 The road to socialism is not natural. It must be paved with the hard work of class envy, demonization of the successful, and obfuscation that each new massive spending program that will raise both taxes and deficits (that’s the point, after all, to create so much red ink that we must raise taxes and redefine what constitutes income) must be passed immediately, without delay, now-or-never to stave off Biblical hunger, plague, and flood. Or else!
Victor Davis Hanson
On Becoming Europe
If “health care” were about health care, the devil would be in the details. But it’s not about health or costs or coverage; it’s about getting over the river and burning the bridge. It doesn’t matter what form of governmentalized health care gets passed as long as it passes. Once it’s in place, it will be “reformed”, endlessly, but it will never be undone.
Mark Steyn
Untangling the Spaghetti
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care.
Sarah Palin
quoted from facebook
At least when I'm alternating between knife fighting for the last can of creamed corn at the market and growing home remedies in the garden on my fortified compound, I'll be secure in the knowledge that BO made the racism problem marginally better.
Ryan Keith Roper
Still No Apologies
Innocence, under the extra-constitutional reign of political correctness, liberalism's brand of soft Shariah law, must be proved ex post facto.
Andrew Breitbart
Obama's Accidental Gift on Race
Etiam diabolus audiatur. (Let even the devil be heard.)
Patrick J. Buchanan
quoting Francesco Nitti in Churchill Stalin and the West, p 84
In conclusion, Coulter has written a biting satire over the trend of anti-intellectualism that clouds part of the conservative ideology, which is otherwise based on principle and reason.
Peter Olofsson
The Coulter Hoax: How Ann Coulter Exposed the Intelligent Design Movement
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
Book of Matthew
Matthew, 5:11 King James Version
Capitalism is liberating: You’re born a peasant but you don’t have to die one. You can work hard and get a nice place in the suburbs. If you were a 19th century Russian peasant and you got to Ellis Island, you’d be living in a tenement on the Lower East Side, but your kids would get an education and move uptown, and your grandkids would be doctors and accountants in Westchester County. And your great-grandchild would be a Harvard-educated environmental activist demanding an end to all this electricity and indoor toilets. Environmentalism opposes that kind of mobility
Mark Steyn
The Ecopalypse
[Steve Wolfer said,] "If you insist on changing all of the dominant philosophy of our culture all at once, you can't get there from here." Well, that's the dirty little secret of the Left, isn't it? Attacks on personal liberty (e.g., bans on foodstuffs and toilets that flush) and bizarre movements toward some utopia divorced from reality (gay marriage and rights for orangutans) can proceed as fast as our chubby little minds can imagine. But real solutions to real problems (allowing drilling in ANWR, slogging it out with the terror states) are forbidden because in reality such things take time to implement and to show results. The Left doesn't want anything that will actually work and hence will actually need time to work. It wants the immediate satisfaction of forbidding, of fiats, of a false sense of ethical superiority. Never actually wanting to arrive anywhere, the Left pretends it can close its eyes and click its heels, and not wishing to get there from here it need never expend the effort to depart.
Ted Keer
Would you register for the Objectivist party?
I have been on the record since the 1990s as strongly opposing hate crimes legislation. I think it is a totalitarian intrusion into citizens' thought processes. Government functionaries should not be ceded the dangerous authority to make decisions about motivation. They aren't novelists, psychologists or sibyls! Furthermore, there should be no special privileged class of protected groups in a democracy. A crime is a crime -- period.
Camille Paglia
Camille Paglia at Salon
Know what the hell is going on and what you are doing - that should be a big goal for Objectivists in general anyway.
Kurt Eichert
Hope versus Reality
The truth is, however, that only one reality exists.
Wafa Sultan
Who Should We Believe?
I won't just imply it - I'll state it out-right - There must be a government monopoly on law. There can be but one set of laws for a given jurisdiction. Period. There is a huge, enormous, unbridgable gap between minarchy and 'anarcho-capitalism.' Minarchy and 'anarcho-capitalism' are so far apart as to be opposites. Capitalism can only exist if there is the freedom for markets to function. And there can be no freedom for markets without the protection of individual rights. People require the protection of person and property against the intiation of force, fraud and theft to make markets free - to open the door for competition. And that requires laws that define those rights.
Steve Wolfer
Is Taxation an Initiation of Force?
