Changing Credit Cards.

The Obama admin has a new plan... punish the responsible.


Powerline has more:

The competent subsidizing the careless--that's classic Democratic Party policy. Of course, the new rules will cause banks to lose interest in extending credit to the feckless

Once again, the Whitehouse and Congress show that playing by the rules is a sucker's bet.

Why Fake Vets?

At Chicago-Boyz, Shannon Love explores why the Dems keep getting tricked by people pretending to be veterans.

If there were a lot of veterans disillusioned with Bush-era policies (now Obama-era policies) why did they find it necessary to rely on a fake vet? If they had dozens or hundreds of real vets ready to sign on to their campaigns what are the odds the most prominent one would be a mentally-ill fraud?

You con someone by playing to their prejudices. Strandlof conned the Democrats by presenting them a fabricated persona and history custom-designed to fit the Democratic narrative. An actor playing a vet scripted to their narrative served their purposes better than a real vet

However, the real reason they didn’t check Strandolf’s creditials is that they didn’t care if he was real or not.

And what is their rational for such deception?

Democrats feel justified in using fake vets because of their utter contempt for the intelligence and wisdom of the electorate. Fake vets are just another version of the “What’s The Matter with Kansas” mindset which holds that most American adults are simply too stupid to understand what is good for them. In this mindset, using fake vets to lie about the American conduct of a war is no more immoral than telling a child that Santa Claus exists.

And it gets worse

The Democrats could easily find veterans who would doubt the wisdom of any particular war or the specific means of conducting a particular war. Why then do they time and time again use fake veterans to front their arguments?

Easy, real veterans won’t lie. In 1971, John Kerry could have found thousands of real Vietnam veterans who believed the war ill conceived and ill fought but he couldn’t find any real Vietnam veterans who would lie about witnessing large numbers of true war crimes. Without fake vets, John Kerry couldn’t make his central argument that the American military in Vietnam had crossed over the line into Nazi-like evil.

John Kerry’s lies eventually got him to within a gnat’s whisker of the Presidency. Younger Democrats have watched the rise of Kerry and others of his generation who lied and they know that deceit not only works but that using it has no negative consequences. For this reason, we will always see fake vets dragged out by Democratic candidates, activists and left-leaning media. They have no reasons, either moral or practical, not to do so.

Of course for this to work, it requires a mass media complict in the deception.

Just imagine what would happen if a Republican used fake vets.

It's not about the facts, it's about feelings.

Enviromentalists are not about science or helping humanity. If they were, they'd understand cost analysis and relative scales.

About 20 million people in America suffer asthma and about 2 million of those suffer asthma so severe it poises a threat to their life if untreated. About 5,000 people or 0.25% of severe suffers die every year. Over the span of 10 years 2.5% or roughly 1 in 40 of severe asthma sufferers will die of the disease.

Let’s suppose that the difficulty in using the new environmentally friendly inhalers
increase the asthma death rate by just 1%. That come to 50 unnecessary deaths a year or 500 unnecessary deaths over a decade. Roughly 150 of those deaths will be children.

And what do we gain by adopting the new system? Nothing. The amount of CFCs in inhalers has an impact so small that we couldn’t even detect it. CFCs used to be used in a wide range of technologies. Every cooling system of any kind used CFCs as did virtually every spray can. Dozens of other less visible technologies also used and released millions of tons of CFCs a year into the atmosphere. It took these decades long accumulation of great gobs of CFCs to produced an effect on the ozone layer. By contrast the amount of CFCs vented from one small compressor would fill hundreds of inhalers. Even if everyone in the world used CFC inhalers we wouldn’t be talking about enough CFC release to have a measurable impact. One volcano erupting anywhere in the world would destroy more ozone than centuries of CFC inhaler use."
Once again, their moral comfort is more important than your life.
This is just a more stark example but it's wholely in line with their views that energy should be more expensive, that food should be more expensive (with less variety and quanity), that all aspects of industry and commerce should be regulated to their morals.

So, we’ve traded zero environmental gain for the very real deaths of people. Why did this decision get made? Certainly, the economic self-interest of companies making the new inhalers played a role. As with the ban on CFCs in other technologies, the ban forced consumers to stop using old CFC technologies that existed in the public domain and instead use new proprietary replacement technology owned by a few companies. Dupont alone made a killing. Likewise with inhalers, anyone could manufacture a public domain inhaler but only a few companies own the patents to manufacture the non-CFC inhalers.

