Democrat Martha Coakley has just conceded the Massachusetts senate race to Republican Scott Brown. After almost 47 years as "Teddy Kennedy's seat" a Republican now takes over in time to deny the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority and possibly stop the Obamacare monstrosity. How sweet the irony.
And now the fun really begins.
I recently received an e-mail from Michael Steele, the Republican National Committee Chairman entitled "Voice your patriotism: Remind the Democrats who they work for...". In this smarmy e-mail Steele asks me to send a “virtual postcard” to the Democrats telling them “I won’t tolerate their socialist power grab”. Steele then reminds me “Our government is of the people, by the people, and for the people. Those aren't just fancy words. They are the bedrock upon which our republic was founded. Whether power hungry officials in the White House and on Capitol Hill like it or not, they are to serve the interests of the people -- not the other way around.” And “That's why you still need to show your support for the principled position of fiscal restraint, personal responsibility, and unfettered liberty as opposed to the Obama Democrats in Washington who are trying to force leftist "change" upon our country. Oh, and don’t forget to make a contribution to the Republican Party.
Here is the response I sent:
Dear Mr. Steele,
You are as breathtakingly ignorant as the Democrats. Take me off this ridiculous mailing list and never bother me with these pathetically disguised money requests again. For your information, any attempt on your part to co-opt the grass roots protest movement going on in this country will not end well for you. In case you didn't notice, Conservatives didn't wait for or accept marching orders from the GOP. You and your party are as much to blame for the current state of affairs as the Democrats.
Rest assured, when we come to Washington, we're coming for all of you!
A plague on both your houses.
Dr. Andrew Weil has an interesting article at The Huffington Post entitled Should You Get Your Drug Information From An Actor? Dr. Weil makes a fair case against direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing but then goes off the rails at the end of the article when he recommends a government solution to this "problem". Not much of a surprise considering where the article is posted.
I don't know about you, but I have a hard time getting my primary care physician to do anything he doesn't want to do. A few years ago I had a much worse than usual case of the flu and my doc basically said "What do you want me to do? You're sick. You have the flu, go home, force fluids and rest. And no I won't give you any antibiotics - they're over-prescribed as it is." Now how much luck do you think I would have getting him to give me a prescription for some medication I saw pitched on television? Not that I would even ask - that's why I go to him. He's my expert and if he thinks this test or that prescription is a good idea, we talk about it and then I do it. I hired him for his expertise because I don't even play a doctor on TV.
So if direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing works as well as Dr. Weil suggests there is something wrong with the medical profession and government intervention ain't going to fix it. Perhaps they should just let us self-diagnose, put vending machines in the waiting rooms and call it close enough.
But Dr. Weil's point about where and from whom we get our information is a very valid. I have repeatedly expressed the same concern in the political arena. In politics, everyone is allowed an opinion, no matter how illogical or uninformed it is. But when an opinion is given more crediance because it came from this actor or that musician we have a problem. For years I have been telling people "When I want the lastest information about geo-politics I consult the Dixie Chicks." I usually just get a blank stare.
Which leads me to the juxtaposition I found so interesting at The Huffington Post. Among their guest bloggers are Bill Maher (comedian), Larry Flint (pornographer) and Eve Ensler (playwright/actress). In addition, one of the most commented on posts was a video of Jon Stewart (comedian/news caster/comedian) and with whom I have a major problem - see here and here. I have to ask - how is this any different than Sally Fields hawking Boniva to the great unwashed? Especially if the readers are not very discerning? How does this elevate the discourse?
From Jill Lawrence at Politics Daily:
"LAS VEGAS – Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, was having second thoughts – or was he? – about the way he had characterized people who are disrupting town halls with "lies, innuendo and rumor," and not letting others speak. They are, he had said, "evil-mongers."
A day after tossing out the term "evil-mongers" in the closing speech of his annual clean energy conference, Reid was alternating between pride in his coinage and knowing that he probably should be trying to defuse, not escalate, the turmoil erupting at town meetings across the country on health care reform.
