ObamaCare

I agree with what Mead writes below -- see the link for an extremely good discussion of the overall problem and its complexities. No matter how the Supremes rule, the GOP deserves a large hunk of the blame for ObamaCare. Everybody knew there were big problems with, for example, pre-existing conditions and people losing their insurance if they changed jobs. Those things have needed to be fixed for a long time, and if the GOP didn't want something like ObamaCare, then they needed to propose serious, persuasive alternatives, because the current system is too flawed to survive. If ObamaCare gets tossed, they'll have one more chance; if they boot that one, it will be hard to blame the public if it gives up on the possibility of a conservative solution. In that case, we will almost certainly end up with some single-payer government system even worse than ObamaCare.

Byron

The Health Care Disaster and the Miseries of Blue

Supreme Screwball

When I heard Breyer's questioning about ObamaCare the other day, it sounded like the guy had taken a couple of hits of Ecstasy -- several minutes of disconnected whimsical babble in this strange lilting voice. Did any of you happen to hear it?

He's the Justice, btw, who wants the US Supreme Court to consider foreign precedents and law in its deliberations, a supremely goofy idea from any perspective, because as Scalia points out there are hundreds of foreign courts, so which ones would you look at, chosen on what basis? You could always find some precedent somewhere or other for any damned thing you wanted to promote, and the hell with our Constitution and body of law -- which are what the Supreme Court is specifically charged with interpreting and ruling on. (Breyer and Ginsburg can lay claim to being the Wacko Wing of our Supreme Court.  Listening to Ginsburg, it was obvious that she doesn't care a whit about the Constitution or precedent; if the legislation under review would promote her liberal social goals, then she's all for it, regardless, so please don't bother her with that Constitution stuff because she doesn't give a hoot in hell about any of it.)

At the link is the transcript of Breyer's stream-of-consciousness blithering the other day, which makes for some amusing reading but that's also alarmingly bizarre. Is this guy dealing from a full deck?

Breyer's unhinged Commerce Clause ramblings

Affirmative Action

Good piece, one that could only come from a faculty member who is safely retired...

Affirmative Action and Radical Politics

But the Comments are the part most worth reading. Some of the usual junk, of course, but mostly thoughtful and with many interesting reports of personal experience of affirmative action in diverse fields, inside and outside of higher education.

Affirmative action began as a good, necessary, and just idea that unfortunately was based on a false assumption. The good, necessary, and just idea was that there were talented, high-ability individuals in the society who had no chance at higher education due to economic circumstances and/or racial discrimination. That was bad for those individuals, whose talents were unfairly going to waste, and bad for the society, which lost the productivity of that talent.  Affirmative action was to make the special efforts required to identify those individuals, and to provide them with educational opportunities commensurate with their talents and abilities.

The false assumption was that there existed a large amount of such unrecognized talent, especially in minority communities, waiting to be discovered and sped on its way to academic and professional success.  There was some, but as it gradually became clear that no large pool of unrecognized talent actually existed, affirmative action became a racial-ethnic quota system in the business of trying to make silk purses out of sows' ears. When compensatory education programs proved unable to effect such transformations, the affirmative action game became what it is today, a phony, quota-driven credentialing system that tries to re-label sows' ears as silk purses on the false hope that nobody will notice.  One result is unqualified individuals occupying positions that are not competent to fill.  Another is for the qualifications of the genuinely talented, superbly competent minority doctor, lawyer, scholar to be viewed as suspect, presumed to be somewhat less than what they appear to be. 

Byron

Going for the Green

10 Reasons Why Fisker May Be Worse Than Solyndra

"Fisker’s shortcomings and mismanagement are contributing to the troubles – and perhaps the eventual downfall – of its battery supplier, A123 Systems, which let go 125 of its plant workers in November. Don’t feel bad for the owners of A123 though, who have received at least $279 million in grants from DOE, as they took care of themselves nicely with raises and parachutes after the factory firings."

Testifying before Congress, Obama's hopelessly incompetent Sec'y of Energy Steven Chu gave himself a "A-minus" for taking care of taxpayer funds. How pathetic.  In fact, Chu is in way over his head, being used as a tool by green-energy scammers and rake-off artists who smelled a payday and have zeroed in on Obama's naive alternative energy fixation like rats on a cheddar wheel.  The venture fails, taxpayer money gets flushed, but these guys always seem to come out just fine. Just lucky, I guess...

Byron

Quote of the Day

Voltaire in 1770:

"In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other."

Voltaire was writing well before the 1789 French Revolution, but what he said is still accurate. Once you have a democracy, this redistribution is known as "buying votes," and once elected as "buying perpetual incumbency with other people's money."

