We're supposed to be best allies with this nation

Israel may not be able to wait to deal with Iran's nuclear program forcefully, but it will have to wait until January to have a friend in the White House.

House member Mike Rogers (R-MI) says he "watched in stunned silence" a shouting match between Bibi Netanyahu and US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro in Jerusalem, as Bibi trie to impress upon Shapiro that time had run out due to the MEC regime's failure to come up with a diplomatic means of putting the squelch on Iran's program.

An encouraging juncture

I'm up to my eyeballs in research and interviews for for article deadlines early next week, so I'm not sure when I'll have the time to blog at length as I want to about the just-concluded Pub convention.  So many great speeches - Artur Davis, Nikki Haley, Condi Rice, Marco Rubio, Mia Love, Paul Ryan, and, of course, our nominee.  And re: him, I understand what makes him tick a lot better now.  Some of his ways have caused me discomfort over the years, but a kinder and more decent man you can't find.  And, of course, Clint Eastwood's unforgettable conversation with the empty chair.

Right now, before I get back to the paid writing, let me say that the new surge of energy among the majority of Americans on the right side of the ideological center line is palpable.  And it's clear that the left is out of intellectual gas.

Victory sure looks doable as of this last day of August.

Then comes the hard work - economic, geostrategic, cultural, and spiritual.

UPDATE: And let's not forget Susana Martinez, who delivered one of the best lines of the entire three days.

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

As we know, Congress has not done the regime's bidding with regard to coming up with some kind of comrpehensive industrial energy efficiency legislation.  There are still too many members who understand that that kind of thing - setting standards for such matters for private organizations that make things - is a totalitarian measure.

So the regime has once again bypassed the people's duly elected Representatives and Senators to impose it by executive fiat.

A refusal to acqueisce to tyranny does not constitute lying

I've seen this set of charges several places already this morning.  The linked article cites Dave Weigel's trotting-out of them at Slate.  (There's even an AP / Yahoo story about it.) I happened to first see them at Salon under the byline of the putrid Joan Walsh.  Alas, Avik Roy at Forbes exposes this attempt to make Paul Ryan's exposure of the MEC's agenda of planned decline for what it is.

The upside down worldview of the UN

The UN serves as an effective metaphor for the hollow nature of the leftist worldview generally.  It routinely looks the force for good in this world - let's use "Western civilization" as shorthand for this - and excoriates it for its very virtues.  Then it holds up supposedly beleagured elements of humanity - elements that actually, through their own anti-dignity, anti-freedom, anti-life modus operandi, have wrought destruction within their own ranks, as well as upon those portions of humanity interested in advancement and living well - without bothering to substantiate its claims for their victim status.

The latest example of this is the official conclusion of the United Nations Relief and Works committee's meeting the other day that, yes, Gaza's future looks bleak, but that is because of Israel's stance.

You just have to proceeed in this world on the basis of what you know to be right and true and understand that there will be those with nothing better to do than try to thwart you.

Makes sense to moi

There's a trend afoot of US companies reincorporating overseas to get away from the crushing tax burden of being based in the People's Republic of Obamica.

I thought so, too

Had one of those situations where I read a ridiculous lefty opinion piece at Real Clear Politics - in this instance, Joan Walsh's Salon column on Rick Santorum's convention speech last night - and knew that by the end of the day I'd see a great takedown of it.  Alas, Quinn Hilyer at The American Spectator steps up.

All in the name of an utterly mad vision

Well, the new CAFE standards are finalized. They make our roads more dangerous, they cost everybody a lot of money, but, as always here at LITD, the main point is that it erodes freedom.  Where the hell does the government get off telling private organizations how to make their products?

All in the name of a thoroughly discredited notion about the global climate.

Those pesky hot mikes

Yahoo News bureau chief gets canned over a remark I'll bet he wishes he hadn't uttered.  Even the regime's propaganda arm has to censure its own when they drop the mask of civility to this degree.

Time to cut the cord

Working on this magazine article about the farm bill is, once I've learned how to put the acronym soup in proper perspective, an eye-opening exercise in understanding why the federal government is in such stratospheric debt.

The House and Senate respectively have approved their versions of the bill, but it's not moving forward right now, because there's some talk afoot about scrapping that and going to an extension of the bill from the last five-year cycle.

I probably should have known to start my research with the Heritage Foundation rather than the more in-the-weeds analysis of the ag-econ think tanks.  Heritage's Emily Goff makes clear that the new way of compensating farmers for loss is a marked departure from the decades-old model of paying them no matter how much they produce.  (Because I was just getting a bunch of charts and tables and acronyms from the university-related sources, I wasn't able to graps this.) Still it's insufficient and ought to be scrapped as well.  Its various provisions wind up doing nothing to extricate government from the farming sector, or reduce the cost thereof.  We're still distorting the actual value of a whole lot of crops.

