I'm watching the Fox broadcast of Rush Limbaugh's speech right now, and my wife asked, "Is this on C-SPAN?"
So I checked and it wasn't. But as you see from the title - it's on CNN! Apparently they think that broadcasting a Rush Limbaugh speech will confirm for their audience what they want them to believe. But it's a huge risk, because no one makes more sense than Limbaugh, and no one - NO ONE can speak better.
There's just one problem: Rush claims that the right Republican leader will turn this around... But he didn't name one...
You may think he just doesn't want to play favorites, but the fact is - he can't name one. Because there isn't one.
Edit: To confirm my point - Romney has won the CPAC Straw Poll.
UPDATE: CNN wasn't taking any chances. Either that or no one on that channel has higher brain functions.
Immediately after Limbaugh finished, both Fox and CNN has people on who labeled Limbaugh's speech, "red meat." But CNN then exclaimed they were being deluged with "twitters." I have no idea what that is, but clearly only idiots do it.
It was amazing that the first five or six "twitterers" all hated Limbaugh, and that the very first one CNN received managed to call Limbaugh - Hitler. That's right, an American news network had no problem leading with that as long as it didn't refer to a liberal.
By RALPH PETERS
President Obama went to Camp Lejeune. He spoke in front of US Marines... And his carefully worded speech... may go down in history as his "Mission Accomplished" moment.
Consider his big sound bite: "Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end." What does that mean?
Will the 50,000 troops he intends to leave in Iraq, the trainers and maintainers, be forbidden to defend themselves? We're not going to leave 50,000 support troops in Iraq without combat units to protect them. We'll just ban the word "brigade" and call our shooters "task forces."
Meanwhile, he's praying that progress continues in Baghdad.
As for yesterday's boilerplate nonsense that "The end of the war in Iraq will enable a new era of American leadership and engagement in the Middle East," hey, if it does, thank George W. Bush. History has a wicked sense of humor.
The fundamental purpose of the speech was to hide the 50,000 residual troops in plain sight:
A strategic novice, he declared Afghanistan the good war. Now it's his. And while Iraq looks increasingly like a success story, Afghanistan's going south. Iraq's the prize, Afghanistan's the booby prize.
Success in Afghanistan's a one-off, while even a half-baked democracy in Iraq changes the Middle East. And Pakistan's the monster under the White House bed. In artilleryman's parlance, Obama's speech to the Marines was all flash, no bang.
He's struggling to appear decisive while carving out maximum wiggle room. And in the modern tradition of Democratic presidents, he just wishes these foreign conflicts would go away. But they won't.
Welcome to reality, Mr. President.
Bobo's baying-at-the-moon press conference keeps playing over in my mind. The reason is that I can't get over the difference between our pipsqueak President's fear-mongering and a true American hero's cockpit recording.
On the one hand, we heard a man who was the quintessential professional working his way through an enormous and imminent crisis - who remained astoundingly calm as he achieved complete success in saving the lives of all on board his plane.
On the other hand, we watched a man with literally no experience frantically telling us that if enormous sums aren't spent yesterday, we may never recover. And his lackies and sycophants cheered wildly. But everyone, even those cheering fools, can have no confidence in someone who has accomplished nothing, and who is younger than half the people he's lecturing.
And compounding his pathetic pleas was the display of raw partisanship that caused me to title my last entry as I did.
The boy has failed. The man succeeded. Everyone sees the contrast, and his supporters know that they voted for hope, not experience or accomplishment or even knowledge, because Obama has only his rhetoric with which to convince, and even that failed him last night.
Their President should literally be removed right now for demonstrating rank incompetence in his entire two weeks in office. The man is simply unfit to serve. We would have far more confidence if it were Captain Sullenberger at the microphone last night displaying the same calm, quiet crisis management skills that we heard at that cabin microphone during that frighteningly intense two minutes when 155 lives "might never recover."
America is rudderless and without hydraulics... and there's a nobody at the helm.
Are you watching this outrageous attack on Republicans? Are you buying that we need to spend more than we've ever spent before so we can save ourselves?
James Taranto has something to say about it:
The so-called stimulus bill may not do much for the economy, but it's certainly stimulating a lot of laughter, as its supporters are reduced to arguing essentially that it would be irresponsible not to waste boatloads of taxpayer money. We do not exaggerate. Consider this article by Michael Hirsh of Newsweek:
Obama's desire to begin a "post-partisan" era may have backfired. In his eagerness to accommodate Republicans and listen to their ideas over the past week, he has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending. This makes very little economic sense when you are in a major recession that only gets worse day by day. Yes, there are still some very legitimate issues with a bill that's supposed to be "temporary" and "targeted"--among them, large increases in permanent entitlement spending, and a paucity of tax cuts that will prompt immediate spending.
