…then the Democrats can be assured to start trolling the prisons.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday tossed out Washington’s law banning incarcerated felons from voting, finding the state’s criminal-justice system is “infected” with racial discrimination.

In other words – because the system is discriminatory because it ostensibly jails too many minorities, the deprivation of voting rights to all convicts is wrong.

Who could possibly make such a ruling?  (emphasis added; listeners to Hugh Hewitt may recuse themselves from the question):

The surprising ruling, by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle, said the law violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act by disenfranchising minority voters.

The decision is the first in the country’s federal appeals courts to equate a prohibition against voting by incarcerated felons with practices outlawed under the federal Voting Rights Act, such as poll taxes or literacy tests.

So – being convicted by a jury of one’s peers (or pleading out of one’s own volition) is the same as poll taxes and literacy tests imposed on the law-abiding?

The two-judge majority apparently was persuaded by the plaintiffs’ argument that reams of social-science data filed in the case showed minorities in Washington are stopped, arrested and convicted in such disproportionate rates that the ban on voting by incarcerated felons is inherently discriminatory.

In retrospect, I suppose we should be thankful they didn’t impose electoral affirmative action, giving two votes to every convict.

Patterico, from a larger analysis that you should read in its entirety:

To me, the biggest concern flowing from this decision is the precedent that federal courts can now make sweeping declarations about the discriminatory nature of the criminal justice system based on dubious studies by sociology professors. (More about that in the extended entry below.) The implications are potentially staggering and go far beyond felons’ right to vote. If federal courts can declare the entire system of criminal justice in a state (or the country!) to be racially discriminatory, you could see an invalidation of Three Strikes laws or any other recidivism statute. You could see a sweeping invalidation of laws prohibiting felons the right to possess firearms. And that could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Commenter carlitos points out another potentially disturbing impact of the decision: its potential effect on rural districts with big prisons. Given that the decision explicitly extends to currently incarcerated inmates, you’re potentially looking not just at a huge bump in the number of Democratic voters as a whole, but also very concentrated bumps in districts that otherwise would likely be reliably Republican.

On the upside, who needs ACORN when you can get the Aryan Nations to do your registration for you?

I’ON a more serious note, I’m curious; the lefty squawked like stuck cats when they thought (erroneously) that the Heller decision might be misconstrued to give firearms rights to convicts – but today, dead silence.  Although I’m happy to attribute the bliss to ignorance, I’m wondering what people actually thin about this…

…and hoping that Alito, Thomas, Roberts and Scalia stay very, very healthy until this one gets to the SCOTUS.

Ezra Klein, former “giggly fratboy” at the old Pandagon blog, exhibits what is becoming an increasingly concerous conceit among the left today; he seems to believe that everything about American democracy started from scratch last January, including that pesky need to limit government’s reach and scope.

And he’s been toking from the same bong Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman have been bogarting regionally:

The modern Senate is a radically different institution from the Senate of the 1960s, and the dysfunction exhibited in its debate over health care — the absence of bipartisanship, the use of the filibuster to obstruct progress rather than protect debate, the ability of any given senator to hold the bill hostage to his or her demands — has convinced many, both inside and outside the chamber, that it needs to be fixed.

Again with the curious definition of “bipartisanship” – “doing what the Democrats want” – which is technically “monopartisanship”.

This might seem an odd moment to argue that the Senate is fundamentally broken and repairs should top our list of priorities.

No, Ezra Klein, it’s exactly the moment I expect Democrat propagandists to argue that the Senate is broken – when they’re not getting their way.  When they’re putting a bill before the American people and their hired board of directors that most of the American people don’t want, and they want it jammed down the collective throat for the peasants’ own good.

It’s not an “odd moment” at all.

After all, the Senate passed a $900 billion health-care bill last month. But consider the context: Arlen Specter’s defection from the Republican Party earlier this year gave Democrats 60 votes in the Senate — a larger majority than either party has had since the ’70s. Democrats also controlled the House and the presidency, and were working in the aftermath of a financial crisis that occurred on a Republican president’s watch. This was a test of whether a party could govern when everything was stacked in its favor.

And in response, the Democrats have floated a bill that, if I were Ezra Klein, I’d whinge “isn’t bipartisan”, but was rather drafted by the most extremely left-of-center Congress of my lifetime.

But I’m not Ezra Klein.  I’m not under the convenient, circumstantial delusion that government’s primary purpose is to enact a vision (mine, as it happens), even to the point where it must be changed to accomplish exactly that.

Government – especially its legislature – isn’t supposed to be an assembly line.  If things are working correctly, it’s more of a tropical rain forest.  Only the absolutely strongest animals, or bills, survive.  That’s how it’s supposed to work.

