How to choose a good wine — the political edition

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Wine-pour-into-pot_2935I’m a teetotaler.  I don’t like the way alcohol tastes and I like even less the way it makes me feel.  I do, however, consider a good red wine an essential ingredient when I’m cooking.  I seldom need to buy cooking wine because the occasional gift is enough to replenish my supply.  Last week, however, I ran out of my wine supply and there wasn’t a gift bottle in sight.

Girding my loins, I headed off to the wine aisle in Safeway.  (In Marin County, Safeway wine aisles are marvels of sophistication and choice.  We are, after all, just one county away from Napa and Sonoma.)  My approach to buying wine is simple:  pick a price range, identify the highest rated wine in that range, and then buy the one with the best looking label.  Using that algorithm, I came home with this wine:

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The Bookworm Beat 1/8/16 — the “world gone mad” edition and open thread

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Woman-writing-300x265I don’t know how this happened, but in just three days of collecting articles on my cyber-spindle, I’ve managed to gather together almost thirty solid links I want to share with you. No time for chat, therefore; instead, I’ll plunge straight into my fascinating “world gone mad” edition:

If you only have time to read two things today

This is a meaty round-up. If you don’t have time to pursue all these links, I recommend two articles, both of which say things we already now, but each of which expresses those ideas with such clarity that you must read them:

1. Noemi Emery’s Obama’s Pass From The Press.

2. Kevin Williamson’s Mrs. Clinton is Professor Click.

The danger to America from Obama’s unconstitutional efforts to grab guns

Mike McDaniel didn’t need to hear Obama’s tearful press conference to know what was coming down the pike. Before Obama even opened his mouth, Mike spelled out the benefits of having a civilized and armed society, as well as the constitutional limitations Obama planned to (and did) blow past on his way to gun confiscation.

I’m shocked — shocked! — to learn that Obama lied about guns in America

Oh, and just about everything Obama said during the press conference was a lie.

Indeed, the very first lie was about those 30,000 deaths annually, with the implication that these are 30,000 annual gun homicides. There aren’t:

At a Jan. 4 press conference, President Barack Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, exclaimed that “30,000 gun deaths in America” was enough evidence for the administration to push past Congress to establish laws to combat gun violence.

“Thirty thousand gun deaths in America every year. Twenty thousand children under the age of 18 have been killed by a firearm over the last decade. Hundreds of law enforcement officers that have been shot and killed over the last decade. And in the face of all these statistics, what’s Congress done?” Earnest asked.

However, Earnest’s efforts backfired when Emily Miller, a reporter for WTTG and author of the book “Emily Gets Her Gun,” noted that 20,000 of those deaths were due to suicide.

Obama also ignore yet another truth: guns don’t just take lives, they save lives. It’s really beyond me why the NRA and other special interest groups don’t track down every single person who lives today because a gun protected him (or her) and have that person do a commercial: “Hi, my name is ___________. I’m here today because a legal gun saved my life. [Tell story.]” Finish with glowing images of survivor surrounded by happy loved ones.  These commercials should flood every type of media:  Television, print, and internet.

Was Paul Ryan more Machiavellian than we realized?

Conservatives in America were deeply disappointed when Paul Ryan pushed through a budget that fulfilled every Democrat’s dream. What the heck was he thinking?

What he might have been thinking about was repealing Obamacare. According to Rick Moran, the recent vote to repeal Obamacare was only possible because of the Ryan budget:

The key to this vote was getting a budget bill passed. Once that happened, reconciliation came into play – the first time since Obamacare was passed and Republicans were in the majority. Of course, there aren’t the votes to override the president’s veto, but the path forward for the people to take back control of their health insurance options has been cleared.

The question remains whether, over the long run, the Ryan budget will do more good than harm.

Culture can be a source for good

In America, of late, popular culture hasn’t done much for the public weal. It’s therefore nice to be reminded that something as simple as a song can be a source of profound good — as was the case with a Yiddish song that powered Jewish partisans during WWII, and that has frequently been recorded since then.

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Watcher’s Council nominations for January 6, 2016

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I should be responding to special interrogatories, but I’m doing something much more fun:  Reading this week’s Watcher’s Council nominations.  Feel free to read along:

Well said, Governor!

Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday morning.

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Watcher’s Council winners — New Year’s edition

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Shame on me!  Practically my first act of the New Year was to forget to tell you who won the weekly Watcher’s Council contest.  Allow me to remedy that omission:

http://www.romanobritain.org/Photos/roman-senate2.jpg

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match up.

“It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to conduct espionage against you and to bribe them to serve you. Give them instructions and care for them. Thus doubled agents are recruited and used.” – Sun Tzu

Once you’ve lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It’s a mentality, a double standard of existence. – John Le Carre

“Espionage is the world’s second oldest profession.” -Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education. – Vladimir Putin

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[VIDEOS] “The Simpsons” imitates life! (And joy breaks out all over.)

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Dancing at Cedar MarketJames Taranto often does a bit called “Life Imitates The Simpsons.”  Sometimes, though, The Simpsons imitate life, and in the nicest possible way.

This is the last season of The Simpsons and that’s probably a good idea.  It’s show its age.  Nevertheless, there are occasional sparks of delight, as was the case with the first Simpsons episode to in 2016.  As you can see, Homer went Greek:

The episode was silly, but that scene made me smile. A big, big smile.

Homer Simpson, of course, is nothing more than a cartoon character. My question for you is this:  How much are you going to smile when it happens in real life?

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Open primaries were meant to combat hardcore candidates, but will they do the opposite?

