You know, it’s possible to be so convinced of your own superior intelligence that you can be easily goaded into making stupid mistakes. Call it The Khan Principle, after that genetically-engineered mastermind who let an aging starship captain bait him into disaster.
Now, Markos Moulitsas is no lab-grown super being, but he does have just a teeny tiny superiority complex, especially where Sarah Palin is concerned. And since he’s one of the leading lights of the progressive Democratic Party, where he goes, many will follow, even if is to a mass petard-hoisting.
Read the account by Cuffy Meigs here of Markos’ latest venture into embarrassment, prompted by a speech given by Sarah Palin at a Tea Party Express kick off rally. Remember, folks, this speech is for the Tea Party Express, so what she says might have a special relevance to the Tea Parties. Even if she doesn’t say the words “Tea Party”, a reasonable person might infer that the theme is important, surrounded as she is by large signs with the words “Tea Party” on them.
I’ll finish with a great paragraph from Janene Garofalo, repurposed masterfully by the great Ed Driscoll:
You know, there’s nothing more interesting than seeing a bunch of Ruling Class reactionaries become confused and angry at events when they’re not quite certain what is being said. It sounds right and then it doesn’t make sense. Which, let’s be very honest about what this is about. It’s not about bashing Republicans, it’s not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don’t know their history at all. This is about hating conservatives in America. This is elitism straight up.
This is the point at which Markos delivers a speech about stabbing at Sarah Palin from Hell’s Heart and what he’d do for hate’s sake, no doubt.
(via Jim Treacher’s Twitter Feed)
UPDATE: Boy does Duane Lester work quickly!
Tags: Markos Moulitsas, Progressives, Sarah Palin, Tea Parties
There are many reasons I’ve had Mark Hemingway as a guest on The Delivery. His ability to eviscerate a knucklehead whose mouth has clearly outstripped his brain is but one of them.
I’d like to put the best construction on this and note that Yglesias is expressing a degree of independence from his fellow CAP apparatchiks, who cooked up the smear that the Chamber of Commerce is spending foreign money in elections. But then he goes on to show that he is still enthralled with the Potemkin-village visit that he and several other liberal journalists took recently at the expense of China-United States Exchange Foundation [...]
Morally praiseworthy? Huh? I’m as much in favor of free trade as the next guy, but primarily because it benefits us. Is our government intended to promote American economic interests, or is it an international charity aimed at propping up an evil, despotic government?
And more importantly, if it is a charity, would Rand Paul approve of giving such a charity tax-exempt status? Let me clear my mind and consult Aqua Buddha for an answer.
Who knows what Yglesias is really trying to say? As Mark notes earlier in his post, the man has already admitted he’d lie his fool head off to pick up one more stray scrap of political power, so why waste the time trying to find wisdom in his writing? Were I Matthew Yglesias, I’d leave Hemingway be for a while and go after a target more befitting my abilities. Perhaps Elmo has a blog.
Tags: Mark Hemingway
If the upper echelon inside the GOP really want to know why they still don’t have the adoration of the Tea Parties, who ought to be natural ideological allies with them, they have only to listen to Senator Judd Gregg.
Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.), the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, said that repealing the new healthcare reform law — or looking to defund it — were not good options.
“I don’t think starving or repealing is probably the best approach here,” Gregg said on the Fox Business Network. “You basically go in and restructure it.”
That’s a change of pace even for Gregg, who’s been among almost all fellow Republicans in the House and Senate who’ve called for the repeal of the measure, which Democrats passed through Congress earlier this year and President Obama signed into law.
This sort of mealy-mouth backtracking, without much of a reason or good sense behind it, is what keeps the Tea Party on edge; and, ultimately, it’s why the American people can’t trust the Republican Party as far as they can throw its nearest elected official.
Yes, we could go back and restructure the Obamacare bill, but why waste the time? The sections that people absolutely despise are the most important parts of the bill — the individual mandate, the Medicare shenanigans, the price controls, the death panels. They are the vital organs, if you will. Once you tear those out, and that will surely have to be done to keep Obamacare from visiting ruination on our health care system, all that’s left is a little gentle Feng Shui arrangement of what’s left of the innards.
It makes far more sense for the GOP to trash the whole, bloated mess and start over with a few core principles: don’t make health care worse, give people as many options as possible, ensure that as many people as want covered can get coverage on their own, create a limited pool for those who are utterly unable to find coverage. Once they have those principles nailed down, they can build simple legislation that accomplishes those missions, and only those missions. Don’t let the industry write the bill. Don’t give in to the temptations of adding more bells and whistles. Don’t listen to the big-government Democrats who are less interested in health care than they are in control and power.
