Don't be fooled by the defunding votes

Instapundit reader Kevin O'Brien notices the elephant in the chamber:

It’s a typical these-voters-are-such-rubes stunt; the House and Senate voted to defund ACORN on different bills.

The Senate bill is a housing bill, the House bill the federal takeover of student loans. Each bill will wind up in conference committee where the ACORN ban can be quietly stripped out, behind closed doors and secure from prying eyes. Then the org can keep on doing its important work of voter fraud and pandering to presumed pedophiles.

The most useful principle to hold close when considering members of Congress: they’re all crooks.

I'm sure that portion of the media that still thinks child sex slavery is wrong will keep an eye on this, just reminding you not to buy into the hype.

Quote of the day

From Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation (via Don Surber) on the ACORN child prostitution aid scandal: “It should have been ‘60 Minutes’ doing this stuff — not two people whose combined ages are 45.”

Surber notes that Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward were 28 and 29, respectively, on the night of the Watergate break-in.

Six moral arguments against socialized medicine

David Swindle's list:

1. It’s immoral to rob Peter to pay for Paul’s health care. It’s not right for government to come in and take one man’s wealth and redistribute it to another who did not earn it. “Thou Shalt Not Steal” is one of the Ten Commandments.

2. It’s not moral to break working systems. Estimates place the percentage of uninsured at 3% of the population from Conservative sources to 18% from leftist sources. That means that the vast majority of people in this county are capable of doing for themselves what the Left insists the government needs to do. The moral thing to do here would be to ask this question: what’s preventing that 3-18% from getting their own health insurance?

3. It’s not moral for healthy people who have made tough, responsible decisions — exercising, eating nutritious foods, not smoking, not engaging in risky behaviors — to be forced to subsidize those who acted irresponsibly. (See Ashton Kutcher’s recent argument.)

4. It’s immoral to give a man health insurance instead of helping him better himself so he can buy it on his own. It shows a lack of respect for men and women’s ability to better themselves. It looks down at people as children who need a Nanny state to protect them.

5. It’s immoral to take away people’s freedom by denying them the right to choose how they’re going to spend their money. This comes in two fashions. First, the immorality of forcing people to pay for health insurance when they choose not to. And second, the immorality of denying people the choice to choose a healthcare plan other than what the government offers.

6. It’s immoral to plunge our government deeper into a sea of debt. We can’t even afford to pay our existing entitlement programs and “progressives” want to add more? How is that moral to promote such fiscal irresponsibility?

Crooked is as crooked does

Byron York catches Barney Frank being...well, Barney Frank.

You may recall that TARP was sold partially on the basis that the taxpayers could end up showing a profit on bank bailouts, with the money returned in the form of paying down the public debt. Which would benefit taxpayers of this and future generations.

Enter the despicable Frank, who wants to intercept the people's money to...see if you can guess...funnel it into a slush fund to use to pay off Democrat donors and special interest groups:

Rep. Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has come up with a proposal to spend any TARP profits before they can be returned to the taxpayers. Last Friday, Frank introduced the "TARP for Main Street Act of 2009," a bill that would take profits from the program and immediately redirect them toward housing proposals favored by Frank and some fellow Democrats. ...

The original TARP legislation required that money made from the program "shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury for reduction of the public debt."

But now Frank wants to spend the money before it can be used to pay down anything. First, the "TARP for Main Street" proposal would take $1 billion "from dividends paid by financial institutions that have received financial assistance provided under...the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act" and apply it to a trust fund that Frank has long wanted to create for low-income rental housing. (The measure, unfunded, was part of last year's bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.) Next, Frank would take $1.5 billion from TARP dividends for a so-called "neighborhood stabilization" fund. Republican critics have charged that both measures might allow federal dollars to be distributed to activist groups like the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, or ACORN.

The "TARP for Main Street" bill would also spend $2 billion, apparently from remaining TARP funds, to subsidize people who are delinquent on their mortgages, and another $2 billion to "stabilize multifamily properties that are in default or foreclosure."

Frank is nothing more than a common criminal, a Bernie Madoff for the gay political class. What a miserable piece of shit.

The voters wanted Democrat rule, and as Mencken said they're getting it good and hard: the emboldening and strengthening of America's enemies, a massive transfer of wealth and power from the people to the federal government, feverish attempts to permanently ration energy and health care, and making pay to play the defining principle of governance. Hope you're enjoying it!

Not so much, etc.

Scattershooting while wondering what ever happened to Keith Owens:

The difference between Obama and Jesus: Jesus knew how to build a cabinet.

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Jim Cramer fights back at Jon Stewart: “President Obama’s team, unlike Bush’s team, demonstrates a thinness of skin that shocks me. . . . Are they really that blind to the Great Wealth Destruction they are causing with their decisions to demonize the bankers, raise taxes for the wealthy, advocate draconian cap-and-trade policies and upend the health care system? Do they really believe that only the rich own stocks? What do they think we have our retirement accounts in, CDs? Where did they think that the money saved for college went, our mattresses?”

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Probably the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard: 10th President John Tyler, born in 1790, has two grandsons still living. When they talk about going back a generation or two, they mean business!

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A fact that doesn’t usually see the light of day, from the NYT: “Restrictions on embryonic stem cell research originated with Congress, which, each year since in 1996, has forbidden the use of federal financing for any experiment in which a human embryo is destroyed.”

Raise your hand if you had been led to believe it was Bush instead of Congress.

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Some lesser-known NBA nicknames.

