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"Think Scott Brown can't win? Here's why he can"

"If we allow more free enterprise and less government intrusion into our lives, we can create jobs here in Massachusetts," State Senator Scott P. Brown, winner of the Republican nomination for the Kennedy seat in yesterday's low-turnout Massachusetts primary, told local TV anchors this morning. Long-shot candidate Brown will face off with Democrat nominee Attorney General Martha M. Coakley in a January 19 special election. NSFW: Click on image to find out how Brown financed his Boston College Law School student career. (Fox25 News photo above)

"Oddly enough, the one media outlet seeing a potential victory path for Brown, if remote, is the New York Times," writes Brian Maloney of SaveWRKO.com on this wild and woolly wintry-mix morning in the aftermath of Massachusetts State Senator Scott Brown's primary victory in the race to fill the late Senator Ted Kennedy's seat. Brown's opponent in the January 19 special election, Democrat Attorney General Martha Coakley, is "the perfect candidate for the modern Massachusetts electorate," quips local political wag Howie Carr: "someone for rich, white lunatics to vote for if they still feel guilty, even after voting for Barack and Deval."

Brown talks with Boston's WBZ-TV early-morning anchors Paula Ebben and David Wade.

Our own Jules Crittenden — together with most commentators, local and national — sees the writing on the wall:

Given that (a) it’s Massachusetts, (b) the national GOP isn’t interested in even making a good showing for Ted Kennedy’s legacy seat, (c) the state GOP is a joke, it is all but a foregone conclusion that would require remarkable gaffes by Coakley, an extraordinary and deft effort by Brown, and probably external events such as a Democratic health-care debacle. Before we get to the not-inconsiderable potential for the latter, there are some other vulnerabilities, however.

In case you're not up to speed on Scott Brown and the Massachusetts electorate, a few helpful facts and figures from that NYT article:

Although this is the state’s first Senate race with no incumbent since 1984 — for a legendary seat that John F. Kennedy, Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams held before Edward Kennedy — polling places reported strikingly low turnout.…

About 37 percent of the state’s 4.1 million registered voters are Democrats, and about 11 percent are Republicans, giving Ms. Coakley an advantage over Mr. Brown in the general election. Although Massachusetts has elected three Republican governors since 1990, it has not sent a Republican to the Senate in 37 years.

Mr. Brown, 50, is a lawyer and a lieutenant colonel in the Massachusetts National Guard who has served in the state legislature since 1996. He opposes same-sex marriage and the health care legislation being debated in Congress, and supports President Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan.

Winning unaffiliated voters, who make up half of the state’s electorate, will be crucial for Mr. Brown. He has emphasized his ability to work across party lines, while casting himself as the only candidate with conservative values.

Coakley "quickly came out against the amendment restricting abortion access in the House health care bill last month, saying, 'It’s personal with me, and it’s personal with every woman,'” reports the Times. Above at her primary election night victory event Tuesday in Boston she told fans "They said that women don't have much luck in MA politics, and we believed that it was quite possible that that luck was going to change, and change it did tonight!" (Elise Amendola/Associated Press photo)

Just for the fun of it, a little local color from WBZ-TV News Political Analyst Bob Kelleher:

Martha Coakley … ran a flawless campaign and put the old-boy network in its place with a blowout win on Tuesday night.

On the Republican side, Scott Brown had the best of both worlds, a cakewalk win, and an opponent who spent a bunch of dough reminding voters that Brown fits the template of the occasional Republican successes in this state, social moderation and fiscal conservatisn.

And more delicious prose from Jules Crittenden:

I liked the part, at the beginning of her victory speech last night, where she said voters indicated they want a new kind of leadership in Washington D.C. Flanked by U.S. Rep. Nikki Tsongas and U.S. Sen. John Kerry, apparently secure en route to a Democratic Senate seat in a Democratic Congress currently doing business with a Democratic White House, it was a somewhat enigmatic pronouncement.

"Think Brown can’t win? Here’s why he can," explains SaveWRKO.com's Maloney with a must-read rabble-rouser's roster of reasons not to wave the white flag just yet. A sampling:

With local media outlets already declaring Coakley our next senator, Martha’s infamous coasting will become even more pronounced. She will put next to nothing into her effort from here, saving campaign funds for future purposes …

Turnout on January 19 will be even lower than today’s. We could be well into single digits across the Commonwealth. Motivating your base, even one as small as the GOP’s, makes it possible to overcome that …

Make it clear: this is about the economy, jobs, and taxes. These are winnable positions for Republicans. Set the agenda, it’s not difficult, as Martha’s sole “issue” is her gender …

ABSOLUTELY go after Coakley EVERY SINGLE DAY. Make her life miserable for the next six weeks, that’s what campaigning is all about. And she most certainly deserves it! There’s no reason she should have a free ride simply because that pleases Margery Eagan and the others who failed to nominate Hillary Clinton in 2008.

Speaking of rabble-rousers, enter stage right the Tea Party Movement, Northeastern Massachusetts Branch. RNC Chair Michael Steele may not get it, but there's a Reynoldsian Army of Davids out here behind Taxachusetts enemy lines fixing to stand up and fight for this Shining City Upon a Hill: As Brown senior adviser Eric Fehrnstom says:

"I think the recent election in New Jersey and in the one in Virginia, which is a swing state, sent a very strong message that people are fed up with business as usual in Washington and they want to see the pendulum swing back in the direction of fiscal prudence."

Our very first foray into Tea Party activism was at a demonstration before City Hall organized by the Newburyport Republicans last March. Tomorrow the sub rosa group will celebrate a year of political reawakening at its annual Xmas Party to be held at the Amesbury Playhouse from 6:30 to 11 p.m. We have it from the horse's mouth — Newburyport's Voice blogger and Chairman of the Newburyport GOP, comrade in arms Larry Giunta — that Scott Brown himself will be there to meet and greet. Turns out his father, C. Bruce Brown, is a member of the Newburyport Republican City Committee and was on the City Council of this Northshore bedroom community for 18 years. "I know C. Bruce," says our imail correspondent, a city resident, "but had no idea he was a Republican." That says it all. One-party states like Massachusetts function as Fear-Lite societies.

. . . beckoning us all to be the best that we can be

Her spirit watches over us in all things great and small: Mummy would have loved this. Mummy wouldn't have approved. Mummy would have been so proud. Remember when Mummy . . .

In memory of our dear mother, we republish this post from December 7, 2004:

Impossible to believe she's been gone eleven [now sixteen] years to the day. Our precious mother happened to depart this vale of tears on December 7, the anniversary of the day that would live in infamy in the nation's heart. In her family's heart Mary lives on, beckoning us all to be the best that we can be.

What is the measure of a woman's life? That she was beautiful and brilliant and beloved . . .

That every friend she ever made, from childhood on, has remained a friend forever . . .

That no one's sorrow escaped her notice or her tender concern . . .

That she was a loyal and loving wife . . .

That she was a devoted and proud and nurturing mother . . .

That she was a ridiculously indulgent and adoring grandmother . . .

That she loved music and art and literature and flowers and animals and bridge games and dear friends?

All of these things are a measure.  But Mary's life was more than the sum of its parts.  Her death has extinguished a most incandescent light.

The Measure of a Woman, tribute written by her daughter, Susan, for the memorial service held in Thanksgiving For The Life of Mary Loddy Jameson, December 19, 1993

Mummy.

