What happens when the Nanny State thinks it knows how to run your life better than you know? In California cops tasered a man who was no threat to anyone else — in his own living room, for his own supposed good.
If someone wants to destroy his own life, the state has no business stopping him. This intervention by police and their use of tasers to take an old man down is outrageous. What’s next, people being arrested because they don’t go in for their yearly check-up?
The left has gathered itself, picked itself up and brushed itself off about the Ground Zero Mosque issue. For months it seemed that only opponents of the mosque were saying anything about it. It was not an issue on the left until their man in the White House spoke up about it. Now the left is fighting back.
Now, when I write “fighting back,” what do you think this means? Does it mean assembling air-tight philosophical, political and economic arguments grounded in empirical facts? Or does it mean name calling and smearing the other side?
Yes, you guessed it. Josh Marshall explains it for you:
The institutional Republican party has fully (though with some notable and honorable exceptions) hoisted its sail to xenophobia and religious hatred. And as Halperin notes, at least for motivating their own voters, it’s simply good politics. This is not something anybody happened into.
Well, there you go. Those creeps on the right are appealing to xenophobia and religious hatred because that works with the stupid American people. Marshall’s argument is classic leftist thought: forget any subtleties of the issue, just cut to what is important — how the immoral GOP manipulates the American masses with their lies.
Eugene Robinson argues along the same lines:
Lies, distortions, jingoism, xenophobia — another day, another campaign issue that Republicans can use to bash President Obama and the Democrats. First it was illegal immigration. Now it’s the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” which is not at all what its opponents claim.
A new book, The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled The World’s Top Climate Scientists by Roy W. Spencer argues that global temperatures are determined by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation rather than man-made CO2.
Claude Sandroff sees this book putting the anthropogenic global warming idea in the grave — if people listen to Dr. Spencer, and with MSM serving as the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party, that’s a big if.
At the end of Spencer’s careful analysis, a simple picture emerges. The PDO is a long-lived ocean-to-atmosphere heat transfer process (similar to the better-known El Niño and La Niña) but of much longer duration. Cloud cover decreases significantly during the positive PDO phase, allowing more sunlight to reach the earth’s surface. In the ocean, this extra energy is stored as heat. In its negative phase, the PDO acts in reverse and cools the atmosphere. And all of this occurs in roughly thirty-year cycles. While this mechanism is operating, mankind is dumping a small, vanishing amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. Big deal.
It’s outrageous that buffoons like Al Gore have led this nation to the brink of Cap and Trade legislation that would devastate the economy in the name of a fantasy.
I went to the doctor today. At the check-in desk a sign read, “ID REQUIRED. For your protection, the federal government requires that all patients provide photo identification when presenting for an appointment.”
A chill ran up my spine when I read that. Several questions came to mind:
1) What gives the federal government the right to dictate that all health care providers look at an ID?
2) Why would the federal government think this law was needed?
3) Why is it for my protection? If someone gets medical care under my name, that’s the clinic’s problem, not mine, is it not?
On this Fourth of July, let us look at what the current president of the United States of America thinks the country is all about. In a recent speech on immigration Obama said,
Being an American is not a matter of blood or birth, it’s a matter of faith.
There has been an argument among Objectivists on the mosque that some would like to build at Ground Zero. Leonard Peikoff opposes the mosque and holds the US government should prevent its existence. Others disagree. Amy Peikoff has two posts supporting her husband.
The argument is complicated and certainly not self-evident. It’s a matter on which good people can disagree. I see in the various comment threads people I respect on both sides.
What would be worse for the rule of law in America, our government violating property rights of those who would build a mosque or giving the enemy in a time of war an enormous morale boost by seeing a mosque built where militant Islam scored its greatest victory?
This strikes me as the kind of argument one finds in a mixed economy. Our government is bad and getting worse. It intervenes now in so many areas that it seldom does anything significant that is limited to the scope envisioned by the writers of the Constitution. Good is packaged with bad, and sorting out what is fundamental or most important can be maddening.
The New York Times has an article about a school that encourages children not to have best friends, but to have many friends.
