Steam Valve

Malkin's Updated Fable

Michelle Malkin has updated the ant and grasshopper fable to more accurately portray modern life in the US of A.

Obama the Chicago Thug

I keep reading that the voters don't know enough about Obama. Here's a little tidbit: his campaign is threatening to take away the broadcast licenses of stations that air the NRA's Obama commercial attacking Obama's position on gun control. This may be how they do things in Chicago, but we sure don't need a thug like this as our president.

Although the Obama campaign protests that the commercial's statements are untrue, Volokh demonstrates pretty convincingly that the statements are based on fact, despite a FactCheck article implying otherwise. Here's an excerpt:

One final NRA claim does not get a FactCheck rating, but it does get a response that might as well as come from the Obama press office. That is: "Obama would be the most anti-gun president in American history."

FactCheck supplies Obama's quote from Heller decision day, beginning with "I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms..", and promising, "As President, I will uphold the constitutional rights of law-abiding gun-owners, hunters, and sportsmen. I know that what works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne."

Well, that Obama has "always believed" in the individual Second Amendment right did not prevent him from proposing a national ban on concealed carry, a ban on 90% of gun stores, a 500% tax increase on firearms and ammunition--as the FactCheck article itself reports. If a candidate proposed banning 90% of bookstores and a huge tax increase on books, it might be justifiable to predict that he would be "the most anti-book president in American history"--notwithstanding his proclaimed belief in the individual First Amendment right.

Gee, I wonder if the ACLU will now do a commercial exposing Obama's position on the first amendment.  As it applies to commercials that attack him.

In the meantime, even the New York Times is now chastising Obama for his own misleading campaign ads.  As far as I can see, McCain's not threatening any broadcast licenses over those ads.

Cross posted at Truth v. The Machine

A Good Start

According to yahoo.com, Democrats are ready to let the ban on offshore drilling expire. That's a good start.

Democrats have decided to allow a quarter-century ban on drilling for oil off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to expire next week, conceding defeat in a months-long battle with the and Republicans set off by $4 a gallon gasoline prices this summer.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., told reporters Tuesday that a provision continuing the moratorium will be dropped this year from a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running after Congress recesses for the election.

Republicans have made lifting the ban a key campaign issue after gasoline prices spiked this summer and public opinion turned in favor of more drilling. President Bush lifted an executive ban on offshore drilling in July.

"If true, this capitulation by Democrats following months of Republican pressure is a big victory for Americans struggling with record gasoline prices," said House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio.

It's a start. Now we need legislation to stop environmental groups from bringing lawsuits to prevent us from acting on this.

Cross posted at Truth v.The Machine

Patriotism Has Nothing to do With Paying Taxes

Amid the gut-wrenching economic news, exposing those who have been entrusted with our nation's well-being as power-hungry, greedy souls who put their own interests and those of their friends well above the interests of their country and its citizens, all played against the backdrop of forces that seek to destroy us, a congress that is incapable of addressing important issues that face us, and a presidential campaign that gets dirtier by the day, I read today a piece that gave me hope. But you have to read it to the end. It's Bill Whittle writing at the National Review Online:

I live a few miles from Santa Monica High School, in California. There, young men and women are taught that America is “a terrorist nation,” “one of the worst regimes in history,” that it’s twice-elected leader is “the son of the devil,” and dictator of this “fascist” country. Further, “patriotism” is taught by dragging an American flag across the classroom floor, because the nation’s truest patriots, as we should know by now, are those who are most able to despise it.

This is only high school, remember: in college things get much, much worse.

Two generations, now, are being raised on this poison, and the reason for that is this: the enemies of this city cannot come out and simply say, “Do not defend the city.” Even the smartest among us can see that is simple treason. But they can say, “The City is not worth defending.” So they say that, and they say that all the time and in as many different ways as they are able.

If you step far enough back to look at the whole of human history, you will begin to see a very plain rhythm: a heartbeat of civilization. Steep climbs out of disease and ignorance into the light of medicine and learning — and then a sudden collapse back into darkness. And it is in that darkness that most humans have lived their lives: poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The pattern is always the same: at the height of a civilization’s powers something catastrophic seems to occur — a loss of will, a failure of nerve, and above all an unwillingness to identify with the values and customs that have produced such wonders.

The Russians say a fish rots from the head down. They ought to know. It may not be factually true that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, the saying has passed into common usage because the image as the ring of truth to it: time and time again, the good and decent common people have manned the walls of the city, and have been ready to give their lives in its defense, only to discover too late that some silk-robed son of a bitch has snuck out of the palace at midnight and thrown open the gates to the barbarians outside.

And how is this done, this “throwing open of the gates?” How are defenders taken off the walls?

