Clipping blog

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• Clearing the Browser Tabs – Getting Our Act Together Saturday Edition
• “Because I am an American. And I Can”
• Left-Wing “Economist” Vanquishes Paul Ryan with Impeccable Logic and Liquor Breath, but Mostly with Liquor Breath

Clearing the Browser Tabs – Getting Our Act Together Saturday Edition Posted: 09 Jul 2011 03:10 AM PDT Let’s do two stories above the bullets today, what do you say? I figure I owe you an extra juicy link today since I failed to delivery a Clearing the Browser Tab post yesterday. I took a bit of an unscheduled day off and caught up on sleep and some other non-internet work I needed to get done. Okay, so there’s this special election set to happen in California to fill the vacancy left by the retirement of Democrat Jane Harman. Her hand-picked replacement, Janice Hahn, is a member of the Los Angeles City Council and a bog-standard left-winger. She loves her some big government and rich unions and, at one point, thought the answer to gang violence was paying a bunch of gang members to tell other gang members to stop being in gangs. Ladd Ehlinger, working on the behalf of a group opposed to Hahn, made an ad that immediately caused most of Hahn’s allies and more than a few right-wingers, to recoil in disgust. See, Ehlinger decided to make a point of Hahn’s gang program in a way that would be both unmistakeable and unforgettable. He succeeded wildly. As it happened, the particulars on which Ehlinger based his ad were dead, solid correct and the race, which experienced professional politicos who denounced Ehlinger thought was in the bag for Hahn, is now very nearly a tossup. Vindication? Oh, you bet. And while we’re speaking of knee-jerk reactions from people on the right who should know better, let me point you to this piece by Sister Toldjah on a fabricated hit-piece against Michele Bachmann and how a fake meme can hit the MSM almost instantly. I spent some time on Twitter yesterday nearly yelling at quite a few people on the right who decided, on the strength of only TP’s characterizations of the pledge Bachmann signed, that she had gone entirely around the bend and they would not vote for her under any circumstances, even if that meant choosing to sit out the election in 2012. I’d like to think we on the right are smart enough to see where anti-Republican stories originate before we grab the pitchforks and torches but obviously that’s not always the case. Hopefully we’ll get our act together in time for the election next year. And now, links. I sincerely hope someone gets this open letter into the hands of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. They need to read it. After months of demagoguery and outright lies about the Republican stance toward the debt limit, the President and his allies have not only not carved any Republicans away from the pack but they did manage to lose an important Democrat. Good going, guys! With every passing day, the evidence mounts higher that the Vote Buying Act Stimulus Bill was nothing but a colossal, expensive failure. I love the Ricochet Podcast, but I hate when they have political consultant Mike Murphy on the show. EJ Hill noticed that Murphy tends to bring out “the claws” among Ricochet readers and wants to know why. I think the answer is simple: he’s an arrogant jerk whose chief political allegiance is to whoever is paying him at the time. Rut roh. Apple’s OS X Lion release may not be the operating system we’re looking for (via Techmeme) If you’re an author (especially if you do horror or fantasy fiction), this reprint of H.P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book should supply you with quite a few ideas. This may be NASA’s photo of the year. Take a good look because you won’t see it’s like on American soil for a long time.

“Because I am an American. And I Can” Posted: 08 Jul 2011 09:49 PM PDT There are days I am immensely proud of my friends. Today is one of those days. Prompted by the story about which I wrote in this post, Ben Domenech posted a series of tweets that together are as eloquent a defense of the wonder that is America as I’ve ever read. With his permission, I  aggregated them and present them to you here. Some people covet what others have, and seek to destroy them or steal it away. Others decide to work hard and earn it for themselves. The wonderful thing about America is that the barriers of class are nothing compared to the will and strength of human endeavor. As a kid, we only had hand me downs, never went to restaurants, our neighborhood was crime ridden. My first house is now a crack house. I had no idea how poor we were by comparison to friends who had new everything, beach houses, real milk. But with commitment, hard work, and long hours, you can achieve a better life not just for yourself, but for your family. A kid who had nothing but a mother and grandparents who loved him can become a bestselling author, a millionaire, a president. That’s what this is all about. Whether our children will have the same opportunities, the same chance to make something of themselves. To decide the life they want, to pursue it, to earn it, and to pass it on – not weighed down by the bad decisions of those who came before. My grandfather was the 7th child. Puerto Rican. No royal blood. No riches. He is buried in Arlington among the heroes. Because he earned it. A handout may be given out of pity. But in time it can become a prison for millions of lives. How quickly a safety net can become a ghetto. How easy it is to pass debt along to others yet unborn. Americans still want to work. To strive. To make something of themselves. Not to fall into the maw of welfare and food stamps. Washington tells us we need them to save us from ourselves. But their policies all too often just make those class divides brick walls. I will be able to give my kids a better life. But if I was to lose it all tomorrow, the answer isn’t to covet what another family has.  It’s to look at what they have and set your mind to the pursuit of it, to hard work and effort. It’s to say “They earned that life. And so will I. Because I am an American. And I can.” America is a country where anyone — anyone! — can take an idea, work it as hard as they can, and turn it into success that can last for generations. The greatest treasure hidden inside America is that the success we build in our lifetimes can lift up the next generation and make it just a little bit easier to build their successes which will in turn build up the generation that follows them. It’s how we’ve gone from a distant outpost of colonies, separated from most of the civilized world by great oceans, to the greatest nation on the face of the planet by a long shot. It would be criminal if we allowed petty, selfish jealousy to destroy what our fathers and grandfathers built for us. (Let me also mention that Ben and Brad Jackson make a daily half-hour podcast called Coffee and Markets that is worthy of your attention.)

