You know what I'm sure is just a coincidence? That Reid picked up the minimum 51 votes to block it.

I don't think that's a coincidence. I think they only wanted 51, because they wanted to permit people like Nelson and Manchin to vote "for" it. I don't know if those guys did vote for it; but in hard votes like this, they usually arrange it so they can vote "for" popular, conservative-friendly measure.

It's fake. It's arranged.

The CCB gets 2-1 support among adults in the newest CNN poll.

And yet the media never once treated it as a viable proposal.

Go figure.

Given than Armageddon is Coming and is Scheduled for August 2nd, don't the Democrats have some obligation to start putting plans and serious offers on the table?

Posted by: Ace at 07:53 AM | Comments (182)
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Breaking now.

Two explosions rocked government buildings in Oslo, Norway, on Friday, state TV and witnesses said.

Windows in several buildings had been blown out, and people were in the street bleeding, state TV broadcaster NRK said on its website.

A first explosion was followed by a second, a reporter for Norwegian state broadcaster NRK told CNN on Friday.

One explosion happened near a government building housing the office of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, said the reporter, Linda Reinholdsen. Another hit near the Norwegian parliament, she said.

Several buildings in Oslo were on fire, she said, and smoke was pouring from them.

No confirmed word on casualties yet but there have been at lest several wounded.

I've seen some reports on Twitter that the Norwegian Prime Minister is ok.

(It doesn't look like it was a holiday, so I removed that). Or, again via Gabe, was it?

Target indicates terrorism. Oslo doesn't have a gas network, so unlikely it was that.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:47 AM | Comments (316)
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If a League of peace-seeking peoples is set at nought, we must convert it into a League of armed peoples, too faithful to molest others, too strong to be molested themselves.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:49 AM | Comments (500)
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Ben Franklin once wrote, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes and VD from French Prostitutes".

Okay, maybe I made a transcribing error.

I think this quote needs to be extended to include : "Taxes can't die".

Let me give you two examples.

In 1861 Alabama became the fourth state to secede from the union. They contributed approximately 120,000 soldiers to the Lost Cause. In order to facilitate an easy re-entry into civillian life, the government of Alabama instituted a property tax that provided pensions to Confederate Vets and their wives. Now in 2011, some 150 years after the end of the Civil War that tax is still being levied.

The Great Johnstown Flood of 1889 was followed by many smaller floods in the early 20th century. The worst of which was the flood of 1936. In order to repay for the cleanup, Pennsylvania instituted an 18% levy on every bottle bought at state liquor stores. Some 75 years later we are still paying that tax.

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:00 PM | Comments (585)
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WSJ's priceless BestoftheWeb* notices and sums up a column by Deepak Chopra.

1. Liberals are freethinkers who wisely question their own assumptions.

2. Conservatives, by contrast, are sheep who blindly adhere to crazy dogmas.

3. It is crucial to keep Obama in office lest the crazy, stupid conservatives take over.

4. Therefore, liberals should stop questioning him and give him their blind support.

It might look snarky but it's an accurate summary of Chopra's column!

more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 03:17 PM | Comments (328)
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Datum:

BULLETIN: WH meeting today at 5:30 with top 2 dem leaders from senate/house

Drew has a theory about this, which I especially like because none of my own effort went into fashioning it. He thinks this indicates trouble for Obama and the Democrats:

There was talk that Boehner and Obama were walking on a deal that was cuts and debt ceiling increase now and maybe some tax reform next year but no promise of increase in tax revenues.

There were reports Dems weren't happy (I sent a link earlier, not sure where it is)

Now there seems to be an unscheduled meeting with the Democratic leadership from the Hill.

I'm guessing (and that's all it is) is that Obama is either telling them the rumors about the Boehner deal weren't true or he's trying to get them to sign on.

Either way, seems to be some trouble in Democratic paradise.

Are they blinking, then? Not sure.

It's possible Obama has realized his best political play is divergent from Congressional Democrats' best play. The Congressional Democrats want no spending cuts, especially not on entitlements, because they're in safe seats and all their base cares about is expanding the welfare state at any cost.

