Tag: QotD

Quote of the Day – Tea Party Edition

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The problem is that most Americans’ trust in the ability of Congress to solve such things, or even to tackle them in a way that will not make them worse, is nonexistent. The idea that our representatives would listen to our concerns, be responsive to our needs, and then have the intelligence to craft solutions based on common sense and/or intelligent thought or even well-meaning effort has been waning over the years but has finally evaporated. If there had been any lingering faith in Congress, HCR erased it. . . . We assume that the cure will be worse than the disease. We expect that the bills will be rushed through without proper debate and enacted at the stroke of midnight, like evil spells in a fairy tale. We are no longer surprised at the depth and breadth of the corrupt and shady behind-the-scenes deals involved. We know the legislations will be lengthy and complex. We do not think our representatives possess the intelligence to even understand the bills they pass—that is, if they bother to read them at all—and either do not appreciate their negative consequences or actually intend them to do us harm. We know that, just when we think we’ve driven a fatal stake into the heart of an unpopular bill, it rises and staggers forward to attack us.

— Neo-Neocon, The calm before the storms

And this describes why people who were apolitical are coming out and attending TEA parties better than anything I’ve seen.

Quote of the Day – Dr. Zero Edition

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This is the dreadful equation of socialism. Money can be used to create value, or it can fuel the exercise of power, but not both…It is possible to ration subsistence, but not prosperity. Americans are slowly, painfully beginning to appreciate the difference between those two levels of existence. We’ve been so prosperous, for so long, that we lost sight of how far our economy would collapse when value was traded for power. The arithmetic of poverty and unemployment is simple, and merciless. Free people multiply. The all-powerful State is only good at division. — Hot Air, The Dreadful Equation

Quote of the Day – Mordor Edition

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The run into Chicago through Lake County, Indiana always reminds me of Frodo & Sam approaching the borders of Mordor: The vegetation gets blighted and unhealthy looking; there are murky pools and low-lying swamps that look like they could contain anything from tentacled horrors to Blinky the three-eyed fish; whole neighborhoods of rusting industry and boarded-up homes can be seen from the highway; and atop a giant black pinnacle on the horizon is the malevolent, unblinking red eye of Mayor Daley… Or maybe it’s just the aircraft warning light atop the Sears Tower; it’s hard to tell from a distance. – Tam, Chicago, part one:

I needed something to grin about today…

Just a Couple of Things

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I’m way behind, I know, but I wanted to get these links out.

First, I strongly recommend you read the text of Vanderboegh’s April 19 speech. Seriously. It’s damned good, and it needs saying and spreading around. I’ve been known to use the key phrase myself occasionally.

Second, I want you to read this post at The Ultimate Answer to Kings, which carries today’s Quote of the Day, because Joel’s right:

The people at those rallies aren’t the extremists. They’re just good, brave people who still believe in the political process. The real extremists stayed home, because they don’t.

Do Your Children Know Who Won WWII?

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On Tuesday this week author Jerry Pournelle wrote an interesting piece he entitled The Education Mess. I strongly suggest you read it. Here are a few interesting excerpts:

Diane Ravitch was one of the architects of No Child Left Behind, but in her new book she now admits that it isn’t working, and is in fact helping kill the kind of education she advocates. She continues to believe that the American public schools do a poor job, and that we can build a much more successful system of public education.

I agree with her on the first point. She’s dead wrong on the second. We can’t build a better system.

That’s not a cry of despair, it’s a statement of fact. There is never going to be a national school system much better than what we have now. It may get worse, but it won’t get much better.

—

In 1983 the National Commission on Education, headed by Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg, wrote that “If a foreign nation had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.” I’ve been pointing this out for years. We have a system of public education indistinguishable from an enemy attack — and it has been getting worse since the Seaborg report.

In 1983.

I graduated from High School in 1980.

