Month: May 2009

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

You Can’t Possibly Take Care of Yourself

What worries me about Obama is not the specifics of the nationalization of GM and Chrysler, the government rescue of the United Auto Workers, the effort to take over college financing, proposed universal health care, massive deficits and tax increases, although they are worrisome and only the beginning, but the attendant culture of ‘inflate your tires’ and ‘wash your hands’ paternalism. I think we are entering an age in which the federal government will increasingly guide our thoughts into what is deemed correct-the sort of car we must drive, the type of salary we should make, the sort of job we should have, even the type of thoughts we are to express, and all in the name of collective brotherhood. The slavish manner in which the media lock stepped into Bush the near fascist for tribunals, wiretaps, intercepts, renditions, Patriot Act, Iraq, and Guantanamo, followed by choruses of Obama the sensitive, anguished overseer of tribunals, wiretaps, intercepts, renditions, Patriot Act, Iraq, and Guantanamo was one of the most frightening things I’ve seen in a free society in 50 years. – Victor Davis Hanson, EuroAmericans?

(h/t to Because I Say So)

I have two images to go along with that quote. The first is “Washington Toilet Paper”:


The second, is from Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism:


Donald Sensing was prophetic.

Thomas Sowell on Sotomayor

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Thomas Sowell on Sotomayor

Much is being made of the fact that Sonia Sotomayor had to struggle to rise in the world. But stop and think.

If you were going to have open heart surgery, would you want to be operated on by a surgeon who was chosen because he had to struggle to get where he is or by the best surgeon you could find — even if he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had every advantage that money and social position could offer?

If it were you who was going to be lying on that operating table with his heart cut open, you wouldn’t give a tinker’s damn about somebody’s struggle or somebody else’s privileges.

The Supreme Court of the United States is in effect operating on the heart of our nation — the Constitution and the statutes and government policies that all of us must live under.

Obama’s repeated claim that a Supreme Court justice should have “empathy” with various groups has raised red flags that we ignore at our peril — and at the peril of our children and grandchildren.

“Empathy” for particular groups can be reconciled with “equal justice under law” — the motto over the entrance to the Supreme Court — only with smooth words. But not in reality.

Read the whole thing.

STOP SCREWING UP OUR INVESTMENTS!

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STOP SCREWING UP OUR INVESTMENTS!

China warns Federal Reserve over ‘printing money’

China has warned a top member of the US Federal Reserve that it is increasingly disturbed by the Fed’s direct purchase of US Treasury bonds.

As we all should be.

Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, said: “Senior officials of the Chinese government grilled me about whether or not we are going to monetise the actions of our legislature.”

“I must have been asked about that a hundred times in China. I was asked at every single meeting about our purchases of Treasuries. That seemed to be the principal preoccupation of those that were invested with their surpluses mostly in the United States,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

In other words, “We’ve bought a lot of your bonds, and we expect them to be worth more than toilet paper.”

His recent trip to the Far East appears to have been a stark reminder that Asia’s “Confucian” culture of right action does not look kindly on the insouciant policy of printing money by Anglo-Saxons.

Mr Fisher, the Fed’s leading hawk, was a fierce opponent of the original decision to buy Treasury debt, fearing that it would lead to a blurring of the line between fiscal and monetary policy – and could all too easily degenerate into Argentine-style financing of uncontrolled spending.

Degenerate into uncontrolled spending? Since when have we had controlled spending? But I guess it was this chart that finally grabbed their attention:


It scares the hell out of me.

However, he agreed that the Fed was forced to take emergency action after the financial system “literally fell apart”.

Nor, he added was there much risk of inflation taking off yet. The Dallas Fed uses a “trim mean” method based on 180 prices that excludes extreme moves and is widely admired for accuracy.

“You’ve got some mild deflation here,” he said.

Time to buy, buy, BUY! Before the inevitable hyper-inflation.

The Oxford-educated Mr Fisher, an outspoken free-marketer and believer in the Schumpeterian process of “creative destruction”, has been running a fervent campaign to alert Americans to the “very big hole” in unfunded pension and health-care liabilities built up by a careless political class over the years.

“We at the Dallas Fed believe the total is over $99 trillion,” he said in February.

Ninety-nine trillion dollars. That’s a number I don’t think anyone can really get their heads around. Certainly not 535 Congresscritters.

“This situation is of your own creation. When you berate your representatives or senators or presidents for the mess we are in, you are really berating yourself. You elect them,” he said.

Which, again, explains why our education system and our media are the messes that they are. Who wants an intelligent, informed and engaged electorate? What is there in that for anybody? It’s much easier to promise the ignorant, apathetic masses bread and circuses for their votes.

(Via Glenn.)

Quote of the Day

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With the election of Barack Obama as president, the liberals have launched a massive, two-front offensive they believe will end in victory. They have judged that our public education system is so degraded that only a few Americans are left who even understand what a democracy is, and how the free market actually works. They are convinced that the majority of Americans are too frightened by the current recession to care about preserving the principles that made us the most powerful, productive and innovative country the world has ever known. In short, the liberals are reaching for victory because they believe that history now is on their side.

The speed of their offensive is breathtaking.

At the core of democracy is the rule of law, and we have already lost it. The liberals lecture us incessantly that everything is “relative,” but that’s not true; some things are absolutes. You cannot claim to be faithful to your spouse because you never cheat on her — except when you’re in London on business. And you cannot claim to have the rule of law if the government can set aside the rule of law when it decides that “special circumstances” have arisen that warrant illegality. When the President and his aides handed ownership of Chrysler Corp. to the United Auto Workers union, they tried to avoid sending that beleaguered company into bankruptcy by muscling its bondholders into accepting less money for their assets than the law entitled them to collect. These contracts, and the law under which they were signed, were mere obstacles to a thuggish President bent on paying off his political supporters.

