Frenzied and Futile

Government: The redistributionist behemoth - The Washington Post:

People are less dissatisfied by what they lack than by what others have. And when government engages in redistribution in order to maximize the happiness of citizens who become more envious as they become more comfortable, government becomes increasingly frenzied and futile.

or as I put it, wealth is finite, envy is infinite.

Good one by George -- he hits the salient point that needs to be made OVER AND OVER. The US entitlement state is busily transferring wealth from the poorest Americans -- the young, to the wealthiest Americans -- the elderly, while the Democrats react politically to the only current attempt to remedy that -- the Ryan Plan, with the cynical pushing Grandma off the cliff ad.

It is the partisanship (usually of the right) that is constantly derided in the press. The hypocrisy (mostly of the left) needs more equal time!

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Kumbaya is a Song, Not a Poilicy

A word from “Zeb” Zobenica | Power Line:

Well worth the read. He pretty much nails OWS and unfortunately WAY too close to 50% of our current population for comfort.

A quick listen to the posturing on the straits / gulf out of Iran and the Chinese flexing their airpower, aircraft carrier, space muscles and of course economic power ought to be enough for people to realize that the world is still a very large, competitive and dangerous place.

But as always, it isn't -- until hit up aside the head with some serious lumber, around half of the population stumbles on without any clue ...

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How Heartless Can I Be???

Will false diagnosis cost Minnesota girl her life? | StarTribune.com:

In a nation by and for lawyers, this is an example of something that we have to fight. I don't care how adorable the little girl is -- this is a cancer that is diagnosed 350 times per year!!! So to not diagnose a "bump" on a baby as something that only shows up 350 times a year in the nation as cancer is malpractice?? Do you know what that means??

It means that we add to the never ending set of biopsies and tests to the already bloated list, all to save AT BEST 350 kids per year (and we won't save half that many). SIDs kills about 2,500 every year by comparison -- just as cute, just as dead -- they just don't have to do all the chemo.

We can't just keep rolling up the costs of "defensive medicine" endlessly. We are all going to die, some of us young. As technology gets better the supposedly "preventable" death potentials rise, but if we demand that Doctors test for all possible conditions, no matter how rare, and then sue them if they fail to, our medical costs will continue to grow so much as to bankrupt the system and prevent reasonable care for any of us!!

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WARNING ... Off By One??

Iran warns U.S. over aircraft carrier - CNN.com:

BO assured us he would just sit down and talk with Iran. Gee, I wonder why they would issue us a warning??? Did they forget that "The One" was our leader??? Oops, perhaps we were "off by one" and we are being led by "B ZERO" ???

Perhaps he could just apologize to them?

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Purple Cow New Year

Seth's Blog: The chance of a lifetime:

Seth has written a bunch of books -- a number of which I've read. "Purple Cow" is just a memorable name.

I read his blog most days on NewsFire -- I think his New Years advice is worthy of a wider audience.

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329K or 27K??? PANIC!!

KNIGHT: Voter ID terrifies Democrats - Washington Times:

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson rejected Mr. Perez’s math and explained on Fox News why the law is necessary. The stateDepartment of Motor Vehicles audited a state Election Commission report that said 239,333 people were registered to vote but had no photo ID. The DMV found that 37,000 were deceased, more than 90,000 had moved to other states, and others had names not matched to IDs. That left only 27,000 people registered without a photo ID but who could vote by signing an affidavit as to their identity.

So Mr Fast and Furious, Eric Holder bandies about 239K voters that MIGHT be "disenfranchised", and the real number shows 302,333 potential fraudulent votes -- still registered, but no longer eligible -- and DUH, had no photo ID!!

There can ONLY be ONE single reason that Democrats are foursquare against photo ID. They are well aware that they run at least 10s and probably 100s or thousands or more illegal votes through key areas of the country that are high percentage Democrat!!! If voters have to have a photo ID, something around 5% of "the vote" in many key areas will suddenly "disappear", and it could be FAR worse than that!!!

At present we have NO IDEA how big the number of fraudulent voters are out there, but every number that I'd seen looks like it is at least 100's of thousands in most states!!