But that will lead to an imploding economy -- not something the egotist Obama wants. Not because he cares about the American people, but no one gets reelected for presiding over a depression.

Two Good Posts From Karl: I've had these open in tabs forever. Figure it's time to post them.

Successful debt deals lean heavily on the "cuts" side of things.

You know what results in catastrophe? A "balanced" mix of cuts and increased taxes -- Obama's preferred plan is the one that always results in calamity.

[T]he real fight — both now or in a possible crisis — is over the mix of spending cuts and tax hikes. A look at other countries’ crises is rather eye-opening on this key point. Canada reduced government debt from 68% of GDP in 1994 to 29% of GDP in 2008. There were six to seven dollars in budget cuts for every dollar of tax hikes — and these were real cuts in spending, not reductions in spending growth, and not the imaginary spending cuts Democrats have offered Republicans in past decades. By 2000, Canada was cutting personal and corporate taxes, as well as capital gans taxes. (Read the linked story for another example, set by New Zealand in the 1980s.) During the same period, Sweden reduced public debt from 78% of GDP to 47% of GDP by cutting public spending from 71% of GDP in 1993 to 52% in 2008—that is, by almost one-fifth of GDP. During the period Sweden cut taxes four times and abolished wealth taxes, inheritance and gift taxes. Finland similarly cut spending and taxes as part of its fiscal consolidation.

Indeed, a study of fiscal consolidations in 21 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development over 37 years concludes that failed attempts to close budget gaps relied 53% on tax increases and 47%, while successful consolidations averaged 85% spending cuts and 15% tax increases.

And here's Karl amplifying my point that it is not a "compromise" for Obama to accept entitlement reform. He ran on that issue, promising to do just that.

January, 2009: Just after he was inaugurated. Here he is recapitulating past promises.

President-elect Barack Obama pledged yesterday to shape a new Social Security and Medicare “bargain” with the American people, saying that the nation’s long-term economic recovery cannot be attained unless the government finally gets control over its most costly entitlement programs.

That discussion will begin next month, Obama said, when he convenes a “fiscal responsibility summit” before delivering his first budget to Congress. He said his administration will begin confronting the issues of entitlement reform and long-term budget deficits soon after it jump-starts job growth and the stock market.

“What we have done is kicked this can down the road. We are now at the end of the road and are not in a position to kick it any further,” he said. “We have to signal seriousness in this by making sure some of the hard decisions are made under my watch, not someone else’s.”

And he said he'd prefer to get moving on this within the first two years of his presidency, and definitely within his first term.

Yeah.

Posted by: Ace at 02:09 PM | Comments (258)
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Verum Serum has a post contrasting a Police song's take on cars with Rush's.

The Police song -- Synchronicity I, I think -- goes...

Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes,
Contestants in a suicidal race.

That is, all you wage-slaves headed to work each day are lemmings in a suicide machine.

You hear this an awful lot from artists. An awful lot. You see this basic idea -- the emptiness and awfulness of normal, quotidian life -- in dozens of movies, like the empty American Beauty, and damn, if they don't win Oscars a lot.

Death of a Salesman was about this. So, instant classic.

This is a silly and solipsistic conceit. Let me define that word, in case you don't know it:

sol·ip·sism (slp-szm, slp-)

n. Philosophy
1. The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.
2. The theory or view that the self is the only reality.

Taken out of the realm of philosophy, the word is mostly used to describe a non-thoughtful, non-philosophical insistence that one's own experience can be generalized to all other's experience. That is, it's a baby thing. Like babies who lack any sense of perspective outside their own heads, the solipsist is incapable of using his imagination to guess what the world might look like from other vantage points.

We are all prisoners of our own experience, it is true, but the solipsist is a willing prisoner, and generally refuses to even try to see the world from a different point of view.

Now, artists love songs like this, and movies like this, because these movies speak to them. They are of a specific psychological type, mostly. They themselves could not function happily within the confines of what most people would call "a normal life," and are driven towards more Bohemian, atypical lifestyles.