Palin's 21st-century stealth campaign of surgical strikes keeps Obama off balance

"Sarah Palin talks to a young fan while at a book tour stop in Roanoke, Va in this Nov. 22, 2009 file photo." (Don Petersen/AP Photo)

“People aren’t going to like Sarah in the same way that an earlier generation liked Ike," writes Ilya Somin of The Volokh Conspiracy in a damned-by-faint-praise critique of Sarah Palin's Going Rogue. While admittedly "initially sympathetic to Palin," Professor Somin worries that she hasn't been doing her homework. We think he's missing a big — if below the radar for some Palinologists — part of the picture, discussed below, but first his take:

Ultimately, the problem with Palin is not that she is folksy, that she is religious, that she didn’t attend a prestigious university, or that she dislikes “East Coast elites.” These are all side issues. Like [John Mark] Reynolds, I also don’t believe that she is stupid. The problem is that she is ignorant about major national political issues, and has made no apparent effort to remedy that ignorance. That might be perfectly fine if she limited her ambitions to Alaska (she does seem to be knowledgeable about Alaska issues) or decided to be just a pop culture figure or activist. It is far more problematic if she intends to run for president.

Sarah Palin "Ignorant about major national political issues"? Busy with his scholarly nose in her book, the professor may have missed Palin's ongoing series of Facebook essays, op ed columns in the Wall Street Journal and other major old-media publications, as well as twitter messages to her nearly 34,000 followers, all part of a 21st-century stealth campaign of surgical strikes strategically timed to keep off balance her arch rival for the soul of the nation. Her latest, "Mr. President: Boycott Copenhagen; Investigate Your Climate Change Experts," posted yesterday, throws down the gauntlet as President Obama prepares to attend next week's UN Climate-Change Conference:

The president’s decision to attend the international climate conference in Copenhagen needs to be reconsidered in light of the unfolding Climategate scandal. The leaked e-mails involved in Climategate expose the unscientific behavior of leading climate scientists who deliberately destroyed records to block information requests, manipulated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, and conspired to silence the critics of man-made global warming. I support Senator James Inhofe’s call for a full investigation into this scandal. Because it involves many of the same personalities and entities behind the Copenhagen conference, Climategate calls into question many of the proposals being pushed there, including anything that would lead to a cap and tax plan.

It was the self-professed rodeo clown himself, Glenn Beck, who put his finger on Sarah Palin's "strategery" in a tweet last July:

Sarah P. Think like a Comm organizer.They were overloading the system. She is 6 steps ahead. VERY SMART lady.

As we blogged back then in "Sarah Palin = 1, Saul Alinsky = 0,"

Expanding beyond 140 characters, Palin recognized that her adversaries — from the dirt-digging thugs on the ground to the fancy lawyers and their bosses behind the curtain — were soldiers in an Alinskyesque, Cloward-Piven-inspired army of "community organizers" out to destroy her and the small-government, free-market principles she stands and fights for by sowing discontent from within the system. Understanding their modus operandi, she outfoxed them, quoting Gen. MacArthur as she exited stage right victorious [via goparchitect]: We are not retreating; we are advancing in another direction.

Her smarts are something you can't get from books.

Update: Credit where credit is due: Palin signals suppport via Twitter for RNC's response to President Obama's job summit ("while his EPA kills jobs, as Don Serber notes"):

GOP Chair Steele great msg re yestrdy's Job Summit; asks Prez 2 buckle down&work Commonsense Conservative solutions 4 jobs: no Stimulus Redux

Wonder if Chairman Steele is listening. Probably not. Last time he twittered was January 30.

Related must-read: Jeffrey Lord's "Biggest Story of 2009: The Rise of the Virtual Newsroom" in The American Spectator.

Update: "This is why the media is going nuts," says Laura Lee in the comments. Her daughter and son-in-law got up close and personal with Sarah, staying up all night waiting in line to meet her at the Norman, Oklahoma book signing:

People are discovering an authentic American who has values just like theirs.

Loved her from the start.

Update: Maggie's links.

Pussytoes

For Tiny's fans, a couple of glam shots, outside in The Little House (above) glistening in the early morning light, and inside the big house (below) curled into a tight furball on the kitchen counter. Hey baby, it's cold outside in these parts. Had a real freeze yesterday, with ice-topped puddles atop the garage to prove it, first of the season in this late-to-give-up-the-summerghost heat island that is Greater Boston. Hey, Al Gore, come on down!

Medical (Health-Care?) Update: What with her diabetes and feline asthma, Tiny keeps us on our toes (not even half as cute as HER tufted toes, see above) worrying and administering twice-daily insulin shots and flovent inhalings (see AeroKat). A week or so ago she was racing ahead of expectations, her glucose level lower than anticipated this early in the treatment. Then we noticed she was back to drinking excessively. Took her in for a glucose check today and were relieved to hear she was doing just fine by veterinary protocol standards. They start with a low dose and then increase as indicated until blood sucrose level is within regulated range. Her early surge of improvement was atypical. The level she's at now is considered appropriate. We'll up the insulin dose from 2.5 to 3.0 cc's and go back for another glucose check Friday. As ever, the vet visits and shots and this and that are horrifying to Tiny herself, who got wind that we were about to grab her for a little trip in the cat carrier this morning and headed for the hills. Among her health-care workers Tiny's hissing and feistiness are legendary.

Update: More hissing and feistiess at Modulator's Friday Ark.

Climategate: "I'm cold," Snowden wimpered, "I'm cold."

Our Thanksgiving wishbone drying out on the window sill  — with a little help from Photoshop's "paint daubs" filter — recalls Georgia O'Keeffe's "Pelvis with the Distance."

"The spirit gone, man is garbage," Joseph Heller's alter ego Yossarian thinks to himself as he watches Snowden's secret spill out all over him and the back of the plane in Heller's WWII satire Catch-22. While many — including ourselves — have used the house-of-cards analogy for Climategate, Snowden's secret rings more viscerally true. Yossarian had bandaged what he took to be a superficial wound on the radiogunner when he realized "Snowden was wounded inside his flak suit":

Yossarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden's flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden's insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out … 'I'm cold,' Snowden wimpered, 'I'm cold …'

A last ironic gasp for the big lie that was Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Climategate: Hiding in plain sight

"Like Barbara Boxer within her Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on climate change this afternoon, Baby makes the rules." we captioned this majestic image of our late beloved boy back in March of 2007

As the Gramscian Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Change house of cards topples in the wake of the unprecedented scientific fraud of Climategate, we're delighted to republish yet another early-warning post signaling the alarm. As we wrote the other day, our own awareness goes back at least as far as July of 1990:

March 21, 2007. Two of our heroes in one day are fighting the good fight:

1. Senator James Inhofe — blogged here —  is not letting Barbara Boxer and Al [Big Sigh] Gore get away with grandstanding at today's "global-warming" hearings, as the Lord of Longwindedness tries to use up all of Inhofe's airtime by blowing hot air. 'Will watch the whole thing in reruns during the wee hours for the thrill of it all. Meanwhile, here's what  the Committee Chair had to say, to much snickering from the peanut gallery:

Elections have consequences, so I make the rules.

Touché. Inhofe parries:

When people don't want to talk about science in a debate format, they just say it's settled . . . My time is almost expired completely. Are you [Gaseous Gore] aware of that?

Here's the follow-up to our teaser post a couple of days back about Tuck's bolster project. He figured out how to do it through a combination of checking things out online, consulting with his upholstery man (the one who made the gorgeous cushion underneath the bolsters above) and a huge bunch of common sense. The biggest nut to crack was how to get a thread through the center of the foam cylinders to pull the buttons front and aft together. The solution was to slash through the fome with a serrated knife from our own kithcen. Ain't they beautiful?

2. "Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus said on Wednesday that fighting global warming has turned into a 'religion' that replaced the ideology of communism and threatens to clip basic freedoms" — check out our own take on the divine Mr. Klaus here:

The right-wing president, a free-market champion, wrote to the U.S. Congress that adopting tough environmental policies to fight climate change would have destructive impact on national economies.

'Communism has been replaced by the threat of an ambitious environmentalism,' Klaus wrote in response to questions from the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Energy and Commerce.

