Category Archives: Political Commentary

The Iran “Deal” (Continued)

…is worse than Munich.

I remember those quaint good old days, when treaties had to be approved by two thirds of the Senate.

[Update a few minutes later]

Also, from Austin Bay:

It begins with a broken promise. Once upon a time, President Barack Obama vowed to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons quest. Promise made, promise broken.

All of Barack Obama’s pronouncements come with an expiration date.

[Late-evening update]
Clueless reporters question President Pinocchio at press conference:

One could deconstruct his evasions line by line, but that would largely duplicate the content of many posts we have done over the past weeks and months. Instead, I want to focus on a few key issues. But first, this observation: if any of the reporters present had read the agreement, which is only 159 pages long, it was not apparent. Maybe reporters are not accustomed to reading legal documents; maybe they are too lazy to try; maybe they have read and understood the agreement and are just partisan hacks, covering for their president. But I have a full-time job, and nevertheless have read the agreement several times. Why can’t reporters do the same? That would seem to be a prerequisite to participating intelligently in a press conference on the subject.

They were told there would be no reading.

Obscuring The Target

with chaff:

“You know what we got last week? We got 3,600 pages, half of which were press clippings, including articles about Richard Gere,” he said. “So if that is their idea of complying with a congressional investigation, then we are going to be at this for a long time.”

He also told CNN that Hillary Clinton was wrong when she said that she’d never had a subpoena in her interview with CNN.

“That is demonstrably false,” Gowdy told CNN. “You have an obligation to preserve the public record.”

This is a deliberate attempt to obfuscate. And of course, when someone says they haven’t been cooperative, they’ll say “We’ve turned over thousands of documents, but they’re never satisfied.”

Bernie Sanders

I have to say, I admire his honesty:

There are very few unspoken rules among major-party candidates for president, and Bernie Sanders is breaking one of them. He’s saying that America’s leaders shouldn’t worry so much about economic growth if that growth serves to enrich only the wealthiest Americans.

“Our economic goals have to be redistributing a significant amount of [wealth] back from the top 1 percent,” Sanders said in a recent interview, even if that redistribution slows the economy overall.

“Unchecked growth – especially when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent – is absurd,” he said. “Where we’ve got to move is not growth for the sake of growth, but we’ve got to move to a society that provides a high quality of life for all of our people. In other words, if people have health care as a right, as do the people of every other major country, then there’s less worry about growth. If people have educational opportunity and their kids can go to college and they have child care, then there’s less worry about growth for the sake of growth.”

Socialists don’t understand that in order for wealth to be redistributed, it has to be created.

Scott Walker

Democrats are terrified of him, and they should be:

Obama and the Democrats asked for a class war and it’s a class war they got: they sowed the seeds, and now they’re reaping the whirlwind in the form of blue-collar conservative, union busting, arch-nemesis Scott Walker.

Imagine winning three elections (one being a recall election that public sector unions poured thousands upon thousands of dollars into) in four years in the deeply divided blue-collar progressive Utopia of Wisconsin. Imagine breaking the back of the organized heart and soul of the Democrat party and dispatching AFL-CIO leader Richard “Morrie The Wig Salesman” Trumka back to the White House to show the President the “W” shaped scar carved into his forehead as a warning to anyone else who stepped foot in the state.

Imagine doing all this after Democratic state legislators fled for the safe harbor of Illinois to avoid voting on your legislation. Imagine having woken up every day to phone calls relating tales unionized shock-troops on your parents’ front lawn and threats not only on your life but the lives of your kids. Now imagine having the real heroes, the brave national media, mock and ridicule you over this. Imagine accomplishing all of this while a partisan Milwaukee District Attorney authorizes the illegal invasion of the homes of your friends, supporters and aides, lawlessly confiscating private property, all while colluding with Lois Lerner and the IRS.

Now. Having gone through all of that, imagine still having the desire to face down and defeat that kind of contumacious Alinskyism on a national scale.

