Happy Friday.

Sorry for another content-less headlines post. I suppose I'm still getting used to news After Election. Someone remind me; what did we used to talk about?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:51 AM | Comments (479)
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I ain't got no time to bleed prepare a decent ONT for the non-AoSHQ Prime morons so y'all are gonna have to provide your own pantless self-entertainment tonight.

Quotes of the Day

There are three ways that men get what they want; by planning, by working, and by praying.

Any great military operation takes careful planning, or thinking. Then you must have well-trained troops to carry it out: that's working. But between the plan and the operation there is always an unknown. That unknown spells defeat or victory, success or failure. It is the reaction of the actors to the ordeal when it actually comes. Some people call that getting the breaks; I call it God. God has His part, or margin in everything, That's where prayer comes in.

     --Gen. George S. Patton in "The True Story of The Patton Prayer"

A good solution applied with vigor now is better than a perfect solution applied ten minutes later.

     -- Gen. George S. Patton

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:05 PM | Comments (709)
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Writing in the Wall Street Journal:

Turnout dropped by 7.9 million voters, falling to 123.6 million this year from 131.5 million in 2008. This is the first decline in a presidential election in 16 years. Only 51.3% of the voting-age population went to the polls.

While the Democratic "ground game" was effective, President Barack Obama received 90.1% of his 2008 total while Gov. Mitt Romney received 98.6% of Sen. John McCain's vote.

(Emphasis mine.) Rove then goes on to list tactical reasons for the failure. more...

Posted by: rdbrewer at 03:00 PM | Comments (704)
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First: I saw this on Hot Air and I'm still angry about it. The Daily Beast actually paid someone to write an article which I personally would title, Breaking: "All In The Family" Was Edgy, Controversial Programming. Because that seems to be the News Bomb this cat wants to drop on you.

All in the Family was controversial. So was Ellen and Will and Grace, as it turns out. Can you believe it. Can you. Believe it.

Anyway he had to pay the rent this month so he decided to write 1700 words on Things Which Were Obvious in 1996 but he repackaged what is basically a list of his favorite family sitcoms into an article under the headline "How TV Destroyed the GOP's Family Values" or something like that. See -- topical and relevant.

This is just part of my reason for this post.

There's actually a rule in magazines, Kaus tells me. Once is happenstance -- twice is a trend! That is, any time a magazine features writer sees the same thing twice, he is now authorized to write a stupid article claiming it's a "trend."

Did you know that twice on the same day I saw men wearing colorful Sergeant Pepper style marching band uniforms in Williamsburg? I did. I'm not even lying. Hours apart, blocks apart, completely different guys.

There did not seem to be any reason for this -- they seemed to just be walking to the Post Office or whatever. This seemed to just be something they liked to do, dressing up in gold-buttoned marching band uniforms.

That was ergo a real trend and not one of these made-up trends that only exist in magazine features, which were only published because dumb people like reading dumb things, and which were only written in the first place because dumb people like paying their rent. (Well, they don't like paying it, but they also don't want to be on the street. So they invent "trends.")

I should have written that up. Marching Band Chic, I could have called it. Or Drum Major Faux-Pas about the Don'ts of marching band fashion.

But I do now have two examples of how insanely stupid magazine features are. So now I'm doing a trend piece of my own.

A guy at Slate -- brace yourselves, I'm about to approvingly cite Slate, and suggest you read something on that amateur webzine -- has gone through a bunch of alleged and very dubious "trends" he read about in the New York Times. He kind of suspects the writers are just making stuff up to pay their rent (my words, his implication).

So he went out, Joe Queenan style*, and tried to jump on seven of these trends.

I sort of think that this writer, who's exposing the made-up-edness of magazine "trend" pieces, is himself making stuff up about his exploits in following trends; I would guess he did none of the things he writes about. But I guess that's just a bigger meta commentary about the central falsity of this genre. Or something.

Point is, it's it's pretty funny and it goofs on the New York Times and media vapidness and dishonesty as a general matter.