Anyone who wonders about the origins of the benefit extravaganza that is bankrupting states and municipalities need look no further than this:  Democrats staying in office by buying public employee union votes with benefit contracts to be paid for with money to be extracted from taxpayers. 

A handy model for that three-part arrangement might be this:   A leech (the Dem officeholder) stays alive by sucking the blood of a vampire bat (the union) that has attached itself to an artery on the neck of a sheep (the taxpayer).  Every attempt by the sheep to shake off the bat and its slimy rider is met with outrage at such selfishness and lack of concern for fairness and equality.

Byron

Stimulus delusions

The stimulus idea always sounds good to people like Obama, because they know essentially nothing about how the economy actually works.  In the video, President Clueless describes his weatherization program and asks "What would be a more effective stimulus package than that?"  Of course, in actual practice it stimulated nothing, turned out to be a complete and total flop.

Video: A case study of the stimulus

"The only positive outcome from the stimulus is that it put an end to the fantasy that top-down control of the economy and government intervention creates economic growth.  If we learn that lesson for more than just a few years, it might make the huge loss and our current economic stagnation worth it."

Why Obama's Stimulus Failed: A Case Study of Silver Spring, Maryland

Arab Spring

Rising crime has some Egyptians yearning for the old police state

The Obama media still persist in referring to this as a "freedom movement," which is highly amusing.

What we see beginning to develop in Egypt is a version of what would have happened in Iraq if we had simply arranged for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and then walked away.  Fortunately, the Bush team was smarter than that, and resisted demands from Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Sen. Barack Obama to declare defeat and bail out. Now Obama finds himself President and Commander in Chief, and he seems to have no strategic vision whatsoever, his Afghanistan policy, if you can call it that, an incoherent shambles.

Killing an old, ill, isolated Osama Bin Laden had some brief symbolic value for Americans, but it was otherwise irrelevant to the apparently pointless mess that is Obama's war in Afghanistan.  OBL's killing changed nothing about that.

You really would think that, long before now, the Great Orator would have given a televised prime-time address to the nation on what he intends to accomplish in Afghanistan, explaining what will justify the additional maimings and deaths of U.S. soldiers, between now and the scheduled withdrawal he's already announced.

What Change is he in the process of accomplishing in Afghanistan in the time remaining, what Audacity of Hope will be made manifest in that place with the remaining expenditure of American blood and treasure? What's the plan, champ?  Where's the inspirational oratory now?

Instead, Obama's taking vacations, doing fancy political fundraisers for rich donors, filling out NCAA basketball tournament brackets, singing R&B songs for an adoring audience.  Something's wrong here.  

Byron 

Fracking: Excellent piece

Very, very good, well worth reading.  (It does lack discussion of recent allegations about seismic effects, however.)

The Truth about Fracking

Illegals for Obama

Justice Dept opposes Texas voter ID law

Could Holder's "Justice" Dept. be any more corrupt?  You routinely need to show a photo ID for all kinds of things -- but not for voting??  Nope, not when every single one of those illegal votes is Democratic! 

Of course, this is not really an issue here in New Mexico, because we issue regular drivers licenses to illegals -- which they can use for all kinds of things, including using the NM license to acquire state-issued documents in other states.  That's A-OK with Obama and his "Justice" Dept.

The Obama administration has proven itself incompetent in virtually everything it touches, except for the worst, most divisive kind of Chicago machine-style political pandering and corruption.  That they're good at.

Byron

Mitt's weakness

Krauthammer is right, unfortunately.  And here's a pluperfect example:

Mitt Romney: It’s not like the president can “precisely set the price at the pump”

Good grief, is he campaigning for Obama?  Or just providing useful quotes for the Obama Campaign?  Is he saying that the president can set prices, just not "precisely"?  There are so many things wrong with that quote you run out of fingers to count them on.

Romney comes out with one dumb gaffe after another, usually right after he's done something positive that should give him a bump up -- he repeatedly punctures his own balloon.  Pffffttt!  It's obvious that Mitt just has no knack for thinking on his feet. Worse, it appears to be something that can't be taught, at least to him.

If and when Mitt debates face-to-face against Obama, the only way I'll be able to stand watching is by peeking from behind the couch.  Paul Ryan would do fine in that contest, so would Marco Rubio, so would some others. But if Mitt does well I'll figure they've stuffed Newt Gingrich into a Romney Suit.

It's too bad, because I really do think Romney would be a very good president.

Byron

Enough already

York: Romney pushes jobs, side issues trip rivals

Yes.  Romney gets it.