Even so, Obama has allowed Congress to grow embroiled in nitpicking over efficiency when the central debate should be about whether the package is big enough. When you are dealing with a stimulus of this size, there are going to be wasteful expenditures and boondoggles. There's no way anyone can spend $800 to $900 billion quickly without waste and boondoggles. It comes with the Keynesian territory. This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply.
Who is this Michael Hirsh, who has elevated unrestrained spending of the people's money to a high principle? Here's his bio:
Michael Hirsh covers international affairs for Newsweek, reporting on a range of topics from Homeland Security to postwar Iraq. He co-authored the November 3, 2003 cover story, "Bush's $87 Billion Mess," about the Iraq reconstruction plan. The issue was one of three that won the 2004 National Magazine Award for General Excellence.
The bill for "Bush's mess" is less than the margin of error in reckoning the cost of the "emergency" legislation about which Hirsh now chides lawmakers for "nitpicking over efficiency."
Blogger Josh Marshall, meanwhile, weighs in with another novel argument:
The other key into the current debate is that the Republican position is ominously similar to their position on global warming or, for that matter, evolution. The discussion of what to do on the Democratic side tracks more or less with textbook macroeconomics, while Republican argument track either with tax cut monomania or rhetorical claptrap intended to confuse. It's true that macro-economics doesn't make controlled experiments possible. And economists can't speak to these issues with certainty. But in most areas of our lives, when faced with dire potential consequences, we put our stock with scientific or professional consensus where it exists, as it does here. Only in cases where it goes against Republican political interests or economic interests of money-backers do we prefer the schemes of yahoos and cranks to people who study the stuff for a living.
Shut up and spend--it's science!
In fact, Marshall's style of argument is the antithesis of science, which is a rigorous process of open inquiry, not an appeal to authority, even the authority of "the best and the brightest." These categories are easily confused when the subject has to do with the natural sciences, as in the debates over evolution and global warmism. But at the suggestion that Congress ought to spend nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer money because science demands it, one can only laugh--although if Congress enacts the bill, it'll be the costliest laugh in history.
Especially because President Obama himself, in a Washington Post op-ed, admits that the so-called stimulus is not just about stimulating the economy in response to an emergency:
This plan is more than a prescription for short-term spending--it's a strategy for America's long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, health care and education.
If we are really in an emergency, and "science" tells us that we need to spend money now in order to deal with it, why not just do that and deal with the long-term agenda in the long term? Is it irresponsible to question a new president who seems to be cynically using a crisis in order to grab new power and huge sums of money for the federal government? We'd say it's irresponsible not to.
But this wouldn't be complete without a shot at the now second worst President in history, George Bush. Obama is doing exactly what Bush never did - he's taking his case to America - badly, but America won't think so, at least not for a while.
Bush failed to let the people know of the pending collapse, as well as so many developments about the war, Katrina... and everything else, really, and he was criticized for his secrecy, when in fact, he was simply doing virtually nothing.
I feel I have neither the time nor patience for this anymore, but then I also feel that if I don't address these things, someone else has to, so...
Some liberal idiot (pardon the redundancy) who goes by the name Joan Walsh, in a commentary in which her main point is that Obama's not as great a communicator as she thought (who knew?), makes this fantastic statement:
Why, when post-secondary education is essential in this economy, are most families on their own when it comes to paying for college? Secondary education is awesome, isn't it? Can you imagine this country without it? But isn't it time to think beyond that? Why isn't K-16 or so an American entitlement?
And remember, writing for Salon, she's probably one of the liberal intelligentsia...
Because there's so much wrong with her question that it becomes a daunting task to even begin to address it, Luckily, I'm feeling "awesome" today.
Which is where we begin: any commentator who uses "awesome" in her commentary is awesomely bad, and none of what she says then should have any credibility whatsoever.
So I'm done.
Unfortunately, liberals aren't. I bet the average left-leaner reading that says, "Right on!" or whatever recycled phrase from the fifty and sixties is currently in vogue. And that means they, and by "they," I'm thinking the likes of Queenie, and John, and Snowy and his band of lesser Australians...
Not only does making college an entitlement automatically raise the cost and/or lower the quality depending on how that entitlement is structured, but it creates all kinds of possible scenarios with bad endings.
For example, what about those who don't want to take advantage of their entitlement which they or their parents are partially paying for through their taxes? Do they feel cheated?
