Arguing with the Left: We Are Doing It Wrong!

This strikes me as the right answer.

If you have ever tried arguing with a liberal, leftist or progressive, at some point you have inevitably come away frustrated by your apparent inability to “win” an argument, despite proving conclusively the other side is objectively wrong.  The subject doesn’t matter, it could be the failure of Obama’s foreign policy, the IRS targeting scandal, tax policy, (lack of) Global Warming, or “helping” the poor.  There in fact is a literal parade of liberal/leftist social policies and issues that have been unequivocal, abject failures, yet no matter how many facts and figures you can marshal, your argument falls flat, and your opponent remains completely un-swayed.  Have you ever wondered why this is?

“It’s not that we on the right don’t have a plan, it’s that we don’t have a narrative.”

Read the whole thing.

Turmoil In Thailand–Corruption As Catalyst

In February I put up a post about what was happening in Thailand from my perspective back at the beginning of February. I left it off with a sort of “here’s how we are, now how did things get here? To be continued” ending. Well, I’ve found someone who can lay it out far better than I could hope to. So, here is what you need to know about the history of the Thaksin regime: The Thaksin regime in perspective. A sample:

Thaksin was a divisive figure. To his opponents, he was a devil who greedily exploited his office and the trust of the people for personal gain, abused human rights mercilessly, and was rapidly becoming a dictator. To his admirers, he was an angel, a champion of the poor laid low by the forces of darkness and backwardness from which he had been trying to save his country. A more balanced perspective is needed.

Thaksin was a Thai variant of a type recognisable in the history of other countries – the tycoon capitalist emerging during the transformation of a pre-industrial world of small business into today’s world of large corporations and conglomerates. He took the obsessive, aggressive and ruthless attitudes of the business tycoon into politics. His outlook differed from that of the old robber barons principally in that it found expression through his ideas of “new management.” This ideology was centralist and authoritarian, and fundamentally incompatible with democratic governance. Hence the damage Thaksin did to the limits on executive power created by the 1997 reforms, and hence his aggressive attitude towards people who did not fit his vision. It was this attitude, which more than anything else, underpinned his mishandling of the crisis in the deep south.

Thaksin learned how to push the buttons of the Thai people, how to manipulate popular sentiment by telling people what they wanted to hear and making them believe it. All he needed for the stamp of legitimacy, or so he thought, was to win an election. He “won” his first election with only about 40% of the vote and bought off some of the lesser parties to form a government. He has never been able to honestly command a true majority of the Thai People.
Read the whole thing.

You Aren't Going Crazy. You Are Being Gas-Lighted

Bill Whittle explains in his latest Firewall video.

Thai Turmoil: Some Observations and Thoughts from Michael Yon

Michael Yon has been on the ground and talking to the protesters, including the leadership, and doing research since December. He’s been posting brief thoughts and updates to Facebook all along. He has just completed his first of what will probably be 10 major dispatches at his website.  It’s worth the time to read the whole thing. Nobody else from the Western media (if they’re even paying attention still) is doing this.

Turmoil in Thailand–My View of the Situation.

I have been following the political crisis in Thailand very closely. My interest in the situation is due to the fact that I am married to a Thai and have both family and friends in the country. They are on both sides of the issue, some support the government, others the protesters. I can speak a little of the language. Let's call my fluency level; enough to make the in-laws careful about what they say around me because they aren't entirely sure what I do or don't understand, and I tend to surprise them once in a while.

I have been alarmed (but not really surprised) to see the Western press and punditocracy trotting out the very simple and simplistic narrative that what is happening is that a bunch of anti-government mobs (a very loaded word) are trying to overthrow a democratically elected government and that it's the Bangkok "elites" versus the rural poor. It's an easy narrative and also a very lazy one. Reality is, as usual, a lot more complicated than that. Very few of the people, if any, in the Western media opining on the situation are actually on the ground in Thailand and talking to the parties and that being the case they are getting the story entirely wrong.

One person who is on the ground and talking to the protesters and their leadership is writer and war correspondent Michael Yon. He is posting throughout the day at his Facebook page and if you want to know what is really happening, in near real-time, that is the place to go.

The main body of the protesters are represented by the People's Democratic Reform Council or PDRC. The Western press has been portraying the protesters as "violent mobs," most likely because they are being fed that line by the government and are too lazy to question that narrative. In reality the protest sites have more of the atmosphere of a series of block parties, complete with food stalls, live music and speeches, than a bunch of unruly mobs. These are the kind of people the Thai government claims are terrorists. Quite a bit different than the press accounts would lead us to believe, no?

