Month: September 2009
Replace Congress
A seismic public opinion shift occurred this summer that Scott Rasmussen was first to measure – a clear majority of the American people, critically including two-thirds of independents, are ready to vote them all out and start over with a new Congress.
But the crucial fact here is not the 57 percent of Rasmussen’s respondents who favor such action. Fully 59 percent said the same thing last October when Congress and the Bush administration were busily throwing $700 billion at Wall Street, allegedly to prevent an economic meltdown of unimagined severity.
The key here is that President Barack Obama and his Democratic congressional allies have moved so far to the left that they have forced a monumental shift among independents, and it was the Obamacare proposal to replace doctors with federal bureaucrats that made it happen.
Notes Rasmussen: “While Democrats have become more supportive of the legislators, voters not affiliated with either major party have moved in the opposite direction. Today, 70 percent of those not affiliated with either major party would vote to replace all of the elected politicians in the House and Senate. That’s up from 62 percent last year.”
Opportunities like this come along once in a political lifetime. Instead of worrying about Whole Foods, the Tea Party leadership should be figuring out how to channel this tidal shift in American public opinion into concrete results in next year’s congressional elections.
Do it!
Accidental Wars
In this Reason Hit&Run post, the vile Patrick Buchanan takes a well deserved beating for his bizarre and ahistorical defense of Adolf Hitler in WWII. However, as loathsome, racist and stupid as he is, Buchanan is correct about one thing: Hitler did not intend to start a second world war that would drag in every industrialized country and leave 3/4 of the industrialized world in ruins.
Instead, Hitler planned on fighting a short, sharp war in Poland. Based on his experience at Munich, he expected that France and Britain would either merely raise a token protest or that they would would fight briefly, realize that they couldn’t recover Poland and then negotiate a peace. He never envisioned that he would fight a gotterdammerung war of global destruction.
Hitler miscalculated. In this he was far from alone. In the 20th Century every war that involved a liberal democracy resulted from the miscalculation of an autocratic leadership.
Can’t Even Clear Brush
I am used to writing about how our country can no longer site any sort of electricity transmission line or coal, nuclear or hydro generation plants because of our broken system that allows for endless delays and legal challenges. And pretty much any kind of significant public infrastructure project like a new highway or subway line takes literally decades from design to implementation, if they occur at all.
But I didn’t really realize how bad it had gotten until I read that a possible cause of the wildfires raging in California is that this sort of situation is so bad that you CAN’T EVEN CLEAR AWAY BRUSH. From this article titled “Feds Didn’t Clear Brush In Wildfire Area”
Steve Brink, a vice president with the California Forestry Association, an industry group, said as many as 8 million acres of national forest in California are overgrown and at risk of wildfire. He said that too few days provide the conditions necessary for larger, prescribed burns and that the Forest Service needs to speed up programs to thin forests, largely by machine.
“Special interest groups that don’t want them to do it have appeals and litigation through the courts to stall or stop any project they wish. Consequently, the Forest Service is not able to put a dent in the problem,” Brink said.
This story pretty much speaks for itself.
Cross posted at LITGM
Compare and Contrast
Murdoc very kindly gave us a heads up to this fascinating photo blog. Pictures taken in Normandy during the 1944 invasion are compared side-by-side with images taken from the very same spot today. Looks like they cleaned up the place a bit since then.
Uncle points us to this photo array. The weekly food intake of families from various parts of the world are shown in graphic fashion, and the money spent is tabulated. Makes me proud to be an American.
Well worth your time.