March 1, 2009
Horrorshow mash
Clearing the decks…
The stench around Carrion, Adolfo Carrion, Obama’s Urban Affairs czar, is laid out in the New York Daily News in a little piece titled, "Buildings sprang up as donations rained down on Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion". Carrion brings Pay-to-Play directly to the White House Oval Office. My earlier notes are here.
The perversion of governance: In order to pay for the burgeoning bureaucracy insidiously built over the last several decades, the new national pastime of the sundry legislatures is tax raising. In a case of not-so-strange bedfellows, perhaps, brothel owners in Nevada might even welcome being taxed, as once the government starts enjoying the revenue stream, it’s less likely to want to outlaw the associated activity. It takes two to pork? Likewise elsewhere with gambling. All of it, both sides, a complete and utter disgrace.
Mickey Kaus sez the card check bill is worse than even he thought it was.
Homeland Security is thinking about forcing the states to embed RFID chips into their citizens’ drivers licenses. I’m thinking about the anvil portion of my bench vise and a ball peen hammer.
Another Obama appointee, another disgrace, this one filling the (aforementioned) post of chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Yes, Charles W. Freeman, Jr. His full, despicable comments on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, from an email obtained by The Weekly Standard:
Sent: Friday, May 26, 2006 9:29 PM
I will leave it to others to address the main thrust of your reflection on Eric’s remarks. But I want to take issue with what I assume, perhaps incorrectly, to be yoiur citation of the conventional wisdom about the 6/4 [or Tiananmen] incident. I find the dominant view in China about this very plausible, i.e. that the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than — as would have been both wise and efficacious — to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquility to Beijing and other major urban centers in China. In this optic, the Politburo’s response to the mob scene at "Tian’anmen" stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action.
For myself, I side on this — if not on numerous other issues — with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans’ "Bonus Army" or a "student uprising" on behalf of "the goddess of democracy" should expect to be displaced with despatch from the ground they occupy. I cannot conceive of any American government behaving with the ill-conceived restraint that the Zhao Ziyang administration did in China, allowing students to occupy zones that are the equivalent of the Washington National Mall and Times Square, combined. while shutting down much of the Chinese government’s normal operations. I thus share the hope of the majority in China that no Chinese government will repeat the mistakes of Zhao Ziyang’s dilatory tactics of appeasement in dealing with domestic protesters in China.
I await the brickbats of those who insist on a politically correct — i.e. non Burkean conservative — view.
Chas
The Obama regime is becoming more authoritarian by the day.
The great failing of the Obama administration is that it is packed with people who show no apparent knowledge of the essential truths of liberal theory. That theory — which is the core of the American political contribution to, and the driving force of, modernity itself — is that freedom is the foundation of and the reason for social and economic flourishing. All evidence suggests they know nothing of this.
Obamites hold the opposite view, the one advanced by the pharaohs and emperors of old, all the way through the Talibans and Hugo Chavezes of our own time. It is the view that nothing is beyond the competence of the state and its great leader. Particularly in economic affairs, these people have a wildly inflated view of what the nation’s chief executive can accomplish through sheer will.
The New York Times, in its trademark pity-the-poor-and-downtrodden infantilism:
As governors in nine states, mostly in the South, consider rejecting millions of dollars in federal stimulus money for increased unemployment insurance, there is growing anger among the ranks of the jobless in those states that they could be left out of a significant government benefit.
Yeah, it always pisses me off when I don’t get my share of stolen loot. Fuck. Them. All.
Elsewhere, it slipped by last week without a lot of notice:
IER: Interior Decision on Oil Shale Locks Away American Energy Resource Larger than Total Reserves of Middle East
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Institute for Energy Research (IER) president Thomas J. Pyle issued the following statement today after the Interior Department announced its plans to withdraw from consideration acreage in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming where research and development of a small portion of our nation’s homegrown oil shale reserves had previously been scheduled to take place:
“Earlier this week, Secretary Salazar suggested America’s massive and homegrown reserves of oil shale held ‘great potential.’ Unfortunately, the Interior Department’s decision today may help ensure that potential never becomes reality – in the process, locking-away an American energy resource larger than the total reserves of the entire Middle East.
“At a time of great economic uncertainty, with millions of Americans out of work and state budgets stretched beyond their breaking point, responsible development of America’s abundant shale resources could be a way out of our current condition, and a way back to a better one. The Interior Department’s announcement today effectively forecloses that opportunity.”
That’s what collectivists DO. They foreclose on opportunity, in the name of incompetent authoritarianism.