There has been some violence. So far 9 protesters have died and a little more than another 600 have been wounded, 3 just this evening in an M79 grendade atttack ( as I write this on my Satrurday morning, 14 hours behind the events) at the Chaeng Watthana protest venue. All of these attacks have been by "Red Shirts" who are on the side of the government, or "Black Shirts," also on the side of the government (and widely thought to be former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatara's private enforcers), on the protesters who are armed with nothing more than whistles. So violence all goes almost all one way. The Red/Black Shirts have been employing hit-and-run tactics, firing guns and grenades into crowds of unarmed people, exactly like tonight's grenade attack. PDRC is allied with another group, Kor Por Tor or KPT (People and Student Network for the Reform of Thailand) who have been serving as guards at the protest sites. They will fight, but only if provoked, and they have taken casualties. The PDRC protesters have done nothing violent to bring violence upon themselves.

One Red Shirt leader, quoted in this Daily Telegraph article, is Ko Tee:
"If anyone doubted the abyss into which Thailand could be heading, Ko Tee - who has been accused of orchestrating grenade attacks on anti-government marches in the Thai capital - is the living proof.
"I want there to be lots of violence to put an end to all this," he said. "I'm bored by speeches. It's time to clean the country, to get rid of the elite, all of them."

To me Ko Tee sounds like he wants to be the second coming of Pol Pot (and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he has more than one Che Guevara T-shirt in his drawer). He is a very dangerous man.
So, how did things come to this pass in Thailand? In a word, corruption. There will have to be a part two to this post but I wanted to paint the scene as I see it now.

When Politics Collides With Reality…..

….The results are rarely pretty.

They have a saying in the world of Engineering; Sure you can have it better, faster, cheaper. Pick any two.

This was the undoing of Obamacare, why it blew up on the launch pad so to speak. Politicians (the Democrat variety, that is) tried to will into existence a whole new way of delivering heath care without having any understanding of the complexity of what they were asking for. Clay Shirky has a great article about this phenomenon over at his blog. It’s a read-the-whole-thing kind of post but this part is worth highlighting:

If I had to design a litmus test for whether our political class grasps the internet, I would look for just one signal: Can anyone with authority over a new project articulate the tradeoff between features, quality, and time?

When a project cannot meet all three goals—a situation Healthcare.gov was clearly in by March—something will give. If you want certain features at a certain level of quality, you’d better be able to move the deadline. If you want overall quality by a certain deadline, you’d better be able to simplify, delay, or drop features. And if you have a fixed feature list and deadline, quality will suffer.

Intoning “Failure is not an option” will be at best useless, and at worst harmful. There is no “Suddenly Go Faster” button, no way you can throw in money or additional developers as a late-stage accelerant; money is not directly tradable for either quality or speed, and adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. You can slip deadlines, reduce features, or, as a last resort, just launch and see what breaks.

Denying this tradeoff doesn’t prevent it from happening. If no one with authority over the project understands that, the tradeoff is likely to mean sacrificing quality by default. That just happened to this administration’s signature policy goal. It will happen again, as long politicians can be allowed to imagine that if you just plan hard enough, you can ignore reality. It will happen again, as long as department heads imagine that complex technology can be procured like pencils. It will happen again as long as management regards listening to the people who understand the technology as a distasteful act.

Dear Liberal, Here’s Why I’m So Hostile

I just discovered a blog I’ve never run across before; Sufficient Reason. Proprietor Jeremy Choate has an awe-inspiring rant against the “Liberal” creed. A sample:

The fact is, you can rail against my conservatism all you wish.  You can make fun of my Tea Party gatherings, and you can ridicule patriots in tri-corner hats until you wet yourself from mirth, but one thing is for certain: my political philosophy will NEVER be a threat to your freedom.  If you feel a burning responsibility to the poor, conservatism will never prevent you from working 80 hours per week and donating all of your income to charity.  If you feel a strong sense of pity for a family who cannot afford health insurance, my political philosophy will never prevent you from purchasing health insurance for this family or raising money to do so, if you cannot afford it, personally.  If you are moved with compassion for a family who is homeless, a conservative will never use the police power of government to prevent you from taking that family in to your own home or mobilizing your community to build one for them.

However, you cannot say the same for liberalism.  If I choose not to give to the poor for whatever reason, you won’t simply try to persuade me on the merits of the idea — you will seek to use the government as an instrument of plunder to force me to give to the poor.  If we are walking down the street together and we spot a homeless person, using this logic, you would not simply be content with giving him $20 from your own pocket — you would hold a gun to my head and force me to give him $20, as well.

Read it all.