The most beautiful boy in the world. Baby Cakes, being a pussycat, doesn't pose, of course, but sometimes our digital cam lucks out and catches him in the perfect moment as above in the countdown to supper.

Meanwhile, the hearing continues. Bernie Sanders [Socialist, VT] opines that Fellow Traveler Albert has given the new generation "the hope that it can become the new Greatest Generation," able to overcome dependency upon fossil fuel. Can you say inspiring? Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation — the armed forces and their homefire burners stateside during WW II who defeated the fascist enemy overseas — gives way to Bernie Sanders's and Al Gore's Greatest Generation, who will exchange "carbon credits" to neutralize their "carbon footprint." It doesn't get any sweeter than VP Gore's response:

I think this generation is becoming involved in this as a moral issue.

What hath God wrought?

Update December 1, 2009: A third hero of the unGore Greatest Generation blipped onto our Twitter radar screen this morning, Australia's totally awesome new conservative party leader, Tony Abbott, "the first politician to reap the benefits of the world’s growing scepticism towards ManBearPig."

More good news from Andrew Bolt Down Under: "Finally, the Climategate scientists produce a real hockeystick."

Andrea Mitchell spilled the beans

Goompa's black beauty Lucie posed the eternal riddle of the sphinx atop the TV receiver Thursday in the post-Thanksgiving tryptophan haze.

Glenn Beck and like-minded thinkers and talkers and "Rodeo clowns" on the right side of the aisle are properly all over Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals and the Cloward-Piven strategy in light of President Obama's relentless Rahm-Emanuel-engineered assault on the institutions of this once Shining City Upon a Hill. If only they'd all been paying attention to Thomas Sowell and our own humble blog five years ago. Herewith republication of our post "Against the dominant orthodoxies":

August 17, 2004. "There always has to be a crisis -- some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses," says Thomas Sowell in a biographically-oriented interview of the pioneering black conservative thinker in The American Enterprise Institute:

It doesn't matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power. Many intellectuals' preoccupation with the poor is very much the same thing . . . the poor are a lever to reach other, political, goals.

The very point we were making in our previous post re Bush bashers' use of disadvantaged Abu Ghraib torturess Lynndie English as a prop to further their anti-American agenda. Turning from the poverty industry to the War on Terror, Sowell notes

The tragedy is that the Left has never understood the importance of incentives in general or power in particular. That power is the only thing that deters power.

The only thing terrorists care about is their power. Depriving them of their power is the only way to change them. When they see the Taliban replaced in Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein ousted in Iraq, that's a strong message.

Asked to assess the impact of his writing, "so much of it against the dominant orthodoxies of our time," Sowell notes with pleasure that his friend Shelby Steele, returning recently from Poland, reported "At the university there, people were all asking, do I know you?" Sowell's Basic Economics has been translated into Polish.  It's that New Europe thing again -- blogged here the other day re waiters in Warsaw wearing "W '04" buttons.  Having lived under the boot of a collectivist micro-managed economy within living memory, Poles are presumably more receptive to Sowell's free-market ideas than left-leaning Old Europeans.

As we blogged here, before the internet and blogging, we never knew any conservative black voices other than Dr. Sowell, introduced to us years ago by Goomp, who named his black-with-white pussycat Tom in his honor.  But times are changing, and for the better:

Someone recently asked me for a list of black conservative authors. Thirty years ago that would have been Walter Williams and me.  Today there are more than I could possibly keep track of.

Thanks to Goomp for calling our attention to this interview.

Related: "Soylent Green revisited," wherein Andrea Mitchell spilled the beans.

Update: "We noted last night that Editor & Publisher called for an end to objectivity in regards to 'Climate Change' back in 2007," writes Ed Driscoll with a linky lovely tip of his Fedora:

But Sissy writes that NBC’s Andrea Mitchell spilled the beans on its happening in the media almost 20 years ago, quoting from Insight magazine in 1990.

"Of course, NBC has gone beyond even that in recent years, moving from advocacy to near-eschatology," notes Ed.

We gathered together

We gathered together to ask the Lord's blessing Down East yesterday, and love was in the air. Our sis and her Barney II paused oven-side for a Pieta Moment with a twist, the son holding the mother up. 

We hadn't meant to brine the turkey, but since the bird required soaking in a sinkful of water for an hour before cooking to get out the final chill, we poured on the salt. According to Goomp it was the bestest, moistest turkey he'd ever had in all his ninety years.

 

Sweet and savory, light and dark, smooth and crunchy, the foodstuffs conspired to tempt and satisfy the discriminating eye and palate.

We'd been a little concerned when the homemade cranberry sauce didn't seem to thicken as much as expected. Following the recipe on the Ocean Spray package, you bring 1 cup each of water and sugar to a boil, add the cranberries and cook ten minutes, then strain to remove solids. As with everything else, the result though not as thick as your typical canned, was the best ever, a luminescent jewel.

The two brothers, our nephews -- one breaking bread with us in Maine, the other dining with friends where he lives in the heartland -- turned making a side dish into a spirited competition, each cooking the same casserole of julienned carrots and parsnips and agreeing that word of mouth would determine the winner. The recipe came from David, a fellow competitor. "What was the premise, again?" we asked our sis:

I never QUITE understood the premise, since each of the three would be playing to different audiences, but it was supposed to be based on preparation technique and audience response.  Christian and I agreed that if Goomp asked for seconds, Christian's was CLEARLY the hands-down winner. 

 

Continuing the theme of unprecedented excellence of our entire meal, we had to take sides, convinced that Christian's dish should win top honors. "What's it called, again?" we asked Susie:

I don't know, re: official name. I'll admit that "Carrots and Parsnips" doesn't sound too glamorous, but it is what it is. ): If you were the Food Channel, you would probably call it "Roasted Root Vegetables with Herbed Butter sauce."

Not having a mandoline in the home kitchen, Christian had julienned by hand, and consulting with a friend who happens to be a professional cook, he topped off the dish with a secret ingredient, Panko (Japanese bread crumbs).

The proof is in the pudding. We ate it all up, and Goomp did indeed ask for seconds. He'd apparently had a bad experience with parsnips in his childhood and had never tried them since.

"The women now went willingly into the field," revisited

"The daily news is like the wind-whipped whitecaps on the ocean, a lot of violent froth on the surface, dangerous to surfers and small craft, but having nothing to do with the larger movement of the sea," we quoted Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna in our post "A lot of violent froth on the surface" last year, where we used the above image of a reproduction of the Mayflower at sea from The History Channel's "Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower.

Editorial Note: This post — first published on August 15, 2007 — on the role of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" in shaping the American character — is timelier than ever today. Cross-posted at Annie Gottlieb's Cloven Not Crested.

"I thought that this passage reflected an early-American lesson that most people in the world did not learn until late in the 20th century," writes TigerHawk of the "tragedy of the commons" experience that taught the Pilgrims -- literally on the ground -- how Adam Smith's "invisible hand" works. We're not sure that "most people" -- yes you, Hillary -- have learned that lesson to this day, but before we get to that, here's the bottom line, from the book TH is currently reading, Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War:

The fall of 1623 marked the end of Plymouth's debilitating food shortages. For the last two planting seasons, the Pilgrims had grown crops communally -- the approach first used at Jamestown and other English settlements. But as the disastrous harvest of the previous fall had shown, something drastic needed to be done to increase the annual yield.

"In April, Bradford had decided that each household should be assigned its own plot to cultivate, with the understanding that each family kept whatever it grew. The change in attitude was stunning. Families were now willing to work much harder than they had ever worked before. In previous years, the men had tended the fields while the women tended the children at home. "The women now went willingly into the field," Bradford wrote, "and took their little ones with them to set corn." The Pilgrims had stumbled on the power of capitalism. Although the fortunes of the colony still teetered precariously in the years ahead, the inhabitants never again starved.

