The Patriot Perspective

We have moved to Wordpress!

2011-04-19T14:07:00.002-05:00

Readers,

We have moved the blog to Wordpress as it offers a little more flexibility vs. Blogger.

You can find our new site at www.thepatriotperspective.wordpress.com

No more post will be made to this site as of 4/19/2011.

Thanks for reading!

Why We Need Compromise

2011-04-01T12:45:00.003-05:00

Let's face it, in politics, compromise is inevitable, and it's necessary. Realistically speaking, nothing gets done if we all cling to our silly principles. The world revolves around people working together, and without working together nothing gets done. That's really what we need.

When you take a good idea and compromise with a less good idea, you still get a good idea. This shouldn't be lost on anyone who completed public schooling - that's one thing we can thank the Democrat party for. They did teach us the value of compromise.

Sometimes you just have to accept that things are how they are, and that the best way to deal with them isn't to stand up to things you can't control, but instead to just try and get a bit of compromise.

When looking at candidates for 2012, for example, we should really give people like Huckabee more thought that what we have. He has the ability to compromise, and that reaching across the aisle and being civil and embracing a lot of leftist policies is a good thing. McCain could do the same, and he did well in 2008 by proving that Republicans, and the right as a whole, can indeed compromise. McCain is still well-regarded in DC circles, where he can go and help out less good ideas by inputting his good ideas. He's still trying to support Americans who were unlucky enough to be born outside the country, mostly in Mexico, and without papers get acknowledged as real Americans - but some racists won't compromise and let them in and here to stay because they're racist racists.

Now sure, some people will say "but that doesn't make any sense, a good idea and a bad idea don't equal a good idea", and to them I say, "you're probably a toothless hillbilly redneck racist who should be herded into camps and exterminated and never allowed to breed and pollute the gene pool". That is, unless they're black, in which case they're an Uncle Tom, and if they're another color, who really cares, since they're white on the inside and racist against themselves, and that's why they'd say something stupid like that. There are no bad ideas, only bad people, and if you think like that, you're one of them.

For another example, take deficit spending. That means we overspend and have to borrow to get the money to cover our bills. If government were a regular average blue-collar family, that'd be like mortgaging your house to pay for your trip to Disneyland. Now who would want to take away a trip to Disneyland?

She hates Disneyland.

Now what happens when you use all that money from mortgaging your house?

Easy! You remortgage!

If someone says you can cut your budget, you should cut it from things that can be seen - like defense - to really show you're doing something about cutting costs. It'd be like the family cutting costs on food. When you see there's less on your plate to eat and the kids are hungry, they'll appreciate spending money on Disneyland that much more.

I'm sure those of you who are stupid and hate logic are asking "but hyuck-hyuck, what happens when we runs out of money? How will we buy more NASCAR crap and be able to pay for cable to watch Jersey Shore?"

Well, that's obvious. You remortgage again! Since people insist on things like defense and the other crap that's spelled out in the Constitution that government has to do - see what happens when you don't compromise? You have to spend that money that could otherwise be saved - and be given to homeless people to buy things to stimulate the economy. If we just stopped spending on defense, we'd be fine, and since we'd stop attacking other countries, they'd maybe start to like us again. With the money we saved, we could put all those soldiers to work making houses for poor people.

There's probably one wife-beating cross-burner out there that wants to know "what happens when you run out of remortgaging?" Well that's easy, you racist, then you rely on your community to help you out - since your generosity in taking the neighbor kids to Disneyland will be repaid. Although you should just do those things because your neighbors aren't as well off as you, not because you want something back.

"But how are you well-off if you're debt?" Shut up, you racist. Don't you have an interracial couple to go abuse?

And your neighbors will help you out with your debt because you do so many good things for them. And they also don't want you to go down, since they'll take care of your debt, but they need you around to pay them back.

So things work out well when we try compromise. Everybody gets to go to Disneyland - all you have to do is let the good ideas mix with the less good, and things work out for the best. Even that's kind of judgemental. Remember there are no bad ideas, only different kinds of good idea. So an idea that isn't as good plus an idea that is good equals a really good idea.

Compromise is a good thing.

How the Tea Party Could Lose

2011-03-30T17:06:00.009-05:00

The Tea Party has some problems. Members need to reassess and reengage. Don't retreat, reload. Ignore anyone who calls you a violent racist homophobe - they will say that because you're "the enemy". Remember:

"Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself."

- Saul Alinsky

They're going to say that crap anyway. They're going to accuse, attack, and lie. The left's use of "teabagger" ridicule, attacking the Tea Party as extremist, and generally trying to terrorize those who oppose them is part of their rulebook. Just remember to ignore them - the people on the far left are unlikely to change (unless their own side rejects them).

But on to what's going on:

CNN Poll: Unfavorable view of Tea Party on the rise

(CNN) -- Nearly half of all Americans have an unfavorable view of the Tea Party movement, putting it in the same company as the Democratic and Republican parties, according to a new national poll.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Wednesday indicates that 32% of the public have a favorable view of the two-year-old anti-tax movement, which also calls for less government spending and a more limited role for the federal government in our lives. The 32% favorable rating is down five points from December.

The people questioned for the poll who say they have an unfavorable view of the Tea Party is 47%, up four points from December and an increase of 21 points from January 2010. That number is virtually identical to the 48% unfavorable ratings for both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in the same poll.

"This is the first time that a CNN poll has shown the Tea Party's unfavorable ratings as high as those of the two major parties," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "It looks like the rise in the movement's unfavorable rating has come mostly among people who make less than $50,000."

Why? Because the Tea Party is disorganized to begin with. The Tea Party, by its very nature, is composed of people who are interested in fewer taxes and less government intervention. Tea Party members have jobs to go back to. Those who are on welfare of one form or another are opposed to having their gravy train cut off. The "recipient class", as Sirius/XM radio host Andrew Wilkow refers to them as, will not vote against their own handouts. They aren't going to reject handouts - unless the Tea Party can explain that, to adjust Art Alexakis song lyrics a bit: "The hand that feeds is the hand that holds you down."

That's a lot to digest, so let's look at some parts of it.

Thomas Sowell wrote about one aspect of the hand that feeds is the hand that holds down recently, but with regards to the Republican party and its inability to win with black voters (arguably the best avenue for the Tea Party movement to make inroads into national politics). He notes specifically that Democrat housing policies have driven blacks from the San Francisco area to the point that blacks now represent as little as only 3% of the population in some places there.

Sowell writes:
Between restrictions on development and the destruction of existing low-income housing by redevelopment, low-income and even moderate-income people are forced out by high housing costs.

Often this process takes the form of ethnic cleansing. Blacks, for example, have been driven out of communities up and down the San Francisco peninsula, including East Palo Alto, which was once 61 percent black, and is today only 17 percent black.

But that 17 percent is still the highest proportion of blacks in any community in three whole counties on the San Francisco peninsula. None of the 38 other communities in those three counties has a population that is even 5 percent black.

Sowell also writes:
With all the Republican politicians' laments about how overwhelmingly blacks vote for Democrats, I have yet to hear a Republican politician publicly point out the harm to blacks from such policies of the Democrats as severe housing restrictions, resulting from catering to environmental extremists.

If the Republicans did point out such things as building restrictions that make it hard for most blacks to afford housing, even in places where they once lived, they would have the Democrats at a complete disadvantage.

It would be impossible for the Democrats to deny the facts, not only in coastal California but in similar affluent strongholds of liberal Democrats around the country. Moreover, environmental zealots are such an important part of the Democrats' constituencies that Democratic politicians could not change their policies.

Although Republicans would have a strong case, none of that matters when they don't make the case in the first place. The same is true of the effects of minimum wage laws on the high rate of unemployment among black youths. Again, the facts are undeniable, and the Democrats cannot change their policy, because they are beholden to labor unions that advocate higher minimum wages.

Yet another area in which Democrats are boxed in politically is their making job protection for members of teachers' unions more important than improving education for students in the public schools. No one loses more from this policy than blacks, for many of whom education is their only chance for economic advancement.

But none of this matters so long as Republicans who want the black vote think they have to devise earmarked benefits for blacks, instead of explaining how Republicans' general principles, applied to all Americans, can do more for blacks than the Democrats' welfare state approach.

The Tea Party intrinsically understands these concepts, both in the general in in Sowell's specific, but isn't getting out that message well enough. The leftist modern liberal statist is inherently destructive to the black community. The modern left thrives on it, because it creates dependency, and it creates a "good feeling" for those giving handouts. It also breeds resentment on the part of the black community, which when directed by the poverty pimps (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, etc.), turn into tools for the left to use against the right and conservatives. The "liberal" creates a handout that's viewed as "good", that "helps" people when it really hinders their growth and development (as individuals and as a community), and the inevitable negative results of domestication by the Democrat party is then blamed on the right.

An easy example is minimum wage laws, championed by the left, and destructive to the communities they're intended to help.

The Tea Party needs to explain these things.

On to another problem:

The older Tea Partiers with signs that say "get government out of my social security" on the surface are subject to immediate ridicule (Saul Alinsky's rule again). The problem is that social security isn't explained. For those who think money magically comes from the government, it's a handout. For those who have had a percentage of their wealth taken from them at the point of the IRS's gun for their entire lives, the message means "I paid in to social security for 30 years and they do owe me MY money back, so get government away from the money I paid in that I want back". That's just a bit long for a sign - unfortunately it's necessary - otherwise it's a point lost on everyone, and easily misinterpreted.

Those "recipient class" see it as rank hypocrisy, because to them, money does just come from government. Or Obama's stash.

But what's the Tea Party's biggest problem? It's cliche, but it's the Tea Party's strength. The Tea Party's strength comes from the fact that they're normal, working people with jobs who have to work. Tea Partiers are productive individuals who don't have time to get into politics professionally. That's why the movement is so remarkable.

That's also why the Tea Party has such difficulty against people who are professional revolutionaries. Obama was a "community organizer" before he was president. The man was a professional agitator and political panderer. His buddy Bill Ayers, after being a terrorist, went on to dedicate his life to indoctrinating children and ruining the lives of black students especially.

These people are professional revolutionaries. Van Jones to Cass Sunstein, this is all they do. Their lives center on getting grants and departments made for the expansion of their own policies. They exist only to grow government as their means to control.

The Tea Party is made of people who desire the exact opposite. Tea Partiers are not lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians, agitators, or professional revolutionaries. They are plumbers, railroad workers, cops, engineers, insurance adjusters, car salesmen, fast food managers, ranchers, farmers, pilots, truckers, warehouse workers, small businessmen, factory workers, and people who produce goods or services.

There are no professional revolutionaries in the Tea Party. There are no conniving bureaucrats out to create their own government empires in the Tea Party.

The Tea Party certainly doesn't need that, but it is going to need some people to bite the bullet and leave behind the private sector to start taking down oppressive parts of government and actively rejecting influence of statist ideologies.

The Tea Party could lose if it doesn't get out its message, it's flailing a bit because it's not out there at the forefront getting the economic word out. It's already mocked and ridiculed, but its members are growing less afraid of being called violent racist homophobes. It does need to start illustrating to people why Tea Party ideas (which are mostly fiscal conservative/Austrian economic school classic liberal) do work. The Tea Party needs to stay active, not just when it's ticked off. The Tea Party needs people to do the nasty work of getting involved with government at all levels. Leftist-statists do this naturally, but Tea Partiers need to start doing it.

Electing new representatives in 2010 certainly made a difference, but now is not the time to rest on one's laurels. Now is the time to press the advantage.

“Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.”

- General George S. Patton

At the basic level, this can mean talking to people around you about this stuff. If you discuss politics with 5 people of non-Tea Party mindset, the simple economic realities will be absorbed. They can't dispute numbers and facts. They may reject the facts, but eventually will come around. Don't preach, just educate. We're all ignorant of something, and for folks who don't pay attention to politics, discussing the examples of minimum wage or housing policies, for example, may be enough to start to get them to come around. Explaining why "get government out of my social security" isn't completely absurd can make a difference as well.

Assuming those 5 all have a negative opinion of the Tea Party as expressed by the CNN poll and represent that approximately 50% negative, if you change 2 of their minds, the Tea Party's disapproval rating drops to 30%. More importantly, the likelihood of them voting based on their own ability to discern the facts of the issues of the day changes.

If the Tea Party disengages, it could lose. If the Tea Partiers pack their bags and assume the job is done because of the 2010 elections, it could lose. If the Tea Party doesn't press the advantage, it could lose. If the Tea Party doesn't explain how statist economic models ultimately fail, and how lefty do-gooder govt. policies invariably hurt those they're supposed to help, it could fail. If the Tea Party doesn't get a leader or two, it could fail. If Tea Partiers don't get involved at the local level, and don't talk to their friends, it could lose.

The solutions are all simple, but require work - something Tea Partiers are actually quite good at. It's just a different kind of work.

*For the lefty who may stumble on this, no, I am not inciting violence. I am not suggesting that libertarians/conservatives/Tea Partiers attack people like lefties do. This is metaphorical, as in attack the ideas.

Financial Martial Law? A second look.

2011-03-27T01:32:00.007-05:00

The link that JBH posted for Michgan's "Financial Martial Law" bill was a floor summary. After he posted it, I looked up the text of the bill, as well as a lot of the debates. Some other things ended up delaying me, but on that first day, I noticed that the story was only picked up by CBS, the Michigan Messenger (which I have no familiarity with), and archlefty Mother Jones. The rest of the search results for it were mostly copypasta of the CBS story, and almost universally on lefty blogs, with the exception of all-around conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Color me skeptical, but I take both of those Joneses with a big grain of salt.

Here's a link to the bill, as approved by the Gov and filed by the Secretary of State of Michigan:
House Bill 4214
And in easier-to-read PDF format:
House Bill 4214

Some of the most important things to note are in one of the first summaries - note the background information.

Note the citation of Citizens Research Council of Michigan's report 362: Financial Emergencies in Michigan Local Governments.

The report basically goes over some of the levels of failure of Michigans, townships, school boards, cities, and communities. It's bad.

To give an anecdotal example, an economic refugee from Michigan who I know bought his house a few years back for about $170,000. He ended up getting away from it at $40,000. He was happy to get out from under the crushing debt on a house that wasn't worth anything anymore due to the housing bubble collapse.

Yes, really. He could buy it.

Now, consider how towns, cities, and even states generate revenue. One of the big methods is property taxes. It's considered a progressive (in the lefty sense) tax that's acceptable, because it only taxes the rich, landed classes. It's politically acceptable, since folks who are well-to-do typically want to think they're paying for their schools, and it's not visible enough like sales taxes to bother people who rent. It's considered a cost of "owning" a home, even though you can never truly own something you have to pay someone not to confiscate, but I digress. It's a standard source of revenue, and widely accepted.

Using that $170K to $40K transition, let's assume a tiny tax rate of 1% of the property's value per year. If Anytown, Michigan, were making $1700 per year in taxes off a house, and budgets according to what they have to spend, even with no deficit spending (unlikely), times 1000 houses in their township, then Anytown, Michigan, has about a $1,700,000 operating budget. That's enough to hire several police, maintain a small fire department, and Anytown's part of Anycounty's incorporated school distruct running (there are also roads, sanitation, etc.).

And with the end of the housing bubble, suddenly Anytown is making $400 per year in taxes off a house. With the 1000 houses in the township, Anytown, Michigan now has only $400,000 to spend for their operating budget. Suddenly, the cost of police, a fire department, and Anytown's part of the school district is threatened, along with the town's other few services.

Anytown still has financial obligations to pensioners, to contracts (be they private or union), and suddenly Anytown is faces with a financial disaster. So Anytown petitions the State to come in. The state is faced with the same budget crisis, and has no money to spare to bail out 200 desperate Anytowns.

The solutions do become desperate. Does the township reneg on its obligations? Do they declare bankruptcy? Do they raise taxes on the remaining residents? Since those residents have fewer jobs, and can't meet their personal obligations and declare bankruptcy as individuals, does Anytown get even the $400 tax anymore? Should the town go bankrupt if it has thriving industries and in simply going through a hard time? Should the town, run by a corrupt mayor and crooked board of aldermen, simply be dissolved?

That's where the bill comes in. Michigan is in a state of financial emergency, no matter what Chrysler is trying to sell. The dominance by unions, democrats, and leftist identity politics melded together to keep everyone but the political exploiters down. The big car companies made foolish decisions to sign unsustainable union contracts and are saddled with debt to the point that taxpayers around the country had to bail out GM and Chrysler - formerly companies that were powerhouses - are now weak shells of their old selves. Black/white identity politics tore communities apart as the economy fell, and things just got worse from there. Economic destruction is all part of that, intertwined with societal destruction and redistribution and unsustainable economic policies.

The state of Michigan didn't past the bill to start dissolving neighborhoods. They passed the bill to keep the entire state from imploding due to its horrible economic situation - they passed it to put capable managers in charge of towns and districts that need help. If they keep doing what they're doing, they'll be begging for a federal bailout, and as Margaret Thatcher said: "Socialism works great until you run out of other people's money."

The thing is, the rest of the country doesn't want to bail out Michigan. For example, California with its own mismanagement certainly doesn't need to be taxed to bail out Michigan, nor does a successful state need to have its success confiscated to bail out Michigan. The successful states need to be emulated, not taxed.

The grasshopper needs to stop having government steal the ant's hard work, and instead the grasshopper needs to get off his ovipositor and start doing what the ant did to succeed. Michigan acknowledges this, as there are towns that are ants, and towns that are grasshoppers within it, and there is no reason why the entire state should be consumed.

Having read a lot of it, I'm not so sure that it's a power grab - it seems to be an extreme austerity move, wherein most of it is a move by the state against local governments, and all with checks and appeals to the state court system as well.

Private Sector Unions to the Rescue!

2011-03-25T07:08:00.013-05:00

Image by friedmanlynn via Flickr

For those of you who don't know I am a member of a private sector union because I have to be in order to work for the railroad I am currently employed with. A day or so ago I spoke with a friend of mine in regards to an email he had received from one of our union representatives.

The email was entitled, "Don't Let Our Enemies Turn Back the Clock." The emails concern was the actions taking place in Wisconsin and other states. In these respective state legislatures along with republican governors are taking actions to break a never ending cycle of public sector unions donating vast sums of money to get democrats elected, in turn the democrats reward these public sector unions with unsustainable commitments in the form of union contracts.

Here at the Patriot Perspective we have explained through several articles the difference between public and private sector unions and how public sector unions in "union states" have the unique ability to affect the tax rates at both the state and local level. Couple that with states like Wisconsin and Michigan whose debt is out of control and one can see why those governments are doing everything they can to reduce their spending and deficits. Does the law itself end collective bargaining for most public sector employees? Yes. Does it force state workers to take an 8% cut in benefits? Yes. Is that really going to destroy someones livelihood? Hardly.

Back to the letter.

"Don't let our enemies turn back the clock. Why are many union (not going to share the name of my union) members participating across America in rallies opposing attacks on collective bargaining rights? Why have we created the Collective Bargaining Defense Fund to assist our union brothers and sisters? Because we know that those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. We know that if right wing extremist succeed in busting public sector unions, their next target is airline, bus, and railroad labor unions."

I would really like to know here exactly how they know that the government is going to target these private sector unions? My experience so far with a private sector union has been dismal. 120 dollars a month for little to no representation. I have to be a member or I cannot be employed by the railroad. How's that for freedom? Most of the time it seems as if the union and the company aren't really at odds with each other. But oh well.

"The history of working men and women in America -- before we fought for and won the right to join a union, engage in collective bargaining and have grievances resolved by a neutral party -- was a bleak history of low wages, few if any benefits, unsafe working conditions, and arbitrary discipline and discrimination on the job."

Largely at the time they are speaking of all those conditions did exist but not anymore, and personally it is hard to see how these folks rationalize that the clock would indeed be turned back to those same conditions in the 21st century. But as I said early I wish I had the right to NOT join a union, and in my industry collective bargaining usually results what the company wants anyway. However, I had an engineer tell me once that he thought he always got better contracts when Republicans were in office. Talk about irony if you are a hard core democrat union guy.

