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Nightly Ramble: All This And a Hat, Too

ramble-ballcap [1]Welcome, one and all tot he most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble.

This is the “All this and a hat, too” Edition

  • More Base!! To start with, today, we see a comment from Glenn Reynolds:

    FUNNY THAT THEY KEPT HIM SO QUIET FOR EIGHT YEARS, THEN: Poll: The more Dick Cheney talks, the more Americans seem to like him. [2].

    Well, no. It’s not odd at all.   To my mind this reinforces what I’ve been saying about the Republicans and their elections future… the way forward is to go to the Republican base, which Cheney seems to have grabbed ahold of bigtime. And that’s the one cure the undeniably withering Republican party refuses.  For all of Powell’s whining about inclusiveness [3], a look at Cheney’s approval numbers, and the people those numbers are coming from, looks like he’s got the brand of inclusiveness needed to win, identified.  The leadership won’t take the cure.

    (I think at some future point I need to write an essay on the subject of what Powell considers inclusiveness. It’s worth a look, and I’m not seeing many others even touching that subject, possibly for fear of being called ‘racist’ or whatever. )

    Frankly, I think there is very little which demonstrates the disconnect from reality that the GOP has been subjected to better than the ‘back of the us’ treatment Cheney’s been getting, vs the approval ratings he’s getting from the GOP rank and file. The GOP leadership has been missing the message all this time…and it cost them the 08 election.

  • Political Payback: Doug Ross [4] wonders if  anti-Obama campaign contributions dictate which Chrysler dealers were shuttered. I think he’s onto something, myself.
  • Out of money: So, Obama is now admitting we’re out of money. But why?  Because we  don’t have government healthcare. [5] Doubtess this is one more crisis they’d rather not waste. I mean, the Democrat party aganda wouldn’t be well served by admitting the bigtime debt Obama has racked up since assuming office is why we’re out of money. Better to blame it on a totally unconnected issue.
  • Is this Russia? Obama figures to create another”‘Czar”… an unelected power, to oversee the Internet? [6] Gee, what could possibly go wrong, here?  Ed Timperlake explores some of this at American Thinker. [7] Before we go off on a misunderstanding, here, I don’t doubt for a moment that there are folks out there waging war in this manner on us. But if we take the inept and totally inappropriate way Obama has been dealing with physical wars, and acts of war, I have no faith whatever that he or any of his appointees will have a clue how to deal with the security issues of the Internet.  In the end, this position will be used as would anything else this administration has set up… as a political tool against Americans who disagree with Obama.
  • Will the Left apologize to John Bolton? Legal Insurection asks that question [8], now that Bolton’s predictions of more Korean Nuke Testing has proven true [9].  They rather unfailingly disparaged him over his prediction, less than a moth ago, as BitsBlog readers will recall.

    John Bolton [10]

    John Bolton

  • The War on Talk Radio: Dick Morris seems to think Obama’s got a war going against Talk radio. [11] I think he’s correct in this.  Figures. We’ve got enemies with Nuclear weapons all over the world, and The Chosen One thinks Talk radio the bigger threat.
  • The coercive power of government: The aptly surnamed Ray LaHood says he wants to  “coerce people out of their cars.” Even George Will, who has been of limited use of late, already has LaHood pegged. [12]

    Furthermore, the new transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, was until January a Republican congressman practicing militant middle-of-the-roadism. He knows what plays in Peoria, and not just figuratively: He is from there. Peoria is a meatloaf, macaroni-and-cheese, down-to-earth place, home of Caterpillar, the maker of earthmoving machines for building roads, runways, dams and things.LaHood, however, has been transformed. Indeed, about three bites into lunch, the T word lands with a thump: He says he has joined a “transformational” administration: “I think we can change people’s behavior.” Government “promoted driving” by building the Interstate Highway System—”you talk about changing behavior.” He says, “People are getting out of their cars, they are biking to work.” High-speed intercity rail, such as the proposed bullet train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, is “the wave of the future.” And then, predictably, comes the P word: Look, he says, at Portland, Ore.

    gwill [13]

    George Will

    Riding the aforementioned wave to Portland, which liberals hope is a harbinger of America’s future, has long been their aerobic activity of choice. But LaHood is a Republican, for Pete’s sake, the party (before it lost its bearings) of “No, we can’t” and “Actually, we shouldn’t” and “Not so fast” and “Let’s think this through.” Now he is in full “Yes we can!” mode. Et tu, Ray?

    Where to start? Does LaHood really think Americans were not avid drivers before a government highway program “promoted” driving?

