Yup.

Well stated by Gil Dodgen in a comment here:

The author’s speculations are precisely what science is not. How ironic, that in an attempt to demonstrate that ID is not science he spouts utterly unsupported speculative silliness to demonstrate what real science is all about.

His speculation is the old co-option fantasy. This particular Darwinian fantasy demonstrates a complete lack of any, even the most trivial, analytical scrutiny. I wrote the following on this topic:

1) In order for co-option to produce a bacterial flagellum (for example) all of the component parts must have been present at the same time and in roughly the same place, and all of them must have had other naturally-selectable, useful functions. There is no evidence whatsoever that this ever was the case, or that it ever even could have been the case.

2) The components would have to have been compatible with each other functionally. A bolt that is too large, too small, or that has threads that are too fine or too coarse to match those of a nut, cannot be combined with the nut to make a fastener. There is absolutely no evidence that this interface compatibility ever existed (between all those imaginary co-opted component parts), or that it even could have existed.

3) Even if all the parts are available at the same time and in the same place, and are functionally compatible, one can’t just put them in a bag, shake them up, and have a motor fall out. An assembly mechanism is required, and that mechanism must be complete in every detail, otherwise incomplete or improper assembly will result, and no naturally-selectable function will be produced. The assembly mechanism thus represents yet another irreducibly complex hurdle.

4) Last, and perhaps most importantly, assembly instructions are required. Assembly must be timed and coordinated properly. And the assembly instructions must be complete in every detail, otherwise no function will result. This represents an additional irreducibly complex hurdle.

Co-option is a demonstrably fantastic story made up out of whole cloth, with absolutely no basis in evidence. And it doesn’t withstand even the most trivial analytical scrutiny. There is not a shred of evidence that this process ever took place, or that it even could have taken place. Worst of all, it requires blind acceptance of the clearly miraculous.

There is a great irony here. This verifiably ridiculous co-option fantasy is presented as “science,” while a straightforward and reasonable inference to design is labeled pseudoscience. The real state of affairs is precisely the reverse.

Darwinist Crybabies Sprint To Their First Resort

Censorship, of course. McWhorter was probably leaned on pretty heavily by his free-thinkin' academic associates. Or perhaps, warned by his benefactors/employer that he was making a deadly career move by raising his head up on this issue.

Link

Link

Link

When Conservatives Do Nothing, It's Treason. When Leftists Commit Treason, It's Nothing.

Read it and weep.

Great Crowder Segment

Some amusing covert ops.

Link

There's An Obama-Shaped Hole In Their Souls

Good essay by Robin of Berkeley.

Zen Traffic

This is strangely relaxing and fun to watch.

Riveting Essay

Rachel Lucas visits Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Government 'Help' Destroys Used Truck And Replacement Parts Market

While subsidizing foreigners. Typical.

GOP Too Stupid To Do This

A simple, clean, truth-communicating, voter-motivating slogan they really ought to use for the Congressional campaigns next year:

"Throw The Leftists Out".

New Oath Of Office To Be: "Yeah, Whatever"

Representative thinks that what the Constitution does not explicitly forbid is thereby permitted. Ass-backwards.

"Journalists, Left Out of The Debate"

The idiots don't understand: they're not supposed to be in the debate.

Link

Interview With The Marine

Good job, very articulate.

Link

For Them, An Oath Is Not A Pro Forma Joshing Around Kind Of Thing

From the comments here:

For you non-military folks (it's not for everyone, no slight intended here) you need to know a few things:

1) The military is about 80% conservative. Puting your life on the line for the love of family, country and duty breeds a deep respect of freedom.

2) The military is a smarter force today than it ever has been historically. We read history, analyze the facts and work hard to keep our nation free. We are not patsies of the government but rather citizens dedicated to keep our country free. We love our children and are educated... many of us hold graduate degrees.

3) That whole oath thing about defending the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic... yup, we really take that oath. We mean it, too.

4) Don't think for a minute that some liberal General is going to stand up and ask his troops to attack Americans and that the troops will just blindly follow. This is not Kent State, we are armed with our own intelligence. Any Field grade officer (senior leader) who has somehow missed that fact won't do well if those orders were given.

The only way to fix the military for Obama would be to massacre them like the communists did to their own military and population in the early days of 1900's: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM

Or what they did to Poland: http://culture.polishsite.us/articles/art281.html

We learn from history: rounding up thousands of military leaders in the night to lead them to slaughter would be a risky, dare I say a deadly endeavor. It would fail and the revolution would be full-on.

Bottom line: The US military is not a pawn of the liberal and will not become jack-booted thugs kicking in your door. We will kill to defend you and the constitutional rule of law. Hopefully it won't come to that.

When They Said "Shovel-Ready" Projects, We Didn't Know They Meant Grandma

Just sayin'.

Lifted the quip idea from here.

Extortionist Mr. Moneybags Leads The Fight Against Capitalist Pigs

Yet another reason to hate unions:

The smartest blogger under 20 (that would be one of my nephews) reveals that Don Hunsucker, President of the UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers) a union which “has launched a campaign against Whole Foods” because its CEO John Mackey dared offer an alternative to Democratic health care proposals, earns $626,769 a year.

(Just read the whole thing.)

$626,769 a year!?!?!? I wonder if Mitchell’s Dad pulls down that much. My brother is a neurosurgeon and quite regularly performs the most delicate operations requiring intelligence, a steady hand, a medical education and many years of practice (his residency alone lasted seven years). He saves lives on a regular basis. I wonder how many lives Mr. Hunsucker has saved.

And I wonder whether the grocery store workers Hunsucker (supposedly) represents know how much he makes. I mean, the average grocery store cashier earns $26,479 a year, a stock clerk $28,697.

Michelle Malkin who links Mitchell’s work, has more, pointing out the UCFW has dispatched its minions to “to educate shoppers about Whole Foods CEO’s efforts to undermine health care reform and President Obama.“ (Only in liberal speak, is proposing reform alternatives “undermining reform.”

I wonder how much those minions are making. You know this spontaneous burst of opposition, organized by union fatcats earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Moxie

Nice guy does good. Cowell says it's the best first performance audition he's ever seen. This young man comes out and OWNs the place.

Link

The Great Thing About The NYT Is You Get Two Newspapers In One

Firmly standing on principle:

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web Today” column takes a stoll down memory lane into the morgue of the nation’s newspaper of record to see how it covered an event back in 2001 and the same event eight years later. The event in question was/is the sitting president’s first summer vacation.

First the 2001 version:

On Friday, as new unemployment figures painted a newly troubling portrait of the American economy, Mr. Bush placed himself in the same scenes — golfing and fishing in a New England paradise — that once caused his father electoral grief.

Simply amazing.

And what, pray tell, was the unemployment rate at that time? Why, 4.5 percent, “five-tenths of a percentage point higher than the average for 2000.”

Now for the 2009 version. First, to set the stage, the current rate of unemployment rate is 9.4% — more than twice the rate during the summer of 2001. So, does the Times urge the current president to scrap his vacation plans and scurry back to the Oval Office post-haste to attend to this crisis? Not exactly. Let’s go to the film:

Mr. Obama, whom aides described as being amused by all of the gloom-and-doom prognosticating over his health care agenda, did not even consider skipping his vacation. Last year, he talked about the importance of taking a break to avoid “making mistakes.”

And there you have it. As James Taranto himself would say, “two newspapers in one.”

Oceana has always been at war with Eastasia.

Rush Audio Parody

For Obama's new book "Your Life. Our Choice."

Well done.

Cartoon

Here:

The Logic Of The Thing

I left this as a comment here:

Dawkins has said that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

Now, I’m a big, big fan of Intelligent Design and all, but I have never asserted, and have never heard anyone assert that “Intelligent Design makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled theist.”

Theism stands up just fine on other grounds.

So, according to Dawkins, the outcome of this scientific debate is crucial to his worldview (that is, unless atheists are to be intellectually unfulfilled).

It isn’t to mine.

So who is more likely to be wearing the bias goggles?

I’d say it’s the atheists, and by a mile.

And all according to the testimony of one of their chief spokesmen and heroes, in one of his most famous utterances.

It Was, After All P. T. Barnum Who Said "There Is A Sucker Born Every Minute"

Unintentional irony: the title of Dawkins' upcoming book is The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. I knew that the Darwinist intelligencia was a circus chock full of clowns, but I didn't think they'd start telegraphing the fact.

See also.

Fake, But Accurate

A venerable tradition.

The Young Man Really Should Have Started With A Paper Route And Worked His Way Up From There

Instead, he started with the presidency and it isn't working out.

