Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window - Steve Wozniak

Monday, August 23, 2010

I just got back from a week of vacation where I played US government - I spent way too much money on feel good stuff that yield no actual benefits - and am now because of the time off, busier than a one legged man at an arse kicking contest now at work. But I felt I had to address something that came up during a conversation I had, with a bunch of obvious liberal morons defending the disastrous collectivist policies of the last decade that have reached new limits under demcorat and Obama control, when they blamed Bush and the Iraqi war for anything from $3-$5 trillion in deficits spending. The numbers widely varied apparently even for them, but I was stumped as to why they would be pulling these ridiculous numbers up until I realized the left still wants to make believe that the deficit spending is because of the Iraq wars and defense spending, and not because of the massive growth in wasteful collectivist spending by government. 

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, July 18, 2007

No, this can’t be true.  Not with an administration as ethical and above board as this one.

White House officials arranged for top officials at the Office of National Drug Control Policy to help as many as 18 vulnerable Republican congressmen by making appearances and sometimes announcing new federal grants in the lawmakers’ districts in the months leading up to the November 2006 elections, a Democratic lawmaker said yesterday.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said documents obtained by his panel suggest that the appearances by the drug control officials were part of a larger White House effort to politicize the work of federal agencies that “may be more widespread than previously known.”

Waxman cited a memo written by former White House political director Sara M. Taylor showing that John P. Walters, director of the drug control office, and his deputies traveled at taxpayer expense to about 20 events with vulnerable GOP members of Congress in the three months leading up to the elections.

In a letter to Taylor, Waxman also pointed to an e-mail by an official in the drug policy office describing President Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, as being pleased that the office, along with the Commerce, Transportation and Agriculture departments, went “above and beyond” the call of duty in arranging appearances by Cabinet members at campaign events.

“This recognition is not something we hear every day and we should feel confident that our hard work is noticed,” said the e-mail, written by Douglas Simon, the drug policy office’s White House liaison. “The director and the deputies deserve the most recognition because they actually had to give up time with their families for the god awful places we sent them.”

The drug control office has had a history of being nonpartisan, and a 1994 law bars the agency’s officials from engaging in political activities even on their own time.

I’m curious, exactly how many laws does this administration have to break before someone begins to care?

Thursday, April 12, 2007

The NYT does a story on voter fraud, and generally makes the claim that it doesn’t appear to be anywhere near as bad as it is.  Then it sticks this whopper about two thirds in.

Voter fraud is a highly polarized issue, with Republicans asserting frequent abuses and Democrats contending that the problem has been greatly exaggerated to promote voter identification laws that could inhibit the turnout by poor voters.

I don’t know what planet the authors of this piece have been living on for the past 10 years or so, but after every frigging election there has been a deluge of plaintive wailing from the left about massive fascist conspiracies of voter fraud.  Why?  Because it was the only way they could wrap their minds around the fact that—once again—the Democrats had lost.  Convinced of their own righteousness and superiority, the only conceivable reason that their party didn’t ride into power on a tsunami of popular support had to be because those right-wing bastards stole the election.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

I am often asked why, given my disillusionment with the Republican Party and the conservative movement in this country, I am still such a fan of John Hawkins and his blog Right Wing News.  The answer is simple:  he’s very, very good at stating his positions, and he’s not afraid to speak his mind.  I respect that to no end, even if I fundamentally disagree with him a lot of the time.  As an example of that, I give you this post, which is John guest blogging at Tom Delay’s website.

How could it be that we had a Republican President, 55 Republican Senators, and a 15 seat lead in the House, yet we still had a massive deficit, a Republican led amnesty for illegal aliens push, and someone like Harriet Miers being nominated to the Supreme Court? Just when did the Republican Party become the sort of party that supported projects like the “Bridge to Nowhere,” and expensive big government programs like the Medicare Prescription drug plan? When did we stop being the party of Reagan and become the Party of compassionate conservatism? “Compassion” is all well and good, but in the real world, all it seems to mean is wasting a lot of taxpayer money and the President standing there and taking it when he’s called a liar who misled the American people into going to war by Democrats who voted for the war themselves because they believed that Saddam had an active WMD program.

Face it: the GOP lost in 2006 because they became complacent, arrogant, and decided that they were too good to, “dance with the conservatives that brung them,” into power in the first place. Moreover, let me add that the distance between the Republicans in Washington and the people who should be their biggest supporters has yet to be bridged by the sting of defeat. The base may not like the Democrats or be happy that they’re in power, but they’re still frustrated and angry with the GOP.