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donald trumpI’ve been open about my contempt for open primaries since they first appeared in California:

Once the votes are counted, the two candidates who got the most votes go on to the November ballot.  Everyone else vanishes from the scene.  In states that have a heavy party majority in one direction or the other (as is the case with Bright Blue California), the practical effect is to banish minority party candidates from the November ballot.

Those who support Open Primaries contend that it is an efficient way to ensure that, when people are really paying attention, the majority of voters get to pick from the two most favored candidates, without having the airwaves — and their brains — cluttered with advertisements and speeches from candidates who don’t have a realistic change of winning.  Those who oppose the Open Primary process — and I am one who does — contend that it effectively shuts the minority parties out of the political debate.

Without regard for such issues as political speech and representation, those people who pushed for open primaries justified the move as a way to shut out extremism by forcing people towards the middle:

Carl Luna, a professor at San Diego Mesa College, said the hope is that the new way of voting will increase voter turnout and will lead to election of more moderate candidates.

“Since anybody can vote for anybody, you might have to appeal more toward moderate candidates, toward independents,” he said. “So you get two Democrats who win in one district, they go to the general election and the Democrat that can get Independents and even moderate Republicans to vote for them has a better chance to win.”

A few months ago, I spoke with one of the driving forces behind the open primary initiative.  He spelled out that point in more detail.  As he saw it, under the old system, parties would use the primaries to elect purist candidates who represented the extremes of their position.  Come the election, there were no moderate candidates on the ballot.  He saw this as the reason that California was such a fiscal disaster:  Because Democrats are the majority, nothing tempered them.  He believed that, open primaries, when financial moderates from either party were on the ballot, ordinary people would be drawn to these candidates, and would even cross party lines to vote for them.  Only moderate and fiscally sound candidates who appeal to the masses in the middle would win the top two spots on the November ballot.

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Don’t believe Leftists who claim Obama hasn’t governed by executive fiat

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Because Obama’s gun control edicts have had conservatives crying foul about Obama’s habit of ignoring Congress, a lot of Leftists are recycling this poster from November 2014:

Obama executive orders and presidential memoranda

The poster offends me. It’s not just out of date, it’s fraud by omission. I decided to correct these flaws:

Obama executive actions 1

 

Amongst my Progressive friends, an interesting trend forcing them to take an honest look at the military

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Five branches of the American militaryAs my children and their friends have grown older, I’ve witnessed an interesting phenomenon: some of the sons are going into the military. Maybe if you live in the South, this is ordinary, but here in Marin it’s extraordinary.  Polite post-9/11 lip service aside, most Marinites, if asked to dig deep in their soul to say what they think about the military would echo John Kerry or Stephen King, which is to say that they believe the American military is for illiterate losers.

The boys who have chosen the military are all pretty much the same: they’re fundamentally decent kids, average students, and don’t know what to do with themselves. They’ve all tried junior college and found it lacking. They were also all old enough to enlist without parental permission but, because they have good relationships with their parents, parental approval mattered.

In each case, the boys have thrived in the military. No matter how Obama tries to feminize it, the military is still the last bastion of traditional manhood in America. No longer are the boys trapped in English classes where they have to talk about their feelings, or forced to listen to their feminist classmates insult them as male chauvinist pigs (even as the boys understand that to respond in kind is a way-one ticket to suspension). Instead, the boys are physically fit, proud, accomplished, and living with the type of camaraderie that transcends race, color, creed, and sex.

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[VIDEO] Elbert Guillory on Obama’s mission to disarm Americans in a dangerous world

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Elbert GuilloryI am not exaggerating when I say that I have been in love (in a political way) with Elbert Guillory ever since I first saw him back in mid-2013, when he was still ostensibly a Democrat. That feeling has never changed and, indeed, my deep and abiding respect for his intelligence, humanism, and patriotism ratcheted up again when I saw this video he made in the wake of Obama’s anti-Second Amendment Executive Orders:

This is yet another video it would do every single person in Marin good to listen to — but the reality is that I’m not a totalitarian, fascist Leftist, so I don’t go around forcing people to listen to things.

Obama’s and the Left’s crocodile tears for the victims of gun violence

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Obama tears up over gun controlThe Progressives on my Facebook feed are in a delighted tizzy. Obama actually cried — he cried! — when he spoke of his new unilaterally enacted gun control edicts limiting law-abiding Americans’ Second Amendment rights. I quote:

“Bravo, Mr. President! Thank you so much for your leadership, your clear-headed thinking and your enormous heart.”

“I agree completely with Obama – if it prevents even one death, that life is meaningful.”

And finally, from “Mrs. Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian” (in fact, a hard-Left Canadian comedienne), came this:

“If you find yourself mocking anyone who cries over murdered children, it’s Jesus’s way of letting you know you’re a sociopath.”

This was a sentiment that several of my Progressive friends “liked.”

There are so many things wrong with these statements that it’s a little hard to know where to begin. What I won’t discuss here are the specifics of the Executive Order — which apparently range from stupid, to dangerous, to vaguely helpful, but always unconstitutional. You can find several intelligent discussions at conservative sites. A few suggestions are Ace of Spades, Larry Correia, Bearing Arms, and AWR Hawkins.

Instead, what I want to discuss are those tears. I believe they are theatrical, and it’s not just because it’s possible that Obama “onioned” his eyes as a way to make them happen. Obama doesn’t needs onions to shed fake tears as a way of cementing a con — and his gun control push is a con, one that he’s probably deliberately running on the American people, although it’s conceivable he’s running it on himself too.

My “Obama is crying hypocritical crocodile tears” argument is best made through the filter of a 2015 HBO documentary, Requiem for the Dead.  Consider this argument a synecdoche, one in which the part is used to be illustrative of the whole.  My experience with a Leftist and Requiem for the Dead is America’s experience with Barack Obama and his acolytes.

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