Conrad Black on the Disaster That Is Obamacare

Over at National Review Online Conrad Black is positively scathing (and dead right) about the state of our legal and political systems and how it lead to the utter disaster that is Obamacare being foisted on us.

The Affordable Care Act was passed in a dubious manner. The 60-vote level in the Senate was obtained by the subornation of Arlen Specter in that tainted window between his rejection by his own party and his defeat by the Pennsylvania voters, and by Al Franken’s questionable win in the Senate election in Minnesota, where partisan, county-by-county recounts overturned the people’s choice. Also, most egregiously, Republican senator Ted Stevens of Alaska had been narrowly defeated in 2008 after being convicted of taking a bribe — a conviction that was subsequently thrown out because of the prosecutor’s completely improper suppression of exculpatory evidence. (At least this was not a partisan act, as this was one of the more flamboyant initiatives of the George W. Bush Justice Department.)

The Affordable Care Act, then, owes its existence to political treachery, electoral hijinks, and extreme prosecutorial misconduct, and it ill behooves the Democrats and their incessant hallelujah chorus among both the hacks and the incurably gullible in the media to incant with woeful faces and in mournful inflection any misuse of due legislative process. The fact that the chief justice had to transform himself into an acrobat and claim that Obamacare was constitutional, under the federal government’s right to tax, does not excuse everybody else from seeing this ill-conceived monstrosity of a law for what it is and what its provenance is.

That isn’t all he has to say by any means. You should absolutely click through and read the whole thing.

One observation that I would add is that everything he has described correlates with the increasing concentration of power at the top, with the federal government. This is what the Founding Fathers feared might happen and, alas, it appears that these fears may be coming true.

The GOP House of Representatives Has Offered Eleven Separate Bills to Try and End the Budget Stalemate…….

…… And eleven times, the Democrat Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, has refused to even allow these bills to be voted on in the Senate. President Stompy Foot Obama has promised to veto them anyway. So this is the fault of the Republican House? No. The Republicans are the reasonable adults here. The Democrats typical form of “negotiation” is reaching an extreme. “Give us everything we demand (i.e., give up all your bargaining leverage and we’ll call it “compromise”) and then we will “negotiate.”“ This is not negotiation. It is dictation of terms. Meanwhile the maladministration seeks to inflict maximum pain on the American people by cutting off access to open plazas grinding hiring to a halt, needlessly preventing businesses from operating, and just generally making it very well known how unhappy the Man Who Would Be King is. From the first link:

1. Roll Call 478 on H.J. Res. 59 (September 20, 2013)

Earlier in September, House Republicans voted to fund the government at current spending levels while strengthening our economy and protecting millions of American families by defunding ObamaCare.

Senate Democrats killed the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

2. Roll Call 497/498 on H.J. Res 59 (September 28, 2013)

With hours left until the government ran out of funding, House Republicans voted to keep the government open at current spending levels while protecting our economy by delayingthe glitch-filled ObamaCare for one year and repealing the tax on medical devices like pacemakers and children’s hearing aides.

Senate Democrats killed the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it, causing the government shutdown.

3. Roll Call 504 on H.J. Res 59 (September 30, 2013)On September 30, the House GOP again voted to fund the government at current spending levels, while ensuring that Congress doesn’t receive special treatment under ObamaCare, and delaying ObamaCare’s individual mandate.

Again, Senate Democrats killed the measure in the Senate, and President Obama threatened to veto.

4. Roll Call 505 on H.J. Res 59 (September 30, 2013)

That same night, Republicans in the House voted to request a formal House-Senate conference, so Democrats and Republicans could sit down at the table and negotiate to resolve their differences.

Senate Democrats defeated that resolution, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

5. Voice Vote on Provide Local Funding for the District of Columbia Act (October 2, 2013)To help reopen parts of the government while Democrats refused to negotiate, House Republicans passed H.J. Res. 71 by voice vote, which would have restored funding for the government of the District of Columbia.

Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

6. Roll Call 513 on Open Our Nation’s Parks and Museums Act (October 2, 2013)

To help reopen parts of the government while Democrats refused to come to the table and work out differences, the House GOP voted to restore funding for the nation’s parks and museums – including the World War Two Memorial in Washington that has been closed to visiting veterans.

Senate Democrats killed the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

7. Roll Call 514 on Research for Lifesaving Cures Act (October 2, 2013)To help restore funding for vital cancer research and other lifesaving innovations, the House GOP voted to reopen the National Institute of Health.

Senate Democrats blocked the bill (see Harry Reid ask a reporter “why would we want to do that?” when asked if he would vote to resume funding for children’s cancer treatment), and President Obama threatened to veto it.