Jennifer Rubin:

Obama’s candidacy was defined (to the exasperation of conservatives) by idealism, appeals to bipartisanship, and competency. He is now short on all three — which explains why his support among voters and especially independents (who were susceptible to pledges to end old-style politics) has plummeted.

As for the idealism, no president has sunk so far so fast. Candidate Obama chastised Washington as a place where good ideas died. He summoned young voters with high-minded slogans and Kennedy-esque rhetoric. Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush were mere politicians; he was the leader of a whole new era in politics.

Now? Opponents of health care are stooges, evil-mongers, and villains. Citizen activists are to be reported to the authorities for spreading misinformation or ridiculed. The candidate with the superior temperament has devolved into a peevish president exasperated that mere citizens would question his wisdom or stand in his way.

...

Bipartisanship has also crashed and burned. During the campaign we heard there was no blue or red America and that the baggage of past political feuds would be left aside. He vowed to put Republicans in his cabinet and to end the blood battles of the Bush years.

...

Obama and the Democrats threaten to “go it alone [7]” on health care — ignoring the burgeoning opposition within Democratic ranks. They plan on using the highly controversial reconciliation process to run roughshod over opponents in the Senate. The president, who never solicited [8] GOP input, declares them to be implacable foes and their ideas out of the realm of consideration.

And then there is the promise of competency. Obama was not going to repeat the lax management and administrative failings of his predecessors. He had no experience, but “judgment” we were promised and he was going to govern with an eye toward pragmatism not pie-in-the-sky adventurism. He was “No Drama” Obama, cool and collected.

Now the adjective most associated with his administration is “chaos [9].” Liberals are amazed he has frittered away the opportunity of a generation to pass the Democratic dream of nationalized health care. Conservatives marvel that he could have delegated the drafting process to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

In sum, anyone hoping Obama would usher in a new era of idealism, bipartisanship and effective governance must be sorely disappointed. It is now about brute power and bare knuckle politics. The issue of the day now is: Can the president muscle through his increasingly unpopular health care plan by skirting congressional tradition and ignoring an angry electorate?

As the reality of President Obama replaces the promise of candidate Obama, the public has recoiled. Unless the Obama they voted for reappears he is unlikely to regain his standing with voters. And those congressmen and senators who have tied their futures to Obama’s popularity will need to give voters a reason not to take their anger out on them. Or they too will find themselves, as Obama now is, in the voters’ dog house.

"America Is Running Out Of Rope"

A Denninger tour-de-force.

The Thrill Is Gone For Obama And The MSM

Because even onanism gets boring after a while. Good Washington Times piece which puts it more in terms of a romance.

Link

excerpt:

[O]ne can understand why Gibbs would be a bit shocked by the slightly less accommodating tone of the media.

Reporters who traveled with the Obama campaign tell horror stories about the organization — dishonesty, rudeness and abysmal access. But those reporters still served up the glowing coverage.

Obama was the hottest news story of their generation. Rather than covering the long-shot freshman senator who would be crushed in February, Obama campaign reporters experienced the reflected glory of being along for a historic journey. There was plenty of motivation to keep that journey going.

Conversely, Obama making a hash out of health care provides plenty of good copy for the White House press corps. And because Obama fatigue has set in with the reading and viewing public, skeptical stories match the national mood.

...

With only the steady breeze of favorable coverage of a typical Democratic president instead of the gale of positive press that once helped drive Obama to victory, it’s going to be a very long journey.

This Couldn't Be More Beside The Point

Yet another instance of "Science and religion are perfectly compatible. Especially Science!"

Nice try. Nice pitch for an inconsequential deism. Nice try for "Can't atheists and theists compromise and agree that God is mostly not there?"

Link

Update: Mark Shea puts it: "On the one hand, naturalism is true and supernaturalism is false. On the other hand, supernaturalism is false, but naturalism is true."

And Our Mothers Wear Army Boots

It's interesting to see all of the recent ad hom's expressed together. From Gagdad Bob's latest:

If you disagree with the left, you're not just wrong, but a well-dressed bedwetting nazi racist employed by the insurance companies.

Nuance!

A complete list will eventually include "capitalist running dog untermenschen imperialist bourgeois pig," but this party is still young. It's not quite time to deploy the tried and true.

Why Bother With Content Of Character When Color Of Skin Will Get You Where You Want To Go?

Because karma is a b*tch, that's why.

True Dat

From comments here:

I’m so tired of the Obama-as-savant trope.

Hitchens once made the point that people who harp on Bush’s dumbness are proving that they are dumb themselves. I’m adding the corollary that those who wax on about Obama’s brilliance are not so brilliant either.

"I Know She Won't Ask Him To Leave"

Brilliant post:

When I began writing for Hot Air, I never imagined I would find myself critical of Charles Krauthammer twice, after only blogging for four months. I’ve followed his work for years, and still eagerly read everything he publishes. He writes brilliantly on many topics, but he just doesn’t get Sarah Palin, or by extension her supporters… which by further extension means he misunderstands the precarious moment America finds itself in, and the opportunities that lie ahead for conservatives.

Let me dispense with the most controversial part of Krauthammer’s recent Town Hall column first: this condescending nonsense about asking Palin to “leave the room” while “we have a reasoned discussion about end-of-life counseling.” There’s only one group of people who needs to leave the room during that discussion, and it’s the socialist zealot in the White House, along with the craven cowards in his party. They’ve already demonstrated a remarkable gift for swiftly leaving the room when people start asking tough questions, so we’ll hardly notice when they slink out. Maybe while they’re gone, they could find the billions in Cash for Clunkers money that vanished into thin air.

Those Facebook pages she’s tossing around like ninja throwing stars are eloquent proof that no one has the right to pat Sarah Palin on the head and send her out of the room, while the grown-ups settle down to serious talk. She isn’t just writing snarky rants. She’s providing both devastatingly effective criticism, and substantial policy alternatives. It’s fairly obvious the White House paid a great deal of attention to her infamous “death panel” column. I haven’t seen that many people turned into nervous wrecks by Facebook since the last time the “Mafia Wars” servers went down.

As many others have noted, Krauthammer begins his latest essay with his bizarrely offensive demand that Palin “leave the room,” then spends the rest of the essay essentially agreeing with her. It seems fair to say that his problem is more with her style than her substance.


...

There is no doubt Obama and his allies want to drive the United States toward a single-payer health system. Some of his more colorful co-conspirators, like Barney Frank, aren’t particularly cagey about it when they speak in front of friendly audiences, and Obama himself has expressed that desire in the past. A health-insurance industry dominated by a tax-subsidized public option, whose vampiric “providers” can re-write the laws of the industry to destroy their nominal competitors, will inevitably collapse… leaving only the government. Tossing a shark into your aquarium is not a good way to enhance “competition” among the fish. When America inevitably loses enough blood to lapse into a single-payer coma, there will be rationing, and that means government functionaries will decide how the limited pool of medical resources is allocated. I don’t think “death panel” is an unfair metaphor for the resulting system, and the sense of dread it provokes in the listener is entirely appropriate.

The death panel doesn’t have to take the form of nine robed Sith Lords, stamping your grandmothers’ termination orders with a giant red skull, then handing them to a ghoul in surgical scrubs. It will be no less deadly if it consists of thousands of faceless government drones in cubicles, processing Quality of Life spreadsheets and crossing out the unlucky Social Security numbers with pink highlighter pens. In fact, my only quibble with Palin’s prediction is that, given the style of the current Administration, it is much more likely that we’ll have a Death Czar. Using the same Noonan-swooning judgment that gave us a tax cheat for Treasury Secretary, Obama will appoint a serial killer to the position. The Death Czar’s first official act will be spending $2 billion in taxpayer dollars to hire a Brazilian company, which will extract organs from Americans after they receive their end-of-life counseling, then ship them overseas for use in foreign patients.

What Palin brings to the health-care debate is the energy, wisdom, and wit to make complex ideas understandable to ordinary people. Let me once again restate my admiration for Charles Krauthammer before saying, with regrettably brutal candor, that Sarah Palin had more impact on the health-care debate with one Facebook note than everything Krauthammer has written in the past year. That’s not because people are shallow, and didn’t pay attention until Palin kicked off a media firestorm. It’s because they understandably seek out leadership on complex issues, and leaders have a knack for rendering fearfully complicated issues down to their essential truths. Ordinary Americans are more eager to entertain appealing speech from an engaging personality, than sign up for a long series of dry lectures, no matter how brilliant the lecturer might be… and they don’t view their ballots as comment cards, to be completed on their way out of the lecture hall.

Every political movement needs both academic intelligence, and vital charisma. The Left has always viewed the relationship between its intellectuals and politicians as something like the production and marketing departments in a business – and when it comes to accumulating power, socialists are all business. People like Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers spent decades weaving the strings that control the Obama marionette. They openly wrote of their understanding that savvy merchandising would be needed to make the public accept their agenda, at least until the public no longer has a meaningful choice about accepting it. When was the last time you heard a leftist intellectual belittle a popular liberal politician, the way Charles Krauthammer treated Sarah Palin?

