 And any scum-sucking scoundrel who points out that "doing nothing" already includes spending billions on renewable energies and living under thousands of regulations is, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman shrewdly noted, a traitor to humankind.
David Harsanyi
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/01/lets_do_something_--_anything_97252.html
Know what the hell is going on and what you are doing - that should be a big goal for Objectivists in general anyway.
Kurt Eichert
Hope versus Reality
I am extremely proud of my compatriots. Finally, we have decided to stand up and become a country of laws, not men. From now on, here in Honduras, no one will be above the law.
Octavio Sanchez
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0702/p09s03-coop.html
They are the biggest of the big — the Citigroups, the Goldman Sachses, the AIGs and other financial behemoths. The Obama administration doesn't want so many around anymore.
The Associated Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31711461/ns/business-stocks_and_economy
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.
Theodor Seuss Geisel
I have been on the record since the 1990s as strongly opposing hate crimes legislation. I think it is a totalitarian intrusion into citizens' thought processes. Government functionaries should not be ceded the dangerous authority to make decisions about motivation. They aren't novelists, psychologists or sibyls! Furthermore, there should be no special privileged class of protected groups in a democracy. A crime is a crime -- period.
Camille Paglia
Camille Paglia at Salon
But what would happen if administrative capability were to evolve to make it possible "to subject all of his subjects to the details of a uniform set of regulations"? That moment has now arrived.
Mark Steyn
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124631535597970609.html
[Y]ou ask him what does he regard the facts of reality as: a necessity or a contingency? He'll say, 'Of course it's a contingency, because God made it this way, and he could have made it another.' And you say, 'Good-bye.'
Ayn Rand
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
[Steve Wolfer said,] "If you insist on changing all of the dominant philosophy of our culture all at once, you can't get there from here." Well, that's the dirty little secret of the Left, isn't it? Attacks on personal liberty (e.g., bans on foodstuffs and toilets that flush) and bizarre movements toward some utopia divorced from reality (gay marriage and rights for orangutans) can proceed as fast as our chubby little minds can imagine. But real solutions to real problems (allowing drilling in ANWR, slogging it out with the terror states) are forbidden because in reality such things take time to implement and to show results. The Left doesn't want anything that will actually work and hence will actually need time to work. It wants the immediate satisfaction of forbidding, of fiats, of a false sense of ethical superiority. Never actually wanting to arrive anywhere, the Left pretends it can close its eyes and click its heels, and not wishing to get there from here it need never expend the effort to depart.
Ted Keer
Would you register for the Objectivist party?
Capitalism is liberating: You’re born a peasant but you don’t have to die one. You can work hard and get a nice place in the suburbs. If you were a 19th century Russian peasant and you got to Ellis Island, you’d be living in a tenement on the Lower East Side, but your kids would get an education and move uptown, and your grandkids would be doctors and accountants in Westchester County. And your great-grandchild would be a Harvard-educated environmental activist demanding an end to all this electricity and indoor toilets. Environmentalism opposes that kind of mobility
Mark Steyn
The Ecopalypse
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
Book of Matthew
Matthew, 5:11 King James Version
In theory, this ought to be boom time for lefties. As their jobs, homes and savings vanish, the downtrodden masses should be stampeding back to the embrace of the Big Government nanny’s apron strings. Instead, the Euro-left got hammered at the polls, the center-right survived, and a significant chunk of the electorate switched to the “far right” – the various neo-nationalist and quasi-fascist parties cleaning up everywhere from Northern England to the Balkans. My favorite of these new and mostly unlovely groupings is Bulgaria’s Attack party, mainly because of its name. I would suggest the Republican Party adopt it, but no doubt within a month or two the latest Bush scion would be claiming to stand for a Compassionate Attack movement, and governors of coastal states would be declaring themselves fiscally attacking but socially surrendering, and the whole brand would go to hell.
Mark Steyn
The New Right, er, Left
I'm a natural scientist. I'm out there every day, buried up to my neck in shit, collecting raw data. And that's why I'm so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses.
Ian Plimer
On Global Warming, The Spectator
Democrats treat judicial nominations like war -- while Republicans keep being gracious, hoping Democrats will learn by example.
Ann Coulter
Will the Defendant Please Rise?
