He that wrestles with us
strengthens our nerves,
and sharpens our skill.
Our antagonist is our helper.
Burke
Guest Body Slam of the Day
"The Zimmerman controversy will eventually go away, but Sharpton, like herpes, is forever." - Jonah Goldberg.
He'll break out again when the mainstream media finds another politically incorrect event to exploit.
Insight on
"The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later." - William Jennings Bryan. Such is the reasoning of a populist whore, like "finger-in-the-wind" Bill Clinton.
"Liberalism's whole approach to racial issues is to reverse engineer from results to causes. Whatever the issue -- from the number of Ph.D.s to the number of business loans -- liberalism looks first to inequality of results and then postulates that the cause must be racism or sexism or some other institutionalized bigotry." - Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg has a separate discussion of trolling; I'm somewhat surprised that he didn't also targeted typically one-sided moderator/interviewer. For example, MTP moderator Gregory routinely engages in gotcha interviews with conservatives, but almost never with "progressives".
Abuse of statistics is typical with "progressives", particularly the 77-centers (ideological feminism), the 1% conspiracy theorists, etc. "And then some magic happens" These intellectual hacks believe that people, including educated ones, are making business decisions based on superficial reasons, as if somehow the KKK has infiltrated and controls the organizations. Do managers make mistakes or bad decisions? Yes, and maybe a few make politically incorrect decisions. But, for example, if I thought women were earning below market and productivity, I have every reason to hire every underpaid woman I can find and exploit my competitor's stupidity.
Obama Scores Another JOTY Nomination
“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” Did this refer to the fact that the Martin autopsy revealed marijuana in his system? "If a white male teen would have been involved in this scenario, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different." This is a racist smear, pure and simple, unworthy of any legitimate President. It is an intellectually lazy, dishonest, morally bankrupt, presumptuous counterfactual. He has no way of knowing that.
Most of us know of people, white or otherwise, whom have committed horrific crimes, were school bullies, etc. I recently mentioned my late paternal aunt picking me up at Newport for a weekend visit; as my aunt drove under overpasses, there were kids on the overpass throwing snow-packed rocks at passing cars, including my aunt's. They weren't black kids. As for the Zimmerman incident, let's recall that Martin had recently moved to the neighborhood, and Zimmerman did not know him. There had been a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood. There could have been a variety of reasons that raised Zimmerman's curiosity including nonverbal responses to Zimmerman's approach. If Zimmerman was following from behind, and Martin was wearing a hood, Zimmerman may not even have realized that Martin was black depending on his viewing angle. (I've worn workout hoodies in colder weather in the past.)
But if we grant for the sake of argument that Zimmerman was guilty of politically incorrect "racial profiling", I quoted Martin Luther King, whom had noted that in some cities blacks committed crimes in higher percentages--even multiples--of their 13% share of the US population. We could make a similar point about radical Muslims and suicidal terrorist activities. To some extent, we are often judged based on things like appearance; for instance, I'm overweight; a lot of people make judgments about fat people; I'm also Franco-American, Catholic, left-handed, a techie, a former professor, and a Tea Party member. People often have unfair preconceptions; for example, I once dated a woman 2 inches taller; she admitted that she thought I wouldn't ask her out because of her height. (Actually, it's more the other way around; a taller wife is relatively rare. Most women prefer taller men.) But even if people choose a spouse based on superficial reasons like appearance, you have to deal with it; you can only control what you think and do, how you choose to respond.
Obama's description of people treating him different in the elevator, women clutching their purses, etc., is really getting into the silly season; it's derivative crap I've heard hundreds of times before. Who knows why people flinch? Maybe the lady got mugged once, and he reminded her of the mugger; maybe it's body odor or 101 other reasons. Obama seems to be playing the race card, and he's on very dangerous ground here; there are reasons Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton had problems building a coalition beyond core black support and Obama succeeded. Maybe he's preaching to the choir in the black American community and/or "progressive" academia and media outlets, but all this is divisive, and blaming the non-black 87% of the US population for problems in the black community is nonproductive; recall you had more stable (two-parent) black families BEFORE the 1960's and the Great Society. One thing that Obama had in common with Martin is their parents had split up.
But when Obama is saying that as a teenager he could have been Trayvon Martin, is he saying, as Charles Barkley might say, that he would have flipped the switch and beaten the hell out of some "creepy-ass cracker"? It's hard to believe the unflappable President would do that. I seriously doubt Zimmerman would have used his weapon unless he was attacked.
I don't know why Obama, after he unethically commented on the case, all but calling Martin the son he never had, would repeat the same mistake just as DOJ is reviewing the case for federal purposes. What kind of legal training did he get at Harvard? He has no sense of the boundaries between the Executive and Judicial Branches of government.
Raisins, Marketing Orders, and the Bill of Rights
I covered this topic a while back. To summarize, the FDR Administration was deathly afraid of deflation. They resorted to manipulate market prices; by keeping supplies of raisins artificially low, they can ensure a high enough price for raisins. The government essentially wants growers to sell to middlemen and the middlemen set aside a percentage of the crop for the government. The government can sell its raisins where they won't undermine domestic prices, e.g., foreign markets, or versus buying them on the market for school lunches, give them to the program. In theory any raisin reserve profits should trickle back to farmers. This system is the hubris of a planned economy and works against the interests of consumers, whom would benefit from lower prices.
The "progressives" see this as just another application of the central government's taxing authority, but the growers rightly see it as theft of property, which the Bill of Rights prohibits without just compensation. Marketing orders are intrinsically bad economics; they are arbitrary (you can manipulate prices of anything from toothpicks to big screen TV's), and they reduce the incentive to innovate and reduce costs, enabling efficient suppliers to gain market share at lower prices.
Political Humor
(HT Jonah Goldberg). The People's Republic of California voted for Biden twice, but....
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Michael Ramirez and Townhall |
The Beatles, "Eleanor Rigby"
