Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on November 07, 2008, 04:30:52 AM
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'Compassionate' Conservatism Was a Mistake
By DICK ARMEY
The liberal pundits who embraced the candidacy of Barack Obama are also eager to issue a death certificate for free market capitalism. They're wrong, and they remind me of what the great Willie Nelson once said: "I'm ragged but I'm right."
To be sure, the American people have handed power over to the Democrats. But today there is a categorical difference between what Republicans stand for and the principles of individual freedom. Parties are all about getting people elected to political office; and the practice of politics too often takes the form of professional juvenile delinquency: short-sighted and self-centered.
This was certainly true of the Bush presidency. Too often the policy agenda was determined by short-sighted political considerations and an abiding fear that the public simply would not understand limited government and expanded individual freedoms. How else do we explain "compassionate conservatism," No Child Left Behind, the Medicare drug benefit and the most dramatic growth in federal spending since LBJ's Great Society?
John McCain has long suffered from philosophical confusions about free markets, and his presidential campaign reflected as much. Most striking was his inability to explain his own health-care proposal, or to defend his tax cuts and tax reform. Ultimately, it took a plumber from Ohio to identify the real nature of Barack Obama's plan to "spread the wealth."
Mr. McCain did find his message on taxes in the last few weeks, but it was too late. A Rasmussen poll of Oct. 30 reported that 31% of likely voters believed that "taxes will go down" under an Obama administration versus just 11% under a McCain administration. Shockingly, 19% of self-described conservatives believed Mr. Obama would cut taxes; only 12% thought Mr. McCain would.
The response by Mr. McCain to the financial crisis on Wall Street was the defining moment of the campaign. In what looked like a tailor-made opportunity to "clean up Washington," the Republican nominee could have challenged the increasingly politicized nature of Federal Reserve policies, and the inherently corrupt relationships between Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and various Democratic committee chairmen. Instead, his reaction was visceral and insecure: He "suspended" his campaign and promised "to put an end to the reckless conduct, corruption, and unbridled greed that have caused a crisis on Wall Street."
In the process, he squandered his political standing with the investor class, a core Republican voting bloc. An October 26-30 Reuters/C-Span/Zogby poll of likely voters showed Mr. McCain barely beating the Democratic nominee among self-identified "investors," 50.4% to 43.8% -- a dramatic drop from the 15-point lead he held in a similar poll a month earlier.
The modern Republican Party has risen above its insecurities to achieve political success. Ronald Reagan, for example, held an unshakably positive vision of American capitalism. He didn't feel a need to qualify the meaning of his conservatism. He understood that big government was cruel and uncaring of individual aspirations. Small government conservatism was, by definition, compassionate -- offering every American a way up to self-determination and economic prosperity.
Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006 because voters no longer saw Republicans as the party of limited government. They have since rejected virtually every opportunity to recapture this identity. But their failure to do so must not be misconstrued as a rejection of principles of individual liberty by the American people. The evidence suggests we are still a nation of pocketbook conservatives most happy when government has enough respect to leave us alone and to mind its own business. The worrisome question is whether either political party understands this.
What will be the fate of free market capitalism in America? Will the 2008 election look more like 1932 -- or 1992?
On both occasions, Republican presidents had abandoned their party's principles for bigger government policies that exacerbated difficult economic times. On both occasions, Democrats took control, largely hijacking the small-government, fiscally responsible rhetoric of their opponents. Of course, FDR's election ushered in the New Deal, the most dramatic expansion of government power in American history, together with policy changes and economic uncertainty that inhibited investment and growth and locked in massive unemployment for nearly a generation.
The official agenda of the incoming administration is not so different from FDR's. Whatever doubts remain about Mr. Obama's governing principles can be cleared up by looking at the governing philosophy of the Democrats in Congress he will be crafting legislation with or the liberal constituencies he is indebted to support. Democrats will not be ambiguous. They have every right to be energized, and will attempt sweeping changes to our economy and the very nature of the relationship between individual American citizens and the federal government.
Their wish list is long. Charlie Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has said he would like to redistribute a trillion dollars through the tax code, including massive tax hikes on capital accumulation and individual entrepreneurship. Labor unions want to take away the right of a worker to a secret ballot in organizing elections. Radical environmentalists demand strict curbs on energy production and use. Hillary Clinton may have lost the primary, but expect Democrats to push her favorite idea: government-run heath care.
Will Democratic overreach give the small-government movement the opportunity to reassert itself in the GOP? Former Congressman Dick Gephardt has warned President-elect Obama and the new Democratic majorities to be humble and measured. But with a legislative agenda driven by Nancy Pelosi, George Miller and Mr. Rangel, the temptations may be too great.
In 1992, Republican backbenchers including Newt Gingrich, myself, Bob Walker and John Boehner rose up to challenge the Clinton administration's agenda on taxes, spending and government-run health care. But before we could beat the Democrats, we had to beat the old bulls of our own party who had forgotten their principles and had become very comfortable as a complacent minority. We captured control of Congress in 1994 because we had confidence in our principles, and in the American people's willingness to understand and reward a national vision based on lower taxes, less government and more freedom.
That can happen again today -- but it will require a new generation of leadership, the sooner the better. Rest assured that the American people will show up for the fight.
Mr. Armey, U.S. House majority leader from 1995 to 2002, is chairman of FreedomWorks Foundation.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/11/06/video-zo-on-the-aftermath/
Zo rocks! I disagree with him about Huckabee, but I think his core point is very valid.
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The modern Republican Party has risen above its insecurities to achieve political success. Ronald Reagan, for example, held an unshakably positive vision of American capitalism. He didn't feel a need to qualify the meaning of his conservatism. He understood that big government was cruel and uncaring of individual aspirations. Small government conservatism was, by definition, compassionate -- offering every American a way up to self-determination and economic prosperity.
Do not every single poll out there show the majority of Americans believe the Democrats are better for the economy?
Total deregulation had led us to the savings and loan fiasco (thanks RR!) and now this.
And again I state the RR led us to the immigration mess we are in.
No mention of that from nonobjective RR lovers.
There will be a never ending fight from the wings of the political spectrum yanking America back and forth.
Real compromise and moderation is always torn by these two extremes.
I really feel like there is no place/party for me to go. I am disgusted by both ends.
I am also disgusted by the rights blaming McCain. Who in there right mind would not agree that the campaign process is not corrupt and yes controlled by special interest groups? I can only hear the libertarians scream over this now.
Why we don't even have any clue where BO got his billion dollars from. Does anyone really think this was from all small donors?
McCain was right about this. But because the Cans held the fund raising advantage (at least in the past) they threw honesty out the window for party politics.
And McCain did come out for regulating Fanny and Freddie. So what was he supposed to do let the market confidence completely crash now and not support the government credit ballout?
I don't want all my savings going to zero.
And people like Coulter who of course blame the loss on McCain. Well who should have been the Can nominee? Romney? He has zero charisma. He would have been wiped even more. McCain is a great American hero. Coulter is a great American embarassment.
Why W was the rights candidate in 2000 and 2004! And W was right to reach out to immigrants and was McCain. Thanks to the greatest living Republican we are left with that mess. And they don't vote for RR's party!
That said Latinos sitll voted for crats by over 2 to 1. Can anyone imagine if Romney was in there? It would have been 10 to one.
I am now a reluctant member of the Can party. I simply have no where else to go. Many of these people don't speak for me.
BTW, I like and respect Dick Armey but I disagree with him and think he is to some extent out of touch.
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***Thanks to the greatest living Republican***
Obviously a mistatement. I meant RR who is not alive.
And don't get me wrong. I loved RR. But lets not blindly put him on a pedestal and idolize his (though ok to idolize the man who is great one) policies as though he had all the answers to the world we live in today.
We need *new* ideas. Or at least new applications of his ideas with *real* adjustments to the changing world.
We don't need a simple rehash of Reagonics or Reagan's lets let capitalism and free markets roll as though everything will take care of itself. It obviously doesn't. Yet I certainly lean more towards Reaganomics and away from bomonomics.
We need great thinkers who can adjust what is wrong with Reaganomics and fine tune them. Not simply declare we need to go back to them blindly and stupidly as though they are the answer to all. Lets learn from history not cling to it.
I guess my views are not able to be heard. I would be willing to bet there is a great mass of those who would agree with exactly what I am saying in this country. But all the far right cans are coming out with articles defending the hard themselves and villifying moderates like me.
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The "four pillars" of conservatism:
1. Adherence to the ideals of the founding fathers.
2. Prosperity through low taxes and reasonable regulation of trade.
3. Individialism and self reliance.
4. Small government.
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GM:
That clip from Zo was awesome! I don't agree on Huckabee, but Zo's mindset and delivery are great.
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We should leave Ann Coulter out of this. Like certain leftists her job is to strike a nerve, not rebuild a party. I suggest leaving Reagan out of this too. Admirers like me refer to Reaganomics to selectively cover only the things we liked about Reagan. He was wrong occasionally as CCP points out. I sincerely doubt Reagan would favor porous borders in a post-911 world. McCain favored a form of amnesty. Should he have bucked the right wing and reached further to the Hispanics? Politically it was a no-win either way for McCain in the campaign, not a major issue or distinction from Obama who just wants hope and change. Instead it was a symptom of the fact that he was a maverick not a leader in congress. If his earlier proposals had been better structured, more persuasively argued and better received, maybe we would have these new residents documented and our fences built by now. CCP, aren't you on the (far) right-wing side of this one?
Deregulation hurt S&L's. More specifically you could say that S&Ls existed only because they were propped up by government policies. Would they exist today (No) if they were still prohibited from offering demand deposit accounts (checking, electronic transfers etc.), just updating passbooks and moving stable savings money into 30 year mortgages in the neighborhood? S&Ls had been granted a half point interest advantage over commercial banks by federal law in exchange for staying out of the checking and payments business. Would we have been better off in the 80s if the banks had failed instead of the S&Ls? I don't know, but we didn't deregulate, we changed the regulations. Back to today, did Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac fail due to deregulation? The videos of the congressional regulation oversight committees have been posted here and they say otherwise. All the right questions were asked by the oversight committees and all the wrong answers were given, mostly by those with their hand in the cookie jar. Faulty regulation is not deregulation.
Deregulation and the failure of free markets keeps getting blamed for failure only in our most regulated and least free industries. Nobody is calling for deregulation of federally insured and federally supported institutions.
Now the first appointee from the party not blamed for the crisis comes from the board of Freddie Mac. That is the audacity of hope. Who can compete with that?
Moving forward, I agree with conservative principles laid down by GM, would add peace through strength, but they need to all be specifically applied to the major issues of the day. They also need a spokesman, a podium and an enormous power of persuasion to get heard and considered in an era where nearly all the main media along with their viewers are looking the other direction. The round table style post recently had many interesting ideas.
Conservatives and center-right people need to debate positions and issues BEFORE the election contests and find solutions and consensus. Crafty can offer to host, lol.
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Doug,
If we are lucky, our grandkids will have peace. We are in a multigenerational war for our survival. It doesn't feel like it to most right now, but it's absolutely the case. Survival, then victory through strength, then someday peace through strength.
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Doug,
Thanks for the thoughtful take. I am happy to leave Coulter out of it. I used to like her but she has lost me.
As for Reagan it is hard to keep him out of it when many conservative journalists, some of them posted here, keep bringing up his name as though he can come back from the dead to save the R party.
I would like to leave him in his rightful place in history within the pantheon of party greats but move on in a forward not backward direction.
As for your point about the immigration thing there is probably a small *majority* of Americans (not only those on the "far right") who want the illegal immigration flood stopped. And I agree with this stance. I want to dispose of old laws that make it ok for people to come here illegally and utilize our hospitals to have babies who are thus legal citizens automatically. Or for those who come here be able to bring 12 or what is it 18 relatives over to live here. I bet more than 50% of Americans would still agree with this.
But!!! I question if it is not *too late* for this because the voting power of the immigrants and particularly the Latino immigrants is now so huge they can make or break national candidates. Look at California, New Mexico, Colorado, and possibly NY and NJ etc.
These states have huge Latino voters.
I feel we must be realists. Some including Rove have felt if we get too strict with the Latinos we "will lose them for generations."
After seeing the Latino voting polls he appears to be right and that was even after W and McCain taking leniency.
Rove was pointing out how Latinos have conservative values with regards to work ethic and family and religion. While that may be true I see them wanting government sponsored health care and many government programs. If they loved Repub. ideals so much they would vote for that party. But many love the big government the Dems offer.
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Thanks for comments back. GM: I agree about requiring victory before peace. Also our strength is not just our arsenal but our will. My recollection of the Iraq war is that 80-90% supported the effort when the Americans appeared to be winning easily and that nearly flipflopped when the war seemed to be going badly. Now it is back to about 50-50 depending on how you ask the question. I don't know why we poll the popularity of war while troops are in harm's way but the results reveal a lack of strength in our resolve that our enemies were happy to expose.
CCP: I don't know to what extent securing borders offends how many Hispanics. You covered the other factors that would have been my reply in the next paragraph. I think the 2/3 that supported Obama related to the class envy / pro-working class message of the campaign. From my point of view that means I think they were sold a false bill of goods since punishing employers doesn't grow jobs or expand middle class wealth. Should we match their proposals or come up with a better false bill of goods. I hope not.
Newt was on the right track earlier this cycle coming up with innovative proposals for the issues of the day. Yhanks for those posts. I disagreed with him on cap and trade but liked most of the ideas and loved the approach. Also, I liked the positive proposal from the recent round table post that indicated we should evaluate our needs and recruit immigrants from around the world. Like Obama did, over the next couple of years we need to change the game, not just re-fight the same battles. (The adventure continues.)
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Occasionally Coulter is still funny, but mostly I wouldn't even let her perform fellatio on me. :lol:
OTOH IMHO President Reagan remains profoundly relevant on many levels, not least of which is the , , , audacity of believing in free minds, free markets, freedom of choice, freedom of worship, the pursuit of happiness, and America.
Here's this from today's WSJ:
After the shellacking it received at the polls Tuesday, the Republican Party faces a choice. It can put the loss down to the country's fatigue with the Bush Administration and the bad luck of running amid a financial panic and shrug it off. Or it can choose a new direction, with new leadership, and retake the high ground it once occupied, especially on the economy.
Paul Ryan
These columns are devoted to ideas, not party, and ordinarily we would not insert ourselves into the internal debate over party leadership. But in the current political and economic climate, it is important that somebody offer an effective argument against the interventionist, antigrowth conventional wisdom that dominates the majority party in Congress. And if the Republican Party would offer that counterargument, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan seems to be the right man to make the case.
Mr. Ryan was first elected in 1998, and he has always won re-election comfortably in a state and a district that are not particularly safe territory for Republicans. Racine County, which represents the biggest piece of Mr. Ryan's district in southeastern Wisconsin, voted for Barack Obama, 53%-46%, but still voted to re-elect Mr. Ryan 62%-37%. He is, in other words, a politician practiced in speaking to and winning over voters who are not necessarily die-hard Republicans.
But the most important reason that Mr. Ryan is the right man at the current moment has nothing to do with electoral calculation. The 38-year-old Mr. Ryan cares about free markets and economic growth and can talk about those subjects in a way that makes sense without falling back on ideology, bromides or oversimplification. He engages these subjects with a vigor that befits his age, and while he has been in Congress for nearly a decade, his is a fresh face on the national scene, one not associated with the bipartisan failures of Congress.
Mr. Ryan is also an effective communicator on television, which will be an important outlet for reaching the American people and presenting an alternative to the economic ideas of Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel. This summer, with a Presidential election well underway and his party in the minority, Mr. Ryan unveiled a far-sighted "Road Map for America's Future."
It is a remarkable document: Other politicians, including Presidential candidates, boldly declare their intentions to push any hard or painful choices off to blue-ribbon commissions. Mr. Ryan's Road Map puts into legislative language not mere general principles, but a plan to pay for all the promises we've made to seniors while preventing government spending from achieving French proportions. "I want to be the Paul Revere of fiscal policy," he said at the time, raising the alarm on our long-term liabilities even while President-elect Obama and others insist that there's nothing to see when it comes to the long-term insolvency of Medicare and Social Security.
More generally, the Republican Party needs a prominent figure who can discuss the full range of economic issues -- growth, the dollar, global trade and monetary policy included. The economy was the top issue on voter minds in this election, and Republicans lost. The party needs someone who can put these issues into a context that voters can understand and relate to. And looking at the national field, there seem precious few candidates for the job.
Mr. Ryan did not solicit our support, and we should note that he said Thursday that he isn't seeking the leadership job. John Boehner, the current leader, wasn't the cause of this year's GOP losses and is the favorite to retain his position. If that's what House Republicans want to do, so be it. Our job is to say what we think in any case. And Mr. Ryan's economic knowledge and youthful energy make him the best choice to pull his party in a more promising direction.
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These words bear re-reading-- especially with BO about to give driver licences to illegals, and the vote to anyone with a driver's license:
"As for your point about the immigration thing there is probably a small *majority* of Americans (not only those on the "far right") who want the illegal immigration flood stopped. And I agree with this stance. I want to dispose of old laws that make it ok for people to come here illegally and utilize our hospitals to have babies who are thus legal citizens automatically. Or for those who come here be able to bring 12 or what is it 18 relatives over to live here. I bet more than 50% of Americans would still agree with this.
"But!!! I question if it is not *too late* for this because the voting power of the immigrants and particularly the Latino immigrants is now so huge they can make or break national candidates. Look at California, New Mexico, Colorado, and possibly NY and NJ etc.
These states have huge Latino voters.
"I feel we must be realists. Some including Rove have felt if we get too strict with the Latinos we "will lose them for generations."
After seeing the Latino voting polls he appears to be right and that was even after W and McCain taking leniency.
"Rove was pointing out how Latinos have conservative values with regards to work ethic and family and religion. While that may be true I see them wanting government sponsored health care and many government programs. If they loved Repub. ideals so much they would vote for that party. But many love the big government the Dems offer."
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***These words bear re-reading-- especially with BO about to give driver licences to illegals, and the vote to anyone with a driver's license:***
Crafty,
and....?
I'm all ears.....
What do you prescribe? Lets face it. There is no political will to do anything about the illegals because as Lou Dobbs points out everyday they parites are afraid to lose votes. Each party is ignoring this issue to get Latino votes. The Democrats sold american citizens down the river years ago on this issue to bring in the Spanish who overwhelming vote for them. The Republicans did not or could not stand up to this and W/Rove/et al must have felt it was too late fighting the tide and tried to also kiss up to those who just got here. So they tried, and unfortunately, even that didn't work because the Dems won them over with more promises.
It doesn't help that Romenys own lawn guy was using illegals. Though I think my lawn guy does to. The cans did not seem willing to go after those in this country who employ illegals. And of course it didn't help that it at least in some places it appears to have been made a crime for empolyers to even try to verify citizens status. ("Why this is not a state or local problem" the local governments would scream - its up to the INS to do that).
Now the only party that would have had any will to do anything about it is out of power.
So what do you suggest? I'm all ears because I am disgusted with seeing ever more people who obviously are not here legally all around me (and far from just Latinos - people from Asia, Africa, Europe) just walking in at their leisure and we sit here like dopes doing nothing. All the while the left talks our own country down and now is going to use their prescription for winning over the world's love by ensuring we become a second rate country.
So did Rove et al make a mistake trying to win over the illegals? I don't know. I do know the Dems are happy to sell out US citizens who were born here or who are non citizens here LEGALLY to get and keep power.
Could Republicans have secured our border and improved standing among immigrants and Latinos in particular? I guess Doug alluded to that question *I don't know to what extent securing borders offends how many Hispanics.* I would think Rove looked into this and made his conclusions that led to his and W strategy regarding this.
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November 08, 2008, 7:00 a.m.
The Death of the American Idea
An electorate living high off the entitlement hog.
By Mark Steyn
‘Give me liberty or give me death!”
“Live free or die!”
What's that? Oh, don't mind me. I'm just trying out slogans for the 2012 campaign and seeing which one would get the biggest laughs.
My Republican friends are now saying, oh, not to worry, look at the exit polls, this is still a “center-right” country. Americans didn't vote to go left, they voted to go cool. It was a Dancing With The Stars election: Obama's a star and everyone wants to dance with him. It doesn't mean they're suddenly gung-ho for left-wingery.
Up to a point. Unlike those excitable countries where the peasants overrun the presidential palace, settled democratic societies rarely vote to “go left.” Yet oddly enough that's where they've all gone. In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter. Even in America, federal spending (in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars) has gone from $600 billion in 1965 to $3 trillion today. The Heritage Foundation put it in a convenient graph: It's pretty much a straight line across four decades, up, up, up. Doesn't make any difference who controls Congress, who's in the White House. The government just grows and grows, remorselessly. Every two years, the voters walk out of their town halls and school gyms and tell the exit pollsters that three-quarters of them are “moderates” or “conservatives” (ie, the center and the right) and barely 20 per cent are “liberals.” And then, regardless of how the vote went, big government just resumes its inexorable growth.
“The greatest dangers to liberty,” wrote Justice Brandeis, “lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”
Now who does that remind you of?
Ha! Trick question! Never mind Obama, it's John McCain. He encroached on our liberties with the constitutional abomination of McCain-Feingold. Well-meaning but without understanding, he proposed that the federal government buy up all these junk mortgages so that people would be able to stay in “their” homes. And this is the “center-right” candidate? It's hard for Republicans to hammer Obama as a socialist when their own party's nationalizing the banks and its presidential nominee is denouncing the private sector for putting profits before patriotism. That's why Joe the Plumber struck a chord: he briefly turned a one-and-a-half party election back into a two-party choice again.
If you went back to the end of the 19th century and suggested to, say, William McKinley that one day Americans would find themselves choosing between a candidate promising to guarantee your mortgage and a candidate promising to give “tax cuts” to millions of people who pay no taxes he would scoff at you for concocting some patently absurd H G Wells dystopian fantasy. Yet it happened. Slowly, remorselessly, government metastasized to the point where it now seems entirely normal for Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Florida to vote for Obama because “I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage.”
While few electorates consciously choose to leap left, a couple more steps every election and eventually societies reach a tipping point. In much of the west, it's government health care. It changes the relationship between state and citizen into something closer to pusher and junkie. Henceforth, elections are fought over which party is proposing the shiniest government bauble: If you think President-elect Obama's promise of federally subsidized day care was a relatively peripheral part of his platform, in Canada in the election before last it was the dominant issue. Yet America may be approaching its tipping point even more directly. In political terms, the message of the gazillion-dollar bipartisan bailout was a simple one: “Individual responsibility” and “self-reliance” are for chumps. If Goldman Sachs and AIG and Bear Stearns are getting government checks to “stay in their homes” (and boardrooms, and luxury corporate retreats), why shouldn't Peggy Joseph?
I don't need Barack Obama's help to “spread the wealth around.” I spread my wealth around every time I hire somebody, expand my business, or just go to the general store and buy a quart of milk and loaf of bread. As far as I know, only one bloated plutocrat declines to spread his wealth around, and that's Scrooge McDuck, whose principal activity in Disney cartoons was getting into his little bulldozer and plowing back and forth over a mountain of warehoused gold and silver coins. Don't know where he is these days. On the board at Halliburton, no doubt. But most of the beleaguered band of American capitalists do not warehouse their wealth in McDuck fashion. It's not a choice between hoarding and spreading, but a choice between who spreads it best: an individual free to make his own decisions about investment and spending, or Barney Frank. I don't find that a difficult question to answer. More to the point, put Barney & Co in charge of the spreading, and there'll be a lot less to spread.
I disagree with my fellow conservatives who think the Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Frank liberal behemoth will so obviously screw up that they'll be routed in two or four years' time. The President-elect's so-called “tax cut” will absolve 48 per cent of Americans from paying any federal income tax at all, while those that are left will pay more. Just under half the population will be, as Daniel Henninger pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, on the dole. By 2012, it will be more than half, and this will be an electorate where the majority of the electorate will be able to vote itself more lollipops from the minority of their compatriots still dumb enough to prioritize self-reliance, dynamism, and innovation over the sedating cocoon of the nanny state. That is the death of the American idea — which, after all, began as an economic argument: “No taxation without representation" is a great rallying cry. “No representation without taxation” has less mass appeal. For how do you tell an electorate living high off the entitlement hog that it's unsustainable and you've got to give some of it back?
At that point, America might as well apply for honorary membership in the European Union. It will be a nation at odds with the spirit of its founding, and embarking on decline from which there are few escape routes. In 2012, the least we deserve is a choice between the collectivist assumptions of the Democrats, and a candidate who stands for individual liberty — for economic dynamism not the sclerotic “managed capitalism” of Germany; for the First Amendment, not Canadian-style government regulation of approved opinion; for self-reliance and the Second Amendment, not the security state in which Britons are second only to North Koreans in the number of times they're photographed by government cameras in the course of going about their daily business. In Forbes this week, Claudia Rosett issued a stirring defense of individual liberty. That it should require a stirring defense at all is a melancholy reflection on this election season. Live free — or die from a thousand beguiling caresses of nanny-state sirens.
© Mark Steyn 2008
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDcxYWNiZTVkNjZkY2I1YmUyMjQzNzc4Y2FjNzI4MjA=
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http://www.gao.gov/cghome/d08446cg.pdf
Ok, so here is the good/bad news: read the above and see that the nanny-state can't go on for much longer. Prepare for a hard landing.
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**I don't agree with every point, but his take on the size of gov't is right on.**
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/791jsebl.asp?pg=1
We Blew It
A look back in remorse on the conservative opportunity that was squandered.
by P.J. O'Rourke
11/17/2008, Volume 014, Issue 09
Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.
An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around Hyde Park.
Mind you, they won't live in Hyde Park. Those leafy precincts will be reserved for the micromanagers and macro-apparatchiks of liberalism--for Secretary of the Department of Peace Bill Ayers and Secretary of the Department of Fairness Bernardine Dohrn. The formerly independent citizens of our previously self-governed nation will live, as I said, around Hyde Park. They will make what homes they can in the physical, ethical, and intellectual slums of the South Side of Chicago.
The South Side of Chicago is what everyplace in America will be once the Democratic administration and filibuster-resistant Democratic Congress have tackled global warming, sustainability, green alternatives to coal and oil, subprime mortgage foreclosures, consumer protection, business oversight, financial regulation, health care reform, taxes on the "rich," and urban sprawl. The Democrats will have plenty of time to do all this because conservatism, if it is ever reborn, will not come again in the lifetime of anyone old enough to be rounded up by ACORN and shipped to the polling booths.
None of this is the fault of the left. After the events of the 20th century--national socialism, international socialism, inter-species socialism from Earth First--anyone who is still on the left is obviously insane and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We've had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.
Liberalism had been running wild in the nation since the Great Depression. At the end of the Carter administration we had it cornered in one of its dreadful low-income housing projects or smelly public parks or some such place, and we held the Taser gun in our hand, pointed it at the beast's swollen gut, and didn't pull the trigger. Liberalism wasn't zapped and rolled away on a gurney and confined somewhere until it expired from natural causes such as natural law or natural rights.
In our preaching and our practice we neglected to convey the organic and universal nature of freedom. Thus we ensured our loss before we even began our winning streak. Barry Goldwater was an admirable and principled man. He took an admirably principled stand on states' rights. But he was dead wrong. Separate isn't equal. Ask a kid whose parents are divorced.
Since then modern conservatism has been plagued by the wrong friends and the wrong foes. The "Southern Strategy" was bequeathed to the Republican party by Richard Nixon--not a bad friend of conservatism but no friend at all. The Southern Strategy wasn't needed. Southern whites were on--begging the pardon of the Scopes trial jury--an evolutionary course toward becoming Republican. There's a joke in Arkansas about a candidate hustling votes in the country. The candidate asks a farmer how many children he has.
"I've got six sons," the farmer says.
"Are they all good little Democrats?" the candidate asks.
"Well," the farmer says, "five of 'em are. But my oldest boy, he got to readin'??.??.??.??"
There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie's electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have a laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not make a man a liberal.
Blacks used to poll Republican. They did so right up until Mrs. Roosevelt made some sympathetic noises in 1932. And her husband didn't even deliver on Eleanor's promises.
It's not hard to move a voting bloc. And it should be especially easy to move voters to the right. Sensible adults are conservative in most aspects of their private lives. If this weren't so, imagine driving on I-95: The majority of drivers are drunk, stoned, making out, or watching TV, while the rest are trying to calculate the size of their carbon footprints on the backs of Whole Foods receipts while negotiating lane changes.
People are even more conservative if they have children. Nobody with kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County. Everybody wants his or her children to respect freedom, exercise responsibility, be honest, get educated, have opportunities, and own a bunch of guns. (The last is optional and includes, but is not limited to, me, my friends in New Hampshire, and Sarah Palin.)
Reagan managed to reach out to blue collar whites. But there his reach stopped, leaving many people on our side, but barely knowing it. There are enough yarmulkes among the neocons to show that Jews are not immune to conservatism. Few practicing Catholics vote Democratic anymore except in Massachusetts where they put something in the communion wafers. When it comes to a full-on, hemp-wearing, kelp-eating, mandala-tatted, fool-coifed liberal with socks in sandals, I have never met a Muslim like that or a Chinese and very few Hispanics. No U.S. immigrants from the Indian subcontinent fill that bill (the odd charlatan yogi excepted), nor do immigrants from Africa, Eastern Europe, or East Asia. And Japanese tourists may go so far as socks in sandals, but their liberal nonsense stops at the ankles.
We have all of this going for us, worldwide. And yet we chose to deliver our sermons only to the faithful or the already converted. Of course the trailer park Protestants yell "Amen." If you were handling rattlesnakes and keeping dinosaurs for pets, would you vote for the party that gets money from PETA?
In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people's business: abortion. Democracy--be it howsoever conservative--is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it's rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don't know if I'm one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.
The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we're in favor of living. We consider people--with a few obvious exceptions--to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.
If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal--and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so--then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public's blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers' money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani.
Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters. We impeached Clinton for lying to the government. To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort. Lying to the government: It's called April 15th. And we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven't done yet, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.
When the Monica Lewinsky news broke, my wife set me straight about the issue. "Here," she said, "is the most powerful man in the world. And everyone hates his wife. What's the matter with Sharon Stone? Instead, he's hitting on an emotionally disturbed intern barely out of her teens." But our horn rims were so fogged with detestation of Clinton that we couldn't see how really detestable he was. If we had stayed our hand in the House of Representatives and treated the brute with shunning or calls for interventions to make him seek help, we might have chased him out of the White House. (Although this probably would have required a U.S. news media from a parallel universe.)
Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required the fly-swat of pest control were strategic errors. Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves. We have lived up to no principle of conservatism.
Government is bigger than ever. We have fattened the stalled ox and hatred therewith rather than dined on herbs where love (and the voter) is. Instead of flattening the Department of Education with a wrecking ball we let it stand as a pulpit for Bill Bennett. When--to switch metaphors yet again--such a white elephant is not discarded someone will eventually try to ride in the howdah on its back. One of our supposed own did. No Child Left Behind? What if they deserve to be left behind? What if they deserve a smack on the behind? A nationwide program to test whether kids are what? Stupid? You've got kids. Kids are stupid.
We railed at welfare and counted it a great victory when Bill Clinton confused a few poor people by making the rules more complicated. But the "French-bread lines" for the rich, the "terrapin soup kitchens," continue their charity without stint.
The sludge and dreck of political muck-funds flowing to prosperous businesses and individuals have gotten deeper and more slippery and stink worse than ever with conservatives minding the sewage works of legislation.
Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants. But never, since the Mayflower knocked the rock in Plymouth, has anything as putrid as the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 been spread upon the land. Just the name says it. There are no farms left. Not like the one grampa grew up on.
A "farm" today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall. If we cared anything about "nutrition" we would--to judge by the mountainous, jiggling flab of Americans--stop growing all food immediately. And "bioenergy" is a fraud of John Edwards-marital-fidelity proportions. Taxpayer money composted to produce a fuel made of alcohol that is more expensive than oil, more polluting than oil, and almost as bad as oil with vermouth and an olive. But this bill passed with bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress and was happily signed into law by President Bush. Now it's going to cost us at least $285 billion. That's about five times the gross domestic product of prewar Iraq. For what we will spend on the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 we could have avoided the war in Iraq and simply bought a controlling interest in Saddam Hussein's country.
Yes, we got a few tax breaks during the regimes of Reagan and W. But the government is still taking a third of our salary. Is the government doing a third of our job? Is the government doing a third of our dishes? Our laundry? Our vacuuming? When we go to Hooters is the government tending bar making sure that one out of three margaritas is on the house? If our spouse is feeling romantic and we're tired, does the government come over to our house and take care of foreplay? (Actually, during the Clinton administration??.??.??.??)
Anyway, a low tax rate is not--never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician--a bedrock principle of conservatism. The principle is fiscal responsibility.
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Conservatives should never say to voters, "We can lower your taxes." Conservatives should say to voters, "You can raise spending. You, the electorate, can, if you choose, have an infinite number of elaborate and expensive government programs. But we, the government, will have to pay for those programs. We have three ways to pay.
"We can inflate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the future, wrecking the nation's culture of thrift and common sense, and giving free rein to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and pay it back 10 cents on the dollar.
"We can raise taxes. If the taxes are levied across the board, money will be taken from everyone's pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most. If the taxes are levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people's pockets, hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be harmed the most.
"And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt. This will cause all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some decent Szechwan take-out."
Yes, this would make for longer and less pithy stump speeches. But we'd be showing ourselves to be men and women of principle. It might cost us, short-term. We might get knocked down for not whoring after bioenergy votes in the Iowa caucuses. But at least we wouldn't land on our scruples. And we could get up again with dignity intact, dust ourselves off, and take another punch at the liberal bully-boys who want to snatch the citizenry's freedom and tuck that freedom, like a trophy feather, into the hatbands of their greasy political bowlers.
But are we men and women of principle? And I don't mean in the matter of tricky and private concerns like gay marriage. Civil marriage is an issue of contract law. A constitutional amendment against gay marriage? I don't get it. How about a constitutional amendment against first marriages? Now we're talking. No, I speak, once again, of the geological foundations of conservatism.
Where was the meum and the tuum in our shakedown of Washington lobbyists? It took a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives 40 years--from 1954 to 1994--to get that corrupt and arrogant. And we managed it in just 12. (Who says Republicans don't have much on the ball?)
Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren't after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross. Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn't meet two out of three of those qualifications. And where would you rather eat? At a Vietnamese restaurant? Or in the Ayn Rand Café? Hey, waiter, are the burgers any good? Atlas shrugged. (We would, however, be able to have a smoke at the latter establishment.)
To go from slime to the sublime, there are the lofty issues about which we never bothered to form enough principles to go out and break them. What is the coherent modern conservative foreign policy?
We may think of this as a post 9/11 problem, but it's been with us all along. What was Reagan thinking, landing Marines in Lebanon to prop up the government of a country that didn't have one? In 1984, I visited the site where the Marines were murdered. It was a beachfront bivouac overlooked on three sides by hills full of hostile Shiite militia. You'd urge your daughter to date Rosie O'Donnell before you'd put troops ashore in such a place.
Since the early 1980s I've been present at the conception (to use the polite term) of many of our foreign policy initiatives. Iran-contra was about as smart as using the U.S. Postal Service to get weapons to anti-Communists. And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power anyway. I had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a sura in Peshawar as the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul. I would rather have had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev.
Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.
The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil.
Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we'd forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces.
Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world's rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we've been doing of that lately.)
If we do have morals, where were they while Bosnians were slaughtered? And where were we while Clinton dithered over the massacres in Kosovo and decided, at last, to send the Serbs a message: Mess with the United States and we'll wait six months, then bomb the country next to you. Of Rwanda, I cannot bear to think, let alone jest.
And now, to glue and screw the lid on our coffin, comes this financial crisis. For almost three decades we've been trying to teach average Americans to act like "stakeholders" in their economy. They learned. They're crying and whining for government bailouts just like the billionaire stakeholders in banks and investment houses. Aid, I can assure you, will be forthcoming from President Obama.
Then average Americans will learn the wisdom of Ronald Reagan's statement: "The ten most dangerous words in the English language are, 'I'm from the federal government, and I'm here to help.'?" Ask a Katrina survivor.
The left has no idea what's going on in the financial crisis. And I honor their confusion. Jim Jerk down the road from me, with all the cars up on blocks in his front yard, falls behind in his mortgage payments, and the economy of Iceland implodes. I'm missing a few pieces of this puzzle myself.
Under constant political pressure, which went almost unresisted by conservatives, a lot of lousy mortgages that would never be repaid were handed out to Jim Jerk and his drinking buddies and all the ex-wives and single mothers with whom Jim and his pals have littered the nation.
Wall Street looked at the worthless paper and thought, "How can we make a buck off this?" The answer was to wrap it in a bow. Take a wide enough variety of lousy mortgages--some from the East, some from the West, some from the cities, some from the suburbs, some from shacks, some from McMansions--bundle them together and put pressure on the bond rating agencies to do fancy risk management math, and you get a "collateralized debt obligation" with a triple-A rating. Good as cash. Until it wasn't.
Or, put another way, Wall Street was pulling the "room full of horse s--" trick. Brokerages were saying, "We're going to sell you a room full of horse s--. And with that much horse s--, you just know there's a pony in there somewhere."
Anyway, it's no use blaming Wall Street. Blaming Wall Street for being greedy is like scolding defensive linemen for being big and aggressive. The people on Wall Street never claimed to be public servants. They took no oath of office. They're in it for the money. We pay them to be in it for the money. We don't want our retirement accounts to get a 2 percent return. (Although that sounds pretty good at the moment.)
What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too.
We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to--as it were--foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We've had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It's one more job we botched.
Although I must say we're doing good work on our final task--attaching the garden hose to our car's exhaust pipe and running it in through a vent window. Barack and Michelle will be by in a moment with some subsidized ethanol to top up our gas tank. And then we can turn the key.
P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
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For those here who think Reaganism' relevance remote:
WSJ
Barack Obama won the White House by campaigning against an unpopular incumbent in a time of economic anxiety and lingering foreign policy concerns. He offered voters an upbeat message, praised the nation as a land of opportunity, promised tax cuts to just about everyone, and overcame doubts about his experience with a strong performance in the presidential debates.
Does this sound familiar? It should. Mr. Obama followed the approach that worked for Ronald Reagan. His victory confirmed that voters still embrace the guiding beliefs of the Reagan era.
During Reagan's campaign, the nation suffered from high unemployment and high inflation. This time around, data from the Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll showed that Mr. Obama took command of the race during the 10 days following the collapse of Lehman Brothers -- when the Wall Street meltdown hit Main Street. Before that event John McCain was leading nationally by three percentage points. Ten days later Mr. Obama was up by five and never relinquished his lead.
Mr. Obama's tax-cutting message played a key role in this period of economic anxiety. Tax cuts are well-received at such times: 55% of voters believe they are good for the economy. Only 19% disagree and see them as bad policy.
Down the campaign homestretch, Mr. Obama's tax-cutting promise became his clearest policy position. Eventually he stole the tax issue from the Republicans. Heading into the election, 31% of voters thought that a President Obama would cut their taxes. Only 11% expected a tax cut from a McCain administration.
The last Democratic candidate to win the tax issue was also the last Democratic president -- Bill Clinton. In fact, the candidate who most credibly promises the lowest level of taxes has won every presidential election in at least the last 40 years.
But while Mr. Obama was promising to cut taxes, the Bush administration took the lead on a $700 billion, taxpayer-backed bailout bill -- with very little marketing finesse. Few Americans supported the bailout, and a majority of voters were more concerned that the government would do too much rather than too little. In terms of getting the economy going again, 58% said that more tax cuts would better stimulate the economy than new government spending.
A Rasmussen survey conducted Oct. 2 found that 59% agreed with the sentiment expressed by Reagan in his first inaugural address: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Just 28% disagreed with this sentiment. That survey also found that 44% of Obama voters agreed with Reagan's assessment (40% did not). And McCain voters overwhelmingly supported the Gipper.
The real challenge for the new president will be attempting to govern with a message that resonates with most voters but divides his own party. Consider that 43% of voters view it as a positive to describe a candidate as being like Reagan, while just 26% consider it a negative. Being compared to Reagan rates higher among voters than being called "conservative," "moderate," "liberal" or "progressive." Except among Democrats, that is. Fifty-one percent of Democrats view that Reagan comparison as a negative. There's Mr. Obama's dilemma in a nutshell.
Mr. Obama won the White House promising tax cuts, but he will be governing with a Democratic Congress bursting with desire for a more activist government. As he faces this challenge, he might remember the fate of another man who made taxes the central part of his campaign: the first President Bush, whose most memorable campaign line -- "Read my lips, no new taxes" -- was as central to his victory as Mr. Obama's promise to cut taxes for 95% of Americans. George H.W. Bush famously reneged on that promise. Voters rejected his bid for a second term.
Mr. Obama ran like Reagan. Will he be able to govern that way, too?
Mr. Rasmussen is president of Rasmussen Reports, an independent national polling company.
Please add your comments
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***Mr. Obama ran like Reagan. Will he be able to govern that way, too?***
Oh comon. What spin. He ran the opposite of Reagan. First of all Reagan didn't want tax "cuts" to be only for certain chosen segment of the population nor did he expect that the other segments would be the ones to pay for them.
Reaganomics is trickle down and Bomonomics is build from the *bottom* and let it work up.
BO is huge government and soak the succesful to pay for it.
BO did not run on Reagan principles.
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Fair enough-- but I think the point here is that if BO had not dramatically and glibly shifted his tax positions during the campaign (and had McC not been so imcompetent as to let him get away with it) to where he was successfully pretending to be a tax cutter, McC would have won.
The larger point is that tax cuts, a key strand of Reaganism, remain quite popular across the political spectrum.
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***The larger point is that tax cuts, a key strand of Reaganism, remain quite popular across the political spectrum***
True and
BO did disingeniusly steal Rep thunder with the rant about reducing taxes on 95%.
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It's too bad McCain tried to out democrat the democrats.
Another viewpoint:
Commentary: GOP should ask why U.S. is on the wrong track
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Ron Paul: Asking about the future of the GOP is the wrong question
Paul says instead people should ask why the country went in the wrong direction
Republicans stopped being the party of limited government, Paul says
Paul says it will take time for GOP to return to its traditional values
Next Article in Politics »
By Ron Paul
Special to CNN
Editor's note: Ron Paul is a Republican congressman from Texas who ran for his party's nomination for president this year. He served in Congress in the late 1970s and early 1980s and was elected again to Congress in 1996, serving continuously since then. Rep. Paul is a member of the House Financial Services Committee.
Ron Paul says the nation is off track and Republicans have to rediscover their core beliefs.
(CNN) -- The questions now being asked are: Where to go from here and who's to blame for the downfall of the Republican Party?
Too bad the concern for the future of the Republican Party had not been seriously addressed in the year 2000 when the Republicans gained control of the House, Senate, and the Presidency.
Now, in light of the election, many are asking: What is the future of the Republican Party?
But that is the wrong question. The proper question should be: Where is our country heading? There's no doubt that a large majority of Americans believe we're on the wrong track. That's why the candidate demanding "change" won the election. It mattered not that the change offered was no change at all, only a change in the engineer of a runaway train.
Once it's figured out what is fundamentally wrong with our political and economic system, solutions can be offered. If the Republican Party can grasp hold of the policy changes needed, then the party can be rebuilt.
In the rise and fall of the recent Republican reign of power these past decades, the goal of the party had grown to be only that of gaining and maintaining power -- with total sacrifice of the original Republican belief in shrinking the size of government.
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Most Republicans endorsed this view in order to achieve victories at the polls. Limiting government power and size with less spending and a balanced budget as the goal used to be a "traditional" Republican value. This is what Goldwater and Reagan talked about. That is what the Contract with America stood for.
The opportunity finally came in 2000 to do something about the cancerous growth of government. This clear message led to the Republican success at the polls.
Once the Republicans were in power, though, the promises faded, and all policies were directed at maintaining or increasing power by trying to whittle away at Democratic strength by acting like big-spending Democrats.
The Republican Congress never once stood up against the Bush/Rove machine that demanded support for unconstitutional wars, attacks on civil liberties here at home, and an economic policy based on more spending, more debt, and more inflation -- while constantly preaching the flawed doctrine that deficits don't matter as long as taxes aren't raised.
But what the Republican leadership didn't realize was that ALL spending is a tax on middle-class Americans through price inflation and that eventually the inevitable consequence is paying for the extravagance with a financial crisis.
Party leaders concentrated only on political tricks in order to maintain power and neglected the limited-government principles on which they were elected. The only solution for this is for Republicans to once again reassess their core beliefs and show how the country (not the party) can be put back on the right track. The problem, though, is regaining credibility.
After eight years of perpetual (and unnecessary and unconstitutional) war, persistent and expanded attacks on our privacy, runaway deficits, and now nationalization of the financial system, Republicans are going to have a tough time regaining the confidence of the American people. But that's what must be done.
Otherwise, Republicans can only mimic Democrats and hope for an isolated victory here and there. And that's just more of the same that brought on the disintegration of the party.
Since the new alignment of political power offers no real change, we will remain on the same track without even a pretense of slowing the growth of government. With the new administration we can expect things to go from bad to worse.
Opportunity abounds for anyone who can present the case for common sense in fiscal affairs, for protection of civil liberties here at home, and avoiding the senseless foreign entanglements which have bogged us down for decades and contributed so significantly to our fiscal and budgetary crisis.
During the debates in the Republican Presidential primary, even though I am a 10-term sitting Representative Member of Congress, I was challenged more than once on my Republican credentials. The fact that I was repeatedly asked how I could be a Republican when I was talking a different language than the other candidates answers the question of how the Republican Party can slip so far so fast.
My rhetorical answer at the time was simple: Why should one be excluded from the Republican Party for believing and always voting for:
• Limited government power
• A balanced budget
• Personal liberty
• Strict adherence to the Constitution
• Sound money
• A strong defense while avoiding all undeclared wars
• No nation-building and no policing the world
How can a party that still pretends to be the party of limited government distance itself outright from these views and expect to maintain credibility? Since the credibility of the Republican Party has now been lost, how can it regain credibility without embracing these views, or at least showing respect for them?
I concluded my answer by simply stating the Republican Party had lost its way and must reassess its values. And that is what needs to be done in a hurry.
But it might just take a new crop of leaders to regain the credibility needed to redirect the Party. It certainly won't be done overnight. It took a long time to come out of the wilderness after 40 years of Democratic rule for the Republican Party to take charge. Today though, time moves more quickly. Opportunities will arise. The one thing for certain is that in the next four years we will not see the Republic restored. Instead the need for it will be greater than ever.
The problems are easily understood and the answers are not that difficult. Abusing the rule of law and ignoring the Constitution can be reversed. If the Republican Party can grasp hold of the needed reforms, it can lead the way and regain its credibility. If power is sought for power's sake alone, the Party will never be able to wrench away the power of the opposition.
In the past two years, I found that when the young people heard the message of liberty, they overwhelmingly responded favorably, fully realizing the failure of the status quo and the need to once again endorse a system of self reliance, personal responsibility, sound money, and a non-interventionist foreign policy while rejecting the cradle-to-grave nanny state all based on the rule of law and the Constitution.
To ignore the political struggle and only "hope for the best" is pure folly. The march toward a dictatorial powerful state is now in double time.
All those who care -- and especially those who understand the stakes involved -- have an ominous responsibility to energetically get involved in the battle of survival for a free and prosperous America.
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Ron Paul is ok domestically, but to pretend that we can withdraw from the fight with the global jihad is suicidal.
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I think one of the key variables is how the Fed has printed too much money and has kept interest rates too low ((ROI should be greater than inflation + taxes). Too much money at too low a price has been sloshing around the global system. Conservatives (and Republicans) need to understand this and communicate this.
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Ok, why is this bad?
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Are you serious?
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I get that too many US dollars translate to a loss in the value of the currency, but I'm not sure I grasp every element of the impact that makes on our economy, aside from the "wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread" from 1920's Germany scenario.
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OK, that give me a sense of where you are at on this subject.
Briefly (and this is a huge subject!) deflating a currency has several consequences. Off the top of my head here are some of them in no particular order:
1) Amongst the most important is the misallocation of investment capital. This is a matter of HUGE importance-- for example too many homes get built. This leads to a bubble, which when it bursts creates calamity and tragedy-- (and the free market gets blamed :x :-P )
2) Savers get screwed. For example, they save what should be enough for old age, then the government comes along and decimates the values of their savings leaving them with a much harder old age-- this then makes them more dependent upon the government;
3) With negative interest rates (inflation + taxes being greater than the interest rate) people are penalized for saving. This leads to one or both of two behaviors: First-- less saving and Second-- riskier investments as savers/investors seek to outrun the dimunition of their savings through inflation and taxes. We see both of these behaviors in abundance on the American landscape.
4) A devaluing currency. Because of the unique role of the dollar in the world economy (i.e. we are the main currency of international transactions) this has profound consequences for the world economy. What happens is that when the dollar depreciates, other countries often feel that this then creates a price advantage for our products on the international market. So other countries print more money too so as to maintain stable exchange rates. This was a major variable in the creation and the maintainence of the Great Depression. These were known as "beggar thy neighbor" devaluations i.e. by devlaing my currency, my country's products become cheaper and my people make the sales and your people do not. The net result is that everyone tries to devalue which means simply that too much money is created and a world-wide inflation is unleashed. We just saw this in the commodity bubbles (including oil) and the housing bubbles world-wide. When the bubble bursts (and it always will) the consequences are terrible--e.g. the current meltdown and often lead those who created the problem blaming the market and panicing people into giving them power to control and manipulate the market even more!!!
Does this help?
Marc
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Anthony Randazzo | November 14, 2008
In the wake of Clubber Lang's vicious defeat of Philadelphia's favorite son in Rocky III, the Italian Stallion reflected back on why he lost. It seemed he had everything going for him—but then he got caught up in his own glory. When Rocky finally hit bottom, his former nemesis, Apollo Creed, dramatically stepped in to offer some stock speech wisdom: "When we fought, you had that eye of the tiger, man, the edge! And now you gotta get it back, and the way to get it back is go back to the beginning."
Today's Republicans are in similar spot. After Barack Obama's massive win, they've been reviewing the fight tapes, only to discover that getting caught up in the glow of their own power eventually led to their downfall. They should've gotten the message in 2006, but this November's spectacular defeat (save Ted "Marion Barry" Stevens) has finally woken them up. Now the question is: What direction will the Republican Party take? Will the GOP "return" to some dogma of the past? Reaganomics would appease many in the Old Party "old guard" who think like Apollo Creed. Or will the party invoke Teddy Roosevelt's progressivism and shift more to the political center? These are the two options currently being debated by pundits on all sides, but the fact is that either option would spell doom for Republicans.
Consider David Brooks' most recent column in the New York Times, where he outlines what he sees as the GOP dividing into two warring camps now that they've been thoroughly defeated. It's the Traditionalists versus the Reformers. Reagan versus Teddy. Old Party power versus moderate centrism. But in reading Brooks' analysis, one is left wondering if there isn't another direction the GOP could head in order to return to power.
Brooks defines the "Traditionalists" as those who believe "the G.O.P. should return to its core ideas: Cut government, cut taxes, restrict immigration. Rally behind Sarah Palin." He puts Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Grover Norquist, and organizations such as the Federalist Society and Family Research Council into this camp.
Palin, Limbaugh, and Hannity truly do belong in the same wing of the GOP, the branch that has rejected intellectualism in favor of dogma, the group that believes passionate devotion to the "real America" will energize a Nietzschian-like will to power. Unfortunately, Brooks identifies this group as the defenders of the free market. That's not a reassuring thought for those who favor both free markets and free minds.
The second group Brooks sees the GOP splintering into is the "Reformers." This group tends to believe that "American voters will not support a party whose main idea is slashing government. Reformers propose new policies to address inequality and middle-class economic anxiety. They tend to take global warming seriously. They tend to be intrigued by the way David Cameron has modernized the British Conservative Party."
Brooks puts authors David Frum (Comeback), Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam (Grand New Party), Ramesh Ponnuru, and Peggy Noonan into this group—as well as himself, proving that his neocon spine has cat-like flexibility. These Republicans believe in John McCain's mission to take the party towards the center with the rest of the country—though most were critical of his methods during the campaign.
Given the Brooks analysis, here's the real problem for the Republicans: The Traditionalist defenders of capitalism wind up out of touch with America and grounded in rhetoric rather than political principle. Meanwhile, Reformers who want to "appeal more to Hispanics, independents and younger voters" have to abandon the small government model and become the conservative wing of the Democratic Party.
None of that spells long term success for Republicans. What the GOP needs are libertarians, those who believe not only in small government, but also in individualism and the truly liberating power of free markets. If the Ron Paul movement tells us anything, it's that the Republican Party can be more than a party of old white guys with bad hair cuts.
Brooks believes that the Traditionalist will win in the short term—led in 2012 by Sarah Palin—but that Reformers will win out in the end as the GOP continues to lose. He argues that once the GOP suffers more defeats, the Reformers "will build new institutions, new structures and new ideas, and the cycle of conservative ascendance will begin again."
Again, it's doubtful that Brooks' vision of a reformed, moderate Republican Party will be able to differentiate itself from a lukewarm Democratic Party. But even if they were to rise to power, it wouldn't be the small government, Goldwater-style GOP of old. It would simply be a new kind of party.
What does this mean for the future of free market economics? Perhaps today's libertarians will learn first hand the pain of Hayek, Friedman, Mises, and the rest at Mont Pelerin who had to confront a world that adversely opposed their ideas.
But perhaps not.
A new conservative movement that takes libertarian ideas seriously could use the inertia created by the nation's new progressivism to slingshot itself into the future on a platform of reduced government, lower taxes, and limited interventionism, while also respecting climate change (adjusting the tax code to encourage green reform without any expense to taxpayers) and reforming the immigration system (opening the borders as the market demands labor without sacrificing security).
The Republican Party has a chance to transform itself into something it has never been: a party of small government based on classical liberal principles. It doesn't have to be one of David Brooks' visions of the GOP. In fact, if the Republican Party wants to return to power it will recognize the flaws in both approaches, avoid them like Road Runner toying with Wile E. Coyote, and embrace libertarianism instead.
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No Room for RINOs
South Carolina's Mark Sanford is one of three GOP governors now being widely mentioned as potential saviors of the Republican Party between now and 2012. All are conspicuous for calling on their own party to live up to its principles. Most notably, none have advocated the GOP move to the left.
Mr. Sanford is a two-term governor known for vetoing spending bills, pushing market-oriented policy reforms (such as moving his state's Medicaid system to a private account-based model) and criticizing the lapses of the national GOP. "Some on the left will say our electoral losses are a repudiation of our principles of lower taxes, smaller government and individual liberty," he wrote on CNN.com after this month's elections. "But Tuesday was not in fact a rejection of those principles -- it was a rejection of Republicans' failure to live up to those principles."
In the same op-ed he took a swing at Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, identifying him as someone who "personifies what went wrong in the election. . . He was a proud champion of pork barrel spending and bridges to nowhere and stayed so long that he developed a blind eye to ethical lapses that would be readily seen by scout leaders and soccer moms alike."
Two other leading lights for a troubled GOP are Govs. Sarah Palin of Alaska and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. Before she became John McCain's running mate, Mrs. Palin was best known for challenging her own state GOP to cure its spendthrift, corrupt ways. She unseated a sitting mayor in her first bid for office and became a giant killer by knocking off the high-handed, free-spending Gov. Frank Murkowski in a Republican primary.
Mr. Jindal is a boy wonder of the party. At 25, he was appointed to fix Louisiana's failing Medicaid program, and succeeded. At 32, he lost a hard-fought campaign for governor but later landed a Congressional seat from which he criticized bureaucratic bungling in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Last year, after Katrina had destroyed Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco's reputation, he won his second bid for the office by promising sweeping reform of Louisiana's corrupt and inefficient government culture.
That Republicans are coalescing around these three governors is also revealing for who is not included. Several years ago Christie Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey and EPA administrator, wrote a book called "It's My Party Too." She used that treatise to argue for the party to abandon its conservative roots. Even after two serious GOP drubbings at the polls, she has found no takers. Likewise, Lincoln Chaffee, the former Rhode Island Senator once labeled a "Republican in Name Only," was still complaining last week to the Washington Post that "right-wing talk show hosts and the Ann Coulters and that ilk" never understood that the GOP needs people like him.
Maybe that's because Republicans have looked closely at the election results. The country hasn't so much moved left as it has abandoned a GOP that abandoned its own principles. In Ohio, Barack Obama actually won about 40,000 fewer votes than John Kerry did four years ago. Mr. Obama took Ohio only because John McCain pulled 350,000 fewer votes than George W. Bush did in 2004. Republicans and Republican-leaning voters stayed home.
That's not an endorsement of the ideas of the left. It's a lack enthusiasm for a party that failed to deliver the smaller government it promised in Washington. At least the GOP, in settling on future leaders like Governors Jindal, Sanford and Palin, seems to understand that.
-- Brendan Miniter
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Reposted from another thread that was essentially of duplicate of this thread.
Future? of Republican party
« on: November 15, 2008, 08:06:02 AM »
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I agree with some of the following though not all. I think he is right on target at the Republican party's banckrupcy in ideas and inability to adapt. Falling to the position that the reason for the failure of the party is due to its diverting from its core principles is hopefully not going to win out the minds of what is left of the leadership and dircection of the party and dooming it to further defeat. If Shawn Hannity and Rush are going to lead this party than whomever follows them goes the way of the pied piper.
If anyone questions the barren thoughtfulness of the party just witness that some in the party think that putting Palin at the forefront and labelling her a leader of the party is a good idea. Anyone who now thinks this woman can attract anyone new to the right is dreaming. She is turning into a total mindless cad inmo. I am surely dissappointed and becoming quite embarassed by her.
I was wrong to think she has her own wisdom or ability to engage in real insightful conversation.
I really thought she would go back to Alaska, perhaps get Steven's Senate seat, or run for the Senate or Congress later and re-establish herself with more gravitas. And if she would then spend the next couple years really LEARNING the issues so she could speak with some authority, sensibility, and logic rather than just run around with some by-gone party slogans. Again I over-estimated her (or if I try to be kind - her "handlers"). The cans are relying on governors. I guess because they are out of power they no longer have the floor to speak their views and establish themselves with cabinet posts, chairmanship seats, etc.
We need another Newt to rise from the Democratic controlled houses to lead the party back. Why can't/won't Newt run again?
Amzing thing to see how our liberal University system honors a person like Ayers but despises a person like Newt.
***Ship of fools
Nov 13th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Political parties die from the head down
Illustration by KAL
JOHN STUART MILL once dismissed the British Conservative Party as the stupid party. Today the Conservative Party is run by Oxford-educated high-fliers who have been busy reinventing conservatism for a new era. As Lexington sees it, the title of the “stupid party” now belongs to the Tories’ transatlantic cousins, the Republicans.
There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on November 4th. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains. Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000—many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases—by six points. John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South.
The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Global warming? Crack a joke about Ozone Al. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantánamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be water-boarding. Ha ha. During the primary debates, three out of ten Republican candidates admitted that they did not believe in evolution.
The Republican Party’s divorce from the intelligentsia has been a while in the making. The born-again Mr Bush preferred listening to his “heart” rather than his “head”. He also filled the government with incompetent toadies like Michael “heck-of-a-job” Brown, who bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina. Mr McCain, once the chattering classes’ favourite Republican, refused to grapple with the intricacies of the financial meltdown, preferring instead to look for cartoonish villains. And in a desperate attempt to serve boob bait to Bubba, he appointed Sarah Palin to his ticket, a woman who took five years to get a degree in journalism, and who was apparently unaware of some of the most rudimentary facts about international politics.
Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future. The party’s electoral success from 1980 onwards was driven by its ability to link brains with brawn. The conservative intelligentsia not only helped to craft a message that resonated with working-class Democrats, a message that emphasised entrepreneurialism, law and order, and American pride. It also provided the party with a sweeping policy agenda. The party’s loss of brains leaves it rudderless, without a compelling agenda.
This is happening at a time when the American population is becoming more educated. More than a quarter of Americans now have university degrees. Twenty per cent of households earn more than $100,000 a year, up from 16% in 1996. Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster, notes that 69% call themselves “professionals”. McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the number of jobs requiring “tacit” intellectual skills has increased three times as fast as employment in general. The Republican Party’s current “redneck strategy” will leave it appealing to a shrinking and backward-looking portion of the electorate.
Why is this happening? One reason is that conservative brawn has lost patience with brains of all kinds, conservative or liberal. Many conservatives—particularly lower-income ones—are consumed with elemental fury about everything from immigration to liberal do-gooders. They take their opinions from talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and the deeply unsubtle Sean Hannity. And they regard Mrs Palin’s apparent ignorance not as a problem but as a badge of honour.
Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world. The movement has little to say about today’s pressing problems, such as global warming and the debacle in Iraq, and expends too much of its energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research.
Conservative intellectuals are also engaged in their own version of what Julian Benda dubbed la trahison des clercs, the treason of the learned. They have fallen into constructing cartoon images of “real Americans”, with their “volkish” wisdom and charming habit of dropping their “g”s. Mrs Palin was invented as a national political force by Beltway journalists from the Weekly Standard and the National Review who met her when they were on luxury cruises around Alaska, and then noisily championed her cause.
Time for reflection
How likely is it that the Republican Party will come to its senses? There are glimmers of hope. Business conservatives worry that the party has lost the business vote. Moderates complain that the Republicans are becoming the party of “white-trash pride”. Anonymous McCain aides complain that Mrs Palin was a campaign-destroying “whack job”. One of the most encouraging signs is the support for giving the chairmanship of the Republican Party to John Sununu, a sensible and clever man who has the added advantage of coming from the north-east (he lost his New Hampshire Senate seat on November 4th).
But the odds in favour of an imminent renaissance look long. Many conservatives continue to think they lost because they were not conservative or populist enough—Mr McCain, after all, was an amnesty-loving green who refused to make an issue out of Mr Obama’s associations with Jeremiah Wright. Richard Weaver, one of the founders of modern conservatism, once wrote a book entitled “Ideas have Consequences”; unfortunately, too many Republicans are still refusing to acknowledge that idiocy has consequences, too.***
Logged
Crafty_Dog
Global Moderator
Power User
Posts: 8269
Re: Future? of Republican party
« Reply #1 on: November 15, 2008, 10:20:21 AM »
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CCP:
Very interesting article.
May I ask you to put it in this thread?
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1736.0
thank you,
Marc
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One reason is that conservative brawn has lost patience with brains of all kinds, conservative or liberal.
This quote strikes me as especially important in regards to the party's future.
There was a time when the power of the "intelligentsia" (for lack of a better word) was incredibly important to the evolution of the conservative movement. Sadly, intelligence has somehow become a bad word. There was a time when sending your kids to college was actually something to be proud of regardless of political affiliation. Unfortunately many in the political realm have equated intelligence/book learning/a degree with being elitist or out of touch with the main stream.
The Economist article points to many examples of this dumbing down, but doesn't ask an important question:
How do you evolve a political movement which for the past few years has placed negative connotations on college education/book smarts? How does one turn the smart folks bad, regular folks good equation around (or at least balance the equation)?
I'll throw it out to the group for a response.
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A rejection of the leftist indoctrination mills that masquerade as schools of higher education does not equate to a rejection of education.
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"A rejection of the leftist indoctrination mills that masquerade as schools of higher education does not equate to a rejection of education"
Funny, I hear that a lot and yet no one ever presents alternatives or solutions. I know you can give me some GM, so please do.
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(Butting in here), if I understand the conversation correctly, there was a request for examples of "leftist indoctrination mills" in higher education. Maybe the most obvious example IMO would be the presentation of the anthropogenic global warming theory without also presenting obvious holes and flaws in the theory. Millions and millions of children I believe have been either shown directly the Al Gore movie, from elementary school to PhD, while few have been taught about the revisions and corrections to the selected data presented. Almost none of the children are taught about the plethora of other interest facts (Arctic ocean level falling, for example) that would lead one to at least partially doubt the alarmist conclusions implied by the warminig view - that a major portion of the United States will be lost to the ocean levels in this century, for example, and that temperatures can only accelerate upward and man is the cause even though temps haven't gone up in ten years.
Besides Al Gore's movie, examples of unbalanced reporting comes from sources as trusted as Weekly Reader, Scientific American and of course the NY Times.
After consistently teaching 'an inconvenient hypothesis' as truth and fact and testing on the fundamentals of human caused warming, then we poll young voters on the topic and are surprised and impressed by the degree of 'consensus'.
Another area would be the widespread focus in higher education on flaws in the free enterprise-based, capitalistic system without the context of also teaching the amazing mechanics and merits of the system.
Would you agree and can others add more examples...
Obvious solution to climate change indoctrination is to have all who are taught the theory to be also taught the view of the most prominent skeptics, that anthropogenic causes are likely a minor part, that the data is inconsistent and that many other factors are still largely not well understood.
Solution for economic teaching is to require the teaching of our economic system to all children with all its successes before teaching its flaws, shortcomings and the alternative systems with their own strengths and weaknesses.
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I've certainly had a hard time finding historically accurate information about the Second Amendment and it's genesis at various colleges, and my kids are certainly not getting accurate info about it in elementary school. AGW, on the other hand is all over the place; I've had a couple interesting conversations with teachers after my kids relay that dad says AGW is unmitigated foolishness.
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Don't need examples of "indoctrination mills". Actually, I find the use of the term not only an over-generalization, but insulting to the intelligence of the individuals that teach/work/attend them. I mean, do you really think that the great majority of this nation's youth is lock stepping to some type of liberal educational agenda? If so, you are veering into paranoid conspiracy territory.
And yes, a "rejection of leftist indoctrination mills that masquerade as institutes of higher education" is a direct attack on education. Especially when you present no alternatives. I'm asking for alternatives to college and university. So give me some.
DMcG, your solution of fair and balanced education looks suspiciously like a 'fairness doctrine' type of equation. Let each subject that is taught be examined equally from both sides, right? So who decides the equal balance? A government entity? The school board? The parents? I find a ton of problems with the state of education across the board, and d*mn if I can think of a solution.
I'll cut it here 'cuz I'm veering way off the thread subject. But please, give me some realistic alternatives or suggestions to what some view as "indoctrination".
Back to my question:
How do you evolve a political movement which for the past few years has placed negative connotations on college education/book smarts? How does one turn the smart folks bad, regular folks good equation around (or at least balance the equation)?
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"A rejection of the leftist indoctrination mills that masquerade as schools of higher education does not equate to a rejection of education"
Funny, I hear that a lot and yet no one ever presents alternatives or solutions. I know you can give me some GM, so please do.
Solutions: The social sciences need to return to the scientific model and reject political correctness and the "Ward Churchillization" of academia. It should be a search for truth and a venue for exchanging ideas rather than imparting post-modern, queer theory talking points while engaging in a stalinesque suppression of dissenting ideas.
The traditional campus and undergrad/postgrad paradigm need to be scrapped. Smaller segments of education that stand alone, or that can be coupled with other segments to reach a more advanced degree, while the student works is much more useful and practical.
The virtual campus/distance learning should be the rule and not the exception. This could be used for greater transparency of who is actually teaching and what is being taught. Much like teaching martial arts, let those that excel be recognized and rewarded rather than labor under a brand name like Stanford or UCLA.
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Don't need examples of "indoctrination mills". Actually, I find the use of the term not only an over-generalization, but insulting to the intelligence of the individuals that teach/work/attend them. I mean, do you really think that the great majority of this nation's youth is lock stepping to some type of liberal educational agenda? If so, you are veering into paranoid conspiracy territory.
**The is a ton of documentation that would support those criticisms of academia. I can cite my own experiences as well.**
And yes, a "rejection of leftist indoctrination mills that masquerade as institutes of higher education" is a direct attack on education. Especially when you present no alternatives. I'm asking for alternatives to college and university. So give me some.
**See my comments above. The current model is wasteful, inefficient and does not serve the taxpayers, the students or the society at large.**
DMcG, your solution of fair and balanced education looks suspiciously like a 'fairness doctrine' type of equation. Let each subject that is taught be examined equally from both sides, right? So who decides the equal balance? A government entity? The school board? The parents? I find a ton of problems with the state of education across the board, and d*mn if I can think of a solution.
**If a school takes any state or federal money, then they had better be ready to meet some standards that demonstrate that the school isn't just teaching only how evil America, western civilization and any random heteosexual white male is.**
I'll cut it here 'cuz I'm veering way off the thread subject. But please, give me some realistic alternatives or suggestions to what some view as "indoctrination".
Back to my question:
How do you evolve a political movement which for the past few years has placed negative connotations on college education/book smarts? How does one turn the smart folks bad, regular folks good equation around (or at least balance the equation)?
**If you are a student of history, you can recognize that our president-elect is getting ready to take our economy over the cliff. As most people have bought into "hopandchange", not realizing it translates to socialism, they'll have to learn the hard way. Post-disaster, a good candidate can then stand up to help fix the mess. Funny enough, lots of NPR fans that fancy themselves intelligent and educated know nothing about anything, like basic economics. This allows them to vote "hopeandchange".**
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I mean, do you really think that the great majority of this nation's youth is lock stepping to some type of liberal educational agenda? If so, you are veering into paranoid conspiracy territory.
Is that a fact? Guess you've never dealt with any of the "green" gibberish being pounded into kids' heads these days. Recycling by about any empiric measure is a grossly ineffective tactic that for the most part leads to sorted piles of trash heading to the landfill instead of unsorted piles of trash doing the same. The underlying cause of the recycling effort would be done a hell of a lot of good if some entrepreneur came along and created markets for recycled material, but what's being taught from kindergarten to grad school in just about every school in the nation, sort your trash into piles that end up in the same place, or find economically productive means of using recycled material? I've rarely seen the latter while the former is epidemic, IMO because members of the nanny state left figure if they can get you feeling guilty enough to muck around in your trash can from elementary school on they are well on their way to getting you to feel guilty enough about everything else to dictate other odious, counterproductive responses.
As mentioned above, the Second Amendment is another case in point. It's not like their isn't copious source material demonstrating the Second Amendment means what it says, and it's not like there aren't leftist in possession of intellectual rigor who haven't, often times reluctantly, come out and said the framers clearly intended US citizens an individual right to keep and bear arms, but try to find those facts in any curriculum in America. My kids are regularly chastised for relaying historical truth with no veering into paranoid territory required. Think on that for a minute: kids contending with opprobrium at school because they spoke accurately. And that's 'sposed to be trumped by the concern that the folks who are force feeding falsehoods might feel insulted when their methods are called out? Which is the bath water and where is the baby?
The solution is simple: intellectual rigor, but that's getting pretty hard to find in the current everybody-who-competes-gets-a-trophy climate. If "save the planet," or "don't hurt anyone's feelings," or "regurgitate this reflexively" are the educational ends then yes, muddleheaded lockstep is a common result. If, on the other hand, the ability to marshal evidence, speak of it cogently, document sources, analyze them effectively, respond incisively to critcism and so is the educational end, then level headed thinking results.
Indeed, the best class I ever took was taught by Roger Wilkins, a very left wing professor who won a Pulitzer for writing the Washington Post editorials that helped drum Nixon out of office. The first day of class he said something like "I am an unapologetic liberal and believe the left wing democratic ideals are what this country needs most." I remember thinking "oh fornication, here we go again: I'll take on some left wing fruit loop on his own ground and end up with another 'C.'"
Didn't happen; Roger respects rigor above all else and favors well framed argument he disagrees with over fuzzy headed gibberish favoring his side of the aisle. He got my libertarian number quickly and used me as a foil as needed. Many a class would start with Roger saying something like "Guinness, let's here what you think about affirmative action," and then it would be on from there. I spent many an office hour debating things further with him, took every course he offered, earned an "A" in them all and was used as the example when students complained he never gave high grades, helped him with his research, and, when he'd be called out of town suddenly, was the guy he'd ask to help with his classes in his absence. I learned a hell of a lot from the guy, and respect the hell out of him for showing me just how effective rigor embedded in the lesson plan can be. As such I'm further all sorts of annoyed that I had to spend so much far less productive time in classrooms with baton wavers who'd get wounded and snarky if you didn't join their parade.
Bottom line: there's no need to present alternative forms of education if rigor is introduced early and throughout the curriculum. Alas these days concepts of PC epistemological purity seems to be the driving force.
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"DMcG, your solution of fair and balanced education looks suspiciously like a 'fairness doctrine' type of equation. Let each subject that is taught be examined equally from both sides, right? So who decides the equal balance? A government entity? The school board? The parents? I find a ton of problems with the state of education across the board, and d*mn if I can think of a solution."
SB, I agree with you and did NOT mean to imply a government solution. Institutions filled with indoctrination will face the wrath of me whining on this board, not a federal balance enforcement board. School choice is one solution. but often the choices look a lot alike. Entrepreneurs and capitalists don't generally go into teaching. K-12 is largely a creature of the teacher's unions unless parents, voters, school boards or legislators speak out and they rarely do.
Schools were loaded with bias in the 1970s too but many kids grew up and voted for Reagan. Kids eventually can smell BS it just takes some time to sort things out. When I was in Jr. High we were told that the world would run out of natural gas in 1982. Either we were lied to or their theory just had some holes. I see many of these new Obama voters as conservatives of the future, just give them time to experience a few of life's real-world experiences.
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May I suggest we continue the discussion of education over at the Education thread on the SCH forum?
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This center is really for pushing an agenda of government control of liberalism (ie "progress)
The radical left fights back with money and research. They now have their perfect spokesperson and wolf in sheeps clothing. My fellow Jews have for centuries knew that education, research and knowledge will ultimately win the day. Probably that is why we lasted for millenium despite dozens of outside attempts at being conquered and wiped out. I am proud of this. Unfortunately their are too many of us enamored with ideas, ideals that are counter to my beliefs. Soros is another Marx, Alinsky and all the rest who just love Obamanism. BO is one of them. Time will tell how much he can get away with.
Perhaps Palin can become a conduit for countering this radical threat but she is NOT intellectual enough to go up against this.
I don't know who is other then Newt at this time - David Horowitz and others do exist. They are out there somewhere. Joe the Plumber is nice but he won't work against this sort of thing. This is a battle of ideals more akin to 1930's Europe IMHO. What I havent quite figured out it how can Soros, a product of the holocaust be more on the side of the philosophy that is closer to Socialism. Somehow Conservatism and the Republican party have become more alinged with Nazism, Marism? I don't get how Soros thinks more and big pushy goernment is not like what created WW2? Newt, could you explain this to me? Anyone here have enough historical knowledge?
****Bloomberg TV Bloomberg Radio Bloomberg Podcasts Bloomberg Press
Soros-Funded Democratic Idea Factory Becomes Obama Policy Font
By Edwin Chen
Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Three blocks from the White House, on the 10th floor of a sleek glass building, young workers pound at computers, with giant flat-screen TVs overhead. It has the look and feel of a high-tech startup.
In many ways it is. The product is ideas.
Thanks in part to funding from benefactors such as billionaire George Soros, the Center for American Progress has become in just five years an intellectual wellspring for Democratic policy proposals, including many that are shaping the agenda of the new Obama administration.
Much as the Heritage Foundation provided intellectual heft for the Republican Party in the 1980s, CAP has been an incubator for liberal thought and helped build the platform that triumphed in the 2008 campaign.
``What CAP has done is recapture the role of ideas as an important political force, something the Republicans had been better at for 25 years,'' said Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute, a non-partisan policy-research organization in Washington.
CAP's president and founder, John Podesta, 59, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, is one of three people running the transition team for president-elect Barack Obama, 47. A squadron of CAP experts is working with them.
Some of the group's recommendations already have been adopted by the president-elect.
Withdrawal of Troops
These include the center's call for a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and a buildup of forces in Afghanistan, a plan for universal health coverage through employer plans and proposals to create purchasing pools that allow small businesses to spread the cost among a larger group of workers. Obama has endorsed much of a CAP plan to create ``green jobs'' linked to alleviating global climate change.
CAP also is advocating the creation of a ``National Energy Council'' headed by an official with the stature of the national security adviser and who would be charged with ``transforming the energy base'' of the U.S. In addition, CAP urges the creation of a White House ``office of social entrepreneurship'' to spur new ideas for addressing social problems.
To help promote its ideas, CAP employs 11 full-time bloggers who contribute to two Web sites, ThinkProgress and the Wonk Room; others prepare daily feeds for radio stations. The center's policy briefings are standing-room only, packed with lobbyists, advocacy-group representatives and reporters looking for insights on where the Obama administration is headed.
`Premier Progressive'
``The center is the premier progressive think tank in Washington,'' said Mark Green, head of the New Democracy Project, an urban-affairs institute in New York.
Just eight days after the Nov. 4 election, CAP released a 300,000-word volume called ``Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President'' that offers advice on issues such as economic revival and fixing the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Work on the book began almost a year ago.
CAP, which has 180 staffers and a $27 million budget, devotes as much as half of its resources to promoting its ideas through blogs, events, publications and media outreach.
The center's future was far from certain in 2003, when wealthy donors such as Soros and film producer Stephen Bing gave $10 million or more to fill what they believed was an intellectual void in the Democratic Party and create a vehicle to produce an agenda for the party's eventual return to power.
Heritage Foundation
Podesta modeled the center on the Heritage Foundation, which became the go-to policy-research organization in 1981 when newly elected President Ronald Reagan embraced its conservative ideas embodied in a book called ``Mandate for Leadership.'' Heritage was just seven years old.
CAP and Heritage have something else in common.
``Others strive to be objective, we don't,'' said Jennifer Palmieri, CAP's vice president for communications.
Podesta likes to say, ``we're not a think tank, we're an action tank,'' said Dan Weiss, an environmental activist who joined CAP last year.
CAP isn't the only Democratic-leaning research organization in Washington with enhanced cachet after Obama's election.
The 92-year-old Brookings Institution, for example, has advisers in Obama's inner circle, including economist Jason Furman and foreign-policy expert Susan Rice. Others are working either part-time or full-time in the Obama transition.
Podesta's center isn't even among the biggest or best- funded. Brookings has a staff of more than 400 and an annual budget of $48 million. Heritage has a staff of 200 and a budget of $60 million. The American Enterprise Institute, which has close ties to the administration of President George W. Bush, has about 140 staffers, including Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, and a budget of $28 million.
Influence
Yet CAP may be the most influential. In addition to Podesta, at least 10 other CAP experts are advising the incoming administration, including Melody Barnes, the center's executive vice president for policy who co-chairs the agency-review working group and Cassandra Butts, the senior vice president for domestic policy, who is now a senior transition staffer.
``John understood that ideas have power in this town, and he brought in super-bright people whose ideas have become essential reading,'' Isaacson said.
CAP's successes offer a lesson for Republican-leaning groups, said James McGann, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who tracks policy groups.
``They've shown that one has to constantly innovate and be responsible to an ever-changing demographics and electorate, and have policies that are responsive to that,'' McGann said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Edwin Chen in Washington at echen32@bloomberg.net .****
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The proper name for this is Liberal Fascism.
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Thoughtful answers as always. Lots to think about now....
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:-P :lol:
Actually, appearances to the contrary, :lol: it IS a serious answer. I've misplaced my copy of the book "Liberal Fascism" and so cannot even give you the author's name.
That said, if you go back to the intellectual origins of Mussolini and Hitler's National SOCIALISM, you will see that fascism is a LEFT WING ideology, not right wing. If you go back you will see that FDR's New Deal, which BO seeks to emulate and dramatically expand, was essentially FDR's take on what Mussolini was doing.
Although American Fascism, a.k.a. Liberalism, usually lacks the overtly violent tactics of Mussolini's Brown Shirts, its economic and social concepts and its goals are those of fascism.
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***That said, if you go back to the intellectual origins of Mussolini and Hitler's National SOCIALISM, you will see that fascism is a LEFT WING ideology, not right wing. If you go back you will see that FDR's New Deal, which BO seeks to emulate and dramatically expand, was essentially FDR's take on what Mussolini was doing.
Although American Fascism, a.k.a. Liberalism, usually lacks the overtly violent tactics of Mussolini's Brown Shirts, its economic and social concepts and its goals are those of fascism***
Yes Crafty. You stated in a better way exactly what I was thinking. Somehow this nut job BO compares the US with "starting to appear uncomfortably close to Nazi Germany!". This is what he said. This guy is a nut job. It is exactly the *opposite* which is true!
They twisted around US conservatism to represent Naziism. In fact Conservativsim is freedom and the liberal agenda is closer to Nazism with its increasing and expanding government control over all of us.
Number 1) We do not have the spokes people, the MSM, around who will straigten this out in a way that appeals to most people IMO.
Number 2) Additionally as Rove says Republicans need to address real time issues in real time ways that ordinary people talk about at the table. Slogans about freedom, liberty, less government alone are not enough IMO. How can this be relayed in a way that appeals to ordinary Americans and in a way that address our modern problems? I don't know.
Hannity and Limbaugh do the first part in a crude way. They have NO clue about the second at all IMO.
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Hannity is a putz and a schmuck. I can't bear to watch him even when I agree with him. :-P
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Other names for Liberal Fascism are Corporatism (running society as if it were one giant corporation) and Crony Capitalism:
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Crony Capitalism, Predatory Politicians, and the Detroit Three
by Newt Gingrich
There’s a term that’s commonly applied to the economic systems of some Asian and Latin American countries. It’s “crony capitalism.”
Crony capitalism is when government controls significant parts of the economy. Under this kind of bureaucratic micromanagement, politicians -- not the free market -- call the shots. And that means that the decisions that control the economy are of necessity political decisions, not economic ones.
Crony capitalism is bad for government. Economic power in the hands of politicians breeds corruption. Crony capitalism is bad for democracy. Individuals and businesses outside favored industries have an unequal voice in self-government. Crony capitalism is bad for business. Politicians wedded to the status quo stifle growth and innovation. And there’s one more thing about crony capitalism: It’s come to America.
Predatory Politicians Practicing Crony Capitalism Created the Economic Crisis
It’s the nature of crony capitalism to expand -- for government to acquire more and more of the economy. The agents of this expansion are elected officials. Call them “predatory politicians.”
Crony capitalism practiced by predatory politicians is at the root of the current financial meltdown. In exchange for campaign cash and support for favored constituents, predatory politicians aided and abetted the government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they created and fed the subprime mortgage market. Now Predatory Politicians Are About to Make It Worse
And to fix the mess they created, what have predatory politicians turned to? Why, more crony capitalism of course.
First, they designed Wall Street bailouts in which a former chairman of Goldman Sachs got a blank check to disburse hundreds of billions of dollars to his former colleagues on Wall Street. Then they took over an insurance company at a hugely inflated cost. Now predatory politicians want taxpayers to fund a bailout of three bloated, stagnant companies that have been losing money for years, one of which is currently hemorrhaging over $1 billion a month.
The Detroit Three: An Investment Only a Predatory Politician Would Propose
To reward the unions that helped produce its electoral victory, the newly empowered Democratic Congress is proposing that American taxpayers pony up $25 billion to bail out the Detroit Three automakers, Ford, GM and Chrysler. Democrats are using the current financial crisis as their excuse to bailout the autos. But in fact, the Detroit three were unprofitable long before the current crisis hit. According to one economist, GM and Ford made more money-losing investments in the 1980s than any other U.S. companies. And the Detroit money pit only got deeper in the ensuing two decades. Since 1998, GM has been losing an astonishing $1.5 billion a month.
That’s an investment only a predatory politician would propose.
Bringing Fannie and Freddie Style Accountability to the Auto Industry
One of the things that makes crony capitalism so profitable for politicians is that Washington exempts itself from the economic and financial rules it imposes on private industry. For example, in 2003, federal regulators discovered that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had engaged in Enron-style accounting fraud. But while executives at private companies who engaged in similar fraud went to prison -- and Congress responded by imposing the draconian and business-killing Sarbanes-Oxley bill on private businesses -- Fannie and Freddie executives barely received a slap on the wrist.
One of the reasons was House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.). Frank fought tenaciously against the regulation that would have held Fannie and Freddie executives accountable and might have averted the financial crisis. Now Chairman Frank wants to bring his particular style of crony capitalism to the auto industry.
Any Detroit Bailout Government Board Should Be Subject To Sarbanes-Oxley
On “Face the Nation” this Sunday, Chairman Frank announced that not only would he push for a taxpayer bailout of the Detroit Three during the special session of Congress this week, but he would also create a government oversight board for the three companies -- in effect, a board of directors made up of predatory politicians.
I believe that it would be a mistake for the taxpayers to be forced to bail out Detroit. Companies at which union workers make $71 an hour in wages and benefits -- compared to just $47 an hour at Toyota’s U.S. plants -- are not going to be saved by a $25 billion government check.
But if Democrats do find the votes to bring crony capitalism to Detroit, Americans should at the very least insist that any government board of directors created for the auto industry be subject to the criminal penalties and lengthy prison sentences in Sarbanes-Oxley.
What’s fair for the rest of us is fair for predatory politicians.
A Chance For President-Elect Obama to Deliver Real Change
The solution to our economic problems, be they in Detroit or on Wall Street, isn’t more crony capitalism; it’s economic growth.
While politicians in Washington are constantly calling on taxpayers to put up more and more money to bail out flagging businesses, there are practical things that wouldn't cost the taxpayers a penny that we could do to make America a better place to create jobs.
One of these things is to repeal Sarbanes-Oxley. As I outline in more detail here, Sarbanes-Oxley has had the unintended consequences of stifling innovation, killing new business start-ups and driving listings overseas.
President-elect Obama won an historic victory two weeks ago on the promise of delivering change to the American people. Bailing out the Detroit auto dinosaurs is not change. It is crony capitalism in service of a failed status quo.
President-elect Obama should stand up to congressional Democrats and say “no” -- “no” to saddling future generations of Americans with the bill for today’s crony capitalism.
That would be change we could believe in.
Your friend,
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From what other Republican [than Newt] do we hear such a logical discussion of the problem from the viewpoint of the right?
Wwhat Newt says certainly sounds logical. And it certainly makes me wonder how Frank could still be in the House and in a position to attempt to fix the problems.
I guess we need a "Republican Soros" to fund a front organization at Frank's district and make his constituants more aware of what a corrupt official he is.
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And on a more mundane level, we also need to end gerrymandering and to kill "campaign finance reform"-- both of which make it harder to take on an incumbent. I don't know what the current numbers are, but not so lmany years ago, the incumbency re-election rate was well above 95%!!!
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Crafty wrote: "not so many years ago, the incumbency re-election rate was well above 95%!"
Here is a link for your stat: http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php In the years 1998, 2000 and 2004 the reelection rate was 98%! 2002 was 96% and during the changeover of congress in 2006 it was still 94%. This year was also extremely high even though the approval rate for congress was 17% or so. I have seen statistics claiming that 92% of election money spent is by the incumbents.
If not for the fun and sport of earmarks, pork, over-regulation and corruption, maybe these brave public servants wouldn't want to stay in Washington so long. On the flip side, if your industry (free enterprise for example) exists only on the whim of some congressional committee, making heavy donations to both sides is extremely rational.
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Limbaugh and Hannity are not leaders of anything. Hannity show is relevant because of his guests. Rush often has spot-on political commentary but he is REACTING to the stories of the day, not setting an agenda. Not as extreme as Coulter, but these guys have the job of holding/pleasing an audience, not solving problems or setting the agenda. I think Rush offends CCP by his tone and attitude more so than by his positions and I highly doubt that the Economists editors listen consistently to the radio shows. Both of these conservatives failed to give any verbal backing to a candidate, then whined about the result. Oprah did better than that.
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SB's question about 'intelligentsia' remains unanswered and I am still pondering it. If the college educated favored Bush 04 by a couple of points and Obama 08 by a couple of points then they appear to be caught up in the same excitement of the moment as the less educated, whether that is excitement for Obama or excitement to be rid of a bad bunch of Republicans. Meanwhile they sell off their assets in anticipation of the new confiscatory regime.
Every issue presents an opportunity look for some intelligence-based book learning wisdom; today it is the auto bailout. Any first look at the issue is - 'big three are failing, Oh that's bad. Many will be hurt. How can we stop it.'
Any thoughtful, intelligence based look at capitalism such as Thomas Sowell's book 'Basic Economics' would tell you in a longer sound bite that things like foreclosure, bankruptcy and being fired from a job that you are lousy at are all very GOOD things for the economy. Immobility of resources is a terrible thing. The fact that all these people have no clue about any other way to make a living except to show up 9 to 5 and have a union shakedown a losing business for 3 times the industry value only to have your congressman lobby the feds for a stopgap measure that won't change the underlying fundamentals is pathetic, from an intelligence-based analytical perspective.
But what happens in the knee jerk media and with the emotions based electorate when a conservative supports allowing failing businesses to fail? He/she will be destroyed and some spineless, mushy, 'compassionate' new politician will be found to take the seat and the nationalizations and bailouts will continue until no industry is untouched or self sufficient. JMHO.
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The nation, as a "debtoholic" probably has to hit rock bottom before facing reality. God help us.
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The nation, as a "debtoholic" probably has to hit rock bottom before facing reality.
I hear ya on that. And as twisted as it might seem, I think the easy credit lifestyle so many have become accustomed to needed a serious slap in the face. Unfortunately, the reprecussions will be felt by many for a looooooooooong time.
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Closely related to debt is the matter of interest rates. The Fed/Govt has been pushing interest rates to artificially low levels for quite some time now-- to the point where interest rates are actually negative!!! :-o
Who on earth wants to save when in constant dollars after inflation and taxes you lose money?
Who doesn't want to borrow at no money down with negative interest rates?
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You know Crafty,
I think the Republicans could get popular again if they get new blood and if they get take "Reaganism" to the next level.
We need a national effort for the party to get new people who are committed not just in talk but in deed to stop the corruption in Washington. Unfortunately we hear this every cycle - yet we need to find a way to break this.
We need to get rid of the the financial interest in lobbyists - they can be heard but not able to buy representatives. One way this would work is to legislate that bills only tackle one issue at a time. We can't pass bills that have hundreds of pages with benefits to local districts of the influenced.
We need to legislate the Federal dollars only really gets spent on Federal issues. Why and where did become the norm for Federal government to be spending Federal tax dollars that goes out to state or local programs. That is the root of the corrupt process in my opinion. This is a real opportunity for Republicans to clean house. Yet to do so they need to clean there own house.
Limbaugh IS wrong. Reaganism is NOT enough. I just got a Hillsdale College report with Rush's dissertation on how "moderate" repblicans are not conservatives and we are wrong. I beg to differ.
Colin Powell is right. If we don't change our message we are destined to continue losing market share. Yes we can hope for a catastrophy that will spell doom for BO but is that what we want?
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Here is the key question: Change the message to , , , what?
Something like this?
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NYT
WASHINGTON — President Obama must wish governors could vote in Congress: While just three of the 219 Republican lawmakers backed the $787 billion economic recovery plan that he is signing into law on Tuesday, that trifling total would have been several times greater if support among the 22 Republican state executives counted.
The contrast reflects the two faces of the Republican Party these days.
Leaderless after losing the White House, the party is mostly defined by its Congressional wing, which flaunted its anti-spending ideology in opposing the stimulus package. That militancy drew the mockery of late-night television comics, but the praise of conservative talk-show stars and the party faithful.
In the states, meanwhile, many Republican governors are practicing a pragmatic — their Congressional counterparts would say less-principled — conservatism.
Governors, unlike members of Congress, have to balance their budgets each year. And that requires compromise with state legislators, including Democrats, as well as more openness to the occasional state tax increase and to deficit-spending from Washington.
Across the country, from California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger to Florida’s Charlie Crist and New England’s Jim Douglas in Vermont and M. Jodi Rell in Connecticut, Republican governors showed in the stimulus debate that they could be allies with Mr. Obama even as Congressional Republicans spurned him.
“It really is a matter of perspective,” Mr. Crist said in an interview. “As a governor, the pragmatism that you have to exercise because of the constitutional obligation to balance your budget is a very compelling pull” generally.
With Florida facing a projected $5 billion shortfall in a $66 billion budget, and social costs rising, the stimulus package “helps plug that hole,” Mr. Crist said, “but it also helps us meet the needs of the people in a very difficult economic time.”
Mr. Obama’s two-year stimulus package includes more than $135 billion for states, to help them pay for education, Medicaid and infrastructure projects. Yet even that sum would cover less than half of the total budget deficits the states will face through 2010, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research and advocacy organization.
The states’ reliance on the federal government in times of distress will be showcased this weekend, when the governors come to Washington for their annual winter meeting. Their focus will be on infrastructure needs and home foreclosures.
The disconnect between Republican members of Congress and governors recalls the mid-1990s, when Republicans took control of both the House and Senate for the first time in 40 years. After an initial public show of being partners in a “Republican revolution,” the partnership all but dissolved when governors strongly objected as the more dogmatic conservatives in Congress tried to cut domestic programs and then shut down the federal government in an unsuccessful showdown with President Bill Clinton.
Recently, Governors Schwarzenegger, Crist, Douglas and Rell joined 14 Democratic governors in signing a letter to Mr. Obama lauding his economic plan. Other Republicans would have signed on, said a person familiar with the letter’s drafting, but for party pressure in their states.
The National Governors Association sent a bipartisan letter of support to Congressional leaders of both parties, signed by its Democratic chairman, Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, and Mr. Douglas, its Republican vice chairman. “The combination of funds for Medicaid, education and other essential services is critical for governors as they work to manage the downturn in their states and improve government for the long term,” it said.
Mr. Crist even campaigned last week with Mr. Obama in Florida for the recovery package.
“Whether it’s teachers or people on road crews helping our infrastructure, those in the health care arena as it might relate to Medicaid, all of these areas are important, all of them can produce jobs,” Mr. Crist said, adding, “Regardless of what your party is, Republican or Democrat, it really doesn’t matter. We have a duty and an obligation to the people who elected us, no matter what our position happens to be, to work together to get through this thing.”
Yet all 16 of Florida’s Republicans in Congress voted against the package. Representative Cliff Stearns condemned it during the final debate as an “unprecedented big-government grab for citizen reliance on the federal government.” Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida, called the bill “a steaming pile of garbage” on his cable television talk show.
The House Republican leader, John A. Boehner of Ohio, angrily dumped the 1,073-page bill to the floor during debate. In the Senate, John McCain of Arizona called it “nothing less than generational theft.” And Republicans in both chambers derided what they described, often misleadingly, as pork spending for the likes of marsh mouse preservation.
Many projects, however, reflected the job-creation wish lists that governors had sent in.
Utah’s Republican governor, Jon Huntsman Jr. sought up to $14.4 billion for roads, rail and sewer projects and for construction of a prison, courthouses and veterans’ nursing homes. Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama, another Republican, came to Washington to discuss transportation projects with his state’s Congressional delegation. “He’s going to make sure Alabama doesn’t miss out on the money we’re entitled to,” a spokesman said.
Mr. Obama began courting the governors before taking office. He invited them to Independence Hall in Philadelphia in December to discuss the economic challenges. Nearly all accepted.
In his opening remarks, Mr. Obama had “a special word” for the Republicans: “I offer you the same hand of friendship and cooperation that I offer our Democratic governors.” He deferred to Mr. Douglas, the Vermont Republican, to steer the discussion.
Privately, Republicans favorably contrasted Mr. Obama with the outgoing Republican president, George W. Bush, according to two participants.
Though Mr. Bush had been a governor — in good economic times — his relations with state executives were distant at best. Amid a downturn early in the decade, he unsuccessfully opposed $20 billion for the states. Last fall, he resisted some Republicans’ pleas for aid.
Mr. Douglas in January sought a meeting with the new administration at the White House office that is a liaison to governors. Instead, he got an Oval Office meeting with Mr. Obama.
When reporters briefly came in — the two men flanked the fireplace just as presidents and foreign heads of state typically do — Mr. Douglas praised Mr. Obama for his leadership. The stimulus bill “might be a little different” if he had written it, the Republican said. “But the essence of a recovery package is essential to get our nation’s economy moving.”
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Actually no. This is the opposite of what I was suggesting. Sure Repblican governors have to suck up to BO because if they don't the electorate will vote them out and vote in crats who are more than happy to buy their votes with taxpayers (the fewer and fewer of us) dollars. How can this be stemmed if not stopped? There seems no end.
"The states’ reliance on the federal government in times of distress will be showcased this weekend"
This may be the problem. Why do States suck up and go begging for Federal dollars every five minutes?
It is always for entitlements. For education? you mean property tax does not cover this?
How come every time money goes into education we hear that money is not the answer.
Maybe it is for teacher unions?
Infrastructure is a code word for union jobs - no?
Medicaid?
When did it become the role of the Federal government to bail out states for every darn thing?
Is this good? Is this necessary? Will not local and state pols endlessly ask for Federal dollars to buy votes for themselves?
Isn't this part of the problem?
It seems reasonalbe to have some Federal disaster relief but everything now is a disaster. It seems like evwery week we are hearing another Disaster. Every flood, every fire, every earthquake, tornado hurricans storm you name is now a "disaster" it seems to me.
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"Colin Powell is right. If we don't change our message we are destined to continue losing market share."
- I am curious what you think would be a good summary of Colin Powell's positions on the issues of the day. I don't know what they are and I don't think Republicans will ever win by running with Clinton or Obama style ambiguity. I also think he can get away with flip-flopping (supporting Bush, then supporting Obama) only because he is a war hero and a NON-candidate.
"Limbaugh IS wrong."
- Wrong on style to run for office, but like Colin Powell, Rush will not be the candidate. He is intentionally too rough on people who hold different views (as if Obama is tolerant of other views, lol). So aside from style or temperament, what positions do you think Rush holds on the issues of the day that are too conservative?
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Hi Doug, I am tired at the end of along day but I hope this sort of helps explain the mindset. Sometimes I lament and think out loud but I am trying to figure out how to better the republican party.
Powell's talk with Zakaria:
***“I think the party has to take a hard look at itself,” Powell said in the interview… “There is nothing wrong with being conservative. There is nothing wrong with having socially conservative views — I don’t object to that. But if the party wants to have a future in this country, it has to face some realities. In another 20 years, the majority in this country will be the minority.”
Powell, who crossed party lines and endorsed President-elect Barack Obama just weeks before the election, said the GOP must see what is in the “hearts and minds” of African-American, Hispanic and Asian voters “and not just try to influence them by… the principles and dogma.”***
I agree with him that "dogma and principles" is just too abstract to appeal to most people. How can this message be expanded so all groups that Powell talks about can relate to it? I don't know. Maybe Michael Steele will help us sort it out. How can we change the 70% Latin and 90% Black vote to republican?
What is wrong with that question? It seems to me that is what Powell is saying.
And to me that is where Limbaugh fails. He just cannot appeal to all except a small minority of these groups.
On the other hand W tried to reach out to minorities and it appears to have mostly failed.
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CCP, Thanks as always for the thoughtful reply. I appreciate Colin Powell for all the things he did for this country - past tense. For my money, he is worthless now to the party. 'We' nominated the least conservative, most centrist candidate for the purposes of winning in a Republican-unfriendly environment - and he ran against the Senate's most liberal and least experienced member. Gen. Powell couldn't contain himself with the excitement of voting for a half-black man and the media attention of finally distancing himself with the administration he once served proudly.
For sake of argument, let's just stipulate that Rush is another negative that R's have to deal with while 'reaching out' to minorities, young people or other potential new supporters.
Obama gave away to me in his pork, massive government-enlargement bill signing ceremony the key to the message for Republicans moving forward:
"We have begun the essential work of keeping the American dream alive in our time."
The party and the candidate of the opposition better learn to articulate a different view of the American dream. $5 billion to ACORN, picking and choosing which homeowners to help, federal takeovers of banking, housing, healthcare, transportation, education... Is socialism unevenly applied by lobyists and staffers who write bills that representatives can't read the American dream. I thought that term was coined to describe something like the viewpoints you read here: rugged individualism, self-discipline, work hard, retain a right to self-defense, look back regularly at statements about individual liberties in the actual words of the founding fathers, the right to personal freedoms and self-determination and maybe even the right to choose which charities you support with your excess income instead of having it rammed down your throat by Washington.
We need someone to paint that picture. Reagan was 1980s and our next leader runs in 2012 so he is no longer relevant, and we can pick at his errors or inconsistencies, but what he did overall was project the bigger picture of the American dream for all, over the hodgepiodge of federal programs for the unlucky who qualify.
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The party and the candidate of the opposition better learn to articulate a different view of the American dream.
This is the obvious key. Re-tooling the message is the biggest part of the equation IMHO.
1) Rush, Hannity, Coulter - The "mouthpieces" of the party. Whether or not they actually speak for all conservatives is irrelevant. They are perceived as "semi-official" spokespeople. Conservative politicians go on their shows and to some that people that equals tacit approval of their views. Big minus if you're looking to for a "big tent" party. The voice that is heard is the one that counts. Conservatives need a voice(s) that can reach the masses on both sides both in office and on the air.
2) Getting the message across - "Mouthpieces" aside, the tone of the discourse is key. Obama's campaign was a masterpiece of massaged message. "WE", "TOGETHER", "DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS ALIKE", "GAY AND STRAIGHT", "YOU AND I", etc. Sounds silly, but it WORKS. Conservatives need to make liberals FEEL welcome. They need to make people WANT to become Republican. Tell them WHY. A huge part of the Obama machines power came from manipulation of image. Stay positive, stay cool, let them attack us, we'll take the higher ground, etc. The fingerpointing by the McCain campaign (again, massaged by the MSM) came across as angry, paranoid, and out of touch, all of which was used by Obama to his benefit. Republicans need to get across their message using modern means (see #4) and a modern face (see #3).
3) The FUTURE not the PAST - Whether us old folks like it or not, our world/way of thinking/views are slowly but surely becoming unimportant. The world is moving on. One of the biggest perceived failures of the Republican party was/is their inability to see that and their desire to cling to the past. Reagan is gone. Period. He is irrelevant to the majority of the voting population. Period. Take the IDEAS, let go of the MAN. In four years, what will most voters remember: 8 years of Bush (which to many equal war and the creation of a recession) and 4 years of...who knows. Republicans can't use Bush. Resurrecting presidents is only useful if they have been overwhelming successes while in office. So even if Obama tanks, Republicans need to come up with a new face to carry the brand forward.
4) Being "in touch" - Internet, facebook, myspace, twitter, bebo, blackplanet, flickr, friendster, linkedin, plaxo, xanga. Have you heard of them? Has your friendly politician heard of them? No? Then they've already lost the race. We are in a world where people are more and more reliant on social networking and the internet. You want votes? Get to those people on the Web. Obama sent texts, uses a BlackBerry, does webcasts, has a website. McCain didn't even use email. Seems silly to those of us in older generations, but the reality is the functionality, usefullness, and yes percieves "coolness" attached to these sites is hugely influential nowadays.
5) The Look - Bodysurfing, BlackBerry using, Facebooking basketball player. That is our president. Again as galling as the image may be to some, to others it signifies being in touch with today's world and IMAGE IS EVERYTHING REGARDLESS OF REALITY. Once the reality hits, it's too late, the dude is in office. Palin's appearance on the scene is HUGE for Republican's. Why? Not because she espouses certain views (which is a large part of it), but because she LOOKS COOL. Soccer moms want someone who looks like them AND has some great ideas. So much of our world is based on image now it isn't even funny. Image first. Vacuous? Yes. But it works.
Now, am I suggesting that Republicans put out a skateboarding, myspace user who plays in a rock band? No. But they do need to break out of the tired old ways of approaching politics and put on new twist on things. They have to CHANGE the way they do business. All politicians need to. Does that mean rebuilding the foundation? No. But it does mean big time remodel.
I actually believe that we are going to witness some massive battles within each party in the next 4-8 years as the old guard starts to fade. It should be interesting.
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Last night on Fox they had their panel discuss what they thought of the mortgage bailout to homeowners that BO claims will keep 7 to 9 million in their homes. Krauthammer stated "I am a Republican" and I am for it only because while it is unfair to most people who have not taken out unreasonable mortgages it tries to get to the root cause of the problem starting at the bottom. Another panelist stated that it helps those whose do not have a mortgage problem by maintaining the value of their home by hopefully preventing further home value drops. Juan Williams who I think tends to feel the exact way I feel the Rep party's problem is that while he doesn't necessariy agree with the plan or that Reps are wrong "they really offer no other solutions".
Saying basically, we all have to crash and burn before we can rise from ashes (which is the repubs message) is a pretty tough act to sell. Sorry but I don't think that the answer of tax cuts is stimulating too many people by itself. And what about the what, 40% who pay no taxes. They don't give a hoot about that. And this group is being widely expanded as we speak.
I thought this is the delemma in a nutshell.
Why do Reps even have to sell the American dream to minorities? Aren't we ALL Americans? Why does the pitch have to be different for specific groups?
Obviously the root cause is minorities and immigrants views of America is or should be about are different from conservatives.
So Republicans are faced with how to bridge this gap. Is it even possible?
How can we sell the American dream as it was meant to be to all Americans?
The answer is we may not be able to. We keep hearing about social injustice....
This will require more thought and more time than I have at the moment.
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Why do Reps even have to sell the American dream to minorities? Aren't we ALL Americans?
Ahhh, here comes the heart of the matter! Minorities have been force fed/taught/experienced the opposite. Opposition to racism, sexism, economic disparity, are the bastions upon which the Democratic party has built its foundation (For sake of this response I won't get into the reality of their positions... :wink:) In that regard, they have "branded" themselves as the helping hand.
The idea the we are "all Americans" is solid. It looks good on paper. But when you look at the spokespeople/rallies/conventions of the Republican party for the past 30 years, what do you see: old white men. So, when you take say an African American and tell them, "Our party believes in X ideals", but the IMAGE that they see does not jibe with the rhetoric, the trouble starts. I think in many regards Republicans have been late in coming to the table in terms of "demonstrating" their inclusivity. Should they have to? I personally don't believe so. But the viewing public needs a face that matches what they hear.
Michael Steele is a step in the right direction for a number of different reason. Unfortunately, the response I've heard to his choice tends to be more along the lines of "Do the Republicans really think that by putting an African American in the spotlight, people will rush to their side?" It's going to take some very serious strategy and brainstorming by the Republicans to turn stuff around.
More later...I actually need to do some work today :-D
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I think in similar ways on this point SB Mig. Recently I wrote a little something. If I find it I will bring over over.
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As much as Obama is going to ruin things, the question will be how much we can do to recover from the damage inflicted.
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From CNN.com today:
The Republican Party needs to change — at least when it comes to its use of technology, Meghan McCain says....
McCain, who authored a popular blog on her father's Web site while he was running for president, also recounts early pushback from Republican strategists when she first sought to establish the Web site.
"Many of the established Republican strategists told me that young people would not visit my web site," she wrote. "I used to categorize many of the advisors in my father's campaign into one of two groups: those that 'respected' the Internet and those who didn't. It was a running line between me and my friends who worked on my site."
McCain also suggested the party's lack of online savvy greatly contributed to her father's defeat last November.
"The Obama administration understands that my generation spends most of its day on a laptop or a BlackBerry, and that using the Web is easy way to communicate their ideas to their constituents," she said. "Until the Republican Party joins the twenty-first century and learns how to use the Internet, its members will keep getting older and the youth of America will just keep logging on to the other side."
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The Rep Party office in Manhattan Beach (the office nearest to me) is like a deranged SNL parody of stereotypes of the Reps being white haired old farts.
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Yeah, between the patrician fossils and the vapid bible thumpers it's pretty hard for me to get much invested in the Rebups.
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Got a better option?
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Libertarians, baby. (Countdown starts for GM's brains to extrude out his ears. . . . :evil:)
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LOL.
I'd post some pics of libertarians, but I can't stomach going to "9/11 troof" websites right now. :-D
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http://michellemalkin.com/2009/02/21/tea-party-usa-the-movement-grows/
Malkin on the incipient tax revolt movement , , ,
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"Democratic leaders say their legislation will grow the economy. What it will do is grow the government, increase our taxes down the line and saddle future generations with debt. Who among us would ask our children for a loan, so we could spend money we do not have, on things we do not need? That is precisely what the Democrats in Congress just did. It's irresponsible. And it's no way to strengthen our economy, create jobs or build a prosperous future for our children." --Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal in his rebuttal to Obama's address Tuesday night
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By PAUL RYAN
Inheriting countless challenges, Congress and the Obama administration have moved quickly on many fronts to implement their economic agenda. After two months of drastic interventions, has hope replaced fear, and confidence pushed aside uncertainty? Hardly.
David GothardThe budget the president released last week, however, does provide some certainty about where we are headed: higher taxes on small businesses, work and capital investment.
Add to this the costly burdens of a cap-and-trade carbon emissions scheme and an effective nationalization of health care, and it is clear that the government is going to grow while the economy will shrink. In a nutshell, the president's budget seemingly seeks to replace the American political idea of equalizing opportunity with the European notion of equalizing results.
A constructive opposition party should be willing to call out the majority when it falls short. More important, Republicans must offer alternatives. In this spirit, here is what I would do differently:
- A pro-growth tax policy. Rather than raise the top marginal income tax rate to 39.6%, it should be dropped to 25%. The lower tax brackets should be collapsed to one 10% rate on the first $100,000 for couples. And the top corporate tax rate should be lowered to 25%. This modest reform would put American companies' tax liability more in line with the prevailing rates of our competitors.
We've seen 10 years of growth in our equity markets wiped out in recent months, while 401(k)s, IRAs and college savings plans are down by an average of 40%. The administration and congressional Democrats want to raise capital gains tax rates by a third. Instead, we should eliminate the capital gains tax. It supplies about 4% of federal revenues, yet it places a substantial drag on economic growth. Individuals already pay taxes on income when they earn it. They should not be socked again when they are saving and investing for their retirement and their children's education.
Capital gains taxes are a needless burden on investment, savings and risk-taking, activities in short supply these days. Getting rid of this tax could help establish a floor on stock prices and stem the decline in the value of retirement plans by increasing the after-tax rate of return on capital.
Democrats oppose this, playing on emotions of fear and envy. But while class warfare may make good short-term politics, it produces terrible economics.
- Guarantee sound money. For the last decade, the Federal Reserve's easy-money policy has helped fuel the housing bubble that precipitated our current crisis. We need to return to a sound money policy. That would end uncertainty, help keep interest rates down, and increase the confidence entrepreneurs and investors need to take the risks required for future growth.
I believe the best way to guarantee sound money is to use an explicit, market-based price guide, such as a basket of commodities, in setting monetary policy. A more politically realistic path to price stability would be for the Fed to explicitly embrace inflation targeting.
Transcripts from recent meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee meetings suggest that the Fed may already be moving in this direction. This would be an improvement over the status quo: It could help combat near-term deflation concerns while also calming the market's longer-term inflation fears.
- Fix the financial sector. A durable economic recovery requires a solution to the banking crisis. There are no easy or painless solutions, but the most damaging solution over the long term would be to nationalize our financial system. Once we put politicians in charge of allocating credit and resources in our economy, it is hard to imagine them letting go.
The underlying structural problem at our financial institutions is the toxic assets infecting their balance sheets and impairing their operations. In order to help purge these assets from the system, we need a government-sponsored, comprehensive solution, but one that is transparent and temporary, and which leverages -- rather than chases away -- private-sector capital.
The general idea is to establish an entity or fund to purchase troubled assets from financial institutions and then hold them until they could be sold once the market has recovered. The Treasury has announced its intention to use capital from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, along with financing from the Fed's soon-to-be operational Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, to set up such an entity. It will be a tall task to get all the details and incentives right, but the administration's general strategy appears to be sound.
A good model for this government-sponsored entity is the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC), which helped clean up bank failures in the wake of the savings-and-loan crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s by absorbing and selling off bad bank assets. The circumstances of today's financial sector are different, but the goals of our current efforts should mirror the general merits of an RTC-like entity. We should aim to recoup a portion of our initial expenditures, and we should leave only a fleeting government footprint on the financial sector and the economy.
