Pot, Kettle, Obama

Eric Zimmerman, Hill writes

President Obama came out swinging today against the Supreme Court’s ruling in a major campaign finance case.[…]

With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics.  It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.  This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington–while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates.  That’s why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue.  We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision.  The public interest requires nothing less

Barack Obama spent over seven hundred million dollars, largely from George Soros, to elect a corrupt and incompetent administration, Bloomberg:

In capturing the presidency, Obama, 47, became the first major-party nominee to reject federal funding for the general election. He spent $740.6 million, eclipsing the combined $646.7 million that Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic nominee John Kerry spent four years earlier

Three quarters of a billion dollars and we get an administration of tax cheats, liars, incompetent boobs, Truthers and pedophiles. We can and should do better.   George your money was not well spent.

It is hard having to correct the boss.  

But I’ve been doing it for a long time and somebody needs to do.  Alas!   Eric rambled:

ISSUE AVOIDANCE: It is flat out amazing to me that the wild scramble for pinning the blame on somebody for the Democrat party loss in Massachusetts, absolutely nobody on the left has correctly identified the problem.  Nobody.  It’s now down to the point where there are a number of people on the left who are pointing the finger directly at the Obama White House.  One such is Paul Krugman, who was noted by Bruce McQuain:

Prior to Christmas Martha Coakley was up in the polls, what twenty points,  and apparently cruising to an easy victory.   Then her campaign was Swift Boated.    That is torpedoed.   The Coakley campaigned took three torpedo hits.

Brown Capitalized on Concerns About National Democrats

— From the beginning, Brown labeled President Obama’s health care and cap and trade plans as tax increases. Polling throughout the race showed this to be the most effective attack on Coakley.

— Coakley’s lead dropped significantly after the Senate passed health care reform shortly before Christmas and after the Christmas Eve “bombing” incident. Polling showed significant concerns with the actions of Senator Nelson to hold out for a better deal. Senator Nelson’s actions specifically hurt Coakley who was forced to backtrack on her opposition to the abortion restriction amendment.

So saith,  Celinda Lake, the Coakley  campaign pollster,  via Ben Smith, Politico, and Betsy Newmark, Betsy’s Page.    All three campaign torpedoes were fired at the behest of Captain Obama,  he has plenty of  fish left and no apparent intent to stop firing.

I add that Coakley took few of her own torpedoes.

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the sphere… the BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

• ISSUE AVOIDANCE: It is flat out amazing to me that the wild scramble for pinning the blame on somebody for the Democrat party loss in Massachusetts, absolutely nobody on the left has correctly identified the problem.  Nobody.  It’s now down to the point where there are a number of people on the left who are pointing the finger directly at the Obama White House.  One such is Paul Krugman, who was noted by Bruce McQuain:
  

  His advice, as it has been all year, is to double down, ignore the growing unrest, and “do it anyway”. Pass health care as it stands. Don’t give in to the will of the people because – and this is the hidden message among all of this – they’re too stupid to know what is good for them. Like Bill Clinton claims – they’ll love it after it’s passed. And, as every elitist knows, the job of elites is to rule, even if the masses don’t like it

  I tell Bruce in the comments there (Yes, typos and all):

  As far as I have observed, the left in majority seems to be in denial that it’s their policies that are the problem.  The American people have looked at the kind of change the Neo-socialist progressives are offering, have correctly identified the cliff that they’re being asked to jump over and are reacting with appropriate fear to what the progressives are trying to ram down our throats. It interests me that Krugman is among the first to pin the blame on Obama.  But even Krugman can’t bring himself to admit the real problem is not the person but the policy.
  Witness; were Obama himself the issue, that little earthquake in Massachusetts night before last would not occurred.

  And your last line, Bruce, is spot on….

  Or he’s so married to a radical point-of-view, that he sees no issue with making such outrageous and plainly false statements if it helps to get what he wants.

  I submit to you that there is a similarity between the oh -so -slick denials of the real cause of the neo-socialist left’s downfall in popularity,  and the denials about the constant failures of socialism itself.  We constantly hear from the devot’e’s of that misbegotten political theory that socialism would work if we just got it right. That the theory itself, is sound and we have to work to bring it to pass. (We even see now some on the left saying that the change was too much too fast, we scared off the American people, that the ideas are still sound, we just have to do it more slowly.  )
  As with most of the neo-socialist progressives, Krugman can’t bring himself to accept that’s the kind of thing we are dealing with here because it discredits his underlying politics..  His trying to pin the tail on the jackass in the White House strikes me as giving himself cover for his line about  socialism will work so long as we get the right people.   He’s now willing to sacrifice Obama for the larger goal of socialism.
  In his way, he’s not only conceding defeat on the battle, but he’s giving us a warning; the war itself has not been won.

  That’s really what all this boils down to.  The American people are not objecting to the individuals in question in majority, but are objecting to the policies being pushed by those people.  The ever larger government and its intrusion into our daily lives.  The American people, given the polling data we’re seeing right now, are one with Ronald Reagan in saying government is not the solution, government is the problem“.
  The mainstream democrats have begun to realize that they have been taken over by the progressives, and they’re starting to lose elections because of them.  That’s why we’ve been seeing so many retirements from Congress recently, and that’s why we see such bickering going on over the senate and its agenda.

