This amount of arrogance, the sheer impardonable pretension, is bound to be popular.
For clear-headed, outside-the-box thinking to diagnose the troubles currently befuddling his Party, his country, and indeed the very human race, FrankJ of IMAO has won the Socrates' Academy Wisdom and Sobriety "Really Smart Blogger Award" award.
Department of Peace? Please, let's strangle H.R. 808 at birth:
(a) In General- The Secretary shall--
- work proactively and interactively with each branch of the Federal Government on all policy matters relating to conditions of peace;
- serve as a delegate to the National Security Council;
- call on the intellectual and spiritual wealth of the people of the United States and seek participation in its administration and in its development of policy from private, public, and nongovernmental organizations; and
- monitor and analyze causative principles of conflict and make policy recommendations for developing and maintaining peaceful conduct.
The criticism of the Bush Administration for its handling of hurricanes Katrina/Rita was, in my increasingly lonely opinion, unjustified Democrat and liberal media opportunism. I am disappointed, but unsurprised, that John McCain has made that narrative his own, and is running against President Bush's unpopular reputation. As I said, my voice is joined by few others.
I will agree that government, at all levels, failed to solve the problems created by nature.
But before Katrina, the expectation of the Federal role was as a backup to local authorities, rather than as a front-line emergency response agent. Katrina marked a turning point, after which disaster response will be henceforth primarily a Federal responsibility.
Government cannot solve every problem, nor can it solve any problem overnight. In particular, natural disasters, even ones for which we have some warning, are going to happen. Government will fail to address them. It's going to happen again, and moving the problem up the food chain from local to Federal will not help.
Whether or not government responds well to an emergency is subject to a toss of dice. Some local officials on the Gulf Coast responded well, for instance, while others worried about disarming the citizenry. Tasking the Federal government with emergency response will make a single toss of the dice matter much more. Each local agency might succeed or fail, but the failure would be limited to only the area of their jurisdiction. A Federal failure is a failure for all.
I understand the political reality: McCain (even if he were not genetically predisposed to solving problems with governmental action) must take responsibility for every woe that falls to Man, and especially for this particular woe.
It would be nice to hear him praise the individuals, who are legion, and local officials, if such there be, who responded with selfless courage to the challenges they faced in the hour of disaster.
It would be even nicer to hear a Federal official make a stand against the growth of Federal power at the expense of State and local authority.
This is one more area in which we've ceded more power to the State to do us good, which power will eventually be used, with the best of intentions or the worst of malice, to do us harm.
While the bullets struck his body, Liviu Librescu held closed the doors to his classrom so that the young people in his charge could escape. His was the ultimate virtue, offering his own life to save others.
w/t Jeff Emanuel
We quasi-conservative, sorta Republican types make the mistake of thinking that Democrats are all liberal atheists who are afraid of guns and want illegal immigration. It's not so. There are lots of Democrats who are gun totin', church goin', law-abidin' citizens who will be insulted by Obama's elitism almost as much as we are. Or maybe more, because he assumes they're in the bag for him, and they're explicitly who he's talking about.
OBAMA: So, it depends on where you are, but I think it’s fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people are most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre…they’re misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to ‘white working-class don’t wanna work — don’t wanna vote for the black guy.’ That’s…there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today - kind of implies that it’s sort of a race thing.
Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long. They feel so betrayed by government that when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama, then that adds another layer of skepticism.That's just incorrect, as many people have pointed out. Americans suspect government because it defines us. It's the definition of American to distrust government.
"It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
"So I said, well you know, when you're bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country."
After acknowledging his previous remarks in California could have been better phrased, he added:
"The truth is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation, those are important. That's what sustains us. But what is absolutely true is that people don't feel like they are being listened to."
Just a bunch of typical white people in Pennsylvania, clinging to their guns and religion. 
In not bitterness but resolution.
w/t BBK
Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) is running for President of the United States.
Transcript of Obama’s Remarks at San Francisco Fundraiser Sunday
No, we don't care what you're going to do for us. We don't want you to do anything for us, because what you want to do for us is going to end up being done to us.[...]
But — so the questions you’re most likely to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What is the concrete thing?’ What they wanna hear is so we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — to close tax loopholes, uh you know uh roll back the tax cuts for the top 1%, Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to uh middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide healthcare for every American.
[The following was cross-posted at Redstate]But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Dear Senator Obama:
The government only has a small number of jobs. Bringing employment opportunities to rural Pennsylvania, or Illinois, or California, is not among them.
The government's first job is to defend the people from foreign enemies, such as the human rights violations of Chinese bankers and Middle Eastern terrorists.
Defending the people individually from each other also is the government's job. And too, we let the government take care of parks, roads and bridges and other such common areas. That's about it.
