Sleepless In America: 2014 Edition

God only knows how anyone in this country can sleep when we don't know if the redhead from the Wendy's commercials has the correct beliefs.

And what about the GEICO gecko?

Insomnia here we come.

Federal Judge Declares Voting "Unconstitutional"

"In any voting situation," stated the judge Ty Rant, "there is inherently the chance voters might vote for something our elites do not favor. As our elites must be catered to in every particular, being that they are better than the hoi polloi, voting must be considered outmoded and something we have progressed beyond."

Judge Sonia Sotomayor immediately signaled her acceptance of judge Rant's opinion.

The Intellectual Bankruptcy Of (Portions Of) The Left

Go read this long (and long-winded) piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates, but only if you have a half-hour of your life you don't mind throwing away.  And why is that exactly? Well, in this piece Coates basically argues that neither whites nor blacks in America are capable of exercising moral autonomy. For Coates no negative consequence ever faced by a black person in any context can be justified because of the existence of white hegemony, the perpetual existence of which is taken to be axiomatic. Consequently, blacks are assumed to never have free meaningful choices to make which means, of course, that they lack a prerequisite of moral autonomy.

Whites, on the other hand, are denied moral autonomy simply of the basis of needing to fulfill the role as hegemonic oppressors. Whites being "wrong" has nothing to do with decisions they do or do not make, it has to do with the color of their skin. In such a view there is no difference between a white person choosing action A and another white person choosing ~A. By definition each decision is a "product of white hegemonic society" and therefore equally "wrong." So, just as in the case for blacks, whites also lack the ability to make free meaningful choices, and thus are denied a prerequisite of moral autonomy.

This is exactly the sort of situation elites like Coates want, because by denying the existence of moral autonomy in these types of questions they can claim that these issues should be above the ken of normal democratic public policy decision making. There is no room for differing opinion or disparate value judgements, there is only the role of oppressor (or oppressed) to enact.

Of course it is a dream come true to live in a world where one's preferences are impossible to gainsay, and Mr. Coates would probably be quite reluctant to leave the very same world he has constructed for himself, but there is no reason why we need to go and live there with him.

Benghazi: No Heavy Analysis Necessary

So Benghazi. What have we learned?

A) The political people around Obama are a profoundly insecure bunch. Their judgement in the wake of the attacks was just plain dumb. There was no way this could have turned the election. It was a terror attack against the US. When have the American people turned against their leaders in the aftermath of such an attack? (The answer is never.) How out to lunch do you have to be not to know this?

B) Those early mistakes were compounded by the refusal to admit there had been any mistakes. As a controversy this should have been over months ago. They can blame Republicans all they want, if anyone is still talking about this it is the fault of the Obama administration and no one else.

C) The capacity for the unofficial/official propaganda arm of the Democratic party, i.e. The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, etc, to run obfuscating disinformation campaigns for the administration is truly remarkable. And disgraceful.

Who Is More Civil?

I just did a little Google experiment by searching for the following terms:

"X should be shot"
"X should be killed"
"X are evil"

Where "X" is either the word Republicans or the word Democrats.

Using the word "Republicans" returned 217,400 responses.
Using the word "Democrats" returned 85,100 responses.

Just sayin'.

Do No Harm

If someone were to try to pin me down about why I view the world, and in particular the American political landscape, the way I do it would most probably boil down to a few main points. Some of them would touch upon my own eccentricities (e.g. I am an incorrigible contrarian), but mostly my political principles stem from a belief that ideology is neither inevitable nor desirable. This is the reason that while I am certainly right of center as such things are measured in American political discourse, you will find no Randian nonsense here.

My biggest beef with ideology is that it acts as a replacement for thinking. When presented with a question or with a situation in the real world that needs addressing, the ideologue responds automatically with a canned answer. Wed this approach with a belief in the moral superiority of their brand of ideological thinking and you have a recipe for disaster on a large scale.

Affirmative action is a classic case in point. The confluence of ideology and rampant moralizing has produced a toxic brew that has positively harmed minority students in this country despite the "best intentions" of the Left. Tragically the ideologically fevered are simply unable to see the truth of this and are therefore doomed to keep inflicting this harm upon minority students.

There is now increasing evidence that students who receive large preferences of any kind—whether based on race, athletic ability, alumni connections or other considerations—experience some clear negative effects: Students end up with poor grades (usually in the bottom fifth of their class), lower graduation rates, extremely high attrition rates from science and engineering majors, substantial self-segregation on campus, lower self-esteem and far greater difficulty passing licensing tests (such as bar exams for lawyers).

