South Carolina, it appears, is going to “outlaw” Obamacare.  To “nullify” it, if you will.

I wonder if that’s ever happened before?  Did it work out ok?

I bet it worked out ok.

[Confidential to Robert Mitchell Jr.:  Here's your chance, buddy.  You keep talking up the power of state governments to prevent our slide into fascism.  The Ace of Spades guys think this will cause the great state of South Carolina to sue the feds over Obamacare, at which point the Supreme Court will rule it unconstitutional.  Now, as they point out, this will take some time to resolve... but as I don't think they can get the re-education camps up and running for another year or so, how about a gentleman's wager?]

I watch sports to get away from the real world in general, and politics in particular.  I believe most people feel the same way.

Which is why ESPN’s “Tuesday Morning Quarterback,” Gregg Easterbrook, grates on my every nerve.  Guys like him are one of the reasons “apolitical,” “independent,” and “low-information” all mean “Democrat” in today’s political discourse.

For instance, from today’s column:

The more is known about DNA, the more race appears to be a social construct: that black and white people are no more different than blondes and brunettes.

This is not even remotely true.  The more we know about DNA, the more racial differences appear both real and intractable.  See pretty much any of the main Dark Enlightenment sites.  Unlike Easterbrook, they are scientifically literate, and back up their assertions with links to credible evidence.  The book TMQ gushes over, however, is “A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America, by Jacqueline Jones, a highly regarded University of Texas historian.”  Let’s google her CV, shall we?

Yep: MacArthur grant,

Taft Prize in Labor History; Spruill Prize in Southern Women’s History; Brown Publication Prize in Black Women’s History; Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer; plus research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council.

In other words, she’s won all the Liberal Prizes for Distinguished Contributions to Leftism.  Her other books include such highly scientific tomes as Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to The Present, The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present, and Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873.  Let’s face it, gang: If the Brown Publication Prize n Black Women’s History doesn’t qualify you to dissect the mysteries of the human genome, nothing does.

From last week’s column:

The scientific consensus on artificial global warming is now strong. Probably climate change is not causing hurricanes (this year’s season was quiet), typhoons or tornados. But slow-moving sea-level rise, and threats to agriculture, seem disturbingly real.

Except that, like the hurricanes, typhoons, and tornadoes, none of that other stuff is happening either.  And would that be the same “scientific consensus” that is now struggling so mightily (and hilariously) to explain fifteen years of “pause” in “global warming”?  Or is it the one that’s freaking out about the upcoming global cooling?  It’s so hard to keep all these scientific consensuses straight, even without the rock solid peer review process.

From his November 12 column:

Only a government-protected monopoly can behave in this manner. The USPS should lose its monopoly, and learn to compete. Companies that compete make their boxes fit their slots, and don’t drive away from business.

Thanks to the yeoman efforts of loyal reader Gary, I won’t claim this is more proof that cognitive dissonance is bullshit (besides, I already did).  But I will point out that bitching about the cavalier disregard of logic, economics, and customer service characteristic of government monopolies is the kind of situation where a huge ObamaCare fanboi like Easterbrook should at least theoretically feel some discomfort in his frontal lobes.  But he doesn’t, because he writes stupid shit like this in every single column.

And the list goes on and on.  Liberals gonna be liberals, yo — injecting their drearily dogmatic politics into everyfuckinthing is the only way to make their souls feel less hollow.  Not even football is safe from the relentless drumbeat of partisan stupidity.

Hundreds of federal scientists said in a survey that they had been asked to exclude or alter technical information in government documents for non-scientific reasons, and thousands said they had been prevented from responding to the media or the public.

The deuce you say. But don’t worry — the evidence for Global Warming is rock solid.  No politics there, thank God.

Wrapped in a pretty decent rant about sci-fi.

Leftists will trace their roots back to Marx or to the left hand seats of the French Assembly during and before the time of the French Revolution, but the transformative and utopian spirit reaches back to Cromwell and the Puritans. The Puritans in their early days were the arrogant intellectual elite precisely like our current ones, and it was bishops, not beer, to which they objected.

