You wanted HOPE and CHANGE, America, well you got it. In order to reduce our national deficit to a mere half trillion dollars in a mere four years, we have to raise taxes and run away from fights.
Reducing the deficit, he said, is critical to the nation’s future: “We can’t generate sustained growth without getting our deficits under control.”
Well, I guess it’s a good thing he’s doing such a great job of controlling deficits!
I thought during the campaign that a President Obama with a Democrat Congress would cause us to look back on the Bush years as a period of relative fiscal discipline. I thought it would take at least a couple of years, though. It’s only taken a month.
Fast fact: If the 2009 deficit were a country, it would be, at least, the 17th largest economy on earth. Indonesia has 237,512,352 people. This year, our government is going to borrow a time and a half as much as those people will produce.
P.S. This looks pretty funny right now.
P.P.S. Allow me to find a silver lining in this. Whatever ambitions Obama and the Democrats may have had for domestic projects (and I’m looking at you, socialized medicine) are simply not going to happen. The pork bill will, by necessity, be the defining domestic achievement of this administration.
Apollo posted this at 8:10 PM HKT on Saturday, February 21st, 2009 as An Insult to Drunken Sailors, That's Not Change!
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For those who love the Japanese, this story is great. It seems that there’s a new fad there, to learn English by reciting Obama speeches.
Yuri Mitani, 26, quietly shuffled up to Mr. Ishiwata, her eyes closed and hands shaking. “Believing that in a tolerant America, your name is no barrier to success,” she said.
“Open your eyes. Convey your message,” said Mr. Ishiwata, smiling. “Also, it’s tolerant. ‘L’ and ‘R’,” he said, correcting Ms. Mitani’s pronunciation of the consonants and sending her back to the end of the line.
Later, Ms. Mitani, who joined the class last month to improve her speaking skills as part of her training to become a middle-school English teacher, said the speech introduced her to a host of new vocabulary. Among her discoveries: the phrase “herding goats,” in the part where Mr. Obama speaks of what his father did growing up.
That afternoon, Mr. Ishiwata used the same speech for a more-intensive Obama experience: a five-hour public-speaking seminar. To warm up, his six students were urged to each take the podium and recite lines 97 to 99, which conclude: “There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.” His observations: One student was too monotone, while another did too much “dictatorial” finger-pointing.
Apollo posted this at 3:59 PM HKT on Saturday, February 21st, 2009 as Those Wacky Foreigners
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From tonight’s cookie: “Hugs are life’s rainbows.”
1. That’s not a fortune!
2. No they’re not; rainbows are life’s rainbows, hugs are life’s hugs. Life features both.
3. Rainbows are rarely seen, even more rarely seen completely, and translucent. Is that what hugs are supposed to be like: rare, incomplete, and faint?
4. Even if that were remotely true, it’s still stupid.
Apollo posted this at 10:35 PM HKT on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 as Grumblin Mumblins
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The North Dakota House has just passed a bill that gives full legal protections to all homo sapeins, from the moment of conception onwards:
BISMARCK, N.D. — A measure approved by the North Dakota House gives a fertilized human egg the legal rights of a human being, a step that would essentially ban abortion in the state.
The bill is a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that extended abortion rights nationwide, supporters of the legislation said.
Representatives voted 51-41 to approve the measure Tuesday. It now moves to the North Dakota Senate for its review.
The bill declares that “any organism with the genome of homo sapiens” is a person protected by rights granted by the North Dakota Constitution and state laws.
I’m a moderate in the abortion debate* but I think everyone can agree that this legislations is insane. As Marianne points out on Ladyblog, this essentially means that the state — e.g., child protective services — has the power to boss you around about your kid before you even know you have one, or potentially hold you liabable for not preventing a miscarraige. Some additional questions
- Wouldn’t this effectively restart the clock of one’s age to conception, rather than birth? Could 17-1/4-year-olds sue to vote, and 21-1/4-year-olds sue to drink?
- Interstate commerce: If a pregnant woman from Bemidji, Minnesota traveled to Fargo, then decided to have an abortion back at home, could a ND attorney sue on the fetus’ behalf?
- Criminal charges: If a woman in ND does have an abortion, will she and the abortionist be charged with murder? If the father is involved, could he be charged as an accomplice? If not, why not?
