Old Sailing Ship and Storm wallpaper
This pass Friday Hot Air and Captain Ed were bleating once again about how mean liberals are, how conservatives are always civil and about how mean liberals are. Seeing that conservative have their cognitive dissonance button permanently engaged it was no big feat for one of Michelle Malkin’s minions to completely ignore Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild by Michelle Malkin, a slim tome of insults, innuendo and poorly supported hyperbole directed at anyone to the left of Eva Braun . Ed is blissfully unaware of Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America by Ann Coulter. To say that all liberals are possessed by evil demons and are intent on destroying the USA, one assumes is what Hot Air considers civil. Since liberals wrote the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, Ed, Malkin and Coulter could be suffering from a case of oh yea, but what have you done for me lately. Ed got his false sense of outrage up at the general tendency to describe conservatives and tea smokers as “terrorists” over their near success in bringing the U.S. economy to its knees. Hypocrisy, irony, and the New Civility
Let’s start there. The “hobbits” remark was an ad hominem, and a dumb one, as I wrote at the time. And ad hominems are at their core uncivil. If there was any real descriptive value at all in “hobbits” as a political label, it escaped everyone, including the writer of the editorial.
However, calling someone a “hobbit” is not the same as calling him or her a “terrorist.” There is a specific definition of terrorism that has become all too real in the last ten years for Americans, and it doesn’t mean someone who works within the political system for policy change.
( A conservative leader has admitted that conservatives acted like hostage takers and plan to do so again)
Gee, I’m happy to concede that conservatives have not perpetrated any really large terror attacks since the Oklahoma City bombing. There have been smaller bombs, cop killings, doctor killings and other assorted acts of terror. All done in the name of the perfect civility that Ed’s side always adheres to. In order to keep that bubble of denial in proper working condition Hot Air really should make sure they cc their e-mails to everyone on the punk conservative mailing list, otherwise one of the kool-kids might go off message, Tea Party Nation: The left’s killed “a billion people”
The founder of Tea Party Nation claimed liberal ideology is responsible for “a billion” deaths over the past century during a raucous rally here Saturday in support of one of the six Republican state senators facing a recall election Tuesday.
“I will tell you ladies and gentlemen, I detest and despise everything the left stands for. How anybody can endorse and embrace an ideology that has killed a billion people in the last century is beyond me,” said Tea Party Nation CEO Judson Phillips.
Phillips, who a day prior likened protesters of Gov. Scott Walker to Nazi storm troopers, urged a few hundred tea party supporters to turn out for state Sen. Alberta Darling, who is in a ferocious battle with state Rep. Sandy Pasch to hold onto her suburban Milwaukee seat.
But he wasn’t the only speaker to use loaded language to gin up the crowd.
Vince Schmuki, a leader of the Ozaukee Patriot tea party group compared the recall effort to a terrorist attack.
“This is ground zero,” said Schmuki. “You remember what the term ground zero means? We have been attacked.”
He continued, “Tuesday is going to be the beginning of our takeover. And we’re going to follow it up the following week, and then we’re going to polish off the enemy in November 2012. Who’s with me?”
It is obvious who Tea Party Nation is referring to. The police, firefighters, teachers, accountants, grounds keepers, janitors, road repair crews and all the other public workers and their families. Those public workers are, according to Hot Air’s sacred righteous teatards, part of the Maoists, Stalinists and other radical leftists who are reprehensible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. In an unfortunate trend in phrasing Americans liberals and progressives – some of them anyway – have taken to calling themselves the left. In the US that is more about distinguishing themselves as opposition to the far right conservatism that has become the deeply radical and anti-American ideology of the Republican Party. The left in the US is simply liberals and progressives who can trace the foundations of their ideology back to Locke and Jefferson ( the founder of the modern Democratic Party). That Tea Party Nation is not able to make that all too obvious distinction should tell America how blinded these miscreants are by a hateful philosophy marked by rabid nationalism, eliminationism, voodoo economics, contempt for a Constitution none of them seem to have actually read and borderline totalitarianism. It is conservatism that is undermining the basic tenets of our democratic republic – currently they are weakening the right to vote, they are trying to take way a woman’s right to have autonomy over her own body, they are using shady backroom deals and money to buy legislation. What do you want to bet that if it was found a group of radical Muslims was doing what the wing-nuts are doing, the wing-nuts would call it terrorism.
The biggest modern driver of world deaths is simple – The Cause Of Nearly Two-Thirds Of The World’s Deaths
Nearly two-thirds of deaths in the world are caused by noncommunicable diseases such as cancer, diabetes and heart and lung disease which are rapidly increasing at a cost to the global economy of trillions of dollars, according to U.N. estimates and preliminary results of a new study.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a report circulated Monday that while the international community has focused on communicable diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, the four main noncommunicable diseases “have emerged relatively unnoticed in the developing world and are now becoming a global epidemic.”
According to the report, 36 million people died from noncommunicable diseases in 2008, representing 63 percent of the 57 million global deaths that year. Nearly 80 percent of deaths from these diseases were in the developing world, and 9 million deaths were of men and women under the age of 60, it said.
