Ryan’s ready to rumble

The New Neo Posted on by

Representative Paul Ryan gave a rousing speech describing the campaign ahead to block the Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda.

Ryan’s a wonky guy. He can crunch the numbers with the best of them. But he’s also pretty eloquent, and in touch with what’s going on with Americans right now, as well as our proud history. It’s a good combination.

Ryan summarizes what’s been going on with Congress in a single sentence:

Has any Congress in history enacted, or tried to enact, so many foolish, squalid, and counterproductive programs?

On HCR, he’s a bit more verbose, but very pointed:

The drama that brought this creature to life was unedifying … part tragedy and part farce. Ethical categories went out the window. Never in history have the deliberations of Congress been subverted on this scale. The secrecy, the lack of transparency, the half-truths were stunning. The votes called at midnight … the 2 and 3 thousand page bills members of Congress had no time to read before the votes … the sordid backroom deals, the Cornhusker Kickback that shamed Nebraska, the Louisiana Purchase, the “Gator Aid” Medicare privilege for Florida, the additional Medicare dollars for states whose wavering representatives only yesterday were ferociously denouncing earmarks … the federal judgeship dangled for one lawmaker’s brother … the raid on the Medicare piggy bank … the lie that $250 billion for “doc fix” shouldn’t count as a Health Care cost … the double-counted deficit estimate scam that would land any accountant in jail … the proposed Slaughter rule that Congressmen not record a vote on a bill their constituents hate, just “deem” it passed and vote on the amendments…and to complete the farce, the phony Executive Order pretending not to fund abortions when the Health Care bill, as “the supreme law of the land,” does fund abortions. The level of political corruption to buy the votes for this debacle makes all past examples look penny ante by comparison.

And here is his warning. Those of you who follow the blogosphere will find its message familiar. But I think it’s brave of a mainstream Republican public figure such as Ryan to state it so boldly and clearly:

Self-government stands or falls on integrity, not only in those who represent you but in the enactment of law. This indecency soiled our freedom and embarrassed the democracy we promote in other nations. And this may not be the last of it. To enact its transformative agenda, this leadership employs the Machiavellian saying that the end justifies the means. America was born in a revolution against that whole idea. Soon it will be the norm.

The Constitution and the consent of the people are all that stand between limited and unlimited government power. Zealous ideologues with the best of intentions brush aside the limits on power in order to get whatever they believe is good for the people … no matter what the people believe. Our system of freedom can survive an assault, but it won’t survive if the people are frightened, or angry, or asleep at the switch. A great Democrat, President Andrew Jackson, once said: “eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty.” We can thank our current leaders at least for this: they have awakened the nation to the danger of taking self-government for granted.

Read the whole thing.

Happy Easter!

The New Neo Posted on by

Happy Easter to all my celebratory Christian readers, and to all those who just enjoy the holiday as well!

One year when my son was little, I spent the week prior to Easter blowing out eggs and dying them. Now that he’s grown and away, the eggs are packed away in boxes and stored in parts unknown. If I could get my hands on them I’d photograph them for you, because even all these years later they are beautiful, with dyes both subtle and unsubtle, interesting etched patterns and rainbow effects—definitely one of my finest crafts hours (to tell the truth, I didn’t have so many fine crafts hours, although there was also a gingerbread house we made that was stored in the attic and alas, eaten by small creatures–and not human ones, at that.)

Blown-out eggs are well worth the trouble, and why? Because they last. And nothing eats them. You only have to make them once, and you’re all set. They are a bit fragile, but not so very.

So here’s my Easter present to you (not that you couldn’t find it yourself): the instructions for blowing eggs:

First, you’ll need to make a tiny pin hole on each end of the egg. A pin works well, or a wooden kitchen skewer or even the tip of a sharp knife. Gently work the tip of the pin/skewer/knife in a circular motion until a tiny hole appears. Repeat on the other side. Then insert the pin or skewer (the knife will be too big here) far enough into the egg to break the yolk. Use your mouth [blow] to expel the contents of the egg.

And here is a more complex–but perhaps better–way, for those obsessive-compulsives among us.

