December 7, 1941 - a date that will live in infamy. Remember.

This “Ace” fellow seems to be a kindred spirit. It often strikes me how much Barack Obama looks, talks, behaves, and (apparently) believes like a character out of an Ayn Rand novel. Rand always wrote of statist Socialists more as caricatures than characters, but Barack Obama could have stepped whole and breathing right out of the pages of Atlas Shrugged. Which shows you the shallowness and unthinking obeisance to leftist cant the man displays -- there is precious little subtlety to Barack Obama. You sometimes find hidden depths even in your ideological enemies, surprising pockets of common ground. But in Barack Obama, there is only a hollow vessel filled up with the thoughts and opinions of leftists he has associated with in his life. He speaks (and apparently thinks) only in platitudes, bromides, and cliches. Barack Obama is, in short, the end product of the grand "progressive" experiment since the early 1900's. Ecce homo!

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

Hayek understood that humility in the face of the imponderable is a very great virtue. Intellectuals of all stripes are terribly prone to hubris. The lesson of the ancient Greeks - which seems to be entirely lost on our current generation of “experts” - is that where Hubris rules, Nemesis always lurks nearby. People who forget that (or ignore it) nearly always come to grief, and take others with them. Also: Hayek understood that economics is not mathematics (however much its practitioners love to put on the mantle of the hard sciences). It is - or should be - a study of human behavior and psychology more than anything else.
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Posted by: Monty at 05:00 AM | Comments (250)
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You guys know the drill.

The Boston-area chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association closed last month. There are too few left.

The Baltimore Sun editorial page on December 8, 1941: "Since force is to be the determining factor, we resort to force."

There are ceremonies all over the place to mark the 70th anniversary of the attack. I'll be at this one. Check your local paper to see if there's one near you.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:54 AM | Comments (189)
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Out of the Time Capsule: Chris Farley Does Newt

From waaay back in 1995. An entirely different world yet in some ways it still feels like yesterday with a slightly updated cast.

On April 4, 1995, four days after Tommy Boy premiered, Chris Farley crashed a meeting of the House Republican Conference. The SNL star stormed into the meeting in full Gingrich get-up to address the crowd.

But just remember that many of the same people cheering Newt in this video would also attempt to oust him from the speakership within two years and weren't sorry at all to see him leave the House only four years later.

We're supposed to be seeing a new and improved Newt 2.0 in 2012, but I and others have our doubts.

[and yes here I preemptively condemn my own traitorous RINO nature]

(video below the fold) more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:13 PM | Comments (769)
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Sorry, long day. Long cold day too, when the hell did winter get here?

The guys in first class

Muletrain2016: 109
Purity Republican: 105
scott: 104
CountryBlumkins: 104
FMG: 104
Roll Tide Roll: 103
Aristomenes from da 54301: 103
chemwonk: 103

The guys that got thrown off the plane for bein assholes

rd brewer: 101
DrewM 98
Gabe Malor 97
Russ from Winterset: 97
Andy 93
Ben 92
DiT 85

Anybody interested in a College Bowl pickem thing? Go to the Yahoo Sports Fantasy thing, pick Join a Group, Groupid is 17838, password is paulanka

Confidence points, like last year. You assign the highest level of points to your best picks.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:07 PM | Comments (16)
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He says "trickle-down economics" rather than capitalism, but "trickle-down economics" is merely an argument in favor of capitalism. There is no such thing as "trickle-down economics." There is capitalism, and the argued advantage of it, which is the trickling down of created wealth.

So he is in fact saying, as the headline puts it, that capitalism has never worked.

Meanwhile his Suicide Solution Socialism has apparently set the economic world on fire, I guess.

I don't talk about this too often because Monty does such a good job and it's frankly depressing. But Europe is probably going to plunge into something in between a recession or a depression, and may erupt in violence and political disorder.

And Europe is Obama's lodestar. That's where he wants to take us. To the extent we haven't gotten there yet, it's because Americans are soft, lazy bitter clingers who hate other sorts of people (and their politico-economic systems).

So Europe's 60 or 70 year history with socialism is about to end in violent upheavals and misery... and here's this ignoramus saying that it's capitalism which is the proven failure.

Video below, and some more commentary from Hot Air.

