Rabu, 29 Februari 2012

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About that RoboKerfuffle

Posted: 28 Feb 2012 12:11 PM PST

I hate robocalls. For those of you who don’t know what a robocall is, know that you’ve gotten one, even if you didn’t know what it was. You know those automated calls you get that just play a recorded message when you pick up the phone? That’s a robocall, and they are much beloved by telemarketers, bill collectors, and political campaigns because they are cheap and easy.

Recently, in Michigan where the state is about to hold its Presidential primary, one of those “friends of the candidate” groups ran a big robocall in support of Rick Santorum that was unusual because it targeted Democratic voters. Here is the text of the call (and you can hear it for yourself here).

Michigan Democrats can vote in the Republican primary on Tuesday. Why is it so important? Romney supported the bailouts for his Wall Street billionaire buddies but opposed the auto bailouts. That was a slap in the face to every Michigan worker, and we're not going to let Romney get away with it. On Tuesday join Democrats who are going to send a loud message to Massachusetts Mitt Romney by voting for Rick Santorum for president. This call is supported by hardworking Democratic men and women and paid for by Rick Santorum for president.

Dastardly, huh*?

This really is the sort of “inside baseball” stuff that gives average folks ample reason to hate politics. Political junkies love stories like this because it’s very easy to turn a nothingburger issue and blow it up into ZOMG THE MOST IMPORTANT THING EVAR. But let’s slow down for a second and look at what the story really is: Rick Santorum, who is clawing for every vote he can get in a hostly contested primary that allows anyone to vote for any candidate they please, made a fairly small effort to get Democrats to vote for him. Is that really such a terrible thing?

Oh, but the Romney stalwarts have pointed out some progressive howler monkeys like Kos have asked Democratic voters to do the same thing, because they apparently believe that Santorum is easier electoral meat for Barack Obama than Mitt Romney. Maybe he is. So what? Rick Santorum would be foolish not to try his level best to get votes from anywhere he can, and if he does end up as the nominee, there’s a chance that some of those votes can stick in the general election. Not every Democratic blue-collar voter (and Michigan is packed full of them) is a sure vote for Barack Obama nor is every Democrat a raging progressive bent on dragging us kicking and creaming into a socialist utopia. And look, it’s not as if Republican voters don’t cross over into Democratic primaries, too. Heck, sometimes even very important Republicans who aspire to higher public office do it once in a while. That Rick Santorum has chosen a similar tactic to one used by progressives does not mean that he has entered an alliance with them nor does it mean he is on their side ideologically. If you truly think so, check with your nearest mental health professional and have them crank the dosage on your medication up just a little bit.

The real question here is why Republican candidates don’t try just a little bit harder to court Democratic voters in open primary states. Eventually, the nominee is going to have to court every voter, and a small amount of effort — a little message here, a mailer there, an advertisement or campaign stop over yonder — could pay off in a few thousand critical votes in November. I am no campaign professional, but I’d think any candidate would want to pull some votes from a pool  their opponents aren’t fishing very hard. Santorum. Gingrich, and Romney have all spent quite a bit of time on television, interviewed by hostile left-wing hosts, and most of their debates were moderated by progressive foes, so why wouldn’t they attempt to woo some Democratic voters on their terms? It could keep one of them in the race long enough to win it.

*Yes, I think I need a couple caveats here.

  • I am not a Rick Santorum guy. So far as his campaign knows, I don’t even exist. I’ve gotten no calls or e-mails from any of Santorum’s people asking for my direct assistance. I met him once a couple of years ago at CPAC, and to be perfectly candid, I was more interested in meeting the guy he was with at the time, Mark Levin.
  • I do not in any way support Rick Santorum’s position on the bailouts. I opposed the Wall Street bailouts. I opposed the auto company bailouts. I opposed the Stimulus bill. I oppose the ongoing “green energy” handouts. I even oppose the current payroll tax “holiday”.

 
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Selasa, 28 Februari 2012

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The First Amendment, Explained Well

Posted: 27 Feb 2012 10:22 AM PST

Rick Santorum said something today at a campaign stop in Livonia, MI that struck me as simple but very profound.


