So here we are, Thanksgiving Week, 2014.

Speaking Truth to Power

For instance, take Mister Obama. I don’t deny that he has the outward appearance of a minority that was very mistreated historically. However, in his particular case, he is not the descendent of slaves but the descendant of slave dealers on his father’s side, and slave owners on his mother’s. Furthermore, for all the clamoring about his coming from nothing, he was raised in privileged circumstances, first in Indonesia, by his mother’s businessman second husband and then in comfort by his grandparents in Hawaii where he attended an exclusive private school and from where, despite his lackluster academic performance, he was wafted to the best schools in the land, likely through the means of connection and influence.

Everything about Obama is built upon lies. Lies upon lies upon lies, prettily told.

Obama to Congress: It’s My Way or My Way

Why Shouldn’t White House Refund Fees to Recent Legal Immigrants?

Legal but Still Poor: The Economic Consequences of Amnesty

Three Lies About Obamacare Jonathan Gruber Accidentally Revealed

I'd post more Obama lies/scandals/ineptidudes links, but it just gets too damn depressing. For instance:

Iran Talks Fail

Oh, let's not forget Global Warming . . . er . . . Climate Change . . . er . . . "Extreme Weather" . . .

People Starting To Ask About Motive For Massive IPCC Deception - It's all about the money.

Renewable energy 'simply WON'T WORK': Top Google engineers - It was always about the money, not about the "environment." Except for the rubes being asked to pay, of course.

Election day.

Voting machine in Texas fails to offer Republican candidate for Governor.

Voting machine in Virginia registers vote for Republican as a vote for the Democrat.

Voting machine in North Carolina registers vote for Republican as a vote for the Democrat.

Voting machine in Illinois registers vote for Republican as a vote for the Democrat.

Voting machine in Maryland registers vote for Republican as a vote for the Democrat.

All of the above appear to be credible reports.

"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action."

All reports in the run-up to this election, all the polls taken in aggregate, indicated that the Republicans should take the U.S. Senate. If they don't, given the appearance or rampant anti-Republican vote diddling all over the country, can we really trust the election results?

When self-styled "progressives" tout "progress," this is the "progress" they mean:

This is in fact the usual result of governmental spending on "social" issues: monumental costs, little to no real results.

To the "progressive," the good achieved by governmental spending is the governmental spending itself. The power to extract wealth from some people and give it to other people is good, in and of itself. It is the wielding of this power which gives the already monumental self-image of the "progressive" that little extra something which allows her (or him) to utterly ignore the actual results of their actions.

They like to call themselves "the reality-based community." A commenter on Ace of Spades HQ recently offered a more accurate description of "progressives": "the community-based reality." The reality of a "progressive" is not an objective one. They don't actually give a damn about helping people. They just want to feel like they're helping people. Results don't matter to them, only the feeling.

In the end, other people don't really matter to "progressives," only their engorged, inflamed, holier-than-thou egos.

You may get the impression that I, in my weaker moments, have less than a full respect for people who parade around demanding that other people do this, that, and the other thing "for the children" or "for the middle class" or whatever emotional lever they think will work that particular moment to grab just a little more power for themselves, for the tawdry and venal purpose of making their own empty lives feel like they're worth something.

You may be correct in that impression.

"Conservative" cities have much lower levels of income inequality than "liberal" "progressive" (actually leftist/socialist) cities:

As an old Democrat, I am sympathetic to the concerns. But it’s dubious the deep blue cities have found a solution. Let’s start with the gap between rich and poor. For the most part the regions and states with the widest gap between the classes are overwhelmingly dominated by modern progressivism.

The capital of blue America, New York City, has easily the worst levels of inequality in the country, with an income distribution that approaches that of South Africa under apartheid, notes demographer Wendell Cox.

But New York is hardly the only progressive stronghold with searing inequality. A recent Brookings report found that of the regions with the greatest income disparity only one, Atlanta, is located in a red-leaning state. These include San Francisco, Miami, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York, Oakland, Chicago and Los Angeles. The lowest degree of inequality was found generally historically more conservative cities like Ft. Worth, Texas; Oklahoma City; Raleigh, N.C.; and Mesa, Ariz. Income inequality has risen most rapidly in the probably the most left-leaning big American city of luxury progressivism, San Francisco, where the wages of the poorest 20% of all households have actually declined amid the dot-com billions.

