Barrel Strength

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A few random thoughts from your correspondent regarding the passage of the bill.

No, the passage wasn’t a surprise and had been predicted by intrade.com for some time.

Yes, it is a momentous occasion for liberals who have finally achieved their long cherished goal of government controlled health care.

Yes, life continues to be sweet for Obama.  The passage of this bill will cement a legacy for him even though it was Pelosi who did most of the work, but then that has been the case for Obama all his life.

Yes, Steyn and Frum are right when he says that winning back legislative majorities is a consolation prize and unlikely to lead to rollback of this bill.  Even the Great Communicator couldn’t roll back two new cabinet-level departments, the Department of Energy and the Department of Education, implemented by Carter.  Who exactly will lead the charge in rolling back this bill as has been suggested here and here?

Yes, things could still be derailed with state challenges and contentious issues in Senate, but it is unlikely.

Yes,  reconciliation, talk of deem and pass and single party vote this will lead to a more divisive and poisoned political arena, similar to the rejection of Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination, which led to “Bork” becoming a verb.

What does the road ahead look like?  In the opinion of your correspondent – grim.  Even before the passage of this bill, US was facing fiscal pressure from increasing deficits that Obama has undertaken as per the chart below.

This has caused, and will continue to cause, a decline in the US rating which will lead to US devoting ever larger portion of the budget to service the debt.  Today Bloomberg reported the following.

The bond market is saying that it’s safer to lend to Warren Buffett  than Barack Obama.

Two-year notes sold by the billionaire’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in February yield 3.5 basis points less than Treasuries of similar maturity, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Procter & Gamble Co., Johnson & Johnson and Lowe’s Cos. debt also traded at lower yields in recent weeks, a situation former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. chief fixed-income strategist Jack Malvey calls an “exceedingly rare” event in the history of the bond market.

This event might be “exceedingly rare” now but when put in context with the graph below, it won’t be.

Neither one of the above graphs address the cost associated with this bill or Social Security.  The Social Security program is projected to be in deficit by 2016, “notably that Social Security payroll tax collections would begin to exceed benefits paid in 2016, a year shorter than had been forecasted in 2008.”  It seems the bill for the party will come due by the end of the decade, long after Obama is gone and is modeling for a place on Mt. Rushmore.

March 22, 2010

M. François Houle
Vice-recteur aux études / Vice-President Academic and Provost
Université d’Ottawa / University of Ottawa
550, rue Cumberland Street
Ottawa (ON) K1N 6N5

Dear Sir:

I have just finished reading your letter to Ann Coulter. I am sure you thought you were writing something genuinely helpful to the maintenance of public peace.

 I am just as sure Ann Coulter will weigh her words precisely, when she rips you to shreds, for the assumption you make about her intelligence, for your mistaken notion about the nature of public discourse, and for the smug condescending tone.

 Your letter certainly lends support to the notion that the modern university has become the central agency in the suppression of freedom throughout society.

 Truths must not be uttered aloud lest dreadful legal consequences ensue: that appears the substance of your warning. Have you allowed yourself to consider that political discourse may require saying unpleasant truths in public, loud and clear, about race, sex, class, nation, religion and every other category and distinction?

 Many think we are living in the age of freedom; we are in fact living in an age terrified of clear thought and plain speech. Pick a topic: Islam, male-female sex differences, the bell curve of the distribution of intelligence and its significance, the heritability of almost anything, and there you will find the academy pleading for the suppression of speech, thought, and research in the name of one cause or another. It is a vast institutional failure.

 Politically Ann Coulter is not my kind of girl, on every count, but she has guts, wit and conviction. Though she is part of the political entertainment industry, she says more truth in fifteen minutes than the academy can muster in a two-day symposium.

 Yours sincerely

 Dalwhinnie

With this heap of schadenfreude — tarted up as elegy — directed at opponents of Obamacare, David Frum may be deemed to have passed from mere spent force to fervent shill for The Usual Suspects™.

Like Obama, Frum concludes that anyone who suspects The One would negotiate in bad faith is at best a hapless child, at worst a demented hick. And this distinguishes Frum from the Pelosi set how?

In an interview on Fox with the giddy Geraldo Riveria, Rev. Al Sharpton shared the following opinion which your correspondent  agrees with.

First of all, then we have to say the American public overwhelmingly voted for socialism when they elected President Obama.  Let’s not act as though the president didn’t tell the American people – the president offered the American people health reform when he ran. He was overwhelmingly elected running on that and he has delivered what he promised.

Obama wasn’t “overwhelmingly elected” as was noted before on this blog but given Obama’s background, which didn’t deviate much as he worked his way up the political food chain, nobody should be surprised at his actions.  Was the public duped?  We will find out in November.

