Senator Jim DeMint has called the Obama Administration the most "anti-business" and "anti-American" of his lifetime. I can just hear the pundits sniggering now at the sport they're about to have with him for such direct and intemperate remarks. It's a short outburst that puts its finger on the crucial spot:
Things that are just so anathema to the principles of freedom, and everything he has come up with centralizes more power in Washington, creates more socialist-style, collectivist policies.
Ay, there's the rub. Under President Obama, government at all levels grows; the private sector suffers except for the Fortune 500 Quislings like Jeff Immelt's GE which prosper by getting in bed with the government; people are told what kind of lightbulbs they will use and are exposed to liability for having a garage sale; government unions flourish while lesser-paid and less-protected private sector workers foot the bill; more and more people cannot find work and avail themselves of the government's inducements to become dependent.
Need Noman go on? He doesn't know much about Senator DeMint except that whenever he hears the name, there's usually a lefty harangue invoking it. Good job, Senator.
OK. Noman admits it. He loves reading Ann Coulter. She's mostly right, funny, irreverent to liberal's sacred cows, outlandish, sarcastic, scandalously blunt, a copious documenter, and a really good writer. She has a keen eye for spotting the insanity of contemporary culture, and a sharp pen for skewering it in print. She's got a point, as she most often does, with this one.
Those of you following the barbaric rioting in Britain will not have failed to notice that a sizable proportion of the thugs are white, something not often seen in this country.
Not only that, but in a triumph of feminism, a lot of them are girls. Even the "disabled" (according to the British benefits system) seem to have miraculously overcome their infirmities to dash out and steal a few TVs.
Congratulations, Britain! You've barbarized your citizenry, without regard to race, gender or physical handicap!
To Noman's mind, that's just about the right touch. He's not so thrilled about Anne's TV and radio persona, which is a bit too coquettish at the same time as it's smug to the point of snobbishness. But, at least she's out there crossing swords with lefties on the big stage. Thank God, as somebody has got to do it. And, she normally acquits herself favorably in debate.
Anne is one of those people that droves of media lefties love to hate. So, it's understandable if the reader is reticent about giving her a chance. That's the point of singling her out for special treatment. Get over your aversion, and rifle through her archives. You might find that these arch-arch-arch-whacko-right wing nut jobs have a point.
Noman has taken great interest in political developments in Wisconsin, a ridiculously liberal state north of Illinois, an even more ridiculously liberal, and crooked, state. Apparently, something happened to the water in Lake Michigan because, except for Chicago, there has been a conservative tilt in recent elections on both sides of that great lake. Yesterday featured the latest endorsement of sensible and fiscally responsible governance in the cheesehead state. Disaffected public unions threatened by Governor Scott Walker's legislative initiatives earlier this year attempted to tilt the balance of the state senate by recalling six Republican senators in order to deprive the Governor of a necessary legislative majority. Things didn't quite work out for Democrats, union thugs, community organizers and horrified liberals from New York to Los Angeles.
Union forces in Wisconsin and beyond were dealt a blow Tuesday night after Republicans held onto four of the six state Senate seats in recall races and kept majority control of the chamber. While thousands marched on the Madison statehouse in February over a new law promoted by Republican Gov. Scott Walker that limits collective bargaining rights for public workers, voters in the Badger State turned out in record numbers and sent a message that economic reform trumps the heated power of organized labor. “The outcome yesterday is a win for Republicans, but it’s especially a weakness for Democrats and the union groups because they fell short of their goal,” said Charles Franklin, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Maybe we could talk about the shows of strength, mobilization and closeness that came from this. But at best what it says is unions will be in for very tough fights wherever they take this issue. It is not going to be one that can easily win.”
Noman hopes that Professor Franklin's grip on reality is firm. And, he is very happy with this result, not because he holds any special animus towards unions, but because Governor Walker's policies seem the only feasible alternative to the capital market meltdowns suffered by Greece, Ireland, Portugal, the EU generally, and the USA recently, indeed as Noman writes this sentence. Unions, and Democrats generally don't seem to understand, or care about, the peril America is in because of impossible entitlement promises and cushy deals for government employees. The present course is simply not sustainable.
Note how the Washington Post handles the same story, even going so far as to intimate that Republicans are cheating.
