I mean, look at this guy. Am I to believe there is really a "Congressman Hank Johnson" (nice "real-sounding" name there, champs) who really believes that if Guam becomes too populous it might tip over?

I was watching this jackass during the Holder hearings, and tweeted about being assailed by an ugly stereotype from an earlier age. He really seems like a character that Keenan Ivory Wayans would have done on In Living Color.

He thinks the murders of 200 people are a "manufactured" controversy.

“I think this is another manufactured controversy by the second amendment, NRA Republican tea party movement,” Johnson said. [...]

Johnson finished off his questioning by commenting that he thinks conservatives are systematically trying to prevent the ATF from functioning. “I think the NRA and other Second Amendment rights radicals have confidence that the U.S. will not have a competent ATF head,” he said.

Another competent ATF head? Like the guy who killed 200 people while trying to protect us?

Thanks to ThomasS.

Posted by: Ace at 02:42 PM | Comments (284)
Post contains 192 words, total size 2 kb.

He's terrific, if you support an absolutist, doctrinaire policy of pacifism, which is in fact far more left-wing than Obama's, and may be more left-wing than Dennis Kucinich's.

Posted by: Ace at 01:09 PM | Comments (359)
Post contains 40 words, total size 1 kb.

Her boobs aren't big enough to get away with being this dumb.

She'd need, guestimating here, like 36GGG's to balance this.

So, she needs to either read more or get life-impairing-sized breast implants.

And reading's hard, so I'm going to go ahead and advise the surgery. more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:31 PM | Comments (232)
Post contains 57 words, total size 1 kb.

Snaps.

Democrats like to think of themselves as the party of smart people. And over the last four years we have heard countless encomiums, and not just from Democrats, of the intellect and perceptiveness of Barack Obama. But a reading of the text of ObamaÂ’s December 6 speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, billed as one of his big speeches of the year, shows him to be something like the opposite.

Even by the standards of campaign rhetoric, this is a shockingly shoddy piece of work. You can start with his intellectually indefensible caricature of Republican philosophy: “We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.” Or his simple factual inaccuracy: “The wealthiest Americans are paying the lowest taxes in over half a century.” Or his infantile economic analysis, blaming job losses on the invention of the automated teller machine (they’ve been around for more than four decades, Mr. President, and we’ve had lots of job growth during that time) and the Internet.

...

What we have here, it seems a president who has no serious interest in public policy. He has spent nearly half his 15 years in public office running for other public office. The only difference now is that, having run out of higher offices to run for, he is just running for reelection instead. Those who pride themselves on belonging to the party of smart people should be embarrassed.

Is are president unteachable?

Sorry I was away so long there. I am just not finding stuff that I feel interested in posting.

Posted by: Ace at 12:18 PM | Comments (119)
Post contains 273 words, total size 2 kb.

This occurred to me due to Obama's claim that paying people not to work creates more jobs than actually creating jobs.

It is a thoroughly stupid and ignorant statement. Even as a weak bit of political spin, it verges, apologies for the word but I mean it, on being mentally retarded.

A year or two ago one of those guys who's supposedly a libertarian but seems to make his rent attacking conservatives posited that the right suffers from "epistemic closure," a mis-named term which he claimed to mean "closed off to information or experience inconsistent with one's prior views."

A tasteless and unnecessary neologism for the very old idea of a Community-Based Reality, a group which decides what reality is according to a group. Contrary information will not be permitted to interfere with the Community-Based Reality the group is deciding upon; they reason backwards from their conclusions to decide what the Facts are which prove those pre-supposed conclusions.

Not a particularly new idea. But he made up a (poor) neologism for it, and attacked the right, so of course he got lots of links and probably a few invitations to MSNBC.

Using this terminology: Is Obama's mind epistemically closed?

Obama is supposedly a learned man. We are told he is a rara avis, in Chris Buckley's dribblings, a true intellectual.

When was the last time Obama actually learned something about the world?

Did he, as the book's title might have it, Learn Everything He Needed To Know By Second Semester Sophomore Year?

When was the last time Obama was actually confronted by new information and new experience and actually adapted his beliefs to fit the new fact-pattern, rather than consistently adapting the new fact-pattern to fit his old beliefs?

For, we were told, anyone who does not do this is is "epistemically closed."

So when has Obama done it? I'm sure that book Bill Ayers wrote for him contains moments of realization, but those are of course set deep in Bill Ayers' past.

One question the media loves asking Republicans is "What have you learned in office?" By which they really are asking: "Which hidebound conservative beliefs are you finally ready to jettison?"

They fret when a Republican dodges the question, saying something bullshitty about learning about the greatness of the American Voting Public, and cry "unteachable!"

Very well.

What has Obama learned in office? Which of his pre-existing beliefs has he learned to is wrong?

Don't say gay marriage; he's still "evolving" on that, so he is not ready to discard that old stance against gay marriage (not until January 2013, at least).

What has Obama learned?

The man is besieged by evidence of his own failures, after all. Even if one were, like his liberal media Praetorian Guard, to take the position that Obama's failures are really Hidden Successes, surely he must have changed some of his beliefs as he sees the practical effect of his hitherto entirely-theoretical knowledge of how economics, and the world, works.

Oh sure he'll claim he's learned he hasn't communicated his vision and his successes enough.

That is just a dodge, of course. That is not confronting his failures and learning from them; that is merely attempting to claim his failures are successes, and his only real failure is being President of a nation whose voters are too dumb to understand how amazingly he's succeeded.

That, in other words, is simply another proof of epistemic closure.

So: If Obama is such a learned man, what the fuck has he learned since age 19?

Posted by: Ace at 09:58 AM | Comments (517)
Post contains 604 words, total size 4 kb.