It is little wonder that Democrats are in COMPLETE PANIC on this one!!

Oh, I bought a new iPhone 4 this weekend -- guess what? I had to produce a state provided photo ID!! Hear any complaints about cell phone companies requiring photo ID?? Know anyone with a cell phone?? I rest my case!!

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BO Death Penalty vs Life

Obama signs defense bill 'with reservations' - CNN.com:

"I want to clarify that my administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens," Obama said in a statement Saturday. "Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a nation."

However he WILL kill US citizens abroad, and HAS already done so .... at least with drones.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/09/30/national/main20113853.shtml

Do we have a press in this country at all?? They raised holy hell about W detaining FOREIGN fighters at Gitmo. Now they are silent as lambs on Gitmo, and on BO KILLING US CITIZENS abroad ... but are completely willing to support complete BO gibberish that he is somehow holier than thou because he won't hold them "indefinitely". I bet he doesn't claim he supports endless Trillion $$$ deficits as well, but they look pretty darned "indefinite" to me!!!

I guess in this case he is "moral" because he ONLY supports the death penalty.

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Change is Constant

Even the Warmists Don't Believe In Global Warming - Forbes:

Good little summary of the weakness of the warmist position. The most damning to me is that the group would blatantly oppose technology that allowed carbon to be sequestered, even though it may be vastly more effect. Pretty clear that their agenda is "control of fossil fuel use" ... or just "control". Climate related outcomes would be incidental.

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Some Americans Still Moral?

Kickbacks Don’t Always Work | Power Line:

Good little PL post. Democrats are sure that everyone can be bought. Maybe there are still some people with a little more moral fibre than that left in America??

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Physics = Faith

The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith—By Alan P. Lightman (Harper's Magazine)

Man lives by faith -- we can't even really choose our faith. We can reject God, in which case Satan helps us believe we have no faith at all. Oh, but we do -- we are all play the eternal faith game at the price of our immortal souls.

As I've commented in other blogs, it has become quite well accepted in theoretical physicists that our goldilocks universe is WAY too precise to be anything but directly "created for us", or a happenstance in something like 10 to the 500th universes. So you get to have faith that our universe was the random accident in a huge number of existing universes, and then you believe that over billions of years with no intelligent selection, we happened to evolve here with consciousness, a built in desire to know our origins and a randomly selected meme to postulate an infinite God. You can either believe in that, or you can believe in God ... either way, you have faith in what you believe.

That same uncertainty disturbs many physicists who are adjusting to the idea of the multiverse. Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.

We're Doomed

The GOP’s Payroll-tax Debacle - Charles Krauthammer - National Review Online

Good coverage of the way politics has trumped any sense of intelligent policy or propriety in the interest of pure politics. Certainly a two month extension makes no sense at all -- but that is the beauty of it-- if all you care about is political theatre and raw political power. Republicans just never quite understand Machiavelli !!! It makes NO DIFFERENCE how foolish, damaging, inconsistent, evil, counterproductive, or any other negative something is. If it wins politically, IT WINS!!

The fact that Charles feels the House Republicans are like the Animal House band shows that in his heart of hearts, he would rather be politically savvy and thus "a winner", than right. I'd like to think that I would stand for the right and allow my self to be fed to the lions as the early Christians did while the Romans laughed and hooted, but I don't know -- the pain of being torn to shreds vs the joy of at least imagined intellectual superiority?? It isn't hard at all to follow the arrow of human nature on that one.

The thing that needs to be remembered is always the longer run. In the long run we are ALL "torn to shreds" (dead) ... and if we continue to follow the kind of behavior of BO, the Democrats, and now capitulated by the House Republicans, we are dead as a nation -- if not already, very very soon.

"Coarseness"??

Newt Gingrich Called 'F-cking A--hole' By Man At Campaign Stop

Nah, Gingerich is as Republican!!! You can call them whatever you want -- er as long as it isn't positive, the MSM tries to avoid publishing that.

