Throwing Obama under the bus

It’s started.

Those occasional grumbles of discontent suddenly became an avalanche of criticism, to the bemusement of many on the right.

The ground may be shifting.  But in which direction?

Today’s Wall Street Journal carried an oped entitled “The United States of Throw the Bums Out.”  In it, former Clinton pollster Douglas Schoen and former Carter pollster Patrick Caddell wrote:

...the Obama administration has launched an estimated $125 million publicity campaign.  Their goal is to communicate that individual components of the [health care] bill are indeed popular...

If the Obama administration is unable to sell the health-care law... the president’s hopes of winning re-election... will deteriorate.

Note carefully what these two likely-liberals are saying:  Everything has now come down to how well the administration does its “sales job.”  (The possibility that the law might be made more attractive-- just a bit-- by fixing one or two bad ideas is not even considered.) It’s all about execution.

The progressives/leftists face electoral disaster.  Every day there’s more bad news.  The realities are catching up with the dream.  The natives are restless, and there’s danger of being swept out of control.  So what’s a good progressive to do?

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and in this case the desperate measure is called sacrifice.

There’s mounting evidence that the current mess is a direct consequence of your lousy ideas.  The opposition will try to say this.  They must be countered.  To defend the agenda, create a distraction:  Start a noisy fuss about “leadership,” and hope they’ll be sucked in.  Throw your leader under the bus.

Because while making the argument “all about Obama,” will not be pleasant, it does have a number of attractions.

It’s about personality.  The Agenda has been executed, with unfortunate results?  Well, that’s all because of bad management, or inexperience, or naïvité... right?  It’s possible the man’s not up to the job.  But he sure didn’t get any help!  (And make certain that the usual suspects continue screaming “racism,” too.)

It draws attention to a lousy president, away from a lousier Congress.  Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Arlen Specter, Barbara Boxer, Barney Frank?  2000 page bills that nobody reads?  Bailouts for buddies?  Congressmen that punch citizens?  Hey, they’re hard-working, innocent victims!  Why, if there had only been some direction from the White House, all would have been ethics, rainbows, unicorns, and 5% unemployment.  So don’t blame Congress, re-elect them!

It will help the DSM suppress any substantive discussion of the progressive agenda.  They don’t have to report on dull stuff like rising taxes, rising unemployment, danger at home and abroad, or a lousy economy when they can fill the space with the daily he-said-she-said and “I’m offended!”  Besides, superficiality is a good thing: The poor, unenlightened proles might learn something they don’t like.  And there’s nothing wrong with the progressive agenda that doing it again-- twice as hard-- wouldn’t fix.  (After all, nobody’s ever implemented Communism correctly, either -- oh, snap!)

So make a bunch of noise, and hope those stupid teabaggers (and stupider Republicans) follow your lead.  Let ’em have Obama.  He’s just one guy.  It’s far better that the public believe the present mess is his fault, rather than begin to realize that it’s the predictable outcome of the leftist/progressive agenda. Discrediting Obama can be endured.  Discrediting the Program would be fatal.

(Besides, the president has another two years. Maybe his “sales job” will have “taken” by then.)

But should Obama have to be brought down, always remember that the bedrock of the progressive agenda is the sacrifice of the individual for the good of the collective.  You’ve done it before; don‘t shrink from doing it now!

After all, that’s the progressive way.


UPDATES:

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The National Rifle Association and freedom of speech

Lots.of.discussion about the deal the National Rifle Association made to get itself exempted from what the Wall Street Journal calls “the latest Congressional attempt to repeal the First Amendment.”

Folks are saying it was the right thing to do (or, at least, made the best of a bad situation), because the NRA gets its strength by being a “single issue” powerhouse, and that First Amendment issues shouldn’t fall within its purview (and besides, they could’t do anything about it, anyway).

Well, here’s my Og-styled view of that attitude:

(And should the bill pass, expect that NRA “exemption” to disappear soon after, in the name of “fairness,” don’t-cha-know.)