“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”
Doesn’t this sound like a leftist attempt to turn children into little collectivists? Selfish individuals, you see, find friends they value. But modern education since Dewey seeks to socialize children. Don’t be “possessive” about friends, just relax and be friends with everyone.
Who know? Maybe American educators will succeed where the Russians failed in creating homo sovieticus.
I just want to draw your attention to a piece by Steven Den Beste called “A Feature, Not A Bug.”
Devastating our economy and making us economically uncompetitive is a feature, not a bug. The whole “global warming” scam has been about throttling the industrialized world, especially the US, by restricting use of energy. It was never really about saving the world climate, it was always about trying to bring about international equality. You could tell that because the Kyoto accord restricted use of energy by rich nations, but permitted poor ones to increase their use of energy.
It important to remember that the left’s goal is egalitarianism. To make us all equal requires destruction, not prosperity. Obama’s presidency is a radical departure from what we knew before. I think many Americans are afraid to see this truth in all its horror.
(I’m sorry that I have not been blogging much of late. I’ve been acting a lot. I just finished doing Bottom in Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Capulet in Romeo and Juliet and the Ghost and Claudius in Hamlet. Awesome roles! At the moment I’m doing another great role, Shylock in Merchant of Venice. How could I resist playing a guy who wants to cut a pound of flesh from a Christian? [Come on, now -- that was a joke.] I’m busy this summer, but I have not given up blogging, and I expect to get back to it later, especially when we get into election season. Oh, yeah — you know we’ll have plenty to say then.)
Obama explains his concept of the American way.
We’re not, we’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service. We don’t want people to stop, ah, fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy.
(To make money is to produce wealth. Can one produce too much wealth? Can one be too healthy or too good?)
Obama’s ideal businessman would think something like, “I’ve made enough money, and it’s embarrassing to make more because all the leftist elitists sneer at me, but darn it, I must continue to produce to fulfill my responsibility to grow the economy.”
In Obama’s universe making money is a necessary evil. Americans must submit themselves to this dirty task so that the state will have enough wealth to redistribute. Those who produce wealth are not only used to support the poor, but they are sneered at for producing so much wealth in the first place.
With such a concept of the American way, it’s no wonder Obama is in a hurry to fundamentally transform it.
In a recent fundraising video President Obama says,
It will be up to each of you to make sure that the young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women who powered our victory in 2008 stand together once again.
I think it’s more than just electoral demographics that makes Obama think in terms of pressure groups. The Democrats want people to think of themselves as members of multicultural collectives, not as individuals. The message is: if you’re a minority or a woman, the Democrats will take care of you.
Individual rights are not an issue in welfare state politics. Instead society is a war of pressure groups. If you’re not rich, you’d better vote Democrat to get your fair share of the pie.
I remember reading a few years ago that the food packets we dropped on Afghanistan were, because of political correctness, made entirely vegetarian. The Afghans were not consulted in the preparation of these rations, and it turned out they wouldn’t touch the stuff. The food that our military delivered at some risk and considerable cost was fed to the Afghans’ animals.
I don’t know if this story is true, but it strikes me as symbolic of the New Leftist welfare state. We have an altruist government forcing on people what no one seems to want, but the state gives anyway because it makes them feel morally noble. Oh, yes — it also gives them the power to rule our lives, but they are not motivated by greed, so they are certain they can do better with our lives than we can.
The reality of what it means to live in an America fundamentally transformed by leftist fools has not even begun to sink in, and we get this from Rep. Dingell:
Let me remind you this [Americans allegedly dying because of lack of universal health care] has been going on for years. We are bringing it to a halt. The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.
Doubtless the closest statist to you will explain that Dingell did not mean “contol the people” in a bad way. His intentions are good. He just wants to help. And to help 300 million people, well, you can’t just let them run around doing what they want. Control. It’s good for you. Bend over and take it.
‘Repeal and replace’ is likely to be the slogan for the fall elections.
What do they mean by replace? Free market reforms? Getting government out of medicine?
Or do they mean some compromise plan that redistributes wealth to give the uninsured health care insurance?
At the signing ceremony the ever amusing Joe Biden said to the Godfather, “This is a big f***kin’ deal.”
