Savor the irony of the overweight, grey-haired, peace-sign-wearing, former hippie near the end blathering:

Tobacco is a no win situation for all of us and if we can’t stop ourselves the government should help us stop.

Dude!

I thought steaks and chicken and turkeys were raised on styrofoam trays covered in plastic!”

WHAAAAAAAAH!!

h/t Cassandra with an extra helping of snark

Ye Gods, to think that all this time, we have been eating animals! Live animals that some … monster had to murder in cold blood before their tender, juicy carcasses magically showed up in neat little shrink wrapped packages down at the local Piggly Wiggly.

Note to the nancyboys at MSNBC: grow some hair on those balls, assuming, of course, you have ‘em and they have actually descended.

UPDATE Mark Steyn

But in this case Sarah Palin was merely indulging in the wearily obligatory annual leaden cutesiness of issuing a gubernatorial pardon to some designated Thanksgiving bird in order to provide the local news shows with their traditional unfunny “funny story” for the “And finally…” closing item. Viewers owe her a debt of gratitude for choosing to perform this dreary ritual in front of a backdrop that entirely undermined it.

Heh.

“Rahm tells me to try the corned beef.”

“Baby blood, Obama!  Baby blood!”

Change you bookmarks accordingingly to:

http://littlemissattila.com/

and stop by for her own unique take on life.

I think there is a song that is going to get more play as the Obama presidency continues. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

When Pres. Bush ran as a uniter and a compassionate conservative, he doomed his presidency to chaos. Our government was established to be confrontational. The two party system, rather than some sort of multi-party system, demands that two poles compete: personal liberty and governmental responsibility. Which personal liberties are most important and which governmental responsibilities are necessary are at stake. When one sits in the BIG Chair, one has to be responsible for those poles, and some portion of the coalition of groups that you serve are bound to be disgruntled.

Now PE Obama rides in on his horse, Hopechanginess, gonna clean up our town. But we like our dirty town. Some of us like Keith Olberman’s rants; some of us like Bill O’Reilly’s tirades. But the circus is the thing. The 2008 election was one big national soap opera. But when Bobby Ewing (or was it Patrick Ewing, it was so long ago) was standing in the shower and we realized it was all just a gimmick, we got pissed that we were dissed. Now our new POTUS will try to do crap he promised; he will learn that some of the stuff he wants to do is impossible given all the factors involved. And new factors in the 7 billion person world will develop. The “ideas” that sounded so good can’t be fleshed out without terrible consequences. But the ideas still sound good. Unity sounds good. A world without nukes sounds good. Taking money from people who will hardly miss it and giving it to those who could really use it sounds good.

But it won’t work. After the laws of thermodynamics, the law of unintended consequences is the most unyielding. And we have thousands of folks on the taxpayers dime who consider those unintended consequences in order to prevent the government from really screwing things up. During the Depression, the problem was that things were so screwed up that unintended consequences weren’t considered, because we were all so screwed that the general impression was, “Hey, it can’t get worse.”

But now we have HD cable TV, the Super Bowl, pizza delivery, and the internet: there’s a lot of shit we like and don’t want screwed up. You can save the environment all you want, but I’ve got a sweet ‘67 Firebird with a 400 in it that I’ve been fixing up, but it uses a lot of gas, so don’t mess with the gas stations I need.

Barack’s gonna have the same problems that GWB had. And the people who elected him will get sick of reality intruding on their dreams. He’ll be just another bum we have to throw out.

Victory in Iraq Day: Participating Blogs

No matter which ’side’ of the aisle we’re on (Conservative Republicans or the more middle of the road sorts of Republicans, or Independents, or Classical Liberals) let’s not forget our American troops, and their sacrifice. We should never forget the purposes of these wars, and the efforts made by our men and women in uniform to win.

Nor should we forget the..efforts..made by our enemies to drive us to defeat.

You know who you are.

Brian at Six Meat Buffet posts on an insufferable Barack Obama Commemorative Plate: The “Historic Victory Plate™ is a treasured collectible work of art that can be proudly displayed on shelves, table tops or can be hung on a wall.“

Or, as a commenter pointed out, there’s other possibilities. He’ll “use it as a base plate for my chamber pot”.

I, of course, agree wholeheartedly that such an eupeptic piece of work needs suitable framing.

There’s only one place in my house what deserves such an exalted work of art, so I contumaciously (in the spirit of the OUTLAW) present…

(Ummm, carefully decide before you click here. Those of weaker dispositions may want to avoid it at all costs. I’ve put it up at home, in it’s full magnificence, but here I’ll simply leave the link..    )

This hit some of the talk shows today (Rush, Glenn), but it deserves its own thread.

Rahm Emanuel reads his lines exceptionally well in this interview with WSJ.

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste, and what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you didn’t think you could do before. I think that America as a whole, in 1973 and 1974 … missed the opportunity to deal with the energy crisis before us. For a long time, our energy policy came down to cheap oil.

This is an opportunity. What used to be long-term problems — be they in the health-care area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory-reform area — things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. And this crisis provides the opportunity for us, as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before.

The good news — I suppose if you want to see a silver lining — is that the problems are big enough that they lend themselves to ideas from both parties for the solution. [Begins to talk about the meeting with McCain, and I could bear it no longer.]

Remember: the reason the Great Depression lasted so long is that FDR got all excited about the chance to do some experimentation with the nation’s economy. In the context of the world’s progressive movements, that meant more and more government intervention, and the result is the enormous “entitlement” burden that will eventually sink us (Forgotten Man).