Essentially, do we really want to confer legal rights on persons whose existence are difficult to ascertain and who — in so many, many ways — we don’t treat as regular people? Don’t most women delay informing friends and family about a pregnancy until it’s far enough along to be a (reasonably) certain thing? Well, if the North Dakota House has anything to do with it, you’ll need to tell the government you’re expecting. So they can help you, you understand.
I hereby accuse the North Dakota House — an the Pro-Life Movement, by extension — of Stage One thought.
* I am vehemently anti-wade and reluctantly pro-choice, and in favor of much greater legal restriction on abortion.
Tom posted this at 5:15 PM HKT on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 as Politics, The Law Is An Ass--An Idiot
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How, exactly, can the living forgive great mass murderers? Those who live weren’t wronged so grieviously as the murderers’ victims. These thoughts came as I read this article (H/T):
LaPel—a serious man who divides his time between his native Cambodia and a church in Los Angeles that is part of the Purpose Driven network of churches—stood in the middle of the Sangker River and baptized Hang Pin in the muddy runoff from upstream clothing factories.
Hang Pin embraced his new life. “He was the most astute Bible student I have ever had,” LaPel remembers. Soon Hang Pin was a lay pastor.
Four years passed. In the middle of the night, back in Los Angeles, LaPel got a phone call from a man he had never heard of. The man’s message was simple: “Hang Pin is Comrade Duch.”
LaPel fell to his knees in shock.
“I hit myself in the head,” he says.
He had recalled instantly that Duch—the nickname of Kaing Guek Eav—was the warden of the Khmer Rouge’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison. The meek, depressed man who had become a diligent minister was one of the bloodiest mass murderers the world has known.
A few excerpts from the article about Comrade Duch’s conversion, with my thoughts:
“Once the Khmer Rouge come to Christ, they are committed,” LaPel says. “They were fanatical Communists, and now they are fanatical Christians.”
Anyone familiar with Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer should not be surprised. Fanatics need a cause, and when one cause burns itself out, they substitute another. We can be grateful that he became fanatically meek and humble, but he could easily have become a different (and more dangerous) kind of fanatic.
Did his daughter ever see a sign of the brutal man he’d been? “He was strict,” she says. “But not really a tough guy. He made us do chores, but he never touched his children. He was mostly strict towards himself.”
A Hoffer quotation comes to mind: The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
“What created the Khmer Rouge is a mystery,” his sister says. “It was like everybody faced the same circumstances. You were either beaten or you were a slave or you were killed. Everyone just tried to survive.”
Now things are different for her brother, she says. “He has a commitment. He always tells me, ‘Accept the Lord. Only Christ has the answer.’ His faith is very strong.”
But Youk Chhang, the investigator who has helped the prosecution, has a different point of view. Whether Duch’s conversion is sincere or not, Youk says, justice demands that he be judged in court.
I must agree with Youk. We don’t know the state of Duch’s soul. But we do know what he has done. Perhaps one day, God will wipe the slate clean. But here on earth, the laws of men must be upheld, and Duch’s evil deeds must be punished.
Hubbard posted this at 10:54 AM HKT on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 as Faith, The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past
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What sort of racist idiot looks at a cartoon of a man-eating chimp and thinks, “the subtle message was clear*: comparing President Obama to a chimpanzee”? For the love of Pete, Obama famously delegated the writing of the pork bill to Congressional Democrats. The day Americans can’t compare their Congresscritters to monkeys without being called racist is the day a part of this country dies.
*How clear can a subtle message be?
Apollo posted this at 12:34 AM HKT on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 as Journalism, Race, That's Not Change!
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If you’ve several too many minutes in your life, read this speech by Eric Holder. While what’s getting attention on the interblogs is his ridiculous assertion that Americans don’t talk about race enough, the real interesting bit to me is that he doesn’t seem to have an interesting thought in his head. That’s fine, so far as it goes, but a government official should not berate his countrymen for not saying anything worthwhile about race, and then himself refuse to say anything worthwhile about race. Instead all we get are the stupid platitudes that are themselves the reason so many don’t want to talk about race. It may amuse some to continually talk about the same damned thing — we’ve come so far, but in some ways were just as segregated as ever; Black History Month is great because it teaches people black history, but in some ways it sucks because it denegrates black history; black people are important too — but some of us got tired of that drivel in grade school.
You want to have a worthwhile discussion about race? Then you offer me a solution to a. the extraordinarily disproportionate amount of crime committed by black men; b. the utterly absurd rate of illegitimacy among blacks; c. the significant underperformance of blacks at nearly all levels of education. And then offer me a solution that can’t be summarized as, “Throw more money at the problem,” or “Punish whitey.” Better yet, when other people propose those solutions (because, plainly, no one in this administration will) stand up and defend them against charges of racism.