"It was an original with me. I maybe could have been less descriptive," Reid said. He also said, "I doubt that you'll hear it from me again." But a few minutes later, he couldn't resist a sardonic little joke. "I feel I haven't done anything to embarrass them," Reid said of his children. "Except maybe call somebody an evil-monger."
As defined by Wikipedia:
"Reductio ad Hitlerum is rationally unsound as guilt by association (a form of association fallacy), it illogically attempts to shift culpability from a villain to an idea regardless of who is espousing it and why."
Apparently Nancy Pellosi has not heard of this or Godwin's Law. Again, citing Wikipedia:
"For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically "lost" whatever debate was in progress. This principle itself is frequently referred to as Godwin's Law."
Speaker Pellosi recently accused the "AstroTurf" protesters of showing up at town hall meetings carrying swastikas.
What????????? I've seen a lot of American flags but no swastikas. And I wouldn't really think the Nazi Party or any of their symbolism would get any kind of love or understanding from a Tea Party type of crowd. However it does make for a pretty wide brush to smear your opponents with, now doesn't it?
And you know, I wasn't going to put up a copy of the poster that is taking L.A. and the Internet by storm - until I ran into an article in The Washington Post that contends the poster is racist.
Edgy? Yes. Racist? Give me a break. The tortured logic (if you can call it logic) employed by the writer doesn't stand up to even casual scrutiny. But it sure is effective when it comes to quelling that viral poster and branding anyone associated with it.
This is already ugly and it's going to get worse.
UPDATE - Frank J. Fleming weighs in:Mark Steyn brings it into focus with this post on NRO (emphasis added):
"Rep. John Conyers can't see why lawmakers should read the laws they make. What's the point? They wouldn't understand 'em anyway:
“I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’” said Conyers.
“What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”
As Betsy Newmark comments:
At least some representative's aides somewhere have read some part of the bill so that should be enough, right? Who says that when you're rejiggering over one-sixth of the US economy and incurring massive future debt that you need to know what it is you're voting on.
Thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. They also provide a clue as to why, in a country this large, national government should be minimal and constrained. Even if you doubled or trebled the size of the legislature, the Conyers conundrum would still hold: No individual can read these bills and understand what he's voting on. That's why the bulk of these responsibilities should be left to states and subsidiary jurisdictions, which can legislate on such matters at readable length and in comprehensible language.
As for optimum bill size, the 1773 Tea Act, which provoked the Boston Tea Party, was 2,263 words. That sounds about right."
H/T Instapundit
Over at Instapundit Glenn Reynolds asks the same questions I have been asking and comes up with the same answer (emphasis added):
JEFF JACOBY: Lawmakers, read the bills before you vote.
Hoyer conceded that if lawmakers had to carefully study the bill ahead of time, they would never vote for it. “If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,’’ he said. The majority leader was declaring, in other words, that it is more important for Congress to pass the bill than to understand it.
“Transparency’’ is a popular buzzword in good-government circles, and politicians are forever promising to transact the people’s business in the sunshine. But as Hoyer’s mirth suggests, when it comes to lawmaking, transparency is a joke. Congress frequently votes on huge and complex bills that few if any members of the House or Senate have read through. They couldn’t read them even if they wanted to, since it is not unusual for legislation to be put to a vote just hours after the text is made available to lawmakers. Congress passed the gigantic, $787 billion “stimulus’’ bill in February - the largest spending bill in history - after having had only 13 hours to master its 1,100 pages. A 300-page amendment was added to Waxman-Markey, the mammoth cap-and-trade energy bill, at 3 a.m. on the day the bill was to be voted on by the House. And that wasn’t the worst of it."
If companies that are “too big to fail” are too big to exist, then bills that are “too long to read” are too long to pass. This sort of behavior — passing bills that no one has read — or, that in the case of the healthcare “bill” haven’t even actually been written — represents political corruption of the first order. If representation is the basis on which laws bind the citizen, then why should citizens regard themselves as bound by laws that their representatives haven’t read, or, sometimes, even written yet?
