Politics and Culture

The reason is that Obama promised to make health care affordable. His plan actually costs people more money in taxes while providing the same and quite probably worse, service. Sound like a good deal to Americans who have or plan to have sometime in the future, health care coverage? Only those who think that they'll never get insurance or those committed to absolute, lefty-style equality would vote for the plan.

Per the Corner:

GM is going through painful downsizing at the behest of its new owner, GM. The goal is to make GM more competitive and keep it alive. We'll see how that goes. But even if it succeeds, it's not all win-win. Ford is eschewing government aid, and so it isn't having it's sizable debts erased. If GM does manage to rebound, it will only be thanks to an unfair advantage, at least from Ford's perspective. If GM comes back, the press will hail Obama's success, liberals will celebrate the genius of public-private partnerships and greet GM like the returning prodigal son. Meanwhile Ford, which has done things the hard but right way, will have to continue to pay its debts and lose market share it otherwise would have gotten fair and square. This isn't to say that Ford should get on the gravy train too (not having the feds look over its shoulders is an advantage of its own), but the costs of this bailout are more complex than simply the (enormous) tab taxpayers are directly picking up.

I can hear Obama ending his speeches with "Buy GM" commercials. As long as GM has this advantage, Americans should boycott the cars they're already subsidizing. We should support private industries like Ford. They have better cars anyways. If conservatives boycott GM, GM sales should be 0 since most liberals wouldn't be caught dead driving a GM.

The lefty, Christophobic blogosphere exploded in joy yesterday at the murder of abortion provider George Tillman. I can hear the sighs now, "Finally, we won't have to use Eric Rudolph's name anymore."

The Daily Kos hasn't been this excited since the 2006 bombing of the Shia mosque in Iraq.

This brings the total number of abortion-related murders to 4, although some would put that number at 40,000,004.

1. Sherrilyn A. Ifill is both wrong and right. Judge Sotomayer did say a racist thing, technically, if you define racist as the dictionary does:

rac·ism (rszm)
n.
1. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.

She said:

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases…I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor [Martha] Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life..

Here we have an allusion to actual and meaningful natural differences and the allegation that Latinas would not only make different choices, a problem in itself as judges are supposed to not take that stuff into consideration, but "better" ones.

(I personally don't think physiology affects wisdom: it's available to all sincere people. I don't know if Sotomayor would consider my mom, a Latina, wise, but if my mom were on the supreme court, she'd not only allow the death penalty, but offer to carry out the sentence herself.)

So, yes, what Sotomayor said fits the definition. On the other hand, I don't really think that Sotomayor is a racist- she's a liberal. There's a difference. Liberals say things that fit the criteria for racist speech, but they don't really believe it. What liberals try to do in this regard is achieve equality, which is their one sacred dogma. One way to straighten a see-saw is to lift the low side. The other way is to lower the high side. Sometimes liberals feel that the lower side has to "make up" it's low time by spending time as the higher half. It's the reason why Marxist-inclined race movements say that the oppressed can't be racists- the oppressed have no power (more here).

This is what Sotomayor was doing. Whereas O'Connor stopped at equal, Sotomayor wanted to make up a little for past slights by saying that Latinas are not only equal, but better.

Some conservatives like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are also being unfair to Sotomayor because immediately after that passage Sotomayor said:

“Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.”

Here, Sotomayor returns to the correct (my) position.

So, how should Republicans handle Sotomayor? I know what appeals to me and that is, calm, non-sensational, non-nitpicking, truth. How would this strategy sound like in a hearing:

Justice Sotomayor, what is your position on this? Do you agree with this decision? What's your general philosophy?

In other words, this is a teaching moment for Republicans. Contrast and illuminate.

Maureen Dowd:

Dowd, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1990, told The Huffington Post that the mistake was unintentional. She claims she never read Marshall's post last week and had heard the line from a friend who did not mention reading it in Marshall's blog.

I don't really care about this--it's too "inside baseball" for me, but I do find her explanation funny. First, when people talk about an article, do they quote it word for word or do they summarize and paraphrase it? Did he print it out and take it to the party? Second, what are the chances that Maureen would remember the quote, exactly, on the odd chance that the guy did, in fact, do that? And, then, to not go to Talking Points Memo when she got home?

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

The quote itself makes absolutely no sense. It's a non-sequitur, no sigue. Why can't the Bush administration be trying to prevent terror and looking for evidence of WMD in Iraq at the same time?