"Let's take a short trip back to the times before workplace democracy. Before labor laws and worker rights, courts considered any combination of workers seeking wage increases and/or improved working conditions as a criminal conspiracy, punishable by fine and imprisonment. Picketing an employer -- by even one picket -- was considered by courts an unlawful restraint of trade. Workers typically put in a 12 hour day, six days a week, with no overtime pay, no paid vacations, no employer-provided healthcare insurance, no process for worker grievances to be heard and no compensation for on-the-job injuries."

Workplace democracy usually means workplace socialism, spreading the work around or in my case keeping the board stacked so others can make money too. Usually those combinations of workers seeking those increases did things they weren't supposed to do. Like blackball fellow employees who couldn't afford to strike and crossed the picket line. Or workers would sabotage or deface company property to get their points across. A lot like those spoiled children up in Wisconsin at the state capital recently. Yes the days might have been long and hard back then with little to no compensated time off and guess what it is the exact same way today. I am on call 24/7 with no set off days, pretty much on duty for 12 hours at a time. Sure I have personal time and vacation days that are compensated but due to some of the recent legislation like the rail safety bill of 2008 which the unions backed so they could get more union dues because it would force the railroads to hire more people, that I rarely get time off unless I call in sick. The only problem is the railroads have been exceptionally slow on hiring and training, so we are constantly undermanned with a decent portion of train service employees on federal rest that they have to take at the behest of the Federal Railroad administration thanks to the union I am a member of.

The letter goes on to give more of the same concerning the plight of workers and then begins it close:

"Turn back the clock? Never. We will not go away. We will never forget. Together, in solidarity, we can and will win this fight and emerge stronger then ever."

Living in the past instead of looking to the future. We will be a nuisance and cause trouble like we did in Wisconsin. We like to co-opt 9/11 slogans to look patriotic. If we can get the workers of the United Sates to unite we can live in socialist harmony the rest of our lives. That about sums up the rest of the letter.

Not once do these people recognize the difference between public and private sector unions. The railroad unions deal with a private company and not the federal government unless they are trying to get legislation passed, which they almost always are. The private sector unions do not affect other citizens tax rates in the state or county in which you live. It is a given that the railroad was brutally tough on its employees in the late 19th and early to mid 20th century. A lot of that act has been dealt with. What I want to know is how is the state of Wisconsin brutally tough on its union employees. The trash collectors, the clerks etc? Do they really have it that hard? Are they struggling for raises just to make ends meet? I seriously doubt it.

Folks, continue to do your research, check every bit of information you come across, there are those out there how what you to cast aside reason and feel just for the sake of feeling and abdicating any form of thinking. Don't cast aside reason hold it tight. Check your facts and do not succumb to the call for the abdication of thought.

Power Grabs: Michigan Republicans

2011-03-14T13:19:00.018-05:00

From CBS News

Keeping in mind there's a huge difference in the political spectrum between a Texas republican and a Michigan republican, Michigan republican governor Rick Snyder is about to allow his state bureaucracy to make a huge power grab over city elected officials.

Mr. Snyder is about to sign into law a bill that will allow the governor of Michigan to declare a "financial emergency" in any town or school district. This declaration would pave the way for the state through a "financial czar" to fire elected officials, break contracts, seize and sell assets, eliminate services and possibly even eliminate whole cities and school districts.

Here is the bill.

If this isn't a statist power grab I don't know what is. The only opposition to this that needs to be noted is state democrats and even some federal representatives are opposed to this bill not because it violates property rights or dissolves local governments on a whim. They are upset because there happens to be legislation that is going to affect the collective bargaining of their beloved public sector unions. They also seem to be linking this bill to the Wisconsin bill that provided reform to bargaining with public sector unions and gave the choices to state employees as to whether they want to even belong to a union.

These state and local democrats of Michigan ARE NOT decrying the power grab itself, which means they are okay with most of the bill. Meaning the are alright with the power to wipe Detroit off the map if they see fit to do so, or some public school that has been mismanaged in another city. They don't seem to be too upset about that. They definitely aren't upset about being able to seize property. And you don't All they care about is losing part of the force that has kept them in office for years, their beloved public sector unions, to which they continuously have given more benefits and more money to over the years, which has continuously increased the tax burden on Michigan's citizens over the years. In turn, these statist lean on the public sector unions political action committees for support reelection which keeps the cycle of ever raising taxes and increasingly over compensated public sector unions.

The Michigan Democrats are also playing the race card on this as well with comments directed towards minority communities that the dissolving of the local governments is targeted at minority communities and will impact the greater then another community. How so? Didn't they elected their representatives? Didn't the next town? Did those individuals even get out to vote? Are the fiscal issues of their township in the hands of their elected officials just like the next town? Don't they have the ability to vote new representatives in every 2 or 4 years just like the next town? How is it any different? You won't get an explanation. Only that it'll affect a minority area that elected fiscal idiots over some other town that isn't primarily minority that also elected fiscal idiots.

Bottom line?

This is a power grab by the state pure and simple. These cities, school districts should be allowed to go into bankruptcy on their own. The democrat gripe over collective bargaining for the public sector unions is just a token out cry that's going to affect only their re election bids. The seizure of property, breaking of contracts in general are pure power grabs and something the statist in general are okay with. More regulation and more regulation are always something the statist want. Dissolving elected bodies reminds me personally of past despots like King George III of Great Britain and should not be tolerated. The people of Michigan need to take a stand for true liberty and freedom, and oppose the signing of this bill that is an outrageous violation of the United States Constitution which guarantees a republican form of government for each state.

Andrew Klavan: Behold, your public sector unions at work!

2011-03-11T12:50:00.004-06:00

H/T Theo Spark. From Pajamas Media.

Unintended Consequences Part 7201

2011-03-07T12:56:00.009-06:00

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/03/us_dept_of_transportation_data.html

U.S. Dept. of Transportation data show drop in flight delays, rise in canceled flights

Published: Monday, March 07, 2011, 7:00 AM Updated: Monday, March 07, 2011, 9:35 AM

By all accounts, the Federal Aviation Administration’s "tarmac rule" has dramatically reduced the number of passengers who are stuck inside an aircraft on the ground for three hours or more.

Violations of the rule, which went into effect last April, can cost airlines $27,500 per passenger, or $2.75 million for a planeload of 100 people going nowhere fast. In fact, there were just three cases nationwide of three-hour tarmac delays in December — compared with 34 the previous December, according to the federal Department of Transportation, the FAA’s parent agency.

But critics say an unintended consequence of the rule is becoming apparent and spoiling travel plans for a far greater number of would-be fliers.

Economists of the Austrian-Chicago schools (Hayek, Friedman, Sowell, etc.) would absolutely refer to this as unintended consequences.

No, the other Hayek.

To put it simply, the airline is impaled on the horns of a dilemma. Which do they do: risk $27,500 in fines per passenger at a cost of $2,750,000? Or lose $500 of business per passenger at a cost of $50,000 (minus the expenses in fuel and some labor hours on the flight as well)?

This is the result of a limited part of "passenger's bill of rights" - a somewhat statist concept that rights spring from the government anyway, but I digress... With bad weather last December at many airports, the regular delays and cancellations were magnified. But this isn't because of December, and this isn't the first time it's been noticed. Not by a long shot.

If the airlines were doing something illegal when airline customers were stuck on planes for 3 hours (arguably this could be the case), a simple prosecution and use of criminal courts would've sufficed.

If airlines were violating their contract with their passengers when they left people stuck on the tarmac for 3 hours, civil courts between the passengers and the airline would've sufficed - a class action lawsuit would result in the passengers getting that $27,500 per person, not the government getting it. Which is a better compensation for the injured party? To get $27,500 for the 4 hours you spent on the tarmac, your flight delayed, unable to get to your important meeting and to see grandma, getting cramped, listening to cranky kids and generally enduring unpleasantness, or would you rather the $27,500 go to a government agency? Assuming you had three delayed flights a year and were given that $27,500 as compensation, you could do pretty well for yourself just through compensation from the airlines. I'd sit on a plane for 4 hours on the tarmac to get a significant part of a house payment or a Mustang.

With the use of what amounts to a new taxation system, a cost-benefit framework is now established for the airlines. Now the airlines are forced by state coercion of extreme fines and thus the laws of economics to abandon flights as soon as the risk of fines come up, which screws passengers further. Imagine sitting for 2 hours and 45 minutes waiting to takeoff and then being kicked back into the terminal and your flight being cancelled.

It's like having your schedule stuck between two warm pillows.

To give a comparison on well-meaning government, consider red light cameras. They were intended to catch people who run red lights. What happens is they scare people on the penalty of a ticket - financial loss - into slamming on their brakes. This results in higher levels of rear-end collisions, increasing the numbers of accidents in one manner.

Red light cameras are frequently used as a revenue stream, and at least in Chicago, are used in poor black neighborhoods (as folks there are less likely to have lawyers or know the Mayor). In Britain, speed cameras known as "Gatsos" are frequently used as a revenue stream via creation of automated speed traps. Speed limits are recorded as being cut as much from 70 mph to 40 mph. The subject (not citizen over there) is inconvenienced, taxed, and all for "their own good"... or fines.

They are not well loved. The British solution is to toss a tyre round the beastly thing and set it alight.

This brings up a cynical question: are the fines intended to actually help airline customers - since a cancellation can be a lot more hassle than a long tarmac wait - or are the fines intended as a revenue stream, with the added bonus for politicians of demonizing airlines for cheap popularity?

Wisconsin Protest: Myth Vs Fact

2011-03-06T17:23:00.004-06:00

H/T: Facts are Stubborn Things

xkcd's Nolan Chart

2011-03-06T02:30:00.008-06:00

Pretty much on the mark with this one:
http://xkcd.com/868/

We here at The Patriot Perspective agree (from back in the days when I was even more heavily influenced by the Jawa Report's style of finishing off a post*):
http://thepatriotperspective.blogspot.com/2009/09/worlds-smallest-political-alignment.html

xkcd is cool, no matter what the haters on any blagoblogs** say. It's just cool the same way that Rush and D&D are cool.

But whatever. I'm a Far Side guy myself.

They're going to rescue Willzyx and Tom Cruise.

---

* For a recent example from Jawa Report. They do look for terrorists and terrorist propagandists to disrupt online, often by reporting videos online or getting servers to stop hosting terrorist sympathizer websites. Admirable work. They also like hot chicks, a staple of the internet - and know there's a reason they're morale boosters. I also like big morale boosters. Most guys do.

**Or blogoblag. But I wrote blagoblog without looking up that comic first... so I'm sticking to it. Blagoblog.

Government Union Collective Bargaining 101

2011-03-05T10:30:00.003-06:00

Ht: Jawa Report & Gateway Pundit

Union Educations

2011-03-01T18:54:00.008-06:00

The Wall Street Journal has this piece today entitled "A Union Education". It's an excellent read, and quite informative about how and why public sector unions are, have been, and always will be a bad idea.

... George Meany, the legendary AFL-CIO president during the Cold War, also opposed the right to bargain collectively with the government.

Why? Because unlike in the private economy, a public union has a natural monopoly over government services. An industrial union will fight for a greater share of corporate profits, but it also knows that a business must make profits or it will move or shut down. The union chief for teachers, transit workers or firemen knows that the city is not going to close the schools, buses or firehouses.

This monopoly power, in turn, gives public unions inordinate sway over elected officials. The money they collect from member dues helps to elect politicians who are then supposed to represent the taxpayers during the next round of collective bargaining. In effect union representatives sit on both sides of the bargaining table, with no one sitting in for taxpayers. In 2006 in New Jersey, this led to the preposterous episode in which Governor Jon Corzine addressed a Trenton rally of thousands of public workers and shouted, "We will fight for a fair contract." He was promising to fight himself.

Thus the collision course with taxpayers. Public unions depend entirely on tax revenues to fund their pay and benefits. They thus have every incentive to elect politicians who favor higher taxes and more government spending. The great expansion of state and local spending followed the rise of public unions.

This is much like the complaints that congresscritters and senators vote for their own raises. There's no accountability on government or union bosses.

The taxpayers are forced to give money to the government. Unions get their money in both dues and salaries from the government. Unions then spend money buying politicians who will grant them political favors in the form of increased wages and better benefits... at the expense of the taxpayer. The unions are accountable to no one, the politicians are accountable to no one after the elections are bought, and the taxpayer has no means to hold anyone accountable... until now.

Basically, that's it. Notice that one group pays in and gets nothing.

It's worthwhile to note that the petulant employees in the Wisconsin are teachers. Teachers who are refusing to teach. Their employers are their students parents - and instead they are going on marches demanding that their students parents pay them more money, even though those same parents are making less money in this recession. And now police unions are supporting them.

The Unions' Real Fight in Wisconsin

2011-02-28T10:52:00.011-06:00

From Real Clear Politics:
Public Unions and The Socialist Utopia

Robert Tracinski points out very succinctly that the Unions' current fight is one for their own survival.

The Democratic lawmakers who have gone on the lam in Wisconsin and Indiana-and who knows where else next-are exhibiting a literal fight-or-flight response, the reaction of an animal facing a threat to its very existence.

Why? Because it is a threat to their existence. The battle of Wisconsin is about the viability of the Democratic Party, and more: it is about the viability of the basic social ideal of the left.

--
For those unfamiliar with Wisconsin, it's a mostly conservative state, with the notable exception of Madison, the capital. Madison is ultra-liberal. Ultra-liberal to the point that San Franciscans think Madison is liberal.

See that cheese? That's not government cheese.

Madison is an ideal vehicle for lefty idealism. Most of the rest of the state is very conservative, traditional, and responsible. This results in a state government that is supported by producers, and traditional-minded producers don't want to get involved in government, which is viewed as the province of those who don't work. Jokes about government workers are still pretty well acknowledged by traditionalists there.

--
In short, public employment is an idealized socialist economy in miniature, including its political aspect: the grateful recipients of government largesse provide money and organizational support to re-elect the politicians who shower them with all of these benefits.

--
Tracinski is dead on here. Wisconsin has a very conservative minded populace that has been propping up this leftist scam for decades just due to their own distaste from it. Respectable, hard working people don't get into politics... at least until the Tea Party came along. (Though back in the 90s, there were a few that got out for Perot.)

--

Now the left is panicking as these experiments in American socialism implode.

On the national level, it has become clear that the old-age welfare state of Social Security and Medicare is driving the federal government into permanent trillion-dollar deficits and a ruinous debt load. Even President Obama acknowledged, in his State of the Union address, that these programs are the real drivers of runaway debt-just before he refused to consider any changes to them. You see how hard it is for the Democrats to give up on their utopias.

On the state level, public employment promises the full socialist ideal to a small minority-paid for with tax money looted from a larger, productive private economy. But the socialist utopia of public employment has crossed the Thatcher Line: the point at which, as the Iron Lady used to warn, you run out of other people's money.

The current crisis exposes more than just the financial unsustainability of these programs. It exposes their moral unsustainability. It exposes the fact that the generosity of these welfare-state enclaves can only be sustained by forcing everyone else to perform forced labor to pay for the benefits of a privileged few.

--
Those hardworking traditionalists and conservatives throughout the state are the ones being told that they must pay for the Unions, and that the guy working in the cheese factory at $10/hr or making trucks for Oshkosh at $15/hr is the evil oppressor of the teachers union that makes $110K/year and only works 9 months.

Pretty much the case.

The public sector unions are the aristocracy demanding that the peasants keep feeding their insatiable appetite. Take that guy on the end and give him a sign demanding the other three pay him more and that it's so unfair, and that the other three, who actually work, really want to go back to child labor in sweatshops.

Union are and always have been a tool to pit one group of workers against another group of workers. They help no one but the union bosses and goons.

Now even the Democrats are turning against them, though unions are huge financial contributors to political campaigns, and almost exclusively to democrats.

The Road To Serfdom Excerpts I

2011-02-13T01:53:00.007-06:00

Friedrich A. Hayek wrote a rather well-known book on economics and the human condition called "The Road To Serfdom" back in the early 1940s. Hayek was an Austrian economist and one of the major contributors to the "Austrian School" of economics. The intro to the edition I'm reading is rather long and any summary of the factors that led to the book would be insufficient in comparison.

He also rather famously remarked: "Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves," being critical of American conservatism that doesn't embrace and conserve its libertarian/classic liberal ideals. Note that our motto at The Patriot Perspective has always been the same.

He also won the Nobel Prize for Economics, but won it at the same time as a scandinavian leftist, cuz... y'know... politics.

As I've been reading it, some passages are jumping out at me. Here, Hayek points out a major problem with central planning and socialism. It must control everything to create its utopia. And it invariably fails, as everything in existence must then be prioritized by government - not by individuals who govern their own affairs, and whose best interests may even change day to day. Here, he makes the point that there can be no such government because there exists no such set of prioritizing values.

Not only do we not possess such an all-inclusive scale of values: it would be impossible for any mind to comprehend the infinite variety of different needs of different people which compete for the available resources and to attach a definite weight to each. For our problem it is of minor importance whether the ends for which any person cares comprehend only his own individual needs, or whether they include the needs of his closer or even those of his more distant fellows-that is, whether he is egotistic or altruistic in the ordinary sense of these words. The point which is so important is the basic fact that it is impossible for any man to survey more than a limited field, to be aware of the urgency of more than a limited number of needs. Whether his interests center round his own physical needs, or whether he takes a warm interest in the welfare of every human being he knows, the ends about which he can be concerned will always be only an infinitesimal fraction of the needs of all men.

This is the fundamental fact on which the whole philosophy of individualism is based. It does not assume, as is often asserted, that man is egoistic or selfish or ought to be. It merely starts from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a sector of the needs of the whole society...

- Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road To Serfdom (pg 102)

--

How badass is the Austrian School of Economics? Salma is the THIRD Hayek to come up when you type "Hayek" into Google.

Egypt's Real Problem

2011-02-07T23:53:00.007-06:00

I recently found myself rethinking my Egypt post while reading this American Thinker piece here:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/02/egypts_real_problem_decades_of.html

The fact of the matter is this: Mubarak is a socialist dictator, and his ruling party espouses socialist ideology. The revolution in Egypt is a direct result of the failure of authoritarian socialist ideology and policy. For over fifty years, the ruling political clique in Egypt has espoused a home-grown form of Arab nationalist socialism.

Arab nationalism. And a socialist dictator. Combine ethnic nationalism with socialism and you get the predictable.

It's still unwise to support anti-Mubarak forces when the predictable replacement is going to be the proto-terrorist Muslim Brotherhood, but once there's some degree of stability, well, stability really is the only reason to support Mubarak anymore.

This reminded me that I have a copy of President Saddam Hussein's Address on Iraq's National Day 1983, and President Saddam Hussein's Speech on the 6th Anniversary of the Day of the Days The Great Victory Day 8 August 1994, and his roughly 50 page treatise "One Trench or Two". All are drier reads than the country they hail from, but they are about pan-Arab nationalism and the idea of central control/rulership. Basically, arab national socialism.

Sometimes you can judge a dictator book by its cover.

Richard Little at American Thinker points out the specifics with regards to Egypt and how it applies there. Broadly, national socialism and centralized control don't work anywhere. Even with cultural differences (including the basic lack of a future tense in Arabic), education level differences, and economic developmental differences, it doesn't work. It doesn't work in Europe - where the wise nations are pulling away from their road to socialism before they implode like Greece; it doesn't work in the US, where individual states like California are imploding from their own policies. It doesn't work anywhere it's tried.

Whether the central control be with a dictator or a committee of bureaucrats, it's all coercive force that works against the will of the individual - the individual who knows their own needs better than any self-appointed super-genius, tyrant or king.

Kudos to the Egyptian people for trying to shrug it off. Hopefully they don't end up replacing it with the Muslim Brotherhood - who will do the same, but with the added dictates of sharia law.

From the John Birch Society: Be Aware of Constitutional Conventions

2011-02-03T14:45:00.005-06:00

From the John Birch Society:

After seeing this video I am going to agree with these gentlemen and their arguments. As a student of the Constitution and of the era in which it was written I can attest to the following:

The original "Con-Con" was called only to reform the Articles of Confederation; instead, the convention's attendees went outside of their assigned bounds and introduced a completely new form of government in the form of our current Constitution. Legally speaking the entire convention could have been arrested for treason. Also, since the Congress under the Articles had commissioned the convention for reforms, the convention had a duty to report to back to the Congress it's findings, which the Convention also failed to do; instead, the Convention took it's case directly to the people of each state effectively by passing the Confederation Congress.

