Harry Reid shook hands with the ad director for the Review-Journal of Las Vegas, Bob Brown, before a Chamber of Commerce luncheon last week as part of “a meet-‘n’-greet and a photo.”
[A]s Bob shook hands with our senior U.S. senator in what should have been nothing but a gracious business setting, Reid said: “I hope you go out of business.”
Whoa. What a time to wish that on anyone. He’s our head Senate Democrat, isn’t he? Has risen to the top, you might say. Yuck.
The irreplaceable David Horowitz on why Nixon White House operative Brian Lamb did not succeed in his mission to liberalize PBS, that is, make it live up to the law that created it, to be “fair, objective and balanced”:
[L]iberals are closet totalitarians who can’t stand to have a conservative in the room.
(Notice “liberal” used twice with seemingly opposite meanings. Trouble is, the term has been hijacked.)
Horowitz, the red-diaper baby who came in out of the cold world of the left and knows where the mind-set skeletons are, cites media and academe:
There is not a single leftwing channel, network or institution — to call them liberal is an offense to language — whether it is MSNBC, CNN, or PBS, Air America, NPR, or Harvard that is capable of fairness or intellectual diversity or has the slightest interest in promoting it.
Among the “hardly any” leftwing intellectuals who support “the practice of intellectual diversity” he (generously) names three — Alan Dershowitz, Stanley Fish and Gerald Graff.
As for the rest of them:
Contemporary liberals are socialists and their instincts are totalitarian — which is expressed in their causes like single payer health care, and their sabotage of the war against Islamic fascists.
Bring that down to the everyday level and putting it in homely terms, they are fussbudgets who know what is right for you and will make you do it,.
Danny Davis was a no-show this morning at 2nd Baptist, Maywood. His office in DC had told Organizing for America (OFA), the Obama campaign agency turned policy muscle, he’d be there for a town hall. Not only was that wrong, or turned out wrong, but his office had the address wrong — 36 S. 13th Ave., vs. 436, the correct address.
This misinformation — fishy, I’d call it — sent Yours Truly on a self-conducted auto tour of Maywood, a mostly black ‘burb a few miles west of Oak Park. This was interesting — I saw a man in his back yard where he had corn growing — but not what I planned.
Two residents were as helpful as they knew how to be when I stopped and asked. One said to try Melrose Park (to the north); so I took 13th Ave. north — finding 2nd Baptist, in fact, where a cop was in the street directing people away from that location, explaining that inaccurate emails had been sent out.
I verified this with several OFA stalwarts who were as disappointed as I was, in uniform tee shirts and beautiful signs made with help of the OFA site — www.barackobama.com or if you sign on, mybarackobama.com. Chatting with them, I suggested that Republicans had sent out the false messages, which they enjoyed.
One asked me to sign a statement of support for Obamacare. I said I had some issues. She asked me what. I said the cost. She offered this solution: measure the cost by the year and not the decade, and it’s not so scary. She also opined that the money saved would balance out the cost. I said I’d have to think about it.
But wait. The costs we hear about are to the federal government, that is us as taxpayers. It’s new expenditures. So that balancing-out idea won’t work for me. I will have to go with her annual-cost suggestion and forget the ten-year business. That way, I won’t feel so bad. We parted friends, that much I know.
The Chicago and (separately) Illinois situations have a D.C. counterpart:
Mayor Adrian Fenty on Thursday dodged more questions about the education of his sons, growing visibly angry as reporters pressed on how his twin boys gained entry into one of D.C.’s top-performing public schools.
The Obamas didn’t have to stoop that low, choosing to go private, as we know.
Eric Zorn takes issue with Tom Roeser, who called U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin “the Dick” (citing as precedent “the Donald” for D. Trump) and complained that Durbin has no townhall meetings about health care/insurance/whatever-the-latest-name and that reporters don’t press him on sensitive issues.
Because, you know, how else could one possibly gauge public sentiment or consider the various sides of the debate other than to participate in a spectacle?
And [Roeser] wants an immediate disquisition from Durbin about the latest developments in the CIA/torture issue.
Oh? It’s not good for D. to meet people in unscripted venues and reporters’ looking for comment from a senator is seeking a disquisition?
Not so, Eric Z. However unbridled the adjectives, adverbs, metaphors, and flourishes Roeser employs, it’s not that easy to deal with the substance therein contained.
When does “the Dick” — upper case and definite article take it out of the realm of the out-and-out contumelious — meet with citizens and take their questions?
And why wouldn’t the mediums ask him about the CIA and torture? Look, he might come up with something good, as when he went off in 2005 about Nazis, Soviets in Gulags, Pol Pot and our Guantanamo guards.
He did apologize for it, yes, and would rather not have to do that again. So maybe that’s why he won’t do the free-flowing-exchange thing this time around: he’s afraid he’ll say something off the wall. But his reason for not doing it is nasty and dismissive of the people who show up:
These folks are there about YouTube. That’s why they’re showing up. They want to get a little clip on YouTube in an effort to disrupt a town meeting and to send the congressman running for his car.
How does The Dick know this, who is on YouTube with that 2005 Senate speech, by the way? He just knows, that’s all.
Some say the final sunset on the Kennedy name within Catholic halls of power was the Vatican’s decision [revealed] in 2007 to overturn the annulment of the first marriage of former U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy, the eldest son of Robert Kennedy. The successful appeal by Joe Kennedy’s ex-wife Sheila Rauch, an Episcopalian, was another blow for the Kennedy image in Catholic circles.
“When you try to defend your marriage, the army that comes after you is pretty brutal,” Rauch Kennedy said [in June of 2007]. “You’re accused of being a vindictive ex-wife, an alcoholic bigot, an idiot.”