These aren’t mine, but they’ll have to do as substitute:

[NOTE: This is a repost from Easters past. But it still works for me.]

HCR: maybe the public’s not so stupid after all

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama and his cohorts love to claim that the public’s dislike of the HCR bill is just “misinformation,” and that the more they learn about the bill the more they’ll like it. Funny thing though; so far, the more the public has learned about HCR, the more they seem to dislike it.

Must be very frustrating for Obamites, so accustomed to reaping the benefits of spin that they don’t understand that sometimes reality overcomes their efforts. They would have done well to have read the book The Wisdom of Crowds. The following is from a review of the book:

While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.” To support this almost counterintuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we’re all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest). His rubric, then, covers a range of problems, including driving in traffic, competing on TV game shows, maximizing stock market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google. If four basic conditions are met, a crowd’s “collective intelligence” will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don’t know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. “Wise crowds” need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people’s errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are “smarter” than if a single expert had been in charge.

Of course, crowds are hardly always correct. Would that they were; it would make elections (and life) a lot easier. Case in point: the most recent presidential and Congressional election, which led us to this sorry pass. Of course, the MSM did their best to make sure that most people did not get the correct information on candidate Obama. If they had received it, I feel nearly certain that the results would have been a great deal different.

And it’s even easier for the aggregate of the population to be correct if the “experts” are as obviously inexpert as our president, who sounded a bizarre note in his rambling 17-minute non-answer to the clear and concise question asked by a woman in the crowd during his Charlotte talk.

We all know that Obama is in love with the sound of his own voice, and believes that others automatically are, too. That’s part of what was going on here. But he was also stalling and setting up a smokescreen, hoping the question would get lost in a sea of words, because he really had no answer at all.

Here’s the entire thing, if you’ve got the stamina to last all the way through. Obama’s hoping that you don’t.

The difficulty of demonizing the Tea Partiers: less than six degrees of separation

The New Neo Posted on by

The word has gone out that, now that HCR has been passed and President Obama is spending his precious time going around the country to “sell” it, the Tea Partiers must be further demonized in any way possible, including of course that perennial favorite, the race card.

But if the Tea Partiers hadn’t already been discredited, it’s not for lack of trying. From the start they were mocked as hate-filled extremists and racists, and given the sexual epithet “teabaggers” as their name instead of the honorable and historically-based one they devised for themselves. They were considered to be similar to those “bitter clingers” Obama had described during his 2008 campaign to supporters in San Francisco.

The idea was (and still is) that, if the ad hominen attacks can be made to stick, the substance of the Tea Party message could be discarded, and the hope of the administration and its supporters was/is that more Americans would be dissuaded from joining up with this bunch of crazy racists.

With a willing press as co-conspirators (or at least cooperative in the coverup), proof was not necessary, and accusations could be made up. Right out of the Alinsky handbook. But what did we expect when we elected a president who had taught Alinsky methods in workshops?

One of the many things the Democrats may have forgotten, however, is that (outside of true-blue monolithic liberal bastions such as Berkeley and NYC), most people actually know a few Tea Partiers, and are aware of who and what they are, and what they are actually protesting, and why. What’s more, those who attend a tea party can report on what they saw there, and they’re not reporting anything like what the media and Democratic leaders are describing.

And, because the Tea Parties are actually rather sedate except for cries of “Kill the bill!” (the ones I attended featured such radical acts as singing “God Bless America”), the would-be demonizers are having trouble finding much evidence for their accusations. Mark my words, however: if they don’t find more of them, they will have to invent them. And they will have no moral reservations about doing so.

There may not be a lot of people attending Tea Parties in terms of percentage of the population of the US. But every person who does attend stands for a host of others who sympathize but do not. It’s easier to demonize a fake populist movement. But it’s much more difficult to successfully demonize a real one.

And the Obamites know this one’s real. That’s why they fear it so.

Obama: mockery in Maine

The New Neo Posted on by

Two days ago President Obama was in Portland, Maine, to give a speech promoting the HCR bill.

