Saturday, October 31, 2009
NOTES FROM THE COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVE FRONT. Yesterday President Obama signed the Ryan White Act, allowing HIV-positive people to travel to the United States. By and large rightbloggers have kept away from it -- oh, wait, here are a few who've weighed in:Obama loves homos with HIV
IMPORTING THE INFERIOR CULTURE
It seems that everything Obama does is to destroy America. And it's just so blatant an open.
Is it inhuman of me to say that America shouldn’t welcome immigrants who have costly health issues unless they have the means to personally pay for their treatment?
Harsh as this may sound, would you wish to be seated on a plane for 12 hours next to someone with contagious leprosy?
... overturning a 22 year ban ignorantly suggesting that he is smarter than the Department of Health and Human Services.
Thank you, President Obama. Are you out of your mind?
The feminist praise of President Obama's decision to overturn Bush's ban on HIV infected people coming to America proves how dangerous feminism is. Etc. On the bright side, Gay Patriot hasn't denounced it yet. So that Tea Party-"Gay Left" rapprochement is still totally on.
11:47 AM by roy edroso
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SOMEBODY HERE KNOWS HOW TO PLAY THIS GAME. As you may have heard, the presentation of White House visitor logs for January-July led to some humorous gun-jumping by the usual gang of idiots.
The White House release is incomplete at this time, which I can't approve. (More names are expected later this year.) But I'm heartened that its content suggests the Administration knows how to drive its opposition nuts on purpose.
The White House went out of its way to alert readers that some names recorded in the logs were not those of the people you might think they are -- the visitors Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, for example, were not the famous preacher and radical, respectively.
Some nonetheless scream the news about Ayers and Wright without the explanation, Atlas Shrugs and Don Surber ("A vote for Obama was a vote for Ayers") prominent among them.
"Michael Moore should be waterboarded," roars Right Wing Fanatic. "Bill Ayers should hang from some basketball net." He is also exercised that "General Petreus" was not included on the incomplete list. (One wants to suggest he try a different spelling, just to make him madder. Oh, wait, he got it from TownHall. Never a good idea, RWF!) "Even Good ole Rev. Jeremiah 'God DAMN America' Wright got a visit," says Flopping Aces. "If you ever wondered why Obama appointed so many raving radicals to important positions in the White House, this list makes it clear..."
"What else is there to do when you aren't selling access that comes with influence," says Riehl World View, "entertaining Bill Ayers or doing the SEIU's business but shoot basketball with Mikey [Jordan, another imaginary celebrity visitor]!" RWV later discovers his mistake, and knows where to place the blame: "White House Plays Games, Sets Trap With Web Site." He says the disclaimer "was nowhere to be seen when I clicked in before I did my post," which left him the choice of checking his information or immediately posting an outraged screed; surely he cannot be blamed for taking the more patriotic course.
Meredith Jessup of Town Hall gets the Bad Bill Award for assuming -- despite the White House caveat, to which she does not refer and may or may not have bothered to read -- that the Malik Shabazz listed is the famous Black Panther, and details his crimes over 1,100+ words. "Stay tuned for the next installment of 'Barack Obama's Guest List,'" she concludes, "where I'll delve into the history of another one of Obama's questionable connections." Maybe it'll be Hitler!
A few at this writing have updated, to similarly hilarious effect. Melissa Clouthier adds, more in anger than sorrow, "David Petraus is notably absent." Petraeus ought to change his name to Smith or something else more American and easy to spell. "I previously posted pictures of Chicago Boss Bill Daley with the president on the White House lawn (but not a word about it in the press at the time)," complains American Power. Holy shit -- the Mayor of Chicago (under a previously unknown nickname*) visited Obama? Draw up the articles of impeachment! "The press is totally in the tank, so the truth is relative to power and access," he adds. "Never believe what these people say." Well, that's one way of getting out of it.
Others actually suggest that the White House accurately reported the names but lied about them not being the betes noires they wanted to think they were. "So, there’s more than one Malik Shabazz?" queries Global Observatory. A look at some of GO's other work may explain their confusion. The confusion of Macsmind ("how many William A. Ayers are there anyway?") is harder to figure.