8. Roll Call 516 on Pay Our Guard and Reserve Act (October 3, 2013)

In order to make sure that the government shutdown doesn’t get in the way of paying our National Guard and Reserve, the House GOP voted for the Pay Our Guard and Reserve Act.

Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

ise to America’s Veterans Act (October 3, 2013)The House GOP voted to provide immediate funding for vital veterans benefits and services during the government shutdown.

Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

10. Roll Call 522 on National Emergency and Disaster Recovery Act (October 4, 2013)The House GOP voted to provide immediate funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to ensure Americans have access to emergency responders in the case of a disaster.

Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

11. Roll Call 524 on Nutrition Assistance for Low-Income Women and Children Act (October 4, 2013) The House GOP voted to provide immediate funding for nutritional assistance for nearly 9 low-income million mothers and children.

Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and President Obama threatened to veto it.

So who are the obstructionist here, the people who make very reasonable requests, or those who say it’s my way or no other? 

John McCain Should Do the Honorable Thing…..

….and resign, then run for his seat again in a special election if he wants to keep it. He has been one of my senators for almost 10 years and I have voted for him, reluctantly, and not usually as my first choice. He only represents Arizona’s interests for one year out of every six, the year leading up to his next reelection. For the other five years he seems to relish his role as “the Maverick,” and does what he damned well pleases, despite what the people of the State of Arizona tell him they want. He always knows better and seems to be more concerned wth Senate “comity” than doing what is right. He’s exhibit number one as to why the 17th amendment was a bad idea. 

Today, after Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is acutely aware that he answers to the people of Texas, not the Senate Majority Leader ( who happens to be with the other party, BTW) spoke for 21 hours against funding Obamacare (actually 21 hours starting yesterday), Senator McCain delivered what might as well have been the Democrat response. Mike Walsh at PJ Media has the basics. Here is the main point:

• his disgraceful attacks on Cruz, including his reach-across-the-aisle, dog-in-the-manger response today, this should be the end of Senator John McCain as a voice of influence in the Republican party. Ditto his mini-me, Senator Lindsey Graham. Indeed, the entire Old Guard of business-as-usual “comity” fans passeth. When you care more about what the other side thinks, it’s probably time either to switch teams or step down.
• There is new leadership in the GOP, whether the party wants to admit it or not: Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Jeff Sessions, and the others who stepped into the breach to spell the senator from Texas.
• The Cruz faction in the Senate, and its allies in the House (whose leadership is now up for grabs) must now press their advantage. The louder the Democrats squawk, the more they are wounded; the one thing they’ve long feared is a direct assault on their core beliefs as translated into actions, and the deleterious effects of Obamacare, just now being felt by the population, are the most vivid proof of the failure of Progressivism that conservatives could wish for.
• Win or lose, the battle is now joined: First the struggle for the GOP and then the battle for control of Congress and the presidency. Cruz just struck at the kings he could reach — the Republican “leadership” — and has most likely dealt them a fatal blow. Now the Tea Party hordes must back him up by eliminating his opponents (who tend to be geriatrics, and thus “leaders” by longevity rather than talent or commitment) through the primary process wherever possible. If he can carry off this coup, he and Senator Paul will very quickly find themselves elevated from back-benchers to commanders.

Finally, this:

• Any party that cannot successfully sell freedom and personal liberty doesn’t deserve power. The trick will be to explain — by word and deed — that the Democrats’ Manichean choice (Big Brother or the orphanage) is a false one, that less can be more, and that the restoration of a Republic of self-reliant citizens will benefit all Americans — not simply the government class and its clients.

The last bullet point is absolutely correct. If the Republican party can’t recognize that, sell it, articulate it and convince us all that they BELIEVE in it, it’s all over.

Just Say ‘No’ to Syria Intervention

I just sent the following to my Congressman and Senators:

I'd like to go on record as being against a military intervention, however limited it may be. I base this on the following reasons:

1. There is no vital US interest at stake, unless you count salvaging President Barack Obama's credibility as a vital national interest, in which case it's already too late.

2. The human toll has already surpassed 100,000 dead from being shot, blown up or hacked to death. Why is it that ~1,400 people being killed by gas suddenly too much? They are not any more dead than the people who were killed by other means.

3. It is far from clear that the anti-Assad forces are all good guys. In fact it seems like the opposition has been thoroughly infiltrated by Al Quaeda and other jihadis who are not our friends and never will be. If we intervene we will, in effect, be providing air support for our sworn enemies.

4. Nobody can help but feel for the innocents caught in the middle of all this but the unintended consequences possible with an intervention will not necessarily lead to fewer civilian deaths and could make the situation even worse.