• BROWN FOR PRESIDENT? I don’t think so. Not yet, at least. As far as I’m concerned calls for Scott Brown to be elected president of these United States would be not unlike what the Democrats did with Obama.  If we’re to take these calls seriously, what would we be saying that the reason behind him becoming president would be?  What, exactly, has he accomplished?  After Bill Clinton’s first presidential election, Former New York governor Mario Cuomo was quoted as saying with regards to Bill Clinton’s accomplishments “what we wanted he has done”.  All that Clinton had accomplished at that point was to win an election. He gave the party power. But what policies would he enact? The Blue Dress Bill?  Similarly, the current occupant of the White House had accomplished absolutely nothing of value to the American people prior to his election.  In both cases the question becomes for what, exactly, were they elected?   I suggest before we pull the Democrat trick of nominating and pushing for somebody who has absolutely no track record of accomplishment whatsoever, that we slow down, take a deep breath, and see what happens with this guy?  Certainly, he is more conservative than the Democrat running for the seat, but let’s remember we’re talking about Massachusetts here.  The Democrats trying to paint him as the next incarnation of Hitler aside, how conservative can he be, really?  Let’s let the guy establish a working record before we elect him Pope , all right?
• EDWARDS ADMITS IT: Here’s a transcrip of the announcemnet from John Edwards that he did indeed father the kid two years ago, and the denials of that were all nonsense.
  

  Vince: “Well one day I was at home threatening the kids when I looks out through the hole in the wall and sees this tank pull up and out gets one of Dinsdale’s boys, so he comes in nice and friendly and says Dinsdale wants to have a word with me, so he chains me to the back of the tank and takes me for a scrape round to Dinsdale’s place and Dinsdale’s there in the conversation pit with Doug and Charles Paisley, the baby crusher, and two film producers and a man they called ‘Kierkegaard’, who just sat there biting the heads of whippets and Dinsdale says ‘I hear you’ve been a naughty boy Clement’ and he splits me nostrils open and saws me leg off and pulls me liver out and I tell him my name’s not Clement and then… he loses his temper and nails me head to the floor.”

  Interviewer: He nailed your head to the floor?

  Vince: At first yeah

  Presenter: Another man who had his head nailed to the floor was Stig O’ Tracy.

  Interviewer: I’ve been told Dinsdale Piranha nailed your head to the floor.

  Stig: No. Never. He was a smashing bloke. He used to buy his mother flowers and that. He was like a brother to me.

  Interviewer: But the police have film of Dinsdale actually nailing your head to the floor.

  Stig: (pause) Oh yeah, he did that.

  Interviewer: Why?

  Stig: Well he had to, didn’t he? I mean there was nothing else he could do, be fair. I had transgressed the unwritten law.

  OK, you caught me.. it’s actually a Monty Python script. But it pretty much tells the tale, doesn’t it?

• PERSONAL NOTES: I passed my final drivers test last night. I actually had a fun time with it, despite the test being more stringent.  That means I’ll have my CDL in hand next Tuesday and will be at my new job in Wisconsin come Groundhog Day.
  

  Your intrepid author, next to his truck

The democrats lost a Senate seat in the bluest of states, Massachusetts, because they were blind to concerns the ordinary American voter, from  Mark Katherine Ham, Weekly Standard:

Democrats fooled themselves into believing the town-hall/Tea Party caricature and ignored the feelings of real Americans.

And, to their electoral detriment, the media (particularly the MSNBC crew) abetted them in this fantasy. As of last night, the media have finally started to change their tune on the Tea Party movement. I was shocked to hear Chris Matthews concede that Democrats had not learned to talk to those critical of the administration, to assuage their worries. Perhaps that was partly because their picture of those critics was painted by…Chris Matthews.

Hat tip:  Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit.

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble.

• THE FINGER-POINTING AND THE DAMAGE DONE: Well, by now you will have known already that there was an earthquake in Massachusetts last night.  Josh Marshall perhaps one of the better examples of progressives trying to minimize the damage to the left’s agenda, caused by that ground movement. Certainly, among the more amusing:
  

  Message of the day to all Dems, Coakley, Rahm, Celinda Lake, national Dem committees, Axelrod, whoever, whatever: Shut the *$%& Up! I don’t know how else to say it. I’m watching MSNBC and hearing all the key players dumping on each other. As I’ve said, the Coakley campaign seems to have been run just terribly. And that’s just the beginning of it. But really, with all that’s at stake, the White House political office left this to Coakley, unsupervised? Really? I just have very little patience hearing all the people who are by definition all to blame have an argument about who’s most to blame.

  That larger agenda of course involves the massive socialist government takeover of healthcare, Marshall makes plain:

  What I’m seeing — and this isn’t just based on public comments but our reporting behind the scenes — is that there’s a lot more energy going into dodging blame for this unforced error of galactic proportions than there is going into the real issue: closing the loop on the health care bill. Which is the only issue in policy terms and political terms. That’s it. Everything else is water under the bridge.

