Exactly.

I supported action the moment I realized that Gadaffy was regrouping and routing the rebels and so we were missing a golden opportunity for, in no particular order, 1, toppling a tyrant and thus giving some hope for an Arab Spring, and 2, justice for the American murdered in terrorist attacks by Gadaffy's direct order.

One can disagree that action is wise in this case but one can't credibly argue that Obama has been a leader or has helped create a strong likelihood of positive outcome. A positive outcome is still possible, but negative outcomes are far more likely now.

And this is all due to the fundamental lie at the heart of "liberal" foreign policy: That American military action is somehow evil, that we are a virus that must be contained.

Not so. American military action is almost always an objective good. The question is never, as the liberals put it, if American involvement is evil for the world. It's not.

The question is whether one particular shithole in the whole amoral world deserves our troops' sacrifice and hardship. Which is a much closer question.

But because Obama and the liberals have spent so many years claiming that America is fundamentally evil, to the extent that their chief foreign policy consists of containment -- containment of America -- that they find themselves in a state of cognitive dissonance when they see a tyrant crushing a rebellion with only America's might capable of saving the situation.

They like to think of themselves as heroes, but they're not, of course. They're villains who have deluded themselves. So when they see a Qadaffy killing rebels, they don't understand. They're confused -- aren't heroes supposed to be on the side of justice and liberation?

But they've spent their whole lives ripping into America for doing just that.

Their only resolution of this contradiction is It's okay when we do it, because our hearts are pure.

No, they're not. They're black with hate and what's worse, they're stupid with hate.

I can understand perfectly well why Chris Matthews and Joan Walsh and the rest of the bastards are so angry we're confronting them with their past evil utterances. It's very embarrassing to be outed as a villain.

But the fact that the charge is deadly makes it no less true.

Posted by: Ace at 08:11 AM | Comments (109)
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Let's play a little game of "Who Wrote This?"....

President Obama Redefines the Term "Exit Strategy"

In an interview with Univision Tuesday, President Obama re-defined the term “exit strategy,” and said our exit strategy in Libya would begin this week.

“The exit strategy will be executed this week,” President Obama said, “in the sense that we will be pulling back from our much more active efforts to shape the environment. We will still be in a support role. We will be supplying jamming, intelligence and other assets unique to us."

Planes in the air? Ships in the Mediterranean? Intelligence being provided? DoesnÂ’t sound like an exit strategy at all.

What it does recall is Lewis Carroll.

"'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

From the beginning of this suddenly-announced military campaign, the White House has been making great efforts to under-sell the US role and emphasize the participation of European allies and Arab partners. Even those Arab partners like the UAE that ultimately didnÂ’t contribute military assets as White House officials say they had been led to believe.

If you just read that to me I'd have guessed Charles Krauthammer, maybe Rush Limbaugh if he were feeling particularly literary. But no, it's neither of those stalwarts of the right.

It was.... more...

Posted by: DrewM at 07:46 AM | Comments (91)
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What an unserious and casual way to describe a call for war. Joe Lieberman has lost a lot of heft in my view.

Oh, wait, that wasn't Joe Lieberman. That was the suddenly hawkish Howard Dean.

DEAN: I don't think you stay out of these things. You can't if you're the most powerful country in the world . . . You have to take chances.

KLEIN: That's not what you were saying in 2003!

DEAN: That's because we were lied to about what we were doing . . . we were lied to about the WMD.

KLEIN: We had the same situation as we do now, which is insufficent information.

Defending Obama, Dean also realizes: "It's easy to criticize in hindsight."

So these people have now been confirmed as partisan game-players as regards war and the lives of American soldier. Throw a (D) on the war and they're all for it, as suspected.

Joe Choo-Choo Biden: Impeach The President For Launching Unauthorized Airstrikes. That was his position as regards a hypothetical airstrike on Iran, ordered by Bush.

He didn't say "airstrike," he said "war," but at the time, no one was talking about anything except airstrikes. (McCain was the most forward-leaning of most national-brand politicians and sang "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran;" no mention of boots on the ground.)

But it's different now, of course. The war is branded with a (D) so anything goes.

