(your links should be added immediately – though you won’t see them until your next refresh)

In the meantime, Fiorina and her wonderfully insane ad team have produced a follow-up, though sadly not a sequel, to “Demon Sheep,” this time completely focused on Carly vs Senator Ma’am, the latter rendered as a Zardoz-like hot air media balloon monster:

I think it’s clear by now that Obama does not wish to make a confrontation with Iran part of his presidency. As I’ve written before, this means that Israeli security fears become a major problem for the administration: surely Obama realizes that one of his most important jobs is therefore preventing the Israelis from attacking.

How does one do that? Typically, the way the United States has alleviated Israeli security concerns is by affirming the closeness of the strategic relationship. But doing this on the Iran issue doesn’t work, for two reasons: 1) it would undermine Obama’s mission to the Arab world, which requires pushing the Israelis away; 2) and in the context of a nuclear Iran, it doesn’t really matter how close the U.S. and Israel are. The Israeli fear of the Iranian bomb is that one nuke would destroy the Jewish state, and that even in the absence of such a strike, Israel would be confronted with an emboldened Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas axis, more wars, constant (and credible) threats of annihilation, and over time would experience the psychological, demographic, and economic attrition of the country.

When we follow this logic chain to its conclusion, we find that Obama’s only option for restraining an Israeli attack is the one that we’re seeing unfold before our eyes: a U.S. effort to methodically weaken the relationship; provoke crises; consume the Netanyahu government with managing this deterioration; and most important, create an ambiance of unpredictability by making the Israelis fear that an attack on Iran would not just be met with American disapproval but also a veto and perhaps active resistance.

Noah Pollak – Contentions – “Re: Re: A New Low”

Michael Ramirez Cartoon.

[E]even if ObamaCare passes, Democrats and President Obama will lose. Republicans have already vowed to make November a referendum on this bill and, by all auguries, Democrats are going to lose big time. The loss of one election if the larger cause succeeds wouldn’t be a big deal. But this bill has little legitimacy and for years might be tied up in constitutional challenges against its individual mandate provision–not to mention the provisions that turn insurance companies into public utilities without due process. ObamaCare could well become President Obama’s Iraq. Worst of all from the standpoint of his personal life story, it will exacerbate the crisis of the entitlement state, requiring someone else to step forward and clean up the fiscal mess he is creating.

Ironically, Obama is not only sowing the seeds for the destruction of his own legacy–but also for the creation of someone else’s.

Wrong Bill At The Wrong Time – Forbes.com.

That tradition includes some things that have become accepted, largely uncontroversial features of American politics and culture – such as voting rights for women, the direct popular election of senators, and popular primary voting for party nominees. The tradition includes other things that most progressives would rather we all forget was their work – national income taxes, say, or prohibition of alcohol sale and consumption. And the tradition also includes immense political and economic commitments – like Medicare, Social Security, and the vast regulatory bodies of the state – that are a constant source of dispute and disagreement even among those who support their aims unreservedly.

But it’s not just or even mainly such measures – measure after measure after measure, good, bad, and indifferent, the vast majority expanding government at the expense of private initiative and investment – that progressives want to recall.  They also want to associate themselves, ahead of anyone else, with the good old very popular, very American idea of progress.

They want us to believe that they stand for progress, because they know that their fellow Americans believe in progress.  The know that America is the true home of progress, and America has welcomed and has given birth to more social, technological, economic, and political progress than any other country.

That, I believe, is what the great progressive Ronald Wilson Reagan had in mind whenever he spoke with his inimitable optimism about the American future.  It’s what made him able, in his last major political address, to respond to the Democrats’ empty calls for “change” by declaring to his fellow Republicans, “We are the change!”

I heard a gasp or two when I described the Gipper as a great progressive.  I’m not referring to President Reagan’s early years as a Democrat and a union leader, or to his admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for whose importance most progressives wouldn’t consider a new face on Mount Rushmore grand enough – if they could, they’d carve up his own mountain for him.

Nor am I referring to President Reagan’s occasional dalliances with impure conservatism.

I’m referring to what Ronald Reagan recognized long before most people of his day, and what he meant when he told the nation 30 years ago, upon being inaugurated for his first term, “Government is the problem.” 

Actually what he said was this, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Ronald Reagan didn’t pretend that there was no crisis in his day, or that he didn’t see any evidence of crisis, or that government is never the solution to problems.  His words rely on the opposite assumption, though we can leave it to scholars and historians to explain which crises Reagan believed government could solve.

Reagan also didn’t pretend that his political opponents lacked good intentions, that they didn’t want to solve the crisis.  What he realized, and in fact had long understood, and what he explained to the nation upon assuming the presidency, was that to progress - to venture unshackled into the future by “the problem,” which was actually a great complex of problems – we needed more than anything else for government to get out of the way.

Today, one decade into the 21st Century, more than 100 years since politicians in both parties and new parties first started marching under the banner of Progress,  we have every right, we need perhaps even more than Reagan did, to ask this question:  Where and what is the real source of progress?  Who, today, deserves to be considered “progressive”? Who really is ready, who really has the courage, imagination, and foresight, to embrace the future?  Who are the real progressives?

NEXT: On the Constitutionalist Response

In politics, left-wing, leftist and the Left are generally used to describe support for social change with a view towards creating a more egalitarian society.[1][2] The terms Left and Right were coined during the French Revolution, referring to the seating arrangement in parliament; those who sat on the left generally supported the radical changes of the revolution, including the creation of a republic and secularization.[3] The concept of a political Left became more prominent after the June Days Uprising of 1848.

