[Guest post by Aaron Worthing]

I already showed how the term “undocumented” to refer to illegal aliens distorts the debate.  Now Maryland’s governor Martin O’Malley gives us a new euphemism: New Americans.

And I love his final position on immigration reform.  Let me paraphrase it: “it is my belief that someone else needs to handle this.”  Well, fair enough, that the feds do need to step up, but what do you do in the meantime?

Oh, and dig the moonbattery in the middle.  I half expected him to say, “Bush lied, soldiers died!

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing]

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing]

Now first, I have to say that “Whoregate” itself—that is the “scandal” in which one of Jerry Brown’s staffers was caught in a recording calling Meg Whitman a whore—never really upset me.  I thought it was a tempest in a tea pot.

But the extended reaction to it, however, is at least interesting viewing.  Previously California Attorney General Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown demonstrated that he doesn’t know much about the statutes he himself enforces.  But for true comedy you can’t beat the National Organization for Women, or NOW, the alleged vanguard of the feminist movement.

I mean just follow this post at the Sacremento Bee’s blog.  First, in the original, un-updated post, we have this statement from Terry O’Neill, President of NOW:

“While our California chapter’s Political Action Committee voted to endorse Brown on the basis of his support for women’s rights, the National Organization for Women clearly and unequivocally condemns calling Meg Whitman, or any woman, a whore,” O’Neill said. “This term is hate speech that carries with it negative connotations associated with women, and it has no place in contemporary society.

“NOW calls on Brown to fire any member of his staff who uses this word or any hate speech against women,” O’Neill said.

But then later I guess it occurred to O’Neill that, gee, this might require Brown to fire someone who might be useful to his campaign.  So in an update to the blog post, we get this:

Minutes after we posted our riff on the National Organization for Women prez calling out the Jerry Brown campaign for its use of the word “whore” we received an, ahem, “clarification” from national NOW prez Terry O’Neill on what she said she “should have said” on the matter….

“We are not saying anyone on the Brown campaign be fired,” O’Neill said. “What I should have made clear was that anyone who says the ‘W’ word from here on should be fired. What happened last week was a teachable moment for all of us. We can all agree that the word is offensive and should be retired.”

Teachable moment? Ack, I just puked in my mouth a little.  Can we stop using that phrase, please?

But that makes perfect sense to let that one go.  You know, because no one ever in the history of humanity ever heard it claimed that it was offensive to call a woman a whore before.  Or maybe the idea is that every political campaign gets one free punch?

By the way, on the NOW website, they noted that Alan Grayson (D-vil) “called Linda Robertson, an adviser to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, a ‘K Street whore[.]’”  And guess who they are endorsing in the race between the Devil and Daniel Webster? Yep, Grayson.  So I guess they don’t want him fired, either.

Meanwhile, California’s NOW President told TPM said that “Meg Whitman could be described as ‘a political whore.’ Yes, that’s an accurate statement.”

So I guess her thought is that you can call a woman a whore if you mean she is a political one.  Hey, I think I know how to fill in the blank in the title of this post, now.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

More than half of the jobs created in the last year…  were created in Texas alone.

Yes, really.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 214,000 net new jobs were created in the United States from August 2009 to August 2010. Texas created 119,000 jobs during the same period. If every state in the country had performed as well, we’d have created about 1.5 million jobs nationally during the past year[.]

And the lessons do we get from that?

What does Austin know that Washington doesn’t? At its simplest: Don’t overtax and -spend, keep regulations to a minimum, avoid letting unions and trial lawyers run riot, and display an enormous neon sign saying, “Open for Business.”

The irony in that statement is from what I heard, Austin’s local government doesn’t know that, but the rest of the state does.  Still, you should definitely read the whole thing.

But, gee, it’s almost like as if you beat up businesses enough, that they will flee the jurisdiction.  Imagine that.

But remember, if you think Obama is a job killer, well you are just a racist.  There is no two ways about it.

…is to forget that those they regulate might either flee the jurisdiction or change their behavior so they are no longer under their regulation.  Its really amazing that liberals don’t get it, because conservatives tell them all the time.  All those signs asking “Who’s John Galt?” was our hint and yet this still seems to be missed.