Left-Wing “Economist” Vanquishes Paul Ryan with Impeccable Logic and Liquor Breath, but Mostly with Liquor Breath Posted: 08 Jul 2011 06:23 PM PDT Talking Points Memo has a story today of true heroism (via memeorandum). A brave left-wing Rutgers economist saw Paul Ryan in cahoots with evil right-wing lobbyists and actively oppressing the poor and downtrodden of America. Unable to resist the righteous fervor welling in her heart she confronted the blackguard,  spoke truth to power to him, and left him utterly speechless. Alternately, a half-drunk sanctimonious progressive had dinner in an expensive restaurant, saw Paul Ryan drinking wine, and ruined his evening by confronting him in a flurry of booze breath, hypocrisy, and left-wing platitudes. You be the judge. Feinberg, an economist by training, was even more appalled when the table ordered a second bottle. She quickly did the math and figured out that the $700 in wine the trio consumed over the course of 90 minutes amounted to more than the entire weekly income of a couple making minimum wage. “We were just stunned,” said Feinberg, who e-mailed TPM about her encounter later the same evening. “I was an economist so I started doing the envelope calculations and quickly figured out that those two bottles of wine was more than two-income working family making minimum wage earned in a week.” She was outraged that Ryan was consuming hundreds of dollars in wine while Congress was in the midst of intense debates over whether to cut seniors’ safety net, and she didn’t know whether Ryan or his companions was going to pay for the wine and whether the two men were lobbyists. She snapped a few shots with her cell phone to record the wine purchase. Where would she have been with that training in economics that allowed her to do simple math? It’s a shame that her economics degree didn’t also teach her that the money Paul Ryan and his friends spent that night belong to them and not the United States Government nor that nothing in the world prevented her from giving the money she spent on dinner to this hypothetical minimum-wage family. Which leads me to another question or three. How much, exactly, did Feinberg’s dinner cost her? How much did she and her husband spend on wine? Why didn’t she wonder how she could live with herself after dropping what had to be a couple hundred bucks on a meal when she could have given that money to the poor and needy? You know the answer to the last question, at least. Progressives live to control your life, never to moderate their own. If you could have stopped Feinberg, mid-rant, to ask her what right she had to lecture anyone in public in such an obnoxious fashion, she would have looked at you as if you had grown a pair of antenna-stalks. If you had asked her why Ryan’s bottles of wine angered her while her own dinner spending didn’t, she wouldn’t have paused for a moment of calm thought. You’d better believe she would have turned her wine-laden tirade on you. If we can blame Paul Ryan for anything, it would be for the almost apologetic tone of his interview with TPM. He should have told him to pound sand — that he was at dinner with friends, that he was complying with all applicable laws, that he resented the implication that an expensive dinner is out of bounds for any American, and that he treated the half-drunk patron with more manners than she showed him. He was far nicer than any of us would have been, I’m sure, and it should shame TPM that they couldn’t even give him credit for that. Instead, they wrote up the self-serving account of an arrogant and overaggressive woman whose skewed worldview and selfish morals happened to mesh perfectly with their own. In a way, I’m glad they’re championing Feinberg as a Hero of the Left. She is the perfect poster child for the spoiled and greedy progressives who want to run your lives so that they can continue to enjoy their expensive dinners free from a little twinge of conscience. (I stole the style of the post title from Ace, but I don’t think he’ll mind.)

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