Democrats’ chances came down to Darling’s race against state Rep.Sandy Pasch (D), which was not decided until early Wednesday morning. Democrats have questioned the results given that Waukesha County was one of the last to finish reporting. In April’s Supreme Court election — also seen as a referendum on collective bargaining — challengerJoAnne Kloppenburg appeared to have beaten Judge David Prosser, before thousands of lost ballots were found in Waukesha.
Actually, "thousands of lost ballots" were not found in Judge Prosser's successful election. The Post writers must have gotten confused with Democratic Senator Al Franken's stolen victory in Minnesota, which did entail discovery of lost ballots in the trunk of a Democratic campaign worker's car. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out after the Wisconsin judicial election.
Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus told reporters she discovered an error Wednesday afternoon when she was importing the election numbers into a computer file and realized that 10,859 votes for Mr. Prosser and 3,456 for Ms. Kloppenburg had not been counted. "This is not a case of extra votes or extra ballots being found," Ms. Nickolaus said, her voice wavering with emotion. "This is human error, which I apologize for." Ms. Nickolaus is a former staff member for the Assembly Republican caucus and was elected to a four-year term.
Noman linked the article in his 4/7/11 blog entry entitled "Cheese Heads Hanging In The Balance." The Post's professional writers must have been too busy under tight deadlines to dig up the facts.
For those interested in reviewing recent political events in Wisconsin, please refer to Noman's posts "Unions Turn To The Bible" (April 6, 2011); "Making An Offer They Can't Refuse" (April 1, 2001); "Those Mean and Stupid Republicans" (March 10, 2011); and "Public Unions Under Water" (March 7, 2011).
So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable. They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.
They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so.They have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game.
They are an absolute deadweight upon society, because they contribute nothing yet cost the taxpayer billions. Liberal opinion holds they are victims, because society has failed to provide them with opportunities to develop their potential.
Most of us would say this is nonsense. Rather, they are victims of a perverted social ethos, which elevates personal freedom to an absolute, and denies the underclass the discipline — tough love — which alone might enable some of its members to escape from the swamp of dependency in which they live.
Only education — together with politicians, judges, policemen and teachers with the courage to force feral humans to obey rules the rest of us have accepted all our lives — can provide a way forward and a way out for these people.
They are products of a culture which gives them so much unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human beings. My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.
Unless or until those who run Britain introduce incentives for decency and impose penalties for bestiality which are today entirely lacking, there will never be a shortage of young rioters and looters such as those of the past four nights, for whom their monstrous excesses were ‘a great fire, man’.
Whew! Noman wouldn't have put it quite like that, especially the parts about "absolute deadweight" and his dogs subscribing "to a higher code of values" than the hooligans wreaking havoc on England's streets. But, he's glad that Hastings splenetic outburst saw the light of day, and that even in PC England, it was published.
Given that President Obama will need all the help he can get in 2012 to overcome a double-dip recession, failed redistributionist policies (failed for America, that is, not for the selected beneficiaries of government largesse), and widespread malaise over American decline at home and abroad, Hollywood is rushing to the rescue. Director Katherine Bigelow will premiere a movie about the killing of Osama Bin Laden one month before the November election. Gee, do you think she's trying to influence its outcome? The successful SEALS operation is often cited as an example of the Commander-in-Chief's courage, brilliance, nerve and just all-round awesomeness, which Bigelow doesn't want us to forget. Neither does the President, who evidently green-lighted access for her to all the key players. Pshaw says the President's mouthpiece; someone as wonderful and principled as a glib lawyer with a community-organizing background wouldn't do that. Neither would an honorable studio like Sony pictures, which values its reputation for truthfulness, fairness and integrity, even if it did just host a glitterati fund raiser for the President.
Hollywood has been known to take liberties with facts and story lines. So, Noman is expecting a little harmless exaggeration around the edges. Perhaps Bigelow will photoshop Obama in Rambo get up going mano-a-mano with Osama, and screaming "this is for Peoria, which I love with all my being" before driving a butter knife slowly into the bad guy's jelly belly. Whatever this October lollypop for the President has in store for the manipulable public, Noman will be sure to miss it. He'll be voting on the President's four-year record, especially the first two when his party ruled the roost and turned our crisis into its opportunity.
Notice how the camera faces leftward and has no swivel. Remember that in October of 2012, and throughout the election season.
The WSJ weighs in on the latest evidence of charter school superiority to the public school alternative in New York:
Today's report has good news: Results released yesterday of test scores in the New York State Assessment Program showed that the most relentlessly attacked charter schools—Eva Moskowitz's Harlem Success academies—have outperformed their public-school peers, often by a wide margin.
