Gee, ya think?

Analysis: Press Largely Ignored Incendiary Rhetoric at Bush Protest

…When Bush visited Portland, Ore., for a fundraiser, protesters stalked his motorcade, assailed his limousine and stoned a car containing his advisers. Chanting “Bush is a terrorist!”, the demonstrators bullied passers-by, including gay softball players and a wheelchair-bound grandfather with multiple sclerosis.

One protester even brandished a sign that seemed to advocate Bush’s assassination. The man held a large photo of Bush that had been doctored to show a gun barrel pressed against his temple.

“BUSH: WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE,” read the placard, which had an X over the word “ALIVE.”

Another poster showed Bush’s face with the words: “F— YOU, MOTHERF—ER!”

A third sign urged motorists to “HONK IF YOU HATE BUSH.” A fourth declared: “CHRISTIAN FASCISM,” with a swastika in place of the letter S in each word…

And, of course, thugs tried to beat up Matt and I’ve received wishes that I be strung up from a lamp post. We have really just felt the love from the left over the past few years.

But now that Obama is President, all of a sudden to speak even the most mildly critical word against the President is un-patriotic. Well, whatever you say, liberals – but pardon us if we don’t buy the horse dung you’re selling.

Or, let the demonization begin:

Militia groups with gripes against the government are regrouping across the country and could grow rapidly, according to an organization that tracks such trends.

The stress of a poor economy and a liberal administration led by a black president are among the causes for the recent rise, the report from the Southern Poverty Law Center says.

I’d refer to the Southern Poverty Law Center as a bunch of blackguards, but our liberals would think I’m saying something about black people – and we don’t want to confuse them any more than necessary.

What we have here is part of a clearly orchestrated plan on the left to make all opposition to Obama odious. The left wants it to be “Opposition to Obama = racism/hate/violence”. This way, they won’t have to debate us – we’ll be beneath contempt and only those who are willing to debate within the Obama party line will be allow at the table. There is nothing we can do to stop the left from making this attempt but I will advise that attempts to slander patriotic, armed Americans who are exercising their God-given rights will not get you very far, in the long run.

Mish’s links to the best illustration of what is wrong with tax and spend liberalism I’ve seen:

…“Cash for clunkers” was touted as a huge success, with cars tearing out of auto showrooms, the program running through its $1 billion appropriation in one week…

…With success like that, why limit the rebates to $4,500? Why not give everyone a $10,000 or $20,000 rebate to turn in an old clunker? And why stop at the cars in the garage when you could get rid of a garage full of accumulated junk, with the government providing rebates to households for unloading what they’ve been meaning to get rid of for years?

A reductio ad absurdum, to be sure. Sometimes reducing a proposition to absurdity is the easiest way to expose its flaws…

…Transferring money from taxpayers to car buyers is exactly that: a transfer. The money taken from taxpayers can’t be used for something else.

This is the lesson of Frederic Bastiat’s essay, “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Unseen.” Bastiat, a 19th century French political economist, tells the story of a shopkeeper who has to hire a glazier to repair a broken window, providing work and income for him in the process. That’s what is seen.

What is unseen is what the shopkeeper would have done if he didn’t have to pay the glazier. He might have bought shoes for his children, providing income for the shoemaker, who in turn could buy leather to produce more shoes. The glazier’s gain is the shoemaker’s loss. There is no net gain, no job or income creation, from this transaction…

The “broken window fallacy,” as it is known, can be applied to all government spending. The $787 billion fiscal stimulus enacted in February transfers money from taxpayers to the government to allocate as it sees fit. The effect of the government’s expenditures shows up as growth in gross domestic product. Auto manufacturers produce more cars to meet the juiced demand, adding to GDP. This is what’s seen.

What is unseen is what would have been produced by the private sector had the government not confiscated future revenue via taxation.

We can only get out of this economic mess by creating wealth – moving the wealth around won’t do the trick. Think of it like this:

The United States is the largest importer and exporter in the world. We have vast amounts of goods coming in and out of our country every day. A very large percentage of this trade arrives and departs by sea. And yet the US flagged merchant fleet totals a mere 465 ships. The Chinese merchant fleet is more than triple that size. What this means is that while we have this insatiable maw for imported goods, we don’t bother building the ships we need to fetch them from foreign lands. Real economic stimulus would be to make ship-building tax free for the next ten years and cut port fees and taxes by 50% for US built merchant ships. This would encourage people to build ships in the US, including foreign people who want to export to the US and don’t want to pay the premium for coming in to our harbors. We do need “stimulus” – but it has to be stimulus in the service of creating wealth, or its not stimulus at all. Its wealth redistribution – a zero-sum game.