- Get a grip on entitlements. With $56 trillion in unfunded liabilities and our social insurance programs set to implode, we must tackle the entitlement crisis. President Barack Obama deserves credit for his recent efforts to build a bipartisan consensus on entitlement reform. But we can't solve the entitlement problem unless we acknowledge why the costs are exploding, and then take action.
I have proposed legislation, called "A Roadmap for America's Future," that would bring permanent solvency to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. By transforming these open-ended entitlements into a system with a defined benefit safety net for the low-income and chronically ill, in conjunction with an individually owned, defined contribution system for health and retirement, we can reach the goal of these programs without bankrupting the next generation. It would also show the world and the credit markets that we are serious about our debt and unfunded liabilities.
Republicans can help Washington become part of the solution, not part of the problem. We can do this by pushing to enact tax policies that boost incentives for economic growth and job creation, focus the Fed on price stability, fix our banking system to get credit flowing again, stop reckless spending, and reform our entitlement programs.
Our economy is begging for clear leadership that inspires confidence and hope that the entrepreneurial spirit will flourish again. Our goal must be to offer Americans that leadership.
Mr. Ryan, from Wisconsin, is ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee and also serves on Ways and Means.
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Eyeing Newt For '12
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, February 27, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Politics: As the Republican Party hunts for new faces for 2012, an old face has intruded from out of right field. Clearly, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is running for president.
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Read More: General Politics
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Can the man who a decade and a half ago led Republicans to control of Congress for the first time in over 40 years perform another unlikely feat and replace Barack Obama in the White House?
Gingrich gave the speech of his life Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. His pre-planned grand entrance, working an overflow hotel ballroom crowd as he inched to the podium in State of the Union fashion to the rhythmic strains of "Eye of the Tiger," left no doubt of his intention to run for the highest office in the land.
Considering that Gingrich was thrown out of the speakership by his own House Republicans after serving only four years, the roaring CPAC crowd might justly be accused of amnesia. But the real electricity came from Gingrich's extraordinary rhetoric.
Again and again, he referred to the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress as the "left-wing machine." Repeatedly he referred to Attorney General Eric Holder's accusation that America is a nation of cowards — challenging him to a one-on-one "dialogue about cowardice anywhere and anytime."
Gingrich suggested that the best locale for such a talk might be a poor neighborhood in Detroit, a city whose once-prosperous population of 1.8 million was halved by liberal policies that "trap children in schools that are disasters."
The former speaker taunted President Obama for opposing earmarks yet supporting spending legislation containing 8,000 such items, contending that the nation would rally behind this president "if he were to take on the Democratic machine" against wasteful spending.
He mocked the president's vow that taxes wouldn't be raised on those making under $250,000, saying the $650 billion pegged for energy tax revenues in Obama's budget would only hit those below $250k who use electricity, gasoline, heating oil or natural gas.
Those taxed the least under the new plan are apparently only "the Amish in central Pennsylvania," he quipped.
The most inventive content in Gingrich's electrifying address, however, was the political prescriptions for the coming Obama years. "We are bigger than the Republican Party," he said of the political movement that has found the GOP to be its most effective vehicle.
He accused the Bush administration of launching a "Bush-Obama continuity in economic policy" with its financial bailout last fall, noting Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's role in that government intervention.
The political division in America, rather than Democratic-Republican, he said, is "a party of the American people" and "a party of big government and political elites." And unfortunately, according to Gingrich, Republicans became "the right wing of that party" of massive government and elitism.
In this context, remembering that Ronald Reagan as a former Democrat "reached out to Democrats and independents" in all of his major speeches, this Republican revolutionary actually called on conservative activists to recruit candidates to run in Democratic Party primaries against incumbent Democratic members of Congress.
He also touted the audacious economic proposals of his AmericanSolutions.com think tank, which include cutting Social Security taxes in half, a zero capital gains tax and matching Ireland's low 12.5% corporate tax rate.
How you sell the scrapping of capital gains taxes, Gingrich said, is by asking Americans how they would like an overnight increase of between 20% and 40% in the value of their 401(k)s and other savings.
As speaker, the talented-but-flawed Newt Gingrich was taken to the cleaners by President Clinton. Veteran Washington reporter Robert Novak found Gingrich guilty of "a mindless tactical incompetence that invites defeat."
But if Washington really is dominated by a "left-wing machine" intent on imposing socialism on America, Republicans may end up turning not to an outsider to fight the Goliath, but to a warrior who knows Washington well.
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Interesting piece on Newt. Of course the person who can electrify the room at CPAC is not likely same one who can connect with the other demographics that need to stop seeing a massive government in control of everything as the American dream. Far more urgent than the Presidential election of 2012 is the congressional election cycle of 2010. For certain, the Republicans / conservatives need to nationalize these contests the way Newt did in 1994. Even then, very few Democratic Senate seats are vulnerable (maybe Harry Reid in Nevada?) while several Republican ones are.
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Of course everone has heard of the Steele Limbaugh thing and of course all the Democrat bent talk shows are having a field day with this.
I agree with those who say listen to Limbaugh and the Rebs are doomed to minority status. Rush is not going to win anyone new over with this stuff. But if the economy continues to tank and BO gets the blame than there is a chance for a Republican come back. The only one of prominence who I see gets it is Newt who was on the other day saying that we need new ideas, we need to take conservatism, Reagonism to the next level. We can't just throw out the same old song and dance. Newt is the only one of prominence who I agree with. I think Steele is on the right track but I don't think he is quite level of spokeperson needed. Only Newt can IMO that I can see. Romeny might be able to but I am not sure if he can attract new faces.
****RUSH: I was not going to talk about Michael Steele. I have had e-mails from the Drive-By Media. I have had interview requests to be on television shows to talk about Michael Steele and what he said about my speech Saturday night. He was on CNN and I was going to ignore it, but so many of you are e-mailing me asking me to respond to this that I have changed my mind and I'm going to do so. Here is what has prompted all of the irritation at Michael Steele. He was on the D. L. Hughley show on CNN Saturday night, and the other voice you'll hear is the other guest, the rapper Chuck D. They had this exchange about me.
HUGHLEY: Rush Limbaugh, who is the de facto leader of the Republican Party --
STEELE: No, he's not.
HUGHLEY: Well, I'll tell you what, I've never --
STEELE: I'm the de facto leader of the Republican Party.
HUGHLEY: Then you know what? Then I can appreciate that, but no -- no one will -- will actually pry down some of the things he says, like when he comes out and says that he wants the president to fail, I understand he wants liberalism to fail.
STEELE: How is that any different than what was said about George Bush during his presidency? Let's put it into context here. Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh, the whole thing is entertainment. Yes, it's incendiary, yes, it's ugly --
RUSH: Okay, so I am an entertainer, and I have 20 million listeners, 22 million listeners because of my great song-and-dance routines here. Yes, said Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, I'm incendiary, and yes, it's ugly. Michael Steele, you are head of the RNC. You are not head of the Republican Party. Tens of millions of conservatives and Republicans have nothing to do with the RNC and right now they want nothing to do with it, and when you call them asking them for money, they hang up on you. I hope that changes. I hope the RNC will get its act together. I hope the RNC chairman will realize he's not a talking head pundit, that he is supposed to be working on the grassroots and rebuilding it, and maybe doing something about our open primary system and fixing it so that Democrats do not nominate our candidates. It's time, Mr. Steele, for you to go behind the scenes and start doing the work that you were elected to do instead of trying to be some talking head media star, which you're having a tough time pulling off. I hope you figure out how to run a primary system. But it seems to me that it's Michael Steele who is off to a shaky start.
My parents taught me when I was growing up that you always stood behind people who defended you, you never abandoned people who stood up for you and who defended you against assault. Michael Steele was a candidate for the Senate in Maryland. Michael Steele was on this program, he got airtime on this program to attempt to refute the lies being told about him by Michael J. Fox in those famous ads way back when that were also run against Jim Talent in Missouri. I personally took time to defend Michael Steele and to rip the substance of those ads, had him on the show. I went after Chuck Schumer when Chuck Schumer's former employee stole Michael Steele's private credit record information and released it. When I went to Washington a couple years ago for a personal appearance from my station there, WMAL, WMAL arranged for a number of dignitaries to meet me backstage. One of them was Michael Steele, who thanked me very much for coming to his defense. Something's happened. Now I'm just an entertainer and now I am ugly and my program is incendiary.
Michael Steele has been around long enough to know that the liberal media will use him by twisting what I say or what others say. He took the bait, he bit down hard on the bait, he launched an attack on me even though the premise of what was said to him was false. He took the bait and he went for it. Now, Mr. Steele, if it is your position as the chairman of the Republican National Committee that you want a left wing Democrat president and a left wing Democrat Congress to succeed in advancing their agenda, if it's your position that you want President Obama and Speaker Pelosi and Senate Leader Harry Reid to succeed with their massive spending and taxing and nationalization plans, I think you have some explaining to do. Why are you running the Republican Party? Why do you claim you lead the Republican Party when you seem obsessed with seeing to it that President Obama succeeds? I frankly am stunned that the chairman of the Republican National Committee endorses such an agenda. I have to conclude that he does because he attacks me for wanting it to fail.
This isn't complicated stuff here, folks. It's difficult to organize the defeat of Obama and the Democrat Congress in 2012, if we want to. It's going to be difficult enough, but on one hand it shouldn't be difficult at all. But it's going to be really hard, Mr. Steele, if you, as the chairman of the RNC, want Obama to succeed. Where does the Republican Party go if you, who are supposed to be redesigning our primary system and helping reestablish our grassroots movement, how are we going to retake elective office if you want this agenda of Obama's and Pelosi's and Reid's to succeed. My colleagues in talk radio can attest to this next point. We get press release after press release after press release from the Republican National Committee attacking the Democrat agenda. They send us points of refutation. I never use them 'cause I don't need them. But they send out all these points of refutation about how this part of what Dingy Harry wants or Pelosi wants is wrong, is wrong, is wrong. Why are you sending out these things, Mr. Steele? Why is your office sending out all these talking points to defeat the Democrat agenda in Congress if your position is you want it to succeed? And I don't understand why you're asking Republicans to donate to the Republican National Committee if their money is going to be spent furthering the agenda of Barack Obama.
If we don't want Obama and Reid and Pelosi to fail, then why does the RNC exist, Mr. Steele? Why are you even raising money? What do you want from us? If I want Obama and Democrats to succeed, I suppose we should be sending the RNC donations? You know, these people, it's a bizarre discussion to have because there's a news story on this, on this feud now between me and Michael Steele. And listen to this. This is a quote from RNC spokesman, Alex Conant, I'm not sure how he pronounces his last name. "The feud between radio host Rush and Rahm makes great political theater, but it is a sideshow to the important work going on in Washington. RNC Chairman Michael Steele and elected Republicans are focused on fighting for reform and winning elections. The Democrats' problem is that the American people are growing skeptical of the massive government spending being pushed by congressional leaders like [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi."
Mr. Steele, your spokesman sounds like the RNC wants 'em to fail, to me. You're opposing 'em. You say the American people are growing weary of it, getting suspicious of it. But it's not just Pelosi's spending. It's Obama's. Where are your guts? Why can't you tie Obama to these policies? They're his! Where are your guts? (interruption) Snerdley, they don't want me doing the dirty work because when I go out there and, quote, unquote, do the dirty work, they try to cut me off at the knees for doing so. The point is, when you read that statement from Alex Conant, they're opposed to the Obama agenda, too, they're just too gutless to say so, and they get frightened when they hear the words, "I want Obama to fail." "Oh, no, no, no, we can't be associated with that." Yet you're sending out all these talking points designed to help people explain to other people why the Obama agenda is wrong. So I think it's bizarre. They put out statements and press releases damning Obama and Pelosi policies and they object when somebody like me says he doesn't want them to succeed.
Now, if it's the purpose of the Republican National Committee to urge the success of the Obama and congressional agenda, then stop sending these press releases here. I don't want 'em anymore. Stop sending all these quotes and facts and figures to prove how the Obama and Pelosi agenda is full of lies. I don't want to see it anymore, because you don't believe it. Why are you even sending these things out, Mr. Steele? It's amazing how many Republican politicians contact this show wanting on it. It's amazing how many Republicans want to come on this show. It's amazing how many send this show an endless number of press releases, their PR flacks are constantly sending me press releases and points, Congressman X saying this, special interest group X saying that, hoping I will mention it, hoping I will promote their cause. Why do they work so hard to be on this show? Why are they so eager to get me to take up their cause? I'm just an entertainer, ugly, incendiary, they say. We don't discuss current issues or policies or history or economics. So on the one hand, they had their PR flaks inundating me every day with this group or this congressman's doing that. I'm supposed to take it and make this or that congressman look good or this or that RNC chairman look good. And then they do what they do.
They chicken out when I happen to articulate exactly what their agenda really is. They don't have the guts to admit it, and I do. I'm going further and telling you today it's not that I want Obama to fail; that's not it anymore. The president is presiding over economic failure. The president is watching it, doing nothing about it. He's watching unemployment grow; he's watching the stock market plummet; he is watching people sign up for unemployment. The president of the United States is doing nothing to stop the downward spiral of this economy. He has no economic recovery plan. The truth is, the president of the United States and Rahm Emanuel, who, remember, said, "Crisis is too great a thing to waste." What does that mean? They want you suffering, they want you miserable, they want it worse, they want you rejecting conservatism. They want you rejecting capitalism. They want you turning to them in fear and desperation and angst for an immediate fix to the problem. They want you thinking you have no ability to fix your own problems. They think you have and they want you to have no ability to take care of yourself. So as the stock market now approaches minus 2,800 since Obama was elected, the statement today is to speed up the economic recovery, we're going to focus on health care. Ask yourself how that is going to get you your next job.
One other thing. Mr. Steele, if you want to lead the Republican Party, as you say you do, then you need to run for and win the presidency. You are chairman of the Republican National Committee. That is your job. To run the Republican establishment bureaucracy and prove you can defeat Democrats and elect Republicans, to come up with a new primary system that eliminates Democrats participating in ours and choosing our candidates and getting the grassroots revved up again. This is how you're going to be measured, not by how entertaining or cute you are on talk shows. By the same token, I'm not in charge of the Republican Party, and I don't want to be. I would be embarrassed to say that I'm in charge of the Republican Party in the sad-sack state that it's in. If I were chairman of the Republican Party, given the state that it's in, I would quit. I might get out the hari-kari knife because I would have presided over a failure that is embarrassing to the Republicans and conservatives who have supported it and invested in it all these years. I certainly couldn't say I am proud of the Republican Party, as I am leading the Republican Party. Right now the Republican Party needs to be led, and it will be. The next Republican president is going to be the head of the party. Last time I checked, I don't think Mr. Steele is running.
And finally, Mr. Steele, we do like to entertain people here. The audience is very smart, sir. They know the difference between entertainment, and they know the difference between deadly serious issues that affect their country. Don't underestimate the intelligence of this audience or Republicans and conservatives generally. The biggest problem with all of you who live inside the Beltway is you look out over America and you think you see idiocy and unsophisticated people, ignorant people, and when you're looking at liberal Democrats, largely you're correct, but your own voters are every bit as informed, involved, engaged, and caring, if not more so than you are. We don't care, first and foremost, about the success of the Republican Party. We care about the United States of America and its future, because we cherish it and love it, and we know what it is that made it the greatest nation on earth, and we don't hear you articulating that you understand that, not just you, Mr. Steele, but hardly anybody else in Washington, DC. So send those fundraising requests out, and, by the way, when you send those fundraising requests out, Mr. Steele, make sure you say, "We want Obama to succeed." So people understand your compassion. Republicans, conservatives, are sick and tired of being talked down to, sick and tired of being lectured to, and until you show some understanding and respect for who they are, you're going to have a tough time rebuilding your party.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Hey, psst, folks, just a little secret between us. Don't tell anybody, all right? This is just between us. Don't tell the Drive-Bys. The Drive-Bys were tuning in for that because they've been asking me for quotes on this. So the way they're gonna interpret -- and really don't tell anybody, this is between us, because I don't want this getting out beyond the show -- the way they are going to interpret what I just did in response to Michael Steele is, "Oh, this is great, this is great! Emanuel's strategy is working great, the Republican Party and Limbaugh are splitting apart, there's a feud, there's infighting." They will miss the whole point, and even if there are any Drive-Bys listening while I tell them the real point, they will reject it because it doesn't fit their template. What happened starting Saturday -- actually, CPAC started on Thursday, but what culminated with my speech on Saturday at CPAC was the reawakening of a huge sleeping giant that is ready to rumble, and that is American conservatism, which is found in the Democrat Party, it's found among independents, and it's found in the Republican Party.
More Americans live their lives as conservatives than you would believe. They don't get their paychecks and walk down the street and say, "Hi, you want some of this?" They'll vote for people who will do it for them, but they're trying to raise their kids right and make money, save money. They've got morality and values, most of them, not all, but most, they may not vote that way, but they live that way. They're waiting to be awakened and that awakening has started. The pressure is on the Republican Party to be more Democrat Party-like, and too many Republicans in Washington want to make that happen. Well, just the opposite is going to happen. The sleeping conservative giant has been awakened here. It's a beautiful thing. ****
END TRANSCRIPT
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By CURT ANDERSON | 3/9/09 4:59 PM EDT
Over the past week, new RNC Chairman Michael Steele has walked through the fire, or more accurately, through a shooting gallery inside the Beltway. To be clear, some of this was self-inflicted. As the chairman has said, he made some missteps in a few media appearances. Live and learn.
Behind the noise however, there is a different scene unfolding, and one that should give hope to Republicans everywhere, or at least Republicans outside the beltway. For the first time ever, the new chairman is conducting a complete and thorough overhaul of all party operations. Anyone associated with the Republican campaigns of the past few cycles knows the real truth: Our party has been out-gunned, out-worked and "out-technologied.”
The chairman promised to clean house at the RNC if he won. He did, and he did. This has led to some serious griping inside the Beltway. Many were lying in wait, hoping he would stumble, so they could pounce. He did, and they did.
As part of Steele’s transition at the RNC, 10 members of the RNC have descended from around the country onto the headquarters at 310 First St. Their mission has been to conduct a thorough forensic audit of all the functions of each department — everything from finance to communications to research to politics. Every line item in the budget has been scrubbed; every position in the organizational chart has been reviewed.
This process was completed on time at the end of February. Now comes the hard part — taking the recommendations of this ten-member transition team and melding them into a new RNC that will do more with less and move the party to the place where we can compete and win in the 2010 elections.
Change is never easy, of course, and many feel threatened by it. Steele’s election as chairman of the Republican Party was a shock to the system for many of the Republican ruling class, the old guard in Washington. Over the past week, countless anonymous sources have brought out the long knives. Indeed, over the past week, the empire has struck back.
To be clear, some of the criticisms have been legitimate. This process has not been perfect. This new administration at the RNC has made mistakes, and all of us on Team Steele will make more, and we will own up to them.
That said, the vast majority of RNC members, both old and new, both those who supported Steele and those who did not, are on board with this overhaul of party operations. There is great unanimity on one thing: The 2006 and 2008 elections were not just bad, they were disastrous. Staying the course is not an option.
The best news is this — over the course of the past month, there is increasing evidence that the Republican Party as a whole is once again finding its voice. With 99 percent of elected Republicans in Washington standing on principle against the so-called stimulus package, the unprecedented expansion of government and wasteful spending, Republicans are coalescing.
We did not get into this mess in a just a few months, and we won’t get out of it in just a few weeks. But the seeds of the comeback are being sown. 2010 will be a different story.
Curt Anderson is a partner at OnMessage Inc, a Republican media and polling firm. He is a top adviser to Chairman Steele and has been Steele’s personal friend for 15 years.
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Chad, Thanks for posting. Steele will be fine IMO if he can now hit the ground running. If not for the mis-steps (all publicity is good publicity?) no one would have noticed or cared that a black man is now running the Republican Party. Repubs had a black man and black woman at the highest cabinet posts and a black man to the highest court in the land without black voters noticing or caring. If/when Michael Steele has accomplishments as RNC Chair, maybe then he will become a national voice and begin to influence a voter or two. There is plenty of room for Steele to make a huge difference, but this defense of Steele came from his own PR person. We will see. We will see what he can do with top down leadership for a deflated structure that needs to be re-built from the bottom up.
One public improvement that comes to mind is to stop having the equal-time opposition speaker talk to an empty room. These should be done with enthusiasm that spills from the live audience to the television, radio and internet audience - either with stadium sized support or in a staged, Letterman/Leno type setting. A citizens version of a joint session of congress is what they need IMO. The future political leaders need to speak to a crowd and the party had better go find and train the candidates that can do it. They also need clarity of message...
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Chad, Thanks for posting. Steele will be fine IMO if he can now hit the ground running. If not for the mis-steps (all publicity is good publicity?) no one would have noticed or cared that a black man is now running the Republican Party. Repubs had a black man and black woman at the highest cabinet posts and a black man to the highest court in the land without black voters noticing or caring. If/when Michael Steele has accomplishments as RNC Chair, maybe then he will become a national voice and begin to influence a voter or two. There is plenty of room for Steele to make a huge difference, but this defense of Steele came from his own PR person. We will see. We will see what he can do with top down leadership for a deflated structure that needs to be re-built from the bottom up.
One public improvement that comes to mind is to stop having the equal-time opposition speaker talk to an empty room. These should be done with enthusiasm that spills from the live audience to the television, radio and internet audience - either with stadium sized support or in a staged, Letterman/Leno type setting. A citizens version of a joint session of congress is what they need IMO. The future political leaders need to speak to a crowd and the party had better go find and train the candidates that can do it. They also need clarity of message...
I enjoy posting thought provoking articles here, and enjoy reading what others find and post here... :-)
I'm wondering if Steele (and Jindahl for that matter) are to be victims of the "Palin effect" it seems like any conservative that comes along who has been competant in any way, will be trashed by the media. The more competant, the dirtier the trashing. God forbid you ask the president an honest question ala JTP.
I just don't see anyone that will be able to hurdle the media double standard put on Repubs. Obama is handling the economy in the same exact way that Bush did, but somehow now it "change"? As long as the Dems own the media the right side of the aisle will continue to shrink. IF they ever take power again I hope and pray it is fashioned after Reagan's first term and then stop there. No more new tone.
/RANT
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Woof,
This should be interesting.
www.glenbeck.com
P.C.
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It was bad enough for Steele to offend the religious right's defacto spokeman Rush Limbaugh but he commited the greatest transgression after that. I believe the religious right will force him out. What a pity that more moderate views are simply not tolerated by the religious right. They rightly claim that Republicans will lose much of their base by not pleasing them. I can also tell something they won't:
The party loses millions of the women's vote because of this same view. Sure the party would be happy to take all Balcks, Latinos, Asians. But they must abide by all *our* beliefs. No compormise no prisoners, no discussion. And that folks is why we lost.
I don't know how being a Republican means I have to believe in every Christian value to be considered worthy. There are more Republicans who are not the religious right than vice a versa. Yet they claim to be the defacto party. I am not afraid to stand up to them.
"RNC chief Steele clarifies his abortion stance after 'choice' remark
By Ann Sanner | The Associated Press
7:06 PM EDT, March 12, 2009
WASHINGTON - A day after a magazine quoted him as saying abortion was "an individual choice," Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said today he opposes abortion and that Roe v. Wade should be overturned.
A leading conservative called Steele's remarks in the magazine "cavalier and flippant," underscoring the new chairman's precarious position with party regulars concerned about his off-the-cuff style and penchant for miscues.
Steele, who was adopted, told GQ magazine that his mother had the option of getting an abortion or giving birth to him.
"The choice issue cuts two ways," Steele said in the wide-ranging interview published online Wednesday. "You can choose life, or you can choose abortion. You know, my mother chose life."
This morning, Steele attempted to clarify his remarks in a statement.
"I am pro-life, always have been, always will be," he said. "I tried to present why I am pro-life while recognizing that my mother had a 'choice' before deciding to put me up for adoption."
Both in the interview and in his statement, Steele said he believed Roe v. Wade was "wrongly decided." He said the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion should be overturned and the decision left to the states.
In the GQ interview, Steele said he was opposed to gay marriage but wasn't going to "beat people upside the head about it."
Steele, a Catholic and former Maryland lieutenant governor, was elected chairman of the Republican National Committee nearly six weeks ago.
Since then, Steele has compared Republicans to alcoholics on a 12-step program and called Rush Limbaugh "incendiary and ugly," though he has apologized to the conservative radio host. Steele has also promised to give the party a "hip-hop makeover" that would be "off the hook" and would attract even "one-armed midgets."
Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, said in a written statement that he was disappointed with Steele's remarks to the magazine on abortion and gay marriage.
"This only serves to reinforce the belief by many social conservatives that one major party is unfriendly while the other gives only lip service to core moral issues," Perkins said, "which is why many have dropped their affiliation with the GOP."
The Republican platform asserts the GOP's opposition to abortion, saying that "the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed."
In his statement, Steele said he supports the platform. "The Republican Party is and will continue to be the party of life," he said.
Steele said in the magazine interview that he believed marriage should be reserved for a man and a woman. "I just draw the line at the gay marriage," he said.
"And I'm not gonna jump up and down and beat people upside the head about it, and tell gays that they're wrong for wanting to aspire to that, and all of that craziness," he continued.
Steele said states should address gay marriage.
"Just as a general principle, I don't like mucking around with the Constitution," he said."
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CCP, The way forward IMO involves building the coalition between the factions you allude to, not to abandon EITHER core group in favor of another. There is nothing 'Christian' about being pro-life or else at least half of Christians aren't Christian. The second strongest defense of pro-life views I ever heard came from radio host Dr. Laura Schlesinger who is Jewish, and the strongest argument I've seen comes from science and ultrasound photography.
The point you make about the platform is correct. The platform tradition should be ended instead of ignored by the elected candidates. It is used only by opponents to demonstrate the extremism of their opponent. The pro-life wording in the platform you cite would trump abortion for even the areas where all serious elected conservatives politicians would draw an exception. The platform process is dominated the small minority of the involved and should be replaced by a Newt-style contract, agreed to and promoted in public, finding core principles that overlap realistic, electable plans for governing.
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Woof,
There has been a push within the leadership of the Republican Party over a number of years, to have what they call a "big tent" membership. This is how President Bush and John McCain became the front runners for the Party's nomination for President. Most of the true Conservatives of the Party didn't like either of these two candidates; even with GW being a "born again" the religious right were leery of him because of his dad's appointment of a Liberal to the Supreme Court. Many Conservatives voted for these guys simply because they would be better than Al Gore or Kerry or Obama as President.
Many of us are now thinking, well if we're going to lose anyany, why not make it a "smaller tent" membership and restore Conservative principles and push out the so called moderates, that are basically Liberals and becoming more Liberal everyday. So what you're seeing now are the first shots in that war. I'm on Rush's side of things, he is not an extremist and the people that want to cast him in that light, are the ones that want the "big tent".
P.C.
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Many of us are now thinking, well if we're going to lose anyany, why not make it a "smaller tent" membership and restore Conservative principles and push out the so called moderates, that are basically Liberals and becoming more Liberal everyday.
ah-men. The Republicans need to stand for something other than just being "democrat lite". I won't get my hopes up tho, the whole opposition party thing is ringing hollow after the last eight years.
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"well if we're going to lose anyany, why not make it a "smaller tent" membership and restore Conservative principles and push out the so called moderates"
Prentice,
I have to respectfully disagree. Most of the Republicans would not call themselves "religious right" though they may think of themselves as "conservatives".
I am not exactly sure what you mean by "moderate". You and or Chad suggest that those of us who are less strict on principle are Dems lite or not really Republicans or conservatives.
Yet I am sure that most of the Rep party would fall into this group. Without them/us, you or I like it or not the strict conservatives are a shrinking group in the overall population. Rush doesn't get it. Hannity doesn't get it. Colin Powell does - in this regard IMO.
I am not sure Michael Steele has the abilities to "lead" the party but I think having a minority at the forefront is a good idea. I would like to give him backing and the chance to try to show minorities they too have a stake in America and a real chance at the pie if they work hard, take responsibility and stop giving in to a party that is more like slave master whitey whose idea of helping them is with their benevolent handouts that was obtained by confiscation from others.
And speaking of W being born again, what the heck does that have to do with being President?
Why is a religious group running a political party?
Is it not all about abortion? Please correct me if I am wrong.
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I am not exactly sure what you mean by "moderate". You and or Chad suggest that those of us who are less strict on principle are Dems lite or not really Republicans or conservatives.
For the record I am fiscally conservative and when I say "dem lite" it is the people in the party that want to be democrat, but not all the way democrat. That is to say they will tell us that a $400B stimulus bill is outrageous, but a $350B stimulus bill is responsible.
As for how I feel about social issues is that everyone should be free do do as they please as long as it does'nt interfere with the freedom of others.
So when I say small tent I mean the people who want liberty and can be adult enough to let others enjoy their liberties.
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Yet I am sure that most of the Rep party would fall into this group. Without them/us, you or I like it or not the strict conservatives are a shrinking group in the overall population. Rush doesn't get it. Hannity doesn't get it. Colin Powell does - in this regard IMO.
Hey ccp,
I'm not religious right either, I was just pointing out that the religious right had problems with Bush but voted for him anyway just like a lot of Conservatives did. It was more difficult for Conservatives to vote for Bush the second time because he practically doubled the size of government when he created Homeland Security and it became obvious that he wasn't going to tighten up the border. He was finally forced into it because a majority of citizens showed that they were in favor of a border fence and workplace enforcement of immigration laws.
And I need to disagree with you that Conservatives are a shrinking part of the population, I think the majority of Americans are Conservative. The problem is that they don't vote. I believe if the Republican Party returns to actually doing what they say they will do then these people will rejoin the process and help make our nation a strong Republic again.
And speaking of W being born again, what the heck does that have to do with being President?
Why is a religious group running a political party?
Is it not all about abortion? Please correct me if I am wrong.
The abortion issue is one part of the much larger issue of moral character and values, it's not about a religion running anything.
P.C.
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As Chad points out: "I just don't see anyone that will be able to hurdle the media double standard put on Repubs"
And as we are seeing it doesn't have to be a Rep they go after. Perhaps that is why Dems who are criticizing BO are doing it indirectly like criticize Hillary for speaking out against Israel when her policy is obviously based on BO's design. Or Finemans somewhat negative citique of BO but then he pulls up short with oh "but Obama is definitley not a socialist". Maybe they are actually afraid to go after the chosen one?
The liberal media is going after anyone who criticizes the chosen one. Of course Stewart goes after Cramer only now because Cramer came out against the latest liberal icon:
****Cramer vs. Stewart: Post-Fight Analysis
Posted Mar 13, 2009 05:07pm EDT by Aaron Task in Newsmakers, Banking
Related: TSCM, VIA, JPM, BAC, WB, ^DJI, ^GSPC
A week-long verbal battle between cable TV personalities Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer came to a head on The Daily Show Thursday night. By nearly all accounts, Stewart won in a unanimous decision, if not a knockout:
"Cramer was playing rope-a-dope while Stewart swung away," writes Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz. "Jim seemed more concerned with being liked than justifying what he does for a living. It was a mismatch."
Some other items of note:
While eager to admit some mistakes, Cramer defended himself (in part) by saying Wall Street CEOs such as Dick Fuld lied to him and (by extension) other CNBC personalities. "I had a lot of CEOs lie to me on the show," he said, suggesting former Bear Stearns and Wachovia executives also misled him.
Stewart's populist rants often got in the way of any real conversation, and Cramer rarely has been at such a loss for words. Stewart tapped into the anger many Americans are feeling toward Wall Street and the financial media, given the ongoing bailout bonanza and the decimation to our collective portfolios: Americans' total wealth fell 18% in 2008, according to the Fed, the biggest annual loss since they started tracking the data after WW2.
Stewart said repeatedly his issue was with CNBC generally, not Cramer personally. But it sure seemed like Stewart's attack was directed at Cramer. (Of course, Cramer was sitting there and further invited attack by sarcastically dismissing Stewart earlier in the week.)
Speaking of the personal, I made a cameo appearance on 'The Daily Show' last night when Stewart showed clips of a segment I filmed with Cramer for TheStreet.com back in 2006. (Full disclosure: I worked for TheStreet.com, which Cramer co-founded, from 1998 to 2007. The company and Cramer were good to me and I still own some shares, much to my dismay.)
In the clip, "Cramer explained how traders gamed the system and seemed to say he had used such techniques in his Wall Street days," as Kurtz writes. There was a minor flap about the segment back in early 2007 and it's certainly received a lot of attention this week.
On The Daily Show, Cramer said he was speaking hyperbolically and denied having done those things personally. "I didn't do it," he said.
While I have no doubt Cramer pushed the envelope before he got out of the hedge fund business in 2000, I had assumed the same during the "infamous" video. I believed he was speaking hypothetically and trying to call attention to what hedge fund managers were doing then versus what he had done five-plus years prior.****
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BOs poll ratings will not come down as long as the majority of Americans think they will not be footing the bill for the unprecedented budgets he is proposing. Until events prove that they too are screwed, along with those of us who know they are his poll numbers will be over 50%.
At this time the Republicans have not convinced many of this IMO.
The Dems keep throwing the chant Rep are the party of "no" and offer no alternatives. I am not sure it is in the interest of Rep to present an alternative while they are out of power and most elections are still a bit off.
OTOH I don't know anyone but Newt who could articulate a message that would get through the left MSM filter.
Perhaps it is best to keep up the no tactics and let BO;s policies eventually fail as I believe will by themselves.
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At the moment :wink: I disagree.
I think we are in serious danger of cultural transmission of the American Creed crossing a tipping point from which we may never recover. Reagan was a clarion voice in the wilderness for many, many years before he was elected. People trusted that he believed what he said because of this.
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Well, I am not sure we disagree.
I am not saying we should not articulate conservative values. What I am saying is the majority of Americans do not think conservative values will benefit them - hence BOs continued popularity. So are you saying rep should come up with a plan and articulate it or are you saying is the plan is to let the markets crash and burn because that is the best long term course of action?
It does not appear most in this country want to hear that.
While I hate BO's politics I am not clear strictly leave the markets alone to "repair" themselves is enough either. Certainly the majority of Americans don't want to hear that.
That is why I like Newt. He recognizes this shortcoming and is searching for ideas that take conservatism foward in a way that applies to todays problems at least in a practical and sensible way.
One risk of articulating your plan now is the other side will steal the ideas for themselves and take the credit. That is what Clinton always did. The great example is welfare reform.
But you certainly raise a good point that that risk is a far better alternative to allowing BO, Pelosi and the other cooks to have their way and destroy what made this country great.
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I too like Newt a lot.
One of my deep concerns is that the Big Lie that "the free market caused it" is becoming accepted fact.
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"...the Big Lie that "the free market caused it" is becoming accepted fact." - the markets that are the most screwed up are the ones that experienced the most government intervention, and vice versa. Besides housing finance with Fannie Mae and the Community Reinvestment Act Program (CRAP), health care is very close to the top of that list.
Whatever and whoever 'our side' is, we always seem to lack a war room with a rapid response team and a clear message back refuting falsehoods. Maybe that is Michael Steele's job. Conservatives answer this kind of bs but they are only heard and read by conservatives.
Luckily, some truths are so true and so obvious that even unspoken they can become known truths. For example, the fact that the policies of the current left machine embody tyrannical socialism.
People have learned hate Nancy Pelosi and the politics she represents even though we are only fed glowing fluff reports about her everywhere we turn. 'Rasmussen Reports has the latest numbers: Sixty percent (60%) of U.S. voters now have an unfavorable opinion of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, including 42% Very Unfavorable, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Even Democrats are now bailing on Pelosi.'
Reelection rates in congress are typically 98-99%, but every seat goes up for campaign and reelection next year. The way forward - step one - is to retake the house or at least retake the momentum in the country in the next congressional election. I'm sure the Republicans are already working on the next 'contract with America'. It will feature a number of positive agenda items but the underlying message is that 'we' offer a vision a little closer to the pursuit of happiness that Jefferson, Madison or Lincoln might have called the American Dream and a little further from the rationed benefits and downsized equality handed out by central planners and central enforcers like Stalin and Pelosi.
Right now the only check/balance on the American Left machine is 'Communist China'. If they stop buying our debt, we will have to cut spending by most of the $10 trillion (and eat the rest as inflation) even without the participation in the process of Republicans.
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"Conservatives answer this kind of bs but they are only heard and read by conservatives.
Luckily, some truths are so true and so obvious that even unspoken they can become known truths"
Doug, well said. And that is the thrust of my concerns about "conservatism" whatever the reitierations. It doesn't seem to be heard by those who are not already "conservatives". Or the message just does not appeal to others.
I am hoping the new contract with America will appeal to all of us with common sense.
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By PAUL D. RYAN
Today, the House of Representatives will consider two budget plans that represent dramatically different visions for our nation's future.
We will first consider President Barack Obama's plan. To be clear, this is no ordinary budget. In a nutshell, the president and Democratic leaders in Congress are attempting to bring about the third and final great wave of progressivism, building on top of the New Deal and the Great Society. So America is placed in a special moment in our history -- brought about by the deep recession, Mr. Obama's ambitious agenda, and the pending fiscal tidal-wave of red ink brought forward by the looming insolvency of our entitlement programs. If this agenda comes to pass, it will mark this period in history as the moment America turned European.
House Republicans will offer an alternative plan. This too is no ordinary budget. As the opposition party, we believe this moment must be met by offering the American people a different way forward -- one based on our belief that America is an exceptional nation, and we want to keep it that way. Our budget applies our country's enduring first principles to the problems of our day. Rather than attempting to equalize the results of peoples' lives and micromanaging their affairs, we seek to preserve our system of protecting our natural rights and equalizing opportunity for all. The plan works to accomplish four main goals: 1) fulfill the mission of health and retirement security; 2) control our nation's debts; 3) put the economy on a path of growth and leadership in the global economy; and 4) preserve the American legacy of leaving the next generation better off.
Under the president's plan, spending will top $4 trillion this year alone, and consume 28.5% of our nation's economy. His plan would mean a $1 trillion increase to the already unsustainable spending growth of our nation's entitlement programs -- including a "down payment" toward government-controlled health care and education; a $1.5 trillion tax increase to further shackle the small businesses and investors we rely on to create jobs; a massive increase in energy costs for families via cap and trade. Moreover, the Obama plan would result in an exploding deficit, a doubling of the nation's debt in five years, and an increase of that debt to more than 82% of our nation's GDP by the last year of the budget. This approach will ultimately debase our currency and reduce the living standards of the American people.
Instead of doubling the debt in five years, and tripling it in 10, the Republican budget curbs the explosion in spending called for by the president and his party. Our plan halts the borrow-and-spend philosophy that brought about today's economic problems, and puts a stop to heaping ever-growing debt on future generations -- and it does so by controlling spending, not by raising taxes. The greatest difference lies in the size of government our budgets achieve over time (see nearby chart).
While our approach ensures a sturdy safety net for those facing chronic or temporary difficulties, it understands that the reliability of this protection and the other functions of government depend on a vibrant, free and growing private sector to generate the resources necessary for it.
Here's an outline of what we propose:
- Deficits/Debt. The Republican budget achieves lower deficits than the Democratic plan in every year, and by 2019 yields half the deficit proposed by the president. By doing so, we control government debt: Under our plan, debt held by the public is $3.6 trillion less during the budget period.
- Spending. Our budget gives priority to national defense and veterans' health care. We freeze all other discretionary spending for five years, allowing it to grow modestly after that. We also place all spending under a statutory spending cap backed up by tough budget enforcement.
- Energy. Our budget lays a firm foundation to position the U.S. to meet three important strategic energy goals: reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, deploying more clean and renewable energy sources free of greenhouse gas, and supporting economic growth. We do these things by rejecting the president's cap-and-trade scheme, by opening exploration on our nation's oil and gas fields, and by investing the proceeds in a new clean energy trust fund, infrastructure and further deficit reduction.
- Entitlements. Our budget also takes steps toward fulfilling the mission of health and retirement security, in part by making these programs fiscally sustainable. The budget moves toward making quality health care affordable and accessible to all Americans by strengthening the relationship between patients and their doctors, not the dictates of government bureaucrats. We preserve the existing Medicare program for all those 55 or older; and then, to make the program sustainable and dependable, those 54 and younger will enter a Medicare program reformed to work like the health plan members of Congress and federal employees now enjoy. Starting in 2021, seniors would receive a premium support payment equal to 100% of the Medicare benefit on average. This would be income related, so low-income seniors receive extra support, and high-income seniors receive support relative to their incomes -- along the same lines as the president's Medicare Part D proposal.
We strengthen the Medicaid safety net by converting the federal share of Medicaid payments into an allotment tailored for each state's low-income population. This will enhance state flexibility and sensitivity to spending growth.
In one of the most valued government programs -- Social Security -- our budget begins to develop a bipartisan solution to the program's pending bankruptcy by incorporating some of the reforms advocated by the president's budget director. Specifically, we provide for a trigger that would make small adjustments in the benefits for higher-income beneficiaries if the Social Security Administration determines the Social Security Trust Fund cannot meet its obligations. This is a modest but serious proposal which would not affect those in or near retirement, but is aimed at helping develop a consensus, across party lines, toward saving this important retirement program. We also assure that benefits for lower-income recipients are large enough to keep them out of poverty.
- Tax Reform. Our budget does not raise taxes, and makes permanent the 2001 and 2003 tax laws. In fact, we cut taxes and reform the tax system. Individuals can choose to pay their federal taxes under the existing code, or move to a highly simplified system that fits on a post card, with few deductions and two rates. Specifically, couples pay 10% on their first $100,000 in income (singles on $50,000) and 25% above that. Capital gains and dividends are taxed at 15%, and the death tax is repealed. The proposal includes generous standard and personal exemptions such that a family of four earning $39,000 would not pay tax on that amount. In an effort to revive peoples' lost savings, and to create an incentive for risk-taking and investment, the budget repeals the capital gains tax through 2010 for all taxpayers.
On the business side, the budget permanently cuts the uncompetitive corporate income tax rate -- currently the second highest in the industrialized world -- to 25%. This puts American companies in a better position to lead in the global economy, promotes jobs here at home, and strengthens worker paychecks.
We hope the administration and Democratic leaders in Congress do not distort and preach fear about our Republican plan. Some may be tempted to appeal to the darker emotions of envy and insecurity that surely run high in times like these. Yet we know Americans are stronger, smarter and prouder than this ploy assumes.
In the recent past, the Republican Party failed to offer the nation an inspiring vision and a concrete plan to tackle our problems with innovative and principled solutions. We do not intend to repeat that mistake. America is not the greatest nation on earth by chance. We earned this greatness by rewarding individual achievement, by advancing and protecting natural rights, and by embracing freedom. We intend to continue this uniquely American tradition.
Mr. Ryan, from Wisconsin, is the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee.
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A worthy House Republican plan
Borrows less and would keep spending within bounds
By Donald Lambro (Washington Times) | Monday, April 13, 2009
When President Obama delivered his record-breaking $3.6 trillion budget to Congress, it was Page One news and led all the TV broadcasts - with little or no critical analysis.
But when the Republicans brought forth their alternative budget, it was relegated to the back pages and received only a cursory mention on the nightly news shows, usually accompanied by a Democratic talking head who dismissed the GOP plan as coldhearted and a penny-pinching approach that turned its back on people in need during these hard economic times.
Actually, the House Republican plan does a number of things to grow the economy that the Democrats do not, like provide tax incentives for business investment, economic growth and job creation; borrow a lot less than the Democrats would and create less debt; and not raise taxes, when to do so would be job-killer in a recession.
In short, House Republicans took up Mr. Obama's challenge to offer their own budget, and it turns out to be pretty good. It deserves a lot more attention than it got from the news media, says Brian M. Riedl, chief budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation. Among its provisions:
• It borrows $3.6 trillion less than Mr. Obama's budget. That works out to $23,000 less debt per household.
• It keeps total federal spending slightly above 20 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), roughly the same rate of spending we had before the recession.
• It contains no tax increases and would shorten and simplify the federal tax code.
• It places a moratorium on wasteful earmarks and tackles needed Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid reforms.
Mr. Obama's budget and the barely trimmed-down version the House and Senate Democrats taped together would slap more than $9 trillion in new debt on our children and grandchildren. "This is more debt than has been accumulated by all previous presidents in American history from George Washington to George W. Bush - combined," Mr. Riedl says.
The Republicans would freeze nondefense, nonveterans discretionary spending for five years at present levels, and stop the stimulus spending planned in 2010 and beyond when the economy is expected to be in recovery.
Unlike Mr. Obama's budget and the Democrats' proposals, the GOP plan would raise no one's taxes. Instead, it would make the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent, along with the alternative minimum tax reduction. But it would give beleaguered taxpayers a further tax break by giving anyone a choice between a 10 percent marginal tax rate for those making less than $100,000, and a 25 percent rate for those making more than $100,000.
And they would offer needed pro-growth incentives that include cutting the 35 percent corporate tax rate to 25 percent and suspending the capital-gains taxes through the end of 2010 to spur capital investment.
"Even with all those benefits, the House Republican budget proposal would bring in revenues averaging just below 18 percent of GDP, which is near the historical average," Mr. Riedl says.
The Obama budget and the versions hatched by Democrats on Capitol Hill would push federal spending as a share of GDP from 23.6 percent in 2011 to 24.5 percent in 2019 - "significantly above the past 40-year average of 20.7 percent," says Americans for Tax Reform.
The Democrats respond to all of this by saying it is just a repeat of the policies offered by former President George W. Bush.
In fact, as Mr. Riedl points out, the Obama and Democratic budgets would "actually accelerate" Mr. Bush's fiscal policies, producing "more runaway spending, more bailouts and even bigger deficits. The president is not repudiating Bushism - he's doubling down on it."
Is he ever. Increasing government spending by $1 trillion during the next 10 years; raising taxes on millions of Americans and businesses by $1.4 trillion during the next decade; and doubling the publicly held federal debt to more than $15 trillion.
In a few days, millions of taxpayers will send hundreds of billions of dollars to the U.S. Treasury to pay for the costs of Mr. Obama's voraciously growing government - in many cases, this is money Americans desperately need to make ends meet.
This is not a time - now or next year - to take more money out of a recessionary, cash-strapped economy with an unemployment rate that is fast approaching 10 percent.
This is a time when the government's policy should be to let the businesses and their workers keep more of what they earn. Mr. Obama's minuscule $7 a week for most workers provides little if any real relief.
Taking less money out of an anemic economy is a message that still resonates with taxpayers, who are beginning to doubt that the Democrats' dubious, snake-oil, tax-and-spend remedies will strengthen the economy.
It didn't make sense when Franklin D. Roosevelt did it in the 1930s, and it doesn't make any sense now.
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'There's a stereotype that if you're gay, you're liberal - and if you are a conservative, you're a bigot. Well, there are people like me who are gay and conservative, and we think it's important that we have a voice."
The speaker is Jimmy LaSalvia. Tomorrow morning in Washington, Mr. LaSalvia and his allies will launch a new tax-exempt 527 political organization they hope will be that voice for gay conservatives. Called GOProud, it will certainly make for a more interesting Republican Party -- and a richer internal debate.
Mr. LaSalvia, the new group's executive director, points to the arithmetic. In the 2008 presidential election, between 4% and 5% of voters self-identified as gay. Of these, 27% went for John McCain. That works out to 1.4 to 1.8 million gay Republican votes.
"If you pulled the lever for John McCain in 2008, then passing hate-crimes legislation or ENDA [Employment Non-Discrimination Act] is probably not your priority," says Mr. LaSalvia. "Most issues that are defined as 'gay' issues have been defined by the left. We take a different approach."
Health care is one example. Mr. LaSalvia points out that many gays do not believe their best interests are served by government-run health care. To the contrary, he says, they believe they would be better served by private-run individual accounts that are portable, that put them in charge of their own health care, and that would allow them to designate their own beneficiaries.
Some of these issues are explored at GayPatriot.org, whose founder, Bruce Carroll, is also on the board of GOProud. From the disastrous economic policies of Massachusetts Democrat Rep. Barney Frank to the outing of gay Republicans to the importance of male sexual monogamy, this conservative site offers a perspective you just won't see anywhere else. Even on hot-button social issues, it can make for some strange bedfellows.
Take abortion. Christopher Barron, GOProud's chairman of the board, points to an example from a few years back, when a Maine state legislator introduced a bill that would have outlawed abortion for a child thought to be gay, in the event genetic testing ever reached that point. That politician, Mr. Barron says, received virtually no support from gay groups. Though he himself is pro-choice, he says, "I want pro-life gays to know they have a home here."
There may even be some common ground on the issue that most divides GOProud from long-standing Republican orthodoxy: gay marriage. Like most conservative organizations, GOProud is skeptical about using courts to advance social change. They also tend to believe that social issues like this one are best left to the American people acting through their state legislatures.
"I opposed the federal marriage amendment because I do not believe we should federalize marriage," says Mr. Barron. "Marriage is and always has been a state issue. The last thing I want is for some federal court to impose a tortured Roe v. Wade law on gay marriage that will make sure that this issue is never resolved."
That's not likely to be satisfying to those who oppose gay marriage on the merits. But the approach is consistent with a conservative respect for process. Even more important today, this approach also helps make possible a real conversation between people who share the same principles but operate from strong, opposing beliefs.
As Mr. LaSalvia puts it, "Demonstrating common ground is just as important as saying it exists, and that's where we're different."
Whatever else it is, these are not your father's gay Republicans. To the contrary, GOProud springs from a growing dissatisfaction among some gay Republicans that the Log Cabin Republicans, the traditional gay advocacy group within the party, has drifted to the point where its positions are indistinguishable from those of the left. It didn't help when the Washington Blade chimed in with a report that Log Cabin's biggest contributor, Tim Gill, is a Democrat.
Messrs. LaSalvia and Barron are themselves former officers for the Log Cabin Republicans. They know they belong to a defeated party that has no clear leaders but is now making decisions that will determine that party's future in the years to come. They say they have formed GOProud in part to participate in that conversation -- as conservatives who want to contribute to the team.
The ironies are legion. Since the loss of Congress and Mr. McCain's defeat in November, any number of people have come forward to suggest that if the party ever wants to win again, it has to abandon its conservative principles. What does it say about the Beltway's established ideological boxes that it is the gay wing of the Republican Party which is now advocating for a return to the party's Reaganite roots?
Write to MainStreet@wsj.com
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By BRIAN M. CARNEY
Sen. Judd Gregg is perhaps best known for something he didn't do. Two weeks into the Obama administration, he announced that he was leaving the Senate to become commerce secretary. Two weeks later, he withdrew his name, drawing a testy jab from the administration for denying it a bipartisan feather in its cap.
Zina SaundersIt's hard to reconcile the man who nearly boarded the Obama express with the tough-minded Republican senator who sat across from The Wall Street Journal's editorial board at our offices earlier this week. As for the lessons he learned from his dalliance with the administration, he reserves his criticism for himself: "I should have been smart enough to see the daylight before I walked in the door. . . . I don't think there's any big lesson here for anybody but myself, which is the obvious: It would have been impossible for me to be with the president 100% of the time, which is what a cabinet secretary has to be."
Just how obvious that should have been became clear in the course of our interview. Also obvious, Mr. Gregg said, was that the Obama administration is filled with "really capable, dedicated, smart, sharp people with an agenda that they intend to pursue aggressively."
The kind words mostly stop there. From health care to global warming, financial regulation, spending and tax policy, Mr. Gregg doesn't pull any punches in his criticism of the new president. He may be "a charismatic person" with "a very strong understanding of who he is and what he wants to do," but when it comes to the substance of what Mr. Obama seeks to accomplish, Mr. Gregg is less charitable. "They have a goal," the senator says, "and he's very open about it. They are going to grow this government."
Mr. Gregg believes the stakes are high. "This is the first time a budget's had real meaning in a long time," he says. In recent years, presidential budgets have been formulaic exercises. Even if Congress went on to adopt them, they would only serve, at best, as rough guidelines for the real work of crafting the appropriations bills that actually set discretionary funding levels. But this budget "is real, and he [Mr. Obama] intends to push it."
That's bad news, in Mr. Gregg's view, because "We're headed on an unsustainable path. The simple fact is these [budget] numbers don't work and the practical implications of them are staggering for the nation and the next generation."
His "main concern," he says, "is that if you look at the Obama budget, it projects on average about a $1 trillion deficit [every year] over the next 10 years." And as a result of all that spending, "You see the size of government growing from 21% [of gross domestic product] to 22%, to 23%, 24%, 25% . . . toward 30%."
Set against this spending growth, Mr. Gregg points out, "the revenue base is only so big. Granted, right now it's way down because of the economic situation. But even if you took it back to an economy that's performing extremely well, say [revenues of] even 19% [of GDP], you can't close that gap under the present projected situation. And so we're in trouble. And the policies of this administration are driving that to an even more acute situation." Spending and deficits are both heading skyward, and government debt held by the public is heading toward 80% of GDP.
For Mr. Gregg, this is like living a nightmare. He has been a hard-nosed advocate for government spending restraint since his days as a Congressman (1981-87) and governor of New Hampshire (1987-93). At times, his commitment to fiscal responsibility led him to oppose tax cuts when they weren't matched by spending restraint. Those stances incurred the ire of his Republican colleagues, but he always stuck to his fiscal-responsibility guns. Now he's staring down a spending explosion that makes those battles look picayune.
One of the big drivers of government spending in the Obama budget is universal health insurance. And on this point, Mr. Gregg says, "At least Obama was half-way honest about how much he was going to spend on health care. He had it at $600 billion. And the real number . . . is $1.2 trillion." But that's better than Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad. "What Conrad did was take the entire amount off-budget and not account for any of it." Mr. Obama's budget, therefore, "was honest to a higher degree. It held itself to a higher degree of integrity than the Senate budget or the House budget."
Well, except for one point: "the huge savings that they claimed on defense spending, which was a total fraud." Mr. Gregg refers to the fact that the administration's budget builds the full cost of the surge in Iraq into the budget baseline. Under that assumption, we would continue to appropriate money for the surge every year for the next 10 years. That allows the administration to "find" $1.6 trillion in savings, "all of which is spending we would never do," according to Mr. Gregg.
Health-care reform is not just about the price tag. How it gets done matters too. And in Mr. Gregg's view, the Obama administration's goal is crystal-clear. "This is a single-payer government. . . . It doesn't want to say that publicly and it rejects it publicly. But the goal is to push that substantively. Because that's what they believe." In other words, what Mr. Obama bills as a "public option" for those who need health insurance but can't get it through their employer or in the private market would soon become the only option -- even for those happy with their current insurance.
Before you cry "conspiracy," Mr. Gregg argues that he has history on his side. The Democrats, he says, pulled the same public-private switcheroo before with student loans for college. Back in the late 1990s, "there was a huge debate in the committee . . . between myself and [Senator Ted] Kennedy over a private plan versus a public plan." In the end, they compromised -- the government would offer loans directly to students, but that program would have to compete with private-sector lenders. "And the agreement was very formal, and the record shows this very clearly. We agreed to level the playing field, put both plans on the playing field at an equal status and see who won. Well, private plans won. Big time."
Given the choice, most borrowers went to the private sector for their loans. But the Democrats who wanted to nationalize the student-loan market did not take defeat in the marketplace gracefully. "They didn't like that," Mr. Gregg says. "So ever since then they've tilted the playing field back and now they're going to wipe out the private plans in their budget."
When it comes to health insurance, Mr. Gregg expects more of the same. "That's the scenario that you're going to see if you have a public plan for insurance that competes with the private plans. That's the game plan" -- call it competition at first, but tighten the screws until the private insurers leave the market or get forced out. But with health-care spending representing 17% of GDP and climbing, the stakes are much, much larger. "Everyone in this country is affected by these policies."
And while the aspiration for universal coverage may be noble, the practical realities of getting there may prove harder for the American public to swallow. "There's no question," the senator says, "that this is a debate about rationing to a large degree. All your single-payer systems are rationing systems. It's also a debate about technology and innovation. Because you will not have capital pursuing technology, innovation and science if it's health-care related, because the return on capital won't be there. And these things are so expensive, especially on the pharmaceutical side and the biologic side, that you'll dramatically slow improvements in the quality of health care through science with a single-payer plan." Mr. Gregg thinks that critique will resonate with the public.
Even so, given the balance of power in Washington, Mr. Gregg gives the Democrats good chances of success in nationalizing our health-insurance market. "I think the odds are pretty good that it's going to happen -- that you'll have a major health-care reform bill pass." As he says, "Elections have consequences."
That said, Mr. Gregg doesn't necessarily think the American people will be happy with those consequences if the Democrats succeed in pushing through a "stalking horse" for a single-payer health-care system. "If they produce a partisan bill and pass it on a party-line vote, it's their baby," he warns. "They're going to have to defend it in the next election cycle and it's likely that it's not going to be perceived as fair by the American people."
Moreover, he says, "I don't think the American people want unilateral government control over the entire health-care system. I think most people understand that we've got a pretty good health-care system. It doesn't reach as many people as it should, and that has to be corrected. But it's innovative, it gives you decent health care for most Americans, and it's a lot better than any of the other countries that have these massive national plans."
That, together with the runaway spending and growing pile of debt, could yet set the stage for a Republican comeback, and sooner than most pundits would predict. Mr. Gregg will not run for re-election when his current term ends next year. Republicans, he says, "became very clouded as to what we stood for under the Bush presidency." But now they're getting their "definition" back.
"We're beginning to speak in a much more definitional voice on issues that were historically Republican issues: fiscal responsibility, giving individuals the opportunity to go out and create a better life for themselves, American exceptionalism, viewing America as a special place, not apologizing for our nation. These are things that we've always, as a party, resonated around. And I think we're starting to do it again." He corrects himself: "I know we are."
The Republican excesses during the Bush administration "haven't been forgiven and they haven't been forgotten" by voters. But if the president and his majorities in Congress get their way, voters will, Mr. Gregg believes, be ready for an alternative. "And we're the only show in town."
Mr. Carney is a member of the Journal's editorial board and the coauthor of "Freedom, Inc.," forthcoming from Crown Business in the fall.
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Republicans lost another Congressional race on Friday, as Democratic newcomer Scott Murphy was declared the victor by some 400 votes in the March 31 special House election in New York state. But you wouldn't know it from the response of House Minority Leader John Boehner, who declared that GOP candidate Jim Tedisco "forced the Democratic Party to invest heavily and defend a seat they should have had in the bag."
I-yi-yi.
New York's 20th Congressional district is precisely the kind the GOP will have to win if it wants to regain a majority. It is one of the few Northeast districts where Republicans retain a party registration advantage, and Republican John Sweeney had held it for four terms before Democrat (and recently appointed Senator) Kirsten Gillibrand won in 2006. George W. Bush carried it twice.
Republicans lost because they fielded a poor candidate who ran a lousy campaign. While Mr. Murphy was a fresh face who could plausibly argue he'd assist President Obama's call for change, Republicans picked an Albany careerist who personified more of the same. GOP power broker (and Al D'Amato pal) Joe Mondello rigged the nomination to deny a real contest, thus cutting out the likes of former state Assembly minority leader John Faso.
At one point, Mr. Tedisco had a 20-point lead but squandered it by waffling on the Obama stimulus plan, running anti-Wall Street ads that confused the Republican base, and waiting until the last few days to criticize pro-union "card check" legislation. In other words, Mr. Tedisco betrayed that he wasn't all that different than the other politicians who have made Albany the tax and spend center of America.
The fact that the race was so close shows that, had Republicans run a credible candidate, they had a chance to send a message to Blue Dog Democrats in Congress that Mr. Obama's agenda is less popular than he is. Mr. Boehner would do better to stop spinning defeat and start looking for candidates who believe in something beyond their own careers.
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As proverb goes, when a Republican senator crosses the aisle and joins the other side, the average intelligence of both sides improves... I will not miss Sen. Specter and no one should read anything more into this than the fact that he was trailing challenger Pat Toomey by 20 points in his bid to be endorsed for reelection. Pat Toomey was Club for Growth president the past several years and will do more for conservatism by running IMO than Sen. Specter can ever do by winning.
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Interesting story about Newt regarding 'cap and trade', maybe one of the two biggest domestic issues facing the country (nationalized healthcare being the other.) Newt previously favored some version of cap and trade. Is it really a flip flop to decisively move from the wrong side of an issue to the right side? Anyway, here is a hate piece from a left wing publication, Mother Jones, attacking him: it was money from the coal lobby, not logic, honesty, principles or wisdom that changed his position, according to the left.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/04/gingrich-v-gingrich
Gingrich v. Gingrich
— By Kevin Drum | Mon April 27, 2009 11:59 AM PST
It's hard to get too worked up when a politician turns out to be opportunistic, but Media Matters documents a pretty stunning case of cynicism from Newt Gingrich today. Last week Gingrich vilified a Democratic cap-and-trade plan for carbon emissions as a "command-and-control, anti-energy, big-bureaucracy agenda, including dramatic increases in government power and draconian policies that will devastate our economy." But two years ago, when he was in his "big ideas for conservatives phase," he was cap-and-trade's biggest fan:
I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there's a package there that's very, very good. And frankly, it's something I would strongly support....The caps, with a trading system, on sulfur has worked brilliantly because it has brought free-market attitudes, entrepreneurship and technology and made it very profitable to have less sulfur.
Well, that's Newt for you: he dumps policy positions as quickly as he dumps wives. But it also goes to show how fleeting conservative support for "market-oriented solutions" like cap-and trade is. A lot of the liberal enthusiasm for cap-and-trade over the past decade has been based on the idea that it might be more acceptable to conservatives than a straight tax, but obviously that hasn't turned out to be the case. Basically, they just don't want to do anything, full stop.
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The mostly feeble and unprincipled Rep response to the explosion of liberal economic fascism continues to diminish the Rep's credibility with me. That said, here's this from Buchanan.
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Glimmers of Hope for the GOP
by Patrick J. Buchanan
05/05/2009
For conservatives fretful over the future of the party to which they have given allegiance, "How Barack Obama Won: A State by State Guide to the Historic 2008 Election" reads like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.
Co-authored by NBC's Chuck Todd, it is a grim tale of what happened to the GOP in 2008, and what the future may hold.
Yet, on second and third reads, one discerns, as did Gen. Wolfe's scouts 250 years ago, a narrow path leading up the cliff to the Plains of Abraham -- and perhaps victory in 2012. First, the bad news:
Obama raised the national share of the black vote to 13 percent, then swept it 95 percent to 4 percent. The GOP share of the Hispanic vote, now 9 percent of the electorate, fell from George W. Bush's 40 percent against John Kerry to 32 percent. Young voters ages 18 to 29 went for Obama 66 percent to 31 percent. And Obama ran stronger among white voters with a college education than did either Al Gore or Kerry.
Put starkly, the voting groups growing in numbers -- Hispanics, Asians, African-Americans, folks with college degrees, the young -- are all trending Democratic, while the voters most loyal to the GOP -- white folks and religious conservatives -- are declining as a share of the U.S. electorate. And demography is destiny.
Other grim news: As noted here recently, 18 states and Washington, D.C., with 247 electoral votes -- all New England save New Hampshire; New York and New Jersey; the mid-Atlantic states, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland; Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota; the three Pacific Coast states plus Hawaii -- have all gone Democratic in all of the last five presidential elections. And John McCain lost every one of them by double digits.
In this Slough of Despond, where is the hope?
Despite all of the above, John McCain, two weeks after the GOP convention, thanks to the surge in energy and enthusiasm Sarah Palin brought to the ticket, was running ahead of Obama.
It was the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the crash and the panic that ensued, which McCain mishandled, that lost him all the ground he never made up. Had the crash not occurred, the election might have been much closer than seven points, which in itself is no blowout.
Second, an astonishing 75 percent of voters thought the country was headed in the wrong direction. Obama won these voters 62 percent to 36 percent. But if the country is seen as headed in the wrong direction in 2012, it will be Obama's albatross.
Third, only 27 percent of voters approved of Bush's performance as of Election Day; 71 percent disapproved. Only Harry Truman had a lower rating, 22 percent, and Democrats were also wiped out in Washington in 1952.
Here is Todd's dramatic point: "With the single exception of Missouri, which barely went for McCain, Obama won every state where Bush's approval rating was below 35 percent in the exit polls, and he lost every state where Bush's approval was above 35 percent."
Obama rode Bush's coattails to victory. Had Bush been at 35 percent or 40 percent, McCain might have won. But, in 2012, Obama will not have Bush to kick around anymore.
On candidates' qualities, the situation looks even rosier for the GOP. In 2008, no less than 34 percent of the electorate said that the most important consideration in a candidate was that he be for "change."
Obama was the "change candidate." He patented the brand, and he carried this third of the nation 89 percent to 9 percent.
But in 2012, Obama cannot be the candidate of change. That title will belong to his challenger, the Republican nominee. Obama will be the incumbent, the candidate of continuity.
The second most critical consideration of voters in choosing a president was "values." No less than 30 percent of the electorate said this was their primary consideration in voting for McCain or Obama.
Among values voters, fully 30 percent of the electorate, McCain won 65 percent to 32 percent, or by two to one.
What these numbers demonstrate is that liberals and neocons instructing the GOP to dump the social, moral and cultural issues are counseling Republicide. When African-Americans, who gave McCain 4 percent of their votes in California, gave Proposition 8, prohibiting gay marriage, 70 percent of their votes, why would the GOP give up one of its trump cards -- not only in Middle America but among minorities?
A conservative who could have sharpened the social, moral and cultural differences might, from the exit polls, have done far better.
McCain's diffidence on life, affirmative action and gay rights, his embrace of amnesty and NAFTA, all help explain the enthusiasm gap. Twice as many voters were excited about the prospects of an Obama presidency as were about a McCain presidency.
Lastly, on Election Day, only 7 percent thought the U.S. economy was doing well, while 93 percent rated it as not so good, or poor. The GOP will not have to wear those concrete boots in 2012.
The tide is still running strong against the GOP. But there may be one or two more White Houses in the Grand Old Party yet.
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The Republican Party's unending tale of woe sounds like a friend's account of sitting through the New York Yankees' 22-4 loss to the Cleveland Indians at the new Yankee Stadium April 18.
In the 14-run second inning, three Indians hit home runs into the right-field seats, including a grand-slam. One ball hit a woman in the head because the fans had stopped watching the game. A nasty fight broke out in the stands. After the fourth inning (16-2), the subway trains taking Yankee faithful back to Manhattan were packed. Republicans know the feeling.
Rookie President Barack Obama has been pounding policy after policy through the Republicans' hapless defense. His approval is out of the park. He's teeing up his first Supreme Court appointment. Al Franken -- in a "say-it-ain't-so" moment if ever there was one -- is close to giving the Democrats a filibuster-proof Senate majority. And Republican voters are heading for the exits, with a puny 31% willing to tell a pollster they belong to the party.
During downturns in sports, three rules of thumb are: Don't panic, stay within your game, play to your strengths. This being politics, the Republicans naturally are violating all three.
Should Republicans return to Reaganism? Daniel Henninger explains. (May 7)
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush made headlines last weekend suggesting it's time for the party to get over its glory days: "I felt like there was a lot of nostalgia and the good old days in the [GOP] messaging. I mean, it's great, but it doesn't draw people toward your cause." Joyful Democratic bloggers put this more clearly in five tight words: GOP Needs to Forget Reagan.
Is this true?
The answer to that historic question is an apt subject this week as the GOP, looking for a path from the wilderness, says farewell at National Cathedral tomorrow to Jack Kemp, who remained a Reaganite to the end.
Jack Kemp, anyone who spent time around him will tell you, stayed on message. That message, like Reagan's, had a number of parts, but it is not possible to even guess how many times Jack Kemp summarized his explanations of that message in three words: "Work, save and invest." Republicans should think hard about building a governing philosophy on the foundation of those three words, ideas that most voters understand.
The full Kemp phrase, of course, was "incentives to work, save and invest." Those incentives were to be the result of a government willing to admit the social benefits of modesty -- in taxation and regulation of the economy. For now, the American public has elected an immodest government. This government says that circumstance forced it to spend $787 billion on stimulus. Its $3.5 trillion fiscal year 2010 budget, however, will by choice take spending to 25% of GDP next year.
Podcast
Listen to Daniel Henninger's Wonder Land column, now available in audio format.
Last weekend, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor began a GOP "listening tour." What's to hear? People want what they always want: a job that will let them build a life and family. What they want from Republicans is leadership toward that goal.
Today Mr. Obama releases the details of his $3.5 trillion budget, his path to the same goal. Rather than drown as usual in this accounting morass, Republicans should contrast the Obama-Pelosi budget with the Reagan-Kemp philosophy of how a striving nation works, saves and invests.
Republicans can start by taking the time to read the first Obama budget document, "A New Era of Responsibility." The word "investment" occurs over 140 times in its 142 pages. But this "investment" isn't private capital invested in private start-ups, what Mr. Kemp constantly called "entrepreneurial capitalism" and what most parents hope their children will join. Mr. Obama's document genuflects to "the market economy," then argues that it won't endure unless we "sacrifice" (through tax increases) to make "overdue investments" (which literally only means public spending) on four explicit goals: green energy, infrastructure, public health care, and education.
This calls to mind the way Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry guided that economy from 1949 to 2001. The Obama-Rattner strategy for GM and Chrysler -- a rescue if the companies agree to the government's desire to build more small "green" cars, presumably sold with a large tax credit -- is industrial policy. Why be postwar Japan?
It is not conceivable that a Reagan or Kemp would have directed the U.S. economy's legendary energies into building hybrid cars, windmills and bullet trains. It would not have occurred to them that America's next Silicon Valley -- Apple, Intel and Oracle -- could grow out of "investments" listed in the federal budget. This would not have occurred to either man because their politics were rooted in the 300-year-old, singularly American tradition of individuals freely deciding how to spend their productive hours and money inside a public system that mainly provides security and safety.
Mr. Obama won the election and deserves time to see what his vision adds to the nation's productive life. If while it awaits that, the Republican Party can't renew what Reagan and Kemp gave them, its listening tour could last a very long time.
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I recall a Dem pundit saying it was time to short Sarah Palin after her approval ratings soared after the Rep convention.
He was right.
I don't know if it is yet time to short Dems but I feel it is time to start ling term investment with Republicans. When we start hearing talk about how the party is finished it is probably time to invest.
Yet the reps have alot of work to do to get it right and to work to appeal to the changing demographics. They also need to find the right spokespeople. Out of the darkness someone will emerge. How about a Latino?
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Must steal this Milton Friedman wisdom from BBG post in the healthcare debate and apply it to all issues:
What should we do about it? Ideally, Friedman argued, we should reverse the mistake that started all the trouble... Yet Friedman was a realist. Vested interests, he recognized, would make such a radical reform impossible. Instead he believed we should seek incremental changes, asking of each proposal simply whether it would move [the issue in question] "in the right direction."
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Crafty: :To quote my mocking description of the demagogues philosophy during my most recent run for Congress (in 1992) "We had a vote. You're paying."
:-(
Marc, maybe 2010 is your time. There is a political pendulum that swung far too far in the wrong direction for all the wrong reasons and it seems to be swinging back - ready to knock down incumbents in its path. Run as a Republican, not for what they used to be but for what they ought to be. I will give my last dollar to the campaign. (Announce soon because that's about all I have.) Let's take back our country the old fashioned way.
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I am deeply honored by your offer of support. I think I would like very much to mount a serious campaign to win.
Unfortunately, I am reminded of a nearly two hour conversation I had (in 1985 IIRC) with then Congressman Dan Lungren of the district (the 42d?) now held by Dana Rohrabacker (sp?). Lungren had just helped his brother run in the neighboring district against long-time pork barrel Dem Congressman Glenn Anderson who headed the "Public Works Committee". In my run as a Libertarian in 1984 against Anderson I caught the eye of his top aide, retired Col. Mike Gravel. Col. Gravel set up the meeting with Lungren.
Long story short-- if I had $100,000 of my own money to kick off my campaign (and the ability to support myself while campaigning), Lungren would support my candidacy. This was in the context of a House of Representatives that at the time had an imcumbency rate of over 98% :-o and a district that was so outrageously gerrymandered that its silhouette was regularly featured in WSJ editorials (this when the editorial page of the WSJ was still a genuine intellectual heavyweight and not like it is now that Murdoch bought it out) on the subject of gerrymandering and the Congress's shockingly low rate of turnover.
In short, I would have to cough up $100,000 of my own money (remember, this was in 1985 dollars) in order to surely lose-- and support my single self. Now, I am a family man and I still don't have a spare $100k (or probably a spare million at this point).
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The money requirement is unfortunate but I didn't hear the door slam shut very hard :-). In some ways it seems that it could be done today without all the outlays but congressional districts are in particularly hard to reach because they don't line up nicely with media markets. Besides campaign cash, supporting your family during the run is of course the issue that doesn't go away.
OTOH: a) When if not now? Obama-Pelosi overstepped so badly that some new voices will be heard and noticed. b) There are ways to get some free traditional media coverage not to mention web-ads and youtube videos clever enough to draw attention. Draw enough attention nationally to get noticed locally. c) You are obviously able to put out amazing effort just observing the breadth of your readings and the times of posts. d) People yearn for non-traditional candidate and may be open to a back-to-the-founding-fathers, limited government / libertarian message - even in sunny southern Cal. d) The more that people or media or opponents question your credentials, the more publicity and interest you generate for your business. e) You can advance your political philosophy by reaching more people even without winning. f) Experience with previous runs, knowledge of the issues and the founding principles, studying law under Ruth Ginsburg and leaving the profession of law all make a compelling story. g) The image of a fighter has proven political appeal. h) You were more available to run or serve when you were single, but will look more mature and responsible when photographed with the beautiful bride and smiling children... i) The job pays $174k per year plus a pretty good health plan!
While knowing it would be nearly impossible financially, maybe still set out at least part way with some exploratory work. Just like with the pilot television programs, publish a few trial runs both video and written and approach a few people. My guess is that that are some people and groups out there with means might get behind the right messenger with the right message. Who knows?
(No reply required - I'll drop the subject until I hear the announcement)
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IMO, this is where Republicans fail miserably. Rather than learn the lessons of their thrashing, forging coalitions that have some demographic momentum, and speaking in a straightforward manner about the damage being done to this nation's founding principles many opt to embrace a status quo that seeks to drive stakes through the heart of the limited government ethos. These timid souls are not that upon which foundational change is precipitated.
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Doug:
Although you make good points, my realities simply do not permit.
BBG:
Exactly so.
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Various clips of people challenging their Congressman at town hall meetings
http://www.clubforgrowth.org/protests/texas_1/
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Miscellaneous political thought: Arkansas is a conservative state with a Dem Senator Blanch Lincoln up for reelection, in need of a prominent R. challenger.
Mike Huckabee doesn't know it right now but he will never be President. My sister lived in Arkansas when Huckabee was Governor and thinks he is wonderful (I don't, but that's another story).
If anyone knows Mike, give him a call and tell him his country needs him - in the Senate.
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I think Buchanan rejoices way too soon.
BO does not continue to crash in the polls like constantly stated by the right pundits. Yes he is down but stabilizing.
And I think that they underestimate there are many people who do want a "public option" (not me), and do want a government nanny.
And I think he underestimated the Dems ability to spin this right back.
And there is still no spoke people for the Republicans.
Palin has a lot of studying to do if he thinks she can attract more than her base.
Who can convince the skeptical that the job of government is to keep level and honest the playing field and then GET OUT OF THE WAY?
The cans are still singing to the choir IMHO.
****A GOP That Can Say No
by Patrick J. Buchanan
08/07/2009
Reports of the death of the Republican Party appear to have been premature.
Not since Sen. Bob Griffin derailed LBJ's scheme to replace Chief Justice Earl Warren with crony Abe Fortas, before Nixon got to the Oval Office, has the GOP defied this city and voted to reject a liberal judicial activist for the court.
In 1970, after revelations of scandal forced Fortas to resign, Rep. Gerald Ford moved to impeach "Wild Bill" Douglas on similar grounds. Then the fire went out -- for 40 years.
Meanwhile, Democrats trashed Republican nominees Clement Haynsworth, Harrold Carswell and Robert Bork, forced Reagan to withdraw Douglas Ginsburg, and made Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito run an Iroquois gauntlet.
Finally, yesterday, Senate Republicans, defying threats of an Hispanic backlash if they voted to reject the first Hispanic nominee, stood up and said no more EZ passes for any liberal judicial activist.
And this is only the most recent act of defiance by a party that, at long last, seems to have found its conservative compass and to be finding its way home.
Recuperation began when House Republicans stood beside Middle America and rejected the Bush-McCain-Kennedy-Clinton amnesty for illegal aliens, inflicting a humiliating defeat on the establishment.
The next sign of recovery was the decision of John McCain to damn the torpedoes and put Sarah Palin on the ticket. The smashing reception Palin received stunned mainstream media, vaulted McCain into the lead, and signaled the party what America wants it to become again.
The next act of defiance was the Republican rebellion against the $700 billion bank bailout of last September. Though House resistance was swiftly broken, Republican instincts were subsequently proven right.
Next came rock-solid Republican opposition to the mother of all pig-outs, the Pelosi stimulus package. Not one Republican voted for it in the House and only three went over the hill in the Senate. How many Blue Dogs are back home bragging about having supported that beauty?
Then, yesterday, mirabile dictu, the Republican minority in the Senate voted four-to-one to send Sonia back to Greenwich Village.
Wailed retiring Republican Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida, "We have allowed ideology to hold a preeminent role as opposed to qualifications. I find it very, very appalling."
But what is truly appalling is the senator's inability to understand what is going in his country.
For decades, a leftist ideology has permeated the Supreme Court. Protected by lifetime appointments, liberal justices have imposed upon this once-democratic republic a social, cultural and moral revolution no Congress could ever have survived imposing and no majority would ever vote for.
Prayer, Bible study, the Ten Commandments were purged from public schools of a nation whose coins bear the inscription "In God We Trust" and whose Constitution never mandated any kulturkampf on the birth faith of the West.
Pornographers were awarded First Amendment protections. Abortion, a crime in every state half a century ago, was declared a constitutional right. New shackles were put on police and prosecutors. The death penalty was outlawed for 20 years because Bill Brennan and friends did not like it. Forced busing for racial balance was imposed, generating white flight, destroying urban schools, and tearing communities apart.
For decades, federal judges and justices were on a rampage. For decades, we lived under a judicial dictatorship.
As for Sotomayor, she was a political activist whose academic and legal career is marked at every step by clamors for raced-based hiring, promotions and admissions. As a judge, she trashed the appeal of Frank Ricci and the New Haven firefighters who had been robbed of promotions they had earned in competitive exams solely because they were white.
She declared the New York state law denying voting rights to convicts a violation of the U.S. Civil Rights Act because it had a disparate impact on minorities, who are overrepresented in prison. Using that yardstick, Justice Sotomayor would have to vote to outlaw the death penalty.
Suddenly, in national politics, the momentum has shifted.
The Republican Party is stirring. Its poll numbers are rising, as support for Obama has fallen to 50 percent in the Quinnipiac Poll, support for his handling of the economy and deficit has fallen into the 40s, and support for his health insurance scheme has plunged to 39.
Of his big initiatives, the stimulus bill is looking like a loser, cap-and-trade may not survive the Senate, and national health insurance may have to be pared back -- or be killed by nervous Blue Dogs.
In both big races three months off, the Virginia and New Jersey governors' contests, Republicans are running 14 points ahead.
As they say in the press box, "Fans, we have a brand-new ball game."
And the reason is that some exasperated Republicans decided to declare independence of the White Houses of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama -- and "dance with the girl what brunt ya."
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Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."****
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The Bigger the Government, the Smaller the Citizen
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
ShareThis
Those of us who oppose a massive increase in the role the national government plays in health care ("ObamaCare") do so because we fear the immense and unsustainable national debt it would incur and because we are certain that medical care in America would deteriorate. But there is a bigger reason most of us oppose it: We believe that the bigger the government becomes, the smaller the individual citizen becomes.
Here are five reasons why bigger government makes less impressive people.
1. People who are able to take care of themselves and do so are generally better than people who are able to take care of themselves but rely on others. Of course, there are times when some people have absolutely no choice and must rely on others to take care of them. Life is tragic and some people, despite their best efforts and their commitment to being a responsible person, must have others support them.
Even if one believes, as the left does by definition, that the ideal society is one in which the state takes care of as many of our needs as possible, one must acknowledge that this has deleterious effects on many, if not most, citizens' moral character. The moment one acknowledges that the more one takes care of oneself, the more developed is his or her character, one must acknowledge that a bigger state diminishes its citizens' characters.
Presumably one might argue that there is no relationship between character development and taking responsibility for oneself. But to do so is to turn the concept of character, as it has been understood throughout Judeo-Christian and Western history, on its head. The essence of good character is to care of oneself and then take of others who cannot take care of themselves.
2. The more people come to rely on government, the more they develop a sense of entitlement -- an attitude characterized by the belief that one is owed (whatever the state provides and more). This is a second big government blow to character development because it has at least three terrible consequences:
First, the more one feels entitled, the less one believes he has to work for anything. Why work hard if I can look to the state to give much of what I need, and, increasingly, much of what I want? Second, the more one feels entitled, the less grateful one feels. This is obvious: The more one expects to be given, the less one is grateful for what one is given. Third, the more entitled and the less grateful one feels, the angrier one becomes. The opposite of gratitude is not only ingratitude, it is anger. People who do not get what they think they are entitled to become angry.
3. People develop disdain for work.
One of the effects of the welfare state on vast numbers of European citizens is disdain for work. This is in keeping with Marx's view of utopia as a time when people will work very little and devote their large amount of non-working time writing poetry and engaging in other such lofty pursuits. Work is not regarded by the left as ennobling. It is highly ennobling in the American value system, however.
4. People become preoccupied with vacation time.
Along with disdain for work, one witnesses among Western Europeans a preoccupation with not working. Vacation time has become a moral value among many Europeans. There have been riots in countries like France merely over working hours. In Sweden and elsewhere, more and more workers take more and more time off from work, knowing they will be paid anyway. In Germany and elsewhere, it is against the law to keep one's store open after a certain hour, lest that give that store owner an income advantage and thereby compel a competing store to stay open longer as well. And, of course, Americans are viewed as working far too hard.
5. People are rendered more selfish.
Not only does bigger government teach people not to take care of themselves, it teaches them not to take of others. Smaller government is the primary reason Americans give more charity and volunteer more time per capita than do Europeans living in welfare states. Why take care of your fellow citizen, or even your family, when the government will do it for you?
This preoccupation with self includes foreign policy: Why care about, let alone risk dying for, another country's liberty? That is the view of the world's left. That is why conservative governments are far more supportive of the war efforts in Iraq or Afghanistan than left-wing governments of the same country. The moment the socialists won in Spain, they withdrew all their forces from Iraq. The new center-left government in Japan has promised to stop helping the war effort in Afghanistan.
Of course, there are fine idealistic individuals on the left, and selfish individuals on the right. But as a rule, bigger government increases the number of angry, ungrateful, lazy, spoiled and self-centered individuals. Which is why some of us believe that increased nationalization of health care is worth shouting about. And even crying over.
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Alexander's Essay – October 1, 2009
Not Yours To Give
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents..." --James Madison
David CrockettMy paternal ancestors settled in East Tennessee about 10 years before it was admitted to the Union (1796). Not far from where they settled lived a fellow who was the region's most famous frontiersman.
David Crockett was his name.
He has been immortalized as a folk hero, known for his battles with the Red Stick Creek Indians under Andrew Jackson, and his last stand at the Alamo with fellow Patriots James Bowie from Kentucky and William Travis from South Carolina.
Crockett battled the Creek side-by-side with fellow Tennessean Sam Houston, but both men were friends to the Cherokee clans, which were composed of highly civilized native peoples living in the border regions between Tennessee and North Carolina.
At the end of his formal service as a soldier, he was elected Lieutenant Colonel of the Tennessee Militia.
Crockett is less known for the several terms he served in Congress between 1827 and 1835 during the presidency of his old commander, Andrew Jackson. Crockett's friend, Sam Houston, had been elected governor of Tennessee. (Houston, who would later become governor of Texas, is the only American in history to serve as governor of two states.)
Though he had little formal education, Crockett exuded a commanding presence and was feared, if not loathed, by his more refined congressional colleagues for his backwoods rhetoric.
In one of his more legendary orations, Crockett proclaimed: "Mr. Speaker ... the gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Everett] talks of summing up the merits of the question, but I'll sum up my own. In one word I'm a screamer, and have got the roughest racking horse, the prettiest sister, the surest rifle and the ugliest dog in the district. I'm a leetle the savagest crittur you ever did see. My father can whip any man in Kentucky, and I can lick my father. I can out-speak any man on this floor, and give him two hours start. I can run faster, dive deeper, stay longer under, and come out drier, than any chap this side the big Swamp. I can outlook a panther and outstare a flash of lightning, tote a steamboat on my back and play at rough and tumble with a lion, and an occasional kick from a zebra."
Crockett continued, "I can take the rag off -- frighten the old folks -- astonish the natives -- and beat the Dutch all to smash, make nothing of sleeping under a blanket of snow and don't mind being frozen more than a rotten apple. I can walk like an ox, run like a fox, swim like an eel, yell like an Indian, fight like a devil, spout like an earthquake, make love like a mad bull, and swallow a Mexican whole without choking if you butter his head and pin his ears back."
What I wouldn't give to hear a tad more of that on the floor of the House these days!
Though his rhetoric may have been unorthodox, Crockett was a man of principle.
His fervent opposition to Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830 (forcing removal of the peaceful Cherokee tribes along the infamous "Trail of Tears") cost Crockett his congressional seat, but he declared, "I bark at no man's bid. I will never come and go, and fetch and carry, at the whistle of the great man in the White House no matter who he is."
But it was Crockett's stalwart opposition to unconstitutional spending that is most worth noting given today's congressional penchant for such spending in the trillions.
According to the Register of Debates for the House of Representatives, 20th Congress, 1st Session on April 2, 1828, Crocket stood to challenge the constitutionality of one of the earliest welfare spending bills.
While the exact text of his speech was not recorded in full (as that was not the practice of the time), the spirit of his words was captured years later under the heading "Not yours to give" in the book "The Life of Colonel David Crockett" by Edward Ellis.
Ellis wrote, "One day in the House of Representatives a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in its support. The Speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose..."
According to Ellis, Crockett said, "Mr. Speaker; I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has not the power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I have never heard that the government was in arrears to him.
"Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week's pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks."
Though the measure was expected to receive unanimous support, after Crockett's objection, it did not pass.
Be sure you are right...Ellis recounts that Crocket was later asked by a friend why he had opposed the appropriation, and he replied: "Several years ago I was one evening standing on the steps of the Capitol with some other members of Congress, when our attention was attracted by a great light over in Georgetown. It was evidently a large fire. We jumped into a hack and drove over as fast as we could. In spite of all that could be done, many houses were burned and many families made houseless, and, besides, some of them had lost all but the clothes they had on. The weather was very cold, and when I saw so many women and children suffering, I felt that something ought to be done for them. The next morning a bill was introduced appropriating $20,000 for their relief. We put aside all other business and rushed it through as soon as it could be done."
Crocket explained, "The next summer, when it began to be time to think about election, I concluded I would take a scout around among the boys of my district. I had no opposition there, but, as the election was some time off, I did not know what might turn up. When riding one day in a part of my district in which I was more of a stranger than any other, I saw a man in a field plowing and coming toward the road. I gauged my gait so that we should meet as he came to the fence. As he came up, I spoke to the man. He replied politely, but, as I thought, rather coldly.
"I began: 'Well, friend, I am one of those unfortunate beings called candidates, and..."
His constituent interrupted, "Yes I know you; you are Colonel Crockett. I have seen you once before, and voted for you the last time you were elected. I suppose you are out electioneering now, but you had better not waste your time or mine, I shall not vote for you again."
Crockett replied, "This was a sockdolager ... I begged him to tell me what was the matter."
The farmer said, "Well, Colonel, it is hardly worth-while to waste time or words upon it. I do not see how it can be mended, but you gave a vote last winter which shows that either you have not capacity to understand the Constitution, or that you are wanting in the honesty and firmness to be guided by it. In either case you are not the man to represent me. But I beg your pardon for expressing it in that way. I did not intend to avail myself of the privilege of the constituent to speak plainly to a candidate for the purpose of insulting or wounding you. I intend by it only to say that your understanding of the Constitution is very different from mine; and I will say to you what, but for my rudeness, I should not have said, that I believe you to be honest. But an understanding of the Constitution different from mine I cannot overlook, because the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is the more dangerous the more honest he is."
Crocket responded, "Well, my friend; I may as well own up. You have got me there. But certainly nobody will complain that a great and rich country like ours should give the insignificant sum of $20,000 to relieve its suffering women and children, particularly with a full and overflowing Treasury, and I am sure, if you had been there, you would have done just as I did."
But the farmer fired back, "It is not the amount, Colonel, that I complain of; it is the principle. In the first place, the government ought to have in the Treasury no more than enough for its legitimate purposes. But that has nothing with the question. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man. ... So you see, Colonel, you have violated the Constitution in what I consider a vital point. It is a precedent fraught with danger to the country, for when Congress once begins to stretch its power beyond the limits of the Constitution, there is no limit to it, and no security for the people."
Thus, Crockett explained of his opposition to support the widow of that distinguished naval officer: "Now, sir, you know why I made that speech yesterday."
Today, there are but a handful of Senate and House incumbents who dare support and defend the Constitution as Crockett did. But there are candidates emerging around the nation who, with our support, will deliver orations as brazen and eloquent, and stand firm behind those words.
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Mark Alexander
Publisher, PatriotPost.US
(To submit reader comments
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We Should Vote for Anyone . . .
Who offers a coherent systematic agenda of reform. What do most want? Not necessarily a Republican or Democrat, or at this 11th hour to be mired in messy issues like gay marriage (I’m opposed to it), but rather fundamental matters of finance, investment, and defense. Here are ten random suggestions; dozens more could be adduced.
I will add one, McCain should have picked VDH for running mate and so should the next nominee. That would keep the issue and policy debates on track.
1) Fiscal sanity that leads to federal spending freezes and a balanced budget that in turn soon allows a paying down of the debt.
2) An oil/nuclear/coal/natural gas rapid development effort (again, to exploit especially new fields in Alaska, California, the Gulf, and North Dakota) to tide us over until alternate energy and new conservation lessen dependence. The alternative is to dream on about “green jobs” while we go broke trying to pay for scarcer imported oil, and lose our autonomy in the next price hike or Mideast crisis, even as we suffer amoral rants from oil-rich unhinged thugs like Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Gaddafi, and Putin.
3) A new national consensus on security to decide that when and if we go to war, to see the effort through, on the principle that whatever the mistakes we commit in battle are far outweighed by the cost of defeat.
4) A bad/worse choice gut check reform on entitlements, especially concerning those unsustainable like Social Security and Medicare, that calibrates payouts in terms of incoming capital—whether by raising age eligibilities or curbing automatic cost of living hikes.
5) Clear, demarcated, and enforced national borders, and an end to illegal immigration through greater enforcement, employer sanction, border fortification, and a change in national attitudes about unlawful entry.
6) Zero tolerance on government corruption. There is no reason why someone like a Charles Rangel is still the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.
7) Tort reform, including limits on personal injury settlements and loser-pays law suit reform.
8) A renewed commitment to national and regional missile defense, on the expectation that the next two decades are going to be terribly dangerous, as lunatic regimes may well threaten to hold an American city or ally as nuclear hostage.
9) Federal investment in hard infrastructure projects, not redistributive entitlements or Murtha-like earmarks, such as freeways, dams, water projects, electrical grids, ports, rail, etc., with regional needs adjudicated by national bipartisan boards.
10) A move to lower taxes, preferably by alternatives to the present income tax system, whether by a consumption tax or flat taxes, calibrated to commensurate spending cuts.
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Decline is a Choice, by Charles Krauthammer is a fairly long read. I recommend reading it slowly - in its entirety. Krauthammer does a nice job of showing how Obama's policies favor American decline for both economic and foreign policies.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/056lfnpr.asp
Decline Is a Choice
The New Liberalism and the end of American ascendancy.
by Charles Krauthammer
10/19/2009, Volume 015, Issue 05
(go to the link, article didn't fit in a post)
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Actuall I personally like and agree with a lot of what Levin and Beck say.
I used to agree with 90% of LImbaugh but I would guess it might be down to 65% now. I don't find him winning over any new converts.
O'Reilly I agree with most of the time. Hannity I am not a fan of.
I haven't read much about this guy but I notice MSNBC is happy to have him on criticizing many on the right for not being inclusive.
That tells me something about him. So I don't yet have a real opinion of him yet, but he now has my ear.
DAVID BROOKS
Published: October 2, 2009
Let us take a trip back into history. Not ancient history. Recent history. It is the winter of 2007. The presidential primaries are approaching. The talk jocks like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and the rest are over the moon about Fred Thompson. They’re weak at the knees at the thought of Mitt Romney. Meanwhile, they are hurling torrents of abuse at the unreliable deviationists: John McCain and Mike Huckabee.
Yet somehow, despite the fervor of the great microphone giants, the Thompson campaign flops like a fish. Despite the schoolgirl delight from the radio studios, the Romney campaign underperforms.
Meanwhile, Huckabee surges. Limbaugh attacks him, but social conservatives flock.
Along comes New Hampshire and McCain wins! Republican voters have not heeded their masters in the media. Before long, South Carolina looms as the crucial point of the race. The contest is effectively between Romney and McCain. The talk jocks are now in spittle-flecked furor. Day after day, whole programs are dedicated to hurling abuse at McCain and everybody ever associated with him. The jocks are threatening to unleash their angry millions.
Yet the imaginary armies do not materialize. McCain wins the South Carolina primary and goes on to win the nomination. The talk jocks can’t even deliver the conservative voters who show up at Republican primaries. They can’t even deliver South Carolina!
So what is the theme of our history lesson? It is a story of remarkable volume and utter weakness. It is the story of media mavens who claim to represent a hidden majority but who in fact represent a mere niche — even in the Republican Party. It is a story as old as “The Wizard of Oz,” of grand illusions and small men behind the curtain.
But, of course, we shouldn’t be surprised by this story. Over the past few years the talk jocks have demonstrated their real-world weakness time and again. Back in 2006, they threatened to build a new majority on anti-immigration fervor. Republicans like J.D. Hayworth and Randy Graf, both of Arizona, built their House election campaigns under that banner. But these two didn’t march to glory. Both lost their campaigns.
In 2008, after McCain had won his nomination, Limbaugh turned his attention to the Democratic race. He commanded his followers to vote in the Democratic primaries for Hillary Clinton because “we need Barack Obama bloodied up politically.” Todd Donovan of Western Washington University has looked at data from 38 states and could find no strong evidence that significant numbers of people actually did what Limbaugh commanded. Rush blared the trumpets, but few of his Dittoheads advanced.
Over the years, I have asked many politicians what happens when Limbaugh and his colleagues attack. The story is always the same. Hundreds of calls come in. The receptionists are miserable. But the numbers back home do not move. There is no effect on the favorability rating or the re-election prospects. In the media world, he is a giant. In the real world, he’s not.
But this is not merely a story of weakness. It is a story of resilience. For no matter how often their hollowness is exposed, the jocks still reweave the myth of their own power. They still ride the airwaves claiming to speak for millions. They still confuse listeners with voters. And they are aided in this endeavor by their enablers. They are enabled by cynical Democrats, who love to claim that Rush Limbaugh controls the G.O.P. They are enabled by lazy pundits who find it easier to argue with showmen than with people whose opinions are based on knowledge. They are enabled by the slightly educated snobs who believe that Glenn Beck really is the voice of Middle America.
So the myth returns. Just months after the election and the humiliation, everyone is again convinced that Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and the rest possess real power. And the saddest thing is that even Republican politicians come to believe it. They mistake media for reality. They pre-emptively surrender to armies that don’t exist.
They pay more attention to Rush’s imaginary millions than to the real voters down the street. The Republican Party is unpopular because it’s more interested in pleasing Rush’s ghosts than actual people. The party is leaderless right now because nobody has the guts to step outside the rigid parameters enforced by the radio jocks and create a new party identity. The party is losing because it has adopted a radio entertainer’s niche-building strategy, while abandoning the politician’s coalition-building strategy.
The rise of Beck, Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and the rest has correlated almost perfectly with the decline of the G.O.P. But it’s not because the talk jocks have real power. It’s because they have illusory power, because Republicans hear the media mythology and fall for it every time.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 3, 2009
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David Brooks is from the Obama wing of the Republican Party IMO. He is infatuated with Huckabee only as it relates to a split among conservatives. There isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Brooks would vote for Huck. Rush is a radio show based on one person's opinion. He doen't hold Get-out-the-Vote rallies. To the extent that his views resonate with others he attracts and holds listeners. That he doesn't change minds could be said about any of them including Obama whose electoral win didn't translate into support for his policies. I listened to Rush more than Brooks did and Rush DID NOT ENDORSE ANYONE for President in the primaries. Even Oprah took a side. Fred Thompson was largely ignored. No one trashed Huckabee. Plenty of conservatives exposed his policies and rhetoric that is/was not conservative. Isn't that what a conservative, opinion commentator should do? No one melted over Romney.
Social conservatives felt threatened by Giuliani but Huckabee knocked him out (and Thompson) in the first state. Then Republicans held their nose and nominated the most centrist and anti-Republican of all the choices hoping that would bring moderates, centrists and independents to the cause in a bad year. The opposite happened.
Huckabee is interesting to the left because his charisma and partial success help to widen the divide among conservatives.
Brooks: "So the myth returns. Just months after the election and the humiliation, everyone is again convinced that Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and the rest possess real power." - In this case "everyone" refers to the people he shares elevators with at the NY Times. He perhaps should take Rush's advice that the NY Times should send 'foreign correspondents' out to the heartland and find out what the people there really think.
On the right, people are fascinated with the so-called tea party movement that really is the groundswell without a leader.
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"On the right, people are fascinated with the so-called tea party movement that really is the groundswell without a leader."
It seems to me many participants in the tea party would find Levin and Beck appealing.
I really don't know how much they are simply preaching to the choir or are actually finding growing support among independents.
Couldn't they be leaders of the tea party?
They may actually be catching moderate/independent ears unlike IMO Limbaugh/Hannity.
Doug perhaps you, or another poster may have heard if they are catching on or simply popular with those who already subscribe to the right.
I am not a fan of Huckabee at all.
I wish Fox would come up with something better on the wknds rather than inundate us with his boring show.
Brooks is also placing all these names in the same vein but they are not the same.
O'Reilly is certainly far more moderate than Limbaugh.
I will have to read Brooks a little more to ascertain what his RX is or if he is just critical without an alternative.
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CCP: "It seems to me many participants in the tea party would find Levin and Beck appealing.
I really don't know how much they are simply preaching to the choir or are actually finding growing support among independents. Couldn't they be leaders of the tea party?"
Not speaking for the movement but if I get to choose a leader from among the right wing punditry I think I will go with Prof. Victor Davis Hanson.
Let the left wing media try to take him apart. Katie Couric can ask him what he reads, Charlie Gibson can see if he understands the Bush Doctrine, and maybe George Stephanopoulos can try to trip him up on the names of leaders around the world. :-)
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Caveat: this comes from Princeton NJ. Not the bastion of liberal academia but I am not sure how objective Gallup is either.
Remember 42% want the health reform as it now is proposed. To me this says at least 42% want huge government, huge handouts, and their perception of social justice which is to take from successful and hard working and give it out.
If one has ever been to a Democrat political rally one knows who I mean. So from the getgo these folks will never change their opinion (unless they win lotto). So how do Republicans appeal to independents? I would think if Limbaugh, Hannity and the rest of the crew could do it they would have by now.
****GOP Losses Span Nearly All Demographic GroupsOnly frequent churchgoers show no decline in support since 2001by Jeffrey M. Jones
PRINCETON, NJ -- The decline in Republican Party affiliation among Americans in recent years is well documented, but a Gallup analysis now shows that this movement away from the GOP has occurred among nearly every major demographic subgroup. Since the first year of George W. Bush's presidency in 2001, the Republican Party has maintained its support only among frequent churchgoers, with conservatives and senior citizens showing minimal decline.
So far in 2009, aggregated Gallup Poll data show the divide on leaned party identification is 53% Democratic and 39% Republican -- a marked change from 2001, when the parties were evenly matched, according to an average of all of that year's Gallup Polls. That represents a loss of five points for the Republicans and a gain of eight points for the Democrats.
The parties were also evenly matched on basic party identification in 2001 (which does not take into account the partisan leanings of independents), with 32% identifying themselves as Republicans, 33% as Democrats, and 34% as independents. The 2009 data show the GOP losing five points since then, with identification increasing three points among both Democrats and independents.
As was shown earlier, the GOP's loss in leaned support over this time is evident among nearly every subgroup. The losses are substantial among college graduates, which have shown a decline in GOP support of 10 points. (The losses are even greater -- 13 points -- among the subset of college graduates with postgraduate educations.) This may reflect in part Barack Obama's strong appeal to educated voters, a major component of his winning coalitions in both the Democratic primaries and the general election.
Aside from education, for which the parties were basically at even strength in 2001, the Republicans' losses tend to be greater among groups that were not strong GOP supporters to begin with. These include self-identified liberals and moderates, church non-attenders, and lower-income and young adults. Thus, a big factor in the GOP's overall decline is the Democratic Party's consolidating its support among normally Democratically leaning groups.
In turn, the GOP has generally avoided significant losses among only its most loyal groups, including frequent churchgoers and self-identified conservatives. The Republican Party maintains majority support among these two groups.
Two exceptions to this general pattern are senior citizens, and racial and ethnic minorities. Republican support among blacks and the larger group of nonwhites has not changed much in the past eight years, but these groups have shown only very limited support for the Republican Party. And while Obama's candidacy seemed to attract young voters to the Democratic Party during the 2008 presidential campaign, it did not have the same effect on older voters. As a result, the share of older voters aligned with the Republican Party has generally held steady.
Implications
The Republican Party clearly has lost a lot of support since 2001, the first year of George W. Bush's administration. Most of the loss in support actually occurred beginning in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina and Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court -- both of which created major public relations problems for the administration -- and amid declining support for the Iraq war. By the end of 2008, the party had its worst positioning against the Democrats in nearly two decades.
The GOP may have stemmed those losses for now, as it does not appear to have lost any more support since Obama took office. But as the analysis presented here shows, the losses the GOP has suffered have come among nearly all demographic groups apart from some of the most ardent Republican subgroups.
Survey Methods
Results are based on telephone interviews with 7,139 national adults, aged 18 and older, in Gallup polls conducted January-April 2009. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±1 percentage point.
Margins of error for subgroups will be larger.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).****
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Well, I for one no longer take the Republican Party seriously.
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Gallup, like a lot of polls, samples all Americans not likely voters to get their numbers. Still their Obama approval spread fell from about 60 points to 12.
Rasmussen measures Strongly approve versus strongly disapprove, groups more likely to show up. Strongly disapprove numbers stand at about 40% which would be a pretty good combined measure of the different types of conservatives out there.
The commentators don't need more than 40% market share to be very successful.
The Obama vote included people not fully sold on the agenda. The excitement of blacks which went 95% to Obama is not likely to be energized in the off-year of 2010. I wouldn't think the Jewish or Israel supporting groups would be energized either. Obama has had double digit losses of popularity in the 18-24 groups among others as hope and change starts to get specific. Gallup story is a little slow since the Republican losses were well known since 2006. The Obama slippage and Pelosi congress disaster polls stories would be more timely stories.
The Republican brand name hasn't meant anything specific or positive, especially to conservatives, for a very long time. (Crafty just expressed that very succinctly.) Bush cut tax rates twice and never articulated why. The so-called Bush Doctrine was dropped by the Bush administration at about the time of the Harry Whittington shooting.
Elected Republicans have had no real, observable tie to limited government for as long as any voter can remember, and no one is out front right now making a persuasive case for common sense conservatism.
This board has a wide enough range of conservative and libertarian thought to come up with the next Contract with America to steer next year's candidates in the right direction. Anyone care to take a stab at it?
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"Elected Republicans have had no real, observable tie to limited government for as long as any voter can remember, and no one is out front right now making a persuasive case for common sense conservatism."
Exactly why I don't take them seriously.
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Doug,
Personally I agree with you.
This statement though I am not sure:
Elected Republicans have had no real, observable tie to limited government for as long as any voter can remember, and no one is out front right now making a persuasive case for common sense conservatism.
What I am not sure about is how many Americans this really appeals to.
There is clearly a large number of Americans and those others who reside here who don't seem to have problem with bigger and bigger government. Obviously they think this will help them get through their miseries.
I would suggest that any Contract with America which on face value is an excellent idea, has to address this point:
That bigger government is going to hurt all of us. That Obama is trashing 200 years of what made this country the greatest in the world.
These people cannot ID with Limbaugh and Hannity and the rest.
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Crafty: "Exactly why I don't take them seriously."
- And the other way forward for conservatives is ....... ?
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CCP: "What I am not sure about is how many Americans this [limited government] really appeals to."
- Yes. That's a big problem, but so is credibility. You don't persuade people in the middle when they see you don't believe in what you say either. George H.W. Bush was kicked out mostly for breaking his pledge of no new taxes. He was replaced with someone who admitted he would raise taxes. Bill I-didn't-inhale/Gennifer-Flowers Clinton was perceived as more honest? I don't know, just know that the brand name didn't stand for anything at that point and people were open to change and compassion instead.
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http://www.zombietime.com/zomblog/?p=1134
I liked this one:
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/dontsharewealthshareworkethic.jpg)
Also: "Don't tell Obama what's after a trillion"
"Put the Constitution on your Teleprompter"
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The Foundation
"But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever." --John Adams
You can either support Democrat health care or the Constitution ... but not both
"At the heart of the American idea is the deep distrust and suspicion the founders of our nation had for government, distrust and suspicion not shared as much by today's Americans. Some of the founders' distrust is seen in our Constitution's language such as Congress shall not: abridge, infringe, deny, disparage, violate and deny. If the founders did not believe Congress would abuse our God-given rights, they would not have provided those protections. After all, one would not expect to find a Bill of Rights in Heaven; it would be an affront to God. Other founder distrust for government is found in the Constitution's separation of powers, checks and balances and the several anti-majoritarian provisions such as the Electoral College and the requirement that three-quarters of state legislatures ratify changes in the Constitution. The three branches of our federal government are no longer bound by the Constitution as the framers envisioned and what is worse is American ignorance and acceptance of such rogue behavior. Look at the current debate over government involvement in health, business bailouts and stimulus packages. The debate centers around questions as whether such involvement is a good idea or a bad idea and whether one program is more costly than another. Those questions are entirely irrelevant to what should be debated, namely: Is such government involvement in our lives permissible under the U.S. Constitution? That question is not part of the debate. The American people, along with our elected representatives, whether they're Republicans or Democrats, care less about what is and what is not permissible under our Constitution. They think Congress has the right to do anything upon which they can secure a majority vote, whether they have the constitutional or moral authority to do so or not." --George Mason economics professor Walter E. Williams
Liberty
"Can President Barack Obama and Congress enact legislation that orders Americans to buy broccoli? If so, where did they get that authority? What provision in the Constitution empowers the federal government to order an individual to buy a product he does not want? This is not a question about nutrition. It is not a question about whether broccoli is good for you or about the relative merits of broccoli versus other foods. It is a question about the constitutional limits on the power of the federal government. It is a question about freedom. Can President Obama and Congress enact legislation that orders Americans to buy health insurance? They might as well order Americans to buy broccoli. They have no legitimate authority to do either. Yet neither Obama nor the current leadership in Congress seems to care about the constitutional limits on their power. They are now attempting to exert authority over the lives of Americans in a way no president and Congress has done before. ... All versions of the health care bill under consideration in Congress would order Americans to buy health insurance. If any of these bills is enacted, the first thing it would accomplish is the amputation of a vital part of our Constitution, and the death of another measure of our liberty." --columnist Terence Jeffrey
Faith & Family
"Hard work and self-denial were part of our national character -- actually our Christian heritage. In recent years, the 'sound economic values' have eroded. ... But the problem, you see, is that values and the character they produce aren't divisible. People will not exercise restraint in their economic dealings while casting off restraints in their sexual and social ones. ... Or turn on the television. There, people are indulging every sexual desire in the midst of a consumerist paradise -- big homes, expensive cars and fashionable clothes. You can do anything you want. The 'Calvinist restraint' ... didn't preach chastity or thrift; rather it preached chastity and thrift. That's because it saw both as proceeding from a common source: the Christian understanding of man's nature and the purpose for which God created him. If you try to have the one without the other, you will get neither. Far from being obsolete, the old culture war is more relevant than ever. Restoring moral values across the board is essential to rescue a sagging economy as well as renew our nation's spirit." --author Chuck Colson
Culture
"Quick: when I say 'Matthew Shepard,' what do you think? A man killed because he was gay? Or just some poor sap in the wrong place at the wrong time? More on that in a minute. Hate crime legislation aimed at making it a federal crime to assault someone for being a homosexual passed the House last week, and could be on its way to becoming law. It sounds great, doesn't it? Who wouldn't be against a law that would prosecute someone for targeting another person based on bigotry and bias? What could be wrong with this scenario? Plenty. I'm all for prosecuting criminals for their acts, especially violent criminals. I'm pro-death penalty, if truth be told. I figure that if you deliberately take someone else's life, you should pay by forfeiting yours. Not very PC of me, but there you have it. However, it bothers me that individuals may soon be prosecuted for not just the crime, but the 'behind the scenes' thoughts that may have contributed to that crime. ... When we begin to prosecute for the thoughts behind the crime, we open a very wiggly can of worms that can't be shut again. ... Thanks to the pop culture myth that helped perpetrate the false reason for Matthew Shepard's senseless death, we could now all be facing regulations that resemble '1984' more than they do 'Land of the Free.' Is this really the direction in which we want to head?" --columnist Pam Meister
The Gipper
"Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than ensuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society. Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business ... frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. Our party must be based on the kind of leadership that grows and takes its strength from the people. Any organization is in actuality only the lengthened shadow of its members. A political party is a mechanical structure created to further a cause. The cause, not the mechanism, brings and holds the members together. And our cause must be to rediscover, reassert and reapply America's spiritual heritage to our national affairs. Then with God's help we shall indeed be as a city upon a hill with the eyes of all people upon us." --Ronald Reagan
Opinion in Brief
"President Obama keeps roaring out deadlines like a lion -- only later to meow like a little kitty. Remember, for example, how he bellowed to cheering partisan crowds that he would close down the detainment facility at Guantanamo within a year? The clock ticks -- and Guantanamo isn't close to being shut down. It once was easy for candidate Obama to deplore George W. Bush's supposed gulag. Now it proves harder to decide between the bad choice of detaining non-uniformed terrorist combatants and the worse ones of letting them go, giving them civilian trials or deporting them to unwilling hosts. Going back further to September 2007, candidate Obama postured about Iraq that he wanted 'to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year -- now!' That 'now!' sure sounded macho. On Iraq, candidate Obama also railed that 'the American people have had enough of the shifting spin. We've had enough of extended deadlines for benchmarks that go unmet.' Talk about 'unmet' deadlines and 'spin'-- here we are in October 2009, and there are still 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The reason why Obama fudged on his promised deadline is that the surge in 2007 worked. American deaths plummeted. The theater is quiet. Iraqi democracy is still there after six years. Obama cannot quite admit these facts, but on the other hand he does not want to be responsible for undermining them. ... The list of what a melodramatic Obama threatens or promises to do and what he actually does is endless." --Hoover Institution historian Victor Davis Hanson
For the Record
"- n Thursday, the administration tried to make [the MSM] complicit in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department made available Ken Feinberg, the executive pay czar, for interviews with the White House 'pool' news organizations -- except Fox. The other networks admirably refused, saying they would not interview Feinberg unless Fox was permitted to as well. The administration backed down. This was an important defeat because there's a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they're engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. There's nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms. [James] Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand 'the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties.' They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other -- and an otherwise imperious government. Factions should compete, but they should also recognize the legitimacy of other factions and, indeed, their necessity for a vigorous self-regulating democracy. Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimize and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian." --columnist Charles Krauthammer
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A thought sparked by the B.O. & friends thread: It is not enough to point out when these people, President Obama and his inner circle, are Marxists, support terror against our country, believe our country deserved attacks of 9/11, were never proud of our country, think Americans are cowards, respected and admired Chairman Mao, want to disarm America, want to curtail free speech, stop out investment incentives, nationalize industries, subsidize the press, bankrupt our energy sources, etc etc etc. Unfortunately, you/we must always also take the time on each point to say or write the part we think goes without saying --- why that is a bad idea!