BO??? He says he thinks he is the 4th greatest President in US History during a CBS 60 min interview, and they CUT IT!!! How often does the MSM tell us that Gingerich is arrogant??

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, we're not done yet. I've got five more years of stuff to do. But not only saving this country from a great depression. Not only saving the auto industry. But putting in place a system in which we're gonna start lowering health care costs and you're never gonna go bankrupt because you get sick or somebody in your family gets sick. Making sure that we have reformed the financial system, so we never again have taxpayer-funded bailouts, and the system is more stable and secure. Making sure that we've got millions of kids out here who are able to go to college because we've expanded student loans and made college more affordable. Ending Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Decimating al Qaeda, including Bin Laden being taken off the field. Restoring America's respect around the world.

The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president -- with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln -- just in terms of what we've gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we've got a lot more work to do. And we're gonna keep on at it

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/pj-gladnick/2011/12/16/60-minutes-broadcast-edits-out-laughable-obama-claim-4th-greatest-presi#ixzz1hBJMuYAw

Modernizing Conservatism

Breakthrough Journal: Issue 2 : MODERNIZING CONSERVATISM

Generally well written but longish.

Three major points I tend to agree with:

1), "Victory" in an ideological sense is impossible in the US given our political structures

2), Liberals and Conservatives have fundamentally different world views -- we will not "finally get educated and all get along"

3). Entitlements are not going away -- so we better figure out how to reform, restructure, innovate, etc on them

I worry about #1 the most ... with the MSM, the SCOTUS and legal system in general being basically liberal, the education system being liberal, the ever increasing number of government workers both liberal and unionized, and the "minority" birth and legal/illegal immigration rate turning those "minorities" into future majorities, it seems that the Statist Re-Distributionist movement MAY have a shot to "win" at some point.

Lie of the Year

"Lie of the year": Dem take on GOP Medicare vote - CBS News

Wow, the generally left-leaning "politifact" has picked the constant Democrat claim that Republicans "voted to end Medicare" as the lie of the year.

I love the runner up, Michelle Bachman saying "A woman came up to me and said .." ... the "LIE" is not that "no woman came up to her" ... it is that the woman's claim about a vaccine causing retardation is wrong.

Lovely. I suspect we ALL know one or more people that believe that some vaccines cause illness. Do they? Well, almost certainly not nearly as often as people claim, but in some cases it is admitted that the vaccines CAN cause disease. Much like "plane crashes do happen" ... but we worry about them far more than is warranted. I have a VERY tough time calling this a "lie" in the same way as the winner. If we make politicians responsible for the correctness of what they pass on when "a guy on the campaign trail told me ..." they will need to be a lot quieter.

How about Eric Holder testifying he had no knowledge of Fast and Furious, then sending a memo with the same statement, then having to withdraw both because it came to light he had been briefed on it multiple times?

How about the constant claims about "The Bush Tax cuts for the wealthy", when by BO's own definition, "the wealthy" are people that make $250K or more, and over 10 years they got $700B and the rest of the income levels got $3T out of the Bush cuts.

For extra credit, when the DEMOCRATS failed to even try to raise taxes in 07-08 when they had both houses of congress, then proceeded to not bring it up in 09-10 when they had both houses, 59-60 votes in the Senate, plus the WH they never took action until they were lame ducks at the end of 10, and then THEY EXTENDED THEM!!!! Could there POSSIBLY be any bigger lie then to still complain about the cuts "for the wealthy"????

The Right to Rise

Jeb Bush: Capitalism and the Right to Rise - WSJ.com

Very well done. The choice between the false hope of the "straight line of Statist progress" that is really a FLAT LINE, and the very statistically real, but never certain hope of "the jagged line of market progress".

In short, we must choose between the straight line promised by the statists and the jagged line of economic freedom. The straight line of gradual and controlled growth is what the statists promise but can never deliver. The jagged line offers no guarantees but has a powerful record of delivering the most prosperity and the most opportunity to the most people. We cannot possibly know in advance what freedom promises for 312 million individuals. But unless we are willing to explore the jagged line of freedom, we will be stuck with the straight line. And the straight line, it turns out, is a flat line.