It's like asking, "Why would the Obama administration be creating uncertainty by transforming health care while trying to stimulate the economy." Wait, that's actually a good question. It would be like incredulously asking, "Why would somebody be trying to prevent an attack while finding evidence against somebody he thinks might attack the United States in the future? The answer's pretty obvious, no?

1. Obama made a good decision about the "torture" photos. Images=emotions and the pictures would inflame passions around the world, exactly the thing liberals say that they don't want to do. Of course, what some on the left really want to do is stir anger against Bush.

2. Democrats are losing the torture debate, and it's not just because of Nancy Pelosi's lying. Remember, Democrats' opposition to torture is completely emotional. When people start asking what makes it immoral, Democrats have no good answer. Go ahead, ask one (or, if you're liberal, tell me). They'll mutter something about it being illegal (low-level moral reasoning: so's marijuana) or its ineffectiveness (lie, and you'd have to believe that the CIA is just trying to be mean). Press them, and nothing.

3. Which brings me to this article on how religious people have less of a problem with enhanced interrogation than their leftist brothers and sisters: Religious people are more morally sophisticated, less likely to let their "yuck" reflex guide their decisions.

4. Christians, by the way, should be against real torture because it goes against the spirit of Christianity, like slavery. Justly applied, however, torture isn't against the natural law and therefore not absolutely forbidden.

5. I'm officially bored (listening, at least) by the Miss California, Carrie Prejean, issue. She's a lovely young lady and will be a wonderful wife to a lucky guy (If I weren't married, I'd take her out), but if she wants to be taken seriously or wants to help the pro-traditional marriage cause, she needs to transition from victim-of-mean-liberals to a smart spokeswoman, and fast.

6. Gratuitous Carrie Prejean picture:

7. A Godless society does not produce great art for long. For a while, it'll be "anti" whatever came before, sometimes "shockingly" so, and then it'll transition to nihilist. It seems like German artist Gunther von Hagens is in the last throes of the anti stage. One really has to go where few men have gone before to shock modern Christians, modern art's main preoccupation. Hagens shtick is having sex with corpses.

8. I beginning to wonder if the Germans have some kind of special fascination with macabre sex. Remember a couple of years ago when German soldiers took time off from not killing the enemy to engage in a little skull sex (not that there's anything wrong with that)?

9. It's going to take a generation of Islam to clean up this mess.

10. Kinsey would have loved to interview those gallant Teutonic knights. An excellent book I'm reading called Ten Books that Screwed Up the World says how Kinsey would insert the business end of a toothbrush in his baby maker and then pleasure himself.

11. Like handwashing and not spending too much, Obama would like to mention that it's not a good idea to share toothbrushes.

10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help by Benjamin Wiker

12. Man, the Democrats have sure cleaned up Washington. No more scandals, no more lobbyists or waste. A true golden age.

13. Here's a British secretary of something explaining why her department of whatever won't allow Michale Savage into (formerly) Great Britain:

Here's the list of people non grata in Great Britain:

-American Baptist pastor Fred Waldron Phelps Snr and his daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper
-Hamas MP Yunis Al-Astal
-Jewish extremist Mike Guzovsky,
-former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard Stephen Donald Black
-neo-Nazi Erich Gliebe
-Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky, the former leaders of a violent Russian skinhead gang which committed 20 racially motivated murders.
-Wadgy Abd El Hamied Mohamed Ghoneim, Abdullah Qadri Al Ahdal, Safwat Hijazi and Amir Siddique
-Muslim activist Abdul Ali Musa (previously Clarence Reams)
-murderer and Hezbollah terrorist Samir Al Quntar
-Kashmiri terror group leader Nasr Javed.

Let's see: murderers, supporters of actual terror that actually kills people (the KKK can be in this category), actual terrorists, un-PC talk show hosts that say mean things about Islam, and a homosexual-obsessed nut who protests funerals (as opposed to causing them).

Hmmm? Explanation:

"If people have so clearly overstepped the mark in terms of the way not just that they are talking but the sort of attitudes that they are expressing to the extent that we think that this is likely to cause or have the potential to cause violence or inter-community tension in this country, then actually I think the right thing is not to let them into the country in the first place. Not to open the stable door then try to close it later," Ms Smith said.

Liberal emotions strike again.

Michael Savage said he doesn't like the Muslim religion (Islamophobe). Wouldn't a congruous offender be Christophobe Christopher Hitchens? Is William Ayers on the list? Yet, no ban. Why? Because a) Brits aren't scared of Christians and b) Christianity is currently out of style.