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Freki, all, We should add this wonderful list of truths (from Freki) to 'the way forward' thread as well.
What clarity!
The 10 Cannots
1. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
2. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong
3. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.
4. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
5. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and independence.
6. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
7. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
8. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
9. You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
10 You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they will not do for themselves.
(1942 by William J. H. Boetcker)
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Alexander's Essay – October 29, 2009
'Nobody Questions That'?
"In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." --Thomas Jefferson
Never before has there been more evidence of outright contempt for our Constitution than under the current liberal hegemony presiding over the executive and legislative branches of our federal government.
The protagonist of this Leftist regime is, of course, Barack Hussein Obama, who promised his constituents, "This is our moment, this is our time to turn the page on the policies of the past, to offer a new direction. We are fundamentally transforming the United States of America. And generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was our time" [emphasis added].
Obama proclaimed, "Everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act -- to lay a new foundation for growth."
In his inaugural speech, Obama declared, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works," signaling his rejection of the old paradigm, which pitted the conservative position, "government is the problem," against the liberal position, "government is the solution."
Thus, by virtue of his election to the presidency nearly one year ago, he believes he has the authority to establish a new paradigm to "fundamentally transform" our nation by creating "a new foundation."
However, if we are a nation of laws with a national government limited by our Constitution, and, indeed, we are, then Obama has no legal authority to "transform" our government.
Those who laid our constitutional foundation were very clear about its limits on government.
Our Constitution's principle author, James Madison, wrote, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined [and] will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce."
Concerning the legislature's authority, Thomas Jefferson asserted: "[G]iving [Congress] a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole [Constitution] to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please. Certainly, no such universal power was meant to be given them. [The Constitution] was intended to lace them up straightly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect."
Madison added, "If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions."
But too many among us have become so fixated on the superficial parameters of today's political debates rather than demand an answer to that most essential question: What is the constitutional authority for Obama's proposals now being debated in Congress?
For example, amid all the acrimony over Obama's transformation of health care, the debate should not be centered on which plan is better, but whether constitutional authority exists for any of the plans under consideration.
Unfortunately, such inquiry is scarce, and hardly noted.
Last week, however, three leading Democrats in Congress were asked during news conferences to cite the constitutional authority for their healthcare proposals. To a one, they responded with answers that betrayed unmitigated arrogance and a disdain for our Constitution second to none in our nation's noble history.
"Are you serious? Are you serious?" replied House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when asked specifically about the constitutional authority for Obama's health care proposal. Pelosi's spokesman later clarified, "You can put this on the record: That is not a serious question. That is not a serious question." (Apparently, there was an echo in the chamber.)
Democrat House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer attempted to answer the question by demonstrating his illimitable ignorance on the subject: "Well, in promoting the general welfare the Constitution obviously gives broad authority to Congress to effect [a mandate that individuals must buy health insurance]. The end that we're trying to effect is to make health care affordable, so I think clearly this is within our constitutional responsibility."
Perhaps Hoyer should take a basic civics course on the "General Welfare" clause in Article 1, Section 8, as written by James Madison. On the limitations of the Constitution, Madison wrote: "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents..."
Finally, Democrat Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee (where Rule of Law once prevailed), responded to the question of constitutional authority by insisting, "We have plenty of authority. ... I mean, there's no question there's authority. Nobody questions that. Where do we have the authority to set speed limits on an interstate highway? The federal government does that on federal highways." (No, actually, the states set speed limits, and only misinterpretation of the Commerce Clause by judicial activists could be construed to give the federal government such authority.)
As for Obama, his publicist, Robert Gibbs, claimed, "I won't be confused as a constitutional scholar, but I don't believe there's a lot of -- I don't believe there's a lot of case law that would demonstrate the veracity of [questions about constitutional authority]."
For sure, nobody will confuse Gibbs with a scholar of any stripe. And, we would remind Gibbs that when the Clintonistas attempted to nationalize healthcare (18 percent of the U.S. economy) back in 1994, the bi-partisan Congressional Budget Office issued this piece of analysis: "The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States. An individual mandate ... would impose a duty on individuals as members of society [and] require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government."
Remarkably, neither Obama's bête noire, Fox News, nor any nationally syndicated conservative column, devoted air time or print to these egregiously errant responses.
To be sure, there are a few Republicans who have questioned Obama's authority. Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch proposed an amendment requiring swift judicial review of the health care folly if it is ultimately passed into law. Not surprisingly, Democrat Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, refused to take up Hatch's amendment, insisting that it was a matter for the Judiciary Committee -- the very committee chaired by the aforementioned Senator Patrick "We have plenty of authority" Leahy.
In order to divine the real source the Left claims as its authority for "fundamentally transforming the United States of America," consider this congressional inquiry from last March.
Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann dared ask Obama's tax cheat Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, "What provision in the Constitution could you point to gives authority for the actions that have been taken by the Treasury since March of '08?"
Geithner responded, "Oh, well, the -- the Congress legislated in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act a range of very important new authorities."
Bachmann tried again: "Sir, in the Constitution. What in the Constitution could you point to gives authority to the Treasury for the extraordinary actions that have been taken?"
Geithner's response: "Every action that the Treasury and the Fed and the FDIC is -- is -- has been using authority granted by this body -- by this body, the Congress."
The "authority granted by this body, the Congress."
In every successive Congress since 1995, conservative Arizona Republican Rep. John Shadegg has sponsored the Enumerated Powers Act (HR 1359), which requires that "Each Act of Congress shall contain a concise and definite statement of the constitutional authority relied upon for the enactment of each portion of that Act."
The measure continues to fail, however, because of a dirty little secret: There is no legitimate constitutional authority for almost 70 percent of current federal government programs, and, thus, no authority for the collection of taxes to fund such activities.
Though Obama swore to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," and every member of Congress has pledged "to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic," and "bear true faith and allegiance to the same," Democrats, and too many Republicans, have forsaken their sacred oaths.
In doing so, they have inflicted grievous injury upon our Constitution, thereby placing our Essential Liberty in eminent peril.
In May 1775, at the onset of the hostilities that gave rise to our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the Second Continental Congress adopted a resolution calling on the states to prepare for rebellion. In its preamble, John Adams advised his countrymen to sever all oaths of allegiance to the Crown.
Since that time, generations of American Patriots have honored their oaths, shed their blood, given their lives -- but not to the crown of any man or a partisan sect. Instead, these sacrifices have been made to support and defend our Constitution and the Rule of Law it established.
Put simply, there is no authority for a "constitutional rewrite" by Barack Hussein Obama, nor Nancy Pelosi, nor Steny Hoyer, nor any like-minded revisionists. Such contempt for our Constitution, such willful violation of their sacred oaths is a disgrace to the selfless dignity of generations of Patriots before them.
At present, we have a gang of outlaws at the helms of the executive and legislative branches. Under such despots, we are being unlawfully taxed without lawful representation. Sound familiar?
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Mark Alexander
Publisher, PatriotPost.US
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From the previous post: ""If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one..." - James Madison
Perhaps the upcoming referendum on the direction of congress should be entitled:
Pelosi-Reid vs. Madison
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Alexander's Essay – October 29, 2009 is very good. Hat tip to Crafty!
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One of the other boards I frequent has an "Oathkeepers project" going I understand it made some appearances on MSM recently. It is just reminding Law and Military about their oaths to protect and defend the constitution. It may provide some wiggle room if and when the break with these jokers finally comes? :roll:
I just hope that not too much damage is done by this apparent "print it, see if we can get away with it" policy. He was elected president, not king.
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The new economic statistics put growth at a healthy 3.5% for the third quarter. We should be dancing in the streets. No one is, because no one has any faith in these numbers. Waves of money are sloshing through the system, creating a false rising tide that lifts all boats for the moment. The tide will recede. The boats aren't rising, they're bobbing, and will settle. No one believes the bad time is over. No one thinks we're entering a new age of abundance. No one thinks it will ever be the same as before 2008. Economists, statisticians, forecasters and market specialists will argue about what the new numbers mean, but no one believes them, either. Among the things swept away in 2008 was public confidence in the experts. The experts missed the crash. They'll miss the meaning of this moment, too.
The biggest threat to America right now is not government spending, huge deficits, foreign ownership of our debt, world terrorism, two wars, potential epidemics or nuts with nukes. The biggest long-term threat is that people are becoming and have become disheartened, that this condition is reaching critical mass, and that it afflicts most broadly and deeply those members of the American leadership class who are not in Washington, most especially those in business.
It is a story in two parts. The first: "They do not think they can make it better."
I talked this week with a guy from Big Pharma, which we used to call "the drug companies" until we decided that didn't sound menacing enough. He is middle-aged, works in a significant position, and our conversation turned to the last great recession, in the late mid- to late 1970s and early '80s. We talked about how, in terms of numbers, that recession was in some ways worse than the one we're experiencing now. Interest rates were over 20%, and inflation and unemployment hit double digits. America was in what might be called a functional depression, yet there was still a prevalent feeling of hope. Here's why. Everyone thought they could figure a way through. We knew we could find a path through the mess. In 1982 there were people saying, "If only we get rid of this guy Reagan, we can make it better!" Others said, "If we follow Reagan, he'll squeeze out inflation and lower taxes and we'll be America again, we'll be acting like Americans again." Everyone had a path through.
Now they don't. The most sophisticated Americans, experienced in how the country works on the ground, can't figure a way out. Have you heard, "If only we follow Obama and the Democrats, it will all get better"? Or, "If only we follow the Republicans, they'll make it all work again"? I bet you haven't, or not much.
This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I'm not sure we're fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.
Part of the reason is that the problems—debt, spending, war—seem too big. But a larger part is that our federal government, from the White House through Congress, and so many state and local governments, seems to be demonstrating every day that they cannot make things better. They are not offering a new path, they are only offering old paths—spend more, regulate more, tax more in an attempt to make us more healthy locally and nationally. And in the long term everyone—well, not those in government, but most everyone else—seems to know that won't work. It's not a way out. It's not a path through.
And so the disheartenedness of the leadership class, of those in business, of those who have something. This week the New York Post carried a report that 1.5 million people had left high-tax New York state between 2000 and 2008, more than a million of them from even higher-tax New York City. They took their tax dollars with them—in 2006 alone more than $4 billion.
You know what New York, both state and city, will do to make up for the lost money. They'll raise taxes.
I talked with an executive this week with what we still call "the insurance companies" and will no doubt soon be calling Big Insura. (Take it away, Democratic National Committee.) He was thoughtful, reflective about the big picture. He talked about all the new proposed regulations on the industry. Rep. Barney Frank had just said on some cable show that the Democrats of the White House and Congress "are trying on every front to increase the role of government in the regulatory area." The executive said of Washington: "They don't understand that people can just stop, get out. I have friends and colleagues who've said to me 'I'm done.' " He spoke of his own increasing tax burden and said, "They don't understand that if they start to tax me so that I'm paying 60%, 55%, I'll stop."
He felt government doesn't understand that business in America is run by people, by human beings. Mr. Frank must believe America is populated by high-achieving robots who will obey whatever command he and his friends issue. But of course they're human, and they can become disheartened. They can pack it in, go elsewhere, quit what used to be called the rat race and might as well be called that again since the government seems to think they're all rats. (That would be you, Chamber of Commerce.)
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And here is the second part of the story. While Americans feel increasingly disheartened, their leaders evince a mindless . . . one almost calls it optimism, but it is not that.
It is a curious thing that those who feel most mistily affectionate toward America, and most protective toward it, are the most aware of its vulnerabilities, the most aware that it can be harmed. They don't see it as all-powerful, impregnable, unharmable. The loving have a sense of its limits.
More Peggy Noonan
Read Peggy Noonan's previous columns
click here to order her new book, Patriotic Grace
.When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren't they worried about the impact of what they're doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?
I think I know part of the answer. It is that they've never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don't have the habit of worry. They talk about their "concerns"—they're big on that word. But they're not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa's lap.
They don't feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—"strongest nation in the world," "indispensable nation," "unipolar power," "highest standard of living"—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.
We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists—they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.
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Noonan expresses the feelings I expressed in my last post under the health care thread.
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The new GOP model
By RICH LOWRY
Last Updated: 4:39 AM, October 31, 2009
Posted: 12:25 AM, October 31, 2009
The Republican Party has no national leaders. Its stand ing with voters is at an all- time low. It battens itself on an ideological purity that turns off the center and can't appeal to an increasingly suburban and diverse electorate. If it is not fated to go the way of the Federalists or the Whigs, it is certainly a spent force.
This is the rote obituary for the GOP that the left can't resist. It is all the more alluring for its elements of truth: A party that holds neither the presidency, the House nor the Senate won't be stacked with national leaders. In polls, the GOP is still suffering from its Bush-DeLay hangover.
Yet, in Virginia this year, this death notice has been shown to be both dated and premature. It foolishly extrapolates from political conditions a year ago that have already drastically changed and assumes that Republican candidates will never adjust to new circumstances. Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell has run a model campaign for the Obama era, energizing the right and winning the center in a tour de force directly on President Barack Obama's doorstep.
The battle over how to interpret the imminent defeat of the Democrat in the race, Creigh Deeds, has already begun. Democrats want to shrug it off as not surprising in essentially a red state, home to the former capital of the Confederacy.
Except Virginia has been trending blue. Obama won it 53-47. Since 1997, The Washington Post notes, a million more people live in the state, most of them minorities and many in the affluent northern suburbs. Democrats hold both US Senate seats; they won a majority in the state Senate in 2007; and they picked up three US House seats in 2008. Virginia is a swing state, even if Democrats don't like the way it's now swinging.
McDonnell is benefiting from some factors outside his control. Since 1977, Virginia has always elected governors from the opposite party as the president. And the Deeds campaign has often matched strategic purposelessness to tactical incompetence. McDonnell, however, has mostly made his own good fortune.
The White House contends Deeds fumbled badly by not basking enough in the reflected brilliance of Barack Obama. It fails to understand the reason he didn't. The cataract of spending at the federal level has turned off independents and created a political opening for limited-government conservatism that hasn't existed since Bill Clinton won the government shutdown fights of the mid-'90s. McDonnell has effectively hit Deeds on Obama-Pelosi issues that are unpopular in Virginia -- deficit spending, card check, cap-and-trade and the ban on offshore drilling.
While tough on Deeds, McDonnell has stayed upbeat, both substantively and in tone. He has unleashed a flurry of policy proposals. Focusing on the pocketbook issues of jobs, transportation and education, his ideas emphasize regulatory reform, competition and private-public partnerships. They are conservative but pragmatic, meant to appeal to nonideological voters. Polls have McDonnell beating Deeds on taxes, economic development, education, transportation and even "issues of special concern to women."
A few weeks ago, that last datum would have been a shocker. When a 20-year old graduate thesis McDonnell had written at Pat Robertson's university came to light, Deeds fastened for weeks on its inflammatory language. He managed only to convince voters he was running an issueless, negative campaign. Deeds narrowly leads on the issue of abortion. But guess what? People care about jobs more.
McDonnell's comportment has perfectly complemented his campaign -- relentlessly cheerful and moderate in demeanor. He's been gracious about Obama personally, even while excoriating him on issues. When a GOP candidate for the House of Delegates unleashed lunatic comments about resorting to "the bullet box" if Obama can't be stopped at the ballot box, McDonnell instantly rebuked her.
After Obama's sweep last year, liberals have talked as if Republicans will never win elections again. They will, and Bob McDonnell shows how.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_new_gop_model_vFAi2C4GhhScc531sd7TxK
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Republican is a brand name that is supposed to be larger than its conservative base to include moderates that share some of the philosophy (and oppose Democrats). There is always a struggle between factions in the party of whether to choose candidates with core conservative principles or to choose more centrist, compromising candidates for electability by appealing to moderates, independents and conservative Democrats. In spite of media hype and conventional wisdom to the contrary, the centrists generally dominate, at least once they are elected, because they know the more conservative base has nowhere else to turn while moderates can cross over any time they choose.
Another strategy would be for the candidate to have clear principles, limited government etc, and set a contrast with the opponent, then try to persuade voters in the middle why this philosophy is a better course. There is always a risk that the opponent will move to the middle, but in this environment, with Pelosi-Obama and the Czars, that doesn't look like the case.
Individual Democrat incumbents and candidates for congress and senate make their own cases for independence and moderation especially in conservative districts and red states but their defining vote is really the first one when they decide on the leadership and who will control the committees.
Strange that with all the negative polling of the Pelosi congress, the generic ballot of the two parties is pretty even. Real Clear Politics average of polls gives Dems about a 5 point edge consistently, but they are averaging polls that count anyone who answers the phone with other polls that attempt to measure likely or registered voters and get very different results.
Adding confusion to it all is that no one really knows what the tarnished brand name Republican means today. In 2006 and 2008 it probably meant something akin to how well do you like the scorned President George W. Bush who was unable to communicate and all over the map with his stands on different issues from taxes, spending, deficits, entitlements, immigration, war, security, etc. and a congress that increased spending faster than anyone imagined possible.
What it most interesting today is that the 'conservative' brand name has never been better. Take a look at this Gallup poll:
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/politicalideology.jpg)
There was only a slight surge in liberalism during the elections of the Pelosi congress and the Obama adminstration and a great surge in conservatism now. Latest numbers have Conservatives at 40%, Moderates at 36% and Liberals at 20%.
Rasmussen has likely voters choosing more trust in Republicans over Democrats on ALL of the top ten issues in the country (story follows).
It should NOT be a long shot or impossible task to paint this congress and this administration as too liberal/socialist for the nation and to form a winning coalition with some kind of consensus on some other way of governing this great country. - Doug
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http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/trust_on_issues
Trust on Issues
Voters Trust Republicans More On 10 Top Issues
For the first time in recent years, voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on all 10 key electoral issues regularly tracked by Rasmussen Reports. The GOP holds double-digit advantages on five of them.
Republicans have nearly doubled their lead over Democrats on economic issues to 49% to 35%, after leading by eight points in September.
The GOP also holds a 54% to 31% advantage on national security issues and a 50% to 31% lead on the handling of the war in Iraq.
But voters are less sure which party they trust more to handle government ethics and corruption, an issue that passed the economy in voter importance last month. Thirty-three percent (33%) trust Republicans more while 29% have more confidence in Democrats. Another 38% are undecided. Last month, the parties were virtually tied on the issue.
(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.
A recent Rasmussen Reports video report finds that voters are more disappointed lately with Obama’s performance in dealing with corruption in Washington.
Among unaffiliated voters who see ethics as the most important issue, 26% trust the GOP more while 23% trust Democrats more. Most (51%) are not sure which party they trust.
On the highly contentious issue of health care, voters now give the edge to Republicans 46% to 40%. The parties tied on the issue last month, after Republicans took the lead on it for the first time in August.
Separate polling released today shows 49% of voters nationwide say that passing no health care reform bill this year would be better than passing the plan currently working its way through Congress. Most voters (54%) oppose the health care reform plan proposed by the president and congressional Democrats, but 42% are in favor of it.
On taxes, Republicans are now ahead of Democrats 50% to 35%, nearly doubling their September lead on the issue. Prior to July, the percentage of voters who trusted the GOP more on taxes never reached 50%. It has done so three times since then.
Thirty-eight percent (38%) of voters say cutting the federal budget deficit in half in the next four years should be the Obama administration's top priority, while 23% say health care reform is most important.
Republicans are down to a seven-point lead on immigration after enjoying a 13-point advantage last month. Recent polling shows that 56% think the policies of the federal government encourage people to enter the United States illegally.
Voters trust Republicans more on Social Security by a 45% to 37% margin, after the GOP trailed Democrats by two points on the issue in the last survey.
The president is proposing a one-time $250 payment to seniors who for the first time in years won't be getting a cost of living increase in their Social Security checks because inflation's down. While half of voters support this idea, they are more skeptical when told how much it will cost.
Republicans lead on the issue of education 43% to 38%. Last month Democrats had a five-point lead.
Voters also trust Republicans more on the handling of abortion 47% to 35%.
The GOP advantage over Democrats increased from two points to five in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot. Forty-two percent (42%) would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate while 37% would opt for his or her Democratic opponent.
But 73% of GOP voters nationwide think Republicans in Congress have lost touch with their voting base.
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Maybe if the Republicans moved to a more Libertarian stance, they would gain some more traction.
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Rarick wrote: "Maybe if the Republicans moved to a more Libertarian stance, they would gain some more traction."
Not just libertarian as if that were just one possible direction to turn, but to truly make the honest reading and adherence to founding principles and constitutional limits on government that these elected officials are already sworn to uphold; that is what I would like to see. Unfortunately, constitutional and libertarian labels remind people of candidates that tend to win about a half percent of the vote. People see them as uncompromising on principles (a compliment in my book) but unworkable in today's society. In other words, if you were sworn to these principles you could do nothing but dismantle most of the 'government' as we know it. People envision disruption and riots in the streets. The dependency we have created over the last half century or so is very real and not easy to repeal.
Another concept comes from the NY Pravda article just posted about Palin is the term 'common sense conservatism'. One commentator during the last campaign looked at Palin's record as Governor and called it 'pragmatic conservatism' with the idea that supporters who expect her to govern with uncompromising conservatism will be sadly disappointed.
The key poiint in my mind is for the candidate or the leader to always know we need to turn, even with very small steps, in the right direction, toward limited government, founding principles, individual liberties and responsibilities and private sector solutions, not to pretend that we can dismantle huge programs overnight.
Another active non-candidate of this type is Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty who has been visiting Iowa, New Hampshire etc. He is NOT a sweep you off your feet, charismatic candidate, but he is a level-headed, common sense conservative that opponents easily underestimate. After plenty of ground testing efforts he hasn't broken out of the lower single digit support and probably won't until the bigger name, front runners start beating each other up. What he has done is run, win and govern in a medium sized, blue to purple state - 2 terms.
In terms of his home state polling, half of Minnesotans predict that he will win the nomination. Amazing number considering most Americans haven't even heard of him, also a higher percentage than actially plan to vote for him if he is the nominee.
Picking Pawlenty wouldn't guarantee you a win in MN; his wins were against second rate candidates, not the leader of the free world with the support of the Chicago machine. Picking Palin doesn't deliver you Alaska because that is already a red state. Picking Mitt doesn't bring you Massachesetts (or Utah) nor does picking Huck bring you Arkansas, those are not swing states. So this will all come down to political skill, positioning and presentation that can be effective across the heartland and in all the usual key states.
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Given Schwarzaneggers recent moves, I was wondering what he was up to, President is out because he isn't a citizen- right, but could he get rep. or senate? I would not be surprised if the Kennedy clan finds a way to lever him in there.
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Why on earth would we be discussing that pussified weenie in the context of The Way Forward for the American Creed?!?
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The Foundation
"They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare.... [G]iving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please." --Thomas Jefferson
PelosiCare is not about compassion -- it's about controlFor the Record
"Last Saturday [Nov. 7], at 11 o'clock in the evening, the House of Representatives voted by a five vote margin to have the federal government manage the health care of every American at a cost of $1 trillion dollars over the next ten years. For the first time in American history, if this bill becomes law, the Feds will force you to buy insurance you might not want, or may not need, or cannot afford. If you don't purchase what the government tells you to buy, if you don't do so when they tell you to do it, and if you don't buy just what they say is right for you, the government may fine you, prosecute you, and even put you in jail. Freedom of choice and control over your own body will be lost. The privacy of your communications and medical decision making with your physician will be gone. More of your hard earned dollars will be at the disposal of federal bureaucrats. It was not supposed to be this way. We elect the government. It works for us. How did it get so removed, so unbridled, so arrogant that it can tell us how to live our personal lives? Evil rarely comes upon us all at once, and liberty is rarely lost in one stroke. It happens gradually, over the years and decades and even centuries. A little stretch here, a cave in there, powers are slowly taken from the states and the people and before you know it, we have one big monster government that recognizes no restraint on its ability to tell us how to live." --Judge Andrew Napolitano
Liberty
"Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi's constitutional contempt, perhaps ignorance, is representative of the majority of members of both the House and the Senate. Their comfort in that ignorance and constitutional contempt, and how readily they articulate it, should be worrisome for every single American. It's not a matter of whether you are for or against Congress' health care proposals. It's not a matter of whether you're liberal or conservative, black or white, male or female, Democrat or Republican or member of any other group. It's a matter of whether we are going to remain a relatively free people or permit the insidious encroachment on our liberties to continue. ... In each new session of Congress since 1995, John Shadegg, R-Ariz.,) has introduced the Enumerated Powers Act, a measure 'To require Congress to specify the source of authority under the United States Constitution for the enactment of laws, and for other purposes.' The highest number of co-sponsors it has ever had in the House of Representatives is 54 and it has never had co-sponsors in the Senate until this year, when 22 senators signed up. The fact that less than 15 percent of the Congress supports such a measure demonstrates the kind of contempt our elected representatives have for the rules of the game -- our Constitution. If you asked the questions: Which way is our nation heading, tiny steps at a time? Are we headed toward more liberty, or are we headed toward greater government control over our lives? I think the answer is unambiguously the latter -- more government control over our lives." --economist Walter E. Williams
The Gipper
"The difference between the path toward greater freedom or bigger government is the difference between success and failure; between opportunity and coercion; between faith in a glorious future and fear of mediocrity and despair; between respecting people as adults, each with a spark of greatness, and treating them as helpless children to be forever dependent; between a drab, materialistic world where Big Brother rules by promises to special interest groups, and a world of adventure where everyday people set their sights on impossible dreams, distant stars, and the Kingdom of God. We have the true message of hope for America." --Ronald Reagan
Political Futures
"Barack Obama told the House Democratic Caucus before the roll call vote on health care on Nov. 7 that they would be better off politically if they passed the bill than if they let it fail. Bill Clinton speaking to the Senate Democrats' lunch on Nov. 10 cited his party's big losses in 1994 after Congress failed to pass his health care legislation as evidence that Democrats would suffer more from failure to pass a bill than from disaffection with a bill that was signed into law. These were closed meetings, but we can safely assume that the two Democratic presidents also assured their fellow partisans that health care legislation would do all sorts of good things for the American people. We know Obama did say that Democrats should 'answer the call of history,' even though America has gotten along pretty well without government-run health insurance for some 220 years. But political calculations are always on politicians' minds. The two presidents were urging passage of legislation that has become increasingly unpopular as its provisions become more widely known. They were speaking at a time when Gallup tells us that only 47 percent of Americans think providing health insurance is a government responsibility, down from 69 percent just two years ago. So despite their assurances, it's unclear whether Democrats will be better off passing a bill or seeing one fail. In political discourse, it's often assumed that there is some clear path to a favorable outcome. But sometimes both paths lead down." --political analyst Michael Barone
Government
"As an American, I am embarrassed that the U.S. House of Representatives has 220 members who actually believe the government can successfully centrally plan the medical and insurance industries. I'm embarrassed that my representatives think that government can subsidize the consumption of medical care without increasing the budget deficit or interfering with free choice. It's a triumph of mindless wishful thinking over logic and experience. The 1,990-page bill is breathtaking in its bone-headed audacity. The notion that a small group of politicians can know enough to design something so complex and so personal is astounding. That they were advised by 'experts' means nothing since no one is expert enough to do that. There are too many tradeoffs faced by unique individuals with infinitely varying needs. Government cannot do simple things efficiently. The bureaucrats struggle to count votes correctly. They give subsidized loans to 'homeowners' who turn out to be 4-year-olds. Yet congressmen want government to manage our medicine and insurance." --columnist John Stossel
Re: The Left
"In the late 1930s, the noted economist Friedrich Von Hayek wrote his landmark pamphlet 'Road to Serfdom,' laying bare the diseased skeleton of socialist/utopian thought that had permeated academia and the salons of his day. With an economy of words that showcased the significance of his conclusion, he pointed out the Achilles heel of collectivist dogma: for a planned economy to succeed, there must be central planners, who by necessity will insist on universal commitment to their plan. How do you attain total commitment to a goal from a free people? Well, you don't. Some percentage will always disagree, even if only for the sake of being contrary or out of a desire to be left alone. When considering a program as comprehensive as a government-planned economy, there are undoubtedly countless points of contention, such as how we will choose the planners, how we will order our priorities when assigning them importance within the plan, how we will allocate resources when competing interests have legitimate claims, who will make these decisions, and perhaps more pertinent to our discussion, how those decisions will be enforced. A rift forming on even one of these issues is enough to bring the gears of this progressive endeavor grinding to a halt. This fatal flaw in the collectivist design cannot be reengineered. It is an error so critical that the entire ideology must be scrapped." --columnist Joe Herring
We Depend on You
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The Chronicle · Wednesday, November 18, 2009
The Foundation
"The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite." --Alexander Hamilton
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Editorial Exegesis
"[Attorney General] Eric Holder's move to try the 9/11 masterminds in Manhattan makes it official: This administration has reverted to pre-9/11 'crime' fighting. Amid all the talk during the attorney general's surreal press conference of the 'crime' committed eight years ago, the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon wasn't even mentioned. Lest anyone forget, the military headquarters of the United States was attacked that day along with the Twin Towers. An entire wedge of the Ring was gutted when the Saudi hijackers slammed American Airlines Flight 77 into it. Nearly 200 military personnel were killed, along with the passengers and crew of the hijacked jet. The jet was a weapon used to attack the very center of our military. That was not a 'crime,' as some say. It was an act of war. And 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, along with the four other al-Qa'ida terrorist co-conspirators Holder wants to try, are no mere criminals. They are enemy combatants -- and should be treated as such. ... Holder clucked that the 'trials will be open to the public and the world.' And they will turn into circuses, playing right into the hands of the enemy. These trials will drag on for years, perhaps even decades, as defense lawyers file endless motions and appeals. Meanwhile, valuable intelligence about interrogation techniques and other methods we've used against al-Qa'ida will be revealed to the enemy during trial discovery. This move to a civilian court makes no sense at all, except viewed through a political prism. ... It will only remind people how much America has shrunk in the last nine months." --Investor's Business Daily
Insight
"The malice of the wicked is reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous" --British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
"We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." --Irish novelist C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
"If you are afraid to speak against tyranny, then you are already a slave." --author John "Birdman" Bryant (1943-2009)
"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it." --American author Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Upright
"From indictment to trial, the civilian case against the 9/11 terrorists will be a years-long seminar, enabling al-Qaeda and its jihadist allies to learn much of what we know and, more important, the methods and sources by which we come to know it. But that is not the half of it. By moving the case to civilian court, the president and his attorney general have laid the groundwork for an unprecedented surrender of our national-defense secrets directly to our most committed enemies." --columnist Andrew McCarthy
"In the string of amazing decisions made during the first year of the Obama administration, nothing seems more like sheer insanity than the decision to try foreign terrorists, who have committed acts of war against the United States, in federal court, as if they were American citizens accused of crimes." --economist Thomas Sowell
"After 9/11, we fought back, hit hard, rolled up the Afghan camps; after the [Danish] cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and signaled that we were willing to trade core western values for a quiet life. Watching the decadence and denial on display this last week, I think in years to come Fort Hood will be seen in a similar light. What happened is not a 'tragedy' but a national scandal, already fading from view." --columnist Mark Steyn
"President Obama traveled all the way to China to praise the free flow of information. It's the only safe place he could do so without getting heckled. With a straight face, Obama lauded political dissent and told Chinese students he welcomed unfettered criticism in America. Fierce opposition, he said, made him 'a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don't want to hear.' How do you say 'You lie!' in Mandarin?" --columnist Michelle Malkin
"In the U.S., the call is for government control, through regulations, as opposed to ownership. Unfortunately, it matters little whether there is a Democratically or Republican-controlled Congress and White House; the march toward greater government control continues. It just happens at a quicker pace with Democrats in charge." --economist Walter E. Williams
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Alexander's Essay – November 19, 2009
The BIGGEST LIE Yet
"It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth -- and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts. ... For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it." --Patrick Henry
Sometimes the biggest lies come under cover of a truth.
Such was the case this week, when Barack Hussein Obama proffered this observation about deficits: "I think it is important, though, to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession."
"Keep on adding to the debt"? From this, one might conclude that Obama has never suggested such a thing, and is truly concerned about deficits.
His revelation came amid discussion of tax reductions engineered to increase employment, as if our Constitution has a provision for that, anymore than for Obama's other proposals.
Obama is feigning concern about deficits now that there is discussion of tax cuts, which he concludes would increase deficits.
"At some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy"? Like the Red Chinese, who hold more U.S. government debt than any other nation ($800 billion), and upon whom we are depending to fund more of our debt. No coincidence that Obama's remarks were made while on his most recent appeasement tour in Beijing.
"Even in the midst of this recovery"? What recovery?
Oh, the one that his $787 billion "hope-n-change" big-government payout package was supposed to ensure?
At the time of that proposal, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office offered this summary: "In the longer run, the [Obama] legislation would result in a slight decrease in gross domestic product compared with CBO's baseline economic forecast." Put another way, the CBO static scoring projected that Obama's big government pork giveaway would hinder economic recovery. Dynamic scoring by economists shows a much worse destiny.
But Obama warned, "If nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse."
Now, after a quick assessment of the Obama Recovery through October, one is stuck with the conclusion that his spending spree has resulted in 10.2 percent unemployment -- except, of course, in such places as Washington, DC, where government jobs are immune to recession.
That would be double-digit unemployment -- so now you know why Obama cleverly framed his recovery program in terms of jobs "created or saved." His administration announced that through October, the American Recovery Act had "created" or "saved" 640,329 jobs. However, a growing number of skeptics, even among his once-adoring media, found some very questionable accounting methods used to come up with that figure.
Asked about some of the discrepancies, Obama's Recovery Czar, Ed Pound, responded, "Who knows, man, who really knows?"
Recovery reality check: Remember when Obama claimed, "This is our moment, this is our time to turn the page on the policies of the past, to offer a new direction"?
That is a reference to Obama's v Reagan's policies, big government solutions v. free enterprise solutions.
Ronald Reagan's economic policies unleashed an unprecedented period of growth, which continued right up until the financial sector collapse in '08, a calamity resulting from policies implemented during the Clinton years, which undermined the values of derivatives used as collateral due. Those policies, as we now know, gave license for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to back high-risk loans to unqualified buyers, thereby setting the stage for the subprime mortgage meltdown and the crash of 2008.
Recall that in 2005, Sen. John McCain sponsored the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act, saying, "For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ... and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. ... If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole."
McCain noted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac regulators concluded that profits were "illusions deliberately and systematically created by the company's senior management."
McCain was right, but Democrats, including Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, ensured that nothing would be done to alter current practices at Fannie and Freddie. "These two entities ... are not facing any kind of financial crisis," Frank said at the time.
The net result of the derivative dilution was a crisis of confidence in the U.S. economy, second only to that which led to the Great Depression.
Remember when Obama claimed, "We are fundamentally transforming the United States of America"? Well, we're in mid-transformation, and how are things looking now?
Obama also said, "Generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was our time."
Indeed, his time to saddle them and their children with unprecedented debt, not only from his "stimulus" folly, but next up, ObamaCare, and then his job-killing cap-and-tax scheme.
If you think you can count on the administration's estimates of the true cost of ObamaCare, think again. The Washington Times recently reminded us of the estimated cost of Medicare shortly after Democrats implemented it in 1965. Then, it was predicted to cost $12 billion by 1990. In actuality, it cost $98 billion, which is to say the original estimate was short by more than a factor of seven.
In my home state of Tennessee, we've already been there and done that. Our state's version of ObamaCare, known as TennCare, implemented by Democrats in 1994 ostensibly to contain healthcare expenses, has quickly grown to consume more than a third of state revenues.
The CBO now says that the $1 trillion estimated cost of ObamaCare is "subject to substantial uncertainty." How's that for qualifying understatement?
As for the big picture, U.S. National Debt topped the $12 trillion mark this week, or approximately $39,000 for every man, woman and child in America, and the federal deficit that Obama now pretends to be concerned about hit a record high $1.42 trillion for fiscal year 2009.
Obama's administration projects that the national debt will top $14 trillion by this time next year, and my sense is that they're being modest. At the current pace, within 10 years our national debt will exceed our Gross Domestic Product.
Of these staggering debt figures, Obama now claims, "I intend to take serious steps to reduce America's long-term deficit because debt-driven growth cannot fuel America's long-term prosperity."
But, what's his real endgame?
We can be certain that Obama's solution to deficits will not be less government. Instead, it will be unprecedented tax increases, a.k.a., socialist redistribution of wealth, a.k.a., "the fundamental transformation of America."
The Tax Foundation now estimates that to offset deficits, "Federal income tax rates would have to be nearly tripled across the income spectrum," with the lowest bracket at 27 percent and the highest at 95. Even the CBO estimates that rates would have to exceed 80 percent, and that's before state and local taxes.
Do you get the picture, folks?
Obama will succeed in his effort to socialize the U.S. economy, using the tax code as his hammer and sickle, unless growing ranks of Americans object to the fact that he has no constitutional authority to do so.
In the meantime, Patriots, keep your powder dry.
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Mark Alexander
Publisher, PatriotPost.US
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Digest · Friday, November 20, 2009
The Foundation
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." --Thomas Jefferson
Government & Politics
Health Care Cost Nightmare
Harry Reid claims his 2,000-page bill will reduce the deficit. He's quite the comedian.It's an accepted fact that no government program comes in on budget, and this maxim likely won't change with the health care legislation that recently passed the House. Republican analysis of the bill in the Senate Budget Committee reveals that a more realistic price tag for the House version, after the benefit provisions are figured in, comes to $3 trillion over 10 years, not $1 trillion as Democrats claim. The disparity comes from the fact that the taxes and fees meant to pay for the bill occur immediately, while major aspects of "reform" won't be implemented until at least 2013. Thus, the true cost of the plan won't reveal itself until well after the current president has stood for re-election.
Despite Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) assurances that the bill will lower health care costs, another report released this week by the nonpartisan Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services found that the House plan would actually raise costs by $289 billion over 10 years. Furthermore, Medicare would be cut by half a trillion dollars, leading to reduced benefits and services.
On that note, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced the Senate's 2,074-page, $849 billion version of the health care takeover plan. Reid has laid out an ambitious plan to pass HarryCare by Christmas.
The Senate bill clocks in a tad cheaper than the House version in part because many major provisions, such as the public option, would be delayed until 2014 -- one year later than the House bill. Reid also claims the bill will reduce the federal deficit by $650 billion in its second 10 years. A 2,000-page bill will reduce the deficit? That Reid is quite the comedian. Besides, while the Congressional Budget Office says the bill will reduce the deficit by $130 billion over 10 years, CBO cautions that its effect on the deficit over the following decade would be "subject to substantial uncertainty." That's comforting, isn't it?
Notably, the Senate bill includes a 40 percent tax on high-deductible "Cadillac" insurance plans (though, naturally, Congress' Cadillac plan is exempt) as opposed to the House's tax on the "rich." It also includes a 5 percent tax on elective cosmetic surgeries (how will Nancy feel about that?), which apparently helps pay for providing -- surprise -- federal subsidies for abortion.
Reid wants to hold a vote to begin debate as early as this weekend. He has "promised" not to use the procedural tactic of reconciliation, which would allow him to pass the bill with only 51 votes instead of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster -- but experience shows how little we should trust Democrats' promises.
As for that prized debate, Harkin referred to a Republican call to read the full bill on the Senate floor as a political tactic, and he threatens that Democrats will hold a live quorum to keep everyone in the chamber while the reading is taking place -- which sounds awfully like a political tactic to us.
It's interesting that both parties seem to view the public reading of the bill as some sort of parliamentary game. Perhaps if public readings of proposed legislation took place all of the time, we would actually know what Congress is up to. What a novel idea.
Democrat senators who pride themselves as being deficit hawks will have a tough choice to make in the coming days and weeks. Will they support HarryCare, which makes them look like hypocrites when they face the voters next year and in 2012? Or will they do the right thing and stop this runaway entitlement before it shoots out of the gate?
The BIG Lie
Where is the constitutional authority for a federal mandate that individuals must buy health insurance?
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) says that one's easy: "The very first enumerated power gives the power to provide for the common defense and the general welfare. So it's right on, right on the front end."
For those who don't follow Sen. Merkley's brilliant explication, he refers to the Constitution's Preamble, which, among several other things, says that the Constitution was written to "promote the general Welfare," though the Preamble doesn't list enumerated powers.
Furthermore, James Madison, primary author of the Constitution, vehemently disagreed, writing, "If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions."
Thomas Jefferson likewise stated that if Congress could "do anything they please to provide for the general welfare ... t would reduce the whole instrument [the Constitution] to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please." For the simpletons in Congress, Jefferson concluded, "Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them." Regardless of what Senator Jeff Merkley says.
This Week's 'Braying Jackass' Award
"We even have blacks voting against the health care bill. You can't vote against health care and call yourself a black man." --race hustler Jesse Jackson, calling out Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL), the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus who dared to stray from the Democrat Plantation by voting against PelosiCare
Faith and Family: Shut Up, She Explained
Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO), like every other Democrat, could use a constitutional education. Oddly enough, though, the part of the Constitution DeGette needs brushing up on is the Left's favorite part: The First Amendment. Leftists have abused it for decades to hammer their agenda into our laws and culture. But they have also intentionally ignored its guarantee of the free exercise of religion. To them, the Constitution is just a scrap of paper written by dead white men. It's old and irrelevant today except for the few phrases that can be used to promote their socialism.
Regarding the health care legislative monstrosity working its way through Congress and the input of religious groups, DeGette said that "religiously-affiliated groups ... should be shut out of the process" because of their opposition to federal funding of abortions. "Last I heard, we had separation of church and state in this country," she sulked. "I've got to say that I think the Catholic bishops and all of the other groups shouldn't have input."
As Family Research Council President Tony Perkins observed, "According to her, if a group of people who are in association with one another because of their Christian faith, they should not have a voice in the crafting of public policy. What she is asserting is that if your ideas and actions are a product of your faith, you're a second class citizen and your voice should not be heard."
New & Notable Legislation
The House passed Medicare "doc fix" by a vote of 243-183 Thursday. The bill would permanently fix the way doctors who provide care for Medicare patients are reimbursed. The projected cost of the fix is $210 billion over 10 years and it doesn't include a way to pay for it, meaning that while Barack Obama has changed his tune and is now decrying the deficit, the House is busy adding to it.
Legacy of the American Revolution
"Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood. ... A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever. Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives." --John Adams
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Brief · Monday, November 23, 2009
The Foundation
"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree." --James Madison
Passing major legislation on Saturday night is a symptom of Potomac Fever
"Here's a new maxim: Nothing good ever happens when the Congress is in session on a Saturday night. As you know, Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid (D-Nev) cajoled, coerced, and co-opted Senators Mary Landrieu (D-La) and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark) into adding the 59th and 60th necessary votes to prevent a GOP filibuster of Reid's health reform bill. Reid and Obama Administration officials relied on the time honored method (used by Republicans and Democrats) of getting recalcitrant Members to vote a certain way: Bribery which, in the real world, is a felony but in Washington it is called 'hardball.' In Sen. Landrieu's case the bribe was $300 million in Medicaid benefits to Louisiana. It's not even a close call. According to the website 'Total Criminal Defense,' 'Bribery is an attempt to influence another person's actions, usually a government or public official employee, by offering a benefit in exchange for the desired decision.' Three hundred million in return for a vote to proceed. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck... Landrieu is a better bribee than she is an accountant. She said in her floor speech that there was $100 million in the bill specifically to pay for Medicaid in Louisiana and only Louisiana. Talking to reporters afterward, she said, 'I will correct something. It's not $100 million, it's $300 million, and I'm proud of it and will keep fighting for it.' No reports, yet, on how angry White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel was when he found out she had been satisfied with the $100 million and he overpaid by a factor of three." --political analyst Rich Galen
Liberty
"The 'reformers' in the White House and the House of Representatives have made all too plain their vision of the federal government's power to coerce individual Americans to make the 'right' health-care choices. The highly partisan bill the House just passed includes severe penalties for individuals who do not purchase insurance approved by the federal government. By neatly tucking these penalties into the IRS code, the so-called reformers have brought them under the tax-enforcement power of the federal government. The Congressional Budget Office stated on October 29 that the House bill would generate $167 billion in revenue from 'penalty payments.' Individual Americans are expected to pay $33 billion of these penalties, with employers paying the rest. Former member of Congress and Heritage Foundation fellow Ernest Istook has concluded that for this revenue goal to be met, 8 to 14 million individual Americans will have to be fined over the next ten years, quite an incentive for federal bureaucrats. ... By transforming a refusal or failure to comply with a government mandate into a federal tax violation, the 'progressives' are using the brute force of criminal law to engage in social engineering. This represents an oppressive, absolutist view of government power. ... The idea of imprisoning or fining Americans who don't knuckle under to an unprecedented government mandate to purchase a particular insurance product should outrage anyone who believes in the exceptional promises and opportunities afforded by our basic American freedoms. ... Unless this paternalistic juggernaut is stopped, Americans will lose some of their most fundamental freedoms, and the power of the federal government to impose novel requirements in every facet of our personal lives will have become virtually unlimited." --Brian W. Walsh & Hans A. von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation
Culture
"Tragically, this administration seems hell-bent to avoid seeing acts of terrorism against the United States as acts of war. The very phrase 'war on terrorism' is avoided, as if that will stop the terrorists' war on us. The mindset of the left behind such thinking was spelled out in an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle, which said that 'Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, will be tried the right way -- the American way, in a federal courtroom where the world will see both his guilt and the nation's adherence to the rule of law.' This is not the rule of law but the application of laws to situations for which they were not designed. How many Americans may pay with their lives for the intelligence secrets and methods that can forced to be disclosed to Al Qaeda was not mentioned. Nor was there mention of how many foreign nations and individuals whose cooperation with us in the war on terror have been involved in countering Al Qaeda -- nor how many foreign nations and individuals will have to think twice now, before cooperating with us again, when their role can be revealed in court to our enemies, who can exact revenge on them." --economist Thomas Sowell
Opinion in Brief
"By the time Obama came to office, KSM was ready to go before a military commission, plead guilty and be executed. It's Obama who blocked a process that would have yielded the swiftest and most certain justice. Indeed, the perfect justice. Whenever a jihadist volunteers for martyrdom, we should grant his wish. Instead, this one, the most murderous and unrepentant of all, gets to dance and declaim at the scene of his crime. [Attorney General Eric] Holder himself told The Washington Post that the coming New York trial will be 'the trial of the century.' The last such was the trial of O.J. Simpson." --columnist Charles Krauthammer
Re: The Left
"In modern America, the guilty are sanctified, while the innocent never stop paying -- including with their lives, as they did at Fort Hood [recently]. Points are awarded to aspiring victims for angry self-righteousness, acts of violence and general unpleasantness. But liberals celebrate diversity only in the case of superficial characteristics like race, gender, sexual preference and country of origin. They reject diversity when we need it, such as in 'diversity' of legal forums. After conferring with everyone at Zabar's, Obama decided that if a standard civilian trial is good enough for Martha Stewart, then it's good enough for the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. So Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is coming to New York! Mohammed's military tribunal was already under way when Obama came into office, stopped the proceedings and, eight months later, announced that Mohammed would be tried in a federal court in New York. In a liberal's reckoning, diversity is good when we have both Muslim jihadists and patriotic Americans serving in the U.S. military. But diversity is bad when Martha Stewart and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are subjected to different legal tribunals to adjudicate their transgressions." --columnist Ann Coulter
For the Record
"[There are] uncanny parallels between George W. Bush and Herbert Hoover: Both were president during a time of economic crisis; both presided over vast expansions of government that helped cause the crisis or at least make it worse than it might have been otherwise; finally both were (inaccurately) portrayed by their political opponents as dogmatic free market advocates, when in fact both were highly statist. After leaving the presidency, Bush is unconsciously imitating Hoover in yet another way -- by rhetorically supporting free markets and criticizing the even more interventionist policies of his Democratic successor (which in both cases built on the expansions of government initiated by the Republicans who preceded them).... Bush's belated support for free markets follows in Hoover's footsteps. After leaving office in 1933, Hoover wrote books and articles defending free markets and criticizing the Democrats' New Deal. Some of his criticisms of FDR were well-taken. Many New Deal policies actually worsened and prolonged the Great Depression by organizing cartels and increasing unemployment. But by coming out as a free market advocate, the post-presidential Hoover actually bolstered the cause of interventionism because he helped cement the incorrect impression that he had pursued free market policies while in office, thereby causing the Depression. Bush's post-presidential conversion creates a similar risk: it could solidify the already widespread impression that he, like the Hoover of myth, pursued laissez-faire policies which then caused an economic crisis. ... The greatest contribution Bush can now make to free market policies is to dispel the impression that he pursued them while in office." --Ilya Somin, Associate Professor at George Mason University School of Law
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Faith & Family
"[W]hy is religious freedom such a concern to us as Christians? Freedom of religion is called the first freedom for a reason. Our Founding Fathers recognized that without freedom of conscience, no other freedom can be guaranteed. Christians, in fact, are the greatest defenders of religious freedom and human liberty -- not just for Christians, but for all people. Compare religious freedom in those countries with a Christian heritage to the state of religious freedom in Islamic nations, Communist countries, and Buddhist and Hindu nations, and you will see my point. The reason that Christians place such a high value on human freedom is that freedom itself is part of the creation account in the Bible. God made humans in His image. He gave us a free will to choose to love, follow, and obey Him, or to follow our own way. That free will, given us before the Fall, is part of human nature itself. Perhaps more than anything else, it was this understanding of individual freedom that turned me into the kind of patriot who would willingly give his life for his country. It was the words of the Declaration of Independence that inspired me to join the Marines: '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.' So this question of human freedom goes to the very heart of who we are as Christians and as Americans." --author Chuck Colson
We Depend on You
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Clarity
If we don't want to go down this rat hole of socialism and decline, we better get clear right now about what it is exactly that we want, why that is a better path than the one we are on, and start speaking out, and writing, showing up, etc. Whatever it takes.
The word for Republicanism of recent past might have been fogginess. Sometimes the principles were ignored; sometimes sold, almost always they were compromised or invisible and inaudible. Sometimes the policies were right but the explanations were wrong, missing or mumbled.
We need clarity as in easy to understand, distinctness, precision. Clarity as a consequence of being explicit. Clarity where actions and words are consistent with clear, stated principles that our great nation has already agreed on.
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YES!!!
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Clarity, and Polite IN-tolerance. The polite tolerance is being misinterpreted.
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Prof. Hanson writes a blog at Pajamas Media called Works and Days. Most recent entry fits well into the discussion of the way forward and ideas for the points of the new contract with America, my personal favorite: moving the UN headquarters to Lagos!
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November 29th, 2009 9:24 am
Change We Can Believe In
So, fellow critics of Obama, what would we do instead? It is easy to harp, as Obama did in 2007-8, but hard to govern, as Obama learned in 2009. So for all the criticism, let us put up some sample proposals of our own.
Ok, try the following.
1. Pay as you go, balanced budget—whatever you wish to call a return to fiscal sanity. Conservatives need to stop talking about tolerable deficits in terms of GDP; and liberals should cease the charade that trillion-plus annual borrowing is great stimulus.
The psychological effect on the American people of paying down the debt through annual surpluses would be incalculable. “Decline” is as much psychological as real, and begins with perceptions of financial insolvency. We have a $11 trillion economy, so balancing the books is not impossible. Note how Obama intends to “address the deficit” only after he has set two budgets that will increase it by nearly four trillion dollars. Note how Bush’s sin of running up large annual deficits is used to excuse Obama’s mortal sin of doubling them. Note how Democrats, after lining up for a trillion-dollar federal take-over of health care, are worried about a multi-billion dollar expense in Afghanistan. Cuts in defense, as the later Romans knew, are always the first reaction to profligate domestic spending and entitlement.
2. Freeze federal spending at the present rate, and let increased revenues balance the budget. The idea that we could ever cut outright the budget seems long ago impossible—given the culture of complaint and the melodramatic rants about starvation and murder if another entitlement is not granted. Still, some sort of leadership is required to remind the American people that much of what their government does is not just unnecessary, but counter-productive and they would be better off without it.
Apparently, Obama simultaneously believes (a) he can create a permanent loyal constituency of millions who either receive or disperse federal “stimulus”, in the fashion of the old Roman turba; (b )he can borrow so much money that higher taxes will be seen as vital and therefore the original intent of income redistribution accomplished; (c) that, having had little experience in the private sector, but much financial success as a community or government employee, he can assume that money comes out of thin air and is to be dispersed non-stop through public benefaction; (d) the upper-middle class, which strives to be as rich as he is, is somehow culpable. A common theme throughout history is a paradoxical hatred of the equestrian, productive class, by both the idle aristocratic and entitlement constituents, who hand in glove need each other.
3. Some sort of fair or flat tax that ends the trillion-dollar industry of tax preparation, avoidance, and fraud. For about a quarter of the population April 15 is a spooky sort of Halloween. Instead, we need a tax system in which one can complete the necessary preparation in about 2 hours. Whose bright idea was it to excuse nearly half the American households from income tax exposure (Clinton and Bush, and now Obama?)—a fact that explains why in Pavlovian fashion recently Senators have been saying that we can add on a new war tax, a health-care surcharge, and a new high rate on “them”? The justification of a 40% income tax, 10% state income tax, 15.3% payroll tax, and new war and health care surcharge taxes can only be that one’s income was undeserved, ill-gotten, and thus better “rectified” by more enlightened federal redistributors.
4. Close the borders to illegal immigration, through completion of the fence, biometric IDs, employer sanctions, beefed up enforcement—coupled with a radical change in legal immigration law that favors education and skill, rather than simply family ties. The present mockery of existing law undermines the sanctity of every law. Those who knowingly break immigration laws, and know that they will not in the future be enforced, naturally assume that other laws likewise will not apply to them, from tax reporting to the vehicle code. We really must ask—why the national outcry over whether illegal aliens will be included in the new health care plan when $50 billion is sent back as remittances to Latin America each year? In rough math, each of the supposedly 11 million illegal aliens sends out on average around $4000-5000 per year southward. Perhaps we could tax remittances to fund their health care? Something is strange about the attitude of “I must send $400-500 a month home to support my family, but now I am broke and need someone to pay for my care at the emergency room, etc.”
5. A can-do energy plan. Offer tax incentives for development of nuclear power. Promote exploitation of gas and oil reserves in, and off, the United States, as a way to transition over 20 years to next generation fuels without enriching our enemies or going broke in the process. I never understood why nuclear power for electricity and natural gas/hybrids for transportation—we could be nearly energy independent through both—were declared environmentally incorrect when dotting pristine fields, deserts, and mountain passes with ugly wind turbines, acres of solar panels, and miles of access roads was considered “green.” Does Obama really think that the truther Van Jones knows more about power production than the head of a natural gas or oil company, or the engineer of a nuclear power plant?
Now the symbolic and randomly odd suggestions:
1. For grades 8-12, teachers could choose either the traditional credential or the MA degree in an academic subject. Few laws would have wider ramifications in curbing the power of the education lobby and its union partners, and vastly improve classroom teaching performance.
It would cost nothing and do more for educational progress than anything of the last three decades (high school students can sense who wrote a MA thesis on the Civil War and who got a teaching credential taking Bill-Ayers-like courses on race, class, and gender stereotyping). Why can PhDs and MAs in American history walk into a JC classroom, but not a high-school history class? Eliminate tenure for teachers and professors, replaced by 5-year renewable contracts, subject to completion of contracted targets on classroom performance and continuing education. The combination of a therapeutic curriculum, with an increasingly illiterate student, has resulted in a national disaster. Hint: when students arrive ill-prepared from dysfunctional families as was common in the last few decades, they need more math, grammar, and basics, not more self-esteem and “I am somebody” pep courses. Each year I taught, I was struck by the ever more common phenomenon of students ever less prepped in grammar, syntax, and “facts”, but ever more ready to expound on something—anything really—about themselves, usually with the theme of their own victimhood.
2. Transfer the UN headquarters to an African or South American capital closer to the problems of hunger, disease, and poverty. I suggest either Lagos or Lima. Global elites could not walk from five-star hotels to the CBS studios to grandstand about US pathologies. But delegates could match their solidarity rhetoric by concretely living with the other. We would get away from the “U.S. did it”. UN forces could ring UN headquarters when a nearby Chavez or Mugabe was rumored to be saber-rattling and crossing borders. When the Kofi Annans of the world got upset stomachs from their luncheon salads, perhaps they could address world sanitation and government corruption rather than Israel.
3. An end to affirmative action based on race. If “help” is needed, it should be based on class and income. Why should Eric Holder’s children be classed as in need while someone from the Punjab (of darker hue) or Bakersfield (with less capital) is considered ineligible? Why should a Carmel female at the corporate level be seen as progress, but not a son of Appalachian coal miners? The entire corrupt system is redolent of the 1/16 laws of the Old Confederacy, as almost every American is conning some sort of Ward-Churchill-like heritage to pull off what Ward Churchill did—get some edge over the competition for something that they otherwise might not obtain. Whether intended or not, affirmative action has become the pet project largely of elites, who feel their own capital and insider connections will ensure their own do not suffer from the unspoken quotas they impose on others—as a sort of cheap psychological penance for their own guilt over their own privilege.
4. Return of the US Homestead Act and expand it to urban areas. Instead of redevelopment for wealthy insider grandees who tear down neighborhoods for convention complexes, state and local government should be encouraged to deed over idle properties to individuals willing to build homes and stay 10 years on the property. Shedding, not adding to, government land-owning makes more sense. Who knows, one might find self-help recolonization projects in downtown Detroit. Maybe Californians and some of their industries might move to the empty top third of their state, rather than families paying $1 million for a 800 sq foot bungalow in congested Menlo Park.
5. Outlaw the naming of federal projects after any living politicians. Don’t laugh. Without their names on highway stretches, bridges, and “centers”, most of these projects would not be built. Once a senator or congress-person accepted that there would never, never be “The Hon. Tadd Burris Community Center” or “Mt. Bud Jones Wilderness Area”, much of the earmarks would cease. What is the logic behind the notion that we immortalize a senator or congresswoman who uses someone else’s money to build a bridge, or lobbies for an earmark for his district, or, at best, simply does his job? Should carpenters get every fourth tract house named in their honor for their work? Should teachers have their classrooms forever emblazoned with their own names (Instead of “room 11,” we would get The “Skip Johnson English room”?)? Should doctors have surgery rooms with their own names on the door? People who give their own money have a right to eponymous monuments, but not those who do it as part of their job descriptions and with someone else’s capital. Our political class, not content with being increasingly corrupt, is now buffoonish as well. The career of the court-jester John Murtha is emblematic of the age.
There!—some modest suggestions for change we can believe in.
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I think this piece makes some very good points.
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By MICHAEL J. PETRILLI
The Republican Party is resurgent—or so goes the conventional wisdom. With its gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey, an energized "tea party" base, and an administration overreaching on health care, climate change and spending, 2010 could shape up to be 1994 all over again.
Maybe. The political landscape sure looks greener than it did a year ago, when talk of a permanent Democratic majority was omnipresent. But before John Boehner starts measuring the drapes in the Speaker's office, or the party exults about its possibilities in 2012, it's worth noting that some of the key trends driving President Barack Obama's strong victory in 2008 haven't disappeared. Republicans need to address them head-on if they want to lead a majority party again.
There are the depressing numbers on young voters (two-thirds of whom voted for Mr. Obama), African-Americans and Latinos (95% and 67% went blue respectively). But these groups have voted Democratic for decades, and their strong turnout in 2008's historic election wasn't replicated this fall, nor is it likely to be replicated again.
The voting patterns of the college-educated is another story. This is a group that, slowly but surely, is growing larger every year. About 30% of Americans 25 and older have at least a bachelor's degree; in 1988 that number was only 20% and in 1968 it was 10%.
As less-educated seniors pass away and better-educated 20- and 30-somethings take their place in the electorate, this bloc will exert growing influence. And here's the distressing news for the GOP: According to exit-poll data, a majority of college-educated voters (53%) pulled the lever for Mr. Obama in 2008—the first time a Democratic candidate has won this key segment since the 1970s.
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David Gothard
.Some in the GOP see this trend as an opportunity rather than a problem. Let the Democrats have the Starbucks set, goes the thinking, and we'll grab working-class families. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, for instance, wants to embrace "Sam's Club" Republicans. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee pitched himself in 2008 as the guy who "looks like your co-worker, not your boss." Even Mitt Romney blasted "Eastern elites." And of course there's Sarah Palin, whose entire brand is anti-intellectual.
To be sure, playing to personal identity is hardly novel, nor is it crazy. Bill Bishop and other political analysts have noted that people's politics are as much about their lifestyle choices as their policy positions. Republicans live in exurbs and small towns, drive pick-up trucks or SUVs, go to church every Sunday, and listen to country music. Well-heeled Democrats live in cities and close-in suburbs, drive hybrids or Volvos, hang out at bookshops, and frequent farmers' markets. These are stereotypes, of course, but they also contain some truth.
Widening this cultural divide has long been part of the GOP playbook, going back to Nixon's attacks on "East Coast intellectuals" and forward to candidate Obama's arugula-eating tendencies. But with the white working class shrinking and the educated "creative class" growing, playing the populism card looks like a strategy of subtraction rather than addition. A more enlightened approach would be to go after college-educated voters, to make the GOP safe for smarties again.
What's needed is a full-fledged effort to cultivate "Whole Foods Republicans"—independent-minded voters who embrace a progressive lifestyle but not progressive politics. These highly-educated individuals appreciate diversity and would never tell racist or homophobic jokes; they like living in walkable urban environments; they believe in environmental stewardship, community service and a spirit of inclusion. And yes, many shop at Whole Foods, which has become a symbol of progressive affluence but is also a good example of the free enterprise system at work. (Not to mention that its founder is a well-known libertarian who took to these pages to excoriate ObamaCare as inimical to market principles.)
What makes these voters potential Republicans is that, lifestyle choices aside, they view big government with great suspicion. There's no law that someone who enjoys organic food, rides his bike to work, or wants a diverse school for his kids must also believe that the federal government should take over the health-care system or waste money on thousands of social programs with no evidence of effectiveness. Nor do highly educated people have to agree that a strong national defense is harmful to the cause of peace and international cooperation.
So how to woo these voters to the Republican column? The first step is to stop denigrating intelligence and education. President George W. Bush's bantering about being a "C" student may have enamored "the man in the street," but it surely discouraged more than a few "A" students from feeling like part of the team.
The same is true for Mrs. Palin's inability to name a single newspaper she reads. If the GOP doesn't want to be branded the "Party of Stupid," it could stand to nominate more people who can speak eloquently on complicated policy matters.
Even more important is the party's message on divisive social issues. When some Republicans use homophobic language, express thinly disguised contempt toward immigrants, or ridicule heartfelt concerns for the environment, they affront the values of the educated class. And they lose votes they otherwise ought to win.
The races in Virginia and New Jersey show what can happen when the GOP sticks to its core economic message instead of playing wedge politics. Both Republican candidates won majorities of college-educated voters. Their approach attracted Sam's Club Republicans and Whole Foods Republicans alike.
It's good news that America is becoming better educated, more inclusive, and more concerned about the environment. The Republican Party can either catch this wave, or watch its historic opportunity for "resurgence" wash away with the tides.
Mr. Petrilli is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a frequenter of the Whole Foods Market in Silver Spring, Md.
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Alexander's Essay – December 17, 2009
The Time Has Come
"It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth -- and listen to the song of that syren, till she transforms us into beasts. ... Are we disposed to be of the number of those, who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not?" --Patrick Henry
The 2008 presidential election was much more than a referendum on the two candidates; it was a referendum on the ability of a majority of Americans voters to discern between one candidate who possessed the character and integrity of a statesman, and one who did not.
A year ago, a majority of our countrymen were hoodwinked into electing a charlatan with dubious credentials to the highest constitutional office in the land. Since then, millions of Americans who had become complacent about the Leftist threat to our liberty have begun to realize that our Constitution is now suffering an unprecedented assault.
There were those of us who realized in 2004 -- back when Teddy Kennedy and John Kerry let him take center stage at the Democrat National Convention -- that Barack Hussein Obama was a Marxist. Nonetheless, too many of our countrymen were lulled into believing that no leftist politico with such abhorrent extra-constitutional views on the role of government could rise to be president of the United States.
The awakening that has occurred since November of '08 is like nothing I have witnessed since the first election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980. After the economic and foreign policy disasters created by the Carter administration, Americans were stirred to action. Yes, the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 resulted in a conservative takeover of the House two years later, but Clinton was far more moderate than Obama, and his election didn't inspire millions of Americans to arm themselves for the first time.
That Obama's election inspired a wave of conservative activism is good news.
The great news is that since last November, millions of Americans have joined our ranks.
And the momentum continues unabated.
I knew we were turning a corner a few months back, when an establishment Republican, typical of most such Republicans, told me that Obama's health care proposal "amounts to socialism." This same fellow told me a year earlier that calling Obama a Socialist was just too severe. When I reminded him of his earlier admonishment, he said simply, "My eyes are now open."
If Barack Obama has given us one thing of value, it is the opportunity to clearly discern between Left and Right, between rule of men and Rule of Law. He is the quintessential socialist, and his domestic and foreign policies present a contrast between tyranny and liberty that has rarely been so apparent. Many who have been hitherto reluctant to rise on behalf of liberty or have been too comfortable to be concerned by such conflict, are now making an ever-louder stand.
Benjamin Franklin aptly noted, "They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Indeed.
Obama is the personification of Leftist philosophy and dogma, and in a turn of irony, for the clarity he has provided to that end we owe him a debt of gratitude.
Despite the fact that the Leftists in media and academia have had a stranglehold on public opinion, seating one of their own as president, which they believe is a great prize, may well be their undoing.
The once noble Democrat Party is now led by those who have turned the wisdom of their iconic leaders upside down.
Then: "My fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." --John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 1961
Now: "Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you."
Then: "I have a dream that my children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." --Martin Luther King, Address from the Lincoln Memorial, 1963
Now: "I have a dream that my children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the content of their character but by the color of their skin."
Today, Democrat Party Leftists deride the notion of individual rights. Instead, they advocate the supplanting of individual liberty with statism.
They promote the notion of a living constitution rather than the authentic Constitution our Founders established.
They despise free enterprise and advocate socialist redistribution of wealth, the ultimate goal of which is to render all people equally poor and dependent upon the state.
They loathe our military and our national sovereignty, and they propose to replace it with treaties that establish supranational governmental legal and policing authorities.
They detest traditional American values, and they support all manner of behavior resulting in social entropy.
Being debated right now is whether an additional 17 percent of the U.S. economy is going to be nationalized under ObamaCare, and whether the rest of the economy is going to be shackled by cap-and-trade taxes in addition to a plethora of other job-eliminating taxes on private sector employers.
Would it surprise you to know that, while Democrat impositions on lending practices are largely responsible for the fact that millions of Americans are now out of work, the number of government "workers" making over $100,000 per year has increased 30 percent since the beginning of the current recession? There are more than 10,000 bureaucrats earning more than $150,000 annually, and the average federal salary is $71,206, not including generous government benefits, while the average private sector salary is $40,331.
Obama and his Democrat Congress have endowed future generations, unless soon reversed, not with liberty but with historically unprecedented levels of debt, which will enslave them to hyperinflation.
Conservatives and liberals can argue various policy points ad nauseam, but the question Americans are asking in greater numbers is this: Are we a nation governed by Rule of Law or the contemporaneous opinions of men?
History provides us with repeated evidence that the terminus of nations that are governed by men rather than laws is tyranny. In the last century alone, hundreds of millions have been enslaved under statist dictators such as Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Mao, Kruschev, Pol Pot, Ho Chi, Idi Amin, Castro, Hussein, Mugabe, Kim Jong-Il, Chavez, Hu Jintao and others. Who might be next?
Surely not us?
Obama has clearly delineated the difference between individual rights and statism, between free enterprise and socialism.
Alexander Hamilton said, "In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend."
Today, more and more Americans are returning to the core principles upon which our nation was founded, which made it the freest and most productive in history. There is a renewed commitment to support and defend Essential Liberty.
John Adams wrote: "Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions are the 'latent spark' ... If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?"
I believe that a supermajority of us are fully capable of understanding the truth, if given the right information and opportunity.
As Thomas Paine noted, "Such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing."
Of course, Barack Obama and his liberal lawmaking brethren have done us great harm this past year, and it may take several election cycles, or a revolution, to turn that around. But, the fields are being plowed and seeds sown.
Ronald Reagan delivered an enduring challenge to conservatives entitled "A Time for Choosing": "You and I are told we must choose between a left or right," Reagan said, "but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism."
Patriots, the time has come to choose.
Reagan also outlined a plan for "The New Republican Party," stating, "The principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered through experience in not just one generation or a dozen, but in all the combined experience of mankind. When we conservatives say that we know something about political affairs, and that we know can be stated as principles, we are saying that the principles we hold dear are those that have been found, through experience, to be ultimately beneficial for individuals, for families, for communities and for nations -- found through the often bitter testing of pain, or sacrifice and sorrow."
If Republicans want to regain majority status, the RNC must purge those who have forsaken the first principles of conservatism for power. In their stead they must lift up those who are devoted to the Rule of Law and Essential Liberty, those who incorporate Reagan's charge, and that of generations of Patriots before him. They must back real conservatives instead of arrogant pretenders (see Toomey v. Specter). Short of bold new leadership, what remains of the Republican Party will end up on the trash heap of political irrelevance.
Patriots take heart: Do not wither during these difficult times. For as George Washington advised, "We should never despair, our Situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again. If new difficulties arise, we must only put forth new Exertions and proportion our Efforts to the exigency of the times."
Indeed, the next several years will be a vital test for Patriots and our countrymen. Let us choose to persevere, to make our cause that of all men, to make no peace with oppression.
In 1776, Peter Muhlenberg delivered a sermon, concluding, "There is a time for all things, a time to preach and a time to pray, but those times have passed away. There is a time to fight, and that time has now come." He removed his clerical robes and set out to command the 8th Virginia Regiment of the Continental Army.
Patriots, we have great opportunity before us, and once again the time has come to fight for it.
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Mark Alexander
Publisher, PatriotPost.US
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And he was a moderate R, now called RINO.
Perhaps I am a Rino. I don't know.
Doug,
Do you actually think the Republicans can win by simply "going back to their roots?"
IMO such talk is only singing to the choir. This alone will not move that party into power. This alone will not appeal to the middle which cans need.
It seems to me the electorate keeps going back and forth from one party to the other because they don't like either one.
It always seems to boil down to the lesser of two evils come election time.
Just my opinion. I am certainly no expert on this.
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It is as much "the lesser of two evils" as it is "the evil of two lessers". Character, integrity, and fidelity to certain ideals are both necessary-- and lacking in both the Patricians and the Demogogues. The point is not "to win", the point is to speak, to persuade, and to act on behalf of what one believes. I believe in the American Creed of our Founding Fathers, in the Declaration of Independence, and in our Consitution.
I have no interest in Republicans who seek to out-slut the Dems in destroying our country.
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How does one effectively counter this debating methodolgy?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNfG8gwamKM&feature=player_embedded
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My father tells a story(and I am sure it is just that) about Pancho Villa. He and his men are sitting on a hill overlooking a village in Mexico. It is being sacked by the Federals. Pancho's 2nd in command says,"come on Pancho lets ride down there and save those villagers". Pancho says," No lets wait and let them suffer a bit more then when we ride down there the villagers will be very grateful for our help!"
Now I do not see how you can argue facts with the youth of this country. They are rebelling against the conservative way of life trying to find their spot in the world. They do not have enough experience to judge things factually so react emotionally which plays into the hands of the progressives. The only thing that might get their attention is the hard knocks of life. The question is can we afford the time to let them learn this way.(this is obviously a generalization there are exceptions I am sure) I think trying to educate the populace with the facts and principles of our history and founding fathers is the primary thing to do, which as I said does not work on the youth. It is a tough question and all I can think that will work is to learn from Pancho and wait a bit. While I wait on the youth I still use this forum to frame the debate this country is in with the light of history. I use many of the articles and quotes I find here to that end passing them along to my friends and family. My thanks Gents and Ladies for that.
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My initial thoughts run along the lines of personality types: Logic is the dominant modality in only 10% of the population whereas, IIRC, emotion is the dominant modality for LOTS more people (the other two are Sensation and Intuition). How do we speak effectively to call to the heart on this issue?
Separately, though not directly on point but perhaps tangentially of interest is a technique I used the last time I ran for Congress (1992). Whenever I would get asked one of those wooly-headed "caring" based questions I would answer with the following story, telling it as if it were literally true-- the punch line giving away that it had been a parable all along:
"I was sitting in the _________ restaurant during the afternoon, having a late lunch with a friend. The only other people there were three people at a nearby table. They finished and when they received their bill they got up and came over to us and gave it to us. "What on earth do you think you are doing?" I asked.
They answered "There's three of us and two of you. We had a vote. You're paying."
And for the rest of the debate, anytime someone proposed some sort of govt. meddling/program, all I had to do was say as I looked at the crowd. "They had a vote. You're paying."
This seemed very effective.
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PS: It is spelled "Villa", not Via (pronounced (Vee-ya)
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"Logic is the dominant modality in only 10% of the population whereas, IIRC, emotion is the dominant modality for LOTS more people"
This would certainly explain the continued undying blind support for Obama from American Blacks.
I cannot understand their continued support for a man who is giving away their country just when at the same time proved they can reach the top if they want to.
Why do they support a party that is more interested in giving away our benefits to those who are recent and illegal arrivals as opposed to those who came here legally or are the descendants of those brought here in chains?
The Rebublican party needs to see this opening. They need to show Blacks the bigger picture. Forget exponentially increasing Black reliance on government. Obama is doing more damage to Blacks by hurting their country, by increasing their reliance on doles than any conservative.
The One gives us the lines about education, about self reliance all the while promoting just the opposite. That is because it is not about American Blacks. For Obama it is about leading the world. It is about socialism, one government, one leader, total world control. He is the greatest megalomaniac since I don't know when. Hitler? Napolean? Ghengis Khan? Alexander?
I guess the difference is soft vs military force. Not just soft tyrrany but "soft" world domination.
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http://www.nationalteapartyconvention.com/
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtjfMjjce2Y&feature=player_embedded#
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Newt is very impressive, reminds me of the Newt of old, challenging the establishment before he won the majority and the speakership. He speaks without teleprompter and almost without notes. If an election were about ideas and issues he would be quite an adversary for the current President.
I like that he does not name Obama. It is not enough to stand against one man, candidate or administration; the argument is against a line of thinking or governing that takes us in the wrong direction. The urgency to bring down Hillary once seemed paramount, but the agenda grew stronger without her.
He makes a point I agree with but think many will find controversial, that the 'weakest' branch (judiciary) should not run roughshod over the two elected branches.
Another point I like is that he challenges BOTH parties to engage in common sense thinking. I doubt he has any pull within the Dem. party but the challenge is right on the money. Security, healthy economy, liberty and privacy - these should not be partisan, only the smallest details should be our differences. Like the Ben Nelson situation, if moderate and reasonable Dems can't find traditional and successful American principles in the politics of their leaders then they may cross over as they did with Reagan.
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Received this from a friend on the RNC written by a fellow committeeman who fled Communist China as a young man, seeking freedom. He writes about fighting for freedom and holding the party, its candidates, and its officeholders accountable to the voters for their faithfulness to conservative principles. (published in the Wash. Times)
As others have described it, the 'big tent' strategy is to stand consistently for solid and proven principles like freedom, prosperity and security and invite all to join us, not as our opponents do - to calculate each demographic's special interest and compromise on principles enough to eek out a majority.
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Solomon Yue:
On Jan. 29 in Honolulu, the 168-member Republican National Committee, the Republican Party's governing body, will debate a resolution over whether the RNC should continue to finance candidates who do not support many key principles in the party's platform. The resolution would set a standard -- some call it a "litmus test" -- to judge whether a candidate qualifies for RNC financial support.
Last month, the special congressional election in New York was a fiasco because the RNC backed liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava over a conservative Republican who wound up running on the Conservative Party line. Mrs. Scozzafava then quit and endorsed the Democrat candidate, who went on to win.
That raised some profound questions: Should the RNC maintain a balance between simply electing more Republicans on the one hand and ensuring that those elected defend the party's conservative principles on the other? To regain public trust, should the RNC match deeds with words by offering concrete steps to hold elected Republicans accountable?
As an immigrant from Communist China, I never had freedom until I got to the United States in 1980. I joined the Republican Party because of Ronald Reagan's pro-freedom agenda. He hastened the fall of the "evil empire" by putting unbearable pressure on its long-crumbling economy. Millions were liberated.
Back then, the Grand Old Party stood for freedom. But I began to share the tea-party activists' frustrations about broken promises, from earmarks to deficit spending. Those broken promises represented this party's failure to stand for principles.
After the 2008 defeat, broken promises continued, with the usual lip service. Republican leaders asked voters to trust them to reassert party principles, while some continued to back the stimulus bill, deficit spending, cap-and-trade plans and Obamacare. Those Republicans not only continued to erode the party's brand name, but also aided and abetted President Obama's march to socialism. Some fear that a candid debate could relegate the Republican Party to indefinite minority status; that the party needs those promise-breakers for a "big tent" to regain the majority.
During the debate at the RNC on a resolution declaring the Democratic agenda as socialist, party leaders put their concern for how the media perceived them above their standing up for conviction. Some of us ask, "At what price?" and wonder whether the tent is big enough for the tea-party activists.
While the RNC debated what the Republican Party should call the Obama agenda, individual freedom eroded at an accelerated rate. The activists saw Republicans as those who voted to take away not only their freedom, but also their children's and grandchildren's freedom while the party stood by. They perceived the GOP's failure to defend individual freedom as its acceptance of partial tyranny for the sake of "bipartisanship."
The anger at an out-of-control Washington has driven those activists to protest in town halls and a march on Washington. They blame both parties for taking away their freedom. I can see their point, since I am now partially owned by the same tyrannical regime that I thought I escaped 29 years ago: China remains the number one holder of U.S. bonds, valued at $799 billion.
The Republican Party is at a crossroads. The fear of becoming a permanent minority party, which caused the RNC not to hold Republican leaders accountable, now becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The latest Rasmussen polls showed, despite Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia, a generic "tea-party" candidate in a 2010 congressional race would finish ahead of an unnamed Republican, by 23 percent to 18 percent.
The Whig Party's failure to stand up for black freedom gave birth to the Republican Party. What would happen to this party if it fails to stand for individual freedom? A political party ceases to exist when it no longer stands for principles. If the Republicans were to break into two or three smaller parties, would this Republic survive eight years of Mr. Obama's socialism?
After broken promises and more broken promises, would another "trust us" approach, without any teeth, be enough to save the Republican Party? Clearly, it is not enough. The RNC must offer concrete steps to ensure that party leaders will defend freedom.
First, the RNC must close the credibility gap caused by ideological inconsistencies. If this is the party of small government, lower taxes, less spending, free enterprise and individual freedom, the RNC must make sure candidates not only run as fiscal conservatives, but also govern that way.
Second, the Republican establishment must resist the urge to endorse a moderate candidate in a contested primary. This not only is divisive, but also raises questions about the party's commitment to conservatism. It further undermines the trust the RNC wants to rebuild.
Finally, the RNC must hold the party's elected lawmakers accountable to the voters by matching their promises with their records when their funding requests are considered.
Facing extinction as a party, the Republican Party must not fail. Benjamin Franklin reputedly said on the adoption of the Constitution, "We have given you a republic - if you can keep it."
Making elected Republicans accountable is one way to keep the republic.
• Solomon Yue, an Oregon businessman, is an elected member of the Republican National Committee and a founder of two conferences within the RNC: the 24-member Republican National Conservative Caucus and the 96-member Conservative Steering Committee.
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See today's entry in the Glenn Beck thread.
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I must admit I have called Rush a blow hard and sometimes he is just that.
But I was worried when he was reportedly in the hospital.
The thought of losing him is the thought of losing this country to liberals.
I don't always agree with him but I feel that we need voices like him to preserve this country or we are lost.
As yet there are no politicians who can do what he does. There is no one on the horizon who can help us get us back to where we are track to stay the greatest place on the planet.
Liberals are dead set on giving it all away - for votes. for power, for their own enrichment.
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I'ver never been much of a Rush fan. Frankly, his time is past. Beck and younger voices that can appeal to 18-35 year olds are who need to be cultivated and pushed to the forefront.
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Rush was a breath of fresh air, but now he is one of many advocates. I hope he can continue to be around tho'.
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"All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of superintending providence in our favor. ... Have we now forgotten that powerful Friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance? I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth -- that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the Ground without His notice, is it probable that an Empire can rise without his Aid?" --Benjamin Franklin
I have been asked on occasion what most defines the difference between conservatives and liberals. There are, of course, many clear delineations between our diametrically opposed philosophies, but there is one that is defining.
Conservatives, The Patriot variety, serve a higher calling -- First Principles -- a calling superior to their own self-interest -- with the objective of enhancing individual and national liberty for the benefit of all.
Ideological liberals, on the other hand, no matter what the cause, tend to be motivated by pathological egocentrism, which generally correlates with the acquisition of power and the suppression of liberty.
The opposition between these competing philosophies is an expression of the light and dark sides of humanity. The struggle between liberty and tyranny is as old as mankind, and though our nation was founded on constitutional Rule of Law -- republican government in support of liberty -- the assault on freedom has been constant since our founding.
However, while this attack is more vigorous today than at anytime in our history, liberty will prevail.
Here, I give you just one small example of why I know that liberty, the Light, the Truth, will trump the darkness of tyranny.
Every year since we launched PatriotPost.US as a touchstone for Patriots across the nation, we have had significant growth over the previous year, both in readership and revenue, which has ensured our growth in successive years.
We are chartered as a "for profit" business (so we can exercise our First Amendment rights without IRS permission) but are donor based, and like most other public interest organizations, we raise most of our operating revenue within the last two months of each year. Needless to say, this highly irregular business model causes some heartburn for our bankers, accountants and legal team -- not to mention your executive editor.
In 2008, as we were ramping up our year-end fundraising campaign, economic collapse coincided with the election of über-Leftist Barack Hussein Obama, though that may have been no coincidence. I prepared to make the necessary cuts to scale our operation to what the economy would support. But much to my relief, our readers fully funded our budget (oh me of little faith).
This year, I was even more apprehensive about sustaining our mission, not to mention the modest budgets of our young staff and their families. However, I am pleased to report that, once again, thanks to Patriots across the nation, we met our budget requirements in full. More remarkable is the fact that PatriotShop.US -- all sales proceeds from which support our mission -- experienced a year-over-year sales increase of more than 30 percent.
I deduce three conclusions from these donor and sales results.
First, our readers are not, in the words of Thomas Paine, "summer soldiers and sunshine patriots." You, fellow Patriots, are cut from the same cloth as our Founding Fathers and all American Patriots throughout our history. You do not "shrink from the service of our country" when times are tough.
Second, these results indicate that a broad swath of Americans are taking a much more active stand for liberty, for now that they see its antithesis in the Oval Office and Congress, they have a tangible example of tyranny in action.
Third, concern for the preservation of liberty is so endemic that we received funding from many readers who fall within three groups from which we do not ask support: Military personnel, students and those in the mission field, or who otherwise have limited income. The letters below are representative of many we received from Patriot donors in those groups.
"I have been a reader of The Patriot for 10 years. I know you do not seek support from uniformed Patriots, but as a Marine officer and combat veteran of two wars, one who understands the full implications of my oath to 'support and defend' our Constitution against enemies 'foreign and domestic,' it gives me great pleasure to support the 'Voice of Constitutional Conservatism.'"
"As a student with no income other than what I earn through summer internships, I have a very limited budget. But the value of The Patriot to my education and growth has been incalculable. Consequently, I make my small but sincere contribution. My one regret is that any amount donated to The Patriot will never adequately reflect its worth."
"I just made a donation, even though I was laid off last month and am still unemployed. I receive The Patriot every day and I have been putting off a donation because I didn't think I could afford it. I realize now that I can't afford not to support this beacon of liberty."
"As a retired command fighter pilot with more than 500 hours in combat, I am honored to support the vital work you are doing for our great nation. Every day, I look forward to The Patriot and its inspiration to reaffirm my devotion to our Constitution."
These words speak volumes.
Though we have a long way to go to restore the integrity of our Constitution, we should all take comfort in the fact that America's strength, her Patriot defenders, are standing up and standing firm, and our ranks are growing. Indeed, the time has come.
And the Left is taking note.
Just this week, two senators, a member of the house, a governor and a lieutenant governor, all members of the once noble Democrat Party, announced that they will not seek re-election in 2010.
This is good news, for it is the strongest indication that all the activism this past year is taking its toll. But the great news, the unwavering verity upon which we can all depend in good times and bad, is, in the words of that wise sage Ben Franklin, "God governs in the affairs of men."
This year, and the two that follow, present enormous challenges for all who want to restore Rule of Law. We are mindful of the enduring words of George Washington at the dawn of American liberty: "We should never despair, our Situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again. If new difficulties arise, we must only put forth new Exertions and proportion our Efforts to the exigency of the times."
In 2010, The Patriot will respond to the exigency of our times, in part, by sponsoring the Essential Liberty Project. Clarity of mission and purpose -- First Principles -- are needed now, more than ever.
Let's make this a year to which our posterity will point and say, "They rose in defense of Liberty," a year that overflowed with Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Thanks to all of you for your support and for your steadfast loyalty to our Constitution and Republic. Make peace with no oppression and keep your powder dry!
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Mark Alexander
Publisher, PatriotPost.US
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I appreciate the Patriot Post, but on behalf of the dearth of liberal posters here I take offense with this:
"Ideological liberals, on the other hand, no matter what the cause, tend to be motivated by pathological egocentrism, which generally correlates with the acquisition of power and the suppression of liberty."
I draw a distinction between conservative Americans who support founding principles and elected Republicans who pass trillion dollar budgets with earmarks the same as their opponents. Same distinction goes for the liberal path. True liberals have some foggy vision of a community utopia where everyone has a fair share of what they need and live happily ever after. We need not insult them; we need to articulate the flaws and downsides of their ideas. It is the elected phony liberals who pray off them for their votes to build their power, make deals, pay back special interests and chop away at our few remaining freedoms.
The true liberal out there doesn't see minimum wage law or single payer healthcare as a federal power grab or anything else other than trying to make the world we live in a better place. You must take that view on, head-on, and demonstrate why that does not make a better world.
Luckily the proportion of true liberals out there hovers at only about 17-21%, see below, in spite of the fact that almost no one is persuasively arguing WHY a larger nanny state is a bad idea.
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/Politicalideology-1.gif)
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Doug:
Thank you for that.
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Through the tall trees of northern Wisconsin, Republican Sean Duffy is stalking a giant. The 38-year-old district attorney is talking fiscal responsibility, job creation, entitlement reform. He's scoring Washington for higher taxes, and for a health-care takeover. He's Facebooking and Twittering. He comes across as a serious yet positive reformer, a combo that has caught the public's eye.
He'll need that eye, and more, since his Goliath is one David Obey, Democratic head of the Appropriations Committee, the liberal bull who has occupied Wisconsin's Democratic-leaning 7th congressional seat since before Mr. Duffy was . . . born. That the Republican is getting some traction says something about how bitter voters are with the Democratic agenda. It says something equally important about a nascent GOP effort to rebrand the party.
Meet the new Young Guns.
The recent wave of Democratic retirements bodes well for Republicans. Yet they are still largely winning by default. The public doesn't like the Democratic agenda, but it hasn't forgotten the GOP's own corruption and loss of principle. And crafting a new image is a tough haul for a minority that is stuck responding to events, and that is still populated by many of the same, entrenched faces.
What is happening instead is a real (if underreported) effort to reshape the party from the bottom up—to, in effect, repopulate it with a crop of reformist candidates in the midterm. Behind the effort are three congressmen—Wisconsin's Paul Ryan, Virginia's Eric Cantor and California's Kevin McCarthy.
In 2007, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard profiled this trio as the "Young Guns" of the GOP. Hailing from different parts of the country, from different perspectives, what the three shared was a core belief in fiscal conservatism, a wonkish interest in tackling systemic government failures (budget, entitlements), and an ability to connect to younger voters.
At a recent interview, Rep. McCarthy remembers that not long after the article, the three sat down and vented frustration that party leaders seemed more interested in protecting old faces than investing in new talent. Inspired by Mr. Barnes's label, they began the Young Guns program, to recruit and bring along a new generation of House Republicans.
In the 2008 election, the program singled out 24 conservative candidates, providing them money and help. Seven went on to win in the GOP wipeout. Several of the victors—Texas's Pete Olson, Florida's Tom Rooney—are already proving to be aggressive new voices. Pete Sessions, who took over the National Republican Congressional Committee, was impressed enough to bring the program within the committee structure and expand it.
Participation in Young Guns today is more challenging. Candidates must hit benchmarks to qualify for the title, money and support; 47 candidates are working to qualify. And what exactly is a prospective Young Gun? It isn't as mapped out as Newt Gingrich's Contract With America. Yet it also isn't Rahm Emanuel's famous Red-to-Blue program, which simply ran candidates—regardless of ideology—who could win.
Mr. McCarthy says Young Guns tend to "fit their district." What they have in common is "that they are all fiscal conservatives" who believe in entrepreneurship and limited government. Many were already unhappy with Republican earmarking and spending, and the bailouts and deficits have provided a new focus on cleaning up government and tackling crony capitalism.
Most are running bread-and-butter economic campaigns, similar to Virginia Gov. Elect Bob McDonnell's. They are folks like Stephen Fincher, a farmer running for retiring Democratic Rep. John Tanner's Tennessee seat, or Frank Guinta, mayor of Manchester, challenging New Hampshire's Carol Shea-Porter. Mr. McCarthy is quick to note these are not backroom-anointed candidates, a la Dede Scozzafava in New York. In some districts, more than one prospective Young Gun is running in a primary.
Wisconsin's Mr. Duffy describes it this way: "I'm running because this is the fight of my generation. The prior one fought the Cold War, before that it was World War II. But our fight is becoming one for the principles of free markets and against creeping socialism." He's targeting Mr. Obey for writing the $787 billion stimulus, highlighting Democrats' failed economic program. The DA (who is also a professional lumberjack athlete) is crisscrossing the district to warn about rampant spending, Medicare cuts, higher taxes and overregulation.
But he's also aware that Republicans can only shake a tarnished reputation by embracing a modern, reform agenda. He's been laying out conservative alternatives to government-run health care. He's honest about the coming entitlement bomb. He's proposing a flatter, smarter tax code. In his first fund-raising quarter, he raised $140,000—a record for the district.
Young Guns is no panacea. Party leaders are still searching for a clear message. The NRCC is struggling to raise money to support its recruits. Voters remain skeptical of the GOP, and the environment may improve for Democrats as the year goes on.
Yet what the program does suggest is some of the GOP's heavy hitters are giving thought to the party's future. Given the Republicans' recent years of wandering, that's a start.
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It is so hard to put conservatism on a bumper sticker, but I think I finally got one:
America, Too Big to Fail
I'm visualizing a new national campaign platform where we propose to break this failing, drifting, expanding, authoritarian, bureaucratic enterprise into smaller pieces before it's too late - say 50 of them. Let each one be self-governing except for just those functions that can done best by a centralized, consensual government, like national defense, interstate commerce and a federal court system. Put it all in writing, maybe in a constitution, requiring strict limits on federal powers, ratify it and then HONOR it. Put in a clause making it difficult but possible to amend this constitution. Require super-majorities of house senate and the state legislatures to make ANY change, otherwise NO crossing the line on the limits of central government power. Then let we the people decide the other issues - closer to home.
Am I on the right track?
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What a series of novel concepts, Doug.
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I just had deja vu :wink: :roll: :-D
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G.O.P. Grief and Grieving
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: January 8, 2010
The attack on the Republican establishment by the tea party folks grabs the gaze like a really bad horror flick — some version of “Hee Haw” meets “28 Days Later.” It’s fascinating. But it also raises a serious question: Are these the desperate thrashings of a dying movement or the labor pains of a new one?
My money is on the former. Anyone who says that this is the dawn of a new age of conservatism is engaging in wishful thinking on a delusional scale.
There is no doubt that the number of people who say that they are conservative has inched up. According to a report from Gallup on Thursday, conservatives finished 2009 as the No. 1 ideological group. But ideological identification is no predictor of electoral outcomes. According to polls by The New York Times, conservative identification was slightly higher on the verge of Bill Clinton’s first-term election and Barack Obama’s election than it was on the verge of George W. Bush’s first-term election.
It is likely that Republicans will pick up Congressional seats in November partly because of the enthusiasm of this conservative fringe, democratic apathy and historical trends. But make no mistake: This is not 1994.
This is a limited, emotional reaction. It’s a response to the trauma that is the Great Recession, the uncertainty and creeping suspicion about the risks being taken in Washington, a visceral reaction to Obama and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness and loss.
Simply put, it’s about fear-fueled anger. But anger is not an idea. It’s not a plan. And it’s not a vision for the future. It is, however, the second stage of grief, right after denial and before bargaining.
The right is on the wrong side of history. The demographics of the country are rapidly changing, young people are becoming increasingly liberal on social issues, and rigid, dogmatic religious stricture is loosening its grip on the throat of our culture.
The right has seen the enemy, and he is the future.
According to a Gallup report issued this week, Republicans were more than twice as likely as Democrats and a third more likely as independents to have a pessimistic outlook for the country over the next 20 years. That might be the fourth stage of grief: depression.
So what’s their battle plan to fight back from the precipice of irrelevance? Moderation? A stab at modernity? A slate of innovative ideas? No, their plan is to purge the party’s moderates and march farther down the road to oblivion.
Erick Erickson, the incendiary editor of the popular conservative blog RedState, appeared on “The Colbert Report” on Monday and said that “no one really knows what a Republican is anymore.”
Split hairs about labels if you must, but the Republican brand already has begun a slow slide into obscurity. And turning further right only hastens its demise. Quiet as it’s kept, many in the party know this. That, alas, is called acceptance.
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I think the tea party movement is alive and well, and spurred on by folks like Glen Beck, Sara Palin, et al. Another group that is gaining traction is Tim Cox's group, "GOOH---Get Out of our House". GOOH was began by Tim Cox and completely financed by him up to this point. He is well off financially, and does not want anyone's money until they reach 500,000 members, which they are well on their way to reaching. Once they reach 500,000 members, he has a plan to replace every member of the House of Representatives with folks from GOOH, who are tested and agree to vote by their stated goals. Their website is: http://goooh.com/Home.aspx. Very interesting concept, and there is a growing number of American's that are sick and tired of the liberal, socialist government now in place. 2010 and 2012 will be very interesting election years.
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I think the liberals are on the wrong side of history. Have they ever heard of capatilism? Democracy? Freedom?
What makes this guy decide that socialism, gigantic control of every aspect of our lives by government, endless expansion of entitlements, giving up American soveriegnty is on the side of history?
These things were already tried and mostly failed.
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/CHBLOW-BIO.html
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The reason I posted his piece is because it addresses the Republican Party.
Do YOU think the Republican Party stands for Free Minds and Free Markets?
Do you think the Reps are going to fare well with the already built into the pipeline demographics of the American people? And what happens if/when amnesty and immigration deform are voted in? :-o
Do you think the Reps are going to fare well with a population educated by the DOEducation, public schools, our Universities, and People magazine?
Do you think the Reps are going to fare well when most voters don't pay taxes?
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Answers to questions
yes,no,no,no.
That is why I am not for a strictly conservative platform. I don't think it can win. That is why I think strict conservatism/Reaganism is dead. Some feel it was the cans trying to be democrats during the W years that did it. Not strict conservative.
Perhaps they are right. I really can't figure it all out.
It does give me some hope when i see some Blacks on Glenn Beck speaking about conservative values - how refreshing.
If only we could convince more of this group that they would be better off in the long run if they embrace this rather than let crats literally give their country away like they are doing. I can only wonder that many Blacks are so engrained to "even" the score for past injustices that they are now (IMO) shooting themselves in the feet while they are trying to get even with Whites.
But I digress, and back to your points,
Yes Democrats are winning the war on demographics by confiscation and bribery.
It seems most of the world has been moving towards freedom and capitalism so I meant in those terms crats are on the wrong side.
But you are right, I may have miscontrued his point -
We in this country are now moving away from freedom and capitalism and yes what Charles Blow claims appears to be true. It appears the Cans are on the wrong side of the trends you point out.
Actually if Bama had his way he would abolishment the concept of *country* altogether and there would be one world government that would control everything and everybody. And in his mind, ideally, he would be the ONE running it.
To me this is plainly obvious. I don't know how many others either don't seem to get it or frankly simply agree with the "plan" and therefore he still maintains some degree of popularity.
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I think what Glenn Beck is doing communicating with black Americans is quite interesting and potentially quite powerful.
It starts in the opening seconds of the show, wherein MLK is shown as a Founding Father to be mentioned as an equal of Washington and Jefferson. (Coincidentally enough something that I have been doing for a couple of years now in the Founding Fathers thread on our SCH forum) It continues there with the iconic civil rights era foto of a civil rights protester carrying a sign "I AM somebody." And the point is driven home in a variety of ways during the show. Nothing forced, nothing phony, nothing condescending.
PS: I think the fact that white American voted for BO had a very powerful effect on black America's perception of white America that has the potential for a deep paradigm shift.
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"PS: I think the fact that white American voted for BO had a very powerful effect on black America's perception of white America that has the potential for a deep paradigm shift."
Could you explain a little more detail what you mean? I think I read you but could you clarify?
There is nothing more I, and I believe, all Republicans would like, than to have more Blacks come on board with us.
If only they would look at what I believe is the larger context rather than the quick "we'll give you quick cash and benes now" with the underlying but *unspoken* truth that you will become and thus remain OUR servants - meaning the Dem party and the government.
Why can't Blacks see themselves as field hands for governement?
Are there any Blacks on this board?
I hope I don't offend anyone but this seems to me a letigimate question.
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Crafty's point of a paradigm shift is logical but I don't think true at least in the short run. There are many reasons more blacks should identify more conservatively in their politics, yet we see no statistical move that I am aware of. America proved they could elect a black man President and all black children were shown they could become anything they want, even President of the United States. Black voters however did not transcend race. Faced with nearly identical politics in the primaries, they almost universally identified with just the one candidate.
Following the race based excitement of the last election, I think turnout will drop in the off-year without Obama on the ballot and much of the excitement will be worn off by 2012. By then I think the race identification fades - he is a politician serving as President with a record to judge - whatever that will be in 2012. Are you better off... But lower turnout is different than oining a free market paradigm for example.
I saw a list of all Presidents with their photo on a card from an inner city school. I first thought this is great, they are learning all of the Presidents at a young age. As I scanned through the photos to the end I realized this was all about highlighting the historic nature of the last election (43 white men followed by President Obama), and they perhaps should be proud in a predominantly black neighborhood. But not all day every day instead of math and science.
When the excitement wears down a little, it would be nice to shift the discussion in every neighborhood back to economic policies that expand opportunities, national security issues, school choice, constitutional liberties etc. instead of who looks like what or as Harry Reid said 'speaks without a negro dialect'.
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In the inner city politics they talk of welfare rights, social justice and voting to keep the programs coming. Many very Marxist themes like taking more from those who can afford to pay more and success of groups like ACORN at opposing things like property owner rights. Nobody seems to ask the question in the most crime ridden and welfare dependent areas, how is this all working out for you?
Elsewhere some brilliant, artculate, thoughtful black conservatives put out wonderful opinion pieces, from Thomas Sowell to Clarence Thomas, Walter Williams, JC Watts, even Michael Steele. I am afraid they are admired mostly by white conservatives. I see Keith Ellison's operatives taking his material from house to house in the neighborhoods regularly, knocking on every door and ready to engage in discussion. I don't see anyone doing that for black conservatives.
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I think Glen Beck is leading the way here.
And frankly, I think WE have to see the potential here instead of staying mired in the "patricians and demogogues" feedback loop.
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"I think Glen Beck is leading the way here." - Look forward to hearing more on that. I'm not seeing Fox News selected in the black non-conservative households I've been in, but they are number one and he is getting talked about.
And frankly, I think WE have to see the potential here instead of staying mired in the "patricians and demogogues" feedback loop.
That is a good point. Our job is to make the case and get the information out. I had trouble getting good numbers, but MN is 5% black, 3% Hispanic. Republicans needed something like a 0.2% gain in their black vote for senate to prevent the 60th vote for govt run health care. Or they needed to win 7/100th of a % of those who voted for the Independent and didn't want the Democrat either. Or just 313 liberal dead people registered by ACORN to stay home and not vote.
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I found it fascinating to see Blacks on the cable shows vehemently disagreeing on Reid's comments.
This IS A FIRST.
I don't think I ever recall Blacks publically showing so much disagreement.
This proves they are not one block.
This proves they are willing to come out and publicaly disagree even when it is a Democrat they are speaking of.
Probably there are many who felt this way all along. Perhaps it is only now we hear from so many more African Americans rather the darm MSM running and getting opinions from sharptons and Jacksons etc as though THEY speak for all Blacks.
If only Republicans can reach out to Blacks and LEGAL Latinos and convince them what I see as a truth that they are mistakenly letting the Democrat party hijack THEIR rights, their futures by giving it away to illegals and having Pres who seems fit to down our country overseas and give away our soverienty to the UN, other nations, and his own delusions of megalomania.
The United States is their country too. Not the governments. Not the Democratic party. Not Obama's.
It is not Obamas right to give us away.
If the Republicans can work on this type of approach then I believe we can win back Blacks to the party of Lincoln.
Why in the world are Blacks standing by and letting the Dems give away their country to illegals predominantly Latinos?
Wake up.
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HOLLAND, Pa. — The Tea Party movement ignited a year ago, fueled by anti-establishment anger. Now, Tea Party activists are trying to take over the establishment, ground up.
Across the country, they are signing up to be Republican precinct leaders, a position so low-level that it often remains vacant, but which comes with the ability to vote for the party executives who endorse candidates, approve platforms and decide where the party spends money.
A new group called the National Precinct Alliance says it has a coordinator in nearly every state to recruit Tea Party activists to fill the positions and has already swelled the number of like-minded members in Republican Party committees in Arizona and Nevada. Its mantra is this: take the precinct, take the state, take the party — and force it to nominate conservatives rather than people they see as liberals in Republican clothing.
Here, in a perennial battleground district outside Philadelphia, Tea Party activists are trying to strip the local committee of its influence in choosing the Republican nominee to run against Representative Patrick J. Murphy, a Democrat who won the seat in 2006 by about 1,500 votes.
After the local party said it would stick to its custom of endorsing a candidate rather than holding an open primary, Tea Party groups decided to hold their own candidate forum where people could cast a ballot. If the party does not yield, the groups say they will host a debate, too.
“We kind of changed the rules,” said Anastasia Przybylski, one of the organizers.
The Tea Party movement, named after the original tax revolt in 1773, might be better described as a diverse, rambunctious and Internet-connected network of groups, powered by grass-roots anxiety about the economy, bailouts and increasing government involvement in health care. At one extreme are militia members who have shown up at meetings wearing guns and suggesting that institutions like the Federal Reserve be eliminated. At the other are those like Ms. Przybylski, who describes herself as “just a stay-at-home mom” who became agitated about the federal stimulus package.
And if the Democrats are big-government socialists, the Republicans, in the Tea Party mind, are enablers.
In some recent polls, a hypothetical Tea Party wins more support than Democrats or Republicans, and the most anti-establishment Tea Party activists push to fight as a third party. But as the movement looks toward the midterm elections in November, a growing number of activists argue that the best way to translate anger into influence is to infiltrate the Republican establishment (Democrats being, for the average Tea Partier, beyond redemption).
“If you want to have revenge against the Republican Party for using you for so many years, the best way is to turn around and use the Republican Party to your advantage,” said Eric Odom, a Tea Party activist in Chicago who recently started a political action committee, and on his blog urged Tea Partiers to stop complaining about the Republican Party and “move in and take it over.”
Republican leaders have been trying to harness the Tea Party energy — Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, recently called the Tea Parties “a revelatory moment.”
“It puts in stark relief where the American people are, how they feel and what they feel,” Mr. Steele said. “It’s important for our party to appreciate and understand that so we can move toward it, and embrace it.”
Not all Republicans agree. Some say the party needs to broaden its reach, not cater to the fringe.
The defining experience for many Tea Party groups was the special election in the 23rd Congressional District of New York in November, where party leaders chose a candidate whom conservatives viewed as a Republican in name only — she supported same-sex marriage, abortion rights and the federal stimulus package. After activists flooded the district to support a conservative third-party candidate, the Republican dropped out and endorsed the Democrat, who won.
Conservatives took the Republican retreat as a victory, but also saw the power of the party structure in deciding who the candidates will be. The rallying cry for more local involvement has been “No more NY-23’s.”
“We don’t want to see what happened in New York happen here,” Ms. Przybylski said.
The forum here drew nine candidates and a standing-room crowd in an auditorium built for 1,200. The questions organizers had drawn up for the candidates hinted at the issues important to so called Teapublicans.
Will you pledge to vote against tax increases, even hidden taxes like those in health care reform? Should corporate executives who encourage illegal immigrants to stay because it is good for business be hauled off to jail? Do you believe manmade pollution is a significant contributor to global warming? (“I don’t necessarily think there’s been global warming,” one candidate objected.)
Each was asked to define the 10th Amendment, and to cite examples of where it “might have been violated.” “It’s my favorite amendment in the Constitution,” exclaimed one candidate, Ira Hoffman. “I can’t believe it!”
The amendment declares that powers not granted to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to the states or the people, and Tea Party activists hold that Congress has overstepped its bounds, particularly by legislating health care. So candidates were asked whether they would support efforts to nullify the health care bill?
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Finally, the moderator asked them if 2010 would be “the year of the Tea Party.” The candidates, and many in the audience, said it would, but only if the Tea Party advocates worked the system.
“I think we can do greater things working in a system that’s established than we ever can being a bunch of anarchists,” said Jennifer Turner Stefano, a vice president of a local Tea Party group who is contesting her local Republican committeeperson.
Ms. Stefano, a stay-at-home mother and former television reporter, will have to get 10 signatures and put her name on the ballot to run. But the National Precinct Alliance estimates that about 60 percent of the roughly 150,000 local Republican committee seats are vacant and can be filled by essentially showing up.
“Even if you’ve got a slight majority, you just need maybe 26 states, then you can have your say in how the party goes,” said Philip Glass, a former commercial mortgage banker in Cincinnati who is the national director of the precinct alliance.
The precinct strategy, like the Tea Party movement itself, has spread via the Internet, on sites like Resistnet.com. A National Tea Party Convention in Nashville next month will feature seminars on how to take over starting at the precinct level.
Advocates hold up the example of Las Vegas, where a group of about 30 people who had become friendly at Tea Party events last spring met to discuss how they could turn their crowds into political influence. One mentioned that there were about 500 open precinct committee positions in the local Republican Party.
They recruited other activists and flooded the committee — the Republican Party says it now has 780 committee people, up from about 300. In July, they approved a new executive committee, and Tony Warren, one of the organizers and a new precinct committeeman himself, said six out of seven executives are “constitutional conservatives,” in keeping with Tea Party ideology.
With the bulk of Nevada’s population in the Las Vegas area, the local committee was able to elect a conservative slate to the state party in December, including a state chairman who has said he wants to make the party “safe” for conservatives.
As recently as last spring, Mr. Warren said, “we didn’t even know how the darn party worked.”
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This sound like....
Classic Clayton Christensian.
The 6'10" pituitary giant from Harvard and his "innovative disruption" that Gilder was so fond of.
There is no question the conservative talking heads are scared to death that the tea party will evolve/morph into a separate movement apart from the GOP. The Hannities the Limbaughs the Levins are incensed at the idea the party will draw away from their power base.
I am not so sure I would mind if it did but more likely than not it would simply be shooting ourselves in the foot by *dividing* a group that would vote against Democrats.
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By JON KELLER Boston
With characteristic hubris, people in this state like to think they've been at the leading edge of American politics since the "shot heard 'round the world" in 1775. And in the past few years, we've given the nation a preview of Barack Obama's presidential campaign with Deval Patrick's successful 2006 bid for governor; provided a critical boost for Mr. Obama's candidacy in the form of an endorsement by Edward Kennedy; and enacted a health-care law that is a template for ObamaCare.
But hubris has yielded to shock here at the possibility that the next political trend the Bay State might foreshadow is a voter backlash against the Democratic Party.
After Kennedy's death in August, few imagined there would be any problem replacing him with another Democrat in the U.S. Senate. It's been 16 years since Massachusetts elected a Republican to a congressional seat, 31 years since the last Republican senator left office. Gov. Patrick appointed a former Kennedy aide as the interim senator, and Democratic primary voters chose the well-regarded state Attorney General Martha Coakley as their nominee for the special election.
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Associated Press
Martha Coakley
.That election, which will be held on Tuesday, was widely seen as a formality. Ms. Coakley coasted through the holiday season while the GOP challenger, little-known state Sen. Scott Brown, scrambled for traction.
The new year, however, brought polls showing the race tightening. This week a Rasmussen Reports poll gave Ms. Coakley a slim 49% to 47% advantage; a Suffolk University survey has Mr. Brown with a narrow lead. Independents are breaking for Mr. Brown by a three-to-one margin, Rasmussen finds. And many people do not realize that independents outnumber Democrats—51% of registered voters in the state are not affiliated with a party, while 37% are registered as Democrats and 11% as Republicans.
"Around the country they look at Massachusetts and just write us off," longtime local activist Barbara Anderson of Citizens for Limited Taxation and Government told me. "But people around here are really not happy with the extremes in the Democrat Party."
Those extremes are cropping up as issues in this race. One is giving civilian legal rights to terror suspects, which Ms. Coakley supports. Mr. Brown, a lieutenant colonel in the Massachusetts National Guard, hammered her for that even before Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day. That incident has tried the patience of an electorate normally known for its civil libertarianism. Rasmussen's most recent survey found that 65% of them want Abdulmutallab tried by the military.
Another issue is taxes. Mr. Brown has scolded Ms. Coakley for supporting a repeal of the Bush tax cuts, for entertaining the idea of passing a "war tax," and for proclaiming in a recent debate that "we need to get taxes up." Ms. Coakley says she meant that tax revenues, not rates, need to rebound. Nonetheless, Mr. Brown's critique resonates with voters who are smarting from a 25% hike in sales tax last year.
Gov. Patrick's approval ratings have also crashed, fertilizing the soil for Mr. Brown's claim in a radio ad that "our government in Washington is making the same mistakes as our government here in Massachusetts."
But nothing excites Mr. Brown's supporters more than his vow to stop ObamaCare by denying Democrats the 60th vote they would need in the U.S. Senate to shut off a GOP filibuster. The Rasmussen and Suffolk polls report that once-overwhelming statewide support for the federal health reform has fallen to a wafer-thin majority.
