A thirteen-year-old girl in Somalia was stoned to death for being raped.
Just a reminder of the kind of people with whom we are at war, even if the Democrats don’t want to believe that we’re at war.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
The Box
John Hare has some thoughts on boxes, and thinking in or out of them.
Obama’s Cruel Tax On The Poor
It’s all in the name of Obama’s True Belief in Global Warming. He says it himself — he’ll take coal off the table as an “ideological matter.” Even if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, he’s opposed to pursuing it.
He wants to put a huge penalty on companies that emit carbon — which means that starting up new coal-powered electrical plants will be prohibitively expensive. In Obama’s own words, “It will bankrupt them.”
“Cap and trade” plans have already been tried, and they don’t work — they cost too much, and people find ways to get around them. But Obama promises us that he’ll take that failed idea and be “as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s” plan.
In other words, if it doesn’t work, let’s do more of it!
This is Obama the New Puritan. We’ve found his real religion: Political and Environmental Correctness.
It’s more important to him to eliminate coal than to find practical solutions. Why? Because coal is “bad.” Our groupthinking “intellectual” elite thinks they are post-religious — but they believe in sin and hate the sinners.
As I said, deeply misguided. But the people get the government they deserve.
Chill Out
Advice from Instapundit on the election outcome:
You don’t have to love the “other guy.” You don’t have to hold back on fighting against policies you don’t like. You don’t have to pull punches. But once someone is duly and legally elected president, you do owe some respect to the office and the Constitution. And to your fellow Americans.
I’m not an Obama fan, particularly, but a lot of people I like and respect are. To treat Obama as something evil or subhuman would not only be disrespectful toward Obama, but toward them. Instead, I hope that if Obama is elected, their assessment of his strengths will turn out to be right, and mine will turn out to be wrong. Likewise, those who don’t like John McCain or Sarah Palin might reflect that by treating Palin and McCain as obviously evil and stupid, they’re disrespecting tens of millions of their fellow Americans who feel otherwise. And treating a presidency held by a guy you don’t like as presumptively illegitimate suggests that presidents rule not by election, but by divine right, so that whenever the “other guy” wins, he’s automatically a usurper.
I concur. I have made no secret of my belief that Barack Obama is a fascist. But unlike most people, I don’t believe that fascists are intrinsically evil. I just think that they’re deeply misguided. If he wins, I expect to be fighting most of his initiatives, probably unsuccessfully, given the likely new composition of the Congress, but he will be, as every president has been before, my president, for good or ill. In four years, we’ll have an opportunity to replace him. It’s conceivable that in four years, I won’t want to, but it seems extremely unlikely. And the world will go on.
Thoughts On Taxes
From Lileks:
If you are opposed to higher taxes on the rich – well, let’s back up. If you start out by questioning the definition of “rich,” you’re one of them. “Rich” is like “racist” – the surest sign of the guilty is the failure to admit your problem. If there are a lot of people who make less money than you do, you’re rich, and it doesn’t matter how you got where you are, or whether that poor fellow over there who works for Wal-Mart – and don’t worry, we’ll belittle him as a three-toothed inbred cousin-marrying NASCAR Oxycontin-popping gun-nut in just a minute – made some life choices that may have affected his earning potential; the existence of disparity is sufficient to prove that something is wrong. Or at least suggest that something must be done. As a wise man said: half the people in the country live below the median income level. Half. In this day and age.
So if you don’t want to help them – that’s what you mean when you oppose taxes, after all – you’re selfish. If you protest that you’ll have to spend less, or invest less, or save less, or give less to charity, well, you had better start making more money, then. Go on; out to the woodshed; squat over that straw nest and pop out some more golden eggs, or whatever it is you do. Incidentally, you should spend less, because you spend money on things you don’t need, and we don’t have to know what they are to know you don’t need them, just like we don’t have to visit your house or neighborhood to know that the former is too big and the latter too far away. You should invest less – put your money in Main Street, not Wall Street. (This does not include spending money on Main Street on things we think you don’t need. It means investing it. Consult a professional; we’re not clear on the details.) You shouldn’t save less, because saving is a virtue. Also, we can tax the interest.