I don't begrudge them that. As someone who's wound up, whether by choice or by chance, in a sort of Bohemian limbo myself, I get why they chafe at the idea of 9 to 5 and nicely-trimmed suburban lawns, myself. (Actually I don't get the latter and never have -- what the hell is the problem with a nice lawn?)

So these songs, and these films, can be said to be the stories of their own lives and their own choices, the rejection of "normal" life and more common non-artistic dreams and ambitions. And certainly, for any successful or semi-successful artist, their choice to take an oddball path can be justified; if it all works for them, wonderful.

But they don't leave it at that. The message of these songs and movies is that the Square, Normal Suburban Workaday Life just wasn't for me, because my psychology was such that I couldn't hack that would always be miserable in such a state; it's almost always generalized and universalized as something much, much bigger:

The life you lead (assuming you're not an Artist) sucks and you're a fool or a coward for leading it.

What? How did we get there?

Not everyone has talent enough to be an artist and produce art on an occasional schedule (when the Muse moves one) and yet be good enough at it so as not to starve. In fact, the number of artists a society can support is surely hard-capped at no more than, say, 1% at the very most, and only during a period of strong, strong economic activity, when artists who can't make a living on their art can get paid good wages as a waiter or something.

This is so obvious, isn't it?

So what the hell is the Artist scorn for all non-Artists?

And why is there no recognition by the Bohemian Lifestyle crowd that the Bohemian Lifestyle isn't very attractive for many people, anyway? Some people really don't like the Bohemian thing of always worrying about rent and never having anything saved for the future.

We call a lot of such people "parents." If the Bohemian lifestyle is tough on an adult -- and it is, unless you're quite rich -- imagine what it's like for a kid.

Artists always claim that among their most important gifts and among their most crucial skills is to see the world through other people's eyes, or imagine a world that isn't, but could be.

Really? Are you sure of that, guys? Because if you have that capability you sure the hell seem to spend an awful lot of your time suppressing it in favor of dogfood morality plays that tell everyone they should just put together a stick and bindle and go hobo-ing on the trains and "see where life takes them."

Something I really like in movies is where the hero or heroine finally has a real job. Tommy Boy was not a great movie -- good, not great -- but I can't tell you how much I liked the occupation of the heroes in that.

They made, and sold, after-market car parts.

How great is that? The heroes actually made good quality car parts so that people could fix their cars. They weren't in Hollywood Cliche Occupations like Artist, Photographer, Magazine Editor, Fashion Designer, Architect, Writer, etc. (Or the ubiquitous Cop or Lawyer, but those professions are usually only seen in the specific genres of crime picture/legal drama.)

They just made stuff, and sold stuff, which other people needed and bought. They didn't have the Philosophically Heroic Profession of Artist; no, they had the mundane profession of car parts manufacturers.

Meanwhile, in parts of the movie they don't show, it's the Car Parts Manufacturers who actually create the excess wealth in society that permits an investment in nice-but-not-necessary diversions like Police albums and therefore makes Sting millions of dollars denigrating the Car Parts Manufacturers.

Just people going through the humdrum, and yet quietly heroic, work of actually building the things and growing the food that actually makes civilization possible.

And this is all so obvious. It's not that they lack insight or perception to see this. It's in plain sight -- no special skill at perceptiveness required.

No, it takes something else. An affirmative, deliberate choice to be blind rather than sighted.

All in order to flatter themselves, and insult other people for not making the choices which were, for them personally, better suited than others, and make millions of dollars denigrating the economic heroes that make their Bohemian existences possible in the first place.

Childish and solipsistic. But children can be so nasty like this.

Here's an Honest Song About the Life of an Artist: People call this a "comical" song. It's a funny thing I'm learning -- you can usually tell a whole lot more truth in comedy because more "serious" works are filled with dishonest dramatic posturing.

But if you're being funny, you're often being real.

So here's a song that expresses the proper sentiment regarding being so damn lucky as to make millions of dollars for banging on a guitar.

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Posted by: Ace at 01:18 PM | Comments (265)
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I'm having trouble understanding this -- I think the guy did try to inform the officer he was armed, but the officer kept barking at him to shut up. When he finally did make his voice heard about the gun, the cop goes bananas with threats, demanding to know why the guy didn't tell him about the gun.