In 2030, the report said, these diseases are projected to claim the lives of 52 million people.
Liberals would do something about that. Conservatives have declared that spending on such nonsense is their highest priority. Out of all discretionary spending the majority of tea bags only agree on cutting one thing – foreign aid. The smallest part of discretionary spending.
update: National Review’s Derbyshire: “I’m On The Same Page As” Breivik
Echoing Pat Buchanan, National Review’s John Derbyshire said that in certain respects, he is “on the same page” as alleged Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.
During the July 29 edition of his National Review podcast, RadioDerb, Derbyshire (who has repeatedly made racially inflammatory comments in the past) said of Breivik’s 1,500 page manifesto (which cites Derbyshire): “The upshot of the manifesto is that Breivik thinks European civilization is under threat of being swamped by Muslims and other incompatibles. A great many people think that, including me and a lot of my friends and colleagues.”
Even Derbyshire’s disclaimer that he doesn’t agree with Breivik’s decision to resort to violence was offensive. Derbyshire stated that it is wrong to “start murdering those responsible for” the threat to European civilization and their families.
Let’s grant that some Muslims, and throw in some U.S. right-wing fundamentalists and some right-wing Catholics are in dire need of some modern liberalism or modernity. Derbyshire and the NR are still in the that camp of ‘thinkers’ who fell Breivik may have gone too far, but his motivations were good as gold.
Paying attention to anything Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says is like caring what S&P thinks about the U.S. economy. Though he did say something interesting. No Chance of Default, US Can Print Money: Greenspan
“The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default” said Greenspan on NBC’s Meet the Press
“What I think the S&P thing did was to hit a nerve that there’s something basically bad going on, and it’s hit the self-esteem of the United States, the psyche” said Greenspan
It is mu understanding that the just print money thing can only go so far and then you run the risk of hyperinflation. After a few days of endless opinion pieces about S&P Greenspan nails when it says it is more of a psychological thing. And he added something the tea baggers should find interesting, though most of them are too mad at him for the printing currency remark to have noticed,
‘The United States was actually doing relatively well, sluggish but going forward until Italy ran into trouble,” he said. “That destabilized the European system, and the crisis re-emerged. Europe is very critical to the United States in the sense not only do we have a fourth of our experts there, but more importantly, significant proportion of the foreign affiliate profits, in fact half of U.S. corporations, are in Europe.”
Gosh, you mean the US has a lot of profitable corporate interests in that bastion of socialism called Europe. That really screws up the meme that Europe can’t get anything right because they are not champions of the free market. Not only are countries like Germany, Sweden and France ferocious free market competitors they manage to do so with fairly strong labor unions and public health care plans. According this recent NYT article high-end goods from Europe – Gucci, Louis Vuitton, BMW, Chanel and Mercedes all report great sales figures – Even Marked Up, Luxury Goods Fly Off Shelves
Another day and two more gay-related stories about Michele and Marcus Bachmann who, after years of condemning gay people and the homosexual “lifestyle,” are now tight-lipped about their views of the LGBT community. First, this tidbit from the Concord Monitor, in which Michele “cut off an interview last week as she was being asked a question about gay marriage,” saying, “I’m not involved in light, frivolous matters,” she said. “I’m not involved in fringe or side issues. I’m involved in serious issues.” This, from a woman who has called gay marriage “probably the biggest issue that will impact our state and our nation in the last, at least, 30 years” and rose to prominence in the Minnesota Senate by sponsoring a failed constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage.
Social conservatives are people with deeply disturbing priorities. Time and again it seems to be more about controlling other adults’ personal behavior than about genuine morality.
A dose of Krugman to get through the day – Credibility, Chutzpah And Debt
To understand the furor over the decision by Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, to downgrade U.S. government debt, you have to hold in your mind two seemingly (but not actually) contradictory ideas. The first is that America is indeed no longer the stable, reliable country it once was. The second is that S.& P. itself has even lower credibility; it’s the last place anyone should turn for judgments about our nation’s prospects.
Let’s start with S.& P.’s lack of credibility. If there’s a single word that best describes the rating agency’s decision to downgrade America, it’s chutzpah — traditionally defined by the example of the young man who kills his parents, then pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan.
America’s large budget deficit is, after all, primarily the result of the economic slump that followed the 2008 financial crisis. And S.& P., along with its sister rating agencies, played a major role in causing that crisis, by giving AAA ratings to mortgage-backed assets that have since turned into toxic waste.
Nor did the bad judgment stop there. Notoriously, S.& P. gave Lehman Brothers, whose collapse triggered a global panic, an A rating right up to the month of its demise. And how did the rating agency react after this A-rated firm went bankrupt? By issuing a report denying that it had done anything wrong.
So these people are now pronouncing on the creditworthiness of the United States of America?
Krugman is going to ruin the utterly false narrative that Obama went on a spending spree and caused the national debt.
The Long Goodbye 