Who makes more sense, John or the excuse-makers in the GOP?  Read the whole thing.

NOTE:  If you’re coming here via a link from another blog full of righteous indignation, make sure you read this first.

Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe God does want a Republican majority in the Senate.

MSNBC is currently reporting that Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD) has suffered a stroke.

There is no word, currently, on the Senator’s condition.

A call from RAW STORY to Johnson’s office has not yet been returned.

If Johnson were to pass away, or be forced to retire, the US Constitution delegates the task of appointing a replacement to South Dakota lawmakers, who in turn, often turn that task over to the Governor. The Governor of that state, Mike Rounds, is a Republican, and both houses of the state legislature are dominated by Republicans.

In the case of South Dakota, the decision would fall to Rounds, whose appointment would serve as senator until 2008 at which point Johnson’s seat would have been up for election anyhow.

While anyone suffering a stroke is a tragic event, how fucking hilarious would it be if the Democrats lost control of the Senate right before they were to assume power?  I’d laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh…

Update: His staff is now saying no stroke.  Stay tuned to see if this is really nothing or if the Democrat politburo is pulling a Fidel Castro.

There’s been (ahem) a few people lately who have essentially blamed me for the loss of Congress because I didn’t vote for the GOP.  Their argument is that no matter how bad the GOP is, the Democrats are worse.  In many respects this is true, but I’d like to illustrate this concept with an analogy.

Say you need surgery and you have to choose between two doctors.  Both of them are drunk.  One is more drunk than the other.  Since a drunk doctor is in no shape to perform surgery, does it really make any difference which one you end up with?  Is it really that significant that one doctor is slightly less drunk than the other?  No matter which one you select, you’ll end up maimed or dead.

So, rather than choose the less of two evils, I punted.  I’m hoping that by a loss this time around it will cause the slightly less drunk doctor to go to rehab and get his act together.  In 2008, I’ll evaluate the two doctors once more.  And if they’re still both drunk, I’ll be once again visiting Dr. Libertarian.

Remember, the lesser of two evils is still evil.

You know the old saying “Don’t put your eggs in one basket?” Well, if you want to know why the GOP lost in November, it’s because they put all their eggs in the fundamentalist Christian basket.

In our study, “The Libertarian Vote,” we analyzed 16 years of polling data and found that libertarians constituted 13 percent of the electorate in 2004. Because libertarians are better educated and more likely to vote, they were 15 percent of actual voters.

That’s a pretty decent sized chunk of voters, enough to swing an election.

Libertarian Party candidates may have cost Sens. Jim Talent and Conrad Burns their seats, tipping the Senate to Democratic control. In Montana, the Libertarian candidate got more than 10,000 votes, or 3 percent, while Democrat Jon Tester edged Burns by fewer than 3,000 votes. In Missouri, Claire McCaskill defeated Talent by 41,000 votes, a bit less than the 47,000 Libertarian votes.

Ooooh, that’s gotta hurt!  But why were libertarians turned off from a party that they traditionally vote for?

President Bush and the congressional Republicans left no libertarian button unpushed in the past six years: soaring spending, expansion of entitlements, federalization of education, cracking down on state medical marijuana initiatives, Sarbanes-Oxley, gay marriage bans, stem cell research restrictions, wiretapping, incarcerating U.S. citizens without a lawyer, unprecedented executive powers, and of course an unnecessary and apparently futile war.

Yep, pretty much.  They GOP isn’t conservative or small government any more, it’s Christian socialism and authoritarianism.  And it’s not a party I have any interest in supporting.  But here’s the kicker.

The striking thing may be that after all that, Democrats still looked worse to a majority of libertarians.

Absolutely true, which is why I voted Libertarian.  I couldn’t lower myself to voting for the Democrats, but there was absolutely no way I could in good conscience vote for the GOP.  Now, here’s the clincher, the elephant in the drawing room, the inescapable, undeniable truth of life that the Republican Party has clearly forgotten.  If you are a Republican who’s all butt hurt over the ass-whipping you just took, READ THIS PARAGRAPH OVER AND OVER AND OVER UNTIL IT SINKS IN.

If Republicans can’t win New Hampshire and the Mountain West, they can’t win a national majority. And they can’t win those states without libertarian votes. They’re going to need to stop scaring libertarian, centrist, and independent voters with their social-conservative obsessions and become once again the party of fiscal responsibility. In a Newsweek poll just before the election, 47 percent of respondents said they trusted the Democrats more on “federal spending and the deficit,” compared to just 31 percent who trusted the Republicans. That’s not Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party.