"Is it possible that collectivism never caught on here because early American utopians such as the Pilgrims tried it and learned that it did not work?" asks the Hawkman. One can only hope, but certain members of every generation seem immune to the Pilgrims' lesson. Besides, "there is something very American about the utopian movement," as Michael Kavanagh wrote re a Beinecke Library exhibition, "No Place on Earth," which "takes as its subject the American utopian dream, as expressed by the Shakers as well as some twenty other groups across four centuries:

The New World was the land of the frontier, that clean, clear space beyond which one could remake oneself into a better human being. America itself can be seen as the biggest utopian experiment of all -- embodied in the credo of the Land of Opportunity is the promise that it is always possible to reinvent one's relationship to society, work and nature.

Attempts to "reinvent one's relationship to society, work and nature" are fine as long as the reinventors don't deny the economic logic of nature and human nature and try to impose their "vision" of "the greater good" on the rest of us. That's why "progressive" governmental interventions — like the "'universal' health-care dreams in Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and other states [see 'Arnold's Health Flop' in today's WSJ] that were unveiled to hosannas but flopped once the fine print and costs were exposed" — are best left to the states, where well-meaning if clueless Utopianators can test their fantasies on a smaller scale. As for Hillary, the Mother of all Utopianators, The Barrister at Maggie's Farm explains:

Socialism advances via invented crises to alarm the people, or to seduce the people, into foregoing the markets for goods and services.

It is a deceptive strategy designed to prey on the worst, most infantile instincts of Americans . . . Hillary goes Shrillary over socialized medicine: Gateway [be sure to click over to watch and listen in horror as the junior Senator from New York doth protest too much that her plans for a national one-payer system have nothing to do with socialism].

I have no doubt that Hillary is a socialist, whether she admits it to herself or not. Anyone who wants the State to take over the medical businesses, which are 16% of our economy, and the oil industry, which is ? % of our economy, has a good start on taking over all of it.

As we said in TigerHawk's comments:

The lesson about human nature learned in the school of hard knocks by the Pilgrims -- "It takes incentives" -- has been lost on Hillary & Company, whose "It takes a village" collectivism would destroy this shining city upon a hill from within.

Is the electorate teachable? Get Prof. Thomas Sowell on the phone.

Update: "Women like to do for their families. So do men," comments Bird Dog at Maggie's in a Monday-morning linkathon.

We gather together

In the wee hours we awoke to find Tiny (above inspecting the Thanksgiving Lite table yesterday morning) and Baby still fast a asleep. Normally they would have been up and at our eyes, ears, nose and throat with their jaws, claws and crazy-hour dashes across our reclining self in the countdown to breakfast at 4:45 a.m. sharp. Tired but happy hosts of yesterday's gala blogfeast like ourselves, however, they overslept.

Plus ça change . . . Nothing changes but the date. Herewith a timely repost:

November 19, 2006. We awoke early morning to find the totally awesome General John Abizaid, head of CENTCOM, addressing an audience of the best and brightest in a C-Span rerun of a Friday forum at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he encouraged his audience to "Think of [the War on Terror] as a chance to confront fascism in 1920, if we had only had the guts to do it." What a treat under any circumstances, but especially when the alternative was all-OJ-book-and-"TomKat"-wedding-all-the-time on the increasingly unwatchable 24/7 cables. The General is a user-friendly Rumsfeld/Cheney, a brilliant, articulate, congenial spokesman for what used to be called The Bush Doctrine and its key "strategery" that dare not speak its name, "stay the course." Abizaid prefaced his remarks with a humorous reference to his appearance before the Senate Committee on Armed Services a few days before, saying he had worn his medals then but was now wearing fatigues, as his formal attire had been bloodied.

Ken, Sol, MB -- who told Tuck she wants to move into our atmospheric Victorian-hunting-lodge-esque living room at once -- Jean and Tuck help themselves to the delights of the groaning board at our elegant Thanksgiving Lite gathering of local bloggers yesterday. It had the festive feeling of our long-ago Christmas parties of friends from the Art Institute, but this time, it was a meeting not of people who happened to work at the same place but of minds, a disparate group who happen to share an understanding of how the world works.

Searching cyberspace for a video of the Kennedy School event to review at our leisure, we came upon our blogfriend Laura Lee Donoho's insightfully titled "Senator Despair vs. General Abizaid," a reference to the moment of truth that we happened to have seen for ourselves last week, when Senator Hillary! in full sourpuss mode had the nerve to chide the gallant and soft-spoken General Abizaid for undue optimism, saying in that you'll-never-amount-to-anything voice that is her signature, "Hope is not a strategy." [Her words have been widely misquoted and are now being presented in news "reports," reflecting the General's response, as "Hope is not a method."] Madame Clinton's question was widely referenced in the media, while Abizaid's reply -- a keeper that belongs in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, not to mention the hearts and minds of his countrymen -- was widely ignored, as it was on Gwen Ifill's PBS show, where her self-satisfied, smirking circle of like-minded Hillary watchers chortled with delight at the General's bitchslapping. His reply resonates:

Despair is not a method. When I come to Washington, I feel despair. When I’m in Iraq with my commanders, when I talk to my soldiers and Iraqi leadership, they are not despairing.

Sol and Tuck and Ken and Teresa and our new blogfriend Jill of Business of Life -- who brought a homemade pecan-and-cranberry pie fresh from her oven -- come back for seconds.

Laura Lee's soldier son had this to say about it all:

I saw McCain and Clinton both beat up on General Abizaid. They are BOTH worthless. Abizaid basically said, hey this is what we are doing given the constraints you put us under, sure we could use more troops but we can’t send more given the military’s force structure (ie we don’t need more troops in Iraq, we need a bigger military period, I guess McCain thinks the Pentagon can arbitrarily make the military bigger whenever there is a need). I just saw Lou Dobbs ranting, Well what is West Point producing nowadays, Generals like Abizaid look like politicians. Another idiot who needs to pull his head out of his ass and figure out what he’s talking about.

Needless to say, Lou Dobbs is not in danger of figuring out what he himself is talking about any time soon.

Don't take my picture! Guests relax in the studio while SpongeBob (upper right) looks on.

Two other contenders for Bartlett's citation this week:

1. President Bush's Iraq/Vietnam analogy ["Peace with honor" need not apply]:

We’ll succeed, unless we quit.

2. US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton re the UN's toxic disingenuousness:

In a larger sense, the United Nations must confront a more significant question, that of its relevance and utility in confronting the challenges of the 21st century. We believe that the United Nations is ill served when its members seek to transform the organization into a forum that is little more than a self-serving and a polemical attack against Israel or the United States . . . The problem of anti-Israel bias is not unique to the Human Rights Council. It is endemic to the culture of the United Nations. It is a decades-old, systematic problem that transcends the whole panoply of the UN organizations and agencies.

Hope may not be a strategy -- or a method -- but national leaders like General Abizaid, President Bush and Ambassador Bolton do give us reason to not yet despair.

Update: Maggie's blesses us with a Thanksgiving Day link.

Soylent Green revisited

"The Tribal Filter on Green News," Insight July 23, 1990.

It's been nearly twenty years we've been calling out the warmenists and their media allies, wondering when, already, the truth would finally out. Now it finally has, as Drudge headlines "Climategate: 'Greatest scandal in modern science,'" and mainstream outlets can no longer deny there's something rotten in the state of warmening "science." Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhoffe says the leaked correspondence suggests researchers "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not," and now "Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails." In celebration of this day of cleaning out the Augean Stables, herewith we offer republication of one of our earliest blogposts on the subject, "Soylent Green." Note Palinophobe Andrea Mitchell's unabashed confession way back when (1990): "Clearly the networks have made the decision now, where you'd have to call it advocacy." Enjoy:

January 3, 2004. Blogging is nothing new.  Before the glory of the internet, we were madly clipping and underlining and annotating the margins of tree-based publications.  Take this snail blog post, "The Tribal Filter on Green News," by Woody West, having "The Last Word" in the July 23, 1990 issue of Insight:

Only lately have the pooh-bahs of the national press felt secure enough to admit publicly that they filter the news through their personal-tribal creed. As a result, of course, they often report as fact that which is both unsettled and disputed.