In the mean time, I guess we’ll keep being a nation of cowards. But there are worse things in life than being called a coward by a nitwit.
P.S. Holder can berate me until the day I die, but I will never be thankful to Toni Morrison.
Apollo posted this at 5:26 PM HKT on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 as Race, That's Not Change!
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An updated Canterbury Tale:
1 Whan in Februar, withe hise global warmynge
2 Midst unseasonabyl rain and stormynge
3 Gaia in hyr heat encourages
4 Englande folke to goon pilgrimages.
5 Frome everiches farme and shire
6 Frome London Towne and Lancanshire
7 The pilgryms toward Canterbury wended
8 Wyth fyve weke holiday leave extended
9 In hybryd Prius and Subaru
10 Off the Boughton Bypasse, east on M2.
Enjoy.
Hubbard posted this at 12:15 PM HKT on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 as Humor, Those Wacky Foreigners
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Wearing a hijab puts women at risk for Vitamin D deficiency.
If the feminist argument or freedom argument or beheading argument doesn’t work, maybe a public health argument will?
Dorothy posted this at 12:25 AM HKT on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 as Veiled Threats
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His presidency may have mixed disaster with brilliance, but Nixon’s still my favorite presidential personality, largely because his is most similar to my own. A great anecdote for the day:
In 1938, in the midst of the real Great Depression, Richard Nixon, then working as an attorney in Whittier and La Habra, California, bought a stripped-down black two-door Oldsmobile (no heater or radio) and saved a little more money by picking it up at the factory in Michigan. He decided to take along his eight-year-old brother Edward. They hopped a train to Detroit, picked up the car, and then started home to Whittier. Ed said, “Dick handed me a map and said, ‘We’re going to Los Angeles, and we’re taking Route 66. If you can find a stretch of road that’s long and straight enough, I’l let you drive.’ He let me drive plenty, as it turned out.”
Will Rogers had died three years before, and so the brothers stopped off in Claremore, Oklahoma to see the Rogers Memorial, which had just opened. Richard pointed to a bronze plaque at the base of Rogers’ statue and asked his little brother to read out the humorist and commentator’s most famous quotation: “I never yet met a man that I didn’t like.”
As Ed tells it, “Dick said, ‘What do you think that means?’ I replied, ‘I guess it means he hasn’t met everyone yet’.”
Eddie was clearly a chip off the old block.
Hubbard posted this at 2:43 PM HKT on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 as Humor, The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past, The Right Words
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I distinctly remember commenting somewhere – though I can’t find it – that a President Obama would mean that the US government would be much more sympathetic to Hugo Chavez in particular, and international leftist despots generally.
Anyhow, this story should be a little strange to any American reader. The Venezualans, whether democratically or no, just amended their constitution to allow the leading anti-American in the western hemisphere, and someone who has brought great destruction to his own country, to stay in power longer. If the Venezualans are stupid enough to keep reelecting this man and granting him more power, that’s their problem and I’m happy to let them live with the consequences. Bon chance, mes amis.
But does the American government really need to make a statement congratulating them on doing so? I don’t think we should necessarily issue a statement decrying the vote, but wouldn’t silence be better than congratulating Venezuala for granting more power to a man who expelled our ambassador just last year, and referred to an American president as the devil?
Apollo posted this at 11:26 AM HKT on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Those Wacky Foreigners
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California is going bust, and the British are amused:
How did this happen? Sure, the economy is bad. But this is a state whose money comes from the most bankable economic assets on Earth – the Long Beach ports, the Central Valley agricultural region, the defence contractors out in the Mojave desert, Silicon Valley, Napa Valley… Hollywood. How do you tax all this and end up amassing debts at the present rate of $1.7 million per hour?
Perhaps it has something to do with the man running the place. And I am ashamed to say that, yes, when the actor most famous for playing a killer robot in a so-so B-movie ran for governor, I was behind him. I defended his fiscally conservative, socially moderate agenda and loveable tendency to work movie tag lines into important policy debates. I believed in Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the “governator”. And like the five million Californians who voted for him, I’m feeling a bit silly now.
A lack of appreciation of the past has been a hallmark of California politics for some time now. My co-blogger Apollo aptly quoted Ghân-buri-Ghân to this effect:
Many paths were made when Stonehouse-folk were stronger. They carved hills as hunters carve beast-flesh. Wild Men think they ate stone for food.
