I’m paraphrasing, of course. What U.N. climate chief Rajendra Pachauri actually said is this:
Climate change skeptics “are people who deny the link between smoking and cancer; they are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder,” he said.
“I hope that they apply it (asbestos) to their faces every day.”
No one seriously doubts the link between asbestos exposure and cancer because there is ample scientific evidence establishing that link. I might add that the level of scientific rigor that went into establishing that link was free from the annoying distractions that hiding data, persecuting opposition, and manipulating raw data tend to cause. How the asbestos/cancer linkage and global warming are analogous is beyond any rational person’s capacity for comprehension.
This isn’t the first or only instance of fascistic zealousness on the part of global warming cult devotees. David Roberts of Grist once infamously called for Nuremberg-style climate trials for AGW skeptics:
When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.
AGW believers might be taken a little more seriously if they weren’t prone to wishing death upon the opposition and drawing absurdly hyperbolic analogies between their raison d’etre and the Holocaust.
“No, We Can’t” actually sounds like a good slogan for the current administration, which may be admitting defeat in the battle for “health-care reform”.
“I think it’s very important for us to have a methodical, open process over the next several weeks, and then let’s go ahead and make a decision,” Obama said at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser.
“And it may be that … if Congress decides we’re not going to do it, even after all the facts are laid out, all the options are clear, then the American people can make a judgment as to whether this Congress has done the right thing for them or not,” the president said. “And that’s how democracy works. There will be elections coming up, and they’ll be able to make a determination and register their concerns.”
President Obama has been sending conflicting signals on his intentions for health-care reform, to say the least. On the one hand, he seems to be conceding defeat in front of the DNC; on the other hand, he makes statements like this of the “damn the torpedos, full speed ahead” variety:
If our response ends up being, you know, because we don’t want to — we don’t want to stir things up here, we’re just going to do the same thing that was being done before, then I don’t know what differentiates us from the other guys. And I don’t know why people would say, boy, we really want to make sure that those Democrats are in Washington fighting for us.
Moderate Democrats have been pleading with increasing fervency for the president to take a more centrist approach to some of his signature policy initiatives in the face of mounting evidence that public opposition to his policies is hardening. Politico reports that they public may be having serious problems with Rahm Emanuel’s “Big Bang” theory of liberal governance:
Moderate Democrats, coping with the electoral fallout of President Barack Obama’s grand and ground-down legislative ambitions, have a message for their leaders: Stop supersizing us.
If the first year of Obama’s term was dominated by the so-called Big Bang push for enormous, politically risky initiatives — the stimulus, cap and trade and health care — Year Two is fast shaping up to be year of small ball, retrenchment and backlash.
“I’ve always maintained that I thought that they were doing too much, too fast,” said Rep. Mike McMahon (D-N.Y.), an endangered freshman who represents a Staten Island district long occupied by Republicans.
“Without question, the biggest complaint I’m hearing from constituents is that there were too many things being tackled all at once, and they didn’t have time to understand and digest all of them,” he added.
Of course, present complaints of over-reaching on the part of moderate Democrats portend few consequences for the president, who doesn’t have to answer to the electorate for nearly three more years. The price of unpopular policies will be paid for by centrist Democrats and, increasingly, even the more liberal members of the party come November.
Liberals Ecstatic Over Potential Repeal of DADT; Every One Else, Including Military–Not So Much
Today’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” has brought the usual loony left-wingers out of the woodwork to provide the customary liberal cheerleading.
Leading the charge is, of course, one of the Four Donkeys of the Apocalypse over on the NYT’s op-ed page: Maureen Dowd. The fiery-haired cousin of the Crypt Keeper shows her flare for drama by likening Admiral Mullen to some manner of Hollywood star for daring to join Hollywood, the MSM, and liberal “elites” in calling for an end to a perfectly sane policy:
On Tuesday, the craggy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff showed that a lifetime in the military has not knocked all the showbiz pizazz out of him.
“I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” Mullen said during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on dropping the archaic “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. “For me personally, it comes down to integrity — theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.”
I respectfully beg to differ. It’s not about “integrity” or homosexuals being forced to hide “who they are”; it’s about values, religious freedom, and homosexuals being asked–remember, service is not compulsory–not to make certain statements, engage in certain acts, or attempt to marry someone of the same sex. That’s quite a bit different.
Again demonstrating her breathtaking ignorance, Dowd posits that Clinton was somehow cowed into not exercising his “authority as Commander-in-Chief and order an end” to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. Dowd’s a halfwit; DADT is a law, not an Executive Order or a Department of Defense regulation. Congress must repeal it. But I digress.