Well, as one who went to Catholic schools, and who has no known children of his own, I can tell you that I'm very hostile that I've had to pay so much for other people's rotten education. And it was even worse for my parents because they had to pay for others' education and pay for mine too...
And clearly, there's a question whether they got their money's worth on both ends.
But the bigger problem with Walsh's the novel concept is the adding of an enormous entitlement to a financial collapse. She thinks it would actually help improve things? Clearly, she's never had a course in economics... or read anything other than People.
In fact, the current "entitlement spending" for college has been a factor (perhaps THE MAIN factor) in greatly increasing the cost of a college education and depriving some people from getting one, while at the same time degrading its quality.
Let's take the college loan program - please! People who couldn't afford college get money they can't afford to repay at the moment, and then they head off to school. But if that money wasn't there, what would happen? Well, for one thing, less people would be able to go to college - at the time. They might have to work for a while or, yes, not go at all.
People on the left think this results in an undereducated society, but it doesn't at all. In fact, it results in -lowering- the cost of college and people who really want to go will find a way. Not everyone of course, and that's where liberals find their rallying point. :If one deserving person can't get the education he desires, then we're all diminished."
The counter to that argument is that if everyone who goes to college gets a better education at reduced cost, then we're all enhanced.
But how does that happen? It's not that hard to understand - unless you're liberal.
When less people buy something, the price goes down, and the people selling that product look for ways to entice you to buy their brand - through lower costs, better quality, more value...
But when a school gets subsidies, either directly from the government or through student loans, not only is there less incentive to improve their product - the education a person receives, but they can charge more for it - simply because there's more money available for it. So if, say, tuition is a thousand dollars, and government subsidizes five hundred of it, then lets charge $1200, administrators say. We win and students win. True, the taxpayer loses, but there's a lot of them and no one knows who they are.
Besides, you get more college educated kids, so everyone wins. They don't realize or they don't care that the subsidy decreases the "excellence factor" in a number of ways.
An so, mediocrity costs more, and those costs are both visible in terms of dollars and hidden in terms of the lack of quality. It is never the case that subsidizing education gets better results. And in fact, we're seeing that the home-schooling phenomenon demonstrated just the opposite.You would think that students who have the advantage of being taught by "professionals" would be better educated. Instead they are being cheated. And most of them will never recover.
For evidence of the sort of thing I'm talking about, look at what's happening right now with the economy - prices are being slashed as consumer spending pulls back... and it's creating buying opportunities... like in the case of vacation travel.
Now it's true that there are real people paying the price for this in terms of lost jobs, but if the government would just leave things alone rather than try to create artificial demand through the 'stimulus," markets would equalize. Then things would start to improve and jobs would be added. meanwhile, costs would remain lower than before because of a reluctance to raise them as well as the reduced credit availability and other factors.
Then we would have a society based far more on the market than it has been. No it is true that those who benefit from this reordering will be different in some cases from those who benefited under the current system, but liberals will argue that there will also be less people who benefit.
That is unknowable, but the fact remains that a system based on supply and demand, a system that is not distorted by public monies and unnecessary restrictions will eventually benefit all of us far more than government manipulation does, and it will be fairer and more efficient.
But you won't be able to convince the Walshes of the world that this is the case... which is another reason why a college education is more or less useless to them.
And he's a lot milder than I have been...
I joined a Republican blog yesterday, and almost immediately, two people wanted to be my friend despite the fact that in the block where I was asked to tell a bit about myself, I put "Later."
And I did go back later. I said that people don't seem to realize that liberals are America's #1 enemy, and that Republicans were #2.
And now that I think about it, they're number two in more ways than one...
Did you hear about how Bobo and Mickey needed to "get away for a while" - already? I said during the campaign that I really knew this guy because I'd known people exactly like him - they have no experience, no accomplishments, but they think they talk a good line and that everyone buys it.
But if you look into his eyes, you see that he doesn't buy it himself. And that the reason he had to get away already is that he's worried he can't maintain the facade. But he also knows he'll get all the help the media can provide.
And clearly, Obama has a lot of people in awe of his various "qualities," none of which really exist. They have been attributed to him, conferred on him, and imagined in him.
The fact is, Obama brings the rankest incompetence to the office. To put it in perspective, Carter was incompetent, but we saw that clearly only after he failed in virtually everything he tried. With Obama, time has been compressed. In fact, he was a failure before he started, his cabinet picks have been ludicrous and worse, and when he talks now, I have to think that at least some of his supporters are wondering, "What have we done?!"
