Quote of the Day

“It’s probably better than anything we would have passed, if we were still the majority”
-- a conservative Republican Senate staffer on the $900 billion omnibus spending bill that keeps spending contained at President Bush's requested levels.

Quote of the Day

"Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice" -- Salman Rushdie & Sam Harris on the latest tribulations in the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Quote of the Day

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

-- Mark Twain

Quote of the Day

Via John Hood:

"A state is an organization with a comparative advantage in violence, extending over a geographic area whose boundaries are determined by its power to tax constituents." -- Nobel Laureate Douglas North

Quote of the Day

From an Investor's Business Daily editorial:

Is has become a familiar refrain among Democrats that the Baghdad parliament is unable to solve the country's deep-rooted ethnic-based political problems over a short period.

But someone should remind the Democrat-controlled Congress that it itself hasn't been able to address the biggest problems now facing America: It can't secure the border from terrorists, for instance. And staving off the inevitable fiscal train wreck on entitlement spending isn't even on its agenda.

Quote of the Day

A post-script in an e-mail from BrotherFunk offers this advice:

"And remember, if you have to swim in a tank full of ferocious sharks, try and remember to bring your shark repelling gamma ray gun."

Quote of the Day

"Well, if Democrats want to declare the surge a failure after just a couple of months, we can declare the Democrat Congress a failure. They haven't achieved any of their benchmarks. It's time for a new direction." -- Rush Limbaugh, on his show today

Quote of the Day

Via yesterday's Best of the Web:

"Wouldn't it be weird if French President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy turns out to be more pro-American than all the Democrats running for U.S. president?"--Jim Seay of Henrico, Va., quoted in the Richmond Times Dispatch's "Your Two Cents" feature

Quote of the Day

"It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers! In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late. Accordingly, I'm readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I'll, in turn, do my best for the cause by writing editorials -- after the fact."

Robert E. Lee, 1863

Quote of the Day

"I hope this ordeal doesn't result in a discontinuation of his delicious salsa." -- my brother, Bently, weighing in on the Imus affair

Quote of the Day

"I so admire the courage of the new voters we had on this," Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said moments after Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) helped deliver a 50-48 majority on the [decision to announce an American surrender in Iraq] issue.

Interesting, Reid's conception of courage.

Quote of the Day

The Senate March 2008 withdrawal plan "does not incentivize the government of Iraq to make tough decisions on reconciliation -- it sets the stage for the government collapse. The arbitrary deadline informs our enemies when they need no longer fear American military power. It signals to the population that their best bet for security really does rest in the hands of militias, rather than the government. It demonstrates to the government that they cannot rely on us -- after all, we are pulling out regardless of the situation or consequences. And it tells the terrorists that they -- not we -- will prevail."

-- John McCain (via Debra Saunders)

Quote of the Day

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people." -- Admiral Hyman Rickover

(via Madscripe @ RAG)

Quote of the Day

From an e-mail from fellow funkateer, Eric "E-Rockafella" Silvestri:

Don't forget: "An object in funky motion tends to stay funky" - Sir Isaac Newton

Quote of the Day

On Speaker Pelosi's request for a larger military aircraft, from John Rutledge:

The following item appeared in today's AM edition of the National Journal's CongressDaily:

HOUSE LEADERSHIP: Pelosi Says She Did Not Ask For Change To Bigger Plane.

Bigger plane? I don't even have a smaller plane. I thought she worked for me.

Sure doesn't take long for those leadership perk habits to set in, does it?

JR

PS: This is not a knock on Democratic politicians. They are still amateurs in the abuse department compared with the Rebublican leaders they ousted. It's a knock on Congress, the only whorehouse in America that loses money.

On Nanny Ninnies

C.S. Lewis:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busy-bodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Quotes

Inspired by that C.S. Lewis quote posted earlier, expect to see more erudite or otherwise inspiring quotes as a regular feature.