  Marshall and his fellow travelers can wail all they like about how this was just one campaign, and say the reason they lost in Massachusetts was because the campaign was badly run. That may be partially true, but they will never allow themselves to come close to the truth… and examine WHY it was badly run and WHY a badly run campaign made a difference.

  The truth of the matter is that the Democrats all over this country have been running bad campaigns for some time now.  That’s particularly true in Democrat party bastions such as Massachusetts.  The reason is, they didn’t need to do better, until now. Bad as they were, their campaigns  were still effective. You don’t spend campaign money where you’re already leading. You don’t put your parties brightest stars at risk if you’re leading.  They’ve never needed to run a good campaign until recently.  There was never any serious question as to who would win, because it wasn’t until just recently that people there got fed up with the Democrats and their agenda.

  People like Marshall, and a whole host of other far left bloggers …..have yet to allow themselves the intelligence to make the connection between the wild unpopularity of the socialist leaning progressive agenda … including the government takeover of healthcare…. and the resulting unpopularity of the people pushing such agendae at the polls.  Like Coakley, for example. That connection was clearly evident when Coakley lost several points amongst the pollsters after supportive visits by Presidents Clinton and Obama.  I’m telling you, gang, I hold no illusions about Brown being a genuine conservative, since about anyone would lean more to the right than what they’ve been electing up there for a long time. That said, this thing is the coalmine canary for the next few elections.

• ONE DOWN, THREE MORE TO GO: For the benefit of those who didn’t remember, and to the chagrin of those who are trying rather hard to forget today is the one year anniversary of Obama in the White House.  Boortz today points out a few of the highlights:

• Travel to Copenhagen to get Olympics for Chicago. FAIL
• Travel to Copenhagen to get some grand global warming treaty. FAIL
• Campaign in Virginia for Creigh Deeds. Republican Bob McDonnell wins. FAIL
• Campaign in New Jersey for Jon Corzine. Republican Chris Christie wins. FAIL
• Campaign in Massachusetts for Martha Coakley. Scott Brown wins. FAIL

I hasten to point out that the one point upon which Mr. Obama has been a rousing success is in unifying the whole of the country against the Democrat party.  Yet, he’s still not gotten the message... word this morning that he’s now abut to order a government takeover of the student Loan Industry. I’m not sure, but I suspect that Obama as first year from the viewpoint of most Americans has in total been an abject failure.  And we’ve got three more years of this.

• THEN THERE’S HAITI: There seems to be some argument as to whether not the 6.1 shaker down in Haiti that popped this morning, is a quake all it’s own or an aftershock of the previous one.  I don’t know as it much mattered to the people running out of the already weakened buildings.
• THE SPLITS, OLYMPIC STYLE:As a preview of the upcoming winter games:

From Glen Johnson and Liz Sidoti:

BOSTON (AP) – In an epic upset in liberal Massachusetts, Republican Scott Brown rode a wave of voter anger to defeat Democrat Martha Coakley in a U.S. Senate election Tuesday that left President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul in doubt and marred the end of his first year in office.

No detail, but the story was filed twenty-two minutes after the polls closed.   I doubt it was close.

Welcome, one and all, to the most intense to nightly read anywhere on the web; the BitsBlog Nightly Ramble.

• BROWN/COAKLEY: The polls won’t close until 8:00 eastern time tonight, and my guess is we will see several days of recounts , but if the polling data we’ve been getting for the last few days,particularly this morning,  is anything like accurate, the senate race in Massachusetts will have already gone to Scott Brown.    That’s assuming of course that voter fraud isn’t added to the mix in great numbers.  I tend to doubt it will be  since for the most part they will not have had a chance to mobilize anything like we saw in Philadelphia a few years ago, for example.  Still, we are seeing some level of fraud, already. Past that, the Dems know they’ve lost. and at this point it’s all down to the  finger-pointing as of this afternoon , as if the race has already been lost.  That’s because as I’ve been saying all along, as close as this race has been, even if Coakley  manages to eke out a narrow electoral victory here, it will still be a major loss for the Democrats, who given the demographics of  the state and all the big names and election dollars they’re been tossing at it,  thought that they didn’t have to work for it at all.  Part of their problem, of course is, that they campaigned that way.  They didn’t put any effort into it until the last minute.  Apparently they figured it some kind of birthright.  After all,  a Democrat has held that seat since 1952.  Both houses in the state legislature are dominated by Democrats, the governor’s mansion has a Democrat in it.  They had no reason to think that this was going to be any kind of a strain.  Add to that the wildly unpopular Democrat agendae, and the resulting shock of this loss, has the democrats going way out of bounds in terms of getting personal. Not that that’s unexpected, mind you.  It’s simply another measuring point.  Another example  is Keith Olberman , Who would in fact to be our nominee for worse person in the world, if  he were not too stupid for personhood:
  