No it isn’t.

Friday, November 10, 2006

I just got an email message from the head of the California GOP.

While Republican Governors and Senators were falling throughout the country in the worst year for Republicans since 1974, you played a vital role in insuring the re-election of Governor Schwarzenegger.  And although the media is rightfully pointing out the broad support the Governor received, exit polls show 91% of Republicans voted for the Governor, an amazing number.  You also were critical in the election of our newest star, Steve Poizner, as Insurance Commissioner.

Just four years ago pundits, both Democrat and Republicans, said it was almost impossible for a Republican to win a statewide race. Now, even columnists like George Skelton believe Tuesday’s results were not an anomaly and that quality Republicans can and will win statewide races in California.  That is a dramatic change.

At the legislative level, even with gerrymandered districts, we not only held the three assembly and one senate seat that were under attack by the Democrats; but you were the difference in the election of Lynn “Landslide” Daucher to a seat formerly held by the Democrats (by a 138 vote margin as of this writing).  And finally, your clear call for “no new taxes” was heard throughout the state with defeat of all measures that sought to increase our taxes.

Wow.  Standard small-government conservatism with a libertarian social policy seemed to work, even in a liberal state like California.  How’s that Christian socialism working out for the rest of you?

This morning Sullivan makes exactly the same point I did two days ago about Rush Limbagh and Hugh Hewitt, though he managed to be a lot more diplomatic and used far fewer “fucks” than I.

The one thing you learn from this: Hewitt and Limbaugh are party animals. They put loyalty to party above intellectual honesty. They have admitted that they knowingly misled their readers and listeners. They can and will do it again.

Of course they will, because their listeners want (need!) to feel that they’re a truth detector, a beacon of accuracy in a world warped by the evil grasp of the liberals.  As I asked their fans the other day, “Since both of them admitted today that they didn’t really believe the things they’ve been saying for the past few years, how can any of you possibly believe anything they tell you in the future?”

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Following up on a point I have made countless times in the past is Jake Tapper.

There are legitimate conservative arguments to make about the media. But not every time someone reports something that doesn’t bode well for Republicans is it bias. Sometimes it’s called: reality.

Exactly.  Just because you believe that the Democrats are the sum total of all evil doesn’t mean that the Republicans are any better.  Just because you happen to rightly point out that Rumsfeld is astonishingly unqualified for his job does not make you a liberal, and the fact that Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore might hold the same opinion (but for totally different reasons) does not make you a liberal.

The Bush administration has done a lot of bad, bad things.  Pointing out this undeniable fact does not make you a liberal, it makes you a believer in objective reality.  Dismissing everything as a plot by them durn libriuls?  That makes you delusional.

Update: Allow me to elaborate here.  The MSM all leans left, that’s indisputable.  However, “that durn librul media” has become such a convenient catchword.  NY Times reports good news about Bush?  Shout it to the world!  NY Times reports bad Bush news?  It’s media bias, because they hate America.  Polling data shows Bush in the lead?  Woo hoo, suck it liberals!  Polling data shows Bush in the toilet?  Well, those polls are biased by the liberal media.

The point of this post isn’t to claim there is no liberal media bias, of course there is.  I blog on it all the time.  The point is that, for way too many people, bad news for Republicans instantly equals “liberal media.” As Tapper said, sometimes it’s not liberal, sometimes its accurate.  “Liberal media bias” has become all-too convenient an excuse for the right to blithely dismiss any reportage it doesn’t like, and that’s a serious problem.

From the AP:

Bush, Pelosi to bury the hatchet

“President Bush today announced he was going to bury a hatchet in Nancy Pelosi’s skull.”

I’m going to post on this because it’s been irking me all morning.  This was left in a comment earlier today.

Whenever you find yourself standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehen on a particular issue, you might want to check your position.

Let’s explore this for a moment.  What is the point behind making this statement?  Simple, it’s to discredit the other party.  If you can’t provide a logical basis for an argument, you can always win by trying to turn your opponent into sum durn librul.  Allow me to flip this around a little.

Whenever you find yourself supporting a president with a long record of approval ratings in the toilet, you might want to check your position.

Whenever you find yourself supporting a party which just lost control of Congress in a fit of voter dissatisfaction, you might want to check your position.

Whenever you find yourself as a staunch backer of one of the most incompetent defense secretaries in the history of this country, you might want to check your position.

Whenever you find yourself as a gung-ho flag waver for an administration which is more concerned with the manner in which a war is fought rather than in actually winning it, you might want to check your position.

