The Ramble for 9/13/11

 Marcy, NY– I’m at the Wal-Mart Regional Distribution center, dropping off some Oatmeal and such. The roads around here are still a bit messed up from the flooding last week, but in better shape than they were then, at least. I-81 still has a serious washout north of Binghamton, for example.  Cooler, this week around here. It’ll struggle to get out of the 60’s.

• Perry and Socialist Security: I note Drudge running a story that suggests Rick Perry isn’t backing off on the Socialist Security Saga. Good.  I had been concerned based on what I was hearing, that he had. Turns out to be some editorializing from folks who would rather he didn’t get nominated. He really shouldn’t back off. Here’s why:
  

  Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s description of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” is drawing lots of criticism from rival candidates Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and Newt Gingrich. But so far at least, it’s not drawing much criticism from the voters most affected by the issue.In a new CNN poll that finds Perry at the front of the Republican pack, the Texas governor’s lead among GOP voters age 65 and older is actually bigger than his lead among younger voters. Fifty-two percent of respondents over 65 say Perry is their choice for president, versus just 21 percent who choose Romney. In the overall numbers, Perry leads Romney 32 percent to 21 percent, with Ron Paul following at 13 percent, Bachmann and Gingrich at seven percent each, Herman Cain at six percent, and Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum at two percent each.

  Republican voters over 65 also believe Perry has the best chance of defeating President Obama in next year’s general election. Perry leads Romney 58 percent to 22 percent among older voters on that question.

  Moral of the story: Voters tend to stick by people who stand for something and don’t back down. Did Reagan teach us nothing?

  Oh, and as for Perry’s point… we have 1.75 workers per SS recipient. The money’s simply not there to tap, Gang. I’ve said it before and will doubtless say it again… what we are witness to is the end of the social Welfare state, world wide. No matter who runs it, the model is simply unsustainable.  It fascinates me that this rather obvious point needs be remade continually.

• Net Favoritism is nearly law, now:  While all the other stories are going on, the FCC which is stacked with leftists, has been quietly  going about pushing what is laughingly called “Net Neutrality”… and it’s nearly law, now. Does anyone really suppose that government’s record with the net will be any better than it has been with anything else they’ve tried to take over? Most folks already know we’re over-regulated. Why isn’t government getting that message?
• The WTC:  I dunno if I’m going into NYC this week or not… I usually do at some ppoint during the week.  But it occurred to me over the weekend, that I missed one aspect of the attack on America…. That being that save pictures and movies and such, I’ve never known the NYC skyline with the World Trade Center in it.  I’d never seen the place in person. It’s only been the last year or so that I”ve been driving down there. Hard as it is for folks not a part of Western NY state, where I’m from, people often spend their entire lives without going to the big city.  It’s 400 miles away, more or less from my front door. That doesn’t alter the writings and perceptions about the place and the events surrounding it, that I’ve posted here.  But, it does give a different angle than say, a resident of Manhattan would have. I’m not sure how important that is to the events that happened, there.  But I cant help but feel I missed out on something important.
• Speaking of 9/11, The Chicago Boys make an important point:
  

  The only part of the American national security establishment that successfully defended America on 9/11 was the portion of the reserve militia on board Flight 93, acting without orders, without hierarchy, without uniforms or weapons, by spontaneous organization and action.

  There is no more heartbreaking audio in the world, than the sounds on 911 tapes of victims pleading for help from government and dying for not getting it. There is no larger lesson of self-reliance than those same audio snips.

• Union Thuggery, Now in Government:  Glenn writes, this morning:
  

  ORRIN HATCH TO NLRB MEMBER CRAIG BECKER: Did You Write The SEIU Intimidation Manual? “U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) today wrote to National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member and former Service Employees International Union (SEIU) official Craig Becker to inquire about his involvement in union intimidation efforts. The letter sent to Becker comes after the SEIU’s ‘Contract Campaign Manual’ was made public. The handbook tells union members to purposefully try to damage their employers’ reputations by coming up with allegations against their employers and managers and to even break the law to gain leverage in contract negotiations.”…

  Well, I agree with Michelle Malkin about Hatch.  Still, credit where it’s due. And take this as a sign that the Union thugs are now a part of our government…. as if, given Obama, we didn’t know that already.

• Jim Toranto on Krugman: (There’s a visual I didn’t need…) Jim has some comments on Krugman’s nonsense, the other day, and as always with Toranto, it’s worth the read…. this time particularly so.  A taste:
  

  Krugman goes on to observe that beside Bush, Giuliani and Kerik, “a lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits–people who should have understood very well what was happening–took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?”

  He has half a point here. We remember one professional pundit who behaved quite badly, writing on Sept. 14, 2001: “It seems almost in bad taste to talk about dollars and cents after an act of mass murder,” he observed, then went ahead and did so: “If people rush out to buy bottled water and canned goods, that will actually boost the economy. . . . The driving force behind the economic slowdown has been a plunge in business investment. Now, all of a sudden, we need some new office buildings.”

  That was former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, who added that “the attack opens the door to some sensible recession-fighting measures,” by which he meant “the classic Keynesian response to economic slowdown, a temporary burst of public spending. . . . Now it seems that we will indeed get a quick burst of public spending, however tragic the reasons.” He went on to denounce the “disgraceful opportunism” of those who “would try to exploit the horror to push their usual partisan agendas”–i.e., conservatives who he said were doing exactly what he was doing.

  For all of his complaints, he himself acts shamefully if it means he can slip in a poliical point or three, in support of his devout and unapologetic left-leaning, and hatred. That alone should tell you the quality of the man, or more correctly, his lack of it. As Glenn said the other day, Krugman is a sad little man and ultimately irrelevant, except as a gauge of how far gone the left has become.