By James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal (link):

Obama’s journalistic supporters live in a bizarre alternate reality in which a politician’s actual words mean nothing. When the president says something foolish and offensive, he didn’t say that.  Meanwhile every comment from a Republican can be translated, through a process of free association, to: “We don’t like black people.”

Adam Smith writes about the overconfident legislator (i.e., the Obamacrat):

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.

He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.

If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Any of this sound familiar?  How did he know?  Read entire op-ed piece by Yuval Levin.

Great column by Charles Krauthammer.  Excerpts:

Absurd. We don’t credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein’s manuscript to the Annalen der Physik.

***

The argument between left and right is about what you do beyond infrastructure. … It’s about endless government handouts that, ironically, are crowding out necessary spending on, yes, infrastructure.

***

Julia’s world is totally atomized. It contains no friends, no community and, of course, no spouse. Who needs one? She’s married to the provider state. Or to put it slightly differently, the “Life of Julia” represents the paradigmatic Obama political philosophy: citizen as orphan child. For the conservative, providing for every need is the duty that government owes to actual orphan children. Not to supposedly autonomous adults.

Entire piece here.

What’s the difference between the Obamacrats and the Borg?

One says

“Your life, as it has been, is over.  You will service us.  Freedom is irrelevant.  Self-determination is irrelevant.”

The other is a fictional tyrant from outer space.

Listen bolow to the Obamacrats telling us that it was Government programs that made America great.  We owe them and they own us.

The Government built roads for us (that we paid for) and educated workers that we could hire (in schools that we paid for).  And because Government built roads and schools, they are now entitled to take whatever they want from us and give it to people who vote for them.

How do roads and schools that we paid for … at the state and local level, by the way … entitle Washington to get more and more of our money?  How do roads and bridges entitle Government to give our money to people like Solyndra and Planned Parenthood and millions of people who have been trained to be dependent on Government handouts?

Hear Ms. Elizabeth Warren (0:47 – 0:28) and Pres. Barack Obama (3:50 – 4:40) on this clip:

Wall Street Journal now follows FAB!

Concerning the agreement to extend the current tax rates for 2 years, FAB wrote:

The only good thing about the 2-year extension is that it just postpones the real debate for another 2 years down the road, just in time for the next election cycle.

The Wall Street Journal now agrees:

But if an angry, let-me-be-clear Barack Obama just looked into the cameras and said he’s coming to get you in two years, what rational economic choice would you make? Spend the profit or gains 2011 might produce on new workers, or bury any new income in the backyard until the 2012 presidential clouds clear?

No matter how much economic bump Mr. Obama gets in 2011 from extending the Bush-era tax rates, the 2012 election will be fought over a deep national anxiety that he rightly identifies but misinterprets.

***

In such a high-stakes world, Barack Obama’s obsession with having it out over the tax tables is a vulnerability. His opponent in 2012 should run straight at it.

If the economy improves, Republicans will say we shouldn’t mess with a formula that’s working, which is a message that will resonate with Independents.  However, Obama will be able to convince many voters that he deserves credit for the improvement, anemic though it might be.   He’ll be trying to get voters to maintain one status quo (himself as President) and change another (tax rates), all at the same time.

If the economy does not improve, Obama will be in a world of hurt.

Of course, as I said, maintaining the current tax rates will not improve the economy, but it will at least avoid another insult.  Other factors might help.  (For example, dramatically cutting deficit spending will do a world of good by improving confidence in government.)  Whatever happens, it will be great political theatre.  The danger for Republicans will be if they try to oversell the effects that maintenance of current tax rates will have.

I’m still looking for something else good in this deal.  They apparently gave us all a one-year reduction on Social Security taxes.  Not so good.  It’s just another give-away program that will do little to stimulate the economy, any more than Porkulus I did.  Plus, more deficit spending just depresses even more our confidence in government even more, which is a huge drag on the economy.

Further, raiding the SS fund will put a few more dollars back into the pockets of working people, but it will be (supposedly) stealing it from their own Social Security fund.  I say supposedly, because in reality, there is no SS fund.  Our SS taxes have become a gigantic slush fund that is used by politicians to hide the true amount of deficit spending.  They “borrow” (a.k.a. steal) our SS money (what they can’t borrow from the Chinese) and never pay it back.  If you account for this borrowing/stealing, the deficit is much, much higher than they say it is.  Harry Reid admitted to the thievery when he told HuffPost, “The money doesn’t come out of Social Security. It comes out of the general fund.”

More deficit, less confidence in government, worse economy.  It will improve, but not as much as it could.

They supposedly extended unemployment benefits, but I don’t believe it lets people collect beyond the current 2-year limit.  It just extends the program that allows people to collect up to 2-years, as compared to the normal limit of 26 weeks or so.  As I understand it.

Here’s the one good thing about this process.  If this bill goes down, we can hope the Republicans in the Senate will block every other piece of lame-duck legislation, as they have promised to do.