Well, most of what I learned about Vietnam I learned from men like Oliver Stone. This self-loathing narcissist has repeatedly tried to inculcate in me a sense of despair and outrage at my own government, my own culture, my own people and ultimately myself. He tried to convince me — and he is a skillfull man — that my own government murdered my own President for political gain. I am told daily in those darkened temples that rogue CIA elements run a puppet government, that the real threat to the nation comes from the generals that defend it, or from the businessmen that provide the prosperity we take for granted.

I sit with others in darkened rooms, watching films like Redacted, Stop-Loss, and In the Valley of Elah, and see our brave young soldiers depicted as murderers, rapists, broken psychotics or ignorant dupes –visions foisted upon me by bitter and isolated millionaires such as Brian de Palma and Paul Haggis and all the rest.

I’ve been told this story in some form or another, every day of every week of the past 30 years of my life. It wasn’t always so.

But it is certainly so today. And standing against all this hypnotic power — the power of the mythmakers in Hollywood, the power of the information peddlers in the media, the corrosive power of America-hating professors on every campus in America… against all that we find an old warrior — a paladin if ever there was one — an old, beat-up warhorse standing up in defense of his city one last time. And beside him: a wonder. A common person… just a regular mom who goes to work, does a difficult job with intelligence and energy and grace and every-day competence and then puts it away to go home and have dinner with the family.

Against all of that stand these two.

No wonder they must be destroyed. Because — Sarah Palin especially — presents a mortal threat to these people who have determined over cocktails who the next President should be and who now clearly mean to grind into metal shards the transaxle of their credibility in order to get the result they must have. Truly, they are before our eyes destroying the machine they have built in order to get their victory. What the hell is so threatening to be worth that?

Only this: the living proof that they are not needed. Not needed to govern, not needed to influence and guide, not needed to lecture us on our intellectual and moral failings which are visible only from the heights of Manhattan skyscrapers or the palaces up on Mulholland Drive. Not needed. We can do it — and do it better — without all of them.

When all is said and done, Civilizations do not fall because of the barbarians at the gates. Nor does a great city fall from the death wish of bored and morally bankrupt stewards presumably sworn to its defense. Civilizations fall only because each citizen of the city comes to accept that nothing can be done to rally and rebuild broken walls; that ground lost may never be recovered; and that greatness lived in our grandparents but not our grandchildren. Yes, our betters tell us these things daily. But that doesn’t mean we have to believe it.

Ask the common people of all politics and persuasions aboard Flight 93 whether greatness and courage has deserted America. Through this magical crystal ball — the one we are using right now — we common people can speak to one another. And by reminding ourselves and those around us of who we are, where we came from, what we have achieved together and of the marvels we have yet to achieve, we may laugh in the face of despair and mock those people that think a man with an MBA from Harvard knows more about running a gas station than the man that actually runs the gas station.

It is the small-town virtues of self-reliance, hard work, personal responsibility, and common-sense ingenuity — and not those of the preening cosmopolitans that gape at them in mixed contempt and bafflement — that have made us the inheritors of the most magnificent, noble, decent and free society ever to appear on this earth. This Western Civilization… this American City… has earned the right to greet each sunrise with a blast of silver trumpets that can bring down mountains.

And what, really, is a Legion of Narcissists and a Confederacy of Despair against that?

Cross posted at Truth v. The Machine

DC Circus

Every once in a while I'm in my car around lunchtime, and when I am, I listen to Rush Limbaugh. That happened today and I heard Rush say something very simple, very true, and very much ignored by most of what we hear from all sides in the media: congress makes the (federal) laws.

(Which reminds me that I read recently that some poll found that most Americans think that the republicans control Congress.)

But we have all of this campaign rhetoric trumpeting how this or that presidential candidate will change the laws to make them fairer, or better. And in the meantime, I don't hear anybody talking about the power of congress. And precious little about how Congress has created the system that allowed the economic crisis we find ourselves in to happen in the first place.

And today I read an article from the Heritage Foundation giving more background on how Congress has shaped the failed energy policy that we are laboring under now:

If Washington really wanted to help Detroit, they could end the regulatory nightmare that prevents profitable, fuel-efficient cars from reaching market. For example, Ford is going to sell a car that gets 65 miles per gallon starting in November. But this car will only be available in Europe. Why? Because the car runs on diesel and environmentalists here in the United States have fought to keep diesel taxes high and refinery capacity low. As a result, the car would just not be profitable here in America. A national energy policy that afforded Detroit more engineering options to make more fuel-efficient cars wouldn’t cost the taxpayers a cent and would undoubtedly create more jobs and reduce our oil consumption.

Meanwhile, speaker Pelosi has continued to showcase her ignorance on energy by referring to natural gas as an alternative to fossil fuels, while, along with Harry Reid, using her power to bully republicans who had been trying to bring energy bills up for debate by shutting the lights off.

And now Harry Reid says nobody knows what to do.
What a circus.