  Just a rough idea of the lack of mentality America is up against. I’m willing to bet this moron doesn’t understand why his numbers are still in John Crapper’s elegant device.
• STOCKS, ANYONE? It might be just a little early to be making this suggestion, and more than granted that if it were easy to predict the stock market, we’d all be millionaires , but you really have to wonder if the stock market activity today, the (A large one day upturn at the moment) has anything to do with the democrats being handed their hat in Massachusetts.  One also has to wonder if the stock market wouldn’t be doing better if there collectivist head was in it.  It doesn’t take a great deal of genius to figure out that the stock market is very happy indeed about the democrats lost in Massachusetts, and its connection to the government takeover of health care.  A victory for Brown will put the stake through the heart of that monstrosity.  It will also appear a number of other ills which have been building since the 2000 election.
• MILITARY INVOLVEMENT IN HAITI: Personally, I’m getting more than a little bit tired of listening to the walking excrement like Hugo Chavez complaining about the U.S. military’s involvement in Haiti, just now.  And parenthetically, that would also include the French, who were playing that line just this morning.  I have a really straightforward question for those people; who would you rather have show up?  THE UAW?  SEIU? ACORN? Who? Who is better equipped to handle such things, than our military?  Perhaps we should cosider this isnt the first time we’ve heard this sng and dance from the socialists of the world.    I remember very clearly listening to Gordron Sinclair’s noon news cast back in June of 1973.   Being in Rochester New York, we are within earshot of much of the radio fare available in southern Ontario Canada.  Toronto, is certainly no exception.  CFRB, the station that Sinclair was on at the time, was even then running 50,000 Watts during the day, and easily covered half of new York State. Sinclair was one of the widest listened- to newspeople in Canada… on the order of Paul Harvey here in the ‘states, in relative terms.   Some of you may not remember what Sinclair said that day, but I do. Read and note the parallels to today.
  

  The United States dollar took another pounding on German, French and British exchanges this morning, hitting the lowest point ever known in West Germany. It has declined there by 41% since 1971 and this Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least-appreciated people in all the earth.

  As long as sixty years ago, when I first started to read newspapers, I read of floods on the Yellow River and the Yangtse. Who rushed in with men and money to help? The Americans did.

  They have helped control floods on the Nile, the Amazon, the Ganges and the Niger. Today, the rich bottom land of the Misssissippi is under water and no foreign land has sent a dollar to help. Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy, were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of those countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.

  When the franc was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.

  When distant cities are hit by earthquakes, it is the United States that hurries into help… Managua Nicaragua is one of the most recent examples. So far this spring, 59 American communities have been flattened by tornadoes. Nobody has helped.

  The Marshall Plan .. the Truman Policy .. all pumped billions upon billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now, newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent war-mongering Americans.

  I’d like to see one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplanes.

  Come on… let’s hear it! Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tristar or the Douglas 107? If so, why don’t they fly them? Why do all international lines except Russia fly American planes? Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or women on the moon?

  You talk about Japanese technocracy and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy and you get automobiles. You talk about American technocracy and you find men on the moon, not once, but several times … and safely home again. You talk about scandals and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everyone to look at. Even the draft dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, most of them … unless they are breaking Canadian laws .. are getting American dollars from Ma and Pa at home to spend here.

  When the Americans get out of this bind … as they will… who could blame them if they said ‘the hell with the rest of the world’. Let someone else buy the Israel bonds, Let someone else build or repair foreign dams or design foreign buildings that won’t shake apart in earthquakes.

  When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke. I can name to you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble.

  Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don’t think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.

  Our neighbours have faced it alone and I am one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles.

  I hope Canada is not one of these. But there are many smug, self-righteous Canadians. And finally, the American Red Cross was told at its 48th Annual meeting in New Orleans this morning that it was broke.

  This year’s disasters .. with the year less than half-over… has taken it all and nobody…but nobody… has helped.

  Here’s a vid of it.
  

  I quote that whole thing to not only point out the charges are not new, but also how bogus they are now and how bogus they’ve always been.

  Frankly, I think that we should be using this opportunity to seriously of rethink our foreign aid programs, and I have serious questions about throwing money hand over fist at Haiti in this situation will actually do any long term good, without serious cultural change. THe comparisons I drew between Haiti and the Dominican Republic yesterday, tell that tale well.
  But I have to tell you, then I’m getting damned sick and tired of being called ‘occupiers’ and ‘aggressors” by people whose apparent sole interest is seeing the recently non-socialist government of Haiti, overturned.  One of the people making those accusations, crazy Uncle Hugo Chavez, has succeeded in making a complete disaster of his own country with socialism.  It is to the point in his country where it is truly impossible to tell which kind of devastation is worse; the earthquake in Haiti, or the socialism of Hugo Chavez.  As such, I take great umbrage at the complaints of these walking excrements.  
  I notice in my feedback, and on my face book page, that some of the sentiment about saying with Sinclair, ‘to hell with the rest of the world’ has already begun to surface. As much as I understand and sympathize with those sentiments, however, I worry a bit about what taking those actions will do to America on the world stage.  Certainly, Chavez does not speak for the majority of the world, or even the majority of his corner of it.  And frankly, I think we learned about the French after 9/11…. at least, we should have.

  But here it is, gang…  If we are not directly involved with the events such as the Haitian earthquake, I fear we leave open such places to the loving care of people like Hugo Chavez, who has already created such devastation in his own country that it’s going to take decades after his departure to recover. If, and I say if, it ever can, at ANY cost. Do we really want that ideology spreading, and with it the misery it undeniably causes?   Certainly, we should be using our money more appropriately, particularly in terms of foreign aid. I’ll be among the first to say that, and loudly.  But backing off of the world stage in the midst of a crisis, can only damage not only our reputation but the situation in the world at large.