Oh, by the way, since when did supporting the First Amendment and advocating freedom of speech become a Republicans-only position?


Elsewhere:
Later (100620):

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Peggy’s rose-colored history

Peggy Noonan:

On 9/11 we were rocked but held together.

No.

For example:
Associated Press:

Beyond the immediate needs to improve security and dismantle “organizations of destruction,” Obama wrote, lay the more difficult job of “understanding the sources of such madness.”  He wrote of “a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers,” of “embittered children” around the world, of the seeds of discontent sown in poverty, ignorance and despair.

The towers had yet to fall when the “progressives” began bleating “Why do they hate us?” and calling for “understanding” of “root causes.”  Most were soon shouted down, but their minds remained unchanged:  Soon they’d be trotting out the same arguments to oppose any concrete action by the “eeeevil Boosh.”

The progressives *never* “held together” with the rest of America  after 9/11 (although they often loudly proclaim that they did).  Just because Noonan the Nitwit has forgotten her liberal buddies’ behaviour doesn’t mean the rest of us have.


HT to “Editor” for the AP link.

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ObamaCare Easter Egg: Paperwork explosion!

Warren Meyer:

A little noticed provision in the recently passed health care reform bill will require every payment to corporations over $600 to be reported on a Form 1099 to the IRS, including payments for the purchase of merchandise and services.  This provision takes effect in 2012.

The current law requires a Form 1099 to be submitted to the IRS when your business pays more than $600 for rent, interest, dividends, and non-employee services if the payments are made to entities other than corporations.  Currently, payments made to a corporation and payments for merchandise are not required to be reported.

To file the required 1099, a business will have to obtain and keep track of a Taxpayer Information Number (TIN) from every vendor before submitting the 1099 to that business and the IRS.  Under current tax law, one copy of the form is sent to the IRS, and another copy is sent to the person to whom the business made the payments.

This is an horrible additional burden for any business, as for most businesses the only 1099s filed are for payments of dividends.  My own (micro) company, for example, typically issues two or three 1099s each year. In 2012, that number will grow to probably 100.

Warren continues:

My small business has over a thousand vendors.  I would have to hire someone full time for a month to do this.

And there’s another little catch: If 1099-requiring payments are made to someone who fails to supply either a TIN or a Social Security number^[1], the payer must reduce that payment by a “backup withholding” amount, and forward that difference to the IRS.

So let’s see: Track every vendor.  If their payments cross $600, obtain a TID.  Otherwise, start withholding taxes.  Prepare and mail a 1099 every year (and don’t forget those copies for the government!).

None of which makes any contribution to the bottom line.  And all of which will affect every business.

And the government gets far more information, in far more detail than it ever has had before, about the commercial activities of the citizens.

Chris Edwards at Cato@Liberty says:

I’m stunned that there wasn’t a broader debate before such a costly mandate was enacted...

And I’m shocked that there might be gambling going on over there at Rick’s, too. (spit!)

As I’ve said before, I’m over giving those weasels any benefit of the doubt.  There are hundreds of lawyers in Congress: There’s no reason they shouldn’t have known exactly what they were doing.

Finally this note, from one of Warren’s commenters:

I can’t believe the several blogs and news sites where I’ve read of this, no one, not even the commenters, recognize what’s going on with this new requirement.  It most certainly is the basic framework data collection that would be required to enforce a VAT.  Now does it’s insertion into ObamaCare make sense?

LATER (100506 20:15), elsewhere:
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Paging Gilbert and Sullivan

The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. Holds Suspects After Pirate Standoff

A U.S. Navy warship sank a pirate vessel and detained five suspects Thursday after Somali pirates fired at it...

Whoops!

...The USS Nicholas took fire just after midnight from a small skiff...  The guided-missle frigate, which was patrolling west of the island nation of the Seychelles, fired back, chased down the skiff, and detained three people on board...

You mean there was something left afterward?  Pity...