What I am struck by is that what we righties decry about FHer-care has been going on for years in agriculture.  It's astounding to think that government has been paying most of farmers' crop-insurance premiums.  Wish I could get the federal Santa Claus to pay my car insurance bill every month.

How health insurance ought to work

Leave it to the great Thomas Sowell to explain how to make health insurance a lot less expensive. 

Who do you think you're jiving?

That "Republican Women for Obama" ad that the regime's propaganda arm released features at least two women who aren't and never have been Republican, but are rather FHers in good standing. 

Sheesh, didn't they think anybody would check into their Facebook pages?

Why is the price of milk going up? Ask the overlords

When you're a freelance writer, you generally don't turn down opportunities to work.  Thus it is that I recently agreed to the request of an editor I've been working for for several years to become a regular contributor to a farming magazine with a multi-county readership.  There's been a learning curve for this city boy, to be sure, but thanks to a network of contacts I'm forming among what may be the last sector in our society to be comprised of solid, salt-of-the-earth types, I'm getting my sea legs.

My current assignment, though, has me in the weeds.  It's on the current versions of the farm bill making their way through the House and Senate respectively.  I'm supposed to get feedback from some area farmers, as well as some policy-wonk types.

Since the FDR era, when the first such bill became legislation, Congress has tweaked it to address the nature of the times about every five years.  It's now time to re-examine it.


To get started on my research, I have been checking out some documents provided at the website of the Agriculture and Food Policy Center, a think tank within Texas A&M run by some agricultural economists.  There are indeed some reports about the current versions of the farm bill update.

Talk about arcane.  The working papers are a jungle of acronyms and terms such as RLC, STAX net payments, SCO premiums, AGI 3-year moving average, NCFI . . . okay, you get the drift.  I am starting to see the braod outlines of what's being presented.  The Center is asking farmers selected of a study it conducted whether they prefer subsidized insurance coverage for price drops or revernue drops, or be compensated by county or on an individual-farm basis.  The two versions of the bill offer various mixes of these variables.  Still, the whole thing makes my head swim.

The text of the remarks of Dr. Joe Outlaw, the Center's director, to the House Agriculture Committee were much easier to understand.  But they paint an odd picture of the farming sector's view of government involvement.  It seems farmers count on price support - "safety net" is the term Outlaw uses a lot - as a given and panic if it looks like it's going to be altered in any way.  On the other hand, they bristle at government mandates such as biofuel-use allocation for corn and other environmentally based intrusions into their operations.


Thus this  morning, I was pleased to run across Katie Kieffer's Townhall column on this very subject.  A number of things became clear.  Certainly a medium-sized family farm operation that is generally based on the classic American work ethic, but that has come to count on subsidized prices and risk amelioration is going to get a little antsy when Congress considers tapering off.  But it's all of a piece.  The government that boosts your soybean or dairy prices is the same government that can tell you what to plant and how much.  And the market for food for all of us is thereby distorted.

 I don't know if I'll be able to draw such a conclusion in the final paragraphs of my article when it's done.  This is supposed to be objective journalism.  Still, if I present the basic dynamics behind the minutae, it will have to be obvious to the reader that, once again, as in any area of life and economics, we're talking about the relationship of government, freedom and dependence.

Thought crimes and real crimes

George Neumayr at The American Spectator points out how the double standard of various MEC-regime embodiments of moral rot getting a pass while conservatives are expected to never falter for a microsecond demonstrates the skewedness of our cultural landscape.

Kevin Jennings and Sandra Fluke?  Cool by the FHers.  Todd Akin?  Made to walk the plank by the Pubs because he did an admittedly horrible job of defending an absolutist pro-life position.

I say Akin still needs to go, but let us remember the conditions that made that so.

Normal people call it imperiling Western civilization in the service of a mad vision

So much for the regime's stated goal of isolating Iran.  120 countries are sending representatives to Tehran, which is hosting the non-aligned nations summit.

You could call it failure, except that the Most Equal Comrade and the Freedom-Hater regime surely don't see it that way at all.  They think that the knocking down of the United States in stature on the world stage is more important than the world's most evil force being able to hold the rest of the world hostage with nuclear weapons.

Just like the debt that is soon to surpass $16 trillion, just like the 8-plus unemployment rate for the last 42 months, just like the fact that this nation is sitting on a reserve of oil, coal and natural gas sufficient to make us the world's most robust energy producer, it's on purpose.

If the facts were known, would it cause the FHers to drop this line of attack?

Charges of hypocrisy generally bore me, because, as I once pointed out in my newpaper column, they tell us nothing about whether the principle being circumvented with a wink and a nod is an eternal verity or a load of hooey.

But it's time to take note of all the FHer Senators who shelter wealth in offshore accounts and investment instruments.  Not because there's anything objectionable about doing that; I spend considerable effort each spring to present the least taxable picture of my finances to the leviathan state that I can.  It's because it may have a remote chance of getting Harry Reid and brain-dead regime apparatchiks to shut their redistributionist pie-holes.