If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough. - Mario Andretti

Friday, March 12, 2010

Here is how the economics behind government takeover of healthcare proposed in the current monstrous bill congress is going to pass against the will of the people by means of a gimmick, works. Obama’s congress proposes a monster that will cost close to $2 trillion over 10 years and gives government absolute and total control of all things healthcare. Even more frightening, the bill is set up in such a way that by that decade’s end everyone will have been funneled into a government controlled plan. People freak out. So Obama then tells congress they need to find a way to make it happened for a measly $900 billion to make the number more palatable. The congress then proceeds to concoct a scheme that charges you taxes over 10 years to come up with some $1.8 trillion dollars the CBO projected optimistically will be the cost of their behemoth takeover plan, but then offers no care whatsoever for the first four or five years. This then allows them to collect some $850 billion dollars in extra cash during that first 10 year stint, leaving us with a plan that they tell us will now only cost us a measly $1 trillion! Presto, healthcare costs are under control! I should mention that this $1.8 trillion CBO score is for the best case scenario cost of a government healthcare takeover, but we all know that as things go, these collectivist scams usually cost orders of magnitude more than was projected by the biggest pessimists, when they go live.

So after the first 10 years of Obamacare comes to a close, and we roll into the next decade of this wonderful collectivist experiment, we suddenly have government controlled healthcare that is at a minimum underfunded by $850 billion dollars for the next ten years, and likely to be behind a couple of trillion already too. Yet they and the MSM are all claiming this bill will save us money! Maybe they know that the collectivists elite in charge and pushing this plan through even though we don’t want it plan to confiscate our paychecks in their entirety and then distribute to us each according to our needs eventually, and then this stuff wont matter much. Barring that, you can fill in the gaps how they plan to deal with the vanishing of the “savings” they are now tauting sooner than later.

The recent revelation that came out, after some massive stonewalling by the WH which obviously knew it was damning, that many of Obama’s top legal appointees, including Eric Holder over at Justice, seem to have a conflict of interest when it comes to terrorism, seems to have lit a fire in the legal community. Whether you feel that there are issues with the whole terrorists are enemy combatants that purposefully avoid any uniforms or identifications vs. terrorist are just criminals, you can not fail to grasp that there is something problematic with having the very people that are now in charge of preventing another terrorist attack being sympathetic to that cause. And before you lambaste me for saying this, remember that, as this Andrew C. McCarthy article points out, these attorneys chose to go represent people that wanted to destroy this country, and we should be able to ask why. Especially when, as I pointed out, several of these attorneys are now the ones making critical decisions on how to handle not just captured terrorists, but how and how timely we get intelligence from these captured terrorists that can protect Americans from another attack. Here is the money quote:

The Justice Department lawyers who represented al-Qaeda were volunteers. Of all the causes to which they could have donated their services, they chose our enemies. They are no doubt sincere in claiming they sought to vindicate principles, not terrorists. But the other stubborn fact is that, since they took the helm at Justice, counterterrorism policy has become much more terrorist friendly.

Anyone that tries to make the case that those people asking for clarifications and pointing out the conflict, are just ushering a new era of McCarthyism, demanding we ignore the consequences and impact of the policies implemented by, and the actions taken by these lawyers now making the decisions to treat terrorists like common criminals, or worse tries to make the case that these policy shifts have made us safer, is an outright liar or moron. Maybe even both. I can guarantee you that the people that say this is much ado about nothing and that anyone that points out that these lawyers once chose to defend terrorists, would be singing a different tune if we had a clear conflict of interest like this with some government appointee that had links to the private sector. There is no excuse, and this is based on their won words and actions, even when you think that capitalism is a bigger threat than terrorism, to pretend that there isn’t a clear issue here. The truth is that these lawyers have made us all less safe. We have been lucky so far, but that luck won’t hold.