He seems to have been pulled over for picking up a prostitute on the street.

Here's my question: Is it, or is it not, standard police procedure to ask "Are you armed?" as one of the first questions (if not the first) at a stop? I believe it is.

So why didn't this idiot cop ask that? It's true that the law requires the license holder to announce he has a gun. He seems to have tried, but Officer Steroids ignored that.

But even if the cop didn't hear the guy attempting to tell him, why did the cop not ask the SOP question?

The cop goes berserk over the presence of a weapon on his subject after he learns of it, but apparently didn't care enough about that possibility to ask about it before that.

Captain Ed discusses the various laws one can have about announcing that one is armed. How about the simplest solution: The cop should ask, as they usually do.

Meanwhile, a conniption alert for the NYT, as they get pictures of a Knob Creek, KY., shooting event.

Posted by: Ace at 12:45 PM | Comments (147)
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It's pretty simple. Obama's great big trump card is threatening to default the nation.

So you take that off the table.

You pass two bills:

1) Allow a conditional increase in the debt limit of up to $200 billion for use only to avoid default. The money could be borrowed only if the Treasury secretary certifies that the funds will be used only for debt service and that there is no other source of funds available for the purpose. Take away the default argument from the president.

2) Prioritize the use of tax revenue in the event of no increase in borrowing authority so that military pay and Social Security checks would not be affected.

Obama and the Democrats would surely like to veto/refuse to pass this.

But what exactly would be their public reason for so doing? The real reason is that they are giving up leverage by holding the nation's credit rating hostage; but they can't say that aloud.

What would they say? If the House acts to make sure no default happens during this period of negotiations and brinksmanship, what exactly is Obama's reason for refusing to safeguard the nation's credit rating?

I don't know. I don't imagine they have a very good reason, apart from dismissing it, vaguely, as "partisan posturing" or something.

Here's why this is important. Boehner was on Rush Limbaugh, stating there was no deal, public or private.

But when pressed, Boehner says it's important to have a back-up plan to make sure we don't default.

Now, if Boehner isn't doing as Morris suggests, then his back-up plan is certainly some form of capitulation to Obama.

Which means that Obama's strategy wins -- he runs out the clock, presents the Republicans with a potential disaster he's personally engineered, and then demands they give in to him to avert that engineered disaster at the last moment.

Dick Morris' plan would strip away that hostage-takers' advantage Obama currently enjoys.

Posted by: Ace at 12:14 PM | Comments (154)
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They're scanning license plates and mapping drivers' whereabouts.

Civil libertarians are raising the alarm over the state’s plans to create a Big Brother database that could map drivers’ whereabouts with police cruiser-mounted scanners that capture thousands of license plates per hour — storing that information indefinitely where local cops, staties, feds and prosecutors could access it as they choose.

“What kind of a society are we creating here?” asked civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate, who along with the ACLU fears police abuse. “There comes a point where the surveillance is so pervasive and total that it’s a misnomer to call a society free any longer.”

The computerized scanners, known as Automatic License Plate Recognition devices, instantly check for police alerts, warrants, traffic violations and parking tickets, which cops say could be an invaluable tool in thwarting crime.

. . .

“People who aren’t wanted for a crime, all of their information is stored in a database that is shared with another government agency,” Crawford said. “The potential for abuse is very big. We don’t think people who haven’t committed a crime should be tracked by law enforcement.”

This is pathetic. We need a comprehensive privacy statute that covers both our digital lives and meatspace, along with reform of reasonable expectation of privacy fictions that have developed in caselaw.* At the rate technology is growing, we need to clarify limits on police power. They will use any tool they can get their hands on as long as it's legal. That's their job. And for the first time, the state of technology is such that the government can keep tabs on everybody all the time--if we let that happen. Without a comprehensive statute, there is little to keep them from "just doing their job," and reform is not going to happen in the courts.

This is America, not Oceania. more...

Posted by: rdbrewer at 11:20 AM | Comments (201)
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