The challenge for conservatism is to educate the voters in its basic principles, since they received no such education in the public schools. Conservatism always triumphs on the elementary questions of freedom and capitalism. The ideas of the Left are diseased in root and branch – history has shown there is no need to allow them to blossom, in order to see they are poisonous. Conservatives who allow themselves to be dragged into bickering about page 945 of a 1200-page bill have already conceded far too much of the debate. Americans deserve better than being told to sit down and shut up, while Washington plays Jenga with Obama’s obscene health-care proposals. They should be angry and insulted their time and money were ever wasted with this madness.

If Obama were the CEO of a private company, he would have already been “asked to leave the room” by the shareholders, and he’d be driving home in tears, listening to voice mail messages from the company lawyers. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy to dispose of corrupt and incompetent elected officials… which is why they should be provided with the smallest possible operating budget, watched like hawks, and kept out of everything that isn’t their explicit Constitutional duty. We can begin the process in 2010, and finish it in 2012. I’d like to have both Charles Krauthammer and Sarah Palin in the room while we prepare for battle. I know she won’t ask him to leave.

The Democrats Come Clean On Their Plans

Finally, finally, some simple honesty. If they'd level with us more in such fashion, an informed electorate could come to make wise choices.

Damned Right!

You have GOT to see this.



H/T Hot Air.

See also.

Death Of A Salesman

A must-read Fred Barnes piece.

Declining Fortunes

One way of looking at it:

So the public figured: why pay two bucks for the Times, when you can get the content for free from the Democratic National Committee?

Following The Lenin/Alinsky Script To The Letter

Horowitz's exposition is well worth a read.

We Are Now At ChuckLev Point Five! Danger!

Some interesting analysis. It used to take the leftists years after a takeover to achieve something less than their present level of disapproval.

This Just In: There Is Nothing Creative About Engineering, But There Is Something Creative About Journalism

Ohhhhkay. So engineers create nothin' but journalists invent stuff all the time. I think I get it.

Quip

Seen in comments here:

Little known fact: The disciples ran up a $1.8T tab during the first year of Jesus' ministry.

Is It 1857, Or 1770?

GayPatriot asks a question that has been on a lot of minds:

I’ve been wanting to post about this question and today seemed like the right time since now I’m not the only one worried about this question. In today’s Washington Times, actor/activist Jon Voight makes this statement:

“There’s a real question at stake now. Is President Obama creating a civil war in our own country?” Mr. Voight tells Inside the Beltway.

“We are witnessing a slow, steady takeover of our true freedoms. We are becoming a socialist nation, and whoever can’t see this is probably hoping it isn’t true. If we permit Mr. Obama to take over all our industries, if we permit him to raise our taxes to support unconstitutional causes, then we will be in default. This great America will become a paralyzed nation.”

“Do not let the Obama administration fool you with all their cunning Alinsky methods. And if you don’t know what that method is, I implore you to get the book ‘Rules for Radicals,’ by Saul Alinsky . Mr. Obama is very well trained in these methods.”

Now this is old news to anyone who really studied Obama’s past. And I’m not as concerned about this kind of argument, nor the “birthers” distraction.

Here are my real fears about the United States heading into a civil war:

1. There is a clear distinction between those who want a more authoritarian/socialist nation versus those who want to preserve the capitalist/democratic America we live in.

2. There is a clear distinction between those who understand the principles and guidance and importance of the representative legislative process versus those who hide behind the Constitution as an excuse to create laws from the bench.

3. There is a clear distinction between those who favor strong national security vs. those who want a borderless, global government.

4. There is a clear distinction between those who hold US Constitutional principles dear (1st, 2nd, 10th Amendments in particular) and those who are ignorant or want to subvert those principles.

5. There is a clear distinction between those who want to maintain a sensible fiscal policy versus those statists in Washington who spend our tax money with reckless abandon.

6. There is a clear distinction between those who see themselves as Americans first versus those who want to segregate themselves into communities and ignore the national identity.

7. Despite his promises, surveys show that Americans have elected one of the most divisive Presidents since Richard Nixon.

These are serious issues that fundamentally challenge the formation of the Republic itself.

...

I’m anxious for a vigorous and respectful discussion on my question posed here. No Americans in 1773 knew there would be a Revolution; no Americans in 1857 knew there would be a bloody Civil War; no Americans in 1928 knew there would be a global Depression and a 2nd global war.

WWOD?

David Harsanyi:

"For with thee is the fountain of life: and in thy light we shall see the public option."

Yes, it's finally come to this. We've dragged the Almighty Lord into the debate. It's Yahweh or the highway.

This week, President Barack Obama claimed his version of health care reform was "a core ethical and moral obligation," beseeching religious leaders to promote his government-run scheme. Questioning the patriotism of opponents, apparently, wasn't gaining the type of traction advocates of "reform" had hoped [Is it now to be "I'm not questioning your Patriotism, I am questioning your salvation"?].

"I know there's been a lot of misinformation in this debate and there are some folks out there who are frankly bearing false witness," Obama said, invoking the frightening specter of the Ten Commandments.

On Team Righteous we have those who meet their moral obligations; on the other squad we must have the minions of Beelzebub — by which, of course, we mean, profit-driven child- killing, mob-inciting insurance companies.

...

As CBS News recently reported, Obama has thrown around the name of God even more often than George W. Bush did. Then again, no group couches policy as a moral obligation more than the left. On nearly every question of legislation, there is a pious strawman tugging at the shirtsleeves of the wicked.

What isn't a moral imperative these days? As if they were chiseling commandments into stone tablets, Democrats refer to budgets as "moral documents." Thou shalt compost or climate change will descend upon the lands and smite the wicked and innocent alike. Extend alms to the downtrodden moneylenders and carmakers for it is just and the president commandeth thee.

If the apostate argues that dependency programs keep poor people poor, or that progressive environmental policies are ineffective and create poverty, or that free will is more important than free stuff; they will be dealt with like the Amorites. And you know what happened to that swine.

...

While we have no clue what Jesus would make of a public option, we do have plenty of evidence that government tends to act immorally, corruptly and incompetently — especially a government with too much power. And the self-righteous elected official who has complete moral certitude on his side also has a tendency to ignore any other concerns. That detail has been painfully obvious in this debate.

"It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies," wrote C.S. Lewis, a man who knew a thing or two about religion. "The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

We now know that the advocates for government-run health care have full approval of their own consciences. That is surely comforting to them. Now, I don't know about you, but I will gladly champion the policies of any president who can walk on water. Until that time, though, I'll take my chances with blasphemy.

This Is A Teachable Moment

One in which Obama is getting schooled, and in which Peggy Noonan is coming to her senses.

Compare And Contrast

Via Brutally Honest, this ZombBlog photoessay.

From the intro:

Why am I doing this?

Let me make this perfectly clear:

I am not publishing this essay in order to make excuses for anyone who has threatened President Obama, or who plans to threaten him in the future.

This is not some wrongheaded attempt at a tu quoque logical fallacy; in other words, I’m not trying to claim that death threats against Bush in the past justify threats against Obama now. Not at all. What I’m saying is that present-day threats to Obama at protests should be investigated — yet previous threats to Bush at protests weren’t investigated, which I think is inexcusable. Threats to the president aren’t excusable now, and weren’t excusable in the past — and yet death threats against Bush at protests seem to have been routinely ignored for years (and readers who have any evidence showing that the threateners depicted below were ever prosecuted for threatening the president, please tell me and I’ll update this essay with the new info). Why the discrepancy?

Am I calling the Secret Service incompetent?

No — I am not calling the Secret Service incompetent. In fact, I’m pointing the finger of blame in an entirely different direction. I’m quite sure that the Secret Service always dutifully investigates any threat to the president of which it becomes aware. But that’s the key right there: of which it becomes aware. The Secret Service has only a limited budget and a limited number of investigators, and so can’t be present to witness every potential threat as it appears. Often, the Secret Service is only alerted to a possible threat by reports in the media. And the media is the weak link.

I contend that the media is aggressively reporting on, highlighting and pursuing any and all possible threats to President Obama — and even hints of threats — but they purposely glossed over, ignored or failed to report similar threats to President Bush. Why? I believe it is part of an ideological bias: most mainstream networks and newspapers tried their best during the Bush administration to portray the anti-war movement as mainstream and moderate; whereas now they are trying to portray the anti-tax and anti-health-care-bill protesters as extremists and as fringe kooks. To achieve these goals, they essentially suppressed any mentions of the violent signage (including threats to Bush) at anti-war rallies, but have highlighted anything that could even conceivably be construed as a threat at anti-Obama events.