Behold, the "American" President.

As Obama called for passage of those bills, he also responded to a recent Republican push to require him to approve the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. "However many jobs might be generated by a Keystone pipeline," he said, "they're going to be a lot fewer than the jobs that are created by extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment insurance."

Sums it up, doesn't it? A government program which puts people on the dole creates jobs, but a private venture to deliver energy does not.

Posted by: Ace at 08:48 AM | Comments (272)
Post contains 120 words, total size 1 kb.

Is Brooks self-aware enough to know he's not really a conservative, and that actual conservatives despise him as an impostor who flatters the liberal chattering class to which he actually belongs?

I assume he knows that, and so I assume he intentionally attacks Gingrich with his latest column's supposedly laudatory bits.

Of all the major Republicans, the one who comes closest to my worldview is Newt Gingrich. Despite his erratically shifting views and odd phases, he continually returns to this core political refrain: He talks about using government in energetic but limited ways to increase growth, dynamism and social mobility.

As he said in 2007, “It’s not a point of view libertarians would embrace, but I am more in the Alexander Hamilton-Teddy Roosevelt tradition of conservatism. I recognize that there are times when you need government to help spur private enterprise and economic development.”

Look at American history, Gingrich continued, “The government provided railroad land grants to encourage widespread adoption of what was then the most modern form of transportation to develop our country. The Homestead Act essentially gave away land to those willing to live on it and develop it. We used what were in effect public-private partnerships to bring telephone service and electricity to every community in our nation. All of these are examples of government bringing about public purposes without creating massive taxpayer-funded bureaucracies.”

This was not one of Gingrich’s passing fads. It is one of the most consistent themes of his career. His 1984 book, “Window of Opportunity,” is a broadside against what he calls the “laissez-faire” conservatism — the idea that government should just get out of the way so the market can flourish. As he wrote, “The opportunity society calls not for a laissez-faire society in which the economic world is a neutral jungle of purely random individual behavior, but for forceful government intervention on behalf of growth and opportunity.”

Over the years, this approach has led Gingrich to support cap-and-trade energy legislation to combat global warming. It has led him to endorse universal health care coverage. It has led him to support humane immigration reform. He enthusiastically backed Jack KempÂ’s efforts to fight poverty, the precursors to compassionate conservatism.

Though his ideas stray, his most common theme is that government should intervene in crucial ways to create a dynamic, decentralized, low-tax society.

So why am I not more excited by the Gingrich surge?

In the first place, Gingrich loves government more than I do.

Now my opening question was just sort of cheeky -- I think Brooks knows exactly what he's doing, and he knows this is the worst possible thing he can say about a candidate he disfavors.

So it is an example of a liberal trying to vote in a conservative primary.

That said, that is my own problem with Newton.

Posted by: Ace at 08:04 AM | Comments (223)
Post contains 486 words, total size 3 kb.

Sounds pretty clear to me. But maybe he's just a highly-ironic person who inserts irony into unexpected situations, like directives about stealing client money for his own use.

Jon S. Corzine, the former U.S. senator and governor who presided over the collapse of the commodities brokerage MF Global, told lawmakers Thursday that he never intended to authorize a transfer of customer funds to the firm’s accounts and that if he did “it was a misunderstanding.”

As previously covered here, Corzine served as Obama's liaison to Wall Street, and, while serving in this capacity, lobbied hard against additional rules that would make it more difficult for him to use client funds for trades for his own accounts. He claims that is not a case of his using undue influence, and the media takes his word for it, because he's a Democrat.

He probably did all this as a goof.

Posted by: Ace at 07:20 AM | Comments (140)
Post contains 196 words, total size 1 kb.

Friday! Wooooooo!

There was news late yesteday in the endorsement battle between the second-tier candidates. Rick Santorum picked up the Iowa Secretary of State, which I guess is maybe a thing for Iowans. Rick Perry got Dakota Meyer. Advantage: ?

Oh, and Santorum labels the other candidates "hypocrites" for declining to appear on Trump's Very Special Episode of the Apprentice.

And in pre-DOOM DOOMiness, Ron Paul's gathering strength in Iowa will help Mitt Romney. Thanks, Ronulans; now please DIAF. For the record, like some of the other cobs, I will not be voting for Paul even if he is the Republican candidate. Not that I expect Paul's campaign to get that far, but lines must be drawn: I have no tolerance for racist conspiracy theorists, and that includes racist conspiracy theorists with disastrous foreign policy and economic views.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (575)
Post contains 146 words, total size 1 kb.

America Returning To Being A Renter Nation?

America is going back to being a renter nation. Up until the 1950s, the percentage of homeowners stayed at 40 percent. Aggressive government subsidies drove the percentage in recent years to above 65 percent. The housing “industry” ran out of buyers. A good 35 percent of Americans prefer the freedom of movement and lack of responsibility that comes from being a renter. We will likely return to being maybe a 55 percent homeowner nation.

There are reasons why home ownership has historically hovered around 63% - and it wasn't because the evil banks were redlining minorities or enforcing arbitrarily harsh underwriting standards.

As Glenn Reynolds has pointed out letting people have the accoutrements of middle class living - a house, nice cars, and a college education - does not in fact make them act middle class nor does it give them middle class values.

And today as a results of the giving-out-loans-like-candy frenzy of the last 15 years it's now harder to buy a house than it's been in decades. So if you don't have a house now, are you totally screwed?

Is there any good news? I would just recall that in 1980 I was repeatedly told by financial experts that if you didnÂ’t already own a house you never would. Interest rates would never return to single digits.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:47 PM | Comments (784)
Post contains 990 words, total size 9 kb.