An Investment in Failure

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The 6/23/09 QotD:

Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress – with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.

I submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent – the failure is deliberate. Don’t laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.

American Thinker, 9/28/08 – Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis by James Simpson

My 6/11/09 QotD:

Philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested that “Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.” And, it was Albert Einstein who explained, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” So which is it — stupidity, ignorance or insanity — that explains the behavior of my fellow Americans who call for greater government involvement in our lives?

According to latest Rasmussen Reports, 30 percent of Americans believe congressmen are corrupt. Last year, Congress’ approval rating fell to 9 percent, its lowest in history. If the average American were asked his opinion of congressmen, among the more polite terms you’ll hear are thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks. But what do the same people say when our nation faces a major problem? “Government ought to do something!” When people call for government to do something, it is as if they’ve been befallen by amnesia and forgotten just who is running government. It’s the very people whom they have labeled as thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks.

Walter E. Williams, Americans Love Government

Now, Thomas Sowell from August of 2007:

It is not just in Iraq that the political left has an investment in failure. Domestically as well as internationally, the left has long had a vested interest in poverty and social malaise.

The old advertising slogan, “Progress is our most important product,” has never applied to the left. Whether it is successful black schools in the United States or Third World countries where millions of people have been rising out of poverty in recent years, the left has shown little interest.

Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves “progressives.” What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing.

One wonders what they would do in heaven.

—

They have shown no such interest in how tens of millions of people in China and tens of millions of people in India have risen out of poverty within the past generation.

Despite whatever the left may say, or even believe, about their concern for the poor, their actual behavior shows their interest in the poor to be greatest when the poor can be used as a focus of the left’s denunciations of society.

When the poor stop being poor, they lose the attention of the left. What actions on the part of the poor, or what changes in the economy, have led to drastic reductions in poverty seldom arouse much curiosity, much less celebration.

This is not a new development in our times. Back in the 19th century, when Karl Marx presented his vision of the impoverished working class rising to attack and destroy capitalism, he was disappointed when the workers grew less revolutionary over time, as their standards of living improved.

At one point, Marx wrote to his disciples: “The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.”

Think about that. Millions of human beings mattered to him only in so far as they could serve as cannon fodder in his jihad against the existing society.

If they refused to be pawns in his ideological game, then they were “nothing.”

Now, three quotes from my perennial “progressive” commenter Markadelphia:

Show me Nancy Pelosi calling for violence and cheering when a comment is made about lynching. I don’t doubt that she is corrupt–mostly everyone is up there–but fervent and psychotic? No. – 08/10/09

—

I have spent my entire life (41 years) studying history and have no problem admitting that, on the whole, Democrats have been more criminal and racist then Republicans. – 10/31/08

—

Correct me if I am wrong. You believe that government is corrupt and would make the health care situation worse. I too believe that government is corrupt but that’s because we elect nincompoops to office. If we elected people who were skilled and intelligent rather than someone you can have a barbeque chicken sandwhich with, then I believe government can work. – 09/08/07

We’ve established that Markadelphia (and by extension, I would hope, most on the Left) understands and admits that “mostly everyone” on Capitol Hill is corrupt, and that, “on the whole” Democrats have been more criminal than Republicans (not that that distinction matters a great deal, other than the fact that they are in complete control of the legislative and executive branches of government at the moment.)

After the 2008 election, I have to ask: Did we get rid of the “nincompoops”? Or did we just swap out a few?

And, given that “mostly everyone” on Capitol Hill is still corrupt, why on EARTH should we assume that “Cap & Trade,” “Health Care Reform,” “The Stimulus Plan,” or any other piece of massive legislation being proposed is anything OTHER than another DELIBERATE “Investment in Failure”? Another power grab by the corrupt and criminal class already seated in the halls of power?

Which is it – ignorance, stupidity, or insanity? I really want to know.

UPDATE:  Original JSKit/Echo comment thread is available here, thanks to John Hardin.