Update: It now looks like Holder wasn’t as forthcoming about his whole role in this and is now being looked at for failing to turn over briefs that would have been cause for concern. Oh, I am sure they will say it was an oversight, in fact they already are, nut what a convenient oversight huh? This is the mastermind that wanted to bring the terrorist show trials to NYC after all. The point is that Holder and his posse have an agenda, and that agenda makes plays havoc with our security. The left’s way of silencing those pointing this out is to accuse them of wanting to slime the lawyers for defending terrorists when the point is that these lawyers chose to defend the terrorists to undermine those that took terrorism seriously and treated this like a war and them like combatants.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Democrats ran and won in 2006, and then again in 2008, on the bad behavior of republicans. Republicans were successfully and correctly painted as having lost their fiscal sanity for the deficit spending prior to 2006, only to have democrats gain control of congress and the spending purse after the 2006 elections, and set new spending records they then blamed Bush for. The leftwing machine’s manipulations of the facts, with big-time help from a complicit media that didn’t point out democrats were always worse at that stuff anyway when in charge, allowed them to run on the lack of fiscal responsibility of the republicans in 2008 again, using the crisis of their own making that they then blamed on Bush yet again, to win big, only to then proceed to set new deficit spending records. Here is the graph for those of you that want to dispute the deficit spending facts, so spare us the bull:

As this projection showed Obama’s deficit spending in his first year ended up being more than all 8 years of Bush. Oh sure, as I already pointed out Obama is blaming Bush for having to do so. Democrats have successfully convinced so many that the financial crisis we are in isn’t tied to those idiotic collectivist economic lending practices they forced upon the market in the last 3 decades. Even worse, they successfully have covered up the rigged games Franks and Dodd set up with Fannie and Freddie to keep those faulty economic policies afloat, and how those trading scams then led to the implosion of the housing market and then the financial sector. But that “It’s Bush’s fault” excuse is wearing thin as people are slowly seeing the truth. Almost $2 trillion of the tax payer’s dollars has been funneled to democrats and their friends, through one collectivist economic scam or another promising salvation, but delivering nothing but a drastically growing government bureaucracy, while the private sector continues to bleed jobs and contract. And the WH remains focused on tacking on trillions more in new taxes and debt so they can give government control of healthcare moneys and decisions, with a scam which purports to reign in costs and be fiscally responsible by of all things taxing us for 10 years to provide 5 or 6 years of coverage, while ignoring the economic disaster they are leaving in their wake. And the one thing they should be addressing, the lack of jobs, gets nothing but some meaningless political play. In the mean time the hole is growing deeper and the spending of money we simply don’t have continues to rise. This year is looking like it will set even higher and wasteful deficit spending records as this February’s $220.9 billion single month record is showing. This seems to be our economic future thanks to the democrats and their economics. But the fact that democrats are destroying our economy, and are trying hard to destroy healthcare, is not the thing I want to address here. I want to talk a bit about one of the other lies they told to get themselves elected.

If you have been following the whole Eric Massa fiasco, you know this stuff has turned into a soap opera writ large. Frankly I do not know if Massa is telling the truth. He is a democrat after all, and lying is second nature for them. However, I do not put it past this WH to do what Massa has accused them of doing either. Based on what I have seen them do in just this first year, I have no doubt that this bunch is probably the most corrupt crew I have ever seen. We are dealing with Chicago politics here, and this – hope & change! - is SOP for these people. My bet is that since Obama wants this monster passed, his team is going to make it happen. Even if they have to do what Massa has accused them of. In fact I do not put it past them to resort to openly committing felonies to do so considering the vested interest they have in making this the law of the lad. After all, they control the levers of power and the press, so whose gonna be able to do anything about anything bad they do? If the stuff that has been going on so far hasn’t made the case yet, I doubt anything they do will.

