Give me a break. Are we really to believe that white-on-black crime is such a huge issue as to override (albeit totally tasteless) expressions of free speech, whereas male-on-female crime is right up there with stampeding unicorns as a national problem?
Obviously, neither effigy should result in arrest - the First Amendment protecting the right to be tacky as well as eloquent - but the fact that one effigy resulted in laughter, and another, in arrest, is absurd.
Subtitled: How the Marxist freak show known as Barack Obama will turn this country into a communistic hell-hole in less time than it takes to let the survivor of an abortion die on an operating room table.
I’m assuming y’all have seen this, but, if not, check out The Obamessiah’s radio speech in 2001:
Ann Althouse declares that this is just normal constitutional law prof talk. With all respect for Prof. Althouse, the quote in question says:
“Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.”
While one could interpret this to mean that the “tragedy” of the civil rights movement is that the movers and shakers focused more on the Supreme Court and less upon traditional political processes, the more natural reading of the statement is that “tragedy” is connected to what comes immediately before it (i.e. no radical reshaping of our Constitutional framework); the words after them indicate other means to bring about “redistributive change.” The only way that Prof. Althouse’s interpretation works is if Obama has the mental focus of a hummingbird on crack, flitting from the non-radicalism of the Warren Court to the tragedy of the lack of community organising and then straight back to “redistributive change.”
While Obama’s candence and discussion of negative rights make this whole thing sound like the legal version of quantum mechanics, this is actually an issue that affects Americans in the most fundamental way. A negative right is the right to be left alone, to make one’s own decisions, determine the course of one’s own life - in short, to give the government the middle finger. (This is a right that liberals only believe in when it comes to pregnancy.) When we subtitute negative rights - for example, the right to decide where to live without the government interfering - for positive rights - e.g. the right to have the government give you a home - we lose the corresponding negative right. We cannot retain the right to non-interference when we give the government a carte blance to tell us how to run our lives.
Snark about Obama’s opposition to protecting newborns aside, it is nothing short of amazing that the same people who believe that the government has no place in abortion - in which two human beings are involved, and only one is capable of making a choice - believe that government ought to run our health care system. For those opposed to 24-hour waiting periods for abortion, why would you beg for a system that would place waiting periods on every single aspect of medical treatment, from ultrasounds to visits with specialists? At least now, people with lousy health insurance can pay out of pocket; those who are unfairly denied coverage can sue; and those who want better care can find a health plan which will give it to them. If the government runs most health care, access to that which is not run by the government will be almost non-existent, and available only to the rich; lawsuits against the government for failure to pay will be barred by sovereign immunity; and people will lack any other options for improved care. It is every caricatured daemon of the conservative movement that liberals use to frighten others, but brought to you by progressives - the very same people who have made a fortune off of suinig doctors and health insurance companies.
The mindlessness does not end with socialised health care. As anyone who has read Anthem or The Handmaid’s Tale, has a passing knowledge of the events leading up to WWII in Europe, or has seen the destruction in Russia following the imposition of communism can tell you, the greatest harm to society often arises out of an attempt to create a utopia. In the cost-benefit analysis, utopists forget the costs - the loss of negative rights being the easiest to ignore and the most frightening in reality. This business of wanting to state that the Constitution should guarantee a home, a job, and health care eviscerates our most fundamental freedoms. As James Madison said,
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
The government is not one of angels, and no amounts of PhotoShopped halos above Obama’s head will change that reality. (One wonders how someone who calls himself a Christian is not ashamed and humiliated by such treatment.) Government is neither beneficient nor omniscient; at best, it can stop other countries from harming us, and police our actions internally. (Heaven knows that governments, and the people who run them, have enough problems sticking within those parameters as it is.) There is no reason to think that government - run by human beings - will suddenly turn into Cinderella’s fairy godmother if we put the right person in the White House, close the right “tax loopholes,” or redistribute wealth just a little bit more. Far more likely is a descent back into oppression and tyranny - the default government of human existence. America - and other free countries - do not exist as a matter of right or of the course of nature, but by terrific struggle against oppressive regimes. Begging for oppression in the name of “redistributive justice” is madness.