By now the big boys have given them the new talking points: ACORN! Also, the list is incomplete, which is Nixonian. With the latter they are on surer ground, and the Administration's attempt to insulate itself from some of the non-fantasy names may remind even sympathetic readers of the spin practices of previous Presidents.
I'm not saying Axelrod is lying, nor that any of the names so far revealed are really a big deal -- only that the Obama people, who are constantly portrayed as inept handlers of the press, seem to know more than their opponents have been willing to recognize.
* UPDATE. Donald Douglas has corrected Daley's name at American Power, notifies me of such via comments. The rest of the post he apparently stands by.
8:01 AM by roy edroso
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Friday, October 30, 2009
CRAZY JESUS LADY NOW JUST CRAZY. Peggy Noonan says our leaders are too stupid to know that nothing they try will work, while her nameless friends in the pharmaceutical and insurance industries realize that the reanimation of her former boss Ronald Reagan will.
As she is a nut, they're all nut graphs, but I'll represent this one here:When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax -- health care, cap and trade, etc. -- I think: Why aren't they worried about the impact of what they're doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse She professes to believe that a national health care system is a form of abuse; also, that her anonymous buddies will stop working if their tax rate approaches something 25-30 percent less than what they had under Eisenhower. And she thinks the government is filled with "Callous Children."
Her loss of faith is remarkable. Once upon a time, when she was the Crazy Jesus Lady, Noonan directed our attention heavenward, confident that this would get our minds right. Now that the Republicans are no longer in power, she is less inclined toward spiritual remedies. I guess she has sensed -- as even dullards like George Pataki have -- that the tide in rightwing fashion has turned toward Tea Party rage, and decided to grab a pitchfork.
I saw the Crazy Jesus Lady losing Jesus about a year ago, when she was trying to maneuver the GOP faithful out of the hands of gooberish preachers and toward the healing embrace of Mitt Romney. Now it appears she has found a new animating force. There will be no murmured prayers or other pretenses of divine grace to soften her spiels now. She has become the Crazy Lady of the God of Wrath.
7:25 PM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, October 28, 2009
CALL FOR ENTRIES. Technorati no longer does anything for me (I mean that literally) and JS-Kit has dropped the hobnails on my last nerve. Suggestions for replacements please?
10:40 PM by roy edroso
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CUTTING OUT THE MIDDLEMAN. Megan McArdle:I really don't want this post to come out as "See--black people don't understand how hard white people have it!" I am overworked, and thus grateful to her for writing her own Shorter Megan McArdle.
UPDATE. You may also enjoy Rod Dreher's contribution, which contains another fatuous misuse of the Robert Putnam diversity study, and suggests that having to work with black people puts white people at unfair risk of persecution by the Human Resources Department ("stakes for white people in making a single slip -- or what is interpreted as a racially hostile slip"). Someone should tell him that terrified and terrorized are not synonyms.
10:15 PM by roy edroso
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REALLY BURYING THE LEDE. Rod Dreher talks about the drop in newspaper circulation. Here are the examples he chooses to cite:But look: the newspaper with the worst circulation falloff in the country, the San Francisco Chronicle (which lost 25 percent of its readers since the last reporting period), is a liberal newspaper in a liberal city. The ailing Boston Globe, ditto. This doesn't mean newspapers aren't biased to the left, but it does mean that there's something else going on here. Yuh don't say. Among the other losers in the latest ABC tally, which Dreher declines to mention: his own paper, the Dallas Morning News, has seen its circulation drop 22 percent in a year -- slightly less than the Chronicle, but more than the Globe (18.5 percent) and much more than the New York Times (7 percent).
Advertisers are bailing, but the Morning News' circ revenue is growing -- because they're charging more for the paper. "We've listened to what our readers and advertisers tell us they value most," says publisher Jim Maroney, "and we are responding to it by maintaining a robust newsroom focused on original, local reporting."
What this "original, local reporting" approach means for the hot gas Dreher blows there -- yelling about Hollywood and his inability to hear U2 properly at the local stadium, for example -- is anyone's guess. "I've tried to do something with the Dallas Morning News online op-ed page, to run it like a blog/aggregator site," says Dreher, "but that hasn't really caught on like I'd hoped it would." Seems to me if Dreher paid less attention to the influx of sooties over t'England, and more on the gol'-durned Mescans in Dallas, he'd have hisself a winner for shore! Yee-haw!