Whatever else they do, they must not drag the 2,000-page beast into a backroom where we can’t see them and “restructure” it with Senator Helpful McHelperson. That’s how we got into this mess. Of course, it’s possible that Gregg wants us to return to that way of doing business. It’s better for him personally and politically if he gets to cut his own slices out of the multi-trillion dollar health care industry in a nice quiet place where he won’t be bothered by pesky Tea Partiers hollering about their money and the Constitution. Perhaps his goal is to return to Pelosi Politics, the sort of “go along to get along” ways that got him put on the short list to join the Obama administration.
The sooner the GOP realizes that we’re done with that way of doing business with our money and our lives, the better off the party will be.
(via memeorandum)
This kind of took my breath away this morning.
The United States of America now owes someone(s) $13,665,000,000,000.
By 2012, when Hillary Clinton next challenges Barack Obama for their party’s presidential nomination, the national debt will be even larger than today’s record — $16,500,000,000,000, according to current federal estimates. That’s more money than the entire United States economy produces in a complete year.
That’s also way more money than either Obama or Clinton spent to win the Democratic nomination in 2008.
This stunning debt news comes to us courtesy of Mark Knoller of CBS News, who is the White House press corps’ chief cruncher of all things numbers.
Knoller has also figured out that during Obama’s presidential watch, the national debt has increased by $3,039,000,000,000, as in, that much more than it was when he took the oath on Jan. 20, 2009, in front of millions of excited witnesses and Aretha Franklin’s huge hat.
I don’t have a good mental picture for how much money that is. In the middle of this year, the real value of all our good and services, our Gross Domestic Product, was a touch over 14.5 trillion dollars. So, the debt piled up during just the Obama administration was 20 percent of everything that all of us have produced so far this year. In other words, take two and a half months of all the work you’ve done so far and throw it out the window because it belongs to someone else. That is the obligation under which our government has put us, our children, and grandchildren.
If we took our entire GDP and paid off the debt, we’d be left with 835 billion dollars. That’s roughly the GDP of South Korea and just a little less than the GDP of Mexico, our drug war-wracked, dysfucntional, population-bleeding neighbors to our south.
Is that really where we want to be? Do we really want to be so encumbered with debt that our free and clear productivity puts us behind Mexico?
Right now, the President and his progressive buddies in Congress and the MSM have no desire at all to stop spending our money. Two and a half months is simply not enough to them. They want more. They need more. Their worldview simply can not exist until every single productive second of our lives belongs to them, to distribute as they see fit, because they’re smarter and more enlightened than us.
It is not difficult to see where their plans lead. We only have to look at the other places where progressive economic policies have been given free reign: North Korea, Russia, Cuba, and much of Central America. Who cares if the peasants get enough food so long as the people running the show have plenty? In the end, that’s where we’re headed if we don’t get control of our government again.
UPDATE: Billion, trillion, what’s the difference anymore? I corrected the errant number at the GDP link, which should have read trillion.
Tags: Big Government, Progressives
Today is likely to be another of those busy days when I’m not going to spend as much time behind the keyboard as I’d like. I may get a post or two up, but in case I don’t, here are a few choice links to exercise your brain until I record the podcast tonight.
You do know about the live podcast show tonight, don’t you? No? Well, if you come to this UStream link tonight, right about 9:30 PM Eastern, you’ll get The Delivery live and on living webcam. You can jump into the chatroom and participate in the show as I record it. I don’t know of any other podcaster who lets you go behind the scenes of his show quite like this, so stop by and say Hello!
- The President, continuing his quest to appear on every single cable channel on the planet, is going to guest on Mythbusters. Alas, Adam and Jamie won’t try busting the myths of Obamacare, financial industry “reform”, or the Vote Buying Act Stimulus Bill.
- When wooing the electorate, it’s probably not best to call them a bunch of stress-addled morons (via memeorandum).
- I would say the bloom is off the Harry Reid rose, except that there never was a bloom to begin with.
- It’s tempting to make fun of the French for rioting at the merest suggestion that the government would have to raise the retirement age to 62, except that we’re headed for a similar reckoning ourselves.
- Welcome home Jeff Hart, hero of the Chilean miner rescue!
- “Scared”? Well, if it’s what lets you sleep at night, Mr. President.
- You can easily lose a couple hours just browsing around the photo site Shorpy.com, especially if you’re a fan of American history. For just a taste of the fascinating photos you can find there, check out this shot of Manhattan, circa 1915.
Tags: Linky Love
In these days of slightly heightened political acrimony, we bloggers are too quick to bandy about phrases like “lying weasel” to describe politicians. Not only does the comparison blacken the reputation of weasels everywhere, but it’s often not necessary when far more flowery terms like “prevaricating poltroon” are out there for the using.
However, there are times when the plain simple power of the phrase is the best to describe some Democrat whose desire to remain in office far outraces his grasp of reality. Such is the case with Congressman Gerry Connoly (D-VA) who testily defended his vote for the Vote Buying Act Stimulus Bill with the old, and long-debunked canard that “[e]very economist, including [some] Republican economists” gave it the double thumbs-up.