The most encouraging part of this research is the parallel finding that these same students have dramatically better outcomes if they go to schools where their level of academic preparation is much closer to that of the median student. That is, black and Hispanic students—as well as the smaller numbers of preferentially admitted athletes and children of donors—excel when they avoid the problem of what has come to be called "mismatch."

... Even as social scientists have transformed our understanding of affirmative action, universities don't seem to be paying attention. Consider the University of California system, which since 1998 has been legally precluded (by Proposition 209) from considering race in admissions. Throughout the past 15 years—most recently in a brief submitted to the Supreme Court—university officials have denounced race neutrality and pointed to the substantial drop in freshman black and Hispanic students at the system's two flagship schools, Berkeley and UCLA.

Yet race-neutrality has produced stunning benefits for minorities in the UC system as a whole, as shown in a data set that economists obtained from UC administrators. Black, American-Indian and Hispanic students made up 26% of all U.C. freshmen in 2010, up from 16% in 1997; the number of B.A.s earned by black and Hispanic students in four years rose 55% between 1995-97 and 2001-03, while the number with GPAs above 3.5 rose 63%.

So, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that not mismatching students via affirmative action has led to dramatic improvements for minority students in California, the ideologues still want to impose their failed ideas upon everyone. It is as if they are saying, "We would rather harm minority students than have them succeed on anything other than our own terms." I'm sorry, but there is nothing noble or moral about such a position. The only thing that should matter is what is best for students, i.e. under what conditions are they most likely to succeed? Nothing else matters very much. Lousy ideology matters not at all.

"It's Not A Nazi Tactic When We Do It"

The liberal demonization of all those who do not agree with their agenda continues apace. But, of course, when they demonize people its because they were asking for it.

Hmmmm..... Where have I heard that before?

Why I'm Not Blogging About Politics Much Anymore

There was a perfect example on a Memeorandum thread today of the reason why I don't care to blog about politics these days.

It begins with this piece by David Brooks where Brooks castigates the Obama campaign's cynical rhetoric against "modern capitalism," of which Romany is supposedly the archetypal specimen. Its the usual Brooks fodder; a good bit here and there surrounded by over broad generalizations and the occasional sweeping denunciation.

Its not much of a piece, by any standard. That presidential campaigns will stoop to cynical populist posturing is hardly breaking news anywhere.

But, no! According to some leading lights, Brooks' column is actually offensive!! Memeorandum helpfully links to drivel by Booman Tribune, No More Mister Nice Blog, The Reaction, and Balloon Juice that make a collective case that is at once idiotic, pig ignorant, dishonest and a complete waste of time for any thinking person. (I'm shocked that Steve Benen, the single dumbest and most unqualified political writer of our day didn't weigh in stupidly as well... he must have been napping.) Its pointless to even waste my time fisking it because it is all so bad I'd have to fisk even the definite articles. Worse yet, if I were to attempt to do so it would only sink myself into that shitty morass.

Part of me would like to blame Memeorandum for linking so often to such useless shit, but maybe they are simply constrained by the sheer amount of shit being produced. Its sad because there are real arguments to be had out there, and I love a good argument. What I do not like are dumbshits, especially when people are being tricked into taking the dumbshits seriously.

It begins to feel like we are all being sucked into the Monty Python "Argument Clinic" sketch, where one wants to say "I don't want to argue about that!" when more and more shitty drivel is being flung in our direction by this new class of aggressively stupid opinion makers. That is the scary part in all this. Its the stupid ones who are driving what gets counted as the "conversation" these days.

So, if you are wondering why I am not writing more just imagine an exasperated Michael Palin saying "I don't want to argue about that!" and you won't be too far off.

The Supreme Court Does The Democrats No Favor

Only time will tell what the practical upshot will be of SCOTUS's rubber stamp of Obamacare, but there may come a time when Democrats will say "with 'victories' like this who needs defeats?"

The trouble comes from the Court correctly labeling Obamacare as what it is; the single largest tax increase in the history of the United States. A tax increase, it must be stated, the brunt of which will be borne by the middle-class; precisely the group Obama promised he wouldn't raise taxes on. Of course Obama's tax promises were hollow from the get-go, but voters may be less likely to view things so strategically. This will be especially true given we are going into a campaigning season where nearly unlimited PAC money will be spent like it was going out of style. The advertizing theme resulting from this spending spree is easy to predict: "Obama is a liar who saddled the middle-class with the largest permanent tax increase in history."

