Archive
Break out the super-patriotism!
The Tories have a new positive ad:
And it’s sure annoying Wherry.
Meanwhile, PMO leakers are claiming that there’s a seventy percent chance of an election.
What say I?
Well, the 70% thing is a lame bit of spin. But I do think that the (re-)emergence of powerful positive advertising is a sign that my guys actually do think an election could come.
In praise of the inactive president
Christopher Hitchens and Leon Wieseltier are somewhat exercised by the relative inaction of President Obama in the Libyan crisis.
Me, I say no, don’t get upset by this. Knowing what I do about the president’s instincts, I don’t want him making quick reactions. Snap judgments are not his forte. I prefer him to sit back and wait to see which way the wind blows.
***
More realistically, you can see this in both the Canadian prime minister and the American president. The two men are each out of step with their electorates, and so they have built in a hesitation time in their speeches, while the gears whirr and each man asks himself, “All right, can I really say that here?”
So until such time as my two countries can effect a trade, I’m okay with the hesitation time. It’s better than the alternative.
Playing for time?
Remember this scene?
[Youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DJtHL3NV1o"]
That’s what the budget demands sound like to me.
I mean, seriously, a 1.4 trillion dollar deficit in a 3.7 trillion dollar budget, and the best you can do is 4 BILLION DOLLARS worth of cuts which were previously proposed by Democrats? That’s it?!
***
But I understand what’s at play. The last thing Republicans want is a government shutdown, with Speaker Boehner playing Newt Gingrich and President Obama playing Bill Clinton.
Thatcher waited till her second term to confront the miners’ unions in Britain, because she wanted to make sure that she could win her point — she waited till coal stockpiles were at a six month supply, and public opinion was ready.
The point isn’t to have a fair fight — the point is to have a winning fight.
And apparently Republicans at the federal level have decided that 2011 is not that year.
Juxtaposition
”I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. ”I feel we didn’t do enough.” Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970′s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings. And he still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in other people, that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement.
Now he has written a book, ”Fugitive Days” (Beacon Press, September). Mr. Ayers, who is 56, calls it a memoir, somewhat coyly perhaps, since he also says some of it is fiction. He writes that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972. But Mr. Ayers also seems to want to have it both ways, taking responsibility for daring acts in his youth, then deflecting it.
”Is this, then, the truth?,” he writes. ”Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me.”
The Anarchist Cookbook was written during 1968 and part of 1969 soon after I graduated from high school. At the time, I was 19 years old and the Vietnam War and the so-called “counter culture movement” were at their height. I was involved in the anti-war movement and attended numerous peace rallies and demonstrations. The book, in many respects, was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in. …
During the years that followed its publication, I went to university, married, became a father and a teacher of adolescents. These developments had a profound moral and spiritual effect on me. I found that I no longer agreed with what I had written earlier and I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the ideas that I had put my name to. In 1976 I became a confirmed Anglican Christian and shortly thereafter I wrote to Lyle Stuart Inc. explaining that I no longer held the views that were expressed in the book and requested that The Anarchist Cookbook be taken out of print. The response from the publisher was that the copyright was in his name and therefore such a decision was his to make – not the author’s. In the early 1980′s, the rights for the book were sold to another publisher. I have had no contact with that publisher (other than to request that the book be taken out of print) and I receive no royalties.
Unfortunately, the book continues to be in print and with the advent of the Internet several websites dealing with it have emerged. I want to state categorically that I am not in agreement with the contents of The Anarchist Cookbook and I would be very pleased (and relieved) to see its publication discontinued. I consider it to be a misguided and potentially dangerous publication which should be taken out of print.
One man is unrepentant; the other really has changed.
One man deserves admittance into civilized society; one man does not.
I think it’s pretty clear who is who.
What happens when Democrats flee the state
Republicans make it difficult to hike taxes:
Madison – Today, Governor Scott Walker signed Special Session Assembly Bill 5 which requires a 2/3s vote to pass tax rate increases on the income, sales or franchise taxes.
