Show me a half-dozen Republican senators attending a birther movie premiere, and I’ll pretend to believe that Olbermann went to the Ivy League Cornell.
Category: Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day
Where Democrats have President Obama, principles, and a new argument about consumer protections, Republicans have an enthusiastic, self-contained base that is ready to work to defeat Obama’s signature initiative. (On some level, this isn’t _really_ about health care: it’s about anxiety and anger at government, and at the Obama administration.) Democratic members are left to sell a series of principles that are popular, but which have been obscured by the focus on Washington sausage making.
[….]
The president, the vice president and the Cabinet will be out in force to make arguments, some of them good arguments, in favor of the need for health insurance reform. The goal of the opposition — of Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity — isn’t to change minds; their activists know what they believe already: it’s to make noise. Making noise scares members of Congress. And Democrats are vulnerable to panics.
That said, if the only people who show up at the constituent meetings are angry, talking-point-spewing ideological opponents of the president, then maybe the maybe the effect of the meetings will attenuate.
Quote of the Day
I have to admit I love to beat up on Goldman; I do it for The Daily Beast and on CNBC every chance I get. I also have to admit cheering Matt Taibbi on when I first read his Rolling Stone article.
But in the end it does no one any good to travel in conspiracy theories. Is Goldman too powerful? Maybe. Was it too big to fail back in September? Given the size of its balance sheet, Goldman’s demise would have made Lehman’s look insignificant. (And while we’re at it, conspiracy theorists, let’s put to rest once and for all that Lehman was allowed to die to remove one of Goldman’s main competitors. Yes, Lehman was competitive with Goldman in the bond market, but the only reason to bail it out was to keep the systematic risk from infecting Goldman. In letting Lehman go under, the government actually put Blankfein and company in greater peril.)
A bigger issue lost in all the back-and-forth about the firm’s connections, trading habits, and where Lloyd Blankfein was the night of September 15, 2008 when Lehman went bust, is that the American taxpayer is right this very moment subsidizing Goldman’s risk taking. That’s a scandal no one seems to want to talk about.
Quote of the Day
Israelis have learned the hard way that reality cannot be ignored and that ideology offers no protection from danger. Four wars and a constant battle against terrorism sobered them up, and made them far less susceptible than most audiences to the Obama speeches that charmed Americans, Europeans, and many Muslim nations. A policy based in realism would help the Palestinians prepare for an eventual state while we turn our energies toward the real challenge confronting the entire region: what is to be done about Iran as it faces its first internal crisis since the regime came to power in 1979.
Mrs. Clinton recently decried “rigid ideologies and old formulas,” but the tension with Israel shows the administration is—up to now—following the old script that attributes every problem in the region to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while all who live there can see that developments in Iran are in fact the linchpin of the region’s future. The Obama administration’s “old formulas” have produced the current tensions with Israel. They will diminish only if the administration adopts a more realistic view of what progress is possible, and what dangers lurk, in the Middle East.
Picture and Quote of the Day
I saw this picture over at HotAir. Which I think they meant as humor. That was until I saw one of the comments. That is when I got the lump in my throat.
Here’s the picture:
Related Sound Clip:
Quote:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”
Many people forget; that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Registered Republican; according to one of his nieces.
My friends; the dream is being realized.
Update: The American Thinker has a great piece on this subject.
Others: NO QUARTER, Moonbattery, alicublog, Jules Crittenden, Riehl World View, Conservatives4Palin.com, Atlas Shrugs, Stop The ACLU, Wake up America, Pajamas Media, Fausta’s Blog and The washington times Blogs
Quote of the Day
There is no evidence Iran has built the cascade to raise LEU to highly enriched weapons-grade uranium, or that the facilities even exist to do this. The Iranian regime has declared it has no intention of building nuclear weapons, indeed, that their possession would be a violation of Koranic law.
And the United States has not rescinded its own National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 that Iran, in 2003, abandoned its weapons program.
Israel has been saying for years an Iranian bomb is months away.
Where is the proof? Where is the evidence to justify a new U.S. war in the Middle East to destroy weapons of mass destruction that may not exist in Iran, as they did not exist in Iraq?
Iran may wish to have a nuclear deterrent, considering what happened to neighbor Iraq, which did not. But the idea that the regime, having built a nuclear weapon, would launch it on Tel Aviv and bring massive retaliation by scores of Israeli nukes on Teheran and other cities, killing millions of Iranians and all the leaders and their families of all factions of this disputatious people, seems like total madness.
For Israel to launch a war on such reasoning would seem to meet Bismarck’s definition of preemptive war as “committing suicide out of fear of death.”
America lived for decades under a threat of nuclear annihilation. We relied on a policy of containment and deterrence, outlasted the Soviet regime in a 40-year Cold War, and are now at peace with Russia.
Ahmadinejad is not so tough a customer as Stalin, Khrushchev or Mao, who talked of accepting 300 million dead in a nuclear exchange. Moreover, Ahmadinejad has no nukes, no authority to take Iran to war, and is looking like a very lame duck before his second term has begun.
And when one looks to U.S. and Iranian interests, they coincide as much as they conflict. Iran detested the Taliban before we took them down, and no more wants them back than do we. Iran is even more pleased with the Shia regime we brought to power in Baghdad than we are.
Iran needs technology to restore its depleted oil and gas fields, and an end to sanctions to restore an economy whose disintegration helped put the regime in crisis and lose it the support of its young.
Obama should tell the Israelis, “Cool the jets!” literally.
Quote of the Day
At the same time, there may be emotional and practical limits to public patience when confronted with the anti-white vibes of those whom the masses empowered. The public reaction to Obama’s statements about the police “behaving stupidly” in dealing with Gates made me think that while voters will put up with a leftist black president who pushes quotas, they don’t want him to show his true feelings too openly. Obama pushed the envelope, by taking the side of a mouthy race-hustler against an immaculately liberal white policeman and his black fellow-officer. What then happened indicates that some white people are suddenly beginning to wake up to political reality.
Quote of the Day
Yet it takes a good dose of rationalization to convince oneself that something only racial is “racist.” This may be easy for the left, but for those on the right it probably takes a bit more effort. After all, many liberals are so detached from reality, so solipsistic and relativistic, that they mistake their feelings for Truth. They have the lie on retainer. Conservatives, on the other hand, embrace it only occasionally, as a consultant.
Another difference between the right and left is that we traditionalists know we’re called to be better than that. We know that the Truth will not only set us free and carry the day when the last chapter is written, but that it’s all we have. The lie will never serve us like it does the liars. That is, unless, as they have done, we make it our master.
And the Truth is the point. Whenever we peddle that lie called the race card, we contribute to the mass delusion and lessen the chances that the Truth will be known, all for some momentary political gain. We trade something beautiful for thirty pieces of silver. Liberals make this a practice, and it’s why they’re contemptible. But, remember, silver is all they have.
As for my friends on the right, for the moment, I could be even madder at you. After all, your trespass is the greater. You forced me to defend Barbara Boxer.
Quote of the Day
- Thomas Friedman’s house
Well, obviously, being a renowned expert, Thomas Friedman, like Al Gore and the Prince of Wales, needs a supersized carbon footprint. But you don’t – you can get by beating your laundry on the rocks down by the river with the native women all day long.
“Environmentalism” is a government restraint on economic advance and, therefore, social mobility. In other words, it’s a way to ensure you’ll never live like Tom Friedman.
Quote of the Day
So my hope is that we never have to have that stand-up. But I’m certainly willing and ready for the fight if this administration continues to try to force their very expansive government philosophy down our collective throats.