And that brings me to my point about this whole Massa thing. If you don’t remember Nancy promising to drain the republican swamp and end the culture of corruption back in 2006, here is just one of the instances the sympathetic press gave her words play. Unfortunately, as case after case proves – Chris Dodd, Barney Franks, Charley Rangel, and a plethora of others – Nancy lied, and the corruption and criminal behavior, like the deficit spending and the fiscal irresponsibility I talked about before, is also setting new records. Don’t take my word for it. The case with Massa is more of the same. Even more important is the fact that while Pelosi is now claiming ignorance that’s a blatant lie because Nancy knew months ago about Massa’s behavior. And while Nancy is playing dumb, just a little research would have made it all obvious from records going back to Massa’s NAVY days showing that Massa was a time bomb waiting to explode.

As is the case in all these other stories of corruption that the MSM is ignoring or down playing, we are being lied to by these democrats that want to pretend real criminal activity and serious ethics violations, stuff that makes what happens when the republicans were in charge look tame, isn’t their modus operandi. And keep in mind that it is this scandal driven congress which is ignoring the will of the people and pushing forward with an unpopular government takeover of healthcare. Why isn’t the MSM up in arms about all this corruption and the will of the people being ignored? I guess that’s more of that hope and change for you.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

I hate to chat about celebrity stupidity in this space.  But God-damn it do they make it easy sometimes.  Here is Sean Penn, on Bill Maher’s show, defending Hugo Chavez.

PENN: The collaborative opportunity in Haiti, when you talk about Hugo Chavez, and some of the other people who are demonized [think Castro], and you know, when some of these countries accuse us of an occupation—where I believe this was strictly a humanitarian action by the United States military, and an incredible one – I’m a little sympathetic. Because every day, this elected leader [Chavez] is called a dictator here, and we just accept it! And accept it. And this is mainstream media, who should – truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.

There’s Sean, calling for journalists to be imprisoned for calling Chavez what he is.  I can see the logic.  Chavez is already well on the way to doing that in his own country.  But we have that pesky First Amendment here and all that.

(And to address this election business: It’s true that the OAS and Jimmy Carter’s group have claimed that the Venezuelan elections were on the level.  On the other hand, Chavez has complete control of the economy and the media and has shut down TV stations and newspapers that criticize him, as I linked above.  Chavez’s loathsome rule is a perfect example of why “democracy” is not a synonym for “freedom” and why the latter is more important the former.)

Now to be perfectly fair, I think Penn is using hyperbole here.  He’s not actually suggesting that journalists be jailed.  And if that were all there was to this interview, I’d shrug it off.  But that’s just the tip of the stupid iceberg.  He also defends Chavez’s rule, claiming that Venezuelans now have access to dreams that only one in five Americans does.  Apparently, George W. Bush was controlling our dreams!  God damn it, why did he want me to keep having that dream where I have to take an exam in high school and haven’t shown up all quarter?  Bastard!

Anyway, I’ll let the Best Magazine on the Planet have its say on this:

As Penn says, the population of Venezuela now has “access to dreams” they never had in the past (could Penn even name the previous president of Venezuela?); a funny little formulation that unconsciously acknowledges that after 10 years of chavismo, the poor are still amazingly poor, the rich are now in Miami, having been replaced by members of the Bolibourgeoise, and the economy is a mess. The poor may have aspirations, but, as Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodriguez discovered, they have seen no real material gains.

In short, Venezuelans can dream all they want about prosperity.  But, under Chavez, those dreams are no more likely to come true than my dreams about Lucy Pinder.  Equality is useless when it just means equal oppression.

And, of course, Penn’s latest outgassing gives me a chance to link to one of Lee’s best jabs at Penn watching an anti-American rally in Iran:

Check out the picture of this wormy fuck.  He’s crouching in that position so you can’t see the erection he got when he heard thousands of Muslims chanting “Death to America.”

Nothing changes, does it?  Penn was a wormy fuck five years ago when Lee wrote those words.  And he’s still a wormy fuck.  And long after we’ve all joined Lee in that Great Jack Daniels Distillery in the Sky (and Penn has gone to that Red Carpet Show Down Below), future generations will still think of him as a wormy fuck.

