Secular Sharia

Some of the dumbest people I know are atheists. If you really want to waste some time, try convincing one that their atheism is just as much an article of faith as anything a deist ever came up with. If you doubt that this is true of atheism, try proving that gods *don't* exist.

Of course deists have the same problem proving that gods *do* exist. But at least they admit that they have faith.

And at least religious people are usually humble. Not so the atheists. And few are quite as aggressive at trying to impose their views by law, all while denying that they have any faith at all.

Captain Ed has more to say here.

In closing, this agnostic wishes one and all a happy Easter. While the law still permits it...

She learned from the master

Don Surber catches Hillary Clinton with a real whopper:

“What has historically happened is that there has to be some negotiation and compromise. We may not get it, but I’m not ready to concede that. I saw a lot of what happened when my husband had a Republican Congress. We would stake out one position, they would stake out one position. And then people would begin to try to figure out how to narrow the difference. That’s what should be happening here.”

Then again, we have to consider that to the Dems, compromise means "do it my way".
True compromise might be what should be happening, but it wasn't exactly the Clinton modus operandi. Mr. Surber offers what may be the best example - the budget showdown in 1995:

WASHINGTON - President Clinton and his Republican antagonists are blaming each other for a pre-holiday federal shutdown, forced by yet another deadlock over the two sides’ budget-balancing priorities.Nine Cabinet departments and scores of other agencies technically ran out of money at midnight yesterday, hours after budget talks between the White House and congressional Republicans broke off in bitterness.

This quote is fairly evenhanded, but the coverage in general wasn't. Never mind the fact that the order to shut down Federal functions came from Clinton's staff, reflecting Clinton's explicit choice and initiative - the whole thing was presented by the press as if the govt shutdown were a calamity and Republicans were solely responsible for it.

So maybe the Republicans shouldn't have done things as they did? Well, a few years earlier a budget deadlock occurred between a Democratic Congress and then-President Ronald Reagan. Reagan could have shut down the govt but he didn't. I don't know what the Republicans were thinking, but in retrospect it sounds crazy to expect Bill Clinton to behave like his superior.

Sometime in that period Rush Limbaugh had a TV show. He had no end of fun showing montages of video clips of Bill Clinton speaking of balancing the budget in N years, where N was usually in the range of 5 to 11 years. Too bad we didn't have YouTube or Tivo back then.

Anyway, it's not as if balancing the budget had never been on Clinton's publicly stated agenda. But being the lying sack that he was and is, when time came to deliver he not only wouldn't but he shut down the govt over it. And being the infinitely brassy SOB that he was and is, he claimed credit for budget surpluses when they occurred a few years later under the Republican Congress despite his best efforts.

And all of this was done in front of and perhaps even per the advice or even the direction of Hillary Rodham Clinton. So excuse me if I doubt her integrity, truthfulness and general worthiness to serve in any political capacity whatsoever.