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Give me Liberty, or…

[Paraphrasing] a defiant commenter on Vox Day’s post about invidious discrimination:

I’m already 71. I’ll die before they can pull the plug on me!

Nice.

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What does “Alter or Abolish” mean?

“Death Panel” was rhetorical genius. Theorists and legislators use complex and nuanced language that usually flies over the heads of the public. “No,” they say, “there will not be death panels, just procedural review boards and end-of-life counseling.” In the ivory tower there is a difference. But in practical effect and in common terms, it’s the same thing.

Public opinion is not a courtroom. So we see politicians on all sides debating the translation of nuance into common terms. “You can keep your doctor.” Only if he isn’t driven out of his practice by the nuance and detail of the actual legislation.

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The Great Unsaver

In February, when the current President was bashing the economy to sell the spendulous bill, I observed there were still 142 million Americans going to work. Last week we were told unemployment dropped .1%, but even Big Media reported the drop was due to people falling out of the labor force, not because more people were back to work. Total employment was slightly over 140 million.

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Pangloss Sees the Rising Sun

Late last night CNN interrupted its regular drone with a breaking story: Japan Emerges from Recession. They played it up a like an airplane crash or celebrity arrest. They even had to rouse a financial correspondent from sleep to get up-to-the-minute commentary over the phone. Faintly optimistic-sounding news about a government statistic from a foreign economy has become sensational.

Although credit was given to the Japanese government’s stimulus spending, the reporter failed to grasp the (in)significance of figures showing Japan’s domestic demand had continued shrinking. The reported growth was entirely from exports. If anybody’s stimulus is responsible, it must be the Chinese. They’re the only big player still growing demand.

Despite persistent efforts of politicians and pseudo-news organizations like CNN to proclaim the economy has “turned a corner” and is “getting back on track” (someday I’ll have to rant about vapid economic metaphors), the US stock market reacted to this phenomenal news by dropping 186 points (2%).

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Who’s in the Empty Suit Now?

I’ve seen plenty of righty speculation that part of the reason Sarah Palin drives lefties crazy is her staunch display of the value of human life. She didn’t abort Trig. Instead, she is proud of him and full of love.

She has been ridiculed as an intellectual lightweight. Yet, she is the one who put the label “Death Panel” on Federal health legislation:

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Barry and the Feeding Tube

This picture, via Maggie’s Farm, is trump on the Failed Obama Administration’s™ prevaricating about the government deciding who is fit to live:

Obama pressing the “kill” button on Terry Schiavo

Yes, it is “over the top”. But it makes the point plain, while staying true to the reasoning behind it.

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Barry and the Butter Knife

I fully expected some kind of Federal health legislation to pass, supported by rhetoric about honoring Ted Kennedy and his cancer. Now it seems the people might stop such nonsense from becoming law.

Should some Kennedy rhetoric be deployed in some effort to resuscitate the legislation, keep this in mind:

So the elder patriarch of the Kennedy Clan shipped his daughter off to a convent, and when she started sneaking out at night and embarrassing the family, he somehow authorized physicians to saw into her brain until she lost the ability to speak.

I think the most horrible thing I’ve read in the last few months is

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Tomorrow It’s All Yours

Cost of Government Day (COGD) is the date of the calendar year on which the average American worker has earned enough gross income to pay off his or her share of the spending and regulatory burden imposed by government at the federal, state and local levels.

Cost of Government Day for 2009 is August 12. On average, working people must toil 224 days out of the year just to meet all costs imposed by government. In other words, the cost of government consumes 61.34 percent of national income.

If you had given the government everything you earned from January 1st through today, you could keep every nickel until the end of the year.

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Around a Corner in the Same Neighborhood

Barry, adding his voice to a choir, has called a bottom:

President Obama says the country has "stepped back from the brink" where the economy is concerned.

The president says the U.S. economy has turned the corner. He made the positive remarks on the day his $787 billion stimulus plan turned one hundred days old at a meeting with major donors in Beverly Hills, California.

"When you look at the economy right now, I think it's safe to say that we have stepped back from the brink, that there is some calm that didn't exist before," Obama said.

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Big Media and Barry’s Birth

Truth is revealed by both what is said and what is not said. Neo-neocon offers a non-conspiratorial reason for following Barry’s birth certificate controversy:

This furtiveness on Obama’s part ties into his secrecy about other aspects of his life. I’m referring most particularly to his school records, from Occidental and Columbia and Harvard Law. These, we know he could release. This failure of his leads inexorably to the perception that the man is hiding something, although we don’t know exactly what or exactly why.