Cross-posted at Truth v. The Machine

Economic Cancer

Those who favor tighter environmental regulations like to argue that cancer takes a long time to develop, and that's why we should ban things before we have any real proof that they'll kill us.

It's certainly true that many things in life take a long time to develop. Like our current financial developments spawned by the mortgage meltdown. An IBD editorial explores the development of federal regulations begun during the Clinton administration:

Yes, the market was fueled by greed and overleveraging in the secondary market for subprimes, vis-a-vis mortgaged-backed securities traded on Wall Street. But the seed was planted in the '90s by Clinton and his social engineers. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck.

And it was the Clinton administration that mismanaged the quasi-governmental agencies that over the decades have come to manage the real estate market in America.

As soon as Clinton crony Franklin Delano Raines took the helm in 1999 at Fannie Mae, for example, he used it as his personal piggy bank, looting it for a total of almost $100 million in compensation by the time he left in early 2005 under an ethical cloud.

Other Clinton cronies, including Janet Reno aide Jamie Gorelick, padded their pockets to the tune of another $75 million.

Raines was accused of overstating earnings and shifting losses so he and other senior executives could earn big bonuses.

In the end, Fannie had to pay a record $400 million civil fine for SEC and other violations, while also agreeing as part of a settlement to make changes in its accounting procedures and ways of managing risk.

But it was too little, too late. Raines had reportedly steered Fannie Mae business to subprime giant Countrywide Financial, which was saved from bankruptcy by Bank of America.

At the same time, the Clinton administration was pushing Fannie and her brother Freddie Mac to buy more mortgages from low-income households.

The Clinton-era corruption, combined with unprecedented catering to affordable-housing lobbyists, resulted in today's nationalization of both Fannie and Freddie, a move that is expected to cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.

And the worst is far from over. By the time it is, we'll all be paying for Clinton's social experiment, one that Obama hopes to trump with a whole new round of meddling in the housing and jobs markets. In fact, the social experiment Obama has planned could dwarf both the Great Society and New Deal in size and scope.

There's a political root cause to this mess that we ignore at our peril. If we blame the wrong culprits, we'll learn the wrong lessons. And taxpayers will be on the hook for even larger bailouts down the road.

But the government-can-do-no-wrong crowd just doesn't get it. They won't acknowledge the law of unintended consequences from well-meaning, if misguided, acts.

Obama and Democrats on the Hill think even more regulation and more interference in the market will solve the problem their policies helped cause. For now, unarmed by the historic record, conventional wisdom is buying into their blame-business-first rhetoric and bigger-government solutions.

While government arguably has a role in helping low-income folks buy a home, Clinton went overboard by strong-arming lenders with tougher and tougher regulations, which only led to lenders taking on hundreds of billions in subprime bilge.

Market failure? Hardly. Once again, this crisis has government's fingerprints all over it.

Cross-posted at Truth v. The Machine

Ire of the Intelligentsia

A psychiatrist explains the liberal venom directed at Palin:

The nomination of Sarah Palin has driven the cognoscenti over the edge. Their attacks on her have distilled and crystallized all of the venom they feel toward their inferiors who have the temerity to challenge their wisdom.
. . .

I suspect much of the rage that has uncovered itself from the left, the fury that a redneck idiot like Sarah Palin could be swinging an election of one of theirs that they thought was a done deal, away from them, is a reaction to once again seeing their deserved power slip away. Professors of post-modernism, feminist and queer studies and other such arcana, are fairly well paid and receive tenure at some of our most prestigious institutions, yet the unwashed hordes rarely accord them the respect and awe they so richly deserve. It is a puzzle that some of our best and brightest have failed to elucidate (despite their high IQs.) Since much of the MSM has studied in the same prestigious institutions and have incorporated the same sense of superiority, it is very difficult for them to recognize their own provincialism and attend to their own limitations. Further, the intellectualization that passes for learning in much of elite academia (and please note that, thus far, such foolishness has not yet infected the hard sciences, though if Harvard is any omen, the future is of concern) specifically impairs judgment. When all situations must be forced to conform to the procrustean bed based on the quasi-Marxist dialectic of oppressors and oppressed, judgemt (sic) must necessarily be suspended lest it fail to adhere to the proper paradigm. I would much sooner trust the judgment of an Alaskan redneck to the judgment of an Ivy league graduate with little experience in the real world whose thinking has been contaminated by what passes for education in the post-modern university.

Cross-posted at Truth v. The Machine

Gloria Steinem: But Palin's not like Hillary

From Gloria Steinem:

Sarah Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Hillary Clinton

But that's a good thing, Gloria.

Politics Masquerading as Science

Patrick J. Michaels, research professor of environmental sciences, past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and former program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society, wrote a scathing review of the latest "Synthesis Report" draft coming out of the United States' Climate Change Science Program:

Trash the entire report. It's neither scientific nor logical. It's a political document. Send the product lead back to Asheville and the senior editor back to Hollywood.