I believe this partly accounts for the 400% increase in reported threats against Obama over those against President Bush. Part of that reported increase in investigated threats is undoubtedly due to an increase in actual threats; but part of it is almost certainly due to an increase in threats which get reported by the media and are therefore brought to the Secret Service’s attention.

[additional excellent points follow]

We Need To Lie Like Crazy Now In Order To Point Out The Truth About The Future!

Greenpeace!

My Opponents Are Not Just Wrong. They Are Not Just Nazis. They Are Sinners. But Behold, I Am Merciful.

Althouse on the new state religion.

Ready. Fire. Aim.

Belatedly discovering that your Party is not all raving leftists. Interesting map included.

Link

Quote from the piece:

It's almost as if the President has absolutely no experience in dealing with the United States Congress whatsoever.

It's Funny 'Cuz It's True

We Have A Religious Obligation To Help One Another, Especially If It Breaks The Commandment "Thou Shalt Not Steal"

It's what God would want. Who would know this better than the The Messiah?

Perhaps Obama Will Soon Excommunicate Us

VDH:

'A contest between hope and fear'? [Victor Davis Hanson]

There is something creepy about the sudden invocation of Christian morality by the president to galvanize support for his state-run health care plan, as if his opponents are suddenly to be seen as somehow selfish or even un-Christian. This is an unfortunate, counter-productive tactic for at least four reasons:

1) The moral argument comes at the eleventh hour, rather than the first, of public debate, as if it is a desperate fall-back position intended to shame opponents who happen to think that massive state intervention will make health care worse rather than better;

2) Ironically, the religious trope would argue against the entrance of the state that would relieve citizens of their own moral responsibilities to help out family and friends in times of illness. It is no accident that secularism, agnosticism, and atheism are strongest in socialist Europe, where the government has relieved citizens of traditional moral responsibilities emphasized by religion;

3) This contrived use of religiosity (e.g., “There are some folks out there who are frankly bearing false witness.”) has a Reverend Wright flavor of mixing politics and religion in cynical fashion to bolster Obama's fides as an authentic moral figure. And isn't the use of religion as a political tool precisely what Obama and others have objected to in the Christian Right?;

4) Rather than demonize opponents as callous and disingenuous, all the president has to do to refute their supposed scare tactics is to explicitly assure the public that abortion receives no state funds in his program, that illegal aliens are not included in his proposed new blanket coverage, and that autonomous government panels will not withhold federal health-care coverage, in the case of the elderly, on the basis of perceived cost-benefit considerations.

I think we are seeing a sort of presidential meltdown. As Obama's polls free-fall, and threaten wider political damage, it causes him a certain novel exasperation that for the first time in his life soaring hope-and-change rhetoric for some strange reason no longer substitutes for a detailed, logical, and honest agenda. The problem right now is not with un-Christian opponents, but dozens of congressional Democrats who simply do not wish to run on state-run medical care (as well as higher taxes, larger deficits, cap-and-trade, etc.), and no longer sense the president's popularity trumps the unpopularity of his agenda and gives them cover with the voters.

Mechanic's Tool Guide

Via e-mail:

MECHANIC'S TOOL GUIDE
---------------------

HAMMER: Originally employed as a weapon, the hammer nowadays is used as a kind of divining rod to locate expensive parts not far from the object we are trying to hit.

MECHANIC'S KNIFE: Used to open and slice through the contents of cardboard cartons delivered to your front door; works particularly well on boxes containing seats and jackets.

ELECTRIC HAND DRILL: Normally used for spinning steel Pop rivets in their holes until you die of old age, but it also works great for drilling mounting holes in fenders just above the brake line that goes to the rear wheel.

PLIERS: Used to round off bolt heads.

HACKSAW: One of a family of cutting tools built on the Ouija board principle. It transforms human energy into a crooked, unpredictable motion, and the more you attempt to influence its course, the more dismal your future becomes.

VISE-GRIPS: Used to round off bolt heads. If nothing else is available, they can also be used to transfer intense welding heat to the palm of your hand.

OXYACETYLENE TORCH: Used almost entirely for lighting various flammable objects in your garage on fire. Also handy for igniting the grease inside a brake drum you're trying to get the bearing race out of.

WHITWORTH SOCKETS: Once used for working on older British cars and motorcycles, they are now used mainly for impersonating that 9/16 or 1/2 socket you've been desperately searching for the last 15 minutes.

DRILL PRESS: A tall upright machine useful for suddenly snatching flat metal bar stock out of your hands so that it smacks you in the chest and flings your beer across the room, splattering it against that freshly painted part you were drying.

WIRE WHEEL: Cleans rust off old bolts and then throws them somewhere under the workbench with the speed of light. Also removes fingerprint whorls and hard-earned guitar calluses in about the time it takes you to say, "Ouch...."

HYDRAULIC FLOOR JACK: Used for lowering a motorcycle to the ground after you have installed your new front disk brake setup, trapping the jack handle firmly under the front fender.

EIGHT-FOOT LONG DOUGLAS FIR 2X4: Used for levering a motorcycle upward off a hydraulic jack.

TWEEZERS: A tool for removing wood splinters.

PHONE: A tool for calling your neighbor to see if he has another hydraulic floor jack.

SNAP-ON GASKET SCRAPER: Theoretically useful as a sandwich tool for spreading mayonnaise; used mainly for getting dog-doo off your boots.

E-Z OUT BOLT AND STUD EXTRACTOR: A tool that snaps off in bolt holes and is ten times harder than any known drill bit.

TIMING LIGHT: A stroboscopic instrument for illuminating grease buildup.

TWO-TON HYDRAULIC ENGINE HOIST: A handy tool for testing the tensile strength of ground straps and brake lines you may have forgotten to disconnect.

CRAFTSMAN 1/2 x 16-INCH SCREWDRIVER: A large motor mount prying tool that inexplicably has an accurately machined screwdriver tip on the end without the handle.

BATTERY ELECTROLYTE TESTER: A handy tool for transferring sulfuric acid from a car battery to the inside of your toolbox after determining that your battery is dead as a doornail, just as you thought.

AVIATION METAL SNIPS: See hacksaw.

TROUBLE LIGHT: The mechanic's own tanning booth. Sometimes called a drop light, it is a good source of vitamin D "the sunshine vitamin," which is not otherwise found under motorcycles at night. Health benefits aside, its main purpose is to consume 40-watt light bulbs at about the same rate that howitzer shells might be used during the first few hours of the Battle of the Bulge. Impossible to position in a spot that doesn't cast your work in shadow, it is more often dark than light; its name is somewhat misleading.

PHILLIPS SCREWDRIVER: Normally used to stab the lids of old-style paper-and-tin oil cans and splash oil on your shirt; can also be used, as the name implies, to round off Phillips screw heads.

AIR COMPRESSOR: A machine that takes energy produced in an oil-burning power plant 200 miles away and transforms it into compressed air that travels by hose to a Chicago Pneumatic impact wrench that grips rusty bolts last tightened 60 years ago by someone at the Springfield Indian Factory, and rounds them off.

PRY BAR: A tool used to crumple the metal surrounding that clip or bracket you needed to remove in order to replace a 50 cent part.

HOSE CUTTER: A tool used to cut hoses 1/2 inch too short.

Vicious Propaganda

Outrageous.

The Real Artist Is Still At Large

Excellent Vanderleun reflection.

What Was Everyone Smoking?

A great Kyle-Anne Shiver piece.

I Sure Hope He's Right

Ed Morrissey:

The New York Times offers a strong hint that Democrats in the Senate will use the budget reconciliation process as a cover to move ObamaCare through the chamber to avoid a filibuster. The Democrats will “go it alone,” the headline reads, although the actual report makes the how of that rather ambiguous. And well it should, since the Democrats know — or should know — that to try reconciliation would be an invitation to a war that would bring Congress to a screeching halt...

In fact, the article never mentions the word “reconciliation,” the process by which the Senate approves a budget for the federal government. Under the rules of reconciliation, no cloture vote is needed, as the chamber has a Constitutional duty to produce a budget. Some Democrats have threatened this for months, notably Chuck Schumer, but the plan has a couple of big flaws. First, the Democrats have to convince the Senate parliamentarian, ostensibly non-partisan, to agree that the bill is primarily budgetary. No one in their right mind could honestly make that judgment about massive regulation of 15% of the American economy. They’re likely to get denied before they even get started.