. . . At a conference on the environment in Washington earlier this year, reported by The Wall Street Journal's David Brooks, Charles Alexander harrumphed:

"As the science editor at Time I would freely admit that on this issue we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy." There was applause from the pressies in conclave assembled, after which Andrea Mitchell, an NBC correspondent, said that "clearly the networks have made the decision now, where you'd have to call it advocacy."

It gets even better:

An environmental reporter at The Boston Globe, Dianne Dumanoski, is quoted as saying, "There is no such thing as objective reporting . . . I've become even more crafty about finding the voices to say the things I think are true.  That's my subversive mission." Then spake Barbara Pyle, environmental editor of Cable News Network, which shows distressing signs of aping the older networks in cooking the news: "I do have an axe to grind. I want to be the little subversive person in television."

Pardon our French, but, plus ça change . . . Oh, and Andrea, there's a message for you from someone called Alan . . . and David Brooks, You're the man!  Clearly.

Update: "Somewhere, a tree is planted." The Anchoress links, and links and links.

[Thanks to susis for title]

Beautiful dreamer

Because her fans demand it, a few shots from Tiny's latest fur fashion portfolio. (Tuck Willis photo)

She had to spend the whole day yesterday at the vet having a Blood Glucose Curve, where they draw blood and check glucose level every two hours. Tiny was not amused. Levels up and down. Adjusting insulin dosage for suitable long term.

Tuck was amused with our tales of stabbing ourselves trying to administer the dose. Nobody said it was going to be easy. Then, too, there's the twice-daily administration of Flovent by AeroKat inhaler. Incoherence sets in. And yet it's not a problem.

Update: All animals all the time at Modulator's Friday Ark #271.

New Girl Media Unplugs Old Girl Network

Pope Benedict met artists from around the world in the Sistine Chapel on Saturday and urged them to inject spirituality into their work, saying contemporary beauty was often 'illusory and deceitful," reports Reuters. Compare Papa Ratzi's open invitation to engage in an expansive search for truth with President Obama's secretive, craven attempts to use the art community as a tool of the state to propagandize his own not-so-hidden statist agenda. Grazie tanto to darling friend and blogbuddy Miss Kelly for the heads up. (REUTERS/Osservatore Romano photo)

"Like me, Jackie became politically involved because of Sarah Palin," writes self-described "California girl, proud conservative, palinista, future politician" Rachelle Friberg, bearing witness to the Amazonian clash between New Girl Media and Old Girl Network that played out upon the national stage last week when MSNBC warhorse Norah O'Donnell tried to play "gotcha" with fresh-faced 17-year-old filly Jackie Seal at a Sarah Palin Going Rogue book-signing event in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The usual suspects used the occasion to present Palin supporters as clueless cultists, but we're more interested in the folks who are paying attention. Here's Rachelle:

I actually got to know Jackie a couple months ago on Twitter. When I first met her, I was struck by how mature, articulate and intelligent a young woman she was. Like me, Jackie became politically involved because of Sarah Palin. She is an amazing girl, and I wish I had become politically aware when I was her age. While she may be young, she is already a very talented blogger who has a great future ahead of her. I actually recently wrote about her and other great, young conservative bloggers who are out there making a difference one post at a time. I find it so amazing and incredible that Sarah has brought so many people together. While Jackie and I do not know Sarah personally, we and millions of others have formed a bond that will last a lifetime.

"The so-called 'Staircase Group' by Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) is arguably the first major original painting in American art," writes collector and curator John Wilmerding in today's WSJ. Read the whole thing for its historically and aesthetically rich appreciation of the Philadelphia-based artist, inventor, scientist, soldier, writer, naturalist and museum founder. The take-home point for our discussion here: "The full-length format … speaks to its final originality. Heretofore it was reserved in the Old World for upper-class and royal portraiture. Peale inverts its use for American figures who are ordinary, relaxed and democratic." Sarah Palin and the Tea Party/Town Hall Movement come to mind.

Then comes Dr. Melissa Clouthier, who begs to differ with those like Politico's Kenneth P. Vogel who say the Tea Party Movement requires "the emergence of a national leader, group or structure" to become a "sustainable bloc with the power to shape the GOP and swing elections." Freedom Works Press Secretary Adam Brandon explains:

We were never looking to own or control it. The focus needs to be on the issues at hand.

Clouthier nails it:

Asking the “who’s in charge” questions about the Tea Party movement is to fundamentally misunderstand conservatives. Conservatives do not like being told what to do. The notion of subsuming self-interest for “the greater good” is anathema to them. That makes replicating the Borg-like work of ACORN and Moveon.org organizations nearly impossible on the right. When conservatives see a goal, they’ll take 50 roads to get there. The left will get on the Huffington Post highway and ride along together.

In related commentary, it's the town hall, stupid, Bill Whittle tells Scott Ott at PJTV:

Let's remind ourselves of what the essential part of a representative democracy is all about. It's a town hall meeting. Who's in charge of a town hall meeting? Nobody … There are rules and procedures so that equals can come to an assignment of responsibility based on their equality.

The final word goes to the totally adorable Tucker Carlson, who had this to say on Fox and Friends this morning:

There's something about Sarah Palin that drives a certain kind of liberal wild, and I don't know why. I'm not a psychiatrist.

But I personally wish she'd stop calling people "sexist." That's what liberals do.

Carlson may not know why Saracudda drives a certain kind of liberal wild, but we do. 'Been blogging about it for years: It's the tribalism, stupid.

Update: Instalanche! Thank you, dear professor.

Update II: "I am the last person in the entire b-sphere to link it, but I’m delighted to do so, writes Attila Girl." Never too late.

All Palin all the time and loving it, revisited

"We're savoring the joy of bloggers, politicians and media types who think McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as running mate is the best thing since sliced sourdough bread," we captioned this image in our August 2008 post dissecting opponents' false claims that the Alaska Governor favored teaching Creationism in science classes. "Not to mention the bewilderment of their counterparts on the other side of the aisle," we continued, "who, like the proverbial deer — moose? —  in the headlights, obviously didn't see it coming down the road to the White House.  Above, "This moose made it across safely, though several hundred other moose end up in collisions with vehicles on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, causing injuries, deaths and property damage." (AP Photo/The Peninsula Clarion, M. Scott Moon)

No, she doesn't think Creationism or Intelligent Design belongs in the science classroom, as we determined to our satisfaction way back in August of 2008 (see below). But tongues will wag in a desperate attempt to discredit Sarah Palin as her blockbuster Going Rogue: An American Life bursts upon a waiting, breath-bated world this week. A relevant excerpt:

Palin complains of several brushes with McCain's 2008 campaign manager. In one, he took her to task for her views on evolution: "'But your dad's a science teacher,' Schmidt objected. 'Yes.' 'Then you know science proves evolution,' added Schmidt. I said, 'But I believe that God created us and also that He can create an evolutionary process that allows species to change and adapt.' Schmidt winced and raised his eyebrows... But I felt I was on solid factual ground."