As the left actively but falsely tries to discredit O’Keefe’s work in exposing ACORN’s criminal activities, of all things by attacking his choice of clothing or by creating the false illusion that his video editing distorted the facts, it bears to point out that ACORN has a long history of other criminal activity. Oh sure, the left will say that it’s always about voter registration and unimportant because nobody can “definitely prove” there was any actual voter fraud, or some such, but the latest case says otherwise:

Milwaukee police officers sat on their hands for months last year instead of investigating possible voter fraud cases from the 2008 general election. It’s an incredible claim, but it’s coming from a credible source: Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf, the Milwaukee County prosecutor responsible for overseeing campaign and election issues. “Honestly, the Milwaukee Police Department largely ignored your double voter (and other) referrals received in January 2009 for the first six months of 2009,” Landgraf wrote in an e-mail to a city elections official on Jan. 26.

Speaking with unguarded candor, the veteran prosecutor said in his note that MPD’s tardy response had a major impact. The cases involve voters who may have cast more than one ballot, felons who may have voted illegally and other cases of possible election fraud. “Sadly, several probable cases of genuine voter fraud were harmed by that delay,” Landgraf wrote in an e-mail obtained through an open records request. The assistant district attorney was even more pessimistic about the investigation of more than 500 individuals who registered to vote on election day but whose addresses could not be confirmed later by postcard. “I do not expect them to ever get to the Address Cards,” he said of the Milwaukee cops.

On Friday, Landgraf declined to provide specifics, referring questions to his boss, District Attorney John Chisholm. Interestingly, Chisholm wouldn’t elaborate on his assistant’s concerns. “I’ll let the e-mail speak for itself,” he said while praising Landgraf’s experience and knowledge.

That emphasis is mine. We are dealing with accusations of voter fraud here, not voter registration fraud. I use “accusations”, because obviously there never was a real investigation despite the obvious. We all know better though. This is SOP from ACORN. It’s what they exist for. And it is clear that there was a delay, on purpose, to make sure any investigation in this case didn’t pan out. You have to wonder how many of these other instances are out there.

Oh yeah, for you clever lefties that will immediately point out that the Milwaukee Journal article never mentions ACORN, that’s likely on purpose. However, you can have a look at this AG indictment which clearly shows that 2 of those co-conspirators being looked at in this case were ACORN employees.

MILWAUKEE – Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen announced today that the Milwaukee Election Fraud Task Force has brought additional electoral fraud cases against five Wisconsin residents.  The Department of Justice, acting as Special Prosecutor for Milwaukee County, has filed felony charges against Maria Miles, Kevin Clancy, Michael Henderson, Herbert Gunka, and Suzanne Gunka, all alleging election fraud arising out of the November 4, 2008, Presidential Election.

“The integrity of elections is dependent upon citizens and officials insisting they be conducted lawfully. Wisconsin’s citizens should not have to wonder whether their vote has been negated or diminished by illegally cast ballots,” Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said.

According to the criminal complaints, Miles and Clancy served as Special Registration Deputies (“SRD”) for the City of Milwaukee in advance of the 2008 Presidential Election.  Each worked for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (“ACORN”).  Miles and Clancy are each charged with the felony offense of Falsely Procuring Voter Registration as Party to a Crime.  The complaint alleges that Miles and Clancy submitted multiple voter registration applications for the same individuals, and also were part of a scheme in which they and other SRDs registered each other to vote multiple times in order to meet voter registration quotas imposed by ACORN.

If you want the reference for that, it is here.

Clearly ACORN employees helped commit voter fraud. Sadly, the Milwaukee police dept dropped the ball, and the usual suspects are doing their best to not point out that connection. But we can continue to pretend the crook is the guy that dressed up as a pimp or not and got ACORN employees giving him advice on how to pimp children and/or foreigners that also might be under age, hide the income to avoid taxes, and then run for office as a democrat.

Thursday, March 04, 2010

The usual suspects in the MSM are all aflutter about some kids on a “take-your-child-to-work-day” being allowed by their father to direct air traffic. It’s a huge scandalous thing! Have these morons been paying attention to who’s pushing for and running the government healthcare takeover? These kids doing air traffic control has a much lower probability of ending in disaster, and fewer people would be affected, when all things are considered. Yet the MSM morons are telling us we should let government take over healthcare. The great majority of the American people get it, though.