And who said this was the case? Why, every liberal member of the Supreme Court. That's who.

The attempts of spin will be interesting. For the moment, press coverage is focusing upon the "victory" aspect. The political ramifications are a different animal all together. Obama and the Democrats have deliberately kicked the hornets nest. That has consequences, no matter how desperately they wish it didn't.

Let the fun begin. And, yes, for a political junkie this is where the fun kicks in. If you find yourself wishing it would all go away because you want to "win" once and for all, well, you're not a political junkie at all. You're a tyrant. Ain't democracy great?

Irrationality. Its Whats For Breakfast...

....lunch AND dinner. I'm beginning to think this must have been what it was like to live in the days of the Weimar Republic. Everything these days, and I do mean everything, is not just politicized, it is linked to specific forms of political action in such a way that once the table has been set nothing can shift it; not facts, not reason, not reality itself. As a result every meme is clung onto with ferocious tenacity, not matter how ridiculous it may turn out to be or how divorced from reality we later discover it is.

Once something has been viewed as a useful political tool it will not be discarded, even if reality itself (or one's perception of it) has to be altered. In the name of political expediency everything is fair game, and dishonesty is something only the "other guy" does.

It doesn't even matter what we are talking about here. I can speak generically because this pattern fits just about every political topic one wants to talk about. That is the point. The content of political discourse isn't important anymore.  Political discourse, as such, simply doesn't exist in this society. What passes for such discourse is merely the tribal identifiers we use to differentiate "Us" from "Them." The scariest part of it is the more one is afflicted with this pathology the more likely it is you will selected by the media as the ones to set the terms of the "debate."

"Political Science A 'Gaffe'" Says New York Times

Who knew? Romney’s Day to Relish Is Marred by Aide’s Gaffe

Mitt Romney sought to use the coveted endorsement of Jeb Bush on Wednesday to amplify his call for Republicans to rally behind his candidacy and get on with the mission of ousting President Obama....

...But if the endorsement held the potential to further choke off the oxygen to Mr. Santorum’s insurgent candidacy, the Romney campaign inadvertently gave Mr. Santorum a new supply when a senior adviser went on CNN and seemed to suggest that Mr. Romney’s conservative positions in the primary season could change like an Etch A Sketch drawing.

“I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign,” Eric Fehrnstrom, a longtime adviser to Mr. Romney, said in response to a question about pivoting to a matchup with Mr. Obama and appealing to moderate swing voters. “Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

OK, fine. I realize the Santorum and Gingrich campaigns are desperate, and will say any damn fool thing in a vain attempt to bolster their fading relevance, but why is the Times endorsing such foolishness?

And it is foolish. One thing Political Science has shown us very clearly is that candidates run towards their party's ideological base during primaries and run towards the center in general elections. Every candidate has the "do over" moment, usually on television at the moment of their nomination acceptance speech, where they stop focusing on the base. We all know this. Its a truism of American politics.

How can acknowledging a truism be a "gaffe"? The short answer is, it can't. The more cynical among us might speculate on the motives of the Times in portraying this unremarkable statement the way they are. For example, they may be panicked
at the idea of the GOP coalescing around Romney at this early date - a date far earlier than the Democrats managed in 2008 I might add - so this is their feeble attempt to keep the contest going a little longer. Who knows.

The way it looks, however, is that the Times is simply ignorant of the most basic parameters of American politics.

Sadly, that sounds just as plausible.

Stasis And The Left

Surprise, surprise; George Will has something worth reading: The inexorable march of creative destruction

After 244 years — it began publication five years before the 1773 Boston Tea Party — the Encyclopaedia Britannica will henceforth be available only in digital form as it tries to catch up to reference Web sites such as Google and Wikipedia. Another digital casualty forgot it was selling the preservation of memories, a.k.a. “Kodak moments,” not film.

America now is divided between those who find this social churning unnerving and those who find it exhilarating. What Virginia Postrel postulated in 1998 in “The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress” — the best book for rescuing the country from a ruinous itch for tidiness — is even more true now. Today’s primary political and cultural conflict is, Postrel says, between people, mislabeled “progressives,” who crave social stasis, and those, paradoxically called conservatives, who welcome the perpetual churning of society by dynamism.