It’s going to get much worse, fast.

American Thinker, Revolution by Herbert Meyer

Via Mostly Cajun.

As always, RTWT.

The Unconstrained Vision

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Last October, National Review interviewed Dr. Thomas Sowell on the topic of his 1987 book Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles which had just been re-issued. I wrote about it shortly after the interview appeared, and excerpted some of the exchange from the second portion of the video interview. Please do go read the earlier piece for the necessary background information.

Here’s the pertinent portion for this piece:

Peter Robinson: Let me give you a couple of quotations. John McCain in the presidential debate of October 16 on the kinds of judges he would nominate to the Supreme Court:

“I will find the best people in the United States of America who have a history of strict adherence to the Constitution and not legislating from the bench.”

Barack Obama during the same debate:

“If a woman is out there trying to raise a family, trying to support her family and is being treated unfairly then the court has to stand up if nobody else will, and that’s the kind of judge I want.”

Thomas Sowell: That’s unconstrained. That somehow or other there are people with the judicial robes on who can just decide these things ad hoc, which among other things would mean we would no longer really have law. You would discover, once you got into the courtroom in front of the judge, you would then discover what the decision is, but you would have no clue beforehand.

Robinson: So that would. . . A full embrace of the Unconstrained Vision, which Barack Obama seems intent on, would overturn the fundamental basis of American law which is a nation of laws, not of men, . . .

Sowell: Absolutely.

Robinson: . . . it would be a nation of men, of judges.

Sowell: Yes!

And now, the words of Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfC99LrrM2Q&hl=en&fs=1&w=425&h=344]
A nation of judges, not laws.

As long as the “right people” are in charge. Right?

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

I wonder what it’s like to wake up one day and realize all the power you’ve thought you’ve held over public opinion doesn’t amount to a teaspoon of frothy spit? From the tone of newspaper opinions recently, they’ve got a lot of the frothy stuff everywhere. – Robb Allen, Taken to Task

Sorry about the lack of posting. I spent my holiday weekend sick in bed for the most part.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

I’ve occasionally thought to myself that I could keep the thing going on major news stories, rather like skipping a stone across a pond. The day-to-day cop hemocides and venal corruption in every goddamned spot on the map doesn’t do it, though. Another 9/11 would naturally strike sparks, but look: the Obama regime is the story, but it needs depths of treatment that only very few are up to.

We are now in the fait accompli of American socialist revolution. Most peoples’ ignorance of history doesn’t allow them to really grasp how rapidly this is happening now, but this wheel is turning like never before.

I have no illusions that I can change any of it . . . . – Billy Beck, Dealing with the Imperative

Part II, Billy Beck from “Hell Is The Impossibility Of Reason”:

A great deal of of the crisis of the age is in the scale of it: it’s so big that many people are flatly intellectually incompetent to even get started on seeing it. There are enormous chains of cause & effect running over generations, compounded by general ignorance of history cultivated with conceptual infirmity and general anti-thought.

It’s all part of what constitutes Endarkenment, a unique event in human history, coming as it does in the wake of The Age of Reason. It’s an amazing thing to consider: that human beings are un-thinking their way down from heights that thousands of generations of their forebears could not have hoped to have dreamed.

Good Thing The MSM has All Those Layers of Review

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Like editors.

Too Much Cola Can Lead to Paralysis?

By Chelsea-Badeau
Thu, 21 May 2009 19:45:46 GMT

Forget about tooth decay and obesity, it looks like there might be an even more serious reason to cut back on your cola consumption.

A report written by Dr. Moses Elisaf scheduled to be published in the June issue of the International Journal of Clinical Practice, says that drinking excessive amounts of cola (diet or regular) can cause potassium levels in the blood to plummet, which could lead to muscle problems, weakness, an irregular heartbeat, and in some cases, even paralysis.

“We are consuming more soft drinks than ever before and a number of health issues have already been identified including tooth problems, bone demineralisation and the development of metabolic syndrome and diabetes” says Doctor Elisaf from the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Ioannina, Greece.

According to the research review, worldwide annual consumption of soft drinks reached 552 billion liters, the equivalent of 83 liters per person, per year in 2007. That figure is expected to climb to 95 liters per day by 2012. The average American drinks about 600 cans of soda every year.

Ninety-five liters a day. That’s a touch over 25 gallons.

Yes, I know it’s a typo, but still . . .

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

The GeekWithA.45:

Even Justice David Souter…

Who, among many other things, could not see a protection for the individual right of arms in the plain language of the second amendment (Heller v. D.C.), who did not see any problem with the use of government force for the taking for private gain (Kelo v. New London) and could not see how the first amendment protected people’s rights to Assemble for the purpose of disseminating political messages 60 days before an election (The fraud of McCain-Feingold) actually can see the Endarkenment slouching towards us…

Quote:
—————-
In a speech at Georgetown University Law Center today, retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter made a powerful plea for re-educating the American public about the fundamentals of how government works.

The republic, Souter said, “can be lost, it is being lost, it is lost, if it is not understood.” He cited surveys showing large majorities of the public cannot name the three branches of government, something he said would have been unheard of when he was growing up in rural Weare, N.H. What is needed, Souter said, is nothing less than “the restoration of the self-identity of the American people.”
—————-

Perhaps, as he enters retirement, he can meditate on his own contributions to the matter to arrive at some understanding of just what that identity of the American people actually is. Perhaps then he will understand that he should beg the American people for forgiveness.

That snarkily being said, the man is right.

And too late.