Sorry, Ezra.  Just because your agenda is dying on its merits doesn’t mean you get to change the rules.

We’ve always known that those “Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota” signs and slogans were buncombe – but it was more of a gut feeling.

But now we have empirical, clinical proof it’s all bull-effluvia.  The unhappiest states are the ones with the highest taxes; the happiest ones, pretty much, have the lowest taxes (with occasional emphasis added by me):

Does living in a blue state make people blue? It seems so, according to a new study in Science magazine that ranks states according to their happiness. The study finds that New Yorkers are the unhappiest people in America and their neighbors in Connecticut come in a close second, followed by Michigan, Indiana, New Jersey, California, and Illinois. And the happiest states? Drum roll, please…Louisiana, Hawaii, Florida, Tennessee, and Arizona.

Eight of the ten happiest states lean right while eight of the ten unhappiest tilt left. While the study by no means proves that being liberal makes people unhappy, it does reflect some of the unfortunate implications of living in a blue state.

As I noted above, this is “Science” magazine, not “Librels Are Teh Suck” blog. 

But first a note on the study. Using data from the 2005-2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and a 2003 economics paper examining quality-of-life indicators, economists regressed the subjective measure of well-being (how people rate their satisfaction) against the objective measure (states’ quality-of-life rankings based on compensating differentials). A compensating differential in labor economics refers to the additional amount of income an employer must pay a worker to compensate for the undesirability of a job or the location’s lack of amenities (e.g. local and state tax levels, climate, environmental conditions, quality of schools, and crime rates).

For example, employers in New York would have to pay higher wages to compensate for New York’s high taxes, traffic congestion, cold weather, and poor schools. Due to these “disamenities,” New York ranked lowest on the quality-of-life index.

And yes, the numbers show a pretty strong correlation:

What’s noteworthy about the study is that states’ quality-of-life rankings (measured by their compensating differentials) correlated exceedingly well with residents’ satisfaction ratings. The correlation between quality of life and satisfaction is statistically significant (P=0.0001; r=0.6; r2=0.36). The coefficient of determination r2 shows how well the regression line fits the data points. While an r2 of 0.36 may not seem large—and in some studies may not be statistically significant—it is unusually high by the standards of behavioral science. To give an idea of the magnitude of this correlation, the r2 of people’s satisfaction ratings taken two weeks apart is also 0.36.

Why?

The study suggests that quality of life heavily influences happiness. This may seem obvious, but until this study, social scientists have struggled to develop a model that supports this hypothesis. Now we know that people who say they’re satisfied with their lives aren’t just delusional or overly optimistic, and people who say they’re unsatisfied aren’t just pessimists. People have legitimate reasons to be happy or unhappy.

And well, high taxes seem to be a big reason—ostensibly an even bigger reason than weather given that California is one of the unhappiest states and inclement Louisiana is the happiest. Further, considering how much New York’s crime rate has dropped and schools have improved in the last decade, taxes seem to overwhelm even these two critical factors in the happiness equation. According to the Tax Foundation 2008 analysis, three of the top five unhappiest states—New York, Connecticut and New Jersey—have the highest state-local tax burdens. On the other hand, four of the top five happiest states—Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Arizona—are among the states with the lowest state-local tax burdens. True, correlation doesn’t prove causation, and high taxes alone don’t always make people miserable, but there’s something going on here.

Read the whole thing. 

While we’ve long known that conservatives are more charitable, are better in bed, and are just plain happier across the board than liberals, this is the first time we’ve shown a statistical correlation between taxation and misery.

I, for one, am happy to vote for a wealthier, happier, less-burdened Minnesota.

Just as our time on earth represents a slim slice of the eons since our planet was formed, our current atmospheric episode is a respite in a wild ride featuring extreme heat, cold and large objects falling on our heads.

We’ve been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we’ve lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.

All this took place without smokestacks and tailpipes. All this took place without the desecration of nature by modern man.

And governments and groupies have been deceived by jet-setting rock stars and carbon-trading billionaires.

Lucky us…

The stroke of luck that’s misled us? The sheets of ice in whose shadow we made a living for two million years peeled back 12,000 years ago leaving a lush new Garden of Eden. In that Eden we invented agriculture, money, electronics and our current way of life. But that weather standstill has held on for an abnormally long amount of time. And it’s very likely that this atypical weather truce shall someday pass.

Man-made Climate Change enthusiasts are not only politically-motivated opportunists, they must also be the most arrogant people on earth, thinking we actually have a role in the climate of the relative pebble we live on as it screams through the universe.