Naturally, this displeases the educational establishment, which works hand-in-glove with the Democratic party. What would public money be without left-wingers to appropriate it for enlightened purposes?
Unfortunately for students throughout the country, those purposes don't include educating them in the three remaining "r's"--reading, riting and rithmatic--the fourth "r," religion, having been banished from public schools in the 1960's as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. One has to marvel at the reasoning, and outcome, of the Supreme Court's dictat.
Secular humanist jurisprudence notwithstanding, US children do surpass the rest of the world's in the possession of self esteem and knowledge of how to put on a condom.
Meanwhile, the battle to stop the movement continues. Ms. Moskowitz's effort to open another school on Manhattan's Upper West Side has met massive resistance. Actor Matt Damon is now throwing his celebrity against charters. Their students, meanwhile, continue upward.
Ah, yes. What would public discourse be without Hollywood celebrities to educate us in the ways of superior wisdom and compassion?
If you'd like to know how parents of children trapped in public schools around the nation feel about this particular battle, Noman encourages you to see "Waiting for Superman." Produced by a well-intentioned lefty--Davis Guggenheim of "An Inconvenient Truth"--it unwittingly stumbles onto the cause of America's educational malaise: teachers unions.
It will break your heart and cause you to scratch your head wondering why "We, the people" grant the perpetrators of this travesty a near monopoly on public funding for education.
For a contrary view, Noman points you to a criticism of the movie, which, incidentally, declines to defend the system that the movie depicts. Having read that "An Inconvenient Truth" was unburdened by a single truthful fact, Noman would have his doubts if the NEA (National Educational Association) didn't provide a quarter of the delegates to the Democratic party's national convention and lavishly fund the campaigns of the party's whackier candidates.
Noman would like to think that "educators" like Randi Weingarten (depicted below) weren't as bad as the movie depicts them to be. He just suspects that they are given developments in public education over the years.
When confronted with Matt Damon's front-man performance on behalf of the educational establishment, he'll remember the system and personalities it harbors, protects and foists on America's children.
The Wall Street Journal editorializes on the hope and change politics that brought us, the US, a downgrade from S&P with the promise of more to come.
Let's recall how we arrived at this crossroads. A credit mania of several years that no one wanted to end suddenly turned into a financial panic in 2008. In their anxiety, and with Republicans holding the White House but having no explanation, the voters turned to the candidate who seemed coolest under fire. Though relatively unknown, Barack Obama was at least promising "hope and change."
Upon taking office, Mr. Obama proceeded to unleash the entire liberal economic and social policy arsenal in the name of ending the panic. Whether or not these were his own convictions, the President allowed the Pelosi Congress to use that rare political opening—and 60 Senate Democrats—to pursue a 40-year wish list.
And pursue it Democrats did. To an economy recovering from excessive private leverage, they poured on trillions in new public spending and debt. Amid a financial system suffering from a nervous breakdown, they castigated bankers for causing the panic and then added 2,000 pages of new rules. They spent nearly two years redesigning one-sixth of the economy to realize their ambitions for national health care. They unleashed regulators to rewrite the nation's energy and labor laws.
And that's not all folks. In short, Democrats had their way--all and exclusively their way--for two years of hegemonic excess the likes of which America hadn't witnessed since the New Deal. But, unlike then, the country had ample proof and reason in 2008 to not repeat the policies that kept America in the throes of depression throughout the 1930s.
Since the tea party eruption last election, Democrats haven't stopped. They've merely gone underground to achieve by regulatory means (as this Op-ed entitled "Obama's New Gifts to Organized Labor" illustrates) what they couldn't by legislative ones, even when they had the votes. The editorial concludes with the following:
The downgrade uproar and even the market turmoil are signs that Americans aren't about to accept economic decline gracefully. To adapt a famous phrase, a debt crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
Lest you miss the reference, Noman suggests that you do a YouTube search on "Emanuel and opportunity," and then surf around for Hilary Clinton and other Democratic luminaries who viewed the crisis as their opportunity to actualize a 40-year wish list. We have reaped what they sowed.
One can hardly expect an article thusly entitled to constitute a ringing endorsement of the President's intelligence, and Bret Stephen's exploration of the President's grey matter doesn't disappoint.
