Clipping blog

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• Clearing the Browser Tabs – What’s Worse than “Crass” Thursday Edition
• The Committee is Nearly Set, And the Fix is Already In.
• The Delivery Presents – Madmen Across the Water/A Book You’ll Love

Clearing the Browser Tabs – What’s Worse than “Crass” Thursday Edition Posted: 11 Aug 2011 03:10 AM PDT I’m not sure the word “crass” is broad enough to apply to this White House. This week, the military brought home the bodies of the brave soldiers who recently died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. As a show of respect to the families of the fallen, the Pentagon kept journalists away and didn’t even send its own staff photographer to document the ceremony. That did not stop President Obama. The White House had its photographer there, and he took a picture of the President that the administration promoted on its website as the “Photo of the Day”. This happened without the knowledge or consent of the Pentagon or the military families whose dead loved ones became just another political prop in the President’s effort to shore up his plummeting approval numbers. And he’s not done. The same Barack Obama who refused to release photos of a dead Osama bin Laden because it would be “an incitement to additional violence” (though he eventually relented and released a single photo) is working with Hollywood to make a major motion picture out of the “gutsy” mission to kill bin Laden. The film is slated for release a month before the 2012 Presidential election. I’m not sure “crass” is a big enough word for this administration at all. And now, links! Dear labor unions: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Love, me. It really is a shame this judge couldn’t have throw the top brass of ACORN in jail for a decade. It would have been far less than they deserve for their rampant crimes, but it would have made a good start. Teach your children well, and don’t forget to keep your eyes on the other kids around you. It does take a village to raise a child and if we abdicate our responsibilities to the government, we will get a generation of feral young adults not all that much later. Again with the Angry White Men meme? Didn’t the left play that one out back in the 1990s? Economic growth is good, not just because it fills our coffers but also because it gives us room to dream big dreams. If all those wealthy left-wingers who constantly whine about how much more they’d pay in taxes want to do something worthwhile with their money, they could fund a project to see if this idea, found by Glenn Reynolds, would actually work. Instead of enriching bureaucrats and politicians, they could provide potable water to millions. Surely that’s worth a shot. There is crazy and there is truly barking insane. It’s the latter brand of nuts to which Standard and Poor’s reacted. This weekend marks the return of the Perseid meteor shower. I’m not quite sure how this year’s event will rate compared to others, but as heavenly fireworks shows go, pretty much any shower is a treat. Hit the link for helpful tips and good viewing hours Friday and Saturday.

The Committee is Nearly Set, And the Fix is Already In. Posted: 10 Aug 2011 01:44 PM PDT We now know the names of nine of the twelve members of Congress who will make up the Joint Committee. This committee’s job is to find at least $1.5 trillion in “deficit reduction” from the next ten years of federal budgets that will likely total more than $37 trillion. John Heyward has a good bit of analysis on the first three members from the Democratic side of the Senate and what he finds is, well, pretty much what you’d expect from Harry Reid. You may notice that Paul Ryan, the Republican’s strongest economic player, is not part of the committee. That was by his own request. He’s going to work on the budget process from his position as chair of the House Budget Committee. Already, the MSM has begun to prepare the field for the left-wing argument that the only reasonable solution involves some budget cuts and large tax increases on “the rich” in the name of “shared sacrifice”. CNN is out of the gate early with a poll that says that very thing (via memeorandum). Most Americans want a special congressional committee tasked with drafting a long-term solution to the nation’s mounting federal deficits to include tax hikes for the wealthy and businesses and deep cuts in domestic spending, according to a new national survey. [...] According to the poll, 63 percent say the super committee should call for increased taxes on higher-income Americans and businesses, with 36 percent disagreeing. And by a 57 to 40 percent margin they say the committee’s deficit reduction proposal should include major cuts in domestic spending. This is, essentially, the first option CNN included in the poll about which I wrote earlier in the week – the option that did not enjoy bipartisan support. If you look at the details of the poll, you’ll find that those of us who are opposed to big government oppose the notion of raising taxes on people who create jobs when the unemployment rate has only been under 9 percent twice since April, 2009. Big surprise, huh? On the other hand, the option that does enjoy the support of every demographic group CNN could find is no longer a part of its new poll. While this new poll did include substantial budget cuts, which is the first part of the universally-favored “Cut, Cap, and Balance” plan, it left out the other two parts. I can’t imagine that we’ll ever get out long-term debt under control without some way of bringing the size of our government down to a sane percentage of GDP, which is what the “Cap” part of CCB would do. More importantly, the CNN poll (and the accompanying story) left out one important fact. Unless I’m horribly wrong, the entire Joint Committee becomes moot if Congress passes a Balanced Budget Amendment. Again, CNN found that the BBA polled better as a “necessary” way to control the federal budget than CCB (74% to 66%). As I’ve written before, I’m not as enraptured with the Balanced Budget Amendment as many of my conservative friends, but it’s not a bad idea. It has a lot of merit and, more importantly for you political pragmatists out there, over 60 percent Americans who call themselves “liberal” like it. But CNN didn’t even see fit to mention it, because if they do, they’d have to also admit that more people want the amendment than want to raise taxes on “the rich”, and we can’t have that meme floating around, now can we? UPDATE: Did I mention the fix is in? Here’s Greg Sargent, unofficial re-writer of Democratic Party press releases blogger for the Washington Post with a gripping report of how the Democrats, who named John “Tea Part Downgrade” Kerry and Patty “Chief Senate Democratic Fundraiser” Murray to the Joint Committee, are playing “softball” (via memeorandum)

The Delivery Presents – Madmen Across the Water/A Book You’ll Love Posted: 10 Aug 2011 12:09 PM PDT If Episode 106 sounds good, you can give most of the credit to SMPMike. The internet connection at The Delivery Broadcast Central was as bad last night as I can remember and we had to contend with several dropped connections and a few sound quality problems. However, SMPMike made everything work out well and the only casualty was the introductory blurb at the beginning of the show. The loud and ongoing death of a once-great England hurts my heart and roused me to a little bit of passion this week. We here in the States can take some instruction from the burning, pillaging, and looting we’ve seen on our television sets the past few days. Indeed, we must take instruction, because what’s happening all across England will happen in our cities if we do not exert ourselves now. In a way, my second-half guest Amelia Hamilton is one of the bright and shining few who will contribute to the revival of our shrinking American spirit, if we are resolved to revive it. Her book One Nation Under God: A Book for Little Patriots is exactly the chlorine we need in the well-polluted cultural pool in which our kids life, whether we wish them to or not. Amelia is very talented and her book is charming and educational, with a message of unabashed love for America that you know resonates very strongly with me. She has my unqualified endorsement (and in the interest of full disclosure, I get nothing for saying so from her but her thanks). The Delivery - Episode 106 This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

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