Naturally, that left-wing blog is up in arms over it:
This is really depressing. The fight is still ongoing over public employee union rights, but without the ability to obtain needed revenue, I don’t see how they’ll matter a whole lot. The state government will say their hands are tied and that they must have concessions, and either the workers will suffer, or the recipients of their services. Revenues, half of what a budget comprises, have now been walled off. This is a budget crisis requiring shared sacrifice, says Scott Walker, but that sacrifice doesn’t extend to any Wisconsinite who doesn’t receive government services.
Good Lord.
Interesting.
Update: And the governor has a free shot at pitching his ideas to the citizenry.
Update again: What I did notice is this:
It’s quite striking the way almost every lie the left ever told about the Tea Party has turned out to be true of the government unionists in Wisconsin and their supporters:
• Extreme rhetoric. The Wisconsin Republican Party has produced what Mediaite.org calls an “incredibly effective” video juxtaposing liberal complaints about allegedly extremist Tea Party rhetoric with unionist signs likening Gov. Walker to Hitler and other dictators. Left-wing journalists are making similar invidious comparisons: “Workers Toppled a Dictator in Egypt, but Might Be Silenced in Wisconsin” read the headline of a Washington Post column by Harold Meyerson last week. The other day on CNN we saw scenes of a Madison crowd chanting, “Kill the bill”–which was said to be violent and invidious a year ago, when “the bill” was ObamaCare.
• Violence. Blogress Ann Althouse, a state employee based in Madison, posted a video of municipal salt trucks blowing their horns in support of the unionists. A YouTube commenter responded (quoting verbatim), “whoever video taped this has no life and should be shot in the head.” Unlike Frances Fox Piven, Althouse has never advocated violence, but don’t expect the Times to give this the kind of coverage it gave Piven’s claims that she had received threatening emails.
• Partisan AstroTurf. …
• Refusal to accept election results. …
• Stupidity. Remember “Teabonics,” a photo album of misspelled Tea Party signs? The unionists can’t spell any better–and some of them are teachers! …
Turns out it was mainly projection. Who knew?
One incident, two reactions
Apparently someone from CAIR went to have a chat with Congressman Allen West (R, FL-22) at one of his town hall meetings.
What happened? Well, you can see the video here.
Instapundit calls it a “massive fail”.
TPM describes it neutrally, but their commenters are less restrained.
Interesting.
Blimp
Standoff in the Midwest
What’s going to cause both sides to play it to the end?
They both think the public is on their side.
Republicans think the country is with them.
Democrats and unions think the country is with them.
And so… well, both think they can win.
Which means the fight will drag on.
First casualty of Indiana Dems’ run
Governor Mitch Daniels’ potential presidential bid.
“Gov. Mitch Daniels signaled this afternoon that Republicans should to drop the right-to-work bill that has brought the Indiana House to a standstill for two days and imperiled other measures.” …
If the Indiana House Democrats get what they want through this tactic, what’s to prevent them from using it again and again every time they think they’ll lose on a big issue?
I had been open-minded about Daniels’ “truce” talk — no matter how much a Republican presidential candidate talks about the importance of social issues, 75 to 90 percent of the president’s time from January 2013 to 2017 will be spent on economic and fiscal crises and managing a dangerous and rapidly changing world. But a concession to Democrats on major reforms like these will spur a lot of talk about Daniels’ toughness, or whether he’s too conciliatory to an opposition that has gone completely off the rails, or more accurately, out of the state….
UPDATE: Fairly or not, many readers are interpreting this news as a sign that A) Mitch Daniels doesn’t want to run for president or B) he isn’t running for president.
Daniels is an extremely tolerant man — he remarried his wife (and mother of his children) after she left him and married a surgeon out in California. But this may be a line too far for Republicans who want to fight this fight.