The annulment had been granted in secrecy . . . after the couple’s 1991 no-fault civil divorce. Rauch found out about the de-sanctification of their marriage only in 1996, after Kennedy had been wedded to his former Congressional aide, Beth Kelly, for three years.
“He is a complicated figure,” says Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and the culture editor of the Catholic magazine America. “Catholics on the right are critical because of his stance on abortion. Catholics on the left celebrate his achievements on immigration, fighting poverty and other legislation that is a virtual mirror of the Church’s social teaching.”
Trouble is, govt. is not profit-motivated, and what it operates has no independent future. Thus U. of Chi economist Gary Becker:
Supporters of a government-run plan claim that it will be financially self-supporting, and will provide a standard for private plans. To see how this would work out in practice, consider the postal system [italics, coloration mine], a nominally private but basically a very old government-run business. The postal system is also supposed to be self-supporting, but only recently it once again asked Congress for additional [?] subsidies to cover deficits. [It’s subsidized?]
It strains credibility to expect that a large government-run health care option will not run huge deficits. Just as part of the postal deficits are caused by government mandates, such as providing Saturday deliveries at no added cost, so Congress will also impose costly and inefficient mandates on the government health care option, in addition to other inefficiencies of such a government health care organization.
This latter is crucial. Mandates because what govt. does is wholly service-oriented, which is what makes it appealing to many people. But do they know what a drain it is and many other services are? And what happens when the money runs out?
As for the subsidy business, I confess to confusion. Cutbacks are reported, but not subsidy. But Becker is a heavyweight in these matters.
Remember in The Graduate, where the Dustin Hoffman character was advised to go into plastics? Now he would be advised to work for a Congress member:
A month after they voted to punish some corporate executives for taking hefty bonus payouts, members of the House of Representatives quietly gave their own staffers a new potential bonus by making even their top-earning aides eligible for taxpayer dollars to repay their student loans.
Or for that matter, for any boss in the federal government, where things have been booming for quite a while:
The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released its annual data on compensation levels by industry (Tables 6.2D, 6.3D, and 6.6D here). The data show that the pay advantage enjoyed by federal civilian workers over private-sector workers continues to expand.
If you live by the visual aid, here’s your cup of tea:
It didn’t start with Obama, as you can see. But we don’t think the trend will slow down now, do we? As matters stand, he may be the last of the big-time spenders. I’m getting a sandwich board announcing, “The end is near.”
As this fellow said two months ago,
Rising unemployment, stagnant wages, falling housing prices … The US economy has overcome such crises time and again in the past. But President Obama and his allies in Congress are gearing up to wallop families and businesses with an array of new taxes to fund a host of spending plans. These won’t just hit hard at average families — they threaten to derail any economic recovery.
Get ready.
Later: Government is a growth business. A case in point:
On Aug. 4, 1977, Jimmy Carter declared war on energy dependence and created the U.S. Department of Energy. Every president since has done the same. Today, 31 years later, the Department of Energy’s budget is $26 billion. It employs 16,000 people and 100,000 contract employees.
So what if we’re finally energy-independent? Huh?
We are no closer to energy independence than we were in 1977.
The whole concept of achieving it with a new department is a flop. F-L-O-P.
“And you want the federal government to run health care?” asks Barry Goldwater Jr. in American Spectator.
Instapundit calls them “dick panels.” They work this way:
Public health officials are considering promoting routine circumcision for all baby boys born in the United States to reduce the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.
Fine, you say. Let them. They put warning labels on lots of things. So put them on uncircumcised members.
Under ObamaCare . . . when the government starts paying more and more of the health-care tab, they will point to ambiguous cost savings down the road in this and other cases, decades down the road to pressure Americans into surrendering their choices now.
So. For uncircumcised deliveries you expect reimbursement from Daddy Health Care? Sorry, fellows and girls. You made your bed, lie in it. No snip-snip, no payout. It’s how it works, don’t you know?
As Hot Air explains:
The advocates of ObamaCare insist that medical decisions will remain between doctors and patients and not involve mandates from government. However, the same people also cheer the idea of government coaching doctors to adopt practices, and to back up those choices with pressure from payment schedules, [Italics added here] which will result in de facto [not here] diktats, especially when it evolves into a single-payer system.
This they will do “in the name of AIDS prevention even though the risks are manageable and the effect less than certain.”
Because they know what is best for you.
Tot lot meeting tonight at Pleasant Home, 7 p.m. It’s the lot at Grove & Randolph, to be expanded east of the alley to OP Ave. Park District looking for feedback. Here’s a thought: Abandon the expanded-tot-lot concept in favor of a two-park concept, leaving the alley open, clear, and free, as Montgomery Ward said the lake front should be, citing an 1836 city mandate. Why so? For garbage and emergency vehicles, for two things, for garage access by residents for a third. (This per the suggestion of a “gate” that can close alley off so kids can move freely from one lot to the other.)
As to the second park, it’s already been discussed, at the Aug. 5 tot lot meeting, also at Pleasant Home, in terms of “passive” use, that is, for sitting on bench and reading or watching tots frolic free-style, pretty fountain in place, etc. — leaving the present lot as is or improved for activity such as swinging on swings, etc. (It’s being fumigated at the moment, by the way, in search-and-destroying of unnamed “stinging insects,” per posted sign, but called bees at the Aug. 5 meeting, when citizens informed park district people of the problem.)
Hence a two-park approach, making park-style use of a gift from the village of the grassy stretch at OP and Randolph, in addition to tapping in on $200G which the parks have to spend on this improvement. Go parks! I like the quiet-bench area idea and hereby recommend it.
Blithe Spirit 