Michael Walzer nailed this back in the Sixties, but, as you can see from the book’s Amazon page, it has not really been appreciated much, then or since.  Hell, Norman Cohn nailed it in the Fifties:

The first thing the Left (the Enlightened, the Saints, the Good Men, the perfecti) does is to exempt itself from the rules it relentlessly, ruthlessly, bloodthirstily applies to everyone else.  Heaven on earth can be achieved if only <i>you</i> do what <i>I</i> say.  Recalcitrants will be shot for the greater good.

(via Vox Day).

Jesus Christ on a rocket-powered pogo stick, I am So. Fucking. Tired.  of JFK hagiography.

Of all the things that bother me about liberals, I think this is the top — the way they’re not just ignorant, but wallow in their ignorance.  Look, knuckleheads:  The “Camelot” guy you’ve got in your heads, the one who was the Liberal Messiah before our current pharaoh?  He has pretty much zero resemblance to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the US.  That guy was a pro-business, anti-communist hawk who cut taxes and believed in robust defense.  He dialed up two neo-imperial invasions of sovereign nations.  He ordered the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem.  Hell, he even lied about WMDs — the “missile gap” he rode to electoral victory was bullshit, and he knew it.

Basically he was George W. Bush with a better haircut and a worse drug habit.

If anyone ran on JFK’s platform today, the same people who are weeping about “Camelot” would be screeching about extremist right wing warmongers.  So please: shut the fuck up, read a fucking book, and then shut the fuck up again for good measure.

Thanks.

So Algore owns beachfront property, does he?  Via Ace:

Ok, so Ted Danson owns in Martha’s Vineyard, noted environmental activist Laurie David does too, and then Al Gore is known to have purchased a coastal palazzo in Montecito, CA. What this tells us is that even global warming’s most famous advocates don’t believe very deeply in their own activism. To believe the warmists we’re sitting idle as Rome supposedly burns, but as evidenced by the popularity of coastal property among warmists and non-warmists alike, the market says the ‘science’ predicting catastrophe is utter nonsense.

Indeed.  I guess Al wanted a front row seat for the rising oceans that will destroy us all.

If you’re a Weimar watcher, this whole ObamaCare fiasco has been a delight for the ages.  Even the mega-liberal National Journal is gaming out repeal scenarios (link to Ace of Spades).  Drew M. comments:

Obama could and would veto any repeal bill but as th piece points out, 62.4% of the House voted for Upton last week and that’s a stones throw for the 2/3 needed to override a veto.

Which is nice, but pointless, of course.  The pooch has already been well and truly screwed.  Those millions of dropped plans aren’t going to get un-canceled, no matter what His Majesty “permits” insurers to temporarily do.  And not just because it’s illegal (though, of course, it is).  Actuarial science doesn’t work like that — the costs have already been calculated, the risks assumed.  And this says nothing of the already-once-delayed employer mandate — jobs that are now unfilled thanks to ObamaCare uncertainty will go unfilled for as long as this nonsense continues… and that, too, is a sunk cost, with continuing economic ramifications in the here-and-now.  And even if the “law” were to be “repealed” tomorrow, what would replace it?  Millions would still be without health insurance, and employers still wouldn’t hire anybody.

All of which will push the clamor to “just do something, anything!” into the stratosphere.  It’s already happening (do you really think President Bush could’ve gotten away with “allowing” a business to disregard part of a duly-passed law?).  Pretty soon it won’t be just the Tom Friedman types longing for Chinese-style authoritarianism.  The first telegenic granny who dies from 404Care.gov will get a law named after her, at which point you can kiss the last remaining shreds of the Constitution goodbye.

Fascism happens when the democratic process fails.  The colossal ObamaCare fuckup — which is even worse than I could’ve imagined — has made the obvious failure of the democratic process pretty much inevitable.  Which way the “fix” goes will show us the shape of the totalitarianism to come, but the quasi-nationalization of healthcare is a foregone conclusion.

Personally, I’m hoping Chris Christie comes out the winner.  Sergeant Schultz was usually pretty funny.

ESPN.com’s Gregg Easterbrook writes a “football” column that is mostly mash notes to Barack Obama.  But it does provide some golden unintentional comedy.  Like this little snipe at the US Postal Service for their poor service:

Only a government-protected monopoly can behave in this manner. The USPS should lose its monopoly, and learn to compete. Companies that compete make their boxes fit their slots, and don’t drive away from business.

He is, of course, a big fan of ObamaCare.  Go figure.