Update - I posted this comment at Tigerhawk this morning:
According to Dr. James McHenry, at the close of the Constitutional Convention Dr. Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman “Well Doctor what have we got - a republic or a monarchy? A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.” It has always been a struggle to keep the Republic and our time is no different.
Should we pass laws or constitutional amendments so those elected to conduct the people’s business are forced to actually do it? What, exactly, do our congressional representatives think they were elected to do? Somehow, reading and understanding any bill they vote on would seem to be the least they could do. But as recent events have shown, it does not appear they can even rouse themselves to do that much.
Which brings us back to Glenn Reynold’s point – “If representation is the basis on which laws bind the citizen, then why should citizens regard themselves as bound by laws that their representatives haven’t read, or, sometimes, even written yet?” The answer is self-evident. The process of “keeping our Republic” has begun anew and the only question is how best to accomplish that goal.
I submit that it is not accomplished by petitioning our elected representatives to do their jobs.
Washington (CNSNews.com) - House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the health-care reform bill now pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on it.
“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.
Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.
In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.
From Ralph Peters:
"We all recall the delighted leftist claims that Iraq had entered a hopeless civil war. Wrong. That Iraqis preferred al Qaeda to us. Wrong. That Shia militias represented the people. Wrong. And that Iran would seize control. Wrong again.
Looking back over six years of good intentions, tragic errors, generosity, arrogance, partisan vituperation, painful deaths and ultimate vindication, two things strike me: the ever-resisted lesson that human affairs are more complex than academic theories claim, and the simple truth that most human beings prefer a measure of freedom to immeasurable repression."
Last Friday while we were being bombarded by the 24/7 news cycle coverage of Michael Jackson's untimely demise the US House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade Bill. I will not go into details about why the bill alone is a travesty. What I wish to point out is that for the second time in recent memory the Representatives of the People have failed to even read a major piece of legislation that will impact this country for generations to come - before they passed it.
There will be a reckoning for this
A friend recently asked me "How should we deal with the mess in Washington?" and I replied "Rope."
More from Armed and Dangerous:
If it is impossible for something to continue indefinitely, it will eventually stop.
The politics of the modern redistributionist state is founded on the assumption that politicians can buy votes by promising voters ever more munificent entitlements - from federal deposit insurance against bank failures to government-subsidized medical care - with the money for these things always somehow being painlessly extracted from somebody else.
Once voters have agreed to forget that every single dollar of tax revenue is extracted from the productive economy by threat of force (including corporate taxes, which are then passed along as higher prices), there is no incentive for any politically favored interest group to do anything but eat subsidies as fast as it can, before all those less deserving other interest groups get a snout in. The demand for entitlements, income transfers, and subsidies will, accordingly, rise without limit. And why not, when “somebody else” is paying?
For this con game to continue working on the suckers voters who buy it, there always has to be a “somebody else” from which more money can be painlessly extracted. It’s “the rich” or “corporations” or (when governments borrow money against future tax revenues) ourselves in the future.
But what happens when there is no “somebody else” left? California’s voters posed that question today when they rejected six referenda designed to raise taxes or borrowing, all of it allegedly intended to pull the state out of a $21-billion-dollar hole. Exit polling made the voters’ reasoning clear; they don’t believe that allowing taxes to rise will produce anything but ever larger deficits as politicians recklessly overspend on behalf of those politically favored interest groups. The state of California is now facing imminent bankruptcy.
The U.S. as a whole will almost certainly face the same problem before the end of Barack Obama’s administration in 2012. Social Security obligations were due to exceed collections in 2013; even before Obama quadrupled the federal deficit this meant a giant blazing meteorite was already hurtling straight at the heart of the Feds’ dinosaurian finances. And the second-order effects of Obama’s socialism-lite economic policy are pushing tax revenues rapidly downwards as investors cut back economic activity in order to avoid being skinned (that is, skinned worse than they already are - the top 1% of earners already pay 39% of all income taxes).
The underlying problem is that in any democratic system, the political demand for redistribution of wealth rises faster that the economy’s ability to generate wealth to be redistributed. Even if none of the money ever stuck to our political class’s fingers on its way through, the structural trend would be to ever-increasing deficits; moral outrage about corruption, while justified, is a distraction from the real problem, which is redistributionism itself.