That doesn't mean he can't get lucky. I mean, Clinton did, and Obama's incompetence won't stop him from making decisions. He could accidentally make the correct ones, but I can't believe anyone but the most deluded still believe he's got abilities far beyond those of mortal men...
And what does that say about Harvard?
Well, today marks the two week anniversary of the most corrupt administration in history, so it's fitting that the guy who was most instrumental in pardoning Mark Rich got confirmed as Attorney General Yesterday. And did you hear one filthy liberal utter a complaint? How about Timothy?
And now we have another tax cheat, Tom Daschle, up for confirmation, and did you hear a single filthy liberal complain? That's because Tom is SOOOOO sorry, but what about the cleavage? What do I mean? Remember on Friends when Joey told Rachel that women can get away with doing bad things to men by claiming to be so sorry while squeezing their breasts together at the same time? And then she was kind enough to demonstrate?
Who knows, Daschle may have the boobs, but I doubt he'll try that tactic.
And it looks like he'll be confirmed anyway. This demonstrates the axiom which states that once you do something, it gets easier and easier. Goiter owed what, thirty grand, and Daschle paid back more than three times that. Lovely hypocrites, these liberals, eh?
And I was looking at some of their blogs today. The subject on one was how outrageous it was that every single House Republican voted against the "stimulus," and thus destroyed the new "bipartisanship."
Do you think it too mean-spirited of me to label them "hypocritical morons?"
If you don't, maybe you better run this by Timothy?
By James Taranto
If a certain sort of conservative tends to be moralistic about sex, liberals tend to be moralistic about money. That makes Tom Daschle the equivalent of a televangelist caught in a sex scandal.
Daschle, now President Obama's nominee for secretary of health and human services, was first elected to Congress in 1978 as a Democrat from South Dakota. In 2004, in the final throes of the Bush majority, voters ousted him from the Senate.
Forced into the private sector, he returned to Aberdeen, S.D., and eked out a living growing wheat on the Daschle family farm. As if! Actually, he stayed in Washington, joined a lobbying firm--albeit as a "special policy adviser," since as a former senator he was prohibited by law from "lobbying"--and raked in the bucks. The prairie populist became a plutocrat, as the Washington Post reports:
Without becoming a registered lobbyist, he made millions of dollars giving public speeches and private counsel to insurers, hospitals, realtors, farmers, energy firms and telecommunications companies with complex regulatory and legislative interests in Washington.
Daschle's expertise and insights, gleaned over 26 years in Congress, earned him more than $5 million over the past two years, including $220,000 from the health-care industry, and perks such as a chauffeured Cadillac, according to the documents.
We thought of a catchy term for people who claim to be tribunes of the poor while getting driven around by a chauffeur. We're going to call them "limousine liberals."
Anyway, there was one little "glitch," as the Washington Post calls it. Daschle, who in 1998 said, "Make no mistake, tax cheaters cheat us all, and the IRS should enforce our laws to the letter" (hat tip: National Review Online), did not pay all the taxes he owed. In particular, he did not pay taxes on the use of the limo, saying he regarded it as merely a "generous offer from a friend."
He finally coughed up the money earlier this month, after Obama nominated him. An earlier story on the Post Web site puts the sum in question at $101,943, which covered three years. That's just the tax (plus interest) on his limo, suggesting that its actual value was somewhere on the order of $100,000 a year. In 2007, the median income for a South Dakota family of four was $66,451.
Bloomberg notes that Daschle also failed to report some income, so that his total additional tax bill came to $128,203 plus $11,964 in interest. And it turns out that even this was an underpayment:
The former senator has agreed that he will have to adjust again his 2005, 2006 and 2007 tax returns because he didn't pay Medicare taxes on the additional taxable income he incurred with the use of the car, the Finance Committee staff reported.
As Health and Human Services secretary, Daschle would oversee Medicare, the insurance program for the elderly and disabled.
Last week Timothy Geithner was confirmed as Treasury secretary even though he "forgot" to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes for four years while he worked for the International Monetary Fund. One begins to detect a theme.
Over the weekend, meanwhile, we noticed this story in the Washington Post:
D.C. Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) has again failed to file his tax returns.
The former District mayor has not submitted federal or city tax forms for 2007--the second instance in which he has not filed required returns while on probation for tax offenses, said two sources familiar with the situation.
Two years ago, federal prosecutors failed to convince a federal judge that Barry should be jailed for violating the terms of his probation, which was ordered in 2006, because he did not file 2005 tax returns.
Like everyone else, we immediately thought that Barry must be angling for a position in the administration. McClatchy Newspapers report that the president "has yet to nominate a new head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy." Coincidence?