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

I was thinking of doing something like this when someone pointed out that the big story now is that O’Keefe had tampered with the video, and hence made the behavior it showed by ACORN, irrelevant, but as you can see Patterico did a better job than I would have given my limited time. The facts are indisputable.

O’Keefe not only passed himself off as a pimp, one that was going to run a stable of underage girls or one of foreign minors in one or the other of the instances videoed, but that the more than one of the people at ACORN advised him on how to do it, and then to avoid paying taxes. All so he could then use the money he was going to make to run for office, as a democrat of all things. The actions of the ACORN employees, at a minimum, fall under the category of aiding and abetting criminal behavior (disclaimer: running as a democrat isn’t immediately a criminal activity, but it ends up that way sooner than later). Furthermore, the idiotic claims that the story falls apart because “the videos were edited” is even more stupid, because the unedited audio is available, and it not only serves to enforce that the people at ACORN are donkey criminals as well as the exat story told be each video, but clearly shows that those impugning O’Keefe or the story by attacking the editing of the videos, are grasping at straws. Finally, that claim that some independent report from the Massachusetts AG exonerated ACORN on the criminal activities they were advising on O’Keefe exposed, is plain and simple false. That dealt with a completely different case, and then they got a free pass from a friendly even then.

The fact remains that those defending ACORN and the democrats are idiots, lying crooks, or both. O’Keefe exposed the crooks and their relation to ACORN, and we the people should hammer that home. That crime syndicate should not be allowed to revitalize itself, even under a new name as the plan seems to be, and nobody should let the demcorats off the hook for their relationship and profiteering from the criminal activities of ACORN. There was a reason that the democrats decided to let ACORN take the fall and cut the funds. They wanted to make sure nobody investigated any deeper because the stories that would come out then would make what O’Keefe exposed look like chump change.

I am serious. This MSNBC tripe of an article literally quotes Rangel’s story, and never really points out that this Caribbean trip is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to actions by Rangel - ranging from cheating on his taxes to shady use of campaign contributions, to just name a few of the obvious ones- that would have landed practically all other citizens behind bars. Basically Rangel traded his powerful seat to avoid the need to actually face the music, considering even with the congressional leadership covering for him eventually he would have ended up being charged, hurting his party in the process, and likely – in the age of the Obama, criminal activity by the left seems to not be prosecuted or outright ignored - lead to some time in the slammer. With him now gone the democrats will simply say there is no need for anymore an ethics investigations, and Charley gets away with all his crimes. Transparency and ethical behavior in the new age of “Hope and Change”, I guess.

Monday, March 01, 2010

Despite the failure of that WH PR stunt around the government takeover of healthcare last week, it looks like, at least to Pelosi, the donkeys are thinking they should move ahead and force that monstrosity on the people. According to Nancy, the problem is the republicans, not the fact that the majority of the people do not want this thing.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Sunday that Republicans have left their mark on the healthcare bill and should accept that the bill will go forward. “They’ve had plenty of opportunity to make their voices heard,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday morning. “Bipartisanship is a two-way street. A bill can be bipartisan without bipartisan votes. Republicans have left their imprint.” The public option, for example, has been stripped from the bill because Republicans were so adamantly against it, she said. “They’ve had a field day going out and misrepresenting what the bill says,” Pelosi said. “But that’s what they do.”

I especially loved that bipartisan bit. As I have always contended, to democrats bipartisan means “you choose to do it my way”. Queen Nancy has decreed that the problem isn’t the cost or all the lies from the people pushing this disastrous proposal, and it certainly isn’t the objection by the people to it and other costly and insane collectivist policies pushed by congress and the WH, as the last 3 elections culminating with the Scott Brown victory for what once passed as a given democrat senatorial seat, but the republicans! They have had their say. Heck, the left even gave up the immediate government takeover option – the public option – and settled for a long term approach that will produce the same anyway. So there!