But the poisonous witch's brew of notions that somehow the people of small town flyover country are helpless without you, and that we don't have jobs, and that the Bush and Clinton Administrations let us fall through some imaginary cracks, and that all of that makes us bitter enough to hate anyone not like us -- that is just the wrong way to look at things.
(More...)
It is despicable and un-American, and I use that term advisedly, to encourage people to be bitter at the government for not doing enough to help them. The American way is self-reliance, not the desperate bleating of a people living only for the next chance to suckle at the government's teat.
In your class warfare, you foolishly suggest that our alleged bitterness over a lack of jobs causes us to cling to guns and religion. You even said it makes us dislike people who are not like us. Do you not care whom you insult, nor with what hypocrisy?
Guess what, Senator: we know that the jobs aren't as plentiful nor as lucrative in our little towns and small cities as they are in the metropoli of your dreams for us. We read the papers. But we also know that where we live, we don't have to lock our doors at night. We can leave our cars unlocked at the grocery store, or in our driveways. And we even have driveways of our own, rather than having to cram ourselves into mass transit. Our schools don't have metal detectors, because they don't need them.
You have the cart before the horse. We choose to live out here, because we can. It isn't any supposed bitterness over lack of government jobs which causes us to cling to guns and religion. We live here in part so we can go hunting and fishing now and then.
And we like our little churches. They don't tell us that the government created AIDS, either. It's not their job.
We choose to live out here because we like our neighbors, for even the nosiest don't tell us how to live. It's not their job.
And Senator Obama, it's clear from all that we have seen, that the Presidency is not, and must never be, your job.
We decided as part of the Civil War that there was a hard limit on the freedom of the individual: we cannot sell ourselves into slavery. Similarly, there is a hard limit on the sovereign public, that no matter how great the majority it cannot dictate certain things to the minority.
Among the things the majority cannot dictate are its religion, its opinion, and whether or not a person may own and carry a gun.
And yet the government schools try, to varying degree of effort and success, to do all three.
Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House and really bad economist, has one thing right. China is our enemy.
When Bill Clinton arranged for China to get Most Favored Nation trading status, he said trading with them would encourage them on the road to democracy. Nancy opposed him, saying we should not trade with wicked nations. In 1991, while Bill Clinton was seeking to pay back his Chinese masters, Pelosi went to China, as well, and found her way to Tiananmen Square:Along with two other members of Congress, Pelosi unwrapped a banner that read, "To those who died for democracy in China." The decidedly undiplomatic delegation was immediately surrounded by police and Chinese "tourists" who pulled walkie-talkies from their backpacks.
Pelosi continues her fight against the state of affairs in China. While the Chinese Communists are calling for 'stepped up "patriotic campaigns"' in Tibet, which yearns for freedom:
Unrest among Tibet's Buddhist clergy has been blamed in part on compulsory "patriotic education" classes, widely reviled by monks for cutting into religious study and forcing them to make ritual denouncements of the Dalai Lama, who fled to India in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule.Freedom of thought, religion, and speech are non-negotiable. I encourage athletes all over the world to reject the Chinese demand for their complicit silence during the Games.
Rights are things you already have which the government cannot take.
The government cannot take away your life, liberty, or property without due process*.
They can't shut you up, keep you from writing about it, or keep you from getting together with others of like mind.
You are free to print or blog all day long, but the government doesn't owe you a printing press, computer, or even a pencil.
You are free to own a firearm, but the government doesn't owe you one.
They cannot force you through their legal system without the advice of someone competent in its workings. Note that you only get the lawyer when the government has a case against you, not the other way around.
You are free to travel, but you don't get a free car.
All of these things are rights.
Health care is not a right. A fortioi, health insurance certainly is not.
But you do not have the right to the free use of someone else's labor. And lest you object that you are willing to compensate the health industry for its labor, whence cometh this compensation? From my labor. And that, you can be assured, is not yours to give away.
-----
* Unless you carelessly live in the only location where a vital strip mall can be built
My recent post (In Case You've Forgotten) demanded defeating and utterly discrediting Islamofascism, ending with
The questions of how far we go to defeat them, and with which of our own ideals we will temporarily part to do so, I leave to another day.I suppose it is a bit of an open question whether we need to temporarily set aside any of our ideals. Things temporarily set aside have a way of becoming lost, of course.
Do you?
[This was originally posted at my tech blog, before I split off political and philosophical rants here and left the stuff I actually know anything about over there. I'm posting this here now because in thinking about the Global War on Terror and its impact on civil liberty, I wanted to get back to basics. I now see several flaws in my reasoning and perspective, and will address those in an upcoming post. ]
I've been thinking lately about human rights. You know, the kind for which men died at Normandy, at Lexington, and Golgotha.
That kind which stem not from the lifestyle to which you are accustomed, not from your power to secure them, nor from government largesse, but those which you have by virtue of your existence.
Warning: I have made no effort to keep the following suitable for the small-minded in general nor for Hate Crimes Commissioners in particular. Others may read freely on...
