Kinsley is Finally Forced to Admit: Bush Gets B+ for Honesty, Even Courage, on Social Security

Michael Kinsley is finally forced back to reality.

Bush was honest and even courageous about Social Security. Social Security is about writing checks: Money goes in, money goes out. As Bush has discovered in the last few months, there are no shadows to hide in while you fiddle with it. The problem is fewer and fewer workers supporting more and more retirees, and there are only two possible solutions: Someone has to pay more in, and/or someone has to take less out.

This is not to say that Kinsley gets it correct on all points, (For example, he still onjects, as you’d expect from a dyed in the wool socialist, to private accounts) but when even this left-wing hack has no choice but to admit Bush has it right on socialist security… well, what other wonder might we find in the future?

Ann Coulter nails it as usual:

“The question Republicans need to ask is: Why do the Democrats want to keep judicial nominees like Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen off the federal bench?
As I understand it, the reason Democrats are in a blind rage about Priscilla Owen is that, as a state court judge in Texas, Owen interpreted a law passed by the Texas Legislature requiring parental consent for 14-year-old girls to have abortions to mean that parental consent was required for 14-year-old girls to have abortions.
I think Americans need to hear Democrats explain that.”

True.

And when they DO explain it, such as when Cynthia Tucker makes the attempt in the case of Judge Brown, to list specific objections, all that gets really done is to re-affirm she’s the person we need just now to get the job done.

Ann’s right. Drag ’em out, kicking and screaming.
Let them defend their positions… it’s an impossible task for them.

You may note if you look really close that I have no link on my pages for “The Moderate voice”.
This kind of nonsense is why.

He takes offense to Pat Robertson’s suggesting on last Sunday’s ABC THIS WEEK that our problems with the Judiciary are more serious than those we have with terrorism… that the Judiciary creates more damage.

“The Moderate Voice” clearly can’t get past his own religious intolerance to see Robertson is correct;

This kind of verbal overkill stops political debate ? cold. So Robertson now says our judges are in some ways worse than terrorists. Why? Because they don’t rule the way HE wants.

The first couple commenters to the thread say it well, but this writer says it best:

Do you think it is more likey that your life would be ruined by a terrorist or a frivolous lawsuit?

Do you think your freedoms are more likely to be limited by the legislator, the executive or the judiciary?

Which branch of government is most responsible for drawing the battle lines in the culture war in the U.S.?

Just so. Time to have the integrity to admit that Robertson is right on this point.

(post re-written 15 minutes after first posted)

Canada’s National Post is reporting:

“The final report into the fatal fire aboard HMCS Chicoutimi will be released Thursday and will not recommend the court martial of the ship’s captain, according to a national television report Monday.

CBC-TV’s The National reported that Cmdr. Luc Pelletier is likely to face some criticism about how he handled the disaster.
While on its maiden voyage to Canada last October, an electrical fire broke out aboard the warship. It led to the death of Lieut. Chris Saunders, a combat systems engineer. Eight others were also hurt.

You may recall the Chicoutimi was a hand-me-down ship, recently retired from the British Navy.  The sub was on it’s first Canadian Voyage having been just picked up a few days before. One reason it was retired was the number of upgrades it would need to keep it in fighting trim. Upgrades which the Canadian government never undertook. Waterproofing electrical connectors, for example…. it was a failure of the existing waterproofing that cause the fire in the first place.

Amazingly the CBC has a fairly decent backgrounder on this one. And to this point, it says:

“The investigation also found that the British navy upgraded its specifications for insulating the electrical connections on Upholder-class vessels in the 1990s. Two additional layers of sealant were recommended to provide “backup protection.” The sealant was added to the other three British subs as they were being built, but not to HMS Upholder, the vessel that would later be named HMCS Chicoutimi and sold to Canada. “

The commander of the sub, in the end, was given faulty equipment … The sub itself…. By a government so strapped for cash by it’s socialist giveaways they were and are forced to buy their military hardware on the cheap. In short, they are not committed to defending Canada. As a result, one person who WAS dedicated to the defense of Canada lost his life needlessly. Instead of focusing on THAT point, the government is likely to try and find some other escape hatch… Someone else on which to place the blame for this death.

We’ll see a lot about this over the next 24 hours.

Alas, it’s simply one more pothole in the road for a government that deals with many… All of it’s own making, and all of this will be forgotten by next weekend in the din of corruption investigations. I submit that this is as important as the stink of the corruption… Indeed, I would, if I were Canadian, consider this part and parcel of why the Liberal Party should cease to exist in Canada, it’s leaders.. Including Cretien, becoming residents of their Federal Prison system.

But you shouldn’t forget.

Think; We have a 3000 mile long open border with Canada. If they’re this openly not committed to their defense forces, how seriously do you suppose they take the task of border security?  Do you suppose that’s a security risk for the United States?

