And Hanson finishes with this:
" I haven’t seen in my lifetime anything quite like it. And this furor of being had has the potential not just to take Obama down, but also his ideology and supporters along with him for a generation."
Lord hear our prayer.
Posted by Cathy at November 23, 2009 3:26 PMDoesn't the CRF need to convene first to vote on this (even thought it is a great selection)? There's a pretty good Korean/Japanese about a mile north of the dim sum...
or Pho?
The best Pho shop in town is just up on Rainier...how about after Thanksgiving...? We might as well eat well on our way down, no?
Posted by Doug at November 23, 2009 6:07 PMWell, Doug, every revolutionary front has to have a front. If I'm back in Seattle soon we can undertake a pho trek.
As for what Jimmy Cliff does or does not like, he's got zippo to say to the Conservative Revolutionary Front. We take what we need and we leave the rest.
Posted by vanderleun at November 23, 2009 6:21 PMJimmy Cliff is sweet but my vote for anthem would be No, No Joe by Hank Williams Sr.
Here's a timely one from 1932:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkNn4WUwtCA
"I'd rather be a free man in my grave, Than living as a puppet or a slave." Funny that. I always thought that the freedom of action enjoyed by dead people is rather limited.
Total freedom is an illusion; anarchy is unstable and replaced extremely quickly by despotism. All societies require regulation, and the real question is how much. And one answer is the smallest amount of regulation consistent with the safety and security of the citizenry - the eternal debate is over how much regulation that represents, and whether one is willing to throw some on the scrapheap for the sake of the freedom of the rest, and if one is so willing how many.
The greatest threat to Western freedom is not Mr. Barack Hussein Obama of Kenya. It seems rather odd to me that Americans, especially commenters here, continually scream about the lesser threat and at the same time contribute entirely unnecessarily large amounts of money and other resources to the greater.
Treason in its most basic form is "giving aid and comfort to the enemy". And therefore any Westerner, when he turns up the heating higher than really needed (if it's oil-fired), drives where walking would do or buys a car bigger than really needed - that Westerner, in a small way admittedly, is committing treason. Or when he votes for a Congresscritter (or President) bought and paid for by Big Oil - that's treason, too.
Posted by Fletcher Christian at November 24, 2009 1:52 AMCome on Fletcher, say what you and your ilk really mean... "ANY freedom is an illusion." Conservatives reject that logic, and your notion of treason reflects the regressive philosophy behind your politics. By your standards, Americans should be sitting the dark, freezing, while riding their horses to work (or at work on their subsistence farms). Conservatives on the other hand, would do what they could to drill here and now, to build nuclear and other power plants, and to generally ensure that American progress continues. That notion is one of the many significant differences between conservatives and the followers of Mr. Hussein Obama of Kenya.
Posted by RKV at November 24, 2009 6:00 AM{Rev V8 SUV, turn on AC and open windows}
Yup. Nothing to see here with the "lesser threat".
RKV - Most of what you are saying, I actually agree with. However - I will agree fully the very minute I see a nuclear-powered car on sale. For the moment, however, cars are powered by oil products. And oil products, at least some of them, provide money to people who want to make everyone in the West either a corpse or a slave.
And I said what I meant and meant what I said: "Total freedom is an illusion." Or to make the point by analogy, completely unrestrained capitalism would lead to long pig being on sale in the marketplace. All societies need regulation.
For an example of insufficiently restrained capitalism at work, see the financial papers for the last year. Sale of fourth and fifth level abstractions (securities based on sliced and diced securities and so on for that far down to individual mortgages) being unrestrained and unregulated led to a housing-price bubble that eventually popped, bringing the economy of the West down with it. And, of course, the people responsible (known in some circles as the Wunch) are sitting pretty on seven-figure bonuses while millions starve.
"What do you call 5000 bankers in a line at the bottom of the sea?" "I don't know, what do you call it?" "A good start."
Posted by Fletcher Christian at November 24, 2009 2:54 PMFletcher, you are reality challenged. To take your nuclear powered car example, an electric car (and they ARE on sale now) that is powered by a nuclear power plant, IS a nuclear powered car.
Regarding financial regulation, if the government wasn't guaranteeing 4th and 5th level abstractions you and I wouldn't give a shit if the paper was worthless, would we? Unless we were greedy enough to believe the financial engineers that is. Investors operating under a "buyer-beware" regime would discount such paper. What we have now, is an alignment of government and the private sector (see the CRA) where the moral hazard has disappeared and the public is left holding the bag. I wish Chris Dodd and Barney Frank were in prison for their actions. I could say the same thing about the ponzi scheme we call FICA, and it's perpetrators. FICA (social security) is unconstitutional for all that, in spite of the courts which won't enforce the plain text of the Constitution, which strictly limits the powers of the FEDGOV.
All very well, but who invented the fraudulent, worthless paper in the first place?
Banking is essentially very simple. One function is to efficiently transfer money from one financial entity to another and thus smooth commerce; the other is to lend money, provided by savers, to people who need to borrow in order to invest. Interest is a compensation for both not having the money and for taking a risk that it won't be paid back. And all the slicing and dicing of loans was an attempt, a successful one for a while, to take the compensation without the risk it was supposed to be paying for; and also to conceal the fact that they were doing that.
Banking is essentially a clerical function. It certainly isn't worth salaries and bonuses in seven figures.
Electric cars don't work yet, and maybe never will - the energy storage density just isn't high enough. Except for specialised uses, of course. One method that might work, if there was enough cheap power, would be to simply make carbon-based fuel from water and air. Strange that just about all the methods of doing that (including the only biomass method that is actually going to work, growing oil-bearing algae) are starved of funding. One might speculate as to why.
Posted by Fletcher Christian at November 24, 2009 11:49 PMI wish we had cars that ran on hippies...
Posted by monkeyfan at November 25, 2009 12:22 PM