“Americans Are Barmy Over Britishisms” [linking NYT article with that title]: "What's up?" "You the man." "Take it easy." I use these slang phrases all the time, which is one of the top five reasons I've never been invited back to the Yale Club. According to the Times, British slang is the only slang that a trendy American ought to use: “Snippets of British vernacular—‘cheers’ as a thank you, ‘brilliant’ as an affirmative, ‘loo’ as a bathroom—that were until recently as rare as steak and kidney pie on these shores are cropping up in the daily speech of Americans (particularly, New Yorkers) of the taste-making set who often have no more direct tie to Britain than an affinity for Downton Abbey,” the NYT’s Alex Williams writes.

I was in England earlier this year, and though I spent most of my time being jetlagged and avoiding their hideous breakfasts, I did pick up some slang—words like lorry, as in "I would rather be hit by a lorry than eat another English breakfast." So I figured this would be easy. I boned up on my Britishisms by rereading Brideshead Revisited and consulting the Wikipedia entry on British slang. When Hurricane Sandy knocked out the electricity, I couldn’t hold it in any longer. "Well, this is all to cock!" I cried.

"Your cock?" my wife said.

"No, no, it's all to cock!"

"Alter cock?"

"It's. All. To. Cock!" I said again, gesturing emphatically.

"I don't get it," she said.

My friend Dan came downstairs, looking particularly pleased with himself. "Well, you're a regular Jack the Lad," I informed him.

"What?"

"You're no Joe Soap, sir. You're Jack the Lad!"

Dan paused. “Greaat …” he said.

"Numpty," I said under my breath. “What’s a numpty?” my wife asked. “That’s exactly the sort of thing a numpty woud say,” I snapped.

Later, in need of some light, I resolved to hammer a candle into an empty Coke can to make an impromptu candleabra. But I needed the right tools. "Do we have a Birmingham screwdriver?" I asked. My wife paused before answering: "Well, I'm sure there are some tools around here."

"Yes, but do we have a Birmingham screwdriver?"

"I don't know how to answer your weird question!" she wailed.

I had discovered one of the main problems with being trendy: If you donÂ’t hang out with other trendy people, then whatÂ’s the use?

Worth a read, I think.

* Two of Joe Queenan's best known articles contain this schtick. In one, he attempted the various cons and ploys he sees in movies, where they work, in real life, where it turns out they don't. In another, he attempted to Live a Day as Mickey Rourke, dressing as Mickey Rourke, drinking hard like Mickey Rourke, trying to have casual sex like Mickey Rourke, chainsmoking like Mickey Rourke, and speaking almost entirely in movie lines once uttered by John Stamos.

No, uttered by Mickey Rourke. Got bored of writing the name there, thought I'd change it up.

But sometimes you gotta just roll the potato.

Posted by: Ace at 02:21 PM | Comments (224)
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I've been looking for something to post on. Still looking. As the last thread is pretty stale, here's a new one.

By the way: more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:48 PM | Comments (248)
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People like to make excuses for Obama -- they love doing that, and they've gotten good at it -- and one I'm very tired of the "Europe is in recession, so American can't crawl out of its own" excuse.

If America were leading the world economy, chugging along like a magnificent locomotive, we'd pull Europe out of recession, and everyone else besides.

But instead we have our hopes pinned on Europe to grow the world economy for us, so we can follow in its wake?

How about instead of "Obama can be excused for the poor American economy, because Europe is dragging us down" we say "Obama's failure to ignite the American economy, indeed, his determination to dampen it, is causing Europe and the world to fall into a global recession"?

Nah. Can't say that. Lightworker. Doin' his best.

Yet another day of declines, though prices didn't end as low as they were earlier. So expect a big fall tomorrow, as yet another tiny bubble of unfounded optimism gets burst.

And Europe is now officially in recession. And our own economy is so weak it'll most likely follow suit.

The euro zone debt crisis dragged the bloc into its second recession since 2009 in the third quarter despite modest growth in Germany and France, data showed on Thursday.

The French and German economies both managed 0.2 percent growth in the July-to-September period but their resilience could not save the 17-nation bloc from contraction as the likes of The Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Austria shrank.

Economic output in the euro zone fell 0.1 percent in the quarter, following a 0.2 percent drop in the second quarter.