To say that allowing homosexuals to serve openly would have a deleterious effect on morale and unit cohesion, while true, isn’t sufficient to win this fight in and of itself, as John Guardiano of The American Spectator states:
The reality is that in a rights-based political culture, where one group of people is aggressively asserting its alleged “rights,” you are politically defenseless and vulnerable unless you can posit an equally strong and countervailing set of rights.
Indeed, it appears that what we are being asked to accept isn’t the idea that homosexuals serve honorably, which I’m certain they do. Again, Americans are being sold a bill of goods under liberals’ usual vague and ephemeral notion of “tolerance”, when what they are really seeking is legitimation and celebration. It isn’t enough that we tolerate abortion; the furor over the Tebow ad shows that we must celebrate abortion by sublimating the urge to celebrate life to the insane and laughable concern that a mere thirty second story of life and faith might demean women and be viewed as divisive. Likewise, it isn’t enough that we tolerate homosexual conduct within society; we must celebrate it by holding it up as every bit the equal of heterosexuality in every way and in every situation.
MSM outlets like the Washington Post demonstrate their bias by declaring, in loud and celebratory headlines, that the ”Pentagon Supports Ending ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Law for Gays in Military”. Just so we’re all on the same page: No, the Pentagon doesn’t. Admiral Mullen supports it, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is preparing for it, but “the Pentagon” is composed of many officers and civilians of varying ranks and pay grades, and I’m quite certain a goodly portion of them don’t support it, even if they do believe its overturn is inevitable and preparations must take place to make accommodations.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is effective policy that works. Homosexuals are free to serve without somehow compromising who they are the same way that heterosexual men and women don’t sacrifice who they are when they obey General Order One in theatre by not engaging in heterosexual sex. DADT is policy that ought to be left alone.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Well, Roger, it’s not a question of picking a fight. And aren’t you concerned about the language that Glenn Beck is using, which is, after all, inciting the American people? There is a lot of suffering out there, as you know, and when he talks about people being slaughtered, about who is going to be the next in the killing spree…
(CROSSTALK)
AILES: Well, he was talking about Hitler and Stalin slaughtering people. So I think he was probably accurate. Also, I’m a little….
HUFFINGTON: No, no, he was talking about this administration.
AILES: I don’t — I think he speaks English. I don’t know, but I mean, I don’t misinterpret any of his words. He did say one unfortunate thing, which he apologized for, but that happens in live television. So I don’t think it’s — I think if we start going around as the word police in this business, it will be…
HUFFINGTON: It’s not about the word police. It’s about something deeper. It’s about the fact that there is a tradition as the historian Richard Hofstetter said, in American politics, of the paranoid style. And the paranoid style is dangerous when there is real pain out there. I mean, with…
AILES: I agree with you. I read something on your blog that said I looked like J. Edgar Hoover, I had a face like a fist, and I was essentially a malignant tumor…
Ailes is armed to the teeth with excellent ripostes to Huffington’s boilerplate anti-Beck tripe, and somehow fairs even better against Krugman on the topic of “disinformation” in the health care debacle:
People did not know what was in the plan, and some of that was just poor reporting, some of it was deliberate misinformation. I have here in front of me when President Obama said, you know, why — he said rhetorically, why aren’t we going to do a health care plan like the Europeans have, with a government-run program, and then proceeds to explain why he’s different. On Fox News, what appeared was a clipped quote, “why don’t we have a European-style health care plan?” Right, deliberate misinformation.
All of that has contributed to a situation where the public…
AILES: Wait a minute, wait a minute…
KRUGMAN: I can show you the clip, and you can…
(CROSSTALK)
AILES: The American people are not stupid…
KRUGMAN: No, they’re not stupid. They are uninformed.
AILES: If you say — if (inaudible) words are in the Constitution, if the founding fathers managed — they didn’t need 2,000 pages of lawyers to hide things, then tell, then tell…
KRUGMAN: Oh, come on. Legislation always is long.
AILES: … then tell people it’s an emergency that we get it, but it won’t go into effect for three years. So you don’t have time to read it, you…
Even Walters herself wasn’t able to make much of a dent in Ailes as she tries to use the hiring of Sarah Palin to make some point or another about “qualifications” and, I assume, fairness.
Trust me, this is must-see tv.
Just when you thought that “there are those who” was long dead and “experts” across the “political spectrum” had faded into irrelevance–if they even existed at all–old boogeymen, some long forgotten and some regular Emmanuel Goldstein-like caricatures have returned to do battle with The One.
The rhetorical bag of tricks is, it appears, only so deep–even for one as talented and bright as the president.