Pope Benedict XVI has often made very much the same point. Now, rather than reinventing the wheel, we herewith republish "All Palin all the time and loving it," written in the heat of battle during the first flush of our smittenness with the Woman Warrior from Wasilla:

August 30, 2008. "My only worry about Governor Palin had been what I would call a hysterical misreading of her views regarding the teaching of creationism in public schools, but Charles Johnson has put my fears to rest," we wrote in the comments at Dr. Helen's totally excellent "My Thoughts on Sarah Palin." More on her thoughts below, but first, here's what Charles Johnson had to say about how some of our fellow citizens on the left side of the aisle have distorted and will attempt to distort Palin's views:

LGF readers are probably aware that I am no creationist; in fact, I am strongly opposed to the teaching of “intelligent design” or “creation science,” or any other name the advocates for creationism concoct in their relentless quest to promote pseudo-science.

So I was disturbed to learn of Sarah Palin’s apparent support for creationism. However, as I posted in a comment earlier, she does not appear to be the fanatical type who wants to force or sneak the teaching of creationism into public school science classrooms.

But this is going to be a point of attack for the left, as Wired Magazine’s Brandon Keim demonstrates in this article: McCain’s VP Wants Creationism Taught in School.

Looks like Palin made an off-the-cuff statement during a debate on a hot topic, didn’t really expect the criticism she’d get, and then softened her position considerably in a follow-up interview. But to quote just the first part of her statements on creationism and ignore the second is misleading; because in the clarification she’s describing a position that doesn’t cause me (a staunch anti-creationist) any discomfort.

Phew. Now back to Dr. Helen (cross-posted at PJM), who thinks "Palin would focus on helping Americans achieve their dreams by staying out of their way":

For me, Sarah Palin represents many right-leaning libertarian ideas that I personally support: low taxes, gun rights, and smaller government …

While Democrats want to expand government programs to “help women,” I believe that smaller government and the policies of the libertarian right help women in many ways that are often ignored …

It seems that more and more women are going into business for themselves; in fact, a recent study shows that women are emerging as a fast-growing sector of new small business owners. That matches my experience: I hear women at my gym all the time talking about their start-up home businesses, such as working with Ebay selling furniture and other items. Some are making a very good living at it. A living, I am afraid, that will be eaten up by regulation and taxes if they are deemed “too successful” by the Obama camp. I hope Palin has more sympathy for entrepreneurs and those who run their own businesses, for they are the backbone of this country. Their success should be rewarded — not discouraged.

Lots of good, commonsense stuff. Plus, a great punchline: "And unlike some female politicians such as Hillary Clinton, Palin made it herself without the help of a career politician husband to give her an added advantage." You go, self-made woman!

90 candles make a lovely light

Just another day on the couch for Goompa's Purrky yesterday, but we had our eye on a bigger prize, our pater familias's 90th birthday.

We three children, two spouses and four grandchildren drove and flew in from points south and west to toast the Energizer Bunny at his Down East homestead, Camelot-by-the-Sea.

Formal posing for pictures? Never our thing, as we're totally into beauty in unexpected places, snapping the shutter early and often before and after formal "say cheese" set-ups to capture Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment."

Ellen's Beef Strogie was to die for, a transcendent reincarnation of our mother's signature dish with salted butter and bouillon cubes front and center. VERY politically incorrect. She's promised to write it all down so we can publish here in our Cold Turkey Cookbook in the "Full of Calories and Loving It" section.

"Just had a nice chat with Dad," imails our sis this evening:

She: He did, indeed, enjoy his birthday celebration and was totally delighted that all four grandchildren were able to attend. He reports that the pumpkin muffins were so good that you had TWO!

We: Yes. Plus I took some home. Delicious!

She: I know that I took a Toll House Cookie, just to be polite, and THEN … I wanted to scarf down the whole container, but retrained myself.

We: Retrained yourself? Love it. You'd have to.

She: I love how all four grandchildren are great cooks. Whatever it took, and I'm sure that Mummy had a lot to do with it … my boys LOVE to cook. They are not slugs on the couch, watching football. They watch some football, then go whip up a meal. AND they do laundry and know how to iron. I think being a sluggard has helped me to raise capable children.

Update: Modulator's Friday Ark #270 now boarding.

"Other than a little hissing, she's a pretty easy cat"

In medical news,Tiny was diagnosed with diabetes on Tuesday and is responding well to insulin injections (twice a day following meals). You start with a low dose, vet checks glucose level periodically, and then you adjust as indicated. Symptoms — drinking excessive amounts of water, lots of urine in litter box, restlessness, losing weight — had developed in the last month or two and seem to be subsiding a bit already since we started injections yesterday afternoon. Because it was apparently caught early — due to our keeping systematic observational notes to guide treatment of Tiny's life-long asthmatic condition — she may be able to achieve remission, possibly within 4-6 weeks say the docs, but we'll have to see. A day at a time.

"She has a good heart, said Dr. Rossi of The Animal Ultrasound Clinic" in Salem, and "other than a little hissing, she's a pretty easy cat." The clinic has state-of-the-art equipment, identical to that used in leading hospitals for humans. Only difference is that TAUC's gets clogged with fur from time to time. We got to sit alongside the proceedings and watch the screen as the doc proceeded. Nerve-wracking but fascinating. "It looks like a weather chart," we noted, and in fact medical imaging involves the same Doppler effect, with sound waves bouncing off red blood cells instead of clouds. Tiny had to wear a wide conic collar and did, indeed, hiss the entire time.

X-rays and a battery of blood and urine tests through our local vet, together with the abdominal sonogram and echocardiogram referenced above, ruled out lots of frightening possibilities her symptoms might have presaged. Now the hard work begins, and indeed this very afternoon our first test. Just as we were about to jab the loose skin at the nape of her neck with the tiny syringe needle, she bolted. We jabbed ourselves with the needle, grabbed Tiny and tried jabbing her again. She bolted again and bent the needle. Not sure whether she got her 1U dose, but thanks to the vet's mini-tutorial and hand-out, we knew not to refill the syringe: "The danger is in insulin overdose, not short-term underdose." We'll just have to wait 12 hours and try again following breakfast. Gotta work on our bedside manner.

Earl Grey could not be reached for comment.

Note: Blogfriend Gayle Miller's golden boy Sam the Wonder Cat was recently diagnosed with diabetes and is doing fine. We invite Gayle and other fans of Tiny's to share war stories in the comments.

Update: Wonderful stuff in the comments: good wishes, good advice, helpful links and a sparkling emerald of a limerick from Elisson, Tiny's Poet Laureate:

Earl Grey dropped on by for a clowder
But Tiny was taking a powder:
An insulin shot
That will, like as not
Have her miaowing, before long, the louder!

Update II: More miaowing, woofing and such at Modulator's Friday Ark #269.

Update III, Friday morning: "This is very good," says local vet Dr. Beale re Tiny's latest blood glucose reading. Original=348=high. This morning=271=considered "under control," within 100-300 range. Will go next Friday for glucose curve, where she'll stay at the vet's all day so they can take a reading every two hours. Tiny will not be amused.

"The media treat it like a case of non-denominational shoplifting"

As temperatures hovered in the low thirties early morning, Tiny kept warm atop the kitchen counter register while Cat Whisperer Tuck murmured sweet nothings.

"Twitter makes it almost impossible to surprise people with breaking news because they all already know about it," twitters Patrick Ruffini. That's how events unfolded in the Fort Hood shooting yesterday as early error-laced reports and theories gave way, in waves, to the facts ma'am, just the facts. It was duly noted by Mark Steyn that the usual suspects on the left quickly lockstepped into politically-correct, see-no-evil mode:

Andy, you're right that there's something deeply weird about the media's instinctive avoidance of the M-word or the T-word and the careless abandon with which they speculate about "post-traumatic stress disorder."

Better to blame "man-caused disasters" on a US-foreign-policy-induced psychological affliction beyond the victim's perpetrator's control than call a spade a spade. In the light of day today, Michelle Malkin and Ralph Peters win top honors for best/most concise analyses of what's really going on behind the curtain. Malkin:

Political correctness is the handmaiden of terror.