"I would like evolution to join the roster of other discredited religions, like the Cargo Cult of the South Pacific. Practitioners of Cargo Cult believed that manufactured products were created by ancestral spirits, and if they imitated what they had seen the white man do, they could cause airplanes to appear out of the sky, bringing valuable cargo like radios and TVs. So they constructed “airport towers” out of bamboo and “headphones” out of coconuts and waited for the airplanes to come with the cargo. It may sound silly, but in defense of the Cargo Cult, they did not wait as long for evidence supporting their theory as the Darwinists have waited for evidence supporting theirs. "
Ann Coulter
In conclusion, Coulter has written a biting satire over the trend of anti-intellectualism that clouds part of the conservative ideology, which is otherwise based on principle and reason.
Peter Olofsson
The Coulter Hoax: How Ann Coulter Exposed the Intelligent Design Movement
If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain.
Matt Taibbi
The Great American Bubble Machine
There is no necessary conflict between intelligent conservatism and real liberalism.
Henry Hazlitt
http://mises.org/story/3577
Etiam diabolus audiatur. (Let even the devil be heard.)
Patrick J. Buchanan
quoting Francesco Nitti in Churchill Stalin and the West, p 84
Innocence, under the extra-constitutional reign of political correctness, liberalism's brand of soft Shariah law, must be proved ex post facto.
Andrew Breitbart
Obama's Accidental Gift on Race
“What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”
John Conyers (D-Michigan)
During his speech at a National Press Club luncheon, Conyers (D-Mich.), questioned the point of reading the health care bill.
At least when I'm alternating between knife fighting for the last can of creamed corn at the market and growing home remedies in the garden on my fortified compound, I'll be secure in the knowledge that BO made the racism problem marginally better.
Ryan Keith Roper
Still No Apologies
Forgive my reductionism, but there will always be tension between those who believe that the good of the individual is primary and that the good of the group must be subordinated to it, and those who believe that the good of the group is primary and that the good of the individual must be subordinated to it.
Phil Bowermaster
Like Richard Nixon, Barack Obama wants to govern on the strength of a silent majority, although with a twist. Obama wants the majority that opposes or questions his policies to stay silent.
Rich Lowry
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmM2MTI2MTVkN2Y2ZjBlOTQ4N2U2YjY4ZGFkYzFmYzQ=
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care.
Sarah Palin
quoted from facebook
Let me get this straight. Turn in a running vehicle that people can afford, to buy a brand new vehicle that they can't afford and accumulate more debt. Then destroy the running vehicle, rather than resell it to someone who can afford it. O, by the way, let's subsidize this by the taxpayer that is unemployed. I am so glad we have common sense in Congress. Not!"
Unknown Author
Reader at Marketwatch.com
A New York Times report on the administration's strategy for fighting back against its critics reads like the flight plan for the Hindenburg.
Robert Tracinski
TIA Daily, 12 Aug 09
If “health care” were about health care, the devil would be in the details. But it’s not about health or costs or coverage; it’s about getting over the river and burning the bridge. It doesn’t matter what form of governmentalized health care gets passed as long as it passes. Once it’s in place, it will be “reformed”, endlessly, but it will never be undone.
Mark Steyn
Untangling the Spaghetti
The road to socialism is not natural. It must be paved with the hard work of class envy, demonization of the successful, and obfuscation that each new massive spending program that will raise both taxes and deficits (that’s the point, after all, to create so much red ink that we must raise taxes and redefine what constitutes income) must be passed immediately, without delay, now-or-never to stave off Biblical hunger, plague, and flood. Or else!
Victor Davis Hanson
On Becoming Europe
Ghimmitude: A peaceful surrender to the state in exchange for health care security and benefits, based on accepting the inferiority of the individual and individual rights.
William A. Jacobson
Legal Insurrection
Except for the demented orphan, the living will is quite beside the point. The one time it really is essential is if you think your fractious family will be only too happy to hasten your demise to get your money. That's what the law is good at -- protecting you from murder and theft. But that is a far cry from assuring a peaceful and willed death, which is what most people imagine living wills are about.
Charles Krauthammer
The Truth About Death Counseling
Obama even gets away with saying things like having a system to "keep insurance companies honest"-- and many people may not see the painful irony in politicians trying to keep other people honest. Certainly most of the media are unlikely to point out this irony.
Thomas Sowell
Whose Medical Decisions?: Part IV
Having aggressively, even promiscuously, blurred the distinction between public and private sectors with improvised and largely unauthorized interventions in the economy, will [President Obama and other statists] ever countenance a retreat of the state? Or do they have an aspiration that they dare not speak?
George Will
Will Obama's Statism Ever Retreat?
