Right Klik: February 2012

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Obamney Wins Big. Set Your Hair on Fire!

Yay! Mitt Obamney (or is it Obomney?) wins two more states (AZ and MI)!

And Obamney managed to win despite the fact that he explicitly stated that he has no intention of worrying about what conservatives think.

"It's very easy to excite the [conservative] base with incendiary comments. We've seen throughout the campaign that if you're willing to say really outrageous things that are accusative and attacking President Obama, that you're going to jump up in the polls. I'm not willing to light my hair on fire to try and get support. I am who I am."

Well that's reassuring!

Everybody knows that you can't make conservatives happy unless you're making extremely extreme, outrageously outrageous, inappropriate, stupid, disrespectful, racist remarks.

So why even go there?

Romney sure won't.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Ron Logic

I'm no fan of AllahPundit, but I think he got this one right:

Romney’s a natural Paul enemy too: He’s an establishment favorite, he paved the way for universal health care with his Massachusetts program, he’s considerably more hawkish than Paul, he has pro-choice roots, etc etc etc. Plus, insofar as he’s the consummate flip-flopper, he’s the anti-Paul; RP could have run a withering campaign against him emphasizing how likely Romney will be as president to shift with the political winds, especially vis-a-vis Paul himself. In fact, if you’d asked me before the debates began whom Paul would spend most of his time attacking, I would have guessed Mitt. What better way for a principled insurgent candidate to gain traction with the conservative base than by beating up repeatedly on a widely distrusted centrist for his betrayals of the cause? And yet … nothing.

...Paul’s advisors have been candid in interviews in explaining that his goal in running this time is to pile up delegates and gain some influence at the convention, either in terms of input into the party’s official 2012 platform or a primetime speaking gig or both. That being so, it’s only logical that they’d go easy on Romney. He was and is the likely nominee; the more helpful they are to him, the less resistance there’ll be to a convention role for the Paul family, especially since Romney will be nervous about alienated libertarians staying home if he freezes Paul out. RP tried running against the rest of the field in 2008 and got nothing from the establishment as thanks. This time, he’s taking a different tack. It’s working.

Principled libertarian conservatism?

Monday, February 27, 2012

Mission Accomplished

"Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe."

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Peep Show: Mark Schools the Occutards

Very timely...

The clip predates the Occupy movement and the Tea Party -- and this is from a British show -- but it's as good a rebuke of naive anti-capitalist sentiment as any I've seen in quite some time.

*STRONG LANGUAGE ALERT:

There are systems for a reason in this world. Economic stability, interest rates, growth. It's not all a conspiracy to 'keep you in little boxes' alright? It's only the miracle of consumer capitalism that means you're not lying in your own sh*t; dying at 43 with rotten teeth and a little pill with a chicken on it is not going to change that!

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Obama's Satan

Somebody found a video of Rick Santorum talking to people at a Catholic school in 2008 about the Devil, a.k.a. Satan. (Apparently, talking to Catholics about Satan is a bad idea -- especially if you're going to be running for president several years from now.)

Question: Does Barack Obama believe in the Devil?

Obama is a Christian, isn’t he?

Last time Gallup checked, belief in the Devil was at 70% and rising.

Having come from Jeremiah Wright’s church, Obama might be inclined to believe in a Satan embodied by the United States of America, but that still counts, right?

Update (via insty): Thinking along the same lines...

Weird religion: Satan is against America. Normal religion: "God damn America."

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Dextrorotatory LinkyDoodles

Dextrorotatory: rotating the plane of light toward the right...

Today's hot topic: Conservative sex.

I thought Mark Steyn's thoughts on the subject were good enough, but it looks like conservative neurons are poppin' all over the sphere.

Enjoy:

Adrienne: "Mr. Moran is free to live his life in any manner he desires. He can have as much sex or as little as he wants. He is even free to write drivel and call it 'science.' What he is not free to do is make me pay for his view of morality..."

Bob the Ape: "If they’re professional women and not on the dole, they can pay for their own contraception. If the rest of us are forced to pay for their contraception, it becomes our business."

Hack Wilson: "How scary. 'He's going to impose a THEOCRACY...' 'He believes in the Bible!' 'He believes a family should have a mother AND a father!' THE FREAKING HORROR!

Fuzzy Logic: All this whining about Santorum is simply insane. "Every political ideology requires varying degrees of 'social engineering,' and yes, that includes 'hands off' ideologies like libertarianism and conservatism."

American Power: "The administration's been aching for a fight on these issues, no doubt, as shown by President Obama's no-holds-barred program to ram through the contraceptive mandate against the wishes of Catholics and religious-minded voters. But also in evidence is the rise of Rick Santorum to the front of the GOP pack. Few predicted so prominent a trajectory for Santorum as recently as a couple of months ago."