Once again, we see clearly that complaints about ‘hate speech’ have nothing to do with there being hate involved, but rather, whose voice is being heard.

Doesn’t it interest you that the Democrats are more worried about the Nuclear option in the Senate, than they are about the Nuclear option being played out in Iran?

Powerline this weekend, quoted Mario Cuomo and had some comments and issued a challange.

I make an attempt to respond in this week’s Bit’s Bit.

I’m still waiting for someone…. anyone… to tell us what the Democrat party’s plan for Socialist Security is.

Update:

GOP BLOGGERS has apparently stumbled onto it.

Kurtz this morning:

Social Security is in trouble, and the public knows it. The president has the courage to fix it, and for that he’s going to get credit, not blame. The Democrats are trapped now. Their obstructionism is exposed, and the president stands to gain his rightful political reward when this problem finally gets fixed. I have never seen anything like the swift, massive, and unified Democratic effort to kill the president’s Social Security plan. It put the far more divided and unenthusiastic Republicans to shame. Trouble is, for all that effort, the Democrats have been digging their own political grave.

Bingo, Stan… Just so.

Ace of Spades HQ makes mention of Rosie O’Donnel’s “Riding the Bus” which was on last night. Rosie, apparently, and in spite of the best typecasting, did NOT play the bus itself.

Of course her Blog is brimming with positive comments.
But as Ace points out…. the woman simply cannot act. Which is why I didn’t even try to watch it.

Ace did, though.
His comments on the point re-affirm my choice to watch the inside of my eyelids, instead.

Leftist Dogma, cliche, bad acting AND the lack of a story line?
Gee…. and this isn’t even PBS?

Boortz asks some interesting questions about this Willbanks thing….

Many, many years ago I had a relative commit suicide over an unwilling participation in a huge wedding.  Is it possible that Jennifer Wilbanks ran away for the same reason?  Was this huge wedding her idea, or was it something that was more or less forced on her by her parents.  I don’t know if we’ll ever know the answer to this one, but is it possible that Jennifer wanted a quieter wedding, but was being compelled to participate in something that she felt was getting completely out of control?  Sometimes you wonder just who these weddings are for .. the bride and groom, or the parents?

I’ll tell you a little secret; In the thousand or so weddings I’ve DJ’d since the early 70’s, I’d say 10-15% of them were like this… overly large and formal… and were making the bride and groom more nervous than they really needed to be. Getting married is a big step, and they’re already nervous enough.

Think 8 wedding showers and 28 attendants is going to push an already nervous bride, over the edge?

My Donna and I had a fairly small wedding, and the night before she had a case of the jitters….but did splendidly on our wedding day.  Then again, we had a fairly small company in attendence.. we had the wedding fairly early in the day, actually had brunch (instead of a lavish dinner) for our guests, and we were done and on the road by 3pm…..

Which is another interesting note in terms of informality… Most people have weddings in warmer months. We married in November. Mostly because it being off season, and my knowing every hall in town, we got a pretty good deal.  A DJ freind of mine did the MC Honors. And as for our honeymoon, we didn’t go to a south sea island somewhere…. we drove north from Rochester to Toronto…. spending out first night together in Niagara Falls, which as I’ve told you before in these spaces, is an old freind for both of us.

In November. Yes, it snowed.

Part of the idea was to keep the pressumes down on both of us. And both our families supported the concept.

I wonder, in the case of Willbanks, et al, if the huge production this whole thing had become before she left, was WHY she left? And if the family is that overbearing, what do you do if you’re the groom in this situation?

(Shudder) She’s a cute kid, but if the overbearing family (and the overbearing family money) was the issue, do I really want that baggage for the next 60 years, or so?

Chrenkoff this morning, points up Axis of Logic’s Mike Whitney who Arthur says is a fool.

I agree. He is that.

Whitney:

“I can say without hesitation that I support the insurgency, and would do so even if my only 21 year old son was serving in Iraq. There’s simply no other morally acceptable option.”

How’d YOU like to be this guy’s kid?
Sheesh.

Chrenkoff:

After all the “we oppose the war but support our troops” political contortionism on the left, it’s refreshing to see somebody out there (and I mean, really out there) saying “screw the troops, too… I wish I had a son, so that he could be killed by the insurgents to make my political stance seem really principled.”

Whitney:

“As Americans, we support the idea that violence is an acceptable means of achieving (national) self-determination. This, in fact, is how our nation was formed, and it is vindicated in our founding document, The Declaration of Independence…

“The Declaration of Independence is revolutionary in its view that we have a ‘duty’ to overthrow regimes that threaten basic human liberties. We must apply this same standard to the Iraqi people.”

