UPDATED: Yes, Bachmann’s Brainy

Elections, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Journalism, Media

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann has all the brain power poor Sarah Palin is without. Chris Matthews says she looks like she’s dazed, hypnotized, irrational. I think this is because to Matthews, a fully engaged female is someone like Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida), who talks up a storm in promoting Obama’s statist schemes. Simpletons perceive a fulminating statism as “good,” “caring,” and certainly “smart.”

Bachmann is in the news for a change as she is “mulling a presidential bid.” As you know, I do quite like this woman. She is quick and cannot be rattled.

Very little has been said in the muck-raking media about Bachmann’s background. You can just imagine what publicity Wasserman Schultz (of the double-barreled, affectatious surname) would receive had she provided foster care for 23 children in addition to raising five of her own.

Most women lawyers, moreover, do not go into tax law; family law is more like it. Michelle has a Master of Laws in tax law from the William & Mary Law School. Now let’s not go off on a tangent about the evils of tax law and its enforcement. We’re agreed; The Sixteenth is the Number of the Beast (and Bachmann is forever tainted for having enforced the law). The point made here is that tax law is quite a bit more cerebrally taxing than immigration or family law. Not that you’d know it from the manner in which she is portrayed, but Bachmann is clearly very clever.

Indeed, from the media scrum one hears very little about Michelle Bachmann’s undeniable intellectual aptitude, as they hate her with a purple passion.

In any event, it is this rational, steely quality that drives Chris Matthews crazy. After all, he is the emotional wreck who regularly experiences daytime nocturnal emissions over Obama and genuinely believes that the president is an intellectual of the highest order.

UPDATE (Jan. 6): According to her foes over at Hardball, “Michele Bachmann (R-MN) introduced the first bill of the 112th Congress today, and she’s landed a prime spot on the Intelligence Committee.” Somewhat vapidly, the WSJ characterizes Bachmann’s challenge to the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul as “an interesting strategy to gain more attention.”

Could it be that the financial bill, in all its 2,300 pristine, unread pages and the 500 odd new regulations it imposed simply needs to go? Bachmann has been consistent in her vehement opposition to a bill that will “further increase in the overweening powers of the Executive branch, which will now be able to seize a firm it designates as systemically risky.”

Et tu, Boehner?

America, Elections, English, Founding Fathers, Multiculturalism, Political Philosophy, Republicans

Did I just hear John Boehner say that America was an idea more than a country? The representative from Ohio took the gavel, today, Wednesday, becoming the 61st speaker of the House of Representatives. Toward the end of his address, Boehner repeated the preposterous notion of America as a propositional nation.

The call to think about the US as an idea—rather than real flesh-and-blood communities animated by shared language, history and heroes—is the call of statism at its purist. For a rootless deracinated people are the most pliable, most miserable, and, thus, easier to control.

Faith in the propositional nation presupposes endless immigration. For, after all, this country is presumed to have had no particular requisite characteristics at its founding. And if early Americans had certain characteristics, these are taken to have played no role in the system of individual liberties America’s apparently amorphous founders established.

It’s Party Time For … Tea Partiers

Elections, Ethics, Morality, Politics, Republicans

Picture “a swanky Washington hotel,” a pulsating techno beat filling the barroom lobby, and country singer LeAnn Rimes for the main event, which is packed with lobbyists and costs $2,500 to enter. Drum roll. You’ve arrived at the fancy fundraiser for the 2011 freshman class of Republicans.

VIA THE LOS ANGELES TIMES:

“The new class of Republican lawmakers who charged into office promising to shun the ways of Washington officially arrives on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. ?But even as they publicly bash the capital’s culture, many have quietly begun to embrace it.

“Several freshmen have hired lobbyists — the ultimate Washington insiders — to lead their congressional staffs. In the weeks leading up to Wednesday’s swearing-in, dozens of the newcomers joined other lawmakers in turning to lobbyists for campaign cash. And on Wednesday, congressional offices will be packed with lawmakers’ relatives, friends, constituents and lobbyists, all invited to celebrate the new Congress.”

“This picture of business-as-usual Washington clashes with the campaign rhetoric of many newcomers, some who were propelled by support from the anti-Washington ‘tea party’ movement. It also muddles the image House Republicans hoped to project as they took the helm this week.”

Think of yourself as their servant, your nose pressed against your master’s mansion windows.

“The Great American Waiver Act”

Government, Healthcare, Regulation, Republicans, Socialism, The State

With a title such as “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act,” you’d think the House Republicans’ plan to kill HealthScare would find its way onto the front pages of the parrot press. Alas, unless the migraine I’ve suffered for the past two days has interfered with my vision, I saw no exclusive report on the bill over the website pages of the New York Times, TIME magazine, Newsweek, Orange County Register, or the Los Angeles Times.

Luckily, there is Michelle Malkin, who covers the news exceptionally well.

Befitting a Republican political ploy is how the Obama houseboys of Hardball saw this simple Bill and its title.

From the hulking horror itself I had originally excerpted here, so that you could get a feel for the impenetrable legalese the Managerial State has evolved over time to ensure the people have not the faintest notion what’s upon them.

If the H.R.4872 Reconciliation Act of 2010 was not cause for revolution, I don’t know what is. It has thousands of sections. Green provisions, early learning fund, promotion of employment experience, translation or interpretation services, whistle blower provisions—all sub-chapters in what is a violative bill by every conceivable criterion.

The two pages endeavoring “to repeal the job-killing health care law and health care-related provisions in the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010” are indeed too sweet and simple to be true. Not in Washington.