Tina Korbe is a little heartened that Obama has unmasked himself:

As tempting as it is to think not only that the government could supply us all with a comfortable living but also that it should, I’m tempted by something else far more. That “something else” is the Founders’ faith in self-government and voluntary associations in and through civic society. Obama said today “we can’t return” to a “do-it-on-your-own” economy, but what he fails to realize is that, for Americans, it’s not a choice between going it alone and going it with the government. He cited the example of a company — Marvin Windows and Doors — that voluntarily refuses to lay off its employees — but confusedly seemed to think more government involvement would help to proliferate that kind of company. But the CEO himself admits a sense of community inspires his faith in his employees — not any kind of government mandate. That CEO clearly keeps faith with the Founders, who, in the construction of our government, controlled for self-interest, but also admonished citizens to remember moral obligations to others.

Today, the president did sweepingly what he has done patchily for the past few months, did at last what I have long wished he would do. He honestly argued for a welfare state and directly stated his disbelief in trickle-down economics. For once — again, except in a few places — this wasn’t conservative rhetoric to cover up progressive policies. It was progressive rhetoric to promote progressive policies. Nobody who reads this speech should be in doubt as to what he’s selling — but they should think deeply about how much freedom they’re willing to give up to buy it.

We can't return to a "do it yourself" economy?

Jesus God. He's really pretty much making the case for socialism, isn't he?

Posted by: Ace at 02:13 PM | Comments (452)
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But what do they mean by "personally?"

Republicans on a private Republican National Committee conference call with allies warned Tuesday that party surrogates should refrain from personal attacks against President Barack Obama, because such a strategy is too hazardous for the GOP.

"We're hesitant to jump on board with heavy attacks" personally against President Obama, Nicholas Thompson, the vice president of polling firm the Tarrance Group, said on the call. "There's a lot of people who feel sorry for him."

Recent polling data indicates that while the president suffers from significantly low job approval ratings, voters still give "high approval" to Obama personally, Thompson said.

Voters "don't think he's an evil man who's out to change the United States" for the worse--even though many of the same survey respondents agree that his policies have harmed the country, Thompson said. The upshot, Thompson stressed, is that Republicans should "exercise some caution" when talking about the president personally.

I don't know what this advisory means because "personally" means a lot of different things.

If they mean "it's dangerous to claim he's evil and deliberately wishes to plunge the country in Cloward-Piven chaos," I agree, that is dangerous. Those in the middle do not believe this (because if they did believe this, they sure wouldn't be in the middle!) and that's too much of a buy-in to expect the politically unaffected to kick in, intellectually.

On the other hand, is it "personal" to note he's a Stuttering Clusterf***k of a Miserable Failure? Okay, yes, with the swears, that's personal; but pointing out someone's policies are a complete and utter failure -- most likely because they are based on a wrongheaded and thick-witted ignorance/denial of the workings of the real world -- that's not personal.

They couldn't possibly mean that, I don't think. If they did mean that, what exactly are they suggesting we run on?

Posted by: Ace at 01:40 PM | Comments (213)
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That document dump on Friday didn't get buried.

It's actually the wrong time for a large document dump, as all it does is give people 48 hours to skim the voluminous record and prepare to print... on Monday.

Obama can't even manage a cover-up.

It was all a lie. The angry denials, the high dudgeon, the how-dare-you accuse-us bleating emanating from Eric HolderÂ’s Justice Department these last nine months.

Operation Fast and Furious — the “botched” gun-tracking program run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — did, in fact, deliberately allow some 2,000 high-powered weapons to be sold to Mexican drug cartel agents and then waltzed across the border and into the Mexican drug wars — just as Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa, who are leading the congressional investigations, have charged all along.

That’s the conclusion we can draw from Friday night’s nearly 1,400-page document dump, which gives us a glimpse into the inner workings of the Justice Department as it struggled earlier this year to come up with an explanation for the deadly mess — and “misled” Congress.

Now the man who supervised it, Attorney General Holder, will appears before Congress again Thursday to testify in the exploding fiasco. But thereÂ’s really only one question he needs to answer: Why?

Why did Justice, the ATF and an alphabet soup of federal agencies facilitate the transfer of guns across the border — without the knowledge of Mexican authorities — when they knew they couldn’t trace them properly?

Dennis Burke, the former, now-resigned disgrace of a US Attorney for Arizona, the one who leaked documents in order to discredit a whistleblower, is revealed as a liar with an agenda in the documents:

The newly released e-mails show Dennis Burke, the since-fired US attorney in Arizona who supervised the operation, furiously pushing back against Grassley and his staff, calling them “willing stooges for the Gun Lobby.”

But everything he was denying happened did in fact happen.

One area of investigation and dispute is the authorship of a letter written to Grassley, now withdrawn due to "inaccuracies" the Justice Department has "discovered" in it. The letter was a flat denial of reality -- it lied. It claimed what happened did not in fact happen.