However, if they do manage to get past that obstacle, the Republicans can shut down the Senate for the next year. Those unfamiliar with the parliamentary procedure may not realize that a great many steps get skipped by unanimous consent. Bill-reading is just one example. One Senator can force each and every bill to be read aloud at every appearance it makes on the Senate floor, including when they are sent to committee. For ObamaCare and cap-and-trade, one bill reading could take a week, keeping the Senate floor locked off from any other business.

Traditionally, Senators give each other the courtesy of unanimous consent to allow business to proceed at a normal pace. If the Democrats try to force ObamaCare through reconciliation, that unanimous consent will dissipate faster than an Obama expiration date. It won’t take the entire Republican caucus to gum up the works, either; it only takes a single objection to end unanimous consent, and the GOP has more than a couple of conservative firebrands who will gladly toss sand in the gears to stop Harry Reid from steamrolling them.

Democrats might think that this will gain them sympathy with the public, but not if they’re breaking rules to pass an increasingly unpopular and intrusive piece of legislation. It will create a firestorm of anger even worse than what we’ve seen in the townhalls thus far. They would be signing their way to minority status, especially in the House. They can kiss the rest of their agenda goodbye for the rest of this session, too, including cap-and-trade. Even budgeting will prove very difficult.

There’s a reason the Times didn’t mention reconciliation. It’s a bluff. Not even Harry Reid is this foolish.

We'll Let God Participate, Assuming He Behaves

Barack Obama:

President Barack Obama needs some outside help pushing health care reform, and he’s turning to rabbis to get it.

In a morning conference call with about 1000 rabbis from across the nation, Obama asked for aid: “I am going to need your help in accomplishing necessary reform,” the President told the group, according to Rabbi Jack Moline, who tweeted his way through the phoner.

“We are God’s partners in matters of life and death,” Obama went on to say, according to Moline’s real-time stream.

They're Like A Bunch Of Hysterical Schoolgirls

Jonah Goldberg:

[I]f you actually want Obamacare to pass, casting a majority of Americans as the stooges of racist goons may not be the best way to go.

Imagine if George W. Bush, in his effort to partially privatize Social Security, had insisted that the “time for talking is over.” Picture, if you will, the Bush White House asking Americans to turn in their e-mails in the pursuit of “fishy” dissent. Conjure a scenario under which then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott derided critics as “evil-mongers” the way Harry Reid recently described town-hall protesters. Or if then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert and then-Majority Whip Tom DeLay had called critics “un-American” the way Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer did last week, or if White House strategist Karl Rove had been Sir Spam-a-lot instead of David Axelrod.

Now, I’m not asking you, dear reader, to do this so that you might be able to see through the glare of Obama’s halo or the outlines of the media’s staggering double standard when it comes to covering this White House. Rather, it is to grasp that the Obama administration has been astoundingly incompetent.

Lashing out at the town-hall protesters, playing the race card, whining about angry white men, and whispering ominously about right-wing militias is almost always a sign of liberalism’s weakness — a failure of the imagination.

...

It’s funny how these supposed champions of the Enlightenment can’t grasp that people can disagree with them for honest reasons. Instead, we simply must be Limbaugh’s automatons, which is to say racist, fascist thugs.

In addition to the slander, such complaints are monumentally, incandescently lame coming from a party that controls Washington. According to liberals themselves, these evil-mongers are a tiny minority, a bunch of “Astroturf” frauds. So why not ignore them and get on with the work you were elected to do?

Iconography

Another great Bill Whittle segment.

C.S. Lewis Quip

Seen here:

"The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed." - C.S. Lewis

And another quip from the comments to the post:

Someone once explained the tyranny of numbers by saying that if a very large number of monkeys were randomly banging on typewriters that one would eventually type out Hamlet. Thanks to the internet, we now know this to be false.

"I Want Medicare For All Americans."

A Democrat speaks on the record.

The Future Lies Ahead

Some don't-miss Andrew Klavan writing.

"Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death Panels"

Steyn:

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death Panels

. . . but you can't have both. On the matter of McCarthy vs the Editors, I'm with Andy. I think Sarah Palin's "death panel" coinage clarified the stakes and resonated in a way that "rationing" and other lingo never quite did. She launched it, and she made it stick. So it was politically effective.

But I'm also with Mrs. Palin on the substance. NR's editorial defines "death panel" too narrowly. What matters is the concept of a government "panel." Right now, if I want a hip replacement, it's between me and my doctor; the government does not have a seat at the table. The minute it does, my hip's needs are subordinate to national hip policy, which in turn is subordinate to macro budgetary considerations. For example:

Health trusts in Suffolk were among the first to announce that obese people would be denied hip and knee replacements on the NHS.

The ruling was part of an attempt to save money locally.

The operative word here is "ruling." You know, like judges. You're accepting that the state has jurisdiction over your hip, and your knee, and your prostate and everything else. And once you accept that proposition the fellows who get to make the "ruling" are, ultimately, a death panel. Usually, they call it something nicer — literally, like Britain's National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE).

And finally I don't think this is any time for NR to be joining the Frumsters and deploring the halfwit vulgarity of déclassé immoderates like Palin. This is a big-stakes battle: If we cross this bridge, there's no going back. Being "moderate" is not a good strategy. It risks delivering the nation to the usual reach-across-the-aisle compromise that will get Democrats far enough across the bridge that the Big Government ratchet effect will do the rest.

After my weekend column recounted the experience of a recent British visitor of mine, I received an e-mail from a gentleman in Glasgow who cannot get an x-ray for his back — because he has no sovereignty over his back. His back is merely part of the overall mass of Scottish backs, to which a government budget has been allocated, but alas one which does not run to x-rays.

Government "panels" making "rulings" over your body: Acceptance of that concept is what counts.

Good Insights

Hewitt:

[T]he damage to the AARP brand is deep and it will last because all across America seniors are watching their alleged "voice" speak mostly about selling them out in the cause of serving a hard left agenda by a hard left president and Congress.

This isn't why the average American joins AARP. The deeper damage comes from products not sold, members not enrolled and services not solicited or accepted. Real reporting would look at the long term membership trends at AARP and discover what percentage of eligible Americans have actually joined in years past and whether, just as the Baby Boom moves massively into its retirement years, AARP has picked exactly the wrong moment to drop the veil and reveal itself as part of the left side of the Beltway establishment.

Two months ago if anyone thought about AARP at all, it was as a non-partisan service provider which, on occasion, would rally its troops on the side of larger slices of the pie for senior citizens. It took decades to build that reputation, and it is shattered in the space of weeks.

Some senior management within Big Pharma must also be asking themselves who exactly advised them to throw in with the suddenly besieged president and whether they ought not to be convening an emergency meeting to recalibrate their strategy of selling out American healthcare in exchange for a false security regarding their place on the profit hit list. Appeasement never works in foreign affairs, and it doesn't work in domestic politics either.

Quip Of The Day

Excellent:

Cash For Clunkers is just “death panels” for cars.

False Witness

Setting the record straight.

The short post covers how the statement:

"These articles are excellent articles I assume. However, they do not address the question that I am posing. So it's not that they aren't good enough. It's simply that they are addressed to a different subject."

became, at the hands of the Kitzmiller Judge:

"He [Behe] was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not "good enough."

and then was trumpeted by Ken Miller (who, as any honest atheist knows, has ANNIHILATED Behe's scientific arguments) as:

"Even when presented with every opportunity to make their case, the defenders of design retorted to little more than saying 'It's not good enough or me' in the face of overwhelming evidence for evolution."

But really, if Darwinists cannot properly interpret and represent the contents of court transcripts that are a matter of public record, this has no logical bearing on their ability to interpret fragmentary scientific evidence and metaphysically fraught theories.

Evolution is a FACT and Behe is a CHRISTIAN. What else need be said?

Some Problems Take Care Of Themselves

Via e-mail:

THE PLAN

A.. Back off and let those men who want to marry men, marry men.

B.. Allow those women who want to marry women, marry women.

C.. Allow those folks who want to abort their babies, abort their babies.

D.. In three generations, there will be no Democrats.

Yup.

Quote:

“Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.”

--P.J. O'Rourke

Cartoons

Here:





Here:

They Have Awakened A Napping Giant

Good article, but I especially liked this comment:

The mistake this administration made was messing with us old folks. You see, to us, you are just a bunch of young punks who don't know crap from apple butter. You kids can't sneak anything that concerns us past us. The Democrat party made an unrecoverable error with this bill, and you all know this is true. See you on election day.

The Wisdon Of Gagdad Bob

I can relate:

Speaking of which, I wanted to briefly mention a point. As you all know, I was once a leftist myself -- HEY, WHO ARE YOU CALLING STALIN?!!! -- which it is almost impossible not to be if you are as educated as I once was. You don't even have to think about it, because you simply pick it up through kosmosis by spending so many moons in the rarified error of that lunar 'batmosphere. Eventually your common sense is eclipsed.