...After the exchange of fire, officials

What?  Not, “a party of burly Marines, armed to the teeth”?

boarded the skiff, detained the men, confiscated ammunition, and sank the boat.

Thus getting 2/3 of the process right.

...Thursday’s action perplexed some fellow Somali pirates.

First Pirate:  “They took on a f*in’ guided-missle frigate?”
Second Pirate:  “And those idiots are still alive...?”
(beat)
Omnes:  “WHY?”

Reached by phone in the central Somail coast pirate town of Xaradheere, pirate Abdi Fanah...

Wait a minute... is this The Wall Street Journal or Weekend Update?

...said: “Some of our friends have approached a warship and some were captured, along with the boat.”

I guess that’s one way of putting it...

Mr. Fanah said that he had spoken with his colleagues

It is Weekend Update!

...He didn’t know why they had attacked the warship.

Possibly drugs were involved?
???
Erm, meanwhile:

...Officials said the suspects would remain in custody...until a determination is made about what to do with them.

Hey, they’re pirates, right?  Well I have an idea...

Prosecuting suspected pirates detained in international waters has proved difficult.

...and it doesn’t have anything to do with “prosecution.”

Coming soon, a new operetta,

Related:

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Saving daylight again

Time again to haul out the daylight savings chart...


...and take a look at what happened at 2:00 this morning.

For those of us here in Indianapolis, when we step out the door this morning, we’ll be finding it much darker than it was a day or so ago. We had just managed a sunrise before 7:00 (or would have, if it hadn’t been pouring rain yesterday), but this morning’s sunrise has been bumped back to almost 8:00.  We won’t see the sun peek over the horizon before 7:00 until April 20 - more than a month from now.  In fact, at 7:00 we’re all the way back unto what the astronomers call “nautical twilight,” which is as good as total darkness for those of us in urban areas.

At the other end of the day, those of us whose homeward commute ends around 7:00 will suddenly find it full daylight all the way until we pull in the drive. The extra end-of-day sunlight is probably a good thing, as everyone on the road will be dozy from having gotten up an hour earlier Monday morning.

Worth it?  It’ll take me a week or so to get my biorhythms adjusted, and the later sunrise won’t help.

My previous rants about DST are here and here.  For the OCD-ers among us, I’ve put a 2010 version of my earlier “How dark is it?” charts below the break...
more...

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Stupid Party sellouts stupidly stagger summit-ward

Dave Camp, R-MI (and Is anybody running against this guy in the primary?):

“I think what we have to do is keep it on the policy and really continue to describe that we have listened to the American people, and anyone listening to the American people would say scrap this bill and begin again, and let’s begin again by focusing on lowering costs...”

No, dummy, the only purpose of this health insurance summit is to undermine the Republicans and give cover to the Democrats.  It’s stupid for the Republicans to buy into it.

It makes no difference whether the Republicans offer anything.  The Democrats hold all the power, let them come up with a plan that the public will accept, or let them fail and suffer the consequences.

There is no need to pass anything.  The Republicans have the best argument: The Democrats already spent all the money, so there’s none left for anything else.  Plus public sentiment backs no-action:

In a New York Times/CBS poll [!!!] released this month, 56 percent said they preferred “a smaller government providing fewer services” to 34 percent in favor of “a bigger government providing more services.”  Some 27 percent named jobs as the most important issue confronting the nation while 25 percent said the economy.  Thirteen percent said health care, fewer than the 16 percent who said “other.”

13% - the best the liberal press could come up with - and 56% saying they want smaller government. Neither is a clarion call for immediate action.

Regardless of the outcome, Republicans will get no credit.  The Democrats and the press - but I repeat myself - will label the Republicans as mean-spirited obstructionists.  It’s as inevitable as Lucy yanking away Charlie Brown’s football, and it won’t be any different this time, either.

Finally, beware the chimera of “bipartisanship.”  For the Democrats and the press (but I repeat myself) “bipartisanship” means Republicans giving up Republican principles to give the Democrats what they want.  This time, just say no.  Your base is watching: Any move away from “no” will be taken as more RINO-willingness to sell out to socialism-lite.   You don’t want to go there.