Support for the state's universal health-care law, close to 70% in 2008, is also in free fall; only 32% of state residents told Rasmussen earlier this month that they'd call it a success, with 36% labeling it a failure. The rest were unsure. Massachusetts families pay the country's highest health insurance premiums, with costs soaring at a rate 7% ahead of the national average, according to a recent report by the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund.
Doubt about the Massachusetts health-care reform "does not necessarily translate into opposition to the federal bill," cautions veteran local Democratic strategist Stephen Crawford, who is not working for any candidate in the Senate race. "I don't think opposition to the plan is going to be a make-or-break issue." That's a far cry from the once widely-held belief here that the Democratic nominee would be hustled into office by voters eager to pass ObamaCare. But it reflects a conviction among local Democratic elites that antitax and anti-big-government politics are "a tired strategy, the same old Karl Rove playbook," as Mr. Crawford puts it.
On Tuesday, we'll have a reading on whether that complacency is justified. It may not be definitive; barely two in 10 voters voted in the primaries, and turnout, especially if it is short on independents, could render the outcome a road test for each party's get-out-the-vote machinery. Here that's akin to a drag race between a Democratic Cadillac fueled with high-octane labor support and a GOP go-kart driven by pedal power. But the long-range weather forecast for the Election Day is clear. There are anecdotal reports of brisk absentee voting, a practice often driven by the state's small but aggressive pro-life faction. And the polls show a sharp enthusiasm gap in Mr. Brown's favor.
Tellingly, the usually-demure Ms. Coakley has been scorching Mr. Brown with a tired strategy out of the Obama campaign playbook, linking him to "the failed policies of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney." Mr. Brown counters by linking Ms. Coakley to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Deval Patrick—people actually in power.
Are we in for another shot heard 'round the world? Perhaps. More likely, listen for the sound of horse hooves on the pavement, and a modern-day version of Paul Revere's historic warning—the backlash is coming.
Mr. Keller is the political analyst for WBZ-TV and WBZ Radio in Boston.
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A bit of rabble rousing to fire up your day!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nEoW-P81-0
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"On Tuesday, we'll have a reading on whether that complacency is justified. It may not be definitive; barely two in 10 voters voted in the primaries, and turnout, especially if it is short on independents, could render the outcome a road test for each party's get-out-the-vote machinery."
Doesn't this make one think we will be seeing another close call with endless legal challenges and murky counts and who knows what other shenanigans?
This article points out union's ability to get out their voters.
I don't know how many "union" votes there are in Mass. but then one could thus ask about the timing of the recent sweetheart deal the legislatures just gave to the unions for the Federal health care bill.
It may not have been a coincidence.
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http://newt.org/MediaArchives/tabid/217/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/4746/Default.aspx
PS: Saw on FOX that Newt did not deny considering run for Presidency , , ,
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Newt and Ron Paul? in any combination?
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FAR too much cognitive dissonance on foreign affairs, the War with Islamo-fascism etc.
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Woof,
Newt, will forevermore leave his name hanging out there as a possible candidate but he will never run for any office again, at least not a serious run; he wants to keep himself in a position of relevancy as a Party leader and pundit but that's all.
P.C.
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That certainly is a plausible analysis, but IMHO also plausible is that he wanted to run last time but thought that the others were starting too soon. While he waited for his moment, Fred Thompson stole the thunder. That Fred then wasted it is another subject.
You may be right, but I am not ready to write Newt off yet. If he decides to really make a go of it he could be really formidable.
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The Pres and V. Pres arguing it out in the office might actually hammer out something more effective than either of them alone......... Either that or they go for a division of labor, the job is too big for one man right now anyway.
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The Reagan Model for Restoration
"No man can well doubt the propriety of placing a president of the United States under the most solemn obligations to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution." --Joseph Story
Commander and ChiefThis week, we observe the anniversary of Ronald Wilson Reagan's birthday -- Reagan Day as it is known around our office.
Ronald Reagan was, and remains, the North Star of the last great conservative revolution -- and the next -- if more Republicans will abide by their oaths to Support and Defend our Constitution and abide by their own political party platform.
At the most recent Republican National Committee confab, some members proposed a "Unity Principle for Support of Candidates" resolution, which identified 10 conservative principles, at least eight of which Republican candidates must support in order to receive RNC funding.
The measure failed, perhaps because more than a few of the current crop of politicos who call themselves "Republican" could not pass muster.
Subsequent to that failed motion, some Leftist intellectuals (an oxymoron, I know, but play along) opined that, based on Reagan's record, not even he would have passed the test.
Of course, as Leftists are prone to do, they are contorting the record so it will comport with their hypothesis, or as Reagan said famously, "The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so."
What is clear about the Reagan record is that he both campaigned and governed on our First Principles, Constitutional Rule of Law and the basic tenets of Essential Liberty.
Unfortunately, at no time did President Reagan have Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, much less a super majority. Because of this, his conservative credentials were sometimes undermined by the opposition. This is most notable in the House's failure to abide by negotiated government spending cuts to social programs commensurate with the tax cuts and increased defense spending that Reagan enacted.
Reagan resurrected supply-side economics -- the real-world-tested fiscal policy that reductions in tax rates and government spending will invigorate the private sector economy, elevate GDP, resulting, ironically, in additional tax revenues even at the lower rates of taxation. But the principle works best only if reduced tax rates are accompanied by comparable reductions in government spending.
Democrats refused to cut spending, all while belittling Reagan's efforts as "trickle-down economics."
However, supply-side economics is so powerful that even though Democrat-controlled House budgets led to record deficits, Reagan's economic policies resulted in the largest peacetime economic surge in American history. This, of course, is in stark contrast to the "trickle-up poverty" of the current administration's past, present and proposed "economic recovery" plans.
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Trickle Up Poverty sticker
Our high quality vinyl bumper sticker, sporting Obama's campaign logo, speaks for itself. Measures 3" x 9"
Typical of great statesmen, Ronald Reagan took no credit for our nation's economic recovery under his tenure. He was called "The Great Communicator" because of his ability to remind us of our nation's values, its character, its soul and its confidence, a far cry from the incessant apologizing and the political chicanery that characterize the Obama presidency.
"I wasn't a great communicator," President Reagan said in his farewell address, "but I communicated great things, and they didn't spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation -- from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in the principles that have guided us for two centuries."
And what were those principles?
Back in 1964, shortly after Reagan parted ways with the Democrat Party ("I did not leave the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party left me."), he delivered a timeless challenge to conservatives entitled "A Time for Choosing": "You and I are told we must choose between a left or right," Reagan said, "but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right, There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism."
In 1977, Reagan outlined a plan for "The New Republican Party," stating, "The principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered through experience in not just one generation or a dozen, but in all the combined experience of mankind. When we conservatives say that we know something about political affairs, and what we know can be stated as principles, we are saying that the principles we hold dear are those that have been found, through experience, to be ultimately beneficial for individuals, for families, for communities and for nations -- found through the often bitter testing of pain, or sacrifice and sorrow."
He continued: "We, the members of the New Republican Party, believe that the preservation and enhancement of the values that strengthen and protect individual freedom, family life, communities and neighborhoods and the liberty of our beloved nation should be at the heart of any legislative or political program presented to the American people.
"Families must continue to be the foundation of our nation. Families -- not government programs -- are the best way to make sure our children are properly nurtured, our elderly are cared for, our cultural and spiritual heritages are perpetuated, our laws are observed and our values are preserved. ... We fear the government may be powerful enough to destroy our families; we know that it is not powerful enough to replace them.
"Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business ... frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite.
"Our party must be based on the kind of leadership that grows and takes its strength from the people. ... And our cause must be to rediscover, reassert and reapply America's spiritual heritage to our national affairs. Then with God's help we shall indeed be as a city upon a hill with the eyes of all people upon us."
In his 1981 inaugural address, President Reagan assured the nation: "The economic ills we suffer ... will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we, as Americans, have the capacity now, as we have had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom. In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
Ronald Wilson Reagan appealed to the best in us.
His final words at the 1992 Republican convention reflect that appeal: "And whatever else history may say about me when I'm gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts. My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty's lamp guiding your steps and opportunity's arm steadying your way. My fondest hope for each one of you -- and especially for young people -- is that you will love your country, not for her power or wealth, but for her selflessness and her idealism. May each of you have the heart to conceive, the understanding to direct, and the hand to execute works that will make the world a little better for your having been here. May all of you as Americans never forget your heroic origins, never fail to seek divine guidance, and never lose your natural, God-given optimism. And finally, my fellow Americans, may every dawn be a great new beginning for America and every evening bring us closer to that shining city upon a hill."
On the other hand, Barack Hussein Obama appeals to the worst in his constituents -- their fears, doubts, dependence on the state, greed and envy, brokenness, pessimism and sense of helplessness. He has twisted JFK's inaugural appeal to read: "Ask what your country can do for you, not what you can do for your country."
Ronald Reagan provided a timeless template for the restoration of our nation's economic and moral prosperity, and a return to First Principles and the Rule of Law. Once again, it is time for action, time to choose.
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http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/THE TEA PARTY
"It's a leaderless movement" former House majority leader Dick Armey
The Tea Party movement in the US is an open source political protest. It emerged due to a substantial loss of government legitimacy (primarily from the mishandling of the global financial crisis) and continues to percolate as legitimacy continues to drain away from the government (health care, banking reform, unemployment, foreclosures, bankruptcy, deficit, etc.). Here's what open source means in this context:
•Lots of small local groups (and individuals), with a plethora of different motivations for action.
•No barriers to entry. Anybody can label themselves or their actions as part of the Tea Party.
•Lots of networked activity and cross movement communication.
As a movement, it is very similar to open source warfare and therefore shares many of the same dynamics. Here are a few of them:
•Its main value is systems disruption. It can slow political processes. It can say no (the name, "Tea Party" is derived from an act of disruptive, albeit non-violent, domestic terrorism directed at the government).
•There are lots of people trying to control it (grab the baton to lead the parade) and form it into a cohesive whole. All of these efforts will fail. Every attempt at control will be attacked and defeated by a majority of Tea Party groups/members.
•Swarms. Groups will rapidly converge on attractive protest targets (typically signaled by media coverage via stigmergy).
Traditionally, a failure by the government would result in a gain by the opposition party. However, the peculiar dynamics of the two party system in the US works against this. The two parties have converged into a single dominant party with roughly similar agendas. Further, these parties have rigged the system to prevent third party formation. As a result, there isn't a structured process to absorb this movement into the political system. Here are some potential outcomes:
•It will merely damage the political party in power, preventing any action by saying no to everything (regardless of which political party is in power). A future Republican government presiding over more loses of government legitimacy would yield movement growth and mutation.
•The Republicans will run an open source counter-insurgency against it, co-opting some of its member groups (not all) and using them to fight against the rest. The result will be dissipation through infighting which will allow the Republicans to pick up former members.
•A new plausible promise emerges that allows it to grow and morph into something else (more of an insurgency than a political protest). It's unclear if the environment is ripe for this yet. A second financial crisis or recession downdraft may afford it. Once it is ripe, all it takes is for one subgroup to demonstrate the plausible promise through action (for example: a real and not a metaphorical Tea Party).
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By GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS
Nashville, Tenn.
There were promises of transparency and of a new kind of collaborative politics where establishment figures listened to ordinary Americans. We were going to see net spending cuts, tax cuts for nearly all Americans, an end to earmarks, legislation posted online for the public to review before it is signed into law, and a line-by-line review of the federal budget to remove wasteful programs.
These weren't the tea-party platforms I heard discussed in Nashville last weekend. They were the campaign promises of Barack Obama in 2008.
Mr. Obama made those promises because the ideas they represented were popular with average Americans. So popular, it turns out, that average Americans are organizing themselves in pursuit of the kind of good government Mr. Obama promised, but has not delivered. And that, in a nutshell, was the feel of the National Tea Party Convention. The political elites have failed, and citizens are stepping in to pick up the slack.
View Full Image
Associated Press
Angela McGlowan enters the GOP primary to represent Mississippi's First District.
.This response has brought millions of Americans to the streets over the past year, and brought quite a few people to the posh Opryland Resort (with its indoor waterfalls and boat rides, it's like a casino without the gambling) for the convention.
Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry—and they are—but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun. Laughter rang out frequently, and when ne w-media mogul Andrew Breitbart held forth on a TV interview, a crowd gathered and broke into spontaneous applause.
A year ago, many told me, they were depressed about the future of America. Watching television pundits talk about President Obama's transformative plans for big government, they felt alone, isolated and helpless. That changed when protests, organized by bloggers, met Mr. Obama a year ago in Denver, Colo., Mesa, Ariz., and Seattle, Wash. Then came CNBC talker Rick Santelli's famous on-air rant on Feb. 19, 2009, which gave the tea-party movement its name.
Tea partiers are still angry at federal deficits, at Washington's habit of rewarding failure with handouts and punishing success with taxes and regulation, and the general incompetence that has marked the first year of the Obama presidency. But they're no longer depressed.
Instead, they seem energized. And surprisingly media savvy. William Temple donned colonial dress knowing that it would be an irresistible lure to TV cameras. When the cameras trained on him, he regaled interviewers with well-informed discussion of constitutional history. Other attendees were hawking DVDs, books, and Web sites promoting tea-party ideals, while discussing the use of tools like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for political organizing.
Press attention focused on Sarah Palin's speech, which was well-received by the crowd. But the attendees I met weren't looking to her for direction. They were hoping she would move in theirs. Right now, the tea party isn't looking for leaders so much as leaders are looking to align themselves with the tea party.
It's easy to see why. A recent Investor's Business Daily/TIPP poll found that three-fourths of independent voters have a favorable opinion of the tea party. This enthusiasm, however, does not translate into an embrace of establishment Republicanism. One of the less-noted aspects of Mrs. Palin's speech was her endorsement of primary challenges for incumbent Republicans, something that is already underway. Tea partiers I talked to hope to replace a lot of entrenched time-servers and to throw a scare into others.
One primary challenger is Les Phillip. He is running against Republican Parker Griffith in Alabama's fifth congressional district. Mr. Phillip, a black businessman and Navy veteran who immigrated with his parents from Trinidad in his youth, got his start in politics speaking at a tea-party protest in Decatur, Ala., last year.
"Somebody had to speak," he told me, "so I stepped up." He did well enough that he was invited to speak at another protest in Trussville, Ala., after which things sort of snowballed. Of the tea partiers, he says, "Their values are pretty much mine. I live in a town in North Alabama where there are plenty of blacks driving Mercedes and living in big houses. Only in America can someone come from a little island and live the dream. I've liked it, and that's what I want for my children. [But] I saw the window closing for my own kids."
Mr. Phillip has gotten tea-party endorsements, as well as one from Mike Huckabee. The Republican establishment is siding with Mr. Griffith, who only recently switched from Democrat to Republican. That support is perhaps understandable as realpolitik, but it's not the sort of thing that sits well with tea partiers, who think that too much realpolitik is what rendered the Republican Party corrupt and ossified over the past decade.
Mr. Phillip isn't the only black tea-party candidate in the deep south—Angela McGlowan, who spoke in Nashville, has entered the Republican primary in Mississippi's first district—and primary challenges aren't the only way activists are exerting influence. Cincinnati tea-party activists are running candidates for Republican precinct executive in every precinct in their area—if elected, these candidates will help set policy platforms within the GOP and have sway over which candidates the party endorses. Activists in other states are doing the same. Adam Andrzejewski, who ran in the Republican primary for governor in Illinois, told me he will run candidates in each of Illinois' precincts, and Utah activists are turning that state's convention-based nominating system into a trial for incumbent Republican Sen. Robert Bennett. Plus, tea-party activists used their convention to launch a political action committee.
If 2009 was the year of taking it to the streets, 2010 is the year of taking it to the polls. With ordinary Americans setting out to reclaim the political process, it's likely to be a bumpy ride for incumbents of both parties. I suspect the Founding Fathers would approve.
Mr. Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee. He covered the National Tea Party Convention for PJTV.com, an Internet television network.
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Newt Gingrich in fine form:
http://newt.org/MediaCenter/FeaturedVideo/tabid/258/Default.aspx
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Newt is great. I just question his generalizable appeal. He didn't exactly leave the Senate high up in the polls.
Barbour, I always recall was/is very well spoken, articulate.
He got rave reviews for his handling of Katrina in Mississippi from what I read.
Anyone have thoughts on him for Pres?
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Barbour is very good in many ways, but IMHO will be too readily seen as "just another old white Republican male". I also doublt his fighting spirit when a liberal-prgressive lynch mob gets in full-throated cry.
Newt on the other hand has a mental speed and verbal agility that can keep him from being pegged as such. A lack of fighting spirit will not be a problem with the Newtster though methinks as his political killer instinct is well proven. As for his foilbes in the mid 90s, as serious as some of them were, I suspect America's concentration span and moral speciousness will not prevent him from being forgiven if he is seen as the man that we want.
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This AM he was on CNN and sat through what was a rather condescending and at times smart alec interview by some well made up and bejeweled low-cut blouse female interviewer who rapped up at the end of the interview by saying thank you for being on and you are always an interesting "character" all the while sitting smuggly with shit eating grin on her face.
Personally I agreed with most of what he said.
The tax code is absolutely nuts, the illegal problem is NOT being addressed in this country but by both parties courting Latinos for votes and that we will now AGAIN, like fools give amnesty to people who take advantage of our laws our services and our country.
As for his statement we are in two wars we have no business bieng in I am less in agreement. I just don't know enoughto have an opinion on this.
The money in politics, the money that is needed that helps keep the incumbants in power, the money that is needed that goes to the mass media for advertising. It is a merry go round of scams, bribes, and back door back scratching.
Some say the internet will neutralize this but I am not so certain.
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by Andrew Napolitano
In the continually harsh public discourse over the President’s proposals for federally-managed healthcare, the Big Government progressives in both the Democratic and the Republican parties have been trying to trick us. These folks, who really want the government to care for us from cradle to grave, have been promoting the idea that health care is a right.
In promoting that false premise, they have succeeded in moving the debate from WHETHER the feds should micro-manage health care to HOW the feds should micro-manage health care. This is a false premise, and we should reject it. Health care is not a right; it is a good, like food, like shelter, and like clothing.
What is a right? A right is a gift from God that extends from our humanity. Thinkers from St. Thomas Aquinas, to Thomas Jefferson, to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Pope John Paul II have all argued that our rights are a natural part of our humanity. We own our bodies, thus we own the gifts that emanate from our bodies.
So, our right to life, our right to develop our personalities, our right to think as we wish, to say what we think, to publish what we say, our right to worship or not worship, our right to travel, to defend ourselves, to use our own property as we see fit, our right to due process – fairness – from the government, and our right to be left alone, are all rights that stem from our humanity. These are natural rights that we are born with. The government doesn’t give them to us and the government doesn’t pay for them and the government can’t take them away, unless a jury finds that we have violated someone else’s rights.
What is a good? A good is something we want or need. In a sense, it is the opposite of a right. We have our rights from birth, but we need our parents when we are children and we need ourselves as adults to purchase the goods we require for existence. So, food is a good, shelter is a good, clothing is a good, education is a good, a car is a good, legal representation is a good, working out at a gym is a good, and access to health care is a good.
Does the government give us goods? Well, sometimes it takes money from some of us and gives that money to others. You can call that taxation or you can call it theft; but you cannot call it a right.
A right stems from our humanity. A good is something you buy or someone else buys for you.
Now, when you look at health care for what it is, when you look at the US Constitution, when you look at the history of human freedom, when you accept the American value of the primacy of the individual over the fleeting wishes of the government, it becomes apparent that those who claim that healthcare is a right simply want to extend a form of government welfare.
When I make this argument to my Big Government friends, they come back at me with…well, if people don’t have health insurance, they will just go to hospitals and we will end up paying for them anyway. Why should that be? We don’t let people steal food from a supermarket or an apartment from a landlord or clothing from a local shop. Why do we let them take healthcare from a hospital without paying for it? Well, my Big Government friends contend, that’s charity.
They are wrong again. It is impossible to be charitable with someone else’s money. Charity comes from your own heart, not from the government spending your money. When we pay our taxes to the government and it gives that money away, that’s not charity, that’s welfare.
When the government takes more from us than it needs to secure our freedoms, so it can have money to give away, that’s not charity, that’s theft. And when the government forces hospitals to provide free health care to those who can’t or won’t care for themselves, that’s not charity, that’s slavery. That’s why we now have constitutional chaos, because the government steals and enslaves, and we outlawed that a long time ago.
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel. His latest book is Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power, and Deception in American History, (Nelson, 2010).
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I was watching that big debate put up on youtube, and your post sums it up nicely. The fact that the healthcare bill was needed or not was sidestepped everytime that issue came up. Instead they were arguing about how or what issues were addressed or resolved by the new bill. I turned it off after about 30 minutes, Obama just doesen't see it, or want to get it. Nice little used car salesman we have for a president mixed with a nice dose of.............something I can't quite put my finger on yet. Might be lack of LEADER, or a lack of respect for others opinions.
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I'll have to check this out. My nephew was asked to help write this but he is doing something else instead. He is I think a bit second guessing that maybe he should have helped on the book but personally, while I generally like Romney - I think he falls just a bit short of the charisma needed to get the no. one spot. But only time will tell for sure.
****The title of Mitt Romney's new book, "No Apology: The Case for American Greatness," is a not-so-subtle jab at the visits President Obama made overseas when he first took office, derided by the Right as the "American Apology Tour."
Behar calls the former governor "hunky" during a discussion about politics.Romney's book as a whole, however, may best be remembered not for the contrasts it offers with the incumbent president but for the contrasts it presents with "Going Rogue," the best-selling memoir of Sarah Palin, a potential Romney rival for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.
Where Palin's book is a mix of score settling and juicy anecdotes, Romney's book consists of a 64-point plan for strengthening the United States and countless references to what he has been reading. Palin's book titillated audiences with her take on her husband without his shirt on ("Dang, I thought. Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd?").****
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Romney brings a lot to the table, and I liked his concession speech, but as a matter of politics (and some substance) the following concern me:
1) His Ken doll image, and his poll-driven campaign , , , until he was the only alternative to McCain.
2) His version of Obama care in MA pre-dating Obama (I could be wrong on this, but my impression is his candidacy would kill the HC issue for his party)
3) His patrician birth, like Bush's, makes him temperamentally incapable of dealing with race-baiting, class-baiting, and other typical Dem tactics. Like Bush, I fear he will become a "compassionate conservative".
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Crafty
I agree. I thought some years ago the "compassionate conservative" idea was sound to soften the stereotype of Republicans as cold harded for those who are of the lower socioeconomic ladder. Now I have come to believe this was a mistake.
But I am still not personally sure we should be. I still am not sure I believe in Levin/Reagan/Hannity/Limbaugh style conservative as being the best alternative.
I just don't know, am not smart enough, and/or just can't get my mind to get a good handle on what is the best way to make this country sound and keep it on top.
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Frankly, I think Glenn Beck is showing the way. Did you catch his show on Monday and yesterday?
PS: Not familiar with Levin and Reagan's son in order to comment. Hannity is both an ass and a mental mediocrity, and Limbaugh , , , well too little content to time ratio for me to be bothered.
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I remember somthing about tough love. Maybe that is more of the way to play it.
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Crafty,
You may want to tune into Levin. 6 to 9 EST on 77 Am radio. I agree with Levin on most things, but I am still not sure of his prescriptions for this country's ills.
Actually I meant Sir Reagan - not the (conservative) son who I also like - unlike the son he had with Nancy who is a quack hell bent on proving he disagrees with his father on probably every political issue.
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"We are not to consider ourselves, while here, as at church or school, to listen to the harangues of speculative piety; we are here to talk of the political interests committed to our charge." --Fisher Ames, speech in the United States House of Representatives, 1789
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Win or lose on health care, one person emerged as holding his own with the leftists policy wonks, with vision and with clarity on crucial policy issues. Paul Ryan was chosen by his colleagues to open at the bipartisan Obama health conference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V8l5HGNBB0
The points and questions he makes on the bill remain unanswered by his opponents.
Today, with the new bill published he is ready, informed, articulate, correct and available.Holds his own with the President and makes a nice contrast with the current speaker. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1Ib57sAH_c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYxNqhCPMpY
I've previously at least thought that I didn't see him as Presidential, not the type who can shout rhythmic platitudes from in front of fake Greek columns in large stadiums with adoring fans. I prefer the executive experience of a governor, but in fact it is Presidents like Clinton and Obama who can sit and look very comfortable all day defending the details of horrible legislation and the cost of 'doing nothing'. We will need someone who knows the legislative issues up and down to stand next to this incumbent President and debate persuasively.
If not this guy, we better find someone just as informed and articulate, without the baggage of previous mis-steps and flip-flops, and not someone who has stepped back from fighting these fights, to offer the country a seriously different direction, message and vision from the current leftist machine.
For example, I love Sara Palin (not necessarily for President). If she is the candidate, she will be the issue. If Romney is the candidate, Romneycare and other past works and positions will be the issue. Far worse yet for Huckabee. If someone like Ryan is the candidate, I think the issues will be the issue and leftists will be forced to defend the indefensible, like calling a new national health entitlement a step toward closing the deficit. MHO.
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Ryan has been impressing me.
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A real Ryan for Pres? :evil: I guess we will see. I would welcome this kind of Campaigning and Platforming, getting in the spotlight over legislation if there were candidates that can make this interesting like he can maybe thing would turn around? Obama may shoot himself in the foot with these televised discussions and debates over policy. A lot of people will see the side stepping that is going on.
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Much remains to be seen with regard to Ryan on foreign affairs, social issues, and preparation to run the Executive branch of govt.
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I see a lot of people talking about change, but what should we be changing, and where are we going with it? It seems NO One is willing to put thes two W'S out there.........
I would suggest 2 changes. The first would be for both houses of congress. A 2/3 vote to pass any legislation and a 3/4 vote to overrule veto. Right now it is something less than that and they are going too fast with tooo many laws time to "derate" the engine.........
The second would be a tax reform. If we are paying taxes, let us decide what programs we want to fund. If I want x% of my taxes to fund the Highway system then that is where it goes. If I choose to leave programs I don't like unfunded, then that is what happens, not a cent of my taxes would go to programs I do not want funded. Okay my tax form got another 5 pages, but it give a check against a congress that likes throwing money around. It would also force the various government departments to get efficient too, after all they suddenly are competing on the tax dollar market now aren't they?
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Keep the government within the boundaries defined by the Constitution.
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Here is irony for ya. On this day 1765
Great Britain Passes the Stamp Act (1765)
Intended to help pay British debts from the French and Indian War, the Stamp Act established the first direct tax levied on the American colonies. It required all newspapers, pamphlets, legal documents, commercial bills, advertisements, and other papers issued in the colonies to bear a tax stamp. The act was vehemently protested by the colonists, and the Stamp Act Congress—the first significant joint colonial response to any British measure—petitioned for its repeal.
Well genital people history has repeated itself to the day, with the passage of this abomination of a health care bill.. The question is, how do we respond? How did our forefathers respond?
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Freki:
I just posted that on the American History thread of our SCH forum.
All:
Following up on my previous post:
"[T]he present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes -- rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provides for amendments." --Alexander Hamilton, letter to James Bayard, 1802
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This most certainly is not the way forward.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20100324/pl_politico/34907
:x :x :x
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I agree with Crafty this is not the way forward. The speed of news coverage and the left leaning nature of the press the Tea party movement must be very careful.
I would like to point out the nature of politics during the revolution. Tar , feathers, and rails were involved. There was a tax collector in Boston whose house was burned down with his family in it! My point is this, incidents like this are not new.
These types of incidents are isolated and in some cases I think made up by the left to discredit the Tea party movement. This move is an old standard play in their play book.
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This most certainly is true. We have seen many fraudulent claims of hateful behavior, and have seen complete silence when hateful or violent behavior comes from the Left e.g. the SEIU thugs beating up that black man who was a Tea Partier.
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Sigh, I hate the way things are looking. Options are getting closed down, channels within the system are getting clogged or modified only for a certain few......... :| :cry:
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Now apparently the Obama team is planning to go for amnesty for the 11-20 million illegal aliens and future Democrat voters and the 30-50 million family members now in their home countries that they will be able to anchor in the coming decades :x
Oh, and by the way, these 11-20 million illegal and soon to be amnestied new Democratic voters, a goodly % of whom will wind up on Medicaid, are not part of the budgetary calculations of the new Health Law , , ,
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"goodly % of whom will wind up on Medicaid"
I believe many already are on medicaid. I think it is because their children are born here and are thus automatic US citizens and for that simple reason - qualify. Not to mention food stamps, and public schools.
And when anyone uses the term "anchor" babies the reaction is one of fury and indignation and of course cries of racism.
This is the last stand. We are on the brink of watching the Dems give our country away.
And yet, through it all, we have the MSM calling anyone who thinks this extremist and casting them as nuts.
Rove tried to reach the Latino voters as a way stemming the tide. Obviously it all failed.
The phoney one struts and and beams more then ever.
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I have been following CCP's argument/observation that Dems are the party of giving out goodies and they will win forever (unless we can think of something fast) by making more people dependent on the government while flooding the voter pool with new people who also see the government as a provider. True on both counts, at least that is their strategy.
The Way Forward, if there is one, I think centers around the way these concepts fit together: spending, debt and a vision of the future that young people will live in.
If you ask an immigrant worker what their income today is, you likely get a low number, well below what today is admitted to be targeted for new taxes, so all new spending is free, right?
But take a longer view. Past income mobility data indicates that 86% of bottom quintile workers exit that group within 9 years: http://www.house.gov/jec/middle/mobility/mobility.htm
The children of today will either grow up and be primarily dependent on (a bankrupt) government or they will grow up to be productive members of society and pay the bills for our expanding older generation. Then ask which group your immigrant children will likely be in, the ones getting a free ride or the ones paying the bills? That is a different question.
People have a pride and optimism in the ability of their own children to grow up and achieve and succeed.
Immigrants, using the term loosely to include trespassers/illegals, might see themselves today as needing a hand up, minimum wage protection, OSHA laws, food stamp help and healthcare etc. but did not for the most part come here to have their children grow up to be dependent on a bankrupt government in the nation they risked everything to enter. Immigrants also tend to be younger and the expenditures for health care go more heavily to the older generations.
I don't believe their vote can't be won. The question needs to be, what kind of future do they want. Is it a dependency-based society? If so, not what is your income today, but do you like the idea of your kid footing the bill for the excesses we create today?
Hard to change the views of 5th generation welfare recipients and hard to win over the highly Democratic felon vote they are racing to register, but we need to fight hard for the votes of young people, immigrants and illegals who will live with the impact they make with their vote.
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Doug thanks for your thoughts.
"I don't believe their vote can't be won. The question needs to be, what kind of future do they want. Is it a dependency-based society?"
I wish you are right. But I don't think this is the case. I don't think minority votes can be had with ideology. If that were the case why do 90-98%% of Blacks vote for dependency aka Democratic. At least not anytime soon.
They don't seem to mind the dole and big government. They obviously see this as some sort of justice against white oppression.
As for Latinos they are obivously less of one block per see.
Except for the Cubans who came over here in the 60's they are in large majorities Democrats.
They are in higher proportions unemployed, uneducated, single parent, and thus far more likely to love the idea of someone else paying for higher education, medical care, and to need and willing to take medicaid, food stamps and the rest.
Do you really think 20 something unwed mothers give a hoot about concepts of "freedom" or founding fathers who are all white English guys who lived 200 years ago? And to many of them stole California, and the rest of the Southwest?
Yes Bush made some inroads with the Latino vote. But it wasn't with ideology. It was with cold cash. It was the trial of "compassionate conservatism". It was I am sad to say by being more like the crats - not ideology.
I wish and hope I am wrong. But the immigrants legal or illegal are not the same as those of our ancestors.
Why the other day CNN was interviewing some Indian guy asking about the health care bill. He was all for it and saying Bama is "his" president. This guy was not born here. He said the bill would bring the US back "into civilized world". Can you believe this statement?
This guy has some nerve. Why they are starving if in F.. India and hundreds of millions cannot pay for care. Indian doctors tell me patients line up for care there and a doctor could see hundreds of people a day. I say how is this possible. They tell me the doctor will ask the patient a question, the patient will answer and the doctor will treat based on that one minute evaluation in a shotgun approach and then on to the next pt. and hope they are right. The poor Indians are happy to even have that.
And this guy on CNN has the damn nerve to come here and criticize this country as needing to be brought into the civilized world? :x
This guy isn't interested in some ideology about freedom. He likes ideology about socialism.
I guess this is more of an ideological choice for this immigrant. Whereas many other it is about the bills, cold cash, and probably for some - let the white/anglo people pay up for a change.
I have said before I think Blacks shoot themselves in the foot by agreeing in almost total mass to government control. Perhaps with time, and more Black Republicans, this will change. But by then it will already be worse.
Just my rather pessismistic beliefs about what I see/read.
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Replying to what CCP wrote here and what Crafty wrote over on Immigration: "[Latinos] tend to vote strongly Democrat. Groups that tend to vote Republican tend to be aging and in decline, both in absolute numbers and as a % of the population. The Republican party is already fairly irrelevant in the northeast of the US and with demographic trends in place will become a shrinking minority. THIS was Bush-Rove-McCain's impetus in supporting amnesty-- to remain competitive for the Latino vote."
Selling conservatism to groups that are traditionally non-conservative has two choices, support policies that violate your own principles to split their vote or articulate your own view better of an America built on founding principles and invite them in.
In 2008, African Americans went 95% to 4% for Obama and Hispanics 67% to 31% Obama. That was an exceptional Democrat year based on many things, first person of color on the ballot, economy in the tank, Republican brand name on a par with syphilis, etc. Besides the margin, turnout was at record levels.
In 2004, it was African Americans 88-11 Democrat and Hispanics 53-44 Democrat.
So the split today is maybe 90-10 Blacks, and 60-40 Hispanic, give or take.
Yet the country is evenly divided. So winning one or two more percent of either or both groups is a BIG deal. We don't need to win all or even majorities of them to win, Just need to reach more of them.
I hate generalities, but... Blacks favor school choice, tend to be more religious and are getting KILLED by abortion policies and see neighborhoods destroyed by failed policies they were taught to favor. Hispanics are very family oriented, mostly hard working and also heavily pro-life. Both groups have more kids so they will take on our debt if we keep spending like we do today.
CCP wrote: "(Latinos) are in higher proportions unemployed, uneducated, single parent, and thus far more likely to love the idea of someone else paying for higher education, medical care, and to need and willing to take medicaid, food stamps and the rest."
True, but also that means they are voting their circumstances that should be improving over time, as they join and move up our economic ladder. As they take root they will see their children as bearing the burden of our increasing debt and unfunded future liabilities. Maybe we can get that written into the amnesty agreement. :-)
My words of course are colored in wishful thinking. But in the 100% liberal northeast, Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's seat. It is possible for liberals to go too far and lose portions of their base. Liberals going too far also tends to clarify Conservatism and unite opposition. The Nov. elections this year and the 2012 elections are our Olympics and what we do now to move forward is analogous to Apollo Ohno's workout regime. Are we doing everything we can to reach these people, putting in something like his 2 hour hard sessions 4 times a day (or leaving it to others and hope it gets done). Is the clarity of our arguments equal to 1000 pounds on the leg press. Do we keep a journal and review it every night to see if we are doing everything we can do to reach ALL of these people. Or are our leaders relaxing at topless bondage clubs? On election day we need to know we did everything we could do to make a difference.
Ignoring these demographic groups longer and losing ground further will be catastrophic to the future of traditional American (conservative) governing principles. Opposing Amnesty means we have to work that much harder getting the message out on the other issues.
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Some good points there.
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Doug and Crafty and all,
There is hope. If it isn't too late before the Phoney One ruins the country.
http://www.nbra.info/
Do you think any of these men and women would ask what I recall seeing a Black talk show host ask RNC man Michael Steele, "so what are Republicans going to do for Blacks?"
I can picture him but can't recall his name. However, I'm sorry to say that Mr. Steele's answer was less than inspiring. I like the "page" he is on but he isn't inspirational as a spokesperson.
Certainly this is one question he SHOULD have an answer to if he is to be a leader attracting minorities back to the party of Lincoln. How he could go on a Black hosted talk show and not be prepared to knock a question like that out of the park I don't know?
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http://www.aspentimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100228/ASPENWEEKLY/100229854/&template=printart
Barack Obama has awakened a sleeping nation
Gary Hubbell
Aspen Times Weekly,
Barack Obama is the best thing that has happened to America in the last 100 years. Truly, he is the savior of America's future. He is the best thing ever.
Despite the fact that he has some of the lowest approval ratings among recent presidents, history will see Barack Obama as the source of America's resurrection. Barack Obama has plunged the country into levels of debt that we could not have previously imagined; his efforts to nationalize health care have been met with fierce resistance nationwide; TARP bailouts and stimulus spending have shown little positive effect on the national economy; unemployment is unacceptably high and looks to remain that way for most of a decade; legacy entitlement programs have ballooned to unsustainable levels, and there is a seething anger in the populace.
That's why Barack Obama is such a good thing for America.
Obama is the symbol of a creeping liberalism that has infected our society like a cancer for the last 100 years. Just as Hitler is the face of fascism, Obama will go down in history as the face of unchecked liberalism. The cancer metastasized to the point where it could no longer be ignored.
Average Americans who have quietly gone about their lives, earning a paycheck, contributing to their favorite charities, going to high school football games on Friday night, spending their weekends at the beach or on hunting trips — they've gotten off the fence. They've woken up. There is a level of political activism in this country that we haven't seen since the American Revolution, and Barack Obama has been the catalyst that has sparked a restructuring of the American political and social consciousness.
Think of the crap we've slowly learned to tolerate over the past 50 years as liberalism sought to re-structure the America that was the symbol of freedom and liberty to all the people of the world. Immigration laws were ignored on the basis of compassion. Welfare policies encouraged irresponsibility, the fracturing of families, and a cycle of generations of dependency. Debt was regarded as a tonic to lubricate the economy. Our children left school having been taught that they are exceptional and special, while great numbers of them cannot perform basic functions of mathematics and literacy. Legislators decided that people could not be trusted to defend their own homes, and stripped citizens of their rights to own firearms. Productive members of society have been penalized with a heavy burden of taxes in order to support legions of do-nothings who loll around, reveling in their addictions, obesity, indolence, ignorance and “disabilities.” Criminals have been arrested and re-arrested, coddled and set free to pillage the citizenry yet again. Lawyers routinely extort fortunes from doctors, contractors and business people with dubious torts.
We slowly learned to tolerate these outrages, shaking our heads in disbelief, and we went on with our lives.
But Barack Obama has ripped the lid off a seething cauldron of dissatisfaction and unrest.
In the time of Barack Obama, Black Panther members stand outside polling places in black commando uniforms, slapping truncheons into their palms. ACORN — a taxpayer-supported organization — is given a role in taking the census, even after its members were caught on tape offering advice to set up child prostitution rings. A former Communist is given a paid government position in the White House as an advisor to the president. Auto companies are taken over by the government, and the auto workers' union — whose contracts are completely insupportable in any economic sense — is rewarded with a stake in the company. Government bails out Wall Street investment bankers and insurance companies, who pay their executives outrageous bonuses as thanks for the public support. Terrorists are read their Miranda rights and given free lawyers. And, despite overwhelming public disapproval, Barack Obama has pushed forward with a health care plan that would re-structure one-sixth of the American economy.
I don't know about you, but the other day I was at the courthouse doing some business, and I stepped into the court clerk's office and changed my voter affiliation from “Independent” to “Republican.” I am under no illusion that the Republican party is perfect, but at least they're starting to awaken to the fact that we cannot sustain massive levels of debt; we cannot afford to hand out billions of dollars in corporate subsidies; we have to somehow trim our massive entitlement programs; we can no longer be the world's policeman and dole out billions in aid to countries whose citizens seek to harm us.
Literally millions of Americans have had enough. They're organizing, they're studying the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, they're reading history and case law, they're showing up at rallies and meetings, and a slew of conservative candidates are throwing their hats into the ring. Is there a revolution brewing? Yes, in the sense that there is a keen awareness that our priorities and sensibilities must be radically re-structured. Will it be a violent revolution? No. It will be done through the interpretation of the original document that has guided us for 220 years — the Constitution. Just as the pendulum swung to embrace political correctness and liberalism, there will be a backlash, a complete repudiation of a hundred years of nonsense. A hundred years from now, history will perceive the year 2010 as the time when America got back on the right track. And for that, we can thank Barack Hussein Obama.
Gary Hubbell is a hunter, rancher, and former hunting and fly-fishing guide. Gary works as a Colorado ranch real estate broker. He can be reached through his website, aspenranchrealestate.com.
http://www.aspentimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100228/ASPENWEEKLY/100229854/&template=printart
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After giving it a lot of thought over the last week or so I am coming to the conclusion that Michael should resign.
Not that I don't like him or generally agree with him. Not that it isn't great to have a minority face on the party of Lincoln.
Not that necessarily the ridiculous spending of RNC donated money on lavish stuff is all his fault.
I don't know how to fundraise. Perhaps the RNC HAS to spend lavishisly to get big donors to contribute. I don't know.
Yet the idea that the RNC donations are down in a political climate like this, the idea that the RNC cannot seem to gt serious about an ideology alone that should be able to attract donors without the birbes just goes along to further the impression that this organization is as corrupt and money hungry as the rest of Washington DC.
If the Republican party cannot send a real message about principles, then they are no better than the crats.
The law should be laid down hard by Steele. We don't want shmoozers. We don't want people dining at fancy restaurants, flying in private jets to Hawaii.
We want an organization that will take this country back and give it to the people who work hard to make it great.
He must go as well as the obvious political culture at the RNC. I wouldn't send them one cent as it stands now.
Nothing appears to have changed.
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Woof,
I stopped giving to the Rep. Party when they started the big tent push to include moderate Liberals like John McCain and other so called "Physical Conservatives" that masquerade as moderate Conservatives, and pretend to be a better choice over mainstream Liberals. These Republican politicans are worse than the Blue Dog Dem's that also pretend to be moderate but are nothing more wolves in sheep's clothing, stealing votes from true moderate Conservatives in both Parties and then when elected they prop up Liberal policies. Even Bush falls into this category with his foot dragging on illegal immigration and his willingness to grow government and government handouts. Yes, Bush was a better choice than voting for Al Gore or John Kerry but he was no Conservative and bit by bit the difference between these kind of Republicans and their Liberal opponents are getting smaller and smaller. Does anyone think that we would be in much better shape if McCain won against Obama? I don't think we would and there lies the problem, if we Conservatives continue to hold our nose and vote for these people the Party will end up just like the Dem Party with Liberals running the show. I still support Conservative Republican candidates and contribute directly to those champaign's and bypass the Party; I don't want any of my money going to the general fund that is used to support someone's reelection bid like Olympia Snowe. :-P
P.C.
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I agree with Prentice. Your money needs to go directly to the right candidates and the right causes and you get to decide what that is. After the nominees are set for each race, then you may have to hold your nose and vote, but there is no reason to have your hard earned money support candidates elsewhere around the country who will later be stabbing you in the back.
For example, McCain's career of being a maverick kills conservative candidates in other states. Dem incumbents excuse their extremist votes by saying it was a bipartisan vote, that they were joined in that vote by the respected R-senator from Arizona so therefore it was a reasonable position.
CCP I agree with you about Michael Steele, but think firing him now will only make things worse. The RNC is not the republican party, the power today is from the ground up. Let the party succeed in spite of the so-called leaderhip. If the RNC does not earn your dollar then just go after the candidates and causes who will. A group of MN businessmen have put up some attention grabbing billboards, here's one in Michele Bachmann's district this year:
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/reagan-billboard.jpg)
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The Foundation
"It has been said that all Government is an evil. It would be more proper to say that the necessity of any Government is a misfortune. This necessity however exists; and the problem to be solved is, not what form of Government is perfect, but which of the forms is least imperfect." --James Madison
Liberty
"Over the past 14 months, our political debate has been transformed into an argument between the heirs of two fundamental schools of political thought, the Founders and the Progressives. The Founders stood for the expansion of liberty and the Progressives for the expansion of government. It's an argument that has been going on for a century but was largely dormant over the quarter-century of low-inflation economic growth that followed the Ronald Reagan tax cuts. It's been raised again by the expand-government policies of the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders. Those policies, thoroughly in line with the Progressive tradition, have been advanced by liberal elites in government, media, think tanks and academia. The opposition, roughly in line with the Founders tradition, has been led by the non-elites who spontaneously flocked to tea parties and town halls. ... The conservative rebellions of the late 1970s and middle 1990s were focused on taxes. The tea partiers are focusing on the expansion of government -- and its threat to the independence of citizens. ... By passing the stimulus package and the health care bills, the Democrats produced expansion of government. But voters seem to prefer expansion of liberty." --political analyst Michael Barone
Re: The Left
"The political issue rumbling toward both the Supreme Court and the electorate is whether Washington's size and power has finally grown beyond the comfort zone of the American people. That is what lies beneath the chatter about federalism and the 10th Amendment. Liberals will argue that government today is doing good. But government now is also unprecedentedly large and unprecedentedly expensive. Even if every challenge to ObamaCare loses in court, these anxieties will last and keep coming back to the same question: Does the Democratic left think the national government's powers are infinite? No one in the Obama White House, asked that in public on Sunday morning, would simply say yes, no matter that the evidence of this government's actions the past year indicate they do. In his 'Today Show' interview [last] week, Mr. Obama with his characteristic empathy acknowledged there are 'folks who have legitimate concerns ... that the federal government may be taking on too much.' My reading of the American public is that they have moved past 'concerns.'" --Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger
Government
"So, what is the impact on the deficit when the Senate health care bill, the reconciliation bill to fix the Senate health care bill and the bill to fix the phantom reductions in doctors' fees are all considered together? ... 'CBO estimates that enacting all three pieces of legislation would add $59 billion to budget deficits over the 2010-2019 period.' Rather than cut the deficit by $1 trillion over two decades as Obama claims, the full health care package increases the deficit by $59 billion over one decade. ... [T]he bill authorizes new discretionary spending that Congress will need to approve in future years to make sure the bureaucracies are in place to carry out the new plan. CBO estimates this will lead to 'at least $50 billion' in new spending over 10 years that was not included in the health care bill itself. ... Nor should Obama's socialized medicine plan be viewed in isolation from the rest of his budget. CBO says his fiscal 2011 budget proposal will increase the national debt by $9.8 trillion over the next 10 years. He is running a record $1.5 trillion deficit this year, and the smallest deficit he will ever run is $724 billion in 2014 -- the year his unconstitutional individual insurance mandate kicks in. After that, the deficit starts an unbroken climb, surpassing $1 trillion again in 2018 and heading ever higher. Just as Obama's claim that his socialized medicine plan will reduce the deficit by $1 trillion will be his defining lie, his legacy will be this: He bankrupted America." --CNSNews.com editor in chief Terence Jeffrey
The Gipper
"The fact is, we'll never build a lasting economic recovery by going deeper into debt at a faster rate than we ever have before. It took this nation 166 years until the middle of World War II to finally accumulate a debt of $95 billion. It took this [Carter] administration just the last 12 months to add $95 billion to the debt. And this administration has run up almost one-fourth of the total national debt in just these short 19 months. Inflation is the cause of recession and unemployment. And we're not going to have real prosperity or recovery until we stop fighting the symptoms and start fighting the disease." --Ronald Reagan
Faith & Family
"What's so disheartening about America's present political environment is that those in Washington are truly convinced that more and bigger government is America's primary solution for recovery, future growth and security. President Barack Obama even declared early in his presidency that 'only government' is our savior. Our Founders had a far better solution than only government. ... As proud as they were of their newfound republic, our Founders' trust and hope was not in government, but in God. For what? For most of the things that people today often look to government to provide: life, liberty, happiness, provision, salvation, decency, civility, morality, honesty, restraint, equity of power and future hope, to name a few. Tragically, in modern times, government has usurped God's role in our republic and Americans' lives. ... To our Founders, God was the source of our human rights, which put limits on government power. Even more, God was (and should be) the ultimate agent for national sustenance and renewal. That is why we are dreaming if we think we can correct the ills in ourselves, our government or our society without his aid." --columnist Chuck Norris
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Brooks is usually a typical liberal/progressive twit, yet there are elements in this piece worth considering:
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: April 5, 2010
According to recent polls, 60 percent of Americans think the country is heading in the wrong direction. The same percentage believe that the U.S. is in long-term decline. The political system is dysfunctional. A fiscal crisis looks unavoidable. There are plenty of reasons to be gloomy. But if you want to read about them, stop right here. This column is a great luscious orgy of optimism. Because the fact is, despite all the problems, America’s future is exceedingly bright.
Over the next 40 years, demographers estimate that the U.S. population will surge by an additional 100 million people, to 400 million over all. The population will be enterprising and relatively young. In 2050, only a quarter will be over 60, compared with 31 percent in China and 41 percent in Japan.
In his book, “The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050,” über-geographer Joel Kotkin sketches out how this growth will change the national landscape. Extrapolating from current trends, he describes an archipelago of vibrant suburban town centers, villages and urban cores.
The initial wave of suburbanization was sprawling and featureless. Tom Wolfe once observed that you only knew you were in a new town when you began to see a new set of 7-Elevens. But humans need meaningful places, so developers have been filling in with neo-downtowns — suburban gathering spots where people can dine, work, go to the movies and enjoy public space.
Over the next 40 years, Kotkin argues, urban downtowns will continue their modest (and perpetually overhyped) revival, but the real action will be out in the compact, self-sufficient suburban villages. Many of these places will be in the sunbelt — the drive to move there remains strong — but Kotkin also points to surging low-cost hubs on the Plains, like Fargo, Dubuque, Iowa City, Sioux Falls, and Boise.
The demographic growth is driven partly by fertility. The American fertility rate is 50 percent higher than Russia, Germany or Japan, and much higher than China. Americans born between 1968 and 1979 are more family-oriented than the boomers before them, and are having larger families.
In addition, the U.S. remains a magnet for immigrants. Global attitudes about immigration are diverging, and the U.S. is among the best at assimilating them (while China is exceptionally poor). As a result, half the world’s skilled immigrants come to the U.S. As Kotkin notes, between 1990 and 2005, immigrants started a quarter of the new venture-backed public companies.
The United States already measures at the top or close to the top of nearly every global measure of economic competitiveness. A comprehensive 2008 Rand Corporation study found that the U.S. leads the world in scientific and technological development. The U.S. now accounts for a third of the world’s research-and-development spending. Partly as a result, the average American worker is nearly 10 times more productive than the average Chinese worker, a gap that will close but not go away in our lifetimes.
This produces a lot of dynamism. As Stephen J. Rose points out in his book “Rebound: Why America Will Emerge Stronger From the Financial Crisis,” the number of Americans earning between $35,000 and $70,000 declined by 12 percent between 1980 and 2008. But that’s largely because the number earning over $105,000 increased by 14 percent. Over the past 10 years, 60 percent of American adults made more than $100,000 in at least one or two of those years, and 40 percent had incomes that high for at least three.
As the world gets richer, demand will rise for the sorts of products Americans are great at providing — emotional experiences. Educated Americans grow up in a culture of moral materialism; they have their sensibilities honed by complicated shows like “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” and “Mad Men,” and they go on to create companies like Apple, with identities coated in moral and psychological meaning, which affluent consumers crave.
As the rising generation leads an economic revival, it will also participate in a communal one. We are living in a global age of social entrepreneurship.
In 1964, there were 15,000 foundations in the U.S. By 2001, there were 61,000. In 2007, total private giving passed $300 billion. Participation in organizations like City Year, Teach for America, and College Summit surges every year. Suburbanization helps. For every 10 percent reduction in population density, the odds that people will join a local club rise by 15 percent. The culture of service is now entrenched and widespread.
In sum, the U.S. is on the verge of a demographic, economic and social revival, built on its historic strengths. The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. It’s always excelled at decentralized community-building. It’s always had that moral materialism that creates meaning-rich products. Surely a country with this much going for it is not going to wait around passively and let a rotten political culture drag it down.
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With 300 billion in private charity, why do we need this health care thing? Obviously, when people are not stifled by government there is room for chariity, maybe more efficient charity at that?
I only wonder how much America will have changed by 2050, will it be a land of entitlements and debt riding on top of the nice looking demographics? or a a pretty much free nation still accepting certain risks because thats what you have to do to live life? We have been accepting so many rules in the name of safety, how many can you accept and still be free?
I like the picture, but I dislike what looks like a path that will nullify it.
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« 2010: TAKE BACK AMERICA — A BATTLE PLANDEM STRATEGISTS HAVE IT WRONG
By Dick Morris 04.7.2010 Stanley Greenberg and James Carville claim that the Republican Party has peaked too soon. Incredibly, Greenberg says “when we look back on this, we’re going to say Massachusetts is when 1994 happened.” Stan’s only claim to expertise in the 1994 elections, of course, is that he’s the guy who blew it for the Democrats. Right after that, President Clinton fired both of the flawed consultants and never brought them back again.
Now,their latest pitch is that the highpoint of the GOP advance was the Scott Brown election and that, from here on, things will “improve slightly” for the Democrats.
Once again, Carville and Greenberg are totally misreading the public mood. Each time the Republican activists battle, they become stronger. Their cyber and grass roots grow deeper. The negatives that attach to so-called “moderate” Democratic incumbents increase. And each time Obama, Reid and Pelosi defy public opinion and use their majorities to ram through unpopular legislation, frustration and anger rises.
Were Obama’s ambitions to slacken, perhaps a cooling off might eventuate. But soon the socialist financial takeover bill will come on the agenda, followed by amnesty for illegal immigrants, cap and trade, and card check unionization. Each bill will trigger its own mobilization of public opposition and add to the swelling coalition of opposition to Obama and his radical agenda.
And, all the while, the deficit will increase, interest rates will rise, and unemployment will remain high.
Meanwhile, the political process will generate more and more strong Republican challengers. We have yet to see if former Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin or Dino Rossi of Washington State will emerge to challenge Senators Feingold and Murray. Better House candidates will decide to capitalize on the momentum and will jump into the race and Republican donors will come out of hiding, their efforts catalyzed by the growing optimism about GOP chances.
Presaging the Republican sweep that looms ahead, is the shift in the party ratings on various issues. Rasmussen has the Republicans ahead by 49-37 on the economy and 53-37 on health care. His likely voter poll shows GOP leads on every major issue area: national security (49-37), Iraq (47-39), Education (43-30), Immigration (47-34), Social Security (48-36), and Taxes (52-34).
When Republicans are winning issues like education, healthy care, and social security – normally solidly Democratic issues – a sweep of unimaginable proportions is in the offing.
Will the rise in economic growth and job creation – if they continue — offset the Republican gains? Not very likely. Remember Bill Clinton’s 1994 experience. Even though the recession had officially ended in the quarter before he took office and he proudly pointed to five million new jobs that had been created during the first two years of his presidency, Clinton got no bounce from the jobs issue or the economy. Even in the election of 1996, the economy was only marginally a source of strength for the Democratic president. It wasn’t until impeachment that the job growth that had been ongoing since he took office began to work heavily in his favor with the public. The hangover from a recession, certainly from one a violent as this, lasts a long time. A very long time.
And all this assumes that things will, indeed, improve. Worries about inflation loom large and concerns that higher taxes and interest rates will trigger a new downturn also abound. As long as the deficit is as high as it is, there is no solid foundation for a sustained period of economic growth.
Finally, Obama is now responsible for health care in America. When premiums rise, it will be his fault. When coverage is denied, it will be on his watch. When Medicare cuts kick in, it will be Obama who gets the blame.
Carville’s last book touted “forty more years of Democrats.” Now he dreams of a loss of “only” 25 seats in the House and “six or seven” Senators. But these are pipe dreams. Republicans will gain more than fifty House seats and at least ten in the Senate, enough to take control in both Houses. That’s reality.
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Interesting.
I heard today that the Reps are drafting a new "Contract with America".
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Transcript or video-- you choose:
http://newt.org/tabid/102/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/4874/Default.aspx
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I watched the whole video. Newt sounds really good,but I have always liked his ideas. I hope the Republicans follow his lead; I have no faith in the Republican party. It is so simple 2+2=4 with the courage to stiffen the spines of the politicians to stand up and say it! He also said something in passing which I have always tried to follow, prepare the conditions of the fight so the opponent is set up to lose. I try to always pick my ground when I can. All I want is a fair advantage! :evil: Lets not waste this position the Left has given us, lets make them pay for it and set this country back on its founding principles.
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Newt did not blink when he was Speaker in regards to budget- ever since he left the spine appears to be gone. When a whole chunk of Congress walks out, the viability of the laws that are being passed becomes suspect. If I or my staf as a Senator/Rep. only had 1 or 2 days to read a couple thousand pages, on top of all the other issues, I would consider a walkout. The principal of "I will not be railroaded into misrepresentation". If that was the entire republican half of the house, the president would look pretty ineffective. Exactly where you want someone routinely abridging the Constitution, in an ineffective position. It would also put the "bipartisan" lie out in the open for all to see.
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Before we narrow the list of names, we need to expand it. Among people not running for President I added Paul Ryan recently and today mention the largest red state's longest serving governor. Roger Simon CEO of Pajamas Media wrote:
"Perry is a people person on a level I have not quite seen before in politics. You even worry about him, if he ever does make a White House run.
When Rudy Giuliani was Mayor of New York, he had some of that people person thing, throwing out the ball at Yankee games and taking the role of America's Mayor after 9/11. But he doesn't have as much charisma as Perry."
http://www.powerlineblog.com/ http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2010/04/19/guns-religion-and-nascar/?singlepage=true
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I am from Texas and I don't like Perry. He is a POLITICIAN = weasel. I do not trust him. I am a conservative and I did not vote for him in the primary. If he gets the Republican nomination for Pres he will be better than a liberal but I would classify him as a progressive republican. Voter beware. IMHO
Freki
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Thanks Freki. I remember you are from Texas and was looking for your feedback on Perry. As with Mark Sanford, I was hoping to hear they are great guys but will settle for hearing the truth before we head any further down the wrong road.
Anybody from further away have a first impression yet about our governor - Tim Pawlenty (R-MN)? He is trying to run but not making much of an impact that I can see.
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The R party in our state has a platform so long and detailed that no ordinary delegate has read it and no candidate has ever agreed to it. There has been an interest in coming up with something more succinct and marketable to describe what we strive for. A year or so back I wrote my top ten list which was ignored by the party; I don't know if I posted it here. Here is someone else's list that will be voted on by the state party next week.
I would ask every like-minded board reader here to comment on these or write their own answer to this question. Let's say a 16 or 18 year old or new immigrant walks up to you and asks you to explain briefly what are the central, guiding principles of your political group or movement that you would ask candidates to follow in order to gain your endorsement or wear your label.
It would be especially interesting to see a serious equivalent posted also by any Dem-liberal-progressives. Rog, Rachel, anyone willing?
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Guiding Principles and Values
Individuals, businesses and the country succeed and prosper when government stays out of the way of those who lead the way with integrity, responsibility, charity, hard work, humility, courage, gratitude and hope.
Government has a role in our society – but that role is carefully enumerated in the United States Constitution. Our party believes that a good government does not eclipse roles that are best carried out by individuals, families, houses of faith, charitable organizations or businesses.
1) America is a great nation; we are the “Shining City,” an exemplar of virtues for all other nations and their people. The greatness of the American nation, the virtues of its people, and the success of the American experiment are a beacon of hope for the entire world.
2) Liberty is essential for our society to advance and prosper. The freedom to explore advances in culture, business, faith, science and government improves all of our lives; on the other hand, excessive government regulation and control hinders that development. The ability and freedom to disagree with each other and our government must also be protected; any hindrances to the free market of ideas will sap the ability of America to advance and to better herself.
3) We believe in the ability of the individual, by themselves or through families, businesses, groups and non-profit organizations, rather than the government to solve the problems of today and lead us into the future.
4) Faith is where we derive our moral compass and come to understand the eternal rules of order and rights which God himself has ordained. We believe each person needs to be free in order to explore his/her Faith.
5) Human Life is sacred; it must be protected at all stages.
6) The Family is among our society’s most important institutions. Government must not be allowed to infringe on the sanctity of the family.
7) The Pursuit of Happiness is essential to our existence; we support equal opportunities not equal results.
8 ) Charity comes best from the heart of individuals and cannot be forced or coerced via taxation and regulation.
9) The law must be applied to everyone equally; no one is above the law.
10) Law abiding citizens must be trusted to defend their life, family and property.
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by Brian Roberts
Most Americans are unaware but a Constitutional Crisis of immense proportions looms in our near future, and the early shots have already been fired. No, I’m not referring to the Obama birth certificate controversy; I’m referring to the fundamental battle for freedom and liberty based on the uniquely American experiment of Federalism. Federalism is the sharing of power between a federal government and the various state governments, and this foundation is at the very heart of the battle.
Through recent actions, the federal government has demonstrated that absolute power is its sole desire. They have ignored the message delivered through tea parties and have now directly engaged in political battles with state governments empowered by their citizenry. If “we the people” lose these battles, ALL power will centralize in Washington D.C. and the dynamics of our free country will rapidly change from a government that serves the people to a government that dictates to the people. The crisis ultimately revolves around this question:
“Who decides the constitutionality of a federal law?”
The most visible battle centers around the unconstitutional health care bill passed in March 2010. But as this one proceeds, there are other Constitutional battles cueing up in the pipeline. Many states where the population embraces freedom have begun to draft legislation that challenges federal authority on matters that the federal government has already overstepped their authority; and, proactive states are preparing legislation in preparation for future offenses. Some examples of these battles:
* Federal Health Care legislation designed to redistribute wealth and make states and people massively dependent on the federal government
* Federal Cap and Trade legislation designed to foster more state dependence of federal funds by making them insolvent through excessive taxation
* Federal Amnesty legislation designed to increase the voter base for federal level redistribution schemes.
* Federal Financial Reform legislation designed to acquire more economic power at the federal level to use a coercive tools against states and the people
* State Firearm Legislation that denies federal authority over firearms produced within a states; this is designed to proactively challenge the federal governments grasp on firearm laws by eliminating the “commerce clause” argument.
Each one of these battles between states and federal governments will test the very foundation of federalism upon which our great country has prospered in relative political, economic, and individual freedom. If the pillar of Federalism is to fall, the entire house of cards of the American experiment will fall with it, and a centralized authority will be formed. Your children’s future will be sealed as servants to corrupt politicians in Washington D.C.
Will the Supreme Court uphold the Constitution?
The first question that must be resolved is “will the Supreme Court uphold the Constitution?” Almost half of the state governments are participating in a lawsuit claiming that the health care bill is unconstitutional. One of the multiple points of contention has to do with the federal governments new power to force a private citizen, under penalty of law, to purchase a product; clearly unconstitutional and something that has never been demanded by federal law before.
This is the federal court’s chance to clearly reassert the state’s constitutionally empowered jurisdiction and put the federal government back under the chains of federalism as defined by the Constitution. If they are willing and able to do this in no uncertain terms, we may still avoid a full constitutional crisis. If, on the other hand, the federal court sides with the federal legislators, then they will have missed the golden opportunity to restore stability and liberty to this country and will have placed us on a road to a government of absolute power.
Past rulings indicate that judges are, as Jefferson warned, simply people too; with political ambitions and a willingness to apply arbitrary opinions over rule-of-law. In fact, Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor, the most recent Supreme Court appointee, publically argued the merits of rulings based on social justice over rule-of-law. Can an idea be any more dangerous to liberty than that?
In the 1942 case Wikard v. Filburn, the Supreme Court ruled that a farmer growing wheat, on his own property, for his own consumption, is subject to federal laws. The ruling was based on a laughable “commerce clause” interpretation that claimed that since the farmer was NOT participating in interstate commerce then the farmer affected interstate commerce. This kind of circular thinking was used to steal the freedom and liberty from this farmer so that federal power might be increased. It was an impossible step of logic, but rulings like this are used as a precedent for incredible interpretations of the enumerated powers in the Constitution.
What precedent is set if the health care legislation is deemed constitutional and the federal government immediately acquires “constitutional” power to mandate private citizen purchases? No doubt, this precedent will be used to force you to purchase all kinds of products that “partner” corporations might offer. What warped definition of “liberty” encompasses this concept?
We can hope the federal courts make the correct ruling here, but this one is simply out of our hands.
Who has the final say on the constitutionality of federal laws?
If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the federal government and deems an obviously unconstitutional law to be constitutional then tensions between the states and the federal government will increase significantly. At this point, the Constitutional crisis will expose its head for all to see, and the fundamental question at the heart of it all is:
“Who decides the constitutionality of a federal law?”
The constitution does not answer this question. The precedent is that the Supreme Court rules on these. But, what happens when “we the people” judge the Supreme Court to be part of the problem?
First, consider that the common idea is that the Supreme Court offers the final say on constitutional. This is partially true given past history and other Supreme Court rulings. But take notice that historically the Supreme Court assumed this power for itself; it was not allocated through the Constitution. This power of final authority was first considered with Marbury v. Madison in 1803 and accrued through other cases presided over by Supreme Court Justice Marshal, a well-known champion of centralized federal power. It’s easy to see the conflict of interest when a federal judicial branch deems itself to hold absolute authority over the constitutionality of federal laws and federal executive actions. Over time a federal court will become more and more emboldened to ignore the states and “we the people” and rule in favor of more centralized federal power.
It is important to realize that the Constitution is silent on this and does not provide the answer. This was intentional, because on all matters “we the people” are the final authority. Giving the federal judicial branch the supreme power of determination institutionalizes an obvious danger to freedom and liberty. This danger was described by Jefferson:
“….To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps…and their power is more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruption of time and party, its members would become despots….”
In 1798, Jefferson and Madison authored the Virginian and Kentucky Resolutions in response to the Alien and Sedition acts. The resolution argued that unconstitutional federal bills that became federal law were null and void and of no effect. According to Jefferson and Madison, states were to be the ultimate arbiter on which laws were constitutional and which were not. By nullifying unconstitutional laws state governments need not ask permission of federal courts to govern their sovereign states.
The Crisis Resolved
So, what’s it going to be?
reclaiming-american-revolutionFreedom through decentralized government in which the people and the states determine the constitutionality of federal laws. With this choice, federalism is restored and sovereign states each govern themselves locally through rule-of-law.
Or, servitude to a centralized government in which all three federal branches work together to pass laws, enforce laws, and judge their own laws constitutional. With this choice, the Constitution and federalism are destroyed, absolute power is centralized and rule-of-men will dominate law.
This question is ultimately answered by the will of the people. We will decide and it will have immeasurable impact on our country’s future.
Brian Roberts [send him email] is the State Chapter Coordinator for the Texas Tenth Amendment Center
Copyright © 2010 by TenthAmendmentCenter.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
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Health care and firearms. There are a bunch of states pushing back on both those issues.
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The Global Crisis of Legitimacy
May 4, 2010
By George Friedman
Financial panics are an integral part of capitalism. So are economic recessions. The system generates them and it becomes stronger because of them. Like forest fires, they are painful when they occur, yet without them, the forest could not survive. They impose discipline, punishing the reckless, rewarding the cautious. They do so imperfectly, of course, as at times the reckless are rewarded and the cautious penalized. Political crises — as opposed to normal financial panics — emerge when the reckless appear to be the beneficiaries of the crisis they have caused, while the rest of society bears the burdens of their recklessness. At that point, the crisis ceases to be financial or economic. It becomes political.
The financial and economic systems are subsystems of the broader political system. More precisely, think of nations as consisting of three basic systems: political, economic and military. Each of these systems has elites that manage it. The three systems are constantly interacting — and in a healthy polity, balancing each other, compensating for failures in one as well as taking advantage of success. Every nation has a different configuration within and between these systems. The relative weight of each system differs, as does the importance of its elites. But each nation contains these systems, and no system exists without the other two.
Limited Liability Investing
Consider the capitalist economic system. The concept of the corporation provides its modern foundation. The corporation is built around the idea of limited liability for investors, the notion that if you buy part or all of a company, you yourself are not liable for its debts or the harm that it might do; your risk is limited to your investment. In other words, you may own all or part of a company, but you are not responsible for what it does beyond your investment. Whereas supply and demand exist in all times and places, the notion of limited liability investing is unique to modern capitalism and reshapes the dynamic of supply and demand.
It is also a political invention and not an economic one. The decision to create corporations that limit liability flows from political decisions implemented through the legal subsystem of politics. The corporation dominates even in China; though the rules of liability and the definition of control vary, the principle that the state and politics define the structure of corporate risk remains constant.
In a more natural organization of the marketplace, the owners are entirely responsible for the debts and liabilities of the entity they own. That, of course, would create excessive risk, suppressing economic activity. So the political system over time has reallocated risk away from the owners of companies to the companies’ creditors and customers by allowing corporations to become bankrupt without pulling in the owners.
The precise distribution of risk within an economic system is a political matter expressed through the law; it differs from nation to nation and over time. But contrary to the idea that there is a tension between the political and economic systems, the modern economic system is unthinkable except for the eccentric but indispensible political-legal contrivance of the limited liability corporation. In the precise and complex allocation of risk and immunity, we find the origins of the modern market. Among other reasons, this is why classical economists never spoke of “economics” but always of “political economy.”
The state both invents the principle of the corporation and defines the conditions in which the corporation is able to arise. The state defines the structure of risk and liabilities and assures that the laws are enforced. Emerging out of this complexity — and justifying it — is a moral regime. Protection from liability comes with a burden: Poor decisions will be penalized by losses, while wise decisions are rewarded by greater wealth. Because of this, society as a whole will benefit. The entire scheme is designed to increase, in Adam Smith’s words, “The Wealth of Nations” by limiting liability, increasing the willingness to take risk and imposing penalties for poor judgment and rewards for wise judgment. But the measure of the system is not whether individuals benefit, but whether in benefiting they enhance the wealth of the nation.
The greatest systemic risk, therefore, is not an economic concept but a political one. Systemic risk emerges when it appears that the political and legal protections given to economic actors, and particularly to members of the economic elite, have been used to subvert the intent of the system. In other words, the crisis occurs when it appears that the economic elite used the law’s allocation of risk to enrich themselves in ways that undermined the wealth of the nation. Put another way, the crisis occurs when it appears that the financial elite used the politico-legal structure to enrich themselves through systematically imprudent behavior while those engaged in prudent behavior were harmed, with the political elite apparently taking no action to protect the victims.
In the modern public corporation, shareholders — the corporation’s owners — rarely control management. A board of directors technically oversees management on behalf of the shareholders. In the crisis of 2008, we saw behavior that devastated shareholder value while appearing to enrich the management — the corporation’s employees. In this case, the protections given to shareholders of corporations were turned against them when they were forced to pay for the imprudence of their employees — the managers, whose interests did not align with those of the shareholders. The managers in many cases profited personally through their compensation system for actions inimical to shareholder interests. We now have a political, not an economic, crisis for two reasons. First, the crisis qualitatively has moved beyond the boundaries of a cyclical event. Second, the crisis is rooted in the political-legal definitions of the distribution of corporate risk and the legally defined relations between management and shareholder. In leaving the shareholder liable for actions by management, but without giving shareholders controls to limit managerial risk taking, the problem lies not with the market but with the political system that invented and presides over the limited liability corporation.
Financial panics that appear natural and harm the financial elite do not necessarily create political crises. Financial panics that appear to be the result of deliberate manipulation of the allocation of risk under the law, and from which the financial elite as a whole appears to have profited even while shareholders and the public were harmed, inevitably create political crises. In the case of 2008 and the events that followed, we have a paradox. The 2008 crisis was not unprecedented, nor was the federal bailout. We saw similar things in the municipal bond crisis of the 1970s, and the Third World Debt Crisis and Savings and Loan Crisis in the 1980s. Nor was the recession that followed anomalous. It came seven years after the previous one, and compared to the 1970s and early 1980s, when unemployment stood at more than 10 percent and inflation and mortgages were at more than 20 percent, the new one was painful but well within the bounds of expected behavior.
The crisis was rooted in the appearance that it was triggered by the behavior not of small town banks or third world countries, but of the global financial elite, who took advantage of the complexities of law to enrich themselves instead of the shareholders and clients to whom it was thought they had prior fiduciary responsibility.
This is a political crisis then, not an economic one. The political elite is responsible for the corporate elite in a unique fashion: The corporation was a political invention, so by definition, its behavior depends on the political system. But in a deeper sense, the crisis is one of both political and corporate elites, and the perception that by omission or commission they acted together — knowingly engineering the outcome. In a sense, it does not matter whether this is what happened. That it is widely believed that this is what happened alone is the origin of the crisis. This generates a political crisis that in turn is translated into an attack on the economic system.
The public, which is cynical about such things, expects elites to work to benefit themselves. But at the same time, there are limits to the behavior the public will tolerate. That limit might be defined, with Adam Smith in mind, as the point when the wealth of the nation itself is endangered, i.e., when the system is generating outcomes that harm the nation. In extreme form, these crises can delegitimize regimes. In the most extreme form — and we are nowhere near this point — the military elite typically steps in to take control of the system.
This is not something that is confined to the United States by any means, although part of this analysis is designed to explain why the Obama administration must go after Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and others. The symbol of Goldman Sachs profiting from actions that devastate national wealth, or of the management of Lehman wiping out shareholder value while they themselves did well, creates a crisis of confidence in the political and financial systems. With the crisis of legitimacy still not settling down after nearly two years, the reaction of the political system is predictable. It will both anoint symbolic miscreants, and redefine the structure of risk and liability in financial corporations. The goal is not so much to achieve something as to create the impression that it is achieving something, in other words, to demonstrate that the political system is prepared to control the entities it created.
The Crisis in Europe
We see a similar crisis in Europe. The financial institutions in Europe were fully complicit in the global financial crisis. They bought and sold derivatives whose value they knew to be other than stated, the same as Americans. Though the European financial institutions have asserted they were the hapless victims of unscrupulous American firms, the Europeans were as sophisticated as their American counterparts. Their elites knew what they were doing.
Complicating the European position was the creation of the economic union and the euro by the economic and political elite. There has always been a great deal of ambiguity concerning the powers and authority of the European Union, but its intentions were always clear: to harmonize Europe and to create European-wide solutions to economic problems. This goal always created unease in Europe. There were those who were concerned that a united Europe would exist to benefit the elites, rather than the broader public. There were also those who believed it was designed to benefit the Franco-German core of Europe rather than Europe as a whole. Overall, this reflected minority sentiment, but it was a substantial minority.
The financial crisis came at Europe in three phases. The first was part of the American subprime crisis. The second wave was a uniquely European crisis. European banks had taken massive positions in the Eastern European banking systems. For example, the Czech system was almost entirely foreign (Austrian and Italian) owned. These banks began lending to Eastern European homebuyers, with mortgages denominated in euros, Swiss francs or yen rather than in the currencies of the countries involved (none yet included in the eurozone). Doing this allowed banks to reduce interest rates, as the risk of currency fluctuation was pushed over to the borrower. But when the zlotys and forints began to plunge, these monthly mortgage payments began to soar, as did defaults. The European core, led by Germany, refused a European bailout of the borrowers or lenders even though the lenders who created this crisis were based in eurozone countries. Instead, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was called in to use funds that included American and Chinese, as well as European, money to solve the problem. This raised the political question in Eastern Europe as to what it meant to be part of the European Union.
The third wave is represented by crisis in sovereign debt in countries that are part of the eurozone but not in the core of Europe — Greece, of course, but also Portugal and possibly Spain. In the Greek case, the Germans in particular hesitated to intervene until it could draw the IMF — and non-European money and guarantees — into the mix. This obviously raised questions in the periphery about what membership in the eurozone meant, just as it created questions in Eastern Europe about what EU membership meant.
But a much deeper crisis of legitimacy arose. In Germany, elite sentiment accepted that some sort of intervention in Greece was inevitable. Public sentiment overwhelmingly opposed intervention, however. The political elite moved into tension with the financial elite under public pressure. In Greece, a similar crisis emerged between an elite that accepted that foreign discipline would have to be introduced and a public that saw this discipline as a betrayal of its interests and national sovereignty.
Europe thus has a double crisis. As in the United States, there is a crisis between the financial and political systems. This crisis is not as intense as in the United States because of a deeper tradition of integration between the two systems in Europe. But the tension between masses and elites is every bit as intense. The second part of the crisis is the crisis of the European Union and growing sense that the European Union is the problem and not the solution. As in the United States, there is a growing movement to distrust not only national arrangements but also multinational arrangements.
The United States and Europe are far from the only areas of the world facing crises of legitimacy. In China, for example, the growing suppression of all dissent derives from serious questions as to whom the financial expansion of the past 30 years benefits, and who will pay for the downturns. It is also interesting to note that Russia is suffering much less from this crisis, having lived through its own crisis before. The global crisis of legitimacy has many aspects worth considering at some point.
But for now, the important thing is to understand that both Europe and the United States are facing fundamental challenges to the legitimacy of, if not the regime, then at least the manner in which the regime has handled itself. The geopolitical significance of this crisis is obvious. If the Americans and Europeans both enter a period in which managing the internal balance becomes more pressing than managing the global balance, then other powers will have enhanced windows of opportunities to redefine their regional balances.
In the United States, we see a predictable process. With the unease over elites intensifying, the political elite is trying to stabilize the situation by attacking the financial elite. It is doing this to both demonstrate that the political elite is distinct from the financial elite and to impose the consequences on the financial elite that the impersonal system was unable to do. There is precedent for this, and it will likely achieve its desired end: greater control over the financial system by the state and an acceptable moral tale for the public.
The European process is much less clear. The lack of clarity comes from the fact that this is a test for the European Union. This is not simply a crisis within national elites, but within the multinational elite that created the European Union. If this leads to the de-legitimization of the EU, then we are really in uncharted territory.
But the most important point is that almost two years since a normal financial panic, the polity has still not managed to absorb the consequences of that event. The politically contrived corporation, and particularly the financial corporations, stands accused of undermining the wealth of nations. As Adam Smith understood, markets are not natural entities but the result of political decisions, as is the political system that creates the allocation of risk that allows markets to function. When that system appears to fail, the consequences go far beyond the particular financials of that event. They have political consequences and, in due course, geopolitical consequences.
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I was looking for this guy but could not find him till now. I heard him speak on cable and he wowed me: Allen West in Florida.
****Among the many reverberations of President Obama’s election, here is one he probably never anticipated: at least 32 African-Americans are running for Congress this year as Republicans, the biggest surge since Reconstruction, according to party officials.
Barbara P. Fernandez for The New York Times
Allen West, running in Florida, says the notion of racism in the Tea Party movement has been made up by the news media.
Princella Smith, in Arkansas, says she disagrees with President Obama but is proud of the country for electing him.
The House has not had a black Republican since 2003, when J. C. Watts of Oklahoma left after eight years.
But now black Republicans are running across the country — from a largely white swath of beach communities in Florida to the suburbs of Phoenix, where an African-American candidate has raised more money than all but two of his nine (white) Republican competitors in the primary.
Party officials and the candidates themselves acknowledge that they still have uphill fights in both the primaries and the general elections, but they say that black Republicans are running with a confidence they have never had before. They credit the marriage of two factors: dissatisfaction with the Obama administration, and the proof, as provided by Mr. Obama, that blacks can get elected.
“I ran in 2008 and raised half a million dollars, and the state party didn’t support me and the national party didn’t support me,” said Allen West, who is running for Congress in Florida and is one of roughly five black candidates the party believes could win. “But we came back and we’re running and things are looking great.”
But interviews with many of the candidates suggest that they felt empowered by Mr. Obama’s election, that it made them realize that what had once seemed impossible — for a black candidate to win election with substantial white support — was not.
“There is no denying that one of the things that came out of the election of Obama was that you have a lot of African-Americans running in both parties now,” said Vernon Parker, who is running for an open seat in Arizona’s Third District. His competition in the Aug. 24 primary includes the son of former Vice President Dan Quayle, Ben Quayle.
Princella Smith, who is running for an open seat in Arkansas, said she viewed the president’s victory through both the lens of history and partisan politics. “Aside from the fact that I disagree fundamentally with all his views, I am proud of my nation for proving that we have the ability to do something like that,” Ms. Smith said.
State and national party officials say that this year’s cast of black Republicans is far more experienced than the more fringy players of yore, and include elected officials, former military personnel and candidates who have run before.
Mr. Parker is the mayor of Paradise Valley, Ariz. Ryan Frazier is a councilman in Aurora, Colo., one of four at-large members who represent the whole city. And Tim Scott is the only black Republican elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives since Reconstruction.
“These are not just people pulled out of the hole,” said Timothy F. Johnson, chairman of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, a black conservative group. That is “the nice thing about being on this side of history,” he said.
He added that the candidates might be helped by the presence of Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee who is black and ran for the Senate himself in 2006.
“Party affiliation is not a barrier to inspiration,” Mr. Steele said in an e-mail message. “Certainly, the president’s election was and remains an inspiration to many.”
But Democrats and other political experts express skepticism about black Republicans’ chances in November. “In 1994 and 2000, there were 24 black G.O.P. nominees,” said Donna Brazile, a Democratic political strategist who ran Al Gore’s presidential campaign and who is black. “And you didn’t see many of them win their elections.”
Tavis Smiley, a prominent black talk show host who has repeatedly criticized Republicans for not doing more to court black voters, said, “It’s worth remembering that the last time it was declared the ‘Year of the Black Republican,’ it fizzled out.”
In many ways, this subset of Republicans is latching on to the basic themes propelling most of their party’s campaigns this year — the call for smaller government, less spending and stronger national security — rather than building platforms around social conservatism.
“Things have evolved,” said Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, who is heavily involved in recruiting Republican candidates. “I think partly the level of hostility to Obama, Pelosi and Reid makes a lot of people pragmatically more open to a coalition from the standpoint of being a long-term majority party.”
Many of the candidates are trying to align themselves with the Tea Partiers, insisting that the racial dynamics of that movement have been overblown. Videos taken at some Tea Party rallies show some participants holding up signs with racially inflammatory language.
A recent New York Times/CBS News poll found that 25 percent of self-identified Tea Party supporters think that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites, compared with 11 percent of the general public.
The black candidates interviewed overwhelmingly called the racist narrative a news media fiction. “I have been to these rallies, and there are hot dogs and banjos,” said Mr. West, the candidate in Florida, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army. “There is no violence or racism there.”
There is also some evidence that black voters rally around specific conservative causes. A case in point was a 2008 ballot initiative in California outlawing same-sex marriage that passed in large part because of support from black voters in Southern California.
Still, black Republicans face a double hurdle: black Democrats who are disinclined to back them in a general election, and incongruity with white Republicans, who sometimes do not welcome the blacks whom party officials claim to covet as new members.
This spring, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell of Virginia was roundly attacked for not mentioning slavery in his Confederate History Month proclamation, which he later said was a “major omission.” Black candidates said these types of gaffes posed problems in drawing African-Americans to their party, but also underscored their need to be there.
“I think what the governor failed to do was to recognize the pain and the emotion that was really sparked by the institution of slavery,” said Mr. Frazier of Colorado. “As a Republican, I think I have a responsibility to continue to work within my party to avoid those types of barriers. The key for the Republican Party is to engage every community on the issues they care about and not act as if they don’t exist.”****
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Thank you CCP! More Black Republicans are running for congress than ever before. Allen West sounds very good to me. I listened to him here on a Laura Ingraham archive following your post: http://allenwestforcongress.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/033010_west.mp3
Of course there is a shortage of people of color in the Republican Party when 19 out of 20 African-Americans voted for Obama. West spells it out. We don't compete based on selling Democrat-Lite. We stand for a set of principles and ask people to join with us with those principles.
He says that if the tea party is only for white people maybe he just has a very good tan.
Florida 22 is the East coast from Palm Beach down to Fort Lauderdale. Allen West lost in 2008 by 9.5%, very possibly winnable this year.
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It seems most Blacks will never listen to Whites so if there are more Blacks in the "other" party maybe more will reconsider and we can break the Dem stranglehold on minorities. It doesn't seem this can happen overnight.
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I remember a black conservative that lasted about a year in the public eye- he ended up "scandalled" into inconsequentiality. I am amazed at how the consevative side ends up "uncle tommed" or "house N!@@a'd" to death. (that is a misuse of reality, but there it is). I remember a show done in recent memory where High Schoolers were questionaired about jobs and some of the reasons that came up were "that isn't a job a black man takes". It reminded me of the women's job/man's job game and how those perceptions could be self limiting...........
I did see it in the service, Technical jobs were majority'd my whites and "smart" stereotyped minorities with a smattering of others, usually from "small town north" areas. Supply/ Support was mainly minority with a smattering of "inner big city" majority. I found the flip flop kind of interesting- but the TV show made it clear how people were taking jobs that were acceptable to a common vision of themselves and peers.............
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By Dick Morris And Eileen McGann 05.12.2010 Behind the scenes, the chances of a GOP takeover of the US Senate increased in the past two weeks with key developments in pivotal states.
Already, Republican candidates are ahead in eight states now represented by Democrats: Delaware, North Dakota, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Colorado, Arkansas and Nevada. And, in California, Senator Barbara Boxer is polling in the low 40s just barely ahead of her Republican challengers.
But nine seats won’t give us control since Biden would break the tie for the Democrats. We need ten.
Enter Washington State where a large field of Republican candidates have failed to dent the lead of three term incumbent Senator Patty Murray. But now it appears that Dino Rossi, the former Republican candidate for Governor, is likely to get into the race. Rossi, in fact, won the election for governor in Washington only to have it stolen from him by 200 votes after multiple recounts. Rossi trails Murray by only 48-46 even though he has yet to announce his candidacy. The vital tenth seat may well be Washington.
Or will it be Wisconsin where Democratic incumbent Russ Feingold is seeking re-election. Feingold is so far left that he wouldn’t find any district this side of Havana safe. And he has now drawn two top tier Republican opponents: Beer mogul Richard Leinenkugel and conservative activist Ron Johnson. Feingold scores below 50% of the vote in trial matchups, a sure indication of vulnerability.
Leinenkugel has good credentials for a race having served as state Commerce Secretary albeit in the current Democratic Administration of Governor Doyle. Johnson brings a compelling speaking style and solid conservative credentials — and a boatload of dough — to the race. Feingold won’t sleep well tonight.
And bear in mind New York where three good candidates — David Malpass, Joe DioGuardia, and Bruce Blakeman — are vying to take on vulnerable appointed incumbent Kristen Gillibrand. Read our book, 2010: Take Back America: A Battle Plan, to see how weak Gillibrand is.
And Connecticut where Democratic Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has slipped to 52% of the vote against Republican challenger Rob Simmons (he leads by 52-38). Blumenthal runs stronger against Linda McMahon of wrestling fame (he beats her, according to Rasmussen, by 55-35). If Simmons wins the primary, he has a good chance of knocking off Blumenthal.
So among Washington, Wisconsin, New York, and Connecticut, we are looking increasingly likely to find a tenth Republican victory.
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Please post this in the States' Rights Thread or the Constitutional Law thread on the SCH forum too. Thank you.
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http://www.pjtv.com/v/3555
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It's POTH, so caveat lector:
Republicans See Big Chance, but Are Worried, Too
By JEFF ZELENY and CARL HULSE
Published: May 23, 2010
WASHINGTON — Republicans remain confident of making big gains in the fall elections, but as the midterm campaign begins in earnest, they face a series of challenges that could keep the party from fully capitalizing on an electorate clamoring for change in Washington.
There are growing concerns among Republicans about the party’s get-out-the-vote operation and whether it can translate their advantage over Democrats in grass-roots enthusiasm into turnout on Election Day. They are also still trying to get a fix on how to run against President Obama, who, polls suggest, remains relatively well-liked by voters, even as support for his agenda has waned.
Republicans are working to find a balance between simply running against Democrats and promoting a specific alternative agenda. And they are struggling with how to integrate the passions of the Tea Party movement — with its anti-government ideology, anti-incumbent bent and often-rough political edges — into the Republican Party apparatus.
This week, House Republicans are beginning a program they call “America Speaking Out.” Their message is that lawmakers will be listening to their supporters over the summer, not simply dictating an agenda. In the fall, Republican leaders said, they plan to turn the ideas into specific policy proposals for the next Congress.
A series of events last week prompted a re-examination among Republicans of where the party stands less than six months before the midterm elections. In Pennsylvania, a Republican House candidate, Tim Burns, lost a special election by 8 points in a swing district of the sort the party needs to capture to have a shot of regaining the majority. And in a Republican primary for a Senate seat from Kentucky, Rand Paul, a leading emblem of the Tea Party, won a commanding victory.
“Democrats still need to be really worried,” said Joe Gaylord, a Republican strategist who helped guide the party’s sweeping Congressional victories in 1994. “But there has to be a message that we are for something, and that if you elect Republicans, there will be some change.”
For much of the first 16 months of the Obama administration, Republicans have unified around an opposition to the president’s agenda, trying to stop nearly every proposal. But that allowed Democrats to brand their rivals as obstructionists who were unwilling to compromise, setting off second-guessing among Republicans about whether they needed to do more. As the fall election comes into sharper view, the party faces the burden of introducing plans that appeal to its base without alienating independent voters.
Republicans continue to have much in their favor, and over all appear to be in a stronger position than Democrats. They continue to benefit from a widespread sense among voters that government has gotten too expansive, with Mr. Obama’s health care bill as Exhibit A. The economic recovery remains tepid, with unemployment still high.
Republicans raised more money than Democrats last month, a reflection of the optimism about the potential for gains in November among the party’s contributors. And the party did pick up a House seat in Hawaii on Saturday in a special election in a district that is heavily Democratic — two rival Democrats split their party’s vote — but Democrats expressed confidence they would win the seat back in November.
While Democrats also face challenges motivating their base this year, the Democratic margin of victory in the House race in Pennsylvania suggests that the party may enjoy organizational capabilities that Republicans do not.
Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, has said that anything short of taking back the House would be a failure. And since the setback in Pennsylvania last week, there has been decided concern in Republican circles that perhaps they were too optimistic.
“You’ve got a country that is in a surly mood and is skeptical of incumbents generally,” said Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota. “But some people have put the expectations so high, even if Republicans do reasonably well this fall, it could look like we haven’t done as well as we should have.”
The defeat in Pennsylvania not only helped alter the perception of the battle for control of Congress, but also prompted a review of how effective Mr. Sessions’s committee has been executing its on-the-ground campaign efforts.
“There is going to be a holistic assessment of what went wrong in the race and what we can learn from it,” said Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the No. 2 Republican. “We have to face the fact that these are going to be very tough races.”
Thomas M. Reynolds, the former New York congressman who headed the Republican campaign operation in 2004 and 2006, said the party needed to better balance local issues with appeals that take into account the national climate.
“We still have an angry electorate that both Democrats and Republicans face,” Mr. Reynolds said, “and our candidates need to talk about what matters at home and what they are going to do about it from an unpopular Washington.”
In the House, Republicans must capture 40 additional seats to win control from Democrats. In the Senate, strategists on both sides believe the prospects of Republicans winning 10 seats to take control remain slim.
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“The one thing that hasn’t changed is, the Republican Party brand is still pretty weak,” said Phil Musser, a Republican strategist. “We need an overhaul, and there is a big opportunity to rebrand around a few unifying themes besides just opposition to Obama.”
As many primary elections give way to the fall campaign, Republicans face a host of broader, thematic questions.
Should the party, for example, seek to nationalize the election? Should it direct candidates to demonize Mr. Obama or Speaker Nancy Pelosi the way Democrats demonized former President George W. Bush in 2006, or the way some Tea Party leaders are demonizing Mr. Obama? Will the legislative achievements of Democrats in recent months — the health care measure and presumably a financial regulation bill — permit Democrats to argue that Washington can get something done, or will the substance of the legislation provide a target for those who argue against the expansion of government?
Some Republicans say they cannot win races by focusing on Democratic leaders, an approach that failed for Republicans in the Pennsylvania race as it did for them nationally in 2008. “It didn’t work then and it isn’t working now,” said Representative Mike Simpson, Republican of Idaho.
Rob Jesmer, the executive director of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, said he thought that given Mr. Obama’s popularity, it was critical for Senate candidates to run against the Democratic agenda, rather than just Mr. Obama himself.
At the same time, there is also increasing pressure on Republicans to come up with some sort of governing agenda to offer Americans an idea of what they would do should they win control of Congress, echoing what Republicans did in 1994 through the “Contract With America.”
But some party officials are wary of such an approach, saying it would allow Democrats to turn attention away from attacks on their own stewardship of Congress. A compromise was reached through the “America Speaking Out” tour, which is set to begin Tuesday.
“It’s a remarkable situation, given where things were a year ago, where Republicans clearly have an opportunity to do really well,” said David Winston, a Republican pollster who concentrates on Congressional races. “The door is open in terms of potential. But we have to answer the question, Why us?”
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second post of the day, from the POTH op-ed page
The Principles of Rand Paul
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: May 23, 2010
No ideology survives the collision with real-world politics perfectly intact. General principles have to bend to accommodate the complexities of history, and justice is sometimes better served by compromise than by zealous intellectual consistency.
This was all that Rand Paul needed to admit, after his victory in Kentucky’s Republican Senate primary, when NPR and Rachel Maddow asked about his views of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “As a principled critic of federal power,” he could have said, “I oppose efforts to impose Washington’s will on states and private institutions. As a student of the history of segregation and slavery, however, I would have made an exception for the Civil Rights Act.”
But Paul just couldn’t help himself. He had to play Hamlet, to hem and haw about the distinction between public and private discrimination, to insist on his sympathy for the civil rights movement while conspicuously avoiding saying that he would have voted for the bill that outlawed segregation.
By the weekend (and under duress), he finally said it. But the tap-dancing route he took to get there was offensive, tone deaf and politically crazy.
It was also sadly typical of the political persuasion that Rand Paul represents.
This persuasion shouldn’t be confused with the Tea Party movement, whose inchoate antideficit enthusiasms Paul rode to victory last Tuesday. Nor is it just libertarianism in general, a label that gets slapped on everyone from Idaho milita members to Silicon Valley utopians to pro-choice Republicans in Greenwich.
Paul is a libertarian, certainly, but more importantly he’s a particular kind of a libertarian. He’s culturally conservative (opposing both abortion and illegal immigration), radically noninterventionist (he’s against the Iraq war and the United Nations), and so stringently constitutionalist that he views nearly everything today’s federal government does as a violation of the founding fathers’ vision.
This worldview goes by many names, including “paleoconservatism,” “the old right” and “paleolibertarianism.” But its adherents — Paul and his father, Ron, included — view themselves as America’s only true conservatives, arguing that the modern conservative movement has sold out to both big government and the military-industrial complex.
Instead of celebrating the usual Republican pantheon, paleoconservatives identify with the “beautiful losers” of American history, to borrow a phrase from the paleocon journalist Sam Francis — the anti-imperialists who opposed the Spanish-American War, the libertarians who stood athwart the New Deal yelling “stop,” the Midwestern Republicans who objected to the growth of the national security state after World War II. And they offer an ideological synthesis that’s well outside either political party’s mainstream — antiwar and antiabortion, against the Patriot Act but in favor of a border fence, and skeptical of the drug war and the welfare state alike.
In an age of lockstep partisanship, there’s a lot to admire about this unusual constellation of ideas, and its sweeping critique of American politics as usual. There’s a reason that both Rand and Ron Paul have inspired so much visceral enthusiasm, especially among younger voters, while attracting an eclectic cross-section of supporters — hipsters and N.R.A. members, civil libertarians and Christian conservatives, and stranger bedfellows still.
The problem is that paleoconservatives are self-marginalizing, and self-destructive.
Like many groups that find themselves in intellectually uncharted territory, they have trouble distinguishing between ideas that deserve a wider hearing and ideas that are crankish or worse. (Hence Ron Paul’s obsession with the gold standard and his son’s weakness for conspiracy theories.)
Like many outside-the-box thinkers, they’re good at applying their principles more consistently than your average partisan, but lousy at knowing when to stop. (Hence the tendency to see civil rights legislation as just another unjustified expansion of federal power.)
And like many self-conscious iconoclasts, they tend to drift in ever-more extreme directions, reveling in political incorrectness even as they leave common sense and common decency behind.
It isn’t surprising that two of the most interesting “paleo” writers of the last few decades, Francis and Joseph Sobran, ended their careers way out on the racist or anti-Semitic fringe. It isn’t a coincidence that the most successful “paleo” presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, opposes not only America’s interventions in Iraq, but the West’s involvement in World War II as well. It isn’t surprising that Ron Paul kept company in the 1990s with acolytes who attached his name to bigoted pamphleteering.
And it shouldn’t come as a shock that his son found himself publicly undone, in what should have been his moment of triumph, because he was too proud to acknowledge the limits of ideology, and to admit that a principle can be pushed too far.
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"The problem is that paleoconservatives are self-marginalizing, and self-destructive."
Exactly!!!
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By JONATHAN WEISMAN
Republican candidate Rand Paul's controversial remarks on the 1964 Civil Rights Act unsettled GOP leaders this week, but they reflect deeply held iconoclastic beliefs held by some in his party, and many in the tea-party movement, that the U.S. government shook its constitutional moorings more than 70 years ago.
Mr. Paul and his supporters rushed to emphasize that his remarks did not reflect racism but a sincerely held, libertarian belief that the federal government, starting in the Roosevelt era, gained powers that set the stage for decades of improper intrusions on private businesses.
Mr. Paul, the newly elected GOP Senate nominee in Kentucky, again made headlines Friday when he told ABC's "Good Morning America" that President Barack Obama's criticism of energy giant BP and of its oil-spill response was "really un-American."
That followed a tussle over the landmark civil-rights law, which Mr. Paul embraced after suggesting Wednesday that the act may have gone too far in mandating the desegregation of private businesses. Late Friday, NBC said that Mr. Paul had cancelled a scheduled appearance on the Sunday morning show "Meet the Press,'' a rare development in the history of the widely watched political program. The network said it was asking Mr. Paul to reconsider.
In tea-party circles, Mr. Paul's views are not unusual. They fit into a "Constitutionalist" view under which the federal government has no right to dictate the behavior of private enterprises. On the stump, especially among tea-party supporters, Mr. Paul says "big government" didn't start with President Obama, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s or the advance of central governance sparked by World War II and the economic boom that followed.
He traces it to 1937, when the Supreme Court, under heated pressure from President Franklin Roosevelt, upheld a state minimum-wage law on a 5-4 vote, ushering in the legal justification for government intervention in private markets.
Until the case, West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, the Supreme Court had sharply limited government action that impinged on the private sector, infuriating Mr. Roosevelt so much that he threatened to expand the court and stack it with his own appointees.
Following his comments on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Rand Paul said Friday morning President Obama's criticism of BP has sounded "really un-American." WSJ's Jerry Seib joins the News Hub to discuss the latest controversy and the political damage of Paul's recent comments.
."It didn't start last year. I think it started back in 1936 or 1937, and I point really to a couple of key constitutional cases… that all had to do with the commerce clause," Mr. Paul said in an interview before Tuesday's election, in which he defeated a Republican establishment candidate, hand-picked by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, Ky.).
Mr. Paul has said that, if elected, one of his first demands will be that Congress print the constitutional justification on any law is passes.
Last week, Mr. Paul encouraged a tea-party gathering in Louisville to look at the origins of "unconstitutional government." He told the crowd there of Wickard v. Filburn, a favorite reference on the stump, in which the Supreme Court rejected the claims of farmer Roscoe Filburn that wheat he grew for his own use was beyond the reach of federal regulation. The 1942 ruling upheld federal laws limiting wheat production, saying Mr. Filburn's crop affected interstate commerce. Even if he fed his wheat to his own livestock, the court reasoned, he was implicitly affecting wheat prices. If he had bought the wheat on the market, he would subtly have raised the national price of the crop.
"That's when we quit owning our own property. That's when we became renters on our own land," Mr. Paul told the crowd.
In an interview, Mr. Paul expressed support for purely in-state gun industries, in which firearms are produced in one state with no imported parts and no exports. Guns produced under those circumstances can't be subjected to a federal background check, waiting period or other rules, he reasons.
"I'm not for having a civil war or anything like that, but I am for challenging federal authority over the states, through the courts, to see if we can get some better rulings," he said.
To supporters, such ideological purity has made the Bowling Green ophthalmologist a hero.
"He's going back to the Constitution," said Heather Toombs, a Louisville supporter who came to watch him at a meet-and-greet at a suburban home last week. "He's taking back the government."
But to Democrats, some Republicans and even some libertarians, Mr. Paul's arguments seem detached from the social fabric that has bound the U.S. together since 1937. The federal government puts limits on pollutants from corporations, monitors the safety of toys and other products and ensures a safe food supply—much of which Mr. Paul's philosophy could put in question.
David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute, said that in many ways Americans are freer now than they were in any pre-1937 libertarian Halcyon day. Women and black citizens can vote, work and own property. "Micro-regulations" that existed before the Supreme Court shift, which controlled trucking, civil aviation and other private pursuits, are gone.
"Sometimes he talks the way libertarians talk in political seminars," Mr. Boaz said of Mr. Paul. "There are not really many people who want to reverse Wickard, but there are many professors who could make a good case for it."
"Rand Paul apparently has a deeply held conviction that corporations should be allowed to do what they see fit without oversight or accountability," Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, Mr. Paul's Democratic opponent in the Senate contest, said Friday.
Mr. Paul's views differ from those of the Republican Party on some fundamental matters. Mr. Paul opposes the anti-terrorism PATRIOT Act, which he says infringes on civil liberties. He opposed the war in Iraq and says any war cannot be waged unless and until Congress formally declares it. And he has expressed misgivings about the nation's drug laws.
Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R, Ariz.) told the newspaper Politico that Mr. Paul's civil rights comments were comparable to "a debate like you had at 2 a.m. in the morning when you're going to college. But it doesn't have a lot to do with anything."
—Jean Spencer and Douglas A. Blackmon contributed to this article.
Write to Jonathan Weisman at jonathan.weisman@wsj.com
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From other threads: Next year's budget is to spend $4 trillion and take in just 2.5 while private employment is at the lowest percentage of the economy in history and public employment at its highest.
We can't all agree on all issues. Could we all at least agree that the government is not the economy, that we do not stimulate the economy by growing the government and we certainly do not alleviate the debt crisis by exploding the debt.
If everyone knows you can't raise taxes in a weak economy, then get the tax increases scheduled for the end of this year off the table NOW. The opposition party should make that point every morning on the steps of congress until the ruling party agrees or until the voters have their say.
The double tax on business is out of line competitively - the corporate rate should be lowered to the average of the OECD. Then the rest of the tax cutting wish list needs to be put on hold while we Cut Spending First.
At four trillion of federal spending and growing, the answer to which program to cut is yes - all of them will be fully scrutinized, cut and frozen until the private economy can catch up with the funding. JMHO.
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Alexander's Essay – May 27, 2010
In Memoriam: American Patriots
"With hearts fortified with these animating reflections, we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare, that, exerting the utmost energy of those powers, which our beneficent Creator hath graciously bestowed upon us, the arms we have compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live as slaves." --Declaration of the Cause and Necessity of Taking up Arms, July 6, 1775
Patriots RememberedMonday is Memorial Day, that exceptional day of each year all Patriots reserve to formally honor the service and sacrifice of generations of uniformed Patriots now departed -- Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen who honored their sacred oaths "to support and defend" our Constitution and the liberty it enshrines.
In this era, however, our "progressive" academic institutions choose not to teach genuine history or civics. Consequently, many Americans have no sense of reverence or obligation for the liberty they enjoy. Indeed, many will "celebrate" Memorial Day as any other holiday, with barbecues, beer, and commercial sales at local malls. Simply put, they have sold out Memorial Day.
However, those of us who do understand the cost of liberty will advance this custom in honor of fallen Patriots, with both formal rites and simple prayers. For it is through the legacy of these Patriots that we are able to see most clearly our nation's noble history of eternal vigilance in support of liberty.
In 1776, an extraordinary group of men signed a document affirming our God-given right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Their commitment to the principles outlined therein are summed up in its final sentence: "And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."
Founding Patriot John Adams wrote: "I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States."
And the cost has been incalculable.
Generations of Patriots have since pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor in defense of the Essential Liberty codified by our Founders in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.
Our nation has, time and again, spent its treasure and spilt its sons' blood, not only for liberty at home, but also abroad.
However, Benjamin Franklin noted in 1777 that it should be so: "- ur cause is the cause of all mankind, and that we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own."
Since the opening salvos of the American Revolution, nearly 1.2 million American Patriots have died in defense of liberty. Additionally, 1.4 million have been wounded in combat, and tens of millions more have served honorably, surviving without physical wounds. These numbers, of course, offer no reckoning of the inestimable value of their service or the sacrifices borne by their families, but we do know that the value of the liberty they have extended to their posterity -- to us -- is priceless.
"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died," said Gen. George S. Patton. "Rather we should thank God that such men lived."
While I greatly appreciate Gen. Patton's sentiment, I must respectfully disagree with his premise. I both mourn their absence and thank God they lived.
Etched into the base of the Iwo Jima Memorial in our nation's capital are the words of Adm. Chester Nimitz, his timeless tribute to the Marines who fought so valiantly there during World War II: "Uncommon valor was a common virtue." Such valor has attended every conflict involving American Patriots.
Not to be confused with men of such virtue, last week, Barack Hussein Obama addressed the graduating class at the United States Military Academy. His minions brokered Obama's appearance before the latest Corps (pronounced "core", not "corpse") of Cadets in the Long Gray Line, in an effort to burnish his thin veneer as "Commander in Chief" of our Armed Forces.
Obama used the occasion to dress up his strategy of appeasement.
In other years, men of somewhat greater stature have addressed the USMA, perhaps the most memorable being General Douglas MacArthur, who delivered his address on "Duty, Honor and Country," without the assistance of teleprompters, or even notes.
His words immortalize the spirit of all American Patriots who have served our nation in uniform:
Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man at arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefields many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of the world's noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless.
His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me, or from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy's breast.
But when I think of his patience under adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements.
In twenty campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand campfires, I have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people.
From one end of the world to the other, he has drained deep the chalice of courage. As I listened to those songs of the glee club, in memory's eye I could see those staggering columns of the First World War, bending under soggy packs on many a weary march, from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle deep through mire of shell-pocked roads; to form grimly for the attack, blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective, and for many, to the judgment seat of God.
I do not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death. They died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory. Always for them: Duty, Honor, Country. Always their blood, and sweat, and tears, as they saw the way and the light.
And twenty years after, on the other side of the globe, against the filth of dirty foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts, those boiling suns of the relentless heat, those torrential rains of devastating storms, the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails, the bitterness of long separation of those they loved and cherished, the deadly pestilence of tropic disease, the horror of stricken areas of war.
Honor. Duty. Country.
Thomas Jefferson offered this advice to all generations of Patriots: "Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them."
Indeed.
We owe a great debt of gratitude to all those generations who have passed the torch of liberty to succeeding generations.
In Memoriam, we recall these words from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
"Your silent tents of green
We deck with fragrant flowers;
Yours has the suffering been,
The memory shall be ours."
And these...
"[L]et us make a vow to our dead. Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for. Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their valor, and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died." --Ronald Reagan at Pointe du Hoc, 1984
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The Americans Who Risked Everything
My father, Rush H. Limbaugh, Jr., delivered this oft-requested address locally a number of times, but it had never before appeared in print until it appeared in The Limbaugh Letter. My dad was renowned for his oratory skills and for his original mind; this speech is, I think, a superb demonstration of both. I will always be grateful to him for instilling in me a passion for the ideas and lives of America's Founders, as well as a deep appreciation for the inspirational power of words which you will see evidenced here:
"Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor"
It was a glorious morning. The sun was shining and the wind was from the southeast. Up especially early, a tall bony, redheaded young Virginian found time to buy a new thermometer, for which he paid three pounds, fifteen shillings. He also bought gloves for Martha, his wife, who was ill at home.
Thomas Jefferson arrived early at the statehouse. The temperature was 72.5 degrees and the horseflies weren't nearly so bad at that hour. It was a lovely room, very large, with gleaming white walls. The chairs were comfortable. Facing the single door were two brass fireplaces, but they would not be used today.
The moment the door was shut, and it was always kept locked, the room became an oven. The tall windows were shut, so that loud quarreling voices could not be heard by passersby. Small openings atop the windows allowed a slight stir of air, and also a large number of horseflies. Jefferson records that "the horseflies were dexterous in finding necks, and the silk of stockings was nothing to them." All discussing was punctuated by the slap of hands on necks.
On the wall at the back, facing the president's desk, was a panoply -- consisting of a drum, swords, and banners seized from Fort Ticonderoga the previous year. Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold had captured the place, shouting that they were taking it "in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!"
Now Congress got to work, promptly taking up an emergency measure about which there was discussion but no dissension. "Resolved: That an application be made to the Committee of Safety of Pennsylvania for a supply of flints for the troops at New York."
Then Congress transformed itself into a committee of the whole. The Declaration of Independence was read aloud once more, and debate resumed. Though Jefferson was the best writer of all of them, he had been somewhat verbose. Congress hacked the excess away. They did a good job, as a side-by-side comparison of the rough draft and the final text shows. They cut the phrase "by a self-assumed power." "Climb" was replaced by "must read," then "must" was eliminated, then the whole sentence, and soon the whole paragraph was cut. Jefferson groaned as they continued what he later called "their depredations." "Inherent and inalienable rights" came out "certain unalienable rights," and to this day no one knows who suggested the elegant change.
A total of 86 alterations were made. Almost 500 words were eliminated, leaving 1,337. At last, after three days of wrangling, the document was put to a vote.
Here in this hall Patrick Henry had once thundered: "I am no longer a Virginian, sir, but an American." But today the loud, sometimes bitter argument stilled, and without fanfare the vote was taken from north to south by colonies, as was the custom. On July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was adopted.
There were no trumpets blown. No one stood on his chair and cheered. The afternoon was waning and Congress had no thought of delaying the full calendar of routine business on its hands. For several hours they worked on many other problems before adjourning for the day.
Much To Lose
What kind of men were the 56 signers who adopted the Declaration of Independence and who, by their signing, committed an act of treason against the crown? To each of you, the names Franklin, Adams, Hancock and Jefferson are almost as familiar as household words. Most of us, however, know nothing of the other signers. Who were they? What happened to them?
I imagine that many of you are somewhat surprised at the names not there: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry. All were elsewhere.
Ben Franklin was the only really old man. Eighteen were under 40; three were in their 20s. Of the 56 almost half - 24 - were judges and lawyers. Eleven were merchants, nine were landowners and farmers, and the remaining 12 were doctors, ministers, and politicians.
With only a few exceptions, such as Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, these were men of substantial property. All but two had families. The vast majority were men of education and standing in their communities. They had economic security as few men had in the 18th Century.
Each had more to lose from revolution than he had to gain by it. John Hancock, one of the richest men in America, already had a price of 500 pounds on his head. He signed in enormous letters so that his Majesty could now read his name without glasses and could now double the reward. Ben Franklin wryly noted: "Indeed we must all hang together, otherwise we shall most assuredly hang separately."
Fat Benjamin Harrison of Virginia told tiny Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts: "With me it will all be over in a minute, but you, you will be dancing on air an hour after I am gone."
These men knew what they risked. The penalty for treason was death by hanging. And remember, a great British fleet was already at anchor in New York Harbor.
They were sober men. There were no dreamy-eyed intellectuals or draft card burners here. They were far from hot-eyed fanatics yammering for an explosion. They simply asked for the status quo. It was change they resisted. It was equality with the mother country they desired. It was taxation with representation they sought. They were all conservatives, yet they rebelled.
