a loveable comedy figure, what with her lovely house in Tuscany contrasting so amusingly with her prolier-than-thou politics, and the never ending japesomeness of her deft, lighter-than-air prose.

But you know what? When she reveals her true colours, as she does here, I think she’s really, really scary. Her whole article teeters on the brink of demanding an eco-fascist world government to save us all from ourselves.

Save us from people wanting to save us from ourselves.

Let It Snow

…let it snow, let it snow.

Joe Lieberman went home to Connecticut for the last day of Chanukkah, and he’s snowed in, which means no cloture vote until he gets back. I’m seeing messages from DC Facebook friends that they’ve had to shovel two feet of global warming off their sidewalks already.