So, the US is threatening basic human liberty? Like the right to be executed and buried in mass graves at the whim of Saddam?

(Mumble…blithering idiot….Sigh) It gets better.

“We have to recognize that the disparate elements of Iraqi resistance, belittled in the media as the ‘insurgency’, are the legitimate expression of Iraqi self-determination.”

Which causes Arthur to quip:

Silly, George W.; instead of stealing the Florida vote in 2000, he should have simply set off a few roadside bombs and the Axis of Logic Left would have found him a legitimate president.

Clearly, being principled, is of itself, not all it’s cracked up to be, and can lead to some really frightening conclusions in logic.

It does strike me, for example, that this is the kind of non-logic that led some to suggest America deserved what it got on 9/11. Terri Shaivo demonstrably had more thinking capacity than these clowns.

Whitney also, it seems to me, forgets that those doing the fighting against those who toppled Saddam, are not Iraqis, but are in fact outside forces… Iranian and Syrian Jihadists. Is he really about letting these rule the day? Doesn’t sound like a good idea.. either from the standpoint of the people forced to live under such rule, nor for the security of the world in general.

Whitney, like so many others of late, seems so devoted to his principle, he seems utterly divorced from it’s consequences.

The left and some libertarians are all bent outta shape because the PResident has nominated John Bolton to be ambassador to the UN. Apparently trhe fear is we’ll make some people angry with us.Go look at this and explain to me why we would want to be FREINDLY with these people… why in the world we’d not want to have someone go in verbal guns blazing, and clean house.

The left is always mumbling about exploitation of regions, of women, and so on. Let’s see them put their money where their mouths are… and denouce the UN.

They won’t do it; Clearly world government is something tey hold bigger than the prevention of exploitation at hte hands of that world government. What’s the matter, liberals? Are these the wrong skin color to deserve your speaking out on their behalf?

The first thing that came to my mind on reading this clip from Powerline was an old Gary Larson “Far Side” You remember the one…. two deer stand upright in a forest, one with a very visible circle target on its chest. The other second deer sympathizes: “Bummer of a birthmark, Hal.”

Mario Cuomo, whatever other talents he may have, has developed a talent for painting proverbial orange circles on his own back…. with his mouth. Let’s take the clip that Powerline did, and tear it apart, line by line as a demonstration of just what I’m talking about.

“Now, the Republicans in the Senate…are threatening to claim ownership of the Supreme Court and other federal courts, hoping to achieve political results on subjects like abortion, stem cells, the environment and civil rights that they can not get from the proper political bodies: the Congress and the presidency.”

Funny. I don’t recall Mario ever complaining when the Democrats over the last 60 years had ownership of the courts, and unquestionably used such ownership to achieve political results on subjects like abortion, stem cells, the environment and civil rights that they can not get from the proper political bodies: the Congress and the presidency. Is Mario really saying that the activities of the Democrats over the last 60 years are invalid? This is going to come as quite a shock to Howard Dean, I suspect.

How will they do this? By destroying the so-called filibuster, a vital part of the 200-year-old system of checks and balances in the Senate that allows the fullest possible debate before one of the president’s choices for the Supreme Court or other federal courts is allowed to take his or her place on the bench. That would be a change so undesirably destructive that it has been called the nuclear option.

Actually, Mario is showing his bias here… and that his bias is overcoming his understanding of history.

The Republicans say it would assure dominance by the majority in the Senate. That sounds democratic until you remember that the Bill of Rights was adopted, as James Madison pointed out, in order to protect all Americans from what he called, the tyranny of the majority.

A tyranny, that dare I point this out again, Mario, you yourself didn’t seem to mind not so long ago. But what you seem to be forgetting is the idea of the tyranny of the minority, which you now support, is also as big or bigger a problem.

And it sounds nearly absurd when you learn that the minority Democrats in the Senate actually represent more Americans than the majority Republicans do.

And of course this ‘majority’ simply didn’t vote for Democrats, then, eh? How can this be, Mario? Are we still dealing with the meme of the ‘stolen election’? Or are you given tacit admission to the fact that the Democrats did not get and still do not have the support of the people? The fact of the matter is, the last Democrat to gain the White House on a true plurality… (without riding a dead man’s coat tails) was FDR.

Mario, it seems, represents a party that has not been ‘progressive’, nor has it had popular support, since the 1930’s.

And he’s just shown us their attitude hasn’t changed since then, either.

Thus we see the dayglow orange circle on the back.  Mario may find his own party taking aim if he keeps this up.

Scientific American:

“Long believed extinct, the spectacular ivory-billed woodpecker has been spotted in eastern Arkansas’ Big Woods region, scientists say. The last confirmed sighting of the bird occurred in 1944. “

Kinda makes you wonder about the other species we’ve supposedly ‘endangered’ doesn’t it?