The Left's Ridiculous Cries of "Vote Suppression"

In a New York Times editorial, they write:

"Next fall, thousands of students on college campuses will attempt to register to vote and be turned away. Sorry, they will hear, you have an out-of-state driver’s license. Sorry, your college ID is not valid here. Sorry, we found out that you paid out-of-state tuition, so even though you do have a state driver’s license, you still can’t vote."

This is utterly ridiculous to me. I was an out-of-state college student. In the eyes of the law at that time, I wasn't a legal resident of Ohio. There is no reason I should have been permitted to vote in an election in Ohio. I should have been voting via absentee ballot in NJ. I say "should" have because I cannot for the life of me remember where and how I voted in the 1984 election, the only national election that occurred during my out-of-state residency. I know I voted for Reagan, but I can't remember if I did it by absentee ballot or did it in Ohio. But, fact is, I should not have been able to do it in Ohio, because there was nothing preventing me from doing both -- voting by absentee ballot in NJ and voting in person in Ohio. There never would have been any corroboration.

Presenting a valid ID is a simple, logical requirement that doesn't present a significant hurdle for any engaged legal citizen, regardless of age or ethnicity. The attempts to paint this as "voter suppression" are embarrassingly transparent attempts to make sure there are no ways to track this sort of voter fraud.

Evil

In a recent post on PowerLine, Scott Johnson recalls former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Wendy Sherman, President Clinton's special adviser on North Korea at the time, effusing about how charming smart and sane Kim Jong Il was.

It seems to me that if Kim Jong Il was sane, that just makes everything he did worse. You can explain someone committing terrible, terrible atrocities as a product of their madness. But if there's no madness, what does that leave? Only that the person is coldly, sanely evil.

Albright famously danced with Kim Jong Il at that meeting. It recalls for me a line from an old Kate Bush song, Heads We're Dancing. "They say the devil is a charming man, and just like you, I bet he can dance."

The EPA and Sustainability

"Sustainability" is one of the newer in a string of hazily and subjectively defined buzzwords designed to justify expanded government control over individual behaviors.

Like "diversity," and "multi-culturalism," "sustainability" is assumed a priori to be a net good without any hard evidence to support the assertion. Additionally, it is such a broad term that adapting it to any particular human endeavor is an entirely subjective evaluation by the experts who know better than we do how to live our lives.

Like "climate change" it is an excuse for elaborate regulatory schemes that effectively put all economic activity under the thumbs of government bureaucrats.

Now the EPA is defining "sustainability" as a core mission and contemplating how it can increase its own regulatory power without the need for legislative action. In plain language, they are planning how they can twist the law and redefine the terms to allow them to usurp powers that were never contemplated by the legislators who drafted the laws is question, and which surely exceed all rational constitutional scope.

The EPA is a rogue organization, one of the biggest enemies of U.S. productivity and it desperately needs to be strongly reined in, if not disbanded.

More on rogueoperator's blog:

Media bias

Today there was a Reuters article with this headline: 

US military marks end to nearly nine bloody years in Iraq


Bloody? really? It could just as accurately have read "US military marks end to a war with one of the lowest proportionate body counts in the history of warfare."

Considering the number of troops that were committed and the length of time they were there, this war was the exact opposite of bloody in terms of U.S. lives lost. Also, the "collateral" civilian damage was among the lowest in history as well. By any standard of warfare, this war was waged with the utmost care for the lives of the troops and civilians. It makes the adjective "bloody" meaningless.

Irony: Discovering These Two Articles on the Same Day

NTSB recommends full ban on use of cell phones while driving

Studies May Have Overestimated Cell Phone Crash Risk

But, hey, don't let uncertainties in the science prevent the NTSB (and the government in general) for trying to regulate our behavior even more minutely.

Things Change

The NYT today has an article lamenting Amazon's war on brick & mortar bookstores.

I sympathize with the brick & mortar stores to a degree. They're like buggy makers in a Model T world. the article states that "losing independent bookstores would be 'akin to editing ... a critical part of our culture out of American life.'"

Once upon a time, horses, buggies and wagons were a critical part of American culture. We lost something real when we lost that necessary relationship we had with our equine servants. That's not an argument for going back to horses.

Things are changing. The brick & mortar bookstore way of doing business won't work anymore. It doesn't make sense anymore. Yet, one day Amazon will have the same, quaint sepia-toned memories the old Sears Christmas Wish Book hold for me. Every years as a kid I'd build my Christmas list from the offerings in that catalog. In my simple world it didn't even occur to me that there were other stores besides Sears, or toys that Sears didn't carry. It was the Christmas Wish Book, and it ruled my Christmas list.

That world is gone, like the horse and buggy, and Sears the retail behemoth that dominated much of the 20th century, is a sad, little also-ran housing the anchor building in a nearby under-used shopping mall. That mall also until not logn ago also featured a Waldenbooks. Also an also-ran. Ford, that led the vanguard of the movement that killed the horse-and-buggy days, is also, increasingly, an also-ran -- bloated, unproductive, debt-ridden, far from its glory days.

One day, Amazon will be an also-ran. You might as well go out to the beach and fight the tide with a child's shovel and sand bucket.