If a Constitutional Convention were to be called now to address term limits, a balanced budget etc... the states could attempt to exert control over the convention and it's participants but I believe it would be exceptionally hard to legally bind a Con-Con to only address certain issues. The issue of control coupled with today's politicians makes a Constitutional Convention a very dangerous option to reform the Federal Government. If instead, reformers follow the simple procedures of amending the Constitution, control of the issues being reformed would be ensured as well as ensuring that politicians stay within the existing framework of the Constitution.

I do not believe we can trust those we have in office, or those they would select, to keep the citizens' best interest in mind. Especially in the setting of a Constitutional Convention and given all their reckless spending, and rights stealing that has occurred the last 10 years. The better course in my mind would be to attempt to address all of these issues through the already tried and proven method of amending the Constitution. So please, go to the websites of your respective state legislatures and check up on them and see if any of them are considering legislation that will call for a Constitutional Convention.

Media Elitism Part 873

2011-02-02T19:01:00.008-06:00

I thought about commenting on this yesterday when I read the story, but there were other things more important than Christine Amanpour in Egypt.

Though from her body language and attitude, she doesn't seem to think so:

The video is here.

It's interesting to see Christine Amanpour take a very standoffish, very insulting, very condescending tone towards the Egyptians on the street she's talking to. She has one hand on her hip - indicating standoffishness or aggression. The other hand is holding the mic in a lazy, inattentive manner implying that it doesn't really matter what the person has to say.

Amanpour's attitude towards the Egyptians seems to be about the same as Susan Roesgen talking to Tea Partiers. Amanpour goes in with an attitude and leaves with an attitude, and seems extra offended that she gets attitude back the whole time. Her problem doesn't stem from Egyptian hatred of the US. It stems from Egyptian hatred of her as a representative.

Robert Young Pelton in Dangerous Places 4th Edition (back before he spent all kinds of time on TV and got into internet fights with milbloggers) made a very important point about how to deal with people who dislike you for your (assumed) Western ways and their preconceived notions thereof. Talk to and with them. Amanpour talks at them.

Ask them how they feel and why they feel that way - and actually want to know the answer. Ask them what they would do if they were president. Ask them what they would do as a citizen of the US. Don't get snotty like Amanpour. Don't walk away in a huff. Don't be an asshole like Amanpour.

She can show them that she has a camera and is part of a big media outlet that hundreds of thousands of people may see - so whatever they want to say, others may hear - and people want to know. Were she to go in with a different attitude, doubtless she would get different results.

But the hand on the hip, the lazy pointing the microphone, the turning away and the general haughty attitude she projects leads me to see the Egyptian point of view quite clearly - she only gives a crap when there's trouble about for her to report.

She's a terrible representative for the US, and clearly doesn't like talking to the people on the street. Amanpour is an elitist - she has disdain for the US anyway, so she sees no reason why people would ever dislike her. She can understand an ideological hatred for the US espoused by the Muslim Brotherhood, but since she agrees with it, she can't understand why she personally is rejected by its proponents.

Basically, she's in the position of a useful idiot or of a bourgeois socialist who doesn't understand they've outlived their usefulness. She's an elitist who agrees with the hatred being spewed by MB and the general dislike of the US throughout the Middle East, since she also hates the US. She's upset and ideologically unable to understand what's going on because of her elitist status. She feels that since she's an elitist America-hater, she's not an American or related to America, so she should be exempt.

Older stuff on her anti-US bias from DeathBy1000PaperCuts.

She even ranked #8 on BigJournalism's Most Biased Journalists list.

Update: New story today opens with the terrible journey of 8 miles, making the reporter the story to begin with, but not as bad as yesterday. Of course, she's hobnobbing with the president of Egypt, so she's back with the elites. She's uses a lot of leading questions with VP Suleiman.

Also today there have been more incidents of reporters being attacked. The question here is how many of them are making themselves into the story.

ABC reporter threatened with beheading, and numerous other attacks on reporters in the video there (including CNN's Anderson Cooper getting punched). FOX reporter hospitalized... but FOX didn't report the story as a story until they were released, at least. CNN and ABC seem to be the worst at turning cameras on themselves and making their reporters the center of the story. At least it's not as bad as Geraldo Running around in Afghanistan with an ascot and a pistol claiming he'd get in a gunfight with Osama bin Laden.

Groundhog Day in the Middle East

2011-02-02T16:16:00.007-06:00

For those unfamiliar with the term Groundhog Day, watch this first:

---

British MP Daniel Hannan made a point today on the Sean Hannity show. During the Cold War, the US supported dictators who opposed communism. Hannan explained that the argument during the Cold War was "He's may be a son of a b*tch, but he's our son of a b*tch. But now the cold war is over, so we can say 'he may be our son of a b*tch, but he's a son of a b*tch."

The first thought is basically why we were supporting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak's dictatorship provided some degree of stability, especially for US ally Israel. Mubarak's Egypt provided security for the Suez Canal, through which some 8% of the world's shipping flows.

The old logic was that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, provided he's not worse than your actual enemy. Ultimately compromising and supporting a very bad guy against an evil evil empire supported one's good principles. Makes sense. The new logic is that since the evil empire is gone, it's time to drop support for the very bad guy. Sorta makes sense.

The only failing is that without a transitional structure, there isn't just a smooth handoff from "very bad guy" to "good new guy". The people who almost invariably takeover in these situations are those that are prepared for it and have been working towards it. Very bad guy is replaced with different evil guy. If you don't want a son of a b*tch, you replace him on your terms to make sure you get a better guy, or you apply pressure to reform him. You don't go along with a mob that is at least in part incited by the evil guys - because that mob and those evil guys are often only kept in check because your guy is a son of a b*tch.

In the past, there are several examples of the people who take over after a nation collapses. The Leninist victory in Russia was a result of a fractured nation in a period of transition. The interim government of Kerensky may have promised a republic, but it lasted just long enough for Lenin to take over - which was his goal - Lenin was a professional revolutionary. The breakdown of China during WWII led to the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek - a US ally, though with many faults - ultimately losing control of China to Mao, who was ready and working towards seizing power. Recently, this is the entire Beckian argument with regards to George Soros and his shadow government.

But it's Groundhog Day in the very easy, and very apt, comparison of the Shah of Iran to Mubarak. The Iranian Islamic Revolution was the result of a lot of factors, but not the least of which was Jimmy Carter not doing much of anything to shore up US interests in Iran by supporting the Shah.

Probably not the best leader in Iran's history, but far from the worst.

The loss of the Shah brought us the Iranian Hostage Crisis and a nuclear Iran that seeks out the ability to obliterate its neighbors. The loss of Mubarak is most likely going to bring us the Muslim Brotherhood in charge of Egypt, as they are the most powerful opposition group, and stand the most to gain. The Muslim Brotherhood has been referred to as "Al Qaeda before Al Qaeda was cool". They've also got a bit of history, going back to some other evil guys.

From the Council on Foreign Relations:
http://www.cfr.org/egypt/does-muslim-brotherhood-have-ties-terrorism/p9248

One reason the Brotherhood’s commitment to nonviolence is unclear: The original Egyptian organization has spawned branches in 70 countries. These organizations bear the Brotherhood name, but their connections to the founding group vary and some of them may provide financial, logistical, or other support to terrorist organizations. Some terrorist groups—including Hamas, Jamaat al-Islamiyya, and al-Qaeda—have historic and ideological affiliations with the Egyptian Brotherhood. In addition, some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists were once Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood members, including Osama bin Laden’s top deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Zawahiri went more hardcore after Sayyid Qutb was hanged by Egyptian authorities. Who was Qutb? Just the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. And what is Qutbism? Just good old-fashioned infidel-killing Jihad.

From a story on the Muslim Brotherhood in CanadaFreePress, 2006:

Here's how the story began. In the 1920s there was a young Egyptian named al Bana. And al Bana formed this nationalist group called the Muslim Brotherhood. Al Bana was a devout admirer of Adolph Hitler and wrote to him frequently. So persistent was he in his admiration of the new Nazi Party that in the 1930s, al-Bana and the Muslim Brotherhood became a secret arm of Nazi intelligence.

The Arab Nazis had much in common with the new Nazi doctrines. They hated Jews; they hated democracy; and they hated the Western culture. It became the official policy of the Third Reich to secretly develop the Muslim Brotherhood as the fifth Parliament, an army inside Egypt.

More on Al Banna here:
http://www.mideastweb.org/Middle-East-Encyclopedia/hassan_al-banna.htm
And from Horowitz here:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1368
Even CNN can't spin them into a good thing, though they try:
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2011/02/01/exp.am.intv.cruickshank.brother.cnn.html

Considering Hitler and the Muslim Brotherhood liked each other, making Mubarak into Hitler really makes no sense, other than to support Orwell's claim that "fascist" just means "anything bad".

Weak, naiive democrat president with no foreign policy experience or understanding in charge of the US. An islamist group seizing power from a US ally. The US ally is a strongarm leader that the democrat's touchy-feely side rejects, rather than figure out why we'd ever support the guy - and what the repercussions of not supporting him will be... Yup. It's GROUNDHOG DAY!

But this time when we drive off the cliff, it'll be different!

Obamacare Unconstitutional

2011-01-31T15:12:00.008-06:00

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was just ruled unconstitutional.

The centerpiece of Obamacare is the individual mandate. For those who've been ignoring the news for a while, basically you are compelled by government to purchase health care, and if you opt out, you face fines. Unpaid fines to the government don't result in the government going "shucks, we didn't really mean it", they result in jail time. Try it this year with the IRS.

They give you free health care in there, too.

J.B.H. wrote about the unconstitutionality of Obamacare a while back.

Jake Tapper from ABC asked Obama about the fine system and the president admitted he agreed fines for noncompliance were necessary.

And there are jail time penalties in the bill:

“H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at any time during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.” [page 1]

“If the government determines that the taxpayer’s unpaid tax liability results from willful behavior, the following penalties could apply…”

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.”

But for now, a judge has ruled against Obamacare and the "buy it or go to jail" mandate - and invalidating the entire bill. Next step is the government going to the supreme court to push for it again.

Ultimately, the question is one of the scope of federal power and the ability for the government to stretch the commerce clause to encompass any absurd suppression of citizens' rights.

This started in no small part under one of the last giant progressive presidents, FDR. Wickard v. Filburn. Filburn was a farmer who was growing extra wheat for himself to feed his livestock. The government had mandated the amount of wheat that could be grown in order to drive up the price of wheat and "help" farmers.

To begin with, it's Keynesian economics, which are predicated on meddling by a bureaucrat who believes they know more than the person on the ground - and the bureaucrat ultimately using the government's gun against the American person who rejects them. The price was low and that "hurt" farmers. But rather than support farmers growing as much wheat as possible by offering tax cuts for farmers or something - leading to more wheat and fewer hungry people, the government decided to limit the amount of wheat. Supply goes down, demand goes up. Of course, limiting the amount of food results in famines... but the bureaucrat in DC doesn't feel it.

The fedgov is hurting people in California's Central Valley right now. This time, rather than favor the price of wheat over farmers, they favor a fish over farmers.

The EPA hates Americans of Mexican descent. Obama hates brown people!

Anyhow, Filburn was growing wheat for himself, and the government (FDR's supreme court), ruled that the government could regulate crops grown for private use, as they "influence the market". The idea was that since Filburn wasn't buying wheat at government-inflated prices, he could also not use his own land to grow wheat to feed his own livestock, as his act of not buying wheat influenced the price somewhere, no matter how miniscule.

Since he used his own land to grow his own wheat and not buy government wheat he was influencing the price of wheat by taking out his buying power. It's like the government looking at the hooligan in the Broken Window Fallacy and going "we should smash some more windows!"

Filburn's right to his own property and his own enterprise on his own land were violated. The government ruled that through the Commerce Clause that it could tell you what to do with your own assets. This is what Obamacare was doing until it was ruled invalid - except now rather than just growing your own wheat, Obamacare took it one step further. If you didn't spend your money, you were subject to penalties.

The Commerce Clause is thus:
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes

What does this mean? According to SCOTUS in Gonzales V Raich, which illegalized home-grown marijuana:
The Commerce Clause emerged as the Framers' response to the central problem giving rise to the Constitution itself: the absence of any federal commerce power under the Articles of Confederation. For the first century of our history, the primary use of the Clause was to preclude the kind of discriminatory state legislation that had once been permissible. Then, in response to rapid industrial development and an increasingly interdependent national economy, Congress “ushered in a new era of federal regulation under the commerce power,” beginning with the enactment of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887 and the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.

What's it really mean?
It was set up so that trading between states would be regular. So that if someone in Vermont wanted to sell something in Maine, they didn't have to pay tariffs to cross New Hampshire. That's about it. It was to keep Kansas from telling flights across the state they have to stop selling drinks at the state line. That was the purpose.

The purpose was not to tell a farmer that if he grew wheat for himself he'd go to jail, or to tell you that when you work for your money, you have to buy a healthcare plan or go to jail.

For those who would contend that not being a lawyer means that you, Joe, Jane, Pedro, Shaniqua or Vinh don't have a voice, that's nonsense. The Constitution was not written in some esoteric language. It's pretty plain even now.

You don't get from this:
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes

To this:
“H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at any time during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.” [page 1]

“If the government determines that the taxpayer’s unpaid tax liability results from willful behavior, the following penalties could apply…”

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.”

Without a hefty load of BS between them. If you don't spend you money the way the govt says, you got to jail. Nonsense.

George Washington Hidden By NAACP At Event

2011-01-20T21:47:00.007-06:00

Via Weasel Zippers, Jawa Report, and American Thinker.

This was done... "to keep from offending anyone".

Methinks there were no members of the 332nd Fighter Group in attendance, or they would've torn the damn thing down and yelled the ears off whoever the organizer for this insult was.

This guy would've been mad, too - or any of the sailors on the nuke sub named after him. And probably this guy - who chose his name.

Update/Edit: It would be remiss if I ignored other times statues have been covered up/removed within the last few years for fear they would be "offensive".

In 2002, someone in the Bush Administration (not Ashcroft, according to the story) covered up the Spirit Of Justice. Whether it was because of "aesthetic" reasons or because somebody didn't like Justice raising the roof and showing off what her sculptor gave her... who knows. It was widely assumed that socially conservative Ashcroft had disliked the Tits of Justice, and for the Department of Justice to cover up a symbol of... JUSTICE seemed to be a rather ominous choice to make when adding "aesthetic" to a room that had never needed it before.

Offensive to people who don't like pecs or boobs.

Then there's also the return of the bust of Churchill, done by a president who holds grudges that have been dead for a couple generations.

Rallied England to defeat Hitler, and he liked Bambi.

Damn The Torpedoes and The Uptight Puritans

2011-01-12T20:34:00.018-06:00

I'm a little behind the curve on the story of Captain Honors, mostly because I thought of it as a Tailhook-type nothing to say beyond what's been said story. Some dumb Navy officer does something stupid, vile and juvenile and gets fried for it. I figured it was cut-and-dried, and oh well there are more important things to discuss. I thought wrong - I didn't bother to surf and find out what was going on until today. Tailhook involved assault. Captain Honors did video skits with less offensive material than guys like Conan and Leno have done for decades.

From the AOL story:
The videos were broadcast on the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in 2006 and 2007. The videos, made while Honors was second-in-command, included gay slurs, mimicked masturbation and racy shower scenes. They came to light in The Virginian-Pilot newspaper over the weekend.

Like I said, no worse than Conan.

Short version of the story - a few weeks ago, Navy Captain Owen Honors, skipper of the USS Enterprise - got fired for some so-called "raunchy" videos made four to five years ago back in 2006 and 2007. The videos were distributed on-ship as part of some kind of series of humorous skits introducing movies.

For those who've been in the military, you know how much downtime you have. For those who weren't in the military... well, imagine going to work every day two hours early and standing around waiting for your boss to tell you what to do for the day. Then you do it for ten hours, then you don't go home - you just go to a room where you live with two other co-workers and you go to sleep. If you're in the Navy, you probably have closer to five co-workers sleeping a couple feet from you.

This is where you sleep. If you want to roll over, you probably have to get out and get back in. Get the top bunk and you won't get peed on.

Being in the military, and especially being on ship, is something that gets you close to people, emotionally, mentally, and physically.

The videos in question are compiled right here:

RedEye has a large portion of the video here, sans edits, along with their commentary.

The dudes and chicks sharing a shower is a joke about navy showers. Since water rationing is often in effect, you only get three minutes to shower. The joke is that with two people in the shower, you could have six minutes. Since facilities aren't integrated, it's two dudes and two chicks in the shower, with accompanying jokes. It's funny, unless you're a member of the Film Actor's Guild and really want to hurt morale by trying to crush what little joy servicemembers get.

Some youtube commenters make good points:

As a sailor, these videos crack me up.

Its a rough sense of humor that comes from being crammed in tight living spaces with ridiculous working hours and a job that can be life and death at times. All due respect to those civilians living stateside who get to go home every night to their family and spacious houses, but you don't understand the military if you are questioning this. Navy is investigating to appease you. We kill people for a living, we can tolerate offensive humor. Come on people.
lentillover1 22 hours ago
...
This is exactly what is wrong with our society.
No sense of ha-ha.
This is hilarious. It's what happens when you spend half of your LIFE at sea.
I feel sorry for people that don't get it.
Guess they wouldn't understand much about:
HONOUR, DISCIPLE, TEAM MORALE, FUN...........
Spend some time in front of the wire in places like Afghanistan or Iraq.
PTSD2010 1 day ago

Let that sink in.

If you're talking about most sailors who joined at age 18-20, the four years they spend at sea represents the first several years of their independent adult lives. In the petty officer 1 and 2 ranks, you're looking at an individual who may have been in the Navy from age 18-26 - spending all of their independent adult life in a cramped, dank, haze-gray tin box miles from land, away from their family and friends beyond shipmates. 8 years before now that PO1 was a squid. 8 years before he was a squid he was in 4th grade. And chiefs and officers really have been at sea longer than they've been on land sometimes - they are a different breed.

The job of the US military is ultimately to make living people into dead people. The hurricane/disaster relief that the Navy does and all the rest are just very positive side effects of power projection.

Power Projection: _________________<-put your gay joke there.

Another youtube quote:
I love how all the service members support the XO and only civilians have a problem with the videos. I think these uptight puritans have spent so much time in their ivory towers they've completely forgotten there are things in this world that are actually worth complaining about.
Ellgrekko1980 5 hours ago

The money quote from the AOL story is this:
A group that has advocated for gay service members praised the military for condemning the videos.

Yup. People who aren't in the military, whose primary function in life is to turn the military into their private social experiment, are the ones who helped push this along. Why? Because they have no sense of humor. Why? Because they hate. Why? Because they are uptight leftist ideological puritans who can tolerate no dissent and no humor.

"Don't offend me" groups - here the gays and leftists offended on their behalf - specifically the uptight leftist ideological puritan gays who can tolerate no jokes and no words they find offensive - are exercising their influence to push the military into what they want it to be, not what it must be. Whether repeal of DADT, relieving on-duty commanders for humor - neither helps the military's mission. The puritans don't care - they are safe in their ivory towers of media and academia.

The military is not a playground for social engineers. It is a tool to defend a free society that allows people to be as gay as they want or as straight as they want or as bi as they want.

To the uptight gay, they don't care. They don't understand that there are second and third-order effects. You get rid of DADT, you lose old soldiers, sailors, and Marines who don't want to be part of the sensitive touchy-feely military run by hairdressers and Barney Frank. To the uptight gay, that's a good thing - it purges the military of elements they loathe.

To the military and the nation, vast quantities of experience and knowledge are lost when those men and women exit the military. It leaves those who are ideologically pure for the uptight gay activists, and those few who can force their sense of duty to be greater than the offense they have been done. But it does damage to the military and its ability to fight.

You fire a commander because he's not politically correct, and you end up short one commander who knows the job well, and you are forced to replace him with someone else. The replacement isn't going to know the job as well, and the replacement is going to have to form a new bond with the unit he commands. Not to mention the crew of the ship don't want a new commander.

GAY SAILORS who served under Captain Honors weren't offended, and are angry that Captain Honors was relieved of command. Go ahead, click the link - it's a news site.

It's unknown what this guy's opinion was, but he looks like he's got a sense of humor.