Charity? Don’t worry about it. Taxes have the same moral power as charity. As Sen. Obama said in the parable of the peanut butter sandwich, sharing is called “Socialism” by some wingnuts. He was correct to scoff: It’s not whether you give of your own free will or whether you are compelled to give; it’s the giving that counts, not the rationale.
Actually, the most important part is the separation of you and your property; that provides a deep glow of inner satisfaction you cannot possibly imagine, unless you have experience at the communion rail handing out the wafers. It’s quite astonishing how the self can be so exalted by selflessness.
Plenty more where that came from, over at his new screedblog. And nobody screed like James.
The Audacity Of Fascism
Not that this is anything new:
Denying access to the minority (in this case Republican) poll watchers and inspectors is a violation of Pennsylvania state law. Those who violate the law can be punished with a misdemeanor subject to a fine of $1,000 and prison of between one month and two years.
Those on site as describing it as “pandemonium” and there may be video coming of the chaos.
Some of the precincts where Republicans have been removed are: the 44th Ward, 12th and 13th divisions; 6th Ward, 12th division; 32nd Ward, Division 28.
“Election board officials guard the legitimacy of the election process and the idea that Republicans are being intimidated and banned for partisan purposes does not allow for an honest and open election process,” said McCain-Palin spokesman Ben Porritt in a statement to Townhall.
Expect a lot of this kind of thing today. Especially in the Windy City.
Beware The Bandwagon
Of all the dumb reasons to vote for Barack Obama (and they are legion, even if there are a few smart ones interspersed), one of the dumbest is simply because the media is telling you he’s inevitable. The bandwagon effect is a classical logical fallacy, that many fall for nonetheless (because most people are untrained in logic).
Don’t let them herd you like a sheep into voting for someone just because you want to vote for the winner. If you’re going to drink the redistributionist koolaid, at least do it because you actually believe it.
Why Isn’t Detroit A Paradise?
Because long ago, it (and other parts of the upper midwest) embraced Obamanian policies. If things go the wrong way tomorrow, the nation will be Detroit writ large.
[Update a while later]
This reminds me of a post I wrote about the rise and fall of General Motors a while ago. As I noted there, my dad was a GM exec, and I grew up in southeast Michigan (well, to the degree that I’ve grown up at all…). In 1973, about the time I graduated from high school, we were deep in a recession (a real one–not what the people whining about today’s economy are describing, with 20+ percent unemployment in Flint), and the golden era was over, never to really return to what it had been.
It’s Getting Harder And Harder To Surprise
The Orion spacecraft program was reviewed with the wrong configuration. There’s more here:
So an older, immature design of the Orion capsule is brought up for review and passes muster, when it fact it lacks many of the features a flight worthy capsule would have (e.g., a weight that would be liftable, a means of landing that won’t kill the occupants) along with several that a real vehicle wouldn’t have (e.g., extra amounts of hot water for BroomHilda’s cauldron).
That’s not the way the process is supposed to work.
Unfortunately, the IG’s office, not known for their brilliance or their ethics, took the ESMD Viceroy’s non-concurrence with their findings and said, “ok, so sorry to have bothered you,” and moved on.
Can’t anyone here play this game? How much longer before this misbegotten program augers in?
What Happens To The Posters After The Election?
Virginia Postrel has some thoughts:
In an interview Fairey assured Smith that his imagery “anti-propaganda propaganda” that, he suggested, is “coming from a position of moral integrity.” In other words, he believes it, or at least believes it’s in a good cause. The Obama posters were, of course, based on the famous propaganda image of Che Guevara. John McCain may suggest that Obama is a socialist. Fairey, a man of the left, literally paints Obama as a communist–which may involve much wishful projection as the belief in other quarters that the candidate is a secret free-trader.
Although campaign posters are surely a form of propaganda, the Obama imagery is so empty of specific exhortation that we do better to think of it as a manifestation of the candidate’s glamour–a seductive illusion in which the audience sees whatever they themselves desire. Glamour is manipulative, but not coercive. It requires the audience to suspend its skepticism and the object to maintain his mystery, a tacit form of cooperation. Give the object the power to compel devotion, and glamour is suddenly neither sustainable nor necessary.
Yes, though there’s actually a more accurate, more encompassing word than “socialist” or “communist” for this kind of political iconography (relating back to the thirties). It starts with an “F.”