When it comes to piloting, Barack Obama seems to think he's the political equivalent of Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Yeager and—in a "Fly Me to the Moon" sort of way—Nat King Cole rolled into one. "I think I'm a better speech writer than my speech writers," he reportedly told an aide in 2008. "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm . . . a better political director than my political director." On another occasion—at the 2004 Democratic convention—Mr. Obama explained to a Chicago Tribune reporter that "I'm LeBron, baby. I can play at this level. I got game." Of course, it's tempting to be immodest when your admirers are so immodest about you. How many times have we heard it said that Mr. Obama is the smartest president ever? Even when he's criticized, his failures are usually chalked up to his supposed brilliance. Liberals say he's too cerebral for the Beltway rough-and-tumble; conservatives often seem to think his blunders, foreign and domestic, are all part of a cunning scheme to turn the U.S. into a combination of Finland, Cuba and Saudi Arabia.
I don't buy it. I just think the president isn't very bright.
Ouch! And Stephens is one of the post-Murdoch concessions to NY Times readers at the Wall Street Journal. The piece goes on to devastate the President, less on the grounds that he is dumb--which he isn't--than on the grounds that he is venal and wracked with hubris. These vices make him stupid. He is more Icarus than Coalemus.
Noman had the pleasure of taking a class with then Harvard Law Review editor, Barack Obama, while both were at the law school. In class, he struck Noman as a thoughtful, articulate man of the left. In fact, Noman had a lot more respect for him then than he does now. What appeared then to be an ability to consider his adversary's perspective for the sake of getting at the truth was, in retrospect, just a callous, manipulative technique for getting his way. That is the way he has governed.
Obama was famous even then as the first black editor of the HLR, and was evidently being groomed by his very intelligent, and leftist, professors for bigger things. Harvard Law in those days was a bastion of political correctness and liberal intolerance, churning out culture warriors for the alienated, anti-Christian, anti-mainstream left. The conservatives on its faculty were Earl Warren liberals. The cutting edge at the time was deconstruction and critical legal theory--with chip-on-the-shoulder attitude. Obama learned his lessons well, and to disguise them even better. His skills were finely honed at the ACORN finishing school for political revolutionaries, and the Chicago school for hardball politics. He is, in brief, the polished product of elite, left-liberal centers of education and politics.
What a waste of a good mind. In Noman's opinion, Obama is very smart. It's the things he believes in that are stupid--at the concrete level, not at the level of glimmering abstractions. He is not grounded in the truth about human nature or society, and thus is subject to criticisms of cerebral insufficiency despite ample and evident proof (at least to Noman) of his smarts.
William McGurn calls attention to recent comparisons of President Obama to President Carter. The troubling aspect for the President of this growing chorus is that it's his people doing the comparing.
So it must have stung when the New York Times's Maureen Dowd recently quoted an unnamed Democratic senator moaning that "we are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes." She was not alone. Eric Alterman earlier this year weighed in with a column in U.S. News whose headline declares, "Obama's Awful '70s Show Echoes Jimmy Carter." The unkindest cut of all comes from Zbigniew Brzezinski—Jimmy Carter's national security adviser and one of the first to hop aboard the Obama bandwagon—who on MSNBC last month brought up the word most associated with Mr. Carter, though he never actually said it: "malaise."
McGurn's opinion piece underscores that Carter, like Obama, was hailed as the genius who would transcend politics and sanitize the nation with his own purity.
Mr. Obama can't be blamed for the excesses that saw him hailed as the new FDR, the new JFK or the new Lincoln, or for the Norwegian committee that bestowed upon him a Nobel. He can be held to account for encouraging them: by delivering a campaign speech in Berlin, by accepting a prize he hadn't earned, by breaking out not only a Lincoln quotation but the Lincoln china and the Lincoln Bible for his inauguration.
Please see Noman's very first post, of Feb 12, 2011, entitled "Jimmy Carter's Second Term." The difference between the two Presidents to Noman's mind is that Carter was simply a liberal imbecile who did all the wrong things, but wasn't out to remake the country; Obama is an Alinskyite agitator (by his own admission) steeped in revolutionary dogma, who most definitely seems out to reshape the country and its institutions. Besides having incompetence, ineptitude, and foolish wrongheadedness in common, the two also evince feelings of guilt and shame about America and its role on the world stage.
Noman hopes that when President Obama is defeated along with his odious party, the country isn't afflicted with his intermittent forays into the limelight as it has been with Jimmy Carter's. With a little luck, Barack will move to Europe or the middle east, where he can revel in the glories of his revolutionary administration without provoking contempt or gales of laughter.
