The recreation of 911 with Air Force Two, or the release of the “torture” memos? Talk about a circular firing squad.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
When Did Defense Of The Constitution Become “Extremist”?
Looks like an interesting book
It seemed to me as a historian that the concept of extremism begged a question: how do certain ideas, movements and political impulses come to be considered extremist? As a citizen whose political identity was shaped by the late twentieth century, I saw the militias’ assertion of a right to use armed force to change government policy as new, threatening, and beyond the pale of legitimate politics. But as a historian of early America I found achingly familiar their assertion of a right to take up arms to prevent the exercise of unconstitutional power by the federal government. As a historian, then, I was faced with a more specific question: how has the United States as a political society come to view the assertion of that right as extremist?
By conventional media wisdom, all of the Founders were “extremists.” But they have no problem with the big-government fascism taking hold of the country.
Lapdogs
Obama tells the press to focus on the “significance” of his infinitesimal budget cuts, and they oblige.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
“How The Internet Saved My Tongue”
The story of Ezra Levant’s battle for freedom of speech in Canada. It still seems amazing that he went through this. These Human Wrongs Commissions are a travesty against liberty.
The Story That Doesn’t Fit The Narrative
The media doesn’t want to talk about Fannie and Freddie:
Do you know how much we’ve committed to backstopping Fannie and its partner-in-crime Freddie Mac (FRE)? $400 BILLION! Back in February that was doubled from the original $200 billion.
But the news of the quarterly loss is getting hardly any attention. Nothing here at the NYT business section, for example. Nothing at the blogs that were going nuts when AIG was revealed to have paid out bonuses back in March.
The problem is that the Fannie and Freddie disasters don’t fit into any conventional media narrative. At AIG you had Joe Cassano, lurking in the shadows, turning AIGFP into his own personal casino, while taking home gargantuan pay.
Fannie Mae? They help nice families get into homes. Their motto is something about helping the people who help house America. Who could be against that? Plus, the Fannie and Freddy story doesn’t help explain the idea that laissez-faire deregulation is what allowed Wall Street to go crazy. Fannie and Freddy had their own freakin’ regulator, OFHEO. Two companies with one regulator to look into both of them.
And then you have all the Democrats on the inside (Rahm Emanuel, for example) on the outside (Barney Frank), who have ties to the company’s worst years.
Yes, inconvenient, that.
Rush Out And Get Your Copy
…before it’s remaindered
The book portrays Speaker Pelosi as vapid, prideful, arrogant, and as an elitist.
There’s probably a good reason for that. They’d have to waterboard me to get me to read it.
Oh, For A Justice Mary Poppins
Frank J. has his wish list for the SCOTUS replacement.
Another Topless Photo Appears
What is it with these gay marriage opponents?
And yes, let’s destroy Carrie Prejean for agreeing with the president.
I wonder if she agrees with the president that this officer should have been fired for being gay?
[Saturday-morning update]
why aren’t leftists upset at Obama for holding the same beliefs on gay marriage as Carrie Prejean? [h/t Instapundit]
Easy, they assume that he is lying. They think his Christianity based justification for opposing actual marriage for gays is simply a lie to fool the rubes on a hot-button issue. They know he might have lost critical support from left-of-center religious conservatives if he had really stated his true beliefs on the matter, so he just lied about his real beliefs to bamboozle the rubes.
Their comfort with this assumption that Obama is lying reveals a lot about contemporary leftists’ mores and their systematic contempt for their fellow citizens. They’re so full of themselves that they believe that the important thing is for them to have power, and that it really doesn’t matter how they get it. If Obama has to lie about his real beliefs about gay marriage then that’s acceptable in the cause of the greater good.
Have to break eggs to make the omelette.
Reading The Tea Leaves
There’s a lot of interesting and disputatious discussion of the NASA budget and its implications for Ares I over at Space Politics this morning.
Ethanol Versus Electricity
An interesting discussion of the transportation tradeoffs of biofuels.