Too bad. Without it, Britain can't think straight.

From Neuroscientist Jeanine Garofalo (S/T Matthew Vadum):

JANEANE GAROFALO: Thank you. You know, there's nothing more interesting than seeing a bunch of racists become confused and angry at a speech they're not quite certain what he's saying. It sounds right and then it doesn't make sense. Which, let's be very honest about what this is about. It's not about bashing Democrats, it's not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don't know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks. And there is no way around that. And you know, you can tell these type of right wingers anything and they'll believe it, except the truth. You tell them the truth and they become -- it's like showing Frankenstein's monster fire. They become confused, and angry and highly volatile. That guy, causing them feelings they don't know, because their limbic brain, we've discussed this before, the limbic brain inside a right-winger or Republican or conservative or your average white power activist, the limbic brain is much larger in their head space than in a reasonable person, and it's pushing against the frontal lobe. So their synapses are misfiring. Is Bernie Goldberg listening?

To Garofalo, only a crazy person wouldn't want to be taxed.

Psychoanalysis is her bag. The one time I heard Garofalo on radio, she was saying how miners in Virginia go home from Church in order to beat their wives. This was after the mining disaster a few years back.

Two can play that game. Garofalo's projecting. She's the racist.

This is part of the left strategy in general, as I show here.

I'd dismiss Garofalo as another lefty nut except that she nearly ruins my Mondays by showing her ugly mug on 24. This is personal. You have violated the sanctity of my LCD TV, Ms. Garofalo.

A distinction between somebody stealing somebody's ID on purpose to steal something further from them and those who just want to have an ID is appropriate. I think the illegal alien would prefer a completely made up number.

I'd like for illegal aliens to consider that they may be taking somebody else's identity, however.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday threw out an illegal immigrant's conviction for identity theft, saying the government had not proven the defendant knew the documents and Social Security numbers he was given belonged to someone else.
The Supreme Court unanimously sides with a Mexican arrested in a government raid on a Midwest work site.

The Supreme Court unanimously sides with a Mexican arrested in a government raid on a Midwest work site.

The justices unanimously sided with a Mexican national arrested in a government raid on a Midwest work site. He was sentenced to an extra two years in federal prison for "aggravated identity theft."

"In the classic case of identity theft, intent is generally not difficult to prove," wrote Justice Stephen Breyer, speaking for the unanimous court. "We conclude that [federal law] requires the government to show that the defendant knew that the means of identification at issue belonged to another person."

The appeal turned on whether those who use fake IDs to obtain work in the United States -- but do not know the documents have information from a real person -- can be treated differently from those who possess phony numbers. The federal government had begun an aggressive crackdown on undocumented workers, most of whom must rely on fake IDs to obtain employment.

Things were going to have to worry about in the future: The energy consumption of our computers.

Here.

In fact, I am not interested in how long the battery lasts, but in the actual power consumption of the computer, the reason is that I life with solar panel energy.

Anyway, I finally bought a Latitude E6500 (which should be arriving this week), not a 17' laptop but the LED TFT seems nice.

I generally admire the Puritans and think they get a bad rap from many modern historians so I'm hesitant to compare their treatment of Puritan social outcasts with what's going on now with Carrie Prejean. The Prejean mob is similar to their Puritan and medieval counterparts in that they've made an independent-minded woman an object of its hatred. It's dissimilar to Puritanism, at least so far, in that the government hasn't been the driving force behind the Carrie Prejean witch hunt. In that sense, Perez Hilton more closely resembles his medieval forefathers, maybe the only way he does.

I've said before here and here and the Brussels Journal here that leftists don't just feel the need to disagree with non-believers, but to destroy them. One of the ways they try to do that is through the hypocrisy charge.

This is a strategy. Rhetorical trick #4 in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals is:

RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity’s very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)

Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky

I don't consider the picture hypocrisy in any way (if the pictures were very revealing, I wouldn't post them on Asymmetric as per my wife's...errr...I mean, my editorial policy), but the attempt to make it so is part of the playbook.

Other rules, demonstrated in the Perez Hilton and the Olbermann videos linked to above, are numbers 5:

RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions. (Pretty crude, rude and mean, huh? They want to create anger and fear.)

and 12:

RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

Now, I'm not complaining about this nor do I want sympathy (as in Alinsky's rule number #10). I'm just "raising awareness."