Or, refuting liberal talking points, one at a time.
An analysis of why the polls differ so much. The AP has the candidates in a virtual tie, while other organisations have Obama in a 14-point lead. As Ann Coulter pointed out last week, the polling margin of error always leans for the Democrats. There are two problems with this: it makes liberals think that there is something wrong with the country, since no one they know is willing to admit to voting for the opposition, and the polls agree; and, in a race like this, with “racism” being thrown about like beads during Mardi Gras, anything other than a landslide victory for Obama will be taken as proof of racism in the Republican ranks.
McCain at the Alfred Smith Memorial Dinner. It’s better than Sarah Palin’s nomination speech, if such a thing is possible. Watch Hillary laugh - and laugh - and laugh. Watch Barack laugh, then grin tightly, then look like a deer in headlights.
The Democrats, having already confiscated 15% of people’s income (remember, your employer chips in half), now want to run your 401(k)s. Your new “401(k)” will be run by the government, return a measly 3% per year, not be tax-deductible, and will result in another massive wealth transfer. (Hat tip: Rachel Lucas.) The liberals warned us to not hand over power to the government in the wake of 9/11; the same applies in the wake of financial disasters as well as those initiated by terrorists. At least it wasn’t our own government that was behind 9/11; the same cannot be said of the subprime mortgage crisis.
I can tell you unequivocally, that every well-designed commercial online payment system is going to have the 3/4 digit code check AND the ZIP check turned ON by default.
Any merchant (Obama’s campaign in this case is a ‘merchant’) who is accepting payment without these checks had to actively go in and turn these checks OFF. This is easy to do and could probably be done with about 6 clicks in less than 2 minutes (un-checking the boxes that specify these safety checks and clicking ‘Save’). What’s much harder for most folks is making the decision to do this. Most merchants won’t make this decision because they want card holders to be protected.
Anybody who swipes at the pump knows that getting the billing zip right for an authorized purchaser is not hard at all. And it’s a great anti-fraud check.
What gets me about this is that Obama is telling all of us in advance how fantastically careless he intends to be with *your* money!
True that.
We got Sarah running with McCain in ‘08. Proving once again that the Republican party has some pretty awesome people who would make great candidates, there is a petition to get Joe the Plumber to run for Congress in 2010. He said that he would consider it. Sign the petition, read the blog, and enjoy the “Plunge Washington” graphics!
I received the following email from Patrick Frey of Patterico’s Pontifications:
I submitted a request for renewal before the expiration date, but the company (1&1 Internet) allowed it to be sold anyway, and it’s now being auctioned off.
Bloggers: if they did it to me, they can do it to you.
I need people to talk about this and draw attention to it.
Aside from the http://70.32.75.225 address, Patterico’s blog - a fantastic site that calls out the media on its liberal bias and has been mentioned in Ann Coulter’s most recent column - can be found at http://patterico.net.
Internet squatting has been an issue for several years. People who have no use for a domain name will purchase it (usually for a few dollars), then sell it (at a remarkable profit) to the person or corporation who would want it. For example, a person could have purchased honda.com or the like, then sold it for a king’s ransom to the corporation bearing that name.
This also happens to bloggers who have owned a domain name for several years. In November of 2006, the Crescat Sententia bloggers failed to renew their domain name. Immediately upon expiration, a company purchased the domain and attempted to sell it back to Crescat for much more than they had paid for it. (Here.)
Now, companies which rent domain names are seeing an opportunity for easy cash in selling domain names that are renewed in a timely fashion. Given that the value of the domain, beyond your $25 or whatever, is entirely based on the work of the blogger - whose words are copyrighted, and, arguably, who may have a common-law trademark in his domain and blog name - and not the work of the hosting company, this is a reprehensible practise.