The Earth is a traveler. Its angle as it sweeps around the sun produces the massive weather flips we call seasons—the dance from summer to winter and back again. But there’s more. Our planet has a peculiar wobble—its precession. And that precession produces upheavals in our weather, weather alterations we cycle through every 22,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years. This is called the Milankovich cycle, named for the Serbian engineer and geophysicist who discovered it.

But the wobbles in our trip around the sun are just a start. The sun is a traveler, too. It circles the black hole at the galaxy’s core every 226 million years. And it takes its tiny flock of planets with it. That means us. The result?

The journey around the galactic core is fraught with dangers. For example, every 143 million years we pass through a spiral arm of the galaxy, an arm that tosses tsunamis of cosmic rays our way. Those rays produce massive climate change. Then there’s the innocent-sounding stuff astronomers call galactic “fluff,” massive clouds of cosmic dust lurking in our solar system’s path that also cause dramatic climate change.

Meanwhile, the sun itself is going through a cycle from birth to death. As a result of its maturation, good old reliable sol is 43% warmer today than it was when the Earth first gathered itself into a globe of planetesimals 4.5 billion years ago.

The bottom line? Weather changes and the occasional meteor have tossed this planet through roughly 142 mass extinctions since life began 3.85 billion years ago. That’s an average of one mass extinction every 26.5 million years. Where did these mass die-offs come from? Nature. There were no human capitalists, industrialists or cultures of consumerism to blame.

…unless you have a Convenient Agenda that is.

1977:  Home ownership should be increased via government incentives and if necessary penalties for those that don’t lend money to people that can’t pay it back.

Result:  The Great Recession.

2009: Access to banking services should be increased via government incentives and if necessary penalties for those that don’t offer banking services to people that don’t have any money.

Result:  [insanity]It’ll be different this time folks.[/insanity]

A report from the (coincidentally insolvent) FDIC:

Consider defining a national shared government-industry
goal to lower the number of unbanked and/or underbanked
individuals and households…

There are people that have never been banked?

Do you know anyone that is “underbanked”

“[There is] an imperative for government and industry to expand financial access to the substantial number of households that have never been banked,”

…or “unbanked” (!!!!!!!!!!!)?

A push to extend basic services such as accounts to poorer communities with patchy credit histories would be especially sensitive because of the role of the subprime mortgage crisis in sparking the recent turmoil.

Ya think?

Not having enough money to need an account was the most common reason cited for staying outside the banking system. One third of households that no longer had accounts said they closed them because of the cost of maintaining them, such as minimum balance requirements, service charges and overdrafts.

“As a society, we should make banks cover these people.”

That’ll have a positive outcome.

But wait! We already have a solution here in the Twin Cities…it’s called Twin Cities Federal*. $50 for opening up a free checking account; $25 for referring your friends, open 7 days a week.

The bank for the underbanked…no TARP required, thank you.

*Johnny Roosh does not endorse Twin City Federal and was not paid a fee to mention them. Yet.

…living in the midst of a burdensome if not oppressive government, gorging itself on the citizens it was created to serve.

We may find ourselves in the very same predicament the pilgrims of Plimoth risked their lives to flee.

The pilgrims were deeply focused on the Old Testament narrative of Moses leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. William Bradford called King James “the pharaoh.” On The Mayflower the pilgrims said their journey was as important as that of Moses. And the first thing they did upon reaching Cape Cod was get down on their knees and thank God for allowing them to cross their own Red Sea.

How disappointed these reverent, hearty souls would be if they could see us today: millions convinced of their victimhood by and willfully living off the government. As many unborn snuffed in the interest of “privacy” and convenience. Full-time career politicians drawing salaries and pensions from the taxpayers. The press, once vigilant, now schilling for a leftist government. A federal agency confiscating the wealth of those who created it; dolling it out to legions of  grovelers, groupies and bootlickers. Their Native-American friends? Running casinos; enslaving ranks of the white man.

And what of God? The God they feared and offered gratitude to for the harvest and their hard-fought and nascent freedoms? That same God now beholds a government hell-bent on removing his word from the public square in the interest of a newfangled concept: political correctness.

And possibly the greatest offense? Tofu.

Had these crusaders, to whom we owe so much, had the ability to see the future, they may have stayed home.

Last quarter’s “numbers” confirm that the stimulus didn’t stimulate, clunkers was one, the unemployed are still growing in ranks and the consumer is still cowering at home. Democrats are looking for someone to take the fall when in fact they are all making exactly the wrong moves economically, and soon time will show, politically.