It was principle, not property, that had brought these men to Philadelphia. Two of them became presidents of the United States. Seven of them became state governors. One died in office as vice president of the United States. Several would go on to be U.S. Senators. One, the richest man in America, in 1828 founded the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. One, a delegate from Philadelphia, was the only real poet, musician and philosopher of the signers. (It was he, Francis Hopkinson not Betsy Ross who designed the United States flag.)
Richard Henry Lee, a delegate from Virginia, had introduced the resolution to adopt the Declaration of Independence in June of 1776. He was prophetic in his concluding remarks: "Why then sir, why do we longer delay? Why still deliberate? Let this happy day give birth to an American Republic. Let her arise not to devastate and to conquer but to reestablish the reign of peace and law.
"The eyes of Europe are fixed upon us. She demands of us a living example of freedom that may exhibit a contrast in the felicity of the citizen to the ever-increasing tyranny which desolates her polluted shores. She invites us to prepare an asylum where the unhappy may find solace, and the persecuted repost.
"If we are not this day wanting in our duty, the names of the American Legislatures of 1776 will be placed by posterity at the side of all of those whose memory has been and ever will be dear to virtuous men and good citizens."
Though the resolution was formally adopted July 4, it was not until July 8 that two of the states authorized their delegates to sign, and it was not until August 2 that the signers met at Philadelphia to actually put their names to the Declaration.
William Ellery, delegate from Rhode Island, was curious to see the signers' faces as they committed this supreme act of personal courage. He saw some men sign quickly, "but in no face was he able to discern real fear." Stephan Hopkins, Ellery's colleague from Rhode Island, was a man past 60. As he signed with a shaking pen, he declared: "My hand trembles, but my heart does not."
"Most Glorious Service"
Even before the list was published, the British marked down every member of Congress suspected of having put his name to treason. All of them became the objects of vicious manhunts. Some were taken. Some, like Jefferson, had narrow escapes. All who had property or families near British strongholds suffered.
· Francis Lewis, New York delegate saw his home plundered -- and his estates in what is now Harlem -- completely destroyed by British Soldiers. Mrs. Lewis was captured and treated with great brutality. Though she was later exchanged for two British prisoners through the efforts of Congress, she died from the effects of her abuse.
· William Floyd, another New York delegate, was able to escape with his wife and children across Long Island Sound to Connecticut, where they lived as refugees without income for seven years. When they came home they found a devastated ruin.
· Philips Livingstone had all his great holdings in New York confiscated and his family driven out of their home. Livingstone died in 1778 still working in Congress for the cause.
· Louis Morris, the fourth New York delegate, saw all his timber, crops, and livestock taken. For seven years he was barred from his home and family.
· John Hart of Trenton, New Jersey, risked his life to return home to see his dying wife. Hessian soldiers rode after him, and he escaped in the woods. While his wife lay on her deathbed, the soldiers ruined his farm and wrecked his homestead. Hart, 65, slept in caves and woods as he was hunted across the countryside. When at long last, emaciated by hardship, he was able to sneak home, he found his wife had already been buried, and his 13 children taken away. He never saw them again. He died a broken man in 1779, without ever finding his family.
· Dr. John Witherspoon, signer, was president of the College of New Jersey, later called Princeton. The British occupied the town of Princeton, and billeted troops in the college. They trampled and burned the finest college library in the country.
· Judge Richard Stockton, another New Jersey delegate signer, had rushed back to his estate in an effort to evacuate his wife and children. The family found refuge with friends, but a Tory sympathizer betrayed them. Judge Stockton was pulled from bed in the night and brutally beaten by the arresting soldiers. Thrown into a common jail, he was deliberately starved. Congress finally arranged for Stockton's parole, but his health was ruined. The judge was released as an invalid, when he could no longer harm the British cause. He returned home to find his estate looted and did not live to see the triumph of the Revolution. His family was forced to live off charity.
· Robert Morris, merchant prince of Philadelphia, delegate and signer, met Washington's appeals and pleas for money year after year. He made and raised arms and provisions which made it possible for Washington to cross the Delaware at Trenton. In the process he lost 150 ships at sea, bleeding his own fortune and credit almost dry.
· George Clymer, Pennsylvania signer, escaped with his family from their home, but their property was completely destroyed by the British in the Germantown and Brandywine campaigns.
· Dr. Benjamin Rush, also from Pennsylvania, was forced to flee to Maryland. As a heroic surgeon with the army, Rush had several narrow escapes.
· John Martin, a Tory in his views previous to the debate, lived in a strongly loyalist area of Pennsylvania. When he came out for independence, most of his neighbors and even some of his relatives ostracized him. He was a sensitive and troubled man, and many believed this action killed him. When he died in 1777, his last words to his tormentors were: "Tell them that they will live to see the hour when they shall acknowledge it [the signing] to have been the most glorious service that I have ever rendered to my country."
· William Ellery, Rhode Island delegate, saw his property and home burned to the ground.
· Thomas Lynch, Jr., South Carolina delegate, had his health broken from privation and exposures while serving as a company commander in the military. His doctors ordered him to seek a cure in the West Indies and on the voyage, he and his young bride were drowned at sea.
· Edward Rutledge, Arthur Middleton, and Thomas Heyward, Jr., the other three South Carolina signers, were taken by the British in the siege of Charleston. They were carried as prisoners of war to St. Augustine, Florida, where they were singled out for indignities. They were exchanged at the end of the war, the British in the meantime having completely devastated their large landholdings and estates.
· Thomas Nelson, signer of Virginia, was at the front in command of the Virginia military forces. With British General Charles Cornwallis in Yorktown, fire from 70 heavy American guns began to destroy Yorktown piece by piece. Lord Cornwallis and his staff moved their headquarters into Nelson's palatial home. While American cannonballs were making a shambles of the town, the house of Governor Nelson remained untouched. Nelson turned in rage to the American gunners and asked, "Why do you spare my home?" They replied, "Sir, out of respect to you." Nelson cried, "Give me the cannon!" and fired on his magnificent home himself, smashing it to bits. But Nelson's sacrifice was not quite over. He had raised $2 million for the Revolutionary cause by pledging his own estates. When the loans came due, a newer peacetime Congress refused to honor them, and Nelson's property was forfeited. He was never reimbursed. He died, impoverished, a few years later at the age of 50.
Lives, Fortunes, Honor
Of those 56 who signed the Declaration of Independence, nine died of wounds or hardships during the war. Five were captured and imprisoned, in each case with brutal treatment. Several lost wives, sons or entire families. One lost his 13 children. Two wives were brutally treated. All were at one time or another the victims of manhunts and driven from their homes. Twelve signers had their homes completely burned. Seventeen lost everything they owned. Yet not one defected or went back on his pledged word. Their honor, and the nation they sacrificed so much to create is still intact.
And, finally, there is the New Jersey signer, Abraham Clark.
He gave two sons to the officer corps in the Revolutionary Army. They were captured and sent to that infamous British prison hulk afloat in New York Harbor known as the hell ship Jersey, where 11,000 American captives were to die. The younger Clarks were treated with a special brutality because of their father. One was put in solitary and given no food. With the end almost in sight, with the war almost won, no one could have blamed Abraham Clark for acceding to the British request when they offered him his sons' lives if he would recant and come out for the King and Parliament. The utter despair in this man's heart, the anguish in his very soul, must reach out to each one of us down through 200 years with his answer: "No."
The 56 signers of the Declaration Of Independence proved by their every deed that they made no idle boast when they composed the most magnificent curtain line in history. "And for the support of this Declaration with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."
My friends, I know you have a copy of the Declaration of Independence somewhere around the house - in an old history book (newer ones may well omit it), an encyclopedia, or one of those artificially aged "parchments" we all got in school years ago. I suggest that each of you take the time this month to read through the text of the Declaration, one of the most noble and beautiful political documents in human history.
There is no more profound sentence than 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..."
These are far more than mere poetic words. The underlying ideas that infuse every sentence of this treatise have sustained this nation for more than two centuries. They were forged in the crucible of great sacrifice. They are living words that spring from and satisfy the deepest cries for liberty in the human spirit.
"Sacred honor" isn't a phrase we use much these days, but every American life is touched by the bounty of this, the Founders' legacy. It is freedom, tested by blood, and watered with tears.
- Rush Limbaugh III
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http://www.usflag.org/more2.html
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This opinion addresses I think a point CCP just made in 'Politics'.
http://weeklystandard.com/articles/think-big
Think Big
Republicans should embrace Paul Ryan's Road Map.
BY Fred Barnes
July 19, 2010
For Republicans, the Road Map authored by congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is the most important proposal in domestic policy since Ronald Reagan embraced supply side economics in the 1980 presidential campaign. It’s not only the freshest, boldest, and most comprehensive Republican thinking, it’s also the most relevant. If Republicans adopt the Road Map as their basic ideological blueprint, it offers them the prospect of a landslide in the midterm election this year, followed by victory in the presidential election in 2012.
For sure, that’s a lot of weight for a policy statement drafted by a 40-year-old House member to bear. But the Road Map is perfectly timed to deal with the crises of the moment: economic stagnation, uncontrolled spending, the deficit and long-term debt, soaring tax rates, health care, the housing problem, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
Yet Republican leaders are wary of endorsing it, and for understandable reasons. The Road Map is sweeping and politically risky. It would overhaul popular programs like Medicare, relying on individuals to make decisions now made by government. Democrats are already attacking it. When Ryan delivered the weekly Republican radio address in late June, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put out a press release under the heading, “Republicans Make Key Advocate of Privatizing Social Security and Ending Medicare Their Spokesman on Budget.”
Democrats insist focus groups have rejected Ryan’s reform of Medicare. When swing voters learn Medicare would become “a voucher system . . . it has a massive impact,” Democratic strategist Robert Creamer wrote in the Huffington Post. “People like the Democratic program of Medicare.”
Republican leaders fear the Road Map might jeopardize, or at least minimize, what is expected to be a decisive Republican victory in the November midterm election. Their advantage in the congressional generic poll is at an all-time high, and President Obama’s approval rating has dropped to the mid-40s. Given these usually reliable indicators, why give Democrats a target to shoot at?
There are three reasons Republicans should ignore their jitters about the Road Map. The first is that the nation’s disenchantment with Obama and Democrats will take Republicans only so far. There’s a residue of bad feelings toward Republicans from the years the party ruled Congress, spent too much, and produced scandals.
Voters have memories. To overcome their qualms, Republicans need to provide more than a litany of Democratic faults. Voters are frightened about the future of the country. They’re looking for a serious solution to the mess we’re in. The Road Map offers exactly that, plus the opportunity to win more seats than Republicans are likely to capture solely by zinging Democrats.
The second reason should be obvious after the ignominious Republican defeat in May in the race for John Murtha’s old House seat in Pennsylvania. Democrat Mark Critz won by running to the right—against Washington, Obama, spending, the deficit —and Democratic candidates across the country are taking the same tack.
Republican candidates need to put some daylight between themselves and their Democratic opponents. The Road Map will do that. Democrats can’t endorse it for fear of alienating their liberal base, which loathes anything that reduces the size of government. The Road Map stamps Republican candidates as the real conservatives, which is what voters happen to be looking for in 2010.
The third reason is the Republican message (or the absence of one). In Pennsylvania, it was “send a message to Nancy Pelosi.” Voters declined. I like the Republican slogan that worked so well in 1946—“Had enough?” But a slogan is not a message. The Road Map is a message. The country is falling apart, we’re going broke, government is on a takeover binge, the economy is wobbling. The Road Map is the solution. That’s a pretty good message.
Those who tremble at the thought of pushing a big idea should remember the campaign of 1980. Reagan, who for years had warned of the evils of government spending and overreach, suddenly became the champion of an across the board, 30 percent cut in tax rates for individuals and business.
That was very risky. The elder George Bush called it “voodoo economics.” Democrats were certain the whopping tax cut would turn the country against Reagan. Quite the opposite occurred. Reagan would have defeated Jimmy Carter without it, but not by the 10 percentage points he actually won by. The tax cut showed Reagan was serious about reviving the economy and not at all a weakling like Carter.
In 1994, the Contract With America wasn’t as risky. It wasn’t a big idea either, but a collection of smaller ones. Democrats, however, believed it would doom Republican chances of a substantial victory. It didn’t. It can’t be proved, but I think the Contract enlarged the Republican landslide.
For now, the Road Map has a relatively small but growing cheering section. A dozen House members have endorsed it. Senator Jim DeMint praised it in his book Saving Freedom. Jeb Bush likes it. On CNN last week, economic historian Niall Ferguson called Ryan “a serious thinker on the Republican right who’s prepared to grapple with these issues of fiscal sustainability and come up with a plan.”
Ferguson sees the Road Map as “radical fiscal reform,” which it is, and said Washington should recognize it as the alternative to “the Keynesian option,” which Washington doesn’t. “I’m depressed how few people in Washington are prepared to talk about” the Road Map option, he said.
Ryan isn’t depressed. “As soon as people become informed and know the details, the more they like it,” he told me. He says the Road Map is “based on a fundamentally different vision” from the “government-centered ideology now prevailing in Washington . . . and restores an American character rooted in individual initiative, entrepreneurship, and opportunity.”
The full plan—“A Road Map for America’s Future”—is outlined in a formidable, 87-page document. It would give everyone a refundable tax credit to buy health insurance, allow individual investment accounts to be carved out of Social Security, reduce the six income tax rates to two (10 and 25 percent), and replace the corporate tax (35 percent) with a business consumption tax (8.5 percent). And that’s not the half of it.
As ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, Ryan was able to get the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to run the numbers in his plan. CBO concluded the plan would “make the Social Security and Medicare programs permanently solvent [and] lift the growing debt burden on future generations, and hold federal taxes to no higher than 19 percent of GDP.” Pretty impressive results, I’d say.
The Road Map does one more thing. It would give Republicans an agenda if they gain control of the House or Senate in the midterm election—or a mandate if they win both. “What’s the point of winning an election if you don’t have a mandate?” Ryan asks.
He doesn’t expect a mandate in 2010. “I need to make sure these ideas survive this election,” he says, and set the stage for “the most ideological, sea-changing election in our lifetime” in 2012. Merely survive in 2010? The Road Map can do better than that. How about thrive?
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Ryan is a bright guy who seems to have character and intellectual integrity. Definitely someone to keep an eye on.
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Actually I saw the Barnes article.
The challenge is to convince the hoards of Americans who rely on unemployment, who work for beans paying their bills from week to week, that this is best for them as well as the country overall.
Maybe Ryan can be that point spokesperson. Like Gingrich was in 1994. I like Gingrich but I think it better if we can get new faces. We need someone who also evokes empathy - Gingrich does not and never has.
We need someone who can show he gets the "pain" while he is telling us the truth about the sacrifices we must all make to get out of this mess.
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"Ryan is a bright guy who seems to have character and intellectual integrity."
I didn't realize he is only 40 and ranking member of the house budget committee. Assuming no executive experience he might be perfectly qualified for President... Better, I would like to see him as the next speaker.
The issue Barnes addresses is whether the party should adopt a comprehensive plan that fixes this mess, include necessarily the controversial entitlement changes and a mandate to reform or I suppose just take 3 or 4 bullet points on the weaknesses of the Dems just to win.
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Paul Ryan: "I for one tried to get us out of this rut by offering my own plan. I call it “A Roadmap for America’s Future.” The motivation in putting this plan out there is twofold:
One: show us that we can do it. Put out a plan with real numbers, certified by the actuaries of Social Security and Medicaid, certified by the CBO that shows us we can get off of this debt path that we’re on, that we can actually turn this thing around. It’s a plan that does three things: pay of our national debt; fulfill the mission of health and retirement security; and get the engine of American prosperity back up and running. Get us on a pathway to growth; get us on a pathway to higher standards of living; get us on a pathway to creating jobs, instead of the path we are currently on.
The second reason why I did the Roadmap was to try and actually encourage other people to come up with their own plans. I’m not suggesting that I have all of the answers to fix all of these problems. This is how I would fix these problems. What I’m trying to do is to get people who don’t agree with the way we choose to fix these problems to come up with their own plans. Unfortunately, we’ve had nothing."
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703808904575025080017959478.html
WSJ (JANUARY 26, 2010)
A GOP Road Map for America's Future
There's still time to rejuvenate our market economy and avoid a European-style welfare state.
By PAUL D. RYAN
In tonight's State of the Union address, President Obama will declare a new found commitment to "fiscal responsibility" to cover the huge spending and debt he and congressional Democrats have run up in his first year in office. But next Monday, when he submits his actual budget, I fear it will rely on gimmickry, commissions, luke-warm spending "freezes," and paper-tiger controls to create the illusion of budget discipline. Meanwhile, he and the Democratic congressional leadership will continue pursuing a relentless expansion of government and a new culture of dependency.
America needs an alternative. For that reason, I have reintroduced my plan to tackle our nation's most pressing domestic challenges—updated to reflect the dramatic decline in our economic and fiscal condition. The plan, called A Road Map for America's Future and first introduced in 2008, is a comprehensive proposal to ensure health and retirement security for all Americans, to lift the debt burdens that are mounting every day because of Washington's reckless spending, and to promote jobs and competitiveness in the 21st century global economy.
The difference between the Road Map and the Democrats' approach could not be more clear. From the enactment of a $1 trillion "stimulus" last February to the current pass-at-all costs government takeover of health care, the Democratic leadership has followed a "progressive" strategy that will take us closer to a tipping point past which most Americans receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes—a European-style welfare state where double-digit unemployment becomes a way of life.
Americans don't have to settle for this path of decline. There's still time to choose a different future. That is what the Road Map offers. It is based on a fundamentally different vision from the one now prevailing in Washington. It focuses the government on its proper role. It restrains government spending, and hence limits the size of government itself. It rejuvenates the vibrant market economy that made America the envy of the world. And it restores an American character rooted in individual initiative, entrepreneurship and opportunity.
Here are the principal elements:
• Health Care. The plan ensures universal access to affordable health insurance by restructuring the tax code, allowing all Americans to secure an affordable health plan that best suits their needs, and shifting the control and ownership of health coverage away from the government and employers to individuals.
It provides a refundable tax credit—$2,300 for individuals and $5,700 for families—to purchase coverage (from another state if they so choose) and keep it with them if they move or change jobs. It establishes transparency in health-care price and quality data, so this critical information is readily available before someone needs health services.
State-based high risk pools will make affordable care available to those with pre-existing conditions. In addition to the tax credit, Medicaid will provide supplemental payments to low-income recipients so they too can obtain the health coverage of their choice and no longer be consigned to the stigmatized, sclerotic care that Medicaid has come to represent.
• Medicare. The Road Map secures Medicare for current beneficiaries, while making common-sense reforms to save this critical program. It preserves the existing Medicare program for Americans currently 55 or older so they can receive the benefits they planned for throughout their working lives.
For those under 55—as they become Medicare-eligible—it creates a Medicare payment, initially averaging $11,000, to be used to purchase a Medicare certified plan. The payment is adjusted to reflect medical inflation, and pegged to income, with low-income individuals receiving greater support. The plan also provides risk adjustment, so those with greater medical needs receive a higher payment.
The proposal also fully funds Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs) for low-income beneficiaries, while continuing to allow all beneficiaries, regardless of income, to set up tax-free MSAs. Enacted together, these reforms will help keep Medicare solvent for generations to come.
• Social Security. The Road Map preserves the existing Social Security program for those 55 or older. For those under 55, the plan offers the option of investing over one-third of their current Social Security taxes into personal retirement accounts, similar to the Thrift Savings Plan available to federal employees. This proposal includes a property right, so those who own these accounts can pass on the assets to their heirs. The plan also guarantees that individuals will not lose a dollar they contribute to their accounts, even after inflation.
The plan also makes the program permanently solvent by combining a modest adjustment in the growth of initial Social Security's benefits for higher-income individuals, with a gradual, modest increase in the retirement age.
• Tax Reform. The Road Map offers an alternative to today's needlessly complex and unfair tax code, providing the option of a simplified system that promotes work, saving and investment.
This highly simplified code fits on a postcard. It has just two rates: 10% on income up to $100,000 for joint filers and $50,000 for single filers, and 25% on taxable income above these amounts. It also includes a generous standard deduction and personal exemption (totaling $39,000 for a family of four), and no tax loopholes, deductions, credits or exclusions (except the health-care tax credit).
The proposal eliminates the alternative minimum tax. It promotes saving by eliminating taxes on interest, capital gains, and dividends. It eliminates the death tax. It replaces the corporate income tax—currently the second highest in the industrialized world—with a business consumption tax of 8.5%. This new rate is roughly half the average in the industrialized world and will put American companies and workers in a stronger position to compete in a global economy.
Even without the Democratic spending spree, our fiscal outlook is deteriorating. They are only hastening the crisis. It is not too late to take control of our fiscal and economic future. But the longer we wait, the bigger the problem becomes and the more difficult our options for solving it.
The Road Map promotes our national prosperity by limiting government's burden of spending, mandates and regulation. It ensures the opportunity for individuals to fulfill their human potential and enjoy the satisfaction of their own achievements—and it secures the distinctly American legacy of leaving the next generation better off.
Mr. Ryan, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, is the ranking member of the Budget Committee.
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H in 1988, W in 2000, and E in 12?
From Huffington Post:
2010 Bush Revival, Bush 3rd Term, Bush Brand, Bush Gillespie, Bush Jeb, Bush Reemergence, Jeb Bush, Jeb Bush 2012, Jeb Bush Revival, Karl Rove, Rosenberg Bush, Rove Bush, Simon Rosenberg, Politics News
Simon Rosenberg is the most bullish of Democratic strategists. The former Clinton administration official and head of the young non-profit group NDN has been the chief proponent of the belief that Barack Obama's election produced the opportunity for a "30-to-40-year era of Democratic dominance." A specialist in the political habits of different demographic groups (specifically Hispanics), he insists that, absent a drastic makeover, the GOP risks cementing itself "as irrelevant to the 21st century."
Sagging poll numbers and policy setbacks have done little to dissuade these rosy prognostications. There's only one thing that makes Rosenberg nervous: another Bush.
"Jeb [Bush] is married to a Latina, is fluent in Spanish, speaks on Univision as a commentator, his Spanish is that good," Rosenberg said of the former Florida governor and brother to the 43rd president during a lunch at NDN headquarters last week. "And if you look at the electoral map in 2012, you have to assume that Obama is going to have a very hard time in holding North Carolina and Virginia. The industrial Midwest, where the auto decline has been huge, has weakened Obama's numbers... a great deal. So Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin become a bit more wobbly. So if you're Barack Obama, the firewall is the Latin belt from Florida to southwestern California. And there is only one Republican who can break through that firewall. And it is Jeb."
Such a sentiment, Rosenberg admits, carries a slight hint of hysteria. After all, there is a good chunk of the country that recoils at the idea of another pol with the Bush surname. But that chunk has begun narrowing. And even within Democratic circles, there is an emerging belief that in a Republican Party filled with base-pleasing dramatizers or bland conservatives, Jeb stands out.
"The vast majority of the voting public yearns for a non-Bush," said longtime Democratic strategist Donna Brazille. But, she added, "Jeb has the talent, the experience and the ability to rebuild the GOP's tent."
"I believe Jeb Bush could run," said Stanley Greenberg, a longtime Democratic pollster. "He is more of a genuine conservative than Romney. Bush is a big hangover, but not impossible." The question, Greenberg asks, is "does his immigration position get him into primary trouble?"
Talk of a prospective Jeb Bush presidential run in the 2012 election is, by definition, speculative. But Rosenberg's frankness in acknowledging his fears gets at a larger, more immediate political phenomenon. Roughly one-and-a-half years after George W. Bush left office with abysmal approval ratings and the likelihood of historical ignominy, the Bush brand is vying once more for political relevance. Within Republican circles, the fear that once accompanied any association with the 43rd president has diminished. There remain, of course, substantive critiques of Bush's presidency. And news that the former president would be releasing his book right around the time of the November election ignited some consternation among Republicans on Thursday.
Story continues below
But the criticisms are mainly offered as a method of distinguishing oneself as a fresh, fiscally sound breed of Republican. Behind the scenes, some of the major figures from the Bush years have assumed influential roles.
Karl Rove, the strategist chiefly responsible for George W. Bush's rise to political prominence, has become the de facto Yoda of the Republican Party, dispensing wisdom in private and from his various public perches. Ed Gillespie, the former RNC chair and Bush hand, has assumed a more institutionally important position, launching a public opinion firm (Resurgent Republic) as well as a election-oriented organization (American Crossroads) that is promising to spend big on the 2010 elections. To be sure, many Bush-linked figures have become, essentially, apolitical in the post-administration era (think: former RNC chairman Ken Mehlman). But others have yet to kill the political bug, such as Sara Taylor, an ex-Rove aide who now plays an important role with likely 2012 candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.
And then there is Jeb. The former governor, GOP officials say, has become increasingly engaged in charting the future of Republican politics. In addition to working closely with House leadership on various rebranding efforts, he helped craft the delicate strategy that the party took in the Florida Senate Republican primary. Understanding that the National Republican Senatorial Committee was essentially obligated to put its support behind his successor, Charlie Crist, he cautioned chairman John Cornyn (R-Tex) to anticipate Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio's rise. The committee was, subsequently, well-positioned to handle Crist's GOP defection.
"I am running into him more around the country than before I would have expected, more [than] when he was governor," said Grover Norquist, head of the influential Americans for Tax Reform and a connected Republican tactician if there ever was one. "As I travel around, I hear Jeb Bush was here last week or is coming next month. And I didn't hear that when he was governor..."
What kind of impact the Bush reemergence will have on the broader landscape is a hotly debated question within both party circles. During the 2008 cycle, these officials were marginalized -- either burned out from the past eight years or too toxic for prospective candidates to touch (the McCain campaign, famously, had a fiery relationship with the former president and his team). Now back on, what one operative called "political terra firma," they have already positioned themselves as the axis around which the GOP's election strategies will turn. Both Rove and Gillespie have used their Rolodexes to recruit major donors and their reputations to pow-wow with some of the more high-profile candidates.
Of course, there's some self-aggrandizement going on, several officials cautioned anonymously. Rove, in particular, is often described as more interested in advancing his own brand, often by overstating his influence. "Karl seems to be mostly in the Karl Rove business," said one GOP operative. "Selling books, going on TV, writing for the Wall Street Journal, speaking engagements. I don't know much advising he is doing."
But that sentiment is not shared by everyone. Indeed, at a time when the campaign committees (mainly the RNC) have floundered, more top-flight Republicans are looking at the operatives who led the Bush years as the closest they can get to a sure thing.
"I think that those two particularly [Rove and Gillespie] bring a credibility," says Norquist. "If you want to write a really big check, you trust Ed Gillespie and Rove will spend $1 million wisely... Both of them you can look at through the prism of the last six election cycles. They've won some and lost some but they are always shooting in the right direction."
Whether that direction ends up being right for the GOP in 2010 remains to be seen. For Democrats, Rove's involvement has been cheered -- in as much as it's created the ideal boogeyman to get the 2010 blood flowing.
"He is larger than life all across the spectrum," explained Tracy Sefl, a Democratic strategist who has worked on campaigns at all levels of governance. "His contradiction is being well-known for the colossal failures attributed to his watch and also being well-known for his intellectual, strategic abilities."
But the major question is whether or not the old Bush guard is properly suited for the modern GOP. Rove, to this point, has had two high-profile endorsement busts: Sen. Bob Bennett in the Utah Republican primary, and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson in the Texas gubernatorial primary. In each instance, he found himself on the wrong side of the Tea Party movement. Whether those are simply glitches in a broader effort to get Republicans elected or indicative of the grassroots and the Bush clan not operating off the same playbook is a major question going forward. And it's one that Jeb Bush -- as he ponders a potential 2012 bid -- will have to consider as well.
"I think that Bush-ism is still alive," said John Feehery, a longtime GOP consultant. "There is, however, an anti-Bushism in the party associated with the Rand Paul crowd. They don't like neocons and government. And Sarah Palin could be seen as part of that group... What people like about Jeb Bush is that he is smart and conservative and well-liked by the base... If there is going to be a Bush revival, Jeb is going to be the leader of that revival. But he has to contend with that [anti-Bushism]."
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CCP: I was trying to figure out the E. Jeb's real name is John Ellis Bush. Yes, he would be a serious contender or frontrunner if not for the family name affiliation. Seems like a showstopper yet we keep seeing those patterns. Maybe he will run against Michelle O or Chelsea Clinton in 2016. Seriously he would have been a better pick in any of the last several cycles.
MN Gov. Pawlenty has a piece published by Politico this week. He seems to be picking up on the Paul Ryan themes and some of Gov. Christie's toughness on spending.
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/39674.html
Time for Obama to make sacrifices
By GOV. TIM PAWLENTY | 7/14/10
Later this week, the White House budget office is due to produce its midyear report on the nation’s fiscal health.
If history is any guide, the administration will try to paint a rosy picture, but the truth is already obvious: Washington under President Barack Obama is not just broken — it’s broke.
When Obama entered office, he inherited a budget deficit that reflected the toxic combination of recession, bailouts and runaway entitlement programs. But rather than getting the government’s finances under control, Obama and his allies in Congress poured gasoline on the fire with trillion-dollar boondoggles.
To put the recent spending binge in context, consider this: At the end of 2008, just before Obama took office, the federal debt was about 40 percent of our nation’s total economy. Now, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office report, the debt will explode to 62 percent of our economy by the end of this year.
If we consider off-budget liabilities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, underfunded entitlement promises and the budget effects embedded in the Democrats’ new health care bill, the fiscal picture gets even worse.
In a bizarre development, the Democratic-controlled House won’t even pass a budget for the first time in decades. Any family or business knows you can’t live within your means without a budget. Congressional Democrats have now announced they won’t even try.
As the governor of a state that, like most others, has been facing recession-driven budget shortfalls recently, I understand the challenges in front of the president. What I don’t understand is his refusal to do anything about it.
During my two terms in Minnesota, we balanced every biennial budget without raising taxes. We set priorities and cut spending. As the economy continues to struggle, more challenges lie ahead for both federal and state governments.
We should remember President Ronald Reagan’s advice that solutions may not be easy, but they are often simple. Obama and Congress should:
1. Set clear priorities but cut almost everything else. Not everything government does is equally important. When faced with a budget shortfall in Minnesota, we considered the importance of programs. We decided to protect funding for the most important ones: the National Guard, veterans’ support programs, public safety and K-12 schools.
Nearly everything else has been cut. Last year, we cut overall spending in real terms for the first time in the state’s 150-year history.
2. Reform out-of-control entitlements. By far, the biggest long-term driver of the federal debt is entitlement spending, including Social Security and Medicare. These programs are going to have to be changed. And despite Beltway rhetoric, it can be done.
For example, in Minnesota, our bus drivers in the Twin Cities had benefits that were completely unsustainable. The premise of our reform was simple:
The status quo must change. We kept our commitment to current employees but changed the rules for new hires.
Reforming that entitlement program and others wasn’t easy. The reforms for our bus drivers led to one of the longest transit strikes in recent history. But we did it. So must Washington.
3. Sacrifice. Americans have sacrificed enough; it’s time for government to sacrifice for a change. When Washington Democrats talk about balancing the budget, they speak gravely about painful choices and sacrifice — but what they mean is tax increases. In other words, we sacrifice so they can spend.
Before we ask taxpayers to make “painful choices,” we need to ask the politicians and bureaucrats to make a few first. In Minnesota, we rejected tax increases every year I was governor, and even cut taxes overall, to make our state more competitive. Washington can — and should — do the same.
The White House’s midyear review will very likely try to present the case for tax hikes as inevitable. But they are not.
Washington politicians may say you can’t solve the problem by simply cutting spending, protecting crucial priorities and balancing the budget without raising taxes.
But in Minnesota, we’ve proven: Yes, you can.
Tim Pawlenty is the Republican governor of Minnesota.
(Gov. Pawlenty won reelection in 2006 when almost no Republicans were winning - in a state where Dems now have a 65% majority in the state house and a 68% majority in the state senate.)
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My understanding is that GH. Bush always thought Jeb would be the more likely to achieve the presidency and was surprised when it turned out to be GW. I don't know that much about Jeb, but the little I know does not suggest that he would be the forceful leader committed to rolling back of the Feds to traditional proportions that we need.
The Pawlenty piece is pretty good. The one time I caught him for a substantial piece of air time he struck me as , , , OK, lacking in fire-in-the-belly as so many Republicans are. Still, the construction of this piece suggests that he is getting "the storyline" for his campaign in order.
I gather Newt is once again making serious noises. Truly a tragedy IMHO that Fred Thompson muddied the waters in a way that kept him out last time. I'd love to see what he could bring at this point in time, or whether he has lost his edge with too much punditry.
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Woof,
I think Pawlenty is the best bet but the party elite still like Mitt and just like McCain he is no conservative. As far as Jeb, I don't think there is a chance in hell that another Bush will get into office. I'll tell you who I would really like to see run, just to stir things up and that is Michele Bachmann. www.michelebachmann.com
P.C.
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Mitt has two large strikes against him IMHO:
1) Like GW Bush, he was born into a presitigious and powerful political family and as such does not know how to respond to class warfare and race baiting because of feelings of patricianly guilt/noblesse oblige.
2) My understanding is that his health care program in MA bears substantial resemblance to Obamacare and therefore will not be able to fight Obamacare
Michele Bachman definitely bears watching but frankly I do not see her as having the preparation or gravitas for President at this point in time.
Christie of NJ is showing a lot of testicular fortitude of the sort we need for budget issues, but is unknown to me with regard to other matters.
FWIW the Bret Baier Report tonight showed polling that had each Huckabee and Romney beating Baraq by a point and Palin tying him.
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Mitt also takes a hit from many on the religion factor, bullcrap, but there.
Ron Paul beat Mit Romney in the starw poll a few months back. He has long experience in the house and some concepts that just might work.
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Crafty wrote: "The Pawlenty piece is pretty good. The one time I caught him for a substantial piece of air time he struck me as , , , OK, lacking in fire-in-the-belly as so many Republicans are. Still, the construction of this piece suggests that he is getting "the storyline" for his campaign in order."
That is about right and P.C. thanks for the nice words about him. I know Pawlenty a little. He does not have knock you off your chair charisma or seem Presidential, but none of them do. He is positioning himself fairly well and getting good experience with the national shows for when the bigger names falter. I post not to endorse but just so we start to get familiar with the people who will likely run. A bit moderate for my taste but about as conservative as we can get and not be painted as a scary extremist. I would just say don't underestimate him. I think he would do pretty well in a long general election as a contrast to Obama, but maybe not at setting the base on fire early and maybe not the ability to separate himself from the packin a crowded primary.
Crafty is right on with Romney IMO. He can draw a distinction between failed healthcare in Massachusetts and Obamacare - that it is what his liberal state wanted to do, but to an energized base it is still what we don't want, government run healthcare. He presents himself very well but became a little too skilled at explaining his changes in views that kept coinciding with changes in his target market.
I like Newt. Newt doesn't have anyone but himself to blame. Fred hardly stole the air in the room. I don't care for Huckabee - I think he is the one that fractured or won the conservative vote, yet like P.C. I don't see him as conservative or electable. I don't know when the time is right but Newt needs to step in early this election cycle and stop being coy about it if he wants to be President. That was one thing Obama did right. He made it clear early that he was running.
Palin is one who may benefit by waiting. She is getting stronger and doing good work for the cause IMO.
Michele Bachmann has the most conservative district in MN and will win again but she won't ever be President. Congress needs strong leaders with principles too. She was a tax attorney. A good firebrand partisan full of positive energy for the base, but not much reach across appeal. Very intelligent but a little gaffe prone. This is a good video of her questioning Geithner and Bernancke:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C69h5PEsDrE[/youtube]
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"Christie of NJ is showing a lot of testicular fortitude of the sort we need for budget issues, but is unknown to me with regard to other matters."
May I suggest we all keep our eye open to this guy. Everytime I hear him on talk shows he sounds better and better. This guy learns. He improves. Some have criticised him for not being "conservative" enough. They are worng and he is right. He cannot win if he comes out to as to "right". We are in a Demcoratic state. One out of three New Jerseans have been reported to be on some sort of dole.
Taxes are astronomical. Costs of living are high. Most are working class. They are struggling. Unions are powerful. Private unions and public unions. They have a stranglehold on the Dem party. Cristie seems to have been able to get past this more than anyone could have hoped. Even Bob Grant says his accomplishments on union concessions while hardly great are still impressive. He held teachers to I think a 2% raise rather thna 4 to 5%.
Corruption in local, county, state government is legendary though I doubt any more than anywhere else in the US, or at least the NE or West coast or other major metropolitan areas.
Watch this guy. His learning curve, going from someone who could barely talk and give speeches to someone who is quite logical, convincing, charismatic, realistic, and taking on the unions by going to voters directly is so far impressive to me. FINALLY we have someone who is doing what needs to be done. And people are agreeing with him. Yet as he has said, he has not won, and it remains to be seen the final result, he or I underestimate the use of bribery by the Dems to buy votes amongst working class, and dole receiving voters.
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"he or I underestimate"
Sorry, I meant he or I do NOT underestimate" the Dems willingness to bribe voters with taxpayer money.
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Woof,
I think Pawlenty is the best bet but the party elite still like Mitt and just like McCain he is no conservative. As far as Jeb, I don't think there is a chance in hell that another Bush will get into office. I'll tell you who I would really like to see run, just to stir things up and that is Michele Bachmann. www.michelebachmann.com
P.C.
Hey Guys,
I didn't say Bachmann could win or even make a good President, I said I would like to see her run just to stir things up. We need someone that can clearly define conservative values both fiscally and socially as things stand now. I don't think most conservatives today hold on to the old guard religious values as being enough to overcome the political realities of our modern society. Yes, they may still hold strong beliefs about abortion and gay marriage but I don't think that overturning Roe vs Wade is realistic to them any longer and things like legal unions are now more acceptable in a political sense. Bachmann is against abortion and gay marriage but I think she could bring conservatism up to date by showing the difference in political focus that many conservatives have nowadays of what is practical policy and what is personal faith that can't be forced on to others and at the same time show a forcefulness and firm will in regard to restoring our Constitutional Republic as envisioned by the Founders and returning to a free market economy where Capitalism (not unfettered greed or political manipulation), is allowed to seek its own highs and lows, its own failures and successes that gives incentive for the kind of innovation that supports natural stability, not a stagnant artificial one supported by tax payers.
P.C.
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Doug,
Yes the E is for Ellis. I never knew that was his middle name, or even that his first name is John.
On another note IT is starting again. Could anyone really have thought that either of them would simply go away?
It is no accident we are seeing more headlines of Hillary lately. I only post the news item below as an example of increasing Assoc Press releases about Hillary. As always they follow her and discuss what she is doing without EVER being able to document ANY accomplishment on her part in anything she does. As Crafty has so deftly pointed out with the simple question, what has Hillary ever accomplished? The answer is nothing. Yet the MSM would have us believe she is and has accomplished so much for the country and the world. Did we already here "rumors" that foreign leaders are "confiding" to her that they do not like Bmaster's policies.
I am sick to think that we will be hearing and seeing more of her from lovers of Clinton and co. who are panicking over the failures of the ONE. And of course behind the scenes she will encourage this while pretending to be loyal to the greatest super human who ever lived. Pretending she is not interested in 2012 while waiting (and praying) for the "groundswell" of support with screams of "you go and girl", and "run Hillary run!" Then she will due her duty for America and patriotically answer the people's calling for her to bring "Clintonism" back to save us (and of course the world).
***Clinton on key Afghan mission as US war fears grow
Clinton AFP By MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press Writer Matthew Lee, Associated Press Writer – Sat Jul 17, 11:39 am ET
WASHINGTON – As concerns grow about the war in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is heading to South Asia on a mission aimed at refining the goals of the nearly 9-year-old conflict.
U.S. lawmakers are increasingly questioning the course of the war. The number of soldiers from the U.S. and other countries in the international coalition in Afghanistan is on the rise. Corruption is a deep problem in Afghanistan, and members of Congress wonder about the utility of massive aid to both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Clinton will attend an international conference in Kabul on Tuesday where the Afghan government is expected to outline plans to improve security, reintegrate militants into society and crack down on corruption. She also plans to stop in Pakistan to push greater cooperation between Islamabad and Kabul.
Clinton, who left Washington on Saturday, will meet up in the week ahead with Defense Secretary Robert Gates in South Korea, where tensions with the communist North have risen after the sinking of a South Korean warship that was blamed on the North.
She will finish her trip in Vietnam for discussions with regional leaders. Among the topics will be the upcoming elections in Myanmar.
At the Kabul conference, she will renew Washington's commitment to support Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government, but press him to follow through on reform pledges he made earlier this year.
Richard Holbrooke, President Barack Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, has said the conference "will be a very important international demonstration of support" for Karzai and his administration.
But Holbrooke acknowledges concerns that the war and the reconstruction effort are not going as hoped or planned.
He told Congress this past week that "there are significant elements of movement forward in many areas, but I do not yet see a definitive turning point in either direction."
Last month was the deadliest of the war for international forces: 103 coalition troops were killed, despite the infusion of tens of thousands of new U.S. troops. So far in July, 54 international troops have died, 39 of them American. An American service member was killed by a blast in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, and an American died in a blast in the south on Friday.
International troops working with Afghan forces say they have killed or captured dozens of senior insurgent figures since April as they aggressively step up operations against the Taliban leadership. But those successes haven't slowed the pace of militant attacks, which continue daily, killing dozens of people each month.
The administration has said it will review its Afghan strategy at year's end. The slow progress against the Taliban and the disruptive effects of the firing of the outspoken American commander there last month, have led to a growing unease among many in Congress, including leading members of Obama's own party.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said it's not clear that the administration has a solid strategy for prevailing. The committee's top Republican, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, decried "a lack of clarity" about U.S. war goals.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who leads the Senate Armed Services Committee, has said that while there remains "solid support" for the war among Democrats, "there's also the beginnings of fraying of that support."
In the House, Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., has put a hold on nearly $4 billion in assistance to Afghanistan, demanding that allegations of corruption be addressed and that the Afghan government be held accountable.***
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Not really the right thread for that piece. Perhaps the Afpakia thread would have been better, or the Political thread.
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Sorry I didn't catch that Paul Ryan had already ruled out in Feb a run for President in 2012, convincingly:
"There’s no way I am running for president in 2012," the Wisconsin Republican told the New York Times Magazine in a Q&A feature. "My head is not that big, and my kids are too small."
Too bad. He is one who already proved he could win a debate with the President - on health care. Did not rule out VP. In the meantime he would provide an excellent contrast to Obama as U.S. Speaker of the House for Obama's last 2, lame duck years.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G6yITxq4as[/youtube]
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Interesting read from G Will:
Through Puerto Rico, the GOP can reach out to Hispanics
By George Will
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Republican governor -- a very Republican governor -- has an idea for solving one of his party's conundrums. The party should listen to Luis Fortuno, the Reaganite who resides in Puerto Rico's executive mansion.
Conservatives need a strategy for addressing the immigration issue without alienating America's largest and most rapidly growing minority. Conservatives believe the southern border must be secured before there can be "comprehensive" immigration reform that resolves the status of the 11 million illegal immigrants. But this policy risks making Republicans seem hostile to Hispanics.
Fortuno wants Republicans to couple insistence on border enforcement with support for Puerto Rican statehood. This, he says, would resonate deeply among Hispanics nationwide. His premise is that many factors -- particularly, the Telemundo and Univision television channels -- have created a common consciousness among Hispanics in America.
How many know that Puerto Ricans are American citizens? That every president since Truman has affirmed Puerto Rico's right to opt for independence or statehood? That every Republican platform since 1968 has endorsed Puerto Rico's right to choose statehood? That Ronald Reagan, announcing his candidacy in 1979, said, "I favor statehood for Puerto Rico"?
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Fortuno supports H.R. 2499 (also supported by such House conservatives as Minority Whip Eric Cantor, Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence and former Republican Study Committee chairman Jeb Hensarling), which would provide for a plebiscite on the island's current status. If a majority favor this status, the question could be asked again in eight years. If a majority vote for change, a second plebiscite would offer a choice among the current status, independence, "sovereignty in association with the United States" and statehood.
Puerto Rico, which is only half as far from Florida as Hawaii is from California, is about the size of Connecticut. Its population is larger than the populations of 24 states. There are, however, problems.
Puerto Rico's per capita income ($14,905) is only 50 percent of that of the poorest state (Mississippi, $30,103) and 27 percent of the richest (Connecticut, $54,397). The fact that Puerto Ricans are at home in American society does not entail the conclusion that the commonwealth, a distinct cultural and linguistic entity (most on the island do not speak English), belongs in the federal union. Currently, Puerto Ricans pay federal income taxes only on income from off the island.
Fortuno says the present system has failed to prevent the income disparity with the mainland from widening. But America does not want lukewarm citizens. In three referendums (1967, 1993, 1998), Puerto Ricans favored the status quo -- an unincorporated territory -- over statehood. In 1998, the vote was 50.4 percent to 46.5 percent. In the 1950s, the last time the federal union was enlarged, Hawaiians and Alaskans overwhelmingly supported statehood.
Many Republicans suspect that congressional Democrats support statehood for the same reason they want to pretend that the District of Columbia is a state -- to get two more senators (and in Puerto Rico's case, perhaps six members of the House). Such Republicans mistakenly assume that the island's population of 4 million has the same Democratic disposition as the 4.2 million Puerto Ricans in the Bronx and elsewhere on the mainland.
Fortuno disagrees, noting that while Republicans on the mainland were losing in 2008, he was elected in the island's biggest landslide in 44 years. The party he leads won more than two-thirds of the seats in both houses of the legislature and three-fifths of the mayoralties, including that of San Juan. Fortuno, who calls himself a "values candidate" and goes to Catholic services almost every day, says that Puerto Ricans are culturally conservative -- 78 percent are pro-life, 91 percent oppose same-sex marriage and 30 percent of the 85 percent who are Christian are evangelicals. A majority supports his agenda, which includes tax and spending cuts, trimming 16,000 from public payrolls to begin eliminating the deficit that was 45 percent of the size of the budget.
Fortuno, 49, who has degrees from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and the University of Virginia's law school, looks half his age. "Republicans," he says, "cannot continue to oppose every Hispanic issue." If he is correct that Puerto Rican statehood is, or can become, such an issue, Republicans should hear him out.
The United States acquired Puerto Rico 112 years ago in the testosterone spill called the Spanish-American War. Before another century passes, perhaps Puerto Ricans' ambivalence about their somewhat ambiguous status can be rectified to the advantage of Republicans.
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Very interesting. Nice find CCP.
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I like Newt and I will vote for him if he is the nominee. I don't endorse these criticisms. If any or all are partly true that still doesn't tell a fraction of the amazing story of what Newt accomplished. This criticism comes from the right but these things always get lapped up by leftists Supporters of Newt should aware and ready to answer the critics' charges against him - that's all I'm saying by posting (linking).
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40213.html
On Gingrich: A legacy of surrender
By HOWARD RICH | 7/26/10
(Howard Rich is chairman of Americans for Limited Government.)
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I too like Newt. Indeed I like him a lot, but it is true that he played the spoiled brat about that Air Force One incident and did fold to Clinton and the Dems. Newt did side with the RINO Reps in upstate NY. I am bummed to see him go spineless against the NAACP.
Doug, you are quite right we need to now where our weaknesses are.
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I watched R-leader Rep. Boehner today on Meet the Press. Very lousy interview mostly because of the interviewer. Boehner looked a couple of times like he needed a script and much of the times like he was reading from one. He was being careful to not make news by saying something controversial, mostly missed the opportunity to set a positive agenda and draw in new people to the cause. Mike Pence followed and was far more personable. Paul Ryan is more articulate, disciplined and persuasive. Boehner is a good guy and I would give him a B as minority leader but someone new, more dynamic and visionary should be the next Speaker. Boehner did say they would be introducing something of an agenda or campaign platform after Labor Day. Looking forward to it!
At the RNC, I might give Michael Steele a D for his job performance so far, yet would still probably keep him for his term. More important over there is the behind the scenes work at the RNC which is probably D work too, but who knows. I don't understand that a first black President spends his time reaching out to liberal elites, offers the inner city of America only free, borrowed money, and then a black RNC Chair reaching out only to known rich Republican donors. Where is the real outreach? Michael Steele IMO should use his position to round up a rainbow coalition of free thinkers and take the message directly into the worst inner-city neighborhoods in this country that it is the economic freedoms, not the government programs, that brings prosperity. Not with the expectation of suddenly winning the minority vote, but to at least put the word out that there is a conservative viewpoint to consider and plenty of intelligent people of color and different ethnicities are joining in.
Nationwide, the grassroots tea party movement and the broadbased rejection at the opinion poll level of the Pelosi-Obama agenda has been phenomenal. Leadership for the most part is lagging or missing so far.
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To me Boener epitomizes the sort of Rep that has led the Reps into the cul de sac in which they find themselves.
OTOH Ryan seems quite promising.
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What America needs is a man like this. Who can bring pride and strength to America - not shame and weakness. What a difference! For Israel I say this brings me only pride and greatfulness there is a real man at their helm. :-D For America the opposite - a great deceiver, a huckster of sorts, a lover of himself. :cry: :x
From Greorge Will - another great article:
***Israel's anti-Obama
By George Will
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | JERUSALEM — Two photographs adorn the office of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Together they illuminate a portentous fact: No two leaders of democracies are less alike — in life experiences, temperaments and political philosophies — than Netanyahu, the former commando and fierce nationalist, and Barack Obama, the former professor and post-nationalist.
One photograph is of Theodor Herzl, born 150 years ago. Dismayed by the eruption of anti-Semitism in France during the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century, Herzl became Zionism's founding father. Long before the Holocaust, he concluded that Jews could find safety only in a national homeland.
The other photograph is of Winston Churchill, who considered himself "one of the authors" of Britain's embrace of Zionism. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 stated: "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." Beginning in 1923, Britain would govern Palestine under a League of Nations mandate.
Netanyahu, his focus firmly on Iran, honors Churchill because he did not flinch from facts about gathering storms. Obama returned to the British Embassy in Washington the bust of Churchill that was in the Oval Office when he got there.
Obama's 2009 speech in Cairo, courting the Arab world, may have had measurable benefits, although the metric proving this remains mysterious. The speech — made during a trip when Obama visited Cairo and Riyadh but not here — certainly subtracted from his standing in Israel. In it, he acknowledged Israel as, in part, a response to Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. Then, with what many Israelis considered a deeply offensive exercise of moral equivalence, he said: "On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland."
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"On the other hand"? "I," says Moshe Yaalon, "was shocked by the Cairo speech," which he thinks proved that "this White House is very different." Yaalon, former head of military intelligence and chief of the general staff, currently strategic affairs minister, tartly asks, "If Palestinians are victims, who are the victimizers?"
The Cairo speech came 10 months after Obama's Berlin speech, in which he declared himself a "citizen of the world." That was an oxymoronic boast, given that citizenship connotes allegiance to a particular polity, its laws and political processes. But the boast resonated in Europe.
The European Union was born from the flight of Europe's elites from what terrifies them — Europeans. The first Thirty Years' War ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, which ratified the system of nation-states. The second Thirty Years' War, which ended in 1945, convinced European elites that the continent's nearly fatal disease was nationalism, the cure for which must be the steady attenuation of nationalities. Hence the high value placed on "pooling" sovereignty, never mind the cost in diminished self-government.
Israel, with its deep sense of nationhood, is beyond unintelligible to such Europeans; it is a stench in their nostrils. Transnational progressivism is, as much as welfare state social democracy, an element of European politics that American progressives will emulate as much as American politics will permit. It is perverse that the European Union, a semi-fictional political entity, serves — with the United States, the reliably anti-Israel United Nations and Russia — as part of the "quartet" that supposedly will broker peace in our time between Israel and the Palestinians.
Arguably the most left-wing administration in American history is trying to knead and soften the most right-wing coalition in Israel's history. The former shows no understanding of the latter, which thinks it understands the former all too well.
The prime minister honors Churchill, who spoke of "the confirmed unteachability of mankind." Nevertheless, a display case in Netanyahu's office could teach the Obama administration something about this leader. It contains a small signet stone that was part of a ring found near the Western Wall. It is about 2,800 years old — 200 years younger than Jerusalem's role as the Jewish people's capital. The ring was the seal of a Jewish official, whose name is inscribed on it: Netanyahu.
No one is less a transnational progressive, less a post-nationalist, than Binyamin Netanyahu, whose first name is that of a son of Jacob, who lived perhaps 4,000 years ago. Netanyahu, whom no one ever called cuddly, once said to a U.S. diplomat 10 words that should warn U.S. policymakers who hope to make Netanyahu malleable: "You live in Chevy Chase. Don't play with our future."
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First must comment on CCP's post of Geo. Will writing about Netanyahu. I love it that one of his heroes/mentors is Churchill, and no he was not bound to become a close personal drinking buddy with Barack Obama, lol.
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http://www.esquire.com/print-this/newt-gingrich-0910?page=all
I thought I was clicking on a positive piece on Newt when I clicked on "Newt Gingrich: The Indispensable Republican" and kept the tab open until I had time to read it in its entirety. Apologies in advance for posting/linking a second hit piece on Gingrich in a short time, but this is what is being written. I didn't realize that Newt is already the front runner in polls and in money. I'm sure that is why the attacks have begun. If you can wade through the obviously anti-Newt, anti-conservative, anti-Republican slant of the writing, I think you will find in this long piece covers his strengths and accomplishments and his weaknesses and vulnerabilities very thoroughly. The bizarre writing style wanders in and out of interviews with none other than the ex-wife Marianne and with Newt. He writes what people said sometimes in quotes and sometimes not. I wouldn't assume any/all of the covered facts or personal accusations and stories are completely true but I will guess that contents of this will become the centerpiece of the future attacks against him. I don't expect him to answer any of it, just to move forward with whatever his new blueprint for the country will be.
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"Not just Bush, but the R. congress of that time needs to be answered."
What is interesting is that I read that one of the architects of W was Rove and that he is behind the scenes making a comeback if you will and is gaining inside power in the party. OR he never lost it.
I don't know what to make of this. If we say that compassionate conservatism does not work and is no more than conservatives trying to keep up with Dems in spending taxpayer money and competing with them to buy votes than, if it true, that Rove is consolidating his political behind the scenes power in the party, than what does that mean for the future of the party?
By the way, I predict we will have a Black Republican candidate for President in 2016.
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"if... Rove is consolidating his political behind the scenes power in the party, than what does that mean for the future of the party?"
IMHO Rove was never the problem. He is an adviser, not a politician or a leader. Presidents need political advisers to figure out the political implications of things. Rove made mistakes, all of them did. This is a different time and his political advice would be different. Rove's name is political poison to some I'm sure but I think he is a conservative with a keen insight. Rove has value, skill, weaknesses and baggage, but I don't think he has any power or ever will other than the power of his ideas. Bush probably used him beyond his area of expertise and that was the Presdent's fault. I don't think any candidate would hand the whole campaign or agenda over to him today. A real leader has to take in all the advice in different directions and then do the right thing.
If I were a candidate, I would love to hear his advice, especially if I could get it in private without being tied publicly to advisers that brought us the failures of the past (and a number of successes). Same with Dick Morris, though I wouldn't buddy around with him in public, but I would hear him out. You have to win elections to govern and to prevent people like Pelosi-Obama from governing. I would also consult and train with all the others I could find who have shown great skill at simplifying, clarifying and articulating the conservative message and define a realistic platform and agenda for this unique time in history.
I don't think Rove (or Cheney) ever controlled Bush or congress; I don't think Rahm or Axelrod control Obama, or Carville or Stephanopoulus controlled Clinton. HW Bush caved in to his advisers but that again was his fault and his responsibility. We have just had a series of inconsistent or wrong headed leaders unfortunately.
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Impressive, short video 2 1/2 minutes, summarizes the political time we live in.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wty7974IKg[/youtube]
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y JOHN FUND
San Diego, Calif.
You can tell it's a volatile political year when a balding, middle-aged pollster gets a standing ovation from hundreds of state legislators after delivering the news that only 23% of the people in this country believe today's federal government has the consent of the governed.
"Americans don't want to be governed from the left or the right," Scott Rasmussen tells the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conference of 1,500 conservative and moderate legislators. "They want, like the Founding Fathers, to largely govern themselves with Washington in a supporting—but not dominant—role. The tea party movement is today's updated expression of that sentiment."
Mr. Rasmussen tells the crowd gathered around him after his speech that the political and media elites have misread the tea party. He believes this strongly enough that he's teamed up with Doug Schoen—a pollster for both President Bill Clinton and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg—to publish a new book that will seek to explain the movement's significance. "Mad as Hell" will be out early next month.
Thanks to the shifting tectonic plates of American society, polls have come to dominate our politics as never before, and Mr. Rasmussen is today's leading insurgent pollster. A co-founder of the sports network ESPN as a young man, now, at age 54, he's a key player in the contact sport of politics. His firm, Rasmussen Reports, has replaced live questioners with automated dialers so it can inexpensively survey a large sample of Americans every night about their confidence in the economy and their approval of President Obama. Key Senate and governor's races are polled every two weeks.
Some traditional pollsters argue otherwise, but time has shown that automated telephone technology delivers results that are just as accurate as conventional methods (as well as being far less costly). Mr. Rasmussen correctly predicted the 2004 and 2008 presidential races within a percentage point. In 2009, Mickey Kaus of Slate.com noted that Mr. Rasmussen's final poll in the New Jersey governor's race was "pretty damn accurate. Polls using conventional human operators tended to show [Democrat Jon] Corzine ahead. They were wrong."
Christopher Serra
Scott Rasmussen
.Early this year, Mr. Rasmussen delivered the first early-warning sign that Scott Brown would change the direction of American politics. A Rasmussen poll showing Mr. Brown surging and only nine points down with two weeks left to go before January's special Senate election in Massachusetts attracted the instant attention of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "How had this happened? What the bleep was going on?" is how the New York Times characterized his reaction. A Boston Globe poll taken about the same time showed Democrat Martha Coakley with a safe 15-point lead.
Mr. Rasmussen has a partial answer for Mr. Emanuel's question, and it lies in a significant division among the American public that he has tracked for the past few years—a division between what he calls the Mainstream Public and the Political Class.
To figure out where people are, he asks three questions: Whose judgment do you trust more: that of the American people or America's political leaders? Has the federal government become its own special interest group? Do government and big business often work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors? Those who identify with the government on two or more questions are defined as the political class.
Before the financial crisis of late 2008, about a tenth of Americans fell into the political class, while some 53% were classified as in the mainstream public. The rest fell somewhere in the middle. Now the percentage of people identifying with the political class has clearly declined into single digits, while those in the mainstream public have grown slightly. A majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents all agree with the mainstream view on Mr. Rasmussen's three questions. "The major division in this country is no longer between parties but between political elites and the people," Mr. Rasmussen says.
His recent polls show huge gaps between the two groups. While 67% of the political class believes the U.S. is moving in the right direction, a full 84% of mainstream voters believe the nation is moving in the wrong one. The political class overwhelmingly supported the bailouts of the financial and auto industries, the health-care bill, and the Justice Department's decision to sue Arizona over its new immigration law. Those in the mainstream public just as intensely opposed those moves.
The division of Americans into these groups has real significance for the way polls are conducted and how their results are interpreted, according to Mr. Rasmussen. One reason some polls offer misleading results, he says, is that the premise behind questions asked isn't always shared by those queried. "Many pollsters have asked voters whether policy makers should spend more to improve the economy or reduce spending to cut the deficit. But I found that 52% of Americans think more government spending hurts the economy and only 28% think it helps," he says. "The trade-offs pollsters offer voters often don't make sense to them. How you frame the question often obscures the results you get."
Mr. Rasmussen argues that Mr. Obama misread the data from early on in his administration. "People remember from his 2008 campaign that he promised to cut taxes for 95% of all Americans," he says. But Mr. Obama's stimulus package only grudgingly included modest tax cuts as part of an effort to secure Republican votes in Congress. "The week it passed, our poll found 62% of voters wanted more tax cuts and less government spending in the stimulus," he says. "We shouldn't be surprised people now think the stimulus has failed."
President Obama also bungled his message on health-care reform because he misread the polls, says Mr. Rasmussen. "He kept citing Congressional Budget Office projections that his plan would save money and cut the deficit. But our polls showed people didn't trust the elites: 60% thought it would raise the deficit and 81% thought it would cost more than CBO projected."
Democrats pushed the bill through anyway, convinced that voters would warm to it. Yet this past week, key White House allies conceded that hasn't happened. "Many don't believe health-care reform will help the economy," concluded a PowerPoint presentation put together by Families USA, a leading liberal group.
As we sit in a holding room after his speech at the conference, Mr. Rasmussen tells me that understanding the tea party is essential to predicting what the country's political scene will look like. "This will be the third straight election in which people vote against the party in power," he says. "The GOP will benefit from that this year, but 75% of Republicans say their representatives in Congress are out of touch with the party base. Should they win big this November, they will have to move quickly to prove they've learned lessons from the Bush years."
Mr. Rasmussen says it is hugely important to know whether a poll has surveyed all adults, registered voters or likely voters. "I've been criticized by some for only polling likely voters, or 'political junkies,'" he says, "but the people who ultimately vote decide everything."
Identifying the likely voters is particularly important this year because turnout is different in midterm elections than in presidential ones. "Remember John McCain won voters over age 40, and this November's older electorate is likely to have more McCain supporters in it than Obama backers," he says. "The statewide elections in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts in the last year all saw fewer minorities and younger people vote than in 2008."
Given his frequent television appearances and the fact that his firm's website gets over a million hits a day in the weeks leading up to an election, I express surprise that people don't know much about Scott Rasmussen. "I'm a lot less important than the numbers I present," he says in an attempt to deflect attention from himself.
But Mr. Rasmussen has an interesting entrepreneurial story. He grew up in Massachusetts and New Jersey, the son of a sports broadcaster. Absorbed with hockey in high school, he joined his father in working for the New England Whalers. They would often bemoan that they couldn't get the team's games on broadcast stations. In 1978, trapped in a traffic jam on the way to the Jersey shore, they came up with the idea of an all-sports network on cable TV.
Using $9,000 charged to a credit card, they created the Entertainment Sports Programming Network, or ESPN. They soon scored a major investor in Getty Oil and launched in 1979. Within a few years, they had millions of viewers. Mr. Rasmussen was 22 years old.
The family sold its ESPN interest in 1984, and Mr. Rasmussen became interested in polling after taking a class at the University of Connecticut. He conducted his first poll in the late 1980s, but his business didn't take off until he embraced automated polling in the mid-1990s. With the exception of Gallup, he probably asks more Americans more questions today than any other organization.
With success has come criticism. Mr. Rasmussen has been attacked for alleged bias towards Republicans. He .rejects such complaints, noting that because he focuses on likely voters his survey sample often includes more Republicans. "The key is whether I've been accurate," he says, noting that he was bitterly attacked by Republicans in 2006 and 2008 for showing several longtime GOP senators in trouble early on. Many of them lost.
As for his own politics, he is coy other than admitting he has a healthy suspicion of the political class he devotes so much time to studying. "If I root for anyone to win, it's for our polls," he laughs. "If a Republican is ahead by two points, I want the Republican by two. If a Democrat is ahead by two, I want the Democrat by two."
This November, he'll be up late analyzing the data and hoping the Party of Rasmussen brings home the win.
Mr. Fund is a columnist for WSJ.com.
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The "Economist" wondering out loud if this guy would be a good candidate for GOP in 12? I know absolutely nothing about him so I have no opinion. I can't say I am knocked off my chair based on this article. As a cynic I would wonder if that is why the Economist is suggesting this guy.
***Mitch Daniels
The right stuff
Indiana's governor is a likeable wonk. Can he save the Republicans from themselves and provide a pragmatic alternative to Barack Obama?
Aug 19th 2010 | Clay County
THE governor does not like to keep people waiting. On a recent morning this small man leapt out of a trooper’s Toyota (Indiana-made) while it was still moving. He burst into a tiny chamber of commerce and began joking with businessmen, teachers and farmers. He is comfortable with most people in most places. He can command a boardroom. He has moseyed through enough fairs to know how to sign a goat—on its left side, so as not to write against the grain of its coat. After some small talk with the chamber, he introduced himself formally: “Mitch Daniels, your employee in public service.”
Most Americans know little or nothing of Mr Daniels. He does not tweet. “I’m not an interesting enough person,” he explains. He is a Republican who had never heard of 9/12, Glenn Beck’s tea-party group, before The Economist mentioned it to him. But he is good at one thing in particular: governing.
Wonks have long revered Mr Daniels. Since February, when he said he would consider a presidential run, others have started to as well. The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, published a glowing profile in June. At Indiana’s Republican convention he was greeted by chants of “Run, Mitch, run!” Mr Daniels is an interesting model. But whether national Republicans will embrace him is less clear.
“I never expected to go into politics,” he explains. Born in Pennsylvania and weaned in the South, he moved to Indiana at the age of ten before a scholarship took him off to Princeton. Over the years he has worked for Richard Lugar, Indiana’s respected and moderate senior senator, served as Ronald Reagan’s budget director, run North American operations for Eli Lilly, a big pharmaceuticals firm, and, from 2001 to 2003, served as George Bush’s budget director. To these jobs he brought a decidedly dorky passion: a reverence for restraint and efficacy. This pervades his life. At 61, he runs or swims almost every day. He subsists, it seems, largely on oatmeal. On a recent shopping trip his credit card was declined for “unusual activity”. He is, in short, just the kind of man to relish fixing a broken state—or country.
In 2003 Mr Daniels announced that he would run for governor. Democrats knew he was intelligent. To their horror, he turned out to be likeable too. Sarah Palin is strident and Mitt Romney disconcertingly perfect. Mr Daniels is at ease, an unusual politician who does not seem like one. He criss-crossed the state in an RV decorated with his slogan, “My Man Mitch”, and soon covered with signatures. He ate pork and watched baseball in the shadow of Gary’s steel mills. He stayed in private homes, first to save money on hotels, then because he liked it and his hosts seemed to as well. (He continues this even now, sleeping in children’s rooms, cramped Latino households and even more crowded Amish ones, often riding between them on his beloved Harley.) In November 2004 he won, by 53% to 45%.
Mr Daniels oozed with ideas. He introduced merit pay for public workers and performance metrics for state agencies. Indiana’s counties skittered illogically between two time zones, so he reset the state’s clocks. A toll road was losing money, so he oversaw a $3.85 billion lease to foreign investors. He was not dogmatic. In his first year he proposed a tax increase. He shrank the state workforce but increased the number of case workers for children. He passed a health plan that included private accounts for the poor.
Not everything went smoothly. The road lease and time change were, at first, enormously unpopular. He privatised the state’s welfare system, an unqualified disaster—eventually he cancelled the contract. But by the end of his first term he had transformed a $200m deficit into a $1.3 billion surplus and the state had earned its first AAA credit rating.
It helped that Indiana was faring better than its rusty neighbours. Manufacturing output grew by 20% between 1998 and 2008. Michigan’s slumped by 12% during the same time. The number of bioscience jobs, still small, grew 17.2% from 2001 to 2008. Mr Daniels tried to help, keeping taxes low and investing in infrastructure before it was hip. When the recession began, Indiana’s unemployment rate was lower than the national average.
By 2008 all this had culminated in a simple reality: Indiana liked its man Mitch. Barack Obama won the state, but Mr Daniels trounced his Democratic opponent, 58% to 40%. Some of this was luck. The opponent was lacklustre; the recession had yet to do its worst. But his victory was still notable. He won the young by 51% to 42%, and even picked up 20% of black and 37% of Hispanic voters.
Such numbers should make strategists swoon. Mr Daniels used to deny any presidential aspirations. Then Newt Gingrich shared a secret: if you say you might run, people will listen to your ideas. Mr Daniels has plenty. He calls the health-care bill “a wasted opportunity”, blaming both Democrats and Republicans. He is deeply worried about debt—he wants to raise the retirement age and stop sending Social Security cheques to the rich. He wonders whether America can afford all its military commitments, particularly those only loosely tied to fighting terrorism.
He has begun to share such opinions in Washington and on Fox News. In recent months Republican kingmakers have quietly descended on Indianapolis for private dinners. Nevertheless, he remains a long shot. Unlike Mr Romney or Mrs Palin, he is still running a state. The recession knocked Indiana backwards. Last year Mr Daniels closed a $957m budget gap by using reserves and making cuts, including some for education. But another hole is expected next year, and the next round of cuts will be more painful. Democrats argue that Mr Daniels has oversold his economic record. The unemployment rate is now 10% and the unemployment trust fund is insolvent.
Added to this, Mr Daniels is largely untested on the national stage. On television, he can seem wooden. His record includes contradictions. Though he has been a fiscal hawk in Indiana, during his time at the budget office a national surplus became a deficit. He has derided the federal stimulus but taken its cash—a sign of pragmatism or hypocrisy, depending on the audience.
More problematic, it is unclear that a clever, measured candidate stands a chance within the Republican Party. Neo-cons are allergic to talk of defence cuts. Social conservatives were rabid after Mr Daniels, anti-abortion himself, told the Weekly Standard that he favoured a temporary truce on social issues. “It just happens to be what I think,” he says, arguing that politicians need to unite on urgent matters of national security and debt. He is also unlikely to fire up tea-partiers. “Didn’t somebody say in a different context, ‘Anger is not a strategy’?” he asked your correspondent over a rare plate of steak and chips.
Mr Daniels still insists he is unlikely to run for president. But he has a familiar post-partisan sheen, not unlike a certain former senator—though he is more conservative, shorter and much balder. He likes to talk about a “programme of unusual boldness” that unites the parties and sets America back on track. “Supposedly we are not capable of making decisions like this,” Mr Daniels said, grinning as he smacked a stubborn bottle of ketchup. “But somebody has got to try.”***
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The way forward includes inspirational leading, not in-fighting. I want to comment on the Gilder interview on interesting thought pieces here in terms of going forward. Gilder is brilliant yet I think we all learned to take him in with a grain of salt. As the analysis put it, I think he was a bit guarded and simplifying where he also can be loquacious.
I would include Gilder and Ron Paul, and VDH, Thomas Sowell, Karl Rove and plenty of others on my short list for input on how to lead, how to come together, and where to take this movement during this great opportunity, as it is still very vague in meaning and direction.
I agree with his criticism of Ron Paul' foreign policy views. I agree with him on tax rates. I think his insights about shifting the discussion to fostering human creativity is brilliant.
I also think a coalition between existing Republicans, conservatives, libertarians and center right moderates will come together politically only if we commit to cut and contain spending first. Within that framework I think we can also cut military costs without surrendering or disarming. I think we can reform entitlements if there is a will without starving the poor or pulling the plug on granny. I think we can refuse to allow raising tax rates in a recession or any other time since that isn't working. I think if we took congress we could reform the tax policy scoring mechanism at CBO, where I think Newt tried and failed, the model that always underscore pro-growth policies and disregards the contractionary effects of rate increases and regulation overload. I think we can put corporate tax rates at the median level of OECD instead of at the highest in western civilization. I think we can do ALL the things proposed in Crafty's piece today regarding ObamaCare, namely de-fund it and send it back to the drawing board. I doubt if we can do it but I would run with Paul Ryan's proposal that we put discretionary spending not to the stone age but back to the 2008 levels of the Pelosi congress and freeze it there until reforms of all the programs can be instituted. I think we could truly end earmarks and could win on that issue alone if anyone believe us. I think we can effectively contrast the last 4 supreme court picks and make a strong case to move all of our governing focus toward respecting constitutional limits on government.
Within that framework, we need to invite Ron Paul and all the people he has inspired to join and influence this movement, not to fight it. I also think Ron Paul needs to fade back a bit especially on things and trust the work he has already accomplished while his son is front and center asking to be trusted for an extremely important seat. You can't sweep swing states with any meaning if you can't win Kentucky.
I think Gilder's positive vision forward needs to overlay all of the root-canal work that need to be done first to make the full package a positive one. But I don't think you can inherit a situation that has spending at $4 trillion, revenues at 2.5 trillion and a deficit that is greater than half of revenues, in a debt crisis environment, and not attack spending head-on.
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Wow. Even Letterman is turning on BO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YNNNmyVCt0
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I hesitate to criticize another Obama vacation - when he could have been nationalizing another industry.
Letterman doesn't rip anything about leftism, only a break from it. Always nice to hear the term 'one term President'.
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hypothetical Democratic congressman's story starring Ron Howard's younger brother Clint Howard.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T9iQyKKoSQ[/youtube]
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Two practical thoughts for 2010:
House) If conservative Republicans take the House, a number of new and pending big government initiatives can be stopped or slowed in their tracks including ObamaCare, see Crafty's post regarding delay, de-fund etc. and cap and tax the energy and manufacturing destruction legislation pending.
Senate) If constitution-respecting conservative Republicans take the Senate, Obama may not be able to put another liberal activist onto the Supreme Court for the ages. If Dems keep the senate, look for Ginsburg 75 now and possibly Breyer who will be 71 in 2012 to retire in the next 2 years so that Obama can pack the court with more young liberal women hoping to live to a hundred and finish dismantling the founding principles.
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The Republicans seem to have a lock on good looking politicians - at least females!
If looks could kill - Kagan, Sotomeyor, Clinton, Michelle, Pelosi we would all be dead by now.
christine2010.com
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CCP: I see that O'Donnell has tea party backing. Hard to say it will be the same old party with all the new faces and commitment this time to positive change.
Sometimes the house races in states that have only one house seat are interesting. Powerline has done some coverage on the South Dakota race this year. Both are attractive women saying they are conservative. Problem for one is that in her first vote she would choose Nancy Pelosi for Speaker and Democrats to run all the committees and control the agenda.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/08/027096.php
http://www.kristiforcongress.com/meet-kristi/
Rand Paul's opponent has that same problem in Kentucky. He is articulate and reasonably conservative on the issues but will align with Reid, Durbin, Schumer etc. if he wins.
Dems have a big problem coming - most of the reasonable and moderate ones from center-right districts are going to lose and all the far left ones from untouchable districts will win, leaving a party even further from the American people than it is today.
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"Both are attractive women saying they are conservative. Problem for one is that in her first vote she would choose Nancy Pelosi for Speaker"
Gives new meaning to beautiful on the outside but ugly on the inside.
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I like the message of this candidate, Ryan Frasier running for congress in the Denver north metro, Colorado's 7th district. He is currently one point up in a Dem. district.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVWxbVvIc8A&NR=1
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"He is currently one point up in a Dem. district"
He answers the questions I see all over CNN when a Black comes on and begs the question, "well what does the Republican party (or tea party for that matter) offer us???"
Well here is your answer,
A free and strong, and safe and properous nation with equal opportunity for all.
Not a country where we are wards of the state, where the elite decide what to do with our money, where property and wealth are not stolen, where we have leaders who are honest and proud of our nation etc.
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A Twenty-First-Century GOP
Republicans need to win back tech-savvy, educated voters. Here’s how.
With President Obama’s job-approval ratings in free fall, Republicans feel
justifiably confident about the 2010 congressional elections. But even if
the GOP has recovered some swagger, the party’s long-term political fortunes
require it to recover something else: the votes of well-educated,
well-compensated elites. Over the past decade and a half, Republicans have
watched scientists, high-tech workers, doctors, financial leaders, and
academics in engineering and business abandon the party in favor of the
Democrats. This exodus has weakened the GOP politically and left it
dependent on white evangelical voters. But the elites’ home could again be
the Republican Party—if the Republicans welcome them back.
An interviewer once asked Karl Rove to define the Democratic Party’s base.
“Anyone with a doctorate,” he responded. This wasn’t true in the past. Back
in 1975, Everett Ladd and Seymour Lipset found that university professors in
the hard sciences leaned somewhat Republican, unlike their colleagues in the
humanities. Ladd and Lipset also discovered that while 64 percent of
social-science professors were liberals, only 24 percent of engineering
professors and 23 percent of business professors were. In fact, when Ladd
and Lipset looked at the 1968 and 1972 elections, the Republican
candidate—none other than Richard Nixon, the scourge of humanities
profs—managed to “command solid majorities among professors of business,
engineering, and agriculture.” Overall, 43 percent of faculty members backed
Nixon.
The conservative foothold in faculty lounges began to loosen as the
seventies ended, and by the new millennium, academic Republicans had become
much harder to spot, even in traditionally conservative disciplines. In the
2004 election, pollster Gary Tobin reported, John Kerry secured 72 percent
of the faculty vote, with the candidate also getting 72 percent among
science and math professors and even managing to win half of the business
and management faculty. The trend of scientists voting Democratic has gone
beyond the campus: according to a 2009 poll, only 6 percent of all American
scientists called themselves Republicans, compared with 55 percent
self-identifying as Democrats.
Republicans have started to lose Wall Street, too. From 1998 to 2007,
reports the activist group Wall Street Watch, 55 percent of commercial
banks’ campaign contributions went to Republicans. George W. Bush beat Al
Gore in Wall Street dollars—$4 million to $1.4 million in 2000—and he nearly
doubled Kerry’s $4 million take in 2004. But these leads have disappeared
over the last few years, with the Democrats gaining a majority of Wall
Street contributions in 2008.
Doctors, like Wall Street execs, have a Republican history, but there are
signs that they, too, are moving away from the party. From 1998 through
2006, Republicans garnered 67 percent of all campaign contributions from the
American Medical Association; but by 2008, Democrats were pulling in 56
percent, and the AMA proceeded to support President Obama’s health-care
overhaul. While the AMA represents only 29 percent or so of American
doctors, this is a troubling development for the GOP.
Republicans are also failing to secure the votes of an emerging group that
should naturally align with the party: libertarian-leaning workers in
Silicon Valley and other high-tech enclaves. Despite the Valley’s
entrepreneurial, leave-us-alone spirit, two-thirds of tech-industry
contributions went to Democrats in the 2008 election cycle, according to
Opensecrets.org.
What’s behind the Republican Party’s poor performance with these key groups?
After all, they are often pro-innovation and anti-regulation, tend to favor
lower taxes, and frequently prefer what works to bromides about what might
be. Various factors explain the disaffection. Scientists particularly
disliked George W. Bush, believing the misleading arguments about a
Republican “war on science.” Silicon Valley and Wall Street executives have
not seen enough pro-growth policies from the GOP to overcome their dislike
of the party’s social policies. And doctors have seen far too few Republican
proposals to improve our health-care system. This unfortunate silence helped
build momentum among doctors for the health-care bill—even though, as Scott
Gottlieb recently argued in the Wall Street Journal, the bill is driving
many to abandon private practice for the apparent safety of HMOs and large
hospital networks.
These elite groups share an important characteristic: a deep attachment to
science and technology. So a serious, technology-friendly Republican agenda
could begin to reverse the party’s losses and could do so, moreover, without
alienating the GOP’s evangelical base. The agenda would have five
commonsense components.
First, Republicans should encourage innovation, especially in areas, like
health care, that provide benefits to millions of Americans. During the
health-reform debate, Republicans were eager to discuss how Democratic
proposals would harm innovation, but they failed to explain how they
themselves would help it. One way would be to promote the development of
lifesaving and life-extending products by offering clearer pathways to FDA
approval of new drugs and treatments. In addition, tort reform could help
reduce what the Pacific Research Institute estimates is $367 billion that
American companies lose in product sales each year by fighting litigation
instead of developing new products.
Second, Republicans should work to ensure that America has access to the
world’s best technological minds. Throughout our history, we’ve done this by
both nurturing native-born brainpower (like Thomas Edison’s) and attracting
great minds from elsewhere (like Albert Einstein’s). Our legal immigration
system currently emphasizes family reunification. Refocusing it to award
residency to people with desirable skills, as countries like Australia and
Canada do, would help us attract more of the best and brightest. Another
good step would be granting green cards to foreign nationals who earn
advanced technical degrees in math, science, or medicine from accredited
American institutions—instead of requiring them to leave the country and
apply for reentry, as we do now. This change would take advantage of
America’s top-flight universities and mask the weakness of our K–12
educational system. According to *U.S. News and World Report*, America has
13 of the world’s best 20 universities, and students from around the world
clamor to attend them.
The failed Kennedy-McCain immigration-reform bill of 2005 did create a
points system for those with certain education or employment credentials.
Unfortunately, the skills-based features of the bill were lost in the larger
battle over *illegal* immigration. Republicans should try to divorce this
issue—which divides the party—from the potentially unifying one of
encouraging skilled legal immigrants. The GOP could then draw a sharp
contrast with Democrats, who tend to oppose skills-based immigration.
The third way that Republicans can regain the elite, tech-friendly votes
that they’ve lost is recommitting themselves to free trade. In the past,
Republicans were overwhelmingly in favor of free trade and could find enough
like-minded Democrats to pass multilateral and bilateral trade agreements,
NAFTA being the most famous example. Nowadays, Democrats generally resist
free trade and cooperate with enough protectionist Republicans to block
free-trade agreements, regardless of who controls Congress.
President Bush must take some of the blame for this reversal, especially by
imposing steel tariffs during his first term, fulfilling a campaign promise
made in West Virginia. On the other hand, he did promote bilateral
agreements to jump-start free trade while cumbersome multilateral
negotiations like the World Trade Organization’s Doha round dragged on.
President Obama, for his part, has been largely unfriendly to free trade,
imposing a fee on imported tires from China, for example. According to
the*Washington
Post*, the Chinese unsurprisingly saw this as “a political concession to
U.S. labor unions” and retaliated, worsening trade tensions between the two
countries. Incidents like these have given Republicans an opportunity to
rediscover their inner David Ricardo.
Fourth, Republicans should capitalize on the Democrats’ recent spending
spree, which has opened the door for a message about fiscal discipline. It’s
true that cutting personal income taxes no longer has the resonance it once
did, since only 47 percent of Americans pay any federal income tax. (When I
served in the Bush White House, I worked on policy papers bragging that the
president’s tax cuts took 5 million Americans off the income-tax rolls; what
the papers didn’t say was that this change made 5 million more Americans
uninterested in what had been the GOP’s strongest talking point.) But the
party should not retreat on other questions of taxation and especially
budgets. Innovation-centered voters understand that our current fiscal path
of $1.4 trillion deficits is unsustainable. Republicans need to issue a mea
culpa for their past contributions to the nation’s fiscal problems and
articulate a serious plan for digging us out of our crushing debt hole.
At the same time, Republicans should promote tax simplification, as
President Reagan did in 1986. Administering the 67,500-page federal
income-tax code requires 100,000 IRS employees and costs our economy between
2 and 5 percent of GDP in lost efficiency, according to the Government
Accountability Office. Limiting the number of rates and loopholes, while
increasing the standard deduction, would help reduce these inefficiencies
and costs. Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire have
created a bipartisan proposal along these lines, and Republicans should make
sure that they remain out front with other tax-simplification proposals.
Fifth, Republicans should put improving our educational system front and
center, so that we can increase the number of high-skilled workers. One way
to do this is to use Title I, which is supposed to help educate 10 million
poor children and to promote flexibility and better educational outcomes.
Republicans used to support Title I “portability”—that is, attaching Title I
dollars to students rather than linking them to a bureaucratic formula that
rewards specific schools, regardless of performance. Republicans dropped
this idea as a concession to Democrats during the No Child Left Behind
negotiations, but they can pick it up again. Having Title I’s $14 billion
follow our neediest children will encourage schools to be accountable to
parents and allow parents to direct money to schools that work best, whether
public or private.
This reform would have a number of political advantages. The recently
oversubscribed school choice experiment in the District of Columbia shows
that parents, regardless of their ideology, want more of a say in the kind
of education their children receive. As many as four in ten parents already
send a child to a school other than their local public one. More to the
point for political purposes is that well-educated voters, including
business leaders, recognize how our deficient K–12 system harms American
competitiveness by consigning poor kids to failing schools.
Not only would this five-part agenda appeal to the highly educated,
high-income voters who once backed the GOP; it also couldn’t be replicated
by the Democratic Party because of the interest-group politics that govern
so many Democratic policy choices. Democrats can’t back tort reform, for
example, because trial lawyers would balk. They can’t advocate free trade or
high-skilled immigration because of labor unions’ objections. School choice,
even within public schools, is anathema to the Democrat-supporting teachers’
unions. Budget discipline gets in the way of ambitious Democratic spending
plans.
An agenda that joins pro-technology voters to the GOP’s evangelical base
would make the party truly formidable electorally. And it would do something
far more important: it would help America maintain its technological
supremacy going forward.
*Tevi D. Troy, the former deputy secretary of health and human services and
a former senior White House domestic-policy aide, is a visiting senior
fellow at the Hudson Institute.*
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Alexander's Essay – September 16, 2010
The Enshrinement of Essential Liberty
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. ... Done...the seventeenth day of September, in the year of our LORD one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven." --George Washington and the delegates
The U.S. ConstitutionOn 17 September of every year, we observe Constitution Day in recognition of the anniversary of that venerable document's signing by our nation's Founders.
In our household, we observe it further because it is the date of birth of my eldest son.
I suppose there really is no such thing as coincidence, because this young man, like his younger sister and brother, proudly represents the promise of Liberty for the next generation. He is an outspoken advocate for both Liberty and constitutional Rule of Law (could be in his genes). He is a student leader, young scholar and great sportsman. A week ago, he completed his Eagle Scout project. He is interested in serving our nation and initiating that service as a cadet in one of our military academies.
I am, of course, proud of each of my children, but that pride is about much more than the delight of a father.
Our nation is under siege, and the Socialist regime of Barack Hussein Obama has proven to be a more subversive threat to freedom than that of any sitting president in our nation's history.
Much of the burden of the damage already done by this odious regime will be shouldered by the next generation, including my children, and it will take clear-headed young conservatives in their generation to hold the line against tyranny.
Like millions of other American Patriots, especially parents, I am of the same opinion as Thomas Paine on the matter of passing our burden to them: "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."
Just one short election cycle past, a majority of Americans were duped into voting for a childish and flimsy promise of "hope and change." What the nation received instead was a perilous attempt by a small cadre of elite Leftists to "fundamentally transform the United States of America."
To arm yourself with the right intellectual ammo to reverse that transformation, I invite you to read any or all of these collected essays outlining the Liberty proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence, and enshrined in our nation's Constitution. After all, if we are to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity," we must first know precisely what it is we're defending.
Start with Essential Liberty, a brief but comprehensive essay on the origins of Liberty: On December 16th, 1773, "radicals" from Boston, members of a secret organization of American Patriots called the Sons of Liberty, boarded three East India Company ships and threw 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor.
Further reading...
A 'Living Constitution' for a Dying Republic: For its first 150 years (with the notable exception Marbury v. Madison in 1803), our Constitution stood as our Founders, and more importantly, "the people," intended -- as is -- in accordance with its original intent. In other words, it was interpreted exegetically rather than eisegetically, textually as constructed, not as could be re-interpreted by later generations of jurists.
Our Sacred Honor ... to Support and Defend: The Constitution specifies in Article VI, clause 3: "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution..." The Constitution also prescribes the following oath to be taken by the president-elect: "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
The First Statement of Conservative Principles: It took the election of a "community organizer" and ideological Socialist, Barack Hussein Obama, to launch a popular resurgence of interest in constitutional Rule of Law and the First Principles upon which our nation was founded, and not a moment too soon.
On American Patriotism: American Patriots will not stand idly by while the last vestiges of Liberty succumb to tyranny. In Jefferson's words, "Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them."
The Brushfires of Freedom: "It does not take a majority to prevail ... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men." --Samuel Adams
The 'Tea Party' Movement: "The people of the U.S. owe their Independence & their liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent. Let them exert the same wisdom, in watching against every evil lurking under plausible disguises, and growing up from small beginnings." --James Madison
Click Here
Tea Party Primer
Our quintessential field guide for the Tea Party movement, Tea Party Primer, is immediately available individually, in small quantity or as a bulk purchase. Inexpensively priced for wide distribution, the Tea Party Primer's purpose is to be a catalyst for the restoration of our Constitution's integrity and mandate for Rule of Law! All purchases at The Patriot Shop support our Mission of Service to America's Armed Forces.
When Debating a Liberal, Start With First Principles: Rule Number One: You must define the debate in terms of First Principles, which is to say, you must be able to articulate those principles. "On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed." --Thomas Jefferson
The Patriot Declaration: We are American Patriots, defenders of First Principles and Essential Liberty... The Patriot Declaration is not a petition. It is a "Declaration of Cause and Necessity" and stands on its own as a resolution of intent for all who sign it. Just as important, it serves as due notice for those who would abandon their oath to "Support and Defend the Constitution" and abuse their office to the detriment of individual liberty and states' rights.
Finally, I invite you to observe Constitution Day by visiting The Patriot's outstanding Historic Documents repository for the complete texts of our nation's most significant formative documents, and to see our excellent selection of constitutional items at The Patriot Shop.
This week, as our family celebrates the birthday of my firstborn son, we are reminded of the challenges he, his siblings and their peers will face in future generations. We pray that the upcoming midterm election will reflect a great public awakening to the perilous threats to liberty we now face, and foretell a trend to restore the integrity of our Constitution. Let us resolve this Constitution Day to arm and rearm ourselves with the First Principles necessary to defend Essential Liberty.
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
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Brief · September 20, 2010
The Foundation
"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny." --Thomas Jefferson
Liberty
"We are faced today with two different roads, one of which follows the path of liberty set
by our Founders in the Constitution, and one of which diverges from that path and leads us down the road to tyranny. There are two different warring camps within our society, and the ongoing battle between those camps has been graphically illustrated in recent primary elections and by the vicious fight over the nationalization of our healthcare system. On one side are those of us, including the members of the Tea Party movement, who work hard to support their families, who love their country, and who understand and revere a document that has stood firm for 223 years to guide us. These ordinary, everyday Americans rightly fear the unprecedented growth in the size and power of the federal government. They are angry over the unsustainable and uncontrollable growth of federal spending and the federal deficit that will inevitably lead to financial ruin. They are appalled over the contempt shown by so many in the other camp for our governing document, the Constitution. ... That other camp is made up of politicians who recognize no limits on their power, their liberal activist allies in the judiciary, and members of the media, Hollywood, and academia, who have been stretching, bending, and chipping away at the Constitution for decades. They welcome a tyranny of elites who can govern however they see fit without being checked and limited by what they view as an 'anachronistic' document and the parochial views of the American people. After all, they know what is best for all of us. They should control our lives and our economy. ... There is a growing movement throughout America to reinvigorate the tree of liberty, a tree whose trunk is the Constitution, whose limbs are the Bill of Rights, and whose leaves are the new sons and daughters of liberty who embody the same spirit that infused our Founders. On Constitution Day, let Americans rededicate themselves to securing 'the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity' by actively working to preserve the Constitution of the United States." --former Attorney General Edwin Meese
The Gipper
"We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall of Philadelphia. In the days following World War II, when the economic strength and power of America was all that stood between the world and the return to the dark ages, Pope Pius XII said, 'The American people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish actions. Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind.' We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth." --Ronald Reagan
Opinion in Brief
"[One of the] central reasons for the Tea Party's rise ... is the yardstick. ... Imagine that over at the 36-inch end you've got pure liberal thinking -- more and larger government programs, a bigger government that costs more in the many ways that cost can be calculated. Over at the other end you've got conservative thinking -- a government that is growing smaller and less demanding and is less expensive. You assume that when the two major parties are negotiating bills in Washington, they sort of lay down the yardstick and begin negotiations at the 18-inch line. Each party pulls in the direction it wants, and the dominant party moves the government a few inches in their direction. But if you look at the past half century or so you have to think: How come even when Republicans are in charge, even when they're dominant, government has always gotten larger and more expensive? It's always grown! It's as if something inexorable in our political reality -- with those who think in liberal terms dominating the establishment, the media, the academy -- has always tilted the starting point in negotiations away from 18 inches, and always toward liberalism, toward the 36-inch point. Democrats on the Hill or in the White House try to pull it up to 30, Republicans try to pull it back to 25. A deal is struck at 28. Washington Republicans call it victory: 'Hey, it coulda been 29!' But regular conservative-minded or Republican voters see yet another loss. They could live with 18. They'd like 8. Instead it's 28. ... What they want is representatives who'll begin the negotiations at 18 inches and tug the final bill toward 5 inches. And they believe Tea Party candidates will do that." --columnist Peggy Noonan
Political Futures
"Writing in 1962, [economist Milton Friedman] noted that 'conditions have changed,' as we 'now have several decades of experience with governmental intervention.' Indeed, it was clear then, way back in 1962, that free economies vastly outperform managed economies. And that was before the collapse of the Soviet/central-planning model, the economic explosion resulting from the Reagan-Thatcher tax cuts, the repudiation of Keynes even in Britain, the bankruptcy of the European welfare state, the rise of the Asian Tigers, and more. What was obvious in 1962 was beyond obvious in 2008 -- or should have been. And yet, Friedman sensed a lingering threat, one that hadn't sauntered off into the night. It was a 'subtle' threat, not from enemies outside but from do-gooders inside. He warned of an 'internal threat' from those professing 'good intentions and good will who wish to reform us,' who 'are anxious to use the power of the state to achieve their ends and confident of their own ability to do so.' It's so subtle that Americans voted for such reform, or 'change,' decisively, on November 4, 2008, without even knowing it, giving the threat vigor. Thus, the managers and planners are in charge, with their hands on the ship of state, seizing the resources that feed the most dynamic, prosperous engine that capitalism and freedom ever produced. The Invisible Hand has been waved off by the visible hands of the reformers. And they are spending us into oblivion." --author and professor Dr. Paul Kengor
Government
"From 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed, until 1940, when the first Social Security checks were paid out, Americans did not receive income from the federal government unless they were pensioned veterans or employees of the government itself. For 164 years, Americans took care of themselves and their own families. With the Social Security Act, they began to slide into government dependency. Today, thanks to Social Security, a majority of Americans over 65 rely on the federal government for a majority of their income. Thanks to Medicare, enacted in 1965, American seniors now rely on the federal government for their health care, too. If Congress does not repeal Obamacare, virtually all Americans will soon depend on government for their health care. We will no longer be a free and self-reliant people -- we will be a government-dependent people." --CNSNews editor Terrence Jeffrey
Re: The Left
"U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently claimed: 'Districts around the country have literally been cutting for five, six, seven years in a row. And, many of them, you know, are through, you know, fat, through flesh and into bone....' Really? They cut spending five to seven consecutive years? Give me a break! Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, writes that out of 14,000 school districts in the United States, just seven have cut their budgets seven years in a row. How about five years in a row? Just 87. That's a fraction of 1 percent in each case. Duncan may be pandering to his constituency, or he may actually be fooled by how school districts (and other government agencies) talk about budget cuts. When normal people hear about a budget cut, we assume the amount of money to be spent is less than the previous year's allocation. But that's not what bureaucrats mean. 'They are not comparing current year spending to the previous year's spending,' Coulson writes. 'What they're doing is comparing the approved current year budget to the budget that they initially dreamed about having.' So if a district got more money than last year but less than it asked for, the administrators consider it a cut. 'Back in the real world, a K-12 public education costs four times as much as it did in 1970, adjusting for inflation: $150,000 versus the $38,000 it cost four decades ago (in constant 2009 dollars),' Coulson says. Taxpayers need to understand this sort thing just to protect themselves from greedy government officials and teachers unions." --columnist John Stossel
Faith & Family
"Surrender on gay marriage is surrender on marriage -- which is surrender on the family and, ultimately, surrender on civilization. ... This unwillingness to fight for the family, on which civilization depends, is another sign of the failure of modern conservatism. The right can win a thousand battles against big government and lose the war for America's future, if it surrenders on marriage and the family. America's social traumas -- illegitimacy, juvenile crime, drug abuse, female-headed-households -- can all be traced back to the decline of the family: which started with the Great Society in the '60s, accelerated with no-fault divorce in the '70s, continued with the rise of cohabitation, and reached its culmination with strange-sex marriage. ... Unfortunately, many conservative intellectuals have lost sight of a crucial fact: American exceptionalism rests on three pillars -- faith, family and freedom. Remove any one, and the entire structure collapses. ... Without the family, it doesn't matter how many times we defeat socialism (nationalized health-care, government take-over of business, soaring deficits, redistributionism), in the end, we lose -- which is why the left has made same-sex marriage its priority, and why it is less tolerant of dissent here than anywhere else. Conservatives who don't understand this, understand nothing." --columnist Don Feder
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A document of values and direction was released last week by the Republicans trying to take Congress while I was out. Does anyone here have any comments either on how good or effective this will be as a governing document or as to how good or effective it will be as a political tool in the election.
My impression so far is that it is mostly right on the money. Some critics call it the same rhetoric but putting it to writing creates a record that incumbents can be held to and judged by. Some say too long for independents or ordinary voters to choose to read, but still they will know that it is there - a series of promises and commitments have been made - in writing.
Also removes the label that the challengers are only running against someone or that voters are only voting against something. Some of the commitments are rather specific:
http://www.gop.gov/resources/library/documents/solutions/a-pledge-to-america.pdf
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Overhauling CBO and JCT Is a Real Test of GOP Resolve, not the “Pledge to America”
Posted by Daniel J. Mitchell
While I’m glad Republicans are finally talking about smaller government, I’ve expressed some disappointment with the GOP Pledge to America. Why “reform” Fannie and Freddie, I asked, when the right approach is to get the government completely out of the housing sector. Jacob Sullum of Reason is similarly underwhelmed. He writes:
In the “Pledge to America” they unveiled last week, House Republicans promise they will “launch a sustained effort to stem the relentless growth in government that has occurred over the past decade.” Who better for the job than the folks who ran the government for most of that time? …Republicans, you may recall, had a spending spree of their own during George W. Bush’s recently concluded administration, when both discretionary and total spending doubled — nearly 10 times the growth seen during Bill Clinton’s two terms. In fact, says Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, “President Bush increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ.” Republicans controlled the House of Representatives for six of Bush’s eight years.
Redemption is a good thing, however, so maybe the GOP actually intends to do the right thing this time around. One key test is whether Republicans do a top-to-bottom housecleaning at both the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation.
These Capitol Hill bureaucracies are not well known, but they have enormous authority and influence. As the official scorekeepers of spending (CBO) and tax (JCT) bills, these two bureaucracies can mortally wound legislation or grease the skids for quick passage.
Unfortunately, that clout gets used to dramatically tilt the playing field in favor of bigger government. It was CBO that claimed that Obama’s stimulus created jobs, even though the head of CBO was forced to admit that the jobs-created number was the result of a Keynesian model that was rigged to show exactly that result . You would think that would shame the bureaucrats into producing honest numbers, but CBO continues to produce absurd job creation estimates regardless of the actual rate of unemployment.
CBO favors deficits and debt when it is asked to analyze proposals for more spending, but it rather conveniently changes its tune when the discussion shifts to tax increases. Since we’re on the topic of twisted economic analysis, CBO actually relies on a model which, for all intents and purposes, predicts that economic performance is maximized with 100 percent tax rates.
The Joint Committee on Taxation, meanwhile, is infamous for its assumption that taxes have no impact – at all – on economic output. In other words, instead of showing a Laffer Curve, JCT would show a straight line, with tax revenues continuing to rapidly climb even as tax rates approach 100 percent. This creates a huge bias against good tax policy, yet JCT is impervious to evidence that its approach is wildly flawed.
And don’t forget that CBO and JCT both bear responsibility for Obamacare since they cranked out preposterous estimates that a giant new entitlement would lead to lower budget deficits.
Not that we need additional evidence, but the head of the CBO just repeated his higher-taxes-equal-more-growth nonsense in testimony to the Senate Budget Committee. With this type of mindset, is it any surprise that fiscal policy is such a mess?
Douglas Elmendorf said extending breaks due to expire at year’s end would increase demand in the next few years by putting more money in consumers’ pockets. Over the long term, he said, the tax cuts would hurt the economy because the government would have to borrow so much money to finance them that it would begin competing with private companies seeking loans. That, in turn, would drive up interest rates, Elmendorf said.
I’ve already written once about how the GOP sabotaged itself when it didn’t fix the problems with these scorekeeping bureaucracies after 1994. If Republicans take power and don’t raze CBO and JCT, they will deserve to become a permanent minority party.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/overhauling-cbo-and-jct-is-a-real-test-of-gop-resolve-not-the-pledge-to-america/
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Good points about the CBO and the JCT. To this list of two I would add a third, "Baseline Budgeting" which is the unique set of rules which apply to governmental bookkeeping. Example? A 10% rate of increase is projected over 5 years. Then in year 2, the rate of increased is reduced to 6%. Under BB, this is called a 4% cut. :-o :x :x
Anyway, here's this:
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Alexander's Essay – September 30, 2010
The New and Improved GOP?
"And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." --The Signers
Republican congressional leaders have issued their 21-page "Pledge to America" with the objective of convincing "the American people we have learned our lesson and we are ready to govern," as one of them claimed.
However, this Pledge amounts to "Trust Us, Version 2.0," and reads like a punch list for all the things Republicans did not do when they held the House, Senate and the White House, just a few short years ago. (As you may recall, Republicans controlled the House for the first six years of George W. Bush's presidency, and the House sets the budget.) It notes that its objective is to "stem the relentless growth in government that has occurred over the past decade," a large measure of which occurred under Republican rule.
The new Pledge is modeled after Newt Gingrich's successful "Contract with America," which was issued six weeks before the 1994 midterm election in the first term of another charismatic charlatan, Bill Clinton. That pledge propelled the GOP into a House majority for the first time in four decades.
The current slate of Republican leaders are hoping that enough of Barack Hussein Obama's supporters have awakened to the error of their ways, and will propel Republicans into the majority again. (It remains to be seen if enough Republicans have awakened to the error of their ways, and if so, can they follow up with a presidential nominee in 2012 with a bit more gravitas than Bob Dole, who, as Bush 41 did in 1992, gave Clinton the presidency.)
The Pledge spells out a few elements of the Reagan model for economic restoration, which Republicans promise to enact if they achieve a congressional majority after the November elections. To that end, it serves as a benchmark for accountability.
It vows to stop any tax increase scheduled after 1 January 2011.
It promises to end the much-maligned Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), revokes any unspent "stimulus" dollars, and commits to "roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels," which would reduce the budget by $120 billion in 2011 -- only about 10 percent of the deficit, but that's a start. It also pledges to end government intervention in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the massive mortgage entities that seeded the current economic decline.
It obligates Republicans to pass legislation requiring congressional approval for any government regulation that would have more than a $100 million impact on the economy (cap-and-trade legislation), effectively holding legislators accountable for the labyrinth of regulations which have greatly stifled job growth and productivity, and which cost consumers hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
While failing to address non-discretionary spending such as entitlements and debt service, which constitute most of the $3.8 trillion budget, the Pledge does promise a vote to "repeal and replace the government takeover of health care." This, of course, leads us to ask: Replace it with what?
The Pledge commits to put a cap on non-military government hiring and spending, but it lacks earmark reform (especially attached to military spending bills) and fails to mention the line-item veto, much less a Balanced Budget Amendment. It requires a "sunset clause" for any new federal program, which would require legislators to renew funding periodically -- and face the consequences of those votes.
The Pledge affirms, "Foreign terrorists do not have the same rights as American citizens," which is to say that acts of terrorism will not be watered down into mere criminal acts. It also "reaffirms the authority of state and local law enforcement to assist in the enforcement of all federal immigration laws," and the immediate need to secure our southern border.
However, the most important element of the Pledge is this: It assures that Republicans will pass legislation requiring "the specific constitutional authority upon which the bill is justified" for any and all legislation ... which will most assuredly put the contest between Rule of Law and the so-called "living constitution" front and center, where it belongs.
The Republicans' current Pledge is clearly a stepchild of the "Contract from America," a grassroots effort by the Tea Party movement to restore constitutional integrity. The Tea Party has thus rung the bell of wayward Republicans, most of whom are now promising to reform their ways.
Will the Pledge succeed?
The short answer is, yes, because among the diminished ranks of Republicans left in the House and Senate there are about 120 members who have been steadfast in their commitment to the conservative principles outlined in the Republican Platform, as their voting records attest. In other words, there is still a powerful core contingent of conservative Republicans in Congress.
But, the real chance of success lies in the influx of an outstanding slate of new candidates running on conservative principles, those who did not need a Pledge to America to run. And keep your eye on those outspoken Republican women among them -- they are leading the charge in defense of our Constitution.
Unfortunately, plenty of pantywaist RINOs, Republicans who have most certainly not voted consistently in support of conservative principles, will still hold congressional seats after November, and they will certainly derail some of the Pledge's commitments.
The bottom line, however, is not whether Republicans stick to their Pledge to America, but whether they will honor their sacred oath to "support and defend" our Constitution, as specified in Article VI, clause 3. It is that pledge which should, first and foremost, guide every elected official.
Finally, allow me a few words about the language in the preamble to the Republican Pledge: "America is an inspiration to those who yearn to be free and have the ability and the dignity to determine their own destiny. Whenever the agenda of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to institute a new governing agenda and set a different course."
The language above is a Beltway-processed knockoff of the real thing from our Declaration of Independence which set forth as follows: "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 [and] whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government."
The latter is not about replacing "government agendas" when they become destructive to liberty, it is about replacing government.
Politicians of every stripe should take note: The defense of Essential Liberty was the foundation of the first Tea Party back in 1773, and it remains so in today's Tea Party movement. Millions of Patriots once again avow, "with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."
That is how Republicans should close their Pledge.
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First a reply to the Pledge post above in this thread: The new pledge is not "Trust Us, Version 2.0" in the sense that these promises were made after the polls already were showing 'certain' victory. So I read the pledge as a promise to themselves to govern in a principled fashion, made publicly so as to deliberately be held accountable. In other words, they are not trying to win - they already have that based on the mis-direction of their opponents - they are trying to make this win in November mean something in January.
I would note that the pledge was largely ignored by the public and the media, but it will come back very quickly if they veer away from the promises they made.
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The examiner is running a series on the way forward for the new congress on various issues this week. This first one is on repeal and replace healthcare. This could also go in healthcare politics but I post it more as addressing the larger question about incremental strategies today for principled governance - and look forward to their other installments.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/How-new-GOP-Congress-can-repeal_-replace-Obamacare-1244238-105136339.html
* Bureaucracy: Every year, Congress passes appropriations provisions that forbid the use of funds for certain purposes. Next year's spending bills should bar the Department of Health and Human Services and other agencies from establishing the 159 boards, panels and programs in Obamacare. The Treasury appropriations bill should likewise remove all authority from the Internal Revenue Service for enforcing Obamacare's tax provisions.
* Stop medical lawsuit abuse: Trial lawyers kept medical tort reform out of Obamacare despite the fact such provisions could save at least $200 billion in unnecessary annual health care costs. Trial lawyers made sure Obamacare did include provisions encouraging state attorneys general to outsource litigation against health care providers to ambulance-chasing trial lawyers. The new Congress should put tort reform into health care reform and take the trial lawyers out of it.
* Abortion funding: Congress can and should also permanently bar Obamacare from ever using federal tax dollars to pay for abortions. Not using tax dollars to pay for abortions is one of the few measures on which opponents and defenders of the procedure agree, but more is required to make the ban effective than a meaningless presidential executive order.
* Burdens on small business: Congress should quickly challenge Obama to veto legislation repealing the Obamacare requirement that small businesses fill out and file 1099 Forms for every vendor with whom they have significant dealings.
* Wheelchair tax: Do Obamacrats really want to face a 2012 re-election campaign after voting to tax someone's wheelchair? We don't think so.
* Employer mandate: However it is ultimately replaced, the new health care reform to come should end the tax breaks that make employers the main source of health care insurance coverage. All Americans should have access to good health care insurance without worry they will be denied because of prior conditions. And they should be able to get their coverage from the provider they choose, wherever it is located.
* Individual mandate: Obamacare may be the first federal law in American history that requires every American to purchase a commercial product under penalty of law. If the Supreme Court has not already declared Obamacare's individual mandate unconstitutional, Congress should repeal it.
Repealing and replacing Obamacare must be done carefully and without undue haste. These recommendations are only the first steps, but they are the essential elements for all that follows.
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I keep seeing all sorts of labels for Repubs now. "True conservatives", "rinos", libertarians, etc I think Dick as hit the nail on the head with his categorization and explanation of what is evolving here. And how the tea party is transforming the Reopublican party to broaden it away from control by the" religious right" which in my opnion has always been a two edged sword:
« BEAT BARNEY FRANK AND THE DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIPTHE NEW REPUBLICAN RIGHT
By Dick Morris10.20.2010Share this article
Published on TheHill.com on October 19, 2010
A fundamental change is gripping the Republican grass roots as they animate the GOP surge to a major victory in the 2010 elections. No longer do evangelical or social issues dominate the Republican ground troops. Now economic and fiscal issues prevail. The Tea Party has made the Republican Party safe for libertarians.
There is still a litmus test for admission to the Republican Party. But no longer is it dominated by abortion, guns and gays. Now, keeping the economy free of government regulation, reducing taxation and curbing spending are the chemicals that turn the paper pink.
It is one of the fundamental planks in the Tea Party platform that the movement does not concern itself with social issues. At the Tea Parties, evangelical pro-lifers rub shoulders happily with gay libertarians. They are united by their anger at Obama’s economic policies, fear of his deficits and horror at his looming tax increases. Obama’s agenda has effectively removed the blocks that stopped tens of millions of social moderates from joining the GOP.
As a byproduct of this sea change in the Republican Party, GOP grassroots activists are no longer just concentrated in the South. They are spread all throughout the nation, as prominent in Ohio as in Alabama, in New York as in Georgia, in California as in Nevada.
The Tea Party’s focus on fiscal and economic issues finds deep resonance among voters of all stripes, united as they are in economic hardship and disappointed as they all are by Obama’s economic program. This antipathy to federal policies is paving the way for vast Republican inroads in normally solid Democratic turf like New York state, Massachusetts, California and Washington state.
Fighting over abortion has become a cottage industry in America. As useful to the left as to the right, both camps have used the issue for 30 years to demand orthodoxy of their constituents and fidelity from their electorates. No longer does the pro-life/pro-choice debate hold voters in blue states hostage to the Democratic Party, bound and determined to swallow as much in regulation and taxation as their liberal candidates offer if only to protect Roe v. Wade. Nor does it hypnotize Southern or rural conservatives who grant their Blue Dog congressmen a pass on Election Day as long as they are right on life, guns and gays. Now these Blue Dogs are paying the price for their betrayal of fiscal conservatism and find that they can no longer assuage their angered base by way of ads showing them with firearms. While social concerns still exist and are held deeply throughout the country, economic and fiscal issues have gripped the hearts and minds of Republican voters and candidates, pushing the social questions aside.
This preference for economic and fiscal questions over social issues is not a top-down decision of the Tea Party leadership. There really is no Tea Party leadership. Those who conduct its affairs are mere coordinators of local groups where the real power lies. The entire affair is a grass roots-dominated movement. I was shocked to learn that the teapartypatriots.org umbrella group, to which more than 2,800 local affiliates belong, has a total payroll of $50,000 per month, with only seven paid staff members, some of them low-level at that. This group, which embraces more than half of the self-described Tea Party groups in the U.S., leaves up to each local organization how to proceed and what to do. It is a bottom-up movement.
The determination to focus on fiscal and economic issues, to the exclusion of social questions, wells up from below as individual members vent their concerns over ObamaCare, stimulus spending and cap-and-trade legislation. It is around opposition to Obama’s agenda, not Roe v. Wade, that the movement is organized. It is a new day on the Republican right.
Related articles:
REPUBLICAN TREND GROWS
TELL CRIST NOT TO SPLIT THE REPUBLICAN VOTE IN FLORIDA
INSIDE TONIGHT’S REPUBLICAN DEBATE
ECONOMIC ISSUES AT THE FOREFRONT
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Frank Rich of Pravda on the Hudson is the epitome of a chattering class progressive. Nonetheless this piece is worth the reading:
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ONE dirty little secret of the 2010 election is that it won’t be a political tragedy for Democrats if a Tea Party icon like Sharron Angle or Joe Miller ends up in the United States Senate. Angle, now synonymous with racist ads sliming Hispanics, and Miller, already on record threatening a government shutdown, are fired up and ready to go as symbols of G.O.P. extremism for 2012 and beyond.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Frank Rich
What’s not so secret is that some Republicans will be just as happy if some of these characters lose, and for the same reason.