I have often found this aspect of the American Left unusual. Be it the longing for the artificial industrial dominance of the U.S. after World War II or the period of social upheaval labelled "The 60's"; the strange desire to stop "climate change" when change is what climate does by definition (and as if any given climate has any claim to being the best or most proper climate); and countless other examples.

Maybe it all stems from the irrational notion that somewhere out there there must be an egghead who can solve our problems, or maybe it is simply a lack of vision and a deficiency in historical knowledge. Whatever the root cause, it certainly results it an outlook which can be as often regressive as progressive, backward looking as often as forward looking.

Very strange.

Why The Democratic Party Simply Is Not An Option For Me

From The Volokh Conspiracy:

The Supreme Court today issued a unanimous decision in favor of the property owners in the important case of Sackett v. EPA... Justice Alito’s concurring opinion includes a particularly clear description of what was at stake:

The position taken in this case by the Federal Government—a position that the Court now squarely rejects—would have put the property rights of ordinary Americans entirely at the mercy of Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) employees.

The reach of the Clean Water Act is notoriously unclear. Any piece of land that is wet at least part of the year is in danger of being classified by EPA employees as wetlands covered by the Act, and according to the Federal Government, if property owners begin to construct a home on a lot that the agency thinks possesses the requisite wetness, the property owners are at the agency’s mercy. The EPA may issue a compliance order demanding that the owners cease construction, engage in expensive remedial measures, and abandon any use of the property. If the owners do not do the EPA’s bidding, they may be fined up to $75,000 per day ($37,500 for violating the Act and another $37,500 for violating the compliance order). And if the owners want their day in court to show that their lot does not include covered wetlands, well, as a practical matter, that is just too bad. Until the EPA sues them, they are blocked from access to the courts, and the EPA may wait as long as it wants before deciding to sue. By that time, the potential fines may easily have reached the millions. In a nation that values due process, not to mention private property, such treatment is unthinkable.

While it is heartening to see none of the Supremes could sign off on this situation, it is still disturbing that the position of the Obama Administration, and thus the Democratic party as a whole, was in favor of unfettered power for the Federal Government without even the option of judicial review.

It's indefensible because it is tyrannical, and until the Democratic party accepts the notion that Washington needs to have some (any) limits on its power, even in its pursuit of Democratically anointed goals, they are a non-starter for me.

Ideological Coordination And The Media

Anyone who has read this blog would be aware that I am no fan of Rush Limbaugh. He simply rubs me the wrong way. Always has.

That being said, I am also being rubbed the wrong way by the incessant demagoguery of the, so called, "mainstream media" this last week. Indeed, in tone and effect the MSM took their marching orders from the "progressive" (once again so called) blogosphere. Not that this is anything new. It has been apparent for some time that media types folllow the lefty blogs extremely closely and very quickly validate the pet concerns of the ahrd left with front page coverage, framed precisely the same way the lefty blogs frame it. By comparison, the concerns raging in the right leaning blogs are lucky to get mentioned on page 46, under the tide schedules.

In a similar fashion, events that inflame the left will routinely be described by the MSM as a "firestrom" (or some such) supposedly embraced by average Joes and Janes, while conservative concerns will be labelled ideologically as being the sort of thing only "right wingers" are whining about.

The Obama administration has been expert at exploiting this coordination (in effect if not exactly by design - journolist notwithstanding) between lefty blogs and the media, reaping tangible benefits for their political program by the simple fact that they get to frame every debate. Thus we hear about Limbaugh using the word "slut" instead of hearing, well, anything else. Left wing causes across the board are now using the "validation" they get from MSM coverage to shill for money, including Obama's re-election campaign. Thus, the MSM's penchant for accepting left wing framing is producing a political benefit for one party in our political system.

Granted, this isn't the sort of thing a MSM type would be worried about, as they want Obama to win in November.

A Tale Of Two People

Person A says, "Corporations are NOT people, and therefore do not have rights!"

Person B says, "Don't you dare violate the free speech rights of Google, YouTube or Wikipedia!"

The irony is, of course, that Person A and Person B are usually the same person.

Irony, It's Not Just For Breakfast Anymore

From the "People Who Do Not Listen To Themselves" File:

Jonathan Gruber, a key intellectual architect of President Obama's overhaul of the American health care system, is a little frustrated.