...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed....
A commenter at IMAO describes the fun to be had in arguing with liberals in libspeak.
People in our community need the empowerment of guns to stop warlike people. Women need to be empowered by guns to keep aggressive and out of control men from rape and domination. Guns build healthy communities where everyone can live in peace.
Lately I've noticed a trend of sorts, or perhaps it's a theme that has always been there: liberals think that famous conservatives are speaking for the great unwashed masses of dittoheads [beware idiotic link], as if conservatives were looking for a leader to tell them how to think. 'Taint like that at all.
I think the error comes from a fundamental difference between liberal and conservative world views: are you an individual, or part of a group? Conservatives see people as individuals first, while liberals see people as members of groups. Conservatives tend to believe it takes two parents to raise a child, while liberals tend to think it takes a village.
Another possibility is that liberals want someone to speak for the downtrodden, and get used to the idea that leaders speak for the group.
Thence the annoying misconception that conservatives look to their leaders for moral and ideological guidance. Conservatives (and for the purpose of this post, libertarians) want someone to articulate the things conservatives as individuals already independently believe.
The conservative movement is all about ideas, not personalities, coalitions, or leaders. There are conservative groups, of course, but their beliefs are not coordinated or cross-checked. The notion that a message would come down from on high about what to believe is so silly it feels like a straw man, yet that appears to be how liberals think conservatives get their beliefs.
What is it about Liberals that makes them see an apple fall from a tree and think that apples have learned to fly?
That's a metaphor.
Rather than recognize that men are capable of evil, calling evil what it is, and insisting that those who engage in it be punished, liberals believe that if only the tools by which we commit our acts of evil were removed, we would no longer commit the evil.
Liberals like Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich want to take guns away from people. Why? Because people use them against each other. Pointing out the children who are hurt by gunfire, Blagojevich ignores the one who pulled the trigger and goes after the trigger, instead. In doing so he seeks to increase the power of government, a government he happens to head.
And yet men (and women) in prison fashion weapons from paperclips and toothbrushes, turning their creativity and copious free time to the manufacture of weapons. How is it that we can expect men and women in a supposedly free society to be any less creative in their pursuit of wickedness? And that is just to address the committed lawbreakers. When the otherwise law-abiding citizen is asked to choose between obeying a law that restricts his freedom of self-defense and breaking that law to defend himself and his family, he will often, thankfully, choose the latter.
Because people use nations against each other, liberals like Howard Zinn [edited 20070711, striking "\nLiberals"] want to take nations away from people. Pointing to the atrocities of men who inhabit nations, and even acts committed on behalf of nations, Zinn pleads that we forgo loyalty to mere nations and adopt it for all mankind. As if no evil was done before the advent of the nation, nor would ever be done on behalf of all mankind. Such evil will be much worse for its sanctimony.
Liberals target not only weapons and nations, but money. Knowing in their hearts that ordinary people are far less able to decide what to do with money than liberals are, naturally the ordinary folks should not be burdened with it. And the great evil done by wealthy people is manifest, for how otherwise did they gather wealth but by acts of evil? Therefore, liberals need to take all the money and use it as they see fit.
When will they learn? People are evil, sometimes more than others. That evil expresses itself without regard to the tools we have at our disposal, whether the tool be a pistol, an army, or a fat bank account. Guns, nations, and money are not intrinsically evil. But disarming people, disallowing the right to self-determination, and redistribution of wealth are.
On my way to work I pass on the highway a series of roadsigns in the spirit of the old Burma Shave advertising signs. You know the kind, a little poem written on signs placed far enough apart so you can read them out loud one line at a time.
Young ThugsThe signs aren't clickable, and that's fortunate, because apparently the site given by the last one has been hijacked by Russian parasuits.
Won't Dare Attack
If A Teacher
Might Shoot Back
Guns Save Life.com
I agree with haystack. Click the title to go to Redstate and see it all.
I have been told being left alone to live my life with as little Governmental intrusion as possible was my right until the Government deemed it necessary to intrude just the same; from marriage being redefined to satisfy a constituency to citizenship being redefined to satisfy a constituency to allowing unborn babies to be killed to satisfy a constituency to allowing criminals who have come here to profit from my generosity be called "Americans" to satisfy a constituency to giving more of my hard-earned money to "Americans" who are deemed more in need than I to satisfy a constituency to being told I am allowed to defend myself with a gun that I am not allowed to have to satisfy a constituency.How often do we read things and say, "I wish I'd said that!" because it is what we were just thinking? He concludes:
Attention political parties. The party is over...you get no money from me, and you are all open game.Attention America, you are being had and you are losing your heritage, your history, your past, and a future you are already being deprived of.
Attention Politicians. I will do everything in my power to get you fired...can you say term limits and recall?
Attention US Government. You will be forced to give me back my country, or arrest me before I go too far.
I have your shield arm, sir.
