Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Pat Buchannan Condemns and then Agrees with Breivik

That's basically the story. Breivek, the guy who killed all those people in Norway, is just evil; his ideology doesn't matter. And it's reprehensible for the European media to note that he does seem to have been a fan of many Conservatives warning about the dangers of Islam. Because of course reading about and enjoying anti-Muslim rhetoric has nothing to do with his actual act of violence, even if he said that the two were connected.

But as it turns out, Breivak was, apparently, largely correct in his analysis of the problem.
As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right.
in fairness to Buchannan he is an isolationist and a nativist; he prefers a strategy of keeping the Muslims in their own land and not interfering with them. Which is frustrating in a way; he's clearly an anti-Islam bigot, but he often opposes military engagement with them.

Still this article is engaging for the way in which it condemns people like me for pointing out that conservative basically agree with Breivak, and then basically agrees with Breivak (on the problem, if not the solution).

Monday, July 25, 2011

Put forward a Plan

Not posting a lot right now; I am pretty worked up about this raising the debt ceiling debate. But there was a comment Speaker of the House Boehner made on the Rush Limbaugh Program on Thursday.
It would have been nice if the President would have put a plan to the table months ago, but the President has refused to put any plan on the table. It's obviously been driving me right up a wall.
Well Republicans put forward a plan. And it didn't go so great for them. The Ryan plan has proved to be pretty unpopular, with it's plan to replace Medicare with a voucher system. So naturally, having shot themselves in the foot, Republicans think it would be only sporting for Democrats to follow suit.

Monday, July 11, 2011

It's Madness

Katie Kieffer's latest article is about Elizabeth Warren. Warren has been tapped to be the head of the Consumer Financial Protection bureau and is unacceptable to Conservatives because she wants to protect Consumers. And anyway, according to Kieffer, they don't need protection.
Does Warren want financial companies to write contracts at a second-grade level because she assumes consumers are too dumb or lazy to read the fine print? She tells Time Magazine that consumers shopping for loans, “… drown in a sea of words that are theoretically disclosures, but they scream, ‘Don’t read me.’”

Mortgage brokers do not go to bed at night dreaming up confusing fine print clauses. Financial companies write lengthy contracts partly to comply with existing regulations and to protect themselves from consumer lawsuits. And Warren wants more bureaucracy?
I think this wouldn't stand out as much if I weren't in the middle of studying the Mortgage crash of 2008. In recent history we have examples of Mortgage fraud on a massive scale, and Kieffer, in so far as she is aware of it, blames Government Regulation for the avarice and predatory lending practices of this industry.

There is a story, quoted in the movie "Inside Job," and the book "All the Devils are Here, The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis," in which 15 or so of Mortgage options offered by Countrywide were placed before Greenspan. He commented that someone with an advanced degree in Mathematics still wouldn't be able to determine which of them was the best deal. And this is the system that Kieffer and other Conservatives are fighting to preserve; they want predatory lenders to have impunity.

Sometimes I believe there is truth in the theory that Conservatives can't tell the difference between money earned and money stolen.

Thursday, July 07, 2011

Ann Coulter sez Single Moms are Evil

Ann Coulter's latest article is in praise of adoption, which I am also keen on, having been adopted. I do think adoption is a good solution to an unwanted pregnancy. But while half of it is nice stuff about how Adoption is good, the remaining half is about how bad single mothers are, culminating in this masterpiece of nastiness.
The plague of single motherhood isn't an inevitable decay brought on by stupid choices of the underclass. Destroying the family is the active social policy of liberals.
So much to unpack. This is why I don't read Ann Coulter anymore; it's exhausting.

First of all, note the mention of the "underclass." I wonder who Ann Coulter considers part of this "underclass?"

But more importantly is the idea that liberals want to destroy the family. I know this is orthodoxy in Ann Coulter's world; but if you believe it how can you stand to be around liberals in any sense of the word. I mean if the stuff Ann Coulter says is true, and it isn't, we Liberals deserve to be hated, scorned, and cast out. Possibly worse.