Tucker Carlson doesn’t like being called a Hitler sympathizer for showing some skepticism about neoconservative plans to engage with bad guys everywhere while demonizing Russia. Make no bones about it!
http://youtu.be/rpJZh92hsaY
The humorists over at Reason TV look at bad foreign and domestic policy without jesting using the argumentum ad Hitlerum. They go all the way to referencing House Lannister! (NSFW)
On July 15, 1976, Jimmy Carter accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party to run for the presidency.
Three years later, as president, he gave his infamous “malaise” speech, in which he focused on energy but did not mention the one thing that actually helped turn the ’70s’ energy crisis around: the phased deregulation of oil prices that had started three months earlier, under his own directive. Instead of touting this deregulatory effort, Carter did the usual politic thing and promised a number of new government programs, extensively ground home a “crisis of confidence” message, and vaguely talked of a spiritual challenge.
The deregulation was startlingly effective, in the long run — though the immediate effect was a rocketing of prices. These high prices presented profit opportunities, and (lo and behold!) domestic production greatly increased, allowing for many, many years of lower prices. Those high prices would have worked better as market signals had not Carter and Congress also established “windfall profits” taxes, to take away those temporary gains to existing business.
Had Carter deregulated prices earlier, he would probably have been re-elected president. Had he emphasized deregulation, he probably would have beat back Ronald Reagan’s free market rhetoric — with actual action.
The price controls had been put in place earlier in the decade by the Republican president at the time, Richard M. Nixon, with the great help of his aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
“Anything whatever can be made ridiculous; to see this side of it, and nothing more, is to become the mere jester, whose claim to be regarded as the ideal moralist is certainly very slight. But between a too solemn sense of high importance, and that conviction of the intrinsic smallness of everything in particular which some of our satirists have displayed, there is a middle ground.”
Arthur Kenyon Rogers, The Theory of Ethics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922).
On July 14, 1789, Paris citizens stormed the Bastille. On the same date nine years later, in America, the Sedition Act prohibited the writing, publishing, or speaking false or malicious statements about the United States government.
The passage of this repressive law spurred the formation of the first opposition party in the United States, with Thomas Jefferson [above] as its leader and figurehead.
Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate; now what’s going to happen to us with both a Senate and a House?
“There is no real paradox in the claim that satisfaction is open only to the man who stands prepared to give up pleasures. This only means, again, that satisfaction as a human goal is not an abstract ideal of limitless good, but presupposes a determinate human nature set to work out its destiny in determinate surroundings. That at which a sensible, human being aims is no unimaginable state of the intensest possible pleasure unaccompanied by pain, but the realization that he is making the very most of life that it is possible for him, with his particular interests and limitations, to make, considering the means at his disposal. If one is not willing to accept these qualifications, he is not yet prepared to set out intelligently to secure satisfaction.”
Arthur Kenyon Rogers, The Theory of Ethics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922).
On July 13, 1973, the minority (Republican) counsel on the Senate Watergate investigative committee, Donald Sanders, asked Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield if he knew of any recordings made in the Nixon White House, and Butterfield responded, “everything was taped” at least while Nixon was in attendance, and that “there was not so much as a hint that something should not be taped.”
This revelation of the Nixon Tapes transformed the Watergate scandal into a major legal as well as political event, and proved to be one of the most astounding examples of “government transparency” in modern times — indeed, it helped demystify and desanctify the Office of the Presidency, a very republican (if not pro-Republican Party) development.
On July 12, 1817, American poet, abolitionist, businessman, and Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau was born. He is perhaps best known, today, for his book of meditations on the simple life, Walden, and his influential essay on civil disobedience.
This birthday marks the Thoreauvian Bicentennial. The occasion is especially important to environmentalists and libertarians, both of which Thoreau was.
Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.
I am persuaded that the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only be examined to be understood and asserted.