• PERSONAL NOTE: I did manage to pass the state road test today, and will receive my commercial driver’s license within seven days.  That said, I still have an internal road test to do at the school.  That is scheduled for tomorrow and 230.  I’ll let you know how I do.  All of this brings me one step closer to something that is becoming increasingly difficult in this Obama economy to maintain; a steady, well paying job.

(edited for typos)

As the drunks pronounce her name,  Marcia Coakley, Associated Press:

Patrick Kennedy, the son of the late Teddy and a Congressman from nearby Rhode Island, showed up to give his support for Coakley’s bid to become Teddy Kennedy’s heir. But he seemed a little confused about whom he was talking about, referring to several times to someone named “Marcia Coakley.” Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.

Marcia Coakley on Martin Luther King day attempted to invoke the Dr. King’s legacy, from  ABC News Boston:

“If Dr. King were here today, he’d be standing with us,” she told the heavily black audience. “And I know that he would be standing with us on the front line for health care, not as a privilege, but as a right.”

So sorry Marcia, you not fit to call yourself a follower of  Dr. King.   You see, Dr. King preached non-violence.   Whereas,  Marcia turns a blind eye to violence.    Coakley is not the spiritual heir of Dr. King but rather Marcia is the spiritual heir of  Dr. King’s tormentor,  Theophilus Eugene  “Bull” Connor.

From the Palm 700P….

Hey Glenn:

London Times: Haiti earthquake: a few more rescues, but aid still slow.“Nobody can go anywhere without security in the city. No aid workers can go anywhere without taking risks with security. That adds to the difficulty of delivering the aid because you not only have to have transport – which is rare – you also have to have some sort of security with you, or you are taking a risk. People are getting angry, people are getting hungry and thirsty.” This is sounding kind of familiar.

As I mentioned before, disaster relief isn’t like ordering a pizza. It’s hard to get aid into a place where the infrastructure has been wrecked and ordinary social order broken down. I’m seeing some people start to go after Obama on this in an obvious echo of the Katrina-based criticism of Bush. I understand the appeal of payback, but I don’t see any evidence that Obama has blown it here; this stuff is just hard. Of course, the press won’t go after him the way they went after Bush, but that’s a given.

Thing is, that’s exactly the point. I said to David in comments earlier this monring:

Haiti in my view can be used as an argument against government “making things better”.  They have a long history of government largess making things worse. Please note that I do not differentiate between one type of government or another in this case, because all of them have had their hands in that hellhole.

Limbaugh quoting David Brooks, is a real teller.  Brooks has this one almost spot on, a point which is of itself surprising.  Brooks’ point about the Dominican Republic , Haiti’s closest neighbor, doing far better, with the same given conditions and natural resources, to my mind does a great deal to defeat the argument that the reason America is great is because of its natural resources, and not because of the freedoms engendered by our founders..  The direct comparison of Haiti to the Dominican Republic eliminates that argument once and for all.

It also tends to defeat the idea that simply throwing government largess … IE; taxpayer funds at a problem, solves the problem.  Even leaving aside the large amount of aid , financial and otherwise given to the various Haitian governments, the Haitian people remain in some of the worst conditions any were in the world.  America alone has put billions of dollars into the Haitian economy.  Can anyone reading this explain to me how it is made the lives of Haitians better?

That government doesn’t work as advertised but rather makes things worse is, of course,  the message that\’s not going to get through from the current occupants in Washington.

See, here it is….

I think that a case can be made that there’s a direct comparison to what went on in the case of Katrina , versus the case of this earthquake.

Look closely at the comparison that I drew between Haiti and the Dominican Republic and Haiti following the earthquake Which was better prepared for the recovery effort?  The DR, of course, and that mostly because of cultural influences.  Being on the smae island, the two countries share the same resourses. .

I dare to suggest to you that a comparison can be drawn between that Haiti/DR juxtaposition,  and that of New Orleans and the surrounding areas in the gulf of Mexico, who were more or less evenly affected by Katrina. It’s as much a case of decades of the  ‘government is everything’ attitude vs a culture of independence, and freedom and how each mindset operates in extreme conditions. High heat tends to boil things down to their essence in a hurry, after all.

The situation in Haiti reveals many things liberals wish us not to see.

While Glenn makes a great point about how “It’s hard to get aid into a place where the infrastructure has been wrecked and ordinary social order broken down”, that was exactly the situation in New Orleans.  Sorry, but what it is.   That social order was broken long before the hurricane warnings went up.  And the current situation in Haiti, I think, and the complaints about our government’s response to it, leaves bare all the BS arguments put forward about Katrina and our response to it, given the similarity of the conditions, both before and after the natural disaster.

Also, the excuse making over what Obama’s been doing so far leaves bare the MSM’s overt leftist bias.

Haiti, for all the pain it’s going through right now, is an object lesson to us all for what it reveals about big government. I wonder who will learn that lesson.