It's not just that all of one's professors are explicitly liberal. It's the way they implicitly think about the world -- the problems they notice, the questions they ask, the topics they emphasize, the things they exclude or take for granted, the jokes they make, the things that cannot be joked about, etc.

But if you are intelligent, you don't just leave it at that. Rather, you want to dig a little deeper. This, I believe, is where the gnostic element of (-n) fits in. What makes human intelligence human (and often all-too-human) is our ability to see beneath the surface and unify phenomena on a deeper level. But obviously it is possible to not only get things wrong, but to do so in a systematic way, e.g., Islamism, scientism, atheism, phrenology, etc.

This I think is why leftists always believe such conspiratorial nonsense. In my case, because I knew that there was more to reality than met the eye, I began reading things by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Edward Herman, Michael Parenti, Eric Hobsbawm, the Frankfurt School of psychopolitical loons, you name it. I didn't even know that these people were Marxists, nor would I have cared if you had told me. I subscribed to The Nation and thought it was actually "objective." I listened to Pacifica radio. I even contributed money to them! How will I explain this to God?

What made it all so seductive was the gnostic element -- the idea that I knew what was really going on beneath the surface of politics. For a godless intellectual, it provides you with the key to the world enigma, or perhaps the business end of the world enema. But if you don't destroy your soul in the process, you soon notice that this "key" only gives access to a dead and repetitive world of compacted fecal matter. Really, it's more of a hammer that reduces every problem to the same dreary nail: power. Corporate power. Class power. Race power. Gender power. Able-bodied power. Heteronormative power. Phallic power (guilty!).

In the end, it's an all-purpose tool that works not because it actually opens anything, but because it smashes it. This is one of the reasons why the left doesn't create anything. Rather, it can only destroy. It cannot create a medical system. Rather, it can only socialize and vampirize an existing one. It cannot create wealth. It can only redistribute it. It cannot create a wonderful group like the Boy Scouts. It can only try to destroy it in court. It cannot create a beautiful institution such as marriage. It can only erode it by redefining it out of existence.

It reminds me of this post about the romanticism of Woodstock at American Thinker. The boomer-left regards Woodstock as some sort of important cultural-spiritual moment (you should hear how they talk about it on PBS, perhaps similar to how a Muslim talks about his pilgrimage to Mecca). But as the author writes, it was really just "five hundred thousand or so young people getting high and watching some bands. That's about all there was to it. They got high, goofed off, made a mess, and then went home and left a pile of trash for someone else to pick up. A real new world creation."

Not that there's anything intrinsically evil about it. There is a place for irresponsible fun, especially when one is young. Just don't elevate it to a metaphysic.

But "Somehow, the fact that The New World that was being created was totally dependent on the Old World's sanitary, transportation and economic structures was totally ignored by the media and the 'Counter Culture.'"

The problem is that "Leftists, being the simpletons that they are, tend to make life-long friends with their basic assumptions about the universe rather than continually updating their thinking as new data become available. They lock in on a mindset and never again question it, like grade schoolers deciding on their favorite color, or flower, or ice cream flavor. Woodstock imprinted strongly on the non-thinkers. They imagined this magical world of fairies and elves and LSD and pot and Jerry Garcia and Janis Joplin and this big evil edifice that is America."

The point is that in order to live in fairyland, someone has to defend the country. Someone has to pick up the trash. Someone has to raise the next generation. Someone has to actually create wealth and employ people.

The pagan aspect of Woodstock -- and of the counter-culture in general -- is no coincidence (bear in mind that the "counter-culture" is now the culture, and that cultured people such as yourselves are now the counter-culture). Indeed, so permeated with romantic mythology was this event, that it would have been appropriate if the film had been directed by Leni Riefenstahl.

...

This is not to say it isn't fun to jump into the mud, especially when one is young. This is why leftism is always a children's crusade, including, of course, those permanent children known as the tenured. If voting were restricted to the people who are actually forced to pay for government, an Obama wouldn't stand a chance. But the youth vote ensures a kind of tyranny of the irresponsible over the responsible, the young over the mature, the takers over the makers. Imagine if you ran your family that way!

Falsifiability

It is said that Intelligent Design is unfalsifiable.

Au contraire. It is eminently falsifiable. All that the unguided evolutionists need do is give a reasonably detailed explanation of how something like the bacterial flagellum came into being, taking proper account of probabilities informed by experimentally established physical reality and not glossing over important details or difficulties.

ID would then be falsified for all intents and purposes.

If the unguided evolutionists can do this, then ID is falsifiable. But if they cannot do this (or refuse to do this), then the question becomes: Is unguided evolution itself falsifiable?

To maintain that ID is unfalsifiable would be essentially to maintain that unguided evolution is unfalsifiable.

The burden of proof is on those who claim that they have an explanation in terms of unguided causes for those complicated things that look designed (such as the flagellum). They're supposed to be the geniuses with the better explanation than the obvious (and allegedly way too easy): "Someone made this." They are supposed to be the heroes of Science! who are bravely willing to bear the burden of proof. If they can't explain something so basic as the flagellum, then what have they got, really?

We're all waiting to be impressed.

The Wisdom Of Vox

Here:

I am a Creationist only in the broad sense, by which I mean that while I am a Christian who believes in creation by intelligence rather than raw time+chance, I also believe the historical truth of the origins of Man and the Earth to be significantly stranger and less compehensible than either the Biblical literalists or the abiogenesis advocates imagine. I should point out that I have virtually no idea of what form that stranger and incomprehensible truth actually takes, but it renders me a virtual agnostic on the general issue of origins.

While I put great credence in documentary evidence, I think much of the YEC case is based on a forced literalism that is absent from most historical readings of the Bible or other historical documents. I am no more concerned about the literal seven days than I am with determining what color the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was. In my opinion, those Christians and anti-Christians who impute great significance to belief in the specifics of the events recounted in the early chapters of Genesis are largely missing the essential points of Christianity. Since I am skeptical of the crude imprecision of secular scientists as they make wild assumptions about events they did not witness, it should surprise no one that I am equally skeptical of the attempts of the theologically inclined to impute very specific meanings to events neither they nor the author of Genesis witnessed either. And since we do not understand either God or His ways, there is absolutely no chance that we can reasonably hope to properly understand the information He has communicated to us through generations of men who did not understand it either. If the first generation Christians, many of whom were there and lived through the relevant events, saw the truth of Jesus Christ as though through a glass darkly, how much more obscure must the truth of Genesis be to those of us who live today?

Here:

The generation of idiots aka Baby Boomers have to be the most trivial, most foolish, most contemptible generation in the history of the planet. Gail Collins explains one of the many reasons why:

The Woodstock-mania must drive young people crazy since it is yet another reminder that the baby-boom generation is never going to stop talking about the stuff it did, and that when they are old themselves there will probably still be some 108-year-old telling them how everybody slept in the mud but that it was worth it because Janis Joplin sounded so awesome and the people were all mellow.

It was a concert to which a bunch of young adults went 40 years ago. BFD. And yet, the Idiot Generation is still rambling on and on about it as if it was ever actually significant to anyone or anything, let alone history. Gibbon wept. Can you imagine The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with a long chapter entirely devoted to the seminal importance of a well-attended concert? Actually, I suppose I can, but where was the Belisarius of Woodstock when the world needed him?

The Idiot Generation is the first and only generation to fail to grow out of their teenage years. They don't drive the rest of us crazy, they have simply caused us to conclude that they are, and have always been, collectively nuts. This goes well beyond the usual parent-child divide; every generation of teenagers believes it invented sex, but the Baby Boomers are the only ones who still believe it as obese, grey-haired, rock-n-rolling AARP members. Instead of going to a concert, my grandfather's generation went off to war in their teens, kicked the asses of the Nazis and Imperial Japanese, came home to build the richest economy in the world, and never once appeared to worry about being cool, much less what anyone happened to think of them. Meanwhile, we have the inevitable avalanche of "60 is the New 35!" articles to anticipate next year. What a bunch of historical losers.

No Beer Summit Required

Sometimes these things happen. No big whoop.

Link

Thoughtcrime

Mark Shea:

My question is not "Why is somebody making Obama 'Joker" posters?"

My question is "Why are we living in a country where somebody who makes Obama 'Joker" posters is referred to as a 'suspect'?"

Yeah, yeah. Defacing property. Duly noted. And that is, of course, so very very different from the *thousands* of political scraps of paper, blues band ads, rock band ads, BUSHITLER cartoons and so forth that are plastered on fifty bazillion walls in fifty bazillion cities all over the world without any notice whatsoever by the MSM. Nobody is ever a "suspect" in the infamous "Indigo Girls at the Paramount, August 12th!" caper which left Seattle reeling from the crime wave of lesbian-folk-rock induced littering. But blaspheme the One and you are a "suspect".