Peters:

On Thursday afternoon, a radicalized Muslim US Army officer shouting "Allahu Akbar!" committed the worst act of terror on American soil since 9/11. And no one wants to call it an act of terror or associate it with Islam.

What cowards we are. Political correctness killed those patriotic Americans at Ft. Hood as surely as the Islamist gunman did. And the media treat it like a case of non-denominational shoplifting.

The Gramscian march through the institutions has well prepared susceptible self-loathing citizens of the once Shining City Upon a Hill to bow down in dhimmitude to creeping militant Islamicism.

Update: Danny Boy links.

Update II: Stoutcat links with "An Unsustainable Narrative."

The GOP establishment is the problem

Even as DIABLO (Democrat In All But Label Only) Dede Scozzafava (above) showed her true colors — after dropping out of the NY District 23 congressional race Saturday — when she "began to quietly and thoughtfully encourage her supporters to vote for Democrat William L. Owens," NYT opinionator Frank Rich showed his true cluelessness when he referred to tea partiers like ourselves as zombie-like members of a "wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama." Dede is not one of our own, Mr. Rich. (AP photo)

With hats off to the Gipper, a new slogan for the ages:

In the present crisis, the GOP establishment is not the solution to our problem; the GOP establishment is the problem.

Just ask any tea partier.

Update: "Kill, or cure? What say you?" teases Dan Riehl with a link. "What doesn't kill us will make us stronger," we reply in the comments. 'Loved this comment from M. Simon of Power and Control:

[Sarah Palin] is one very smart lady. She can read a map.

The foxy lady has outfoxed the old dogs who were supposed to be guarding the GOP henhouse.

Assimilating with panache

"I am a lion," oldest sister of the family next door explained as she and her siblings approached our front porch late afternoon on this Halloween Night, transmogrifying a Muslim headscarf into the golden mane of the King of the Jungle. Middle sister was also a cat, more of the domestic variety. They have a couple of pet cats at home across the yard and often wave and chat with us when we're out wrangling Tiny.

The sisters had learned how to apply the striking cat make-up at a neighborhood festival across the Creek in East Boston last summer. Baby sister (right) may or may not have been a tiger (note striped sleeves). Lots of cat-themed fabrics. Very imaginative costuming. They brought a little package of cat toys as a hostess gift for Tiny.

"We wanted to scare you," they teased. We may not have been frightened, but as far as Tiny was concerned, it was a terrorist attack. Especially on the part of baby sister, who pursued her across the yard, into the house and up the stairs for elusive petting opportunities. We hadn't had trick-or-treaters for years since the neighborhood kids had grown up, moved away and had kids of their own. Delightful to see the latest wave of immigrants assimilating with such panache — playing with elements of their native culture — to this all-American autumn ritual.

Update: More faunal delights at Modulator's Friday Ark, now boarding.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation*

"Call me Chinese. I mean they practically own us anyway," quips Glenn Beck. Tiny is not amused.

Update: All animals all the time at Modulator's Friday Ark #267, now boarding.

*Blog title is excerpt from T.S. Eliot's "The Naming of Cats."

Give to strategic small-government candidates, not parties

There's something happening here. The anti-establishment protest song has been turned on its head as Tea Partiers find their voice: "People speaking their minds/Getting so much resistance from behind/What a field-day for the heat/A thousand people in the street/Singing songs and carrying signs …" (Cover image of October 2008 "quickie paperback satire" Terminatrix,  co-authored by top Harper-Collins Editor Adam Bellow (Saul's boy), who most recently worked on Sarah Palin's forthcoming blockbuster autobiography Going Rogue)

"It's quite a revelation. I'd been slowing down party contributions of late. Now I see THE WAY!" we twittered blogfriend Barry Campbell of enrevanche ecstatically this morning in response to his response to an earlier tweet of ours:

We: Give to strategic small-government candidates, not parties!

Barry: Yes. And I agree so fervently that I don't mind the "shouting."

It was a eureka moment as we saw the social-networking sausage taking shape before our eyes. Delicious! It started with Sarah Palin's endorsement last week of Doug Hoffman, the independent conservative candidate challenging ACORN-supporting Republican-Party-sanctioned RINO Dede Scozzafava in the upstate NY District 23 congressional special election. Dismissed by Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party establishment, Hoffman has become a beacon of hope for the Army of Davids Tea Partiers, who are getting glimpses of a way out of the desert as he surges ahead in the latest poll. And, of course, Palin's every strategic move is of intense interest — to both diehard fans like us and those who can't stand her — in the blogosphere, the twittersphere, Facebook and on cable TV. The networks and airwaves were abuzz. Based upon Palin's support we sent a little money Hoffman's way, just as we had sent a check to Joe "You lie!" Wilson earlier based upon his speaking truth to power during President Obama's recent address to a joint session of Congress. Today it was dollars for someone else we'd never heard of, conservative VA AG candidate Ken Cuccinelli, based upon a Twitter tip from Erick Erickson of Red State, who looks to a higher authority for his response to "the new counter spin" that would have us once again hold our noses as so many small-government citizens did with John McCain:

To quote Christ, “What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matt. 16:26 NIV)

Well. Gotta be off to add a little something to the coffers of "Upstart candidate Marco Rubio," who's "cut in half [Obama-hugger] Governor Charlie Crist's lead in the race to win the Republican nomination for a Florida U.S. Senate seat in 2010" thanks to "popular outrage at his support for the $787 billion federal stimulus package." We encourage our readers to lend support to strategically-targeted, small-government candidates wherever they may find them. And while we're in the mood, we especially urge you to support our dear blogfriend, satirical genius and candidate for Leigh County [PA] Executive, Scott "Live the Freedom" Ott of Scrappleface and the Washington Examiner. Click here to give early and often.

Update: Dan Riehl links:

Just as one should always follow the money, the politicians will follow the money, too. Use it to force the GOP to adopt the policies we want, not simply for spite against the GOP.

As we wrote in the comments, "Absolutely. Not an ounce of spite. Just a way out of the desert."

So easy to love

Earl Grey, majestic lord of all he surveys.

Putty in Tiny's paws.

Seductive.

Voluptuous.

Wary of entering the inner sanctum.

"Now that President Obama has made it safe to hate Fox"

Tiny's main squeeze Earl Grey stopped by early morning for a nip. After we suggested the feral fellow not enter the house, he scurried into Tiny's hosta blind to reconnoiter before heading off for parts unknown.

"Obama has authorized 40,000 more troops to fight Fox News" deadpans Jay Leno in his latest monologue — available for your viewing pleasure at Weasel Zippers (via Infidels Are Cool) — playing off the Leader of the Free World's recent full frontal assault on Fox News as Faux News," side by side with the President's deeply demoralizing dithering over when/whether to send in the Afghanistan reinforcements requested by his generals. Then comes Claudia Rosett with the deliciously headlined "First they came for Fox News …" [Wish we'd thought of that. Actually, we did, but like President Obama, we dithered so she beat us to the punch]:

Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was hammering home the same message, that Fox is "not a news organization so much as it has a perspective,” and urging “More importantly is not have [sic] the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led in following Fox, as if what they’re trying to do is a legitimate news organization …

 

Caption from our March 3, 2009 "Obama's sledging strategy of intimidation": “I do think he's an intellectual force, which is why the Republicans pay such attention to him," Rahm Emanuel told CBS News's Bob Schieffer on Sunday in a rare moment of truthfulness before spinning off to repeat the big lie that Rush wants Obama the President of the United States — as opposed to Obama's socialist agenda, the real object of Limbaugh's critique — to fail.

We've had Rahm "Toes" Emanuel's number from early on when he showed his cards:

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously said, explaining "What I mean by that, it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do."