Oh Dear Sweet Lord: You gotta watch Joan Walsh, suddenly a rootin'-tootin' six-gun-shootin' patriot with a bad case of war fever, saying that Obama's deteractors have no "coherent principle" for criticizing him and are just looking for excuses to "cheap shot" him.

The reason for this outburst is that Matthews & Co. are very, very upset to see Obama's (and their own) words thrown back in their faces.

Posted by: Ace at 07:16 AM | Comments (131)
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But always remember, the real danger to Mideast "peace" is some Jews building homes.

Police said that a bomb exploded outside Egged bus number 74 at a station opposite the Jerusalem Conference Center (Binyanei Ha'uma) in the center of town.

Magen David Adom relayed that there were 25 people injured. Three people were seriously injured. Israeli media reported that two of those were in critical condition.

Five people were moderately injured and the remainder lightly to moderately. MDA said that no deaths took place.

Police suspected that an explosive device inside a bag was left at the bus stop, which then exploded. Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch said that the explosive device was between one and two kilograms and contained shrapnel.

There are reports that the bomb was tied or placed on a lamppost and detonated remotely. Welcome to the wonderful world of IEDs in Jerusalem.

UPDATE: One confirmed death.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:34 AM | Comments (93)
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Monty mentioned that Paul Ryan's roadmap for debt reduction takes several decades to get us back to where we were a few years ago. Here are the actual numbers.

If you want to pay down the debt to where we were at the end of FY10 (that's about 6 months ago), Ryan's plan will take 55 years.

Ryan's plan is hampered by his strategy to limit government revenues to 19% of GDP. The National Committee on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform's plan (i.e., the plan submitted by Obama's debt reduction committee) allows government revenues to rise to 20.6%, so their plan "only" takes 12 years to pay off this year's debt.

Of course, the higher government revenues mean higher taxes & fees, which likely means slowing of economic growth. so the plan submitted by Obama's commission is probably far too optimistic. But neither plan is realistic, even with optimistic assumptions. Believing that the government can hold to a long-term course of fiscal austerity, and that no other economic crises or setbacks will occur in a decades-long timespan, is completely fanciful. And as you can see from Monty's post below, the assumptions about future interest rates on our debt may be invalidated within a year, let alone a decade.

With just this year's spending, President Obama, Henry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi have saddled us with debt that we will probably never pay back, and the White House budget (even before the CBO corrections) agrees. It doesn't even try to pay back these deficits - in fact it doesn't even balance the budget. Ever.

In my opinion, we have to abandon the notion that any of the proposed plans are going to address the federal debt problem. Think instead of the reality that your children and grandchildren are going to live in a country with much lower economic growth than we've enjoyed in the past.

This is not to say that Ryan's plan is completely useless - it does slow the rise in the debt/GDP ratio, perhaps giving us time to implement a faster plan before some disaster scenario strikes.

Closing Question: How much would you have to cut the federal budget to get back to the FY08 debt/GDP level within 10 years?
Answer: ~ 35%

Posted by: Geoff at 06:21 AM | Comments (98)
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I often (like, all the time) hear people tell me that I'm being overly alarmist about our national debt and entitlement crisis, that we have time to implement more moderate measures to solve the problem. My response is usually, "What time, exactly, do you think we have?"

Congressman Paul Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future" -- the most serious and "politically-feasible" (I really hate that term) plan -- takes several decades simply to get us back to where we were a few years ago, debt-wise. Harry Reid speaks blithely of waiting twenty years to even begin thinking of reforming Social Security.

We don't have twenty years to dick around. We may not even have ten. We may not even have five.

The few politicians who actually are thinking of the problem still assume that we have decades to slow-roll the changes. I don't think we have that much time. Nor do a lot of other people. Why? Debt. Specifically, the costs to service our debt.

Here's a pull quote:

[T]his scenario is likely to prove optimistic. For the five years ending 2007, consumer price inflation averaged 3.2%. Inflation appears on a path to exceed 5% annually (see “Higher Inflation is on the Way“). Sustained inflation of 5% would imply interest rates of 7%. At those rates, federal net interest payments would exceed $1 trillion a year.

That’s more than the federal government will this year spend on Defense ($768 billion), Medicare ($494 billion), Social Security ($748 billion) or all other non-defense, non entitlement programs combined. The $800 billion additional annual spending will also more than offset efforts by the bi-partisan “Gang of Six” to craft a deal to cut the budget deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years.