Pretty strong words from a climatologist with such impressive credentials. He doesn't mince words:

Virtually every sentence can be contested or simply ignores published science that disagrees with CCSP's preconceived message. In its own words: "Aggressive near-term actions would be required to alter the future path of human-induced warming... future generations will inherit the legacy of our decisions."

If "future generations" and "legacy of our decisions" sound more to you like politics rather than science, you're correct. The CCSP report isn't a science document at all. Not unless global warming science is a virtually one-sided world where almost everything is bad and getting worse, and where a moderate response dishonors our progenitors.

Of course, this can't be. Global warming lengthens growing seasons. Carbon dioxide, the cause of (part of the) warming (dormant for 11 years now) clearly improves crop yields in a world where stupid global warming policies (like burning our food supply in cars) are increasing food scarcity. If they have the money, by and large, Americans move to a warmer climate. And so on - which is why the CCSP document and the delete key should become intimate friends.

How did such a remarkable distortion see the light day? The "product lead" is Tom Karl, who heads the Commerce Department's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. He is perhaps the most political and politically savvy climate scientist in U.S. history. When Al Gore was vice president, he would issue monthly briefings on the horrors of climate change. When Mr. Gore exaggerated some local flood, or claimed Florida would burn because of global warming, Mr. Karl stood by and remained mute. But now, with the prospect of an increasingly Democratic Senate, and a president who will go along with the madness of climatically futile policies (Barack Obama or John McCain on global warming? Pick em!), Mr. Karl and CCSP have picked up the scent.

. . .
Want more evidence as to the perfidy of the CCSP process? The senior editor is no climate scientist; it's Susan J. Hassol, who wrote the HBO global warming "documentary," "Too Hot Not to Handle." Laurie David, the force behind Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," was the executive producer. This isn't science, it's science fiction.

The first illustration inside the front cover gives away the spin. It's a picture of people of as many races and sexes as possible holding hands. What that has to do with climate change science is a mystery, but it certainly reflects a political view.

The draft CCSP report knowingly uses Photoshopped imagery of a flood, uncritically publishes a misleading temperature history, which splices together two completely different sets of climate data, and generally assumes people are stupid.

There's a wonderful picture on Page 55 of two senior citizens, captioned: "The elderly are especially vulnerable to extreme heat." If that's true, then there must be massive and increasing numbers of heat-related fatalities in hot cities with old populations. In fact, Tampa and Phoenix have a disproportionately elderly population and very few heat-related deaths; statistically, Tampa has the fewest of any major U.S. city.

It may shock the CCSP, but when heat waves become more frequent, people change their habits and localities adapt their infrastructure to better deal with the heat.

Cross posted at Truth v. The Machine

Been a Long Time Comin'

I remember many years ago when I was young, feeling an indescribable elation when Geraldine Ferraro was nominated as vice president.  It was a first.  It hit me at a gut level.  A woman.  Up there, speaking about our country.  Could become vice president of the United States of America.

I hadn't followed politics before that, and knew virtually nothing about the issues that faced our country at the time.  What I'm talking about is just a visceral reaction that I hadn't expected.
Of course, at the time I had been reading feminist writings, and was taken with the idea that women could become leaders like they hadn't been before. It made me feel a sense of potential that I'd never felt before.

The only other time I remember feeling like that was when the Twins won the series three years later in 1987.  They'd been the underdog, nobody expected them to win but they did.  Their victory sent an electrical energy throughout the twin cities.  You could feel it.  It made everyone in the twin cities feel like anything was possible.

But not until tonight have I seen a woman actually fill in the outlines of what I had dreamed of back in the last century.

I already admired Sarah Palin when I read that she had the guts to sue the federal government over the polar bears.  But tonight I saw her take the shape of the future that feminists had only envisioned back then.

Except, now I have been following politics, so now it's much more than just seeing a female take the stage at a party's convention.  It's so much better.

I see and hear a woman stand up and give one of the best political speeches I've ever heard.  The tears started coming down my cheeks even before I knew that it was going to be a good speech well delivered.  By the time I realized that, I was feeling the same indescribable elation I felt back in 1984.  Only this time, I know what the issues are and, on a rational level, I am also elated at the thought of this real-life, gutsy woman becoming vice-president.

I can't help but think that there are many other women out there who, watching this gutsy hockey mom get up on the stage tonight and start talking, also had tears running down their cheeks just at the thought of Sarah Palin becoming vice president.  And the fact that the MSM is following the lead of the soros machine in trying to pillory this woman ASAP is only making the drama so much more riveting.

I told my husband, "You have no idea what this is doing to women."  We were seeing some of their faces on the tv screen during Palin's speech.  Ecstatic.  She was so good. Cross posted at Truth v. The Machine