To uptight ideological puritan gay, or leftist who is offended on their behalf, the concept of military readiness is alien. They think the world is at peace because it always has been - in their limited experience and understanding of culture. They know they can get the military and other US institutions to do what they want by waving paper at them and telling them they're mean. The rest of the world agrees with them externally - because it's a means to tear down the US.

Except for Japan, which is just in it for more gay and lesbian sailors... Or gays and lesbians in sailor suits, anyway.

Obviously not all people who are gay have no sense of humor and want to get officers fired because they can't take a joke. And some gay people recognize that a Navy-gay-shower joke, or calling someone "fag", unless they're a Harley Davidson rider, is really pretty meaningless and harmless. The military is full of people from the ages of 18-22 who say "fag" or "gay" as a general negative, but who have no real dislike of gays or lesbians (or Harley Riders). It doesn't make them Fred Phelps.

Gay people with a sense of proportion often understand they should be concerned about places where being gay means you'll be executed. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but "fag" - especially when not directed at you, nor meant with mean intent - can never hurt you. And the dude saying "fag" in a manner that isn't aimed at gays is the same guy who stands against those oppressive regimes, and for gays being safe - and who's sworn to uphold gays' Constitutional right to defend themselves.

And again, there are those who see the big picture, and who understand that - gay sailors know this is bullshit and address it:
In all honesty, do Americans really want a military full of men and women who's first reaction to a harsh word or off-colored joke to go running to mama crying? Do we really want those people as our defense against the ever growing terrorism threat and foreign nationals with a vendetta against America? It seems thats what the media and the higher ups that be wish... Before you know it they'll be administering sensitivity training on the polite and politically correct way of killing the enemy.

- Eric Prenger

Thank you for your service, Mr. Prenger. Thank you for speaking out against people whose interest in you is as their pawn and who can't understand that you're the sailor who has their back covering them while they go from ship to shore. I'm sure Captain Honors would be proud to serve with you again.

I don't know the man beyond his letter to an Atlantic writer and his letter to the leftist gay group that got Captain Honors relieved, but Mr. Prenger knows more about comraderie and what it means to put on a uniform than any of those who claim to be offended on his behalf.

Mr. Prenger does more for gays than any uptight leftist ideological puritan gay political action group and the leftists who are "offended on their behalf" who actively makesthe US less safe by targeting the military as their ideological enemy. Mr. Prenger's example, through time, would've eroded DADT - the other favorite recent subject of the uptight puritan gay. And if Mr. Prenger and his crew were offended by Captain Honors, with the good working relationship between commanders and troops evident by an XO who does movie night skits, they would've been able to address it. Had he or any other gay sailor been offended, he could've requested mast over it. The procedure is already there to say "Sir, that was kinda uncalled for." But it wasn't necessary.

Morale was improved (aside from a few lame jokes), no one was hurt, and no one cared.

Colonel Kurtz makes it simple to understand:

We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!

Let's Hear it for Civility, Leftists

2011-01-10T13:20:00.017-06:00

While the left is up in arms about this graphic:

Looks kinda like the Democrat one from yesterday, huh?

I'm sure they're also doing things to foster the civility they're talking about. Like with this "Kill Sarah Palin" Facebook Group:

Lets hear it for civility, leftists!

A bit bigger, showing members and creator.

This is the creator's FB page link at the bottom:
Elliot Parker

And his base FB page from the link:

Since I'm one of those cavemen still without facebook, I can't pull up any more of these pages, but they're screencapped for posterity.

Here's some members* (see update), with screenshots:
Kenstasia Falcon
Bart AlfvoetPatrick LearyRon HughesChristina-Jackson-Lewis

Update: *After JBH took a look at the FB side of the house, a couple of the members of the page seem to joining it just to report the page. Seems like a dumb thing to do, attaching your name to a call for assassination of a public figure (or private figure, for that matter), even if it is just to report it.

Update 2: As of 0310 CST, the page is erased - gone, down the memory hole. It's still acknowledged by Google Cache as existing:

Update 3: Anon @ 2:54 mentions that 9 out of 10 times you need to join a Facebook group to see it. This one not so. As I mentioned up above, I'm not on Facebook (yes, I know, I'm a dinosaur) - this was pretty much public for all to see - except for the friends/members list. Also, the group was at about 70 to just below 90 members the whole time I was screencapping it - there were many members who were there to stay.

Wayne @ 5:33 asks if there are any more screencaps of members. JBH said he went in (he's not a dinosaur, and has a FB login) and took some screenshots of the full group itself - hopefully he'll be able to post a few at some point soon. There are also still apparently a few that can be viewed in the Google Cache - screencaps below in case they disappear, too:
Jarrad Winter
KGem-Hologram - funny, you'd think she'd be apolitical
David Leonard
Sam Spennell

Leftist Lies and The Arizona Shooting

2011-01-09T20:09:00.009-06:00

With luck, Arizona Democrat Representative Gabrielle Giffords will pull through and make as best a recovery as possible; as will the rest of the wounded. With time, the wounds left by the loss of the dead will heal.

---
But the wounds that are now opened and the lies that are now being spread are getting pretty bad in the realm of the living - the left is taking full advantage of Rahm Emmanuel's "Never let a good crisis go to waste" mentality, while violently erasing their own history.

Hillbuzz has a roundup here.

Michelle Malkin's roundup here.

On January 6th, the leftist blog DailyKos had a post entitled "My CongressWOMAN voted Against Nancy Pelosi! And is now DEAD to me!"

This has since been erased by the DailyKos.

While the left is condemning a map with "targeted districts" made up by Palin's camp that included Giffords' district - indicating it was vulnerable, as Giffords is a Blue Dog Democrat; the left is hiding its own history of such imagery:

Done by democrats.

Note that many of these items are being deleted and scrubbed from leftist websites, and in some instances even the google caches have been deleted and scrubbed. This is nothing new to the left.

Uncle Joe was editing history long before DailyKos.

It's something indicative of a group that can't stand up to criticism. The left is rabidly violent, and indeed the demented killer in AZ shares many points with the left - and was identified by those who knew him as being a rabid leftist.

The killer was a left wing pothead, according to those who knew him. But much like the leftist who flew his plane into the Austin, TX, IRS building, or the Jihadist who shot up Fort Hood - the left will simply write a counternarrative of lies and blame their usual targets and violently ignore reality. What doesn't fit with what they want, simply does not exist. Any information to the contrary must be destroyed. Stalin would be proud.

Let's hear it for democrats preaching civility!

Richard Cohen Lies

2011-01-04T21:18:00.011-06:00

Richard Cohen wrote a column for the Washington Post today lamenting the lack of blue-blood New Englanders in the military, and how sad it is that the Ruling Class can have the Country Class fight for it, because if there were more blue-blood New Englanders in the military, we wouldn't have gone to war. The blue-blood New Englanders would've protested and stop the war. And isn't that sad.

That's my summary.

Here's the article, decide for yourself:
How Little The US Knows of War

Perhaps most importantly, here's the second sentence of the article:

The U.S. Army that fought the Vietnam War was reviled, not spit upon (that's a myth) but not much admired, either.

It is not a myth. Richard Cohen, you are a liar.

Here's some documentation for you - there are dozens upon dozens of incidents:
http://www.military-money-matters.com/real-facts-about-vietnam-veterans.html
http://www.military-money-matters.com/vietnam-veterans-spit-on-part-2.html
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2007/01/they_want_it_le.html

Here's one:

Rick Atkinson, Pulitzer Prize winner and former assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, writes in his book, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966 of Captain Tom Carhart's return from Vietnam, pp. 324-5:

"Still in uniform, he was strolling through the O'Hare terminal in search of a telephone when a group of hippie girls darted up and spat on him. The shock and pain could have been no more intense if they had slashed him with knives. Reeling with surprise and uncertain what to do, he did nothing. His assailants scampered off through the airport crush as Tom wiped the saliva from his face, now aflame with humiliation. That night he got into an argument about the war with his friends' daughter, who was home from college. This is great, he told himself sardonically. I'm back less than twenty-four hours, I get spat on, then I get hassled by my countrymen over a cause for which I got myself shot twice. Welcome home, Johnny."

As to the "substance" of your column after the lie - Mr. Cohen, just because you live in a bubble isolated from the military doesn't mean everyone else does. I'd bet you don't know any truck drivers, machinists, or farmers, either; and likely no beat cops or firefighters. What you are writing about is the break between the Ruling Class - of which you are a part - and the Country Class - of which I, JBH, and 95% of the nation are. The culture you represent rejects the military and refuses to join - perhaps if you weren't busy celebrating the denouement and "no great songs", you'd get a clue. Also, there have been some great songs. They just belong to genres you don't listen to. On this you are simply ignorant.

---
These are for people who've earned them.

This one's for all you guys who aren't short yet, but want to be (you'll miss it when you're out and forget about police call and being drunk in morning formation - til then suck it up - time is on your side):

And for those who are staying in, but who aren't super-motivated:

And for genuine motivators like SSgt Hyatt, who had more legitimate motivation in his little finger than most Marines ever have, the kind of sergeant that made Hollywood sergeants:

Yes, it's a bit motarded. But at least it's not Taliban Bodies...

Okay, sure, here's Taliban Bodies, for all you motards*!

Is it a war song? Was Surfin' Bird?

I could do a year's worth of posts on music influenced by OIF & OEF, from Dixie Chicks' release of Travelin' Soldier in 2002 to Bad Religion's Let Them Eat War in 2004 to Toby Keith's Angry American/Courtesy of the Red White & Blue to John Michael Montgomery's Letters From Home in 2004 to... screw it, we got some room for more motivation by 3 Doors Down - Citizen Soldier (Nat Guard extended version):

*Motard: Combination of motivation and retard. Implies an individual who's motivated to a stupid level. Mindless, obnoxious motivation.

Meet The Liberal Elite

2010-12-29T23:13:00.003-06:00

As the video description says:
"A conservative encounters an elitist liberal. A pleasant conversation ensues. This is that conversation."

The flat delivery of xtranormal's animated characters makes it that much more fun. Enjoy!

Damn Yankees

2010-12-26T19:44:00.009-06:00

NY Post columnist Eric Torbenson recently published a column entitled "Deep in the heart of taxes". The main points of the column are this:

New York, I love you — but I can’t make the math work.

Like lots of media professionals (and fashion mavens, artists, musicians, et al.), I’ve penciled out the numbers for what it would mean to take a job in New York City. There’s barely enough room on the back of the envelope for subtracting the double-dose income tax hit from the city and state, and that’s before even adjusting for cost of living.

That’s one of the reasons I’m in Dallas. You know, Texas, the state that parlayed this year’s census data into four new House seats — pinching the two lost by the Empire State — because people actually want to live here.

Lots of Texas professionals love New York this way: fly in for $200 round trip, suck down the city’s beefy marrow of culture for a weekend and jet back to live cheap and pay no income tax. It’s all the pleasure and we keep our treasure.

This isn't really a surprise. Texas acts as a tax haven from socialist hellhole states like New York. State/city income tax is the reason why Rush Limbaugh left NY for Florida. But the problem comes at the end of that assessment by Torbenson. Torbenson's idea of "beefy marrow of culture" is the kind of narrow-mindedness that's very easily illustrated.

It's meant as a parody, but seriously, this is what they think.

He elaborates:

The state still has its issues. When you have no income tax, property and sales taxes have to make up the revenue gap, and they’re pretty steep. And try not to be poor down here because the Texas approach to a social safety net can be summed up as “Meh.” Texas spends less per capita on social services than virtually any state.

The income gap here makes Texas look more like Mexico in some ways than the rest of the country, though New York is no stranger to wealth excess contrasted with subsistence living. Texas has led the country in the percentage of people lacking health care, teenage pregnancy rates and drags the bottom on educational attainment. Political discourse here remains whether Democrats are socialists or simply traitors.

Here is where Torbenson illustrates that he doesn't understand Texas at all, and should go back to NYC where he belongs.

Sales tax is not steep. 6.25% is not steep. There is no sales tax on food. That makes it much, much easier to be poor. Plus, unlike his beloved NYC, we in Texas have grocery stores and supermarkets and local markets down here - you don't have to eat out just to eat, as in NYC. NYC's sales tax, by comparison, is 8.875%.

Property tax is higher in Texas than some places because... guess what? Wealthy folks own property. To be among the "landed classes" has for millenia been one of the striving forces of people, and an indication that one is well-to-do. And if you pay a little more to own the land, well, that's just how it is. You can afford a home. Suck it up.

No one who's making $20K a year is going to feel it anywhere near as much in their pocket, though it will be passed on slightly from the landlord. The landlord, meanwhile, benefits from low sales tax and no income tax... which is why an apartment in Texas rents for $500 instead of $5000.

As a counterpoint to Mr. Torbenson - if he can come up with a way to cut property taxes and still run the state, let him run for governor. Debra Medina ran on the idea of cutting property taxes. While she had faults that led to her failure in the governor's race, the idea of changing property taxes may have some merit. Of course, this would, by all definitions, be an explicit endorsement of the landed classes - and while it would benefit those who don't own land as well - it'd require a lot more than just a whining New Yorker complaining about his rates to change.

The next thing on Torbenson's litany of complaints about his new home state is the lack of social services. Being the daft New Yorker that he is, perhaps he needs a reminder of what "social services" means:

High per-capita spending means HANDOUTS. Handouts are best summed up by on of my favorite Democrats, Grover Cleveland.

"Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character. . . . "

This applies at the state/local level, too. Give handouts, and you end up with professional recipients waiting in line to be given their "due" for being poor. And where does that money come from? Someone's "stash"? No, Mr. Torbenson, it comes from citizens. It comes from the higher taxes that you and your ilk are trying to run from. Vice President Joe "Foot-in-mouth" Biden says it's patriotic to pay taxes. He says those taxes are put back in the pockets of middle-class Americans.

Mr Torbenson, why are you running from your obligations to give money to middle class New Yorkers?

The income gap doesn't make Texas look like Mexico. Mexico looks like Mexico, where the rich live in walled enclaves. Texans enjoy a basic human right that Mexicans do not. Self-defense.

Do not underestimate this. There may be great wealth disparity in Texas, but so what? The vaquero riding a ranch in west Texas or the bubba slopping hogs in east Texas all share the same protection under the law, and are all afforded the ability to defend themselves against predation. Their basic security is ensured by Texas law. Their ability to earn and improve their lot is limited only by their own potential. Their right of self defense isn't limited by connections to the mayor or governor, as in New York.

Mr. Torbenson, you fail to understand the most basic elements of human living. People in Texas can be secure in their homes and their property moreso than any New Yorker.

Texas shares a border with a third world nation that's rapidly descending into anarchy, and plays host to a few sanctuary cities that invite in third world aliens. Austin is a major offender in this category. That by itself increases the teenage pregnancy rate and the rate of people in the state without health care.

Political discourse in Texas does often consist of whether Democrats are socialists or traitors because we look at what they do. When you live on the border, you see the criminal aliens that sneak across (or are caught) and you see the effects of illegal aliens invading the country.

You also see this:
“I have only one loyalty,” he says, “and that’s to the immigrant community.”

- Illinois Democrat Congressman Luis Gutierrez

Make no mistake - he's not talking about the legal immigrant community from India or Sweden or Laos or Japan or Bangladesh or Egypt. He's talking about illegal aliens, primarily from Mexico.

His "one loyalty" isn't to his constituency. It isn't to his oath of office. It's to these guys:

Chinga tu madre, culo de perro.

Remember this... just last week?

Democrat Congressman Luis Gutierrez IS a traitor. And a socialist. Yes, a socialist.

Mr. Torbenson doesn't understand the concept of a social safety net, either. A social safety net, to a socialist leftist who lives in NYC (even if you write for the NY Post, you're probably more socialist/leftist than you are constitutionalist), means the government's gun is put up against your head and taxes are taken to be redistributed.

A social safety net, to folks in Texas, means that when your neighbor, friend, family member or fellow church parishoner or coworker or whoever needs some help - you have more of your own wealth to offer it. Culturally, you don't go begging for the government to shove a pistol in someone else's face and take their money for your "safety net". Your neighbor, or your friend, or your fellow parishoner or your relative helps you out. You aren't conditioned by the nanny state government to beg for handouts, so your social net knows when you need help, you need it. Or if you cry wolf, they ignore you, and you get nowhere - and you stop crying wolf and get a job.

In a more extreme example - in Boston, people seeing a cop being beaten walk by and don't help. New Yorkers are famous for closing their shades and ignoring a woman being murdered. In Texas, you don't even have to be home for your neighbors to defend you and your property.

Where do you feel safer? A state with a firm self defense mindset, where your physical safety is a priority to state representatives, and your financial and social safety is ensured by loving relatives, friends, coworkers, and the generous spirit of the people you know? Or a state where your "safety net" is doled out by some faceless bureaucrat, sick and tired of the incessant begging at their office?

If you're an illegal alien and burglar, feel free to relocate to New York. They have TVs there, handouts for you, and they won't shoot you - and if they did, they'd go to jail and you'd get to sue them.
---

Mr. Torbenson, in the Rockies, there's a term. It's called "aspenification".

Your town doesn't even have a gay lesbian bisexual transgender crystal-channeling health center, does it, Stan DARSH!?!

It's when a good town is overrun with aliens. Not the illegal alien kind. The kind of aliens that come from California. Usually they're running from something - high taxation due to idiotic social programs, crime caused by their social programs and gun control that disarmed all the non-criminals, that kind of thing. The town is taken over by rich people (typically from California) who are socially insulated by their position and their ability to just flit about from coast to coast. They don't understand what happens around them because they're wealthy enough to avoid any ramifications. So they simply move again, and ruin another small town.

In the Rockies, they typically come in and overtax the local government and drive out all the previous residents. Then they wonder why their city collapses on them in a rush of insane living expenses, taxes, and absurd laws and regulations. Basically, they bring their own big-city baggage with them and inflict it on the new town.

The newcomers don't want to assimilate into the small town. They resent the small town because it's prosperous. They want to change their new home into their old one - and they don't understand that the reasons the new town is BETTER than their old home is because of all the bullshit they inflict on it.

In Texas, there's a term for people who aren't from Texas. It's used elsewhere in the old South, though Texans strangely even use it to refer to folks from the old South. Yankees. It has to do with newcomers. Newcomers who come to stay are called Damn Yankees. Those who don't assimilate to Texas culture and understand that the things that Texas does are for a reason* earn the name - and it's no term of endearment. Also in the old South, they're referred to as Goddamn Yankees.**

Again I recall Thomas Sowell:
"For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before."

*For example: I used to live in a state with huge tracts of Forest Service and BLM land. Quite often really nice for that state, but it doesn't work in Texas. And I wouldn't want it, nor push for it, in Texas. That's just not how it works in Texas.

**In the bible belt, that's no small curse, either, though it may be lost on the philistines who populate Gotham and use "f*** you!" as a greeting - the "New York hello".

What We Believe Part VII: American Exceptionalism

2010-12-22T13:18:00.005-06:00

Bill Whittle's final Part VII of the What We Believe series, explaining Tea Party/conservative beliefs:

Whittle wraps up the series, and hopefully those who've watched it have gotten a little more insight - possibly into their own views and how to express them.

Picking nits:
Folks used to statistics will note that his comparison of "science units" is not done per capita, as the other nations listed are smaller. Were it done per capita (rounding to nearest million in both cases) it would look like this:

UK:______.29 science units/person (18 million science units/61 million population)
Canada:___.27 (9sci/33pop)
USA:_____.24 (75/307pop)
Germany:__.18 (15sci/81pop)
France:___.16 (10sci/62pop)
Italy:_____.11 (7mil/60mil pop)
Japan:____.09 (12sci/127pop)

Considering the VAST size of the US population, that's pretty darned decent. Couple it with the fact that the UK benefits from many very well established science centers, and that Canada has no small benefit from being a partner to both the US and UK, it's not too much of a surprise that per capita, the UK and Canada are doing very well. And good for them - but by no means is their prosperity an indictment of the fact that the US is the shining beacon of science by volume, and a very strong third per capita. That the US, with a vast population to offset in per capita comparison, still eclipses other nations is perhaps a greater support of Whittle's point of American exceptionalism in science endeavors.

Now, there are other reasons for this as well that Whittle hit on in earlier videos. One is the rule of law. Individuals who discover or invent something are probably going to have their patents, inventions, or ideas respected. Discovery and invention are generally rewarded through prosperity, and only rarely thwarted by intellectual theives or seizure by the state.

