Are Ya Serious: Minnesota Huh?

I'm fascinated by the text of a Facebook group calling on Minnesotans to lobby their governor against his proposed spending cuts. The text of the group's Facebook page:

A $6.4 billion deficit. The longest and deepest economic recession since WWII. A quarter of a million Minnesotans out of work. 1,000 more losing their jobs every week.

Governor Pawlenty's solution:

* Eliminate health care for 113,000 working Minnesotans, including 20,000 kids
* Cut $764 million from local hospitals, forcing many in Greater Minnesota to close
* Lay off 12,000 Minnesota teachers
* Put 16,000 health care professionals out of work
* Close nursing homes around the state
* Saddle the sick and disabled with higher fees and fewer services
* Fire police officers, fire fighters, and paramedics with deep cuts to Local Government Aid and County Program Aid
* Put the state $1.8 billion in debt for the next 20 years

Call Governor Pawlenty. Tell him he can't cut his way out of this recession. Fair and reasonable revenue is necessary to keep our state whole through this crisis.

I really sympathize with the staffers at the Governor's office who will be fielding the phone calls called for here. I'm having trouble parsing exactly what this group is saying and I'm looking right at it. They clearly understand that a massive budget deficit and projected long-term debt are bad things. Cutting back on government spending, however, is apparently also unacceptable. Clearly they would prefer he just wave his magic wand and fix the problem without having to make any difficult choices. And what on Earth do they mean by "fair and reasonable revenue"? Newsflash: revenue's going to drop in a downturn, and there's not much the governor can due about that. Unless is this cryptoprogressive code for "raise taxes", you know, because raising taxes in a downturn has always worked in the past. Sigh.

Also, what exactly are they getting at with that "Greater Minnesota" business? I may have studied in Minnesota, but I've got 'Sconnie in my blood, and if those lutefisk-eaters come lookin' for lebensraum in these parts they'll find me digging my foxhole on the St. Croix bluffs!

Creeping Totalitarianism Isn't Funny

There was a time not long ago when it was utterly beyond the pale in American politics to suggest, for example, that one's habitual claims of being one election away from emigration might not be the strongest evidence of a citizen's patriotism. Dissent is patriotic, we were incessantly lectured, even the sort of patriotism that only considers your country worth living in when your team is in charge. Well, that's all out the window now, as Wanda Sykes, in a "comedy" routine at the White House Press Correspondents' dinner, (in which the comedians traditionally roast the sitting president), blusters that Rush Limbaugh is a treasonous terrorist who ought to be tortured. Oh, and she wishes he would die. Painfully. All this because he has stated that he hopes Obama fails. I genuinely can't understand why the Obots have such a hard time understanding this: did these people spend eight years dutifully wishing success upon the policies of George W. Bush? Did any of us expect them to? Good grief! Sykes:

Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails. So you're saying, 'I hope America fails', you're, like, 'I don't care about people losing their homes, their jobs, our soldiers in Iraq'. He just wants the country to fail.

Leftists blithely equate one politician's ambitions with the entirety of the American enterprise, yet seem completely baffled when people suggest there's something creepily totalitarian about this. This is the definition of totalitarianism, after all, the idea that the entire nation is represented in this one man. I fear for the future.

I'm Not Sure "Disappointed" Cuts it, Madame Secretary

"Disappointed"? Really? That's the strongest language our Secretary of State can conjure in her statement on Iran's conviction of an American journalist on trumped-up charges of spying? Oh, sorry, she's "deeply disappointed". Good grief.

CNN in Chicago

And this is the state of American media today, a "reporter" contemptuously badgering a "tea party" demonstrator, cutting off the point he was making so she can get on her own soapbox, and then commenting on the "threatening tenor" when other demonstrators tell her to let the guy speak. Appalling. (Via HotAir).

I think my favorite part is where she interjects, as the man is explaining how Lincoln stood for self-reliance and individual responsibility, that Illinois is going to receive $50 billion in stimulus funds, as if that somehow rebuts his point. They just don't get it.

America 1, Pirates 0. Also: Terrorism?

Yay for America. Boo pirates. And I'm tired of hearing about it already. The captain seems a stand-up fellow, so hopefully he'll resist the siren song of the cable "news" circuit and endless inane interviews recounting minute-by-minute how he was feeling throughout the crisis.

All this talk of pirates, (with the requisite jokes about peglegs, eyepatches, and parrots) has of course awakened a desire among some to give them a more 21st-century name. They're terrorists! after all. Maritime terrorists!

Count me with Yglesias in saying: puh-leeeeze. These guys board ships to either steal the booty outright or ransom the ships and crews. They've not expressed a moment's interest in advancing any particular ideology, and how their activities could possibly do so is beyond me. They're not attacking civilian populations with the intent to further their political goals. They don't meet any coherent definition of "terrorists" other than that we don't like them and they happen to be Muslim. Then again, that's uncomfortably close to what passes for a definition these days.

"Terrorist" is one of many words in danger of being overused into meaninglessness. There are plenty of terrorists in the world. And there are also Muslim extremists fighting us who are not terrorists by any reasonable definition. Most of the Shia militias in Iraq that fall under the Jaysh al-Mahdi/Sadrist umbrella, for example, are guerilla fighters who targeted uniformed soldiers of the enemy (us) and took reasonable care to avoid civilian casualties. By definition they are not terrorists, and it confuses the issue to conflate them.

It's Fun to be Aggrieved

The layers of hostile ignorance on display in this training video put out by Penn State University's Counseling and Psychological Services office are beyond my patience to dig through. This is also a must-see for anyone who doesn't believe it's seriously unhealthy that significant portions of our society are completely insulated from contact with military servicemembers.



James Taranto fleshes out the complete absurdity of the vignette. Here's the crux: a veteran student believes he's being treated unfairly because of his service. The narrative of the video tries to present this as completely unreasonable for him to believe, and yet here's the opening dialogue between his professor and her supervisor:

Instructor: Actually, I kinda wanted to talk to you about something else? Um, I'm still having problems with that student I mentioned.

Chairman: The Veteran.

Instructor: Yeah.

There are so many more angles to look at this, but I just get too depressed or angry thinking about it. It's probably my PTSD making me unpredictable and vaguely threatening.

Don't Believe Your Lying Eyes

That wasn't a bow. Also, these are not the droids you are looking for. Relevant non-bow starts at about 0:50 or so.

Blogging at Work!

I can't believe it, I'm blogging from work! I know that for most of you, this isn't a revolutionary concept, but things work a little differently in the wonderland that is Army. See, for the longest time, all DoD internet connections have blocked anything having to do with blogs. Anything that even had "blog" somewhere in the URL was automatically blocked, on the assumption, I presume, that all bloggers are either ne'er-do-wells intent on compromising national security or inane timewasters. Because we wouldn't want our soldiers reading such trash as Tom Ricks, Kings of War, or Abu Muqawama. They should be reading serious commentary such as they'll find on "real news" sites like CNN or FoxNews.

Are Ya Serious? : Citibank Falls for Nigerian Email Scam

Well, they weren't quite sending their account numbers to an exiled prince in exchange for a cut of his fortune, but this is pretty close. Really?