And as for that message from the American people, Rep. Camp?  You should have stopped at “scrap the bill.”


Provoked by: Bashir, commenting at Daily Pundit, where there’s more discussion.

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OK, RINO apologists. Tell me where I’m wrong.

In the comment thread of this post at Daily Pundit, poster “TraitorHater” lamented:

Why Republicans don’t run on a program of deregulation and ending corrupt interventionism picking winners and losers this year, which because of the lousy current House and Senate campaign committees it appears they won’t do, I can’t understand.

To which I replied: Because:

• Because deregulation reduces the power of the government and, by extension, the Republican establishment.
• Because without regulation it’s harder to do favors for your buddies in business or in the pressure groups…
• …or screw the folks who aren’t your buddies, which makes it harder to extract protection money campaign contributions.
• Because less regulation means less lobbying -> fewer post-congressional career opportunities.  (Horrors! Ex-congressmen might have to work for a living!)
  
• Because deregulation means that people have more opportunity to do what they want, instead of what they’re told…
• …which is anathema to the political class and the “educated” (see David Brooks)
• And speaking of the “educated classes,” less regulation means less influence for the media, the academy, and the progressive internationalists/socialists generally…
• …also anathema to the political class and the “educated” (see David Brooks)

Vote ’em all out.


LATER (100120 17:55): Quoth Tam:

Nowadays we just have the Party of Big Government and the Party of Even Bigger Government and the easiest way of telling them apart is that one of them doesn't like abortion and gay cooties.

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Ability is insufficient. There must be permission, too.

Via “Mr.B,” Herbert E. Meyer on our latest intelligence screwups:

The reason our intelligence service keeps failing to connect the dots is because the officials in charge don’t know how.  And the blame lies squarely with President Obama -- and alas, with President George W. Bush before him -- for appointing managers rather than dot-connectors to run our intelligence service.

Mr.B believes the rot goes beyond the exceutives, and that we must clean house:

Like any bureaucracy, the intelligence game is full of mindless drones...

Having people who are just putting in their time towards retirement is NOT going to keep the citizens of (and visitors to) this country safe.
...
Civil service laws be damned.  Get the right folks in there, and the pencil pushing REMFS who just need to get their time in, and their proper tickets punched the hell out of the “intelligence” game.

Well yes, but...

Look, “dot-connecting” is as much an art as it is a skill, and nine times out of ten it’s the product of a judgement call.  It’s tricky under the best of circumstances, even moreso when being wrong might land the dot-connector in political hot water.

And good dot-connectors are smart- certainly smart enough to detect the unspoken messages issuing from their superiors.  What kind of messages do you suppose our dot-connectors are detecting?

What is obvious is that neither the Bush administration (which began by “declaring war on a noun”) nor the Obama administration (whose F.B.I. is busy taking sensitivity lessons from people connected with the Muslim Brotherhood) have been interested in connecting the “wrong kind” of dots. Fear of accusations of racism, international pressures, political correctness, sympathy for “revolutionaries”... whatever the reason, both administrations have continually bent over backwards, failing to name the enemy and rushing to declare each new incident “isolated.”

So it’s no surprise that, in the wake of the Fort Hood shootings, we discovered that Nidal Malik Hasan’s conduct and statements repeatedly raised concerns among his superiors and colleagues; and that each time those superiors and colleagues failed to act, instead keeping their concerns to themselves.   No surprise at all that those superiors and colleagues might have believed that connecting “Muslim” with “Jihad” or “terror” might be a career-ender.

I cannot believe that our military and our intelligence agencies have lost all  ability to connect the dots.  What I can believe is that our dot-connectors know which way the wind blows, and- consciously or unconsciously- tailor their output to avoid conclusions their superiors “don’t want to hear.”  And as long as those superiors “don’t want to hear” about Islamic terrorism, it will take something really frightening to make it across that threshold.