I’ve observed before that sometimes Obama will put two contradictory assertions in the same address, hoping the discrepancies in logic will go unnoticed. But he usually places them some distance apart from each other. This time, however, they followed one another in fairly rapid succession in his speech.

Judge for yourself. Here’s Obama in his familiar folksy, sarcastic, and contemptuously mocking mode, having a fine old time egging the crowd on to laugh at those who’ve had the audacity to criticize the bill by pointing out its profound dangers (I’m not sure whether the relevant parts of his address were scripted or ad-lib):

THE PRESIDENT: You turned on the news, you’d see that those same folks who were hollering about [HCR] before it passed, they’re still hollering, about how the world will end because we passed this bill. (Laughter.) This is not an exaggeration. John Boehner called the passage of this bill —

AUDIENCE: Booo!

THE PRESIDENT: — no need to — we don’t need to boo, I just want to give the facts — called this passage of this bill “Armageddon.” You had others who said this is the end of freedom as we know it.

So after I signed the bill, I looked around. (Laughter and applause.) I looked up at the sky to see if asteroids were coming. (Laughter.) I looked at the ground to see if cracks had opened up in the earth. You know what, it turned out it was a pretty nice day. (Laughter and applause.) Birds were still chirping. Folks were strolling down the street. Nobody had lost their doctor. Nobody had pulled the plug on Granny. (Laughter.) Nobody was being dragged away to be forced into some government-run health care plan.

But the thing is, though, you have to love some of the pundits in Washington. Every single day since I signed the reform law, there’s been another poll or headline that said “Nation still divided on health care reform. Polls haven’t changed yet.” Well, yeah. It just happened last week. (Laughter and applause.) It’s only been a week. (Applause.)

Can you imagine if some of these reporters were working on a farm? (Laughter.) You planted some seeds, and they came out the next day, and they looked, and nothing’s happened! (Laughter and applause.) There’s no crop! We’re going to starve! Oh, no! (Applause.) It’s a disaster! (Laughter.)

Let’s review: those who warned that Obamacare would have severely negative results are birdbrained idiots because the first week after it was signed life goes on as before. And those who point out that his polls numbers haven’t risen as a result of the passage of Obamacare are birdbrained idiots because of course nothing about it has gone into effect yet.

I’m sure many if not most in that cheering crowd got caught up in the giddy delight of the whole enterprise of gleefully mocking one’s critics after a victory. Who cares that the coach is speaking nonsense, completely contradicting himself, when it’s so much fun to spike the ball in the endzone and do a jubilant victory dance?

Mocking his serious critics is one of Obama’s favorite activities. I can’t say I recall hearing any previous president (Democrat or Republican) do it very much in public (although in private it no doubt was a very different matter). The only person who comes to mind—although I don’t think Obama would like this comparison very much—was Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew, who had to resign amidst bribery and tax evasion charges in 1973.

Agnew was known for relishing a verbal battle. But looking back, Agnew was the soul of sophisticated wit compared to Obama:

With the help of White House speechwriters Pat Buchanan and William Safire, Agnew developed a distinctive, jeering speech style that mixed some heavy fun into the contempt.

In a 1969 speech against war protesters, he said, “A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” “In the United States today,” Agnew told a 1970 audience in San Diego, “we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.” He went after “pusillanimous pussyfooters” and “vicars of vacillation” and “the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”

Agnew (or perhaps Safire or the offputting Buchanan) apparently was fond of alliteration. Obama is not.

One thing Obama is fond of, however, is delivering the usual nonsensical reassurances without actually answering his critics’ analyses of the issues. You know the drill: you can keep your insurance if you like it. The Republicans want total deregulation of the insurance companies; no controls at all. Obamacare will be good for the elderly. It will reduce the deficit. And so on and so forth.

And the crowd cheered on.

Ice skating: jumping, turning, spinning

The New Neo Posted on by

In both ballet and ice skating, the best jumpers tend to be more compact. Jumping not only takes extreme athleticism and coordination, it also requires exceptionally strong legs—particularly the thigh and butt muscles. Conversely, the more elongated the torso and extremities, and the taller the dancer or skater, the more difficult it is to pull it all together to get the elevation and make the required rapid revolutions simultaneously (as required in skating).