Consider Mikhael. He invented a product that's used worldwide, was adopted by his own government, and is so famous and iconic as to be recognized immediately. You probably know his last name already, and undoubtedly the initials his invention is known by.

His invention is so famous it's even on the flag of Mozambique.

Did he earn anything from it the way an engineer in the US would have? He received a lot of medals, promotions, and state handouts, but nothing along the lines of what a US inventor would receive for such a prolific creation - with about 100 million units worldwide. If he were selling records, it'd be a decuple diamond album, topped only by another Michael. Except a record cost about thirty to fifty times less.

What We Believe Part VI: Immigration

2010-12-21T16:38:00.007-06:00

Bill Whittle's Firewall Part VI of the explanation of Tea Party/conservative values:

There's a huge difference between legal and illegal immigration, and Whittle makes that pretty clear. For those concerned about the illegal immigration and criminal enterprises on the southern border, I suggest these internet news sites:
Borderland Beat
and
BorderReporter

Both of these sites will keep you up to speed on what the bi-coastal leftist ruling class media doesn't bother to show. Be advised, both sites sometimes feature graphic material concerning the massacres, beheadings and murders that take place along the border and into Mexico.

For folks who live considerably north of the border, and whose interaction with illegal aliens is one of hiring a day laborer, or some other innocuous, seemingly innocent activity, consider that people whose backgrounds have never been looked into could be former child soldiers from the Salvadoran civil war. Your 40 year old gardener may have been the leader of a death squad for either the leftist guerillas or the Salvadoran government. The day laborer at your house may have left Mexico because he was running from the law in Mexico. The guy at the Chinese restaurant here illegally may have been sent across in a shipping container, and he's working until his sister's debt is paid off - while she works as a "masseuse"/prostitute and her papers are held by the smuggler.

ICE has been apprehending record numbers of criminal illegal aliens this year.

Criminal illegal aliens being given a pass within the US is more the rule than the exception. While anecdotal, the story of the feds releasing an illegal alien from Bolivia who killed a nun is standard operating procedure across much of the nation.

And that's not even getting into the illegal alien criminal gangs.

That's from 2005. Click the image and notice that there are a lot of arrests far north of the border.

One more anecdote: a mutual friend of JBH and mine recently was doing a ridealong with a state trooper in a north midwestern state. They were riding in an unmarked police vehicle, and another vehicle approached them, wanting to race. The state trooper told our friend that he'd wait until the racing vehicle hit a high enough speed to take him to jail to pull him over. When the speeds reached over 100 mph, the trooper turned on his lights and pulled over the racer. The racer was an illegal alien, and was released. Not arrested and released - just released - as in "Have a nice day, sir."

The reason? That northern midwestern state is a sanctuary state. Orders from the state capital to the state police tell them to leave illegal aliens alone.

Think it's an exaggeration? Remember Massachussetts state representative Democrat Mike Moran - being hit by an illegal alien?

It's commonplace. Illegal aliens can commit crimes with impunity. And that's not even getting into the effects of a massive influx of cheap labor that depletes the job pool available to US citizens.

The republicans want cheap labor, and the democrats want cheap labor and to give handouts and make a perpetual voting bloc based on ethnic identity. Republicans are simply cheap stupid opportunists, and democrats are conniving, slithering, racist opportunists.

Tea Partiers want the rule of law, not rule by the whims of whatever political power is in charge.

What We Believe Part V: Gun Rights

2010-12-19T20:46:00.012-06:00

Bill Whittle's Part V of the explanation of Tea Party/conservative beliefs:

We see natural law revisited here. If it's yours, it's yours - and your property is your right - and your right to defend. No legitimate government can take away the right to property. Indeed, original phrase used by the founders was "life, liberty and pursuit of property". If it's yours, it's yours - be it your home, your house, your car, your labor, your wealth or your body.

Photo by Oleg Volk.

Just today, I stumbled across this essay: Violence Is Golden. It's a very direct assessment of how society works, and how violence works. It's a more elaborate version of Robert Heinlein's explanation in Starship Troopers via Sgt Zim of the application of force.

Photo by Oleg Volk.

It's something that, like Whittle says, most conservative/Tea Party/traditionalist types instinctively understand. It's not something that needs to be elaborated on to be understood - but it's worth it to examine beliefs anyway. For most folks, Oleg Volk's posters are simply direct, visual statements of common sense. Through examining these beliefs, it makes it easier to convey them to those who don't understand - those who fear firearms and place their blind trust unwisely in the monopoly of force that the state controls.

Again, by Oleg Volk.

But for people who live in a bubble, it is not easy to understand. For rich city people who believe that the police are there in an instant, perhaps banning guns makes sense. They don't have to experience violence in their lives. They are never threatened by crime, animals, nor do they feel the boot of oppressive government - the police are invariably subservient, because the super-rich are connected to the county/city/state/federal government.

For the not-super-rich city dweller, the modest suburbanite, or the rural resident of whatever means, physical security is a real concern - even against tyrannical government.

For people who've been victimized on a massive scale - they know what gun control really means firsthand. It isn't a myth, it isn't a "can't happen here", and no amount of "we live in a good neighborhood" or "we have laws against that" means a damn thing. They know that violence exists - sometimes in the form of common thugs, but more often in the form of tyranny.

Volk's work again.

And that line of defense is just part of beauty of the Second Amendment. The Founders knew a way to prevent tyranny, oppression, and crime (which is just tyranny or oppression on the personal scale). And they knew that the more of it we exercise, the fewer rights we have trampled - the freer we are, and the safer we are. The greater that defense, the greater the deterrence against oppressors.

No freeman should ever be disbarred the use of arms.

- Thomas Jefferson

An armed society is a polite society.

- Robert Heinlein

For those unconvinced, I suggest exploring Oleg Volk's site: A Human Right. It's also a good site to explore your own opinions on the Second Amendment, as well as something to show to others who may not have the frame of reference to understand.

Also, since it's fun and informative and persuasive, check out Penn & Teller skewering Gun Control.

She can resist tyranny, oppression, and crime. Sunburn, not so much.

And Oleg Volk has an awesome job.

What We Believe Part IV: Natural Law

2010-12-17T17:32:00.006-06:00

Bill Whittle's Part IV of the explanation of Tea Party/conservative beliefs:

Natural law means the right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
Political law means that the "authorities" decide you need to be have your limbs fettered and bound because you might swing your fists.

John Locke wrote much about Natural Law in his Second Treatise of Government, and he starts by addressing man kind in a condition of nature - wherein man is free, and left to his own devices. There is no government to determine what an individual can or cannot do - his actions are subject only to the limitations of the individual's imagination and capability. In a state of perfect freedom, an individual is subject only to the triumphs and tragedies and vicissitudes of life. Government exists as a compact between indivuduals to provide for mutual safety and improvment.

Often times, once government has established itself as a power, be it the tribal chief, the invading warlord, or the gerrymandered-district eternal senator; the government as an institution is simply a tool of power for a tyrant - not a tool for groups of individuals to provide for their common defense and well-being.

Consider this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Governments exist by the consent of the governed, and are rejected by those who are governed, but no longer wish to be. Contracts exist by consent of those involved, and are to be honored.

Government existing at the behest of the governors - the ruling class - is tyranny.

What We Believe Part III: Wealth Creation

2010-12-16T22:28:00.003-06:00

Bill Whittle's Part III of the explanation of Tea Party/conservative beliefs:

It's worth it to follow this up with Francisco D'Anconia's money speech from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In part:

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality."

Citizens Concepts: The Patriotapp

2010-12-15T17:53:00.011-06:00

Here's the website.

SO, these folks have built themselves an iPhone called the patriotapp. Here's what they say about it:

"...the word's first iPhone application that empower citizens to assist government agencies in creating safer, cleaner, and more efficient communities.... This app was founded on the belief that citizens can provide the most sophisticated and broad network of eyes and ears necessary to prevent terrorism, crime, environmental negligence, or other malicious behavior."

This is downright scary, this application is capable of letting a person take photos and send those photos along with a write-up to various government agencies including FBI, EPA, GAO, and CDC. this sure smacks of the DHS's "If you see something, say something," campaign, which now is at your local Wal-Mart store.

The website states the applications several uses:

Enable citizens to record and communicate the following:
National Security
Suspicious Activities
Crime
Government Waste
Environmental Crime or possible violations
White Collar Crime
Workplace Harassment
Discrimination, or other violations
Public Health Concerns

This basically is another way for the government to build information on the citizens they are supposed to be protecting. The potential for this application to be misused is exponential. People will be turning the neighbors in for blocking each other's drive ways, playing their music too loud, or collecting information for the government, such as how many guns a guy sees his neighbor with. This app gives people the incentive to actually spy on their neighbors.

On the other hand, however, this touted as a new 911 service that can help the authorities respond even faster with better information. But at what cost? How many potential resources could be wasted when a neighbor gets upset at another and decides to send that message to the FBI or DHS? Is this app going to solve problems or cause new ones.

Lets not forget we have folks calling 911 to complain about their fast food.

Related articles

What We Believe Part II: The Problem With Elitism

2010-12-15T16:30:00.002-06:00

Bill Whittle's Part 2 of the explanation of conservative/Tea Party beliefs:

A few minutes to gain valuable insight into the why. It may be a "why" that many of us already intuitively know, but to examine one's own beliefs is always worthwhile.

Thomas Sowell offers this quote about traditions from his book "The Vision of the Anointed":
"For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before."

Sowell's statement, in conjunction with Whittle's explanations, is much of the reason why social and fiscal conservatism so often find themselves represented by the same individuals. The basis for much of the thinking - that individual experiences have given people decades, centuries, or millenia of good choices - remains the same, and to disregard either social conservatism (traditionalism) or fiscal conservatism without good cause, or because of elitist mandate, is foolish. It assumes that the financial or social engineer (whether to stricter or looser policies of society or finance) alone has a better idea - and the elitist engineer must therefore direct society.

The non-elitist who believes they have a better way puts forth his new ideas as an invention, which is adopted by society if it's good, and ignored or rejected by society if it is not.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And if someone thinks they can do better - they can prove it themselves.

What We Believe Part I: Small Government and Free Enterprise

2010-12-14T18:46:00.003-06:00

Part 1 of Bill Whittle's 7-part breakdown of modern conservatism and the fundamental beliefs of the Tea Party.

Lame Duck "Immigration Reform" - Amnesty

2010-11-30T19:20:00.008-06:00

Michelle Malkin has the roundup here:
http://michellemalkin.com/2010/11/30/dream-act-nightmare-a-massive-open-borders-entitlement-program/

Short version from the People's Cube:
The interesting part is that even if it doesn't go through - since Democrats do have to appease the Unions - it may be pushed through by Republicans who want cheap labor for businesses and only pay lip service to US citizens next year. And while one can explain that the failure of the fedgov to enforce immigration laws has led to the ready availability of illegal or amnestied-legal unskilled labor depresses labor costs all around and causes employers to fire long-term, higher-paid workers due to their newfound lack of economic viability... the short version is this:

Which is why Democrats who were beholden to union votes weren't necessarily pro-illegal alien.

The rank & file working Democrat voter (the union guy) - is not pro-illegal alien. But the lame duck congress doesn't have to answer to him. Nor does it answer to the rest of the population that opposes granting citizenship to what amounts to underground invaders.*

Of course, if the current congressional leadership simply takes via taxes from Citizen A and Legal Resident Alien-Who-Worked-His-Ass-Off B and gives via handouts to Illegal Alien C, D, E, F, and G, then that congressman now has C, D, E, F, and G voting for him/his party in perpetuety... and as for Citizen A and Legal Resident Alien B? A bureaucrat with the swipe of a pen has told them that their country isn't theirs anymore - and they don't have the votes to change it anymore.

*I have no idea if that was a 50s sci-fi movie, but it should be.

Economics by Mike In East Texas

2010-11-08T09:29:00.006-06:00

For those who live outside the range of the Texas State Network's 1080 KRLD and who aren't awake during the overnight hours, you're missing out on on hell of a show. Texas Overnight runs between midnight and 4 AM CST, and is one of the most engaging, intelligent talk radio shows around.

Every Monday, Texas Overnight host Charley Jones has a guest on who's only identified as "Mike in East Texas", a self-described "forensic economist". Despite his folksy accent, Mike is exceptionally wise when it comes to economics, and breaks down the economic situation pretty well. His identity is a fairly well-kept secret, but what he has revealed is that his economic acumen led him to a remarkably productive career. He retired at some point and now shares information with Charley Jones' listeners.

The following is a two-hour discussion between Mike in East Texas and Charley Jones from 11/8/10.
http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/10716314?v3=1
Edited because the darn thing started immediately playing at the site. Really obnoxious...

If you want some stunning insight on what's happened in the last few years, it's highly recommended. Give it a listen for a few minutes and you'll probably find yourself hooked.

(More Texas Overnight pieces with Mike can be found on the net, but if y'all would like, I'll dig them up every Monday that I can find them. Leave a note below.)

The Extremists Are Coming

2010-11-06T17:42:00.000-05:00

Saw this one over at Theo Spark's blog, which is not always 100% SFW, but has a lot of good news & politic info. And pinup girls.

Vanity Fair (Statist in Disguise)

2010-11-05T10:50:00.009-05:00

In a recent article which can be found here, an editor of the Vanity Fair magazine tells the American electorate to "Man up" and stop acting like angry, hormonal teenagers. Here are a few points I would like to highlight about this piece of writing:

1. He believes the American electorate to be a bunch of self possessed teenagers who are acting out at their parents, i.e. the government. It has to be mentioned that this is a definite liberal sentiment, that "they" (statist, modern liberals, socialist etc.) know what is best for you, just like your parents did. They want "the best" for you but with that comes the erosion of your personal responsibility by the statist government. Some examples include New York state regulating your salt intake, and a general push in some states to not allow vending machines on school campuses for "the good of the children." It also includes determining if you should receive healthcare if your 65 years old or a new born infant because some government bureaucrat has decided he knows better the a physician does.

2. He also is still clinging to racism alledgedlly perpetrated upon President Obama by the American people especially those that love their guns and are just angry white folks. Look at Lt. Colonel Allen West in Florida, look at all the African American voters that stood within and with out the tea party this last election. This has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with the Obama Regime's agenda and a congress that was owned lock, stock and barrel by statist and followed regime's whims. Even then the regime couldn't always do what it wanted. People forget about the statist super majority and the senate and healthcare almost failed anyhow.

The gentleman from Vanity Fair attempts to sound a moderate but it is evident he is not. He clings to the liberal argument that the majority of this country is racist and hates Obama when in reality its the Obama Agenda that is truly despised. He wants to get back to the days of "moderate" President Bill Clinton which he apparently forgets was forced to the center after the statist attempted to pass healtcare reform during his first term and was "shouted at" by us angry teenagers. He also points out that what makes this national "teenage backlash" worse is that us right wingers like our guns and that statement further implicates this gentleman as another statist that just doesn't get it.

Statist will never understand conservative principles of freedom, liberty, nor personal responsibility. They want to take care of us.... The only problem is "We The People" grew up between 2008 and 2010 and we want our government back.

The Vote

2010-11-02T07:54:00.004-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

My fellow United States Citizens,

Today I have decided to change up our usual format due to today be November 2, 2010.

Today the midterm elections occur and this time around everyone regardless of the views you hold need to be heard, from both the left and right of the political spectrum.

Today is the day where each American needs to do his or her one most sacred duty:

That of heading to the polling place and casting your vote for your congressmen and various state post as well. If you have never served your country by being a military veteran and you wish you could have, by casting your vote today you will have done your country, your state, and your local areas a valuable service - that being your participation in the politcal machinery which our professors and other learned men call our democracy.

Are you fed up with out of control spending and fiscal idiocy in Washington D.C?

Go vote!

Are you tired of seeing congressmen and women trying to control your lives trough the implemetation of Obamacare?

Go Vote!

Do you feel as if Congress is slowly eroding our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Go Vote!

Are you unhappy with the way the current administration in Washington D.C. presents the United States to the rest of the world?

Go Vote!

Keep in mind that even though your one vote may not seem that much in the political grand scheme of things, you couple that vote to your neighbors, your fellow townspeople, others that reside within your county and in your state, one can get a pretty clear picture of what,"WE THE PEOPLE," want.

So my fellow citizens, let your voices be heard today even if you support the current regime in Washington, its your right, and its granted to you by virtue of the United States Constitution, not the federal government.

Rally To Celebrate Snarkiness

2010-10-31T22:02:00.007-05:00

Hotair has a piece about Reason TV visiting the Steven Colbert/John Stewart "Rally To Restore Sanity/Fear" in DC.

Taking it on face value, these people are the antithesis of what they claim to want.

The woman says "no Hitler mustaches"... except for Bush. That's okay.

The old man admits democrats have been in charge for two years, yet says "republicans blocked them". A supermajority in the senate for a year and change meant there was no blocking by the republicans. The old man probably even knows he's wrong, but needs his scapegoat.

The kids at the end argue that the way to get out of debt is to get out of more debt, much to the amusement of the Reason TV interviewer. The poor schmucks can't even come up with a way to make going further into debt to get out of debt sound good... because they're forced to think about it. Sanity may be restored there for a moment as they had to ponder exactly how to get out of debt - and how the entire rally is its own antithesis.

The folks at the rally sponsored by vapid clowns have their own positions shot down in a heartbeat in a matter of a couple simple questions. There's no easy answer out of it, there's not even a politician answer, there's no "context" to it, either.

To their credit, those folks at the rally who Reason talked to often try to respond honestly, but then find that their own positions are completely devoid of substance and logic.

Sanity is insanity. Logic is illogical. Ignorance is strength.

This is typical of the left. First use language to hide who/what you are, then use it as a weapon. Call yourself "reasonable" when you are anything but, and then ridicule the other side until they "compromise" which really means acquiescing to your demands... because, after all, you're the "reasonable" one.

5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage."

- Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

No matter what the liberal elitist with the "liberal elitist" shirt believes, her own positions are centered in ridicule. They call themselves "reasonable", when they are anything but, and ridicule those who are not like them - and therefore "unreasonable". It has nothing to do with being a "rational, reality-based, fact-finding, science-believing, correct-spelling, tolerant, peaceful, intelligent thinker." Someone who really is all of those things understands that more debt does not equal less debt.*

Someone who is elitist is by definition intolerant of others. They twist words to their opposites, and ridicule and shame the other side into believing they should conform. After all, the liberal elite knows what's best for you.

To quote Thomas Sowell from "The Vision of the Anointed":
"In their haste to be wiser and nobler than others, the anointed have misconceived two basic issues. They seem to assume (1) that they have more knowledge than the average member of the benighted and (2) that this is the relevant comparison. The real comparison, however, is not between the knowledge possessed by the average member of the educated elite versus the average member of the general public, but rather the total direct knowledge brought to bear though social processes (the competition of the marketplace, social sorting, etc.), involving millions of people, versus the secondhand knowledge of generalities possessed by a smaller elite group."

Or in musical form, back before BR got all lefty & silly:

Update: An Outsider's View of the Colbert/Stewart rally.
Very much worth reading to see a first-hand look a the rally and one person's experiences.

*Unless the party says it does. Then more debt equals less debt and then 2+2=5.

Things To Remember for 2010 Elections

2010-10-26T17:37:00.006-05:00

A quick roundup of headlines from The Drudge Report today:

Nevada voters with Democrat Harry Reid's name already checked.

North Carolina voter has his party-line Republican vote recorded as party-line Democrat... Five times.

The Ninth Circus Court of Appeals overturned Arizona's law requiring proof of citizenship to vote. Thus, foreigners now vote in US elections - effectively meaning that we have no sovereignty.

Update:
Voting Machines in Nevada voting automatically for Harry Reid are "maintained" by Service Employees International Union workers.

Michelle Malkin has a roundup of voter fraud here.

Update 2:
Jawa Report Roundup of Voter Fraud

Uncle Joe was right:

It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes.
- Josef Stalin

Chinese Professor

2010-10-21T20:15:00.002-05:00

Submitted for your approval, a new ad from Citizens Against Government Waste:

HT: Hotair.