[This is a guest post by Aaron Worthing]

John Galt represents the ultimate version of that ideal, a man who organizes a strike to tear down a collectivist system.  Of course in practice it is more likely to be expressed in people not withdrawing entirely but only partially.  Of industries refusing to deal with high risk areas (see, e.g., here and here).  And of course of businesses never coming into a jurisdiction in the first place, rather than business that is already there fleeing.

A case of this principle in operation is found in  the European Union and its carbon footprint.  For years environmentalists have lamented that we failed to join the Kyoto Protocol (often falsely attributing that failure to George W. Bush, too).  Oh, if only we could have been as enlightened as Europe…

Well, except that they were not so enlightened.  Walter Russell Mead explains that

while the EU’s emission of CO2 declined by 17% between 1990 and 2010, this apparent progress was bogus.  If you add up the CO2 released by the goods and services Europeans consumed, as opposed to the CO2 thrown off by the goods and services they produced, the EU was responsible for 40% more CO2 in 2010 than in 1990. The EU, as the Guardian puts it, has been outsourcing pollution — and jobs — rather than cutting back on greenhouse gasses.

It’s an interesting piece and I suggest you read the whole thing, but in short what they did was they squeezed emissions in the European Union so low, that the producers and the jobs went to other countries.  Meanwhile, in their smug self-satisfaction they more than doubled their carbon footprint.  And bear in mind that unlike America, Europe’s population is in decline.  It should have been easy to keep their emissions level.

And with respect to Patterico, in my mind that is the best argument for laws like Proposition 23 in California.  The basic idea of the law is that most, if not all, of California’s onerous environmental regulations would be repealed until their unemployment reaches 5.5% for a year.  Really, as a general proposition, it is absolutely insane for California to be doing this to itself.  I mean even if you believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming (and I feel there isn’t nearly enough proof of it to justify giving up prosperity or freedom for it), doing it in one state is just insanity.  The factories, the jobs, etc. will just go elsewhere.  It’s as simple as that.

Of course as a Virginian, those jobs might go to my state so… um, please California, vote “no” on Proposition 23 and keep sending us your jobs!  /sarcasm

So if anything a global approach would make the most sense—again, if you bought into this claptrap in the first place.  And no, not one where certain nations are held to one standard, while others are held to another.  Otherwise, you just get a clusterfrak similar to what Mr. Mead just told us about.  But doing it in one state, and one state only, in the middle of an economic downturn, is just insanity.

Also, let me note to commenters that if you are going to discuss the merits of AGW as a theory, please discuss it in Patterico’s original Proposition 23 thread.  It’s not that I am opposed to discussing it, but Patterico is trying to create one big thread where all the information is hashed out in a sort of open source way, and if you have something to say that wasn’t already said there, he would probably appreciate it all in one place.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing]

Thanks to DRJ, we get this clip of Obama denouncing the independent groups that engage in freedom of expression without disclosing their donor lists—as they are entitled to under the law.  Real Clear Politics has a snicker at his reference to Star Wars, but what appalled me was the part where he said that such expression was a “threat to democracy.”

You know there was a time when the Supreme Court said that revealing the names of the members of an organization was harmful to freedom of speech.  But now, the president thinks all that speech is a threat to democracy.  Too much talking, too many people saying things he might not want them to say.  Somehow our democracy is threatened if the wrong people speak.

Hey, why don’t you try this instead, Mr. President?  Refute their arguments. If they are lying, tell us that.  If they are using faulty logic, make the case.  Rather than finding out who the messenger is, so you can kill that messenger, why don’t you just do that?

And don’t get me started on the hypocrisy of all of this (as revealed by Karl).

The right to debate should not be up for debate.

Update: This video from ReasonTv makes a valid point, sarcastically.  This nation was literally founded on anonymous political speech.

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In related news, Justice Alito is not coming to this year’s SOTU/STFU.  Honestly, I think it’s a mistake for any of the justices to attend, for any president.  Last year’s silliness where the president deigned to chide them for what he considered their bad decision only drove that point home.  Hopefully we will set a new tradition and none of them will show up, for any president, ever again.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]