But whatever Tuesday’s results, this much is certain: The Tea Party’s hopes for actually affecting change in Washington will start being dashed the morning after. The ordinary Americans in this movement lack the numbers and financial clout to muscle their way into the back rooms of Republican power no matter how well their candidates perform.
Trent Lott, the former Senate leader and current top-dog lobbyist, gave away the game in July. “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” he said, referring to the South Carolina senator who is the Tea Party’s Capitol Hill patron saint. “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.” It’s the players who wrote the checks for the G.O.P. surge, not those earnest folk in tri-corner hats, who plan to run the table in the next corporate takeover of Washington. Though Tom DeLay may now be on trial for corruption in Texas, the spirit of his K Street lives on in a Lott client list that includes Northrop Grumman and Goldman Sachs.
Karl Rove outed the Republican elites’ contempt for Tea Partiers in the campaign’s final stretch. Much as Barack Obama thought he was safe soliloquizing about angry white Middle Americans clinging to “guns or religion” at a San Francisco fund-raiser in 2008, so Rove now parades his disdain for the same constituency when speaking to the European press. This month he told Der Spiegel that Tea Partiers are “not sophisticated,” and then scoffed, “It’s not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.” Given that Glenn Beck has made a cause of putting Hayek’s dense 1944 antigovernment treatise “The Road to Serfdom” on the best-seller list and Tea Partiers widely claim to have read it, Rove could hardly have been more condescending to “these people.” Last week, for added insult, he mocked Sarah Palin’s imminent Discovery Channel reality show to London’s Daily Telegraph.
This animus has not gone unnoticed among those supposedly less sophisticated conservatives back home. Mike Huckabee, still steamed about Rove’s previous put-down of Christine O’Donnell, publicly lamented the Republican establishment’s “elitism” and “country club attitude.” This country club elite, he said, is happy for Tea Partiers to put up signs, work the phones and make “those pesky little trips” door-to-door that it finds a frightful inconvenience. But the members won’t let the hoi polloi dine with them in the club’s “main dining room” — any more than David H. Koch, the billionaire sugar daddy of the Republican right, will invite O’Donnell into his box at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center to take in “The Nutcracker.”
The main dining room remains reserved for Koch’s fellow oil barons, Lott’s clients, the corporate contributors (known and anonymous) to groups like Rove’s American Crossroads, and, of course, the large coterie of special interests underwriting John Boehner, the presumptive next speaker of the House. Boehner is the largest House recipient of Wall Street money this year — much of it from financial institutions bailed out by TARP.
His Senate counterpart, Mitch McConnell, will be certain to stop any Tea Party hillbillies from disrupting his chapter of the club (as he tried to stop Rand Paul in his own state’s G.O.P. primary). McConnell’s pets in his chamber’s freshman G.O.P. class will instead be old-school conservatives like Dan Coats (of Indiana), Rob Portman (of Ohio) and, if he squeaks in, Pat Toomey (of Pennsylvania). The first two are former lobbyists; Toomey ran the corporate interest group, the Club for Growth. They can be counted on to execute an efficient distribution of corporate favors and pork after they make their latest swing through Capitol Hill’s revolving door.
What the Tea Party ostensibly wants most — less government spending and smaller federal deficits — is not remotely happening on the country club G.O.P.’s watch. The elites have no serious plans to cut anything except taxes and regulation of their favored industries. The party’s principal 2010 campaign document, its “Pledge to America,” doesn’t vow to cut even earmarks — which barely amount to a rounding error in the federal budget anyway. Boehner has also proposed a return to pre-crash 2008 levels in “nonsecurity” discretionary spending — another mere bagatelle ($105 billion) next to the current $1.3 trillion deficit. And that won’t be happening either, once the actual cuts in departments like Education, Transportation and Interior are specified to their constituencies.
Perhaps the campaign’s most telling exchange took place on Fox News two weeks ago, when the Tea Party-embracing Senate candidate in California, Carly Fiorina, was asked seven times by Chris Wallace to name “one single entitlement expenditure you’re willing to cut” in order “to extend all the Bush tax cuts, which would add 4 trillion to the deficit.” She never did. At least Angle and Paul have been honest about what they’d slash if in power — respectively Social Security and defense, where the big government spending actually resides.
That’s not happening either. McConnell has explained his only real priority for the new Congress with admirable candor. “The single most important thing we want to achieve,” he said, “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Any assault on Social Security would defeat that goal, and a serious shake-up of the Pentagon budget would alienate the neoconservative ideologues and military contractors who are far more important to the G.O.P. establishment than the “don’t tread on me” crowd.
For sure, the Republican elites found the Tea Party invaluable on the way to this Election Day. And not merely, as Huckabee has it, because they wanted its foot soldiers. What made the Tea Party most useful was that its loud populist message gave the G.O.P. just the cover it needed both to camouflage its corporate patrons and to rebrand itself as a party miraculously antithetical to the despised G.O.P. that gave us George W. Bush and record deficits only yesterday.
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Wall Street Journal have been arduous in promoting and inflating Tea Party events and celebrities to this propagandistic end. The more the Tea Party looks as if it’s calling the shots in the G.O.P., the easier it is to distract attention from those who are actually calling them — namely, those who’ve cashed in and cashed out as ordinary Americans lost their jobs, homes and 401(k)’s. Typical of this smokescreen is a new book titled “Mad as Hell,” published this fall by a Murdoch imprint. In it, the pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen make the case, as they recently put it in Politico, that the Tea Party is “the most powerful and potent force in America.”
They are expert at producing poll numbers to bear that out. By counting those with friends and family in the movement, Rasmussen has calculated that 29 percent of Americans are “tied to” the Tea Party. (If you factor in six degrees of Kevin Bacon, the number would surely double.) But cooler empirical data reveal the truth known by the G.O.P. establishment: An August CNN poll found that 2 percent of Americans consider themselves active members of the Tea Party.
That result was confirmed last weekend by The Washington Post, which published the fruits of its months-long effort to contact every Tea Party group in the country. To this end, it enlisted the help of Tea Party Patriots, the only Tea Party umbrella group that actually can claim to be a spontaneous, bottom-up, grass roots organization rather than a front for the same old fat cats of the Republican right, from the Koch brothers to Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks. Tea Party Patriots has claimed anywhere from 2,300 to nearly 3,000 local affiliates, but even with its assistance, The Post could verify a total of only 647 Tea Party groups nationwide. Most had fewer than 50 members. The median amount of money each group had raised in 2010 was $800, nowhere near the entry fee for the country club.
But those Americans, like all the others on the short end of the 2008 crash, have reason to be mad as hell. And their numbers will surely grow once the Republican establishment’s panacea of tax cuts proves as ineffectual at creating jobs, saving homes and cutting deficits as the half-measures of the Obama White House and the Democratic Congress. The tempest, however, will not be contained within the tiny Tea Party but will instead overrun the Republican Party itself, where Palin, with Murdoch and Beck at her back, waits in the wings to “take back America” not just from Obama but from the G.O.P. country club elites now mocking her. By then — after another two years of political gridlock and economic sclerosis — the equally disillusioned right and left may have a showdown that makes this election year look as benign as Woodstock.
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This article was linked at conservative Townhall and says that young voters are alienated by certain aspects of the tea party movement. What I take from it is the need for one thing to keep a sharp focus on who will pay most for the trillions of excess today. Young people by their nature come from a dependent class, used to having others pay their bills, needing tuition subsidies etc. It is a rare talent in conservative leaders to be able to explain why pro-growth policies with economic freedoms are preferable to redistributionism and dependency. In the current cycle one person with that gift i think is Marco Rubio. We will need way more people to understand it and articulate if we want to be successful in 2012. OTOH, reader beware, the underlying study comes out of Harvard. People in their 20s are too young to know that liberalism, socialism and communism were all tried and failed. It's not still an open question.
http://townhall.com/news/politics-elections/2010/10/30/tea_party_movement_alienating_young_voters/page/full
Tea party movement alienating young voters
APNews
The tea party is failing to woo young voters despite a loose structure that could make it easier for those under 30 to achieve leadership roles, analysts and political activists say as the grass-roots movement prepares to flex its muscles in midterm elections.
A survey released Oct. 21 by Harvard University's Institute of Politics showed that only 11 percent of those 18 to 29 consider themselves supporters of the tea party, and analysts say the leaderless movement's ties to social conservatism and rhetoric in favor of an earlier America are hampering its appeal.
Despite widespread voter anger ahead of Tuesday's midterm elections, the tea party has been a hard sell to young voters because many equate joining with embracing conservative social values, said Peter Levine, director of CIRCLE, a Tufts University group that conducts research on the political involvement of young Americans. He said this holds true even for those who would otherwise identify with the party's call for stricter fiscal conservatism.
"A lot of young people, whether it's from the media, professors or other sources, come to the opinion that the tea party is just a bunch of right-wing extreme radicals, racists _ whatever," said Patrick Kelly, a tea party activist and freshman at Elmhurst College in Elmhurst, Ill. "That's the biggest deterrent."
Tea party supporters want to open the door for young voters, and FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe said the movement can win over those under 30 by placing them in leadership roles. FreedomWorks was founded by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, and has fueled much of the movement's growth.
"More young leaders begets more young participants," Kibbe said. He said that young voters are tougher to organize but that the tea party can engage them through things they enjoy. "The tea party is different," he said. "We have music, we have fun, we do protests. It's a different set of activities than your typical, canned Republican stump speech that was driving people away in droves."
Matthew Segal, the 25-year-old executive director of the nonpartisan Student Association for Voter Empowerment, said the tea party's opposition to government action also turns off young voters. "The tea party is based on an anti-government premise, and young people are the most trusting constituency of government," said Segal, whose Washington-based organization promotes electoral participation by students.
And while the tea party often seems to be recalling earlier times, with rhetoric harkening back to the Founding Fathers, American youth don't always share those sympathies. Even the movement's name refers to an insurrection more than two centuries ago, notes Christopher Kukk, who teaches political science at Western Connecticut State University.
"It's all about keeping America, preserving America, not changing America," Kukk said. Young people, he said, are "talking about changing America."
Many young voters also recoil at the tea party's homogenous racial makeup. According to the Pew Research Center's October political survey, 85 percent of registered voters who agree with the tea party are white. Just 2 percent are black.
"The young generation is just by the numbers the most diverse generation in American history," Levine said. "You can't get that much purchase on this generation if you look like you're all white."
Supporters agree that a large part of the party's problem with youth is perception. Although some tea party groups are libertarian and don't espouse socially conservative values, voters and the media rarely make that distinction, said Emily Ekins, a UCLA doctoral student who studies the movement's different, and sometimes opposing, philosophies.
Some tea party backers also note the generational gap when it comes to all the talk about history. Joel Pollak, a tea party-endorsed Republican trying to unseat Democrat Jan Schakowsky in Illinois' 9th Congressional District, said young voters' lack of Cold War memories prevents them from recognizing the threat that overreaching government policies pose to American freedom.
"Young people today grew up with very little knowledge of communism and socialism," the 33-year-old Pollak said.
Still, observers see an opportunity for a third-party group to make headway. More than 40 percent of voters under 30 don't identify with a major political party, according to Harvard University's October poll.
"There is room for an independent party to rise up and grab young people," Segal said. "If the tea party numbers don't show that, then they clearly aren't resonating with young voters."
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It's no shock to find that young people indoctrinated by leftists in academia cling to leftist beliefs. When they hit the real world, they are in for a harsh lesson. Good luck with all those crushing student debts and no jobs after graduation.
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No surprise, but a terrible tragedy that young people, current President included, are only taught Alinsky-onomics through the age of 30 and need to find out real info by accident or by making political-economic mistakes. We will never have an economy hitting on all cylinders consistently while we keep the fundamentals of how it works a secret from the newer participants.
The citizens on Communist China, a totalitarian, dictatorial regime with zero consent of the governed are receiving, in some ways, better economic governance than we are.
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Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I can guarantee you Bamster already has his strategy for dealing with a Rep majority in Congress and based on history it WILL work to revive him
If Boehner does nothing more the oppose Bamster the Republicans WILL lose next cycle. Here are two historic precedents for the exact same strategy and posture.
The "do nothing Congress" of 1948 which resulted in Truman upsetting Dewey and the Crats retaking both houses. Also more recently the Reps strategy when Newt was speaker in 1995 paved the way for Clinton's comeback and eventually Newt left with disasterously low poll support:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80th_United_States_Congress
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_government_shutdown_of_1995
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I agree with pundits who say that Reps better not think any win is some sort of referendum for them rather than a repudiation of Bamster and Pelosi.
Strick right wing libertarianism/conservatism alone will not work with independents who want problems fixed in some way IMHO.
There is just too much of the country that wants others to pay for their ills. 50% don't pay taxes. So tax breaks ain't gonna win them over.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI53fHNygpI
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Is the "barfed up" speech a response to my post?
"free market principles" sounds ok to me and others who pay taxes. But explain that to those who rely on doles to pay for their food, shelter, and sustenance and who would as Clinton says be on bread lines if not for the doles and bank bailouts.
No one on the right, libertarian or conservative is explaining this to those people.
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CCP, From the thread 'California' I thought I would move my reply over to 'The Way Forward' as I wander with my answer.
"Doug, What is your take with California? The state that gave us Reagan in the 70's? Rush was saying Fiorina and Whitman lost because they are "RINOS". He actually believes a stricter conservative would have won."
No. Some things aren't winnable, but in general a more consistent pro-freedom message is more persuasive than the we are just like them but not as bad message, with no mention or commitment to core governing principles. The next Presidential race needs to be won without California unfortunately, just like Obama was able to win his Presidency without getting my vote. Some people you need to persuade - some people you need to defeat. Rand Paul wouldn't win in Calif. but he can play a role in this. No bailouts for failed states. Bailouts prevent error corrections. I have no idea what it would take to make California look like the land of opportunity again, but right when political turnarounds seem impossible is when they can happen suddenly.
"Who do you think all these maids, grass cutters, nail hammerers, housekeepers, apple pickers are going to vote for?" - They sound like very dedicated, principled, hard working people in a country where people can jump classes and quintiles in less than a generation. I would think they would support economic freedoms but one good leader or candidate can not always cut through the rest of the noise they are hearing, and no one is really trying.
"Savage lays out a proposal for repubs in his book though I haven't read it. He says the new "contract" or whatever you want to call it is lame. I think he may be right."
- I disagree. The 'Pledge' is a governing philosophy that would have prevented most of this economic carnage if those basic fundamentals had been adhered to a few years back. http://pledge.gop.gov/
"the pocketbook issue" - Yes. There are hundreds of issues out there. My opposition to abortion and yours to immigration are not starting points - they follow things like giving responsibilities back to the states and having a federal government provide for our security. The focus needs to be on what rescues the republic right now and that requires a focus on what unites the coalition, what unleashes the economy, what balances the books, and what policies will get the government back to governing, not running the economy. A maid may be on the free-ride side of current federal taxation, but does she really believe that her beautiful and smart children in school and her grandchildren not yet born will never amount to anything and will never be burdened by the debt and bureaucracy that we are now growing? I don't think so. Someone needs to make that case with every bill, every vote and every issue that we face. This relates to what I posted about the tea party alienating young voters, and blacks, Hispanics, gays thinking they have more economic opportunity and freedom under Dem rule. At double digit unemployment, the facts indicate otherwise. Right now the focus needs to be (IMHO) control spending first, stop the expansion and pull the government back out of private industries other than to provide reasonable and necessary regulation.
No time now but I would like to come back to this thread and post answers Marco Rubio gave to basic liberal questions (how can government create more jobs etc.) in his debates in a very key swing state. He sounded more like Reagan than like Keynes or Krugman or a typical Dem-lite RINO. He won a swing state by a million votes over a (formerly) popular sitting governor.
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Two Reagan-esque figures both come from Florida. Marco and West. Marco needs more seasoning, but has awesome potential, West is ready for 2012.
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsOmFIX-PG0&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsOmFIX-PG0&feature=player_embedded
Someone really ready to lead on day one.
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"Is the "barfed up" speech a response to my post?"
Goodness no!!! Just riffing on a theme :-)
@Doug: Good post!
GM: That's a hard to handle political ad!
:lol: 8-) 8-)
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http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q4/view647.html#Wednesday
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Sixty Seats, nationwide.
The interesting lesson is that the "moderate" Republicans in California were repudiated. In Delaware and Nevada the country club party wing of the Republican party didn't support the conservative women, while the Democrats ran vicious personal attack campaigns. They came close in races that the Democrats considered vital. In California two liberal Republican women didn't stir up much enthusiasm, while the tea party movement was discouraged and even rejected. In Alaska it's still undecided, and won't be for a while: the Country Club Republican leadership didn't support the tea party candidate and allowed one of their ruling class to retain committee assignments. All told, it was an extraordinary election: sixty sets, and the key conservatives won in most cases; and there were informative lessons in the cases where they lost.
One lesson is that the country is appalled at what has happened in the past four years, but not ready to turn to the Republicans in a blind trust. Another is that the mechanics of party structure remain important.
Carly Fiorina ran as "a Republican willing to compromise". She took conservative stands, but she didn't try to rally the conservatives and the tea party. California has a highly professional Democratic machine with a unionized ground game; the only way to defeat it is to turn out the Republican and Independent vote, and that didn't happen. There were local movements against Sanchez in Bob Dornan's old seat, but they weren't good enough. California is a special case, with a long established and well oiled political machine; it won't be turned around easily. The same is true of New York.
Obama is now calling for openness and compromise. We must find common ground. Hardly astonishing: now he is eager to sit down with both parties. A typical and predictable speech. He has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
The question is, have the Republicans learned anything?
The election has given the Republic another chance, but only a chance. It's time to build on that. We can begin by thinking hard about what "building consensus" means. We know what it means to the President. We know where Carly Fiorina got by making her willingness to compromise a key part of her campaign. Does the Republican leadership?
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Republican tactics:
First, send an Obama-care repeal bill to the Senate. See if any Democrats will vote for it. If not, get them on record. If they will, then Obama must veto it; try to pass it over his veto. Get those who are defending it on record.
Second, refuse any appropriation for enforcing it. Append "provided that no revenues appropriated under this Act shall be used in any way for enforcement of the Health Care Act" to every appropriation for anything else; then just don't initiate or pass any appropriation for its enforcement. Again make the Democrats step up and defend their agenda.
The nation repudiated the Obama agenda last night. The Republicans need to make certain that the next election is also a referendum on that agenda.
The Tea Party needs to think hard about its candidates, understanding that every one of them is going to be subjected to vicious personal attacks designed to make them appear to be flakes or crooks or utter incompetents. The attacks will be unrelenting, and may not be based on anything factual. Candidates need to learn how to deal with la calumna as a campaign strategy. (See the Barber of Seville) and only choose candidates who can shrug that off and stay to message. That's not going to be easy.
The Tea Party can be proud. They hold the balance of power in the United States. It is no mean accomplishment.
And the Republican leadership needs to understand: the Tea Party played by the rules. They ran in primaries, and where they didn't win they still turned out to vote Republican. It is now the turn of the Country Club Republicans to learn how to play to win. The Tea Party holds the balance of power here -- and West Virginia shows there are alternatives to the Republican Party if the Country Club hasn't learned that. It's not an attractive alternative. It is better if the Republicans become a genuine center-right party.
All told it was a great night for the Republic. Not as great as I had hoped it would be, but it will have to do. It's a great start.
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Doug writes (a lot of food for thought),
"Who do you think all these maids, grass cutters, nail hammerers, housekeepers, apple pickers are going to vote for?" - They sound like very dedicated, principled, hard working people in a country where people can jump classes and quintiles in less than a generation. I would think they would support economic freedoms but one good leader or candidate can not always cut through the rest of the noise they are hearing, and no one is really trying."
You are right about no one trying. I haven't heard anyone making this case. I am not for amnesty though which is what the illegals want.
"Savage lays out a proposal for repubs in his book though I haven't read it. He says the new "contract" or whatever you want to call it is lame. I think he may be right."
- I disagree. The 'Pledge' is a governing philosophy that would have prevented most of this economic carnage if those basic fundamentals had been adhered to a few years back. http://pledge.gop.gov/
I'll have to review the pledge. From what I saw before it was rather vague.
"This relates to what I posted about the tea party alienating young voters, and blacks, Hispanics, gays thinking they have more economic opportunity and freedom under Dem rule."
I don't recall this post. The Tea Party is alienating these groups?
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The tea party isn't hip and cool, like Jon "I'm afraid of being identified as jewish" Stewart or Snooki.
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""Who do you think all these maids, grass cutters, nail hammerers, housekeepers, apple pickers are going to vote for?" - They sound like very dedicated, principled, hard working people in a country where people can jump classes and quintiles in less than a generation. I would think they would support economic freedoms but one good leader or candidate can not always cut through the rest of the noise they are hearing, and no one is really trying."
EXACTLY SO!!!
In the big picture we can say "We will unleash you to succeed!" but THEN we must be able to specifically name the leashes that hold them back and what we are going to do to cut them.
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"but THEN we must be able to specifically name the leashes that hold them back and what we are going to do to cut them"
Okay, here's one. Besides lowering and simplifying tax rates, how about a 90 day delay for all government compliance requirements for all private sector new-hires, including no tax withholding for 90 days, and a delay to file all paperwork, forms, IRS/OSHA/workman's comp/healthcare etc. requirements.
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Doug, anyone:
Any thing else at the federal level?
And what about at the state level?
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http://hotair.com/archives/2010/11/06/video-rubio-gives-gop-address-calls-it-the-republican-second-chance/
If you want to see why Democrats feared Marco Rubio so much that they tried to stick a knife in the back of their own candidate to stop him, this video demonstrates just how powerful a figure he will become with a national platform on which to speak. The GOP may not have had a speaker like Rubio since Ronald Reagan, excelling at both the message and the mechanics of oratory — and even Reagan didn’t have this kind of compelling backstory. Rubio reminded listeners of his origins from a people exiled from their birthplace because of their desire for freedom, and the dream of a better life that is a “sacred duty” for this generation to deliver to the next, not to mortgage from the next generation for our own exploitation.
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Rubio's message is of Reagan but his presentation reminds me more of JFK.
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"Doug, anyone: Any thing else at the federal level? And what about at the state level?"
At the state level, hard to answer with 50 different states. Mine just made the biggest flip in the legislature since parties have been designated on ballots. Yours, ... :-( Seriously, the states have some role in this mainly by keeping their competitiveness up and lessening the burden they place on enterprise and investment. I would like to see states implement preferential long term capital gains rates. (Does your state have that now?) It make no sense to tax inflationary gains as ordinary income. If nothing else it violates cruel and unusual punishment. I like what states have done to join together and fight PelosiCare.
At the federal level, we face two tasks: a) rescue the republic, and b) keep the political momentum moving forward because point a. will take more than one election cycle.
Here is a 6-legged stool, taxes, healthcare, spending, energy, monetary reform and the border, to set the foundation for sustained growth.
Taxes: The House should vote to make tax cuts permanent immediately upon taking office. The Senate will probably agree to extend them all for one year, but that only leaves us in the same lousy situation we were in the past year with investors still not knowing what future rates will be. I think this will need to settle at two years which rightfully passes it to the next congress (and next President) which means letting the people decide again.
Health care defund needs to be accompanied with 'repeal and replace'. Don't let the critics say it is going back to the way it was. Republicans had bills that did most of the popular parts of this bill without the total takeover of government. Go back to the best of those ideas and pass it in the House. Then defund the PelosiCare while the 'greatest deliberative body bloviates and dithers on the new proposals.
Spending. End earmarks for two years - really - and roll back discretionary spending to 2008 levels. That is a pretty good compromise; I would rather roll them back to 1956 levels.
Cap / Trade / Energy Tax: I would take each serious proposal in this arena and conduct an up or down vote on each. In other words reject these political limits on energy and get Dems on record for their votes. Again I would do it right away so manufacturers know those caps and taxes are not coming. Then approve ANWR, some offshore drilling, more clean coal and more nuclear. Also a major new effort toward expanding clean natural gas into more areas of production and usage from north American sources.
The Fed: I would put the Fed on notice that we aren't going to tolerate another failed attempt at wealth through inflation and devaluation. That isn't where the jobs are. Let the Fed know they will be getting their congressional charter re-written if they can't stay focused on their primary mission, a strong stable dollar.
Border: Link some of the human talent returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and resources freeing up with the need to secure the border.
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Doug:
Good stuff all, but the intended meaning of my question was focused on appealing to Latino Americans. :-) Sorry for my lack of clarity :oops:
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"...appealing to Latino Americans"
I never understood why Republicans couldn't get a group of very persuasive black conservatives into predominantly black neighborhoods and at least expose people to a different message and win maybe a few votes.
Republicans today should use the historic and impressive new class of newly elected Hispanic Republicans to take a very optimistic, pro-growth economic message to the Hispanic community.
Second is to somehow get ahead of the curve on getting the undocumented documented and out of the shadows, without true amnesty and without ripping apart the conservative base. But I really don't see how that can be done.
One question I have regarding Marco Rubio is what connection Cuban-Americans have with Mexican-Americans and people here from South America. It often seems that politically they do not. Does anyone out there have any insight on that?
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Dashing off an observation:
The Cubans who came to US, especially Florida in 1959-60 etc. were the successful 10% of Cuba-- which in many ways was a much more successful country than people realize e.g. a very high literacy rate.
The Mexicans who come to the US tend to be of those not finding opportunity in Mexico.
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A Reagan speech juxtaposed with perfect examples from today of what he warned about then. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wusgcG4rfo
If there is anyone out there young enough to not have lived through Reagan's spoken convictions or else weren't paying attention then, here is a 2 minute chance to start.
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By JOHN FUND
When it comes to Hispanic voters, last week's elections were a tale of two results for Republicans. On one level, the GOP can take pride in the fact that 31% of all Hispanic members of Congress are now in their party. But on another level, the overwhelming Democratic advantage among Hispanics helped cost the GOP key Senate seats in Nevada, Colorado and California.
The next Congress will feature an unprecedented five new Hispanic Republicans. Two are from Texas and defeated Democratic incumbents - Bill Flores of Bryan and Quico Conseco from San Antonio. Jaime Herrera was elected to an open seat in Washington state. Raul Labrador defeated a Democratic incumbent in Idaho. David Rivera won an open House seat in Florida, just as Marco Rubio won that state's vacant U.S. Senate seat. In addition, Republicans elected two Hispanic governors -- prosecutor Susan Martinez in New Mexico and Brian Sandoval, a judge, in Nevada.
But Hispanic voters also powered the come-from-behind victories of two Democratic Senators. Hispanics accounted for 14% of the electorate in Nevada, up from 12% in the last midterm election of 2006. The two-to-one advantage they gave Majority Leader Harry Reid allowed him to win by a surprising 50% to 45% margin. In Colorado, Hispanic voters made up 13% of the vote, up from only 9% four years ago. Their big margin in favor of Democratic Senator Michael Bennet helped him pull off a come-from-behind victory.
Finally, in California exit polls show Hispanics made up 22% of all those voting, up from 19% in 2006. Republican Carly Fiorina won Anglo voters over Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer by nine points, but her 65% to 28% loss among Hispanics doomed her chances for an upset.
There are some lessons here. Clearly, Sharron Angle's ad depicting dark-skinned figures violating U.S. immigration laws angered many Hispanic voters in Nevada, especially after she clumsily tried to claim they might have been Asian. Similarly, the presence of anti-immigration hardliner Tom Tancredo on Colorado's ballot as the de facto Republican candidate for governor helped fuel Hispanic turnout.
On the other hand, there were Republican success stories. Texas Governor Rick Perry won 38% of the Hispanic vote in his re-election bid this year. He credits his showing to his advocacy of economic opportunity even while he vowed to tighten border controls. Marco Rubio won 40% of the non-Cuban Hispanic vote in Florida (and 55% of the overall Hispanic vote) and ran effective Spanish-language ads describing what the American dream means for immigrants. Columnist Luisita Lopez Torregrosa writes in PoliticsDaily.com that both men "appeal to the growing Latino middle- and upper-classes in states like Florida and Texas who oppose illegal immigration (because the negative image of illegal immigrants affects the image of all Latinos) and who believe in assimilation in the American mainstream."
Going forward, Republicans know that hardline immigration positions seen as insensitive to Hispanics can cost them votes among a growing share of the electorate. On the other hand, candidates can talk tough on immigration and still do well with Hispanic voters if they can convincingly promote a message of economic opportunity.
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"candidates can talk tough on immigration and still do well with Hispanic voters if they can convincingly promote a message of economic opportunity"
Truthfully, that would be the ONLY hope for Republicans to gain Latino voters who overwhelming like big government tax dollar support.
I am dubious it would work.
Remember, if all those who could legally have voted did - it would have been a victory for Dems. The Repubs won because of of likely "voters" and turn out.
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A well articulated, optimistic economic message gets you up to mid-30s percent of Hispanic vote on a good year. Those numbers and Crafty's earlier post confirm what I suspected about Cuban Americans. They are not politically connected to other Hispanics.
"Texas Governor Rick Perry won 38% of the Hispanic vote"
"Marco Rubio won 40% of the non-Cuban Hispanic vote in Florida"
As I suspected, Marco Rubio's ethnic and culture advantage with Hispanics is worth about 2 points outside of Florida though his across the board appeal is very high.
Republicans need to consider (again) getting out ahead of their opponents with a passable 'documentation' solution that improves the status quo. There isn't going to be mass deportation and Republicans can't simultaneously play to the resentment of illegals and hope for increasing their Hispanic support.
We need a settlement framework that will give us a shot at winning more than 40% of the national Hispanic vote without tearing apart the coalition and losing people with the concerns that CCP has very well expressed here. I know Rove and McCain types already tried. It needs to be a much tougher, longer term agreement (IMHO).
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The crisis that threatens this country is the ethnic loyalties that trump American loyalty. Rewarding illegal immigration is corrosive to the rule of law. If "La Raza" is more important than America, then we are fcuked.
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"Rewarding illegal immigration is corrosive to the rule of law."
I agree, but what then? The status quo IS an acceptance of illegality. Mass deportation is not going to happen. If Republicans write the bill, new border enforcement could actually come ahead of other provisions. I'm suggesting some sort of documentation agreement tough enough to be hated by extreme groups but to put some kind of offer on the table to bring an underworld out of the shadows within 10 years, I would say, before the next census. The last census was a missed opportunity. For security alone, we should know who is here.
Perhaps renewable work papers with some enforceable criteria, some deportation, and never citizenship or voting for anyone who entered illegally and won't go back to re-apply.
The other path I see is to ignore the problem, let Dems win in 2012 - all branches, buy gold, allow the collapse, and go underground ourselves.
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1. Secure the border. It can be done. It should have been done long ago.
2. Prosecute the employers of illegal aliens after the needed changes in state/federal law.
3. Empower local level law enforcement to enforce the laws against illegal immigration.
4. Cut off all welfare, medical benefits to illegals.
Make these stick and the vast majority will self deport.
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"1. Secure the border.
2. Prosecute the employers of illegal aliens
3. Empower local level law enforcement to enforce the laws against illegal immigration.
4. Cut off all welfare, medical benefits to illegals.
Make these stick and the vast majority will self deport."
- I am confident that we can get you, me and everyone to the right of you and me, (not exactly a controlling majority) to support this. Point 4 is not going to happen, therefore mass self-deportation is not going to happen. Only the people who wanted to work would leave. During the heated debates for point 4, we will drop our percentages to single digits, lose all branches and return to my plan b: lose the country, buy gold and go underground ourselves.
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You can have a multiethnic/racial society, but not a multicultural one. Best case, you get Quebec in Canada, worse case, the former Yugoslavia. That leads us back to the aformentioned plan B.
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GM nails it:
"The crisis that threatens this country is the ethnic loyalties that trump American loyalty. Rewarding illegal immigration is corrosive to the rule of law. If "La Raza" is more important than America, then we are fcuked."
For a very long time I have had a wonderful Mexican mechanic who has a small neighborhood shop with two men under him. He has been here a long time and speaks English just fine and seems to have Americanized. Often he and his guys and I have bantered in Spanish; it chuckled them to see just how Mexicanized my Spanish was-- expressions I use are those only of someone who has spent a lot of time in country off the beaten path. I thought and felt him to be exactly how it should be for Mexicans coming to America.
A couple of months ago I had on a t-shirt with a "Viva la Revolucion Reagan" caption to a silhouette of head shot of President Reagan with a posture like that of the famous Che Guevara picture. So my mechanic gets aggro with me with "!Viva la Raza!" Those who know of these things know that this is exactly whereof GM speaks. Things went back and forth a bit, with one of his guys also chiiming in with his own "!Viva la Raza!" with me answering that this was America, that the place for people who thought of themselves as La Raza was 120 miles to the south and "!Viva La Migra!" (This is pocho slang for the INS).
This is the short version of the story; bottom line though is that I feel quite bummed; I liked him, felt him to be a good addition to America, and then it turns out I had been fooled as to where his sense of loyalty lay
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It's not one bit different than a skinhead shouting "White power". Would an advocacy group called "The Race", that claimed to speak for the concerns of "european-americans" and european culture and european immigrants (legal or illegal) get the mainstream acceptance that "La Raza" does?
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I always wonder what is the correct category for Ronald Reagan speeches. He deserves founding fathers status or a place of his own. With Marco Rubio, he fits just fine under 'the way forward' but it looks to me like at this point in his career deserves a category of his own or could share easily share one with the Gipper.
Anyone who remembers Nov-Dec 2000 with the Florida recount bouncing from the Sec. of State to the candidates' attorneys to the Florida Supreme Court to the hanging chads and mistaken Buchanan votes in Palm Beach County to the absentee military vote controversy to the uneven recounts from Miami Dade and Broward unlike the rest of the state and then up to the Supreme Court where two different questions are settled with two different votes and the recount ends with Bush (rightly)awarded the President in total anger and disbelief by the other side... anyone who remembers all of that should appreciate that within one decade a 39 year old son of an exiled maid and a bartender is elected U.S. Senator from Florida - by a margin of a MILLION VOTES - over a second place Republican sitting Governor and third place sitting Democratic Congressman. In his victory speech he asked his supporters to pray that he never lets Washington change him and with this speech introduces himself to the nation along with the serious challenge the new congress faces.
My first criteria for leadership of the movement is the ability to articulate freedom. This is what I mean by that!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-2oZ2MoP-0[/youtube]
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Doug:
If you search for "Ronald Reagan" on the "Founding Fathers" thread you will find him there. My house, my rules, and my rules say Ronald Reagan IS a Founding Father!
Rubio is certainly off to a most promising start and is a man to watch, but let us remember that Reagan had a very successful career as an actor and was head of the Screen Actor Guild (what a wonderful education in the ways of some of the finest liars on the planet and as such for a career in politics!) activist, governor of CA for 8 years during turbulent times, and an unsuccessful run for the Presidency before being elected. At this point Rubio has the right values and speaks well but he has little life experience and testing so far IMHO.
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By ZOLTAN HAJNAL
Lost in the GOP's euphoria over its landslide midterm victory is the fact that the Republican Party has almost become a whites-only party. Its strategy may win seats now, but it will lose over the long run.
Republicans won big in 2010 primarily because they won big among white voters. The 60% of the white vote that Republicans garnered last Tuesday is, by most estimates, the highest proportion of the white vote that the GOP has won in any national election since World War II.
Relying on white support is not a new strategy for the party. In 2008, 91% of the votes that John McCain received in his presidential bid came from white voters.
The problem for Republicans is two-fold. First, whites may currently be the majority but they are a declining demographic. The proportion of all voters who are white has already declined to 75% today from 94% in 1960. By 2050, whites are no longer expected to be a majority of the U.S. population.
Second, Republicans are alienating racial and ethnic minorities—the voters who will ultimately replace the white majority and who they need to stay in power. In every national election in the past few decades, Democrats have dominated the nonwhite vote. Democrats typically garner about 90% of the black vote, two-thirds of the Latino vote, and a clear majority of the Asian-American vote—and 2010 didn't fundamentally alter this pattern.
Even with Democrats presiding over the worst economy since the Great Depression, racial and ethnic minorities did not turn away from the Democratic Party. Last week Latinos favored Democrats over Republicans nearly 2 to 1 (64% to 34%), blacks voted overwhelmingly for Democrats (90%), and a clear majority of Asian- Americans (56%) supported Democrats.
If minorities didn't give up on the Democratic Party last week, they are unlikely to do so without dramatic changes in the platforms of the two parties. A growing and resolutely Democratic nonwhite population is clearly a serious threat to the Republican electoral calculus.
Republicans thus face a real dilemma. They may be able to gain over the short term by continuing their current strategy of ignoring or attacking minorities. But that is short-sighted.
Over the long term—as white voters become a smaller and smaller fraction of the electorate and Latinos and other racial and ethnic minorities become a larger and larger share of the electorate—any campaign that appeals primarily to whites will be doomed.
Mr. Hajnal, an associate professor of political science at U.C. San Diego, is author of "America's Uneven Democracy" (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
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The GOP needs to be more vocal about why their position is what it is. The Demms have a wonderful dogma about fairness, empowerment and caring (yeah, touchy feely stuff.....). The GOP expresses the same thing but it is framed as what the numbers say and over time this is the right course........... They need to frame things with more immediacy, and as "this puts more food on the table NOW, and in the future will provide even more....." or as "Refuse to be a slave of the state! According to this survey, in the last 5 years, the state has created more slaves by........."
Also start putting out "study guides" that are always focussed strictly on helping people getting GOOD information to make up their own mind. Show a "selflessness" and define the party by that. Be the "Make up your own mind party" rather than what looks like the "WASP fudy duddy party"
It will appeal to the thinkers and the honest and the producers in many more ways than they are currently appealing. "Make up your own mind about religion, Government does not do that for you". "Make up your own mind about an appropriate lifestyle, government does not do that for you"
When you get right down to it, the democrats and republicans are not about government- they are really just different lobbying groups for jobs for politicians.........
It's true!!! And I think this comment could be posted in a lot of sections. For example, do you want more Hispanic to vote Republican? Most Mexicans I know work hard for their money; they embody the American Dream. So get the message out.... and add a little touchy feely stuff...
And you might find a lot of Hispanics changing parties.
The same applies to truly sealing the border and strictly enforcing the laws, but offering some
form of amnesty (sorry) for qualified (healthy and non criminal) applicants. If presented right, many Hispanics will understand and support
the Republican party position. The Republican party has some great ideas, they just need a little touch feely stuff to sell it.... :-)
Give them hope, the possibility of reaching their dreams through hard work. Isn't that what the Republican Party is all about?
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I just did a yahoo search on "why immigrants vote democrat". Didn't find much. Wikepedia has information when one looks at Demcrat party with regards to history and voting preferences of different groups.
For example Asians used to be more Republican - when they came from Communist countries. That trend has changed. I wonder if it has changed in part because thier children are going to liberal dominated American schools and thus grow up more socially liberal than their tried and true elders.
Since most Latinos are lower wage employees they are simply not going to vote for reduction in government benefits. It just believe it could happen.
I was very disheartened frankly when I heard Dick Morris on O'Reilly last night. Did anyone else see him explain why Repbuplicans didn't win 100 in the house and a majority in the Senate as he predicted?
He stated he studied the situation with Zogby. And they determined that 3% of the people who had not yet decided within 6 days of the election overwhelmingly voted for Bamster et al. Why? Because most were already Democrat and Obama running around the country "reving" up his base worked to get them out to vote.
He nodded yes when O'Reilly asked him if that means Bamster still has considerable power.
I am not so heartened as Hannity wants to sell us the notion conservatism is back. Still 50% do not pay taxes in this country. That stat alone is a disaster for what this country stands/or better stood for.
And Crafty's disappointment with his Mexican mechanic who he thought would have (at least by now) *bought into* the ideals of America is exactly why IMO Reagan made a huge mistake not enforcing laws against illegals in the 80's. These immigrants are not the same as those from Europe. Many of them come from countries with socialist movements. They may not like dictatorships but they are necessarily capatilists either.
I see the revolving door of Latinos going to and from the obstetrics floor in the hospital. Their children are in our schools. Someone who works in the system told me they were not kidding at all when they said one of the first English words they learn is Medicaid.
I probably agree with Doug. I prefer what GM says but it is probably political suicide. I would not rule out Bamster giving them all amnesty. Apparantly there is nothing that could stop him or do anything about it. All he has to do is want to do it.
I hope I am very wrong about this - but we may already have seen the Tea Party at its peak.
The country is almost given away. I mean if we couldn't win the Senate this time around????
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Amnesty is a message to everyone in the world that aspired to become an American and showed respect for this country and it's laws, that they were stupid for believing that the rule of law is important and filling out the forms and waiting for years to come here. Let's be clear, as our president would say, do what you want, no matter what the law says. If enforcing the law seems too difficult, we won't do it. Forget waiting in line at the US embassy. Save your money for the coyotes.
The rule of law is now as dated as powdered wigs and quill pens.
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"Amnesty is a message to everyone in the world that aspired to become an American and showed respect for this country and it's laws"
I agree with. It doesn't help when our own President doesn't even respect this country. I am still not clear why he think it necessary to go around apologizing for us. For example, we need to repair relations with the Muslims. Shouldn't they be apologizing to us?
I wonder. Would the "Muslim world" if you will, have liked us if it weren't for our support of Israel?
Somehow I think the Jews are as usual the excuse for some other issue.
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Not just, "I agree with"
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By ARTHUR LAFFER
Since its cyclical zenith in December 2007, U.S. economic production has been on its worst trajectory since the Great Depression. Massive stimulus spending and unprecedented monetary easing haven't helped, and yet the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve still cling to the book of Keynes. It's an approach ill-suited to solving the growth problem that the United States has today.
The solution can be found in the price theory section of any economics textbook. It's basic supply and demand. Employment is low because the incentives for workers to work are too small, and the incentives not to work too high. Workers' net wages are down, so the supply of labor is limited. Meanwhile, demand for labor is also down since employers consider the costs of employing new workers—wages, health care and more—to be greater today than the benefits.
Firms choose whether to hire based on the total cost of employing workers, including all federal, state and local income taxes; all payroll, sales and property taxes; regulatory costs; record-keeping costs; the costs of maintaining health and safety standards; and the costs of insurance for health care, class action lawsuits, and workers compensation. In addition, gross wages are often inflated by the power of unions and legislative restrictions such as "buy American" provisions and the minimum wage. Gross wages also include all future benefits to workers in the form of retirement plans.
For a worker to be attractive, that worker must be productive enough to cover all those costs plus leave room for some profit and the costs of running an enterprise. Being in business isn't easy, and today not enough workers qualify to be hired.
But workers don't focus on how much it costs a firm to employ them. Workers care about how much they receive and can spend after taxes. For them, the question is how the wages they'd receive for working compare to what they'd receive (from the government) if they didn't work, plus the value of their leisure from not working.
The problem is that the government has driven a massive wedge between the wages paid by firms and the wages received by workers. To make work and employment attractive again, this government wedge has to shrink. This can happen over the next two years, even with a Democratic majority in the Senate and President Obama in the White House, through the following measures:
1) The full extension of the Bush tax cuts. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives can write legislation extending all the tax cuts in perpetuity. Of particular importance for employment is keeping the highest personal income tax rate at 35%, the capital gains tax rate at 15% and the dividend tax rate at 15%, while eliminating the estate tax permanently. If the Senate blocks this legislation or Mr. Obama refuses to sign it, House Republicans should hold firm and let voters decide in 2012. (My guess is that he'll sign it or have his veto overridden.)
2) The full repeal of ObamaCare, which allows individuals to pay only five cents for each dollar of health care. Who do you think pays the other 95 cents? As former Sen. Phil Gramm notes, if he had to pay only five cents for each dollar of groceries he bought, he would eat really well—and so would his dog. No single bill is more antithetical to growth than ObamaCare.
Repeal could take the form of Michele Bachmann's Legislative Repeal Act, and if it is blocked in the Senate or by a veto Republicans should continue bringing it up every six months. Come 2012 the public will have a clear view of what congressional candidates stand for. The end game for U.S. prosperity is the election in 2012.
3) The cancellation of all spending that punishes those who produce and rewards those who don't. This is really the distinction between demand-side economics and supply-side economics. Stimulus spending and quantitative easing don't make it more rewarding to work an extra hour. If the government pays people not to work and taxes people who do work, is it really so difficult to see why employment is so low?
So the government should sell its stakes in public companies acquired via TARP, sell government-run enterprises that lose money (e.g., Amtrak and the Postal Service), end farm subsidies that pay people not to farm, cancel the rest of the stimulus and return all spending programs to their pre-stimulus levels. Congress should also continually examine spending in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it should return the duration of unemployment benefits to the standard 26 weeks, from the current 99 weeks.
4) The enactment of stalled free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.
These changes would spur recovery, but they are just the start. Elected officials should offer longer-term measures that voters can judge in 2012, when 33 senators—including 21 Democrats, two independents who caucus with the Democrats, and 10 Republicans—as well as the entire House and President Obama are up for re-election.
Beyond 2012, the ideal growth agenda would include:
1) A true flat tax, a la Jerry Brown's proposal in 1992. Congress should replace all federal taxes (except sin taxes) with two flat-rate taxes, one on personal income and one on net business sales. The personal income tax would be on all forms of income: wage income, dividends, inheritance (as proposed by Democratic Rep. Jared Polis), and all capital gains. This tax code would remove loopholes and almost all deductions, and the static revenue rate would be around 11.5%.
2) Price stability. Congress should revise the Federal Reserve's mandate, making it serve only the goal of price stability (and not also full employment). In addition, the Fed should follow a monetary rule, targeting either the quantity of money or the price level. There can be no prosperity without price stability.
3) Passage of a balanced budget amendment, without raising taxes. This would prevent government from being able to balance its budget by unbalancing the budgets of its citizens. And it would force politicians to make difficult decisions about what spending is worthwhile, just like the rest of us. (Marc: How would the language for this read?)
4) Finally, saving the best for last, the mother of all supply-side reforms is incentive pay for politicians (which the comedian Jackie Mason called "putting the politicians on commission"). Politicians must be held personally responsible for their actions. In business, firms align the incentives of decision makers with the incentives of shareholders to ensure that they take the best course of action. Washington must begin doing the same by creating an incentive structure that pays elected officials according to factors such as stock market performance and economic growth. (Marc: For some reason I am reminded of Fannie Mae accelerating its profits in order to pump up bonuses for its executives)
Mr. Laffer is the chairman of Laffer Associates and co-author of "Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status" (Threshold, 2010).
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I question growth agenda #4 as well.
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Crafty,
Some great ideas. Not all new but nonetheless excellent. NOw if only we can convince enough of the electorate this is the right path for ALL of us. We need the expert political salesmanship. I don't know yet if we have it. People on the dole, those who don't pay taxes are not going to be easily convinced. See the terrible situation in Ft. Lauderdale wherein police officers are being let go. A similar situation is happening here in Newark, NJ where a large proportion of the city work force is being let go. I have to say the reason it is like that is the more senior employees are essentially screwing the newer employees. They refuse to budge on their contracts so the only thing left is to fire the newer city employees. My hunch is the same thing is happening to private union members. Some tell me the union "ain't what it used to be". In other words the union bosses are screwing them to keep their cushy positions. One union guy tells me they are having a meeting about a million dollars missing from their pension fund. It is dog eat dog.
The Republicans are going to have a very tough time convincing the "let the rich pay for it croud" that doing that is shooting themselves in their own heads. I have not yet heard a single Republican convincingly address this issue. I don't know why.
"But workers don't focus on how much it costs a firm to employ them. Workers care about how much they receive and can spend after taxes. For them, the question is how the wages they'd receive for working compare to what they'd receive (from the government) if they didn't work, plus the value of their leisure from not working."
Absolutely. As long as we can keep taking from the "rich" forget it.
By TODD WRIGHT
Updated 9:44 AM EST, Fri, Nov 12, 2010
The Broward Sheriff's Office has decided to drastically cut services to Lauderdale Lakes because the city has fallen behind in its monthly payments, the Sun-Sentinel reported.
"Let me be clear, we are not abandoning the residents of Lauderdale Lakes, but during these strained economic times, I have an obligation to the taxpayers of Broward County to ensure that services are provided based on allocated funding," Sheriff Al Lamberti wrote in a Nov. 5 e-mail notifying city leaders of the pending change.
The city owes about $6 million, which in these economic times isn't pocket change for a small city. Just last week, the City Commission approved another one-year deal with BSO.
But Lamberti's stance is the city has to pay to play, or be protected. He's made similar threats to the County Commission after complaining about an extra thin BSO budget.
While Lamberti isn't abandoning the city, it certainly appears BSO is taking a leave of absence.
Nine sergeants and deputies will be transferred from Lauderdale Lakes to other BSO-served cities and the city will also lose the use of a ladder fire truck and 12 firefighters.
That could leave residents in a pinch when they call 911 when something goes up in flames, fire union officials said.
"We have no choice but to scale back services to the residents of Lauderdale Lakes," Lamberti said.
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"• Unmarried women voted Democrat by 61-34."
No suprise. Sure the tax payers should be their sugar daddy. I am tired of paying for this. Take care of your own children.
****DickMorris.com
« SMASH THE UNION THUG-OCRACYOBAMA’S EFFORTS WORKED
By Dick Morris11.10.2010Share this article
Published on TheHill.com on November 9, 2010
President Obama’s last-ditch attempt to turn out his voter base worked — and changed the 2010 election from a tsunami of epic proportions into a mere catastrophe for the Democrats.
John Zogby’s post-election polling reveals that voters who made up their minds about how to vote within the last week voted Democrat by 57-31 while those who made up their minds earlier backed the Republican candidate, 53-44. Zogby’s data indicated that it made no difference whether the voter decided for whom to vote two or three weeks before the election or more than a month before. Both groups backed Republicans by 10 points. But those who decided in the voting booth or in the week immediately before voting backed the Democrat by large margins.
Fortunately for the GOP, only 8 percent of the electorate were late deciders. A full 46 percent were early voters.
These Democratic late deciders were all straight from the party’s base:
• 15 percent of single voters decided late, and singles voted 64 percent Democrat.
• 14 percent of under-$25,000-income voters decided late, and voters in this income category voted Democrat by 59-36.
• 20 percent of voters 18-29 decided late, and this group backed Obama by 56-37.
So Obama’s appearances on “The Daily Show” and in youth-oriented media worked well to his party’s advantage.
Race, age and marital status were the key predictors of how a person would vote.
Racially, the Zogby poll shows that blacks cast only 10 percent of the vote and Latinos only 8 percent in the 2010 elections. In 2008, they cast 13 and 10 percent, respectively.
Obama did well among Latinos. His appeals based on immigration worked. Hispanics voted Democrat by 58-37. But, surprisingly, Zogby showed erosion among black voters, who backed the Democrat by only 72-24, well below their percentage for Obama himself in 2008.
Age played a key role in determining one’s vote:
• Among the youngest voters, 18-24, Democrats got 66 percent of the vote.
• More broadly, those aged 18-29 voted Democrat 56-37.
• Those aged 30-49 were split fairly evenly, with Democrats winning 47 percent and Republicans 50 percent.
• Voters 50-64, the baby boomers, have shifted to the Republicans, backing them by 54-43.
• And, thanks to ObamaCare, the over-65 voters backed Republicans by 57-38.
But voters under 30 constituted only 11 percent of the vote, and those 18-24 were just 3 percent. The failure of these groups to turn out in larger numbers did much to doom the Democratic candidates.
Marital status continued to be one of the key variables in our politics:
• Married men voted Republican by 60-35.
• Married women followed suit by 58-40.
• Unmarried men voted Democrat by 50-42.
• Unmarried women voted Democrat by 61-34.
Oddly, Obama’s last-minute appeal seems to have been effective based largely on demographics, not on union membership. The unions are the Democratic Party’s financial base, but not their voters. Union members broke evenly, with 49 percent backing Democrats and 47 percent voting Republican.
Historically, Democrats “come home” as Election Day approaches, and those whose involvement in politics is most marginal — who tend to be poorer, less educated and more Democrat — make late decisions to support Democrats. The 2010 election was no exception to this trend.
I had thought that it would be. Based on the solid Republican trend that continued well into October, I believed that the late deciders would tend to side more with the GOP than usual. I felt that those who normally voted Democrat would stay at home. They didn’t. And Obama’s last-minute campaigning had a lot to do with it.****
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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/11/12/school-reverses-course-ordering-student-remove-flag-bike/
California school has done a U-turn after it forced a student to remove an American flag attached to his bike, saying the Stars and Stripes could spur racial tensions on campus.
Cody Alicea,13, had been flying the flag on the back of his bicycle for almost two months to show support for veterans like his grandfather, Robert Alicea.
But just in time for Veterans Day, school officials at Denair Middle School told Cody he would no longer be allowed to display the flag, citing complaints from other students.
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From Drudge:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/13/MNIG1GBD0C.DTL&tsp=1
Homeland security estimates there are around 2.6 million illegals in California. Probably an underestimate but lets say it is remotely accurate.
There are 3 mill. self identified Latinos in California schools. So how many of these are legal, or born to illegals? How many of the 7% of Asians are there legally?
Even asking the question would get any politician threats on his/her life.
Obviously if most of these people were prospective Republicans than the entire Democratic Party would be building a Great Wall on the border. But what is the stroy with Republicans? I am not clear how much of it is they are just afraid to "offend" anyone and how much, as suggested it is due to them protecting business that rely on cheap illegal labor. I think it is more the former.
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This could go under Palin or under 2012 Presidential as well. I post it here for substance, not personalities. I see it as the way forward, economically and politically. These are bold proposals. Ryan isn't some wild extremist anymore; he is the incoming chairman of the committee, and Palin is a frontrunner putting heat on other potential candidates to say more precisely where they stand on spending and deficits, the Ryan roadmap and the deficit commission. I would like to see a couple of Democrats endorse the 'Roadmap' or publish a comprehensive plan of their own.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703766704576009322838245628.html
Why I Support the Ryan Roadmap
Let's not settle for the big-government status quo, which is what the president's deficit commission offers.
By SARAH PALIN
The publication of the findings of the president's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was indeed, as the report was titled, "A Moment of Truth." The report shows we're much closer to the budgetary breaking point than previously assumed. The Medicare Trust Fund will be insolvent by 2017. As early as 2025, federal revenue will barely be enough to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on our national debt. With spending structurally outpacing revenue, something clearly needs to be done to avert national bankruptcy.
Speaking with WSJ's Jerry Seib, Congressman Paul Ryan (R, WI) insisted that the deal between Republicans and the White House on the Bush Tax Cuts was not a second stimulus and that the agreement would promote growth despite adding to the deficit.
The commission itself calculates that, even if all of its recommendations are implemented, the federal budget will continue to balloon—to an estimated $5 trillion in 2020, from an already unprecedented $3.5 trillion today. The commission makes only a limited effort to cut spending below the current trend set by the Obama administration.
Among the few areas of spending it does single out for cuts is defense—the one area where we shouldn't be cutting corners at a time of war. Worst of all, the commission's proposals institutionalize the current administration's new big spending commitments, including ObamaCare. Not only does it leave ObamaCare intact, but its proposals would lead to a public option being introduced by the backdoor, with the chairmen's report suggesting a second look at a government-run health-care program if costs continue to soar.
It also implicitly endorses the use of "death panel"-like rationing by way of the new Independent Payments Advisory Board—making bureaucrats, not medical professionals, the ultimate arbiters of what types of treatment will (and especially will not) be reimbursed under Medicare.
The commission's recommendations are a disappointment. That doesn't mean, though, that the commission's work was a wasted effort. For one thing, it has exposed the large and unsustainable deficits that the Obama administration has created through its reckless "spend now, tax later" policies. It also establishes a clear bipartisan consensus on the need to fundamentally reform our entitlement programs. We need a better plan to build on these conclusions with common-sense reforms to tackle our long-term funding crisis in a sustainable way.
In my view, a better plan is the Roadmap for America's Future produced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.). The Roadmap offers a reliable path to long-term solvency for our entitlement programs, and it does so by encouraging personal responsibility and independence.
On health care, it would replace ObamaCare with a new system in which people are given greater control over their own health-care spending. It achieves this partly through creating medical savings accounts and a new health-care tax credit—the only tax credit that would be left in a radically simplified new income tax system that people can opt into if they wish.
The Roadmap would also replace our high and anticompetitive corporate income tax with a business consumption tax of just 8.5%. The overall tax burden would be limited to 19% of GDP (compared to 21% under the deficit commission's proposals). Beyond that, Rep. Ryan proposes fundamental reform of Medicare for those under 55 by turning the current benefit into a voucher with which people can purchase their own care.
On Social Security, as with Medicare, the Roadmap honors our commitments to those who are already receiving benefits by guaranteeing all existing rights to people over the age of 55. Those below that age are offered a choice: They can remain in the traditional government-run system or direct a portion of their payroll taxes to personal accounts, owned by them, managed by the Social Security Administration and guaranteed by the federal government. Under the Roadmap's proposals, they can pass these savings onto their heirs. The current Medicaid system, the majority of which is paid for by the federal government but administered by the states, would be replaced by a block-grant system that would reward economizing states.
Together these reforms help to secure our entitlement programs for the 21st century. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Roadmap would lead to lower deficits and a much lower federal debt. The CBO estimates that under current spending plans, our federal debt would rise to 87% of GDP by 2020, to 223% by 2040, and to 433% by 2060. Under Rep. Ryan's Roadmap, the CBO estimates that debt would rise much more slowly, peaking at 99% in 2040 and then dropping back to 77% by 2060.
Put simply: Our country is on the path toward bankruptcy. We must turn around before it's too late, and the Roadmap offers a clear plan for doing so. But it does more than just fend off disaster. CBO calculations show that the Roadmap would also help create a "much more favorable macroeconomic outlook" for the next half-century. The CBO estimates that under the Roadmap, by 2058 per-person GDP would be around 70% higher than the current trend.
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Besides new strategies and new policies, the movement toward constitutional conservatism or common sense conservatism needs new 'spokesmen'. Here's one. Too bad that people like Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem will have essentially zero experience this coming Presidential cycle, but we need all the help and talent we can get in the House and Senate as well.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvo3JzM01Jc[/youtube]
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Forwarded by an internet friend:
The piece below was part of a high school writing prompt that our daughter brought home on Friday. The paragraph is from Letters from an American Farmer , written in 1782 by Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur, a naturalized American citizen, known for observations on life in pre-Revolutionary America. His most famous work, included in the Letters, is “What Is an American?”… a classic articulation of the identity of the members of that new nation. It was considered such a definitive description of the American national character that it was included in the onboard reading material for passengers on American Airlines in the 1970s!
Three parts of this one paragraph really struck me. First, in terms of our circular’s discussion about power returning to the “East”… it is now, truly, a full circle. The second highlight, “without any part being claimed,” Crevecoeur would be surprised at the extent of the claim now! My third thought was that parts of our nation are returning to the very characteristics that the early America had been a refuge from: involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor.
I can’t help but notice how far we’ve come…afield…from what he found so promising about this new nation. This includes the switch: rather than coming to America to be changed, transformed by the opportunities…some are now coming to America to change America rather than “be melted into a new race of men.” Nothing you don’t already know…just a curious read from 228 years ago!
David
WHAT IS AN AMERICAN?
He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the east; they will finish the great circle. The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which has ever appeared, and which will hereafter become distinct by the power of the different climates they inhabit. The American ought therefore to love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born. Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement? Wives and children, who before in vain demanded of him a morsel of bread, now, fat and frolicsome, gladly help their father to clear those fields whence exuberant crops are to arise to feed and to clothe them all; without any part being claimed, either by a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord. I lord religion demands but little of him; a small voluntary salary to the minister, and gratitude to God; can he refuse these? The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. --This is an American.
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There were two big speeches this week, and I mean big as in "Modern political history will remember this." Together they signal something significant and promising. Oh, that's a stuffy way to put it. I mean: The governors are rising and are starting to lead. What a relief. It's like seeing the posse come over the hill.
The first speech was from Mitch Daniels, the Indiana governor who is the answer to the question, "What if Calvin Coolidge talked?" President Coolidge, a spare and serious man, was so famously silent, the story goes, that when a woman at a dinner told him she'd made a bet she could get him to string three words together, he smiled and said, "You lose." But he was principled, effective and, in time, broadly popular.
The other speech was from a governor newer to the scene but more celebrated, in small part because he comes from a particular media market and in large part because he has spent the past year, his first in office, taking on his state's most entrenched political establishments, and winning. His style—big, rumpled, garrulous, Jersey-blunt—has captured the imagination of the political class, and also normal people. They look at him and think, "I know that guy. I like that guy."
Both Mr. Daniels, who spoke Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and Chris Christie of New Jersey, who spoke Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute, were critical of both parties and put forward the same message: Wake up. We are in crisis. We must save our country, and we can. But if we don't move now, we will lose it. This isn't rhetoric, it's real.
Here's why response at both venues was near-rapturous: Everyone knew they meant it. Everyone knew they'd been living it.
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Mr. Daniels began with first principles—the role and purpose of government—and went to what he has done to keep his state's books in the black in spite of "the recent unpleasantness." He turned to the challenge of our era: catastrophic spending, the red ink that is becoming "the red menace." He said: "No enterprise, small or large, public or private, can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be." If a foreign army invaded, we would set aside all secondary disputes and run to the ramparts. We must bring that air of urgency to the spending crisis. It is "our generational assignment. . . . Forgive the pun when I call it our 'raison debt.'"
He argued for cuts and sunsetting, for new arrangements and "compacts" with the young. What followed has become controversial with a few conservatives, though it was the single most obvious thing Daniels said: "We have learned in Indiana, big change requires big majorities. We will need people who never tune in to Rush or Glenn or Laura or Sean," who don't fall asleep at night to C-Span, who are not necessarily engaged or aligned.
Rush Limbaugh, who is rightly respected for many reasons—lost in the daily bombast, humor and controversy is that fact that for 20 years he has been the nation's most reliable and compelling explainer of conservative thought—saw Mr. Daniels's remarks as disrespectful. Radio listeners aren't "irrelevant or unnecessary."
Of course they're not. Nor are they sufficient. If you really want to change your country, you cannot do it from a political base alone. You must win over centrists, moderates, members of the other party, and those who are not preoccupied with politics. This doesn't mean "be less conservative," it means broadening the appeal of conservative thinking and approaches. It starts with not alienating and proceeds to persuading.
The late Rep. Henry Hyde, he of the Hyde amendment, once said to me, "Politics is a game of addition." You start with your followers and bring in new ones, constantly broadening the circle to include people who started out elsewhere. You know the phrase Reagan Democrats? It exists because Reagan reached out to Democrats! He put out his hand to them and said, literally, "Come walk with me." He lauded Truman, JFK and Scoop Jackson. He argued in his first great political speech, in 1964, that the choice wasn't right or left, it was up or down.
That's what Mr. Daniels was saying. "We can search for villains on ideological grounds," but it's a waste of time. Compromise and flexibility are necessary, "purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers." We must work together. You've got to convince the other guy.
Mr. Christie covered similar territory in a way that was less aerial, more on-the-ground. He spoke of making change in Jersey.
Pensions and benefits on the state level, he said, are the equivalent of federal entitlements. They have powerful, "vocal" constituencies. He introduced pension and benefit reforms on a Tuesday in September, and that Friday he went to the state firefighters convention in Wildwood. It was 2 p.m., and "I think you know what they had for lunch." Mr. Christie had proposed raising their retirement age, eliminating the cost-of-living adjustment, increasing employee pension contributions, and rolling back a 9% pay increase approved years before "by a Republican governor and a Republican Legislature."
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.As Mr. Chrisie recounted it: "You can imagine how that was received by 7,500 firefighters. As I walked into the room and was introduced. I was booed lustily. I made my way up to the stage, they booed some more. . . . So I said, 'Come on, you can do better than that,' and they did!"
He crumpled up his prepared remarks and threw them on the floor. He told them, "Here's the deal: I understand you're angry, and I understand you're frustrated, and I understand you feel deceived and betrayed." And, he said, they were right: "For 20 years, governors have come into this room and lied to you, promised you benefits that they had no way of paying for, making promises they knew they couldn't keep, and just hoping that they wouldn't be the man or women left holding the bag. I understand why you feel angry and betrayed and deceived by those people. Here's what I don't understand. Why are you booing the first guy who came in here and told you the truth?"
He told them there was no political advantage in being truthful: "The way we used to think about politics and, unfortunately, the way I fear they're thinking about politics still in Washington" involves "the old playbook [which] says, "lie, deceive, obfuscate and make it to the next election." He'd seen a study that said New Jersey's pensions may go bankrupt by 2020. A friend told him not to worry, he won't be governor then. "That's the way politics has been practiced in our country for too long. . . . So I said to those firefighters, 'You may hate me now, but 15 years from now, when you have a pension to collect because of what I did, you'll be looking for my address on the Internet so you can send me a thank-you note.'"
It can be a great relief to turn away from Washington and look at the states, where the rubber meets the road. Real leadership is happening there—the kind that can inspire real followership.
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http://townhall.com/columnists/carolplattliebau/2011/03/07/a_word_of_warning_for_hill_republicans/page/full/
After the past few weeks, many GOP conservatives – and Tea Partiers – are beginning to understand how some of the Obamaphiles feel. Like Obama supporters, conservatives worked hard to secure leadership that, we believed, both understood what was best for America and had the courage to stand firm for real change. But the first months of GOP congressional control have been disappointing; if the GOP leadership continues down its current road, the disillusionment now being expressed by erstwhile Obama supporters like Matt Damon will soon be an entirely bipartisan affair.
Certainly, there’s no doubt that John Boehner and other congressional leaders have a tough job. In the interest of restoring America’s financial health, they are stuck proposing spending cuts and long-term, structural changes to well-beloved entitlement programs. What’s more, they’re forced to deal with a President whose budget reflected a fundamental unseriousness about the looming fiscal crisis -- and an obvious strategy of abdicating all budgetary responsibility in order to be able to demonize the GOP for any proposed cuts.
But still.
Last month, conservatives across the country were treated to fancy rhetorical footwork as some Republicans tried to explain away the collapse of their campaign-era commitment to a $100 billion spending decrease in this year’s budget. Further reductions were presented only after substantial push-back from the Tea Party and conservatives.
Just this week, Tom Coburn told radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt that a bipartisan “working group” of senators was considering a substantial cut in the home interest rate deduction for houses costing more than $500,000. Although the proposal may hold appeal inside the ornate conference rooms of Capitol Hill, in the real world, it would disproportionately punish homeowners in states with high-value houses, even as it devastates the home-building industry.
Coburn’s revelation came even as the GAO issued a report uncovering as much as $100 billion to $200 billion being spent on wasteful and duplicative government programs each year. It’s hard not to wonder: If more is to be demanded of the already-overburdened American taxpayer, shouldn’t the request come only after government has done its part to “sacrifice” first?
The tone-deafness doesn’t stop there. Days drag on, and Americans hear little from top GOP congressional leaders. What they do hear, too often, is filtered through left-leaning cable television shows. Nowhere are GOP leaders explaining why – in contrast to the “exploding deficit” scare of the early 90’s – our current fiscal situation presents an unprecedented threat, requiring serious and quick remediation. And amid all the hints about upcoming proposals for spending cuts and tax reform, no one is “connecting the dots” to help regular Americans understand how the proposals will create the conditions that secure economic growth, prosperity and a brighter future for all of us.
Instead, it’s beginning to look, once again, like leaders in the highest ranks of the GOP are more focused on their standing inside the Beltway than the promises they made to the people outside it. But this time, that won’t cut it; it’s an invitation for Tea Partiers to form their own, third party, and a recipe for political disaster come 2012.
But above all, the GOP has to act with the understanding that falling short won’t just mean unfortunate electoral results for their politicians. It will mean real trouble for America.
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WHY THE RECENTLY-PASSED CONTINUING BUDGET RESOLUTION WAS A MISTAKE - POSTED AT REDSTATE.COM
Posted by Russ Vought (Profile)
Wednesday, March 16th at 7:10PM EDT
12 Comments
Keith Hennessey critiqued opponents of the short-term CR making the case that our intransience is hurting the cause. It has been endlessly forwarded around to conservatives since yesterday. Keith argues that the short-term strategy is better because it allows the spending cut coalition to avoid the pitfalls of a public shutdown fight.
He argues that conservatives who disagree either have no strategic plan and/or want to reward themselves individually or merely play to their conservative base. Keith then argues that such conservative discontent should be channeled to “ratchet up the spending cuts in the next CR” or to “choose one funding limitation and insist that it be included.” But the gist is that conservative opponents don’t have “a complete and viable alternative strategy,” and thus instead of discarding the short-term game, it’s better to just add to the list of demands.
I respect Keith a lot. When I was cutting my teeth as a legislative aide in the Senate, Keith was one of the big dogs, and then went on to bigger and better things in the Bush White House. However, I think these arguments—because of their prevalence in Leadership and establishment circles—need to be unpacked and responded to. Read on.
FIRST, our viable alternative strategy is to force Senate Democrats to pass a bill. Currently, the very willingness of Republicans to do the short-terms absolves both Senate Democrats and the President of any responsibility. The House acted. It passed H.R. 1. The Senate has not. Harry Reid has essentially thrown up his hands and said that he can’t pass anything (notwithstanding the fact that he claims to run the Senate). We all know that he can pass something. Until the Senate passes legislation, real Congressional negotiations cannot begin. Not unlike their Wisconsin state colleagues, Democrats must participate to have a say. Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, and Chuck Schumer are not, and the short-term strategy is letting them get away with it. Furthermore, it’s letting the White House get away with staying above the fray. Keith thinks this is a good thing, but why? Obama has an advantage for sure, but this debate is not a foregone conclusion, and conservatives operating on principle have bested Obama repeatedly since he has been President.
SECOND, Republicans can and must message the following argument:
a) Democrats controlled both the Presidency and the Congress and were unable to pass a budget, leaving a portion of the responsibility to Republicans.
b) House Republicans passed H.R. 1 to fully fund the government, make a down-payment of a mere $61 billion in cuts in the face of a $1.5 trillion deficit, and limit some of the main excesses of the current federal government (Planned Parenthood, EPA, Obamacare, etc.).
c) Democrats have not responded. The Democrat Senate Majority refuses to pass not just the right bill, but any bill. And the White House sent their chief negotiator to Europe and is spending more time filling out their NCAA brackets then getting serious about their shared responsibility to fund the government. Who is unserious here?
Can we be successful in making this argument while Obama has the bully pulpit? Well, what arguments have we failed to win against the Obama bully pulpit in the last two plus years? Think of the big fights that we have had with Obama—stimulus, cap-and-trade, his budgets, and of course, Obamacare. He had the bully pulpit. We won the argument. It takes message discipline, but it can be done.
THIRD, Keith is overselling the current strategy as a “complete and viable” strategy. He states that Democrats are more afraid of a shutdown than Republicans. That is simply not true. Sure, Democrats don’t want to shut the government down over $4-6 billion in cuts because they know they can’t sell that to anyone, especially when many of the cuts were proposed by their President. However, Senators Durbin and Schumer are all but rooting for a shutdown, while Congressional Republicans are petrified of that prospect.
The mere fact that no new riders were attached to the current three-week CR is evidence of that fear. For example, House Republicans had considered re-instating the Dornan Amendment (not exactly a “new” rider, I know) to bar federal and local DC funds from being used to fund abortions, as included in H.R. 1. President Obama previously signed legislation that included this rider before Democrats weakened the language in the last appropriations cycle. Republicans removed it because they were worried about giving the Democrats an opportunity to claim they were attempting to jam thru a “policy” agenda, using deficit concerns as a pretext. Simply put, the party that quakes at the thought of a shutdown has the least amount of leverage, thus Democrats have the most until Republicans find a spine. This weakness will not be on display on this three-week extension, but it will be when Republicans start packaging substantial cuts that Democrats refuse to accept. Part of the strategic reason to oppose short-terms is to regain the leverage in this fight, and to do that, you simply must be prepared to shut the government down. Not rooting for it, but prepared for it. Diplomacy without the threat of military force does not work.
FOURTH, our strategy will lead to more cuts and more riders. Currently, the short-terms are not securing any riders. Even Keith’s suggestion of attaching an EPA rider can’t happen on an upcoming short-term, because the fear of a shutdown has reduced their leverage to demand it. What about more cuts than the $2 billion per week that each short-term seem to contain? It’s important to remember a few things here. Some of these cuts are illusory. For instance, in the current short-term, of the $6 billion in cuts, $1.7 billion was to rescind excess money that was not used for the census and was not going to be spent. That is not a real cut. Others were proposed by Democrats. In addition, with every short-term extension, it makes it harder to get the full cuts that remain because there are less remaining weeks to absorb whatever haircut is being demanded. Remember when House Leadership was saying that they couldn’t cut more because they had to “pro-rate” the $100 billion for seven months? It wasn’t much of an argument at the time, but with every new short-term it is more credible.
Most importantly, as Keith points out, conservatives have exactly three leverage points to demand concessions from Democrats over the next year: a long-term FY11 CR, a debt limit increase, and the FY12 appropriations bills. Already this three-week extension will expire on April 8, the same week that Rep. Paul Ryan is unveiling his FY12 budget. The other side knows that they are best served by one big grand bargain—thus their “rope-a-dope” strategy. Conservatives need to understand they will get more concessions by keeping these three opportunities separate. That maximizes our leverage for more cuts and limited government riders.
FIFTH, it’s important to remember that most opponents of the CR have both principled and strategic reasons for their position. When you go out and promise voters that you are going to dismantle and defund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood, and then you exclude these issues from the negotiations on the first must-pass bill, then you’re not being very principled. Also, pretending that these short-term opponents do not have a political strategy or an endgame is simply to ignore the arguments we continue to make.
All of this requires Republicans to act and talk as if they understand the seriousness of our fiscal crisis. $2 billion here, $6 billion there does not accomplish that. They need to restore leverage to the negotiations with a willingness, but not a desire to shut the government down. They need to win the daily argument for why Democrats are fundamentally unserious about cutting spending and have chosen to repeatedly run out the clock instead. They can’t do that with the present strategy.
Republicans need to dig deep and embrace the sort of brinksmanship that shows they are playing to win.
Crossposted at Heritage Action for America
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"It is necessary for every American, with becoming energy to endeavor to stop the dissemination of principles evidently destructive of the cause for which they have bled. It must be the combined virtue of the rulers and of the people to do this, and to rescue and save their civil and religious rights from the outstretched arm of tyranny, which may appear under any mode or form of government." --Mercy Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 1805
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Economic growth over the past ten years has been less than 2 percent annually. And this is a mighty soft economic recovery going on right now, following the very deep recession.
So it’s appropriate enough that Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor unveiled a strong pro-growth economic plan at Stanford’s Hoover Institution this week. Cantor is afraid the Republican budget-cutting message is a little too austere, so he’s attempting to balance the necessary budget cuts with a pro-growth, tax-and-regulatory reform message.
Cantor focuses especially on getting business tax rates down to at least 25 percent. He also proposes a tax holiday to repatriate the foreign earnings of U.S. companies. So many CEOs have made the same argument. And this was done successfully in 2004-05. If enacted, maybe $1 trillion in cash will flow back home for new investment and jobs.
But no sooner did Cantor make this speech, than the Treasury shot down any idea of a corporate-tax holiday. I guess this is the same Treasury that works for the Obama 2.0 pro-business president. Or not.
Cantor is completely right on this. He’s also right on his other proposals to lower trade barriers and put a freeze on regulatory burdens.
Mr. Cantor also has an interesting proposal to deal with the backlog of 700,000 patent requests in order to speed American innovation and small-business creation. He also believes the visa system should be streamlined to bring in high-skilled workers from abroad in order to create new jobs at home.
It will be interesting to see if Cantor’s growth message is taken up by other Republican leaders, most particularly Paul Ryan. Will Mr. Ryan include tax-and-regulatory reform with his tough budget-cutting proposals?
The only thing missing from Eric Cantor’s speech was a monetary hook to stabilize the dollar. The GOP needs a King Dollar policy. Otherwise, all the best tax cuts will be blunted by a sinking dollar and rising inflation.
But bravo to Eric Cantor for getting out a growth message. And let’s see if the GOP presidential wannabes pick up on the need for growth plan.
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There were videos posted that reached out to younger people with music and video that supported liberal causes and some envy and questioning from the conservative side asking how can we reach out with the best of today' communications and technology capabilities.
Rather than answer that, Powerline blog has posed it as a contest. Mentioned as an example is the highly informative Keynes-Hayek video posted on Economics, but the subject here is federal spending and debt which is also hard to put to song or entertainment but is costing young people every hour of every day for the rest of their lives. Stay tuned for the many great entries that are expected.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/05/029004.php
Announcing the Power Line Prize
May 8, 2011 John Hinderacker
Our nation faces an unprecedented financial crisis. Every knowledgeable citizen understands that the fiscal path we are on is unsustainable. Indefinite continuation of the status quo is not an option. There are only two possibilities: reform and collapse.
The massive federal debt that is now being incurred represents an existential threat to America's future. In a best-case scenario, it will saddle our children with financial obligations that will cripple their ability to prosper over the remainder of this century.
What to do? Federal spending must be gotten under control, obviously. The problem is ultimately a political one. Approximately one-third of Americans understand the threat posed by the federal debt crisis, and are prepared to act to meet it. Another one-third may or may not understand the threat, but either have skin in the game--i.e., their personal financial interests in government spending outweigh concern about the national welfare--or are so blinded by ideology that they are hopeless cases.
That leaves the critical one-third, many of them young, who for whatever reason do not yet understand the threat that federal spending and debt pose to them and to the country. Data have been collected; charts and graphs have been prepared; op-eds have been written. But many millions of Americans have not yet been reached or persuaded by these sober economic analyses. We need a marketing campaign: a sustained effort to use the tools of modern communication to reach and educate every American, and to mobilize popular opinion to demand reform from the politicians in Washington.
Toward that end, we are proud to announce the Power Line Prize. Power Line, in conjunction with the Freedom Club, is offering a grand prize of $100,000.00 to whoever can most effectively and creatively dramatize the seriousness of the federal debt crisis. Any medium of communication is eligible: video, song, screenplay, television commercial, painting, Power Point, essay, performance art, or anything else. The runner-up will receive a $15,000.00 prize, and two third-place finishers will receive $5,000.00 each. Entries must be submitted by midnight on July 15, 2011. Judges' decisions are final. All submissions become the property of Power Line and the Freedom Club. Entries must be original and unique to the Power Line Prize competition; i.e., they must not have been published or made public in any form prior to the time when contest winners are announced.
The contest web site is here. You can find much more information about the contest there, including complete contest rules. You can also get there by clicking on this graphic:
We will have much more to say about the Power Line Prize over the weeks to come. In the meantime, if you are a creative sort, this is your chance to make a difference on the most critical issue of our time. (Spread the word!)
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Sunset or Sunrise on Liberty?
The Current Crisis and the Opportunity of a New Dawn for Liberty
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." --Thomas Payne
Sunrise on LibertyA few decades ago, one of the national service opportunities I pursued required a battery of examinations including a comprehensive personality profile. After three days of psychological tests, a career profiler compiled my assessment. In a later interview with said profiler, he looked at me and declared with candor, "You are crazy!"
That decree got no rise out of me. I have received that appraisal numerous times, but he did put a fresh perspective on it. He continued, "Not crazy in the pathological sense, but crazy in that you are one of very few people I have profiled who actually thrives in the midst of crisis and conflict." Apparently, most "normal people" try to avoid crisis and conflict. He labeled my folder, "Warrior."
In light of my penchant for what Sam Adams called "the animated contest for freedom," I offer the following opinion about the future of American Liberty.
On occasion I have been critical of Barack Hussein Obama, a phony "community organizer" con man, who, with the help of his Leftist puppeteers, masterfully duped 69 million Americans into giving him the most expensive public housing and benefits in the nation.
I am most critical of this charlatan's political endeavor to demolish free enterprise with a debt bomb, and from the economic rubble, resurrect a transformed USSA subject to tyrannical rule via Democratic Socialism.
Obama built his presidential campaign around the "change" theme: "This is our moment, this is our time to turn the page on the policies of the past, to offer a new direction. We are fundamentally transforming the United States of America."
His former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said infamously, "Never allow a crisis to go to waste," which was the basis for Obama's assertion, "this painful [economic] crisis provides us with an opportunity to transform our economy to improve the lives of ordinary people."
By no means will the full implementation of Democratic Socialism "improve the lives of ordinary people." As I have noted previously, Democratic Socialism, like Nationalist Socialism, is nothing more than Marxist Socialism repackaged. Likewise, it seeks a centrally planned economy directed by a single-party state that controls economic production by way of regulation and income redistribution.
The success of Democrat Socialism depends upon supplanting Essential Liberty -- the rights "endowed by our Creator" -- primarily by refuting such endowment.
Indeed, Obama's mission is transformation, and economic crisis is the horse he rode in on. It can also be the horse that he and his socialist cadre are chased out on.
Truth be told, I want to "fundamentally transform" what our nation has become after years of incremental encroachment upon Rule of Law by socialist predators, the most brazen offender in history being Obama. Indeed, I do not want the current economic "crisis to go to waste," and see it as a great opportunity to "change" our economy in such a way as to improve the lives of all Americans.
Of course, the opportunity I see in the current crisis is diametrically opposed to that which Obama and his Leftist cadres envision. I see a new dawn for Liberty on the horizon.
For all Patriots, steadfast in our devotion to Freedom, the sun is rising on one of two options to preserve the legacy of Liberty for this and future generations. The first and more desirable option is the transformational restoration of constitutional Rule of Law and the second is the transformational reformation of government, in fulfillment of Thomas Jefferson's contention, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
The current economic crisis, which had its beginnings in 2006 with the surprisingly ubiquitous collapse in real estate values and subsequent banking crisis, poses an ominous threat to Liberty. The Obama administration used the cover of this crisis to implement its so-called "stimulus plan," which primarily stimulated the growth of central government at an enormous cost.
The result was accelerated accumulation of crushing national debt, now approaching $15 trillion, which has placed our economy on a collision course with catastrophic collapse, short of bold intervention.
The economic indicators foretelling that collision abound.
The Commerce Department reports that the American economy grew at an annualized rate of 1.8 percent in the first quarter of 2011. (You might have missed that report amid all the political campaigning over OBL's demise.)
Home values fell three percent in the first quarter and it is estimated that more than 28 percent of homeowners now owe more than the value of their property.
Energy and commodity costs are highly volatile, in large measure due to abysmal domestic economic and energy policies plus weak foreign policy. One way to devalue outstanding debt is inflation, and there are plenty of indicators that inflation is underway.
Imports are up and exports are down. The International Monetary Fund estimates that China's economy will surpass ours by 2016.
Unemployment inched back up to 9 percent last month, but the "real" unemployment rate, those who have given up the search and part-time workers seeking full-time employment, is almost 16 percent.
More Americans are dependent upon government assistance payouts than ever before. More than 18 percent of total personal income was redistributed in the form of "government benefits." Almost one in seven households receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (food stamps).
The declining status of the U.S. dollar as the world's safest fiat currency is a metaphor for the decline of our standing as the world's beacon of liberty, the decline of "American exceptionalism."
Having a good recollection of the Carter administration, I invoke Yogi Berra's sentiment, "It is like déjà vu all over again."
Despite the considerable barriers these indicators pose to economic recovery, there is still time for a transformational restoration of constitutional Rule of Law and the consequential rescaling of our central government to comport with the limits placed upon it by our Constitution. But as noted above, that will require bold intervention, and it will require that a majority of the members of Congress honor and abide by their oath of office.
At present, there are outstanding plans on the table to put prosperity over poverty, including the Republican Study Committee Budget for FY 2012 and Heritage Foundation's comprehensive plan to restore prosperity.
House and Senate leaders are stepping out with bolder propositions to cut government spending. As a prerequisite to raising the national debt ceiling to avoid default, Speaker John Boehner has drawn the line, and may even hold it: "Without significant spending cuts and reforms to reduce our debt, there will be no debt limit increase, and the cuts should be greater than the accompanying increase in debt authority the president is given. We should be talking about cuts of trillions, not just billions."
Conservative Senate leaders are calling for a Balanced Budget Amendment as a condition to any agreement on increasing the national debt limit.
Of course, Obama, the consummate socialist, trotted out the class warfare card in response: "Their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America, [pitting] children with autism or Down's syndrome against every millionaire and billionaire in our society."
Then, in his fatuous display of faux bipartisan, Obama insisted the budget talks must "start by being honest about what's causing our deficit."
Apparently, Obama thinks the budget deficit is caused by a lack of government spending and regulation, as he is proposing a lot more of both.
So, given the current crisis and the long odds against the restoration of Rule of Law, would you concede that this portends a Sunset or Sunrise on Liberty?
Call me crazy -- that profiler certainly did -- but I clearly see a new dawn for Liberty, whether it be transformational restoration of constitutional Rule of Law or the transformational reformation of government. Count me in for either option.
I believe, as did my mentor, President Ronald Reagan: "America's best days are yet to come. Our proudest moments are yet to be. Our most glorious achievements are just ahead."
But I also know, as did he, that "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States when men were free."
That extinction will arrive only if we "shrink from the service of our country."
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
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Alexander is right on.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AdHbmgGCyg&feature=player_embedded
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Woof All:
Of course this could have been posted in the 2012 campaign thread, but I post it here; deeper even than Presidential politics is whether this country continues to believe in the free market.
Marc
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House Majority Leader Eric Cantor turned the policy temperature down on austerity this week by rolling out a strong economic-growth agenda. Headlined by a 25 percent top tax rate for individuals and business, the Cantor package includes regulatory relief, free trade, and patent protection for entrepreneurs. It’s job creation and the economy, stupid.
Sounds Reaganesque? Well, Eric Cantor has a lot of Reagan blood in him. Back in 1980, while Cantor was still in high school, his father was the Virginia state treasurer of the Ronald Reagan presidential campaign. So the apple never falls far from the tree.
In fact, it looks like Cantor is restoring the supply-side incentive model of economic growth. Forget tax-the-rich class warfare. Throw out wild-eyed government-spending stimulus and dollar-depreciating Fed money-pumping. Make it pay more after tax to work, produce, and invest. Go for a growth spurt, something the economy badly needs. And -- my thought -- crown such a growth strategy with a stable King Dollar re-linked to gold.
When I interviewed Cantor this week, he made it clear that faster economic growth was crucial to holding down spending, deficits, and debt. As scored by the CBO, every 1 percent of faster growth lowers the budget gap by nearly $3 trillion from lower spending and higher revenues. “Grow the economy,” Cantor said. “It will help us manage-down the deficit and it will help get people back to work.”
This is not to say that spending cuts and structural entitlement reforms aren’t necessary. They are. But it is to argue that lately the GOP has forgotten the growth component that is so essential to spending restraint and deficit reduction.
The GOP should say: In return for substantial federal-spending cuts, we’re gonna more than make it up to you with large tax cuts. You will win. Big government will lose.
I suggested to Cantor that the GOP adopt a 5 percent national growth target, which President John F. Kennedy had when he launched his across-the-board tax cuts in the early 1960s. “That is a fantastic goal,” he told me.
Cantor’s growth plan is very timely as the U.S. economy is once again sputtering. In what is already one of the weakest post-recession recoveries in the postwar era, first-quarter GDP came in at a tepid 1.8 percent. Many economists believe the second quarter will be no better.
And consider this: Between 1947 and 2000, average real economic growth registered 3.4 percent yearly -- an excellent prosperity baseline. Yet over the past ten years -- amidst boom-bust Fed policy, a collapsing dollar, and soaring gold -- the stock market on balance hasn’t moved as the economy has averaged only 1.7 percent annually. Because of the ongoing slump, actual real GDP growth from the early 2000s through the first quarter of 2011 has dropped nearly 17 percent below the long-run historical trend. That translates to a massive output gap of $2.7 trillion.
In order to close that gap in five years the economy would have to grow 7.3 percent annually (roughly Reagan’s two-year recovery rate in 1983-84). To close the gap in ten years, the economy would have to grow near 5.3 percent annually.
Alright, so why not establish a national economic growth target of over 5 percent? That might wipe out the current spirit of economic pessimism and decline.
A 5 percent growth target might give some hope to the roughly 15 million unemployed. Or the 12 to 15 million homeowners who can’t meet their mortgages, are in foreclosure, or have upside-down property values. Or the disappointed investors who haven’t made any real cash in ten years. Or the families who are suffering from rising gas and food prices.
A 5 percent growth target might wipe out the sense that we can’t seem to right the economic ship.
For all these reasons, according to the polls, jobs and the economy are the number one political issue today. Entitlements are going to have to be fixed. But that day of reckoning is nearly 20 years away. Right now folks want work and income to pay the bills.
The brilliance of Mr. Cantor’s effort is his attempt to move the GOP back to the economic-growth high ground. It is our most urgent priority.
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The 5% minimum, sustained, real growth target is correct, if not too cautious. In the most similar circumstance of economic doldrums in our time, the growth rate coming out of it approached 8%.
In what year of a multi-year, double dip depression do we collectively admit that growth is good?
The current emphasis on cutting medicare, cutting social security, cutting our security presence around the world might be necessary, but is what the growth crowd used to call the root canal wing of the Republican Party. Right now, we need it all. Downsize the public burden, yes, but also re-energize private growth.
On the other side of the coin is Krugman and few others who said all along that the stimulus was too small and too timid and needs to be doubled. I guess that means the deficit is too small and too timid as well - for the hard core Keynesians. Good grief. Do the math on current and projected debt when the interest rates hit 10-15% or higher and tell us we are too timid with our spending!
Where Krugman et al are right about the stimulus being too small is the clear fact that the so-called stimuli so far are really still at zero. The point was to stimulate the private economy and the private sector growth machine. Growing the total cost of permanent public sector unions jobs only so far isn't temporary spending or private stimulus.
As BD pointed out elsewhere, tax policy is only one factor (and we have a thread for that). Federal taxation is badly in need of reform, but we don't fact the same rate cutting opportunities at 30+% tax rates that we did at 70% tax rates to re-energize growth.
The question I pose here is - yes, tax reform, but what are all the other things we can do to re-energize private growth? I believe we have a thread for each one but we need the total package pulled together IMO in order to move forward and sell growth and confidence to voters and investors.
As the Reagan era began, we had the two-pronged problem of unemployment and inflation out of control simultaneously. It was believed from all conventional economic thought that, for one thing that wasn't possible, and for another thing that it wasn't curable. Conventional wisdom was wrong on both counts. Also unnecessary damage was done in '81-'82 by having the bad tasting medicine kick in before the stimulative policies went fully into effect. Maybe we can learn from that.
Today it is the two-pronged problem of unemployment symbolizing a sputtering economy and the outrageous levels of both current deficits and total debt that make it seem impossible to move forward.
Economists like Krugman and Reich ridicule the austerity approach alone. Where is the stimulative effect in shrinking our spending or in shrinking our monetary expansion?
The answer is that a) austerity alone will not stimulate, and that b) austerity (sanity might be a more aptly label) is only one small part of re-building the investor confidence that is so badly needed.
If Republicans were to hold a hard line now on the debt ceiling and win that battle with the Senate and Executive Branch, deficit spending would end this summer. The result of that move alone would not be stimulative.
Again, a multi-pronged problem requires a multi-pronged solution. We don't need to balance our budget at the sick economy level. We need balance atg full frowth and capacity. That means doing 'all of the above' simultaneously in terms of addressing the economic problems we face.
Instead of ending huge programs now, they can be identified and phased back to their right size in a foreseeable and believable period of time. If we want to send functions back to the states, that should be coupled with a stronger economy and lower federal burden so that states can handle them. If we want to pay social spending recipients less without hurting them (60+% of spending?), then we need to reverse the policies that ran up the costs of energy, food, healthcare, tuition etc along with all the policies that chased away jobs and production.
We will never grow jobs by keeping the focus on hypenated-growth, smart-growth with anti-growth excuses like disparity obsession and class envy to win votes and lose jobs. OMG, someone else benefited from that policy! You grow jobs by improving everything that has to do with the competitiveness of producing goods and service here, by unleashing creativity and innovation. A complete overhaul of the tax system in the direction of simplicity, wider application and lower marginal rates is one big part of that, but this time a complete overhaul of all anti-job growth, anti-competitiveness regulations needs to be front and center as well.
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Good discussion. I would add that the US tax code is not only a matter of the marginal tax rate (as hugely important as that is) it is also a matter of mis-directing investment e.g. the housing bubble.
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I have opposed the balanced budget amendment because it would do nothing to limit spending and likely require future tax increases to match growing spending.
I was wrong. It's all in there!
Please read the text of the Senate Republican version with nearly all Senate Republicans as co-sponsors. It limits spending to 18% of GDP.
This came to my attention through a Tom Daschle editorial opposing it.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576361911670103814.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
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http://www.scribd.com/doc/52020805/GOP-Balanced-Budget-Amendment-Text
(This didn't cut and paste very well with section nos, page nos and line nos. Read it at the source link if you prefer.)
JOINT RESOLUTION
Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the UnitedStates relative to balancing the budget.
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives
1
of the United States of America in Congress assembled
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(two-thirds of each House concurring therein),
That the fol-
3
lowing article is proposed as an amendment to the Con-
4
stitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all
5
intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when
6
2
JEN11494 S.L.C.
ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several
1
States:
2
‘‘ARTICLE
—
3
‘‘SECTION 1. Total outlays for any fiscal year shall
4
not exceed total receipts for that fiscal year, unless two-
5
thirds of the duly chosen and sworn Members of each
6
House of Congress shall provide by law for a specific ex-
7
cess of outlays over receipts by a roll call vote.
8
‘‘SECTION 2. Total outlays for any fiscal year shall
9
not exceed 18 percent of the gross domestic product of
10
the United States for the calendar year ending before the
11
beginning of such fiscal year, unless two-thirds of the duly
12
chosen and sworn Members of each House of Congress
13
shall provide by law for a specific amount in excess of such
14
18 percent by a roll call vote.
15
‘‘SECTION 3. Prior to each fiscal year, the President
16
shall transmit to the Congress a proposed budget for the
17
United States Government for that fiscal year in which—
18
‘‘(1) total outlays do not exceed total receipts;
19
and
20
‘‘(2) total outlays do not exceed 18 percent of
21
the gross domestic product of the United States for
22
the calendar year ending before the beginning of
23
such fiscal year.
24
3
JEN11494 S.L.C.
‘‘SECTION 4. Any bill that imposes a new tax or in-
1
creases the statutory rate of any tax or the aggregate
2
amount of revenue may pass only by a two-thirds majority
3
of the duly chosen and sworn Members of each House of
4
Congress by a roll call vote. For the purpose of deter-
5
mining any increase in revenue under this section, there
6
shall be excluded any increase resulting from the lowering
7
of the statutory rate of any tax.
8
‘‘SECTION 5. The limit on the debt of the United
9
States shall not be increased, unless three-fifths of the
10
duly chosen and sworn Members of each House of Con-
11
gress shall provide for such an increase by a roll call vote.
12
‘‘SECTION 6. The Congress may waive the provisions
13
of sections 1, 2, 3, and 5 of this article for any fiscal year
14
in which a declaration of war against a nation-state is in
15
effect and in which a majority of the duly chosen and
16
sworn Members of each House of Congress shall provide
17
for a specific excess by a roll call vote.
18
‘‘SECTION 7. The Congress may waive the provisions
19
of sections 1, 2, 3, and 5 of this article in any fiscal year
20
in which the United States is engaged in a military conflict
21
that causes an imminent and serious military threat to
22
national security and is so declared by three-fifths of the
23
duly chosen and sworn Members of each House of Con-
24
gress by a roll call vote. Such suspension must identify
25
4
JEN11494 S.L.C.
and be limited to the specific excess of outlays for that
1
fiscal year made necessary by the identified military con-
2
flict.
3
‘‘SECTION 8. No court of the United States or of any
4
State shall order any increase in revenue to enforce this
5
article.
6
‘‘SECTION 9. Total receipts shall include all receipts
7
of the United States Government except those derived
8
from borrowing. Total outlays shall include all outlays of
9
the United States Government except those for repayment
10
of debt principal.
11
‘‘SECTION 10. The Congress shall have power to en-
12
force and implement this article by appropriate legislation,
13
which may rely on estimates of outlays, receipts, and gross
14
domestic product.
15
‘‘SECTION 11. This article shall take effect beginning
16
with the fifth fiscal year beginning after its ratification.’’.
17
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"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." --John Adams, Address to the Military , 1798
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"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." --John Adams, Address to the Military , 1798
Yeah, I know.... :-(
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For conservatives, it can't get any better
By George Will
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
For a conservative Texan seeking national office, it could hardly get better than this: In a recent 48-hour span, Ted Cruz, a candidate for next year's Republican Senate nomination for the seat being vacated by Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, was endorsed by the Club for Growth PAC, FreedomWorks PAC, talk-radio host Mark Levin and Erick Erickson of RedState.com. And Cruz's most conservative potential rival for the nomination decided to seek a House seat instead.
For conservatives seeking reinforcements for Washington's too-limited number of limited-government constitutionalists, it can hardly get better than this: Before he earned a Harvard law degree magna cum laude (and helped found the Harvard Latino Law Review) and clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Cruz's senior thesis at Princeton - his thesis adviser was professor Robert George, one of contemporary conservatism's intellectual pinups - was on the Constitution's Ninth and 10th amendments. Then as now, Cruz argued that these amendments, properly construed, would buttress the principle that powers not enumerated are not possessed by the federal government.
Utah's freshman Sen. Mike Lee, who clerked for Justice Sam Alito when Alito was an appeals court judge, has endorsed Cruz. The national chairman of Cruz's campaign is Ed Meese, the grand old man of Reagan administration alumni.
For anyone seeking elective office anywhere, this story is as good as it gets: At age 14, Cruz's father fought with rebels (including Fidel Castro) against Cuba's dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Captured and tortured, at 18 he escaped to America with $100 sewn in his underwear. He graduated from the University of Texas and met his wife - like him, a mathematician - with whom he founded a small business processing seismic data for the oil industry.
By the time Ted Cruz was 13, he was winning speech contests sponsored by a Houston free-enterprise group that gave contestants assigned readings by Frederic Bastiat, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. In his early teens he traveled around Texas and out of state giving speeches. At Princeton, he finished first in the 1992 U.S. National Debate Championship and North American Debate Championship.
As Texas's solicitor general from 2003 to 2008, Cruz submitted 70 briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, and he has, so far, argued nine cases there. He favors school choice and personal investment accounts for a portion of individuals' Social Security taxes. He supports the latter idea with a bow to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who said such accounts enable the doorman to build wealth the way the people in the penthouse do.
Regarding immigration, Cruz, 40, demands secure borders and opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants but echoes Ronald Reagan's praise of legal immigrants as "Americans by choice," people who are "crazy enough" to risk everything in the fundamentally entrepreneurial act of immigrating. He believes Hispanics are - by reasons of faith, industriousness and patriotism - natural Republicans. He says the military enlistment rate is higher among them than among any other demographic, and he says an Austin businessman observed, "When was the last time you saw a Hispanic panhandler?"
The Republican future without Hispanic support would be bleak. Forty-seven percent of Americans under 18 are minorities, and the largest portion are Hispanics. One in six Americans is Hispanic. In 37 states, the Hispanic population increased at least 50 percent between 2000 and 2010. The four states with the largest Hispanic populations - California, Texas, Florida and New York - have 151 electoral votes.
One in five Americans lives in California or Texas, and Texas is for Republicans what California is for Democrats - the largest reliable source of electoral votes and campaign cash. In 2005, Texas became a majority-minority state; in five years Hispanics will be a plurality; in about two decades, immigration and fertility will make them a majority.
But, Cruz says, unlike California's Hispanics, those in Texas "show a willingness to be a swing vote." Furthermore, the three Hispanics elected to major offices in 2010 - Florida's Sen. Marco Rubio, Nevada's Gov. Brian Sandoval and New Mexico's Gov. Susana Martinez - are Republicans.
"It took Jimmy Carter to give us Ronald Reagan," says Cruz, who believes the reaction against Barack Obama will give the Republican Party a cadre of conservatives who take their bearings from constitutional law as it was before the New Deal judicial revolution attenuated limits on government. This cadre is arriving: Sens. Lee and Rubio were born seven days apart, and Cruz six months earlier.
The parties' profiles are often drawn in the Senate. The Republican profile is becoming more Madisonian.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
George Will's latest book is "With a Happy Eye but: America and the World, 1997-2002" to purchase a copy, click here. Comment on this column by clicking here.
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Maybe he can skip the senate. We have an opening higher up. :-)
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Very impressive. Lets keep an eye out for further developments of this guy!
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Chronicle · June 29, 2011
The Foundation
"Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness." --George Washington
Editorial Exegesis
Rather than drill, Obama plays games with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve"President Barack Obama has chosen a curious moment to release 30 million barrels of oil from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The president initially justified the release as protection against disruptions in supply caused by the conflict in Libya. Later, the administration changed the explanation, saying Obama hopes to stabilize gasoline prices going into the summer vacation driving season. Libya is an important source of oil. But the fighting there has not had a major impact on supplies. And oil prices have fallen back in recent weeks from their yearly highs. ... As we've said when previous presidents considered using the reserve to influence short-term prices, that's not what the stockpile is there for. The reserve is designed to shield the American economy from dramatic disruptions in the oil supply. Such a major cutoff hasn't happened. Using the reserve to manipulate market prices is a futile enterprise. ... The president's decision to release oil reserves, coming at a time when his approval rating is sinking, opens him to criticism that his re-election campaign is driving his economic and energy decisions. He can claim credit for future declines in gasoline prices that may have occurred naturally. If the priority of the administration is now to keep gasoline cheap, it should also drop its opposition to increased domestic oil production, which would have a larger impact on long-term oil prices than would tapping into the reserve. Likewise, that goal should also inform its current considerations of sharply higher fuel economy standards for the automotive fleet. ... In any case, the release of the oil reserves in response to fluctuations in the market is not sound policy." --The Detroit News
Upright
"On economic growth, real GDP has risen 0.8% over the 13 quarters since the recession began, compared to an average increase of 9.9% in past recoveries. From the beginning of the recession to April 2011, real personal income has grown just .9% compared to 9.4% for the same period in previous post 1960 recessions. The standard response from Obama apologists is that recession of 2008 and 2009 was different because, as former Clinton administration economist Robert Shapiro puts it, 'this was a financial crisis, and these take longer to recover from.' In fact, in most cases, the deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery to make up for lost ground." --columnist Stephen Moore
"Right now America is nothing more than Greece with better PR. And note I said right now, because at the rate we're going, we're well on our way to making that country look like amateurs by comparison." --columnist Arnold Ahlert
"The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along." --columnist Mark Steyn
"A recent poll showed that nearly half the American public believes that the government should redistribute wealth. That so many people are so willing to blithely put such an enormous and dangerous arbitrary power in the hands of politicians -- risking their own freedom, in hopes of getting what someone else has -- is a painful sign of how far many citizens and voters fall short of what is needed to preserve a democratic republic." --economist Thomas Sowell
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For the last 235 years, on the Fourth of July, Americans have celebrated the birth of the United States, and the founding ideas that have made it the most powerful, wealthiest and freest nation in the history of civilization.
But as another Fourth of July approaches, there has never been more uncertainty about the future of America -- and the anxiety transcends even the dismal economy and three foreign wars. President Obama prompted such introspection in April 2009, when he suggested that the United States, as one of many nations, was not necessarily any more exceptional than others. Recently, a New Yorker magazine article sympathetically described our new foreign policy as "leading from behind."
The administration not long ago sought from the United Nations and the Arab League -- but not from Congress -- authorization to attack Col. Gadhafi's Libya. Earlier, conservative opponents had made much of the president's bows to Chinese and Saudi Arabian heads of state, which, coupled with serial apologies for America's distant and recent past, were seen as symbolically deferential efforts to signal the world that the United States was at last not necessarily pre-eminent among nations.
Yet there has never been any nation even remotely similar to America. Here's why. Most revolutions seek to destroy the existing class order and use all-powerful government to mandate an equality of result rather than of opportunity -- in the manner of the French Revolution's slogan of "liberty, equality and fraternity" or the Russian Revolution's "peace, land and bread."
In contrast, our revolutionaries shouted "Don't tread on me!" and "Give me liberty or give me death!" The Founders were convinced that constitutionally protected freedom would allow the individual to create wealth apart from government. Such enlightened self-interest would then enrich society at large far more effectively that could an all-powerful state.
Such constitutionally protected private property, free enterprise and market capitalism explain why the United States -- with only about 4.5 percent of the world's population -- even today, in an intensely competitive global economy, still produces a quarter of the world's goods and services. To make America unexceptional, inept government overseers, as elsewhere in the world, would determine the conditions -- where, when, how and by whom -- under which businesses operate.
Individual freedom in America manifests itself in ways most of the world can hardly fathom -- whether our unique tradition of the right to gun ownership, the near impossibility of proving libel in American courts, or the singular custom of multimillion-dollar philanthropic institutions, foundations and private endowments. Herding, silencing or enfeebling Americans is almost impossible -- and will remain so as long as well-protected citizens can say what they want and do as they please with their hard-earned money.
Race, tribe or religion often defines a nation's character, either through loose confederations of ethnic or religious blocs as in Rwanda, Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, or by equating a citizenry with a shared appearance as reflected in the German word "volk" or the Spanish "raza." And while the United States was originally crafted largely by white males who improved upon Anglo-Saxon customs and the European Enlightenment, the Founders set in place an "all men are created equal" system that quite logically evolved into the racially blind society of today.
This year a minority of babies born in the United States will resemble the look of the Founding Fathers. Yet America will continue as it was envisioned, as long as those of various races and colors are committed to the country's original ideals. When International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of sexual assault against a West African immigrant maid in New York, supposedly liberal French elites were outraged that America would dare bring charges against such an establishment aristocrat. Americans, on the other hand, would have been more outraged had their country not done so.
The Founders' notion of the rule of law, coupled with freedom of the individual, explains why the United States runs on merit, not tribal affinities or birth. Most elsewhere, being a first cousin of a government official, or having a prestigious name, ensures special treatment from the state. Yet in America, nepotism is never assured. End that notion of American merit and replace it with racial tribalism, cronyism or aristocratic privilege, and America itself would vanish as we know it.
There is no rational reason why a small republican experiment in 1776 grew to dominate global culture and society -- except that America is the only nation, past or present, that put trust in the individual rather than in the state and its elite bureaucracy. Such confidence in the average free citizen made America absolutely exceptional -- something we should remember more than ever on this Fourth of July.
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second post of day:
By LEON KASS
Parades. Backyard barbecues. Fireworks. This is how many of us will celebrate the Fourth of July. In earlier times, the day was also marked with specially prepared orations celebrating our founding principles, a practice that has disappeared without notice.
It is a tribute to a polity dedicated to securing our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we can enjoy our freedoms while taking them for granted, giving little thought to what makes them possible. But this inattention comes at a heavy price, paid in increased civic ignorance and decreased national attachment—both dangerous for a self-governing people.
For an antidote to such thoughtlessness, one cannot do better than President Calvin Coolidge's remarkable address, delivered to mark the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1926. While he celebrated the authors of our founding document, Coolidge argued that it "represented the movement of a people . . . a great mass of independent, liberty-loving, God-fearing people who knew their rights, and possessed the courage to dare to maintain them."
History is replete with the births (and deaths) of nations. But the birth of the United States was unique because it was, and remains, a nation founded not on ties of blood, soil or ethnicity, but on ideas, held as self-evident truths: that all men are created equal; they are endowed with certain inalienable rights; and, therefore, the just powers of government, devised to safeguard those rights, must be derived from the consent of the governed.
What is the source of these ideas, and their singular combination in the Declaration? Many have credited European thinkers, both British and French. Coolidge, citing 17th- and 18th-century sermons and writings of colonial clergy, provides ample evidence that the principles of the Declaration, and especially equality, are of American cultural and religious provenance: "They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit." From this teaching flowed the emerging American rejection of monarchy and our bold embrace of democratic self-government.
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Associated Press
Calvin Coolidge: 'If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it.'
.Coolidge draws conclusions from his search into the sources. First, the Declaration is a great spiritual document. "Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man . . . are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. . . . Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish."
He also observes that the Declaration's principles are final, not to be discarded in the name of progress. To deny the truth of human equality, or inalienable rights, or government by consent is not to go forward but backward—away from self-government, from individual rights, from the belief in the equal dignity of every human being.
Coolidge's concluding remarks especially deserve our attention: "We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. . . . If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things which are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshipped."
Coolidge was no religious fanatic. He appreciated our constitutional strictures against religious establishment and religious tests for office, limitations crucial to religious freedom and toleration, also principles unique to the American founding. But he understood that free institutions and economic prosperity rest on cultural grounds, which in turn rest on religious foundations.
Like Tocqueville, who attributed America's strength to its unique fusion of the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion, Coolidge is rightly concerned about what will happen to the sturdy tree of liberty should its cultural roots decay. It is a question worth some attention as we eat our barbecue and watch the fireworks.
Mr. Kass, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is a co-editor of "What So Proudly We Hail: The American Story in Soul, Speech and Song," published last month by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2011/07/05/video-walking-into-mordor/
Winning the culture war.
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What brilliant good it can do a country when the world respects, and will not forget, one of its leaders. What was vividly true 30 years ago is true today: The world looks to America. It doesn't want to be patronized or dominated by America, it wants to see America as a beacon, an example, a dream of what could be. And the world wants something else: American goodness. It wants to have faith in the knowledge that America is the great nation that tries to think about and act upon right and wrong, and that it is a beacon also of things practical—how to have a sturdy, good, unsoiled economy, how to create jobs that provide livelihoods that allow families to be formed, how to maintain a system in which inventors and innovators can flourish. A world without America in this sense—the beacon, the inspiration, the speaker of truth—would be a world deprived of hopefulness. And so we must be our best selves again not only for us but for the world.
These are the thoughts that follow eight days of celebration, in Eastern Europe and London, of the leadership of Ronald Reagan. History is rarely sweet, but it was last week when they raised statues of him in his centenary year. People old and young stopped for a moment to think and speak of him, and to define what his leadership meant to them and their countries. The celebrations in Krakow, Budapest, Prague and London were a reminder that we are all traveling through history together, that you are living not only your own life but the life of your times, as Laurens van der Post once said. And your era can actually be affected, made better, by what you do.
The subject matter was the fall of the wall, the end of communism, the reunification of Europe—those epochal events the world is still absorbing and that in retrospect seem even more amazing. Good people picked good leaders—the Big Three of the Cold War, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Reagan—and together they pushed until walls fell. Man is not used to such kind outcomes. A feeling of awe and gratitude colored the ceremonies: "My God, look what was done, I still can't believe it. Let's talk about how it happened and take those lessons into the future." Now of all times we could use the inspiration.
In Krakow, the city from which Karol Wojtyla was called to Rome to become John Paul II, there was a thanksgiving mass celebrated by Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, who said in his homily: "President Reagan . . . took great pains to bring about the demise of that which he so aptly named 'the evil empire.' This empire of evil denied many people and nations their freedom. It did so by way of a pernicious ideology . . . the result of this experiment was the death and sufferings of millions." "There can be no doubt," he said, that Reagan and John Paul brought about "the collapse of communism."
