Welcome to Medary.com Sunday, November 24 2024 @ 09:57 AM CST

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In A Yugo . . .

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It's Snookums Sunday here at Medary.com.

Snookums really wanted to buy a Yugo. Her brother talked her out of it.

Photo from Amazon's Car Lust blog.

In retrospect, probably a good thing, but who knows what might have been?

Post title is of course a reference to Paul Shanklin's parody of Elvis Presley's In The Ghetto, made (in)famous by Rush Limbaugh.

Because I'm not posting on politics any more

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I don't have to post on the connections of Obama's senior advisors to the Fannie Mae/Freddy Mac debacle, and the high overall content of Democrat fingerprints all over the home mortgage mess that's currently metastasizing throughout the financial sector.

Nor do I have to post on the unconscionably sleazy hacking into Palin's private Yahoo e-mail account and spreading the contents far and wide across the Internet--in an attempt to find more sleaze with which to slime the Alaska Governor.

Nor do I have to post on Obama's continuing confusion regarding who he's running against (G.W. Bush?  Rush Limbaugh?  Who is that white-haired old man with the funny walk, anyway?)

Nor do I have to post on Obama's continuing efforts to silence political opponents by organizing concerted campaigns to simply shout them down.

Because, you know, I'd really like to.  But other bloggers have it covered pretty well.

Being the contrarian . . .

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I see the long-term effects of today's 500+ drop in the DJA and all of the stock markets as being a good thing - - long term, that is.

Short term, lots of people who had nothing to do with the problem are going to get hurt.  That's bad.  But lots of people who had a hand in engineering the mess in Wall Street got their knuckles rapped hard by reality today.

I heard something on the radio today:  Responsibility Requires Risk.  When you take the risk out of any economic endeavor, you take the responsibility out, too.  Without risk, you can behave irresponsibly and get away with it.  Of course, risk is always there--it's just that some folks are better at shifting the risk to Somebody Else than other people.  These people tend to be a) very wealthy and b) very corrupt.  Most of them are politicians, including, today, most of the members of Congress.

Think of that the next time you want the Government to come swooping in to solve a "market failure."

(Still not "politics."   I didn't name any candidates.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it!)

We need a new "New Deal"

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FDR's New Deal is running out of gas.  FNMA ("Fannie Mae") and "Freddie Mac" have already gone under.  Social Security isn't far behind.  And, LBJ's "Great Society" Medicare program is running on financial fumes, too.

It's past time to re-think the massive, authoritarian-era (1930's) government intervention into massive swaths of the economy.  We know more now.  We know better--or at least we should.

(Yeah, I know I said "no politics" but this isn't really politics.  It's economics--and human nature.  You give people power, they WILL abuse it--no matter where, how, or when.  That was the brilliance of our Founding Fathers.  I'm not sure that either side--Republicans or Democrats--really understand that.)

Turning off the politics spigot

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OK, it's time.  If you've been reading Medary.com you've got a pretty good idea what I think about the Presidential election and politics in general.  The entire world will be consumed by the U.S. elections.  Since I'm at heart a contrarian, if everybody goes that way, I am going to go the other way, just to see what's there.

So, I'm going to turn off the politics spigot, now.  You all go out there and play nice for the next couple of months, OK?  No teasing, no taunting.  (Who the hell am I kidding?)

Anyway, here at Medary.com, we're turning to travel, food, fun, and of course simians for the next couple of months . . . at least until after Election Day.

Hang on folks, we're goin' on a ROAD TRIP!!!

Political snark

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On the heels of the wildly offensive "Jesus was a community organizer, Pilate was a governor" quip, via Instapundit, a couple of retorts:

Hitler was a community organizer, FDR was a governor, and
Pontius Pilate was the guy who voted "present"
Careful with those stones, those walls look pretty transparent . . .

Another Democrat bids his old party farewell

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Gerard Vanderleun, writing at the American Digest:
No matter the good it once did, the Democrats today present as sick and crazed political party that is so greedy and hungry for power that it will do anything, including selling its country down the drain, to get it back.

Regardless of the race of the Democrats' selected nominee, Martin Luther King's dream of judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin has been transformed into a tawdry thing; a dried husk in which they wrap their skeletal remains, a hollow phrase spewed by the ascendent race hustlers of the party and lapped up by their acolytes.

Until 2004, with the exception of Guiliani's second term as mayor, I voted the Democrat ticket in every election since 1967. In 2004, offered the Insane Clown Posse of John Kerry and John Edwards, I voted for George Bush. The spectacle of the last four years of various Democrats reaching for the gold ring did not inspire me to change my view. Only the dead enjoy parties in a crypt. Not even Roman columns improve the Charnal house atmosphere that fumes through the party today.

From the party that gave us FDR, Truman, JFK and even, yes, LBJ, the Democrats have gone through a process of gradual but inexorable devolution to the party of such weak, tepid and compromised souls as Carter, Clinton, Kerry, and now Obama - the ultimate bargainer, the race hustler with an Ivy League sheepskin. But these chestless men the Party puts up are only the shadows cast by the compromises it has made within itself. It has made many compromises over the years, taken in many "causes" each one more dubious and rotten than the last.

As a result of this unremitting ideological promiscuity, the "progressive" party has become progressively more diseased from each submissive encounter. The gangrene that has rotted the body of the party has transformed it into some transnational Dorian Gray. Strutting and noble and handsome when preening before the cameras and the crowds, but putrid and pestilential when you see it as it is in the dull light of its polluted "new morning."

Politics is a profession founded on and fueled by hypocrisy. This we all know. But, at the same time, we also need a politics that somewhere within it has a shred of uncompromised decency, the understanding of honor, and more than a little courage. None of these qualities exists in the Democratic Party today.


Most illuminating are the comments--erudite and sad, but agreeing with Vanderleun.

Contrary to what regular readers here may think I think about this, the abandonment of the Democratic Party by its saner members is probably not a good thing, long term, for the country.  But at some point an institution gets too corrupt to redeem, I suppose.