There were a lot of hands working on it.

The Justice Department released documents today detailing how officials prepared a Feb. 4 letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) that Attorney General Eric Holder has since admitted contained false information about Operation Fast and Furious, a botched gun operation under investigation by Congress.

The documents show that Dennis Burke, then a U.S. attorney who has since resigned, and William Hoover, then the deputy director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who has since been reassigned, principally provided the false information to officials who drafted the letter. But the documents do not shed light on whether either knew the information was false at the time.

In the Feb. 4 letter, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich broadly denied that ATF officials had allowed assault weapons to “walk,” which meant ending surveillance on weapons suspected to be en route to Mexican drug cartels, allowing the guns to escape into the wild. “ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation to Mexico,” Weich wrote.

Grassley’s allegations about Fast and Furious, later revealed to be true, “are based on categorical falsehoods,” Burke wrote in a Jan. 31 email. Faith Burton, a Justice Department official who drafted an early version of the letter, took notes based on a phone conversation with Hoover that read, “ATF doesn’t let guns walk.”

Emails show Lanny Breuer, the assistant attorney general for the departmentÂ’s criminal division, received versions of the letter on four occasions via email.

Breuer forwarded the emails to a personal account but told Congressional investigators in a written statement today he “cannot say for sure” whether he viewed the drafts.

I'll be he cannot say for sure.

Now, Napolitano and Holder have both testified that they knew nothing of this beforehand, or even in the aftermath of Brian Terry's murder. They claim they didn't find out anything about this whole "Covert Operation To Smuggle 2000 High Powered Weapons To Mexican Criminals" thing until after it was brought to their attention by the media (if I'm remember right -- in any event, a long time after the shooting).

Via Sipsey Street Irregulars, Senator Grassley doubts that this claim is plausible, given that so many of their underlings knew all about it and were chatting with each other.

Note that Napolitano traveled to Arizona specifically to learn about the investigation into Brian Terry's murder. But her claim is that the local FBI and ATF bigs she met with failed to inform her that they'd been killed with US-provided guns.

If that's true, why haven't Napolitano and Holder already drawn up charges against the men who concealed this?

Bonus: Check out the New York Times' headline on an article in which the DoJ admits it provided congressional investigators with lies, or as they term them, "inaccuracies."

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Posted by: Ace at 11:46 AM | Comments (329)
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It's not true. Sure, any successful new industry tends to destroy some jobs. But successful industries also create their own new jobs, and further, new efficiencies in the economy create completely unrelated jobs, products and services that can now be profitably offered because people have a bit more wealth, and hence can spend a bit on things they hadn't spent on before.

Obama only focuses on the first part: Internet sales has destroyed a good many brick-and-mortar sales positions. This is true (and I think something we need to look at as regards the disparate tax treatment of internet and local sales; either end the tax for both or impose it on both).

But in any growing economy, efficiencies would create wealth which would lead to other jobs.

His problem, then, is that he simply has a stagnant economy and diminishing wealth.

Not the internet.

But he needs a new villain because ATMs and robots were last season's villains.

Posted by: Ace at 11:14 AM | Comments (205)
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Love that headline gag by JWF.

"Mostly peaceful" is not peaceful. "Mostly peaceful" demonstrations are low-intensity riots.

WW2, if you think about it, was "mostly peaceful." There were whole swaths of the world in which there was no fighting, wasn't there? Apart from the mostly peaceful Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7th), and some sporadic naval engagements in South America, the whole North/South America half of the globe was "mostly peaceful."

Except whet it wasn't, of course.

According to a police report, officers arrived at McKeldin Square just after midnight for a report of an assault and spoke to the victim, who said she and 23-year-old Desiree Nicholson had gotten into an argument “because [Nicholson] was not taking care of her cat,” according to report.

She said Nicholson kicked her in the stomach, and then stabbed her on her arm and thigh with a knife. The victim was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital for treatment, police said.

Posted by: Ace at 09:45 AM | Comments (204)
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What?

E-mail: "With the Iowa Caucus on January 3rd ... Trump needs you, his loyal supporters to help build an even larger Should Trump Run Army."

Drew asked Katrina Trinko who'd sent that. She responded:

http://www.shouldtrumprun.com/ is the website it links, Trump adviser Michael Cohen signs, and Trump's name is sender

So we've got a guy who is pretty darn likely to actually be competing in the debate himself, and might just announce at the end that everyone failed, and so he could say to all of them: "You're all fired!", and announce his own bid.

Posted by: Ace at 08:42 AM | Comments (252)
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