Our whole "plan" (to the extent that our government even has a plan for getting us out of this mess) is founded on the belief that our borrowing costs will remain low -- that the interest-rate environment will remain at or near zero indefinitely. Well, it won't, and I don't think enough people are thinking about what a huge dent interest-payments on the debt is going to put into our budget. Our entire federal budget will be eaten up with four things: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and debt-service payments. That means any additional spending (like, oh, say, the military) will have to come from borrowed money...which will have to be borrowed at higher rates, which in turn causes debt-service costs to rise yet again. This is the vicious debt-spiral many European countries now find themselves in.

What has basically happened during the past forty or fifty years is that we've spent most of our actual capital -- mainly on our vast welfare state and government apparatus, but also on our huge military. We are like a couple who lives paycheck-to-paycheck: any money that comes in goes right back out. Nothing gets tucked away. An unexpected expense -- a busted water-heater, broken-down car, or an unexpected illness or injury -- all of a sudden puts you in a hell of a financial hurt. So you borrow. You can't really afford even the payment much less the whole loan, but what can you do? You may even cast caution to the winds and buy that jet-ski you've had your eye on (on credit, of course). Why not? You're already screwed; being screwed a little bit more hardly matters at this point, right? Then something else breaks and you have to borrow again (if you can), and the monthly bills start to pinch you where you live -- it's either service your debt or pay the rent, because you can't do both. At that point, the spinning plates will come crashing down -- you will either default on your debt to avoid starving your family into oblivion, or you will force your family to live like animals in a cave so you can pay off the debt you ran up.

So the frustrated call goes up: "Okay, we're boned! I get it! But what can we do about it?" Answer: I don't know. Maybe nothing, at this point.

There are too few people who understand the gravity of the problem, and too many people who depend on a government check. The only real solution would require a combination of deep cuts to entitlement programs, a vast downsizing of our federal and state governments (and thus their spending), and a dedicated years-long effort to pay off our debt. But these solutions are waved off as "politically unfeasible", which is tantamount to simply admitting that the problem cannot be solved at all.

I've often said that circumstances will impose a solution on us if we don't find one ourselves -- we simply cannot continue as we are. And the reckoning is not comfortably far off in the future; it's unfolding right now, before our very eyes.
more...

Posted by: Monty at 05:26 AM | Comments (157)
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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:28 AM | Comments (204)
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You go, girl:

When a burly ex-convict forced his way into a posh Florida home last week, he had no idea what awaited him -- a 25-year-old beauty queen with a pink .38-caliber handgun.

Meghan Brown, a former Florida pageant queen, shot and killed 42-year-old Albert Franklin Hill during a home invasion March 12 at the 2,732-square-foot house she shares with her fiance in Tierra Verde, Fla.

Hill barged into the home at around 3 a.m. after Brown responded to a knock at the front door, according to a police report. He allegedly grabbed the 110-pound Brown around her nose and mouth and dragged her to an upstairs bedroom.

The womanÂ’s fiance, Robert Planthaber, said in an interview that he was quickly awakened by the altercation and ran to BrownÂ’s side.

"I attacked him and took a severe beating to the head," Planthaber told FoxNews.com. "But I got him off of her long enough for her to scramble to the room where she keeps her pink .38 special.”

Brown, who reigned as the 2009 Miss Tierra Verde, snatched her gun from a nearby bedroom and shot the suspect several times – hitting him in the chest, groin, thigh and back, her fiance said. Hill was pronounced dead at the scene.

Picked the wrong former beauty queen to mess with, he did. ..fritz..

Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:25 PM | Comments (116)
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Welcome to the boringest night of the week. Here's a video game and quiz to help keep you awake for a bit. more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:42 PM | Comments (731)
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I don't do pop culture very well. As ace reminded me some years ago, "if you don't have the chops".. etc.

So you may consider this the "hey, I don't do pop-culture worth a damn either, but I go to the movies once every other month or so, and I was wondering if I should, cause I remember John Wayne and Kim Darby and Glen Campbell and stuff, and I just kinda wondered if the Coen Brothers 'screwed this up'".

They didn't screw it up.

Some minor spoilers below. more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:33 PM | Comments (43)
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