In an article entitled "S&P Seen Surrendering to Tea Party Costing U.S. Taxpayer," Zeke Faux of Bloomberg illustrates why media is held in such low repute. You see, the long-expected, well-deserved downgrade is not the result of anything having to do with the President's insistence on reckless spend-and-tax governance; his jihad to expand the size of government and its control over the nation's people and their behavior; his demagoguing of every negotiation to accuse the other side of wanting to suck up to fat cats and throw old people under the bus; his chastising others for failing to compromise or think of the nation's well-being while he refuses to budge on his statist-friendly strategies for redistributing America's power and wealth; or his slippery use of terms like balance, investments or fairness. No. Nothing is ever his or his party's fault. Rather, according to Zeke Faux, it's the fault of the ubiquitous "Tea Party"--that perfidious boogie-man menacing the nation from its odious red states, or wherever abused taxpayers take a dim view of Democrats' vision for their wallets, nation and futures--or more precisely, S&P's capitulation to its awesome might.
Standard & Poor’s, the rating company that downgraded the debt of the United States to AA+ from AAA for the first time, now finds itself assailed by investors led by billionaire Warren Buffett for making a political decision that has more to do with Tea Party politics than the financial stability of the U.S.
Would that be the same Warren Buffet who led the charge of billionaire population controllers in favor of President Obama's candidacy? Buffet backs the President almost as fervently as he champions abortion on demand, even while he's at odds with him on substantive economic matters such as cap-and-trade, card check, and tax incentives for corporate jets. When asked in 2008 why he supported Obama over McCain, Buffet replied that he differed too much from McCain on matters of social justice. Noman always looks to billionaire investors for guidance on what constitutes social justice, just as he looks to millionaire movie actors and actresses. They know better, and they always seem to vote Democrat for social reasons.
Faux next quotes that eminent statesman and economist, Barney Frank, to rebuff Republican claims that the Obama presidency is precipitating national decline:
Democrats disagreed. “We have the people who helped cause the financial crisis now claiming that they’re the experts on what the American budget should be,” Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a telephone interview before the downgrade was announced. “It’s beyond their competence and I’m just puzzled that people pay attention.”
Though he's posted on it before, Noman delights in having yet another opportunity to remind readers of "people who helped cause the financial crisis." It indeed puzzles Noman why people pay attention to Frank, or the Democratic party.
The irony of it all is too much for Noman. Assailed by Democrats for being too slow to downgrade subprime CDOs, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and the GSEs, S&P now finds itself being assailed by Democrats for reacting too quickly to political dysfunction in Democrat-controlled DC. Moreover, after months of President Obama's hectoring opponents that unless things were done his (unarticulated) way the US was going to default on its debts, seniors were not going to receive social security checks, and armageddon was just around the corner, S&P is now blamed for taking him seriously.
“They think they’re giving an honest appraisal but they have instead become hopelessly entangled in the politics of the national debt,” Chris Rupkey, the chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York, said in a Bloomberg Television interview on Aug. 5. “The U.S. is not out of money, it has the financial resources to make good on its debt, and it should not have been downgraded.”
Noman wonders where Bloomberg was hiding Chris Rupkey when Sarah Palin, Ron Paul, Republicans generally, and the bogie-man Tea Party were being excoriated for proclaiming essentially the same thing. Perhaps S&P was being "hopelessly entangled in the politics of the national debt" by its silence while Democrats played politics with the nation's credit rating.
It gets better, yet. Faux then trots out Paul Krugman to deliver the coup de grace.
“There is no reason to take Friday’s downgrade of America seriously,” Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman said in a New York Times column. “These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.”
This from a man who claims on Keynesian grounds that the problem with President Obama's opportunistic $1 trillion slush fund for Democratic constituencies was that it was not large enough. It should go without saying that, he, the New York Times, Bloomberg, all their lefty writers and editors, and the far-too-many practitioners of faux journalism are the last people whose judgment we should trust.
Noman's opinion on the big matter is that America's crippling problem is its President, a revolutionary in the Saul Alinsky mold, and the people leading the Democratic party. Rather than being the leader of a nation, Barack Obama is the leader of a faction, which, incidentally, knows nothing about economics, disdains the notion of transcendence, and scoffs at the notion that means must be intrinsically moral--irrespective of the ends they serve.