Which won’t be solved by replacing a few incompetent agency heads.  Permission to connect the dots has to come from the White House.

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Saving daylight: So, what’s in the account?

(My previous post, mostly about Indiana’s time follies, is here.)

First, a few definitions:

Of the three types of twilight, we who live in urban areas are probably most interested in the first, Civil twilight.  Although the sun is below the horizon, during that period there’s still enough sky illumination to allow “normal activities” without artificial lighting.  (In Indiana the length of Civil twilight varies between 28 and 33 minutes.)  At the end of Civil twilight in the evening, the sky is still light; but if you plan on doing anything outdoors it’s time to turn the lights on.  During Nautical twilight sailors at sea can still make out the horizon clearly enough to do star sightings, but for those of us on land things just gradually get darker.  By the time we urbanites reach Astronomical twilight any remaining sky illumination has usually been swamped by the glow of city lights.

Now let’s look at Daylight saving, or, rather, let’s first not look at daylight saving.  Here’s a plot of the sunrise/sunset and Civil twilight data for Indianapolis for the year 2009.  Violet is darkness; the orange bands are the periods of Civil twilight:


With daylight savings added, the plot looks like this:

As you can see, the major result is to extend the working day at the expense of the early morning.  But there are some other interesting effects:

If you prefer to “get up with the sun,” it’s harder to do under Daylight savings time.  Without DST, if your alarm sounds at 6:30, you’ll awaken to sunshine from April 1 to September 19 (172 days); and with enough light to walk out and get the paper from (roughly) March 14 to October 22 (223 days).  Apply DST, and sunrise comes at 6:30 or earlier only on the 63 days from May 15 to July 16, with Civil twilight beginning at 6:30 or earlier from April 21 to August 17 (119 days).  A 6 o’clock wakeup is worse: With DST, the sun is never in the sky at 6 or before (without DST: April 20-August 18 - 121 days), and Civil twilight is around for only 66 days, from May 14 to July 18.

You do get more light at the end of the day, just hope you don’t have kids to put to bed:  Even without DST the end of Civil twilight (remember, not darkness - that’s half-an-hour later) falls after 8:30 p.m. (2030) from May 22 to July 30.  Daylight saving makes the sky Civil-twilight-or-brighter from March 26 to September 9, with the latest end of Civil twilight at 9:50p.m. (2150) on June 26 and 27.  The golf courses love it, but pity the drive-in theater operators (or you, if you want to do some weeknight astronomy).

Eastbound drivers on the 7a.m. - 8a.m. morning commute also “benefitted” by getting to face the rising sun four times:  Between January 23 (sunrise 8:00) and March 7 (sunrise 7:08, at which point DST kicked in), from March 12 (8:00 daylight time) to April 19th (7:01 daylight), then from August 18 (7:00 daylight) to October 20 (8:00 daylight), with a final round from November 1 (7:14 standard time) to December 22 (8:00 standard).  My back-of-the-envelope calculation says DST gives them an extra 96 days of glare (and I wonder how many extra sun-in-the-eyes related accidents)!

Homeward commuters don’t have it quite as bad:  Drivers headed westbound between 5 and 6 o’clock face the sun for 29 days (from January 1 to January 28), 16 days from March 8 to March 23 (but only if their travel was 5:44 or later), and finally the 61 days from November 1 (when the end of DST moved sunset from 6:43 to 5:43) to the end of the year. Overall, 105 days under daylight, 103 without:  A wash, with the only disadvantage the sudden appearance of the setting sun on November 1.

That last congressional revision of DST dates also ensured that the latest sunrise of the year no longer falls in late December, when you might expect it. This year it took place on October 31, at 8:12 a.m..  (The latest December sunrise- actually December 30-January 8- is 8:06 a.m..  The final seven days in October have sunrises at 8:06 daylight or later, moving the end of DST to the first Sunday in November means those sunrises will always occur under daylight time.)

After the jump, “How dark is it?”

more...

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