This is not what the G&M cognoscenti were hoping for when they sought the views of their readership:

Readers of this blog will be au courant with the ongoing collapse of the man-caused global warming fraud. A new book is out by Andrew Montford called The Hockey Stick Illusion. It reviews the work of Stephen McIntyre of Toronto in bringing down the credibility of the “hockey stick graph” that showed the rise of temperature in the 20th century. It has won a favourable review from the British science writer Matt Ridley.

This morning’s article in the National Post trumpets Capitalism made us Kinder, study says.

Obviously it is not capitalism, which is a late development of the post-1400s in Europe, but the universal human tendency to trade, which has softened barbaric manners.

“The finding, reported in the journal Science, suggests people trust and play fair with strangers because markets and religion — not some deep psychological instinct inherited from our dim tribal past — have helped shape our neural circuitry over the eons.”

“The hunter-gatherer and tribal societies studied are known for sharing among family and close acquaintances. But the researchers found fair play in monetary transactions with strangers was almost an alien concept. People in the simpler societies treated strangers less fairly, and were less likely to punish people who kept most of the money for themselves.

“Social scientists — and economists in particular — have long been baffled with the way people in large societies are so trusting and fair in dealings with strangers. Many academics have argued it is a throwback to a time when humans were hunter-gatherers.

“Mr. Henrich and his colleagues say their findings indicate playing fair with strangers is a behaviour that was favoured as the size of societies and populations grew.

“The emergence and growth of markets allowed for the exchange of goods, skills and knowledge and enabled large complex societies to emerge and function, Mr. Henrich says, noting that humans in large societies are not nearly as selfish as some would suggest.

“There are all these aspects to our lives that just seem to work, because we are not actually baboons,” Mr. Henrich says in an interview.

This is what we would have expected. Read the rest…

French, the perennial culture snobs, show the way.

In recent years, the few fully veiled Muslim women who had dealings with Quebec’s health-insurance board could choose to be served by a woman to avoid exposing their faces to a man outside their family.But in the latest example of the province’s growing resistance to the accommodation of minority religious practices, the insurance board on Tuesday announced the end of the policy after the provincial human rights commission said it has no duty to acquiesce…

The news follows last week’s expulsion from a French-as-a-second-language course of an Egyptian woman who insisted on wearing a niqab during class. It was the second school Naema Ahmed was expelled from for wearing the full face covering, which leaves only a slit for the eyes. Authorities at the first school had said her teacher was unable to properly assess her pronunciation without seeing her mouth.

Quebec’s Immigration Department said she could not continue her studies while wearing the niqab.

“If you want to integrate into Quebec society, here are our values,” Immigration Minister Yolande James told reporters last week. “We want to see your face.” Ms. Ahmed has filed a complaint with the Quebec Human Rights Commission.

The last paragraph just about sums it up.

While our legislators have decided that the ongoing assaults on the freedoms of Canadian citizens must go to the bottom of the workpile, they instead feel that it may be worth forcing an election over the disposition of irregular bandits rounded up in unlawful combat that is NOT sanctioned under the Geneva Conventions.

“Contempt of Parliament” be damned, it is this Parliament that is contemptible as it accedes to the abuse of genuine citizens!

Fox news reports on the ACLU lawsuit against the US government which “asks for information on when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, the number and rate of civilian casualties and other basic information essential for assessing the wisdom and legality of using armed drones to conduct targeted killings.”

Perhaps the lawsuit will lead to the following modification to drone munitions.

From Facebook front page today.

Help translate Facebook into English so that it can be used by people all over the world, in all languages.

Click on the Translate Facebook button to add the Translations application, developed by Facebook, so that you can be part of the community of translators.

Excuse my language, but what the fuck is this?!  A company with revenues estimated to be in the range of $1bn to $1.5bn this year is looking for free work?  A company that, according to research firm Hitwise, accounts for 7.07% of all US internet visits last week compared to 7.03% for Google is looking to freeload?  How many ways can you say fuck off to them?

Maybe a well placed ad on the Canadian Cynic blog will elicit the fools that Facebook needs.

Obama, winner of 2009 Nobel Peace Prize after mere 12-days of work, first sent 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and then followed that up with expansion of war to Yemen.  Now it seems that he has his eyes set on Iran according to this report in The Herald.

The Sunday Herald can reveal that the US government signed a contract in January to transport 10 ammunition containers to the island. According to a cargo manifest from the US navy, this included 387 “Blu” bombs used for blasting hardened or underground structures….

Contract details for the shipment to Diego Garcia were posted on an international tenders’ website by the US navy.

A shipping company based in Florida, Superior Maritime Services, will be paid $699,500 to carry many thousands of military items from Concord, California, to Diego Garcia.

Crucially, the cargo includes 195 smart, guided, Blu-110 bombs and 192 massive 2000lb Blu-117 bombs.

“They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran,” said Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London, co-author of a recent study on US preparations for an attack on Iran. “US bombers are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours,” he added.