WSJ: "From what I can find out about it, it wasn't a miscalculation. They knew that the Catholic Church and other believers were going to push back against this thing. . . . They were determined to push it through, because it's their irreplaceable ideological core. . . . The left keeps putting these issues into the mix, and they do it very deliberately, and I think they do it as a matter of principle."

Final thoughts:

Apparently conservatives are supposed to sit down, shut up and let totalitarian leftists ram their social-issue mandates down our throats (and our children's throats). And if we do this, we make way for lukewarm social "moderates" like Mitt Romney who will sell us out on our economic freedom as well.

No thanks.

Let's Talk About Sex

Mark Steyn made me think about Salt-N-Pepa:

Headline: Brokest Nation In History Fusses Instead About Sex...

The U.S. economy shuts down in 2027? Had you heard about that? It's like the ultimate President's Day Sale: Everything must go — literally!

At such a moment, it may seem odd to find the political class embroiled in a bitter argument about the Obama administration's determination to force Catholic institutions (and, indeed, my company and your company, if you're foolish enough still to be in business in the United States) to provide free prophylactics to its employees.

The received wisdom among media cynics is that Obama has engaged in an ingenious bit of misdirection by seizing on a pop-culture caricature of Republicans and inviting them to live up to it: Those uptight squares with the hang-ups about fornication have decided to force you to lead the same cheerless sex lives as them.

But perhaps now is the time to obsess about sex:

Ten thousand Americans retire every day, and leave insufficient progeny to pick up the slack. In effect, Nancy has rolled a giant condom over the entire American economy.

Testifying before Congress, Timmy Geithner referred only to "demographic challenges" — an oblique allusion to the fact that the U.S. economy is about to be terminally clobbered by 100 trillion dollars of entitlement obligations it can never meet...

Not to worry, says Barry Antoinette. Let them eat condoms.

This is a very curious priority for a dying republic. "Birth control" is accessible, indeed ubiquitous, and, by comparison with anything from a gallon of gas to basic cable, one of the cheapest expenses in the average budget. Not even Rick Santorum, that notorious scourge of the sexually liberated, wishes to restrain the individual right to contraception.

But where is the compelling societal interest in the state prioritizing and subsidizing it? Especially when you're already the Brokest Nation in History. Elsewhere around the developed world, prudent politicians are advocating natalist policies designed to restock their empty maternity wards.

Read the rest...

Obama Finally Brings Us All Together

"Media pundits have often tried to point out the similarities between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement, in a futile attempt to get the two groups to merge. Unfortunately, the differences were too great, and we have yet to see the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street protesting against the same thing side-by-side at the same protest."

That is, until now.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

GOP Following Ted Kennedy's "Moral Conviction" Tradition

An excellent point from Red Mass Group: In their quest to eliminate freedom of choice in health care, Democrats are moving to the left of Ted Kennedy...

The progressive movement is in an all out war on the so called Blunt Amendment and Scott Brown's push for it. They are hitting at the phrase "moral conviction" as a code word for all people to stop providing birth control coverage. Jim Braude hit Brown repeatedly last night with this phrase.

The problem for the left is this is the exact same language used by Ted Kennedy to define a conscience clause. In 1994 and 1995 Ted Kennedy introduced health care bills. Both of which had seemingly identical language regarding a moral conviction clause:

"A Health Professional Or A Health Facility May Not Be Required To Provide An Item Or Service In The Comprehensive Benefit Package If The Professional Or Facility Objects To Doing So On The Basis Of A Religious Belief Or Moral Conviction." (S. 2296, Introduced 7/19/94)

"A Health Professional Or A Health Facility May Not Be Required To Provide An Item Or Service Under A Certified Health Plan If The Professional Or Facility Objects To Doing So On The Basis Of A Religious Belief Or Moral Conviction." (S. 168, Introduced 1/5/95)

The KosKids say that the Blount amendment goes beyond the Religious Freedom argument, by including a moral conviction clause.

In Obama's Democrat Party, your inalienable "right" to popular health care amenities is more important than anything guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Hat tip: Mike Stopa

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Social Conservatives vs. Libertarians...

An unnecessary war?

The schism between libertarianism and social conservatism has been exploited ruthlessly by the statist left and some of Ron Paul’s disciples.

But social conservatives want more freedom, not less. On that, at least, SoCons and libertarians should be united.

In defending their own freedom, social conservatives have not forgotten the phrase “free exercise thereof,” three words in the First Amendment that anti-religion leftists usually ignore.

With their debatable critiques of social libertarianism and progressivism, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich et al. are right to point out that government is increasingly hostile to those who choose to exercise their natural right to be free of the anti-conservative mandates and social engineering projects of the radical left.