The term was applied to a number of revolutionary movements in Europe, especially socialism, anarchism[4] and communism. The term is also used to describe social democracy.[5] Roderick Long, an anarcho-capitalist professor, summarises left-wing politics as “concerns for worker empowerment, worry about plutocracy, concerns about feminism and various kinds of social equality”.[6]

Left-wing politics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So there you have it – born in revolution and radicalism, behind the great political alternatives, cooling into mere social democracy, and finally, in the words of something called an “anarcho-capitalist professor,” devolving into a set of “concerns” and an element of “worry” associated with a special interest issue agenda.  It’s like the scene in Casablanca, when the assorted freedom-lovers sing their hearts out against the Nazis, except it’s “La Marseillaise” vs the Spongebob Squarepants theme song, and Spongebob wins.

How far the lowly have fallen…

Doctors say that Nordberg has a 50/50 chance of living, though there’s only a 10 percent chance of that.

– George Kennedy as Ed Hocken in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad

Matthew Continetti, while linking to Hennessey’s post, alludes in a different direction:

Say they don’t get the votes before the Easter recess. Would the president and Congress declare the bill dead? Doubtful. It’s more likely they would become the peasants in Raskolnikov’s dream, flogging a dead horse and trying again and again and again to pass the bill.

Both posts are well worth reading, even if the only takeaway is that there seems to be a crime, or something crime-like, but also disease-like, going on.  Not clear whether it’s turning into a tragedy, a nightmare, or a joke, or more, or all of the above…

Frustrated with his inability to control a sprawling government and anticipating a climate such as today’s, late in his second presidential term Reagan began arguing for a package of five constitutional amendments that he called his “Economic Bill of Rights.” (Once again he borrowed from FDR, who used the same label for a very different set of ideas in 1944.) Reagan’s package included two familiar standbys he’d requested in nearly every State of the Union address he delivered: a balanced budget amendment and a line-item veto. But he added three more proposals: a federal spending limit (revived a few days ago by Republican Reps. Mike Pence and Jeb Hensarling), a “supermajority” vote requirement for Congress to raise taxes, and a prohibition on wage and price controls.

Granted, seeking multiple constitutional amendments may not be the most conservative of initiatives, but if the tea party faction wishes to stand for something concrete rather than remain merely a protest movement, it might consider embracing Reagan’s Economic Bill of Rights, perhaps with the addition of term limits and an anti-earmark provision to keep the politicians away.

Steven Hayward – “Would Reagan vote for Sarah Palin?” – washingtonpost.com

Pretty picture with arrows and blobs

Seems the world’s coming to an end, again. Seems we’re all doomed, again. It’s your fault, again. Don’t know how you can live with yourself, this time.

The Warmists are perspiring, as they do, over a report from University of Fairbanks researcher Natalia Shakhova indicating that methane has been leaking in some rather unimaginable way from certain unimaginable structures known as clathrates, located in the unimaginable seabed in the unimaginable super-Siberian arctic.

Having read a science fiction novel several years ago in which these clathrates were accidentally disturbed (an errant missile barrage, as I recall), causing a total destabilization of world weather patterns and an incidence of civilization-wrecking super-hurricanes (superduper mama hurricanes giving birth to baby super-hurricanes) and other stuff, I feel qualified to report that this isn’t that quite yet.

Some amount, possibly large, of something, but a small amount compared to other amounts of other things, is entering the atmosphere by some unimaginable process, in unimaginable quantities that may or may not lead to temperature change of some uncertain but possibly significant significance. It could very well have been caused by the action of global warming – heating the oceans, melting things that God or Darwin meant to stay frozen.

This possibly resultant possible release of methane may be something new and catastrophically catastrophic, more worrisome than worry itself, and it therefore deserves, in Dr. Shakhova’s opinion, urgent monitoring. Whether Dr. Shakhova’s department would be involved intimately with this monitoring activity, for years if not decades, is not stated in the reporting.

On the other hand, this release of methane may not be anything new, it seems, reports a skeptical German scientist. It may have been going on for a very long time. Very long. Not a long time if considered in relation to measures of time on greater scales, but quite long compared to lesser-scaled ones.

Young leftwing experts on everything and committed climate alarmists are up in arms about it – or would be, if they weren’t generally anti-”arms” – and their commenters are downright fortumulous, where not beschnaggered.

No one else cares or believes, or likely will care or believe, until and unless bears give birth to hares, oxes give birth to foxes, and the faces on Mt. Rushmore weep tears of human blood. That is the state of things post-Climategate, post-Glacier-gate, post-IPCC-horndog-gate, etc. That may not be a good state of things, compared to some other states of things, or then again, that may have been the way things always were, or at least for a very long time. Very long. Not a long time compared to measures of time on greater scales, but quite long compared to lesser-scaled ones.

Intellectual humility leads me to note that this one may be THE ONE, the problem, the overturning, the singular bad thing. I don’t know. I don’t claim to know. A choir of angels could sing the truth to me, and I still wouldn’t know. And neither would you.

However, if THIS is IT, the Mother of Storms, then all of the other stuff – the incredibly convenient INCONVENIENT TRUTH, IPCC reports, 2020 targets, cap’n'crunch, and all the rest – has been even more a super-colossal waste of time than even the most committed climate skeptic would have said, because the effect will have been a gross crying of wolf on a global scale. If this one, or the next one, is the real climate wolf – there’s a likelihood of that somewhere between zero and certain, inclusive, is my assumption – a lot of sheep are going to get eaten – and then the real fun will start, and it won’t have much to do with the IPCC, 2020 targets, or cap’n'crunch.

Pretty Picture with Blob and Pointers

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