One big difference between Washington and private markets is that politicians think everything they do is free-standing. Markets, however, combine all the potential costs of Washington’s policies and then decide whether to invest, or not. Consider what private decision-makers [read job-creators; employers-JR] see in their future:

A 2,074-page, trillion-dollar health-care bill to redesign 17% of the U.S. economy. A carbon tax—cap and trade—that remains an Obama priority ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit next month. A falling dollar and gyrating commodity prices, with no idea where those prices will go next.

Democratic liberals are talking about an income tax surcharge to pay for any commitment in Afghanistan. Card check, to expand unionization of the private economy, remains a priority. Domestic discretionary spending in fiscal 2010 is set to rise at 12.1%, with inflation near zero.

Nurturing a fragile economic recovery into a durable expansion requires policies that restore public confidence and reassure investors, risk-takers and employers. The Democratic agenda is doing precisely the opposite, which is how you get subpar growth and fewer new jobs. [emph. mine-JR]

High unemployment will progressively weigh more heavily on a Congress and Administration that has shown how ill-equipped and out of touch they have become they have been all along. They remain without a clue as it regards restoring our economy in a way that is meaningful for their constituents: jobs growth.

At the same time, they have failed to capitalize politically on the crisis (they themselves created), revealing how utterly failed and irrelevant their policies and leadership have become. How effectively they have shown once again that they are the wrong party at the wrong time, or at any time.

Joe from St. Paul’s Como neighborhood writes:

Who’d have thought that Democrat efforts since Obama was elected are morality-based, not reality-based?

As an economy, we want badly managed car makers and banks to fail and good ones to thrive.  But Democrats want to take political control over decisions about their product lines and employee compensation which we all know can’t possibly work as efficiently as the market-based model, which includes both the reward of success and the penalty of creative destruction for failure.

As a nation, we have too much invested in housing stock and industries related to it.  When housing slips, electricians lose their jobs.  And with an aging Baby Boomer population, we’re likely to see a major demand shift away from building McMansions toward one-level senior homes.  It’ll be a giant shift in a huge sector of the economy.

But Democrats don’t want to support downsizers, they insist on subsidizing first-time homebuyers and continue the CRA madness of requiring lenders to lend money to people who can’t pay it back.

As a member of the world community, we want all nations to live in peace – or at the very least, to leave us in peace.  Toward that end, we have sought international arrangements to promote stability for the last half-century.  But Democrats go out of their way to insult our traditional allies, embolden our traditional adversaries, and ignore the most flagrant kooks on the planet as they acquire the most destructive weapons ever known, all the while apologizing for our country’s founding religion and our past errors.

It’s the mindset I’m talking about, the worldview that says if person A kills you, it’s an ordinary offense and not really his fault, more a peccadillo really; whereas if person B does it, it’s a hate crime that must be persecuted relentlessly and unmercifully.

I don’t know the word for it, but there should be a term that describes a political mindset determined to allocate punishment and reward based on the political status of the actors rather than the results.

The Twin Cities media glitterati are getting their yuks over this bit here today; Barney Frank on Michele Bachmann’s 10,000 interlopers:

Democratic Rep. Barney Frank took a dig Friday at the Republican lawmaker who organized a protest by conservatives against health care legislation.Frank, a Massachusetts liberal, told an audience: “Some of the people (at the rally) that wanted to engage me in conversation appeared to have been the losers in the ‘Are you smarter than Michele Bachmann contest?’.”

That’s right, hoi polloi.  Stay out in flyoverland, where you belong.  Let your Patrician Lords and Masters do all the thinking for you.  That’s why they have the eternal sinecures; the club membership that never ever expires.

(It’s why they need the Deluxe Congressional Healthcare plan; dealing with all of you sluggards is so stressful, the mere prole “public” plan won’t cut it!)

Rep. Bachmann, R-Minn., had organized Thursday’s rally attended by thousands of conservatives critical of the Democrats’ health care plan. Her spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment. Frank, who recently compared arguing with an angry voter to conversing with a dining room table, said this week’s protest was like being trapped inside a furniture warehouse.

How cool would it be if the voters of Massachussetts relieved Mr. Frank of the onerous duty of having to deal with all of us troublesome effing peasants for the rest of life?

A guy can dream.

For much of the past ten years, proponents of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) have pointed to a short list of cities that have adopted the system for their elections.  These included four cities of any real size.  San Francisco uses it for its city assembly elections; Tacoma Washington and a few other smaller cities (up until Minneapolis and Saint Paul adopted it in the past two elections).

I observed at the time that IRV seemed to work, sort of, in places with pretty monochrome politics, where elections were usually one-party blowouts with very little chance of needing IRV’s byzantine choice-ranking process, its lack of a paper trail, and its turning over of the counting process to an opaque, “black box” algorithm that is utterly unaccountable to people outside the election process.  Places like, well, San Francisco and Tacoma Washington and Minneapolis and Saint Paul; hopeless one-party liberal cesspools.