    Will goes on from there, of course and it’s well worth the read. But, here then is yet another example of a ‘Republican’ gone to the dark side in the mold of Colin Powell, and John McCain.  And the Republicans wonder why they’re losing elections?

    Oh… importantly, Will identifies that this auto-phobia has it’s roots in something other than the false meme of ‘global warming’…

    And long before climate change became another excuse for disparaging America’s “automobile culture,” many liberal intellectuals were bothered by the automobile. It subverted their agenda of expanding government—meaning their—supervision of other people’s lives. Drivers moving around where and when they please? Without government supervision? Depriving themselves and others of communitarian moments on mass transit? No good could come of this.

    That’s really what all this is about. Power over other people’s lives. It’s time we stand up against this nonsense, and push ourselves back to a time as Will says when government’s purpose was to deliver the mail, defend the shores and let citizens get on with their lives. It’s a measure of how things are going that we have “Republicans’ who don’t understand that.

  • Gun crime drops, post-Heller: Say Uncle has the details [14]. Not like I didn’t say this would happen… it always does…  but nice to see the confirmation, anyway.
  • Great interviewRight Wing News has a great interview with Mike Adams, today. [15]
  • More NORK: I commented on the NORK testing over the weekend [16], so I won’t get itno it very much here. I will, however, mention a great point made by Mario Loyola at The Corner: [17]

    Policy decisions are often a matter of choosing between different sets of problems.

    Mario Loyola [18]

    Mario Loyola

    The reason Clinton decided not to react to North Korea’s removal of plutonium-laden fuel rods from the Yongbyon reactor in 1994 — the last point in time at which the North Korean program could have been interdicted with confidence — was the fear of a North Korean conventional retaliation. In terms of pure strategic analysis, it’s inconceivable that North Korea would have reacted to the destruction of a single building by launching a suicidal attack on the South, but the 12,000 North Korean conventional missiles trained on Seoul were able to focus the attention of U.S. commanders and of the White House. So Clinton, as was his fashion, decided that it was better to let his successors deal with a big mess than risk dealing with one himself.

    Well, look at the mess. North Korea has nuclear weapons, and can detonate them at will just a few hours’ drive from an international border, and there isn’t a thing we can do about it. Even if we were willing to risk the chance of a North Korean nuclear retaliation against the South or against Japan (which we aren’t) we don’t know anything about the location of their stockpile of fissile material and warheads, so the program can no longer be interdicted. The window for effective self-defense against the North Korea nuclear threat opened and closed in 1994, on Clinton’s watch.

    Exactly. And I submit that knowing Obama to be of similar mind about negotiation being the only available tool, The North is playing a brand of hardball they’d never have played with Bush, and certainly not any conservative.  Similarly, Iran:

    When Clinton allowed North Korea to break out of the nonproliferation regime, the nuclear genie was let out of the bottle. Iran saw what North Korea had been able to accomplish armed with little more than crazy talk, and lunged for nuclear weapons of its own. It only backed off this gambit briefly in 2003, when it seemed like a secret nuclear program was not the smartest thing for a terror-sponsor to be pursuing, but 2003 turned out to be a temporary blip in the long decline of America’s effective strategic deterrent. In 1994, the appearance of a single U.S. aircraft carrier 12 miles off your coast might have been a terrifying sight. Today, we cruise three aircraft carriers in plain sight off the Iranian coast — each of them much more powerful than the carriers of the Cold War, because of precision-strike — and the Iranians basically laugh at us.

    Correct. And this kind of nonsense goes on every time we put a Democrat in the WHite House. You’d think someone would get the message by now. Aside from our sworn emenies, I mean.

  • More on Sotomayor: Rick Moran,who I’ve been spanking rather a lot of late, gets it exectly right on Obama’s USSC pick. [19]?
    Rick Moran [20]

    Rick Moran

    It’s a miserable choice for conservatives as Roger Kimball points out in his PJM post [21]on the announcement. But beyond questions of qualifications, temperament, and intellectual heft, Sotomayor is the perfect political choice for the president. Playing identity politics to the hilt, he has chosen a liberal woman and a member of an important minority group — Hispanics.

    Exactly. Now, given she was picked because she was part of a favored group, do you supopse there’s a hope in hell of her rulings not reflecting the reason behind that choice? Me, neither. And for all the screaming going on in some quarters [22], that’s exactly what’s what. The leftards can scream and bitch about racism all they like, but when they’re confronted with racism in their new found heroes, the sudden silence is of itself revealing of their true motives. As an example… do you supopse any of them will have the courage to face the blatant racism exhinited in this quote? [23]

    Sotomayor: ‘I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male’…

    As I say… Me, neither.