The whole thing is quotable, and I’m going to archive it in my records, but I came across something else today that is a perfect companion to Pournelle’s spot-on diagnosis. From a comment at American Digest to his piece Somebody’s Been Raising A Generation of Schmucks:

As the webmaster of an educational resource site for the humanities, we hold focus groups of teachers to get feedback on our site and its content. One teacher from one of D.C.’s tonier private schools pointed out that they no longer teach the “military aspect” of our nation’s wars. She said (in refrence to WWII in particular) they focused on things like the home front, Japanese internment, A. Phillip Randolph and civil rights — you know, the important stuff — but NO “military history.” An astonished history teacher at the table turned to her and asked, “but Susan, do your students at least know who WON World War II?” – Don Rodrigo.

It’s already worse. The suck just isn’t evenly spread around.

Quote of the Day – Balko Edition

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On Rooting for Government To Fail – Reason online, Radley Balko. Not long, so I’ll quote the whole thing for my archives:

The American Prospect‘s Mori Dinauer is just a hair off in this post.

I don’t promote government failure, I expect it. And my expectations are met fairly often. What I promote is the idea that more people share my expectations, so fewer people are harmed by government failure, and so we can stop this slide toward increasingly large portions of our lives being subject to the whims, interests, and prejudices of politicians.

I will concede that there’s a problem, here. In the private sector failure leads to obsolescence (unless you happen to work for a portion of the private sector that politicians think should be preserved in spite of failure). When government fails, people like Dinauer and, well, the government claim it’s a sign that we need more government. It’s not that government did a poor job, or is a poor mechanism for addressing that particular problem, it’s that there just wasn’t enough government. Of course, the same people will point to what they call government success as, also, a good argument for more government.

It’s a nifty trick. The right does it with national security. The fact that we haven’t had a major terrorist attack since September 11, 2001 proves that the Bush administration’s heavy-handed, high-security approach to fighting terrorism worked! But if we had suffered another attack, the same people would have been arguing that we need to surrender more of our civil liberties to the security state. Two sides. Same coin.

That Pew poll is also a pretty good indication that the more government tries to do, the more poorly it does it. Your usual caveats about correlation and causation apply, but the federal government certainly didn’t shrink over the period the trust-in-government trend line has taken a nosedive. Note too that during the Clinton administration, federal spending actually shrank as a percentage of GDP, and the federal workforce shrank by nearly 400,000, leaving it at its lowest level since 1960. And wouldn’t you know it, that’s one period in the last 50 years over which trust in the federal government took a sharp climb.

But in general—yes—I think the fact that more people are realizing that government isn’t capable of solving all of their problems is an encouraging trend. Because it isn’t.

Quote of the Day – Tea Party Edition

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The Obama Democrats see a society in which ordinary people cannot fend for themselves, where they need to have their incomes supplemented, their health care insurance regulated and guaranteed, their relationships with their employers governed by union leaders. Highly educated mandarins can make better decisions for them than they can make themselves.

That is the culture of dependence. The tea partiers see things differently. They’re not looking for lower taxes; half of tea party supporters, a New York Times survey found, think their taxes are fair. Nor are they financially secure: Half say someone in their household may lose their job in the next year. Two-thirds say the recession has caused some hardship in their lives. But they recognize, correctly, that the Obama Democrats are trying to permanently enlarge government and increase citizens’ dependence on it.

And, invoking the language of the Founding Fathers, they believe that this will destroy the culture of independence that has enabled Americans over the past two centuries to make this the most productive and prosperous — and the most charitably generous — nation in the world. Seeing our political divisions as a battle between the culture of dependence and the culture of independence helps to make sense of the divisions seen in the 2008 election.

— Michael Barone, Washington Examiner, Tea parties fight Obama’s culture of dependence

Quote of the Day – Economy Just Like WWII Edition

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Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration — which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better — has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated. During the downturn, federal revenues plunged and spending soared. And, as will happen for two decades, every day 10,000 more baby boomers are joining the ranks of recipients of Medicare and Social Security, two programs with unfunded liabilities of nearly $107 trillion.

In the context of this concatenation of troubles, the administration’s highest priority was to put an enormous new health care entitlement on the welfare state’s rickety scaffolding. – George F. Will, If VAT, Ditch the Income Tax