Another Sign We’re Winning

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Another Sign We’re Winning

Another incident that makes Paul Helmke a Sad Panda. Verbatim from Instapundit:

SCENES FROM A NEW AMERICA: So I dropped the girls off at a movie, and — since the Insta-wife was lunching with her mom — stopped at a Sonny’s Barbecue for lunch. A man — late 40s, big, with a wife and a daughter — came in with an empty holster on his belt. As he sat down at the booth next to mine, the manager came by and asked him if he’d left his gun in the car. Yes, said the man, who had a permit but thought he wasn’t allowed to carry in restaurants in Tennessee.. Well, they’ve changed the law, said the manager, and if you want to go get it that’s fine with us. It’s legal now, and I’m happy to have you carrying — if somebody tries to rob me, it’s two against one.

The man stepped outside and returned with a Springfield XD in the holster, chatted with the manager for a bit about guns, and then sat down and had lunch with his family.

Note that no children, homeless persons, nor other innocents were harmed by this customer.

Immortal Quote of the Day

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Immortal Quote of the Day

“In actual shootings, citizens do far better than law enforcement on hit potential,” said (Cole County, Missouri Sheriff Greg) White. “They hit their targets and they don’t hit other people. I wish I could say the same for cops. We train more, they do better.”

— Guns to be allowed on campus?

h/t to Robb at Sharp as a Marble for that shocker. We’ve known it for a long time. Nice to see a Law Enforcement official admit it in a public forum, and the media repeat it.

Right-Wing Hate Groups?

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One more swing at the Markadelphia piñata before I call it a night. When I posted the compilation video of Obama’s “I was for Single-Payer Universal Heath Care Before I Was Against It,” Markadelphia accused me:

As to this video, wow…what happens when you watch this? Do you immediately think of it as gospel? Or do you question how it was edited and ask yourself if it is propaganda?

But in a comment to my “Free Speech Permit” post, he linked to a story about how “Right-wing militias are on the rise.”

ORLY?

It was reported in the mainstream media, thus it must be true!

Or was it (DUM-dum-DUM!) PROPAGANDA?!?!?

The website Sweetness & Light did a little background checking on the source of that “report,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the author (sole author) Mark Potok, who also happens to be a Huffington Post contributor (no bias there!)

The evidence? Apparently Mr. Potok’s own fever-dreams. S&L has been keeping tabs on Mr. Potok for quite a while.

But these fever-dreams fit the template, and thus must be accurate! (Just as the angry crowds at “Town Hall” meetings are “astroturf” but the bussed-in supporters with professionally printed signs being paid $10-15/hr for their work are “grassroots.”)

No, Markadelphia, you don’t get no respect. On a daily basis you prove you don’t deserve it.

Bullet, Dumpster, Done

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Bullet, Dumpster, Done

I have said before:

While I’m not a big fan of capital punishment, there are those occasions where the evidence is so overwhelming and the crime(s) so heinous that I’d be more than happy to be the guy pressing the plunger, pulling the handle, or throwing the switch.

I’m in general opposed to capital punishment because pretty much anything government does, it does poorly, but . . . (see above.)

Here’s another example of where I’d be happy to be the guy carrying out the sentence:

‘Psychopath’ Sentenced to 120 Years in Horrific Child Porn Case

PHILADELPHIA — A seldom-employed psychopath was sentenced Wednesday to spend the rest of his life in prison for making a huge cache of child pornography that shows him sexually assaulting a dozen children, including infants at a girlfriend’s in-home day care.

The FBI found John Jackey Worman with more than 1 million images and 11,000 videos of child pornography when they arrested him in suburban Philadelphia in 2007. Worman made girls in his care perform sex acts for school lunch money.

“I cannot know … what was going through your head while you were molesting my daughter. Was it a big joke as I pulled away each day?” the mother of one of the abused infants asked Worman during testimony Wednesday. He stared blankly ahead.