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Martin Kozlowski
In Budapest, in a special session of the Hungarian Parliament, Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen spoke of the end of Hungary as a captive nation and its beginnings as a democracy. Reagan, he said, "helped Hungary find itself." Member of Parliament Janos Horvath spoke of Reagan's style of peaceful liberation. What America did by being strong, by being serious in its focus, by speaking plain and true, not only inspired the victims of communism but weakened their oppressors. Reagan had "the imagination" to understand that the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a historic event: "He kept quoting Harry Truman's commitment to the liberation of the captive nations. That, for Reagan, was a more important thing than for other presidents." Hungary knew Truman had been "infuriated" by what the Soviets did, "arresting people, including myself." Reagan made clear he "felt the indignation." And so, "Hungary took seriously what America meant—human rights, democracy." It left Horvath an optimist. "I have faith that the right thing prevails. This is the Ronald Reagan mentality."
I asked a member of Parliament whether the people of Hungary had felt any bitterness over the fact that President Eisenhower did not commit U.S. military forces to help the Hungarians in 1956. At first he was puzzled. Bitterness? Any residual disappointment, I said. No, he said. "We understood your position." Meaning, he explained, our position as a superpower in the nuclear age, and our position on freedom. They knew whose side we were on.
A veteran diplomat in the area, an American, said later that everything he'd heard in the speeches left him thinking how the great progress of the past quarter-century had been made not through warfare but through diplomacy, tough decisions, aid, encouragement and rhetorical clarity and candor.
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At the unveiling of the Reagan statue in Freedom Square, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Reagan "managed change wisely and preserved peace. This is why he needs to have a statue in Budapest." In tearing down "the distorted and sick ideologies of the 20th century," Reagan "remade the world for us."
Rather stunningly, the leader of Hungary's government bluntly ended his speech with a sentiment often heard in Omaha, Tucson, Morristown and Tallahassee: "We need a Ronald Reagan. Is he there, somewhere, already?" The world misses him as much as we do. It misses grand leadership as much as we do.
***
In Prague they named a street for him. In London, on the Fourth of July, 235th birthday of the United States, they unveiled a statue in front of the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square. Two other presidents grace that square: a heroic FDR in flowing cape, and a steely-eyed Eisenhower in army uniform. The day was nonpartisan, non-narrow. A great American was being justly honored by his British friends who, as Foreign Secretary William Hague said, "will never forget" him. A statue, he said, is not just a remembrance. With statues we come "face to face" with the great men and women of the past, and ponder their greatness.
That night, members of Parliament gathered for a formal dinner in London's magnificent Guildhall. There were speeches, some beautiful. Among the packed tables there was a former member of Mrs. Thatcher's cabinet, who in his day had taken heavy blows for his unrepentant conservatism. Now, white-haired, he listened to the speeches, as across the room a woman watching him remembered the greatest speech in English history: "Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot/ But he'll remember with advantages/ What feats he did that day."
And so Mr. Reagan's centennial nears its close. We remember him—and Thatcher, and John Paul—for many reasons. To reinforce and reinspire. To keep fresh our knowledge that history can be made better. To be loyal to the truth.
And another reason. That night in conversation, former Prime Minister John Major asked how our teaching of history was in America. Not good, I said. He said in Britain it was the same, and it concerned him. We were across from a huge, heroic sculpture of the Duke of Wellington. If we don't teach who he was and what he did, we will not make any more Wellingtons. Glory lives only when you pass it on.
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And another reason. That night in conversation, former Prime Minister John Major asked how our teaching of history was in America. Not good, I said. He said in Britain it was the same, and it concerned him. We were across from a huge, heroic sculpture of the Duke of Wellington. If we don't teach who he was and what he did, we will not make any more Wellingtons. Glory lives only when you pass it on.
Anyone know who couldn't be bothered to go to the ceremony honoring Ronald Reagan that was held in front of the US Embassy in London?
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Umm , , , our embassador?
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Umm , , , our embassador?
Bingo!
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2011/07/obama-ambassador-to-uk-skips-event-honoring-ronald-reagan-outside-us-embassy/
Obama Ambassador to UK Skips Event at US Embassy Honoring Ronald Reagan
Posted by Jim Hoft on Tuesday, July 5, 2011, 4:18 PM
The ceremony honoring Ronald Reagan was held outside in front of the US Embassy in London.
People take their turn to pose for photographs beside a statue of the late U.S. President Ronald Reagan after its unveiling outside the U.S. embassy in London, Monday, July 4, 2011. The 10 foot bronze was unveiled Monday to mark the centenary of Reagan’s birth. (AP/Matt Dunham)
Sadly, the Obama ambassador to the United Kingdom skipped the event.
He had better things to do.
The Evening Standard reported:
Last night’s Guildhall dinner in honour of Ronald Reagan’s centenary was a truly glittering and warm occasion.
The British roasted lamb and the sunny Californian chardonnay evoked the close Anglo-US relationship of Reagan and Thatcher as much as the fine speeches by Condi Rice and William Hague.
But guests were left asking, where on earth was the American ambassador to London, Louis B Susman?
“Our ambassador should be here,” said Lynn de Rothschild, the American entrepreneur who is married to Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and was one of Hillary Clinton’s key fundraisers in 2008 as well as a supporter of several Republican presidential candidates. “This was an historic dinner to mark Reagan’s centenary and to celebrate him as the man who ended the Cold War. What could not be more important?
“Why is our ambassador not here on Independence Day? No excuse. How is it that America is not represented in this room by our ambassador? It is appalling that no representative of our government is in this room. This has the feel of petty partisanship.”
Ambassador Susman is, of course, a long-standing Democrat fundraiser, nicknamed the vaccuum cleaner for his skill at sucking donations out of the wealthy. And his efforts to fill Obama’s campaign pockets was said by many to be his main qualification to come to London.
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http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2011/07/01/
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http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2011/07/01/
I think the Cloward-Pivenists misunderstand how it would play out or who would win in the end.
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Dear Republicans - It's Time for You to Choose - Choose Wisely
Posted by Erick Erickson (Profile)
Friday, July 15th at 5:00AM EDT
“From here on out, if you lose this fight, every time you balk at expanding government, social security checks will be withheld, medicare payments will be withheld, and in just a few short years, surgeries will be cancelled, vaccinations withheld, and hospitals shuttered.”Dear House Republicans,
In the election of 2010, voters sent you to Washington to do two things: (1) End Obamacare and (2) pull us back from the brink of financial ruin.
You have failed at the first task. Obamacare remains. You never even seriously attempted to restrain its funding or implementation. Heck, you haven’t even saved the incandescent lightbulb.
Will you now fail at the second task too?
If you cave, fold, or compromise on the President’s terms, you will have failed in both your missions. If you support Mitch McConnell’s plan, you will have decisively failed.
Now is a time for choosing. Now is your time for choosing.As I pointed out to John Boehner yesterday, despite what the pundits in Washington are telling you, it is you and not Obama who hold most of the cards. Obama has a legacy to worry about. Should the United States lose its bond rating, it will be called the “Obama Depression”. Congress does not get pinned with this stuff.
But there are a few points that you need to understand.
First, as the hours go on, the doom and gloom scenarios are going to get worse. By the end of July, Goldman Sachs, Ben Bernanke, and Timmy Geithner are going to tell you the world will end unless you raise the debt ceiling.
They did it with TARP too.
And now we know that the amount of money used in TARP was far less than allocated and a lot of the TARP situation involved Hank Paulson forcing solvent banks to play along. Oh, and a great many Republicans were primaried out of office.
Do not believe the doom and gloom. Wise decisions are never made when premised on fear.
Second, understand that the pundits and talking heads people expect you to listen to probably have it wrong. Remember, in 2010, they told you that if you kept being the Party of No, you’d lose. And yet . . .
As I’ve said repeatedly, the pundits and chattering class in Washington have a bias far greater than their liberal one — it is a good government bias. They believe Republicans and Democrats should come together and do grand bargains. Evil and stupid come together and do something evil and stupid. The press heralds it as bipartisanship at its finest, damn the results. We’ve been doing these grand bargains for years. Remember the last time we had a balanced budget in DC? That was at $5 trillion in national debt and no one bothered to read the fine print that the “balance” was actually based on a 10 year Congressional Budget Office projection.
Likewise, the pundits with a good government bias for some reason tend to ignore the Democrats’ problems. In 2010, the media told us you beat the Democrats because the Democrats got their message wrong, not their policy. We know the truth. But we also know that the Democrats were willing to lose to advance socialism. Are you willing to lose to advance freedom?
Finally, and here is my big point — you have to win this fight. If you do not win this fight, there will be no more chances to turn back government. Why? Because President Obama is holding senior citizens hostage with their social security checks.
If the President can force your hand by using entitlements as a lever to punish the American people if you don’t do as he wants, you will have established this as a precedent. From here on out, if you lose this fight, every time you balk at expanding government, social security checks will be withheld, medicare payments will be withheld, and in just a few short years, surgeries will be cancelled, vaccinations withheld, and hospitals shuttered.
It will all be because if you lose this fight now, the Democrats will know for certain from here on out that they can use withholding entitlements as a tool to force your hand.
You must win this fight. You must show you are not afraid. When Ben Bernanke brings the Grim Reaper in on August 1st to tell you we are all going to die, you must mock death and choose life — not bipartisan compromises that will keep growing government and ever more rapidly turn this nation into a third class banana republic. In short, you must hold the freaking line!
Now, some of you, if you have read this far, are saying, “But in 1995, the Republicans got blamed for shutting down the government.” They did. But that’s because Americans detest losers. And Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole threw in the towel instead of fighting. Their will broke. They did not break the President’s will. Of course, the next year the GOP still only lost 9 House seats and actually gained Senate seats. Imagine what would have happened had they broken the President’s will.
House Republicans, this is a time for choosing: Do you choose to be more courageous than the Democrats who were willing to risk defeat to advance socialism? Is keeping your job more important to you than saving the country? If so, the odds are you will both lose your job and lose your country.
This is a time for choosing. Choose wisely.
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On the first redstate post (Erick Erickson) I was going to say they are pretty reliable conservative source though they looked happy to post partial facts and turn on McConnell quickly.
This, though, is unfair:
"Heck, you haven’t even saved the incandescent lightbulb."
James Tarranto, WSJ: "House Republicans failed yesterday in an effort to repeal the Bush-and-Pelosi-era ban on traditional incandescent light bulbs, which begins to take effect at the end of this year. The vote was 233-193 in favor of repeal, but the bill was introduced under a procedure that required a two-thirds supermajority."
They won by 40 votes, party line vote, I'm sure. They didn't so much fail to repeal but they failed to convince Democrats to join them who failed to hear an uproar from the American people. They failed to expose rules that continually allow one congress to bind a future congress against their will and against a basic tenet of freedom: consent of the governed.
Failure to save the freedom to choose your own light bulb falls squarely on the Dems and nowhere else. Who needs friends who falsely imply otherwise.
On the rest of it the guy is entitled to his opinion but he is just as misguided as Obama is to believe you control Washington when you hold one body or one branch. This was a two election rescue and even if the second goes perfectly, hold the House, win the Presidency and take majority with say a 55-45 margin in the Senate, Republicans still won't have full control. You still have to be smarter and more persuasive than your opponent. Beating up on your own doesn't get you there; it should be used wisely and sparingly. MHO.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6AgL-I3PxHE
A question was posed here a while back about how to reach more people and younger people with an awareness and explanation of what is happening in this country and an idea of what needs to be done to get back on track. Clarity, articulation and visualization always seems to be lacking. Powerline Blog and Freedom Club responded to the DBMA challenge by offering a $100,000 prize for the best creative depiction of our spending and debt problems. Monday they announced the winner.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/08/the-winner-of-the-power-line-prize-is.php
John Hinderacker: “Squirrels,” as we call it informally, is a beautiful piece of work. (View it on YouTube in HD here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AgL-I3PxHE&hd=1) We asked Justin to share his thoughts on the contest and his video:
Justin Folk: "When I first heard of the contest, I found it hard to believe that anyone would put up such a great prize to offer creatives a chance to dramatize the debt crisis. Most people don’t want to think about debt or the dangers it holds. Wars and environmentalism have attracted most of the attention of creative people in our culture–and not usually for a good result. But when you consider what debt can do and has done to nations throughout history, we’d be fools to not recognize our country’s solvency as the single greatest issue we face today. In my piece, I wanted to not just show how bad the problem is- which is in itself a noble effort since 15 trillion is hard for most to comprehend–but I sought to convey how we got to this point, and our choices moving forward.
I feel the squirrel allegory allows people to absorb the story unguarded, not pointing fingers at any one political party. I wanted to reach independents, conservatives, and liberals. Our debt, after all, belongs to all of us.
I’m grateful that Power Line and the Freedom Club saw the need to summon creative minds on this issue, and honored to have been picked as the winning entry."
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AgL-I3PxHE&hd=1[/youtube]
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"No morn ever dawned more favorable than ours did; and no day was every more clouded than the present! Wisdom, and good examples are necessary at this time to rescue the political machine from the impending storm." --George Washington, letter to James Madison, 1786
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The Nation's Pulse
American Tipping Point
By Jeffrey Lord on 8.2.11 @ 6:08AM
Hush puppies and the Tea Party.
The Republican run House of Representatives passed a debt limit plan last night 269-161. With Arizona Democrat Gabrielle Giffords returning from death's door to cast a yes vote. Good for her.
You always think of these things together, right?
No? Well, you should.
Hush puppies, for those coming in late, were once the casual shoe of choice in the late 1950s. By the 1990s they were pretty much vanished, disappeared to the fashion twilight zone along with tri-corner hats and powdered white wigs for men. They sold somewhere in the neighborhood of a pathetic 30,000 pairs a year, usually out of small family-run shoe stores in the small towns of off-the-beaten path America. The company that made them -- Wolverine -- was on the verge of giving up with the once iconic shoe from the Eisenhower-era that was, in 1950s beatnik lingo, "nowheresville" by the time of Bill and Hillary.
And then something peculiar happened. Something very much like what has been happening in the House of Representatives the last several days.
Out of the blue, hush puppies were becoming hip in the hippest clubs and bars of Clinton-era Manhattan. Impatient customers began scouting those small town shoe stores and scooping up the remaining supply. A prominent fashion designer was seen clad in them, another called Wolverine wanting to feature them in his spring collection. So did another. One L.A. fashionista mounted a 25-foot inflatable basset hound (the basset hound the Hush Puppy symbol) on the roof of his store, bought and gutted the building next door and turned it into a hush puppy boutique. One movie star of the day walked in personally to pick up a couple pairs of puppies. By 1995, sales had skyrocketed from the lonely 30,000 sales a year to almost half-a-million. The shoes were winning prizes as "best accessory" from fashion big wigs. And on and on it went.
If you've read author Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling classic of a few years back called The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, you will recognize this hush puppy story as Gladwell's. Along with other seemingly odd topics like Paul Revere's ride or the sudden drop in the crime rate of the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Gladwell posited the idea that:
…the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.
When three characteristics combine -- "contagiousness, the fact that little causes can have big effects… (and) that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment" -- a "tipping point" occurs.
Hush puppy sales take off. Crime falls through the floor. A book sails on to best seller list. Or, as Gladwell also notes, a Boston silversmith's determination to spread the news of an impending British attack "mobilizes an entire region to arms" and an entire revolution is launched. And so on.
To which, this morning, it must be said after that 269-161 vote in the House last night: America has reached a new Tipping Point.
An epidemic of conservatism is sweeping America. And thanks to the Tea Party, yesterday disgracefully accused of terrorism by Vice President Biden (he the vice president in an administration terrified of calling real terrorists terrorists -- seriously!), the country will never be the same again.
Let's start with Gladwell's point of contagiousness, or, as he says in illustrating the point, the importance of understanding that epidemics are an "example of geometric progression."
Remembering that some 40 years separated the popularity peaks of the hush puppy, it should be noted that 78 years have separated the serious and seemingly permanent rise of Big Government from today. From Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to the presidency of Barack Obama is a long time. And Big Government -- the idea that, in the vernacular, "tax and spend" can just sail on endlessly -- seemed like an impregnable fortress of an idea.
But like the hush puppy epidemic, along the way Gladwell's "little causes" began to multiply.
Some seemed insignificant in the day, others of moderate or even large consequence. Here's a partial list:
• 1938: Ohio Senator Robert Taft gains political celebrity as a devout opponent of FDR's New Deal, winning his first Senate race in the anti-New Deal election year of 1938. The same year Democrats lose a record 72 seats in the U.S. House and 6 in the U.S. Senate. Taft loses three bids for the GOP presidential nomination -- in 1940, 1948 and, most spectacularly, to the moderate Republican General Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. But the idea germinates of the GOP as the natural home of political conservative opposition to Big Government.
• 1947: Regnery Publishing, a publisher of conservative books, is created in by Henry Regnery, the father of Alfred Regnery, now the publisher of The American Spectator.
• 1951: William F. Buckley Jr. becomes an unlikely bestselling author at the age of 25 with his first book, God and Man at Yale, published by Regnery. The book is highly controversial, the first serious allegation that a major American educational institution has abandoned its cultural founding principles for a far-left leaning liberal secularism.
• 1955: Buckley creates National Review magazine, the publication designed to promote the cause of conservatism in a culture where Big Government and its left-leaning accoutrements have become the cultural norm. Famously, Buckley declares his intention of "standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'"
• 1961: Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, having delivered a speech at the 1960 Republican National Convention demanding "let's grow up conservatives," authors a bestselling book called The Conscience of a Conservative.
• 1964: Goldwater defeats liberal GOP Establishment choices, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton, for the GOP presidential nomination. Losing in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson, Goldwater's nomination victory continues the Taft transformation of the GOP from a party of "dime store New Deal" moderates to conservatives.
• 1966: Actor Ronald Reagan, whose nationally televised speech for Goldwater electrified the budding conservative movement, is elected Governor of California.
• 1967: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. founds The Alternative, a conservative magazine that evolves into The American Spectator. The magazine features conservative intellectual and political thought, spotlighting writers such as Tom Wolfe, Thomas Sowell and George F. Will among many. Also appearing in its pages: Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point.
• 1976: Former Governor Reagan challenges incumbent GOP President Gerald R. Ford for the Republican presidential nomination, specifically challenging as a conservative champion. Reagan loses in a tight battle.
• 1978: New York Congressman Jack Kemp gets the Republican National Committee to endorse classical economics -- "supply-side" or "growth" economics -- as the official position of the national party.
• 1980: Reagan wins the presidency in a landslide and the 8-year "Reagan Revolution" begins.
• 1988: Rush Limbaugh begins his nationally syndicated talk radio show, quickly establishing himself as the premiere talk radio conservative in the land.
• 1990: President George H.W. Bush breaks his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge and raises taxes. Conservatives abandon him and he loses re-election, winning only 37% of the vote.
• 1994: The GOP sweeps the congressional elections in a conservative tide, making it the House majority party for the first time since 1954. Newt Gingrich becomes Speaker of the House.
• 1995: Bill Kristol creates the Weekly Standard magazine, a magazine of "neoconservative" political and intellectual thought.
• 1996: Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and Roger Ailes launch Fox News. It becomes the most-watched cable news channel in America, dwarfing rivals CNN and MSNBC.
• 2001: Sean Hannity's radio show begins national syndication. He is already the co-host of Fox TV's popular Hannity and Colmes. Hannity becomes the number two talk radio star in America behind his friend Rush Limbaugh.
• 2002: Mark Levin, a former Reagan aide and head of the Landmark Legal Foundation, begins his first radio show, now syndicated nationally.
• 2009: The "Tea Party" movement begins, formed by activists concerned over the size of U.S. indebtedness and the national deficit.
• 2009: Levin writes Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto. The book sells over 1.2 million copies and becomes the informal bible of "Tea Party" activists, literally waved in the streets at mass rallies and saluted by Tea Party favorite Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.
• 2009: Talk radio's Glenn Beck begins a television show on Fox that for a period becomes the hottest show in the five o'clock time-slot. The show lasts only two years, but in its heyday brings considerable attention to Beck and his particular brand of conservatism.
• 2009: Conservative activist film maker James O'Keefe's undercover videos of ACORN result in the congressional defunding of the controversial group after video shows members of the group aiding in prostitution and tax evasion schemes.
That's a fairly considerable if partial list of what Gladwell calls "little causes" -- some admittedly larger or smaller than others.
Yet the point remains: when you add everything on this list together, when you add the fact that one event has frequently spread its contagiousness or been pushed by, in Gladwell's vocabulary, "connectors" -- "people with a particular and rare set of social gifts" who have the ability to "spread" an idea like an epidemic, a Tipping Point is in the works. Henry Regnery, for example, published and made a star of Buckley, who befriended Reagan who inspired Limbaugh, who was befriended by Buckley and placed on the cover of National Review, with Limbaugh in turn aiding Hannity and Levin and Levin's book inspiring the Tea Party etc., etc.
What is evident in this explosive fight over the debt ceiling is what Gladwell calls the force of "geometric progression." The collective weight of it all from the election of Taft to Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin's latest radio shows and the appearance of the Tea Party marking an American "Tipping Point."
This is not the first time a "Tipping Point" has occurred in American history. The lead up to the tipping point that was the American Revolution was replete with incidents and powerful personalities stretching over a century and a half from the initial landing of the Pilgrims (literally sailing across the Atlantic to get out from under British control) to the first "Tea Party" in Boston to the rhetoric of Patrick Henry and the ride of Paul Revere. All these and more finally culminated in the "shot heard 'round the world" when Americans confronted the British militarily at Lexington and Concord. The world was never the same again, the once presumed eternal certainty of British colonial rule on its way to being shattered for good.
There are other "tipping points" -- one culminating in the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, another in the American civil rights movement, with more historical turning points beyond that. Each in their own way propelled by events large and small, championed by personalities famous and unknown.
But make no mistake.
Thanks to the Tea Party movement, Conservatism is on the verge of a major victory that dwarfs the technical and actual realities of whatever the details of the resulting deficit deal passed last night. Yes, there is a long, long way to go. But the idea that America doesn't, in fact, have to be governed for eternity as a debtor nation with a mammoth, out-of-control, ever-expanding government is winning the day. It is tipping the balance with increasing decisiveness against an idea that has become so much a part of conventional wisdom that even some conservatives, startlingly including, inexplicably, the Wall Street Journal, have displayed the wobblies at the thought of confronting the Leviathan. The WSJ's attacks yesterday against Jim DeMint, Michele Bachmann and Sean Hannity, saying "sooner or later the GOP had to give up the hostage" -- follows another editorial in which the paper railed against Tea Party members as "hobbits." The paper, sounding like cranky British Tories in 1775 Boston rather than the bold, forward-looking paper that championed the much-derided ideas of Ronald Reagan, wildly bought into the liberal notion that the Tea Party from Hobbitville is somehow holding the government hostage, instead of the other way around. In fact Big Government liberalism has spent decades holding and trying to hold the average American hostage to all manner of outrageous tax rates, taxes and regulations on everything from capital gains to sex (in Harry Reid's Nevada) to soda, SUVs and poker.
Let me see if I understand this without drink, drugs or rock and roll: the Wall Street Journal is saying that because Senator DeMint, Congresswoman Bachmann and Sean Hannity are not caving to President Obama -- they are insufficiently conservative?
My oh my oh my oh my.
The view from here in Hobbitville is that our WSJ friends and other conservatives who seem inexplicably to have wanted to fold out of what Rush Limbaugh bluntly labeled "fear" are betraying nothing as much as an odd editorial-version of a Big Government, tax-and-spend Stockholm syndrome. The psychological shift where the hostage identifies with the hostage-taker. Oh please don't hurt me and I'll compromise!!!!!!!!!
The Tea Party not only would have none of this, the Tea Party's role in all of this marks the definitive and latest American "Tipping Point" -- a point when the balance is discernibly shifting and the world changes. And as that long list of conservatives and the events associated with them indicates, there are a lot of people over eight decades who deserve some thanks.
America -- and the eternally Big Government, tax and spend ideas of the American Left -- will never be seen the same way again. Which is precisely why the Left is writhing and foaming as this goes to Internet print.
The Tea Party is the new Hush Puppy. They are, to use a Gladwell example, Paul Revere. The message has been delivered with maximum impact. The revolution is here.
A new American Tipping Point
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I think this event in Wisconsin highlights how close we are to the edge of socialist/fascist revolution in the US. As discussed by Mark Stein and Mark Levin last night the big question is do Americans want an America like we have enjoyed for 200 years or do they want an America that is a socialist or fascist like state?
That is the question. That is the choice. Can a Republican candidate make it clear that IS the choice and it must be made now.
Electing Brock again will seal the fate in (my opinion) the wrong direction. With 50% not paying Fed income taxes, illegals coming in by the millions not because so much because they love traditional American ideals but they want our benefits, with so many other benefits paid for by the state to Americans, with children who seem to have learned that it is the governments responsibility to take care of them, we are at the cross roads. The perilous closeness of the divide seems to be highlighted with this:
****Republicans hold off Dems in recalls, win enough seats to keep majority in Senate
Story Discussion More (2) Font Size: Default font size Larger font size Republicans hold off Dems in recalls, win enough seats to keep majority in Senate
CLAY BARBOUR and MARY SPICUZZA | Wisconsin State Journal madison.com | Loading… | Posted: Wednesday, August 10, 2011 9:00 am
STEVE APPS – State Journal
Democratic supporters Yvonne Ziegler, of DeForest, and Lynn Nicklas and Norma Furger, both of Lodi, react to news of Republican gains in Tuesday's recall elections while watching results on a live network broadcast on the Capitol Square. Democrats gained two seats, not enough to win back control of the state Senate, with a third still undecided.
Any incumbents defeated in Tuesday's recall elections will continue to perform their legislative duties until certificates of election are issued to their successors.
Results will be certified three days after the Government Accountability Board receives the last county canvass in each district. If GAB gets all canvasses in on Thursday, spokesman Reid Magney said, it could certify results next Tuesday.
Winners could take oath of office the next day.
After tens of millions of dollars spent by outside interest groups, dozens of attack ads and exhaustive get-out-the-vote efforts, Democrats on Tuesday fell short of their goal of taking control of the state Senate and stopping the agenda of Gov. Scott Walker.
Republicans won four of six recall races, meaning the party still holds a narrow 17-16 majority in the Senate — at least until next week, when Sens. Robert Wirch, D-Pleasant Prairie, and Jim Holperin, D-Conover face their own recall elections. A third Democrat, Sen. Dave Hansen, D-Green Bay, easily survived a recall attempt last month.
Sens. Robert Cowles, R-Green Bay, Sheila Harsdorf, R-River Falls, Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, and Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, successfully defended their seats Tuesday.
Challengers state Rep. Jennifer Shilling, D-La Crosse, and Jessica King unseated incumbent state Sens. Dan Kapanke, R-La Crosse, and Randy Hopper, R-Fond du Lac.
Going into Tuesday, Republicans controlled the body 19-14, so Democrats needed to win at least three seats and hold onto two more next week to take over.
"The revolution has not occurred," said UW-Milwaukee political science professor Mordecai Lee, a former Democratic lawmaker. "The proletariat did not take over the streets."
Tuesday's recalls were largely seen as a test of Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who has drawn national attention since unveiling his controversial plan to strip nearly all collective bargaining rights from most public workers. Proof of that was visible on election night as national news organizations broadcast from across the state and political pundits led their newscasts with result updates and discussed their ramifications on the nation's political landscape.
Republican senators were targeted for recall after backing Walker's plan. Democratic senators came under attack for leaving the state to delay a vote on the measure.
However, the focus of the recalls has since expanded, shifting away from the collective bargaining fight toward issues such as taxes and funding for public schools and seniors.
A couple thousand Democratic supporters gathered at the state Capitol Tuesday night, hopeful at first but deflated when it appeared they might fall short of the three victories they needed.
Still, some praised Democrats' modest gains.
"I think the fact that this election is going on right now is a victory in and of itself. We put them on the hot seat," said Randy Bryce, 46, of Caledonia, who came to the Capitol Tuesday with his wife and 4-year-old daughter. "I would have liked to have seen us run the table on them, but this is okay for now."
Several media reported Darling was waiting for Pasch to make a concession speech shortly before midnight, But Darling's victory allows Republicans to continue to control the Legislature and set the agenda.
"I don't think there is much of a moral victory in taking only two," UW-Madison political science professor Charles Franklin said. "This was all about taking command of the Senate."
Tuesday's unofficial results capped the most expensive elections in state history.
Cash flowing into the recalls already has approached $30 million, and total spending by third-party groups and candidates could top $40 million, election watchdogs say. That total would double spending on all 116 of last fall's state legislative races combined.
Outside interest groups have spent millions on both sides, from conservative organizations like Wisconsin Club for Growth, Wisconsin Family Action, and Citizens for a Strong America to pro-union and liberal groups like We Are Wisconsin, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and Democracy for America.
Many view the races as a sign of whether the next Wisconsin politician facing recall will be Walker himself. The governor remained largely absent from any public appearances with the GOP senators targeted for recall.
Tony Spencer, a 36-year-old laid-off carpenter from Shorewood, voted for Darling's challenger, Democratic state Rep. Sandy Pasch.
"I'm in a private union, so they haven't necessarily come after me," Spencer said. "But everybody should have the right to be in a union. I came out to stop all the union-bashing stuff."
But John Gill, 45, of Menomonee Falls, voted for Darling and questioned the opposition's anti-GOP rhetoric, which went far beyond collective bargaining.
"This was all supposed to be about the workers' rights, so to speak. But that has not been brought up one time. It's all been misleading, the attack ads, things like that," Gill said. "The one reason they started this recall, they didn't bring up once."
— State Journal reporter Jeff Glaze and The Associated Press contributed to this report.*****
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"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." --Thomas Paine, The American Crises, No. 1, 1776
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second post:
By STEPHEN MOORE
Even with a lousy jobs report, weak GDP numbers and stock market turbulence, House Republicans have been slow to propose policies that would help expand the economy. The GOP has chosen to emphasize austerity—reduced spending, less debt—instead of growth. Where are today's Jack Kemps?
The good news is that key House Republicans are planning on rolling out a tax-reform plan with growth incentives as early as next month. My sources say this would be a pre-emptive move to get out ahead of the bipartisan "super committee" charged with raising revenues and possibly modernizing the tax code.
The idea taking shape is to pass something like the broad outline of the tax changes in the "roadmap" budget drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan and passed by the House earlier this year. That plan called for a 25% top tax rate on individuals and corporations. There is also interest in moving to a "territorial" tax system so that U.S.-based multinational firms don't face one of the highest tax rates in the industrialized world. The GOP plan is expected to be revenue neutral so that it does not increase the deficit.
House Republicans are hoping to blunt criticism voiced often by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi that the GOP has done nothing for job creation. Republicans also hope a House-passed tax reform bill will put intense pressure on Senate Democrats to come up with their own plan.
"We've got to be seen as promoting our own growth and jobs agenda," said Rep. Jim Jordan, who heads the conservative Republican Study Committee and is a fan of the House passing an ambitious tax plan. "We haven't done that of late."
Any Republican plan would have to move through the House Ways and Means Committee, and that means GOP Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, the committee chairman, would play a big role. Mr. Camp's office didn't respond to a call for comment, but in the past he has told me that he's a big supporter of lower rates in exchange for a broader base. And in recent weeks Mr. Camp has held committee hearings on tax reform. As one House member put it to me, "we've got to convince Dave that this is his chance to make history."
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The United States of Entitlements
by Bruce Thornton (Research Fellow and W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow, 2009–10, 2010–11)
The 2012 presidential election will be a referendum on democracy.
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Ancient Athens birthed both democracy and its most penetrating critics. The fundamental contentious issue was whether average people had the ability to manage the state and determine its proper interests, policies, and goals. For the defenders of democracy like the philosopher Protagoras, the politikê technê—i.e. the skills and knowledge necessary for coexistence in a community—belongs to all men by nature. Otherwise, no community could even exist. It would degenerate into a Hobbesian war of all against all. For its critics like Aristophanes, Plato, and Thucydides, radical democracy empowered people who did not have the skills or virtues necessary for seeing beyond their immediate private interests and desires in order to choose policies that benefitted the state as a whole, both in the present and the future.
Illustration by Barbara Kelley On the whole, the American Founders agreed with these critics of democracy. The founders rejected democracy for the same reason they rejected monarchy and oligarchy: given that, as Alexander Hamilton wrote, "men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious," these irrational appetites and passions inherent in human nature, when concentrated in one governing faction, would cause each to degenerate into oppression and disorder if left unchecked. Fearing this outcome, the founders created a republican mixed government like that of ancient Sparta or Rome as described in the work of the Greek historian Polybius. "The balance of a well-ordered government," John Adams wrote, "will alone be able to prevent that emulation [rivalry for power] from degenerating into dangerous ambition, irregular rivalries, destructive factions, wasting seditions, and bloody civil war." Thus the Constitution established a monarchical executive, an oligarchic Senate, and a democratic House of Representatives, each empowered to balance the other and forestall the inevitable decline into tyranny each alone would undergo if it possessed too much power.
Will voters make decisions that are necessary for the long-term health of the country?
The excesses of ancient Athenian democracy and its near destruction at the hands of Sparta made the founders particularly wary of direct democracies, which as James Madison wrote, "have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." By empowering people no matter how lacking in virtue, character, or knowledge, democracy gives greater scope to their irrational appetites, leaving them vulnerable to factional strife or the demagogue who promises them the gratification of their desires at the expense of freedom and political order. Then democracy becomes "ochlocracy," a "mob rule" that descends into tyranny: "For the mob," Polybius writes, "habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors, as soon as it has got a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, being excluded by poverty from the sweets of civil honors, produces a reign of mere violence. Then come tumultuous assemblies, massacres, banishments, redivisions of land; until, after losing all trace of civilization, it has once more found a master and a despot."
Though this may seem like a dusty political philosophy lesson, remember that the United States has evolved perilously close to the sort of direct democracy that would have horrified the founders. In addition to certain constitutional changes such as the 17th amendment’s direct election of senators—which subjects that body more directly to the short-term selfish interests of constituents—more recent developments in communication technology are altering the nature of our republic. Daily polling, the blogosphere, and the 24-7 news cycle have exposed politicians to incessant pressure from fickle public opinion. The growth of special-interest lobbies, also empowered by those same developments in communication technology, has made it easier for political leaders eager for reelection or private gain to pursue short-term economic and political advantage at the expense of long-term planning and the collective good. And the evolution of "democracy" into an unexamined, self-evident good sidelines the traditional criticisms of democracy that so influenced the American Founders.
In the next few years our country will be a sort of laboratory in which these old ideas about the dangers of democracy will be put to the test. Particularly worrisome is the increasing inclination to see the state not as an object of collective affection, duty, and loyalty in which individuals find some measure of their identities and meaning, but rather as a mere dispenser of entitlements that each faction tries to control for its own benefit. This weakness of democracy was apparent at its birth in ancient Athens. By the middle of the 4th Century B.C., an Athenian citizen could expect some form of state pay practically every day of the year, such as a stipend for attending the Assembly, serving on a jury, or attending a festival. Meanwhile, the citizen’s responsibility to manage the state and its military was given over to professional generals and politicians.
Demosclerosis is the modern expression of the dangers of direct democracy.
More dangerous than the abdication of civic duty is the threat of violent revolution to enrich one’s faction, as when Polybius speaks of the democratic "mob" as "habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors"—a hope that is made real by violence. Traditional criticisms of democracy that influenced the American Founders invariably focus on its tendency to sacrifice the good of the state in order to redistribute wealth by expropriating it from others, whether through manipulation of the machinery of government or through violence.
In our own day, violent revolution is unlikely. But expansive and expensive entitlements managed and dispensed by government bureaucracies achieve the same end using democratic means: the redistribution of wealth at the expense of the long-term planning and policies needed for civic and economic well-being. The clash of numerous competing factional interests as they enrich themselves via such government transfers of wealth has led to what journalist Jonathon Rauch in 1994 called "demosclerosis."
"By definition," Rauch explains, "the government's power comes from its ability to reassign resources, whether by taxing, spending, regulating, or simply passing laws. But that very ability energizes countless investors and entrepreneurs and ordinary Americans to go digging for gold by lobbying government. In time, a whole industry––large, sophisticated, professionalized, and self-serving––emerges and then assumes a life of its own. This industry is a drain on the productive economy, and there appears to be no natural limit to its growth. As it grows, the steady accumulation of subsidies and benefits, each defended in perpetuity by a professional interest group, calcifies government. Government loses its capacity to experiment and so becomes more and more prone to failure." Demosclerosis is the modern expression of the dangers of direct democracy that the founders feared.
The present crisis of entitlement costs––$2.4 trillion in 2011––and the burgeoning government debt needed to pay for them give force to Rauch’s analysis. According to the Heritage Foundation, if the country stays on its present course, by 2050 the national debt will hit 344 percent of GDP, while by 2080 spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Obamacare subsidy program will reach 24.2 percent of GDP, a sum that will consume all federal tax revenues (assuming the amount of taxes collected averages 18 percent of GDP).
Americans know that Medicare is in trouble. But they don't want to do anything about it.
Yet despite this swiftly advancing economic catastrophe, Representative Paul Ryan’s proposal to reform Medicare, the only specific plan to appear so far, is not popular with most Americans. According to a CNN poll, just 35 percent favor Ryan’s plan, while 58 percent oppose it. And even though the plan does not apply to anyone over 55 years old, 64 percent of those over 65 oppose it. Still, Americans do recognize that Medicare is in trouble—but they do not want to do anything about it: a CBS News poll finds that 53 percent believe that Medicare needs fundamental changes, while 58 percent say it should continue functioning as it does now. This cognitive dissonance applies to entitlement spending in general. A Bloomberg poll finds that 49 percent of those polled are more worried about Republican cuts to entitlement programs, while 40 percent are more worried about Democrats maintaining current spending levels.
The practical political fallout of these conflicting attitudes was apparent in the May special election in New York’s 26th Congressional District, a traditional Republican stronghold. Democrat Kathy Hochul won in part because her opponent, Jane Corwin, had endorsed Representative Ryan’s plan. During the campaign, Corwin was cast as eager to reduce entitlements in order to give tax-breaks to the rich. Lurid ads appeared in which a Ryan look-alike pushed an old lady in a wheelchair over a cliff. This was not a far cry from Paul Krugman’s hyberbolic assertion that Republican calls for budget cuts "are literally stealing food from the mouths of babes."
President Obama, for his part, legitimized these scare tactics. In April, he called the Ryan plan a "vision that says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors," and claimed that seniors would have to pay $6,000 more for health care in order to finance "tax cuts for the wealthy."
Will the New York special election, with its Mediscare tactics, be a harbinger for 2012? The debt and economic growth will surely be on the electorate’s mind. But more profoundly, the 2012 elections will be a referendum on democracy itself, a contest between Plato and Protagoras. It will show whether a critical mass of American voters are able to see beyond their own private interests and make decisions that, while causing themselves some pain, are nonetheless necessary for the long-term fiscal health of the country—or whether, consistent with the ancient critics of democracy and the fears of the founders, they will choose instead a government that uses its power to benefit those who are, as Polybius put it, "habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have [their] hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors."
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Bruce S. Thornton is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He received his BA in Latin in 1975 and his PhD in comparative literature–Greek, Latin, and English–in 1983, both from the University of California, Los Angeles. Thornton is currently a professor of classics and humanities at California State University in Fresno, California. He is the author of nine books and numerous essays and reviews on Greek culture and civilization and their influence on Western civilization. He has also written on contemporary political and educational issues, as well as lecturing at venues such as the Smithsonian Institute, the Army War College, and the Air Force Academy and appearing on television, including the History Channel and ABC’s Politically Incorrect. His latest book, published in March 2011, is titled The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama's America.
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Alexander's Essay – August 25, 2011
Ballots or Bullets?
Ballot Box Barriers to Restoring Constitutional Integrity
"We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our Liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections. If an election is to be determined by a majority of a single vote, and that can be procured by a party through artifice or corruption, the Government may be the choice of a party for its own ends, not of the nation for the national good." --John Adams, Inaugural Address, 1797
All around us, there are imminent and ominous threats to the future of American Liberty. None, however, is more grave than the demolition of free enterprise by those who would replace it with the authoritarian rule of Democratic Socialism envisioned by Barack Hussein Obama and his leftist comrades.
Rancorous political debate is currently focused on competing solutions for our failing domestic economy and the collapse of our esteemed standing among the nations of the world.
Conservatives, particularly those resolute constitutional constructionists who identify with the much-maligned Tea Party Movement, rightly understand, as did Ronald Reagan, that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." That is why we are advocating for the restoration of constitutional limits on the central government.
Conversely, the growing ranks of leftists in Congress, some 80 of whom are openly members of the Socialist Party of America's Congressional Progressive Caucus, led by Reps. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Keith Ellison (D-MN), subscribe to the notion that government is both the engine and the drive train of our nation's economy.
But if Essential Liberty and Rule of Law as enshrined in our Constitution are to survive, then free enterprise must be their economic engine. At present, however, that engine is attempting to pull an ever more bloated government trailer -- a trailer so overloaded as to bring the economy to a dead stop.
How bloated?
Obama's government programs will amass a $1.3 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2011 alone, some $400 billion more than the paltry $917 billion in savings to which Congress agreed over the next decade under the recent budget deal and corresponding debt-ceiling increase.
This oppressive bloat -- and our elected leaders' utterly inadequate response to it -- will serve as fodder for much of the political debate ahead of the 2012 election. Indeed, the future of Liberty depends on the successful defeat of enough congressional leftists to provide strong conservative majorities in both the House and Senate. Moreover, Liberty hangs in the balance of the upcoming presidential election. While conservatives recaptured the House of Representatives in 2010, the first effective step to restrain Obama's agenda, only a conservative president can begin to undo the damage done to our nation by the Obama regime.
However, do we still have the luxury of political solutions, via elections, to salvage what is left of our Republic? Is the ballot box still a viable method to restore constitutional integrity?
Is the ballot box still an option? Post your opinion
As John Adams once warned, we must be vigilantly on guard against all contagions that would "infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections."
These contagions, these obstacles, are as follows, roughly in order of threat magnitude: an ignorant electorate; candidates who are unable to articulate the difference between Rule of Law and rule of men; institutionalized dependency on the state, including the fact that 40 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax; forced redistribution of wealth; comfort, complacency and indifference; Leftmedia dezinformatsia; opposition by the leftist elite; and, finally, the conferring of legal status upon illegal immigrants in order to fortify Democrat voter constituencies illegitimately.
The most significant obstacle to restoring liberty by way of the electoral process is the fact that so many Americans know so little about civics or civic responsibility. When it comes to getting government right, ignorance is not bliss.
It follows, then, that there is a dearth of qualified candidates who are able to articulate the difference between Rule of Law and rule of men, who instead get lost in the high weeds of lesser political issues.
A majority of Americans are beneficiaries of some combination of thousands of government schemes to redistribute wealth. The resulting institutionalized dependency on the state is insidious, as it results in reliable votes for whichever party (read: the Democrat Party) can take the most from one group and redistribute it to another. It's no wonder that the most recent Index of Dependence on Government (2010) reports the greatest single-year percentage rise in dependence since 1976.
As Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) recently noted, Obama's "intent is to create dependency because it worked so well for him."
Additionally, 40 percent of Americans pay no federal income taxes. This huge voting bloc thus has no (apparent) stake in our nation's fiscal health, and its voters are thereby motivated to use their ballots to keep the government largess spewing.
As 19th-century political economist Frederic Bastiat noted, "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
The forced redistribution of wealth pushed the Cost of Government Day to 12 August this year, which means that the average American tax payer must now work 224 days to fund all taxes, and hidden regulatory taxes, imposed by the central government. That date is 27 days later than in 2008, and it now consumes more than 60 percent of national earned income. There are endless regulatory costs on the horizon, such as Obama's new fuel economy standards which according to a study conducted by the Center for Automotive Research, will increase the average retail price of motor vehicles more than $11,000.
As government takes more, individuals have less to live their lives and to support Liberty advocacy organizations like The Patriot Post.
Of course, comfort, complacency and indifference, particularly among wealthy "Republicans" who contribute little to sustain our legacy of Liberty for our posterity, undermine the potential for sustaining Liberty by way of the ballot box.
In response to such indifference, Samuel Adams advised, "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!"
Meanwhile, Leftmedia indoctrination and thriving financial support for wealthy left-elite socialist causes continue to twist public opinion and ensure the success of leftist candidates and policies.
Other obstacles to ballot box solutions? Post your comments
While these are certainly formidable obstacles to the rejection of socialism and successful restoration of constitutional integrity, they are not insurmountable. Still, when generations of Americans have been inculcated with the belief that they are entitled to so much from the state, it may take a generation or more to re-educate them, and to stave off the violence that often erupts when the state fails to meet their expectations as witnessed recently in Greece and England.
The question remains: Are we irrevocably locked into the Cycle of Democracy? Recall that this evolves from bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to Liberty (Rule of Law); Liberty to abundance; abundance to complacency; complacency to apathy; apathy to dependence; and from dependence back into bondage (rule of men).
At the close of the first American Revolution, George Washington wrote, "No country upon earth ever had it more in its power to attain these blessings [of Liberty] than United America. Wondrously strange, then, and much to be regretted indeed would it be, were we to neglect the means and to depart from the road which Providence has pointed us to so plainly; I cannot believe it will ever come to pass."
We have already veered from that road. Is there time to use the ballot box to attain a new dawn for Liberty, or are we destined to dependence and bondage, which will require another renewal of faith and courage?
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second post:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/08/24/rubio_conservatism_is_about_empowering_people_to_catch_up.html
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Regarding the previous post, you can put Marco Rubio's name right into the title of The Way Forward thread, or would that be redundant?
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My simplest proposal to jumpstart enterprise would be to waive all employment law in the first year for entrepreneurs other to avoid blatant discrimination and mistreatment. Require only a 1099 for monies paid out, with no withholding or other forms required in the first calendar year. This WSJ piece goes further:
An Entrepreneurial Fix for the U.S. Economy
Several reforms can make it faster and easier for new business startups.
The Kauffman Foundation recently proposed a way to do that with a set of ideas aptly called the Startup Act. Those ideas, which would cost the government virtually nothing, include:
• Letting in immigrant entrepreneurs who hire American workers.
• Reducing the cost of capital through capital gains tax relief for early stage investments.
• Reducing barriers to IPOs by allowing shareholders to opt out of Sarbanes-Oxley.
• Charging higher fees for patent applicants who want quick decisions to remove the backlog of applications at the Patent Office.
• Giving licensing freedom to academic entrepreneurs at universities to accelerate the commercialization of their ideas.
• Having the government provide data to permit rankings of startup friendliness of states and localities.
• Regular sunsets for regulations and a consistent policy of putting new ones in place only if their benefits exceed their costs.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576512683292295492.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
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Tack this on to Crafty's post with the youtube of Sen. Marco Rubio at the Reagan Library - this is the Q &A that follows. Off script he is just as compelling.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_TUXd06BiU&feature=relmfu
Questions: Will he be VP? How do we attract more young people to conservatism? Tax code reform? Defense? ("The world is as dangerous as it has ever been. If somehow we think that weakening America's national defense is something we can afford to do we are sadly mistaken. We cannot. Weakening our national defense is not the way to balance the budget of the United States of America.") What should the Tea Party focus on?
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By SHELBY STEELE
If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama's character, today's left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.
Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines this presidency: Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-'60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America's exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America's greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.
Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.
Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his "leading from behind" profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his "hope and change" campaign slogan came to look like the "hope" of overcoming American exceptionalism and "change" away from it.
So, in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.
View Full Image
Chad Crowe
.But then again, the American people did elect him. Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America's bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence?
American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.
Yet today America is fighting in a number of Muslim countries, and that number is as likely to rise as to fall. Our exceptionalism saddles us with overwhelming burdens. The entire world comes to our door when there is real trouble, and every day we spill blood and treasure in foreign lands—even as anti-Americanism plays around the world like a hit record.
At home the values that made us exceptional have been smeared with derision. Individual initiative and individual responsibility—the very engines of our exceptionalism—now carry a stigma of hypocrisy. For centuries America made sure that no amount of initiative would lift minorities and women. So in liberal quarters today—where historical shames are made to define the present—these values are seen as little more than the cynical remnants of a bygone era. Talk of "merit" or "a competition of excellence" in the admissions office of any Ivy League university today, and then stand by for the howls of incredulous laughter.
Our national exceptionalism both burdens and defames us, yet it remains our fate. We make others anxious, envious, resentful, admiring and sometimes hate-driven. There's a reason al Qaeda operatives targeted the U.S. on 9/11 and not, say, Buenos Aires. They wanted to enrich their act of evil with the gravitas of American exceptionalism. They wanted to steal our thunder.
So we Americans cannot help but feel some ambivalence toward our singularity in the world—with its draining entanglements abroad, the selfless demands it makes on both our military and our taxpayers, and all the false charges of imperial hubris it incurs. Therefore it is not surprising that America developed a liberalism—a political left—that took issue with our exceptionalism. It is a left that has no more fervent mission than to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism and unbridled capitalism.
But this leaves the left mired in an absurdity: It seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity. When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, then the world in fact no longer knocks on its door. (Think of England or France after empire.) To civilize America, to redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline—as if we can redeem America only by making her indistinguishable from lesser nations.
Since the '60s we have enfeebled our public education system even as our wealth has expanded. Moral and cultural relativism now obscure individual responsibility. We are uninspired in the wars we fight, calculating our withdrawal even before we begin—and then we fight with a self-conscious, almost bureaucratic minimalism that makes the wars interminable.
America seems to be facing a pivotal moment: Do we move ahead by advancing or by receding—by reaffirming the values that made us exceptional or by letting go of those values, so that a creeping mediocrity begins to spare us the burdens of greatness?
As a president, Barack Obama has been a force for mediocrity. He has banked more on the hopeless interventions of government than on the exceptionalism of the people. His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen. He is afraid to ask difficult things of them.
Like me, he is black, and it was the government that in part saved us from the ignorances of the people. So the concept of the exceptionalism—the genius for freedom—of the American people may still be a stretch for him. But in fact he was elected to make that stretch. It should be held against him that he has failed to do so.
Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is "White Guilt" (Harper/Collins, 2007).
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Alexander's Essay – September 1, 2011
The Essential Question in Any Political Debate
The most important inquiry conservatives must posit in every policy debate: "What does our Constitution authorize and mandate?"
"The Constitution which at any time exists, 'till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole People is sacredly obligatory upon all." --George Washington
The most vital debate of the 2012 political cycle, indeed the essential question in any political debate, is one that you will not hear much about unless you are represented by one of the authentic conservatives who have carried the banner of the Reagan Revolution into the 21st century, or you are represented by one of those much-maligned Tea Party "radicals."
One unifying characteristic of the old guard and the new breed of senators and representatives is that they insist upon establishing the Essential Liberty and Rule of Law precedents as prerequisites for any political policy debate.
Our Constitution, as written and ratified, stipulates in its preface that it is "ordained and established" by the People in order to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." To that end, it established a representative republic, not a popular democracy, which is to say it affirmed the primacy of Rule of Law over rule of men.
Our Founders understood that the Rule of Law enshrined in our Constitution was the fundamental guarantee to protecting and sustaining Liberty for their, and our, posterity. Consequently, they prescribed that all elected officials be bound by Sacred Oath to "support and defend" our Constitution.
For presidents, Article II, Section 1, specifies: "Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: 'I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.'"
Likewise Article VI, Clause 3 specifies: "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution."
However, in the current political era, the vast majority of those elected to national office have abandoned their oaths in deference to political expediency and constituency. For this they should be duly prosecuted, one and all, for breach of oath and trust.
Are oaths binding? Post your opinion
Democrats deign to trace their party lineage to the father of classical libertarianism, Thomas Jefferson, yet they utterly reject questions about constitutional authority. So archaic do they believe such queries to be that when asked, they insist, in the words of Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, "Nobody questions that."
But if Liberty is to be sustained by ballots rather than bullets, every conservative candidate must base his or her campaign platform upon restoration of our authentic Constitution and wholly reject the so-called "living constitution upon which Democrats have constructed their socialist empire.
For much of our nation's history, election cycles have been filled with rancorous political debates. Like today, many of those debates were focused on personalities and motivated by power seekers. The consequence has been an incremental erosion of constitutional authority, particularly by the Judicial Branch, which has amended our Constitution by judicial diktat rather than by the legitimate method prescribed in Article V.
James Madison wrote, "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." However, the "gradual and silent" erosion has been punctuated with periodic landslides. Today, tyranny is hovering on the immediate horizon.
In the decades following our nation's founding, many of the great debates were centered on Liberty. The notions of containing the power of the central government and promoting individual freedom were fervently tested. But four major events in the years after 1850 altered the political debate and, tragically, increased the power of the central government far beyond its constitutional limits.
The first of those events was the War Between the States which cost 600,000 American lives and annulled the authority of our Constitution's mandate for Federalism. Unfortunately, today's "Republicans" tie their lineage to Abraham Lincoln, the man who engineered that frontal assault on states' rights. (Sorry, not buying this one at all. Slavery is not a right. Period.)
The second major insult to Liberty came during the Great Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt and his "useful idiots" used the fear generated by economic crisis to implement his "New Deal," an explosive expansion of central government power that came at enormous offense to the authority of our Constitution.
The third colossal affront to our Constitution occurred under another Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, who implemented his "Great Society" programs in response to fears about social and economic inequality.
The fourth and final nail in the coffin of American Liberty is being hammered in by Barack Hussein Obama and his Leftist cadres. They are determined to replace our republican government with European-style Democratic Socialism, and they have made significant strides toward that terrible goal.
The only way to re-establish the primacy of Rule of Law over rule of men and reinstate limits upon our government and its controllers is to restore the authority of our Constitution. Only then will we ensure that Liberty prevails over tyranny.
Does constitutional authority matter? Post your comments
That authority was, and remains, clearly defined by our Founders who, though they might have differed modestly on the question of constitutional interpretation, universally agreed with George Washington: "The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their Constitutions of Government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, 'till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole People is sacredly obligatory upon all."
Washington also wrote, "Should, hereafter, those incited by the lust of power and prompted by the supineness or venality of their constituents, overleap the known barriers of this Constitution and violate the unalienable rights of humanity: it will only serve to show, that no compact among men (however provident in its construction and sacred in its ratification) can be pronounced everlasting and inviolable, and if I may so express myself, that no Wall of words, that no mound of parchment can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other."
What did other Founders write about Rule of Law and the authority of our Constitution?
James Madison: "I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution. And if that is not the guide in expounding it, there may be no security for a consistent and stable, more than for a faithful exercise of its powers. ... If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions."
Thomas Jefferson: "Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction. ... To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. ... The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. ... The opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch. ... On every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed. ... [C]onfidence is every where the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy and not in confidence; it is jealousy & not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power ... in questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution."
Alexander Hamilton: "[T]here is not a syllable in the [Constitution] which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution, or which gives them any greater latitude in this respect than may be claimed by the courts of every State. ... The Judiciary ... has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society, and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither force nor will. ... If it be asked, 'What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic?' The answer would be, an inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws -- the first growing out of the last. ... A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government. ... [T]he present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes -- rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provides for amendments."
John Adams: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. ... The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People. ... [T]hey may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. ... A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever."
Article VI of our Constitution proclaims: "This Constitution ... shall be the supreme Law of the Land."
The definitive reflection on constitutional authority comes from Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, a Madison appointee, in his "Commentaries on the Constitution" (1833): "The constitution of the United States is to receive a reasonable interpretation of its language, and its powers, keeping in view the objects and purposes for which those powers were conferred. By a reasonable interpretation, we mean, that in case the words are susceptible of two different senses, the one strict, the other more enlarged, that should be adopted which is most consonant with the apparent objects and intent of the Constitution. ... Temporary delusions, prejudices, excitements, and objects have irresistible influence in mere questions of policy. And the policy of one age may ill suit the wishes or the policy of another. The constitution is not subject to such fluctuations. It is to have a fixed, uniform, permanent construction. It should be, so far at least as human infirmity will allow, not dependent upon the passions or parties of particular times, but the same yesterday, to-day, and forever."
The last best hope for the restoration of our Constitution's original intent is upon us. Accordingly, a revival of its prescribed limits on the central government rests on the shoulders of those wise enough to educate themselves to the principles of Essential Liberty and bold enough to make constitutional authority the centerpiece of any political debate.
At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a citizen asked Benjamin Franklin what form of government the Founders had created. He responded, "A republic, if you can keep it." The question for American Patriots today: "Can we keep it?"
Well, can we? Tell me what you think
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
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By PETER BERKOWITZ
With the opening of the fall political season and tonight's Republican candidate debate, expect influential conservative voices to clamor for fellow conservatives to set aside half-measures, eschew conciliation, and adhere to conservative principle in its pristine purity. But what does fidelity to conservatism's core convictions mean?
Superstar radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has, with characteristic bravado, championed a take-no-prisoners approach. In late July, as the debt-ceiling debate built to its climax, he understandably exhorted House Speaker John Boehner to stand strong and rightly praised the tea party for "putting country before party." But then Mr. Limbaugh went further. "Winners do not compromise," he declared on air. "Winners do not compromise with themselves. The winners who do compromise are winners who still don't believe in themselves as winners, who still think of themselves as losers."
Enlarge Image
CloseAssociated Press
Republican presidential candidates at the last debate.
.We saw the results of such thinking in November 2010, when Christine O'Donnell was defeated by Chris Coons in Delaware in the race for Vice President Joe Biden's vacated Senate seat. In Nevada Sharron Angle was defeated by Harry Reid, who was returned to Washington to reclaim his position as Senate majority leader. In both cases, the Republican senatorial candidate was a tea party favorite who lost a very winnable election.
The notion of conservative purity is a myth. The great mission of American conservatism—securing the conditions under which liberty flourishes—has always depended on the weaving together of imperfectly compatible principles and applying them to an evolving and elusive political landscape.
William F. Buckley Jr.'s 1955 Mission Statement announcing the launch of National Review welcomed traditionalists, libertarians and anticommunists. His enterprise provides a model of a big-tent conservatism supported by multiple and competing principles: limited government, free markets, traditional morality and strong national defense.
These principles may appear harmonious. That's because they all served the cause of preserving freedom against the leading threats of the day: massive expansion of government, intrusive regulation of the economy, a breakdown of established sources of authority and belief, and communist tyranny. But harmony was an achievement. Just ask those who made a priority of limiting government about the impact of funding and maintaining a powerful military. Or inquire of a traditionalist what measures are necessary to maintain the virtues amidst the constant churn and cultural cacophony generated by capitalism.
Our greatest conservative president, Ronald Reagan, prudently wove together a devotion to limiting government and protecting the moral bases of a free society. But the policies he pursued were not mechanically derived from his principles. They stemmed from complex considerations concerning the necessary, the desirable and the possible. His landmark pro-growth tax cuts of 1981 were followed later by some tax increases. On divisive social issues such as abortion and school prayer, he offered strong words but restrained actions. And in confronting the Soviet Union, he insisted on the unmitigated evil of communism while pursuing dramatic negotiations to lessen the threat of nuclear conflagration, thereby paving the way to victory in the Cold War.
The intellectual architects of the American political and economic order were also blenders and weavers. For example, John Locke, the great 17th-century theorist of individual rights and limited government, argued in "The Second Treatise of Government" that in the event a father dies and fails to provide for the care and education of his son, the state must make provision.
And in "The Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith, the father of free-market economics, maintained that the public should offer and require an education for almost all. While it would be grossly misleading to designate Locke and Smith as founders of the modern welfare state, it would be negligent to overlook their teaching that beyond securing individual rights, governments devoted to freedom had interests in the welfare of their citizens.
Today, we are urged by tea party activists, and with excellent reason, to look to the authors of "The Federalist," the authoritative expounders of the Constitution, to recover the principles of limited government. But it is instructive to recall that in their day the makers of the American Constitution were the enlargers and strengtheners of federal power.
Hamilton, Madison and Jay defended the new Constitution not only because of the many and varied limitations it imposed on the exercise of power. They also defended it because, in contrast to the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution incorporated in the national government the power to operate without the regular intervention of state governments; assigned it ultimate authority in matters requiring uniformity, including regulation of trade and naturalization; and made it supreme over the states, including in judicial matters.
On issue after issue, fidelity to the variety of conservative principles imposes not only the obligation to blend and balance but also to give due weight to settled expectations and longstanding practices. For instance, an appreciation of these crisscrossing obligations should impel conservatives to work both to improve the public schools we have and to increase competition and parental choice among an array of options.
While developing cost-cutting and market-based reforms for health care, conservatives should frankly acknowledge, as does Rep. Paul Ryan in his bold plan, the importance of maintaining a minimum social safety net. And in the Middle East and elsewhere, conservatism encourages a vigilant search for opportunities to promote liberty while counseling that our knowledge is limited, our resources scarce and our attention span poor.
Compromise can be, and often is, the path of least resistance, the province of the mealy-mouthed, weak-kneed, and lily-livered. Yet when circumstances warrant—and they often will—compromise will be the considered choice of the steely-eyed and stouthearted.
Clarity about principles is critical. It enables one to spot the betrayal of core convictions. But contrary to the partisans of purity, in politics winning and compromise are not antithetical.
Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
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Great Post! That is exactly what we need...
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The Berlowitz piece and JDN reaction: Great Post! "[compromise] is exactly what we need..."
Good grief!
He starts with a takeoff from something Rush L. said about winners not compromising. What did he get, two lines out of a 20 year, 3 hour a day show? Berkowitz's must be the piece Rush was responded to as I tuned in. He says they always point back to the same 3 examples, Christine what's-her-name and Sharon Angle lost. And Goldwater in '64. That's it. That proves that principled conservative candidates never win and RINOs always do. Really? Christine and Sharon were the least qualified candidates running. How about Marco Rubio who won by a MILLION votes, Rand Paul and plenty of others - like a conservative businessman over liberal lion Russ Feingold in Wisconsin where Obama had just won by FOURTEEN POINTS over the senate's most moderate member, John McCain! Goldwater lost in '64 but Reagan won twice and won big, 40 states in 1980 and then 49 states in 1984! Ford, Dole, McCain? 0 for 3. Democrat-Lite. Not exactly a winning flavor. Who were the great moderates of history?
Reagan compromised plenty - as pointed out in the piece. So does Rand Paul now and Marco Rubio and Ron Johnson (R-WI). It is a complete straw argument IMO to say this is about compromise. Compromise is what they all do every day on every issue. The question at hand is about CAVING, or are we just choosing candidates who share none of our core principles in the first place?
CRA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, these are Alinsky type wedges that would never be the law of the land without the signing on of moderate RINOs. Let's see - these and a few others brought down the country if not the world economy. Government owning mortgages, auto manufacturers, investing in energy - the inefficient types, mandating healthcare and bailing out insurance companies? Bailing out Central banks - of foreign countries? Drilling for oil in Brazil while banning it at home? The feds choose your light bulbs, food in the schools, hell, everything in the schools. Now we have federal spending at nearly 4 trillion with no end in sight, on revenues stuck at 2 1/2, and 72 distinct federal means tested welfare programs, none authorized in the constitution that I can find. Maybe unenumerated powers?? That is compromise? On what core conservative principles?? There are none left that I recognize!
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What remains a baffflement to me is how the reigning story on the recent game of chicken over raising the debt ceiling is to blame the Tea Party's takeover of the Reps and their collective failure to compromise when there were only $21B in cuts this year and $40-something billion in cuts next year-- not to mention that apparently Boener was willing to sign on for $800B in "revenues enhancements".
WTF?!?
It is profoundly maddening that the Reps let this sort of thing happen again and again and again.
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S&P lowered its rating after the deal, not during the stalemate. That blame argument rings hollow for anyone paying attention. The
If that false blame argument slips into the speech, like he did in SOTU at the Supreme Court with false characterization of the Citizens United decision, those this time on the receiving end of it should quietly and politely stand up and walk out. Freedom of speech does not include any kind of compulsion to listen, and that shows more openmindedness than not showing up in the first place which is what I would probably do in their situation.
Moving the decimal point on the cuts in the last deal to the new unit trillions, that draconian 'cut' was $0.02 trillion and it lasted one month until tonight where the President will likely propose another half trillion in new spending. Yes the tea party picked the wrong fight on debt ceiling and lost it. Don't minimize however that the tea party succeeded in drawing enormous attention to the problem of spending, deficit and debt even in the middle of summer when conventional wisdom says that no one is paying attention.
They lost because there was no republican consensus on making 40% cuts in spending in a recession nor any ability to win that argument with the senate and executive even if there was. The debt ceiling was going to go up right from the beginning and the rest was about drawing attention to the problem.
Those making the blame tea party case OTOH are not exactly winning. They got their debt limit raised and their license to keep on spending at quite a cost. Obama's approval on his economic policies is down to just immediate family and a couple of journalists and it is still falling. If spending does increase dramatically now, and I don't see how, he would then face another debt ceiling fight just before the election.
If the President wants $400 billion more here or there for new domestic initiatives, first tell us which failed domestic initiatives you will end to free up the funds.
Next step if there is no stomach for real cuts is to freeze spending (END ALL BASELINES) and get focused on growth.
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This is an excellent, short interview, it covers the Obama plan, what is okay in it, that overall it isn't a serious attempt to grow jobs, what needs to be done, what works, the amazing potential for growth we have right now if we would just do a few things.
It would save me a lot of time and trouble writing my views on the issues if I could just post a quick video of Marco Rubio answering a few basic questions each morning.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/09/14/rubio_on_obamas_jobs_plan_only_job_he_is_trying_to_protect_is_his.html
Just 2 1/2 minutes, please watch.
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This is an excellent, short interview, it covers the Obama plan, what is okay in it, that overall it isn't a serious attempt to grow jobs, what needs to be done, what works, the amazing potential for growth we have right now if we would just do a few things.
It would save me a lot of time and trouble writing my views on the issues if I could just post a quick video of Marco Rubio answering a few basic questions each morning.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/09/14/rubio_on_obamas_jobs_plan_only_job_he_is_trying_to_protect_is_his.html
Just 2 1/2 minutes, please watch.
Rubio has my vote when he runs for president.
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GM: "Rubio has my vote when he runs for president."
Yes. I will waive my two-term Governor rule whenever he makes the jump - Rubio has an upside risk of greatness well worth taking. That video is without notes, presumably without knowing the questions. He is succinct, articulate and right on the money with each answer. He connects the immediate question, a 'jobs' bill with what we should do now and a clear vision forward. He never loses sight of what makes America great and what is the proper role of government.
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IMHO he would make a great VP candidate right now.
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"IMHO he would make a great VP candidate right now."
I like that idea. I think Bobby Jindal would be a great VP pick as well.
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Just a quick yip to say that IMHO we are missing an opportunity with the response of our side to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Instead of focusing on the anti-free market element, I would focus on the correct anger at bailouts of some people, bank, and businesses that have acted very badly and communicate that what we see here is the natural result of the progressive/liberal fascist ideology.
Marc
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The original story mentioned is posted in 'Tax Policy'. I offer this excerpt of a WSJ letter to the editor in partial answer to Marc's point about answering anger about bailouts:
"Regarding Stephen Moore's "Flat Is the New Fair" (op-ed, Sept. 30): The flat tax should have been implemented years ago. It would have ... [/b]denied Congress the means to reward favored groups with special benefits[/b]..."
Since Obama claims there is no real progressivity in taxes now, what on earth would we lose by agreeing to tax all income of all people evenly, instead of based on who do you know and how big is your group.
That simple reform wouldsolve half of the problem and isolate the rest to be tackled over on the spending side of the ledger.
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"Instead of focusing on the anti-free market element, I would focus on the correct anger at bailouts of some people, bank, and businesses that have acted very badly and communicate that what we see here is the natural result of the progressive/liberal fascist ideology."
I agree. It is not simple class warfare, envy, or incorrect to do something about the inherent reality and truth that some of those fabulously wealthy peolpe have gotten away with things none of the rest of us could or should get away with.
I don't think that any Republican who points this out and is willing to at least give credence about a concept that works in practice as well as in theory to a "level playing field" is going against any core principle of hard work, risk taking, reward those who do well, personal responsibility or the rest.
One can be populist in this regard and conservative. One of the tenets of our society, culture, political makeup is we all have an "equal chance". Of course that is not really true but at least we should all have to play by the same rules. Those at the top can clearly get around rules that the rest of us cannot.
This theme would in my view capture some of the independent voters who are on the fence not sure which side is better.
Those on the left want redistribution and point out that the wealthy are always keeping everyone else down and ripping us off.
Those on the right don't support this view and talk only about equal opportunity and personal responsibility.
I agree in theory with the right's view but also realize that is not recognizing that a lot of powerful people also are unethical.
It seems to me most in the US want to be responsible and want not be envious of wealth, success and achievement. Yet many also realize some are ripping the rest of us off and they cannot and should not simply look the other way.
I liked Newt's comment about how Republicans should stop social engineering as well as those on the left.
I agree if I understand what he meant. But he was never given the chance to explain. The conservatives simply jumped all over him. They ignore this at their own peril (by which I mean lost votes).
"The flat tax should have been implemented years ago." No question. It seems for the first time thanks to Herman Cain we have a spokeperson who is getting press over the idea of a flat tax. Though I prefer a little higher income tax and no federal sales tax as in his 9 9 9 idea.
Thank God for Cain! Now if he can brush up on foreign policy....
We need a cure for colon cancer just in case... and soon.
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"I prefer a little higher income tax and no federal sales tax as in his 9 9 9 idea."
This is my view as well and both need to be in the teens. He can go back to his same experts for the revenue neutral number on that and offer the country through their representatives a choice that includes a President Cain with each.
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Regulations today are worse than taxes, worse than spending and maybe even worse than what we are doing to our currency.
An excerpt from Steven Hayward yesterday (biased blogger) agreeing with Peggy Noonan on 'This is no time for moderation', praising Cain and goes on into regulations:
"I depart from Peggy in one respect. While our financial structures are certainly still shaky, a much larger problem is the regulatory structure that has clotted the arteries of the economy by making it cumbersome and difficult to get anything started. Consider the Keystone XL pipeline, which would generate over 20,000 constructions jobs, and lot of other permanent jobs after it is finished. It is going to be approved. Eventually. Is the long hearing and litigation process really contributing to reducing the environmental impact the project is going to have? Surely not. And to the extent the long review process does lead to mitigations of harms, are there any changes that couldn’t have been figured out in the first 90 days of the whole story? A country serious about job creation wouldn’t tolerate this kind of process. I’m convinced the purpose of the whole regulatory process today is to extort things from the private sector, and/or to simply wear out the opposition to new things before the government finally says “yes.” We can’t afford this frivolousness any more.
As a thought experiment, think back to all the New Deal era construction projects, like the Columbia and Colorado River dams, the Empire State Building, and the Oakland Bay and Golden Gate bridges. None of them could be built as quickly today, if at all. The hearing/litigation process would have delayed them for years, and run the cost way up. The replacement Oakland Bay Bridge, called for after its collapse in the 1989 earthquake, is just now approaching completion, 22 years (and three recessions) later. Notice how long it took to let everyone have their say on replacing the World Trade Center at Ground Zero. See the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Project No Project website for much more on this point.
So just as Reagan embraced supply-side economics as a radical move to change the economy in 1980, the big opening for someone today is to find the regulatory equivalent of the Laffer Curve. Someone needs to figure out a way to rip out the regulatory structure by the roots, and replace it with something that delivers genuine protection for health, safety, and the environment while allows things to get built and businesses to get started quickly."
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/10/time-to-raise-cain-literally-and-figuratively.php
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By NEAL B. FREEMAN
Editor's note: We replace our regular Weekend Interview feature this week with an essay adapted from remarks by Neal Freeman, delivered yesterday on the 60th anniversary of the publication of William F. Buckley Jr.'s "God and Man at Yale." Mr. Freeman is chairman of the Blackwell Corporation, served on the board of National Review magazine for 38 years, and is a director of the William F. Buckley Program at Yale, which brings speakers to campus and sponsors for-credit courses.
New Haven, Conn.
It was my good fortune to be the guy standing next to Bill Buckley when he became Bill Buckley. When I went to work for him in 1963, he was a fiery polemicist in the world of the little magazine. Less than three years later—after the Buckley newspaper column had spread to every city across the country, after the Buckley for Mayor campaign in New York City, and after the launch of the "Firing Line" television program—he had become a large and influential presence on the national stage.
What I remember most vividly from those transformative years are three things. The first is his extraordinary personal courage.
When Bill Buckley set out to change the world, the ideological forces arrayed against him permeated the media, the academy, the political establishment and popular culture. As just one measure of the correlation of forces, consider the situation on the Yale campus.
As my own class approached graduation—that glorious June day when our commencement speaker, John F. Kennedy, got off the lambent line, "I now have the best of both worlds, a Harvard education and a Yale degree"—we conservatives sought to make a show of support for our emerging champion, Barry Goldwater. From a class of 1,000 young men, we managed to secure the support of five classmates. In addition to myself, one of our number is now an academic in California, one is a lawyer in New York, one is deceased and one is a lobbyist for the legalization of marijuana. Barry would have been proud of at least one of us.
Not included in our number, I should note, was our hard-drinking classmate, Richard B. Cheney. As God is my witness, Dick Cheney was a 160-pound scatback on the football team. Also not included was a quiet economics major named Arthur Laffer.
Enlarge Image
CloseWilliam F. Buckley Jr. in 1951 with his book that shocked the academic establishment.
.As scrawny as were our ranks in the undergraduate college, they dwarfed our support among the Yale faculty. Within the approximately 700-strong faculty, we enjoyed the support of two professors. One was a feisty lecturer in the law school, Robert Bork. The other was an Asian scholar named David Rowe. The odds on the Yale campus were, in rough approximation, the same odds that Bill Buckley faced across the broader culture—and Bill Buckley was undaunted by them. (My apologies. Bill would have found a way to include the word "synecdoche" somewhere in that last sentence.)
In the matter of physical courage, those of you who sailed through rough seas with him, or darted through New York City traffic on the back of his motor scooter, will know something of his fearlessness. What I remember is his demeanor during the mayoralty campaign. The public square could be a dangerous place during the 1960s. Political figures who stirred passions beyond the edge of consensus tended to attract not just controversy but gunfire.
As a political candidate, Bill Buckley stirred those same passions, but we were blessed with a first-rate security detail. It was called the NYPD. That year in New York, it seemed that every cop—white, black and Hispanic—was for Buckley for mayor. It was the first known sighting of what psephologists would later identify as the Reagan Democrat.
At the first threat-assessment meeting, Bill listened patiently to the cops' presentation and then thanked them politely. On the way out, he issued two directives. The first was that he would not be attending any subsequent security briefings. Reports that he could be shot the next morning did not concentrate his mind. They bored him. And second, he instructed me to make sure that threat reports never reached his wife, Patsy. The campaign was in its early weeks and Bill was still hopeful of winning her support.
The second Buckley trait that stands tall in my recollection is excellence. Bill resolved early that every speech he gave, every column he wrote, every edition of the magazine he edited must not be just competitive with, but superior to, the products of his liberal counterparts.
It was a humbling experience to be edited by Bill Buckley. I still have the original of the first editorial I wrote for National Review. We used Royal typewriters in those days to pound out copy on yellow foolscap: Here and there, one of my black words peeks through a blaze of red ballpoint ink. It was his conceit that if you couldn't write, you couldn't think; and that if you couldn't think, you were unlikely to prosper in his friendship.
The third trait is joy. The sound that rings in memory is that of Bill's laughter. Bill with a colleague in the office. Bill on the phone with a delicious story. Bill on the boat in the company of his many best friends. All Buckley ventures, be they commercial, political or simply for the good of the order, were aimed at high purpose but pursued in high spirit. When I left Bill's employ to start climbing the corporate ladder in New York, I took with me, for as long as I could, the privilege of editing his thrice-weekly column. An evening phone call from my star columnist would go something like this:
WFB: Mon vieux, I will be filing three columns within the hour. Do you know what that means?
Me: A particularly long and difficult evening for your editor?
WFB: Of course not. The copy will be pristine as always. It means that we can be at the boat by eight in the morning.
Me (cautiously, remembering a previous occasion when I had agreed to meet him at the boat only to learn later that it was docked in Miami): Where is the boat?
WFB: Stamford.
Me: Where is the boat going?
WFB: Nova Scotia. You'll love it this time of year.
Me: Bill, I'm running a commercial organization. I can't just leave a note for my secretary saying that I've sailed for Nova Scotia.
WFB: Why not? Secretaries at National Review handle that sort of thing all the time.
And so they did. The joy that Bill Buckley brought to any room lingered long after his departure. Years after the event, I obtained excerpts of Bill's interview with the FBI on the occasion of my appointment to a federal position. At the end of such field investigations, the agent typically asks an omnibus, fanny-covering question: Would I, candidate Freeman, be likely to embarrass the administration? Replied witness Buckley, under oath: "I should think that the reverse is much more likely."
How then would Bill Buckley have addressed today's question: "Buckley's Legacy: How Would the Patron Saint Turbo-Charge Conservatism?" He would have begun, of course, with the obligatory quibble.
"Ontologically speaking," he might have mused, "how could conservatism ever really be said to be turbo-charged, as you so infelicitously put it?" After rejiggering the question to his satisfaction, he would have marched through the following agenda.
First, he would have summoned the Republican stalwarts for catechismic instruction. Mitt Romney, invited to dinner at 73rd Street, would have been given a pass on gun control, abortion, immigration and universal health care. Bill believed that every human being is endowed by his Creator with the unalienable right to flip-flop, though Bill might have regretted, in Mr. Romney's case, that it had been exercised so vigorously.
Instead, Bill would have bored in on what he perceived to be a lacuna: namely, the widespread presumption that Mr. Romney can fix our broken economy with an economic plan that is manifestly inadequate to the challenge. Mr. Romney would have squirmed through the evening. Bill would have barely survived it. He hated to drink alone.
Rick Perry's visit would have triggered the full WFB charm offensive. Tales of the original WFB and his wildcatting days in Mexico would have spiced the evening. Mr. Perry would have responded with a Dan Rather-sized Texasism, an impenetrable aphorism involving parched land and poisonous snakes. Bill would have been befuddled no more than momentarily—and segued quickly into a mini-lecture on why contemporary international affairs call for a somewhat less, uhhhh, parochial foreign policy than the governor has heretofore advanced.
When Sarah Palin came to lunch, Bill would have been on his best behavior. Patsy might even have persuaded him not to eat the salad with his fingers. After an hour and a half, Bill would have concluded, under the unbending terms of the Buckley Rule—which, as you will recall, holds that conservatives should support for election the rightward-most viable candidate—that Mrs. Palin was sufficiently rightward but insufficiently viable. As they parted that afternoon, Bill would have accepted an invitation to go spear-hunting for large mammals deep inside the Arctic Circle, a commitment that neither Sarah nor Patsy would ever let him forget.
The session with Newt Gingrich would have caused Bill to remark on the Speaker's X-ray insight, his barbed wit, his broad range of reference and allusion. It might also have caused Bill to remember an observation by the late Herman Kahn: "Some people learn through the eye by reading, others through the ear by listening. I learn through the mouth by talking." Bill would have counseled the Speaker to add to his senior staff an editor with plenipotentiary powers.
The summit meeting with Herman Cain would have excited high anticipation. Bill would have relished the prospect of a Cain-Buckley alliance for its sheer theatricality. During their time together, Bill would have spent his time much as he had with Mrs. Palin, in a quiet inventory of the intellectual warehouse. What does Mr. Cain know? What has he read? Is he . . . up to it?
I should also note—as long as we're channeling dead conservatives—that, had Bill ultimately endorsed Mitt Romney, National Review publisher William Rusher would have dashed back to the office to dictate his letter of resignation.
Beyond the political arena, Bill would have had advice for two other constituencies critical to his conservative enterprise. To the hardy band of right-leaning scholars beavering away in the American academy, he would have said: "Be brave, but until you have secured tenure, be no more brave than conscience demands. Concentrate your careerist energies on the edge of evolving scholarship, but celebrate loudly and redundantly the core values of the Western canon."
To the stewards of his movement's public diplomacy—the editors and publishers, writers and producers, the bloggers and talking heads—Bill would say: "Keep handy the metrics of fusionism and appreciate the vital contribution to our coalition made by each major strain of conservatism. Avoid sectarianism. Adhere strictly to principle, but polish to a high shine the fresh formulations of our timeless proposition. Labor without pause to coin language that will fire the imagination and ignite commitment. And along the way, please, have a little fun. Try to be a little less, uhhhh, constipated."
Let me close by saying why I have chosen to support the Buckley program and to serve on its board alongside Jim Buckley, my boss in several implausible political ventures, and Priscilla Buckley, my savior-editor when I was a columnist for National Review. There are two reasons. The first is to keep alive a longstanding but fragile tradition here at Yale. Decade after decade, Yale has done almost nothing to encourage but just enough to permit a culture of conservative dissent. I like to think of Yale's posture as a grudging but honorable acquiescence to the true spirit of academic freedom. I became a conservative while a student at Yale. Some of you in this room did as well. It's possible. Not likely, but possible.
The second reason to support this program is that Bill would have loved it. Bill Buckley had the most complicated relationship with Yale of any student since Nathan Hale. Starting off as a golden-boy student, very much in the line of Potter Stewart, Sargent Shriver, George H. W. Bush and such, Bill quickly became, with the publication of "God and Man," Yale's designated apostate. Yale's memories of the book, as Bill once described them, were "long and censorious." The relationship between the precocious graduate and the historic university was marked for many years by simmering tension interrupted occasionally by awkward confrontation.
The ice eventually began to melt and ultimately Yale invited Bill to join the faculty. His course in English composition, which debuted in the fall of 1997, became popular with both the students and their instructor.
The process of reconciliation was completed in the spring of 2000 when Yale awarded Bill an honorary doctorate. How pleased was Bill? When word began to spread of the award, I called to congratulate him. He picked up the phone saying, "Dr. Buckley here. Any metaphysical problems I can help you with today?"
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second post of day:
The Occupy Wall Street protesters aren't good at articulating what they want, but one of their demands is "end corporate welfare." Well, welcome aboard. Some of us have been fighting crony capitalism for decades, and it's good to have new allies if liberals have awakened to the dangers of the corporate welfare state.
Corporate welfare is the offer of special favors—cash grants, loans, guarantees, bailouts and special tax breaks—to specific industries or firms. The government doesn't track the overall cost of these programs, but in 2008 the Cato Institute made an attempt and came up with $92 billion for fiscal 2006, which is more than the U.S. government spends on homeland security.
That annual cost may have doubled to $200 billion in this new era of industry bailouts and subsidies. According to the House Budget Committee, the 2009 stimulus bill alone contained more than $80 billion in "clean energy" subsidies, and tens of billions more went for the auto bailout and cash for clunkers, as well as aid for the mortgage industry through programs to refinance or buy up toxic loans.
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This industrial policy model of government as a financial partner with business can sound appealing, but the government's record in picking winners and losers has been dreadful. Some of the most expensive flops include the Supersonic Transport plane of the mid-1970s, Jimmy Carter's $2 billion Synthetic Fuels Corporation (the precursor to clean energy), Amtrak, which hasn't turned a profit in four decades, and the most expensive public-private partnership debacle of all time, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have lost $142 billion of taxpayer money. A few other illustrative industry handouts:
•The ethanol subsidy, benefitting mostly corn farmers and corporate fuel blenders in the Midwest, costs about $6 billion a year through an array of tax subsidies, tariffs and mandates while making fuel and food more expensive.
• The Federal Communications Commission recently approved spending up to $4.5 billion a year on a Universal Service Fund to bring broadband development to rural America. Broadband service is already rapidly expanding (with some $65 billion in private capital) absent the subsidies, but Internet providers and telecom firms pressed for the program. This is in addition to a $5 billion Broadband Technology Opportunities Program run by the Commerce Department.
• The Department of Agriculture's Market Access Program helps advertise and promote the products of agribusinesses like the USA Poultry & Egg Export Council and Sunkist, the orange growers consortium that has received more than $800 million in the life of the program.
• Crop price supports for wheat, corn, rice, sugar and soybean farmers are supposed to help struggling family farms, but at least half the subsidies go to large and wealthy farmers and corporations. Congress can't seem to wean the farm belt off these payments even though commodity prices and farm incomes are near an all-time high. Restricting those funds to farmers with incomes below $250,000 would save $30 billion over the next decade.
• Some $8 billion has gone via Mr. Obama's Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Loan Program to the likes of Nissan, Ford and Tesla Motors for more fuel-efficient cars. Another $2.4 billion has been routed to manufacturers trying to build battery-operated electric cars. As with the loan guarantees to Solyndra, if these companies succeed, the private investors get rich. If they fail, taxpayers lose.
According to the Pew Charitable Trusts's Subsidyscope data base, direct expenditures in the energy industry more than quadrupled in Mr. Obama's first year in office to $18 billion from less than $4 billion in 2008.
That doesn't include loan guarantees. The real scandal of Solyndra, the solar company that recently went bust, isn't that the taxpayers lost more than $500 million on a lousy bet by the Energy Department, but that the feds keep making these deals even when their rate of return is likely to be zero or negative. The Solyndra loan constituted less than 2% of the $40 billion in outstanding loan guarantees to dozens of energy companies, according to the House Budget Committee.
Republicans, for their part, favor handouts to the nuclear industry. Over the years the feds have provided billions of dollars in loan guarantees and cut-rate insurance to nuclear plants, though even nuclear-utility executives say new plants may not make economic sense in a world of cheap and abundant natural gas. Last month House Speaker John Boehner backed a $2 billion Energy Department loan guarantee sought by USEC Inc. for a uranium-enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio.
• The Export-Import Bank has a portfolio of $14.5 billion of outstanding loan guarantees to assist major U.S. exporters. More than 90% of the funds went to 10 corporations, including Boeing ($6.4 billion), General Electric ($1.043 billion) and Caterpillar ($424 million).
Defenders claim government subsidies for business are justified because American firms must compete with subsidized firms from China and Europe. But as Milton Friedman was famous for advising: Never fight a subsidy with a subsidy. This industrial policy was also the rage in the 1970s and 1980s when Japan's keiretsu and Ministry of International Trade and Industry were going to dominate the world, but we know how that has worked for Tokyo.
For those who say this is good for American competitiveness, consider that ending all corporate welfare programs would finance a substantial cut in the 35% corporate income-tax rate that makes U.S. business less competitive but does a poor job of raising revenue because of these loopholes. A big rate cut would generate far more jobs and wealth than passing out checks to businesses one at a time.
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As important as this economic damage is the corrosive effect that corporate welfare has on public trust in government. Americans understand that powerful government invariably favors the powerful, who have the means and access to massage Congress and the bureaucracy that average citizens do not. This really is aid to the 1% paid by the other 99%.
Yet the parade of subsidies gets longer each year, perhaps, as the old joke goes, because in Washington Republicans love corporations and Democrats love welfare. As House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan puts it: "How can we save billions of dollars from unjustified subsidy and entitlement programs, if we can't get corporate America off the dole?"
With American federal debt headed toward the worst European levels, this is an issue that should unite the tea party, the Occupy Wall Street protesters and Congressional deficit-cutters.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204358004577032442153911170.html
To Increase Jobs, Increase Economic Freedom
Business is not a zero-sum game struggling over a fixed pie. Instead it grows and makes the total pie larger, creating value for all of its major stakeholders, including employees and communities.
By JOHN MACKEY
Is the United States exceptional? Of course we are! Two hundred years ago we were one of the poorest countries in the world. We accounted for less than 1% of the world's total GDP. Today our GDP is 23% of the world's total and more than twice as large as the No. 2 country's, China.
America became the wealthiest country because for most of our history we have followed the basic principles of economic freedom: property rights, freedom to trade internationally, minimal governmental regulation of business, sound money, relatively low taxes, the rule of law, entrepreneurship, freedom to fail, and voluntary exchange.
The success of economic freedom in increasing human prosperity, extending our life spans and improving the quality of our lives in countless ways is the most extraordinary global story of the past 200 years. Gross domestic product per capita has increased by a factor of 1,000% across the world and almost 2,000% in the U.S. during these last two centuries. In 1800, 85% of everyone alive lived on less than $1 per day (in 2000 dollars). Today only 17% do. If current long-term trend lines of economic growth continue, we will see abject poverty almost completely eradicated in the 21st century. Business is not a zero-sum game struggling over a fixed pie. Instead it grows and makes the total pie larger, creating value for all of its major stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers, investors and communities.
So why is our economy barely growing and unemployment stuck at over 9%? I believe the answer is very simple: Economic freedom is declining in the U.S. In 2000, the U.S. was ranked third in the world behind only Hong Kong and Singapore in the Index of Economic Freedom, published annually by this newspaper and the Heritage Foundation. In 2011, we fell to ninth behind such countries as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Ireland.
The reforms we need to make are extensive. I want to make a few suggestions that, as an independent, I hope will stimulate thinking and constructive discussion among concerned Americans no matter what their politics are.
Most importantly, we need to radically cut the size and cost of government. One hundred years ago the total cost of government at all levels in the U.S.—local, state and federal—was only 8% of our GDP. In 2010, it was 40%. Government is gobbling up trillions of dollars from our economy to feed itself through high taxes and unprecedented deficit spending—money that could instead be used by individuals to improve their lives and by entrepreneurs to create jobs. Government debt is growing at such a rapid rate that the Congressional Budget Office projects that in the next 70 years public money spent on interest annually will grow to almost 41.4% of GDP ($27.2 trillion) from 1.4% of GDP ($204 billion) in 2010. Today interest on our debt represents about a third of the cost of Social Security; in only 20 years it is estimated that it will exceed the cost of that program.
Only if we focus on cutting costs in the four most expensive government programs—Defense, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which together with interest account for about two-thirds of the overall budget—can we make a significant positive impact.
Our defense budget now accounts for 43% of all military spending in the entire world—more than the next 14 largest defense budgets combined. It is time for us to scale back our military commitments and reduce our spending to something more in line with our percentage of the world GDP, or 23%. Doing this would save more than $300 billion every year.
Social Security and Medicare need serious reforms to be sustainable over the long term. The demographic crisis for these entitlement programs has now arrived as 10,000 baby boomers are projected to retire every day for the next 19 years. Retirement ages need to be steadily raised to reflect our increased longevity. These programs should also be means-tested. Countries such as Chile and Singapore successfully privatized their retirement programs, making them sustainable. We should move in a similar direction by giving everyone the option to voluntarily opt out of the governmental system into private alternatives, phasing this in over time to help keep the current system solvent.
In addition, tax reform is essential to jobs and prosperity. Most tax deductions and loopholes should be eliminated, combined with significant tax rate reductions. A top tax rate of 15% to 20% with no deductions would be fairer, greatly stimulate economic growth and job creation, and would reduce deficits by increasing total taxes paid to the federal government.
Why would taxes collected go up if rates go down? Two reasons—first, tax shelters such as the mortgage interest deduction used primarily by more affluent taxpayers would be eliminated; and secondly, the taxable base would increase considerably as entrepreneurs create new businesses and new jobs, and as people earn more money. Many Eastern European countries implemented low flat tax rates in the past decade, including Russia in 2001 (13%) and Ukraine in 2004 (15%), and experienced strong economic growth and increased tax revenues.
Corporate taxes also need to be reformed. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S.'s combined state and federal corporate tax rate of 39.2% became the highest in the world after Japan cut its rates this April. A reduction to 26% would equal the average corporate tax rate in the 15 largest industrialized countries. That would help our companies to use their capital more productively to grow and create jobs in the U.S
Government regulations definitely need to be reformed. According to the Small Business Administration, total regulatory costs amount to about $1.75 trillion annually, nearly twice as much as all individual income taxes collected last year. While some regulations create important safeguards for public health and the environment, far too many simply protect existing business interests and discourage entrepreneurship. Specifically, many government regulations in education, health care and energy prevent entrepreneurship and innovation from revolutionizing and re-energizing these very important parts of our economy.
A simple reform that would make a monumental difference would be to require all federal regulations to have a sunset provision. All regulations should automatically expire after 10 years unless a mandatory cost-benefit analysis has been completed that proves the regulations have created significantly more societal benefit than harm. Currently thousands of new regulations are added each year and virtually none ever disappear.
According to a recent poll, more than two-thirds of Americans now believe that America is in "decline." While we are certainly going through difficult times our decline is not inevitable—it can and must be reversed. The U.S. is still an extraordinary country by almost any measure. If we once again embrace the principles of individual and economic freedom that made us both prosperous and exceptional, we can help lead the world towards a better future for all.
Mr. Mackey, co-founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, is a member of the Job Creators Alliance, a nonprofit devoted to preserving free enterprise.
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Alexander's Essay – December 15, 2011
Liberty v the Fatal Cycle of Democracy
The Path from Freedom to Bondage
"Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them." --Thomas Jefferson
December 15th marks the anniversary of the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights, the common name for the first 10 amendments to our Constitution. The purpose of the Bill was, and remains, to assert the enumeration of limitations on the national government in order to protect our natural rights to Liberty and property as "endowed by our Creator."
There was much debate among our Founders about the need to enumerate rights that are inherently endowed, especially as amendments rather than in the corpus of our Constitution. Alexander Hamilton argued this point in Federalist No. 84: "I ... affirm that bills of rights ... are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. ... For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?"
But a majority of our Founders, led by James Madison and George Mason, prevailed, and the state legislatures concurred with the addition of enumerated limitations on the central government, as outlined by the Bill of Rights Preamble: "The Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added..."
Thus, it is a fitting day to pause and take account of the principles of Essential Liberty embodied in our Constitution, the sustenance for which generations of Patriots have expended much treasure, blood and life.
As a vigilant student of American history, I can't state too emphatically that we are at a tipping point between Liberty and tyranny. I also argue that this juncture is like no other since the Tenth Amendment challenge that was waged and lost in the War Between the States.
For those who choose to read such words as hyperbole, Samuel Adams said it best: "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands, which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
But it is the inherent nature of genuine Patriots to stand ever ready to defend Liberty, convicted that, in the words of George Washington, "Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind."
It is in that spirit that I offer this observation about this precarious position we now inhabit between freedom and bondage.
To understand the state of our Republic, one must consider it in the context of history to avoid repetition. As 20th-century philosopher George Santayana concluded in his treatise, "The Life of Reason": "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
In 1764, as historian Edward Gibbon "sat musing amidst the ruins" of Rome, he was inspired to write about the failure of republics. The original text of his seminal work, "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," was published in 1776, as our Patriot ancestors were declaring our natural right to Liberty. Gibbon outlined in detail how opulence and entitlement led to the incremental loss of civic virtue.
The 18th/19th century Scotsman Alexander Fraser Tytler, a lawyer and professor of history, summarized this link as follows: "[Patriotism], like all other affections and passions, it operates with the greatest force where it meets with the greatest difficulties ... but in a state of ease and safety, as if wanting its appropriate nourishment, it languishes and decays. ... It is a law of nature to which no experience has ever furnished an exception, that the rising grandeur and opulence of a nation must be balanced by the decline of its heroic virtues."
Tytler's assertion about the relationship between opulence and decadence reflected his astute understanding of human nature.
This contiguous rise and decline has been characterized as a fatal "Cycle of Democracy" (often misattributed to Tytler as its source). The cycle follows this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to Liberty (Rule of Law); From Liberty to abundance; From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage (rule of men).
So, at what stage of this rise and decline do we now find ourselves? In his recent book, "After America," Mark Steyn gives us a clue.
With their average 8th grade education, the Greatest Generation built the strongest and most innovative economy in history. However, "In the space of one generation," writes Steyn, "a nation of savers became the world's largest debtors, and a nation of makers and doers became a cheap service economy." Indeed, our country now hosts the most over-educated and under-productive generation in history, and has institutionalized a social subculture demanding government subsidies to compensate for their lack of initiative.
"Big government makes small citizens," Steyn concludes. "A great power can survive a lot of things, but not a mediocrity of spirit. A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for so long."
It is my observation that since WWII, we have transitioned from abundance to complacency, from complacency to apathy and from apathy to dependence. The rise of populist Socialism spawned by Barack Hussein Obama and his Leftist cadres, has resulted in a surge of dependence upon the state.
The manifestation of this dependence spilled onto the streets this year in the form of the "Occupy Movement."
In fact, Time Magazine, that erstwhile advocate of statism, just named its 2011 Person of the Year, "The Protester." Its cover story category, "Prelude to the Revolutions," lists in order of significance, first Tunisians protesting dictatorial tyranny, second Egyptians protesting dictatorial tyranny, and third, "Occupy Wall Street and its millions of supporters." (To be fair, a few paragraphs later Time did richly understate, "The stakes are very different in different places. In North America and most of Europe, there are no dictators, and dissidents don't get tortured.")
As for the gap between dependence and bondage, philosopher and author of "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand, wrote, "The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time."
The most pressing question now is this: Are we irrevocably locked into the Cycle of Democracy where totalitarian rule of men is inevitable, or is there still time to restore republican Rule of Law?
The answer, I believe, is no and yes, respectively. But time is short.
The prospect for restoring Liberty as enshrined in our Constitution continues to improve as the number of Americans joining the debate over the proper role of government authorized by our Constitution grows strong. There is a resurgence of Patriotism underway, and together we can sustain the sunrise on Liberty.
We can and must circumvent the Cycle of Democracy to avoid the terminus of Democratic Socialism which is bondage. Together, we can maintain the momentum of our mission and charge. Thank you Patriots for locking and loading on the frontlines of Liberty.
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Libertas aut Mortis!
Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
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John Hinderacker describes Gov. Daniels as Tim Pawlenty without all the charisma, but he looked good on radio last night and these are good points IMO:
"As Republicans our first concern is for those waiting tonight to begin or resume the climb up life’s ladder. We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have nots; we must always be a nation of haves and soon to haves. …
The extremism that stifles the development of homegrown energy, or cancels a perfectly safe pipeline that would employ tens of thousands, or jacks up consumer utility bills for no improvement in either human health or world temperature, is a pro-poverty policy. It must be replaced by a passionate pro-growth approach that breaks all ties and calls all close ones in favor of private sector jobs that restore opportunity for all and generate the public revenues to pay our bills.
That means a dramatically simpler tax system of fewer loopholes and lower rates. A pause in the mindless piling on of expensive new regulations that devour dollars that otherwise could be used to hire somebody. It means maximizing on the new domestic energy technologies that are the best break our economy has gotten in years. …
It’s not fair and it’s not true for the President to attack Republicans in Congress as obstacles on these questions. They and they alone have passed bills to reduce borrowing, reform entitlements, and encourage new job creation, only to be shot down nearly time and again by the President and his Democrat Senate allies. …
No feature of the Obama Presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favor with some Americans by castigating others. As in previous moments of national danger, we Americans are all in the same boat. If we drift, quarreling and paralyzed, over a Niagara of debt, we will all suffer, regardless of income, race, gender, or other category. If we fail to shift to a pro-jobs, pro-growth economic policy, there will never be enough public revenue to pay for our safety net, national security, or whatever size government we decide to have. …
2012 must be the year we prove the doubters wrong. The year we strike out boldly not merely to avert national bankruptcy but to say to a new generation that America is still the world’s premier land of opportunity. Republicans will speak for those who believe in the dignity and capacity of the individual citizen; who believe that government is meant to serve the people rather than supervise them; who trust Americans enough to tell them the plain truth about the fix we are in, and to lay before them a specific, credible program of change big enough to meet the emergency we are facing."
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" who trust Americans enough to tell them the plain truth about the fix we are in, and to lay before them a specific, credible program of change big enough to meet the emergency we are facing"
Agreed by me. I hope the electorate is ready for honest and needed changes.
The Dems don't think they are and are salivating at the thought of the Repubs going out on the "limb".
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By DANIEL YERGIN
A movie producer once shared with me a maxim for making historical films: Faced with choosing between "drama" and "historical accuracy," compromise on the history and go with drama.
That is certainly what the producers of "The Iron Lady" have done. The result is a masterly performance by Meryl Streep as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. But the depiction of Mrs. Thatcher in the movie misses much of the larger story. That story—the struggle to define the frontier between the state and the market, and the calamities that happen when governments live beyond their means—is directly relevant to the debt dramas now rocking Europe and the United States.
After World War II, Britain created the cradle-to-grave welfare state. A clause in the constitution of the Labour Party which came to power in 1945 called for government to own the "means of production." That ended up ranging from coal mines and the steel industry to appliance stores, hotels and even a travel agency.
The postwar "mixed economy" became a recipe for economic decline. Inflexible labor rules and competition for power among unions led to endless strikes and disruption of the economy. Workers in state-owned companies were essentially civil servants, which gave them enormous clout when they struck. The system stifled innovation, adaptation and productivity, making Britain uncompetitive in the world economy. Yet the spending and debt to support an expansive welfare state went on.
By the late 1970s, enormous losses were piled up at state-owned companies, debts which had to be covered by the British Treasury. A desperate Britain needed to borrow money from the International Monetary Fund. Inflation was heading toward 20% as the deficit mounted and strike after strike disrupted economic life. Even grave diggers walked off the job. The continuing deterioration of the country seemed inevitable. Some predicted that Britain would soon be worse off than communist East Germany.
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Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1982
.Enter Margaret Thatcher, the daughter of a grocery-shop owner who had begun her own professional life as a food chemist but decided she preferred politics to working on ice cream and cake fillings. In 1975, she was elected leader of the Conservative Party. Four years later, she became prime minister, determined to reverse Britain's decline. That required great personal conviction, which Meryl Streep brilliantly captures.
Mrs. Thatcher came with her own script, a framework provided by free-market economists who, even a few years earlier, had been regarded as fringe figures. One telling moment that "The Iron Lady" misses is when a Conservative staffer called for a middle way between left and right and the prime minister shut him down mid-comment. Slapping a copy of Friedrich Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty" on the table, she declared: "This is what we believe."
Years later, when I interviewed her in London, Mrs. Thatcher was no less firm. "It started with ideas, with beliefs," she said. "You must start with beliefs. Yes, always with beliefs."
As prime minister, she encountered enormous resistance, even from her own party, to putting beliefs into practice. But she prevailed through difficult years of painful budget cuts and yanked the government out of loss-making businesses. Shares in state-owned companies were sold off, and ownership shifted from the British Treasury to pension funds, mutual funds and other investors around the world. This set off what became a global mass movement toward privatization. ("I don't like the word" privatization, she said when we met. What was really going on, she said, was "free enterprise.")
But it was labor relations that were the great drama of the Thatcher years. The country could no longer function without labor reform. This was particularly true of the government-owned coal industry, which was being subsidized with some $1.3 billion a year. The Marxist-led coal miners had great leverage over the entire economy because coal was the main source for generating Britain's electricity. Everyone remembered the paralyzing 1974 National Union of Miners strike which blacked out the country and brought down a Conservative government.
By the 1980s, it was clear that another confrontation was coming as Mrs. Thatcher's government prepared to close some of its unprofitable mines. The strike started in 1984 and was marked by violent confrontations. But the Iron Lady would not bend, and after a year the strike faltered and then petered out. Thereafter, the road was open to reformed labor relations and renewed economic growth.
In 1990, discontented members of the Conservative Party did what the miners could not and brought Mrs. Thatcher down. The Iron Lady, in their view, had become the Imperious Lady of domineering leadership. They revolted, forcing her to resign.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were intellectual soul mates, but the movie does not touch on arguably their greatest collaboration, which was ending the Cold War. Mrs. Thatcher's visit to Poland in 1988, for instance, gave critical impetus to the Solidarity movement in its struggle with the Communist government.
But the difference between how Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher are seen today is striking. The bitterness of the Reagan years has largely been forgotten. Not so with Margaret Thatcher. She remains a divisive figure. Her edges were sharp, as could be her tone. Moreover, she was a woman competing in what had almost completely been a man's world.
Yet her true impact has to be measured by what came after, and there the effect is clear. When Tony Blair and Gordon Brown took the leadership of the Labour Party, they set out to modernize it. They forced the repeal of the party's constitutional clause IV with its commitment to state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy.
They did not try to reverse the fundamentals of Thatcherite economics. Mr. Blair recognized that without wealth creation, the risk was redistribution of the shrinking slices of a shrinking pie. The "new" Labour Party, he once said, should not be a party that "bungs up your taxes, runs a high-inflation economy and is hopelessly inefficient" and "lets the trade unions run the show."
The lesson that governments cannot permanently live beyond their means had been learned. When economies are growing in good times, that lesson tends to be forgotten. Yet the longer it is forgotten, the more painful, contentious and dangerous the relearning will be. That is the real story of the Iron Lady. And that is the story in Europe—and the U.S.—today.
Mr. Yergin is author of "The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World" (Penguin 2011) and chairman of IHS CERA.
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Interesting read on the Margaret Thatcher movie. This author suggests the movie doesn't really do her full justice and sacrifices history for some hollywood glitz.
Contrast this review with the following one from the Economist obviously written by a Thatcher hating liberal:
http://www.economist.com/node/21542367
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My understanding from other accounts is that Thatcher is played perfectly, they just omit or downplay her politics. But why would this woman be a famous figure or historic without her politics, such as stubborn advocacy for free enterprise and helping to bring down the Soviet Union?
I don't plan to go out of my way to see the movie though maybe would be inspired to learn more about her career and philosophy through books and other readings.
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"As I said in a speech at the end of last year, we have never been a nation of haves and have nots. We have always been a nation of haves and soon to haves, a people who have made it and people who believe that given the chance they will make it too. And if we lose that, we lose the essence of what’s made us great in terms of economics."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jkUPQA9ApM
http://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=b96ff565-08a5-4206-b1eb-57127c5d57c8
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http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/big-trend-toward-republicans-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/
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Back in the dog days of George W. Bush's second term, when each month seemed to bring new lows for the president's approval ratings, there was almost always this consolation: The surveys would show that Congress was even less popular than he was.
In general, that's going to be the advantage an executive enjoys over a collective body such as a legislature. Hence the decision by Barack Obama to take a page out of Harry Truman's 1948 playbook and campaign for re-election against a "do-nothing Congress." Given his record, it may be his wisest course.
It's also a gift to Republicans—if the party's presidential nominee has enough wit to turn it to his advantage.
Let's take the politics first. However useful the "do-nothing Congress" theme may be for Mr. Obama, it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of Harry Reid in an election when the Democratic majority he enjoys in the Senate is up for grabs. To the contrary, it opens the door for Republicans to turn the tables in a way that squeezes Mr. Reid and his fellow Senate enablers: between a Democratic president attacking them implicitly, and a Republican presidential contender attacking them explicitly.
Ed Gillespie, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee who was a colleague in the Bush administration, sums up the challenge this way. "Our nominee," he says, "needs to talk about the do-nothing Senate, and remind voters that Harry Reid and the Democrats are in control there. Republicans need to constantly remind voters that the problems in our economy and with the health-care bill are the result of Democratic control—and that in the Senate this control continues to block reform and advance the Obama agenda."
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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.)
.The good news is that the Republican contenders are mostly in a good place to advance this argument. As a former leader in the U.S. Senate, Rick Santorum no doubt understands how important a majority in the Senate would be to a GOP president. So does Newt Gingrich, who had his own experience with the Senate leadership when he served as speaker of the House.
For the Romney campaign, this line of attack might be even more fruitful. For the most part, Mr. Romney has campaigned as a former business executive and Beltway outsider who can get things done. The president, however, is not a CEO with everyone else in Washington under his direction—and going after Mr. Reid's do-nothing Senate would be a good sign that Mr. Romney understands that.
Manifestly there's no shortage of material. Under Mr. Reid's leadership, the Senate has not passed a budget resolution in three years. It has never voted to extend the payroll tax cut for a full year—which Vice President Joe Biden says is the administration's No. 1 economic priority. Nor did it protest when the president made a controversial recess appointment when the Senate plainly was not in recess.
The one notable area where Mr. Reid did not "do nothing"—ObamaCare—is not pretty. It would be good for Republicans to remind the public of this record. Partly it involved a complete rewrite in Mr. Reid's backroom, along with notorious vote-buying deals to secure enough votes to prevent a GOP filibuster, including the Louisiana Purchase ($300 million in Medicaid funds for the home state of Sen. Mary Landrieu) and the Cornhusker Kickback ($100 million in Medicaid funds for Nebraska's Sen. Ben Nelson).
The point is that with the exception of ObamaCare and the stimulus, Mr. Reid's energies have been exercised largely to prevent action, not take it. Remember Mr. Obama's jobs bill, and how he called on Congress to "pass this bill now"? When Senate Republicans pushed for a vote, Mr. Reid responded by changing the rules of the Senate to prevent one.
Over in the House, meanwhile, Republicans have been a hive of activity. Currently some 30 pro-growth bills languish in Mr. Reid's do-nothing Senate, lest the buck ever be passed to the president's desk. These include measures reflecting proposals endorsed by the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness—ranging from regulatory reform and tax simplification to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy.
For the past two years, House Republicans have used their majority to block further expansion of the Obama agenda. They have also come up with real alternatives that they know will likely be vetoed by the president or stalled in the Senate. That too is part of the groundwork for this November's elections. For the message they are sending is that if you want change in Washington, you need more than a Republican-controlled House.
By adopting the do-nothing Congress meme, Mr. Obama implies that Mr. Reid and his Senate Democrats have failed. Memo to Messrs. Romney, Santorum and Gingrich: Now's the time to make that point from the right.
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By JAMES TARANTO
If you're a Republican in New York or another big city, you may be anxious or even terrified at the prospect that Rick Santorum, the supposedly unelectable social conservative, may win the GOP presidential nomination. Jeffrey Bell would like to set your mind at ease.
Social conservatism, Mr. Bell argues in his forthcoming book, "The Case for Polarized Politics," has a winning track record for the GOP. "Social issues were nonexistent in the period 1932 to 1964," he observes. "The Republican Party won two presidential elections out of nine, and they had the Congress for all of four years in that entire period. . . . When social issues came into the mix—I would date it from the 1968 election . . . the Republican Party won seven out of 11 presidential elections."
The Democrats who won, including even Barack Obama in 2008, did not play up social liberalism in their campaigns. In 1992 Bill Clinton was a death-penalty advocate who promised to "end welfare as we know it" and make abortion "safe, legal and rare." Social issues have come to the fore on the GOP side in two of the past six presidential elections—in 1988 (prison furloughs, the Pledge of Allegiance, the ACLU) and 2004 (same-sex marriage). "Those are the only two elections since Reagan where the Republican Party has won a popular majority," Mr. Bell says. "It isn't coincidental."
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Jeff Bell, author of "The Case for Polarized Politics," on whether it's politically smart for conservatives to run on social issues.
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.Mr. Bell, 68, is an unlikely tribune for social conservatism. His main interest has always been economics. He was "an early supply-sider" who worked on Ronald Reagan's presidential campaigns of 1976 and 1980 and Jack Kemp's in 1988. In 1978 he ran an anti-tax campaign for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey, defeating Republican incumbent Clifford Case in the primary but losing to Democrat Bill Bradley.
Even now his day job is to advocate for the gold standard at the American Principles Project. But he's been interested in social issues since the 1980s, when "it became increasingly clear to me . . . that social issues were beginning to be very important in comparison to economic issues," in part because "Reaganomics worked so well that the Democrats . . . kind of retired the economic issues."
In Mr. Bell's telling, social conservatism is both relatively new and uniquely American, and it is a response to aggression, not an initiation of it. The left has had "its center of gravity in social issues" since the French Revolution, he says. "Yes, the left at that time, with people like Robespierre, was interested in overthrowing the monarchy and the French aristocracy. But they were even more vehemently in favor of bringing down institutions like the family and organized religion. In that regard, the left has never changed. . . . I think we've had a good illustration of it in the last month or so."
He means the ObamaCare mandate that religious institutions must provide employee insurance for contraceptive services, including abortifacient drugs and sterilization procedures, even if doing so would violate their moral teachings. "You would think that once the economy started looking a little better, Obama would want to take a bow . . . but instead all of a sudden you have this contraception flap. From what I can find out about it, it wasn't a miscalculation. They knew that the Catholic Church and other believers were going to push back against this thing. . . . They were determined to push it through, because it's their irreplaceable ideological core. . . . The left keeps putting these issues into the mix, and they do it very deliberately, and I think they do it as a matter of principle."