Here's one to kick things off:

"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

-- Abraham Lincoln, from the March 4, 1861 Inaugural Address

'We Seem To Be Choking on Tigers, While Our Bellies Fill With Gnats'

When the walls of Western Civilization come tumbling down, who will bear responsibility for letting its foundation erode? Not the external threat of Islamic terrorism. Terrorists have no involvement in the structural health of Western society. A more likely culprit will be the well-intentioned agents of do-goodery, those mom and dad types whose every legislative turn inspires a return to child-like psychological weakness.

Jonah Goldberg writes today on the dangers lying beneath infantilizing America. Quoting a certain editorial in a certain publication, he begins:

The New York Post recently compiled a list of the things that the New York City Council tried to ban — not all successfully — just in 2006 alone: pit bulls; trans-fats; aluminum baseball bats; the purchase of tobacco by 18- to 20-year-olds; foie gras; pedicabs in parks; new fast-food restaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods); lobbyists from the floor of council chambers; lobbying city agencies after working at the same agency; vehicles in Central and Prospect parks; cell phones in upscale restaurants; the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., because of a unionization dispute; mail-order pharmaceutical plans; candy-flavored cigarettes; gas-station operators adjusting prices more than once daily; Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus; Wal-Mart.

On Jan. 2 here in Washington, D.C., the city council’s smoking ban was extended to bars and nightclubs. Even private clubs, where members must pay through the teeth to associate voluntarily, are forbidden to allow smoking on their own property. In some states, you can’t smoke in your car if young children are present — your own children that is. In California, outdoor smoking bans are all the rage. In 2005, a Pennsylvania legislator received national attention for his effort to mandate that all dogs must wear seatbelts in cars. He got the idea from the winner of his annual “There Ought to Be a Law” contest, a busybody kid who thought it was hypocritical that canines be exempt from mandatory seat-belt laws. My daughter seems well on track to spend her entire childhood in a world where eating a peanut product would be as unthinkable as lighting up a stogie.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville warns: “It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones. ...”

“Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately,” he continued. “It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will.” He goes on to note that in the “great things,” the burden of (temporarily) lost freedom must inevitably fall “upon a small number of men.” For example, in war we understand that some men (and now women) surrender the bulk of their liberties to protect the liberties of everybody else.

A reader sends Goldberg this quote from C.S. Lewis's "Mere Christianity," which rather perfectly describes nanny-statists:

"One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons-marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning."

My pops responds, noting:

Liberals are also the leading practicioners of manipulating voters by encouraging envy and coveting what rightfully has been earned by others.
Detestable people.

The cult of paternalistic politics portends dark days ahead. Goldberg concludes:

On countless fronts, the natural pastures of daily liberty have become circumscribed by dull-witted but well-meaning bureaucrats slapping down the paving stones of good intentions on the road to hell.

The rule of thumb for a free society should be that it infringes liberties rarely, but when it does so it is for important reasons. Today, that thumb has been cast down, Caesar-like, pointing in the opposite direction. We have democratized the small assaults on freedom so that everyone must endure them, while we caterwaul about the tyranny of any real inconvenience that might fall “disproportionately” on the few. We ban using trans fats for millions but flinch at the idea that some kid might have to endure the Pledge of Allegiance or a moment of silence in school if it conflicts with his conscience. Everyone must surrender his shoes, his regular-sized toothpaste and shampoo at the airport, but we man the barricades to protect a few young Muslim men from being inconvenienced for an extra five minutes at the airport.

Free speech is most restricted where it is most important — in political contests near Election Day — while it is maximized to an absurd level at the fringes of culture and decency. Banning “hate speech” from everybody’s lips is a progressive priority, but electronic eavesdropping on a few terrorists is an impermissible leap down the slippery slope to the police state.

Of course, there are legitimate objections to infringements of liberty or principle on what de Tocqueville would call the “great things.” What is so disturbing is how few legitimate objections are raised about the “little things.” And I can’t help but shake the feeling that civilizations fall apart, or get plowed under by the wheels of history, when they fail to understand these distinctions. One of my favorite sayings is that America can choke on a gnat, but it swallows tigers whole. These days, we seem to be choking on the tigers while our bellies fill with gnats.