Noman's opinion on the little matter is that media is an adjunct of the Democratic party, or vice-versa. There is nothing wrong with America that could not be fixed by a free press. Media is badly in need of the affirmative action it so vociferously champions in other contexts. Minimally, Zeke Faux should change his unfortunate last name, or stop living down to it.
Noman has been wanting to comment on a weekend conversation he took part in a couple of months back in the country home of an academic colleague. In attendance were a number of 40ish-to-60ish-year-old academics (with spouses) including a superstar professor on his annual visit to Europe from his nose-bleed-elite institution in the US. Somehow the conversation turned to the wonder of youth, and the natural desire to recapture it, in particular to being a teenager again. The superstar initiated that he'd trade all of his best-selling business books, accolades and tenure to be nineteen again. He reiterated it several times (especially the part about the best-selling books) in order to suggest the thrilling virility of his late-teen youth (unlikely), and to ignite the conversation. His (second) wife playfully interjected that she was offended because he didn't know her then. In saying it she coquettishly called attention to her newly-lifted, over-painted face. Her "figure" was emaciated, liposuctioned into submission and plasticized into form; her hair was tinted and starched to some semblance of "body." She conceded that he had a point, however, and confessed that she would trade her plight as the pampered, jobless wife of a wealthy, famous and powerful man in a heartbeat just to be nineteen again.
By the time the conversational compass pointed to Noman, it occurred to him that everyone who had chimed in agreement was either childless, or had one or two children long gone from the nest. These were adults wanting to relive youth because in a crucial way, they were still living as children. It was all about them, rather than others, just as it is for a nineteen, or nine-year-old. (It needn't be said that these Americans were deeply convinced liberals of profound social conscience, incidentally with an equally profound distaste for religion.) Noman, the father of eight no-children, all of them currently at home, truthfully commented that he wouldn't want to be 19, or any age, again. He wanted to see how his children would turn out; what would become of them; what would they make of their lives; who would they love, and bring into the world; what would their contribution to life be? These were just some of the questions that he wouldn't even know to ask had he not willingly surrendered his youth to love and procreation.
From the birth of his first child while in law school, even before his first midnight trip on foot to the emergency pharmacy (the night before an exam) in order to find her needed medicine, Noman knew that it most definitely wasn't about him any longer. It was about her, his little girl, and his wife who was counting on him to protect them both. It was about his family, the one he formed in love and volitionally brought into existence with another person, his no-wife. It made Noman more of a man, less of a child. And, he's never wanted to go back. This is what life is meant to be, which is something that children teach better than anyone or -thing is the world. Despite the aches and pains of age, Noman wouldn't give this knowledge up if you paid him.
Noman won't preach about the importance of life, children and family--conceived of along procreative lines (no pun intended)--to personal development, and social reality.
Noman has long preferred "The Big Sleep" in Bogie and Bacall's oeuvre, even to their first of four movies together, "To Have and Have Not." But, that's all changed now. Despite Noman's predilection for film noir, and appreciation for the convoluted yet captivating plot of "TBS", "THaHN" features a sequence of five scenes that so deliciously ratchet up the romantic tension between B&B as to change Noman's mind. It starts in a police station where a cop slaps Bacall with a glove, and ends with the scene appended below. Bacall is at her best--sassy, languid, nearly brash in her prancing prowess--and it's her performance that marks the crucial difference between the two films. Noman absolutely loves the way she calls Bogie a "stinker" before planting a great movie kiss on him in the clip below. Earlier in the film they refer to each other by nicknames, and she rejoins "I'd appreciate your not calling me "Slim"; I'm a little too skinny to take it lightly." She delivers the line perfectly.
Bogie dominates "The Big Sleep" somewhat to the movie's detriment. They were a powerful screen couple, but more so when she held her own, and her character held independent interest. Plus, as a romantic protagonist, Bogie was a lousy movie kisser as the following trailer indicates. (It's that way of holding a woman's face by her jaw in pucker position, like he does with Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca.) Noman's favorite scene in "The Big Sleep" (which he can find on You Tube, but for some reason can't link) occurs early in the movie when she chides him for his bad manners. He retorts: "Well I'm not crazy about yours either. I didn't ask to see you. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. I don't like them myself. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings..." It's classic Bogie.
This is all by way of saying that if you're looking for some classic movie entertainment, you could do much worse than these two films. Watch them both, and let Noman know what you think.