These collectivist have literally calculated that while this move will crush them in November, that nobody will dare roll this crap back. Thus in the end, they win, as the social expansion takes the biggest jump it has in decades and even more people become accustomed to the “free ride”. I think the idiot donkeys forget that this monster isn’t supposed to do anything but steal more of our money for the next 4 years before it delivers a single service. If they lose big enough though, that assumption might prove erroneous. But they are gambling that they are not going to lose big enough, and that even more importantly, there will be nobody with the guts to roll this back in the next 4 years, especially with Obama c*ck-blocking for them, it looks like. Lets hope they fail either way. Not because I hate this sort of colelctivist crap, but for the sake of the American people which have already beeen badly screwed over by these demcorats in but 1 year.

It looks like the movie “Hurt Locker”, yet another anti-military Hollyweird fantasy where the soldiers are all idiots or prone to stupid behavior, while loved by the Hollyweirdos precisely because of the portrayal, doesn’t play well with the troops that have done the real thing, and I am not surprised the troops, and especially those with the ordinance disposal units, laugh at this dumb movie.

Reporting from Baghdad, Los Angeles and Washington - Many film critics—and awards voters—have praised “The Hurt Locker’s” depiction of the U.S. military in Iraq, often singling out the bomb disposal drama for its authenticity. But as the film emerges as a favorite to win the best picture Oscar, a number of active soldiers and veterans say the film is Hollywood hokum, portraying soldiers as renegades while failing to represent details about combat accurately.

Truthfully, my first reaction was to actually wonder how the news this anti-US military movie, which I again am pointing out portrayed our troops negatively to suit the image Hollyweird has of the military, was causing a controversy and getting front page time. I admit that was not the least bit surprised about the movie’s negative portrayal, because that seems to be SOP for the left, which while it claims to have respect for the troops and to support our men and women in harms way, also seem to feel the military is an evil entity used by evil America. That this is being pointed out, and in the lefty rags of all places, is surprising.

My guess is that it is attributable to the fact that the CinC now has a (D) next to his name and his WH, despite the facts to the contrary, is now claiming Iraq as their victory. I have already pointed out that I expect much historical whitewashing and fudging to go on about the Iraqi conflict now that we have literally made all the idiots that said a military victory was impossible eat their own words. I am admitting that I didn’t expect it this soon.

I suspect that over the next decade many will rewrite the facts to create the illusion that the left wasn’t just violently opposed to us winning, but actively took measures to force us to lose in Iraq, just like was done after the fall of the USSR to hide the role the mostly pro-Soviet left played there and then. Today we have the majority of these people that were calling Reagan a warmongering nut that would start WW3, all saying that they were right there with Reagan, pushing for the military arms race and the line in the sand that finally broke the evil empire and ended the 70 plus year suffering of millions at the hand of the first collectivist paradise. That is when they don’t try to tell you Reagan’s role in the whole thing was minimal, and the lion share of the credit should go to Gorbachev, or some such other nonsense.

Anyway, I should also mention that it isn’t a coincidence that a movie that inaccurately and negatively portrays our military, like the Hurt Locker does, is up for so many movie awards. Hollyweird loves

Friday, February 26, 2010

Remember when good old BushChimpy McHitler was in charge and stories were reported about his fascist expansion of power? Well my bet is that most of you have no clue that The House of Representatives reauthorized the Patriot Act for one year Thursday by a vote of 315-97. Guess the fact that the people in charge now have a (D) next to their name suddenly this critical issue has lost both its criticality and its fascist appeal. We get told that…

Many lawmakers wanted to rewrite or even kill some of the most controversial provisions in the act. But Congressional leaders didn’t have the appetite for a major battle with the economy and health care reform swinging in the balance.

