Who Gets To Be Tyrant

Now this is funny...

Body Language and Government Health Care

The picture reveals much more that a thousand words ever could. In an article published in the excellent American Thinker, Thomas Lifson unpacks the symbolism in a truly compelling way. He points out that...

Sergeant Crowley, the sole class act in this trio, helps the handicapped Professor Gates down the stairs, while Barack Obama, heedless of the infirmities of his friend and fellow victim of self-defined racial profiling, strides ahead on his own. So who is compassionate? And who is so self-involved and arrogant that he is oblivious?

Lifson, in an update to this post, adds this:

...this picture becomes a metaphor for ObamaCare. The elderly are left in the back, with only the kindness of the Crowleys of the world, the stand up guys, to depend on. The government has other priorities. One of the major subtexts of the health care debate involves the public's fear of indifferent, powerful bureaucrats ruling their lives.

In fairness, we do not know the context in which the scene unfolded. But the symbolism is breathtaking.

Tax Burden - Top 1% Bear The Load

From TaxFoundation.org comes this chart:

Notice that the pink and blue lines have crossed. After the crossing point -- somewhere between 2006 and 2007 -- the top 1% of all taxpayers paid more in taxes than do the bottom 95% of all taxpayers. Please, please, please someone tell me what the future holds for a country in which the majority of voters do not pay taxes?

Obama's Decline Continues

Take this with a grain of salt. Rasmussen's polls are often at odds with the rest of the mainline political polls. However, if you average all of the polls together, Obama's approval index is trending downward.

Why is New Jersey So Corrupt?

In my view, the answer is pretty simple, really. The opportunities for corruption multiply in proportion to the power and size of government. According to the Tax Foundation, New Jersey had the worst business tax climate among the 50 states in 2008 and 2009, the highest state and local tax burden in the country, and a top marginal income tax rate of nearly 11%. The state has 566 local government authorities with the power to impose a mind-numbing array of taxes, fees, regulations, edicts and ordinances.

 

Remembering Mencken

When ever confronting a climate change advocate who would control every aspect of your energy usage in order to save us all from climate change catastrophe, please repeat H.L. Mencken's dictum at least 10 times.

The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it.

Personally, I'm at a loss as how to counteract these people. Reason and experience have no place in their world view. I make this claim not from the standpoint that man-made climate change doesn't exist (I happen to believe that it does), but because the climate change alarmists who would rule your lives are so certain and will brook no debate. To them, as Al Gore claims, the debate is non-existent. Prompting this dismay is the publication of yet another peer-reviewed study arguing against the "fact" that humans are a major source of climate change. The study appears in the July 23, 2009 edition of the Journal of Geophysical Research. If you'd rather not wade through the scientific gibberish, Investor's Business Daily provides a nice discussion.

A Weekly Roundup

... of good examples of conservative reflection on recent political develoments

 

James Taranto, Fact Check: Cardinals to Win Super Bowl, exposes a particularly insidious (and all too common) method of news (not opinion) bias. The issue at hand is the "fact check" refutation done by the Associated Press concerning the claims made against Obama's campaign rhetoric.

The statements that Thompson, McCain and Joe the Plumber made, and that the AP claimed to refute, were not factual claims at all. They were predictions. We now have sufficient facts, as reported by Ohlemacher above, to conclude that those predictions were accurate. But an accurate prediction ("the Steelers will win the Super Bowl") is quite different from an accurate statement of fact ("the Steelers won the Super Bowl"). If you don't grasp the distinction, try going to Vegas and placing a bet on the Steelers to win Super Bowl XLIII.

So the AP repeatedly made a cognitive error in treating as-yet-untested predictions as if they were statements of fact. Even more ludicrous, however, is the basis on which the AP concluded that the GOP statements were false. It treated Obama's campaign promise as if it were not only a statement of fact but an incontrovertible one.

A promise is a statement of intent, not a fact. Sometimes people are unable to do what they intend because of circumstances beyond their control. Giving Obama the benefit of the doubt--assuming that he sincerely intended not to raise taxes on people making under $250,000, and that circumstances made it impossible to do otherwise--it's as if the AP had done a pre-Super Bowl "fact check" along these lines:

CLAIM: The Pittsburgh Steelers are favored to win.

THE FACTS: Arizona Cardinals coach Ken Whisenhunt has made clear that "our guys are ready to play" and that they intend to be victorious.

But the AP's campaign coverage was worse than this. Politicians sometimes make promises in bad faith--surely more often than American pro sports teams throw games. By treating Obama's campaign pledge as if it were an established fact, the AP displayed either a staggering naiveté or an appalling pro-Obama partisanship.

Victor Davis Hanson, Growing Worries about Our Pied Piper, concludes his insightful piece thus:

Americans are waking up to the fact that their president says, promises, and does things that simply do not make sense, at odds with what they know of human physics — with the predictable nature of the way humans have conducted themselves for centuries: Borrowing is debt, not "stimulus"; serial apologies soon sound insincere or become counterproductive; blaming someone else becomes tiresome; scapegoating leads nowhere; taking responsibility for failure is as necessary as being praised for success; people can be fooled only so many times by sonorous, ego-laced rhetoric.

Charles Krauthammer, Plumage -- But at a Price, unpacks the gauzy rhetoric surrounding President Obama's understanding with Russia

[Russian Aggression] — not nukes — is the chief cause of the friction between the U.S. and Russia. You wouldn't know it to hear Obama in Moscow pledging to halt the "drift" in U.S.-Russian relations. Drift? The decline in relations came from Putin's desire to undo what he considers "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century — the collapse of the Soviet empire. Hence his squeezing Ukraine's energy supplies; his overt threats against Poland and the Czech Republic for daring to make sovereign agreements with the United States; and finally, less than a year ago, his invading a small neighbor, detaching, and then effectively annexing two of Georgia's provinces to Mother Russia.

That's the cause of the collapse of our relations. Not drift, but aggression. Or, as the reset man referred to it with such delicacy in his Kremlin news conference: "our disagreements on Georgia's borders."

Mark Steyn, Behind The Times, writes that the rest of the world is waking up -- Not so the U.S.

 

No, I mean that most of the developed world has already gone down the paved road of good intentions and is now frantically trying to pedal up out of it. New Zealand was one of the few western nations to sign on to Kyoto and then attempt to abide by it — until they realized they could only do so by destroying their economy. They introduced a Dem-style cap-and-trade regime — and last year they suspended it. In Australia, the Labor government postponed implementation of its emissions-reduction program until 2011, and the Aussie Senate may scuttle it entirely. The Obama administration has gotten to the climate-change hop just as the glitterball's stopped whirling and the band's packing up its instruments.

 

Brian Garst, Protecting Their Own: The International Community Sides With Zelaya, writes of America's support for Zelaya's attempt to subvert the Honduran Constitution.

Until recently the United States has at least rhetorically stood against these efforts, but America's new President, in all his cowardice, has decided to surrender the language of freedom to those who would deny its application to their own people.  The fledgling - yet still bravely democratic - government of Honduras has stood strong despite this betrayal.  It is a sad day that sees America abdicate its once proud role as the beacon of freedom in the world.  I pray that they can forgive our governments now that the people of Honduras have been left in the dark, abandoned by the supposedly free nation's of the world, to find their own way.