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Democrats have hit on a new form of stimulus: steal the credit card numbers of a political opponent’s donors and use them to make fraudulent charges. Don’t look at me, I wasn’t the one who believed in this kind of change.

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Former teammate Mark Madsen on the Shaq flopping kerfuffle, the ultimate man bites dog story: “I played with Shaq for three years in Los Angeles and while I did see the big fella sacrifice his body and step in and take charges, I never once saw him flop in those three years. And the funny thing is that almost every team in the NBA tries to flop against Shaq. There are probably even coaches that teach their centers and forwards to try to flop on Shaq. So, this whole commotion about whether or not Shaq's play against Dwight Howard was a flop is so funny because everyone in the league tries to flop on Shaq and Shaq never flops back.”

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A former detainee at Guantánamo Bay has become the Taliban’s chief operations officer in southern Afghanistan. Good thing we’re planning on closing Guantanamo, so this kind of thing will become more common…you might even say it will explode.

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Noted fabulist Seymour Hersh has set tinfoil hatters atwitter with his tale of Dick Cheney hit squads (apparently not very good, since there are no known victims). Reason has a post on his loose relationship with the truth, with some classic comments. My favorite: “Sy Hersh has predicted 8 of the last 0 American invasions of Iran.”

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From one crook (Blagojevich) to another (Quinn) in the Illinois statehouse: Illinois Gov. to Propose 50% Increase in State Income Tax

Line of the year

Jack Kelly:

When in the last election Democrats spoke of a "culture of corruption" in Washington, few realized they were making a campaign promise.

Okay, wish I'd said this too

The Washington Post reports on the latest misadventures of the crackhead former mayor Marion Barry:

D.C. Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) has again failed to file his tax returns.

The former District mayor has not submitted federal or city tax forms for 2007 -- the second instance in which he has not filed required returns while on probation for tax offenses, said two sources familiar with the situation.

Two years ago, federal prosecutors failed to convince a federal judge that Barry should be jailed for violating the terms of his probation, which was ordered in 2006, because he did not file 2005 tax returns.

Prompting James Taranto's priceless reaction:

Like everyone else, we immediately thought that Barry must be angling for a position in the administration.

Famous quotes

“Make no mistake, tax cheaters cheat us all, and the IRS should enforce our laws to the letter. ” Sen. Tom Daschle, Congressional Record, May 7, 1998, p. S4507.

Tax receipts up

Some characteristic genius from Scrappleface:

“The president’s plan is simple but ingenious,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, “He targets wealthy individuals who filed inaccurate tax forms, cheating the government out of tens of thousands of dollars. Then he just nominates them for cabinet positions. They suddenly see the error of their ways, and they cut checks for the full amount owed, plus interest.”

The Elephant in the Room

Fashionably late to the party as always, I have finally decided to join a few million of my closest friends in the blogosphere. I have no idea how often I will end up posting or on what range of topics, but the time has come to have a repository of my thoughts on issues as they happen.

And in picking this time to start, I am pretty much forced to address THE issue of the day/week/month, even though it has completely beaten me down by this point, that being the end of life saga of Terri Schiavo.

This appears to be a case of the correct application of a very bad, and arguably immoral, law.

I believe that the Florida courts acted properly given with what they had to work. Congress injecting itself into the situation by passing legislation specific to the outcome of a single case offends my senses of federalism and limited government. I cede that there might have been a Constitutional due process argument to be made in the federal courts, but Congress attempting to bully those courts is as reprehensible to me as is the current practice of the judiciary circumventing the will of the people by legislating from the bench.

That it was the legal thing to do did not make it the right thing to do. The will of the woman herself should have been the deciding factor if discernable, but in this case anybody who says her wishes were respected is engaging in base speculation (and the spread of misinformation) and nothing more. Hearsay evidence from somebody with significant conflicts of interest is hardly proof that this is what she would have wanted, and that is really all we had here. It is certainly possible that they had these types of discussions at some point, but even if so did they move from the somewhat common discussion of being kept alive on life support (which has nothing to do with this case, another commonly repeated bit of misinformation) to the realm of being hydrated and nourished if the individual is incapacitated?

Given that her wishes were unknown, who should make such a monumental decision? The easy answer is the legal guardian, but that is problematic at best in this case given that said guardian had a vested interest in deciding in his own best interests and not in hers. He had certainly been consistent in making decisions against her best interests in the past, from denying her medical treatment and testing to denying her therapy, any or all of which might have improved her condition. He certainly had financial incentives to hasten her death from very early in the process. I discount the incentive of moving on to his new family, as he was offered and refused an easy divorce, so that was clearly not driving his actions. Not to be ignored is the nontrivial possibility that he contributed to her falling into this condition in the first place and wanted any evidence to go away. While ascribing her condition to him is irresponsible, the physical evidence that he had serially abused her, including evidence of multiple broken bones in the past and of strangulation at some point, makes it impossible to dismiss outright either.

What is clear is that he aggressively wanted her to die from very early in the process, at least by the time he gained the medical malpractice verdict, and that he made every effort to block evaluations and treatment of her condition in life and, ultimately, in death as he also tried to block a potential autopsy. He wanted to paint her as a hopeless cause and sought to deny the possibility of any evidence to the contrary being brought to the table. Why is open to discussion, but the central pattern of his actions is not.

Should medical professionals or the courts be able to step in when a guardian acts against the interests of a patient without personal instructions? Should there be mechanism for appointing a new guardian in cases of clear conflict of interest? Should end of life decisions be made without consideration of the entire immediate family? There are no easy answers. It is sad that a woman had to die to bring to light these holes in existing statutory law.

I will look at political aspects of this case in a future post.