Yeah, sure. That’s why the MSM chose not to scream bloody murder about them not caring about it too: the usual BDS infected leftist tools in the MSM are too worried with helping the donkeys pass their government healthcare takeover and how to expand the public sector - it’s job creation, darn it! - at the expense of those of us that do work for a living. And that guy that ran against all things evil about Bush, and still blames Bush for everything that’s bad and takes credit for everything that Bush did that isn’t?

The Senate ok’d the package earlier this week. President Obama is expected to sign the bill into law.

Yeah, I thought so.

I did not watch that 7+ hour freakshow that the democrats were hoping to use as a vehicle to paint the republicans as evil “no sayers” with no ideas or plans on healthcare with the help of the usual suspects in their controlled MSM – while anyone that had the ability to navigate a web browser and Google could see these donkeys were full of it – and I am glad I didn’t waste my time. The democrats pretended to care and to want bipartisanship, only they meant by bipartisanship that the republicans should do what they wanted and be happy about it. The leftist twits are now threatening reconciliation – a process that has never been used in the way they intend to abuse it, but we are talking about the party of the end justifies the means after all here – despite the public objection to this debacle. It is now or never and all or nothing with these fools. And they are continuing to pretend that they are doing it to help the country and the people economically, while also providing care to all those poor people that can’t afford it. How noble, but al bullshit. The end game still is to have government literally take over and control 1/5th of our economy. Not to mention get the power over life and death decisions. Fun stuff, but I want to talk about the cost to us tax payers.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

I want to throw this out for discussion. Via Glenn Greenwald, I find what is, to me, a surreal discussion at Newsweek about whether Joe Stack—the Austin airplane guy—was a terrorist or not.  To me, this isn’t even a question.  I have a fairly solid definition of a terrorist—someone who uses violence or the threat of violence outside the legitimate theater of war against the innocent to advance a political agenda.  Joe Stack meets that definition.  He crashed a plane into a building and killed innocent people to advance whatever lunacy was in his statement.  But Newsweek seems confused:

Did the label terrorist ever successfully stick to McVeigh? Or the Unabomber? Or any of the IRS bombers in our violence list?

Yes, yes and yes.  McVeigh was a mass murderer, but he was certainly a terrorist.  Someone protesting against big government or even a government they consider evil can organize politically, can write, can agitate, can defect to another country, can defect to an enemy.  Those last may be treasonous, but they are not terrorism.  But when you drive a truck-bomb up to a building full of innocent people because you want to foment a revolution, that’s pretty much the definition of terrorism.  I haven’t completed my study of the colonial era, but I have yet to find an instance of the Patriots protesting taxes by blowing up buildings.  The closest they got to terrorism was the occasional tarring and feathering.

Right or wrong, we definitely reserve the label “terrorist” for foreign attackers. Even the anthrax guy (not that we ever found him) wasn’t consistently referred to as terrorist.

Maybe not be Newsweek, but I certainly think the American people thought it was terrorism.  ALF goons who firebomb animal research labs are terrorists.  And men who murder abortion doctors are terrorists.  Why are we even having this discussion?  Why is Newsweek playing the “it’s not terrorism when Americans do it” game?  Where does that game even exist outside of their office?

But maybe I’m a whinging lefty wingnut pansy.  Do you guys see the distinction?  Did someone mix crazy pills in with my Azithromycin?  Is Joe Stack a terrorist or not?

Update: Just as I wrote this, a friend sent me this definition of a terrorist from the Patriot Act:

activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the U.S. or of any state, that (B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping, and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.

How does this not apply?

To be fair, Newsweek may be arguing a cultural theme—whether Americans consider guys like Stack to be terrorists, not whether they are terrorists.  Their discussion is very confused and obtuse—it’s hard to know what they’re arguing about.  In either case, however, they’re full of shit.  Joe Stack was a terrorist and I think most Americans would consider him a terrorist.  Just not the media, I guess.