I also observed, at some length, that I had plenty of vocational, non-partisan issues with IRV from my background as a usability guy.  I’m hoping to download a ballot from the Minneapolis election sometime today and start taking a formal whack at that angle (although I suspect the worst parts of the process lie behind the scenes).

Those were my observations. They were, by the way, backed up by real-world experience:

Problems from complicating the ballot have been documented in IRV elections. In Cary, N.C., 22 percent of the voters polled admitted to not understanding IRV. In Pierce County, Washington, 63 percent of 91,000 voters indicated that they did not like using IRV. Several studies by San Francisco State University on San Francisco’s Ranked Choice Voting indicate that older voters, those with English as a second language, and those with less income and education were less likely to understand IRV.

You read it here first.

More importantly, though, are the observations from the people of Tacoma, Washington.  While the people of Saint Paul were wafting to the polls on pungent little clouds of reassurance from their political masters and voting for IRV (sometimes called “Incumbent Retention Voting”), the people of Tacoma were going to the polls, yelling “This Sucks!“, and ending their experiment.

With extreme prejudice.  By a 2-1 margin.

What do they know that we don’t that IRV’s slick, well-financed advocates won’t tell you?

Anita Moncrief in the GreenRoom writes knows why the left – and the “elite” of the GOP – are so shaken up by NY23; it upsets the cozy system the parties had worked out amongst themselves:

Doug Hoffman’s candidacy was much bigger than him. It signaled the reemergence of the American citizen as “the ruler of the roost” and both parties have taken notice. Some career politicians find the notion of having to answer to “the people” galling, and continue to undermine the will of the people. However, politicians like representatives Steve King of Iowa, Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and of course, Sarah Palin. are continuing to shake up Washington.

And Washington doesn’t like getting shaken up!

Look at how the media, the leftymedia, and their subordinates in the lefty blogosphere are painting each of these events; count the number of times you saw Hoffman portrayed as a “Teabagger’s” candidate – har di har, lefties, another gay sex joke.  If we admit you’re comic geniuses, will you let it drop?

The left’s canonical response to Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin is a matter of shameful record.

Someone left a quote in my comment section yesterday, attributed to Mahatma Gandhi:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then yo win.

(Wikiquote says the sourcing is disputed; it may have come from a speech by unionist Nicholas Klein: “And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”  We’ll ignore the next step; he was with the United Clothing Workers).

So watch for those SEIU thugs.  It’s a good sign.

This past week Keith Ellison issued a breathless, well-worn and blatantly specious (if not utterly ignorant) monologue to justify the further distension of the bowels of the federal government via yet another bloated agency. As I read his drivel, in my ears rang the sultry voice of classic SNL fixture Jane Curtain, warbling on and on and on; aptly blunted by Dan Ackroyd’s signature catchphrase.

the American dream of home ownership, and borrowing generally, washed up on the shores of a financial disaster — the most serious since the Great Depression.

One cause (there were many) was the failure of our system of consumer financial protection. No one was there to review transactions or protect consumers. The proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency provides the lifeline that consumers need.

Oh, someone was there. Federal regulators were there, telling banks they couldn’t borrow funds at the best rates unless they met certain ratios of mandated risky sub-prime transactions to the prudent and secure deals banks would normally seek.

A free market cannot be held culpable if it is not free.

These so-called predatory lenders Keith, were not only incented to push unqualified home buyers into loans they couldn’t afford, they were strong-armed to do so via quotas and measures put in place during the Carter administration and given teeth during the Clinton administration. Sadly, G.W. Bush failed to preemptively unwind the brewing disaster despite the behest of Senator John McCain, among others.

The government-inflated and guaranteed demand for housing and all the furnishings that go inside created a bubble with all the periphery that usually comes with one. It ended as they usually do – otherwise we’d not know it was a bubble, now would we?

If anyone needed regulatin’ it was the regulators.

The American Dream is just that, Keith. Home ownership, while beneficial to all of us, is not a Government-Given right. With rare exception, when liberals act with politically motivated and self-serving mandates under the auspice of a “lifeline”, disaster follows close behind.

…and that disaster, our Great Recession, is the direct result of exactly the same type of programs Mr. Ellison and his ilk offer as it’s “solution.”

Betty McCollum (DFL MN4) confirms it – “bipartisanship” is just for Republicans! (emphasis added):

“Now is the time to pass a public health insurance option. Now is the time to expand access to quality health care, control rising costs, keep American businesses competitive, and improve the health of the American people,” she told the crowd of assembled party activists.