Worman has told prison doctors he feels no remorse for sexually “anointing” his female victims.

“I am totally at peace with everything I have done,” he said, according to U.S. District Judge Lawrence F. Stengel, who sentenced him to 120 years in prison.

I’ll spare you the details of his acts, but I want to comment on this (and sue me, AP, if you want. I claim “fair use.”)

Psychiatric tests conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons revealed only that he is a pedophile with an anti-social personality disorder.

—

Worman declined to make a statement Wednesday. His court-appointed lawyer argued against a life term, comparing it to “putting down” an animal.

“A sentence that basically says we’re putting you down does not recognize whatever degree of humanity exists in Mr. Worman,” lawyer Mark Cedrone said.

John Jackey Worman is the human equivalent of a rabid dog. “But he’s SICK!” some may cry. Indeed he is. And it’s an incurable disease.

We put down rabid dogs. We should do the same to rabid humans.

Multiply by the Zip Code

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Via Neo-Neocon comes this fascinating piece by an actual doctor on the wonders of .gov health care, Obamacare and Me. By all means, read the entire piece, but I want to archive here the crucial portion:

I have taken care of Medicaid patients for 35 years while representing the only pediatric ophthalmology group left in Atlanta, Georgia that accepts Medicaid. For example, in the past 6 months I have cared for three young children on Medicaid who had corneal ulcers. This is a potentially blinding situation because if the cornea perforates from the infection, almost surely blindness will occur. In all three cases the antibiotic needed for the eradication of the infection was not on the approved Medicaid list.

Each time I was told to fax Medicaid for the approval forms, which I did. Within 48 hours the form came back to me which was sent in immediately via fax, and I was told that I would have my answer in 10 days. Of course by then each child would have been blind in the eye.

Each time the request came back denied. All three times I personally provided the antibiotic for each patient which was not on the Medicaid approved list. Get the point — rationing of care.

Over the past 35 years I have cared for over 1000 children born with congenital cataracts. In older children and in adults the vision is rehabilitated with an intraocular lens. In newborns we use contact lenses which are very expensive. It takes Medicaid over one year to approve a contact lens post cataract surgery. By that time a successful anatomical operation is wasted as the child will be close to blind from a lack of focusing for so long a period of time.

Again, extreme rationing. Solution: I have a foundation here in Atlanta supported 100% by private funds which supplies all of these contact lenses for my Medicaid and illegal immigrants children for free. Again, waiting for the government would be disastrous.

—

I am a pediatric ophthalmologist and trained for 10 years post-college to become a pediatric ophthalmologist (add two years of my service in the Navy and that comes to 12 years). A neurosurgeon spends 14 years post-college, and if he or she has to do the military that would be 16 years. I am not entitled to make what a neurosurgeon makes, but the new plan calls for all physicians to make the same amount of payment. I assure you that medical students will not go into neurosurgery and we will have a tremendous shortage of neurosurgeons. Already, the top neurosurgeon at my hospital who is in good health and only 52 years old has just quit because he can’t stand working with the government anymore.

You want to know what “Single-payer Universal Health Care” would be like for those with serious illness?

Take that, and multiply by the Zip Code.

Obvious Penis Compensation Issues

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Obvious Penis Compensation Issues

(To steal a meme from SayUncle)

Harlem Store Owner Shoots 4 Robbers, Killing 2

They strode into the restaurant supply store in Harlem shortly after 3 p.m. on Thursday, four young men intent on robbery, one with a Glock 9-millimeter pistol, the police said. The place may have looked like an easy mark, a high-cash business with an owner in his 70s, known as a gentle, soft-spoken man.

But Charles Augusto Jr., the 72-year-old proprietor of the Kaplan Brothers Blue Flame Corporation, at 523 West 125th Street, near Amsterdam Avenue, had been robbed several times before, despite the fact that his shop is around the corner from the 26th Precinct station house on West 126th Street.

