Tag: trainwreck

A noble opportunity to contribute

I am confident that the American people, being staunchly committed to their hallowed and time-honored principles of diversity, social justice, and the sanctity of public union contracts, will welcome this opportunity to ensure that no retired government employee is denied the right to live large while not working at home instead of not working at the office:

Democrats in the Senate on Thursday held a recess hearing covering a taxpayer bailout of union pensions and a plan to seize private 401(k) plans to more “fairly” distribute taxpayer-funded pensions to everyone.

This is precisely why I never contributed a dime to any 401(k) plan. Even in my misspent youth, I understood that which Congress gives, Congress will take away the moment it decides it wants to do so. Fortunately for those who have been diligently salting away their retirement money in these plans, since 2008 we have repeatedly been shown that Congress is much more prone to listen to the voice of the outraged masses than to a statistically insignificant but wealthy and politically influential special interest group that is demanding large sums of money.

Wait a minute….

Et tu, Jonah

Mr. Golberg takes an astonishing position on the Obama administration’s assertion of a right to assassinate American citizens without trial:

Some civil libertarians seem to think we can never, ever kill an American citizen without a trial by jury (and perhaps not even then). That argument would have been silly during the days of conventional warfare. Now it’s plain crazy. And the Obama administration is right. This is no job for courts. Wars and how we fight them are political decisions, properly left to Congress and the president.

Jonah should know better. He is, after all, the one who built the case against the pragmatic, “it’s just this one brick” approach of progressive totalitarianism in his very good Liberal Fascism. He further compounds his error when, after being correctly called on his erroneous reasoning by a reader, he attempts to justify his position by bringing up the example of World War II.

“Surely, “the battlefield” is a very amorphous term these days. An American fighting in Nazi uniform in 1943 could be killed and even singled out for killing without a trial by jury, or at least I think that’s the case. Awlaki — like all of al Qaeda — refuses to play by the rules even the Nazis agreed to. I’m at a loss as to why they should be rewarded for it.”

Of course, the only reason that an American fighting in Nazi uniform – more likely Wehrmacht, but never mind that – could be killed on the battlefield was because no one knew he was an American. The Constitution clearly and explicitly deals with the question of treason in time of war, which makes since because it was written by men who had recently fought in the Revolutionary War, so it is ludicrous to appeal to some pragmatic sense of sobriety and sanity and claim that it supersedes the Constitution.

Article III
[Section 3.] Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

Jonah isn’t one of National Review’s Trotskyites, so it is a little disappointing to see him toeing the anti-constitutional neocon line on this issue.

Global Warming Nazis

I had previously preferred the term “global warming fascists”, but the term simply doesn’t do justice to these twisted, human-hating idealogues.  It appears we may end up eventually having to go to war with the sick bastards should they take over a country or two just like we did with their German predecessors; as with the National Socialists, the global warming extremists genuinely believe that their mad pseudo-scientific myths justify killing people. 

Fortunately, given that their tanks will be solar-powered and their cruise missiles will be launched by turbine windmills, it should take a lot less than five years to defeat them and wipe them out.  And, seeing how they won’t be utilizing carbon anymore afterwards, it will be a win-win.

It’s clear that the pro-warming media has the vague idea that something has gone seriously wrong here, even if they don’t quite understand what the negative reaction is all about.

“While many people said they found the short an amusing way of addressing the issue of apathy towards climate change issues, others found it tasteless and unnecessarily violent.”

Yeah, that was just explosively hilarious, wasn’t it? I mean, about the only thing that would have made it funnier if the self-appointed climate saviors were murdering Jewish schoolchildren… no, make that gay Jewish schoolchildren. Ho, ho, ho.

NRO endorses assassinating Americans

I am not a conservative. I am a Christian libertarian technodemocrat. But if this is what is actually supposed to pass for conservative opinion leadership at a leading conservative publication, it’s no wonder that the Tea Partiers are abandoning both the Republican Party and the conservative media:

The Obama administration is not, by authorizing Awlaki’s assassination, green-lighting his killing under all conceivable circumstances. The administration, I suspect, is just making sure that if he’s found congregating in a sanctuary with other terrorists, we can bomb the sanctuary — we don’t have to forfeit a worthy military operation just because one of the terrorists happens to be an American citizen. But if he’s found under other circumstances, where there is no demonstrable military value in killing him, he will be captured, held, interrogated (one hopes), and tried — either by a civilian or (I would hope) a military court.

This seems like common sense to me. The unfortunate thing is that the assassination authorization should never have been made public. Clearly, the administration leaked it to underscore the president’s willingness to fight al-Qaeda aggressively. All the leak has done, though, is cause unnecessary legal headaches. If the administration had handled this top-secret authorization appropriately, chances are: Awlaki would, at some point, have been either killed or captured; the attendant circumstances would have made it obvious why the option chosen (kill or capture) was chosen; and no one would ever have thought to ask whether Obama had authorized his assassination.