What Americans today call "liberal" is in fact totally authoritarian. What Americans today call "progressive" is in fact a reversion to medieval feudalism. What Americans today call "conservative" is in fact largely the very liberalism which the "liberal progressives" have completely abandoned.

American "liberal" "progressives" have become the very thing that they claim to oppose: totalitarian busybodies hell-bent on controlling and regulating every second of everyone's lives, from conception to death, and utterly intolerant of anyone or anything which disagrees with their agenda of universal control.

“I know you feel that you’re a victim,” she said. “If you would be more careful, maybe you wouldn’t be victimized as frequently.”

The slut! Wearing that little thing, walking down that street, at that time of day?. She was asking for it!

Wait, what? That was spoken by Claire McCaskell, loathsome and corrupt Senator from Missouri, to the admittedly loathsome and creepy "Dr. Oz?"

Oh. That's completely, totally different. Because androphobia. After all, girrrrls rule, boys drool, right? Guys need to be careful. Women, on the other hand, don't. Especially with what they say, apparently.

With all the blather about the "war on women," how about a little attention to the ongoing, rampant "war on men?" Think of that the next time you watch a TV commercial where the dopey husband is set straight by the long-suffering, smarter-than-he-is wife . . . or daughter.

It's everywhere. You're soaking in it.

Check your prejudices.

And because people can be stupid: the second paragraph in this post is what is called sarcasm. It's a rhetorical technique. It can confuse the easily confusable. Sorry about that. Get smarter.

Since "Redskins" is doubleplusungood, I present this list, in no particular order:

10. Washington Lobbyists
9. Washington Beltway Bandits
8. Washington Bureaucrats
7. Washington Corruption
6. Washington One Percenters
5. Washington Dictators
4. Washington Apparatchiks
3. Washington Erasers
2. Washington Federales
1. Washington Elitists

Just a few ideas off the top of my head . . .

Our first President, that is, not the person occupying the office at this moment. In a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, dated April 28, 1788:

In answer to the observations you make on the probability of my election to the Presidency (knowing me as you do) I need only say, that it has no enticing charms, and no fascinating allurements for me. However, it might not be decent for me to say I would refuse to accept or even to speak much about an appointment, which may never take place: for in so doing, one might possibly incur the application of the moral resulting from that Fable, in which the Fox is represented as inveighing against the sourness of the grapes, because he could not reach them. All that it will be necessary to add, my dear Marquis, in order to show my decided predilection, is, that, (at my time of life and under my circumstances) the encreasing infirmities of nature and the growing love of retirement do not permit me to entertain a wish beyond that of living and dying an honest man on my own farm. Let those follow the pursuits of ambition and fame, who have a keener relish for them, or who may have more years, in store, for the enjoyment.

I have often said that the only person who can be trusted with the office of the President is somebody who manifestly, honestly, does not want it.

Sigh.

Those of us who watch this process--on climate change, health care, minimum wage, and a host of other issues, and despair of ever getting our fellows to think through the consequences of their good intentions now have a bit more scientific evidence behind us. From BBC comes a story titled The best way to win an argument. The article describes research led by University of Colorado researcher Philip Fernbach. I'll let the abstract of the paper written by Fernbach and his colleagues begin:

People often hold extreme political attitudes about complex policies. We hypothesized that people typically know less about such policies than they think they do (the illusion of explanatory depth) and that polarized attitudes are enabled by simplistic causal models. Asking people to explain policies in detail both undermined the illusion of explanatory depth and led to attitudes that were more moderate (Experiments 1 and 2). Although these effects occurred when people were asked to generate a mechanistic explanation, they did not occur when people were instead asked to enumerate reasons for their policy preferences (Experiment 2). Finally, generating mechanistic explanations reduced donations to relevant political advocacy groups (Experiment 3). The evidence suggests that people’s mistaken sense that they understand the causal processes underlying policies contributes to political polarization.

A parody (?) of every amorphous, vapid, feel-good multinational corporate advertisement you have ever seen in your life . . .

I dunno why. That just kinda popped into my head tonight for some reason.