There were no customers in the store, only Mr. Augusto and two employees, a man and a woman. The police said the invaders announced a holdup, approached the two employees and tried to place plastic handcuffs on them. The male employee, a 35-year-old known in the community as J. B., struggled with the gunman, who then hit him on the head with the pistol.

Watching it happen, Mr. Augusto, whom neighborhood friends call Gus, rose from a chair 20 to 30 feet away and took out a loaded Winchester 12-gauge pump-action shotgun with a pistol-grip handle.

This would be an “evil assault weapon” in New Jersey, a weapon “manufactured for no other reason than to hunt man” that, according to Jersey City Police Chief Thomas Comey, should be banned.

The police said he bought it after a robbery 30 years ago.

Apparently they’re pretty effective for defending against criminals.

Mr. Augusto, who has never been in trouble with the law, fired three blasts in rapid succession, the police said,

Well of course. It’s a rapid-fire assault weapon after all!

although Vernon McKenzie, working at an Internet company next door, heard only two booms, loud enough to send him rushing to a window, where he heard someone shout: “You’re dead! You’re dead!”

The first shot took down the gunman at the front. He died almost immediately, according to the police, who said he was 29 and had been arrested for gun possession in Queens last year and was the nephew of a police officer.

I wonder if he had any problems acquiring the firearms he used in crime?

Mr. Augusto’s other two blasts hit all three accomplices, who stumbled out the door, bleeding.

One of them, a 21-year-old, staggered across 125th Street and collapsed in front of the General Grant Houses, a nine-building complex with 4,500 residents, one of the city’s biggest housing projects. Someone called 911, and an ambulance rushed him to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where he was dead on arrival. The police said he had a record of arrests for weapons possession and robbery.

Another criminal with a long rap sheet. And Mr. Augusto? Clean as a whistle. But I do wonder if he jumped through all the hoops necessary to acquire and maintain a premises permit for his 12-gauge.

A law enforcement official said that the district attorney was considering a possible misdemeanor weapons charge against Mr. Augusto, indicating that he did not have a permit for the shotgun.

Apparently not.

Read the whole thing. As Instapundit said, “Surprisingly sympathetic treatment from the NYT.”

Quote of the Day

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Back to John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education:

I lived through the great transformation which turned schools from often useful places (if never the essential ones school publicists claimed) into laboratories of state experimentation. When I began teaching in 1961, the social environment of Manhattan schools was a distant cousin of the western Pennsylvania schools I attended in the 1940s, as Darwin was a distant cousin of Malthus.

Discipline was the daily watchword on school corridors. A network of discipline referrals, graded into an elaborate catalogue of well-calibrated offenses, was etched into the classroom heart. At bottom, hard as it is to believe in today’s school climate, there was a common dedication to the intellectual part of the enterprise. I remember screaming (pompously) at an administrator who marked on my plan book that he would like to see evidence I was teaching “the whole child,” that I didn’t teach children at all, I taught the discipline of the English language! Priggish as that sounds, it reflects an attitude not uncommon among teachers who grew up in the 1940s and before. Even with much slippage in practice, Monongahela and Manhattan had a family relationship. About schooling at least. Then suddenly in 1965 everything changed.

Whatever the event is that I’m actually referring to—and its full dimensions are still only partially clear to me—it was a nationwide phenomenon simultaneously arriving in all big cities coast to coast, penetrating the hinterlands afterwards. Whatever it was, it arrived all at once, the way we see national testing and other remote-control school matters like School-to-Work legislation appear in every state today at the same time. A plan was being orchestrated, the nature of which is unmasked in the upcoming chapters.

Think of this thing for the moment as a course of discipline dictated by coaches outside the perimeter of the visible school world. It constituted psychological restructuring of the institution’s mission, but traveled under the guise of a public emergency which (the public was told) dictated increasing the intellectual content of the business! Except for its nightmare aspect, it could have been a scene from farce, a swipe directly from Orwell’s 1984 and its fictional telly announcements that the chocolate ration was being raised every time it was being lowered. This reorientation did not arise from any democratic debate, or from any public clamor for such a peculiar initiative; the public was not consulted or informed. Best of all, those engineering the makeover denied it was happening.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Nice to have that from a “Primary Source.”