Those two quarters of contraction put the euro zone's 9.4 trillion euro ($12 trillion) economy back into recession, although Italy and Spain have been contracting for a year already and Greece is suffering an outright depression.

Tampons are still legal though. We really dodged a bullet on that.

Posted by: Ace at 12:23 PM | Comments (460)
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I'm from the government, and I'm here to shake hands with victims on videotape.

Posted by: Ace at 11:41 AM | Comments (170)
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There was so much about this movie I didn't like it takes a long post to explain it all. (There's a lot I liked, in the beginning, too; but I guess everyone says that.)

Let me just make a general observation.

Space travel in fiction has two major tropes in its depiction. I'm calling these the Institutional Phase, and the Commercial Phase.

The beginning of space travel -- and this is the same for any previous mode of difficult transportation -- is the Institutional Phase. This is the period in which only rich governments or the sci-fi standby of the Large Evil Corporation Which Has Some Governmental-Like Powers and Attributes can build and launch a spacecraft.

The Commercial Phase comes later in science fiction, as it has in the past, and as it would actually unfold in the future. The Commercial Phase comes when the technology has matured enough to make it practical for small private owners. In the Commercial Phase, space travel is relatively common, almost mundane. It might be a bit expensive, but you can still cross a good part of the galaxy in exchange for a down payment equal to the cost of an old, beat-up Landspeeder. It's not cheap, but you generally expect that if you have a few thousand credits you can hire yourself a flight to almost anywhere.

The Institutional Phase is Star Trek; the Commercial Phase is Star Wars.

In terms of the look of each -- the Institutional Phase likes the color white, for both exteriors and interiors. It is marked by the NASA aesthetic -- stuff sort of looks like NASA designs stuff, because the Institutional Phase is nearer-future, so we expect it to look more like the designs we see in the present. It's clean -- often pristine -- because any government rich enough to afford a spaceship is also rich enough to hire on some janitors or, more likely, janitorial robots (though we usually do not see these things in space travel movies-- we see them more in near-future earthbound movies).

The Commercial Phase's dominant color is gray, naked metal, because painting ships white is an unnecessary expense. Sure, governments have money to burn and so paint them in the Institutional Phase, but the Commercial Phase is filled with private owners who are often short of cash and can barely afford parts and fuel, nevermind pretty white paint. The look is dirty and worn -- the "worn future" look I think Lucas called it -- for the same reason your typical Old West stagecoach was probably dirty and worn. Because the owner doesn't have a lot of money, and the coach itself is probably 10 years old, bought well into its obsolesence curve, probably from a richer company or a government office at auction.

Note that in the Commercial Phase you see plenty of Institutional Phase stuff -- the Galactic Empire has nicely painted hallways, and their ships are obviously much younger than the Millennium Falcon. The Alliance ships in Firefly are very pretty indeed. But of course that's just because Institutions continue to exist, well into the Commercial Phase.

That's the look. But more importantly is the type of characters you'd expect to see. This is important: In the Institutional Phase, you're going to have a lot of military types, and they are going to be highly competent and very well psychologically balanced. The reason is simple: if you only have one or two spacehips, but a population of billions, you can afford to rigidly screen your staff to make sure they're detail-oriented go-getter who Play Well With Others and who have proven in the past they can function well in a rigid military heirarchy (as a ship must be -- especially if it's an experimental sort of ship where Protocols Must Be Followed because people have barely any experience at all with this sort of thing).

Only in the Commercial Phase are you going to start seeing the kinds of people who would never get a job on a spaceship -- not even as janitor -- as the staff on a ship in the Institutional Phase. Han Solo, for example, is not only a career criminal, but he also yells a lot, trusts his instincts (and his instincts aren't especially sound), hits on his passengers, and gets into pointless arguments with androids.

Han Solo is a damned good pilot but he'd never have a chance to demonstrate that in the Institutional Phase. His background check would turn up all his previous Imperial Entanglements, and his psychological profile would tag him as a selfish, grandiose hothead who's liable to shoot at a door without first making sure its magnetic seal isn't engaged, thus causing a comical ricochet around the walls of a trash compactor.

