Kasich Shows Political Cowardice

Unfortunately, I believe this is correct in its assessment of Kasich's action.

Whatever justifications Kasich may give, the actual explanation for his embrace of the Medicaid expansion is political cowardice. Chastened by his failed attempt at public sector union reform and Obama’s victory in the state, Kasich is up for reelection next year. And he’s afraid to stand up to the inevitable onslaught of attacks from Democrats who would charge that he was refusing to accept free money to bring health care to poor Ohioans. The end result is that a politician who ran for office claiming to have been “in the Tea Party before there was a Tea Party” is now actively embracing a policy that the Tea Party movement was born to oppose.

This should serve as a sober reminder to conservatives that no matter how big of a disaster Obamacare is when it’s implemented in 2014, the nation is almost certainly stuck with it. More broadly, it’s a demonstration of how difficult it is to defeat big government.

I'm disappointed in Kasich about this; I makes the whole tax-cut thing look like a bone he threw to the base. He is going to lose more support from this action than he gains. I fear Ed Fitzgerald will be a formidable opponent next year, and will skate to the state house and turn this whole state into Cuyahoga county. Yes, you should be shivering.

Don't know if this is Google bias or not

If you Google "potatoe" the results page has oodles of Dan Quayle references. There's no self-correction. On the other hand, Googling "Oiho" gives you the standard auto-correction, with the option to actually search on the Oiho misspelling which, at this point, yields 577,000 results.

My guess is that they are not going to relax their auto-correct to allow for this meme. At least not until the effect blows over. It is not cool to make fun of The Chosen One's many gaffes among the cool kids. Here's another good one from Free Republic's page:

You've got to take out the trash

I'm telling anyone who will listen. You have got to get rid of associations with bad people. If you don't distance yourself immediately people will wonder about you. Ron Paul didn't have the nerve to do it, and it really hurt him. Now David Frum has seemingly refused to do it, and so we see him descending further into irrelevance in the conservative commentariat.

I want the butterfly

HT Kathy Shaidle: Indonesia mulls tearing down Obama statue. This is the kind of stuff I live for.

"Barack Obama has yet to make a significant contribution to the Indonesian nation. We could say Obama only ate and shit in Menteng. He spent his subsequent days living as an American," the web page says.

"For the dignity of a sovereign nation, Barack Obama's monument in Menteng Park must be removed immediately."

As the kiddies would say, Obama is soooooo last year.

John Stossel: "Grateful for small favors"

Here's John Stossel explaining what a joke it is for the Obama Administration to claim their so-called economic stimulus spending and recovery plans have done anything demonstrably positive. His concluding paragraphs:

As I wrote in February: "Given time, the economy, unless totally crippled by government intervention, will regenerate itself. That's because an economy is not a machine that needs jumpstarting. It is people who have objectives they want to achieve. They will not sit on their hands forever waiting for government to 'fix' things. Instead, they work to overcome obstacles to get what they want. Some banks are struggling, but there are still people who want to lend money and people who want to borrow it. They will find each other without government help".

But I underestimated this administration. I expected it to say, in the face of continued rising unemployment, that the "stimulus" wasn't big enough. Instead, it claims success.

I suppose I should be relieved. Claiming success is far less destructive than another irresponsible "stimulus." I'm grateful for small favors.

He absolutely right; the reality which the phrase "the economy" describes is something which can't be reduced to static machinery. It's an aggregate of the many individual decisions and actions made by people. Reminds me of the great line by Bruce Willis in the latest Die Hard movie, "It's not a system, it's a country!"

News Heading of the Week

From this article, about halfway down: Some Never Forgave Kennedy for Chappaquiddick. What? Who would those ignoramuses be? Forgive and forget–we're talking about one girl here, jeez.

I liked the following question posed by Ted Kennedy biographer Edward Klein: "How could he be one of most trusted members of Senate–and they trusted his word as good as gold–be an out of control frat boy most of his life?" Then he answers his question: "Life is complicated and people aren't as simple as we'd like them to be."

After that night, the word Chappaquiddick became synonymous with deception and abuse of power, and for decades until this day, each anniversary was dredged up in newspapers around the country.

But oddly, the darkest moment in Kennedy's career also sealed his fate as a work-horse senator and ultimately transformed him into one of the most highly regarded politicians in Congress.

Yeah, "highly regarded" because no one could win an election against him. With the Kennedy machine behind him, the guy could do whatever he wanted.

Well that's that. Wanted to make sure I had the word "chappaquiddick" on the blog for some hits.

John Zmirak's Quip on Dorothy Day

John Z comments on his own article in which he'd mentioned Dorothy Day in passing:

Well, I can't quite give you a full answer, since I found D.D.'s book so unpleasant I couldn't get through it. But what I have read of her, and seen of her movement, makes me queasy. To put it briefly, she seems to me the mirror image of Ayn Rand, and equally insufferable. I'm planning to slog through her book in pursuit of an article about her and Rand.

It strikes me that she didn't love the poor so much as poverty, and that her objections to the market economy were precisely that it produced wealth and middle-class comfort, which she seemed to detest. I'm reminded of Christopher Dawson's profoundly mistaken essay on Catholicism and the Bourgeois Ethic, and Amitore Fanfani's equally off-putting book on Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism. I'm reminded of the Spiritual Franciscans, and all those who hold up ordinary Christians to monastic standards--goading them in the short run perhaps to heroism, and in the long run to despair or cynicism.

In general, any AUTObiography that makes me "feel unworthy to call myself a Christian" compared to the AUTHOR makes me deeply suspicious.

Any religious movement which becomes almost 100% heretical in the lifetime of its founder was probably built on sand.

But again, I'll have to goad myself to finish her book, with the promised reward of the essay: "The Two Insufferables: Ayn Rand and Dorothy Day." Stay tuned....

This is as humor-filled as any Zmirak essay, and in it he pinpoints what has always troubled me about Day. Like many leftist radicals, her left-anarchist followers seemed to believe that any system is preferable to the present one, therefore let us tear it down. Whereas her followers who are not as radical are continually in a sheepish "well-what-she-really-meant-was" mode. Neither one of these interpretations of Day's teachings strikes me as Catholic nor even coherent and is therefore most likely an utter waste of time in a world filled with great Catholic classics which I yet need to read.

Anyone enamored of Day from her writings would advise me to read them. What I have read of her comes across as the tedious rantings of an insufferable scold. If she was great for what she accomplished, then I've known many great people. If she was great as a writer, then I've read books by greater people and much better communicators. And maybe I should start my line of Pauli-brand books.