Infrastructure didn’t just arise out of the desert. It took generations to build—and only a single generation to wreck. Will the state get a bailout?
Hubbard posted this at 9:42 AM HKT on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 as Bailoutistan, It's Economics - Stupid!
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Huh.
NEW YORK (CNN) — The founder of an Islamic television station in upstate New York aimed at countering Muslim stereotypes has confessed to beheading his wife, authorities said.
Muzzammil Hassan has been charged with murder in the death of his wife, Aasiya Hassan.
Muzzammil Hassan was charged with second-degree murder after police found the decapitated body of his wife, Aasiya Hassan, at the Bridges TV station in the Buffalo suburb of Orchard Park, said Andrew Benz, Orchard Park’s police chief.
Tom posted this at 9:23 AM HKT on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 as Uncategorized
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Much seems to have been made in recent weeks of what a centrist the new senator from New York is. In particular were hints that she might support gun rights – an explicit Constitutional right supported by large majorities of Americans, but somehow opposed by nearly all Democrats.
This story, though, is weird. Seems that as part of her pro-gun bona fides, Gillibrand said she had two guns under her bed. Now she’s informed the media that she’s moved the guns to prevent theft, that the two guns were rifles, and that she kept them there for self-defense.
The obvious question here – but journalists don’t know enough about guns to ask the question – is, Who keeps two rifles under their bed for self-defense? Unless you’re interested in stray rounds killing your neighbors, or you’ve a room in your house more than 50 yards long, I’m not terribly sure why you’d use any rifle for self-defense. But two rifles? Was she going to go after intruders with one in each arm? Or perhaps her and her husband would chase intruders from the house and team stalk them through a neighboring wood?
I guess if the options are rifle or no gun, a rifle is better for self-defense. And if the options are two rifles or no gun, well obviously two rifles would be better for self-defense than no gun. But Gillibrand is not a poor woman, and reliable shotguns can be had for cheap. If she was actually interested in self-defense, there were smarter ways to go.
P.S. Of course there’s this:
Gun-control activists questioned the safety of placing guns under a bed where children can find them and burglars look first. The National Rifle Association said it is up to gun owners to safely store weapons.
Gun-control activists question the safety of placing guns anywhere except an incinerator. Why on earth would you ask them about how to safely store guns? It’s like asking Phyllis Schlafly which abortion clinic provides the best customer service, or Ralph Nader what color Hummer you should buy. The NRA, of course, is the correct source for this question, and their answer is, of course, correct.
P.P.S. A major news outlet has now published a story with the headline that Gillibrand no longer has guns under her bed. According to the story, she told the media about this so people wouldn’t break into her house to steal her guns. Um, it seems to me a more obvious result of publishing a story with the effective headline “Wealthy woman sleeps totally unarmed but with expensive items in her home” is to encourage break-ins, not discourage them. Of course, I live in the world where pistols and shotguns are the self-defense weapons of choice, so what do I know about New York?
Apollo posted this at 12:12 AM HKT on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Running with the antelope
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This new C-Span poll, showing historians’ rankings of presidents, is irksome. Firstly, any poll of American presidents that does not include James K. Polk in the top five is frankly inaccurate. Truman starting the Cold War – wise and important. Polk beating back the Mexicans and settling our last disputes with Britain – vastly more important. I am a fan of Harry Truman, but the recent attempts to rehabilitate him have gone too far if he’s being ranked as one of the five best presidents. LBJ on top of Polk is just ridiculous. And putting the treacherous John Tyler above George W. Bush — indeed, above anyone except Buchanan — is malicious or ignorant.
But the real kicker is the “pursed equal justice for all” ranking. I’m unsure of what criteria they’re using there, but surely it can’t be efforts at racial equality. To list FDR — who appeased his southern supporters by nixing Republican-led efforts to pass anti-lynching laws, and who did more or less nothing to move race relations onto a better footing — ahead of Eisenhower — who signed the first post-Reconstruction civil rights law, who responded unflinchingly with overwhelming force when southern governors attempted to use the National Guard to maintain segregation, who featured blacks in some of the first television campaign ads (in 1952 and ‘56) — is nothing more than blind hero worship. And to list Bill Flippin’ Clinton ahead of Ike in that category is simply a joke. Carter and Kennedy ahead of Grant? Please.
Apollo posted this at 11:13 PM HKT on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 as The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past
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