Germany's venerable leftist rag, Der Spiegel, interviews Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler on the debt ceiling "compromise." Compromise and bi-partisanship have made comebacks in the media's lexicon since the public swept those nasty, evil, selfish tea-party meanies into power last election (in the House of Representatives) on a platform of limited and reduced government. The words virtually disappeared during the first two years of the Emperor Barack the Unreproachable's reign, when overlords Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi rammed the statist agenda down the throats of a financially traumatized and politically defenseless nation.
Note the interviewer's mastery of the Democratic party's and American media's talking points: the tea party is causing an image the world over of chaos and gridlock in America; it is holding Congress hostage to a radical cause; it is acting irresponsibly and unpatriotically by not going along with Democrats; it only wants to win and is not open to compromise; not accepting lies about future spending cuts is pigheaded; cutting the size of government will hurt the economy. Noman thinks Meckler handles it all with laudable firmness and patience, and encourages readers to ponder his arguments. Meanwhile, he appends a flashback to remind readers of Democrats' commitment to bipartisanship and compromise.
Noman gets his daily assault on personal tranquility from the news as always. It's simply that he's been too stressed with teaching to set his thoughts down for public consumption. Nevertheless, the extremely common-sensical, even if somewhat flamboyant, Sarah Palin has given Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner a chance to provoke Noman into comment, stress or no.
Ms. Palin said the U.S. cannot default on its debt and that the debt limit will eventually be raised, but she said the U.S. would have not have to default if Congress does not raise the country’s borrowing limit by Aug. 2, the date the Treasury has said the U.S. will no longer be able to pay its obligations with the current debt limit.
“I’m still not one to buy into this notion that we must incur more debt, [that] we must increase the debt ceiling by Aug. 2, otherwise there will be catastrophe,” she said. “You prioritize…you pay for the essentials first and then the nonessentials have to get cut.”
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has called such a move “a radical and deeply irresponsible departure” from past practice.
Let's see. To pay for the essentials first, and then cut the nonessentials is a "radical and deeply irresponsible departure from past practice." Presumably, past practice is to be hallowed and revered now that the counter culture has become the status quo and replaced all received understandings and institutions with its own creations. That's against the way we've always done things, says Tim Geithner without a hint of irony. The steady and highly responsible thing to do now is to keep on borrowing in a radical and deeply irresponsible manner. How else might the Democratic party's constituents feed at the public trough? And, after all, that's the important matter for a Treasury Secretary to concern himself with, isn't it?
While you are being mesmerized by President Obama's leisurely style, resonating voice and media adulation, here is a little something to ponder about the state of America.
At the end of August 2008, before the financial bailout and the stimulus, the publicly marketable segment of the U.S. national debt was 4.88 trillion. Of that, $2.56 trillion was in the intermediate-term Treasury notes, $1.22 trillion was in short-term Treasury bills, $582.8 billion was in long-term Treasury bonds, and $521.3 billion was in TIPS.
At the end of March 2011, by which time the Chinese had dropped their Treasury bill holdings 97 percent from their peak, the publicly marketable segment of the U.S. national debt had almost doubled from August 2008, hitting $9.11 trillion. Of that $9.11 trillion, $5.8 trillion was in intermediate-term Treasury notes, $1.7 trillion was in short-term Treasury bills; $931.5 billion was in long-term Treasury bonds, and $640.7 billion was in TIPS.
Before the end of March 2012, the Treasury must redeem all of the $1.7 trillion in Treasury bills that were extant as of March 2011 and find new or old buyers who will continue to invest in U.S. debt. But, for now, the Chinese at least do not appear to be bullish customers of short-term U.S. debt.
Who would have thought that capital would become the only remaining moral force in public governance? The bond market will decide America's political fate, just as it has made decisions that politicians don't dare touch in Greece, Ireland and Portugal. No politician alive has the nerve and power to cut the size of the government behemoths we've created under the influence of socialist ideology. And one of the two parties is ideologically committed to growing it. Few have been able to reduce its onerous demands on the body politic's purse and patience. It always wants more. There's always another dozen bureaucracies to create in order to provide six-figure salaries to the annual legions of social-science majors graduating from America's colleges and universities.
Big government liberals in both parties, but mostly the Democratic party, steered us to this precipitous state of affairs. Their solution to profligate spending?--more taxes, of course. Naturally, that will smother the last remaining spark of life in the economy. But, who cares? Life will be more "fair" in America once nobody has anything: nobody except the illuminati and government bureaucrats, that is; in short, our betters.