Now, the Commercial Phase permits a wide range of personality and occupational types. The setting permits hotheads, mercenaries, goons, and Space Hookers. But in the Institutional Phase, you're going to have a much less diversity: Most people are going to be ex-military, most people are going to have advanced degrees (including the military people), and virtually everyone is going to be of a pretty well-balanced, controlled, cool-tempered personality type.

No government or corporation spends $10 trillion building a ship and then says, "Hey, let's put the Loose-Canon Rebel Who Plays By His Own Rules in command."

The Institutional Phase story doesn't really suggest a lot of personality conflicts, then. For this reason, if you're trying to be somewhat realistic about it, you're going to be missing something fun in drama, which is people yelling at each other and undermining each other's authority and making lots of wisecracks in dangerous situations where you really should be pretty quiet and awaiting your next order.

A lot of science fiction movies -- especially the horror-themed science fiction of Alien, Aliens, and all of its many imitators -- gets around this problem by killing the captain early, thus giving a plausible reason why the Chain of Command is somewhat in flux and people are backtalking their superior officers. Suddenly orders are open to debate and argument and outright subversion. Which is more interesting, dramatically.

Though not ideal, as a matter of shipboard governance. The sort of spaceship that makes for a dramatically lively movie is exactly the opposite of the ship you'd actually want to be on. When your ship is being buffeted by asteroids, you wouldn't want to hear, through your cabin door, that Han and the Princess are having yet another spat, and that even the android has grown so insubordinate over the crazy decisions the captain is making that he's had to be deactivated.

Anyway, bringing this around to Prometheus: This is an Institution Phase film. They establish that the Great Big Evil Corporation has put an awful lot of money into this vessel, and while it's not the first starfaring vessel, you get the sense that there haven't been many more than ten such ships.

And yet, who's on this ship? You have an extremely surly Punk Rock Geologist Rebel for some reason. This guy passed the psychological exam? First guy who tries to make friendly, post-hypersleep conversation with him gets a gruff answer and is immediately told "I'm only in this for the money."

Only in it for the money? You had a planetary population of ten billion (let's say) to choose from and you couldn't find a Geologist who was actually interested in achieving the goals of the mission? You just grabbed up the guy who had no professional or scientific motivation, but just wanted a hundred thousand bucks?

Were the all the other Geologists unavailable?

Even assuming this guy was "The Best In His Field" -- I don't think they say that, but let's pretend he's a Rock Star of Geology (see what I did there?) -- "The Best" is a silly sort of claim. The guys at the top of the field are usually pretty close together in terms of qualification. Who "The Best" is is usually a pretty debatable proposition.

Here's what I would have looked for in a Geologist on this ten trillion dollar spacecraft making a first-of-its-kind flight to a distant planet:

1. No mowhak, no facial piercings, and no facial or neck tattoos. Sorry to be all lookist, but this guy is broadcasting his philosophical adherence to the Cult of Noncomformity, and I think on this flight, I'll choose the conformist. Give me the guy with the Tom Cruise haircut, please. That guy would be signalling his comfort in an orderly, rules-based environment, in which following the chain of command is of capital importance. Which, hey! It turns out that's what this flight is.

2. A motivation greater than money. Money equals comfort -- future comfort, yes, but it is the currency of comfort. A dangerous spaceflight, cramped conditions, boredom, and an even more dangerous landing on an alien world are inherently uncomfortable things. So I'd choose the guy who Really Wants To Be On This Mission, because only that sort of person would have the internal fortitude and resolve to handle all the many dangers and discomforts of the mission.

And the thing is, given that this is a spaceflight to an uncharted alien world which will provide years of material for research -- I think I could manage to find a Geologist who actually was sort of intrigued by the whole Adventure and Furtherance of Science thing.

3. A guy who can actually get along with other human beings. A spaceship is no bigger than, say, a suite of offices at a corporate office park. You're going to have to see these people a lot. You're going to have to work with them a lot. You are going to have to be in their company almost every waking minute for the next year or two.