There are those whose minds somehow see a value in stealing the legitimacy of an idea... even though legitimacy can't be acquired by theft. Anarchists have attempted to steal the legitimacy of the Libertarian party by twisting concepts and ignoring the realities. As if it made sense to have a party that puts up candidates for office in a government that they believe should be eliminated. They just keep insisting that they are right whether they are or not, then they can continue to pretend being as legitimate. Theirs is the primacy of words - not ideas and certainly not existence.
Steve Wolfer
Think of it as Evolution in Action
Are you happy to see the state to which we've fallen - pressure group pitted against pressure group, old against young, citizen against citizen all fighting to grab a share of the swelling portion of our national income funneled through the hands of Congress?
Bill Frezza
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2009/08/24/what_is_the_foundation_of_your_economic_beliefs_97371.html
As part of his campaign to rally religious support for his health-care plan, Obama reportedly told a group of rabbis, "We are God's partners in matters of life and death." God's partners? During the election campaign, Obama notoriously dodged a question on abortion by demurring that the theology of the issue was "above my pay grade." Well, apparently he's been promoted.
Robert Tracinski
The problems of our economy have occurred not as an outgrowth of laissez-faire, unbridled competition. They have occurred under the guidance of federal agencies, and under the umbrella of federal regulations.
Ted Kennedy
http://blog.american.com/?p=4328
Still, even for a demographic doom-monger such as myself, you could hardly ask for a more poignant fin de civilisation image than a stampede of broody lesbians stymied only by defective semen, like some strange dystopian collaboration between Robert Heinlein and Russ Meyer set in a world divided into muff divers and duff donors.
Mark Steyn
Notice Anything Shriveling?
The consensus appears to be that creationism — the belief in a managed process with an omniscient authority — is the only way to achieve successful outcomes. There is general agreement that the natural operation of the market is inadequate, and that a better outcome can be achieved through the wisdom and activity of governments and regulators. This creationist approach is similiar to the industrial planning which went out of fashion in other sectors in the 1970s. It failed then. It’s failing now
James Murdoch
2009 MacTaggart Lecture
You can't make an omelet without breaking chicks.
Mark Steyn
Things only a Kennedy could get away with
The fundamental issue here is not the proper role of government; it is the proper concept of rights.
William Dwyer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/NewsDiscussions/2540.shtml#4
Everyone likes penthouses, so why not have a building in which every apartment is a penthouse?
Ann Coulter
Liberal Lies About National Healthcare
There are things you can do to be free, and if you turn your attention to those things, no one will stand in your way. But when you become preoccupied with those who are blocking you, you overlook the many alternatives you could use to bypass them.
Harry Browne
How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World
But the great mass of Americans, the big center, will, I strongly suspect, not be listening. Mr. Obama has grown boring. And it's not Solid Boring, which is fine in a president and may be good. It's sort of Faux Eloquent Boring, especially on health care. The president likely doesn't know this, and his people won't have told him because they don't know it either, but Mr. Obama always has the same sound, approach, logic, tone, modulation. He always has the same stance. There's no humor or humility in it. News is surprise, and he never makes news.
Peggy Noonan
Coruscating on Thin Ice
Can you imagine the press running an article in 1939 saying that Hitler, speaking from Moscow, approves of FDR's decision not to allow increased immigration of Jews from Europe and hopes that FDR keeps his promise to turn back refugees? Without comment. With a straight face?
Ted Keer
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/NewsDiscussions/2549.shtml#0
Any self-respecting schoolkid, enjoined by his principal to be a "servant" to the head of state, would reply, "Get lost, creep." And, if they still taught history in American schools, he'd add, "Oh, and by the way, that question was settled in 1776."
Mark Steyn
Obama 'Outreach' To School Kids Feels More Like Personality Cult
Critics say that greed is the driving force of capitalism. My answer is that envy is the driving force of socialism.
Svetlana Kunin
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=336952385266203
"We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that -- if you quit on school -- you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country." . . . If the adults won’t listen, go after the kids. Can you think of a better way to inculcate the character of totalitarian servitude and obeisance in children than this speech?
Edward Cline
Barack Obama: Seducer of the Young
You lie.
South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson
Outburst at President Obama's Health Care Address to Congress
Our objections to the Democrats’ health care proposals are not mere “bickering” or “games.” They are not an attempt to “score short term political points.” And it’s hard to listen to the President lecture us not to use “scare tactics” when in the next breath he says that “more will die” if his proposals do not pass.
Sarah Palin
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/note.php?note_id=131081638434&ref=nf
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