Nobody makes millions of people shop at Amazon every day. It's giving people what they want, just like its predecessors did. Some day, someone else will figure out how to do that better.

Crediting it with the destruction of the personal and the enemy of artistic and literary development is more than a little absurd.

I'll Show You Sorry

Iran Official Says U.S. Should Apologize for Drone 'Invasion'

We really need some people with balls running our foreign policy, because this deserves no response but "Here's a big, heaping plate of 'Fuck You' delivered by missile for your convenience."

Iran has waged a war of terror against us for more than 30 years and is responsible for hundreds of American deaths. At some point, it's time to stop pretending to be polite to the little shits and make them properly piss their pants.

 

Thank You, Jesus!

Salma Hayek Turned to Christ for Breasts

'I put my hands in the holy water and went: "Please Jesus give me some boobs."' 

 

Jesus didn't go for half measures answering that one, did he?

The Crap People Without Script and Ad Blockers Have to Put Up With

Man, every now and then I turn off NoScript and AdBlock Plus to try to get a particularly stubborn site to function, and sometimes I'll forget to turn them on and go back to my usual sites and -- oh, man, the shit that's popping up and blocking and spamming all over my screen! Sites grayed out until you click on the obscuring ad, sites where all the ad content increases the page load time x10. Ugh. I don't know how people put up with it.

Sorry. I refuse to be a good little consumer. I don't have this blog set up for ad revenue, but even if I did, I could hardly blame the readers (if there actually were any, heh!) for trying to bypass that humongous pile of crap.

Where Are The Feminists for Veena Malik?

A young Pakistani actress is in hot water for a nude photo on the cover of the Indian edition of FHM. Magazine. Her life and liberty are in serious risk for doing the same thing top actresses in the west do every month in men's magazines.

But if you search NOW's website for mentions of Veena Malik, you find nothing.

Also among international women's rights organizations:

http://www.madre.org/search/search.php?search=1&query=veena+malik&x=12&y=6

Did you mean: vienna maliki?

The search "veena malik" did not match any document

http://iwrp.org/?s=veena+malik

Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.

http://www.amnestyusa.org/search/node/veena%20malik

Your search yielded no results

http://www.aiwr.org/news
No search facility, but nothing in their News section

http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/iwraw/index.html
Again, no search facility, but nothing found few browsing.

As is typical of feminist and "women's" organizations, they're pretty silent about the plights of actual women, or when speaking up doesn't involve an opportunity to bash the west.

Mubarak is Obama's Shah

Now that Islamists have won nearly two-thirds of the vote in Egypt's democratic elections, it's pretty clear that Mubarak is to Obama what the Shah of Iran was to Jimmy Carter.

Carter betrayed the Shah and the U.S. was rewarded with the Islamic Republic of Iran and more than 30 years of Islamic terrorism.

Obama betrayed Mubarak, taking sides against him and hastening his fall from power, probably reducing the chance that a like-minded pro-western ruler could be selected to succeed him. Our reward is the Islamic Republic of Egypt. How many years and how many lives will that cost us?

Meet the New Boss...

...same as the old boss.



The most frustrating thing about today's idealistic young revolutionaries in OWS is that they're exactly as stupid as the idealistic young revolutionaries from the 60s, and just as misguided. In many cases, they're actually being led around by yesterdays idealistic young revolutionaries, who are today's wannabe iron-fist dictators, or at least, people bent on increasing the power of government over individuals -- George Soros, Bill Ayers, et al.

The U.S. Shadow Economy

I've seen several articles recently about the U.S. "Shadow" or underground economy. It's easy to find examples if you Google for them, so I'm not going to provide examples. The underground economy is steadily increasing as a share of the U.S. economy. I participate in it every day, myself, though I do have an "on-the-books" day job.

This is a very bad thing for the U.S. as a nation. One of the most important books on economics in decades is Hernando De Soto's The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. The underground economy is not the focus of the book, but it turns up as a feature in every failed attempt at capitalism he examines in the course of the book.

When societies make capitalism difficult -- byzantine regulations, onerous taxes, uncertain property rights, organized efforts to prevent outsiders from breaking into protected cartels -- the underground economy develops as a result.

If the underground economy is starting to become popular here in the U.S., it means we are failing at enabling people to engage in open free enterprise. People are sensing that they are being taxed too much, that the regulations they are supposed to comply with are burdensome, expensive, arbitrary and all-too-often ridiculous.

So, it's no surprise when small businessmen start routinely dealing with each other in cash-only and service-for-service transactions: "I provide a service you need, you provide a service I need. We help each other out and the tax man never has to be the wiser."

The advantages of operating in the underground economy are starting to outweigh the disadvantages. People are losing their respect for the government, because they see the government operating recklessly, foolishly and without respect for its constituents, but still thinking it has a right to our support and our taxes.

I'd guess that a plurality, if not a majority, of Americans do not feel our Federal government deserves our respect or support -- we don't want to give it money any more than we'd give money to the drunken sailor whose spending it emulates.

That's a bad sign for the republic, because a republic that doesn't have the respect or support of its citizens won't long stand.