As we wrote back in April in our post "Roll over, George Washington, and tell Ben Franklin the news":

You remember Emanuel's quotable quote about fooling all of the people some of the time. As we wrote in our recent appreciation of Roger L. Simon, "Part of my leftism was a sales pitch," re Rahm Emanuel's conscience-free self-revelation:

Translation: Take the money and run when people are preoccupied, and you can get away with spending it in ways they would never agree to were they paying attention.

A brief encounter over catnip sets Tiny's heart aflame.

Enter center stage ABC's White House Correspondent Jake Tapper, who had the cojones to challenge Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to explain the Fox attacks:

Tapper: It’s escaped none of our notice that the White House has decided in the last few weeks to declare one of our sister organizations “not a news organization” and to tell the rest of us not to treat them like a news organization. Can you explain why it’s appropriate for the White House to decide that a news organization is not one.

Gibbs: You and I should watch sometime around 9 o’clock [Hannity] tonight. Or 5 o’clock [Glenn Beck] this afternoon.

Tapper: I’m not talking about their opinion programming or issues you have with certain reports. I’m talking about saying thousands of individuals who work for a media organization, do not work for a “news organization” — why is that appropriate for the White House to say.

Gibbs: That’s our opinion.

We loved Fox & Friends anchors' comments this morning:

Steve Doocy: Jake Tapper is a great reporter, who asked Robert Gibbs a lot of fair and balanced questions.

Gretchen Carlson: If I were Jake Tapper's boss, I'd give him a raise.

But even as Jake Tapper speaks truth to power:

One of MSNBC's Keith Olberman's guests last night snickered "Now that President Obama has made it safe to hate Fox ..."

Perpetual adolescence, the legacy of the the Gramscian infiltration.

Update: Way cool: Karl Rove tells Hannity "I have to compliment Jake Tapper of ABC News."

Update: We have to compliment Modulator for Friday Ark #266, now boarding.

Limbaugh's critics: Fools Rush in

"Freedom from Fear" (left) and "Freedom from Want" are two of Norman Rockwell's "The Four Freedoms" series inspired by FDR's rousing wartime State of the Union address in 1941. Reproduced in four consecutive issues of The Saturday Evening Post in 1943, the original paintings by America's favorite illustrator toured the United States, raising over $130 million for the war effort. (Norman Rockwell Museum photos)

"Honor is as valuable to the millionaire as to the pauper," writes HotAir's Dr. Zero this morning in "Defending the Invincible," a rare and honorable discourse upon honor itself — in this case Rush Limbaugh's honor, dishonorably challenged last week by ankle-biting sufferers of Rush Derangement Syndrome trying to slander "the most dangerous man in America" as racist:

It requires only a drop of the moral imagination utterly lacking in the people who slandered Limbaugh to guess what it feels like, when a man whose life revolves around words and ideas sees his dreams boiled away by words he didn’t speak, and ideas he has never held.

The events of the past week were about more than simply thwarting Limbaugh’s desire to buy into a football team. There was the naked greed of parasites like Al Sharpton, desperate to maintain his relevance in a world that has wisely stripped him of the power to destroy a man’s life with a phony rape allegation, or launch murderous riots. There was the blind personal hatred of Limbaugh, by people who long ago tired of watching him rewrite their plans for the part of America that refuses to submit to them. And, of course, this was the latest offensive in a bitter war against the ideas that Limbaugh has long served, as their most cheerful and effective defender. Limbaugh’s enemies in that war are angry because they’re frightened. They’re frightened because all of their estimates and projections said they should have been able to claim victory by now.

Be sure to read the whole thing, a tour de force laying bare "what's wrong with the liberal project." We approached the subject from a slightly different angle back in the heyday of Bush Derangement Syndrome in our post "It does not take into account the psychology of people," republished below:

November 5, 2004. "The riot in French suburbs reveals the flaw in Fabian socialism. It does not take into account the psychology of people," writes Minh-Duc of State Of Flux in the most eloquent analysis of "why they hate us" we've seen anywhere:

It assumes that by providing the basic subsistence to people, that would be enough to keep them content. People are never content with bare subsistence -- especially if it comes in the form of hand out and charity. It degrades them and robs them of their self-esteem. It is a shameful existence. Men need pride from their own labor. Self-reliance brings personal honor and pride -- a sense of ownership over one's own life. This is why the free-market economy is not only an efficient and effective system -- it is also a humane and honorable one.

Just right. We wrote something similar in response to Jeff Jarvis's well-meaning but clueless reaction to the London bombings last summer. "Well what the hell do they have to be angry about?" Jeff had written. "They're fed. They're free. They're educated. They have health care. They can say and go where they want." As we wrote then:

It's true these folk are psychopaths who must be rooted out and brought to justice, but it's naive to believe they should be content to have physical comforts handed to them on a welfare platter. No man -- no creature worth its salt -- can bear the shame. Come to think of it, that's exactly what's wrong with the liberal project.

"Freedom of Speech" left and "Freedom to Worship" complete the series.  We remember having reproductions of the illustrations hanging on the walls of our grade-school classrooms in the fifties and thinking even then they seemed quaintly old-fashioned. In today's world, again at war with those who would stomp on our freedoms, we see them with fresh eyes.  Because Rockwell's subject matter was usually on the corny side, serious art critics tended to look down upon the artist's accomplishment, but beyond the anecdotal component -- much loved by the average American -- his compositional and painterly skills were quite remarkable.

Without an appreciation of human nature -- Minh-Duc's "psychology of people" -- FDR's "The Four Freedoms" are stillborn.  The words of George Weigel come to mind in his powerful essay "Is Europe Dying? Notes on a Crisis of Civilizational Morale" [via Jack Yoest via Laura Lee Donoho of The Wide Awake Cafe]:

Europe began the twentieth century with bright expectations of new and unprecedented scientific, cultural, and political achievements. Yet within fifty years, Europe, the undisputed center of world civilization in 1900, produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems, a Cold War that threatened global holocaust, oceans of blood, mountains of corpses, the Gulag, and Auschwitz. What happened?

Take, for example, the proposal made by a French Jesuit, Henri de Lubac, during World War II. De Lubac argued that Europe's torments in the 1940s were the "real world" results of defective ideas, which he summarized under the rubric "atheistic humanism" -- the deliberate rejection of the God of the Bible in the name of authentic human liberation.

The proponents of nineteenth-century European atheistic humanism turned this inside out and upside down. Human freedom, they argued, could not coexist with the God of Jews and Christians. Human greatness required rejecting the biblical God, according to such avatars of atheistic humanism as Auguste Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche. And here, Father de Lubac argued, were ideas with consequences -- lethal consequences, as it turned out. For when you marry modern technology to the ideas of atheistic humanism, what you get are the great mid-twentieth century tyrannies -- communism, fascism, Nazism.

To deny that Christianity had anything to do with the evolution of free, law-governed, and prosperous European societies [as the European constitutional treaty does] is, to repeat, more than a question of falsifying the past; it is also a matter of creating a future in which moral truth has no role in governance, in the determination of public policy, in understandings of justice, and in the definition of that freedom which democracy is intended to embody.

In our own, non-theological formulation, blogged here in an appreciation of [are you sitting down?] Andrew Sullivan's Easter post last year before he went down the rabbit hole:

We believe deeply that the denial of life's dark side in ourselves is the key to what's wrong with the utopianist left world view.

Sadly, despite centuries of historical evidence to the contrary, the collectivist dream persists, as we were again most unpleasantly reminded when sufferers of Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) from south of the border marched in hysterical protest at the Third Summit of the Peoples of America earlier this week.

Update: Maggie's links: "SISU on human nature."

That you do so well

Being the object of a voodoo-doll puncturing. It's remarkably effective. Could we sue for physical deterioration caused by mental anguish?