Santorum: “I’m for separation of church and state. The state has no business telling church what to do.”
February 27, 2012 09:45 via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite
@jonward11
Jon Ward

What’s notable about that, you ask? It gets the relationship between government and church exactly right. The First Amendment does not exist to make sure that a particular church does not take over government but to protect all churches from undue government interference. The Founders were far less afraid of today’s Progressive Bogeyman, the Fundamentalist Theocracy, than they were of a situation in which the government backed one church and used its coercive might to squash other churches. They knew very well how that worked.

One of the great divides between progressives and conservatives is how they view the relationship between church and government. Progressives believe that the supposed Wall of Separation exists to prevent the government from becoming overrun by faith and morality and other icky bits of religious belief. They believe if that wall, erected by the Supreme Court in 1947, wasn’t there then the United States would slide into a theocracy, possibly run by the American Taliban.

Conservatives believe differently. We know that if everyone is allowed — and even encouraged — to pursue their own religious believes with as much vigor as they desire, there is no chance that any one religion will amass enough power to run our government. It is only when government intrudes upon the church instead of protecting the free expression of religion that the balance changes and favored religions gain advantage over those that do not have the regard of powerful government officials. That is how you get a national religion or, as we’ve seen in the United States lately, a national push to drive religion from the public square.

And, by the by, we conservatives also know it’s perfectly acceptable for a man to speak at a religious university about his religious beliefs, even if four years later he decides to run for President. We can do that without falling into a hysterical tantrum because we know that the First Amendment both allows it and constrains our government from letting that man become Theocrat-in-Chief. It’d be nice to have a President in office who knows the Constitution well enough to know how the separation of church and state should work. Granted, he’s no scholar or anything, but I think we can live with that.
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Senin, 27 Februari 2012

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You’re Not a Boiling Frog, But You Might As Well Be.

Posted: 27 Feb 2012 06:10 AM PST

I’m sure you’ve all heard that you can boil a frog to death if you put it in a pan of room temperature water, stick the pan on the stovetop, and put a low heat under it. The story goes that the temperature will rise so slowly that the frog will die because it won’t ever notice that the temperature had risen too high. Now, there is some debate about whether that can really happen or not, but for our purposes, it doesn’t matter. The concept works as a metaphor for the present day situation wherein overzealous government officials have stolen away out freedoms, little by little, until we are no longer outraged by affronts to our dignity that would have caused riots in the streets just a couple of decades ago.

Does that sound like overwrought rhetoric? I admit, I hesitated to even use the metaphor because it gets misused so often. But I think it’s accurate. Take this story from our neighbors to the north.

Jesse Sansone is a resident of Kitchener, Ontario. His daughter, who is 5 and in kindergarten, drew a picture of him with a gun fighting “bad guys and monsters”. Now, if you thought to yourself, “I like that. That’s how a little girl is supposed to think of her Daddy”, I’d say you’re pretty normal. Obviously, you would not qualify to be an Ontario government bureaucrat. Stafferss at the school school contacted Family and Children’s Services, who promptly called the police, who met Mr. Sansone at the school when he arrived to pick up his daughter and two other children at the end of the day. The police arrested Sansone and told him they were going to charge him with possession of a firearm.They separated him from his children, strip-searched him, and stuck him in a cell.

Ridiculous, right? Kind of makes your blood boil a little? Oh, but the story gets worse. I’ll go to the news report for the rest.

While Sansone was being strip searched at the police station: told to disrobe, lift his testicles and bend over, his wife was home with their 15-month-old daughter.

“They came to my house, told my wife that I had been charged with possession of firearms, that she would have to come with them, and that Sundae (their infant daughter) would have to go with the social worker,” said Sansone. Stephanie called her Mom who rushed over to take Sundae instead.

“My littlest is still in diapers with a bottle. Thank goodness my mother-in-law lives nearby,” Sansone said.

Once Stephanie got to the police station she had to wait.

“The detective was giving my wife the idea that our children were at the police station with her, just in another room at the station. She was waiting for over an hour, close to two hours, not knowing where the kids were,” Sansone said.

His children had been at Family and Children’s Services, being interviewed by social workers.