“You know there is a lot of talk about how Democrats need to reach out to Republicans and work for a ‘bipartisan’ health care bill. I am sick and tired of talk of a bipartisan health care bill — that’s just a plan for less health care for people in need and more profits for corporations driven by greed,” she said.

But McCollum – famous for ducking any debates and avoiding any dissent, as befits a “representative” from a one-party city who has never needed to remember that there are at least two sides to any issue – does make one illustrative point:

“Since I’ve been in Congress there have been a number of historic bipartisan bills — historically bad!”

She’s got a point; “bipartisanship” is the plea of the weaker party, or at least of the party that doesn’t need to reach across the aisle – which, as a Saint Paul DFLer, is all McCollum knows; the “bipartisanship” of ramming our agenda down the opposition’s throat.

Of course, McCollum is in the majority now.  She can afford to talk like a petty absolutist tyrant.

That “Majority” thing’s gotta change. 

Which is why your vote matters in 2010.  When McCollum is in the minority again – then she’ll see the value of “bipartisanship”. 

Let’s hope a new Republican majority doesn’t make that mistake again.

Hey boys and girls! Sometimes comedians can say the funniest things!

Please read the following quote; another example of an entertainer confusing his or her entertainment value with political relevance; Garrison Keilor:

“Thirty-two percent of the population identifies with the GOP, and if we cut off health care to them, we could probably pay off the deficit in short order.”

Now, tell us what’s wrong with that quote (economics majors: shhhhh.)

A generation of left-wing agitation directly led to violence in the streets of Pittsburgh this week.

The clashes began after hundreds of protesters, many advocating against capitalism, tried to march from an outlying neighborhood toward the convention center where the summit is being held.The protesters banged on drums and chanted “Ain’t no power like the power of the people, ’cause the power of the people don’t stop.”

The marchers included small groups of self-described anarchists, some wearing dark clothes and bandanas and carrying black flags. Others wore helmets and safety goggles.

One banner read, “No borders, no banks,” another, “No hope in capitalism.” A few minutes into the march, protesters unfurled a large banner reading “NO BAILOUT NO CAPITALISM” with an encircled “A,” a recognized sign of anarchists.

Violence, injuries and much property damage ensued. 

This sort of violence is the inevitable, direct result of the kind of rhetoric we’re getting from the left:

• Michael Moore’s assaults on “capitalism”
• The rhetoric of the likes of Keith Ellison and Dennis Kucinich – prominent Democratic/leftist legislators
• The demonstrations at the homes of AIG executives by groups of rent-an-outragers (we call them “TeabAIGers”), who made it very clear that the political is utterly personal
• The writings of vital lefty pundits like Nick Coleman and their disparaging references to “Big Cheeses”…
• The anti-business rhetoric of the likes of Andy Stein of the SEIU.
• The demonization of conservative causes, groups, and even thoughts by Janet Napolitano

…and many, many more, it’s clear to me that it’s inevitable that the left’s rhetoric on the economy is not only going to lead directly to violence; it’s already led there.

(more…)

In my various skirmishes with the Minnesota left’s various anti-charter school advocates, I’ve brought a lot of evidence to bear that a) charter schools are a vital component in school choice, and b) most of the “evidence” against charter schools is partisan baked wind.

But if the public-school advocates had brought this to the table, I might have changed my mind.

Oh, I’m being sarcastic. It’s a bunch of elementary teachers leading their kids through a song praising Barack Obama.

Did I say “Praising?”

Barack Hussein Obama
He said that all must lend a hand [?]
To make this country strong again
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
He said we must be clear today
Equal work means equal pay
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
He said that we must take a stand
To make sure everyone gets a chance
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
He said Red, Yellow, Black or White
All are equal in his sight
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
Yes
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama

[switch to the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”]

Hello, Mr. President we honor you today!
For all your great accomplishments, we all [do? doth??] say “hooray!”
Hooray Mr. President! You’re number one!
The first Black American to lead this great na-TION!
Hooray, Mr. President something-something-some
A-something-something-something-some economy is number one again!
Hooray Mr. President, we’re really proud of you!
And the same for all Americans [in?] the great Red White and Blue!
So something Mr. President we all just something-some,
So here’s a hearty hip-hooray a-something-something-some!
Hip, hip hooray! (3x)

It occurs that linking to this video might make me a racist, so I should just stop right now.

I was going to give the President kudos for making this observation while on the Letterman show during the media’s Obamapalooza this past few days…:

Addressing suggestions that recent criticism of his health care reform efforts has been grounded in racism, President Obama this afternoon quipped, “I think it’s important to realize that I was actually black before the election.”…

…Mr. Obama said the notion that racism is playing a role in the criticism, which has been voiced by former President Jimmy Carter and others, is countered in part by the fact that he was elected in the first place – which, he said, “tells you a lot about where the country’s at.”