Beltway Adventure

2010-10-16T22:35:00.004-05:00

Blogger Iowahawk offers a text-based adventure version of the events in DC from the last couple years, with characteristic wit.

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2010/10/beltway-adventure.html

I've included a short continuation of my own, were ADVENTURER to keep playing:

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO?

>

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO?

>TURN HARDER LEFT. DEMONIZE STATES THAT OPPOSE POLICIES.

THAT ISN'T WORKING.

>TURN HARDER LEFT

THAT ISN'T WORKING.

>DEMONIZE PEASANTS. NATIONALIZE MEDIA. DECLARE MARTIAL LAW.

YOU WILL BE IMPEACHED IF YOU DO THAT. YOU HAVE WASTED A TURN. IT IS NOW NOVEMBER 2010.

>CAMPAIGN FOR ALLIES IN CONGRESS

IT'S TOO LATE FOR THAT NOW.

>WAIT

IT IS NOW 2011. WAR IS GETTING WORSE, PEASANTS ARE MARCHING WEEKLY. STATES IN THE FOREST ARE WINNING CHALLENGES AGAINST YOUR PROGRAMS IN COURT. YOU ARE IN AN OVAL OFFICE. THERE IS 20% REAL UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE FOREST. YOU HAVE 35% APPROVAL HEALTH. YOU HAVE NO GOLD LEFT. CHINA WANTS YOU TO GIVE THEM GOLD BACK. YOU HAVE NO CONGRESS LEFT. YOU HAVE NO MEDIA LEFT SINCE NO ONE BELIEVES THEM. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO?

>SPIN. BLAME BUSH. BLAME PALIN. BLAME NEW CONGRESS. BLAME SENATE. BLAME BASE. BLAME RACIST EXTREMIST TEA PARTY.

THE PEASANTS ARE THE TEA PARTY. YOU NOW HAVE 15% APPROVAL.

>RALLY BASE

YOUR BASE IS NOW SUPPORTING HILLARY.

>DON'T PANIC

WRONG GAME.

>WAIT

IT IS NOW 2012. YOU HAVE BEEN VOTED OUT OF OFFICE BY A GRUE.

Klavan's Guide To The Elections

2010-10-10T01:11:00.004-05:00

Andrew Klavan's "Klavan on Culture" presents some interesting points for the upcoming elections to consider in these first two parts of what may become a short series:

Part 1: The Economy

Part 2: War!

As someone who generally identifies more with the Tea Party and Libertarians and Constitutionalists...

I'm going to have to make sure I'm hydrated and well-rested for pelting day.

More Eco-Daleks

2010-10-06T12:07:00.006-05:00

Every time you drive your SUV, Manbearpig kills a little girl.

Via Hotair.

More here.

While this is plainly misanthropic, and clearly falls into the usual eco-dalek theme, is it really a surprise?

Of course, Manbearpig is all about people who are made to feel guilty by buying into this bullshit being convinced to buy carbon indulgences to make the prophets and bishops of global warming/climate change rich while making them feel good. It's all about redistributing wealth from the global rich to the global poor because the "overconsumption" of the global rich is killing the global poor.

Global rich here ends up meaning the lower, middle, and upper class of the West (not the upper-upper class, though) having to sacrifice the wealth and prosperity they've created and enjoy - from high-calorie, low cost foods that make it so the US is one of the few nations where poor people are fat (unlike the rest of the world throughout history). Global poor here means the dictators who go along with the scheme and keep convincing the anthropogenic global warming useful idiots to give them money. The dictators will keep their people poor while blaming the rest of the world for their woes, because without the scapegoat, the people would overthrow the dictator and get freedom or at least a less-bad dictator for themselves.

Note the careful choice of the Manbearpig cultists' choice of victim. They cry about how the third world is suffering because you drive an SUV and have kids who need to eat - and often point to the suffering in Africa. (Why is Africa suffering? Dictators and Western aid propping up dictators regimes... but I digress.) Why is the child not a dusky-colored urchin from the third world? Because that'd be rightfully viewed as horrifically racist and most importantly misanthropic.

So why is it a western-looking white child? Kids of the globally "priviledged" probably won't suffer from the effects of you driving an SUV - in fact they'll benefit from the quality of life improved by having a car to get them to soccer practice rather than being told to walk across town (and because Manbearpig is bullshit).

The point is to elicit an emotional response. Terrorizing children is their MO, as we saw with 10:10. This white western girl is clearly a beneficiary of the destruction wreaked by Manbearpig (in the eco-dalek ideology), so terrorizing her is a righteous act. She also represents the offspring of the target audience - Westerners who will abandon their reason in order to abandon the lives that they've built in order to give it to Manbearpig cultists who've done nothing but peddle an ideology.

It also belies a fundamental disconnect from what makes one group of people prosperous and another not so prosperous. Often the weaker nation is still developing - and needs a market to sell products to - the greater nation. Often the weaker nation is weaker because its development is stymied by its own self-destructive dictators/government. The leftist Manbearpig cultists and ecodaleks don't understand this. They can't understand this due to their ideology. They also can't understand that environmental stewardship is usually a luxury afforded to those who are wealthy. But I'm digressing...

---

Aside from being a visual agitation meant to say "do this or we'll kill your kids", it's also kinda funny. Perhaps because it's almost to the point of self parody, and looks a lot like this internet meme:

Eco-Daleks

2010-10-01T18:40:00.007-05:00

I'm coining a new term today:
ECO-DALEK.

For those unfamiliar with Dr. Who, a Dalek is one of these:
Wikipedia entry here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalek

They're slow-moving, nigh-invulnerable aliens with one goal. To EXTERMINATE pretty much everything that isn't them. (They're also low-budget monsters with plungers for death rays, but they've got cultural staying power and some good story arcs.)

So what exactly is an Eco-Dalek? An environmentalist-ecoterrorist that believes in extermination of mankind for the sake of the planet.

(Alternately, they can be Enviro-Daleks.)

The bad guys in Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6 novel were representative of that. Obama's Science & Technology Czar, John Holdren, holds this view. He believes in forced abortions and mass sterilization by poisoning drinking water to exterminate the population in order to "save the planet". The concept of overpopulation by people overpopulation and consumption overpopulation also results in this view - where if there are too many poor, or rich who use too many resources, they must be exterminated.

In fact, most Malthusians think this way. Some educated idiots simply compare humans to bacteria while their projected malthusian catastrophes never happen. They know what's best for the planet, and the planet is the most important thing. So humanity has to start dying.

Of course, they believe that they are the chosen ones who should live since they're the best stewards of the land and know how to preserve and protect the planet. Everyone else must die, they must live, since they are perfect. It almost parallels Marxist doctrine of class enemies, but here the class enemies are based on piety to adherence to the doctrines of environmental mania and their leaders whether through advancement of the AGW cause or at least buying carbon indulgences. This is why Al Gore, with a mansion and jetsetting around the world as the prophet of Manbearpig, can be an absolute hypocrite (though he buys carbon credits from his own company). Al Gore, while he is the prophet of Manbearpig, doesn't seem to be an eco-dalek yet. He hasn't actually said "you should die". (Yet.)

Al Gore's brand is more of an enviro-statist. He's all for the government regulating your life until you're a subsistence farmer who doesn't harm the earth at all, or until you're simply hooked up to pods like in Matrix and fed bonemeal slurry Soylent Green from dead people so we don't even have to farm anymore.

This is his world:

A world where you submit to the eco-state. The state, of course, does whatever it likes. And of course, those who consume more are evil, those who consume less are good, so it's also a bit of watermelon environmentalism. Green on the outside, red on the inside. A dictatorial authoritiarian government will rule your life, for your own good. Alternately: Enviro-nazis.

The eco-dalek is something else.

Consider the following ad from the land that brought you 1984, Dr. Who and blood pudding:

This is a real ad. No, this is not a spoof by the Onion.

The UK Guardian has part of the story here. It's part of the 10:10 project, telling people they must reduce their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010.

Hotair has a good roundup of critical responses here.

You don't do what they "nudge", then they will EXTERMINATE!

For your own good, of course.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.

- C.S. Lewis

Al Gore merely wants to tell you how to live for your own good. He'll dictate how your life shall be, and you'll live as he tells you to. The eco-dalek tells you you should not live. He'll dictate that you must die for your own good.

EXTERMINATE!
EXTERMINATE!
EXTERMINATE!

Did Obama Fail Driver's Ed?

2010-09-29T03:02:00.015-05:00

Obama is one of those elites who must never drive.

He's got this metaphor he's been using on his permanent-campaign-mode speeches about a car.

“Somebody pointed out to me that when you're in a car and you want to go forward, you put it in ‘D,’” he said. “You want to go back in the ditch, you put it in ‘R.’ So I just want everybody to think about that.”

That doesn't make sense, does it. Those of us who are part of the country class know what cars are, and know how they work.

Democrat economic policy in one photo.

So there's this metaphor, where the economy and general state of the government is because someone drove it into the ditch. If you weren't aware of the CRA that caused the mortgage crisis or the democrats who resisted regulation of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac or the democratic congress that's been in charge since 2006 and wrote the bailouts (signed by fiscally irresponsible Bush who "abandoned free market principles"), you might just be willing to think that his metaphor makes sense. There are several more examples over at American Thinker, where they noticed the car metaphor sucks as well.

But, see, the people who drove us into the ditch were, in fact, the democrats.

From American Thinker

We're at 9% unemployment, possibly as much as 17% real unemployment (which covers those who are unemployed but no longer looking for work) - we're in no way, shape or form "out of the ditch". Keynesian stimulus, like Japan's Lost Decade, never works - and it isn't working now. More "D" isn't going to help.

It's Uncle Sam charging more deficit spending on the credit card the Chinese gave to us. Democrat are using spending on credit to buy us bread and circuses right up until there's no more credit to spend. In no way, shape or form are we out of the ditch.

But Obama doesn't drive, and probably hasn't in a long time. I shall break it down further.

Pictures make everything better.

See, when you're in the ditch, and D got you there (because it almost always does), you probably want to try some R. More D is not going to get you out of the ditch.

Just in case, take a look at what a car in the ditch always looks like. R rarely gets you in the ditch.

Now, if he wanted a metaphor, he could've said "if you keep turning right, you'll end up in the ditch". It's an absurd metaphor, given democrat policies being the root of our current woes, but it at least is somewhat consistent with how cars work. Of course, the rebuttal, that when you turn left, you get hit by a truck, is also true.

---

To continue the car metaphor, though, the people riding in the car are seeing a lot of warning signs. The guys in D just keep going past them.

Because Obama knows nothing about economics, and neither did Bush and the 2006 Dem Congress, or the Arlen Specter RINOs.

The rest of the country is yelling "STOP THE CAR!!!" Hundreds of thousands to a million plus marched on DC in a Tea Party that the ruling class pres decided to ignore. Another few hundred thousand showed up to the "Restoring Honor 8/28" rally. All these folks are shouting "STOP THE CAR!" And the ruling class isn't listening. And those bought off by the ruling class aren't listening because the guy in "D" is paying them off.

And there's one passenger who's looking between the rest and starting to see that the train never stops, is always on schedule, no matter what the guy in "D" says, and won't make an exception - and is beginning to see that there's no way to miss the train - especially by driving between the cars. The undecided passenger is starting to see that they guy going "slow down" is good, and the guy going "STOP!!!" has the best plan, even if it doesn't sound very... moderate.

Economic reality is always on time. It just doesn't care what time you think it is.

But the ideologue leftists and the leftist ruling class think if you just apply a little more D we'll make it past. Socialism works every time it's tried - just ask Cambodia, Russia, North Korea, China, Ukraine, Belarussia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland...

And just like how socialism always works, more D always works. Just ask Dirty Mary & Crazy Larry.

For those who require refreshers on Economics, try here. Driver's Safety, try here.

Mr. President, please watch them. Please stop the car. Please listen to us.

Please listen to Thomas Sowell:
"For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before."

We've seen Dirty Mary & Crazy Larry. We've watched Last Clear Chance and the Incredible Bread Machine. We know how this ends.

Dropping the Red Kool-Aid for a Spot of Tea

2010-09-21T09:16:00.008-05:00

From the New York Post:

President Obama came out yesterday and was attempting to align himself with the Tea Party movement.

Oh yes, a definte laugh, or should this be a sign of concern for the mental state of our leader? This is the same man who TRIPLED the deficit of his not so popular republican predecessor. This is also the man that has spent more money than ALL OTHER presidential administrations combined. This is the man who has done everything he can with the support of the most liberal congress ever to centralize power in the hands of the federal government. The Healthcare bill fiasco, the 2nd stimulus, tripling the size of Americorps, attempting to shackle the populace with cap and trade all belong under this man's name. He now expects you all to believe that he is a fiscally responsible conservative president, that favors limited government and that the populace being wary of the government is a good thing? One word will some that up:

WOW.

Now he says that the Tea Party has misdirected itself. It should be angry with the republicans still in office. Guess what Mr. President.... We are. We are mad at both sides of this mess because it took both for us to be in the situation we are in. But right now YOU and YOUR party have exclusive control of the federal government. You and your party are spending out of control, yes we do know that the occasional RINO votes along with you, they are being revealed and being marked for replacement in the coming November election as well. You and your ilk, Mr. President, think the citizens of this country are stupid and cannot keep up with politics nor understand the arguments. The Tea Party itself, made up of both democrats and republicans sees right through you, your party and your lies.

Mr. President, the nation is very disappointed with you, even your misguided followers, who think you are not doing even to "fundamentally transform" these United States. Now it is the citizen's turn, Mr. President, on 2 November we intend to fundamentally transform Washington D.C.

Image via Wikipedia

Indoctrination? Creating Rights? Wealth Redistribution? The Same Ole' Progressive Agenda

2010-09-17T07:34:00.009-05:00

From the Blaze:

This is everything that Barack Obama and the left preach. They attempt to indoctrinate people, seems they like to focus on children. Speaking of which I know several schools across the country got their "education" video whose return address comes from the Department of Education via 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

They also attempt to create rights to shore up their voting base. Seriously folks? High speed internet isn't a right, for a list of rights try reading the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. Is high speed internet a nice tool? You're darn right it is. Does it warrant a government subsidy so those who can't afford it or it isnt available in an area can get it? Absolutely not. "Chairman Julius" Genachowski, and former FCC chairman Michael Copps need to keep their "collective" hands off the constitution and focus on monitoring radio stations for curse words. However, Copps seems to want to do otherwise by stating very clearly:

"You will need and you are entitled to have these tools and services available to you. I think it is a civil right."

Guess what "Chairman" Copp, try heading to a public library. Most of them today have high speed internet and that type of technology in place. We don't need to spend any more money that we do not have on goods or services that the left feels is a "right" so that they can get re-elected. We have already done that with Americorps to increase the number of government subsidized volunteers, and we are about to reap the "so called benefits" of a government option healthcare system. America was already the world leader in "private interest" volunteerism and "had" the worlds' best healthcare system. There was no need to spend the money on two of these issues.

Most importantly Leftist want to redistribute wealth to low income families or if you prefer take money away from those who have worked their rear ends off to get what they have. This can also cause those lower income families to vote for whomever "shows them the money." However, that money has to come from somewhere, and its the taxpayer, or worse yet it gets borrowed from China or Japan. The leftists' believe that even if you have whatever it is they are subsidizing that they will just go ahead and give it to you any way because the extra income is "useful." Really? Useful to get you reelected? Useful to help that low income family? Will that low income family use that money wisely? Will that money have oversight to determine if it is being used for it's intended purposes?

Clear examples of leftist ideology, and clear examples of why the leftist way never works. It is impossible to oversee and fund a subsidy in our current economic state without the raising or creation of taxes (another leftist pillar). You can't create rights out of thin air. If you do you asking for the destruction of a nation due to the populace losing all its iniative and its will to work or produce anything of economic value. You can't indoctrinate people either, if you do, today you risk completely alienating the popualce due to the internet and the growing number of citizens that are "doing their civic homework."

One can clearly see all these elements of the leftist plan at work and the good news is that people are now seeing it for what it truly is and people are throwing it back in the leftist "collective" faces.

2 November is approaching, please be sure to register to vote and discuss the issues with family and friends.

Modern Liberal Thought - In Light of 9/11

2010-09-12T23:19:00.006-05:00

Evan Sayet tells this parable about the modern liberal:
...
I call myself a "9/13 Republican"...

I tell a story. It's not a true story, but I think it kind of clarifies what happened to me.
I say: imagine being in a restaurant with an old friend, and your catching up. And suddenly, he blurts out "I hate my wife." And you kind of chuckle to yourself because he says it every time you're together and you know he doesn't hate his wife. They've been together for 35 years. He loves his daughters and they're just like her. Naw, he doesn't hate his wife.

You're having some dinner and you look out the window and you spot his wife out the window. And she's being beaten up. And you grab your friend and you say: "C'mon, let's help her! Let's help your wife!" And he says, "Nah, I'm sure she deserves it."

At that moment it dawns on you that he really does hate his wife.

Well that's what 9/11 was for me. I would hear my friends from the left say how evil and horrible and racist and imperialistic and oppressive America is and I'd laugh to myself and say "They always say that. They love America."

And then on 9/11 we were beaten up. And I grabbed them by the collar, I said: "C'mon let's help her! Let's help America!" And they said: "No, she deserves it."

At that moment I realized they really do hate America.

...
Evan Sayet tells this parable here at the beginning of "How Modern Liberals Think" - what's been termed the "Grand Unified Theory Of Liberalism":

For all the benevolent talk of the 9/12ers - about how we all got along on 9/12, the 12ers do have good intentions, but they forget that liberals really do hate America.

There was a story in the paper on 9/11 in the New York Times that a lot of people missed. They were too busy watching a terrorist attack to read it. It starts with this line:

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.''

And was originally accompanied by this picture of the terrorist Bill Ayers who bombed the Pentagon, and who helped kill 3 police officers* and planned to bomb an NCO dance at Ft. Dix:

The reason he didn't go to jail is because his dad owned Com Edison. He's a super rich boy who wanted to be the king of the commies, and was going to murder 25 million people if he got his way.

Yuri Bezmenov defected to the West and spent a lot of time trying to explain how the KGB would tear down liberal (classical liberal, not leftist) and democratic societies by poisoning them from within. He explains exactly how modern Liberals came to the point that they really do hate America.

*The third policeman.

Never Forget

2010-09-11T06:05:00.006-05:00

...

The Jobs Are Out There - says ...

2010-09-07T09:48:00.011-05:00

Hilda "Documented or Not" Solis.

via HotAir

Labor Secretary Solis did a piece for USA Today a couple days back that's worth reading for it's absurdity. Ed Morrissey over at HotAir does a good job breaking down one part of her opinion piece. I'm going to cut up some of the rest.

Maybe it's because I when went to college I had professors and instructors who lived under the USSR and who had plenty of first-hand knowledge of the "there is work and the fields are ripe with glorious wheat, comrade" that my surplus Soviet BS detector goes off pretty quick.

Mine says: детектор дерьма

She starts of with some anecdotal equivalent of "glorious worker of the revolution" BS, and degenerates into more BS.

The big question: Are things getting better? To answer that, we need to look back more than a year ago, when the economy was losing a staggering 800,000 jobs a month. Our actions, most notably the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, stopped those losses.

The ARRA is a gigantic payback of favors to democratic districts and non-existent districts. It didn't work and cannot work, but a lie told often enough becomes truth.

The Recovery Act saved millions of American jobs — keeping health care providers in hospitals, teachers in classrooms, and police and firefighters on the beat. But the benefits weren't just in the public sector. During the past eight months, the economy has averaged 95,000 new private sector jobs.

Check this: from the Bureau of Labor & Statistics. See that unemployment going up, see the job loss? That "new private sector jobs" number is BS. There's a net loss, but Solis is selling the "we created some". If the factory goes out of business due to new EPA regulations and 1000 jobs are lost, but the pawn shop hires another few employees, an ACORN office hires a few employees to distribute other people's money, and a check cashing place open up, creating 50 jobs total - Solis reports "50 new jobs created". The net number of jobs in the community is -950, but the "new private sector jobs" is 50.

Sure sounds better than "unemployment keeps going up because Keynesian economics are bullshit and we're driving you down the road to serfdom".

Still, at 9.6%, the unemployment rate remains unacceptably high. So as we stem jobs losses, we must also accelerate growth in every sector of the economy — from health care and renewable energy to advanced technology and manufacturing.