Noman is disgusted at the nauseating spectacle playing out before us in DC.
The strident march of tolerance goose steps forward into the brave new world. It appears that Representatives Pete Stark and Nancy Pelosi want gays, but not faithful Catholics, to adopt children. That will be the likely affect of proposed legislation aimed at eliminating "homophobia" in the adoption process.
Stark told the Huffington Post he decided to introduce the measure because of the “homophobic opposition that has tried to decide that gay people aren’t suitable adoptive parents.”
He cited a “tremendous need” for adoptive parents in the U.S. and said there are “thousands of kids who would otherwise be stuck in foster care.”
But Sprigg said the bill would drive out “some of the most effective adoption agencies that there are.”
“Christian adoption agencies such as Catholic Charities have such an outstanding record. It would be sacrificing the interest of children to drive them out of the adoption business.”
In 2009 Catholic Charities completed 3,794 adoptions and provided adoption services to 43,982 clients. It provided foster care services for 18,344 children and adolescents, the Catholic Charities USA 2009 Annual Survey reports.
“The impact of the legislation would be to mean that fewer children will actually get homes,” said Windham. She said such proposals are part of a “growing conflict” and that supporters of religious freedom should oppose Stark’s bill.
Without a religious freedom exemption, the bill would make it “very difficult if not impossible” for religiously-affiliated agencies to operate, Windham said.
Similar laws have forced some agencies to close.
So, the Democratic party's Catholiphobia has gotten the better of it again, ironically in the name of tolerance. "Gays, out of the closet; Catholics into it."
Naturally, more children will go without adoptive homes should Christian organizations be forced out of the market by government preference. Who cares? The point of the Orwellianly entitled “Every Child Deserves a Family Act” is not to give every child a family. Rather, it is to bend the Church to the leftist will, or, minimally, harass it for having the temerity to hold a contrary opinion regarding family matters--the traditional one--to Reps Stark, Pelosi, and their ilk.
Noman is too tired to spend much time on this. He just thought you'd like to know what the party of the culture of death is planning should it recover its political hegemony.
Does Pete Stark look like Leo G. Carroll to anyone besides Noman?
Noman remembers laughing heartily as a young squirt at the lame joke a about Greece being located next to Turkey. The possibility of it sliding out of Europe, however, is no joke as explained by Josef Joffe in this moring's European WSJ.
Greece's problem is not just liquidity, which could be solved by injections from abroad. Rather, Greece's debt crisis is rooted in its economic fundamentals, and nothing short of fundamental reform could improve its long-term prospects under the euro. Here are some telling numbers: While unit-labor costs in Greece have shot up 15 percentage points since 2005, they rose by only five points in Germany. To restore their lost competitiveness, Greeks and their government would have to agree on a new social contract between them, one that demolishes market barriers and privileges, and in particular those that coddle a bloated public sector that makes up 25% of the work force.
But how many societies could bear such a revolution, especially one ordered by foreigners? Last year, facing the prospect of even modest reforms, the Greeks answered with bloody riots to protest the demands of their supposed tormentors abroad. This year, Greeks are doubling down on their bet against their own ability to change, and are cleaning out their bank accounts and dispatching their euros to Switzerland and Britain—or to their own bedrooms, underneath their mattress.
The line about the bloated public sector being reigned in by foreigners reminded Noman of the US. The foreigners in that case are the tea partiers, who, by all media accounts, are some weird and alien presence in the US body politic. What could be stranger than taxpayers who are fed up with Socialist self-dealing to the point of protesting about it? Gasp.
But, we're talking about Greece here, and implicitly about Germany. The cushy Greek lifestyle is lived courtesy of hard-working Germans who are getting tired of footing the bill. Sound familiar?
At least in the German case, Greeks can buy German exports. So, they get something back for their largesse. What do Wisconsin taxpayers get for $106,000 per year school teachers (before medical, pension and early retirement benefits)? They get their children turned into little Trotskyites who worship whatever Democrat happens to be in the White House, and who burn with a passion for "social justice" along the lines of bigger government and higher taxes. Oh, and let's not forget abortion-on-demand, gay marriage, euthanasia and all those other social blessings so precious to lefties, who champion only "freedoms" that turn people into slaves.
Greece and Europe are just different fora for the same problem we have in the US. Some people adamantly insist on having things their way, at other people's expense.