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

• MLK: Yes, today is Martin Luther King’s birthday, or at least when we celebrate it. David’s thoughts from 2007 are still potent today. Read them. David also pointed up last year
  

  From Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech:

  “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

  About the only people who cite King’s quote on character are some whites.  Race merchants like the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and BO himself, have made character off-limits.

  Back babies are harvested by the abortion mills of Planned Pasrenthood, disarmed black citizen are gunned by by armed thugs, poor black children are trapped in failing schools and traditional marriage values are mocked.  Is this really King’s dream?  I, for one, doubt it.  What say you?

  
  How many today know Martin was a Republican? For so he was. How many among the left who sing his praises today, poke fun at the Christian (Lutheran) religion he preached, never knowing and not caring about his connection to it? That connection not only existed,  but was at the center of all he did.  It strikes me as tragic that the race huxters, and socialists of all stripes have managed to twist MLK’s words being all recognition, and have done so with such impunity. His message has been overrun by people who haven’t a clue, and less of a care about the values behind it.  I say, that is indeed tragic. Tragic not for Martin, but for us.

• COAKLEY-BROWN Akfonzo Rachal at Pajamas Media today notes a number of things about that race that the MSM would rather not tell us about.(Video)  Meanwhile, same place, Rick Moran wonders if the right will get behind the less than perfect candidates… such as Brown. Make no mistake; there are a number of people out there who are wondering why the conservatives are getting excited over Brown’s candidacy, given that he is an extraordinarily liberal candidate.  I view Brown,  in much the same way I viewed John McCain in the 2008 election.  He’s an improvement over what the Democrats are offering, though granted in some areas not by much.  Unfortunately, that’s how the right is going to have to view a lot of these things.  We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and it’s not going to be anything but an incremental task getting us out of it.  The trick right now is to push to the right incrementally, in the process teaching the lesson that the world doesn’t end when somebody other than the far left Democrat gets elected.  The Democrats are understandably panicked.  At this point the most recent polling I’m seeing shows Brown in the lead 51 to 46.  By the way; that’s a wider lead than Brown had prior to  Obama’s visit there.  He’s just not nearly as popular as he would like us to think.   Indeed, Obama’s people are now telling him, that she’s toast. There is little doubt in my mind that this is the coal mine canary. And what do the Democrats blame this impending loss on? George W Bush. And, no, I’m not kidding. I mean, let’s ignore the fact that the last Mass three house speakers… all Democrats… have been indicted and have resigned… corruption. Let’s ignore the idea that giving Congressional Democrats another vote would be giving overt approval  to Government takeover of healthcar, which is wildly unpopular.. even in the liberal bastion of The People’s Republic of Massachusetts.  No… It’s all Bush’s fault, right?  Tell me, please…  Why are we taking Democrats seriously at all, anymore?
• BYE BYE OBAMACARE: There’s one big reason why the selection in Massachusetts is so important to the nation.  The fact is that the attempted government takeover of our health care was already one foot  in the grave and the other on a banana peel.  A victory for Brown in Massachusetts would complete the task of burying that neo socialist monstrosity.  That’s a point that even the press is starting to admit.   The Democrats are throwing everything they have at this senate race, because they know that the election will  the start of a movement  away from central government.  The momentum will have started moving against them, if they can’t get control of healthcare. And believe me, there is far more in the way of government largess in the pot on this one, then just health care.
• WHAT”S THAT CRUISE SHIP DOING HERE? There’s a number of people making some rather self righteous noises this morning about how Caribbean cruise lines still docking up against the private beaches in Haiti. Forgetting that amongst everything else there is economic devastation going on in that country right now, apparently there’s some people who would rather not see those beaches being used.  The bottom line, however, is that there are huge numbers of people who work in the tourism trade there, and whose livelihoods depend on such commerce.  Do we really want a stop the ships from docking there,thus killing off the only economic bright spot in the whole place, just so we can feel better?
• TRAGIC? Yes, it’s true, I have never seen anything that matches the desperation attached to the situation in Haiti.  Other, of course, then the Jimmy Carter reelection campaign.  But I think a direct comparison can be drawn between the response on this, and the response on New Orleans, and the serious breakdown in social order proceeding both situations.  I went into that just a little bit yesterday.

My new Pajamas Media editorial deals with what I’ve considered the biggest problem America faces just now in our War on terror… our return to the underlying attitude of the Democrats that brought us the “Gorelick Wall.”

The bottom line is that, like the Clinton administration, the Obama administration has approached al-Qaeda’s war on us thinking that it could be contained and dealt with in the civilian criminal justice system. We don’t, in other words, need to treat this as a war. We may or may not have returned officially to the Gorelick policy, but we returned to the attitude which gave us the policy when we put Democrats back in charge of the executive branch.

What is most alarming to me is I see no moves on the part of the administration to correct this problem, as I discuss in my piece, there.

From the Palm 700P….

Hey Glenn:

London Times: Haiti earthquake: a few more rescues, but aid still slow. “Nobody can go anywhere without security in the city. No aid workers can go anywhere without taking risks with security. That adds to the difficulty of delivering the aid because you not only have to have transport – which is rare – you also have to have some sort of security with you, or you are taking a risk. People are getting angry, people are getting hungry and thirsty.” This is sounding kind of familiar.