But if the GOP is determined to commit electoral seppuku then, sure, go ahead and nominate Santorum. He's already made himself unelectable in the general with his statements on reproductive issues, and the Obama camp still has Rick's fascinating views on teaching Creationism in biology classes to hammer him with. (Google "Santorum Amendment.") That's a debate we don't need, unless the idea is to lose even bigger, while also setting science teaching back a couple of generations. Editorial cartoons will have Santorum dressed like Elmer Gantry in a tent show, waving a chimpanzee femur at an audience of toothless GOP yokels. Thanks, but include me out of that hoedown.  Live by the social conservative agenda, die by it.  The risk is not just that Obama gets re-elected, but that both houses of Congress end up controlled by the Democrats also.

In my view, the best thing the GOP can hope for on this Super Tuesday is for Santorum to get trampled from one end of the country to the other, to give a nice concession speech, and then to go away.

Here's what's sad: The Democrats have moved so far to the left margins that there is plenty of territory for the GOP to be a true Liberal party with strong appeal to independents -- Free people, free markets, smaller less intrusive government, balanced budgets, lower taxes, term limits.  But no, instead we get just one more self-destructive debate over the agenda of the social conservative wing, and an eventual nominee loaded down with baggage he has to drag along into the general election.  To say that the GOP needs new leadership is a vast understatement.

Byron

Absolute travesty

Have a barf bag handy.  You have been warned.

The proposed $100 million national monument to Eisenhower will be used to promote one more "inversion of traditional hierarchies."  How challenging and transgressive!  Naturally, the proposal gets a rave review from the Washington Post's art critic who fairly chirps at the prospect, praising it for "de-emphasizing the 'masculine power' that has traditionally marred Washington’s memorial architecture" with a proposal that “has ‘re-gendered’ the vocabulary of memorialization, giving it new life and vitality...“The effect will be that of a giant stage set enveloping a relatively small representation of Eisenhower, yet another inversion of traditional hierarchies that suggests a powerful sense of the finitude of man and the vastness of history, nature, and fate.” 

Little re-gendered Ike, made small by a powerful sense of human finitude in the face of the vastness of fate. Yes, no doubt that's the kind of man it took to command the European Theater of Operations in WWII, to run Operation Torch in North Africa and the invasion of Sicily, to be Supreme Allied Commander planning, organizing, and commanding the largest armada in all history in the cross-Channel invasion of Fortress Europe in Operation Overlord (D-Day), and to be Supreme Commander of NATO after the war.  Sick.   

Ferguson perfectly identifies the problem when he calls this fiasco "testimony to postmodernism’s ability to corrupt everything it touches."  Just so. 

Since what's proposed is much worse than no memorial at all, the far better alternative is to junk the whole thing. Or if it has to be built, remove all reference to Eisenhower, and make it a monument to Billy Elliot. 

Byron

Why Afghanistan?

I know, I know.  This is Obama's and the Democrats' "good war," the one we should have fought all along, instead of "Bush's War' in Iraq. 

But Bush's war in Iraq had a clearly stated purpose and rationale, and it's result is an Iraq too busy trying to establish a stable democracy to take part in regional conflicts. (Imagine the Middle East today, with Iraq right there in the middle and still run by Saddam and his psychopath sons.) Obama rejects the idea of nation-building, a perfectly defensible policy choice -- but in that case, what is the point and purpose of his war in Afghanistan? Where's the Great Orator's nationally televised speech about that?  Where is the questioning media demanding clear answers?  (I'm just kidding about that last part, obviously.)

Mark Steyn gets it right:

"Six weeks after the last NATO soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will be as if we were never there...We came, we saw, we left no trace. America's longest war will leave nothing behind."

"The combined Western military/aid presence accounts for 98 percent of that benighted land's GDP. We carpet-bomb with dollar bills; we have the most advanced technology known to man; we have everything except strategic purpose."

We have another winner!

GOV'T MOTORS halts production of CHEVY Volt...

Lays off 1,300...
BLAMES MEDIA FOR LOW SALES...


That flushing sound is another taxpayer-subsidized triumph for the Obama Administration.   Wha' hoppen? I guess the dealers finally ran out of room to store any more Volts on their back lots.

Who needs market capitalism when you have this Genius Squad running things?  Noooo-body.  It does remain a bit of a mystery, though, just who in the world they thought was going to buy this ludicrously overpriced bolus of a car. I suspect it failed because the Obama/Chu marketing plan -- forcing gas prices up to $5 a gallon -- just didn't kick in soon enough. 

I predict the Obama brain trust will now move to Plan B, which is to make the taxpayers pay for them a second time by filling Government fleets with surplus Volts.

Meanwhile, everybody's on tenter hooks waiting for the introduction of the new Chevy Solyndra. Gonna be huge!  Solar powered, so just be sure you're home before dark.  Or if it clouds over.

Byron