In the meantime, the police searched his house and found a gun — a toy gun that shoots those little foam darts. So, after hours of detention during which his dignity was violated in the most intrusive fashion, his kids removed from him and questioned without any of their parents in the room, and his wife taken to the police station and removed from her infant daughter, the police released Sansone. The story does not say whether he was actually charged with a crime. I’m hesitant to say he was released without charges because even though the police didn’t find a gun, there’s no guarantee they didn’t dice to charge him anyhow and let the prosecutor sort the whole thing out. So it’s entirely possible that, after a day in which he was treated not as a free citizen of a free nation but as the vassal of a totalitarian state, Sansone will have to live with a potential court trial over his head.

But even if the police released him without charges, there is no happy ending to this story. As Sansone notes several times in his account to the reporter, he had to explain to his children why the authority figures they should regard as protectors and worthy of respect took their daddy away in handcuffs. He will likely have to explain that to the youngest children several times. There is every reason to believe his young daughter, whose picture triggered the entire episode, was traumatized by it. He’s going to have to spend some time reassuring her that she didn’t do anything wrong and that she wasn’t the reason that the police took Daddy away.

Little girls should think their fathers keep them safe from bad guys and monsters. But that’s now how it works in Ontario, where the bureaucrats fulfill both roles and hold the power to put monster-slaying Daddies in jail simply because their little girls draw them as gun-toting heroes.

Now, here’s my question. When will we see the angry mobs take up their pitchforks and torches and lay siege to the Ottawa government until every one of the tyrants involved in this decision be places in stocks so that they can be properly humiliated? If this isn’t worthy of outrage, then what is? Have we all gotten so inured to the petty tyrannies of government that we’ll just read this and shrug it off? Sure, it happened in Canada and that’s an awfully long way away from most of us. We probably won’t have to worry. After all, it’s not like our government would do something as intrusive as take away a little girl’s healthy lunch because it didn’t conform to Federal Little Girl Lunch Guidelines (see Episode 134 for details).

You may not be able to boil a frog in a pot of water, but you can boil away the rugged independence of a people, and it doesn’t take that long. All you have to do is strip away the little freedoms, one by one over the course of a few decades, and pretty soon they won’t blink more than a couple times if you lock them up because their little girl drew a picture of a gun.

Nancy Pelosi’s Gasoline Lies, Linked and Debunked

Posted: 26 Feb 2012 09:30 PM PST

Jeff Goldstein has done us all a service, at great risk to his sanity. He delved into a Nancy Pelosi press release, wherein she blamed high gas prices on eeeeeeeee-vil speculators, Wall Street, Republicans, the Easter Bunny, and the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Okay, I made up the latter two, but, really what can you do with anything Nancy Pelosi says but laugh at it and pity the poor people who have to spend all day listening to her attempt to warp reality to fit her own bizarre worldview.

As it happens, Jeff did the one useful thing you could do with a Nancy Pelosi statement. He identified all the lies and put links behind them to the facts and for that, we should all be grateful. Here’s just a bit of his post, which really should live a long and useful life in your bookmarks. I guarantee you, as gas prices rise toward $4 this summer, you’re going to get a lot of use out of it.

Independent reports confirm that speculators are driving up the cost of oil, hurting consumers and potentially damaging the economic recovery. Wall Street profiteering, not oil shortages, is the cause of the price spike. In fact, U.S. oil production is at its highest level since 2003, and millions of acres have been cleared for additional development.

We need to take strong action to protect consumers from this speculation. Unfortunately, Republicans have chosen to protect the interests of Wall Street speculators and oil companies instead of the interests of working Americans by obstructing the agencies with the responsibility of enforcing consumer protection laws. They have also repeatedly opposed our efforts to end billions of dollars in outdated taxpayer subsidies for oil companies enjoying record profits.

We support efforts by the Obama Administration to expand domestic energy resources, including natural gas and renewable sources like wind and solar that create jobs in America and will end our dangerous dependence on foreign energy supplies. This can be achieved because today, the United States currently has more oil and gas rigs at work than the rest of the world combined, and imports of foreign oil have decreased.