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Unresolved

This fact, from a 2003 New York Times story, struck me:

To date, 208 of the 343 firefighters killed on Sept. 11 have been positively identified.

135 FDNY had no earthly remains even after two years of digging and sifting. That’s total sacrifice.

The story covered a debate about how to honor rescuers in a 9-11 memorial. Should they be considered equal with the other victims? Should their rescuer status be acknowledged? If so, would that be fair to the civilians who stayed in the flaming towers to help others escape?

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Food Insurance

From the comments in a Vox Popoli thread about health care:

If you can't get insurance because of a pre-existing condition, you don't really want insurance. You want someone else to pay your bills. Insurance is about sharing risk of the unknown. A pre-existing condition is known with certainty.

People with asthma or diabetes, for example, need medicine to maintain a quality of life similar to those without such afflictions. Inhalers and insulin are more ongoing necessities—like food—than one-time catastophes like a kidney transplant.

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Same to Rather, Couric and that little dog Blitzer, too

TJIC’s opinion on Cronkite is indistinguishable from my own:

I never got the veneration that some people feel for news anchors.

They’re stuffed shirts, selected for and paid for their ability to project an air of portentiousness and seriousness while they read crappy fourth-rate, low-depth, low-bandwidth news aloud to an audience of admiring monkeys.

Why, exactly, should I care that another one of these hair-gelled used-car-salesmen has passed on?

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Nirther Puts Barry in Check

A US soldier challenging the legitimacy of orders issued under President Obama has had his deployment to Afghanistan rescinded two days before his case was to be heard in Federal Court:

[Major Stefan] Cook said without a legitimate president as commander-in-chief, members of the U.S. military in overseas actions could be determined to be "war criminals and subject to prosecution." He said the vast array of information about Obama that is not available to the public confirms to him "something is amiss."

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Protecting the Stupid

The Failed Obama Administration is proposing to limit consumer finance contracts. A new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) would amplify existing government assaults on the people’s right to make contracts:

Traditionally, consumer protection in the United States has focused on disclosure. It has always been assumed that with adequate disclosure all consumers -- of whatever level of sophistication -- could make rational decisions about the products and services they are offered. No more. If the administration's plan is adopted, many consumers will be told that they cannot have particular products or services because they are not sophisticated, educated or perhaps intelligent enough to understand what they have been offered.

Don Boudreaux extends the reasoning:

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Colonel Obama has No Shame

The current President must not listen to himself. Or he’s a paragon of “do as I say, not as I do” hypocrisy. In a speech to the descendants of those his ancestors enslaved, Barry chided African leaders:

“No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20% off the top. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery.

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Tattooed Absolution

An apt description of today’s urban culture is “post-modern”. All meaning is derived from context, without anchor to history and tradition. Tradition is merely fuel for irony, where the past is never faced honestly.

We knit and bake and work on motorcycles just like people did last century, but now the tone is different. The past has been deconstructed and rebuilt in terms of exploitation and degradation. The only acceptable way to embrace tradition is by mocking it. An implicit conflict between the experienced value and the learned negative regard remains unresolved.

Windfarms Becalmed

The Pickens Plan, to build huge taxpayer-subsidized wind farms in the name of oil independence, has collided with economic reality:

The economy has changed drastically since the tycoon last year called for the United States to cut back on its oil imports in the face of record-high prices and said he planned to invest $10 billion in wind power.

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The Most Common Denominator

Observing Independence Day, Cobb calls out the practitioners of identity politics:

I find it difficult to presume to lead some fraction of the people or to defend some fraction of humanity as a worthy political aim. I am greatly convinced that the human animal does not vary so much that he can be served well by a wide variety of principles. There are a simple few and the paths towards attaining and defending them are few. But having found those paths, we must find our human center of gravity, each individual conforming at their core, and place that center on those paths.

Rules that apply only to some qualified group are counter to our common humanity. There are too many ways to rearrange ourselves into sets of suffering, and this devolves into a struggle to find the most powerful victimhood rather than a persistent effort to do the basic things all humans have moral duty to pursue. Either we embrace that all men are created equal, or we are doomed to live within the limits of tribalism.

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Sovereign and Independent

On this date we honor the declared independence of thirteen States. It also marks a turning point in a failed rebellion. The Confederate States of America was formed with the same political ideals as the United States from which they seceded.

The CSA had no unified declaration. They each acted in the spirit of the original, as evidenced by the concise preamble to the Confederate Constitution:

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