On and on we can go with this – various incentives to build new transportation means, rather than just refurbishing what we’ve already got. Incentives for people to start manufacturing at least some of the things we import. Incentives to start and expand farms. Incentives to start and expand mines. Providing a spur for people to invest their time, money and sweat in making new wealth.

If all we’re to do is have government take money from one hand and place it in another, then we’re not doing anything – at best, we might provide a temporary boost for those areas favored with government money. But in the long run, everything has to be paid for – and we’ll pay for the Spendulus by not having money to do what we’d prefer. Obama might be happy. The GM employees might be kicking up their heels. The people who got the 4,500 in swag are pleased…but for the rest of us, it will hurt more and more as time goes on.

The sooner we get at making, mining and growing things the faster our wealth will start growing – and the faster we’ll be able to pay off these insane debts we wracked up (and note, liberals, I say “we” – because we all did it…its not Bush’s fault, its not Obama’s fault…its all our fault). The longer we keep to this dimwitted tax and spend liberalism, the longer and deeper will be this economic depression.

Thinking about the Culture of Death and where it came from:

Eugenics and abortion is about the tyranny of the elite deciding who shall live and who shall die. And if it’s about the elite, it’s about money. It was the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and other capitalist lords who funded eugenics research in the early 20th century. They went on to be major supporters of Planned Parenthood. Chesterton says that wealth, and the social science supported by wealth tries inhuman experiments, and when they fail, they try even more inhuman experiments. They are inhuman because they are godless. But they are godless because they don’t want to face how inhuman they are. The wealthy industrialist became agnostic, says Chesterton, “not so much because he did not know where he was, as because he wanted to forget. Many of the rich took to scepticism exactly as the poor took to drink; because it was a way out.” – Dale Ahlquist

Death is the way out – and now we have “death with dignity”. As if death was ever actually undignified. Well, to the Culture of Death, natural death is undignified or, at least, unscientific. Much better to abort at one end and present the hemlock at the other. Thus we can be, as the Liar promised, as gods – pretending that we are ruling ourselves when we are actually abdicating our authority and surrendering ourselves to slavery.

Beware the man who has done wrong and refuses to admit it, especially those men who have piled up wealth and feel guilty about how they did it (George Soros, call your office) – confession is good for the soul, not least in that it prevents a person from merely going from bad to worse sins.

Which was actually a sort of joke I had with some friends as a teenager as we shared the potato chips out of the bag. But, I guess we were just advanced for our age:

Only Two Things Scare Me:

And one of them is antibiotic resistance. Along with my regular co-author, Bill Sage, I’ve just sent off a new article to the law reviews, titled Combating Antimicrobial Resistance: Regulatory Strategies and Institutional Capacity.

Antibiotic resistance is a major public health problem. Every year, two million Americans acquire bacterial infections in the hospital, and 70% of those infections are resistant to at least one antibiotic. MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staph aureus) has attracted the most media attention: the CDC estimated that MRSA caused 94,000 life-threatening infections, and 18,650 deaths in 2005.

Congress and many states are currently debating legislation to reduce antibiotic resistance. The article blends regulatory theory and comparative institutional analysis to explain how we can use regulation to lower the risk of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection, rationalize the use of existing antibiotics, and encourage innovation. We canvass the full range of regulatory options that are available, and explain the compatibility or incompatibility of particular regulatory strategies with existing legal and regulatory systems.

Or, alternately we can stop being afraid of dirt. Stop using anti-bacterial soaps. Stop fretting that if our kitchen counter isn’t surgically sterile that we’ll catch salmonella. This is not an argument in favor of wallowing in filth and, truth be told, I’m a bit obsessive-compulsive about having clean hands…but methinks we go too far in our worries about dirt.

The first I heard of this sort of thing was back as a child when the word came out – from official sources, as far as I could tell – that we shouldn’t stuff the turkey at Thanksgiving. Seems that there was this one in a zillion chance that you’d get food poisoning….of course, you also had to be an idiot and not clean the turkey properly and not cook it thoroughly, but that was besides the point. From that point on, no stuffing in the turkey…people who wished to each out and have stuffing with their turkey were forced to consume dry, tasteless bread-gunk cooked outside the bird. Its only gotten worse since then.

Live a little, people – keep clean, but remember that we have bacteria in our own intestines and couldn’t live without them. We’re not meant to be perfectly clean in the physical sense…and if we tolerate a little dirt, we’ll find that when we’ve actually got a real infection, we’re not infected with resistant bugs.

