Independence Whip, June 30, 2010

Know your Republican Heritage – QUIZ #1 [*1] — Highly amusing, especially question #1. Click on the link for the answers:

Q. How many Democrats in Congress voted to abolish slavery?
127
95
34
0

Q. Which park was established by a future Chairman of the Republican National Committee?
Central Park
Griffith Park
Franklin Park
Lincoln Park

Q. Which former Republican presidential nominee declined a nomination for Chief Justice?
James Blaine
Wendell Willkie
Thomas Dewey
Bob Dole

Q. Who was the first Vice President to attend Cabinet meetings?
Levi Morton (R-NY)
Theodore Roosevelt (R-NY)
Calvin Coolidge (R-MA)
Charles Dawes (R-IL)

Q. Which archaeological site was discovered by a future Republican U.S. Senator?
Angkor Wat
Great Zimbabwe
Machu Picchu
Stonehenge

Statement Regarding Comments Overheard On FOX40.com Stream Following Sarah Palin Speech [*2] — What did I see the other day? Something like “The e-mails will always go public. The camera is always on. The microphone is always live. That’s just how things are.” If you don’t know that, and you’re in politics or in journalism, you’re in the wrong business.

Kopp the Custard Man [*3] — Joe “Big *censored*ing Deal” Biden strikes again. (Don’t get on me about the F word. Biden said it. You can’t un-ring the bell. Of course Biden says a lot of breathtakingly stupid things pretty much all the time. He was the stupid Vice Presidential candidate in 2008–in contrast, the Governor of Alaska was a brilliant torch of intellectual wisdom and eloquent clarity compared to Uncle Joe.)

A World Without Profit [*4] — If profit is a bad thing, why do you want a raise? (Assuming, of course, you actually have a job.)

Rep. Paul Ryan Delivers 3:20 Of Lucidity [*5]

Talk about a recipe for disaster: Democrats are offering no budget, no priorities, and no restraints – yet all their taxing, borrowing, and spending continues unchecked. With this budget failure – a first in the modern era – Democrats are missing a critical opportunity to provide the fiscal discipline economists say is needed to create private-sector jobs and boost our economy. This unprecedented budget collapse also sends a clear signal to American families struggling to meet their own budgets that Washington still doesn’t recognize the severity of its spending problem.

Emphasis mine.

28 August, Lincoln Memorial? Yeah, We’re Blogging That [*6]

Expansion talk leaves college basketball’s ego bruised [*7]

“The whole thing has gotten out of whack,” said ESPN’s Dick Vitale, the voice of college basketball. “It’s all about one thing: dollars, dollars, dollars, football, football, football, greed, greed, greed.”

I don’t care for Vitale as a TV basketball analyst, but he’s right on this one. This bubble, like all bubbles, will break at some point, and it will be really, really messy.

Barack Obama, facilitator-in-chief [*8]

Is Keynesianism finally dead? [*9] — Not until the Democrats (and their squishy-Republican enablers) are expunged from mainstream American political discourse, unfortunately . . .

The Keynesian Dead End: Spending our way to prosperity is going out of style. [*10]

Obama’s promise to bankrupt coal industry to cost 1,000 jobs in upper Midwest [*11] — So, using Democrat-onomics, is this jobs “saved” or jobs “created?”

Meanwhile, back in the Gulf, chaos still reigns [*12]

The New Jim Crow [*13] — The problem isn’t the people, it’s the ideology and the society that their misguided “leaders” have imposed on them–in part intentionally, in part as “unintended consequences” of trying to do good things for them, and doing bad things instead. Central planners and social architects simply do not know enough to competently design sustainable social structures. And they never will, because they can’t out-think the collective interests of all of the people in the society they’re trying to guide.
There’s a very good reason why Justice has always traditionally been depicted as blind–or at least blindfolded. What you look like isn’t supposed to matter. What you do is supposed to be what matters.

Sen. Hatch Calls for Repeal of Obamacare Mandates [*14]

SEPP on the PNAS blacklist paper [*15] — SEPP = Science and Environmental Policy Project; PNAS = Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; “blacklist” = the names of scientists who have expressed any degree of skepticism whatsoever over the fevered claims that human activity is the sole–or even the major–cause of the global warming that some measurements have observed since the 1970’s. Science is supposed to be about questioning and testing hypotheses, and incrementally better understanding the world and universe in which we live. But the anthropogenic global warming/”climate change” movement has long since departed the restrictions of science and is flying free in the less rigorous air of belief–a worldwide cargo cult, naively trying to explain things that they don’t really understand.

G20 urges phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies [*16] — A good start. Phase out all subsidies.