Tag: QotD

Quote of the Day – The Kind of Day I’m Having Edition

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We have not succeeded in answering all our questions. The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions. In some ways we feel we are as confused as ever, but we believe we are confused on a higher plane and about more important things. — Anonymous

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There comes a point in the history of every project when it becomes necessary to shoot the engineers and begin production.  — Anonymous

Quote of the Day – Prophecy Edition

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As mentioned in the post below, reader John Hardin has taken the download I got from JS-Kit/Echo when they discontinued their commenting function, and has reconstructed many of the comment threads that were previously lost including the one to my February, 2008 post Human Reconstruction, the Healing of Souls, and the Remaking of Society. Today’s QotD comes from that recovered comment thread, by reader “James”:

Anyone who has listened to anything Obama has ever said and who thinks he is going to do anything that even remotely resembles defending the Constitution is simply delusional.

He will keep everything passed by the current administration and add more of his own. He will then turn in inwards in ways that Bush could never get away with, and get nothing but applause for it. Same goes for Hillary and the Manchurian Candidate. There is simply no way to impliment and administer their socialist program without it.

And five years later on, he proves to be absolutely 100% accurate with the exception of the “applause” comment, at least with regard to things like expanded drone strikes, NSA spying on American citizens, IRS-Gate, etc.   

Silence, yes.  “Applause” not so much.

I have the BEST readers, I swear.

Quote of the Day: What Obama Hath Wrought Edition

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Bryan Preston at The PJ Tatler – Matt Damon and Charles Krauthammer Agree: Obama is No Good:

Obama is leading. He just isn’t leading in any traditionally American way, through the constitutional process and within the bounds of our historic political discourse. But he is leading, and it’s a grave mistake to believe otherwise.

Kevin Williamson warns where Obama is leading.

Barack Obama’s administration is unmoored from the institutions that have long kept the imperial tendencies of the American presidency in check. That is partly the fault of Congress, which has punted too many of its legislative responsibilities to the president’s army of faceless regulators, but it is in no small part the result of an intentional strategy on the part of the administration. He has spent the past five years methodically testing the limits of what he can get away with, like one of those crafty velociraptors testing the electric fence in Jurassic Park. Barack Obama is a Harvard Law graduate, and he knows that he cannot make recess appointments when Congress is not in recess. He knows that his HHS is promulgating regulations that conflict with federal statutes. He knows that he is not constitutionally empowered to pick and choose which laws will be enforced. This is a might-makes-right presidency, and if Barack Obama has been from time to time muddled and contradictory, he has been clear on the point that he has no intention of being limited by something so trivial as the law.

Or what used to be our common language. Obama doesn’t believe in either one.

And here we are, living in what was a constitutional republic being rapidly transformed into a surveillance state.

And this is why, as much as I respect him, I find Victor Davis Hanson’s analysis of the Obama presidency unconvincing.

Discuss.

Quote of the Day – Heather Mac Donald Edition

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From her NRO column, The Post-Zimmerman Poison Pill:

The idea that the criminal-justice system discriminates against blacks — and that this bias explains blacks’ disproportionate presence in custody — is a staple of civil-rights activism and of the academic Left. Every effort to prove it empirically, however, has come up short. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Alfred Blumstein has found that blacks are underrepresented in prison for homicide compared with their arrest rates. A meta-analysis of charging and sentencing studies showed that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms, according to criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen.

Pesky things, facts.  RTWT.  More pesky facts therein.