As I mentioned before, disaster relief isn’t like ordering a pizza. It’s hard to get aid into a place where the infrastructure has been wrecked and ordinary social order broken down. I’m seeing some people start to go after Obama on this in an obvious echo of the Katrina-based criticism of Bush. I understand the appeal of payback, but I don’t see any evidence that Obama has blown it here; this stuff is just hard. Of course, the press won’t go after him the way they went after Bush, but that’s a given.

Thing is, that’s exactly the point. I said to David in comments earlier this monring:

Haiti in my view can be used as an argument against government \”making things better\”.  They have a long history of government largess making things worse. Please note that I do not differentiate between one type of government or another in this case, because all of them have had their hands in that hellhole.

Limbaugh quoting David Brooks, is a real teller.  Brooks has this one almost spot on, a point which is of itself surprising.  Brooks’ point about the Dominican Republic , Haiti’s closest neighbor, doing far better, with the same given conditions and natural resources, to my mind does a great deal to defeat the argument that the reason America is great is because of its natural resources, and not because of the freedoms engendered by our founders..  The direct comparison of Haiti to the Dominican Republic eliminates that argument once and for all.

It also tends to defeat the idea that simply throwing government largess … IE; taxpayer funds at a problem, solves the problem.  Even leaving aside the large amount of aid , financial and otherwise given to the various Haitian governments, the Haitian people remain in some of the worst conditions any were in the world.  America alone has put billions of dollars into the Haitian economy.  Can anyone reading this explain to me how it is made the lives of Haitians better?

That government doesn’t work as advertised but rather makes things worse is, of course,  the message that\’s not going to get through from the current occupants in Washington.

See, here it is….

I think that a case can be made that there’s a direct comparison to what went on in the case of Katrina , versus the case of this earthquake.

Look closely at the comparison that I drew between Haiti and the Dominican Republic and Haiti following the earthquake Which was better prepared for the recovery effort?  The DR, of course, and that mostly because of cultural influences.  Being on the smae island, the two countries share the same resourses. .

I dare to suggest to you that a comparison can be drawn between that Haiti/DR juxtaposition,  and that of New Orleans and the surrounding areas in the gulf of Mexico, who were more or less evenly affected by Katrina. It’s as much a case of decades of the  ‘government is everything’ attitude vs a culture of independence, and freedom and how each mindset operates in extreme conditions. High heat tends to boil things down to their essence in a hurry, after all.

The situation in Haiti reveals many things liberals wish us not to see.

While Glenn makes a great point about how “It’s hard to get aid into a place where the infrastructure has been wrecked and ordinary social order broken down”, that was exactly the situation in New Orleans.  Sorry, but what it is.   That social order was broken long before the hurricane warnings went up.  And the current situation in Haiti, I think, and the complaints about our government’s response to it, leaves bare all the BS arguments put forward about Katrina and our response to it, given the similarity of the conditions, both before and after the natural disaster.

Also, the excuse making over what Obama’s been doing so far leaves bare the MSM’s overt leftist bias.

Haiti, for all the pain it’s going through right now, is an object lesson to us all for what it reveals about big government. I wonder who will learn that lesson.

At least Martha is amusing, video:

From Robert Coata National Review:

Here’s the transcript (via the Brown campaign):

Dan Rea: Umm Would Barack Obama be in if this thing was not this close?

Martha Coakley: Umm it’s hard to know, I think that he uh is welcome in Massachusetts and I’m sure everybody is happy to see a president come.

Rea: 62 to 36

Coakley: But I think probably if it weren’t so close Rudy Giuliani would be here and besides he’s a Yankee fan (Laughter)  I just want people to know (Laughter)

Rea: Uhhh yeah but now Scott Brown has Curt Schilling

Coakley: and another Yankee fan

Rea: Schilling?

Coakley: Yes

Rea: Curt Schilling a Yankee fan?

Coakley: nooo, alright I’m wrong on my, I’m wrong

Rea: The Red Sox’s great pitcher of the bloody sock?

Coakley: well he’s not there anymore.

Another Coakley gaffe? Can’t say I’m really surprised. Instead of offering further commentary/eye rolls, I’ll just leave you with this

Curt Schilling:

I’ve been called a LOT of things… 01.16.10 at 1:06 am ET

But never, and I mean never, could anyone ever make the mistake of calling me a Yankee fan. Well, check that, if you didn’t know what the hell is going on in your own state maybe you could….

Dan Quayle, call your agent.

Fausta:

I have been reading on the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, and of course, soon enough one finds stupidity strewn along the path.

First Danny Glover, who believes the earthquake was caused by global warming and climate change:

Video:

Hat tip: Tim Blair, Daily Telegraph(UK).

If Glover has half the brains of a nit wit, he would know that there is zero evidence of any connection be tectonic plate movemen and climate.

ADDENDUM: Eric

And you know, David, there’s an important comparison that many are missing, here. There are a lot of people who stood sniggering behind their hands at the comments of Pat Robertson.  The connection they miss when they hold their silence over the comments of Glover is that both sets of comments are being driven by religion. In one case, Christianity… which is of course unpopular with the far left, and Gaia worship which is of course is all the rage among that same group.