In other words, McCarthy is just fine with passing laws that authorize the government murder of its own citizens because it happens to be politically unviable at the moment. This is deeply, profoundly, and abysmally stupid. It is insane. And there is literally nothing conservative, in the American political sense of the word, about it.

If I were the editor of NRO, I would fire McCarthy on the spot for this defense of legalizing government murder.

His argument is risibly incompetent and not only depends entirely upon the transient nature of temporal politics but also upon what he imagines Obama’s reasoning behind the assassination authorization to be. McCarthy writes: “We are a political society, not a legal one. The executive branch typically has vast legal authority, but its exercise of that authority is hemmed in — thank goodness — by politics.”

Ergo, under his reasoning, once it becomes politically popular to murder certain American citizens en masse, it will be legal to do so. This isn’t merely madness, it is the familiar route to the guillotine, the gulag, and the gas chamber. To make this argument while simultaneously claiming to wear the mantle of Edmund Burke, among others, is a grotesque offense to reason, history, and conservatism itself.

If Awlaki is genuinely a traitor, the correct Constitutional thing to do is to arrest him, put him on trial for treason, and then execute him. The fact that the Obama administration is openly attempting to omit the first two steps with the support of the conservative and mainstream media alike is an indication of how completely lawless both the United States government and its lapdog media have become.

UPDATE: McCarthy isn’t the only NROcon to cheer on Obama’s American citizen assassination policy. David French writes: “We need to stop incentivizing enemy violations of the laws of war, and one way to do that is to find them and capture or kill them no matter their location, no matter their clothing, and no matter their nationality.”

He also attempts to claim that it’s not “assassination” so long as the person assassinated is an enemy. Which, no doubt, would be news to Abraham Lincoln, among others. And William F. Buckley wept.

NRO clings to sanity

Apparently they haven’t gotten completely blitzed on the Neocon-spiked Kool-aid:

The Awlaki case speaks to something even more fundamental than law: Decent nations do not permit their governments to assassinate their own citizens. I am willing to give the intelligence community, the covert-operations guys, and the military proper a pretty free hand when it comes to dealing with dispersed terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and its affiliates. But citizenship, even when applied to a Grade-A certified rat like Awlaki, presents an important demarcation, a bright-line distinction in our politics.

If Awlaki were to be killed on a battlefield, I’d shed no tears. But ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in Yemen or Pakistan is no different from ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in New York or Washington or Topeka — American citizens are American citizens, wherever they go. I’m an old-fashioned limited-government guy, and I am not willing to grant Washington the power to assassinate U.S. citizens, even rotten ones. The three most powerful people in government at this moment are Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, a fact that should give pause even to the most hawkish conservative. I would hope that other conservatives see this at least as a matter of prudence, if not a burning moral question.

We’ve reached a very problematic state of affairs when the so-called “liberals” have endorsed a policy of the federal government intentionally murdering American citizens and most of the so-called “conservative” media is kind of maybe okay with it.

All your income are belong to us

I imagine the IRS will regard this as a brilliant notion.

The UK’s tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer. The proposal by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) stresses the need for employers to provide real-time information to the government so that it can monitor all payments and make a better assessment of whether the correct tax is being paid.

This should suffice to guarantee the complete exit of all mobile capital from the UK.

Government efficiency

$2 million per job:

DPW has received $70.65 million and created or retained 45.46 jobs, though they are expected to create 238 jobs overall (the fraction of a job created or retained correlates to the number of actual hours works). LADOT has been awarded $40.8 million and created or retained 9 jobs, though they are expected to create 26 jobs overall. Overall, the Departments have received $111 million in federal stimulus funds out of the $594 million the City has been awarded so far and created or retained 54.46 jobs.

I’m disappointed that we’ve only created or retained 55 jobs after receiving $111 million in ARRA funds.

At that price, one wonders what these jobs involve. NFL quarterbacking? Jobs programs don’t work. They’d be better off just cutting a direct check to people.

Torture is illegal

But only if it isn’t secret:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information. The sharply divided ruling was a major victory for the Obama administration’s efforts to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy powers. It strengthens the White House’s hand as it has pushed an array of assertive counterterrorism policies, while raising an opportunity for the Supreme Court to rule for the first time in decades on the scope of the president’s power to restrict litigation that could reveal state secrets.

