Archive for July 28, 2010

Worry not Smitty

Posted: July 28, 2010 by datechguy in opinion/news
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As soon as the historically deficient Ezra Klein is confronted with a republican controlled Senate he will modify his position.

Ezra might I suggest Master of the Senate by Robert Caro (my Amazon review here) if you want to learn about what the senate can and can’t do.

Memeorandum thread here. Take a look at the links at the thread, each of these liberal sites seem to forget that these rules would apply if the Republicans control the senate, but worry not, that’s when they will also change their minds.

Compare and contrast: Throwing things

Posted: July 28, 2010 by datechguy in opinion/news
Tags: , ,

On Morning Joe today, the crew correctly argued that raising the troop levels will not cause the war to be won.

One quick question for our liberals friends.

Throwing troops at war doesn’t solve the problem

BUT

Throwing money at problems will.

Explain.

The Gods of Irony head’s are now exploding.

Update: This comes from a discussion of hiring quotas that were included in the bank bill. Brown and Mika both came down on “White Men” and maintained that if there were more women in charge in Wall Street than the bank meltdown wouldn’t have happened. After all we know that women are not greedy and could never run a company into the ground or lie or steal or cheat.

Are we actually hearing people saying this in the year 2010? I was waiting for them to call for Wall Street to be run by a “Wise Latina”.

The details:

Four members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights have signed a letter complaining that Section 324 of the conference report titled the “Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act” “includes a section on race and gender that even those who pride themselves on keeping up with national affairs may have failed to notice.” This provision, which can be found on page 172 of the conference report, may lead to unconstitutional racial and gender preferences being forced on financial institutions covered by the new law.

There’s more:

The Commissioners further argue that these new bureaucrats will be empowered to shall “’develop standards’ for ‘assessing the diversity policies and practices of entities regulated by the agency’ and ‘develop and implement standards and procedures to ensure, to the maximum extent possible, the fair inclusion and utilization of minorities, women, and minority-owned and women-owned businesses in all businesses and activities of the agency.” According to the letter, this new mandate will cover “financial institutions, investment banking firms, mortgage banking firms, asset management firms, brokers, dealers, financial services entities, underwriters, accountants, investment consultants and providers of legal services.” If these institutions are doing business with the government, newly minted bureaucrats will be allowed to study the racial and gender composition of these covered entities work forces to search for companies with not enough minorities and women in a decision making capacity.

If I’m Scott Brown, and the senators from Maine, I’m feeling pretty foolish right now, and you should be.

Update 2: Newsbusters wasted no time jumping on this. They miss the irony part.

Why is this so confusing? Let me answer you:

1. Preventing Afghanistan from being used as a forward base for terror.

2. Neutralizing the Taliban as an effective fighting force.

Why is it so hard to understand that?

The Morning Joe crew has one good point. You don’t win a war simply by throwing more troops at it you win a war by having a smart stratagy to win it and the right leaders and tactics to do so.

Anybody who thinks the US military can’t win in Afghanistan is an idiot, but it’s more than that. The president in one of he few really good moves has put Petraeus in charge over there. There reason you see the Wikileaks and the push against the Afghan war now just as the strategy has changed is not because the left is afraid of losing this war, its because the left is afraid we will win it.

Expect more of this meme, in their minds the battle cry is “Stop Petraeus before he wins again!”