It happened to Crescat; it happened to Patterico; it could happen to you. The best way to ensure that this happens less, not more, frequently, is to ensure that any company which does this has its name dragged through the mud across the internet. To that end, please re-post this on your own blogs (I know, blogspotters and wordpressers, that you don’t have to worry about this, but take one for the team) and, if you are doing business with 1&1, find another company.
A bloggish smorgasboard for your political and nerdy appetite.
Mary Katharine Ham of the Weekly Standard wrote that one poll, post-”Joe the Plumber,” has McCain within a point of Obama. (Here.) This poll, unlike others, includes cell-phone only households. Traditionally, pollsters have assumed that those people would lean Democrat or would mirror landline households; however, this poll seems to indicate otherwise. This blogger’s theory: cell-only users may be more into the internet, and, in this election season in particular, the news that is available via the mainstream media is far different than what is found on the interwebs.
Speaking of the election and polling: the SF Gate has an article about the energy and excitement that Sarah Palin generates (here), and Michelle Malkin links to news articles - ignored by the larger media outlets - about record turnout at Palin rallies in Colorado (here). Then again, it’s not a surprise that the media - a media which writes negatively about McCain roughly 75% of the time, but laudes Obama - would not want to advertise this.
As previously blogged, McCain pays his female staffers more, on the average, than his male staffers; Obama, however, pays women $0.83 for every dollar earned by men. Obama’s defence when Palin brings this up at rallies?
The Democratic senator’s campaign said Palin was distorting a study that showed that McCain “has more women in senior, higher-paid positions - not that women are being paid less than men for the same job.” Obama has fewer senior staffers because he is a first-term senator.
Please, Senator Obama, do you need to advance the stereotype that people go to law school because they can’t do math? When you’re talking about averages, the absolute number of data points is irrelevant (unless that number is so small as to increase the margin of error beyond the significance of the findings). The issue is the relative distribution, not the absolute number, of men and women in those positions.
If Obama’s defence is that his senior positions are filled with men, but McCain manages gender parity (or better) among his top staffers, then that brings up another issue: why Obama hasn’t hired qualified women to fill his senior staffing roles. As Obama has fewer senior roles to fill, he has an easier, not harder, time achieving gender parity, as he needs fewer top-notch women.
Nice try, Senator. Now go and find some qualified women to help you in your journey to the top, which has lead you to throw Alice Palmer, Hillary Clinton, and now Sarah Palin under the bus.
Like a horror-movie villain, the old “Sarah Palin doesn’t know what a VP does” meme won’t die. First, her detractors criticised her for saying that she would not know what role she would have in a McCain administration. Turns out, the Constitution gives exactly two roles to the VP: President of the Senate, and President should the person actually in that role pass away.
In September, Gov. Palin said that, in a McCain administration, she would focus on energy, reform, and helping special-needs children (here). Much like a First Lady, the VP does not have specific duties or obligations, but may use the role and the prominence to work on various policies which are aligned with that individual’s interests or expertise.
“[T]hey’re in charge of the U.S. Senate so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom,”
she gave a logical, coherent response about both the constitutional and unofficial roles of the Vice President.
Now, her detractors are complaining that she “overstated” the role of the VP. Well, no, she did not. The Constitution states that the VP is the President of the Senate, and the colloquial “in charge” would not be inappropriate. The Constitution does not limit the role of the VP; Palin would certainly be allowed to lobby the Senate to make policy changes, enact legislation, and do whatever else she wants. Presidents and VPs work with the Senate all the time to get legislation through; if such were not the case, Presidents could not coherently talk about making (as opposed to signing or line-item vetoing) new laws. Yet, no one seems to be saying that Barack Obama, when he would “cut taxes,” is co-opting the role of the House.
Best of all, the ponitificating talking heads miss the point. Should anyone wonder who “Brandon” is, he is a third-grader. Palin said this when talking to elementary-school students, who, by definition, aren’t really equipped to talk about the intricacies of the history of the Vice President’s role in the Senate.
Apparently, we now need a “Brandon the Third Grader” to explain basic stuff to the electorate. Maybe he can play with “Joe the Plumber’s” kids.
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