It’s Not About Ownership, It’s about CONTROL

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It’s Not About Ownership, It’s about CONTROL

Since it appears to be “Spank Markadelphia” week here at TSM, I’d like to point out one of his sillier “gotcha!” points, one he is so proud of:

Currently, 20+ trillion dollars is in the hands of private organizations in this country. That’s 99.77 percent of our nation’s wealth. The other .23 percent is owned by the government.

—

Most bankds(sic) have paid back their loans and the government owns .23 percent of our wealth. The rest is in private hands. So…who has the power again?

I think he got his information from The Atlantic, since he used a graph from there in a post of his own, but that piece says 0.21%. I believe he’s mentioned this number here in other places, but my Google-fu is weak this evening.

So, for Markadelphia, possession of wealth is apparently the only marker of power that matters.

No wonder he apparently hates people with three vacation homes.

I found an interesting piece today from the Center for Fiscal Responsibility, which declared that yesterday, August 12, was “Cost of Government Day” – the day on which working people stopped earning money that would go to Federal, State, and Local governments, and finally start going into their pockets. It was the latest date this has ever happened. Per the piece, the date shift is almost entirely due to the recent massive increases in Federal spending – Bush’s TARP and Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, noting “. . . these spending bills set taxpayers up for a year when federal spending has reached a record 28.5 percent of GDP.

The GDP for the US, according to the CIA World Factbook was $14.33 trillion in 2008. As many are now aware, our annual expenditure for health care in 2007 was estimated at $2.4 trillion, about 1/7th of our GDP.

And now the government wants to control a bigger – much bigger – chunk of that.

So the Federal government controls about 28.5% of our GDP – that is, about $4.8 trillion dollars annually. To that they want to add a significant portion of an additional $2.4 trillion – and, if you happen to believe (as I do) that the plan is to eventually control it all, and with “normal government efficiency” that means more than the $2.4 trillion we spend now, while we get less for it.

The control of $4,800,000,000,000 annually isn’t power?

Then there’s this:


The ability to print money isn’t power?

And, finally, the Federal Government outright owns an estimated 28.8% of all land in the United States, and with the Kelo v. New London Supreme Court decision of 2005, pretty much any government entity can take any property they want for pretty much any reason. In addition, as of 2004, the Federal government outright owned a bit over 411,000 buildings, about 17.5% of which (and 20% of the square footage) provide housing to American citizens. (Source: GSA’s FEDERAL REAL PROPERTY PROFILE 2004 – PDF)

THIS isn’t POWER?

By comparison, at his peak Bill Gates was worth only $101 billion.

So, who has the power again?

Oh, and just who is it that controls the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, FBI, NSA, CIA, Secret Service . . .

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

As a recent convert from liberalism to conservatism, I must say… you all are so much more fun and entertaining! I truly wish I could have come to my senses sooner!

But now I find myself in this very strange place of conversion. I still hold some of my more liberal thoughts, but now find myself reviewing them from a firmer stance in reality. As my dear friend Kevin would probably phrase it, “You must have gotten tired of sniffing the Unicorn Farts!”

With this newfound light to the world, I also have a new view of where this illustrious country of ours is headed… and frankly it scares the crap out of me. I used to blind myself by saying, “We can make it better, we just need to try harder and come up with better solutions.” Something that I now have found out is very closely related to the Democratic motto when a plan of theirs goes wrong, “The philosophy can’t be wrong, the idea is sound… we just have to do it again, only harder!” Ah… to be free of the shackles of delusion.

— Mr. Bill, Rants and Reviews, “Where are we going, and what are we doing in this handbasket?”

I’m not solely responsible, but I may have helped create a monster.

The rest of it is worth a read, too. He’s asking questions.