I'm going to go with the guy who's first words out of hypersleep, to a man who just greeted him and introduced himself, aren't a variation on "F*** you, I'm eating cereal."

4. A guy who doesn't shit himself and go stir crazy at the first hint of... I don't even know if "danger" is the right word What he went crazy over was the first hint of... a 2000 year old dead body. He saw a 2000 year old dead body and immediately said, "F*** this insanity, I'm going to go running off on my own down an unexplored cave, where I imagine it will be safer."

Okay, I'm belaboring this point, but you get what I'm saying. How did this guy pass a psych test? What the hell is he even doing here? I don't know if this guy would actually even be on board a spaceship in the Commercial Phase, let alone the Institutional Phase.

This guy is especially egregious, but half the characters on that ship should not have been there. Charlize Theron seems, at first, like the sort of controlled personality type you'd have on board but then you quickly figure out she's a brittle personality type -- her outward iciness masking treacherously cold water churning underneath -- and she has sex with the Captain like six days into the mission. I would expect she could hold out longer than that.

The Captain is quirky -- I guess you can have a quirky person on board -- but he's also a lunatic. He plays a snatch of Steven Stills' Love The One You're With and then is shocked that Charlize Theron doesn't know who Steven Stills is.

In 2095, Steven Stills is still a thing? People didn't know who he was in nineteen ninety-five, dude. Why the hell would you expect her to know Steven Stills, and chuckle over her ignorance? Did you also expect her to know who Kajagoogoo is?

The only people who seem to belong on the ship are the crewmembers who never say a word, because at least those guys do not betray their utter lack of psychological unfitness for the mission.

So, what I think Scott did was this: He wanted quirkiness. He wanted People Motivated By Money. He wanted dirty people on board the ship. He wanted Tensions In The Chain of Command.

Essentially he wanted to remake Alien, then. But those things all seemed to work in Alien because Alien was set, pretty damn explicitly, in the Commerical Phase. Alien was about, as everyone calls them, Space Truckers. Makes sense that Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton would only be in it for the money. Space Truckers don't get into Space Trucking for Love of Space Trucking. It's a job. They want to get paid.

Prometheus is set hundreds of years earlier in the Institutional Phase. There shouldn't be any Space Truckers, there shouldn't be any surly cowardly mohawked mercenary geologists on board ("Why did I get into Exoplanetary Geology? For the money, of course. You can really make a killing in Exoplanetary Geology"), and the Chief Corporate Officer should not be some strange mix of Ice Princess and Space Whore.

This was a really bad movie overall. I kind of hated it, hated everything past the first forty minutes. I hated it for a lot of reasons. I didn't really hate it for this reason, the plausibility of Commercial Phase character types in an Institutional Phase mission. This would be a nitpick I'd ignore if the movie weren't so awful.

But it is awful, and I think this is a halfway interesting point, so I'm just writing about this thing.

But all the rest of it was bad too.

Except the beginning parts.

It's very sad that even someone like Ridley Scott just remakes a movie -- Prometheus is just a very dumb remake of Alien with better special effects but far less impact. It's just sad that he thought he had to stay so close to Alien, down the the Space Trucker idea, even though it made no sense whatsoever in the movie's story.

Here's What I Mean: I forgot about this example.

So, they just landed on the planet. Literally, they landed on an alien, unexplored world not ten minutes ago.

It's almost dark, and the Captain -- the Captain -- says "It's getting dark, we'll make camp for the night, and go out to the ruins at dawn."

And the Scientist says, "No, I've been waiting for this for five years, I'm going now!" He literally says that, or something very close to that.

And then everyone goes now.

...?

This is what happens on a spaceship? A captain gives an order about safety, and securing the ship and the landing area, and when he will permit people to venture out, and then a passenger/specialist with no rank whatsoever gives a contrary order based on Enthusiasm and Devil May Care Excitement and everyone says, "Hey, let's listen to the stubble-bearded scientist guy, the captain's all wet"?

This is what happens on interstellar spaceflights to unknown alien worlds which are strongly suspected to be inhabited? (That's the whole point, they think there's life on the planet.)

People just sort of make up their own minds about whether the Captain has authority to give orders, or the stubble-bearded, over-emotional drunk of a scientist does?