We call on the Republican leadership to act on behalf of American consumers and join our efforts to crack down on speculators who care more about their profits than the price at the pump even if these spikes harm the American consumer and our economy.

Jeff also took a few well-placed shots at Bill O’Reilly, Hero of the People, for his shameful Pelosi impression. Do read the whole post. and follow the links so that the nest time you hear a Democrat reading the Democrat-approved talking points of the day, you’ll be able to knock them down with the practiced ease of Pelosi’s plastic surgeon shoving another quart of botox into her face.

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Mitt Romney, NASCAR…umm…Fan.

Posted: 26 Feb 2012 09:14 PM PST

I’m not going to sit here and say Mitt Romney is way out of touch with the average American. That would, I’m sure, get me attacked by hordes of stouthearted Republicans angry that I “attacked Romney from the left”. That he flings around $10,000 bets like they’re strands of beads at the most drunken Mardi Gras ever certainly doesn’t mean he doesn’t know the struggles of the working class. And, really, who among us hasn’t described over $374,000 as “not very much” money? He was totally believable when he said that he really was worried a couple of time in his life about being laid off when he had just graduated college.

No, I’d never say that Mitt Romney didn’t have his fingers squarely on the pulse of those of us who consider ourselves middle class. I’d much rather let him do it for me.

Romney was at Daytona last year and said he also has been to the track in New Hampshire. Does he follow the sport?

“Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans,” he said. “But I have some friends who are NASCAR team owners.”

Yep, that’s a real Man of the People right there. Why, you can almost imagine Mitt leaving his VIP tour of Daytona (where he hob-nobbed with a couple billionaires, car owners ,and star drivers) picking up a cold beer and some nachos, and taking his seat with the rest of the poor schlubs in the grandstands can’t you? Except, you know, he didn’t really plan on staying to watch the race, which got rained out anyhow. He had to jet back to Michigan that day for another campaign appearance.

You know, just like any common working guy.

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Minggu, 26 Februari 2012

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The Delivery Presents – Fail, Fail, More Fail, and King Cake!

Posted: 25 Feb 2012 01:36 PM PST

Episode 135 was…well, let’s just say that I do hope you have as much fun listening to it as I did making it. The second half turned into the Goofy Jimmie Fun Half-Hour of Funness and romped through the subjects of Bigfoot, my proposal to make a “Chasing Chupacabras” television show, the Nativity, and the not at all true origins of King Cake. Yep, all that in 30 minutes.

The first half? Well, let’s just say that freedom was on the menu and I, at least, am offering as much of it as we all want to take. It’s going to take some doing, and I don’t think the GOP’s “frontrunner” is the guy to help us get there, but we’re creative and determined. We can get there.

I will say that I know my “first halves” have been pretty dour lately. I think that needs to change a bit over the next couple of months. On the other hand, the news really isn’t good and I don’t see where it’s going to get much better in the near future. We’ll need a very clear view of what the situation is and where we see it headed in the future. More than that, we’ll need as many possible solutions as we can get on the table and that, really, is why I unleash the rants. The more we have frank discussions about what is wrong and what we have to do so fix it, the sooner we’ll be on the way back to real prosperity.

(Post title in part thanks to @anthropocon)

The Delivery - Episode 135

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Clearing the Browser Tabs – The “Yeah, I’m a Bad Blogger” Edition

Posted: 25 Feb 2012 11:47 AM PST

Okay, so maybe I’ve lost my blogging mojo. I’ve not written on back to back days here in forever. The Presidential primary season has ground me down to the point where my soul is a shriveled nub of cynicism and my desire to dive into the fray is lower than my desire to listen to Milli Vanilli’s Greatest Hits. Pop culture has devolved to such a mass of derivative and lazy piffle that all I really have left is a weak shake of my old man cane and a barely croaked-out “Get off my lawn”.

Yeah, it’s been rough out here for this blogger and let me tell you, I don’t see where things are going to get better in the foreseeable future. But do not despair! My loss of mojo is your link-loving gain. It’s been a while since I cleared the browser tabs, but it’s time and I have many good links to share. Who knows? Maybe writing this post will re-mojofy my blogging heart and I’ll write some proper posts.

And now, links!

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