If you don’t understand that the US has completely abandoned even the pretense of the rule of law by now, you’re probably not going to recognize it until either guillotines and/or pyres have been set up on the Mall or you find yourself in a detention camp. This is a truly remarkable and totalitarian decision by the federal court. It has declared that the mere possibility of exposing secret government information to the electorate – in a nominal democracy – trumps all of the unalienable rights endowed by the Creator and delineated in the Constitution.

It was a terrible mistake for the Supreme Court to create the abominable “state-secrets privilege” 50 years ago; this assertion of a privilege to secretly torture and assassinate is merely the inevitable consequence of expanding the central state’s power to conceal its actions from the citizenry.

Yowzers

In which Karl Denninger prison-rapes Paul Krugman’s bizarre meanderings on Social Security:

Seriously. This tripe is so bereft of logic and actual mental acuity that it is unworthy of graduation from elementary school:

“About that math: Legally, Social Security has its own, dedicated funding, via the payroll tax (“FICA” on your pay statement). But it’s also part of the broader federal budget. This dual accounting means that there are two ways Social Security could face financial problems. First, that dedicated funding could prove inadequate, forcing the program either to cut benefits or to turn to Congress for aid. Second, Social Security costs could prove unsupportable for the federal budget as a whole.”

Baloney. This is called fraud in the private-sector. First, there is no dedicated funding. Second, all the money taken in over the years was not “invested”, it was spent.

“Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund.”

That so-called “trust fund” is a fraud. It does not exist.

Here’s what actually happens (and Krugman knows this, which makes him a damned liar besides):

1. Your tax dollars go to Treasury
2. Treasury keeps them and issues “special” Treasury bonds to the Social Security “trust fund.”
3. Treasury counts these tax receipts against the federal deficit, making it look (much, until the last year) smaller than it really is.

Note the slight-of-hand here. Social Security gets an alleged “bond” but they can’t sell it to anyone but the Treasury. That is, legally it is an IOU, not a bond. A bond can be marketed in the open market to anyone who is willing to buy, for whatever they’re willing to pay. These are unmarketable (intentionally) and thus can only be redeemed in one place – at Treasury.

The problem is that Treasury spent the money and thus doesn’t have anything with which to redeem the IOUs!

Seriously, even people who don’t pay any attention to either politics or economics knows that the Social Security “trust fund” is nonexistent and that Congress has been operating on a pay-as-you-go system all along. I can’t even pretend to understand what Krugman was thinking when he wrote this ridiculous column. The money in the so-called “lock box” isn’t there because the box doesn’t exist either. The money is nothing more than yet another government debt as it was all spent years ago.

Anklebiters Anonymous

In the interest of helping our resident trolls evolve into substantive commenters, as well as assisting non-Ilk readers recognize the usual suspects, I have decided to create a “best of” series which should serve as both amusement and edification. The honor of the first “Beezle” award goes to Cabal, whose epic defense of science he quite clearly doesn’t understand was eviscerated by the merciless duo of Bob Mando and DaveD. Please note that the ellipses are Cabal’s; his award-winning comment is quoted precisely and in full.

“Every single living organism that we know of is carbon-based and all of them require oxygen to live…without exception. And carbon is a by product of oxygen. the relationship between the 2 couldnt be clearer.”
– Cabal: 8/10/10 10:37 AM, Science gets it wrong… again

“Pure, unadulterated BS. there are numerous KNOWN organisms which will die in the presence of oxygen.

a – photosynthesis is possible without oxygen, even by carbon based life forms.
b – it is a founding principle of Evolution that cyanobacteria generated the free oxygen that exists in the atmosphere now as waste products.
c – it is a founding principle of Evolution that cyanobacteria ‘evolved’ from more primitive forms of bacteria which did not use oxygen at all in the photosynthesis process.

You are wrong about … well, pretty much everything, really. Carbon is a non-radioactive base element, number 6. Oxygen is also a non-radioactive base element, number 8. Neither of these elements can ever be a “product” of the other without the intervention of fusion or quantum manipulation. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is a compound element which breaks down into one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms through simple chemical processes.”
– Bob K. Mando

“You have shown yourself to be profoundly ignorant of both biology (“Every single living organism….require oxygen to live…without exception.” Except the ones that don’t.) and basic chemistry (“And carbon is a by product of oxygen.”) You haven’t even grasped the most basic elements of the observable world, which you interact with everyday. Why, then, should we pay any attention at all to your ramblings on the more abstract aspects of life and the universe?”
– DaveD

Congratulations to all. The award is named for the banned commenter Beelzebub, whose ability to mangle facts and logic in the process of attempting to “correct” others is unparalleled.

UPDATE – Cabal amused the crowd by accepting his award, but not the chemistry lesson. Cabal: 8/12/10 9:57 AM: “I was not in error. Remove oxygen molecules from the universe and carbon based life becomes impossible.”