I’ve personally never cared for his speaking style. I find the president’s speaking to be jarring; he trips over applause lines and rushes through others; he whistles his ‘S’s, and his hand gestures are often annoying to me. But I would be a fool, blinded by ideology if I weren’t able to recognize that the man has the power to inspire people through his speaking. That’s why it’s such a shame that he squanders his intellect and oratorical prowess on resurrecting the same boogey men and shadow-boxing the same imagined villains.
Rather than possibly admit that leftist’s devotion to Keyne’s outmoded and demonstrably flawed economic theories might have inspired the decision to pass Porkulus, we continue to get fed this “experts across the political spectrum” nonsense. He made a decision as a leader, and that decision was wrong; his insistence on using his ideological opposites to provide cover for his decision is unbecoming a leader.
His continued reliance on straw men is disconcerting. Where are these people who want to put America’s future on hold? Where are these people who say that recovery can’t occur? No one of any consequence has these opinions. There are those of us who think that the private sector ought to be responsible for America’s future and her recovery, but that’s not the same as what the president implies.
His stubborn refusal to accept responsibility for the deficit he helped run up as a senator is nothing short of infuriating. Of course, having accrued far more “not voting” tallies than actual yes or no votes might have him a little confused, but here’s the truth: he voted for TARP and was a reliable vote on bills that contained net tax increases. Why persist in acting as though he stumbled into office and deficits Elmer Fudd-like? Oh, those wasscawy Wepubwicans! I’ve stumbled into a wecession!
The president, even during the SOTU address, will lull even us hard-core conservatives into open-mindedness and regale us with his oratorical skills, as he did when he insisted that he would not settle for an America that took second place in the world–and then proceeded to attribute the success of China’s economy to the glory of their government. China is a growing powerhouse precisely because of their reluctant yet increasing embrace of markets, not because of the wisdom and foresight of their tyrannical government.
Overall, it was a speech full of incongruities. The president claims to feel our pain, but not enough to lay off of wildly unpopular legislation like his health care “reform” bill. He acts like he practically had to be dragged into bailing out banks, but sees no other possibility but to force the not-so-subtle hand of government into the energy sector. He wants a post-partisan era of cooperation, but issues a wildly inappropriate denunciation of the Supreme Court in the middle of his speech and then allows shmuch Democrats like Schumer to stand up right next to the justices and applaud like drunken frat boys cheering a wet t-shirt contest at his comment. Do leftists now begin to see the substantive points of disagreement we have with the president?
His speech exhorted Republicans to work more on providing solutions, but he failed to reasonably acknowledge the multitude of amendments and bills that Republicans have proposed during this session. He gives tacit approval to the “party of no” imprecation while asking us to be more cooperative. Do leftists begin to see that this isn’t about being the party of no? I mean, it isn’t as though we railed against a sweeping expansion of government power that is wholly amenable to our ideology simply for political gain, as Democrats did with Medicare Part D. Normally, Democrats jump at the chance to add layers of bureaucracy to the government works; all of the sudden, and every day since, Dems act as though their conservative sensitivities have been offended by Medicare Part D. One imagines antebellum mansions and Democrats as fainting Scarlet O’Hare types: Oh, I do declare!
And finally there is, again, the utter classlessness of attacking a man who has been completely powerless for over a year now. But if you listened to the SOTU, you’d think Bush was back in Crawford ruthlessly twirling a Thadeus mustache and silently beating down the lumpenproles with his polo mallet. Bush is the most powerful former president in history, apparently. Soon we will be regaled with ribald tales of how the defiler Bush caused the downfall of Sodom and Gomorrah.
This speech, I’m certain, will have the dual virtue of not doing much to rally his disheartened base and also not courting anyone on the other side of the aisle. One thing is for certain: Republicans need to capitalize on the good fortune they’ve been handed. If they waste this opportunity to begin elucidating conservative ideas and principles–McDonnell did a great job of that tonight–then they will have given away a huge advantage.
Hey, If Corporations Shouldn’t Give Money to Campaigns, Should the NYT Give Out Endorsements?
The MSM are hyperventilating over the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down large portions of McCain-Fiengold. Rarely are people so genuinely unaware of the ideas of hypocrisy and slippery slope.
Forgetting for a second that the New York Times is owned by the–wait for it–New York Times Company, a corporation, let’s just focus for a moment on the idiotic assertion that a Supreme Court ruling on a law that didn’t even exist until 2002 somehow imperils democracy and threatens a return to the robber baron era:
With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.
