26/11: Small Towns

Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
Paul Gregory Alms, a Lutheran minister in Catawba, North Carolina (population 700) has a wonderful post on small towns over at the First Things blog:

Excerpts:

In many ways, they are exactly like the rest of America. People in them watch CNN and Fox news. They have cable and satellite television and high-speed Internet connections. Kids play the same video games and wear the same fashions. But there is one distinctiveness here, and a single word captures much of it: connectedness. To live in a small town is to be connected, and not electronically or digitally. Rather it means to be connected to people in the flesh, to actual places, to land and buildings, to a common past.

....

People are often born, grow up, marry, raise a family, work, retire, and die all within the same few miles or even acres. Birth, childhood, family, place, memory, and death are all tied tightly together. These few acres or miles are a part of daily experience. You drive by the place where you grew up every day. It is the same with the place where you went to school or played baseball or where your granddaddy used to work. The past is not past in a small town. The past is experienced viscerally and concretely every day. It is a part of today as surely as the ground upon which one walks.

...

Land and family inevitably bring one in contact with the past. The past lives here in ways that are inconceivable elsewhere. To go to the grocery store is to potentially encounter your entire past life and even ancestry: your grandmother, your first grade teacher, your girlfriend from high school, your cousin, your boss from years ago. When one lives in the place where one was raised and when that place is small and self contained, the past is its own character in the drama of life. Memories are resurrected often and in many ways. The memories are also associated with place: a childhood accident there, your grandfather’s farm there, a marriage proposal there. All of it is just around the bend. People in small towns do not escape the past by moving to some other place. They confront it daily. They inhabit it.
Category: General
Posted by: an okie gardener
Tonight the wife and I saw An American Carol in a theater in Lawton, Oklahoma. Just four of us in the multiplex room for the 5:30 showing. Too bad.

The film is humorous throughout, and laugh-out-loud funny in spots. I won't summarize the plot, since I assume you've seen the trailers, or at least have seen or read A Christmas Carol. This movie resembles director David Zucker's other works--Airplane, Naked Gun, Scary Movie--with verbal gags and sight gags. Kevin Farley carries the movie reasonably well as Michael Malone (Michael Moore) and Kelsey Grammer get the most screen time of the ghosts as General Patton. I think the most effective work is done by Jon Voight as the ghost of George Washington. Every sacred cow of liberalism gets gored.

At its core, the movie portrays two antithetical world-views. On one side, those who believe that other peoples, nations and their leaders are basically decent, and only would attack us if we provoked them. Since Islamic terrorists are attacking us, we must have done something to provoke them. If we only could change our nation into a pacifist, socialist utopia, and then sit down and talk with our attackers, everything would be well. On the other side, those who believe that some other peoples, nations and their leaders are evil, and mean us harm for reasons that will not change even if we apologize to them for existing.

If you are in the latter category, you'll enjoy the movie.
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
Everyone knows the old saw "Success has many fathers, but Failure is an orphan." How does McCain explain this?
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
Why aren't more people talking about this?
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
"Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits."

Remember this?

UPDATE: Watch Video Here
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
From Patrick Deneen:

“My friends, during the primaries I insisted that I would rather lose an election than lose a war. I was honored to receive my party's nomination, and have had the honor to represent my party during this election season. However, with the coming of this economic crisis that threatens to undermine the American economic system, it is time to put aside partisan bickering and to offer some straight talk. And, given that this threat is as grave to our country as a military conflict, I want to state that I am willing to lose the election if it means that straight talk will help defeat this threat to our national well-being.

“Congress and the administration have reached the outlines of an agreement that would restore confidence to our financial system and allow it again to provide essential loans necessary for the functioning of our economy. But make no mistake about it, my friends — this agreement is only a temporary solution, one that will require oversight and accountability. I make it my solemn oath that this short term solution will not become yet another permanent government entitlement program. Like the Surge, it is a temporary measure — needed to restore confidence in our financial system and prevent a collapse of our economy; when its work is done, I will be vigilant that our government stands down and returns the essential workings of the economy to the private sector. In this, I believe that I will be more vigilant in preventing further permanent expansion of our federal government than my opponent, who believes that every problem can be solved by yet another permanent government program.