Well, that’s cool. 

But the kudo-ing is somewhat tempered by the knowledge that the President can afford to take the high road.  He’s got all sorts of flaks, minions and stooges who are on the payroll to do all the dirty, uncivil, defamatory work for him:

Andy Stern, President of the Service Employees International Union, issued the following statement today regarding recent attempts of right wing extremists to silence working families by attacking progressive individuals and community organizations:

“This is a moment of profound change for this country–from kitchen tables to town halls to the floor of the Senate, this nation is engaged in a vigorous and heated debate about how we rebuild our economy, solve our national healthcare crisis and restore the American Dream.

“As has always happened when progressive change is in the air, the backlash gets fierce, ugly and anti-American. This time is no different. Right now, there is an insidious and coordinated effort on the part of the extreme right to target individuals and grassroots community groups as a way to silence the voices of women and men who have suffered the most under 8 years of right wing policies.

“These extremists will attempt to shut down and shout down anyone with a different point of view.

Why, yes, that’d be Andy Stern of the SEIU, whose goons actually did silence people at last month’s Town Hall rallies.  But don’t dare call them un-American, mind you.  As someone who (unlike most DFLers) is a former union member, I’m ashamed at Stern’s disingenuity.

And of course, Jimmuh Cartuh, Babs Boxer, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are still roaming around trying to defame all who dissent.

But hey – at least the President said the right thing.  Right?

• Do you need tax-avoidance assistance?
• Do you have cash to “process” back into the system?
• Did you “forget” to vote the last few cycles and would like to “catch up” and vote twice or more in the next election?
• Are the monthly payments on your mortgage, flat screen television, leather sofa, and 24″ chrome wheels too much to handle right now?
• Is your community disorganized?
• Do you have immigrant employees that need “Social Security” numbers or “Citizenship”?
• Do you run an “entertainment or recreational enterprise” and need help determining what legitimate NAICS code to assign to it?
  
• Would you like a ride on Marine One?⁺

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Nancy Pelosi is  projecting again:

I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw … I saw this myself in the late ’70s in San Francisco,” Pelosi said, choking up and with tears forming in her eyes. “This kind of rhetoric is just, is really frightening and it created a climate in which we, violence took place and … I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made.”

Funny thing about Republican enthusiasm; it may be boistrous, but nobody gets hurt.

It’s Pelosi’s team that is behind every single act of political violence in America today.

“The good news: it appears to be well run.”

At last, we can all see exactly what a “neighborhood organizer” does before becoming a “public servant.”

Interestingly, if you rearrange* the letters in “ACORN” you get….OBAMA!

*and swap a couple out for others and use the “A” twice

…and is not often found paired in a sentence with “Barack Obama.”

But don’t call Obammy a “liar”, “hypocrite”, “cowardly”, or “intellectually dishonest” as the First Amendment has no place in the House.

The Economist, not bound by such childish attempts at squelching free speech, has no problem calling Jimmy II a liar. They just use bigger, prettier words.

…on his speech on America’s financial collapse:

…much of what Mr Obama said was disingenuous.

Which is to say…

“You lie!”

In all fairness however, one must attempt to discern if Obama (and his accomplice TOTUS) are:

1. employing deliberate disingenuousness or if
2. President Bush is correct in saying Obama is without a clue, i.e. Obama’s just stoopid with numbers and math and money.

I might suggest 3. (1+2=3)

Arnold Kling, writing at EconLog, tries to unpack the significance of the Tea Parties from a class perspective.

And he does it from the perspective of someone who’s definitely a member of one of the classes; the Tea Parties, to Kling, come from the world of NASCAR, WalMart and truck pulls:

Do [Tea-Partiers] fit the stereotype of being white, small-town, uneducated racists? Not much racism, but otherwise I would say they fit the stereotype enough to make me skeptical that this is an important political movement. This country is becoming more urban, less white, and more educated. At most, this movement could turn out to be the right-wing equivalent of MoveOn–a mailing list to be tapped when somebody wants to try to mobilize activists. But it may not even achieve that before it splinters and shrivels into insignificance.

Which, to be fair, is the norm for social movements, whether the Grangers or the Bund or the sixties’ Peace movement or the Contract For America or, for that matter, MoveOn.  They all coalesce around some crystal-clear imperative that everyone, or at least everyone that’s fundamentally sympathetic, can sink their teeth into.  Then, as things proceed, they get complicated; crystal-clear imperatives collide with reality and become bogged down with the ambiguities that plague every human endeavor where two more more gather.