The Times would go much further toward persuading its more skeptical readers if they could explain how our great republic ever withstood the insidious influence of labor unions who, much the same as corporations, pool money and power in order to influence elections.
The Times hysterical missive could better be served if they were able to clearly elucidate how, if corporate spending on elections has such a damning and corrupting influence, the republic has withstood the Times–which again, is corporately owned–not endorsing a Republican presidential candidate in its pages since Ike. More than half a century has passed since the Times gave its nod to a Republican candidate for president. Yet and still, America survives! Perhaps a better question for the Times’ astute readership is, how has democracy withstood the Times?
But the NYT is not alone. Similar to the NYT’s hysterical requiem for representative democracy is the Washington Post’s absurd and poorly argued op-ed, which asserts that since corporations aren’t explicitly mentioned in the first amendment, they aren’t worthy of protection:
This result was unnecessary because the court’s conservative majority — including supposed exemplars of judicial modesty — lunged to make a broad constitutional ruling when narrower grounds were available. It was wrong because nothing in the First Amendment dictates that corporations must be treated identically to people. And it was dangerous because corporate money, never lacking in the American political process, may now overwhelm both the contributions of individuals and the faith they may harbor in their democracy.
I suppose the reason I find this passage so amusing is that it comes from the liberal WaPo. This is a publication that has run innumerable columns in its op-ed pages expressing support for something that the Constitution not only doesn’t explicitly recognize as protected, but doesn’t even support in theory–no matter how tangential you imagine that reasoning to be: abortion. Liberals will fight to the death under the banner of “penumbras” and “emanations” for a practice that the founders would have found not just ghastly, but anathema to the civil society, but they can’t seem to imagine that the Constitution’s guarantees of speech and assembly, applied mutually, offer protection for corporations–which are nothing more than collections of people assembled for a common purpose or purposes.
Put simply, the underlying principle of free speech for commercial corporations protects not just the Wal-Marts and Exxon Mobiles of the world, but the NYT and the WaPo:
The first problem is that, like the “real people” argument, it applies to media corporations as well. On this view, the government would be free to censor the New York Times, Fox News, the Nation, National Review, and so on. Nearly every newspaper and political journal in the country is a corporation. If the Supreme Court accepted this view, it would have to overturn decisions like New York Times v. Sullivan and the Pentagon Papers case.
Perhaps the MSM will remember this the next time they rail indiscriminately against the influence of corporations on political campaigns.
Hat tips: Volokh Conspiracy, Hot Air.
For sheer audacity, tone-deafness, and outlandish spin, nothing in recent memory quite matches some of the MSM attempts to explain away the results of Tuesday’s special election.
Proving their trademark objectivity and critical thinking skills, the New York Times unequivocally declared that the election results are neither a verdict on Mr. Obama’s presidency, nor of his signature health-care “reform” efforts:
There are many theories about the import of Scott Brown’s upset victory in the race for Edward Kennedy’s former Senate seat. To our minds, it is not remotely a verdict on Mr. Obama’s presidency, nor does it amount to a national referendum on health care reform — even though it has upended the effort to pass a reform bill, which Mr. Obama made the centerpiece of his first year.
Perhaps the Times’ editorial board is genuinely unaware of the fact that A) polling indicates that health care “reform” was the single more important issue to voters in the Massachusetts special election, and B) Brown explicitly promised on numerous occasions to be the 41st, cloture-killing vote on ObamaCare. Apparently, it isn’t enough that he was so enthusiastic at the thought of being that 41st vote that he often affixed “41″ to the end of his autograph; Mr. Brown will have to walk into the Times building with a bullhorn and large blinking lights above his head shouting “I WANT TO KILL OBAMACARE” before the Times will be willing to cede the fact that maybe, just maybe, the vote was something of a referendum on the president (thus far) and health-reform measures.
Various liberal apologists have attempted to put down cover fire for congressional Democrats and the president by asserting that Brown’s election is simply a populist tidal wave of anti-establishment sentiment. One of the more absurd examples is NBC’s Kelly O’Donnel:
O’DONNELL: Brown’s success, riding a populist, anti-Washington wave, stung the White House. The President in an interview with ABC News recognized that kind of momentum.
It may have escaped Ms. O’Donnel’s keen journalistic instincts, but the Democrats run Washington right now. Hence “anti-Washington” could be aptly rephrased, “anti-Democrat”. That isn’t to say some voters aren’t upset with some Republicans, or all Democrats, for that matter. But despite all the spin, Democrats own an overwhelming majority in the House, they had a filibuster-proof Senate until Tuesday, and they own the White House.