Conservatives and libertarians may choose to have constructive conflict over some issues (e.g., expanding the role of government in homosexual relationships), but if there's any hope of reducing the oppressive power of the state, social conservatives and libertarians need to present a united front.

x-posted

*Tangential addendum:

The distinction between "personal freedom" and "economic freedom" is a sham.

Examples:

Paying taxes for schools that indoctrinate my kids to left-wing ideology -- personal or economic?
Incandescent lightbulb ban -- personal or economic?
Cigarette taxes that penalize smoking -- personal or economic?
Higher personal income taxes -- personal or economic?
Contraceptive mandates -- personal or economic?

Personal freedom and economic freedom are inseparable.

Why is this important?

Progressives use their personal freedom scam to mislead libertarians into thinking that outside of the economic realm, progs and libertarians share some common ground (e.g., marijuana, gay marriage, abortion and the war against "fundies" and shadowy theocrats).

Don't be fooled. Progressives have always wanted to control everything, personal and economic (and they'll use religion to get what they want, if they can).

Progressive statists buy political support with ephemeral state-approved personal "freedoms" the same way they buy votes with redistributed income.

*Afterthought:

Could it be that the paranoid "social conservatives want to create a totalitarian theocracy" meme and the idiotic "libertarians believe in no government and want poor people to die" mischaracterization come from the same place (and for the same dishonest and divisive reasons)?

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Bright Minds, Dark Attitudes: Progressive Bigots vs Social Conservatives

Let's start off with an astute observation from Kevin Williamson:

If you want to see how dedicated a progressive is to dispassionate science, spend two minutes talking about the heritability of intelligence. You’ll be up to your neck in witchcraft and superstition and evasion in no time at all. (If you want to test a progressive’s faith in rigorous scholarship more broadly, ask him about gains from trade and comparative advantage, realities that are as solid as anything social science has to offer.)

Lately, however, appreciation for the science of intelligence has enjoyed a brisk revival in progressive circles. Dr. Gordon Hodson of Brock University is telling them something they want to hear:

...lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies ... we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice.

Naturally, faced with such a delicious affirmation of one of their most cherished stereotypes, progressives have been credulous. To protect and buttress their hateful attitudes, progressives have ignored the problems in Hodson's study while overgeneralizing its dubious results.

In so doing, the left has somehow missed the irony.

But Hodson's research is riddled with flaws. Dr. William M. Briggs, Adjunct Professor of Statistical Science at Cornell University, takes note:

[The study] is a textbook example of confused data, unrecognized bias, and ignorance of statistics...

What makes the study ludicrous, even ignoring the biases, manipulations, and qualifications just outlined, by the authors’ own admission the direct effect size for [intelligence] on “racism” is only -0.01 for men and 0.02 for women. Utterly trivial; close enough to no effect to be no effect...

Dr. Briggs points to a host of other problems.

In fact, several important points have been conspicuously ignored during left-wing jubilation over Hodson’s research:

1. Some ideas that are strongly associated with the progressive point of view are firmly rooted in ignorance. For example:

If you changed the question to attitudes toward global free trade there would be a correlation between lower I.Q. and the ‘more liberal’ (at last in American politics) position.

Why do I feel it’s safe to bet that Hodson and his fans will not hasten to investigate these links?

As Jonathan Haidt has articulated most recently, most academic political scientists and psychologists have strongly social liberal views, and so they consciously or unconsciously tend to caricature and misrepresent the views of half their study population…

2. "As LiveScience's Stephanie Pappas mentions, the questionnaire didn't test for secretly racist thoughts, and thus the more intelligent subjects may still have been prejudiced, but just better at lying about it." (social desirability bias, à la the Bradley effect).

Hodson et al. are utterly disappointing in their lazy attempt to address this concern.

3. The study looked at IQ at ages 10-11, and social attitudes 20 years later. "[T]rying to measure a person's 'cognitive ability' at such a tender age is fraught with difficulty. According to a recent paper in Nature, IQ fluctuates dramatically during adolescence, with some people's scores improving and others' deteriorating, and only becomes relatively static once the brain has stopped growing." A direct link between childhood IQ and adult attitudes would be expected to be tenuous, at best.

4. Conservative prejudice (real or imagined) does not justify prejudice against conservatives. This is especially true if we are to believe that conservative prejudice is truly due to intrinsic cognitive deficiencies.

One of the most pernicious ideas to emerge from this discussion is the notion that conservative ideology is a poison that turns feeble-minded folk into monsters.

If we get the the point where we’ve legitimized the idea that stupid people should be sheilded from our opponents’ political ideas, we’ll be well on our way to a panoply of problems that are at least as dangerous as Hodson’s “dark attitudes.”