Objectivism needs to be cut down to its roots and thoroughly re-evaluated and understood apart from all its principals, past and present. Most people--Objectivists--do not understand the actual terrifying simplicity of Objectivism and that the complexity and difficulty is in the details of living an individual life.
Brant Gaede
Simple Exercise thread on the Valliant fiasco at Wikipedia
Neda died with open eyes. Shame on us who live with closed eyes.
Unknown Iranian
John McCain, The US Senate
Make no mistake, these are murders, not "killings," or "deaths," but murders. Obama "supporters" were all fine with the fact that Barry had precious little to say about the murder of unarmed Iranians in the street, and I found that amazingly unforgivable
Teresa Summerlee Isanhart
Peace at Any Price
Socialists [believe in evolution in biology, in the survival of the fittest. But not in economics.] Economically, these people will take monkey tails and staple them to our backs.
Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck with Yaron Brook
Is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright a better role model than Martin Luther King? It's a damned shame that our first minority president wasn't a veteran of our civil-rights struggle, rather than its privileged beneficiary.
Ralph Peters
Green Light for a Crackdown
It must have been the viewing angle: The despots who run Iran somehow missed the halo gracing President Obama during his recent sermon to the Muslim world.
Ralph Peters
The Obama Effect
Obama offered Muslims a careful admonition about women's rights, noting how denying women education impoverishes a country -- balanced, of course, with "meanwhile, the struggle for women's equality continues in many aspects of American life." Well, yes. On the one hand, there certainly is some American university where the women's softball team has received insufficient Title IX funds -- while, on the other hand, Saudi women showing ankle are beaten in the street, Afghan school girls have acid thrown in their faces, and Iranian women are publicly stoned to death for adultery. (Gays, as well -- but then again we have Prop 8.) We all have our shortcomings, our national foibles. Who's to judge?
Charles Krauthammer
Obama on High
No law in any state in the United States now or ever has forbidden homosexuals to marry. The law has never asked that a man prove his heterosexuality in order to marry a woman, or a woman hers in order to marry a man.
Orson Scott Card
Homosexual "Marriage" and Civilization
What does it say about her qualifications to be on the Supreme Court when her supporters' biggest talking points are that she had to struggle to rise in the world? Bonnie and Clyde had to struggle. Al Capone had to struggle. The only President of the United States who was forced to resign for his misdeeds-- Richard Nixon-- had to struggle. For that matter, Adolf Hitler had to struggle! There is no evidence that struggle automatically makes you a better person.
Thomas Sowell
Out of Context II
Hey, Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors. Comrade Obama! Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to his right.
Hugo Chavez
On Venezuelan state TV Reuters
Racism has never done this country any good, and it needs to be fought against, not put under new management for different groups.
Thomas Sowell
"Out of Context?" Op. Ed. on the Sotomayor nomination.
In 1963, when a benefactor offered to fund a chapel [at Churchill College, Cambridge], and Crick’s fellow Fellows voted to accept the money, Crick refused to accept the argument that many at the college would appreciate a place of worship and that those who didn’t were not obliged to enter it. [Crick] offered to fund a brothel on the same basis, and, when that was rejected, he resigned.
Mark Steyn
Obituary of Sir Francis Crick
North Korea is like a dog. If you feed him every time he pees on the rug, then he'll continue to pee on the rug. There's no reason for Kim Jong-il not to pee on our rug.
Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu
Washington Times
I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
Robert Anson Heinlein
Whatever the verbal fencing over the meaning of the word "torture," there is a fundamental difference between simply inflicting pain on innocent people for the sheer pleasure of it-- which is what our terrorist enemies do-- and getting life-saving information out of the terrorists by whatever means are necessary.
Thomas Sowell
Debate Over 'Torture' Lacks Seriousness (Thanks, Joe.)
Floor, or table? I don't care!
Dialog from Battlestar Galactica
Helen to Saul Tighe "Deadlock"
What's a demonstration? It's when students show how much they don't know by repeating it loudly.
Leslie Nielson
An American Carol
One of the most important skills for political success is the ability to make confident assertions of absurdities or lies.
Thomas Sowell
Random Thoughts
In securing victory, no strategem is more profitable than claiming already to have achieved it.
Wikipedia (Anonymous Editor)
Imagine you see a person at work taking buckets of water from the deep end of a swimming pool and dumping them into the shallow end in an attempt to make it deeper....That scenario is equivalent to what Congress and the new president proposes for the economy.