Imagine, the nerve of these Catholics; thinking they have a right to believe as they wish and live their lives uninstructed by the State:

…Belmont Abbey College is nestled in the plush green rolling hills of Belmont, North Carolina. The campus could provide the backdrop for a film depicting the idyllic Catholic College. Founded by and still served by Benedictine Monks, it provides a visual witness to the beauty of the Benedictine mission of “work and prayer” and the Order’s significant role in helping to birth the great European Universities out of the Monasteries of the Middle Ages. The Monastery on campus is a symbol of the dynamic Catholic faith, life and culture which characterizes this Catholic College.

What is more appealing than even its beauty is Belmont Abbey’s dedication to handing on the fullness of Catholic faith, thought and culture to their student body. It has an overt commitment to teaching the fullness of the Catholic Christian faith and infusing in its graduates a Catholic worldview….

…In 2007, a faculty member discovered that under the College’s existing Health Insurance Plan, anti-life and anti-family products and procedures were potentially covered, including abortion, contraception and sterilization. The College, a Catholic institution committed to the infallible teaching of the Catholic Church concerning the sanctity of life, removed the provisions…

…a complaint was filed by eight faculty members with the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) alleging that the exclusion of these “services” constituted discrimination against women in violation of both North Carolina and Federal law. An investigation ensued.

In March of 2009 the College Administration received a “Dismissal and Notice of Rights” determination letter from the EEOC indicating that they were closing the file. As a constitutional lawyer of almost thirty years, I know that such letters usually indicate the Commission’s intention to dismiss the claim. The College understandably interpreted it as an indication that the Commission found that the College’s decision to amend the plan did not violate the law.

So, imagine the shock as summer was winding to an end and the Administration received a “determination letter” from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accusing them of discriminating based upon gender. Reuben Daniels Jr., of the EEOC Charlotte District Office Director wrote that the Commission had determined that Belmont Abbey College discriminated against women: “By denying prescription contraception drugs, Respondent (the college) is discriminating based on gender because only females take oral prescription contraceptives… By denying coverage, men are not affected, only women.”

So, we can be Catholic all we want – but unless we make provision for supporting hateful, anti-Catholic actions, we’re in violation of the law. This is just a foretaste of what the left wants to bring against all believers and all religious institutions. It won’t be illegal to believe in God, but it will be illegal to act upon one’s faith.

Note the way this attack is made – while the Catholic Church is opposed to all artificial birth control, the EEOC is saying that since a particular type of birth control is used only by women, it is discriminatory against women – deliberate and with malice, or the EEOC would have no basis for complaint – to deny that particular type of birth control. This is Alice in Wonderland nonsense – the sort of thing only insane people can think of. In this case, people who are insanely opposed to the Catholic Church and will use any club which comes to hand against it.

We must pray for the good people at Belmont Abbey – and also pray for the misguided fools who brought this case.

Obama baby boom: Predicted surge in births goes bust

Soaring deficit may defy forecasts

Watchdog says bad assets still threaten banks

Energy prices slump after Labor Department report

Energy prices slumped Tuesday on a Labor Department report that suggested consumer spending, a major economic driver, may be depressed for some time as companies cut back.

Wholesale inventories fall for 10th straight month

…wholesale inventories declined 1.7 percent in June, nearly double the 0.9 percent decrease economists had expected.

Bankruptcy Filing Near for Taylor Bean

A bankruptcy filing is “imminent” for Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp., lawyers representing the mortgage lender said in a federal court filing last week.

Pickens Long Oil, Still Expects Higher Prices

Soros: Economy Has Bottomed

Trinkets that stick it to Obama start to sell

“UPS & FedEx are doing just fine. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.”

Thanks for proving the point that the government needs to stay the hell away from the heath care business.

I knew that there was something #fishy about this AP Story regarding the Portsmouth, NH Obamacare rally, featuring the Chief Snake Oil Salesman, himself:

The White House had been ready for an unruly reception from opponents of overhauling health care. There was no sign of that, perhaps because of the makeup of the day’s crowd or out of traditional deference for the president.

Obama’s push came amid a string of disruptive health care town halls nationwide that have overshadowed his message and threatened to derail support in Congress. Indeed, Republican-turned-Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter faced hostile questions, taunts and jeers earlier Tuesday as he tried to explain his positions at a town hall in Lebanon, Pa. Voter fears of a government takeover of health care were on stark display.

Some lawmakers, holding forums during Congress’ August recess, have gone so far as to replace public forums with teleconferences or step up security to keep protesters at bay.