That aside, though, I think Kling has it wrong; “education” isn’t a binary, “have or have not” idea.  While the “elite” of which Kling speaks trends generally left, a graph expressing formal “education” on the left would be an inverted bell; plenty of the putative educated “elite” (like, it seems, Kling) on one end, lots of poorly-educated or miseducated on the other, and a big gap in the middle.  On the right, I suspect, it’s reversed; the bell curve covers that middle – people of widely-varying but generally solid accomplishment with perhaps less regard for the trappings of “elite” formal “education”; indeed, people who know the difference between education and school.  While the Blue states may be where the “elite” get educated, general levels of education – expressed in terms of literacy and graduation rates (76% of Red State students graduate high school, if you leave out the old Confederacy, where social traditions de-emphasize education) are higher in red states.  “Education” in whatever form is seen as a means to an end, rather than as an entree to an “elite” that’s rather meaningless to life in the region.

But Kline makes a useful point:

I think the long-term significance of what is going on, both at the progressive end and at the Tea Party end of the political spectrum, is an open rupture. In the 1960’s, a Hubert Humphrey or Robert Kennedy could connect with uneducated white voters. The idea of blowing them off was unthinkable, if only because they were such a large majority of the voting population at the time.

Now, the elitism of President Obama and his supporters has reached in-your-face levels. They have utter contempt for the Tea Party-ers, and the Tea-Party-ers know it.

I wouldn’t want the Tea Party-ers at the faculty picnic, either. But my sense of class solidarity with Obama and other educated progressives does not make me want to see them exercise power. If anything, being a member of the educated elite and knowing knowing them as well as I do makes me share the Tea Party-ers’ fears.

The idea that we are a free association of equals – that our individual traits, our strenths and weaknesses and skills and, yes, education, are individual traits that don’t affect the fact that we are all equal before the law – is a conservative one; the conflict between that and the idea that society needs an “elite” to do the hard work of planning out life for all the proles (with commensurate rewards and privileges) isn’t “left-wing”, per se, so much as it is an artifiact of Fabian socialism that the American left adopted during the New Deal, and stayed with ever since.

One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy. The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice-versa. I see the chances of both sides losing as much greater than the chance of either force winning.

And there, he’s got a point.

Read the whole thing; read it critically, but do read it.

NarcIssIst-In-Chief, Barack Obama

“I‘m not the fIrst presIdent to take up thIs cause…but I‘m determIned to be the last.”

It’s all about the “O” – er the I – that is.

Behold a man who spends a quarter mIllIon taxpayer dollars to take hIs wIfe on a date In Chicago yet can’t get on a plane to New York to observe a moment of sIlence (a dIffIcult feat indeed for SIr Talkalot) for the over three thousand vIctIms of the 9/11 attacks.

Three days later he’s on a plane to New York to “celebrate” the fIrst annIversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers and to take credIt for the economIc non-recovery engIneered by he and hIs tax-evading, crack economIc team.

In every one of the Emperor Hussein’s speeches, not only does the song remain the same, so do the words. I want you to do this. I am going to force you to do that. I will not allow you to do whatever. Not since Thomas Friedman got his column at the New York Times has anyone so abused the first-person singular. Indeed, Barry’s patented speeches are an orgy of solipsistic onanism, his animus apparent, his feelings deeply sensitive. Even though he’d like to discuss these crucial reforms civilly, the time for talking is over. Cross him and he will call you out. And whatever you do, don’t get him all wee-wee’d up.

It’s all about hIm, our Super-Ream Leader™.

The world’s oldest sophomore, Tom Friedman, has discovered the wondrous advantages of one-party autocracy over our current system of government. No, I am not exaggerating.

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

If you’re new to Friedman’s writing, or perhaps still nostalgically influenced by his presumably serious position as a columnist for the New York Times, you might think this is merely an attention grabbing opening lede which will be smoothly integrated into an otherwise sensible opinion piece as he develops his thoughts on this. You possibly also still believe in the Easter Bunny.

(more…)

…is a teleprompter, and independents, Republicans a public majority and a growing faction of your party is against you, what do you do?

Give another speech? …to my kids?

Obama has lost contact with the American people and is soon to be floating in a political vacuum…talking to himself.

“We gave Congress a charge, we gave them broad outlines, which is the reason we are farther along than any of the five presidents that have tried,” [Rahm] Emanuel said in an interview yesterday.

By what measure? Americans are five times more pissed off at their government? The unsubmitted bill used five times times more paper?

Rahm is in a state of stupor.

“We’re not there yet, and this speech is intended to finish the job.”

…I guess we’ll see what or who will be finished. When a thug from Chicago says “finish the job”…