But. If it is impossible for something to continue indefinitely, it will eventually stop.
Soon - very soon, in historical time - it will become clear that democratic redistributionism cannot deliver on its promises. All such systems, not just California’s and the U.S’s, are running headlong towards a terminal state of moral, political, demographic, and financial bankruptcy.
Then, the question will become: what happens afterwards? And it is a serious one, because the crisis could resolve either through the end of democracy or the end of redistributionism. On one path, we learn that we must live within our means and reject the delusion that redistribution can solve more problems than it causes; down the other path lies Peronism on steroids.
I am not in doubt which of those I will choose. If I am given any choice…
The Barrister over at Maggie's Farm nails it:
"Most Americans, unlike Europeans, are emotionally mature enought to be willing to see that government is not run by their betters, but by cowardly morons - often by cowardly moronic narcissists who could never handle a real, demanding job in which their added value could be measured.
The widespread recognition of that is one thing that distinguishes America from nations with monarchic, dictatorial, and dependency traditions.
Hope springs eternal from the human breast, though, doesn't it? Even from those who know better.
I have felt disgusted and embarassed by our federal government and the administration over the past few weeks. We posted earlier today that these people could not run a successful candy shop, much less the government. But they have not shown that they can even run their own lives honestly and effectively. That's why I want them as far as possible from my medical care, my investments, my business, and my pocketbook - and from everything else in my life. Please - do me no favors."
Make way for the clue bus - here comes Newsweek (emphasis added):
"Surfer that he is, President Obama should know a riptide when he's in one. The center usually is the safest, most productive place in politics, but perhaps not now, not in a once-in-a-century economic crisis.
Swimming in the middle, he's denounced as a socialist by conservatives, criticized as a polite accommodationist by government-is-the-answer liberals, and increasingly, dismissed as being in over his head by technocrats.
Luckily for Obama, the public still likes and trusts him, at least judging by the latest polls, including NEWSWEEK's.But, in ways both large and small, what's left of the American establishment is taking his measure and, with surprising swiftness, they are finding him lacking."
From TigerHawk:
"With the ridiculous granting of a vote to the District of Columbia's representative in the House, let us not hear any more about the Bushies "shredding the Constitution." If it is lawful to do this by statute, then why not just decide that Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam should each get a seat or two? Indeed, why stop there? Why not give Americans living in France their own seat? What about each Indian Tribe? In fact, what does geography have to do with it? I think we need to give each disadvantaged minority group their own seat, broken down by skin pigmentation, accent, quantity of vowels in last name, and type of mental and physical handicap. Oh, and each NFL city should have its own representative, and each college football team that gets screwed because we do not have a post-season playoff system in lieu of the BCS. And why not give General Motors and Chrysler their own actual vote, instead of making them grovel for the votes of others? And school teachers. Don't forget them.
Goddamn. What a bunch of clowns."
Human Events:
"Every conservative should relish the call for the federal government to “cease and desist all mandates that are beyond the scope of [its] constitutionally delegated powers.” In this way, we honor the Constitution that enumerates a number of our liberties yet also guarantees us other liberties that are neither enumerated nor denied in the document.
Liberals don’t respect the Constitution, and liberals in Congress don’t hesitate to propose legislation that would clearly violate it. The current push to give Washington, D.C. a voting representative in the House of Representatives is a good example; even liberal Prof. Jonathan Turley told a Congressional hearing that this bill is patently unconstitutional. But they press on with it.
Our Constitutional system of checks and balances is always thought of as enabling two of the three branches of the federal government to keep the third within its constitutional bounds. But there is a fourth check, the states, which also have a Constitutional function. It is to them this burden now falls. The states can choose between allowing the federal government to impose untenable conditions on them if they accept the stimulus money, or to reject it.
These eleven states have the right to reject the stimulus plan. And they must.
There is no other option. For this federal expansion will not stop unless we stand in its way with courage in our hearts and the Constitution in our hands."