For their part, many environmentalist clearly supported the inhaler ban merely out of quasi-religious fetishism. Their mystical reasoning divides the world into good substances and bad substances. A substance that is bad for in one instance is bad in all instances. They have no concept of tradeoff. CFCs are bad for the ozone so they have to be rooted out everywhere regardless of the degree of harm or the cost in resources or lives. It’s the symbolism that matters, not the physical reality.

What follows is the most worrying part. The creeping effect of such laws.

Had you told someone twenty years ago in 1989 when the ozone banning Montreal Protocol was signed that it would lead to the banning of medical technology for zero environmental gain, people would have laughed at you. Yet, here we are.
What does this suggest about future tradeoffs such as replacing coal with unreliable weather-dependent power sources? Environmentalist claim they won’t chose to starve us for power to save the environment and they mock anyone who suggest they would yet the example of the asthma inhalers should give everyone pause. If they can rationalize the dramatic dangers of putting asthmatics at risk they can readily rationalize the much more subtle harms of starving the economy of power.

Bit by bit freedom gets erroded and people become less healthy and less wealthy. Why? To make some people feel better, to sate the desires of their faith.


Roger Kimball has more

“It’s a plan that will trigger the creation of millions of new jobs for Americans.” How, pray tell? He doesn’t say because it isn’t true. It doesn’t have to be true. As the philosopher Harvey Mansfield observed some years ago, “environmentalism is school prayer for liberals.” Just say something is “environmentally friendly” (it doesn’t have to be so in fact, it just has to look as though it is) and susceptible souls will roll on the ground, wave their arms and legs in hte air, and empty their pockets. The great thing about environmentalism, from the point of view of a politician and an environmentalist, is that you can never be green enough. The amount of money you can spend is therefore endless — a permanent boon to the politician — while the opportunities for smug self-righteousness are also endless, an munificent gift to the environmentalist, who regards his position on “the environment” the way a properly brought up lady in Victorian times regarded her virginity.

And Kimball gets to the heart of it

The Obama initiatives on the environment and health care bring us to the core of his domestic agenda. He talks about job creation, energy independence, and more humane and affordable health care. He has shown us nothing, absolutely nothing, to support those claims. What he has shown us are plans to turn over huge swathes of the U.S. economy to the government.

Power. That's what Hope and Change is all about. Taking power from the people, from the individual.

Amazing.

The President is finding new ways to vote present on all sorts of issues:

The elected official third in line to the presidency has accused the CIA of repeated crimes, and the Agency has responded by essentially calling this official a liar. And the president's representative tells the public he has nothing to say on the matter.

This is, essentially, voting "present."

Is he trying to Ruin us?

If somebody were deliberately trying to undermine the very fabric of these United States, he would first vow not just to change its policies but to completely "change America," and then would do just about everything Barack Obama already has begun to do as president.

The American Spectator has a long list.

He would stop paying for missile defenses. He would stop planning for forces strong enough to handle two regional wars at once, and would concentrate only on counterinsurgency needs while hollowing out our conventional forces. He would repeatedly insult our closest ally (Great Britain) while kowtowing to enemies such as Iran, Venezuela, and Nicaraguan communists. He would travel the world repeatedly apologizing for supposed American sins while failing to defend the USA from verbal assaults from tinpot dictators.

Though I suppose for some, those are features not bugs.

After Hubris....

Victor Davis Hanson points to yet another part of reality the Democrats try to deny.

A Nancy Pelosi, hellbent on releasing once-classified memos for partisan advantage, and eager to begin 'Truth" hearings, suddenly believes such an inquisition will not apply to herself, despite the fact that she, like so many Democrats from Senator Schumer to Senator Rockefeller, in that dark period in 2001, spoke of the need for, or was complicit in, approving enhanced interrogation techniques.

Then the president himself, who jump-started his campaign in Iraq's crisis year by slamming the commander-in-chief on renditions, military tribunals, email and phone intercepts, Predator drone attacks, and Iraq, now suddenly wishes to explain the nuances and complexities of these policies and why he will continue the Bush protocols — apparently oblivious to the hypocrisy involved with his own prior self-interested stridency. These examples could be easily augmented.

The problem is that between 2003-2008 there was such hysterical antagonism to Bush that the combatants never worried about the often vicious means they used to achieve their supposedly lofty ends, and so now, finding themselves in a position of responsibility, are infuriated that anyone, well, would even conceive of playing hardball as they once did.

The National Debt

Using the President's own numbers, historical data and some visualizations to show just how fast Obama's planning to raise the debt.



Via Ace

The difference between Bush's and Obama's deficits is the difference between driving at 63 mph and 174 mph.

One is over the limit. The other is reckless verging on suicidal.