Update: Ta-Nehisi:

By Isikoff’s lights--and by the lights of several of his colleagues--the Ku Klux Klan, an organization responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent people, the men who turned Birmingham into “Bombingham,” who hurled molotov cocktails into the homes of Detroiters who dared moved west of Woodward, who lynched black men in the streets, who brought food, children and wives to the spectacle, who smiled next to smoking corpses in post-cards for far-off relatives, who displayed the knuckles and testicles of black men in pickle jars, were not terrorists, but “Ethnic Intrusion Protesters.”

This is not merely about semantics. I deeply suspect that our inability to grapple with and understand our own history of home-grown terror, indeed defining it as something else, inhibits our understanding of the very terror we now face and claim to be at war with.

Our friends on the left that want to have government take over healthcare often site the Canadian system as an example of how it should be. Of course, people also point out how many Canadians are forced to jump the border to get quality and timely car they can not get when government bureaucracy runs healthcare. Now we seem to have the case of Newfoundland and Labrador Premier, Danny Williams, whom opted to come to the US for care (while it is still possible). When questioned by the press about why he did something like that his answer was “My heart, my choice”. Funny that how the collectivist healthcare system that the left wants to straddle us here with tends to deny everyone but the elite that choice, as this case again proves.

The 60-year-old Williams said doctors detected a heart murmur last spring and told him that one of his heart valves wasn’t closing properly, creating a leakage. He said he was told at the time that the problem was “moderate” and that he should come back for a checkup in six months. Eight months later, in December, his doctors told him the problem had become severe and urged him to get his valve repaired immediately or risk heart failure, he said. His doctors in Canada presented him with two options - a full or partial sternotomy, both of which would’ve required breaking bones, he said.

So in order to save some cash they send him home and told him to come back in 6 months. When he did, they diagnosed him with a critical condition and offered him 20 year old surgical procedures as the solution. Faced with that dilemma he then opted to…

He said he spoke with and provided his medical information to a leading cardiac surgeon in New Jersey who is also from Newfoundland and Labrador. He advised him to seek treatment at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami.

And his choice faced with this limitation of his country’s healthcare system was to go to the US - where I should add that the government had not taken over control of healthcare yet and turned the thing into a disaster - to get the surgery he needed, without having to endure a 20 year old painful and dangerous medical procedure. You know why the Canooks had to offer him that 20 year old chest cracking procedure, right? Because in order to control the skyrocketing cost of “free healthcare”, innovation and technological advancements have to be abandoned. Not to mention that he was probably worried that something as complex as that procedure might have a low survival probability, to save costs, you know. OK, I was just kidding about that last part there, but the humor is in the fact that that’s not too far from the truth.

Anyway, that’s the system we will soon have if Obama and the democrats get their way. One for them, and something like the Canadians have for us peasants.

In the age of “Hope and Change” deficits no longer matter it seems. This even as a Tax Policy Center released a
detailed 40 page report of the key tax proposals in President Obama’s 2011 budget, and if you look at their numbers they are projecting a whopping $4.9 trillion shortfall, which eclipses the $1.1 trillion claimed by the Obama people. Here is the killer quote:

The budget assumes a baseline in which the 2001-2003 tax cuts are permanent (including the estate tax at its 2009 level), the exemption in the alternative minimum tax (AMT) is permanently indexed for inflation from its 2009 level, and that temporary expansions of refundability of the child tax credit and of the earned income credit are permanent. Those provisions would reduce revenues by $3.8 trillion over the 2010-2020 period. TPC’s analysis measures the impact of the tax proposals not against the administration baseline but rather against a current law baseline that assumes the 2001-2003 tax cuts expire as scheduled in 2011 and that the AMT exemption maintains its permanent level. Against that baseline, the administration’s tax proposals would cause much greater revenue losses than official budget estimates show [$4.9 trillion v. $1.1 trillion].

For those that are numerically challenged, this means that the difference between all the goodies that the collectivists want to farm out reported in this analysis and the tax intake of Uncle Sam in this business hostile environment are going to leave us with an unbelievable additional $4.9 trillion in new debt. Of course, knowing the way collectivists operate, they will simply raise taxes - and likely also spending - and then be flabbergasted when we end up with something close to a $7 trillion gap.