But it’s the taller dancer or skater who often has the more lyrical flowing line. I’m about to post a video (hat tip: Beverly) featuring an unusual skater of years past—although not so many years past; the performance is from 1999.

Her name is Lucinda Ruh. Ruh managed to achieve a merely serviceable jump, with only a modest number of revolutions. Although her jumps would have drawn gasps of pleasure and astonishment back in 1956, when she skated in 1999 they really were weak compared to the opposition.

Ruh’s problem with jumps most probably was caused by the fact that she was 5’9″, (her height according to the seemingly knowledgeable You Tube skating aficionados), enormously tall for a female skater or dancer. It certainly wasn’t due to any problems with turning itself, though, because Ruh was the best spinner ever—which is also somewhat unusual because spinning, like turns and jumps, tends on the whole to favor the short and compact, although not as strongly.

But spin Ruh did, and in extraordinary fashion. She hardly moves off a single spot as she whirls at speeds high enough to cause her image to blur. I once wrote a piece on the concept of the natural turner; some people have it and some don’t, and Ruh had it. Turns and spins are something you can learn and you can even improve, but natural turners and/or spinners are born rather than made. It probably has a great deal to do with the inner ear and the brain as much as the muscles of the body. Watch, and marvel (and stay with it right to the end of her performance at minute 4:15—you’ll be glad you did). Her costume is lovely as well:

For Good Friday

The New Neo Posted on by

The Anchoress writes with her usual grace, this time about the turmoil in the Catholic Church over allegations of abuse coverups, and why she remains a Catholic nevertheless.

And what of the role of our friends in the media in this scandal about the Pope’s possible enabling of child-abusing priests? Here’s Britain’s Telegraph on the subject:

Did Joseph Ratzinger, when he was Archbishop of Munich in 1980, enable a priest already facing allegations to work in a parish and subsequently abuse boys? A headline in The Times on Saturday left readers in no doubt: “Pope knew priest was paedophile but allowed him to continue with ministry.”…

Many Catholics ”“ and I am one of them ”“ believe that the Pope has been stitched up over this Munich case. The then-Archbishop Ratzinger did not allow a priest he knew to be a paedophile to continue in ministry. He gave permission for the priest ”“ a revolting pervert called Peter Hullermann, who was accused (but not convicted) of forcing an 11-year-old boy to perform a sex act on him ”“ to receive counselling in Munich while suspended from priestly duties.

Without Archbishop Ratzinger’s knowledge, Hullermann was later transferred to parish duties. By the time he was convicted of sex offences, the archbishop had become Cardinal Ratzinger and had been working in the Vatican for several years…

The future Pontiff could have been more vigilant, but to bracket his delegation of decisions with Cardinal Brady’s complicity in a cover-up is unfair.

And then there’s one of our favorite newspapers (to fisk, that is), the New York Times. In its reportage on a different case of priestly pedophilia and allegations of coverup by the present Pope, the Times appears to have misrepresented the situation with what amounts to callous disregard for the facts. Read the whole thing.

Sexual abuse of children by priests in the Catholic Church is and was all too real, and coverups were especially prevalent in decades past. That is a very terrible fact, and the Church still has very much to answer for in that regard. But—at least as far as the information obtainable so far goes—the current campaign to implicate the Pope smacks of agenda-driven overreach by the usual suspects at the MSM. Is it really any surprise?

Obama the constitutional law scholar…

The New Neo Posted on by

…may not worry about what the procedural rules are in the House or the Senate, as he told Brett Baier. But it is heartening to learn that the majority of the American people still do:

A new Gallup poll shows that a majority of Americans believes Democrats abused their power by using procedural shortcuts and controversial parliamentary tactics to pass the new national health care makeover…The poll asked, “Regardless of whether you favored or opposed the health care legislation Congress passed this past week, do you think the methods the Democratic leaders in Congress used to get enough votes to pass this legislation were an abuse of power or were an appropriate use of power by the party that controls the majority in Congress?” The results: 53 percent say the Democrats’ methods were an abuse of power, while 40 percent say they were appropriate.