I could see this happening in Star Wars. Han gives an order, and Leia, being Leia, decides to be Her Bratty Worshipfulness and just blows him off and runs outside. (Except it would be Leia urging caution, and Han ignoring her, but it could happen the other way. Leia likes defying Han.)

Star Wars is commercial phase, and also comical. They're funny movies. They have a comedic spirit. (The originals, I mean.)

But in a "realistic, serious" movie about an Institutional Phase first exploration of an inhabited alien world? The Captain gives an order, and the crew -- who, incidentally, he could literally kill with a pistol for being insubordinate and risking the safety of the ship; he has that power as captain, presumably, as a captain has now-- just decides "The hell with Captain Poo Poo Pants, he's a big fuddy-duddy; a rigid military heirarchy is a green light to do whatever you want and make all of your dreams come true!" ?

Really? That's serious and realistic?

Posted by: Ace at 10:43 AM | Comments (598)
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A plurality. 40% want the budget balanced with mostly/only spending cuts. 11% want it balanced with mostly/only tax hikes.

Adding the two tax-heavy groups together and you have 56%.

But the thing is, Obama talks about a "balanced approach," ad nauseam, and yet never proposes one. His actual proposal is to raise taxes by three times the size of the pittance of cuts he's proposed. And of course he wants the tax hikes now. The cuts.... eh, they can wait.

I'd sure like to see this "balanced approach" Obama talks about so much, on paper. An equal amount of tax hikes and spending cuts would in fact be a far more right wing proposal than he's actually put forward.

His actual plan is about as balanced as, say, France's Socialists are implementing.

The French economy has been stuck at zero percent growth for months, while unemployment has climbed to above 10 percent — and all signs point to an oncoming recession.

Sounds like a plan. Let's do that.

I'm finding the gravitational pull of the Let It Burn caucus growing increasingly strong and increasingly irresistible.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:31 AM | Comments (425)
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Before the election -- long before -- I had a fantasy. It went like this:

It has long been a mark of the Smart Set to acknowledge the distressing problem of financing our entitlement systems. For decades, a pundit on the pages of the Washington Post could make his rent by writing the same basic column once a month -- "While these nincompooops in DC argue about this or that temporary trivia, everyone ignores the real problem, which is that, due to the Baby Boom followed by a very long Baby Bust, there are too few workers to support the ever-growing cohort of retired folks, and this problem will get worse and worse every year until we either do something about it or we don't, in which case the system collapses catastrophically."

Even liberals who didn't understand math (which is most of them) knew that the Smarter Folks who did understand math were quite certain this was a problem, and so echoed their concerns.

When the Republican Party -- first in the form of Paul Ryan, then in the form of Mitt Romney, who substantially embraced his ideas -- began talking about serious reforms -- unpopular but necessary -- I had a fantasy that the media's Smart Set, which has long cherished its unearned reputation as the Smart Set, would at the very least remember the things they'd been saying and writing for 15, 20, 30 years and perhaps admit that Romney and Ryan had a pretty strong point, and anyone arguing against them was simply unserious.

This, of course, did not happen. Obama, while making soft, vague noises about reform, never laid out an actual plan or proposal for it, and in fact campaigned almost exclusively on the meaningless bromide "a balanced approach." His only concrete idea was to raise taxes on the rich, but that could only raise $80 billion per year, and even that assumes that the higher taxes would not dampen the taxable base (and thus mean that a higher tax rate brings in less actual revenue than projected).

So here we are. Obama has been reelected without any mandate for critical reform. In fact, his buffoonish incompetent of a Vice President vowed in August, campaign season, that Social Security would not even be touched.

On the same trip to southern Virginia, Mr. Biden wandered into the Coffee Break Cafe in Stuart. According to the White House pool report, when a diner there said, “I’m glad you all are not talking about doing anything with Social Security,” Mr. Biden responded: “Hey, by the way, let’s talk about Social Security. Number one, I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security. I flat guarantee you.”

Why is this so depressing? Because, as Mr. Biden knows, Social Security is going broke. If “no changes” are made, then by 2033 the program will not be able to pay benefits as promised.