“However, as part of that vigilance, I will also seek to prevent this sort of crisis from ever happening again. Many people in our nation have made bad choices and share the blame over the past several months and even years leading up to this crisis. Many on Wall Street acted with greed and lack of restraint. Our regulators have not exercised their proper authority and watchfulness. Lenders were unscrupulous and speculators sought to make a quick dollar at the expense of ordinary citizens. Under my administration, this will cease.

“However, we must also be willing to consider our own participation in this crisis. We have become a nation of debtors and spenders, and no nation — no republic — has long persisted where appetite replaces self-governance. My friends, when our nation called me to serve as a young man, I did not hesitate to heed that call, and I bear the scars and, yes, the medals of one who sacrificed much for his nation. Today we need a renewal of a spirit of devotion to a cause greater than ourselves — a devotion to the health of our nation, vitality that is built on the bedrock of the decencies and virtues of our citizens.

“For the past several decades leaders of both parties have watched, and even encouraged, rising levels of debt and consumption in both the public and the private spheres. We have wagered our future by allowing foreign powers to hold most of our national debt, and we have indirectly supported people who seek our destruction when we fill our gas tanks. We have ceased to encourage and support many of the virtues of frugality and responsibility that a citizenry needs to embody for its nation to flourish, and have mortgaged the future sometimes for fleeting pleasures. I promise to you today, my fellow Americans, that I if I have the honor and privilege of serving as your next President, I will make it my foremost task to endeavor to restore the esteemed place of these virtues of self-sacrifice and commitment to a greater good than ourselves by means of example, encouragement, and, yes, legislation that will reward savings and not spending, conservation and not waste, and a promise to future generations to leave the our nation at least as good if not better than we found it.”

Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
From The DrudgeReport:

David Letterman tells audience that McCain called him today to tell him he had to rush back to DC to deal with the economy.

Then in the middle of the taping Dave got word that McCain was, in fact just down the street being interviewed by Katie Couric. Dave even cut over to the live video of the interview, and said, "Hey Senator, can I give you a ride home?"

Earlier in the show, Dave kept saying, "You don't suspend your campaign. This doesn't smell right. This isn't the way a tested hero behaves." And he joked: "I think someone's putting something in his metamucil."

"He can't run the campaign because the economy is cratering? Fine, put in your second string quarterback, Sara Palin. Where is she?"

"What are you going to do if you're elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We've got a guy like that now!"

UPDATE Video available here.
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
"On Nov. 5, the presidential election winds up in a electoral-college tie, 269-269, the Democrat-controlled House picks Sen. Barack Obama as president, but the Senate, with former Democrat Joe Lieberman voting with Republicans, deadlocks at 50-50, so Vice President Dick Cheney steps in to break the tie to make Republican Sarah Palin his successor."

Here.

23/09: My Two Cents

Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
Spengler asks: "Why should American taxpayers give US Treasury Secretary "Hank" Paulson a blank check to bail out the shareholders of busted banks? Why should the Treasury turn itself into a toxic waste dump for their bad loans?"

For what it's worth, I think the latest Democratic mantra, "Don't send a blank check to Washington" is absolutely brilliant and captures the sentiments of most Americans. Here was a real opportunity for McCain to go toe-to-toe with the Administration, in weeks just before the election, both tapping into populist sentiment while defending conservative economic principles. He blew it. McCain has simply allowed himself to be out maneuvered on this one. Instead, McCain's move has been to rail against bailouts both before and after they happen, but support them in the moment -- bizarre. He was against the AIG bailout the day before he approved it. Most Americans are freaked out by this bailout giving Paulson unfettered authority and allowing companies to give massive payouts of taxpayer money to their CEOs.

But maybe you disagree?
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
Dennis Prager, one of my favorite Americans, nails it on the head. The real danger for Obama is that this quickly spreading "voters-are-racists" attitude is seen for what it is by uncommitted Democrats and independents. Obama is smart enough to know this, so he tries to avoid it, but he can't control his "well-meaning friends" in the media and academia.

Amazing, isn't it? Those intelligent, well-educated, and highly ambitious leftists have never figured out that if you insult the voters as racist, they just might vote against you! Their ignorance is bliss.