The article Shea links contains the interesting line:

"City officials, meanwhile, are trying to determine what local crimes might be associated with the posting of the images on public and private properties."

Why? If the associated crime is not already obvious to these "officials", then why dig around to gin up charges?

Ineffective Is As Ineffective Does

Great point.

But, But I Thought My Well-Run And Beloved Grocery Store Was A Commie Operation!

Leftists cry when they find out Whole Foods is run by a sane, rational adult.

Europe Sucks

VDH has seen the future.

Nuance!

Instapundit:

UPDATE: Harry Reid: Protesters are “Evil-Mongers.” Remember how Democrats and media made fun of Bush for talking about “evildoers?” But those were just terrorists, not people who, you know, opposed the Obama Administration’s agenda.

How Fake Is Obamacare?

A lot more obviously fake than even this.

Here's Today's Cute Fix

Awwwwww! Now that's cute!

Shea Waxes Chestertonian

Well said:

It turns out that the book which formed the central text for an entire civilization
...is not only interesting, but something besides a mere collection of passages whose sole utility is to be debunked.

For me, the surest sign that there's just flat something wrong with evangelical atheists of the "New Atheist" variety is that they lack the humanity to conceive of the Bible as anything other than something to refute. A normal unbeliever would at least have enough poetry in his soul to treat the Bible as I treat the Iliad and the Odyssey or the collected Fairy Stories of Andrew Lang. You have to have a screw loose to pore over the adventures of Ulysses simply and solely to prove that a Cyclops is physiologically impossible or to heap scorn on the zoological preposterousness of Puss n Boots. There's something unutterably crabbed, cramped and dead in the soul with the new atheist's everlasting need to heap contempt on every single passage he finds in Scripture without ever inquiring as to why the greatest artists who ever lived found it so nourishing. A normal person, like the atheist Theodore Dalrymple can see the wierd abnormality and social defectiveness of the New Atheist. The New Atheist can see nothing but his Little System of Order, into which no normal person, believer or unbeliever, can possibly fit. Give such people power, and the mass executions are sure to follow, because such people can only solve the problem of a system that makes short beds by chopping off a man's head so that he fits it.

He's A Person Of Color

I do not oppose Obama because he's black, I oppose him because he's a Red!

He Nails It

Excellent:

This last week has been a rather disturbing one for America. We have seen and heard things that most of us thought could not ever happen in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

As the left tries to ram its dictatorial “health care” bill down the nation's throat, the citizenry speaks back to their insolent public officials. Exercising their First Amendment right to free speech and to petition government for redress of grievances, they show up in unprecedented numbers at town halls, telling (and often yelling) at congressmen, who have no real interest in listening, that they absolutely don't want authoritarian government rationing care.

What is the response? Do the Democrats acknowledge the hornet's nest they've stirred up and back off? Do they understand that they are supposed to represent these folks and their opposition to the annihilation of private medicine and insurance?

Not quite. The White House set up an e-mail address for supporters to rat out opponents, advised Democrats to “punch back twice as hard,” and President Obama arrogantly told these folks to shut the hell up and get out of the way. The Speaker of the House labeled them Nazis, claiming they were carrying signs with swastikas. And the next day, union thugs were sent in to physically intimidate people at packed town halls in places like Tampa, and St. Louis. One man in the latter location was beaten so badly he had to be hospitalized.

...

We have holders of national office, when faced with widespread opposition to their proposals, whose first instinct is to openly slander the America people, view the people as an enemy to be defeated by any means necessary, and tacitly endorse violence to repress them. (None of these town halls, as vocal as they were, turned the least bit violent until the day after the White House said to "punch back twice as hard" and the SEIU union goon squad started showing up. Coincidence?)

Think about how radical and extreme this is. This sort of thing was supposed to only happen in third-world banana republics in far-flung corners of world. Thanks to Obama and Pelosi, it now happens in America.

...

This is a reckless and dangerous escalation of the conflict. It raises the stakes to where one fractious event could cause things to quickly spiral out of control. It actually increases the chances of such an event occurring, as someone who's been given the finger by his own government figures he has nothing left to lose. And once that Rubicon gets crossed, it may be impossible to go back.

A president with real experience and real leadership skills would know better than this. But all Obama has to fall back on is his rabble-rousing, radical Marxist street thug past. Excuse me, I meant “community organizing.” (Funny how he despises the community organizing against him.) Thus you get exactly the arrogant words he spoke and reckless actions he took. And with them, gasoline may well have been poured on the dry tinder. All that's left is the spark to set it ablaze.

Think about that as well: He'd rather risk America coming apart than not get his way. Instead of temporarily accepting political defeat and regrouping, he'd rather take us down a path of conflict wherein the end must necessarily be one side defeating the other, cost and damage incurred in the process be damned. The closest comparison to this I can think of is an abusive husband who'd rather kill his wife than have her escape his control.

As for the Vichy Republicans, the ostensible “opposition,” who ought to be a veritable megaphone channeling all the citizens' outrage into one unmistakable voice, they are inexplicably nowhere to be heard. Their gutless cowardice apparently knows no limits, and they too are responsible for the escalation of this conflict and whatever deleterious consequences to which it may lead, as they are derelict in their duty to provide a proper political outlet into which all the outrage can be funneled.

One doesn't go outside the system so long as they have an effective way to oppose within it. The GOP steadfastly refuses to be a public voice of real opposition, and as such they are just as much a part of the problem. It's said that all that's need for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, and that's exactly what the GOP is doing – nothing.

The only one who is clearly calling Obama and Pelosi to account is Sarah Palin. I close by linking to her statement on the health care debate, posted last Friday on her Facebook page. If not for her, there would be no Republican opposition at all.

They Parodize Themselves

"Can't Make It Up: Dem Rep Who Opposes Photo ID To Vote Requiring Photo ID For Town Halls"

Link

Clarion Call

Great Bill Whittle video commentary.

Joke Of The Day

In this comment.

I'm Sorry, But Who Did You Say Was Doing The Dying Here?

Great R.S. McCain post.

excerpt:

TPM's Eric Kleefeld headlines an item about a North Carolina protest, "Tea Party Rage -- Rage Against The Dying Of The Right."

This is a very interesting twist. Kleefeld would have his readers believe that the movement which is putting boots on the ground -- organizing dissent, bringing out people for protest rallies, training voters as grassroots activists -- is thereby giving evidence that it is "dying."

Obama's declining approval ratings, voters opposing single-payer health care by a 25-point margin -- all of this, Eric Kleefeld wants you to believe, is about "The Dying Of The Right."

How encouraging it is to see that liberal elitists are now resorting to such counter-factual rationalizations, telling themselves that these phenomena -- clear indications of Obama's miscalculations and policy overreach by Democrats in Congress -- are actually proof of desperation by the defeated "Right."

Certainly, it is heartening to me personally, as these grassroots protests are evidence of the power of "Libertarian Populism," which I described last year as "an enduring populist conception of the government in Washington as a corrupt insider racket controlled by special interests, in which both Democrats and Republicans are out of touch with the concerns of ordinary Americans."

Libertarian populism was "The Spirit of '94," the mad-as-hell mood that fueled the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. If the government in Washington is always by its nature an "insider racket controlled by special interests," both unresponsive and irresponsible, then effective opposition to the federal Leviathan is not about counting R's and D's in Congress, but rather about limiting the power of Leviathan.

And the failure of Republican leaders to live up to their limited-government rhetoric -- their seduction by David Brooks and "national greatness," which led to the discredited idiocy of "compassionate conservatism" -- is what has brought our nation under the thumb of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama.

The Tea Party movement appeals to a long and heroic tradition of "anti-government" activism in America. When John Cornyn gets booed in Texas, when union goons feel the need to beat up black man selling flags, in when Ben Cardin finds his town-hall meeting packed to fire-code limits in deep-blue Maryland, we are living in a moment that would bring a smile to the faces of those patriotic "angry mobs" who tarred-and-feathered royal tax collectors back in the day.

...

California Is Over

Good Charles Hugh Smith diagnosis.

Quote

Seen in comments here:

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill

What He Said

Good stuff:

The most interesting thing about Pelosi and Hoyer’s brand of McCarthyism is how pathetically ineffective it is. To their great surprise, calling the protesters “un-American” isn’t shutting them up. Today’s USA Today op-ed is the latest variation on one of the oldest plays in the Left’s playbook: painting their opposition as fundamentally illegitimate. It’s time for them to replace that page in their playbook, because it will never work again.