"This is the glorious way of the future, comrade! Green jobs and health care for all and advanced technology!" Except they're not stemming job losses if they made 95,000 new private sector jobs and unemployment still went up. Why? See above.

The government does not and cannot create real jobs. If the Department of Labor wanted to make unemployment go away tomorrow, it could hire every unemployed person at $1/day to dig a hole today and refill it tomorrow. Unemployment would be zero. The Department of Labor could have the Treasury Dept. print enough money to make every one of those jobs pay $100/hour if they wanted. It would collapse the economy overnight.

These health care/green jobs/high tech jobs that are "made" by government aren't natural. They're created by government subsidy.

Well what does that mean? It means that government is taking YOUR tax money and applying it to something that some bureaucrat likes. If Govt. Flunky 1 decides he likes govt. running health care, he takes your tax money and applies it to hiring a (govt.) health care worker. Would that job have naturally existed? Maybe if the market would support it, but probably not.

Govt. Flunky 2 then takes your tax money and applies it to a green job he likes. Would that job have naturally existed? Maybe - but its wage rate would be set by the free market - not artificially manipulated by government. The green job itself would only exist if the technology is marketable and a net gain.

When Flunky 1 and Flunky 2 take your money, they first pay themselves for their department. And their department is always indispensable. Read Hilda Solis' statement here:

One of the ways this administration is accomplishing that goal is through smart investments in the American workforce. We are ensuring industries that we know are growing have workers prepared through high-quality training programs that we know are working.

Translation: "We are important. Without us, the American workforce would not be able to compete. Our smart investments in the work force drive it and we prepare workers for work. Government is important."

The private sector cannot survive without government. Consume. Watch TV.

Solis proves my point right here with her next anecdotal success story:

For instance, during a recent trip to Nevada, I met a plumber who spent half of his life mastering his craft at a company from which he hoped to retire. Then, the recession hit — hard. Despite having a job that people of my father's generation thought was recession-proof, he found himself unemployed.

Anecdotal story of glorious worker? Check.

Socialist Realism. It's popular with leftists who've never read Kolyma Tales or Ivan Denisovich.

He didn't want to tell me his problems. Instead, he talked to me about how he was leveraging opportunity — specifically a training program made available by my department — into a new career. Although it had been years since he was in a classroom, this seasoned tradesman was learning a new trade. Soon, the classes had opened the door for him to the high-growth renewable energy industry. Today, he is a solar panel installer. He loves his job, and his family's finances are back on track.

He didn't want to tell his problems - because he's a glorious, noble worker!

Now, leveraging opportunity through the DoL's program is what, exactly? It's you, the taxpayer, paying for his training. Why are you paying for his retraining? So he can become a solar panel installer. Why that? Because it's a subsidized green job.

Hey Comrade! We have green jobs!
MS Paint is not the ideal vehicle to use to write in Cyrillic, especially at an angle. And when your Russian's rusty.

The government is taking your money and training someone to take a job that the government is funding. Even if you don't pay taxes directly, every business that pays taxes has to make up for the taxes imposed on them - which results in prices of the goods you buy every day going up. You don't escape the taxes.

Is that green job economically feasible? Is it a net gain to a business? If yes, then a business would train him and hire him. If no, then he wouldn't be hired.

If Govt. Flunky 1 or 2 decides that it's a "good job" and it makes him feel good, then Govt. Flunky Committee will take your money and put it into making a job that's a net loss. If the training, job, and program are all a net loss, they don't care - because the Govt. Flunkies aren't accountable to anyone - not even the laws of economics (until govt. collapse). They get paid until they retire, and they can give away your money until then. Driving you out of business with regulations and taxes just means that Govt. Flunkies are still needed to "save" your job... that they just destroyed.

Remember from above: Bureau of Labor & Statistics says we had a net loss of jobs, but Solis congratulates herself on the 95,000 new jobs she "created". She keeps her job, and you need her to get you a new one. The expansion of the state is the cause of the problems the individual has, yet the state portrays itself as the solution to all the problems... that it just created, and exacerbates with its "solution".

This story is not unique. I have heard them from countless people across the country — the former auto worker turned medical assistant and the recently single mother who went back to school to become a heating and air conditioning technician. They remind me that America's spirit of "can do" is unstoppable, and that our nation's workers are the best in the world.

The auto worker turned med assistant is going from private sector job to govt. funded job. The govt. took over health care, remember? The single mother who went to school to become a heating & AC technician is part of this govt program. Another green job subsidy.

Cue some more asskissing at the end. The "can do" spirit doesn't mean scam into a government subsidized job. "Can do" spirit is stoppable by government. And it can be quashed when the plumber decides it's easier to take care of his family by scamming a govt. program than it is to relocate and work as a plumber somewhere else. When the auto worker's company is destroyed by government meddling, he goes off to use your taxpayer money to find a new taxpayer subsidized job.

They're all being paid $1 to dig a hole and refill it, and Commissar Solis is busy telling you what a wonderful thing it is.

Two Ducks in a Pond - Dolores Huerta and Hilda Solis

2010-09-01T10:01:00.012-05:00

Delores Huerta and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis are literally two ducks in a pond.

The speakers of the "We Can Help" campaign that allows workers "documented or not" to petition the federal government for help. Here is a video taken from the new news site: The Blaze

So how do you feel about that America? Is it alright for these women in a government advertisement to give support to workers, "documented or not?" Undocumented workers is now the liberal code word for illegal aliens who do not rate support from our government.. Is it really the law to for the government to ensure "safe housing and transportation? I know I'd like to know which law that happens to be.

To go a step further, the excerpts of Huerta's speech to a Tuscon highschool assembly openly flag her as a radical socialist. These two women are clearly another example of which our president has told us before, to judge him by who he surrounds himself with. For almost 2 years now we citizens of the United States have been judging you and your form of government and soon you will see our respons.

The Threat to Modern International Liberalism

2010-08-31T13:37:00.014-05:00

Rush Limbaugh frequently comments on his show that the left will tell you who they're afraid of by who they demonize.

Charles Krauthammer (quoted in the last post), said this:

The last refuge of a liberal

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, August 27, 2010

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the "bitter" people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging "to guns or religion or" -- this part is less remembered -- "antipathy toward people who aren't like them."

That's a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

Yesterday, the UK Independent posted this zany piece of tripe:

The threat to American conservatism

Monday, 30 August 2010

It is always tempting to home in on the absurdity of the Republican right in America, the almost comic quality of some of their views and the ludicrous nature of the accusations they hurl at President Barack Obama.

The paranoid and hate-filled world of the "birthers", the Tea Party people and all the rest is so alien to the British experience as to be incomprehensible. We tend not to take them seriously, or assume that the Republicans' constant lurch to the right inevitably renders them unelectable. We may be making a mistake. The huge size of the rally held in Washington at the weekend – where several hundred thousand people turned up to hear the Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck announce that America was "turning back to God" – provides further disturbing proof, if any were needed, of the growing popularity of the hard right.

The paranoid, hate-filled world of leftist Hillary supporter Philip Berg? Or is it because Obama brings up the birth certificate issue every time he gets the chance as a way to ridicule people he doesn't agree with? And what better way to address the birth certificate issue than to pass a law preventing it from being conclusively addressed? It's a funny soundbite on the surface, but since the long-form certificate has been hidden rather than shown to the public, it's just another indicator that transparency isn't valued at all by Obama. (Showing it would be a 5-minute solution to what the left claims is an issue.)

That part about "we don't control control every branch" sounded kinda ominous. As though he mentally punctuated it with "yet".

Tea Party hate? Oh, that's right, Brits do tend to be in favor of high taxes on the colonies. We've seen this before.

That means you, you snotty redcoat.

The root of the problem is in the second sentence, though. They "tend not to take seriously". Why? Because (haughty brit accent) these are peasants from the flyover states! Why should we take seriously the drivel that these know-nothing serfs prattle on about. They should be groveling at our magnificence at our wondrous ability to lead them into a glorious future, rather than resenting the grandeur that we have bequeathed to them. These chattering bucolic simpletons had best mind their manners when addressing their betters.

Whatever haughty Brit or snooty ex-pat wrote this, they don't have a clue. They revel in their ignorance. Quite literally - they ignore ideas that disagree with them in their ivory towers, and are annoyed when someone disagrees with them.

The reason their ivory towers run the way they do is because the conservative, provincial flyover states feed them, the blue-collar conservative worker builds their houses, and the baby-killer soldier they readily mock defends them. The elitist left exists in an artificial environment - which is why none of the left's ideas ever stand up to reality. They're like the stereotype of spoiled teenagers who think their parents fools, but who don't understand that their parents are the ones insulating them from the world.

The fact that the rally was held on the site where Martin Luther King made his "I have a dream" speech 47 years ago has caused offence among the heirs of King's civil rights movement, who resent Mr Beck's assertion that the two causes have much in common. But ructions from that quarter will do Mr Beck and fellow star turn Sarah Palin no harm among their supporters. It is more likely to do the opposite. Overwhelmingly white, conservative, rural and religious, their constant complaint that they "want their country back" is in part a thinly-veiled snipe at Mr Obama's race.

And Krauthammer is right again. "Overwhelmingly white" and sniping at race. So they're racists. Well, at least the left is consistently unoriginal.

From the stack labeled "Community Organizer Chest".

The problem with this is that American conservatives judge people based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

This Republican guy made some good points. Maybe the left should listen to them.

American conservative values, as we've expounded upon here before, are based in conserving American virtues. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights... Kinda important things that ultimately defuse racism rather than support it.

Now, did it cause offence to the heirs of the civil rights movement? Maybe if you consider people who engineer strife and hatred to keep their race-baiting going. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would be out of business if they didn't keep racial resentments simmering.

Those who weren't heirs, but were actual movers in the civil rights movement seemed okay with it. MLK's niece, Alveda King, spoke at the rally.

Here on the other side of the Atlantic, we await two things: for so-called ordinary Americans to recoil from and disavow the right's toxic, divisive rhetoric; and for moderate Republicans to start re-asserting the very different traditions of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and George Bush senior, for that matter.

Toxic? Divisive? Lower my taxes is toxic? Divisive is "quit taking money from one group to give to another"? Really? Note the Independent has no actual "toxic, divisive" quotes to give. Since there aren't any.

Moderate republicans? Lincoln? Sure, he preserved the union. He also suspended habeus corpus. I guess that's sorta like the left. Strong central govt, individual rights don't matter in the face of "the greater good" and the modern left can use moral equivalents to Lincoln's actual war against slavery to justify their own abuse of individuals.

Eisenhower wasn't a moderate. He warned against the military industrial-complex expansion of government, as well as gigantic federal expansion in other sectors of public life. He espoused small-govt principles in his farewell speech. Watch:

And Bush Sr. was not a conservative. New world order, all that jazz.

Neither of those outcomes seems to be materialising. Centrist Republicans have become a marginalised minority in their own party – eclipsed and somehow out of place among people who have come to expect references to God's will to appear in almost every sentence. Meanwhile, Obama's fellow Democrats are heading towards mid-term elections in November in a mood of despondency, and expect a drubbing at the hands of their adrenaline-filled opponents.

The gulf from leftist statism to liberty is vast. Centrists are those willing to appease, who have no principles. The left - the international left - wants more centrists to cut down the power and autonomy of the American individual. The expansion of state control by Obama and his Mao-loving, genocidal, communist cohorts is something that the American people reject.

The left rejects religion, because it's an affront to worshipping the state. The Brit saying "people who have come to expect references to God's will to appear almost every sentence" is of the class that also says that God is not appropriate for a sacred spot.

The UK Independent sums up with this, praising Obama:
The man they chose as his successor remains what he was on day one; a decent, thoughtful patriot and a builder of bridges who still aspires to lead a country in which race is no longer the defining issue. He has given the country a measure of health reform and begun the process of disengagement from costly and unpopular military entanglements.

A decent, thoughtful, patriot and a builder of bridges who aspires to lead a country in which race is no longer the defining issue. He has given the country a measure of health reform and begun the process of disengagement from costly and unpopular military entanglements.

All true, provided you view evil as good and wrong as right.

Modern liberalism, both domestic and international, is threatened by the Tea Party, is threatened by folks like Glenn Beck and his Restoring Honor rally, and is threatened by people who believe in their own independence.

There's a socialist/communist anti-capitalist poster that says "the boss needs you, you don't need the boss".
This isn't quite representative of reality, as "the boss" is just an individual (or representative of a group of individuals) who's amassed enough capital to be able to employ you, the worker, to help him with production. Provided you're in control of your own sale of labor, you can change jobs if you like, build capital if you like, and potentially become the self-employed worker who exercises his own use of capital and doesn't need the boss, or be a boss. None of which is bad.

The free market individual who understands this has no reason to fear this propaganda piece, that, while strictly true, isn't representative of reality.

When applied like this: "the big government bureaucrat ruler needs you, you don't need the big government bureaucrat ruler" - it becomes a threat to bureaucrats both domestic and international. America was founded on less government - and every time big government is shown to be the failure it is - big government rulers get scared.

Rush is right on this. The left will tell you who they fear. They fear individuals who don't need them. They are at their wits end, as Krauthammer notes, and have reduced themselves to crying racism. The race card is maxed out. And we don't need the big government bureaucrat ruler. The left fears that.

Modern Liberalism, Oikophobia, and Projection

2010-08-29T02:46:00.006-05:00

Charles Krauthammer has a good piece at the Washington Post about how modern liberalism (leftism) inevitably fails and seeks to blame those it would rule.

The last refuge of a liberal

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, August 27, 2010

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the "bitter" people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging "to guns or religion or" -- this part is less remembered -- "antipathy toward people who aren't like them."

That's a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

It's an excellent piece, and I recommend reading it all at the link.

I'd planned on blogging about it yesterday, but good things come to those who wait, and now James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal has done a piece expounding on Krauthammer's column. Taranto explains how the modern liberal (leftist) is an oikophobe. This explains why self-identified liberals are intolerant of the people they profess to stand for, and share more in common with Soviet commissars who would never consider themselves the comrade of the "glorious" coal miner or wheat farmer.

Oikophobia
Why the liberal elite finds Americans revolting.

If you think it's offensive for a Muslim group to exploit the 9/11 atrocity, you're an anti-Muslim bigot and un-American to boot. It is a claim so bizarre, so twisted, so utterly at odds with common sense that it's hard to believe anyone would assert it except as some sort of dark joke. Yet for the past few weeks, it has been put forward, apparently in all seriousness, by those who fancy themselves America's best and brightest, from the mayor of New York all the way down to Peter Beinart.

What accounts for this madness? Charles Krauthammer notes a pattern:

It's worth it to go back and read Krauthammer.

What is the nature of this contempt? In part it is the snobbery of the cognitive elite, exemplified by a recent New York Times Web column by Timothy Egan called "Building a Nation of Know-Nothings"--or by the viciousness directed at Sarah Palin, whose folksy demeanor and state-college background seem terribly déclassé not just to liberals but to a good number of conservatives in places like New York City.

In more cerebral moments, the elitists of the left invoke a kind of Marxism Lite to explain away opinions and values that run counter to their own. Thus Barack Obama's notorious remark to the effect that economic deprivation embitters the proles, so that they cling to guns and religion. (Ironically, Obama recently said through a spokesman that he is Christian.) Here's Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's labor secretary, explaining "The Anatomy of Intolerance" to readers of TalkingPointsMemo.com:

Many Americans (and politicians who [sic] the polls) don't want a mosque at Manhattan's Ground Zero. . . .

Where is all this coming from?

It's called fear. When people are deeply anxious about holding on to their homes, their jobs, and their savings, they look for someone to blame. And all too often they find it in "the other"--in people who look or act differently, who come from foreign lands, who have what seem to be strange religions, who cross our borders illegally.

So if some Americans are afraid of people "who have what seem to be strange religions," it must be a totally irrational reaction to "economic insecurity." It couldn't possibly have anything to do with an act of mass murder committed in the name of the religion in question.

And Reich doesn't just fail to see the obvious. He dehumanizes his fellow Americans by treating their values, feelings and opinions as no more than reflexive reactions to material conditions. Americans in fact are a very tolerant people. Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was no serious backlash against Muslims. What makes them angry--what makes us angry--is the bigotry of the elites.

It's also worth it to read the whole thing here at the link.

Now, one more smaller read to tie things in together and that's it. Reason Online had a column the other day talking about the history of The Big Lie, and how it was not supposed to be a tool for use by fascists, but a tool that had been used against them, as described by Hitler. In modern usage, it's the concept of The Big Lie that's important, not so much it's origin... until someone cites its origin incorrectly. But I digress... the important part is that the leftist founder of DailyKos has released a shitty new book and what it shows about the left.

Roger Ebert, Hypocrisy, and "the Big Lie" Michael C. Moynihan | August 26, 2010

As I observed on Twitter last night (which you would have known if you were following me), the strangest thing about Markos Moulitsas’s stupid new book American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right is that it is blurbed by David Coverdale, the leather-faced former Whitesnake front man. Quoth Mr. Tawney Kitaen, “American Taliban shines a blinding light on the conservative right’s dark agenda. Anyone who genuinely cares about America should read this book.”

The title of Moulitsas’ book is pretty self-explanatory, but according to the promotional materials provided by the publisher, the DailyKos founder “pulls no punches as he compares how the Republican Party and Islamic radicals maintain similar worldviews and tactics.” To my comrades on the left, congratulations on the acquisition of your very own Dinesh D’Souza. But today I noticed a few other effusive blurb writers praising the Republican-Taliban connection:

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow is, I am often told, a paragon of reason on cable news. Indeed, she opined to Rep. Joseph Cao (R-La.): “Do you feel like it's possible to have a constructive debate, even about hot-button issues like abortion, like some of the other things that have attracted some of the most extreme rhetoric? Or do you feel like things have now been so heated, for so long, and there's been so many exaggerations that the prospects for civil discussion are dim?” Yes, purge the extreme, over-heated rhetoric from the debate...by providing a blurb for a book comparing the Republican Party to the Taliban! Because, as Maddow says, “It isn’t possible to understand American politics now without understanding the worldview and arguments of Markos Moulitsas.”

The book is called American Taliban, and it's every bit as stupid as you'd expect from Markos "Screw Them" Moulitsas. The bogus polls he cites are from pollsters he's suing because they manufactured data to suit his book. It's leftist propaganda. No surprise there.

For reference, he was saying "Screw them" about those two Americans hanging from the bridge.

James Taranto of WSJ (just read the whole thing already) finishes with this:

There is one important difference between the American oik and his European counterpart. American patriotism is not a blood-and-soil nationalism but an allegiance to a country based in an idea of enlightened universalism. Thus our oiks masquerade as--and may even believe themselves to be--superpatriots, more loyal to American principles than the vast majority of Americans, whom they denounce as "un-American" for feeling an attachment to their actual country as opposed to a collection of abstractions.

Yet the oiks' vision of themselves as an intellectual aristocracy violates the first American principle ever articulated: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . ."

This cannot be reconciled with the elitist notion that most men are economically insecure bitter clinging intolerant bigots who need to be governed by an educated elite. Marxism Lite is not only false; it is, according to the American creed, self-evidently false. That is why the liberal elite finds Americans revolting.

This is how modern liberals (again, leftists) can accuse those who aren't leftists of being like the Taliban, of being closed-minded, of being haters, of being reactionary small-minded bigots. Simultaneously, the liberal can embrace the sharia-supporting Cordoba/Ground Zero Mosque, embracing their own open-mindedness by embracing islam, yet ignore women's and gay rights that they also claim to support. This is how the modern liberal can accuse everyone but them of being "economically insecure bitter clinging intolerant bigots who need to be governed by an educated elite" - just as Taranto says.

To the educated elite of the left, the Taliban and Islamic terrorists, soccer moms and Nascar dads are all the same, even though they're opposites. To the educated elite of the left, when they have to decide who the real bad guy is, oikophobia rules, and they tear down the American citizen who rejects the left's statist rule - be it absurd taxes or the left's de facto support of the advancement of a global caliphate.

Perhaps one quote by Moulitsas * makes this distinction more clear:
The military is perhaps the ideal society -- we worked hard but the Army took care of us in return. All our basic needs were met -- housing, food, and medical care. ... The Army taught me the very values that make us progressives -- community, opportunity, and investment in people and the future.