For their part, many Democrats themselves are exhibiting a refreshing measure of humility and a willingness to confront reality head-on. Evan Bayh, Jim Webb, and Barney Frank have all been gracious following the results of Tuesday’s election. Webb exhorted his colleagues to hold off any further voting until Brown is seated, and Frank–normally known for a stubborn committment to whatever course of action he deems appropriate and necessary at the time, which also usually happens to be the wrong course of action–was firm in his assertion that there would be no trickery aimed at delaying Brown’s seating.
One of the NYT’s dreaded Four Donkeys of the Apocalypse is weighing in on the obvious failure of the president’s first year with an answer that would be shocking, were it not for the fact that it’s the same answer that’s been front and center on the Times op-ed page for the past year: Obama doesn’t blame Bush enough:
The Obama administration’s troubles are the result not of excessive ambition, but of policy and political misjudgments. The stimulus was too small; policy toward the banks wasn’t tough enough; and Mr. Obama didn’t do what Ronald Reagan, who also faced a poor economy early in his administration, did — namely, shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations.
That’s a winning strategy: blame Bush even more than you already do! Perhaps a thousand references to “the previous administration” a day isn’t enough; maybe a thousand and one will finally convince the American public that hope and change don’t suck!
First off, Reagan laid blame for the 1981 recession at the feet of the Carter administration because that’s where it belonged; second, Reagan didn’t prattle on and on about it in every speech and press conference, in person, through aides, and through media surrogates for a full year after taking office with the shamelessness that has characterized the past year.
In fact, so pervasive is the constant blame Bush meme that astute bloggers keep having to post, again and again, to try to inform people of the truth of the matter–that poor Democratic policies are the root cause of the financial crisis. The “deregulation, tax-cuts-for-the-rich, and Wall Street greed” shtick is wearing really thin these days.
Krugman claims that the stimulus “surely worked” but was “too small” to affect any job growth. Never does Krugman–or any other Keynes worshipping liberal for that matter–bother attempting to justify the laughably absurd and demonstrably false idea that somehow the government can address deficits with more spending, or spur long-term job growth with fiscal profligacy. It’s outrageous that liberals continue to claim that the failed Keynesian economic theories of the past century are anything but abject disasters, made even more outrageous by the fact that they counter 100 years worth of empirical evidence of failure with their audacious “failed policies of bla bla bla” argument.
So I suppose that it’s time once again for this–you guessed it!–this graphic:
-
- Krugman wonders: What do the red dots mean? Who is Milton Friedman? How could Harvard mistake me for an Economist?
It’s more than just a touch ridiculous that this twerp continues to put his fingers in his ears and babble “Bush sucks, Obama’s great”. Worse still is that he commits it to print. Reagan had far more class than this current bunch could ever dream of. Yes, Reagan did remind the country every great now again that he inherited a mess; that mess was, in fact, worse than what President Obama got handed. Krugman is a tool, an apparatchik, and probably the world’s only Harvard-educated “economist” who doesn’t understand or believe in the power of the free market. Hey, someone should give him a Nobel Prize!
Video: Just a Reminder: Gov’t Interference and Moral Hazards Created Financial Mess We’re In
From the Center for Freedom and Prosperity comes a refresher course in Economics 101. The video is masterful, so I’ll let you watch and then comment:
I bring this up mostly because the DNC talking point of choice recently wormed its way into the Coakley-Brown debates. Still genuinely unaware of the fact that the internet exists and that people can find out for themselves how we came to be in this mess, Democrats continue to press forward with the audacious contention that some great Republican trifecta of greed, deregulation, and tax cuts have brought us to the brink of economic ruins. Here’s Coakley handing out her version, along with the now-cursory attempt to tie the Republican to the spooooky Bush-Cheney duo:
As the candidates fought over taxes, Coakley turned aggressive, suggesting that Brown was promoting a return to the era of George W. Bush, which she said favored the rich and triggered the economic collapse.
“He wants to go back to those Bush-Cheney policies that provide for the very wealthiest,’’ she said.
“You can run against Bush-Cheney, but I’m Scott Brown,’’ Brown responded. “I live in Wrentham. I drive a truck.’’
Brown’s answer was sufficient, given that most debates–and indeed, even most columns and blog posts–don’t allow enough time to detect and overthrow the popular MSM-backed theory of deregulation, greed, and tax cuts, let alone the time to explain the real reason for the “Great Recession”. This video is one of the best summations of the underlying reason for our current economic situation, as well as a fairly succinct argument against government interference in the insurance business. It’s about risk–something Democrats surreptitiously claim they can remove from life without also removing individual liberty.