"I'm frustrated that the future of the American health care system rests in the hands of one or two of these unelected people...

Amazingly, he's not talking about himself.

I myself find it particularly disturbing that all of our fates are being determined by a unelected "intellectual architect" who seemingly knows nothing about American government:

He credited Mitt Romney for not totally disavowing the Massachusetts bill during his presidential campaign, but said Romney's attempt to distinguish between Obama's bill and his own is disingenuous.

"The problem is there is no way to say that," Gruber said. "Because they're the same fucking bill. He just can't have his cake and eat it too. Basically, you know, it's the same bill. He can try to draw distinctions and stuff, but he's just lying. The only big difference is he didn't have to pay for his. Because the federal government paid for it. Where at the federal level, we have to pay for it, so we have to raise taxes."

Here is a clue for the great intellectual: they are different fucking Constitutions. What is allowable for Massachusetts under their state Constitution may not be allowable for the Federal government under the U.S. Constitution. Really, its not that hard a concept to grasp.

But, I guess trivial matters like rule of law are a matter of indifference when you are an "intellectual architect."

Gravy Train Time

From the "It's crap like this that make me want to tear my hair out" file:
Loophole lets union officials claim big teacher pensions

Last fall, Ed Geppert, then president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, co-wrote a scathing public essay that alleged some politicians and pundits in Illinois were "waging a relentless war against public employees over state pensions."

The "claim that the state pension shortfall was caused by overly generous pension benefits paid to state employees and teachers is provably false," stated the essay.

What Geppert didn't mention during that debate is that he personally was already getting an annual pension of roughly $185,000 — far more than most working teachers make in salary — through that same struggling system.

Geppert taught in the Metro East for seven low-paid years in the 1970s before leaving teaching and rising through the union ranks for three decades. Thanks to a little-noticed loophole in the system, he was allowed to apply the regular state teachers' pension formula to his much higher union salary.

The formula is based on an average of the retiree's highest four recent years of salary. For many teachers, that average may be around $50,000. For Geppert, it was more than $200,000 because of his union salary, which was six figures through most of his IFT tenure. That average was helped along by a salary spike of about 15 percent, to $260,000, just before he formally retired in 2004.

There was nothing in the law to prevent him from continuing to collect that pension after he returned to the union as its president three years later.

When asked last week about the arrangement, Geppert's combative tone from the essay had become more pragmatic. "I followed the law," he said. Using the system as it was available to him "was only the prudent thing to do."

Prudent, eh? Geppert stopped working as a public employee in the pension system in 1977, back when his average pay was only $12,100. Now he is drawing $186,000 a year from that same pension fund. That is patently absurd. If Geppert continues to draw his pension for another ten years we will have taken out over $3 million dollars out of the fund.

And Geppert is not alone:

Among former Metro East teachers who went on to boost their public pensions through union positions, the Post-Dispatch review of records found, was Terry Turley, a former East St. Louis schoolteacher. Records show Turley left teaching in 1995 to work for the IFT, making a union salary of between $90,000 and $157,000, then getting a final-year spike to $184,000 in 2005. Turley's resulting pension annuity through the Teachers' Retirement System is about $129,900.

That list also includes ex-teachers such as Andrea Baird, who taught in Carrollton for 13 years in the 1970s and 1980s, topping out at a salary of $17,300. After joining the staff of the IFT, her salary roughly doubled, then continued to climb, to $165,000 by 2003. She retired a year later, with a $32,000 final-year raise to $197,000 — setting up a $140,700-a-year pension annuity through the teachers' pension system.

Neither Turley nor Baird could be reached for comment despite messages left last week and on Tuesday.

While some pension recipients spent most of their careers as union officials, others actually did teach for most their careers, then were able to substantially boost their pensions with just a few high-paid years with a union.

That was the way it worked for Martha Bowman, who spent 33 years teaching in Marion, climbing to a salary of about $62,000, according to records. She then spent her last six years before retirement with the Illinois Education Association, the state's second major teachers union. There, her salary rose to $143,500 in five years — $24,000 of that coming in a final-year boost — setting up a retirement annuity of about $100,000 annually, more than twice what it would have been for her teaching service alone.