The important question is this, will this be sufficient to ensure Obama a Nobel Peace Prize in 2010?

In a WaPo article “Obama’s happiness deficit” Fred Hiatt attempts to slice and dice the reason why Obama is not happy.  He states the following.

I started thinking about this a few weeks ago when Obama confidant David Axelrod, noting that the president always makes time for his daughters’ recitals and soccer games, told the New York Times, “I think that’s part of how he sustains himself through all this.”

Really? Is the presidency something to sustain yourself through?

He did ask for this job; we didn’t make him take it. And so it seems fair to ask: What part of it does he enjoy? Formulating rational solutions to complex problems, for sure.

But schmoozing with foreign leaders, like President George H.W. Bush? In a column last week, Jackson Diehl pointed out that Obama’s relations with just about every counterpart are prickly.

How about horse-trading or arm-twisting, like President Lyndon Johnson? George Will last week cited a recent Obama statement on the health-care bill (”Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people”) to point out that Obama views such politics with a certain disdain.

Hiatt enumerates several activities and opines if Obama enjoys them or not.

1. Time for family – Yes, with link to a NYT article supporting that contention.

2. Schmoozing with foreign leaders – No, with link to WaPo article supporting that contention.

3. Political horse trading – No, with link to a WaPo article supporting that contention.

4. Formulating rational solution to complex problems – Absolutely!  When it comes to this activity the only evidence he provides is his own statement, “for sure”.   That is it?!  We have always heard how brilliant Obama is but what evidence is there to support that contention?  What legal papers has he published?  What has he accomplished that can be classified as brilliant?

There is substantial evidence contrary to this commonly held viewpoint, e.g. he wasn’t a professor as is often attributed to him with some even calling him a constitution law scholar.  For somebody who lovingly wrote two books about himself, although some contend that he didn’t write Dreams From My Father, it is very surprising that the only article he wrote in Harvard Law Review was “an unsigned — and previously unattributed” article of little significance.  He also didn’t distinguish himself, and didn’t publish anything, when he taught at University of Chicago.

For somebody who is suppose to be a great orator, why did he never exercise those skills in the court?  Chicago Sun-Times notes this.

The oratorical skills White House hopeful Barack Obama has shown on the stump — and in his “There’s not a black America and white America … there’s the United States of America” speech — would seem to make him a natural for wowing juries.

So why did Obama never make impassioned speeches in court when he returned to Chicago from Harvard Law School in the early ’90s to, as his Web site says, “practice as a civil rights lawyer”?

A review of the cases Obama worked on during his brief legal career shows he played the “strong, silent type” in court, introducing himself and his client, then stepping aside to let other lawyers do the talking.

What proof is there of his brilliance?

Blog postings like this only confirm my growing suspicion that the shade of difference between many self-proclaimed conservative “activists” and social “activists” is that the former will claim a predilection for a Tim’s double-double over the latter’s allegiance to the fair trade decaf soy latté. And that is because the supposed champions of the right have as their mirror image the typical “pinko shit disturber” when it comes to bleating, “But that’s not fair!”

Case in point: the accusations against Stephen Harper that he is not moving sufficiently to the right in the current parliamentary environment. He has to govern within a minority Parliament. Simply put, he leads a party that does not enjoy the essentially automatic confidence of the House that comes with a majority of seats in hand.

I realize this smacks of remedial civics but see how so many in the blogosphere wilfully deny this fact. Suppose Harper introduces a bill to privatize the CBC. Not only would it be assured of defeat but it would certainly be deemed a matter of confidence and so result in an election. Between the vituperation of an institution under attack like the Mother Corpse and its familiars in the mainstream media, just try to see if the proposition of a Conservative victory would survive our version of the Clapham Omnibus test.

In retrospect it is now easy to see how the coalition debacle of 2008 flowed from the suggestion to phase out political party subsidies. Of course on paper it makes eminent sense and many Canadians would find merit in it. But how deluded must one be to imagine that the opposition parties would willingly commit seppuku for the benefit of the governing party?! Yes, the opposition acted out of craven self-interest: what else would you expect them to do?!

The reality of the current parliament is irksome for most, yet for some it is so profound an obstacle to the realization of their wishes that they ignore at the minimum, at the extreme denouncing it as unfair to their dreams. The difference between this and the mindset of the spoiled idle children who hit the streets for sundry causes like anti-globalization or denunciation of Israel is frankly asymptotic.

The activists love to berate those who toil in the trenches of conventional political warfare, in riding associations and on the electoral hustings. They thrill to the brazen pronouncements of solidarity with the true conservative cause on their web pages. The crowds at think-tank conferences content themselves with the smug satisfaction of those who are unstained by the base toil of genuine political work, it being the preserve of insular-minded hacks on the Hill.

And that is why such people are rendering all forms of assistance short of genuine help to the task of establishing a majority conservative government in Ottawa.