Whenever you find yourself defending the astonishing corruption of the Bush-era GOP, you might want to check your position.

Get the point?  It’s not me that has anything to apologize for.  What remarks like the one above are intended to do is throw up some kind of evil boogeyman, against which all “normal” people will rebel.  It’s exactly the same logic that we’ve seen in this election cycle.  “If the Democrats win, then those gay homosexuals will be in the elementary schools converting your children to their sick lifestyle!” Rather than defend the policies of the Bush GOP (which is virtually impossible to do), they throw up a red herring like the impending homosexual invasion to muddy the waters.  It’s the politics of fear and intimidation, Karl Rove’s masterstroke, and it just didn’t work any more.

Disagree with my views?  Refute them all you like.  But remember this, it wasn’t my party or my ideology that just got kicked in the nuts yesterday. 

I have to admit that I’m quite happy that Jim Webb won.  Allen was a moron, and Webb is exactly the type of guy I wish we had more of in Congress.  Good for him.

A while back I wrote a post about gridlock, and how divided government is always something we should strive for.  In this post I asked whether you would prefer a Democrat president and a Republican Congress or vice versa.  If I had to pick one, it would be a Democrat president.  Now we’ve got the opposite.  Let’s see how well this works, too.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

I have another comment here which I think deserves a response on the main page.

Andrew Sullivan would know about dick in his mouth. Lee you said “I haven’t spent the last four years with George W. Bush’s dick in my mouth, telling everyone how wonderful it tasted” well if my memory serves me, you voted for him 2 years ago. And I remember nothing but good talk about him from you.

That’s partially true, but not entirely right.  Yes, two years ago I voted for Bush.  I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I thought that at the time he was, even with all his faults, the best man for the job.  If the election were held today, and I had to make the same choice between the two candidates, I’d probably choose Bush again for the same reasons I did before.  If I remember correctly, at the last minute I went back on one of my pledges, and donated $20 to the GOP, simply because I thought Kerry was singularly unfit to prosecute a war of any description, let alone a non-conventional war like this one.  So in that sense I was pro-Bush.

However, I was also anti-Bush at the time, but not as overtly so.  I was very critical of the president’s spending policies, and some other general stuff like that, but the Iraq War was still new enough to where it had not yet turned into a goatfuck, and this it was all-too easy for us to write off the bad news as nothing but reports by the durn librul media trying to sabotage the war.  Where I failed in this regard is that, yes, the media were trying to sabotage the war, but this didn’t make their reports any less accurate.  So when they reported on , say, Abu Ghraib, I was all too willing to dismiss it as agitprop by the anti-war contingent of the American left.

Since his reelection in 2004 we’ve been treated to Teri Schiavo, then the hurricanes and the incompetent rescue, not to mention the aftermath.  Then the video of Bush surtfaced receiving his final briefing prior to the hurricanes making landfall, where he just sat without asking a single question.  It was mindblowing seeing this transpire, and it really showed a level of monumental self-delusion.  This was really the beginning of the end with me.  When I started reading the resumes and pedigrees of some of the people Bush put into key cabinet posts I was just floored.

As things started going south in Iraq I got to thinking if the media stories we were hearing might, y’know, be true after all.  And they were.  We learned about the people sent to Iraq to fulfill jobs for which they had no experience of qualifications other than being campaign donors for the GOP, or interns at the national party apparatus.  So they’d send someone to Iraq, for example, to set up the Treasury or some other vitally important institution, and this guy would have zero experience at everything except raising GOP money.  I also read about how there was, literally, no counterinsurgency plan in place because the fundamentalists had convinced Bush/Rummy that they would ever become established.

In 2002 I was gungh-ho Bush.
In 2004 I was “Man, is this guy an asshole!  But, he’s better than Kerry.”
In 2006 I am “This guy has lost touch with reality, and the only thing which can solve the problem is politically.”

I wanted the GOP to lose and lose big because they absolutely deserved it.  If there was a way to do so without helping the enemy I would do so, but there isn’t, so I didn’t.  The Bush/Cheney/Rummy cabal needed to be stopped, and they showed no inclination themselves towards self-restraint and self-policing.

At any rate, 2004 saw me as lukewarm at best when it came to Bush.  By 2006 I had learned so much new information I was just disgusted.  And I voted accordingly.

Update: I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA why I named this post what I did.  I was really tired last night, and this was the last thing I did before I went to bed, so I guess in my mind this was some great witticism, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what it was.  Apologies.