It's crazy. It also, it must be noted, is not a loophole. "Loophole" suggest an unintentional ambiguity in a law or regulation. This was very clearly intentional, and a legalized fleecing of Illinois taxpayers and the rank and file teachers the unions are supposed to be supporting. It amazes me liberals can bitch and moan about CEO pay for Fortune 500 companies while at the same time signing off on the pillaging of millions, if not over a billion dollars nationwide, from the pension funds of rank and file teachers.

And make no mistake, these unions officials want this "system" to carry on forever, because, they say, they work hard not like those lazy-layabout-all-summer teachers:

Bowman said she doesn't agree with the move in Springfield now to prevent union salaries from being applied to the teacher pension system. "Most teachers work nine months out of the year. When you're a union leader, you're on call 24/7. You don't have time off. There are a lot of weekends and evenings."

Geppert, the former IFT president, also is opposed to the legislation.

"I think it's a sad thing to occur," he said. He predicted it will be difficult to lure high-quality people into union service without allowing them access to teacher pensions.

That's right. What could possibly induce a teacher making $35,000 a year from taking a job making over $100,000 a year? Hmmm.... I wonder.

I'm sorry, but there is no rational reason why highly paid union officials should be in the teachers pension funds. By all means, set up your own pension fund for union officials, and even apply for a teacher's pension if you are properly vested in it. However, that pension must be based solely upon your work and salary as a teacher.

That's how it would work in the real world.

Matthew Yglesias Comes Out Forcefully Against The Enlightenment

From Think"Progress" (or is that "Think""Progress"?: Let Children Vote

Sally Kohn writes about a campaign in Lowell, Massachusetts to let seventeen year-olds vote in local elections. More power to them, but I say let any American citizen vote in any American election he or she wants to.

Objections to this usually take the form of imagining a highly disciplined party of seven year-olds reliably delivering bloc votes to whichever candidate credibly promises endless kindergarten.

Uh, no. The usual objections would cite John Locke or John Stuart Mill and acknowledge children have insufficient reason to be held responsible for their actions. That Yglesias is seemingly unaware of any such fact, and instead believes children were not voting because of the difficulty in molding them into a coherent voting block - I'm not joking... he actually says that is what he believes is the rationale - really, it's impossible to have an argument with such a person. After all, Yglesias is denying reason itself as being anything other than an arbitrary notion.

I really fear for our civilization. Half of our "educated" classes are morons. I'm sorry folks but intellectual doofism will be our downfall.

It's Called A Flashback And Not A Flashforward For A Reason

I've not been paying too much attention, obviously, to the various "Occupy" rallies going on hither and yon... mostly because I have a life. I did read this however and thought it worthy of a sympathetic chuckle: The 1960s radicalism of Occupy Wall Street will help elect a Republican in 2012

Photos confirm what I suspected: that most of the protesters are kids looking for their Sixties rush. Naked girls are painted in psychedelic colours. Handsome boys lounge around in cable-knit sweaters. Angry, doomed youth wave signs in the faces of frustrated policemen. Numbers are exchanged; kisses are snatched behind the barricades; disease is spread. This is what every generation of liberal has tried to recreate since 1968, be it the Watergate protests, the Battle of Seattle or the Stop the War Movement. I know this because I, too, once grasped for my 1968 moment. In 2003, I joined the sweaty ranks of the antiwar campaign. I was honestly motivated and intellectually sound, but I can’t deny the heady anticipation that a life of protest would lead inexorably to drugs and girls. I got the drugs but not the girls, and woke up several months later in a squat surrounded by Trotskyite bores who seemed far more intelligent when I was stoned....

Protest is exciting when you are young, and everyone deserves their chance to burn something down. But the political reality is that voters don’t actually want the wheels of Capitalism to stop turning. They don’t want free love or a rainbow nation of stoners. They want a job. That’s why Barack Obama, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have made a big mistake in expressing sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street movement. They’ve endorsed a happening that is moral in principle but politically toxic. Ordinary voters – the boring, unpretty folks who get up every day and go to work and never once complain – will reject it at the polls. The silent majority will be heard eventually, just like it was back in 1968.

Bingo.

Early Onset Curmudgeondom

I swear, as time goes on I find myself looking at the topics of political discussion displayed at Memeorandum and saying "Oh, go away already. I know what I feel is important in this world, and it has nothing to do with whatever the hell is occupying your tiny little minds."

And I'm not 83. I'm 43.

If I don't see some intelligence enter the fray soon I'm giving up.

What that entails exactly I have no idea. But I'll tell you one thing... this won't be a political blog anymore.