But the Democratic president faced no outbursts.

The encounter was so friendly, in fact, that by the end Obama was even asking for skeptical questioners to come forward — to no avail.

Of course, to the clueless AP state-run media, there was nothing #fishy about this happenstance. But to anyone with a google search engine, the reasons were obvious:

On Monday dozens of workers — including White House staffers — spent hours setting up the high school auditorium for Obama’s forum, which is only open to those members of the public who secured tickets. Organizers would not disclose how many tickets were issued.

John Moran, 71, of Nottingham was among the many who went to the school to pick up tickets for an event marking Obama’s first trip to the Granite State since he took office in January.

Moran, a Democrat, said he is a strong Obama supporter who was thrilled when he got a call notifying him that he would have two tickets for today’s Town Hall forum.

The Nottingham resident said his wife — who will also be attending — was even more excited with the chance to see Obama live.

“She is really tickled. You should have seen her … she was jumping up and down,” Moran said.

Moran said he has a couple questions in mind if he is called on at the forum with one of them being how the president intends to get health insurance companies to work with him to reform health care.

He said he hopes Obama’s plan will push for a more proactive approach to healthy living that involves coverage for preventive health care like screening and exercise.

Kathleen O’Brien, 64, and Jean Sanders, 66, both of Atkinson, said they will be sitting on stage for the event as they worked on Obama’s campaign beginning in 2007.

On Monday they both went to the high school to pick up tickets and their excitement was more than evident.

“He is as good as everyone says he is. The last person I worked this hard for was Robert Kennedy,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien wore an American flag-style scarf around her neck and a lanyard carrying several Obama pins.

She said she’s read most of Obama’s reform bill concerning health care, but still wants more information.

“I want to hear as much as possible about the plan,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien and Sanders said they spent the weekend calling those who were selected in the lottery to receive tickets.

Sanders said some people sounded like they had just won a fortune when they were informed they would be able to attend the forum and hear Obama speak first-hand about his plan.

“It was unbelievable,” Sander said.

Now here’s the real ‘laugh-a-minute’ quote:

O’Brien said she is sure many “hecklers” will be outside Portsmouth High School trying to derail reform, but she said anyone paying attention to the specifics of the plan will support what Obama is trying to do. She balked at those who say the plan is not in the best interest of senior citizens.

“He is actually protecting seniors,” O’Brien said.

Now that’s Astroturf you can believe in.

Victor Davis Hanson with a timely reminder:

…Once we get beyond the emotional high of seeing two young Americans rescued from such a creepy regime, I think we are going to collectively sober up and realize that we just did what we always said we would never do: bargained for the release of hostages from terrorists. Think away the notion of North Korea as a legitimate government, and we are indeed left with begging a terrorist clique, at a critical time in non-proliferation talks, to release those they kidnapped for the purposes of humiliating the United States. What would have been the press reaction had Bush I been asked by someone like Boone Pickens to visit Pyongyang to free two of his company’s kidnapped employees in North Korea with the complicit blessing of the Bush II administration amid talks about nuclear violations?

The genesis of the ill-famed “Iran/Contra” affair was the desire by President Reagan to get American hostages out of the hands of Islamist savages who had already proved their brutality by cruelly murdering some of their captives. An admirable and humane impulse, but it eventually led to giving weapons to the very Islamists we were actually in battle against. There can be no deals with terrorists – even if those terrorists have set themselves up in an organization which apes human government. Much as I was (and am) delighted that those two women were released, I wonder how many others will be made to pay the price now that the terrorists know we will deal with them in return for released hostages?

The Israelis have this same problem – time and time again they have given up hundreds of captured enemies because the Islamists have one or two Israeli soldiers in captivity. All these exchanges do is provide incentive for more taking more captives. I wonder how many of our enemies are wondering, now, just what we’ll give up for one or two additional American prisoners?

It is a hard thing, but it must be done – when an American is taken captive, our position should be that we will punish those who took captive and/or harmed an American…this punishment may range from criminal prosecution to a well aimed, Special Forces bullet, depending on what seems most appropriate. Regimes who sponsor capturing Americans must be advised that massive US military strikes will follow swiftly upon our conclusion that said nation had a hand in the outrage. Some of our enemies will not listen and will take captives and brutally kill them…but not that many, because there would be no upside for it.

Terrorists are despicable savages, but they do have an inner logic – they want us afraid and grovelling…show no fear and wield the sword for innocent, unarmed prisoners and the enemy will make different calculations.