…On Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David, invoking the spirit of Henry Clay, quipped “a good compromise leaves everybody dissatisfied.” Compromise is the sort of talking point constantly pushed by moderates that pleases absolutely no one beyond the Beltway journalists feeding it to them. Conservatives–not even just the true-red hardcore ones, but the moderates as well who are tired of losing–don’t want a President who will reach across the aisle and work with Democrats. They want someone who will steamroll them like Obama did during his first two years, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. And Scott Walker? He’s certainly not going to be touting his record of working with Democrats in Wisconsin, not after signing Act 10, concealed carry, and Right-To-Work legislation into law…and that’s exactly why he’s enormously popular. Conservatives dream of someone who will break what’s left of the tired and aged Democratic minority in Congress, and leave them on an ash heap, barely able to comprehend how old and outdated their party faces have become while wallowing in the mess left for them to clean up as their own demi-god strolls out of office singing “Amazing Grace” to himself. There can be no compromise this election.

Yes.

How To Stop A Centralized Bureaucracy

Math:

The only thing that will upend the carefully crafted apple cart the political bosses have set up is math. The math that Mark talks about in the Soundcloud clip I posted is rapidly becoming a reality in states like Illinois. The answer from Democratic politicians has been to look for ways to increase taxes and fees to keep the shell game going. None of them have cut the size and scope of government. None of them have deregulated anything to allow more choice and freedom for people. Interestingly, the United States federal budget allocates 62% of all spending to entitlements, and the number will rise dramatically with Obamacare. It’s totally unsustainable but the crony capitalists in Washington don’t care about it. They’ll be fine.

They were told there would be no math.

Science

Is it ever “settled”?

As things stand today, Darwin’s notion of evolution, especially when we extend it with the things we’ve learned in the intervening 160 or so years, has stood up very well to attempts to falsify it.

That’s what science as a process really is: that process of observing, proposing explanations, and then trying to knock those explanations down. Eventually, you have only a few explanations left standing: our best explanations for what we observe in the real world. It’s that collection of best explanations that we call “science.”

What isn’t science is (e.g.) climate models, particularly when they can’t even hindcast.

“Settled science” is a newspeak phrase that the Left has come up with to impose their policy preferences on us.

[Update a few minutes later]

Why biology students have misconceptions about science.

I think there’s more of a crisis in science education (as with all education) than most people realize.

Birds Of A Feather

The Wisconsin thug who helped target Scott Walker and his associates was close friends with Lois Lerner:

After Walker’s victory in a recall election, Lerner’s long time friend Kennedy helped Milwaukee County prosecutors conduct an onerous, several-year investigation into Walker’s political allies, complete with secret subpoenas for phone, text message and email records and armed, middle of the night raids on Walker associates’ homes.

I know! I’m shocked, too!

Suburbia

Countering the Left’s assault on it:

…if the American Dream is not dead among the citizens, is trying to kill it good politics? It’s clear that Democratic constituencies, notably millennials, immigrants and minorities, and increasingly gays—particularly gay couples—are flocking to suburbs. This is true even in metropolitan San Francisco, where 40 percent of same-sex couples live outside the city limits.

One has to wonder how enthusiastic these constituents will be when their new communities are “transformed” by federal social engineers. One particularly troubling group may be affluent liberals in strongholds such as Marin County, north of San Francisco, long a reliable bastion of progressive ideology.

Forced densification–the ultimate goal of the “smart growth” movement—also has inspired opposition in Los Angeles, where densification is being opposed in many neighborhoods, as well as traditionally more conservative Orange Country. Similar opposition has arisen in Northern Virginia suburbs, another key Democratic stronghold.

If Republicans were smart, they’d make this a major campaign issue. So they probably won’t.

[Update a while later]

Hey, Obama, want to force communities to integrate? Start with Chappaqua.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Democrats turn hard Left.

I think they may find that they had bad timing. I certainly hope so.