A regimented, structured society with a caste system where everyone wears the same clothing, everyone operates at the same time, where regulations are harshly enforced and grueling work is the norm? Where liberty and freedom are granted only by the grace of those of superior rank? The left does want a harshly statist society. They want to live in 1984. They want the state to rule them "for the greater good".

His freedom is slavery.
His ignorance is strength.

Moulitsas doesn't seem to understand that the military is voluntary. There is a great distinction between being conscripted into a socialist state with threat of prison just to be a citizen and voluntarily making one's personal liberty and even life secondary in order to keep your fellow countrymen safe.

But the left wants to be the ruling class and resent it when the country class tells them no. Anyone who doesn't submit to their grand scheme of a regimented society for the "greater good" is the problem. Anyone who opposes the country class is someone they ally with.

They are oikophobe bigots and tyrants, who accuse others of being bigoted tyrants if they resist. Projection.

*Of course, given that the left frequenly has liars who claim military service as street cred - like the liar Micah Wright, we're just assuming that Moulitsas was in the military. 20 mile road march and bleeding feet in boot camp? I find that claim highly dubious.

Progressives Against Progress

2010-08-27T16:44:00.009-05:00

http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_3_american-liberalism.html

Progressives Against Progress
The rise of environmentalism poisoned liberals’ historical optimism.
by Fred Siegel

For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, American liberals distinguished themselves from conservatives by what Lionel Trilling called “a spiritual orthodoxy of belief in progress.” Liberalism placed its hopes in human perfectibility. Regarding human nature as essentially both beneficent and malleable, liberals, like their socialist cousins, argued that with the aid of science and given the proper social and economic conditions, humanity could free itself from its cramped carapace of greed and distrust and enter a realm of true freedom and happiness. Conservatives, by contrast, clung to a tragic sense of man’s inherent limitations. While acknowledging the benefits of science, they argued that it could never fundamentally reform, let alone transcend, the human condition. Most problems don’t have a solution, the conservatives maintained; rather than attempting Promethean feats, man would do best to find a balanced place in the world.
...
American liberalism has remarkably come to resemble nineteenth-century British Tory Radicalism, an aristocratic sensibility that combined strong support for centralized monarchical power with a paternalistic concern for the poor. Its enemies were the middle classes and the aesthetic ugliness it associated with an industrial economy powered by bourgeois energies.
...
Like the Tory Radicals, today’s liberal gentry see the untamed middle classes as the true enemy. “Environmentalism offered the extraordinary opportunity to combine the qualities of virtue and selfishness,” wrote William Tucker in a groundbreaking 1977 Harper’s article on the opposition to construction of the Storm King power plant along New York’s Hudson River. Tucker described the extraordinary sight of a fleet of yachts—including one piloted by the old Stalinist singer Pete Seeger—sailing up and down the Hudson in protest. What Tucker tellingly described as the environmentalists’ “aristocratic” vision called for a stratified, terraced society in which the knowing ones would order society for the rest of us. Touring American campuses in the mid-1970s, Norman Macrae of The Economist was shocked “to hear so many supposedly left-wing young Americans who still thought they were expressing an entirely new and progressive philosophy as they mouthed the same prejudices as Trollope’s 19th century Tory squires: attacking any further expansion of industry and commerce as impossibly vulgar, because ecologically unfair to their pheasants and wild ducks.”

Neither the failure of the environmental apocalypse to arrive nor the steady improvement in environmental conditions over the last 40 years has dampened the ardor of those eager to make hair shirts for others to wear. The call for political coercion as a path back to Ruskin’s and Mishan’s small-is-beautiful world is still with us. Radical environmentalists’ Tory disdain for democracy and for the habits of their inferiors remains undiminished. True to its late-1960s origins, political environmentalism in America gravitates toward both bureaucrats and hippies: toward a global, big-brother government that will keep the middle classes in line and toward a back-to-the-earth, peasantlike localism, imposed on others but presenting no threat to the elites’ comfortable lives. How ironic that these gentry liberals—progressives against progress—turn out to resemble nothing so much as nineteenth-century conservatives.

More at City Journal.

This article interested me since it points out the leftist ruling class' environmental statist ideology. Written by a leaning-lefty, he seems somewhat dismayed by the constant push for statist rule by "liberals". This ideology quickly summed up:
1. Nature is god (whether the left believes it or it's just to get to #4 is up to the individual lefty)
2. The masses ruin nature
3. Therefore masses must be controlled (or exterminated)
4. The leaders know best and are exempt from rules for the masses

Fred Siegel's politics seem to lean left (without doing too much research into the guy), and this is shown in his ending statement.

19th Century British "conservatives" are not the same as US conservatives. Look at the top of the blog here. See where it says " helping to conserve American libertarian values"? That's US conservatism.

Conservatism within the US is often viewed as traditionalism - which is associated with religious and family groups, and while often laudible in their non-governmental efforts, conservatism is adherence to the Constitution and adherence to those principles of the Constitution. It's a document of classic liberalism - as in liberty for all, tolerance for all, and the ability for each man (and woman) to live his live how he chooses free of all but the fewest govt. restrictions.

The US is a nation of free men who came together to establish a nation of free men. They took pride in their traditions, but did not want to impose on one another. The most unifying tradition is that of a reverence for freedom.

Conservatism - as in conservation of one's original values - in other nations is a different animal. Conservatism in England may represent groups like the British National Party, which has a very pro-Anglo/pro-white/anti-everybody-who's-not-a-white-Brit bias to them. They are conserving old values of the UK, just values that are rooted in nationalism and white British ethnic supremacy.

Until a 2009 court order, they restricted their membership to "indigenous caucasian". Presumably to keep any smart-ass Chechens from joining just to fuck with them.

Conservatism in Japan may represent hard nationalist policies that are very pro-Japanese and frequently anti-Korean, anti-Chinese. Conservatism in France or Iran may represent laws that preserve the language against any change or modification, or variations against traditional morality of those nations.

Pictured: elastic loaves.

The United States, unlike most nations in the world, is a collection of different ethnic groups. The US is not represented by one cardinal national group. There is no "American" ethnicity. There is a group of people who are irish, a group who are german, a group who are russian, congolese, brazilian, mexican, japanese, chinese, etc. There is no ethnicity nor ethnic culture to match the United States.

Thus Siegel makes a big mistake in assuming that this leftist enviro-statism has anything to do with actual conservatism. The difference between British monarchists in the 19th century and American conservatives is vast. The left, which are emphatically illiberal and intolerant, despite their nom de jour "liberal", are far from American conservatism. That they may want to conserve monarchical dictatorial rule is not a surprise to those who've seen the effects of disagreeing with a "liberal." (Liberal-on-liberal violence, especially.)

That some use environmentalism and some use ethnic supremacy are simply different means to the same end: power. Some are naked in their power grab based on what they perceive as an ethnic right, some grab for power by determining that they alone can save the world from an environmental apocalypse - and that all others be damned. Neither is remotely like American conservatism. Both are statism, autocracy, and dictatorship.

American conservatism is entrenched in these words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,...

When You're Holding A Hammer

2010-08-24T17:05:00.001-05:00

Backstory at HotAir.

The Rural Point of View

2010-08-22T22:11:00.003-05:00

A quick summary of some major differences in culture between regions to put some things in perspective.

By Texas natives Reverend Horton Heat.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose III

2010-08-13T02:18:00.008-05:00

Milton Friedman on the Economy in 1980 talking with Phil Donahue, followed by more proof government is going the wrong way, and the free market is the greatest cause of happiness in the world.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

The solutions that work remain the same then as now. Reduce spending, lower taxes, reduce regulation, let people be free.

---
And again, that's enough of Donahue's hair. Palate cleanser:

Media vs Black Tea Partiers

2010-08-05T23:22:00.004-05:00

Reporters vs black conservatives at a national press club event on 8/4/10.

HT Jawa Report & Breitbart.

Permission to Rock The Vote, Sir?

2010-08-03T16:50:00.005-05:00

DENIED.

I'd heard some info about this in the last few days, but Matthew Breitbart's Big Peace site and the Washington Times have a pretty good roundup of what's going on.

http://bigpeace.com/jdonovan/2010/08/03/voting-rights-for-felons-but-not-soldiers/

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/28/holder-puts-felons-over-soldiers/

Short version, the government got told they have to make sure deployed troops can vote. the Obama administration, knowing that troops will vote against democrats, has seen fit to pass on actually enforcing the rules that will make it so troops are guaranteed their rights to vote even when deployed.

Instead, as is noted in the story, the Obama administration is more interested in restoring voting rights for felons - as he expects them to vote for him.

Transparent pandering to whoever will vote him and his leftist cronies into power in perpetuety.

It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes.

- Josef Stalin

Let Me Be Clear

2010-07-26T13:54:00.001-05:00

The Ruling Class vs. The Country Class

2010-07-21T18:26:00.010-05:00

Angelo M. Codevilla has written an excellent piece over at American Spectator entitled
America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution. It's an excellent read, though a bit long.

He divides the nation into two classes - a ruling class and a country class. The ruling class, is by and large, blue state-oriented, govt.-oriented, non-producers who believe they know what's best for everyone, and they should rule. The country class, is by and large, red-state oriented, private enterprise-oriented, producers who believe that individuals know what's best for themselves, and that individuals should rule themselves. The ruling class desires authority, the country class desires autonomy.

From Codevilla's piece:
Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct.
--
The point is this: though not one in a thousand of today's bipartisan ruling class ever heard of Adorno or McCloskey, much less can explain the Feuerbachian-Marxist notion that human judgments are "epiphenomenal" products of spiritual or material alienation, the notion that the common people's words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our ruling class. They absorbed it osmotically, second -- or thirdhand, from their education and from companions. Truly, after Barack Obama described his opponents' clinging to "God and guns" as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointing out he had said "what everybody knows is true." Confident "knowledge" that "some of us, the ones who matter," have grasped truths that the common herd cannot, truths that direct us, truths the grasping of which entitles us to discount what the ruled say and to presume what they mean, made our Progressives into a class long before they took power.
---

2004 - both major candidates for president were members. Was there a conspiracy? No. They're just members of the same ruling class. The secret society is a coincidental symptom, the ruling class is the disease. Unless you're Alex Jones. Then they're all reptilians.

---

Caroll Quigley, historian and professor, who had an influence on Bill Clinton and his Rhodes Scholarship:

"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies."

Quigley may have brought this up as part of his belief in conspiracy theories... or may have brought it up as a model of what an individual political party should do (as in the rapidly evolving idea that Obama's weaknesses are going to be exploited by Hillary Clinton in 2012, to the effect of unelecting Obama's overt radical leftism and electing Hillary's not-as-overt radical leftism). It ties in with the idea that there is a ruling class - a class that rules by patronage and pull.

It also backs up the idea that there isn't a dimes worth of difference between the two parties in the US, much less branches of those parties. With RINOs on one side and democrats on the other, it's a convincing case. With the illegal immigration debate in 2007 - where the ruling class of republicans and democrats were united against the country class - the people - it was made pretty apparent.

It's also why the media selected a RINO candidate for pres in 2008 - by choosing the one the ruling class approved of. McCain was and is a member of the ruling class. Thompson, Tancredo, Hunter, and especially Ron Paul, were not.

It's important to note that the media itself is part of the ruling class. Consider NPR's griping about the "Tyranny Of Constituency".

The NPR poll shows why individual House members wind up being more loyal to their own jigsaw piece of the national puzzle than to the national puzzle itself. Only their own micro-constituency can vote for them (or against them).

NPR considers it terrible when representatives actually represent the people who elected them, rather than go along with the national ruling (leftist) class.

National Public Radio promotional still from a telathon. Seen with sunglasses.

Unless you're Alex Jones, then this is pretty much all you see everywhere. Without the sunglasses.

--
But individuals with principles who adhere to them aren't rulers. Originialist judges don't rule on a whim. Constitutionalist legislators don't write things because they feel like it.

And there is a simple way to tell apart the ruling class from the country class.

I use what former Texas State Representative Dr. Suzanna Hupp said:

"How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual... as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of."

It's a litmus test for whether a politician is part of the ruling class. If they don't trust you with your own security, and if they don't trust you with physical power, they're ruling class. If they trust you, they're country class who work for you, the citizen. Even if they harbor some ambitions of the ruling class, they're still someone you can reason with, because at the basic physical level they believe in self-determination and individual autonomy.

The New York Times Lies

2010-07-19T09:25:00.003-05:00

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

- Vladimir Lenin

The New York Times has a story from July 17th about how the Tea Party isn't racist because it's just a bunch of racist hatemonger bigots, it's because they're old hatemonger bigot racists.

First off, that's outright bullshit. No matter how many times Alfonzo Rachel or Katrina Pierson show up at Tea Parties and are celebrated as leaders and spokespeople thereof... well, the racist left simply calls them names and ignores them.

The second lie is this one from the NYT:
There have been scattered reports around the country of racially charged rhetoric within the movement, most notably just before the vote on the new health care law last March, when Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the legendary civil rights leader, was showered with hateful epithets outside the Capitol.

It's total bullshit.

Andrew Breitbart even offered $10,000 of his own money if anyone could prove the n-word was said even once.

From Breitbart's challenge to the leftists:

If we let them get away with Saturday’s stunt — using the imagery of the Civil Rights era and hurtful lies to cast aspersions upon the tea party whole — then they really will have won the day.

It’s time for the allegedly pristine character of Rep. John Lewis to put up or shut up. Therefore, I am offering $10,000 of my own money to provide hard evidence that the N- word was hurled at him not 15 times, as his colleague reported, but just once. Surely one of those two cameras wielded by members of his entourage will prove his point.

And surely if those cameras did not capture such abhorrence, then someone from the mainstream media — those who printed and broadcast his assertions without any reasonable questioning or investigation — must themselves surely have it on camera. Of course we already know they don’t. If they did, you’d have seen it by now.

THOUSANDS OF TIMES.

Rep. Lewis, if you can’t do that, I’ll give him a backup plan: a lie detector test. If you provide verifiable video evidence showing that a single racist epithet was hurled as you walked among the tea partiers, or you pass a simple lie detector test, I will provide a $10K check to the United Negro College Fund.

---
There were dozens of camera phones (even my old clamshell phone has a video recorder) and there were dozens of video cameras at the event. Dozens of people were taping and recording it. But the slurs didn't happen. Yet the left continues to repeat the slander against the Tea Parties.

Why? It's their narrative. They hate the Tea Parties, and the worst thing to call them is racist. In a multiculturalist tolerant society, that's the worst thing to be. That's why anyone who's black, brown, red, yellow, or off-white at a Tea Party gets the kind of names hurled at them like Michelle Malkin does every day in her email. Because the left can't write them off as just racist - and when the left's ideological worldview doesn't work, it gets angry.

Just like when leftist liberal union members beat up a black dude named Kenneth Gladney and called him n*gger.

Much as the Tea Parties aren't racist, and as Malkin, Zo and Pierson are denigrated by the left - insulted and more - and Gladney was beaten and called n*gger, the left itself is racist.

And to knock out one more anti-Tea Party slur, much as the left mocks the Tea Parties as astroturf - when they aren't - the left sees only itself - as all they do is astroturf.

No Mosque at Ground Zero

2010-07-18T11:22:00.002-05:00

The Jawa Report links to Brit Pat Condell when he puts up really good videos like this one, and I feel that their statement that "more folks should see it" is quite correct. Thus:

It's also a quick primer in case you're not up to speed on the story - basically, an Islamic group wants to build a mosque at Ground Zero in NYC. Pat Condell points out that Cordoba is also the location of the major mosque built in Spain when the Muslims invaded and conquered Spain. They built the mosque because they conquered. Here in the US, they plan on doing the same.

Now, if they wanted to build it at the Trinity Ground Zero, I wouldn't have a problem.

Dont' Be That American

2010-07-12T10:31:00.005-05:00

Personally I like some of Jay Leno's stuff though I do not watch his show regularly. One thing I do enjoy that he does is his "Jaywalking" segment. This time he's interviewing Americans who don't seem to know what the 4th of July holiday is all about. At the end of the clip Jay will ask a grandfather of a family who hadn't been able to answer any of the simple questions and the grandfather answers every single one.

Please citizens of the United States please don't be these people, be the grandfather who knows his history and his heritage.

Celebrate Your Independence

2010-07-04T09:23:00.004-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

Independence Day.

Celebrate it Independence Day and remember what happened on this day so long ago. Our forefathers gave us the Declaration of Independence. It stated that a people had the right to be free. That every man, woman and child has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It addressed the grievances they brought against King George III in a clear argument as to why they should break their political and economic bonds to Great Britian.

Today, we as an American people are facing some of the same arguments as our founding fathers. We face increasing interference from our federal government in our lives to include our rights to see to our own bodies' health, to create a living for oursleves without government saying how much we can or cannot use for our own benefit, and to hand pass on something tanglible to our children when we pass from this world.

Americans, enjoy this day. This is a day of freedom from all it was enshrined as such when the Declaration was read to the people in 1776. The document still stands and is just as applicable to our current overgrown, powerhungry federal government as it was to the government of King George III of Great Britian. Think on these things today as you are with your friends and family celebrating the very essence of which this amazing country was built on.

Happy Independence Day. Be Safe.

Manbearpig Terrorists

2010-06-25T09:11:00.010-05:00

Via Pajamas Media:
Spain’s Dr. Gabriel Calzada — the author of a damning study concluding that Spain’s “green jobs” energy program has been a catastrophic economic failure — was mailed a dismantled bomb on Tuesday by solar energy company Thermotechnic.

Says Calzada:

Before opening it, I called [Thermotechnic] to know what was inside … they answered, it was their answer to my energy pieces.

Dr. Calzada contacted a terrorism expert to handle the package. The expert first performed a scan of the package, then opened it in front of a journalist, Dr. Calzada, and a private security expert.

The terrorism consultant said he had seen this before:

This time you receive unconnected pieces. Next time it can explode in your hands.

Dr. Calzada added:

[The terrorism expert] told me that this was a warning.

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For those who think of Spain as a land of bullfighters and beaches at Ibiza, remember they were a fascist dictatorship for decades under Franco, and have their own home-grown terrorists with which to contend. So Spain knows a thing or two about terrorism and tyranny. The security expert consulted was one who fought against the ETA.

Pictured: Ibiza's beautiful beaches and an inhabitant.
Not pictured: Global warming zealot terrorists.

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From Expansion.com:
Un colaborador de EXPANSIÓN, amenazado por sus artículos sobre la energía solar
Gabriel Calzada, colaborador habitual de EXPANSIÓN, recibió una bomba simulada, enviada por una empresa fotovoltaica que pretendía así intimidarle por sus artículos críticos sobre la energía solar.
...
El agente de seguridad privada recomendó no abrirlo tras comprobar que se trataba de dos objetos metálicos difíciles de interpretar. Pidió ayuda a una persona con más experiencia quien tras un breve visionado de la pantalla del escáner creyó saber de qué se trataba y procedió a abrirlo con cuidado ante la atenta mirada del guarda de seguridad, Lorenzo Ramírez (antiguo redactor de Expansión) y el propio Gabriel Calzada. De la caja salieron un filtro de gasoil y una pieza con rosca que podía adaptarse al filtro.
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For those who don't read Spanish, it's pretty much what PJ media relates to us.
The title is "A Contributor of Expansion was Threatened for his Articles on Solar Energy". You can go use babelfish for a robot translation that isn't perfect.

...an employee of the company immediately knew about what package she treated and she answered without doubting a second that " it is our answer to articles on energy of Mr. Calzada in Expansión".
(via babelfish)

De la caja salieron un filtro de gasoil y una pieza con rosca que podía adaptarse al filtro.
"In the box was left a diesel filter and a piece with a spiral that could adapt to the filter."
(with help from babelfish)

"Ten cuidado Gabriel, esta vez lo mandan como aviso, la próxima vez te puedes encontrar con un paquete que estalle al abrirlo".
Be careful, Gabriel. This time it came as a warning, the next time it could explode when you open it.
(via ShortTimer & my Langenscheidt English-Spanish dictionary)

Bad things going on in Spain.
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But Spain has some nice things going on at the World Cup.

Global warming zealot terrorists have probably gone there to protest the carbon footprint of futbol stadiums and acquire vuvuzelas as WMDs.