Breaking down the results by party, 86 percent of Republicans say the Democrats abused their power, while 58 percent of independents agree. Nineteen percent of Democrats say their own leaders abused their power, while 70 percent say Democratic methods were appropriate.

The party breakdown is interesting as well. It follow the pattern of polls on many issues lately, with Independents siding largely with Republicans and the Democrats standing alone in a different universe. This was how the Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey and Massachusetts were accomplished. And this would be the required road if the Republicans are to win back the House and possibly even the Senate in 2010.

I take notes and write drafts for quite a few posts that never see the light of day. Some time ago—I think late in the 2008 presidential campaign—I noticed that then-candidate Obama almost never used the word “liberty” in his speeches. When I did an exhaustive search on it in preparation for a post I never did write, I found that, although “social justice” and “justice” and “fairness” came in for a lot of praise from Obama in his speeches, and “freedom” was mentioned now and then, “liberty” seemed to go missing for the most part.

In his scripted speeches, Obama tends to choose his words very carefully. So even back then I didn’t think that the paucity of references to liberty was an accident. Nothing that Obama has done since has convinced me otherwise; in fact, it has become increasingly clear that he believes that his version of social justice trumps liberty, and that he is determined to impose it on us whether we like it or not, and that he has the full cooperation of the Democratic Congressional leaders and almost all Democrat members of Congress in doing so—and that the rules that protect us from such encroachments on liberty are seen by them as annoying obstacles to be gotten around.

You can’t say Pelosi didn’t warn us. She made it crystal clear two months ago:

I am heartened by the fact that Americans appear to be aware of this willingness of Congress and the President to abuse their power. I am disheartened by the fact that the people seem more concerned with liberty than their own government is. But the Founding Fathers knew this might someday be the case. Let us hope that the safeguards they placed in the Constitution long ago will suffice to protect us now, and help us to protect ourselves. We will need every one of those safeguards.

The morning after: thinking about April Fools Day

The New Neo Posted on by

I feel like I have a bit of a hangover from yesterday, even though I’m not a drinking woman. As I wrote in an addendum I just added to yesterday’s “In defense of Hank Johnson” post, while it’s a wonderful thing to be linked by such blogosphere luminaries as Instapundit and Powerline, it’s also true that the best April Fools jokes are unexplained as such.

But an awful lot of readers (both new and old) thought I was being serious in my fanciful riff on the Guam video, despite the date being April First, and despite my putting a reference to April Fools Day within the body of that piece in what I assumed would be a big hint. I really didn’t want to put a note in the post itself saying “ALERT: April Fools spoof!” (I thought that would ruin the joke), although such a message appeared many times in the comments section.

But people don’t always read the comments section, and many just didn’t remember that the date was April 1st. I waited till today to write this explanation, since April Fools Day is now over and now The Truth Can Be Told. So here it is: that post on Johnson was a spoof. Unfortunately, too many people may have already gone away thinking I’m some sort of weirdo who spreads unsourced rumors on a daily basis.

Nothing could be further from the way I usually operate (hey, did you hear about…?). Perhaps the problem is that the truths that actually did appear in my piece yesterday—(1) the video itself; (2) the fact that Willard had a role as consultant and actor in the movie “Top Gun;” and 3) the fact that Johnson is one of two Buddhists in Congress—were already sort of quirky. This was especially the case with the video, which should have been a joke but unfortunately was not (at least, not an intentional one).

Johnson has since said that he was offering a metaphor about Guam. I leave it to you to watch the video and judge whether that is true (I don’t think so). And another fact that came out is that Johnson has been suffering from Hepatitis C and its treatment, which can affect the mind. That is true, and I wish him well in fighting the disease. But if his mind is this affected, he needs to step down from his Congressional post.

And that’s no joke.

It strikes me that this year people just do not seem to be in a joking mood. I noticed fewer April Fool prank posts around the blogosphere yesterday than in previous years. Perhaps because the truth has become more like the Onion than any joke could be.

Maybe I should just give up April Fools pranking. Maybe I will.

Until next year.