Please vote 'no' on any resolution giving President Obama any sort of authority to intervene militarily in what is a Syrian civil war. It is hard to stand by and do nothing in the face of the horrors we are seeing, but that is what we must do.

Regards,

Obama made an unforced error when he made his unscripted, off-the-cuff red line comment but that bell can’t be un-rung. The mistake has already been made. To intervene militarily in this internecine conflict would just compound the error and gain absolutely nothing in return while providing yet one more grievance for our enemies to nurse.

Detroit. An Economics Lesson on How Not to Do It.

Over at The Market Ticker, Karl Denninger has a primer on how not to run a government.

If you increase tax rates then you decrease economic surplus.  This inevitably slows economic expansion; it mathematically must.

If you make political promises that can only be met through increased tax rates, now or in the future, you begin the process of slitting your own throat.  That outcome is inevitable when you agree to political promises that have escalating expenses over time as pensions, medical benefits, salary "step" increases, bond issues that have a payment schedule longer than the useful life of the asset bought and similar.

This is a must read article.

Bill Whittle Has More on False Narratives and Yellow Journalism

In his latest Afterburner video Bill Whittle unpacks the Martin/Zimmerman case with further examples of yellow journalism, outright false reporting, omission of key facts, etc. Anyone who relied on the MSM to follow the case could very well come away thinking that last week’s not-guilty verdict was not the right one. Watch this video and then ask yourself if you think you are being well-served by the MSM or whether you are being manipulated and deceived..

Judge Jeanine Piro On the Benghazi Hearings

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Leon Panetta need to be held to account for the Benghazi debacle. Incompetence is the best-case scenario here and I don’t think any of them is that truly incompetent. Watch.

Fight, Republicans, Fight

Michael Walsh at National Review has it exactly right:

Advice to the RNC: Don’t “re-brand.” Fight.

That’s it. Fight. Fight them on every front, fight them in every state, fight them on television and in print and on the airwaves. Confront them at every opportunity, seek out and embrace conflict, and fear not bullies like Chuck Schumer (the living embodiment of the Lefty Sneer), Dick Durbin, and passive-aggressive corruptocrats like Harry Reid. Don’t make nice with them, don’t play fair with them, don’t reach across the aisle and above all, treat them and their ideas with exactly the same amount of respect with which they treat yours: none. Contempt is the only language they understand. [emphasis added]

Truer words are hard to imagine. Read the whole thing.

Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society

This half hour or so video is well worth the time to watch.

Rand Paul’s SOTU Response

I can’t find anything to disagree with here.

An Open Video Letter to Senators Franken, Klobuchar and Rep. Nolan

This is an excellent demonstration of why an “assault weapons” ban is nothing more than an attempt to limit our freedom to defend ourselves. Gun control is about controlling people, not guns. Stewart Mills, owner of sporting goods retailer Mills Fleet Farm in Minnesota demonstrates very convincingly that a 12 gauge shotgun is far more destructive than an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. The shot gun inflicts far more damage in a little over 3 seconds than the AR-15 inflicts in over 33 seconds.  Watch and learn.

(via Power Line)

Are You Thinking About a “Protest Vote” On “Principle?”

Bill Whittle asks you to think twice. A final pre-election appeal to principle:

A Malignant, Failed President

I haven’t wanted to think of our president as an evil man, just a hopelessly naïve one too steeped in his leftist ideology that he is unable to recognize mistakes and change course when his policies turn out to be demonstrably wrong. In the wake of the Benghazi debacle I am now convinced that the man is evil to his core.

Barack Obama left four Americans to die and though he had the means to send help, help that was requested and denied three times. It may have already been too late for Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith but Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty could have been saved as they fought a desperate rear-guard action that saved at least twenty more consulate personel in a battle that lasted nearly 7 hours.

Writing at Canada Free Press, Kelly O’Connell takes the same view, that Obama is evil, in a post entitled “Biopsy From a Malignant, Failed Presidency.” You should definitely read the whole thing but this section summarizes the sentiment quite well:

Third, Obama’s loss of nerve and decision to call off a military strike that could have taken out the Benghazi insurgents, and instead—just letting Americans die an agonizing, lonely death—is the most quintessential aspect of the story. This is because it reveals Barack as he truly is inside—an immoral, gutless, unfeeling, selfish, hypocritical, overly ambitious and hideously uncaring person. Obama ONLY cares about what he personally finds valuable, which obviously does not include individual Americans, or any random human beings.

  This man must be voted out of office and if not voted out, impeached. Such evil cannot be trusted with the levers of power.

 

Related: Mark Steyn calls for an “act of urgent political hygiene.”