Walter E. Williams
The Spendulus
Its one thing to be so deluded that you think everyone should pay for your pet programs. Its quite another to think everyone but you should pay for them.
Ryan Keith Roper
Daschle Bows Out
One skin, one driver.
Fred Bartlett
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/1363_4.shtml#98
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Unfortunately, what happens in Hollywood does not stay in Hollywood.
Andrew Breitbart
I Pledge...what?
Nothing teaches objectivity like doing a basic physics experiment and proving to yourself first hand that the laws of physics aren't some made up thing like the tooth fairy or santa claus.
Mike Erickson
Knowledge about Knowledge
[T]he only acceptable outcome of this war, both for Israel and for the civilized world, is ... the disintegration of Hamas rule. It is already under way. This is not about killing every last Hamas gunman. Not possible, not necessary. Regimes rule not by physically overpowering every person in their domain, but by getting the majority to accept their authority. That is what sustains Hamas, and that is what is now under massive assault.
Charles Krauthammer
Two Endgames for Israel
Whoever called politics "the art of the possible" must have had a strange idea of what is possible or a strange idea of politics, where the impossible is one of the biggest vote-getters. People can get the possible on their own. Politicians have to be able to offer the voters something that they cannot get on their own. The impossible fills that bill perfectly.
Thomas Sowell
The Art of the Impossible
Objectivism is not a way of putting your life on autopilot. In the face of such matters as taste, temperament, talent, and level of intelligence a formula for an inflexible, infallable morality is impossible. One can only be as moral as ability allows, and should be judged on those isssues that matter most. [Moral p]erfection is an impossible goal.
Robert Davison
An Answer to Robert Bidinotto on Moral Perfection
Not even Gandhi was against the concept of Superior Violence.
Fred Bartlett
Violence is the Last Resort of the Incompetent
There once was a local standup routine in a West Coast pub (of all places) and in attendance was this small group of German tourists. After the show the comedian came down to the bar and the Germans wanted to buy him a drink. One of the visitors asks him, "You really have a great routine going, how come we don't have anyone as funny as you back home?". The Coaster set down his beer and says, "Because you killed them all."
Rick Giles
Where is Sarah House
Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating. ...For Hamas the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians.
Charles Krauthammer
A Real Cease-Fire Needed in Gaza
Hamas had to rub salt in the wounds by staging a grotesque victory parade worthy of a barbarian emperor, in which they publicly taunted Israel and the parents of Gilad Shalit. It was the sort of show that is outlawed by international law, that hasn't been practiced since the Middle Ages, but it attracted hardly a murmur of international condemnation. The Palestinians had their gladiator show. The admission price was yet to be paid.
Ami Isseroff
Thanks to Teresa
I think there are two kinds of incompetent people. Those that treat violence as a first resort, and those that treat it as a last resort. The former are thugs. The latter are cowards.
Joseph Rowlands
Gulching and Shrugging
Today, large parts of the modern world have abandoned reason as well as religion. If you were to look among academics for an intellectual defense of reason, you wouldn’t find many players on the field. I’m aware of a handful of philosophers who work in the Objectivist and Aristotelian tradition of Ayn Rand. There are Catholic philosophers. That’s it. The rest of academia is either actively hostile to the idea of reason itself, or has retreated to the safety of narrow, technical knowledge.
Jennifer Roback Morse
Jennifer Roback Morse in NRO on reason and Benedict XVI
The wonder of Rand's thought is that it coheres. It self corrects. It is the only real and unapologetic attempt at systematization since Marxism, and the most noble since that of the Greeks. Rand's original theory of concept formation and her brilliant identification of the stolen concept stand around her system like a fence; keeping in the productive fruit of her and her spiritual predecessors, and expelling weeds from the garden of thought.
Ted Keer
What is Objectivism Defined As?
If you're very very rich, you can buy your Senate seat by spending as much of your money as you want. Meanwhile, your poor plebeian opponent is running around groveling for the small contributions allowed by law. . . . Having given this additional leg up to the rich, we should resist packing our legislatures with yet more privileged parachutists, the well-born. True, the Brits did it that way for centuries, but with characteristic honesty. They established a house of Parliament exclusively for highborn twits and ensconced them there for life. There they chatter away in supreme irrelevance deep into their dotage. Problem is that the U.S. Senate retains House of Commons powers even as it develops a House of Lords membership.
Charles Krauthammer
Camelot is Not a State
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