12:55 AM by roy edroso
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BEAUTIFUL EXILES. The New York Post does a Goin' Galt story (with reliably rightwing sourcing and a thumbs-up from the Ole Perfesser) about "tax refugees" who seek to "escape from New York." Overall, the ex-New Yorkers earn about 13 percent more than those who moved into the state, the study found...
While New York City and the state were the losers, the Sunshine and Garden States were winners. more than 250,000 New Yorkers who lived in and around the city fled to Florida. Another 172,000 city taxpayers ended up in New Jersey. Rich chunkheads have been moving to Joisey since time immemorial, and well-fixed New Yorkers moving to Florida is equally a stereotype. But let's see how things are doing in those tax Valhallas to which they're moving (in both of which conservatives have of late been calling for new management):"Florida's unemployment rate jumps to 11 percent; Tampa Bay area hits 11.7." -- St. Petersburg Times.
"The most recent banks to fail were Partners Bank, Hillcrest Bank Florida, and Flagship National Bank, all of Florida..." -- AllGov.
"Overall, the [University of Florida] survey found [state] consumer confidence flat at 72 in October... With decreasing revenues and increasing costs, the state could see a $2.6 billion budget deficit, [survey director Chris] McCarty projected..." -- St. Petersburg Times.
"Property taxes will increase about $300 for the typical homeowner in northeastern New Jersey over the coming year, despite a recession that has crimped the ability of taxpayers to foot the bill... tax increases are down from prior years, when levies were rising 5 percent to 8 percent per year. But they come amid a recession that has stalled economic growth, cost New Jersey 173,000 jobs and produced regional inflation in the first half of 2009 of less than 1 percent." -- NorthJersey.com. These well-off citizens aren't heading to these places because they're economic powerhouses, but to take advantage of suburban sprawl, southern sunshine, and perhaps lower personal and business tax rates, and the prospect of paying lower wages, as may be common in the depressed economies of their new homes (though I note with interest that the National Right to Work Committee considers Jersey a "forced-unionism" state). In other words they're looking for pleasanter environs after a stint in the Big City, and to keep more of what they've got.
God go with them. But I doubt they'll bring much entrepreneural energy to their adopted homelands. New York's tax burden has been onerous for decades, and outflow has kept pace with it, as the study finds -- the exodus was no worse in 2004. Yet those refugees don't seem to have done much for Jersey and Florida so far, though I'm sure they've done pretty well for themselves.
The Go Galt idea is that disaffected "producers" take their magical power to create wealth with them. But more often than not, what they take is their money, and then they sit on it (and, of course, demand more breaks) -- else their long-favored destinations would now be paradises rather than recession-wracked sinkholes.
New York's not doing so hot itself, but at least we've got people coming here who are willing to do some goddamned work.
12:03 AM by roy edroso
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Monday, October 26, 2009
NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the fake Obama "thesis." You'd think days after its revelation as a fake, the follow-ups would stop rolling in, but in the minutes since I posted, Israpundit has come up with one: "Read it all and grab your smelling salts." Thence comes the more-or-less obligatory follow-up: " I am looking for the link for the ten pages ……….can’t find it. But listen to this interview with Obama where he embellsihes upon this anti-capitalist thinking..." Thence to the go-to 2001 Obama quotes, which have nothing to do with anything.
We also have On The Right's consideration, entitled "The dishonest left-wing media." He says the thesis story "I knew to be a satire when I posted it," by which he apparently means he posted it uncritically, and updated, "While the documents are false, I stand by what has been posted. Obama is a radical and I believe that the evidence supports that." In the follow-up he details the crimes of Rachel Maddow, Dan Rather, etc. 20/20 Radio, admitting "We Just Got Punked!!!" adds, "it does not surprise me that an Obama thesis that Rush and some others on the right got a hold of was a fake! You see the first problem is that no one will be able to get a hold of Obama ANYTHING! All that stuff is SEAL!"
Fair-minded people who wish to give their opponents the benefit of the doubt should remember that these people are never so insistent on their own credibility than when they've been proven incredible.
2:50 AM by roy edroso
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