David Boaz, writing at the Cato Institute’s blog, smacks Connoly’s big honking fib around a while. The most decisive part of the smackdown comes at the end, when Boaz points out that it would be almost impossible for him not to know the truth. Several national media outlets, including the preferred newspaper of Capitol Hill, reported on the rather contentious debate, which included economists on both sides of the issue. Indeed, Cato itself published an advertisement in opposition to the deficit-exploding act of Keynesian folly backed publicly by several hundred economists.
So, sorry weasels, but I’m afraid that “lying weasel” is really the best phrase to use for the soon-to-be-former Congressman from Virginia.
Tags: 2010 Election, Democrats, Economic Stimulus
Very recently, the United States Air Force chose a new motto. The slogan, “Aim High…Fight-Fly-Win”, is designed to be “an enduring statement of Airmen’s pride in their service…a two-part expression — a call to action, with a response of commitment.”
I wonder how much pride the Airmen who serve aboard Nancy Pelosi’s party planes feel in their work today. Judicial Watch released several documents gotten from a FOIA request show that The Dumbest Speaker of the House in History is also a miniature Marie Antoinette. In just two years, she has racked up well over $2 million in travel expenses, including who has spent over a million dollars a year on her private junkets (85 in a little over a year, two of which ferried her family members across the country). That money includes over $101,000 in food and drink on her flights. Here’s the drink menu for one of her recent flights:
For example, purchases for one Pelosi-led congressional delegation traveling from Washington, DC, through Tel Aviv, Israel to Baghdad, Iraq May 15-20, 2008, included: Johnny Walker Red scotch, Grey Goose vodka, E&J brandy, Bailey’s Irish Crème, Maker’s Mark whiskey, Courvoisier cognac, Bacardi Light rum, Jim Beam whiskey, Beefeater gin, Dewar’s scotch, Bombay Sapphire gin, Jack Daniels whiskey, Corona beer and several bottles of wine.
Now that’s a lot of high-end hooch! Look, I’m not a monster. I get that you’d want to get drunk as quickly as possible if you found yourself looking down the barrel of a 16-plus hour flight with Nancy Pelosi as your constant companion. I wonder, though, if they might have gotten liquored up just as well with only one brand of whisky, gin, and scotch.
And, seriously, folks…Corona? All that money and Pelosi couldn’t have gotten a good beer for the flight? She should be ashamed for that alone, much less for flushing two million collars and hundreds of hours of our solders’ lives down the tubes. Then again, the next time Pelosi shows shame for anything she does as a politician will be the very first time. She is beyond shame, beyond embarrassment, and far beyond changing her totalitarian ways.
Clearly, Pelosi believes our volunteer Air Force is her own private chauffeur service and we are her personal serfs. It is time we disabused her of those delusions. Come Election Day, we can toss her out of the Speaker’s chair harder than any Speaker has been tossed before. Maybe we should also burn the chair it to destroy the lingering scent of disgrace and shame while we’re at it, but that may be a bit beyond our ability as voters. A simple electoral humiliation may be the best we can do.
Tags: Corruption, Democrats, Nancy Pelosi
Are you ready for Monday? Well, never mind that. It’s here and ready for you!
- In the name of academic freedom, shut the hell up! Jeff Goldstein, smart man that he is, saw this one coming a long time ago.
- Is Nancy Pelosi toast no matter what happens in November? Well, her own people are running away from her like she was a phaser on overload, so maybe (via memeorandum).
- Will the AstroTurfing from the left never cease? Sheesh!
- The Anchoress has a good post on bullies and Maureen Dowd. Yep, those two do go together. Read and find out how.
- Glen Asbury’s latest Twitter Personality of the Week profile of my friend Brandon Kiser is a good one. Glen’s profiles, which have been running for a couple months now, are always interesting. He has a good eye for the up-and-comers in the social media world. Go back and read into the archives, then keep your eyes peeled for the next one.
- Gabriel Malor doesn’t like the new rumors of a VAT that have been floating in the air lately. I’m not quite as certain on the issue. I can see a case for a VAT as part of a radically different approach to the tax system than we have now. I don’t think he’s thought his argument through enough to consider that case, but YMMV.
- In non-shocking news, the Democrats and David Axelrod (who has still not put the shocking rumors of sheep-fondling to rest) are a bunch of filthy hypocrites.
- Pay attention, guys: Cubachi likes the chivalrous men.
- We lost a couple of cultural biggies this week: Barbara Billingsley and General Johnson (Of Chairmen of the Board). R.I.P.
- With all the talentless musical “artists” churning out carbon-copy albums these days, you’d think the ridiculously musical sisters of SheDaisy would have an album deal. Yet, they don’t. Some record company out there needs to fix that, and fast.
Tags: Linky Love
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