"The house we hope to build is not for my generation but for yours. It is your future that matters. And I hope that when you are my age, you will be able to say as I have been able to say: We lived in freedom. We lived lives that were a statement, not an apology."


Monday, August 22, 2011

Qadaffi's Impending Fall

If Qadaffi and his regime are indeed about to collapse, we will be exchanging a bastard we know for bastards we don't. It is dubious whether Libya can do worse, but it is uncertain (at best) whether they can do much better.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

RE: ‘Corporations are People’

Mitt Romney arguing as he did that "corporations are people too" is as true as it is politically tone-deaf. The best argument against over-taxation of corporate America is not a kind of sympathetic declaration you'd expect to hear from Barney the Dinosaur – I seriously doubt "corporations are people too" will make the hearts of that many Americans bleed.

This is a bread-and-butter issue and should be presented as such. The dispositive argument is that whatever taxes you levy on corporations, they are not the ones that will ultimately pay them: individual Americans will. A greater tax burden will cause businesses to cover that cost by passing it on to the consumer in the prices they charge for their goods and services. Higher corporate taxes mean one thing and one thing only: higher prices on American consumers. Taxing corporate American only hurts Middle-America.

If Governor Romney wants to marshal public opinion against taxing corporations more than we do already (as he should), he should make this simple point, emphasizing that taxing corporate America more only makes corporate America the federal government's tax collector.

35 Yard-line Abomination

The most obnoxious aspect of the NFL's decision to move kickoffs from the thirty to the thirty-five yard-line is that, not only is it logically conflicting, but it fails to reach the natural conclusion of that logic.

The Competition Committee enacted this alteration to "improve" player safety. By moving the kicker five yards closer to the opponent's endzone, scintillating touchbacks will increase exponentially. Fewer kickoff returns means fewer returners being targeted for annihilation by coverage teams, who are usually comprised of back-end-of-the-roster types looking to earn their way up the depth chart through dogged pursuit and earth-shaking hits.

Setting aside the issue of whether the reduced risk of injury is worth drastically detracting from the game of football, this move fails to realize its own logic. If you are going to enact a rule that aims to take away kick returns why not do just that and take away kick returns? As it stands now, kickoffs will be pointless plays that will achieve nothing but an inevitable result: the offense starting their drive from the twenty. It's a charade that allows the Shield to continue its obnoxious practice of commercial break, followed by kickoff, followed by commercial break.

This failure to reach a logical endpoint only ends up confounding all logic -- indeed human reason altogether. By removing kickoff returns without removing kickoffs, the coverage team will be made to run down the field for a full-speed collision with the blocking team for no reason.

That's right: a "player safety" rule is going to make players run into other players – an obvious injury risk – only to watch the returner take a knee six or seven yards deep in the endzone. So concerned is the NFL with the physical well-being of its players that it is now asking them to risk injury for no reason whatsoever.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Roger Goddell's NFL.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Iowa

It is a curious system whereby the one who would be president of the United States must first campaign to be the mayor of Des Moines.

Unemployment

Liberals preoccupation with extending and extending unemployment is really the least they can do -- the only consolation they can offer to the millions of Americans out of work and unable to find any. It is, after all, their prescribed policies of spending, taxing and regulating that has preserved the current economic climate of stagnant growth and job creation.

Any plausible standard of decency dictates that a federal government that prevents the citizens it serves from finding work must make some kind of restitution.

Of course, to make that restitution it must take from the pockets of those with jobs...

What -- and with what -- restitution is to be made to them?