Then, too are the comments of Rush Limbaugh. Let’s look at that for a moment:

RUSH: David Brooks today in the New York Times is basically saying what I said yesterday and was attacked for, that giving aid money to countries does not help them grow.  Here it is right here in the New York Times, and nobody’s mad at them.  Do I need to read it? Yeah, let me.  “On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.  This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: ‘You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.’

If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. He’s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.  The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.” Oh, my gosh, this is deja vu, except I’m the one that said it.  Using our own war on poverty, how much money have we given to the poor in this country, and we still have the same percentages of poor people — and we’re never supposed to examine the results, right?  Only the good intentions of the givers!

And, of course, the givers are us.  Our back pockets are looted by our own government, and the money is redistributed — and as Mr. Brooks is saying here, there is no upside to this.  “In the recent anthology ‘What Works in Development?,’ a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results. … . More than 10,000 organizations perform missions of this sort in Haiti. …

“The second hard truth is that micro-aid is vital but insufficient. Given the failures of macrodevelopment, aid organizations often focus on microprojects. So we have “more than 10,000 organizations performing missions of this sort in Haiti.” It’s exactly what I said: We’ve got charities on the ground 24/7, 365 in Haiti. By some estimates, Haiti has more nongovernmental organizations per capita than any other place on earth. They are doing the Lord’s work, especially these days, but even a blizzard of these efforts does not seem to add up to comprehensive change.  Third, it is time to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of efforts to tackle global poverty. Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism.” Yeeeees, all the things we pointed out this week: Dictatorships! “But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well.

“Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican Republic, and the D.R. is in much better shape. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island and the same basic environment, yet the border between the two societies offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth — with trees and progress on one side, and deforestation and poverty and early death on the other. “As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book ‘The Central Liberal Truth,’ Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized.”

“Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10. … In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.  These programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement — involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance,” and none of these programs are sponsored by government and certainly not by liberal government.

So the things that end poverty are cultural, and they start bottom-up, and they’re done by citizens and real people who can’t take it anymore.  Throwing money at it accomplishes nothing!  It’s been demonstrated all across the world, but most near to us it’s been demonstrated in Haiti.  I mention all this as a rebuttal to all of the feigned outrage at me, the lying note that I urged people not to give to charity for Haiti.  Nobody in their right mind would ever believe that about me or anybody else, for that matter.  However, I did say find some way to do it other than giving it to Obama, ’cause I know he’s going to eliminate the charitable deduction. He wants to wipe out individual charitable giving.  He wants the government to be the go-to person for all charities.  That’s the only reason you wipe out the deduction for charitable contributions.
END TRANSCRIPT

Limbaugh here makes a point that I’ve been screaming for years about culture being the biggest reason that a society lives or dies. Now, of course that will be derided as old fashioned, one sided, pig headed etc… by the same people who remain silent about Glover and his ilk.

Addendum II (David L)

I too had no use for what either Pat Robertson or Danny Glover had to say.   However Robertson’s statement was purely theological.    As such it can only be believed or disbelieved, but neither be proven nor dis-proven.

As for Limbaugh’s long winded take on the perils of Haiti,  it reads like a short version of Dr. Thomas Sowell’s many books.   In general I believe in Milton Friedman ideas that personal freedom in conducive to improving the human condition.   Sadly in the particular case of Haiti, there appears to too little of what Sowell calls human and cultural capital for Friednan’s prescription to work.

Finally, the liberals preach that all cultures are equal.   Yet Haiti’s culture clearly does not work.

My intend is not to oppose Martha Coakley’s bid for the Senate from Massachusetts.   No, I’ll pass on commenting on the merits Coakly as candidate.    Coakly is simply a bad person.

Elizabeth Scalia, Anchoress, is one of the sweetest and gentle soul on the Internet.   So I take note when the Anchoress calls Coakley nasty and stupid:

So, there you have Martha Coakley: As nasty as Barbara Boxer; as stupid as Patty Murray. She’ll fit right in with the senate, if what we are looking for is “more of the same

More, Dorothy Rabinowitz won a Pultizer for writing about the Amirault cases in Massachusetts.   Her latest, from the Wall Street Journal:

The story of the Amiraults of Massachusetts, and of the prosecution that had turned the lives of this thriving American family to dust, was well known to the world by the year 2001. It was well known, especially, to District Attorney Martha Coakley, who had by then arrived to take a final, conspicuous, role in a case so notorious as to assure that the Amiraults’ name would be known around the globe.

The charges against Gerald Amirault are prosperous on their face, had no physical evidence and no reliable witnesses.    Yet Coakley persists in her persecution of Amirault.

While there is nothing Gerald Amiraultz can do to convince Coakley of his innocence,  Coakley seems to have convicted John McCormach of the Weekly Standard by virtue of the fact that McCormack dared questions of her royal highness,  from William A. Jacobson, Legal Insurrection:

Coakley’s non-reaction to the assault, even though she knew that the reporter only was trying to ask a question, is the big story here.

There is something to see here, so do not move along.

Coakley is a mean and nasty person.    No matter what happens on Tuesday, that will not change.