And the use of crises (manufactured or otherwise) for opportunistic power grabs is one way that you usher in totalitarian controls (Liberal Fascism) .

Glenn Beck interviewed Jonah Goldberg Friday on this very quotation, and Jonah observed the following:

You know, the whole idea of fascism, people say that fascism, you know, and liberalism don’t have anything in common because fascism was totalitarian. Well, fascism was totalitarian but it wasn’t totalitarian the way the communists were. The communists just flat out took over everything. The way the fascists do it was they basically co-opted one institution after another. They said basically if you’re willing to promote our values, our ideological agenda, support for our ambitions, then you can stay a nominally independent fraternity, you can stay a nominally independent business, on your own university, so long as you agree with us on everything. And when you look at things like environmentalism, there really is that sense like, you know, I think we’re having green week again right now on NBC [owned by GE, which makes wind turbines and fluorescent light bulbs — ed.].

Then Glenn asks:

So when you saw all of this [research for the book], did you get a chance to look at those movements, at the beginnings of them and was there a point, was there a tipping point to where the people were like, “Oh, crap, now it’s too late.”

And Jonah answers:

I think in the American context the thing to keep in mind is that you are absolutely right: Among the intellectual classes there was an overwhelming consensus for something like fascism in the United States. You know, differences about doctrine or how it implemented and all the rest.

But there was almost a universal yearning to restore Woodrow Wilson’s war socialism, to have something like fascism here and the greatest work against it was the deeply embedded cultural love of freedom and democracy in this country, and I think if we’re going to fight, whether you are right or I’m right about how bad it can get, the remedies are the same.

The remedy is fight tooth and nail on the principles of free speech. Don’t make it about defending Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. Don’t make it about protecting conservative talk radio. Make it about protecting free speech. On the union stuff with card check, it’s not about keeping unions from getting more powerful or rewarding the Democratic party with labor and all that kind of stuff. It is about protecting the secret ballot.

These are the institutions that the founding fathers had in mind from the beginning to protect us, and it’s an important thing to keep in mind.

When Barack Obama talks about unity, how we need to have unity and hope and hopeful unity and hopeful unified hopefulness or whatever the hell he’s talking about, unity can be wonderful. Unity can be a fantastic thing. It can be the profoundest of evils. Rape gangs are unified, the mob is unified.

In our political culture the hero is the individual who stands up to the mob an says, “you will not hang this man today.”

The founding fathers, you read the Federalist Papers, federalist 10, federalist 51, it’s all about the importance of preventing unity. That’s why we have divided government, three branches of government each vying for control over the other, we have a Bill of Rights, we have separation of powers, you know, we have 50 state governments, each of them divided up and it’s all to protect against the dangers of majoritarian faction brimming with a sense of unity that gets to destroy the rights of the minority.

And conservatives are uniquely positioned because we actually care about the Constitution in a way that the left doesn’t. The left, when they say they care about the Constitution, what they really mean is they care about doing good, and so they invoke the Constitution when it helps them and they call for a living or new constitution whenever it gets in their way. We actually care what the actual Constitution says and for conservatives in particular, what we need to simply do is stand by these principles and point out to the opposition that simply because something seems good doesn’t mean that we should be violating the Constitution or violating the American tradition of letting liberty and democracy and republic, small R republicanism, that we shouldn’t violate these things simply because we’ve gotten caught up in some fad.

Because that’s what fascism was and always is. It’s a fad. It’s one of these things where people get a fire in their mind, they get all excited, they get imbued with that same spirit that when we were teenagers we said, “if we all work our hardest, we can make this our best yearbook ever!”

Turns out that President Bush wasn’t cut by world leaders after all; he had actually shaken everyone’s hand earlier in the proceedings.  And the newsies and lib-bloggers who chortled over what they thought was Bush’s humiliation at the hands of the world community?  “Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought.”

In What Went Wrong?

Key recommendations:

• Legal immigration must be distinguished from illegal immigration at every juncture. … Conservatives’ chief talking point should be the deleterious effect of unchecked illegal immigration on the wages of poor workers, coupled with the employers’ discrimination against Mexican-American second-generation and African-American entry-level workers in preference for off-the-books and cheaper illegal laborers.
• What unites skepticism about euthanasia, abortion on demand, or embryonic stem-cell research is fear of a sort of soulless Brave New World notion that individuals don’t matter, that ease of lifestyle trumps every other difficult moral consideration, and that such thinking is the beginning — not the end — of something frightening.
• Civil unions should be seen as an avant-garde institution for novel times, while traditional marriage is reserved as a retrograde stuffy institution for the hopelessly straight.
• The problem with liberal notions of high taxes and big government … should be that they are elitist. Those born into particular social and economic castes are frozen. … Meanwhile, those struggling to become prosperous and leave capital behind for their children are suddenly taxed to death just as they begin to succeed — as if, once the hyper-wealthy have gotten theirs, the rules change and no one else can follow.
• A more articulate, persuasive defense of existing foreign policy, without gratuitous “they’re wimps” lingo would help.
• Conservatism also applies to bearing and comportment. There was something repugnant about greedy CEO and speculators on Wall Street wildly raking in hundreds of millions under the guise of “free-market conservatism” — as if Ace hardware store owners, truck drivers, and farmers would find them kindred spirits. Conservatism’s social message used to be something like “Don’t do all the things that you are otherwise free to do” or “Just because we don’t make all your appetites illegal, does not mean that some are not immoral.” Conservative populism is not anti-intellectualism at all, but rather a disdain for excess and arm-chair elitism.

Discuss…