Did you expect more dignity from the Democrats at what is, by their own statements, an historic event? Instead of Cicero they sound like Al Capone in Cicero, Illinois.
But why shouldn’t they talk like gangsters? They went to the mattresses to seize control of one-sixth of the economy. They now have the power to make offers the American people can’t refuse. It is a big f***kin’ deal.
Health care reform was such a success that Daily Kos is already looking forward to the next big reform.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will be speaking this afternoon about financial reform at the American Enterprise Institute, not exactly a place brimful of folks who give smiles to reforms that involve the government unless it’s reducing its oversight role. Over the weekend, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made some rumblings about the need to do something about firms that are “too big to fail,” calling their existence “pernicious” and an “insidious” barrier to competition. And starting at 5 p.m., Senator Dodd will lead the executive committee of the Senate Banking Committee in the first round of marking up the 1336-page Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010. (Summary here.)
History was made tonight. In the past year the American people said they did not want socialized medicine. Tonight the Democrats said “Tough. You’re getting socialized medicine whether you like it or not because we know what’s good for you better than you know.”
Socialized medicine is here to stay. The Republicans will not repeal this legislation. I write this first because they never have significantly rolled back the welfare state. The programs of the New Deal and the Great Society are all still here with us; they created the mess we’re in today. Nobody talks about repealing them.
Second, if you listened to the final speeches of Republican John Boehner and Democrat Nancy Pelosi before the vote, it was obvious who would win, and it was obvious that socialized medicine is here to stay.
Rep. Alcee Hastings speaks:
There ain’t no rules here, we’re trying to accomplish something….All this talk about rules…. When the deal goes down… we make ‘em up as we go along.
Drew M. reacts:
“A government of laws and not of men”-Stuff John Adams actually wrote.
…
234 years is a good run by any standard. Now, as with all things, it comes to an end.
Or as Jennifer Rubin puts it,
This is the talk of tyranny.
The Democrats are intent on passing their health care reform even if it kills them. There is currently some question as to whether or not Nancy Pelosi has the votes to pass the Senate bill in the House. But the Dems have figured out a postmodern solution to this problem: pass the bill without a vote.
…it looks like House Democrats won’t have to vote directly on a Senate bill they really don’t like. The speaker hasn’t made a final decision, but she told her rank-and-file during the meeting that the plan now is to craft a rule that would “deem” the Senate bill passed once they approve the package of fixes.
Gus Van Horn considers the question of why liberals hate Sarah Palin so much. I’ve noticed in my personal relations with liberals, especially women, that they do have an intense negative emotional reaction to Palin. The Alaskan Governor really bugs them. Gus takes a guess at the reason:
My first stab would be that they see her as typical of “little” people who need their help — except that she is uppity.
I think that is part of it. The left believes in two classes: the rulers and the ruled. Although few will admit it in America, the longing for a stratified class society in which everyone knows his place has always been important to anti-capitalists. This is why capitalism’s first enemies in England were conservatives who longed for a return to the feudal order. Sarah Palin, with her soccer mom demeanor and her guns, is clearly meant to be among the ruled. There’s nothing more offensive to the ruling elite than a commoner who rises above her station.
A few more thoughts on the Coffee Party USA, to follow up on my last post.
Remember during the Bush presidency when dissent was the highest form of patriotism? We didn’t hear much from the left about “cooperation” when it came to the Patriot Act or the war in Iraq. And when Congress stopped Bush’s Social Security reform cold, there were no complaints about “obstructionism.”
The idea of forming a movement around “cooperation” is a gimmick to help the Democrats succeed with their socialist agenda, particularly health care reform.
The Tea Party, at least what’s best about it, is founded on timeless principles: limited government, individual rights. I have held these principles for 33 years, since I first read Atlas Shrugged.
The left has gimmicks that hide their true agenda; the free market right has immutable principles.
UPDATE: Instapundit:
2300 SHOW UP FOR ST. LOUIS TEA PARTY, only 30 show up for St. Louis “Coffee Party.” And that 30 includes the “tea party infiltrators.”