He said that stupid thing in the same trip he said another stupid thing -- that "dey gon' put y'all back in chains" -- so he was once again the beneficiary, as he so often is, of covering up his serious incompetencies and stupidities with less serious but even more risible incompetencies and stupidities, thus covering up the fact that he is, in fact, seriously incompetent and stupid.

Harry Reid, who is about as far from a Statesman as a Cowboy Poetry is from Shakespeare, pandered on this issue for years before the election (and the last one) and, shockingly enough, continues pandering post-election.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday that he will not allow changes in Social Security to be part of the negotiations to avoid a federal budget fiscal cliff, further narrowing the opportunities for savings that could be tapped to close the deficit.

Republicans have insisted that big entitlement programs such as Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid be part of the end-of-year negotiations to head off tax-rate increases and the $110 billion in automatic spending cuts. Â…

“Social Security is not part of the problem, That’s one of the myths the Republicans have tried to create,” he said. “Social Security is sound for the next many years. But we want to make sure that in the outer years people are protected also, but it’s not going to be part of the budget talks, as far as I’m concerned.” …

“I’m giving you my personal feelings about where we need to go. Take care of the middle class and have the richest of the rich contribute a little bit to helping our economy,” he said.

No one has explained to him that $80 billion per year is not equal to our $1.whatever trillion per year deficit. It's less than 1%.

Now comes the Washington Post, after fighting assiduously to re-elect the team pandering on entitlements, slandering and lying -- I'm sorry, I mean "Fact-Checking" -- the team which told the truth about entitlements, to impotently object that "entitlements must be on the table."

They have no credibility on the issue. If this was such an important issue-- which they remember to say again after the election -- why did they work so hard to elect the Party determined to pander and offer nothing but Mathematical Fantasies? When it comes to pandering, their mouths say "No" but their eyes say "Yes yes yes," and the Democrats know it.

AS BIPARTISAN negotiations over avoiding the “fiscal cliff” draw nearer, many of President Obama’s core Democratic supporters are urging him to fix the debt through defense cuts and tax increases rather than by tackling Social Security, Medicare and other federal entitlement programs. It’s a reprise of progressive resistance to the entitlement trims Mr. Obama contemplated during the abortive debt-reduction negotiations with House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) last year. This time, though, the Democratic base is claiming vindication in the just-completed election.

Fair enough. Mr. Obama won on a pledge to raise more revenue from the wealthy, and labor unions and like-minded groups provided much of the funding and many of the foot soldiers for his campaign. Nevertheless, on this he must tell his political base no. Any serious debt-reduction plan has to include revenue and defense cuts. But no serious one can exclude entitlements.

...

At his news conference Wednesday, President Obama called for “a serious look at how we reform our entitlements,” advocated “compromise” and pronounced himself “ready and willing to make big commitments” on debt reduction. Sounds like a man who understands what is needed.

Yes, a man who understands what is needed, and yet has not submitted a single proposal for what is needed, and also forgot to tell his top allies the Vice President and the Majority Leader of the Senate what is needed.

Part of the reason I had this fantasy -- this fantasy that the press would actually stand up, for once, for something besides liberalism -- was Mickey Kaus' oft-repeated assertion that the press are, or at least consider themselves to be, "Secret Patriots." And that while they have a liberal bias, they also have a bias towards patriotism -- statesmanship -- which can sometimes check their bias towards liberalism.

I just watched an entire political campaign in which the media never criticized nor pressed Obama on his inaction and failure to present a plan on entitlements, nor made any serious effort to criticize the idiots around him who were vowing -- vowing, promising -- that entitlements would be entirely untouched.

Secret Patriots? No. Simply liberals. When it comes to the country versus liberalism, they will, as we thought, simply choose liberalism every time.

Liberalism is its own nation, its own farflung tribe, its own Fifth Column within any country it infests. The "patriotism" postulated by Kaus is simply a loyalty to the Grand Progressive Cause.

It is not a patriotism of country ; it is simply a insurrection on the sly.

Posted by: Ace at 08:54 AM | Comments (261)
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