Declaring your opponents to be illegitimate is a lazy way to avoid having to debate them. No one expects powerful political leaders to lower themselves to debates with fringe lunatics. Much of the public will automatically ignore the ravings of madmen, without feeling any need to examine their arguments at length. If you discount the illegitimate opinions of all those insurance company shills, Republican party operatives, and racists thronging the town hall meetings, why, ObamaCare enjoys overwhelming support!

...

The Democrats are accustomed to deploying this strategy without much effort, since they had the enthusiastic support of the media. When you have total control over camera placement, it’s easy to film someone like Cindy Sheehan and her tiny band of crackpots as a huge grassroots movement with absolute moral integrity. It’s equally easy to point the cameras away from gigantic pro-life rallies in Washington, and pretend they didn’t happen. Unfortunately for them, Democrats now live in a world where they don’t have complete control over the cinematography, script, and soundtrack of the American epic any more… and they will never get it back.

They began losing it during the 2004 election, most notably in the case of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. It was remarkable to watch Democrat media shills take to the air within minutes of the Swift Boat Vets being thrust into the national spotlight, declaring them “discredited” and floating the usual dark insinuations about their character and motives. For the first time in recent political history, it didn’t work. The 2004 campaign ended with those Democrat operatives weeping in frustration, unable to figure out why repeatedly calling them “the discredited Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” didn’t discredit them. Frustration turned to horror when the rising alternative media had the impudence to question the legitimacy of Dan Rather, the designated heir to Walter Cronkite, and bring his phony National Guard document scam crashing down in flames.

The cultural and media landscape has changed enough to deprive Democrats and their media allies of the power to rule their opponents out-of-bounds easily. It’s darkly amusing to watch them fumble across this new, less slanted landscape, shrieking the devil words they think will scare voters out of questioning them. If you look beyond the squalid little insinuations about swastikas and un-American fifth columns, even the less hysterical challenges to the legitimacy of their opponents are revealing. The accusation that people asking questions at town hall meetings are paid operatives of the insurance companies supposes the superior virtue of politicians to private industry. When Obama’s political staff sends out marching orders to supporters, along with scripts for how to look credible and concerned while advocating state-run health care, it is considered to be noble “community organizing.” If insurance companies were to assist with any kind of organized resistance to Obama’s agenda, it would be denounced as sleazy and sinister.

To appreciate this mindset, you must embrace the central tenet of socialism: the State is caring, compassionate, and wise, far beyond the vile and money-grubbing businessmen of the private sector. The insurance industry couldn’t possibly know anything useful about insuring people, could it? Of course not. Only their greed prevents them from showering Americans with cheap, universal coverage. The same dynamic is at play when liberals sneer at the idea of allowing energy companies to have any say in energy policy. It’s also why the Left loves to extol the virtues of “working Americans,” while offering only hatred to the business owners who employ them, and arrogant contempt for the consumerist culture that purchases the products they create. On any given topic, the only legitimate voices belong to politicians and their supporters. Businessmen are expected to sit quietly in their cells and await judgment.

The Left’s challenge to the legitimacy of its opponents stands reality on its head. In truth, there is no greed as boundless and vicious as a politician’s lust for power… and unlike the energetic pursuit of the profit motive, the greed of a Nancy Pelosi produces nothing useful as a side effect. There is no class of people less qualified to run any industry than the political class, whose priorities never include the health of the industries they run into the ground. No one cares less about their “employees” and “customers” than a liberal politician. No one should be allowed to “buy” controlling interest in any industry with a stack of ballots, because the Constitutional restraints on government were not meant as minor inconveniences for the State to navigate around. Elections may have consequences, but the suspension of anyone’s right to property or free speech should never be among them.

In the end, health insurance is like any other commodity. There are only two ways to obtain it: buy it, or force someone else to give it to you. The people who understand this cold truth do not sacrifice the legitimacy of their dissent by acting outraged in the face of an outrage.

Bravo

Some must-hear straight talk from a mere commoner.

We're Going To Give You Pretend Money For Payment, But You Must Give Us Real Money As Tax On This 'Revenue'

California!

Bruce McQuain calls this the theater of the absurd, but that implies humor and entertainment value. Unfortunately, California’s attempt to get hard cash in taxes based on payments to businesses it made with imaginary money is neither humorous or entertaining. It does demonstrate the complete disconnect from reality suffered by the state’s political class in Sacramento:

Small businesses that received $682 million in IOUs from the state say California expects them to pay taxes on the worthless scraps of paper, but refuses to accept its own IOUs to pay debts or taxes. The vendors’ federal class action claims the state is trying to balance its budget on their backs.

Lead plaintiff Nancy Baird filled her contract with California to provide embroidered polo shirts to a youth camp run by the National Guard, but never was paid the $27,000 she was owed. She says California “paid” her with an IOU that two banks refused to accept - yet she had to pay California sales tax on the so-called “sale” of the uniforms.

California wants Baird and her colleagues to pay taxes on money she never received. The state of California hasn’t paid her the money they owe her, but they want her to pay the money she owes them. In any other situation, a court would laugh this one right out the door, and perhaps the federal court will do so. Baird would have no chance at all in a state court.

When governments start issuing IOUs instead of actual US currency, they are legitimizing that kind of transaction for themselves. To give Baird a pile of literally worthless paper and then object to Baird responding in kind is the worst kind of hypocrisy. Either California’s government deals in scrip, or it doesn’t, but the rules should be the same in either direction.

It’s difficult to think of a more breathtakingly stupid series of actions in government than what we’ve seen in California over the last few months. This one is practically pathological.

You've Gotta Hope So

Good rhetoric:

Obama has done it.

He's finally screwed the pooch this time. Drank from his well of invincibility one too many times to discover it's nothing but pure Kool-aid, and now his shiny, golden veneer is starting to strip away.

He and his gaggle of political goons are scared.

As per his bidding, he and his White House Chicago thugs have been forced to regress from an empty "hope and change" blurb to violent rhetoric like "If you get hit, we will punch you back twice as hard."

Is this the Sopranos?

Valiant prose like that really makes one proud to be an American right now, doesn't it? Such class.

We are witnessing an administration and an entire political party to begin to unravel right before our weary eyes, and all in such a short amount of time.

These sniveling Democrats, lowering themselves into calling dissenting Americans names like "Astroturf", and "internet rumor-mongers" who are "carrying swastikas", are officially showing the true colors of this pathetic administration and its radical lackeys, and there is nothing their state-run media hacks can do to help them.

Losing control of their seemingly once invincible aura, they have helplessly transformed almost overnight into a frightened Chicago street gang, who, frankly, have gotten the s--- kicked out of them by the Neighborhood Watch program.

The resistance to Obama's Health Scare boondoggle is authentic to the core, from the hearts and minds of well-intentioned, educated, articulate people hailing from all sides of this nation's political spectrum. They have finally had enough of the crooked Obama-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate, which operates by political stiff-arming, forcing the populace to accept ill-prepared, impossible to understand, shotgun legislation designed to transform the institutions of our nation into their own personal jack-booted thugacracy. Nothing of what they have done has been born of good intentions for the common welfare of our nation. As they are so fond of pointing out, "they won", and they feel it is their right to operate the way they do, just because they can. And the quicker, larger, and more confusing they make it, the more punch drunk the nation gets.

Not any more.

This week was a turning point. It may well become the defining moment of Obama's presidency, making him one of the most destructive presidential care-takers in the history of our nation. His master plan of blowing up our country's institutions in favor of his own warped socialist desires, along with his willing, power-drunk congressional conspirators, is finally starting to sicken the citizenry.

To quote one of our past enemies, Obama has managed to "awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."

He has no idea.

Here's How You Really Fix It

Denninger

But since there's nothing in it for petty tyrants, it's not going to happen.

Read This, Citizen!

Link

Ace Is Beside Himself

And he's not easily flappable. Great post.

Also, some more comic relief highlighted.

Great Goldberg Piece

Link

Noonan, In Vintage Form

"You Are Terrifying Us"

Ruthless Thug Photoessay

This is an outrage.

Symbols Matter

Just one of those coincidences.

"He Loves Little Dogs!"

Welcome comic relief.

Like A Petulant Child

I wanted to title this "Petulant Son Of A Bitch," but held back. Our President is an insolent little tin-pot tyrant.

Are you starting to get that 1770's, feeling yet?



H/T Brutally Honest.

They Think You Are Stupid

Great Hugh Hewitt column.

It begins:

President Obama's decision to unleash his operatives at the DNC, surrogates like Barbara Boxer, and his staff like Linda Douglas to slander and attempt to intimidate opponents of Obamacare not only has badly backfired, it has opened another front the president now finds himself fighting on: Does he intend to be the new Nixon, rather than the new FDR? Like Nixon, will he unleash a political operation that spirals out of control and ends his presidency?