Another example: "In the lame-duck session of the last Congress, when the Democrats had their last [House] majority . . . what was their biggest priority? Well, they let the Bush tax cuts be renewed for another couple of years, but what they did get through was gays in the military. . . . It keeps coming back because it's the agenda of the left. They're not going to leave these issues alone."
American social conservatism, Mr. Bell says, began in response to the sexual revolution, which since the 1960s has been "the biggest agenda item and the biggest success story of the left." That was true in Western Europe and Japan too, but only in America did a socially conservative opposition arise.
The roots of social conservatism, he maintains, lie in the American Revolution. "Nature's God is the only authority cited in the Declaration of Independence. . . . The usual [assumption] is, the U.S. has social conservatism because it's more religious. . . . My feeling is that the very founding of the country is the natural law, which is God-given, but it isn't particular to any one religion. . . . If you believe that rights are unalienable and that they come from God, the odds are that you're a social conservative."
The rise of the tea-party movement heartened many libertarian conservatives, who saw it as leading the Republican Party away from social conservatism. Mr. Bell acknowledges that the tea party is distinct from social conservatism, but he also argues that the two have the same intellectual and political roots:
"I think the tea party is an ally of social conservatism, because it also seems to go back to that idea in the Founding. . . . The tea party brings absolute values, normative values, to a whole set of issues where they really weren't present, namely economics and the size of government." Another commonality is that both arose in reaction to an aggressive left.
The populist nature of social conservatism perplexes liberals, who think less-affluent Americans ought to side with the party of statist economics. The libertarian social scientist Charles Murray presents a more sophisticated variant of the puzzle in his new book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010." Mr. Murray shows that upper-middle-class Americans lead far more conservative lives than the less affluent do, by such measures as marriage, illegitimacy, churchgoing and crime.
Yet Mr. Bell notes that social conservatism is largely a working-class phenomenon: "Middle America does have more children than elite America, and they vote socially conservative, even though they might not necessarily be behaving that way in their personal life. They may be overwhelmed by the sexual revolution and its cultural impacts."
Mr. Bell squares that circle by arguing that social conservatism is "aspirational" and "driven by a sense in Middle America that the kind of cultural atmosphere we have, the kind of incentives, the example set by government, is something that has to be pushed back against." Mr. Murray urges liberal elites to stop being nonjudgmental—to "preach what they practice." To hear Mr. Bell tell it, they should listen instead.
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.Mr. Murray's book focuses on whites so as to avoid both the confounding variables and the controversies around race. Mr. Bell, for his part, sees in social conservatism opportunities for the GOP to expand its appeal among minority communities. "Latino voters tend to be more socially conservative," Mr. Bell says, noting that in 2008 they backed California's Proposition 8, which overturned a state Supreme Court ruling establishing same-sex marriage, by 53% to 47%. Non-Hispanic whites narrowly opposed the measure.
This naturally leads to a question about immigration, a topic that divides Republicans and inspires harsh rhetoric that can be off-putting to Hispanic citizens. But don't blame social conservatives for that, Mr. Bell says: "The evangelicals and the Catholics—in other words, people who are more involved with their religion—tend to be more pro-immigration."
Even without immediate gains among minority voters, Mr. Bell sees social issues as the path to a GOP majority in 2012. They account for the George W. Bush-era red-blue divide, which Mr. Bell says endures—and, he adds, red has the advantage: "There was one state in 2000 that Bush carried that I would say was socially left of center, and that was New Hampshire," the only state that flipped to John Kerry four years later. "By 2004, every state—all 31 states that Bush carried—were socially conservative states." Those states now have 292 electoral votes, with 270 sufficient for a majority.
By contrast, not all the Kerry states are socially liberal. "The swing vote in the Midwest is socially conservative and less conservative economically," Mr. Bell says, so that "social conservatism is more likely to be helpful than economic conservatism."
Among states that last voted Republican in 1988 or earlier, he classifies two, Michigan and Pennsylvania, as socially conservative, and two more, Minnesota and Wisconsin, as "mildly" so. That adds up to 35 states, with 348 electoral votes, in which social conservatism is an advantage. A socially liberal Republican nominee might win more votes in California and New York—places where the GOP has declined as the country has become more polarized—but his prospects of carrying either would still be minuscule.
Not that any social liberals are seeking the GOP nomination anyway, with the partial exceptions of Ron Paul and, earlier, Jon Huntsman. "It's very different from the 2008 field," Mr. Bell says. "In that situation, Mitt Romney, who I don't think has really changed much in views since 2008—he was considered the conservative alternative to [John] McCain and [Rudy] Giuliani. Now, almost by default, he's considered the establishment candidate, with Santorum and [Newt] Gingrich running to his right."
Mr. Santorum is the most consistent and unapologetic social conservative in the race, but Mr. Bell rejects the common claim that he places too strong an emphasis on social issues: "I think that's unfair to Santorum. He goes out of his way to say that he has an economic platform, he isn't just about social issues."
He notes that on NBC's "Meet the Press" last weekend, host David Gregory opened his interview with the candidate by asking a series of questions about social issues, one of which he prefaced by saying that such issues "have come . . . to define your campaign."
Mr. Santorum disputed the premise: "It's not what's defining my campaign. I would say that what's defining my campaign is going out and talking about liberty, talking about economic growth, talking about getting manufacturing jobs back here to this country, trying to grow this economy to make sure that everybody in America can participate in it."
This exchange, like many other Santorum interviews, can be seen as a synecdoche of the liberal-conservative social-issue dynamic Mr. Bell describes. To the extent that social issues have "come to define" Mr. Santorum's campaign, it is in substantial part because liberal interviewers like Mr. Gregory have kept pushing them. If Mr. Bell is right, Mr. Santorum should end up benefiting politically, including in November if he is the nominee.
But what about voters who don't make a high priority of social issues, who aren't unwilling to vote for a social conservative but might be put off by a candidate who is—or is made to appear—a moralistic busybody? "The key thing along that line is the issue of coercion," Mr. Bell says. "Who is guilty of coercion? I happen to think it's the left." Mr. Obama and his supporters are "going to imply that Santorum wants to impose all the tenets of traditional morality on the American population. He doesn't. He just doesn't want the opposite imposed on Middle America."
Mr. Taranto, a member of the Journal's editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today column for OpinionJournal.com.
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Teaching George Washington
http://townhall.com/columnists/marygrabar/2012/02/22/teaching_george_washington_when_professors_aim_to_stop_santorum/page/full/
In an age and time when I find most of my college students unfamiliar with the story of Adam and Eve or the origin of the phrase, “judge not lest ye be judged,” I enter discussions about religion with some caution. Almost universally my students do not believe that religious belief is necessary for morality, and seem to be offended by the very concept.
But when one discusses the speeches of our earlier presidents, as I do in my composition classes, it is necessary to address religion’s role.
So last week, as we discussed George Washington’s Farewell Address, I asked students to recall the major points he made. Because several of them had already studied the speech in high school, they listed points most emphasized by teachers: his cautions about foreign entanglements, factional discord, and debt. Not many recalled his injunction to use the Constitution as a safeguard against “internal enemies.” Only one recalled his reminder about the importance of religion.
Although it does not take up much of the speech, it is an important passage, and one worth recalling in today’s age when libertarian ideals seem to motivate most college students and when many conservative pundits caution us about focusing on social issues.
But Washington reminds us, as do the other Founding Fathers, of why the Constitution is necessary in the first place.
The Constitution is structured according to a vision of mankind as inherently flawed, as marked by Original Sin. This view of human nature is what sets apart those who established the longest-lasting Constitution from the utopian idealists who see human nature as essentially good. Those human beings who are flawed by selfishness or irrationality (as they see it) can be shaped by the right social and political forces—and woe to the man who resists the efforts by the utopian theorists to make him good! We have seen that in the death tolls of such schemes.
But in Washington’s view, because character alone cannot be trusted, a division of powers helps provide checks against branches of government and of individuals. Washington echoes James Madison.
Yet, even with such multiple safeguards and a contract that stands beyond the immediate interests of parties, Washington still reminds us of the importance of religion. He calls “religion and morality” the “indispensable supports” of the “dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity.” In fact, he implies that patriotism is impossible without “these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.” It’s a sentence I emphasize. I ask students if they agree. Of course not, they almost unanimously say. One does not need to be religious to be patriotic. One does not need to believe in God to be moral.
Washington continues: “The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.”
Notice that Washington calls on the “mere politician” to respect religion and morality. Washington then claims, “A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity.” (It’s no wonder that moderns who ascribe to the notion that religion is a private affair that should be divorced from political life would rather forget George Washington or wipe him from the history books.)
Furthermore, Washington maintains that morality emerges from religion, as he asks a rhetorical question: “Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?” This leads to my question of why we ask those who testify in court to place their hands on the Bible. This inspires more looks of consternation among students who have been educated in the idea that any kind of insistence on religious faith is an expression of “intolerance.”
Washington finally ends that paragraph by stating point blank, “And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
That is about as unequivocal a statement as one can get.
CONTINUED
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I know most on this Forum prefer the far right and laugh at the political center, but frankly, that's where I am as are lots of Americans. I was sorry to see Sen. Snowe leave.
“I see a vital need for the political center in order for our democracy to flourish and to find solutions that unite rather than divide us,” she said. “It is time for change in the way we govern, and I believe there are unique opportunities to build support for that change from outside the United States Senate.”
Snowe is one of the last representatives of a dying breed, the “Northeast” or “Teddy Roosevelt” Republican: fiscally conservative, environmentally conscious, and liberal or ambivalent on social issues.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/29/olympia-snowe-why-she-s-leaving-the-senate.html
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Rush on radio today has it right.
Naturally the MSM turns this into a rap against the Tea Party and in general the Republican party.
Somehow she can't just go queitly. It has to be emphasized that she is just soooo depressed by partisanship (aka the right of her) and *they* are by implication ruining the country and her great work in moving this country foward will be sorely missed.
He is exactly right. The MSM always turns anyone who complains about partisinship into this sort of story line (those dirty Tea baggers are destroying progress, and the ability to move this country forward)
Rush is also right when he explains in his usual descript way how the Democrats have decided they must win by turning this into the 50% on the dole vs those who are paying. They publically call them the 1% but they are really waging war on the rest of all of those who are footing their bills. Taxpayers HAVE become the new class of SLAVES in this country.
Any more get into that group and the death of this country as we know it can already be engraved on the tombstone.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304724404577295461300545118.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
Paul Ryan threw his hat into the presidential political ring this week. It's a big hat—the House Republican budget resolution. A House budget isn't your father's idea of a presidential candidacy. Instead, it's an "ideas candidacy," and it just might put a Republican back in the White House.
Mr. Ryan chose last year not to undergo the U.S.'s presidential trial by ordeal. Instead, he is using the institutional authority of his office, chairman of the House Budget Committee, to shape the debate between the incumbent president, a New Deal Democrat, and the Republican reform movement that Mr. Ryan and his allies in Congress represent. (That, by the way, includes the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, who had to sign off on this document.)
Paul Ryan's admirers had their reasons for wanting him on the field, and mine comes down to one—the single, stark point Mr. Ryan has made since his side lost the health-care battle with Barack Obama, and which he made this week: "It is rare in American politics to arrive at a moment in which the debate revolves around the fundamental nature of American democracy and the social contract. But that is where we are."
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.Republican discontent the past nine months has been about the inability of any presidential candidate to match the moment as Mr. Ryan defines it. But it may be that Republicans have been loading up more hope than any one candidate can bear these days.
A modern presidential candidate is Gulliver, pecked at daily, even hourly, for months by thousands of squawking Internet crows. If Ronald Reagan himself were running like this for a year, we'd start picking at him, too.
Worse, they are connected to nothing other than themselves. Last summer, a member of the GOP leadership visited our offices, and we asked how much contact they had with the six or so candidates competing then in the not-so-great debates. The answer: zero. The party and its presidential candidates have become like celestial bodies, rotating in distant corners of the same galaxy.
With the Ryan budget, this party's two poles are joined. Especially on taxes.
Taxation is the subject that most clearly defines the competing visions of the two parties. Medicare is about a big fix. Tax policy is about the nature of the nation. It comes down to this: What are taxes for?
Related Video
With the House budget, the GOP's institutions are joined to the party's presidential candidates.
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.In a blog post under that headline last April, Paul Krugman gave the conventional answer: "So taxes are, first and foremost, about paying for what government buys (duh)."
Larry Summers, when he left the White House, spoke of the impending nightmare of an "inadequately resourced" government. He said, "While recovery is our first priority, it is essential that we establish long-run parity between revenues and expenditures."
This has been the standard model of taxation's purpose since the king was collecting taxes in Robin Hood's Sherwood Forest. Ronald Reagan overturned the king's model in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, with support from pre-Obama Democrats. Reagan, radically, gave the economy's long-term growth prior claim over government's revenue needs. Refuting Reagan forever is the raison d'etre of the modern Democratic party and its satellites. Taxes are about government, nothing else. Duh.
For the alternative to this galley-slave view of taxes, with the citizenry rowing endlessly to the horizon for the government, open footnote 76 in the Ryan budget. It is House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp's tight description of what we should want from our tax system.
Here's my summary of his summary: Our taxation system ought to serve an America that must live and survive in the world as it is now, and will be into the distant future. That is a tax system that allows economic growth greater than the below-2.5% of the past three years, the new Obama normal. It is a tax system that maximizes the release of capital into the economy for productive purposes. That tax system will allow users of capital to create jobs for people who don't want to work for the government. That tax system will let U.S. firms compete in the new world dominated by young, emerging economies. It will be a fair tax system if its claims are not so heavy that it sinks into the corruptions of loopholes, credits and preferences bartered in Washington.
The tax system we have now is a 20th-century tax system, whose purpose was to pay for what government bought. And bought and bought. Republicans, anti-status quo insurgents and upwardly mobile independent voters should recognize that with the Ryan-Camp tax plan (two low personal rates, a lower corporate rate) now joined to the high-growth consensus of these presidential challengers, the U.S. has one chance this year and next, when the new code would become law, to rejoin the real world, not some 60-year-old dream world.
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I actually like his radio show better than Levin's. At least drudge gives him some airtime while Fox bans him. He calls O'Reilly the "lephrechan". I happen to like OReilly too.
Thank God the congress and the senate are likely to be repubs. If Obama wins again, which I doubt, at least he can be countered.
I could not imagine Obama unleashed for a second term.
http://www.wnd.com/2012/04/michael-savage-its-do-or-die-for-america/
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Woof All:
In my opinion, this is an important read meriting our time and contemplation , , , and commentary.
TAC,
Marc
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http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Future-tense--X--The-fourth-revolution-7395
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http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2012/06/08/7-reasons-why-the-right-should-not-seek-to-convert-the-left/?singlepage=true
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A Georgia Town Takes the People’s Business Private
By DAVID SEGAL
SANDY SPRINGS, Ga.
IF your image of a city hall involves a venerable building, some Roman pillars and lots of public employees, the version offered by this Atlanta suburb of 94,000 residents is a bit of a shocker.
The entire operation is housed in a generic, one-story industrial park, along with a restaurant and a gym. And though the place has a large staff, none are on the public payroll. O.K., seven are, including the city manager. But unless you chance into one of them, the people you meet here work for private companies through a variety of contracts.
Applying for a business license? Speak to a woman with Severn Trent, a multinational company based in Coventry, England. Want to build a new deck on your house? Chat with an employee of Collaborative Consulting, based in Burlington, Mass. Need a word with people who oversee trash collection? That would be the URS Corporation, based in San Francisco.
Even the city’s court, which is in session on this May afternoon, next to the revenue division, is handled by a private company, the Jacobs Engineering Group of Pasadena, Calif. The company’s staff is in charge of all administrative work, though the judge, Lawrence Young, is essentially a legal temp, paid a flat rate of $100 an hour.
“I think of it as being a baby judge,” says Mr. Young, who spends most of his time drafting trusts as a lawyer in a private practice, “because we don’t have to deal with the terrible things that you find in Superior Court.”
With public employee unions under attack in states like Wisconsin, and with cities across the country looking to trim budgets, behold a town built almost entirely on a series of public-private partnerships — a system that leaders around here refer to, simply, as “the model.”
Cities have dabbled for years with privatization, but few have taken the idea as far as Sandy Springs. Since the day it incorporated, Dec. 1, 2005, it has handed off to private enterprise just about every service that can be evaluated through metrics and inked into a contract.
To grasp how unusual this is, consider what Sandy Springs does not have. It does not have a fleet of vehicles for road repair, or a yard where the fleet is parked. It does not have long-term debt. It has no pension obligations. It does not have a city hall, for that matter, if your idea of a city hall is a building owned by the city. Sandy Springs rents.
The town does have a conventional police force and fire department, in part because the insurance premiums for a private company providing those services were deemed prohibitively high. But its 911 dispatch center is operated by a private company, iXP, with headquarters in Cranbury, N.J.
“When it comes to public safety, outsourcing has always been viewed with a kind of suspicion,” says Joseph Estey, who manages the Sandy Springs 911 service in a hushed gray room a few miles from city hall. “What I think really tipped the balance here is that they were outsourcing just about everything else.”
Does the Sandy Springs approach work? It does for Sandy Springs, says the city manager, John F. McDonough, who points not only to the town’s healthy balance sheet but also to high marks from residents on surveys about quality of life and quality of government services.
But that doesn’t mean “the model” can be easily exported — Sandy Springs has the built-in advantage that comes from wealth — or that its widespread adoption would enhance the commonweal. Critics contend that the town is a white-flight suburb that has essentially seceded from Fulton County, a 70-mile-long stretch that includes many poor and largely African-American areas, most of them in Atlanta and points south.
The prospect of more Sandy Springs-style incorporations concerns people like Evan McKenzie, author of “Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government.” He worries that rich enclaves may decide to become gated communities writ large, walling themselves off from areas that are economically distressed.
“You could get into a ‘two Americas’ scenario here,” he says. “If we allow the more affluent to institutionally isolate themselves, then the poor are supposed to do — what? They’re supposed to have all the poverty and all the social problems and deal with them?”
The champions of Sandy Springs counter that they still send plenty of tax dollars to the county and that race had nothing to do with the decision to incorporate. (The town’s minority population is now 30 percent and growing, they note.) Leaders here say they had simply grown tired of the municipal service offered by Fulton County.
“We make no apologies for being more affluent than other parts of the metro area,” says Eva Galambos, the mayor of Sandy Springs. And what does she make of the attitude of the town’s detractors? “Pure envy,” she says.
NOTHING about Sandy Springs hints that it is one of the country’s purest examples of a contract city. Even those city hall employees betray no sign that they work for a jumble of corporations. Drive around and you’ll see a nondescript upscale suburb, where the most notable features are traffic lights that seem to take five minutes to turn green. There is no downtown, or at least anything that looks like a main street. Instead, there are strip malls with plenty of usual-suspect franchises — although one strip mall, oddly enough, includes a small museum that tells the story of Anne Frank.
The town is home to offices of United Parcel Service, Hardee’s and other corporations, and it also serves as a bedroom community for Atlanta. Residents include Herman Cain, members of the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Falcons, and executives at Delta Air Lines, CNN and other companies. This is also home to the rapper and producer Akon, whose opulent tastes were featured in an episode of “Cribs” on MTV.
“A few years ago, I got a call from his head of security,” says Kenneth DeSimone, the deputy chief of police, who is giving a tour of the town one May afternoon. It turned out that somebody had stolen a pistol and a laptop from Akon’s home.
“He seemed really focused on the laptop and I was looking around this guy’s house thinking, ‘What is the big deal with this laptop? He can afford another one.’ Turns out, there was a bunch of new Lady Gaga demos on it. Worth millions.”
That crime was solved when an informant helped lead the police to some young people who, Mr. DeSimone said, had no idea whose home they had entered and what was stored on the computer.
The car driven by Mr. DeSimone says “Sandy Springs” on the side, which is one reason that this town can’t claim to be the most outsourced city in the United States. That distinction probably belongs to Maywood, Calif., eight miles southeast of Los Angeles, which in 2010 fired all but one employee, its city manager. Maywood is now operated, from top to bottom, through contracts. The police officers are members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, paid a combined $3.5 million a year to patrol the streets, according to Felipe Aguirre, a council member.
But Maywood was pushed to extreme measures after it flirted with bankruptcy and lost insurance coverage for its public work force. Sandy Springs went the public-private partnership route by choice, and it evangelizes about its success.
Few have more zeal than Oliver W. Porter, a founding father and architect in chief.
With his gray beard and thick gray hair, Mr. Porter is a beatnik version of John Updike with a Southern drawl and a pipe. He is sitting one morning in a tiny room in his basement, which has a small desk, a chair and a psychiatrist’s couch. A parachute is spread out along the ceiling, like a canopy, and a mural of an ancient Roman landscape — Mr. Porter’s handiwork — adorns one wall.
This unassuming nook is where every element of Sandy Springs was conceived and designed. With the title of interim city manager, Mr. Porter drafted requests for proposals and fielded calls here, often from people who imagined him in charge of a small battalion of employees.
“One day a lady called and said: ‘Oh, Mr. Porter, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. May I speak to your staff?’ ” he recalls. Reliving the moment, he picks up the phone, puts it to one ear and then switches to the other.
“Staff speaking,” he told the caller, in a slightly deeper voice.
Mr. Porter, a retired AT&T engineer, was an advocate of the town when it was a hopeless cause, during the many years when Democrats blocked efforts to let a largely Republican and white suburb cleave itself from Fulton County. One Democratic legislator vowed that Sandy Springs would incorporate “when pigs fly,” a phrase that Mayor Galambos has since adopted as the name of her blog.
After an election in 2004, both houses of Georgia’s legislature were controlled by Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction.
“It was like a dog that’s been chasing a train for years and finally catches it,” Mr. Porter says. “The question was, What do I do with it now?”
As a fan of Ronald Reagan and the economist Friedrich Hayek, Mr. Porter came naturally to the notion that Sandy Springs could push “the model” to its nth degree. His philosophical inclinations were formed by a life spent in private enterprise, and cemented by a visit to Weston, Fla., a town that had begun as a series of gated communities.
Mr. Porter tells this and other stories in “Creating the New City of Sandy Springs,” a book that will leave readers with one indelible lesson: incorporating a city is dull. Superduper dull. The book is composed mostly of the codicils, requests for proposals and definitions of duties that were required to jolt Sandy Springs to life. Without a love of minutiae and a very long attention span, forget it. But this is intended as a blueprint, not a gripping narrative. Mr. Porter regards the success of Sandy Springs as a way out of the financial morass that has engulfed so many cities in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
“Many are on the verge of bankruptcy,” Mr. Porter says. “They have significant unfunded liabilities, like pensions and other benefits. It’s almost like a poison that a lot of people are unaware of, and this model could be an answer.”
HOVERING around the debate about privatization is a basic question: What is local government for? For years, one answer, at least implicitly, was “to provide steady jobs with good wages.” But that answer is losing its political tenability, says John D. Donahue of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “A lot of jobs in government are middle-class jobs that in the private sector are not middle-class jobs,” he says. “People aren’t willing to support conditions for public workers that they themselves no longer enjoy.”
In a way, what Sandy Springs and other newly incorporated towns have done harks back to a 19th-century notion of taxation, which was much less about cross-subsidies and much more about fee for service.
“It was normal from around 1830 through the end of the Civil War for cities to be run like businesses,” says Mr. McKenzie, the “Privatopia” author. “When people paid property taxes, it was to get something that benefited them directly — like butchers wanting a certain area cleaned up.”
Sandy Springs residents still send roughly $190 million a year to Fulton County through property taxes, about half of which goes to schools, including those in Sandy Springs. But by incorporating, the town gets to keep $90 million in taxes a year to spend as it pleases.
Has this financially hurt the rest of Fulton County? It has, says the county manager, Zachary Williams, who calculates that the incorporation of Sandy Springs, and neighboring towns that incorporated after it, cost the county about $38 million a year. Mr. Williams described the figure as “significant,” especially given the strains imposed by the economic downturn.
“I would bet that Atlanta is top five in the country in terms of foreclosures,” he says. “I think our vacancy rate is 14 to 18 percent.”
Some Georgia politicians outside Sandy Springs regard it and other breakaway towns as “the first shot in the battle to destroy Fulton County,” as State Senator Vincent Fort, a Democrat whose district includes part of Atlanta, put it.
“What you have is the northern section of the county,” he went on, “which is mostly white, seeking to leave the rest of Fulton County, and doing so with what I think are racially tinged arguments about the corruption and inefficiency of local government.”
Town leaders say race had nothing to do with it. Mayor Galambos said, “A 94 percent vote in favor of incorporation speaks to the broad community support for self-government and a desire to have local dollars remain local.”
BUT leave aside questions of fairness and race. Many cities that have dipped a toe or two into the privatization pool, and others that have plunged in, have had awful results. Recently, the company that has a contract to manage Chicago’s parking meters sent the city a series of bills, totaling nearly $50 million, to make up for revenue lost from people with disability parking placards and from street closings. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has refused to pay.
New York City’s comptroller released a report in late May that said that Hewlett-Packard, a major contractor in the city’s emergency dispatch service, was paid $113 million for work considered subpar.
In Maywood, Calif., going private has driven up the cost of running the town, says Mr. Aguirre, the council member, and the quality of municipal service has gone down.
“Let’s say a tree falls on a car,” Mr. Aguirre says. “Previously, we had an employee who would deal with it. Now, you have to make an appointment and they’ll come out when they can. They’re not our people to control any more.”
Mr. McDonough, the Sandy Springs city manager, says the town has sidestepped such problems. The key, he explains, lay in the fine art of drafting contracts.
Initially, and for the first five and a half years of its life, Sandy Springs used just one company, CH2M Hill, based in Englewood, Colo., to handle every service it delivered. Mr. McDonough says CH2M saved the town millions compared with the cost of hiring a conventional public work force, but last year Sandy Springs sliced the work into pieces and solicited competitive bids.
When the competition was over, the town had spread duties to a handful of corporations and total annual outlays dropped by $7 million. (Representatives of CH2M, which still has a call-center contract, said at the time that they were “deeply disappointed” by the results, but wished the city well, according to a local news report.)
To dissuade companies from raising prices or reducing the quality of service, the town awarded contracts to a couple of losing bidders for every winner it hired. The contracts do not come with any pay or any work — unless the winning bidder that prevailed fails to deliver. It’s a bit like the Miss America pageant anointing the runner-up as the one who will fulfill the winner’s duties if, for some reason, Miss America cannot.
“In most cases, Miss America serves her whole term,” Mr. McDonough says, warming to the analogy. “But every once in a while something happens and they don’t have to run a whole new competition.”
The privatized approach saves money, he continues, because corporations hire superior workers and give them better training. Work handled by 15 public employees can be done by 12 privately employed workers, he says: “It’s all about the caliber of employee and the customer focus that comes out of the private sector.”
During a tour of city hall, Mr. McDonough bumps into Kevin Walter, the deputy director of public works. Mr. Walker has good news. Currently, Sandy Springs pays for two people to operate two road maintenance trucks five days a week — in effect, 10 days of work every two weeks. Well, Mr. Walker has just figured out a way to reduce the number to nine days every two weeks, saving $50,000 a year.
Does Mr. Walker, or rather his company, URS, get to keep a portion of that $50,000?
“No,” Mr. Walker says. “But I get to keep my job. Our job is to run all these projects and programs very efficiently.”
And your contract?
“It is renewed every year,” Mr. Walker says.
“It can be renewed every year,” Mr. McDonough clarifies.
“It can be renewed every year,” says Mr. Walker, correcting himself.
Any anxiety that you will not be renewed?
“No,” Mr. Walker says. He quickly reconsiders. “A little bit,” he says. “Enough so that we do an excellent job. We know we can do an excellent job and we have faith in the city. And we know it would not be easy for them to change so we’d have to really mess up for them to change. But we’re not going to mess up.”
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By DAVID GELERNTER
Presidential elections are America's season for serious chats around the national dinner table. The sick economy, health care and the scope of government are the main issues. But another is even more important. Who are we? What is the United States? Recently Gov. Mitt Romney urged us to return to "the principles that made America, America." But too many of us don't know what those are, or think they can't work.
Yes, Americanism evolves, and by all means let's change our minds when we ought to. We should always be marching toward the American ideals of freedom, equality and democracy, as we did when we ended slavery, granted women the right to vote, and finally buried Jim Crow. But if we forget our basic ideals or shrug them off, as we are doing today, we no longer deserve to be great. Without our history and culture, we have no identity.
Almost no one believes that our public schools are doing a passable job of teaching American and Western civilization. Modern humanities education starts from the bizarre premise that students must be cured of the Europe-centered, misogynist, bigoted ideas of the past. Many American children have never heard a good word for the United States, the West, Judaism or Christianity their whole lives.
Who are we? Dawdling time is over. We have failed a whole generation of children. As of fall 2012, let all public schools be charter schools, competing for each tax dollar and student with every other school in the country. Of course this is a local issue—but a president's or would-be president's job is to lead. There are wonderful teachers, principals and schools out there, and a new public-school system based on the American ideal of achievement will know how to value them.
No principle is more American than equality. Every generation has strained closer to the ideal. We have seen the near eradication of race prejudice in a mere two generations—an astounding achievement. We are a nation of equal citizens, not of races or privileged cliques. Affirmative action has always been a misfit in this country. A system that elevates individuals because of the color of their skin, their race or their sex has no place in America.
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.Yet a boy born yesterday is destined to atone (if he happens to be the wrong color) for prejudice against black women 50 years ago. Modern America is a world where a future Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor, can say publicly in 2001, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [on the bench] than a white male who hasn't lived that life."
Once a justice has intuited, by dint of sheer racial brilliance, which party to a lawsuit is more simpatico and deserving, what then? Invite him to lunch? Friend him on Facebook? This is not justice as America knows it.
Next Independence Day let's celebrate the long-overdue end of affirmative action, and our triumphant return to the American ideal of equality.
Modern American culture is in the hands of intellectuals—unfortunates born with high IQ and low common sense. Witness ObamaCare, a health-care policy, now somehow deemed constitutional, that forces millions of Americans to buy something they don't want.
Bilingualism was the intellectuals' response to one of the best breaks America ever got, a common language to unite its uncommon people. Resolved: The federal government will henceforth conduct its business and publish its statements in English, period. There is plenty of room in this country for new immigrants of all races and religions who want to learn America's culture and be part of this people; none for those who dislike all things American except dollars. Resolved: The federal government will henceforth enforce its own immigration laws.
America's creed is blessedly simple. Freedom, equality, democracy and America as the promised land, the new Jerusalem. What Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he invoked "the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life."
President Obama rejects this creed. He doesn't buy the city-on-a-hill stuff. He sees particular nations as a blur; only the global community is big enough for him. He is at home on the exalted level of whole races and peoples and the vast, paternal power of central governments.
The president has revealed no sense of America's mission to move constantly forward "with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." Lincoln's sublime biblical English uses the parallel stanzas of ancient Hebrew poetry. That is who we are: a biblical republic, striving to live up to its creed. The dominion of ignorance will pass away like smoke and we will know and be ourselves again the moment we choose to be. Why not now?
Mr. Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, is the author of "America-Lite," out on July 4 by Encounter Books
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Second post of day
Works and Days By Victor Davis Hanson
July 2, 2012 - 12:04 am - by Victor Davis Hanson
I have a confession to make: I don’t quite understand the jubilation among the conservative-Republican forces during the last two months of the Obama crack-up, and here, unfortunately, is why:
1. The so-called Obama crash. I believe that Obamism — 41 months over 8% plus unemployment, anemic GDP growth, serial $1 trillion deficits, unsustainable rates of new aggregate debt, the takeover of health care, record numbers on unemployment insurance and food stamps — is not only strangling the country, but in the long run will be seen as such by most Americans. Obama is incoherent — castigating the Supreme Court’s right to overturn a law, then himself suing to overturn state laws, while simply ignoring federal laws. Abroad, even his supporters cannot claim the Russian reset was a success. What was so hard about supporting the Iranian dissidents in the spring 2009 demonstrations, or expressing support for secular democratic movements in the Middle East rather than praising the Muslim Brotherhood? Why treat Israel or Canada worse than Turkey? And was it worth the administration chest thump to risk the security of the United States by leaking classified information about Predators, the cyber war against Iran, the Yemeni agent, and the bin Laden raid?
But all that mess is not to say that in the here and now Obama cannot cobble together a 51% majority to win the election. He figures that he can by appeals to gays (gay marriage), those on entitlements (nearly fifty million are now on food stamps; 50% are paying no income tax or are on some sort of entitlement — or both), the greens (Keystone), the Latinos (de facto amnesty), feminists (“war on women”), the (fill in the blanks), etc.
Obama’s bad news of the last 90 days: the Scott Walker victory, the Obama gaffes (the private sector is doing “fine”), the Democratic defections (whether senators and representatives bailing from the convention or smackdowns on Bain Capital from Cory Booker, Bill Clinton, etc.), the Holder mess, the circumvention of Congress by de facto amnesty, the non-ending scandals (Solyndra, Fast and Furious, GSA, Secret Service, etc.), the Putin/Merkel put-down, our new Muslim Brotherhood friend and ally running Egypt, the supposed shortfall in campaign donations, etc. Yet this weekend Obama remains up in the polls and ahead in key swing states. If these “bad” weeks have led to his rise in the polls, what might good weeks do?
Sometimes when I watch Fox News, listen to talk radio, or read the blogs, I fear too many are in a strange bubble: the Obama embarrassments are tallied, his crashing defeat predicted — but no one seems to say, “But hey, he is still after all that ahead in the polls!” And to the extent someone might point to polling, he is met with “But the polls are biased!” Perhaps they are by 3-4 points. But right now, given the power of incumbency, the changing nature of the U.S., and the no-holds-barred methods of Barack Obama, the advantage is still all Obama’s — and almost all the polls show that. And we should remember that fact rather than be told simply how bad Obama is.
2. The Supreme Court. I have read all the exegeses of why Justice Roberts voted to tip the court in favor of upholding Obamacare. I do not here care to comment on the case other than to note that the most radical piece of social legislation since the Great Society is now the law of the land. It may prove a boomerang in November; there may be some clever means to detect in Roberts’ decision a path for upholding judicial conservatism. In fact, there may be all sorts of hidden good news. But for now, the decision is a huge victory for Barack Obama — how can it be any other?
Other depressing notes: the Court is now 4 liberals, 2 swings, and 3 conservatives. Is this really the age of a conservative Supreme Court? But more importantly, the elite culture in the New York-Washington corridor is a force multiplier. It defines liberal blinkered orthodoxy on the Court as “open-minded” and “moderately liberal” in contrast to conservative orthodoxy that is “reactionary” and “closed-minded.” In other words, there is always more pressure on a conservative than a liberal to be thought sober and judicious by joining the other side. A liberal justice joining the conservative side almost never happens. Because of the great decision of our age, Justice Roberts will be revered by the media-academia-arts-government nexus as the new Earl Warren, even as conservatives rightly respect his right of independent judicial review. And, as Roberts knew, had he voted otherwise to reject Obamacare, he would now be reviled by the Left in the manner of Robert Bork, while, without fanfare, being simply acknowledged as a fair and circumspect judge by conservatives.
3. Obamacare. Obamacare is a disaster. Imagine DMV supervisors, TSA employees, someone like an Eric Holder running the show, and taking a number at the emergency room, and you have the formula of dealing with your rendezvous with a tumor or heart attack. Most Americans don’t want it. But be prepared: we will hear that if it were not for courageous Barack Obama and Justice Roberts, then conservatives would have taken 25-year-old Johnny off his parents’ plan and thrown him in the street, or denied all treatment to Linda with breast cancer — as if neither could find health care without a massive government bureaucracy. Remember again: this was a plan that was sold as a mandate, not a tax; then argued by the administration before the Supreme Court as a tax; then found constitutional on the basis that it was a tax; and now defended on the basis that it is suddenly once again not a tax. Adolescents, not the president of the United States, make it up as they go along — mandate, tax, penalty, fee, etc.
4. The Arizona decision. How is the court rejection of the Arizona law good news? Yes, I know they upheld the right to ask for proper ID when there is good suspicion of a possible crime, but that is merely a reflection that what thirty years ago was a common-sense given is now considered a landmark breakthrough.
Factor in the president’s circumvention of Congress to grant de facto election-year amnesty to about a million illegal aliens, and examine where we are: it is illegal for a state to try to enhance federal immigration law enforcement, but it is still apparently legal for a municipality to declare itself immune from federal immigration law by granting sanctuary to illegal aliens. Arizona “broke” the law by trying to enforce it; the president did not break the law by trying to circumvent it. The former passed a law through a majority vote, the latter shredded it by fiat. In some sense, there is no federal immigration law anymore — only what Barack Obama on any given day determines is politically expedient to enforce or not enforce. If one million can be exempted today by presidential decree, why not five million next year and another six the year after? The Arizona border or Parlier is a long way from Martha’s Vineyard and Sidwell Friends.
5. Fast and Furious. The Republicans may find themselves pursuing the moral and ethical high ground right into a political quagmire, reminiscent of once trying to convince the American people that a sitting president cannot lie under oath with impunity, even as the country sided with Bill Clinton without worry that he had been serviced in the Oval Office by his own in-house intern.
From the little that we know, Eric Holder at best knowingly presented false information to a congressional committee, and at worst also oversaw a harebrained scheme that led to several deaths (among them one and maybe two Americans) and whose ultimate objective is still unclear — and did so as the chief law enforcement officer of the nation. If that stands, in some sense we are then reduced to a banana republic. That said, the Holder mess, in the campaign sense, may divert attention from the economy, will likely not proceed to any further action against Holder or new releases of documents until after the election, and allows Holder once again to play the race card. Unless something dramatic happens, the contempt vote will either not help the Republicans or likely distract them from the economy. That is not a reason to stop now, but only a warning once more of the long road ahead.
6. The Obama crises. We hear of defections in the black community. Does that mean from a 97% majority down to a 95.5% margin? The Latino community is unhappy? Does that translate into a lost 3% from 2008? Is he short of cash? Does that mean Obama will not quite reach $1 billion until late October? Given that Obama has polarized the country, the fact that purple-state Democrats up for reelection don’t want to be seen with Obama is understandable, but not necessarily a barometer of what Ohio, Florida, Colorado, and Virginia will do on Election Day.
What Does It All Mean?
None of us know what November brings. We all imagine the race will be far closer than 2008. We worry that eight years of this administration will institutionalize what we saw during the first four years. That said, every person worried about the direction of the country will have to vote, donate time or money, or offer public or private commentary. We are going to see things in September and October that we have not quite seen before in an election, as our modern Borgia pulls out all the stops to do whatever is necessary to win.
We have a president who was not truthful about his prior associates and pastor, raising taxes, the Bush-Cheney protocols he once demonized, and promises to follow the law. The law now is followed largely to the degree that it is judged most progressive for most people. On a mundane level, a president is up for reelection who, by common assent, made up almost all the key details in his own memoir, claimed on his own bio that he was born in Kenya, jokes with his middle finger on his chin, laughs about Predator assassination drones protecting his daughters, offers a double-entendre about a sex act with his wife, and links “BFD” T-shirts to his website. From the fundamental to the ridiculous, Obama is sui generis. After all, we have a man of the people in the White House who has set presidential records for golf outings and fat-cat fundraisers, while running on them/us class warfare — to the delight of 50% of the country.
Against all that, rationalizing recent conservative defeats is surely no way to learn from them — and learn from them we must.
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All:
Not sure what to make of this piece after one read, but I post it because it reads to me as a sincere effort to be thoughtful on a deeper level about what is going on.
Marc
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POTH
Campaign Stops September 27, 2012, 11:49 pm7 Comments
The Unraveling of Government
By MICKEY EDWARDS
Frustrated over the inability of political leaders to find common ground on even the most pressing national issues, Americans have developed a long list of people or political practices to blame for the fact that government doesn’t seem to work anymore. But the real problem is something that’s not high on most such lists, something that’s far more crucial.
We’re electing the wrong people, they complain. There are no leaders any more. There’s too much money in politics. Too many corporations, labor unions, special interests and billionaires. Too many right-wingers, or left-wingers, in Congress, on television, on the Internet — and they’re all zealous and nasty. Too many Americans only talk to people who already agree with them. And so forth. Every observer has his or her own pet reason for the failure of the federal government to function.
If any attempt is made to assess the problem as a whole, each side complains about “false equivalence” and doubles down on blaming the opposition. It’s not that the villains they’ve identified don’t share in the blame, because they’ve all played a part in the unraveling of government. The problem, however, is much deeper than any of these individual elements: it’s the political system itself that is at fault. The problems with governance will never be solved until we turn that system upside down and start over.
While the United States is actually a Republic, with the attendant constitutional constraints on the powers of the majority, its political system is also based on a fundamental underlying democratic principle: that the people themselves will choose their leaders and thus indirectly determine the policies of their government. Because the federal government’s most important powers – to declare war, to establish tax policies, to create programs, to decide how much to spend on them, to approve treaties, to make the final decisions about who will head federal agencies or sit on the Supreme Court — are all Congressional powers, it is only by being able to select members of the Senate and the House of Representatives that the people are able to manage the levers of government.
Yet despite the repeated and urgent warnings of the Republic’s founders, we have created a system that seriously undermines that democratic principle and gives us instead a government that is unable to deal with even the most urgent problems because the people have been shoved aside in the pursuit of partisan advantage. In some ways our system has come to resemble those multi-party parliamentary systems in which the tail (relatively small groups of hard-liners) is able to wag the dog. What Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison all agreed on was the danger of creating political parties like the ones we have today, permanent factions that are engaged in a constant battle for advantage even if that means skewing election results, keeping candidates off the ballot, denying voters the right to true representation and “fixing” the outcome of legislative deliberations.
Associated Press Photo/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts “George Washington Addressing the Constitutional Convention,” Junius Brutus Stearns, 1856.
Let’s begin with the election process itself. In most states, party leaders have conspired to create “sore loser” laws that deny any place on the November ballot to a candidate who loses in a party primary or convention, no matter how few people participated. The two most egregious recent examples were former governor Mike Castle’s losing a spot on the Senate ballot in Delaware in 2010 because 30,000 people, in a state of nearly one million, voted for his primary opponent, and Utah, with a population of nearly three million, where Senator Robert Bennett was denied a place on the general election ballot that same year because a convention of 3,500 party activists denied him their endorsement.
This year, the same thing happened to Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, who lost a primary to a man who vowed never to compromise. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch survived this year only by disavowing his own bipartisan credentials. Two incumbent Democratic House members, Jason Altmire and Tim Holden, both moderates, were tossed out of office by liberal activists in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primaries earlier this year, just as Senator Joe Lieberman, after having been his party’s vice-presidential nominee, was defeated in a Connecticut Democratic primary in 2006. (Because Connecticut is one of the states that doesn’t have a “sore loser” law, Lieberman was able to run as an Independent in the general election where his re-election demonstrated that the primary results did not reflect the preferences of Connecticut voters.)
Because activists can use closed primaries to deny ballot access to people they deem insufficiently pure, the majority of voters — many of whom would prefer the candidates who have been eliminated — simply lose the ability to make that choice. Why we would allow parties in a democracy to limit voter choice is simply beyond me. The primary system was introduced by Progressives in the late 1800s and early 1900s as a reform to expand democracy and give voters a greater voice in the selection of public officials, not to squeeze voters out of the picture. If the goal is to send to Washington the preferred choice of the state’s voters (or a congressional district’s voters), all credible candidates should be allowed to appear on the ballot and all the voters, regardless of party, should be allowed to determine who will represent them.
Washington State (in 2006) and California (in 2010) woke up to this dramatically undemocratic system and enacted changes in their laws to create open primaries – every candidate on one ballot, all voters eligible to choose whomever they want. Every state should do the same thing. It is beyond comprehension that we who demand choice in everything we do willingly accept restrictions in the selection of the people who will decide whether we go to war, what taxes we will pay and what services government will provide.
It was the intention of the founders to ensure that our representatives were, in fact, representative. The Constitution specifically mandates that all Senators and Representatives be actual inhabitants of the states from which they are elected, with the idea being that they would be familiar with the interests and concerns of the voters and the voters would be familiar with the reputations of the candidates. But because political parties control the drawing of congressional districts, “representation” is very much an afterthought; what matters is creating an advantage for one’s party. Thus district lines are crazily shaped and urban Congressmen who have never spent a day on a farm become the “voice” of farmers whose interests they cannot effectively articulate.
This, in fact, happened in my own case after I became the first Republican elected to Congress from Oklahoma City since 1928 in a district that was nearly 75 percent Democratic; because Democrats controlled the state legislature they redrew my district as a large upside-down “L” running north from Oklahoma City to the Kansas border and then east almost to Arkansas. I had always lived in cities and suddenly I was charged with trying to adequately represent the interests of wheat farmers and cattle ranchers and small-town merchants. The idea that one’s Congressman is one’s “voice” at the table when laws are made has been completely demolished by party-controlled gerrymandering. There’s a solution for this, too: congressional redistricting takes place every 10 years after a national census, and more than a dozen states have now turned that responsibility over to nonpartisan and independent redistricting commissions; that’s a course every state should follow.
There’s more – cash poured into campaigns through “super PACs” controlled by long-time political party operatives, for example. But it’s important to look not just at the election process but also at what happens after the elections are completed.
After one brief moment when members of Congress are sworn in, all equally members in common of the United States Congress, the teams quickly divide for partisan battles over the Speakership, legislative rules and the margin of control to be exercised by the majority party on every committee and subcommittee. Committees (and the Congress itself, for that matter) function almost as side-by-side convenings of separate governments. House Speakers function not as non-partisan overseers of the legislative process but as party bosses. Committee members, ostensibly charged with careful consideration of legislative proposals, win their positions by promising to toe the party line. Staff members are at least as partisan as the members they serve.
On the House floor, Republicans and Democrats must speak from separate lecterns and when they step off the floor to use their phones, drink coffee or read newspapers, they do so in separate cloakrooms. That well-known center aisle is like the mighty Mississippi, a wide divide that extends through everything the Congress does. That is why on almost every major issue, from spending and taxes to Supreme Court nominations, almost all Republicans are on one side and almost all Democrats are on the other side.
Members of the president’s party see him not as the head of a separate branch of government, to be kept in check as the Constitution envisioned, but as their party leader whom they are required to protect. So much for the separation of powers. When combined, activist control of party primaries and a commitment by party leaders to wage a perpetual struggle for political advantage have created an environment in which intransigence is rewarded and cooperation is punished, making the bipartisan compromises of the past almost impossible.
It doesn’t have to be this way, either. The Speaker of the House need not be partisan; in fact, the Constitution doesn’t require that he or she even be a member of Congress. It would be possible for House members to select a respected community leader – a university president, perhaps, or the head of a nonprofit organization – to guide the consideration of legislative proposals. House and Senate committees could be staffed with nonpartisan professionals. Committee membership can be chosen by drawing or seniority, not by virtue of a pledge to blindly follow party dictates.
Here’s the hard part. The dysfunction – the inability to consider ideas that emanate from “the other side”, the unwillingness to compromise, the constant maneuvering for party advantage – derives directly from the power we have given those parties to shape who sits in office and how they function. And every single piece of that rotten puzzle can be undone by the people themselves. Nearly half the states allow for initiative petitions, by means of which voters themselves can change election and redistricting laws (to be clear, I don’t favor the use of citizen initiatives to set policy; it’s a power that should be reserved to setting the rules of the game, the process by which lawmakers are chosen).
Voters must remember that the ultimate power rests in their hands. This is not a spectator sport; our system of constrained and mediated democracy requires an engaged citizenry, willing to confront elected officials and demand the changes that are required. To keep their offices, legislators must return home to face their constituents and those same voters can demand changes in the procedures that have bogged government down in recrimination, vitriol and stalemate.
Our current system, with parties controlling who gets on the ballot, what districts they run in, and what happens to large amounts of potential campaigns funds, rewards incivility and discourages cooperation. If we allow that system to continue, it is we who must share the blame for a government that can no longer function.
Mickey Edwards, who served in the House from 1977 to 1993 as the representative of Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District, is the author of “The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans.”
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By Charles Krauthammer, Nov 09, 2012 12:24 AM EST
The Washington Post Published: November 8
They lose and immediately the chorus begins. Republicans must change or die. A rump party of white America, it must adapt to evolving demographics or forever be the minority.
The only part of this that is even partially true regards Hispanics. They should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family-oriented and socially conservative (on abortion, for example).
The principal reason they go Democratic is the issue of illegal immigrants. In securing the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney made the strategic error of (unnecessarily) going to the right of Rick Perry. Romney could never successfully tack back.
For the party in general, however, the problem is hardly structural. It requires but a single policy change: Border fence plus amnesty. Yes, amnesty. Use the word. Shock and awe — full legal normalization (just short of citizenship) in return for full border enforcement.
I’ve always been of the “enforcement first” school, with the subsequent promise of legalization. I still think it’s the better policy. But many Hispanics fear that there will be nothing beyond enforcement. So, promise amnesty right up front. Secure the border with guaranteed legalization to follow on the day the four border-state governors affirm that illegal immigration has slowed to a trickle.
Imagine Marco Rubio advancing such a policy on the road to 2016. It would transform the landscape. He’d win the Hispanic vote. Yes, win it. A problem fixable with a single policy initiative is not structural. It is solvable.
The other part of the current lament is that the Republican Party consistently trails among blacks, young people and (unmarried) women. (Republicans are plus-7 among married women.) But this is not for reasons of culture, identity or even affinity. It is because these constituencies tend to be more politically liberal — and Republicans are the conservative party.
The country doesn’t need two liberal parties. Yes, Republicans need to weed out candidates who talk like morons about rape. But this doesn’t mean the country needs two pro-choice parties either. In fact, more women are pro-life than are pro-choice. The problem here for Republicans is not policy but delicacy — speaking about culturally sensitive and philosophically complex issues with reflection and prudence.
Additionally, warn the doomsayers, Republicans must change not just ethnically but ideologically. Back to the center. Moderation above all!
More nonsense. Tuesday’s exit polls showed that by an eight-point margin (51-43), Americans believe that government does too much. And Republicans are the party of smaller government. Moreover, onrushing economic exigencies — crushing debt, unsustainable entitlements — will make the argument for smaller government increasingly unassailable.
So, why give it up? Republicans lost the election not because they advanced a bad argument but because they advanced a good argument not well enough. Romney ran a solid campaign, but he is by nature a Northeastern moderate. He sincerely adopted the new conservatism but still spoke it as a second language.
More Ford ’76 than Reagan ’80, Romney is a transitional figure, both generationally and ideologically. Behind him, the party has an extraordinarily strong bench. In Congress — Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Kelly Ayotte, (the incoming) Ted Cruz and others. And the governors — Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Nikki Haley, plus former governor Jeb Bush and the soon-retiring Mitch Daniels. (Chris Christie is currently in rehab.)
They were all either a little too young or just not personally prepared to run in 2012. No longer. There may not be a Reagan among them, but this generation of rising leaders is philosophically rooted and politically fluent in the new constitutional conservatism.
Ignore the trimmers. There’s no need for radical change. The other party thinks it owns the demographic future — counter that in one stroke by fixing the Latino problem. Do not, however, abandon the party’s philosophical anchor. In a world where European social democracy is imploding before our eyes, the party of smaller, more modernized government owns the ideological future.
Romney is a good man who made the best argument he could, and nearly won. He would have made a superb chief executive, but he (like the Clinton machine) could not match Barack Obama in the darker arts of public persuasion.
The answer to Romney’s failure is not retreat, not aping the Democrats’ patchwork pandering. It is to make the case for restrained, rationalized and reformed government in stark contradistinction to Obama’s increasingly unsustainable big-spending, big-government paternalism.
Republicans: No whimpering. No whining. No reinvention when none is needed. Do conservatism but do it better. There’s a whole generation of leaders ready to do just that.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
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Elevating Ryan or changing out Boehner is deck chair material, as GM said, not crucial like policy stands, stalemate positions and messaging. Ryan will be out front with or without a promotion. I don't know what his future role will be. He did not deliver Wisconsin or any other state; VP choices rarely do. I give Boehner (and Ryan) credit for the what the House passed the last two years and Boehner and his team credit for getting everyone reelected in the face of 10% congressional approval. No one on the right, left or center is going to approve of the stalemate of divided government, and yet they chose at least 2 more years of it. Boehner isn't the best face for the national party but neither was Denny Hastert - or Tip O'Neill, Jim Wright, Pelosi etc for the other side.
Republicans in the House ran on a clear record and a clear agenda and they won. Pres. Obama ran mostly away setting an agenda except to keep his failed policies in place, and he won. House Republicans have as much of a mandate to stand strong on policy positions than Pres. Obama.
The two part question over the past 4 years was how to win back power and then what policies we will need to turn this around if we win the election. Now the choice is simpler, cave or honor on our core principles.
Krauthammer is right that immigration reform is an area to consider. Take a key issue off the table before the next Presidential cycle. Gay marriage might be another. Rape abortion too!
But the size and scope of government is a place where voters expect Republicans to draw the line. The size of government needs to be limited to the lowest level of what all three participants can agree, House, Senate and President. That makes the House the crucial determinant.
The President isn't giving up powers that are uniquely his like Supreme Court nominations; the House should not give up powers that are uniquely theirs like the origination of all bills for raising revenue: http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec7.html
House Republicans are more free now to exert their rightful powers than they were over the past two years. Maybe they will get accused of refusing to let Democrats spend beyond our means. So what. Maybe they lose the House next. So what, that is not worse than not performing their constitutional responsibilities now.
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Boener played the Rep hand very badly IMHO with regard to what became the sequester. HUGE error IMHO-- and he looks like the kind of Rep that people dislike :lol: McConnell too.
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To all people being laid off today - it is day 1 of your new involuntary polysci/Econ class. Pay attention. There's a test in 4 years.
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324439804578109051314776698.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion)
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To all people being laid off today - it is day 1 of your new involuntary polysci/Econ class. Pay attention. There's a test in 4 years.
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324439804578109051314776698.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion)
Dems: It's STILL Booooooosh's fault!!!!!
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Doug,
As for immigration it may the politically correct thing to do to get it off the table as Krauthammer and apparantly Hannity believe. I can say with full confidence that this WILL not resolve the Republicans Latino minority status. First if we do not concede amnesty we can be totallly 100% guaranteed Obama will grant it before his teem expires anyway.
Second if anyone believes that a Repub party backing of amnesty will make most Latinos love our party that all I have to do is remind everyone Reagan granted amnesty to what was it 1.5 or 3 million illegals 25 yrs ago. And what was his thanks? 20 million more flood the country and 75% of the Asians, Latinos and the rest vote for the opposing party. We must first learn from history - not repeat it.
Rush Limbaugh is correct here. It is not about immigration policie. That is all a smoke screen. The issue for Latinos who are on the bottom rungs of th economic ladder, many are single mothers, is the government giveaways. period.
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I don't know how our party can compete with bribery of blocks of citizens. We can't come back with ok we will give you food stamps, medicaid, welfare, unempolyment, easier disability, tax (the shrinking share of taxpayers ) more, school loans health care and guess what WE will throw in "free" season tickets to see your favorite football team - courtesy of the rich.
Hey aren't I entitled to have seats?
I don't know if a really charismatic, persuasive telegenic candidate is enough.
I don't know if the ideals that were the core traditional American values reflected in our constitution are enough. People want the easy route - the cold hard cash.
The only thing I can see is until this socialist turn crashes of its own weight - until taxes are 79% like in France, and our debt load cruhes us, and people will begin to realize this IS worse, until then, it may be too late.
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One last warning. We read rumors about the increasing and expanding surviellance of our government. As our world, our lives, our humanity, including all our communications, our interactions, our believes, thoughts, transactions, buisness and personal become digitalized into the exponential data streams that are collected, catalogued, categorized, and analyzed by our government and sadly but surely private companies our freedoms will diminish.
Knowing full well how it is virtually impossible to protect electronic data, Indeed no average person can even get any kind of device that can be even reasonalby be protected (don't kiod yourself with the propaganda about enscryption - etc) we are virtually at 100% risk of totaliarism. Akin to the Okhrana police of the Tsars, and later the KGB.
We hear rumors that our government is surviellancing "right" wing groups. Oh really? Who, Why and who decides what is right wing or a danger. Obama would consider any teapartier to be a danger. I am not kidding. There is an appearance that progressive powers in our government is gearing up to combat what they will perceive is a counter revolution.
Warning made. Readers beware. I believe it is happening before us but under the radar.
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Last post for the day.
People who have read or remember any of my posts would know I used to be more of a "moderate" republican. But three terms of Bushes prove this is doomed to failure. We do not need Jeb or now we have another one.
As before H gave us Clinton. W was worse - we got the racist socialist American hating guy we have. W tried to close the donut hole, compassionate conservatism etc. What did it accomplish? All it did was give away more benefits and then the left moves *forward* even more. It does not stop their movement. It does not make them happy. It doesn't even slow them down. WE have to keep the eye on the ball - the END GAME. What is their endgame
One *world* government
Essentially no religion. Both concepts are "Medievil"
There should be no USA. Just one country and the wealth shared and spread around as the central government sees fit.
Of course the libs, including my fellow Jewish intellectuals will say that this is "progress", this is "good, this is "fair". That those who will be in charge will still be duly elected, and we the people will have the power to remove, replace, change correct the government. This is fantasy. We will lose our freedoms, we will be servants of government and the power will be so great we will be helpless.
In any case the point is to watch where THIER endgame is. Concilialtion will only reuslt in short delays and not win anyone over to our side.
We do have to win with ideas. Not with more giveaways. But for now I don't think ideas will/can win. Not until the country breaks more. Unfortunately we will have to endure far more pain before the "masses" will be able to see this. Till then they buy the demogaguery that the rich need to pay more hook line and sinker. This is what they all say while waiting in line picking up their checks or running to the mailbox to do the same.
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re your post #554:
I deeply share this concern about the all-seeing, all tracking, State. Indeed, note the substantial thread in this regard on our SCH forum.
I suspect that with the right articulation we can generate considerable support our position across much of the political spectrum, though it may be at the cost on this issue of the support of our GM. :-D
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Many of you asked what I mean by healing the country in the wake of the election. In it's essence, I mean the opposite of this:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57548572/states-petition-to-secede-from-union/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/11/12/states-petition-obama-administration-to-secede/
http://www.examiner.com/article/citizens-15-states-file-petitions-to-secede-from-united-states
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Many of you asked what I mean by healing the country in the wake of the election. In it's essence, I mean the opposite of this:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57548572/states-petition-to-secede-from-union/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/11/12/states-petition-obama-administration-to-secede/
http://www.examiner.com/article/citizens-15-states-file-petitions-to-secede-from-united-states
BD, wouldn't you try to get your family off of a sinking ship?
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So much for the "united" in the USA.
Many of you asked what I mean by healing the country in the wake of the election. In it's essence, I mean the opposite of this:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57548572/states-petition-to-secede-from-union/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/11/12/states-petition-obama-administration-to-secede/
http://www.examiner.com/article/citizens-15-states-file-petitions-to-secede-from-united-states
BD, wouldn't you try to get your family off of a sinking ship?
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It's not. Why pretend? Let those who want cradle to grave government live in the socialist states, and the free citizens choose small government. Why not?
So much for the "united" in the USA.
Many of you asked what I mean by healing the country in the wake of the election. In it's essence, I mean the opposite of this:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57548572/states-petition-to-secede-from-union/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/11/12/states-petition-obama-administration-to-secede/
http://www.examiner.com/article/citizens-15-states-file-petitions-to-secede-from-united-states
BD, wouldn't you try to get your family off of a sinking ship?
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In thinking about your anaology more deeply, if the ship is sinking why try to take 40% with you? Wouldn't it be better for you to jump to another ship?
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In thinking about your anaology more deeply, if the ship is sinking why try to take 40% with you? Wouldn't it be better for you to jump to another ship?
Actually, it's just under 50 percent. Why not let the looters and moochers have their utopian country without the bitter clingers messing if up?
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Maybe you misunderstand who is leading the secession charge. And, again, using YOUR analogy, if the ship is sinking and it makes sense to jump, why try to take 40% of the ship? (Quick math note, 20 states have secession petitons in, and 20 is 40% of 50.)
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Look, the current version is terminal. Why not have the two paradigms do things their way?
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"President Barack Obama was not re-elected by people who want to 'take.' The president was re-elected by people who want to work -- and who were convinced, rightly or wrongly, that the president's policies were more likely to create work than were the policies advocated by my party.
The United States did not vote for socialism. It could not do so, because neither party offers socialism. Both parties champion a free enterprise economy cushioned by a certain amount of social insurance. The Democrats (mostly) want more social insurance, the Republicans want less. National politics is a contest to move the line of scrimmage, in a game where there's no such thing as a forward pass, only a straight charge ahead at the defensive line. To gain three yards is a big play."
http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/12/opinion/frum-conservatives-despair/index.html?hpt=hp_c1
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BD:
You may be right about what many people thought they were voting for and that not so long ago what you write about Rep and Dem being about differing levels of social insurance-- but Obama is about quite a bit more than that.
Certainly I understand the emotional pressures that contemplate discharge through secession, but the Civil War settled that that is not happening. Nonetheless, the Tenth Amendment is real important and needs to be re-reified into our political-legal culture.
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President Barack Obama was not re-elected by people who want to "take." The president was re-elected by people who want to work -- and who were convinced, rightly or wrongly, that the president's policies were more likely to create work than were the policies advocated by my party.
The United States did not vote for socialism. It could not do so, because neither party offers socialism. Both parties champion a free enterprise economy cushioned by a certain amount of social insurance. The Democrats (mostly) want more social insurance, the Republicans want less. National politics is a contest to move the line of scrimmage, in a game where there's no such thing as a forward pass, only a straight charge ahead at the defensive line. To gain three yards is a big play.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/12/opinion/frum-conservatives-despair/index.html?hpt=hp_c1
Frum is in serious denial. It is the moochers and looters who run things now. They'll trade votes for more goodies until there is nothing more to consume.
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With apologies: the words on the above were quoted from the article. I have modified the post to make this more clear.
BD:
You may be right about what many people thought they were voting for and that not so long ago what you write about Rep and Dem being about differing levels of social insurance-- but Obama is about quite a bit more than that.
Certainly I understand the emotional pressures that contemplate discharge through secession, but the Civil War settled that that is not happening. Nonetheless, the Tenth Amendment is real important and needs to be re-reified into our political-legal culture.
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So noted. :-)
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Maybe Minorities' Values Need Changing
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
ShareThis
The most widely offered explanation for Mitt Romney's defeat is that the Republican Party is disproportionately composed of -- aging -- white males.
That is, alas, true.
But the real question is what Republicans should do with this truth.
There are two responses.
The nearly universal response -- meaning the response offered by the liberal media and liberal academics (and some Republicans) -- is that the Republican Party needs to rethink its positions, moving away from conservatism and toward the political center.
The other response is for conservatives and the Republican Party to embark on a massive campaign to influence, and ultimately change, the values of those groups that voted Democrat.
The Democratic Party, and the left generally, have done a magnificent job in identifying conservative values as white male values. One reason for their success is that they dominate virtually every lever of influence -- the high schools and universities, television, newspapers, movies, pop culture and everything else except talk radio. Another is that they really believe that conservative values are nothing more than white male -- especially aging white male -- values. Remember, leftism has its own trinity -- the prism through which it perceives the world -- race, gender and class. In this case the race is white; the gender is male; and the class is rich.
As a result of this identification, there is no debate over whether the minorities' (and single women's) values are correct or whether the values of the white males are correct. The left has successfully forestalled any such national discussion by simply reducing conservative values to the dying fulminations of a former ruling class.
In the words of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, "Mitt Romney is the president of white male America."
This identification seems to be working. But it's intellectually dishonest. Aging white males are as important to the left as they are to the right.
In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, liberal Harvard professor Benjamin M. Friedman strongly criticized the Tea Party. After citing "surveys showing that Tea Party members are 'predominantly white, male, older, more college-educated and better off economically than typical Americans,'" he noted parenthetically "they sound like, say, readers of The New York Review of Books."
Come to think of it, these people who make up the tea party also sound like the people who attend classical music concerts, who endow concert halls, museums, hospitals, and universities, and fund left-wing causes (George Soros, for example).
Perhaps when this generation of aging white males dies off, aging women, aging Latino and black males, and young people will become the readers of journals such as the New York Review of Books and endow symphony orchestras.
I suspect not. And if not, the left may come to regret its contempt for this particular group. Without aging white males, I doubt the New York Times would survive. How many young people, females, Hispanics and blacks subscribe to the New York Times?
Obviously the issue for the left isn't aging white males, it is conservatives, whether they are young or old, white or nonwhite, male or female. If female aborigines were conservative, the left would have a problem with female aborigines.
For conservatives, the issue is that for generations now, they have failed to make the case for their values. They haven't even conveyed conservative values to many of their children. And when they have, the university has often succeeded in undoing them.
The only answer to the "demographic" problem, therefore, is to bring women (single women, to be precise), young people, Hispanics, and blacks to conservative values. I wrote a column in September ("It's not Just the Economy, Stupid!") criticizing the Mitt Romney campaign for only talking about jobs and the economy. President Obama kept saying that this election was about two different visions of America. But like George Herbert Walker Bush, the Romney campaign appeared to disdain "the vision thing."
Our only hope for America is that every conservative takes upon him or herself the project of learning what American and conservative values are, coming to understand what leftism stands for, and learning how to make the case for those values to women, young people, blacks and Hispanics. That is what my radio show, latest book and Prager University are about. And while I am, happily, hardly alone, there are still far too few of us who understand "the vision thing." Surely the Republican establishment has not.
We should missionize for the American Trinity (Liberty, In God We Trust, E Pluribus Unum) as least as passionately as the left has missionized for its antithesis -- Egalitarianism, Secularism and Multiculturalism. Or we will lose America as we have always known it.
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Gee, you'd have to change schools and academia and the MSM from being the left's indoctrination mechanism. Good luck with that.
Don't worry, some reality therapy is coming in an epic dose.
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http://pjmedia.com/blog/3-windows-into-obamas-dangerous-second-term/?singlepage=true
3 Windows into Obama’s Dangerous Second Term
The nightmare has already begun. by
Tom Blumer
November 13, 2012 - 11:05 pm
Several post-election developments have already served advance warning on America, or at least the portion paying attention between so-called reality TV shows, that President Obama’s second term will be every bit as dangerous and ultimately disastrous as those of us deeply concerned about the consequences of his reelection warned it will be. I will look at just three of them. There are many others.
Dependency. Blogger Matt Trivisonno first noticed a delay in the release of the USDA’s monthly food stamp enrollment report, which usually occurs near the end of each month, in early October. When it was data-dumped late in the afternoon on Friday, October 5, two days after the first presidential debate (imagine that), it showed that July enrollment had edged up to a then-all-time record.
What should have come out in late October didn’t arrive until November 9, yet another Friday afternoon, three convenient days after the election. It’s now clear that Team Obama deliberately sat on it, as its contents would certainly have become a final-days election issue had they been known. August enrollment exploded by over 400,000 to a record-shattering 47.1 million.
Revised data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that the economy added 192,000 jobs during that same month. Though that level of monthly job growth, symptomatic of the worst economic recovery since World War II, is still unacceptable, the food stamp rolls should be declining, and they’re not. That’s because the program has morphed from being about temporarily helping the truly needy into a dependency-engendering, vote-buying enterprise.
It should be clear to anyone with their eyes open that even if the economy improves, something Obama seems bound and determined to prevent in action while feigning fealty to that goal in words, we’re doomed to four more years of an unrelenting effort to add objectively not needy recipients to the food stamp and other dependency rolls. Gutting welfare reform, which HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has already seriously compromised with loosened work requirements presented last summer, is a key objective.
Energy. In news naturally ignored by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and virtually everyone else in the establishment media, The Hill reported late last week that the Interior Department “issued a final plan to close 1.6 million acres of federal land in the West (i.e., 2,500 square miles) originally slated for oil shale development.”
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and the Environmental Protection Agency plan to spend the next four years using largely phony environmental concerns to prevent the country from seeing affordable energy costs and from achieving long-term net energy independence. The U.S. could accomplish the latter within a decade if the government would, with appropriate oversight, let the oil and gas industry do in the West what it has successfully been doing in North Dakota and Pennsylvania. Indeed, $3 per gallon gas will likely become the economy-inhibiting floor, while any number of geopolitical or weather-related shocks could again send energy prices skyrocketing.
Regulation and cronyism. On October 23, John Hayward at Human Events identified what we would face if Obama won reelection:
Sprinkled through his speeches and debate performances are little hints that he (Obama) plans to double down on everything the American public hates. Solyndra? More to come. Regulation? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Taxes? Not nearly high enough. ObamaCare? Not nearly complicated enough. Medicare? Ignore your lying calculators, it’s just fine the way it is.
Even though many of its regulations don’t go live until 2014, ObamaCare is already holding back the job market. As the Wall Street Journal reported on November 4 (“Health-Care Law Spurs a Shift to Part-Time Workers”):
Several restaurants, hotels and retailers have started or are preparing to limit schedules of hourly workers to below 30 hours a week. That is the threshold at which large employers in 2014 would have to offer workers a minimum level of insurance or pay a penalty starting at $2,000 for each worker.
The reason companies are making these moves now is that the penalty thresholds in 2014 will be driven by reported employment during 2013. The bifurcation of the workforce between those desperately hanging on to full-time jobs and those who can only find part-time or temporary employment (if they’re even that lucky), already well under way during Obama’s first term, is destined to accelerate during his second.
Thus, Obama, no longer needing voter approval, supported by legions of federal apparatchiks, and clearly unconcerned about annoyances like the Constitution’s supposed limits on executive power and authority, now has a four-year open field.
As the ugliness continues to unfold, I certainly hope that the millions of conservatives who chose to stay home, thereby guaranteeing Mitt Romney’s defeat in four states where their presence in numbers comparable to 2004 and 2008 would have given him an electoral vote majority, seriously question their decisions. Jim Geraghty at National Review noted that even in the face of dozens of external and self-inflicted factors leading to his underperformance, Romney could have won the election if a combined 407,000 sideline-sitters would have shown up in Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Colorado. New Hampshire, Iowa, and Nevada should also have been within reach.
By sitting out what may come to be seen as the most consequential presidential election in almost 150 years — this time potentially fracturing the union beyond repair instead of saving it, as Lincoln’s 1864 reelection did — they have for now forfeited any right to have their complaints taken seriously. If they continue to refuse to engage, it will only get worse.
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz7boAzeV7s[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz7boAzeV7s
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A Tale of Two Revolutions
This may have been posted in the past, but is worth a look again.....I just hope the path that our country has chosen is not a slippery slope. I fear it is....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqUiE-vJ-64&feature=youtube_gdata_player
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqUiE-vJ-64&feature=youtube_gdata_player [/youtube]
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I have no idea how I can keep my sanity now -
One week post election and I am already going crazy every time I have to hear Obama's voice.
His hatred of America, anger, racism just keeps getting worse.
Well Michelle stated she did not like America. Now, I no longer do.
My liberal Jewish family members better not bring up politics on Thanksgiving. :x :x :x
I am no longer proud to be Jewish. Sorry. My brethren have given a lot to the world. But Obama is absolutely unforgiveable. Obviously most liberals are not Jewish but Jews have a disproportionate amount of influence in respect to their numbers. Just like the socialist movements in Europe and including Russian Communism. Without Jewish political theory, votes, media, financial support there is no doubt this guy would never be President.
I am not sure if any of the founding fathers of America were Jews.
My Jewish liberal guys and gals will be sorry for what they did to America. They jeopordize their own earned privileged position. They are apparantly too dumb to know it.
Frum sounds all mixed up.
I prefer Krauthammer, Levin, Kaufman, J. AND B. Goldbergs and even Jackie Mason.
In reading Stalin he was personally somewhat neutral about the Jews. It wasn't a racial or genocidal thing with him. Yes , he murdered many. He was just afraid of their ties to the capatalistic country called America and probably Zionism.
Stalin did have a problem with the "intellectual" Trostsky and less "militant" (if you will) Jewish soicalists, but any dislike of Jews seemed to be more from a paranioa about their politics and threat to his power. Not that he hated Jews "per se".
The social Democrats and social capatilists of Europe from the 1800's to early 1900's would be so proud of the liberal Jews of today in the US. :-( :x :cry: :cry:
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I have great regard for Mark Alexander and his Patriot Post. Indeed I make a donation every December.
That said, I have not much patience for the War of Secession history that ignores slavery. Any analysis of State's Rights that ignores this is profoundly incomplete at best. Nonetheless, there are other points of merit in here IMHO.
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Alexander's Column – November 15, 2012
Mapping the Right Road Forward
Big Problems Require Big Solutions
"[T]he crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves." --George Washington (1774)
I've heard that fruit doesn't fall far from its tree, and have often found that to be true. A bright young Patriot, who also happens to be my high-school daughter, demonstrated this principle just yesterday.
In a post-election summary to our fellow Patriots last week, I included images of election maps that exposed some facts Obama and his Leftist cadres don't want you to contemplate.
Chief among those facts are that the assault on Liberty we witnessed in the presidential election was led, as in 2008, primarily by urban dwellers, most of whom reside on "government plantations," and subsist on the spoils of what Obama calls "redistributive justice." That collectivist constituency now accounts for almost 50 (FIFTY) percent of Obama's voter base. Socialist Democrats have mastered the practice of co-opting (read: "buying") their allegiance and getting them to the polls. The good news is that about nine million fewer Obama voters showed up in 2012.
The county-by-county election maps clearly revealed the geographical delineation between the Left-leaning urban centers and the Right-leaning rest of the nation. Naturally, I observed that this delineation formed reasonable lines for secession, and I recalled these words from fellow Tennessean Nathan Bedford Forrest on the Second War for Independence (as it was known in the South): "I loved the old government. I loved the old Constitution. I do not hate it; I am opposing now only the radical revolutionists who are trying to destroy it."
So, you ask, what does this have to do with fruit trees?
My daughter walked into my home study (affectionately called "The Man Cave" around our house), and she was sporting one of those expressions that conveyed she was on a mission. She asked, "Can I sign a petition for our state to secede?"
Apparently, as you may have heard, some despondent souls across the nation, still licking their wounds after Obama's re-election, are preparing to surrender the future of the Republic. They have launched official secession petitions from all 50 states on the most illogical of places to undertake such folly -- Obama's White House "We the People" page for online petitions, which promises a response from the president to every petition that gathers more than 25,000 signatures.
Those petitions are closing in on a million signatures.
My daughter got wind of this, and she's now ready to grab her M-4 and a case of 5.56 and start over, with her brothers at her side! I love her spirit. She's one of those "quiet girls," but if you're on the wrong side of Liberty, you'd best get out of her field of fire.
After telling her that she most certainly could sign a petition for secession (just not one managed by Obama's lemmings), we had a discussion about the frustrations that have led some of our countrymen to give up on ever restoring Rule of Law.
I explained that nine of the secession petitions on the White House website have already exceeded the 25,000 signature threshold, and I anticipate Obama's response will be some version of what he has already said about grassroots conservatives -- something about those Tea Party people being an "angry mob" who are "waving their little tea bags around" while "they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Obama and his sycophantic Leftmedia will have a good laugh with these understandable but ill-conceived petitions -- and that's unfortunate, because the petitions provide an opening for Obama to further marginalize legitimate grievances about the Left's collective disregard for our Constitution.
Now, please don't flood our website's "Comments" page with a defense of these petitions. I happen to agree with old N.B. Forrest in his assessment of the principle cause of the first attempt at secession, and I take exception to the gubmint schools' uncritical and unflinching idolization of Abe Lincoln, whose reckless disregard of our Constitution exceeds that of any president in our history, with the possible exception of Barack Obama. (I guess that assessment may result in a flood of objections, too.)
Post Your Opinion
The fact is, I don't support secession, and having been around a couple of revolutions in Africa and Eastern Europe, I would much prefer constitutional restoration over insurrection -- if the former is achievable.
So why, in my assessment of the electoral maps, mention secession at all?
Because an alternative worth contemplating seriously would be to pursue a Constitutional Confederacy -- an alliance of those states that are not under the mob rule of urban Leftists, whose delegations could assemble to re-ratify our Constitution and the Rule of Law it enshrines.
As of today, Republicans control 30 state governorships and 27 state legislatures, and twice as many states are under total Republican leadership (governor and both houses) as states controlled by Democrats. That is plenty enough muscle to populate a Constitutional Convention for the purpose of re-adopting our authentic Constitution in its original form, amended as prescribed, and thus rejecting the so-called "living constitution" now obscured beyond recognition by the "despotic branch" of which Thomas Jefferson so presciently warned. Those states re-ratifying would then reject extra-constitutional regulations and taxes in favor of Tenth Amendment federalism as prescribed when each state first ratified our Constitution.
Now that is a movement in support of "We the People," which would generate a LOT of heartburn for Obama and his legions of urban socialists.
OK, I haven't completely taken leave of my senses -- but this notion of a Constitutional Confederation is representative of the big ideas that need to be considered in order to resolve big problems. And if you haven't yet taken leave of your senses, you know our nation is beset with BIG problems.
Here is where we find ourselves after the presidential election.
Our nation is in crisis -- and given the post election "economic revisions" this week, that crisis is not abating. The poverty rate was revised upward to 16.1 percent -- a record 49 million people living in poverty by American standards (up 3 million more than estimated the week prior to the election). The Latino poverty rate was revised upward to 28 percent. Jobless claims were up 78,000 this week, with Pennsylvania and Ohio hardest hit -- just wait for the December jobless claims...
Here is the short list of major domestic problems we face: Massive debt, crippling taxes, mandated tax increases and budget cuts under the Budget Control Act of 2011 -- which will likely result in economic reversal (recession), out-of-control welfare and entitlement spending, inflation (just watch), overbearing government regulations and health care mandates, ever-expanding government plantation populations, failed educational institutions, increasing dependence on foreign oil, declining defense capability and the increasing threat of another devastating strike by Islamofascists on U.S. soil.
The short list of international problems: Chinese manipulation of debt markets, the re-emergence of Russian authoritarianism, the meltdown of relations in the Middle East and Africa, and Europe plunging back into economic recession.
Oh, and the biggest domestic problem: The re-election of a "community organizer," who has never so much as operated a lemonade stand, with the expectation that he will solve all the other problems, even though he and his "useful idiots" spent the last four years making matters much worse.
Barack Hussein Obama has no legislative mandate, but neither do the establishment Republicans. Obama did not win the 2012 election -- the GOP lost it. However, I can assure you that Obama will proceed as if he won every vote in America, not the thin 4/10ths of one percent that reseated him. That assurance was evident in Obama's post-election press conference this week, the first in eight months, when he doubled down on his list of Leftist mandates.
Post Your Opinion
The good news is that Republicans can counter Obama's platform and restore the integrity of our Constitution, but only if the conservative wing of the Republican Party convinces the rest of the GOP to do what Mitt Romney failed to do -- rally grassroots conservatives. That will require leaders in the House and Senate who actually get "the grassroots thing," which the current leadership does not. (If new legislative leadership does not emerge, see "Constitutional Confederation" reference above.)
To better understand what the Romney campaign did not, the last time a GOP presidential contender genuinely identified with grassroots folks and they with him, was 1984, when Ronald Reagan won 525 electoral votes to his Democrat opponent's 13. (To see what an election map looks like when a presidential candidate has earned the support of grassroots America, click here.) The Reagan model was, and remains, the right road forward.
The current cover of Newsweek proclaims "GOP: You're History" (which is ironic for a failed magazine in its final weeks of publication), but if the GOP does not get it right from this day forward, the Republic as we know it will be history.
The fact is, almost every critical national problem we face is, in every respect, the direct result of the gross political violation of the limits our Constitution prescribes on the scope of our federal government. Period.
The current crises are accompanied by great opportunities, both in terms of policy and politics -- restocking our national and state legislatures with right-minded leadership in 2014 and 2016.
We're unlikely to win the support of any government plantation dependents -- those welfare captives who make up the Left's largest constituency (50 percent). We're not going to change the minds of ideological socialists who make up about 10 percent of Leftist voters. But the right appeal will win over a majority of the remaining 40 percent of Obama's "middle constituency" and change the political landscape in the next two election cycles. Recall that a mere two-percent swing in the most recent election would have resulted in Obama's defeat -- which makes his victory all the more bitter. The right conservative leadership has the opportunity to win a 10 to 15 percent swing by rallying grassroots America to the cause of Liberty.
It has taken generations for our nation to become mired deep in the mud in which we now find ourselves stuck. It will take more than a few election cycles to pull us out. But there has been a great awakening among Patriots, and our ranks have grown rapidly in recent years. With the right leadership, the march to restore Liberty and constitutional integrity will be unstoppable.
Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis
Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
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The Conservative Future
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: November 19, 2012 15 Comments
If you listened to the Republican candidates this year, you heard a conventional set of arguments. But if you go online, you can find a vibrant and increasingly influential center-right conversation. Most of the young writers and bloggers in this conversation intermingle, but they can be grouped, for clarity’s sake, around a few hot spots:
Paleoconservatives. The American Conservative has become one of the more dynamic spots on the political Web. Writers like Rod Dreher and Daniel Larison tend to be suspicious of bigness: big corporations, big government, a big military, concentrated power and concentrated wealth. Writers at that Web site, and at the temperamentally aligned Front Porch Republic, treasure tight communities and local bonds. They’re alert to the ways capitalism can erode community. Dispositionally, they are more Walker Percy than Pat Robertson.
Larison focuses on what he calls the imperial tendencies of both the Bush and Obama foreign policies. He crusades against what he sees as the unchecked killing power of drone strikes and champions a more modest and noninterventionist foreign policy.
Lower-Middle Reformists. Reihan Salam, a writer for National Review, E21 and others, recently pointed out that there are two stories about where the Republican Party should go next. There is the upper-middle reform story: Republicans should soften their tone on the social issues to win over suburban voters along the coasts. Then there is a lower-middle reform story: Republicans should focus on the specific economic concerns of the multiethnic working class.
Salam promotes the latter. This means acknowledging that working-class concerns are not what they were in the 1980s. The income tax is less burdensome than the payroll tax. Family disruption undermines social mobility. Republicans, he argues, should keep the social conservatism, which reinforces families, and supplement it with an agenda that supports upward mobility and social capital.
Similarly, Henry Olsen of the American Enterprise Institute has argued for a Republican Party that listens more closely to working-class concerns. Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review has argued for family-friendly tax credits and other measures that reinforce middle-class dignity. Jim Manzi wrote a seminal article in National Affairs on the need to promote innovation while reducing inequality.
Soft Libertarians. Some of the most influential bloggers on the right, like Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok and Megan McArdle, start from broadly libertarian premises but do not apply them in a doctrinaire way.
Many of these market-oriented writers emphasize that being pro-market is not the same as being pro-business. Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago published an influential book, “A Capitalism for the People,” that took aim at crony capitalism. Tim Carney of The Washington Examiner does muckraking reporting on corporate-federal collusion. Rising star Derek Khanna wrote a heralded paper on intellectual property rights for the House Republican Study Committee that was withdrawn by higher-ups in the party, presumably because it differed from the usual lobbyist-driven position.
There are a number of unpredictable libertarian-leaning writers, including Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic on civil liberties issues, and Eugene Volokh on legal and free speech concerns.
Burkean Revivalists. This group includes young conservatives whose intellectual roots go back to the organic vision of society described best by Edmund Burke but who are still deeply enmeshed in current policy debates.
Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs is one of the two or three most influential young writers in politics today. He argues that we are now witnessing the fiscal crisis of the entitlement state, exemplified most of all by exploding health care costs. His magazine promotes a big agenda of institutional modernization.
The lawyer Adam J. White has argued for an approach to jurisprudence and regulatory affairs based on modesty, but not a doctrinaire clinging to original intent. Ryan Streeter of Indiana champions civil-society conservatism, an updated version of the Jack Kemp style.
By and large, these diverse writers did not grow up in the age of Reagan and are not trying to recapture it. They disdain what you might call Donor Base Republicanism. Most important, they matured intellectually within a far-reaching Web-based conversation. In contrast to many members of the conservative political-entertainment complex, they are data-driven, empirical and low-key in tone.
They are united more by a style of feedback and mutual scrutiny than by a common agenda. Some politically unorthodox people in this conversation, such as Josh Barro of Bloomberg View, Meghan Clyne of National Affairs and Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute, specialize in puncturing sentimentality and groupthink.
Since Nov. 6, the G.O.P. has experienced an epidemic of open-mindedness. The party may evolve quickly. If so, it’ll be powerfully influenced by people with names like Reihan, Ramesh, Yuval and Derek Khanna.
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Common Sense After a Close Election
By Tom McClintock on November 19, 2012
Common Sense After a Close Election
Northern Division Republican Women
Rancho Cordova, California
November 17, 2012
"Now let's pull up our socks, wipe our noses and get back in this fight."
After listening to ten days of hand wringing and doom saying from the usual suspects that Republicans must abandon our principles if we are to survive, we need a little of Mark Twain's common sense. I suggest we all take it to heart.
He said, "We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again -- and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore."
So it is in that spirit that I will begin with three incontrovertible truths about this election.
First, the same election that returned Barack Obama to the White House also returned the second largest House Republican majority since World War II - bigger than anything Newt Gingrich ever had.
Second, according to polls before, during and after this election, the American people agree with us fundamentally on issues involving the economy, Obamacare, government spending, bailouts - you name it.
Third, the American people are about to get a graduate level course in Obamanomics, and at the end of that course, they are going to be a lot sadder and a lot wiser.
That is not to say that there aren't many lessons that we need to learn and to learn well from this election, particularly here in California. But capitulation is not one of them.
Have we forgotten that just two years ago, Republicans campaigned on clear principles of individual liberty and constitutionally limited government? We took strong and united stands to oppose Obamacare, rein in out-of-control spending, roll back the regulatory burdens that are crushing our economy and yes - dare I say it - secure our borders? Have we forgotten that the result was one of the most stunning mid-term elections in American history: a net gain of 63 U.S. House seats, six U.S. Senate seats, 19 state legislatures, six governors and nearly 700 state legislative seats?
Now we're told, just two years later, after a net loss of just eight House seats, two Senate seats and a 2 1/2-percentage point loss of the White House, that we must abandon these principles or consign ourselves to the dustbin of history.
If you want to see a catastrophic election, look at 1976.
We not only lost the Presidency, but as a result of that election the Democrats held 61 U.S. Senate seats (today they have 55); and 292 House seats (today they have just 201).
Then, we heard the same chorus of impending doom that we hear today. We had to moderate our image. We had to broaden our base. In short, that we had to become more like the Democrats.
Here is what Ronald Reagan said to the naysayers of 1976:
Americans are hungry to feel once again a sense of mission and greatness.
I don 't know about you, but I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, "We must broaden the base of our party"-when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents...
Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?
Let us show that we stand for fiscal integrity and sound money and above all for an end to deficit spending, with ultimate retirement of the national debt.
Fortunately, we had the good sense to take that advice, and four years later Ronald Reagan became President, and shortly after that it was morning again in America. That would never have happened if we had listened to the usual suspects of their day and become a pathetic reflection of the Democrats. As Phil Gramm said, "why would anyone want to vote for a fake Democrat when they can have the real thing?"
The first of the cold stove lids we are told not to sit on is illegal immigration. Republicans, they say, must accept the notion that our nation can no longer control its borders and we should declare amnesty for the 12 to 20 million illegal aliens now in this country. We should do so, we are told, because our position on border security has hopelessly alienated Latino voters who would otherwise share our values.
It is true that Latino voters are a growing part of the American electorate - making up ten percent of the vote in 2012, of which 71 percent voted for Barack Obama, according to the CBS exit poll.
Sean Trende is the senior political analyst for Real Clear Politics. Last May, he published an article addressing this argument directly. He made three points.
First, Latino voters are not a monolithic group on this issue. Citing 2008 exit polling, he noted that a majority of Latino voters "either thought that illegal immigration was fairly unimportant or thought that it was important and voted Republican."
So why are Latinos voting for Democrats? Very simply, he said, once you adjust for socio-economic status, Latinos vote pretty much the same as the general voting population. But because they are disproportionately poor, they tend to vote disproportionately Democratic. However, as they begin to work their way up the socio-economic ladder and assimilate into American society, they become more and more Republican.
Second, citing research from the Pew Institute, he pointed out that the wave of illegal immigration has now crested, and may actually be reversing. He noted that every immigration wave has followed this pattern. Those who stay become more and more assimilated and more and more Republican as the years go by.
As recently as 20 years ago, we used to hear a lot about the Italian vote or the Irish vote. We don't hear about that anymore because they have melted into the general population. The demographic tide, he said, is not running against the Republicans, but running with them.
Third, he points out that a very sizeable part of the Republican base is firmly opposed to illegal immigration, and that abandoning that position could be politically catastrophic. He reminded us, "In a large, diverse country, every move to gain one member of a political coalition usually alienates another member."
Heather MacDonald makes the same point in the aftermath of the election. She notes that 62 percent of Latino voters support Obamacare. They overwhelmingly support higher taxes to pay for a larger government and more public services. These are not voters who will suddenly flock to the Republican banner because we have reversed our position on border security.
That's not to say Republicans should ignore the Latino vote - far from it - and I will get to that in a few minutes. But to suggest that Republicans need to reverse themselves on a fundamental issue of national sovereignty and the rule of law is unprincipled, counterproductive, self-destructive and wrong.
Ironically, the issues where most Latino and African-American voters do agree with us are the social issues, like abortion and marriage -- but of course, we're told by the same naysayers that we should repudiate our position on these messy social issues.
Let's look closer at the polling on the social issues. According to exit polling by Public Opinion Strategies, it is true that five percent of voters last week said that the most important issue in their vote for President was their pro-choice/pro-abortion position. Five percent of the entire electorate is nothing to sneeze at.
But four percent of voters said that the most important issue in casting their vote for President was their pro-life/anti-abortion position. That's a statistical tie.
I have a question for you. How many of those hard-core, single-issue abortion-on-demand Obama voters will suddenly switch their votes to Republicans once we've renounced our position on this issue?
Now, here's a bonus question: how many of that four percent of the electorate who support us solely because of our pro-life position are going to stay with us once we have repudiated them?
It is important in politics to know the difference between addition and subtraction. Addition is what creates majorities and subtraction is what destroys them. In this single exercise, we have just subtracted four percent of the entire American electorate from our vote and added little or nothing.
Now, repeat this process on every other so-called social issue, and tell me if we will be better off or worse off for taking this advice.
With all this said, there is no blinking at the fact that we just lost an election that we should have won, and to pretend there's nothing wrong meets Einstein's definition of insanity. There's a great deal wrong and a great deal that we need to address.
The voters who appeared at the polls agree with us on Obamacare. According to the CBS exit poll, by a plurality of 49 to 44 percent, they want to repeal some or all of Obamacare.
They agree with us on the size of government. By a margin of 51 to 43 percent, they believe that government is "doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals."
They agree with us on taxes. By a resounding margin of 63 to 33 percent, they disagreed with the statement that "taxes should be raised to help cut the deficit."
Perhaps most telling of all, 52 percent of voters agreed "things in this country today are seriously off on the wrong track," and yet then voted to continue down that wrong track for another four years.
As Lincoln said, "The voters are everything. If the voters get their backsides too close to the fire, they'll just have to sit on the blisters a while." It is a painful experience; but it is a learning experience. And at the end of that experience, they emerge sadder but wiser and in time for the next election.
We are winning the issues. And that means over time we will be winning the votes -- but only if we stay true to our principles and true to the millions of Americans who are already with us and many more who may not consider themselves Republicans today - but who believe as we believe.
What was the single biggest political movement in 2009 and 2010? It was the much-maligned, politically incorrect Tea Party, which energized fully one third of the American electorate across party lines. Although 60 percent were Republicans, 20 percent were Independents and 20 percent were Democrats. Long before the Tea Party, we had another name for that phenomenon. We used to call it the "Reagan Coalition." But this year, those who tell us we need a bigger tent told the Tea Party to get out. And many did.
Who brought a tidal wave of young people into the party? It was the much maligned and politically incorrect Ron Paul, whose simple message of unadulterated freedom resonated deeply on college campuses. Eight thousand UC Berkeley students turned out last year to hear that message. But this year, those who tell us we need a bigger tent told Ron Paul and his supporters to get out. And they did. In fact, many of their votes went to Obama.
A well-intentioned supporter e-mailed me last week and said, "we've got to kick the religious right out of the party." I reminded him that we did that in 1976, when the religious right voted for Jimmy Carter.
My point is, you cannot build a majority by systematically ejecting the constituent parts of that coalition. You build a majority by adding to that coalition by taking your principles to new constituencies.
Working Americans of every race know instinctively that you cannot borrow and spend your way rich. We need to appeal to them.
Immigrants came to this country to escape the stultifying central planning and corrupt bureaucracies that ravaged their economies. We need to appeal to them.
For the first time in our history, young people face a bleaker future than their parents enjoyed. We need to appeal to them.
The very groups of voters most damaged by Obama's policies are those who voted for Obama - we need to appeal to them.
Not in the closing days of a campaign poisoned with partisanship - but right now.
We need to recognize that a large portion of our population is not familiar with the self-evident truths of the American Founding and has no compass with which to follow back to the prosperity, happiness and fulfillment that is the hallmark of free societies.
Without that clarion call - without a party of freedom willing to paint our positions in bold colors - I am afraid that as the economy suffocates under the avalanche of government burdens, intrusions, restrictions, regulations and edicts, people in their growing despair, will increasingly turn to the false hope that paternalistic government offers.
The only antidote to that is the self-evident truth of the American founding: that freedom works and we need to put it back to work.
Like it or not, we are at this moment the only party equipped to revive and restore those truths and take them to the millions of Americans who are desperately searching for them.
Great parties are built upon great principles, and they are judged by their devotion to those principles. Since its inception, the central principle of the Republican Party can be summarized in a word: freedom. The closer we have hewn to this principle, the better we have done; the farther we have drifted from it, the worse that we - and the country - have done.
Dick Armey put it more simply: "When we act like us, we win, and when we act like them, we lose."
The Republican Women formed originally as the educational arm of the Republican Party. Never has that role been more important than it is today. We will not win the political battle until we win the battle over principles. We need to begin that campaign today. We can be confident that these principles resonate, but only when we are true to them with our existing constituencies while we reach out with them to new constituencies.
That is our challenge. That is our destiny. That is the salvation of our country. Now, fellow Republicans, let's pull up our socks, wipe our noses, and get back in this fight.
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I like the McClintock piece. I don't know how a California conservative stays sane and interested in politics.
Isn't it amazing that Republicans worst year ever, 1976, was followed by a) Dem governing failure, and b) Republican return to principles and the election of Reagan winning 40 states in 1980 and 49 states in 1984.
Many observations, but take the abortion question for one. Assume 40% roughly of the electorate are to the right, 40% are to the left and the remaining are in the center. From a pro-life vs. libertarian (false argument) how does it make sense to kick 4% of the electorate (10% of your base) out of your party? Especially when you know that the 5% hard core pro-choice will never join you for doing that.
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Let Obama be Obama
Victor Davis Hanson
Nov 22, 2012
After his party's devastating setback in the 2010 midterm elections, Barack Obama was re-elected earlier this month by painting his Republican opponents as heartless in favoring lower taxes for the rich. They were portrayed as nativists for opposing the Dream Act amnesty for illegal immigrants, and as callous in battling the federal takeover of health care.
Republicans countered with arguments that higher taxes on the employer class hurt the economy in general. They assumed most voters knew that amnesties are euphemisms for undermining federal law and in the past have had the effect of promoting more illegal immigration. They tried to point out that there is no such thing as free universal health care, since Obamacare will only shift responsibility from health care practitioners and patients to inefficient government bureaucracies and hide the true costs with higher taxes.
And they utterly failed to convince the American people of any of that.
Why doesn't the Republican-controlled House of Representatives give both voters and President Obama what they wished for?
The current battle over the budget hinges on whether to return to the Clinton-era income tax rates, at least for those who make more than $250,000 a year. Allowing federal income rates to climb to near 40 percent on that cohort would bring in only about $80 billion in revenue a year -- a drop in the bucket when set against the $1.3 trillion annual deficit that grew almost entirely from out-of-control spending since 2009.
Instead, why not agree to hike federal income tax rates only on the true "millionaires and billionaires," "fat cats" and "corporate jet owners" whom Obama has so constantly demonized? In other words, skip over the tire-store owner or dentist, and tax those, for example, who make $1 million or more in annual income. Eight out of the 10 wealthiest counties in the United States voted for Obama. Corporate lawyers and the affluent in Hollywood and on Wall Street should all not mind "paying their fair share."
Upping federal tax rates to well over 40 percent on incomes of more than $1 million a year would also offer a compromise: shielding most of the small businesspeople Republicans wish to protect while allowing Obama to tax the one-percenters whom he believes have so far escaped paying what they owe, and then putting responsibility on the president to keep his part of the bargain in making needed cuts in spending.
Likewise, instead of hiking death taxes on small businesspeople, why not close loopholes for billion-dollar estates by taxing their gargantuan bequests to pet foundations that avoid estate taxes. Why should a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates act as if he built his own business and can solely determine how his fat-cat fortune is spent for the next century -- meanwhile robbing the government of billions of dollars in lost estate taxes along with any federal say in how such fortunes are put to public use?
The president flipped in an election year on the Dream Act. Suddenly, in 2012, Obama decided that he indeed did have the executive power to order amnesty without congressional approval for those who came illegally as children, stayed in school or joined the military, avoided arrest and thus deserved citizenship. In response, Republicans supposedly lost Latino support by insisting that federal immigration law be enforced across the board, regardless of race, class, gender or national origin.
But why not make the president's Dream Act part of the envisioned grand bargain on immigration? Once it is agreed upon that we have the ability to distinguish those foreign nationals deserving of amnesty, then surely we also have the ability to determine who does not meet that agreed-upon criteria.
Why, then, cannot conservatives allow a pathway to citizenship for the play-by-the-rules millions who qualify, while regrettably enforcing an un-Dream Act for others who just recently arrived illegally; enrolled in, and have remain on, public assistance; or have been convicted of a crime? Who could object to that fair compromise?
Finally, Obamacare will be imposed on all Americans by 2014. But so far the Obama administration has granted more than 1,200 exemptions to favored corporations and unions, covering about 4 million Americans. Shouldn't Republicans seek to end all exemptions rather than tackle the improbable task of overturning Obamacare itself? Their motto should be: "Equality for all; special treatment for no one!"
One of the brilliant themes of the 2012 Obama campaign was forcing Republicans, on principle, to systematically oppose most of the things that the administration wanted them to oppose -- thereby shielding itself from the unwelcome consequences of its own ideology while winning political points. Now, in defeat, Republicans should agree to let the chips lie where they fall: Tax only the truly rich; reward only the truly deserving illegal immigrants; and exempt no one from Obamacare.
Nothing could be fairer or more equal than that.
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Winning the Latino Vote
If the Democrats have the winning formula, why not copy them?
By Victor Davis Hanson
Over the last three weeks, I think I have read most of the post-election op-eds written on the Latino vote. I have studied exit polling, read sophisticated demographic analyses, and talked to as many Latinos in my hometown as I could. The result is that I would not advise Republicans to go down the identity-politics route. I don’t wish to live in an America where Steve Lara or Bob Martinez is reduced to an anonymous “Latino” and Victor Hanson is just a “white male.”
But if Republicans really believe there is a monolithic Latino vote, and if those of Hispanic descent are easily definable and vote predictably en masse and along tribal lines rather than as individuals, then perhaps Republican pundits and operatives hell-bent on wining the Latino vote might consider the following — not entirely unserious — recommendations.
1. Family values. I didn’t sense a big upsurge among Latinos that I know for Rick Santorum and his religious-based agenda. The Catholicism of Santorum or of Newt Gingrich had little resonance. Abortion, gay marriage, and ending “Don’t ask, don’t tell” seemed mostly non-issues. Nor do I gather that Latinos in central California vote on the basis of family values any more than do non-Latinos. Mike Huckabee’s family populism would win few adherents. In terms of divorce, illegitimacy, crime, and high-school-graduation rates, there are few statistical differences that reflect any ethnic patterns. Family values in the Latino community may be defined somewhat differently from the way elite Republican consultants imagine, perhaps more along the ancient Spanish notion of a patron/client relationship that ultimately originated in Rome. (Marc: This is EXACTLY right IMHO.)
In our time, the patron is seen as the big and powerful federal government, which has an obligation to care for its less-well-off and unfortunately all-too-often-dependent and oppressed clients, who in turn will vote in thanks for state help with food, shelter, education, and health care. The patron of the classical hacienda protects the client against outlaws and oppressive forces — in this case supposedly rich old white guys (see Obama’s “punish our enemies”), who are not sensitive to the needs of a victimized “other.” If Republicans wish to win on this more European and statist notion of family values, then I would suggest trying to expand food stamps, add more coverage to Obamacare, and forgive delinquent mortgages, student loans, and small-business loans. The key would be to fashion a family-values platform that worries more about the collective familia than the more individualist and stereotypically Anglo-Saxon agendas of the well-off. High taxes and generous redistributionist spending are far more a mark of family values than is being against abortion or for traditional marriage.
2. Immigration. The DREAM Act, as La Raza activists have argued, is the beginning, not the end, of needed amnesties. To win the Latino vote on this issue, I suggest stopping all the talk of reforming legal immigration, especially the elitist notion that all immigration must be “legal” or, worse yet, predicated on skill sets, education, a knowledge of English, and capital. All such criteria are interpreted as mere cover for the prejudicial and discriminatory, since they tend to favor advantaged Europeans or Asians at the expense of disadvantaged Latinos. As a friend said to me, “It’s our turn; you had enough people come here from Europe.” Better yet, as I read La Raza literature, Republicans might consider dropping altogether the obsession with a “border” that discriminates against indigenous folk on both sides of the current artificially constructed line. They should accept the undeniable fact that there is a Mexico and an America — but also something new and unique in between, developing within the 200 miles north and south of the Rio Grande. I think support for a blanket amnesty for 11 million unlawful immigrants and an end to the fixation on border “security” might seriously help Republicans with Latinos. And it is high time that conservatives stop demanding that we complete that silly border fence; perhaps they should even call for dismantling that anachronism once and for all.
3. Affirmative action and diversity. I would put emphasis on the salad bowl and forget the archaic and now mythical melting pot. The more hyphenated names, newly acquired accent marks, and trilled Rs the better. There should be hundreds of Republican Latino-American and Republican Viva la Raza committees. It also would be wise to stop the nativist fringe nonsense about English as the official national language. Instead, conservatives should welcome bilingualism in the schools and encourage simultaneous Spanish-language translation at their conventions and campaign stops. The way of the future is multilingual ballots, government forms, and IDs that do not seek to privilege one tradition over another.
====================
. State spending. Republicans are apparently unaware that their mantra of smaller government is a dog whistle for cutting state spending and employment for the less-well-off. Yet many first-generation Latino-Americans rightly see government employment — the post office, the DMV, the county offices, the schools — as an important bridge into the middle class. When Republicans talk of cutting spending, Latinos feel targeted. Why cut the hours of a DMV employee so that a grandee in Atherton has low enough taxes to afford a third Mercedes? To win the Latino vote, conservatives have to concede bigger deficits, higher social spending, and more government employment. They should examine very carefully the demographics of Jerry Brown’s winning campaign to pass Proposition 30, which just ensured that California will have the highest taxes in the nation and will be able to continue to provide the most generous welfare support and state-employee compensation packages. (As my same friend put it, “If rich guys want to leave California, well, good riddance.”) If Republicans could fashion something like Prop. 30 on the federal level, they might receive as large a percentage of the Latino vote as did the California ballot initiative. If George W. Bush received a larger Latino vote than did Mitt Romney, perhaps it was not because of his halting Spanish, but because of his compassionate conservatism as embodied in No Child Left Behind, an enhanced unfunded prescription-drug Medicare benefit, and a vast increase in annual deficit spending and the size of the federal government. Note how loudly opposing most of what Bush did led to shrinkage in the Latino vote for Romney in 2012.
5. “Them.” Barack Obama brilliantly and cynically created a loose coalition of those with grievances against the supposed white male establishment. It did not matter that some members of this coalition were multimillionaire elites like Elizabeth Warren or affluent Chinese-Americans or Cuban-Americans who are the grandkids of those dispossessed by murderous Communists in Havana or Beijing. The Obama administration’s four-year barrage of “my people,” “punish our enemies,” “a nation of cowards,” the Skip Gates pontification, the Trayvon Martin if-I-had-a-son line, Eric Holder’s charges of racism over the Fast and Furious investigation, the whites-in-Hell slurs from Joseph Lowery, who gave the benediction at Obama’s inauguration in 2008, the hyphenated campaign committees, the executive orders, Sandra Fluke, the constant charges of racism by the liberal media, the weekly outraged Black Caucus — all of that insidiously created a climate of socially acceptable anti-old-white-guy feeling that anyone not of that suspect group could buy into — and anyone of that unfortunate group could buy out of by loudly proclaiming his support for Obama.
Is this not a model for capturing more of the Latino vote? If the Republicans could nominate a non-white-male, then he could rally the forces of non-white-maleness and find a majority coalition based on collective grievances. Chinese-Americans would vote with Japanese-Americans. Rich Cubans would vote with poor Oaxacans. Third-generation upper-middle-class Arab-Americans could even join with Jewish-Americans on the rallying cry that they had grievances against “them.” If a conservative Marco Rubio or Bobby Jindal — or better yet, Nikki Haley — could wage such an us/them campaign, where could the white male voter really go?
Short answer: Nowhere.
If what liberals say is true — that the Republican party is rightly lumped together as too white, too old, too male, and too in control — why not, then, have Republicans run a stereotyped class/race/gender campaign against themselves? Why not point to the supposed mess America has become after 238 years, and say, “We think you can do better”?
Why not “Vote for us, because we don’t like ourselves all that much either”?
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http://www.humanevents.com/2012/11/28/newt-gingrich-the-key-r-word-is-republican-not-romney/
By: Newt Gingrich
11/28/2012 05:31 AM
With all the efforts to understand the recent election defeat, a lot of the focus has been on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and his campaign. That is exactly the wrong way to begin analyzing the outcome of the 2012 campaign. The focus on Romney as a candidate is profoundly misleading for those who want to prepare for future Republican victories.
Any analysis of recent Republican presidential results will reveal a systemic failure which can’t be ascribed to Romney.
The last clear Republican presidential victory was in 1988 when Vice President George H W Bush won with 53.37 percent over Dukakis.
Since then we have lost the popular vote in five out of six elections for president and dramatically underperformed in re-electing a president with the lowest margin in the history of presidential re-elections. (Other incumbents were defeated for re-election but none was re-elected with a narrower margin than President George W. Bush in 2004.)
Consider the results:
President George H. W. Bush lost re-election in 1992 in a three way race with then-Gov. Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. The Republican got 38 percent in a three way race.
Senator Bob Dole got 41 percent against President Bill Clinton in 1996.
Then-Gov. George W Bush got 543,816 fewer votes than Vice President Al Gore, but won because of a fluke in the electoral college. It was the fourth weakest winning performance in American history.
President George W Bush was re-elected with 50.73 percent of the vote in 2004. It was the weakest Presidential re-election in American history. This was against a candidate who on 53 issues averaged being in the minority position by 77 to 17 percent as a senator and whose record was more liberal than Senator Ted Kennedy’s.
By contrast, President Richard Nixon got 60.17 percent of the vote for re-election in 1972 and President Ronald Reagan got 58.77 percent of the vote for re-election in 1984. So the Republicans in 2004 were running between eight and ten per cent behind the norm for re-election.
Then Sen. Obama beat Sen. McCain in 2008 with the Republican only getting 45 percent and losing by 9,549,000 votes.
The defeat of Romney with 47.61 percent of the vote running 5,910,000 behind President Obama is about the norm for recent Republican candidates.
Instead of looking at the Romney campaign in isolation Republican activists and analysts should be looking at the culture, structure and system of the GOP and its consultants, people who are paid for campaign advice without long term institutional responsibilities.
Republicans need a thorough systematic lessons-learned approach because the problem is systemic rather than personality-based.
Any team which has had 20 straight years of underperforming ought to review the entire system and not simply focus on the newest scapegoat.
In the first weeks of our “Lessons to be Learned” project at Gingrich Productions, we have already begun to develop insights that are systemic rather than personality driven.
There are big problems from the failure to think strategically about issues, to the unwillingness to engage the proliferation of infotainment outlets, to the methodical failure to include minorities even when they agree with us on values and issues.
Over the next few months we will be issuing a series of reports on different aspects of the Republican failure to modernize.
As George Santayana warned: “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
We do not need to lose five of the next six presidential elections to learn that we have some serious thinking to do.
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http://www.cdapress.com/columns/my_turn/article_1b7ce2da-391a-11e2-be26-0019bb2963f4.html
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http://www.cdapress.com/columns/my_turn/article_1b7ce2da-391a-11e2-be26-0019bb2963f4.html
Let the population feel the full weight of these policies. Not a slow boil, but ALL IN and NOW. The President has moved the goal posts to $1.6T in new taxes. Let him have it.
Exactly!
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Baraq's tax increases on the rich will theoretically pay for 8 days of government spending. I find it plausible to give him those increases and then let the results speak for themselves.
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Baraq's tax increases on the rich will theoretically pay for 8 days of government spending. I find it plausible to give him those increases and then let the results speak for themselves.
It's the only viable option.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/the-reagan-coalition-is-dead-gop-now-needs-more-than-old-white-men-to-grow/
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Crafty,
You're right (as usual). I don't want a crash. It doesn't have to be either tyranny or total anarchy.
Doug,
Your right that there seems to be this subset of voters who either don't vote, or can change their minds about who to vote for on the basis of a single news story or how they feel that day. These voters are still deciding the elections I guess.
While the Dems seem to win some over with Christmas gifts the Repubs only have ideology and the evidence. Can that win over enough voters?
Thank God for some like Levin or Limbaugh. If only we had savvy pols on our side who had *their* gift of gab and charisma. If Romney only had some of that. Except for the first debate.....
Gingrich was close. He had some of it.....
How do we convince people the government is not good to depend on. We can talk debt, deficit, spending, forever but how do we get people to have the courage and the faith to give up their government assistance??
Some people are worried. They are not simply moochers (though some certainly are). They are fighting a losing battle to pay their bills. They are scared.
We may be able to win the hearts and minds of some of the middle clas, but how do we convince them to risk their pockbooks to the Republicans?
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A deep and important question and the full answering of it exceeds my concentration as bedtime approaches.
I would put spending in our cross hairs in Reaganesque soundbite simplicity. I know I have hammered on these data previously.
a) 40-45% of federal spending is deficit spending.
b) 65-70% of that is financed by the Fed.
Present the question: How can this possibly lead to anything except disaster?
c) divide the deficit spending by Obama by the number of jobs created (be smart and precise with the definition of jobs created) so as to generate a cost per job created. Anyone care to take a stab at this?
d) Average federal employee pay (including pension and medical) vs. the average for the private sector; numbers of fed employees making $100k+ when Baraq took office and now.
e) Hammer away at low interest rates as a gift to Wall Street and the banks that is a "War on Savers" (including your parents and grandparents)
f) Baseline budgeting!!! FOX seems to have gotten ahold of this one. Hallelujah!
I know all of these points have been made elsewhere and here before but we need to go "prison sewing machine" with them
TAC!
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Crafty excellent points. Thanks for some thoughts. In addition to these thoughts
I would also like to add that we have to "break" the stranglehold the Dem party has with minorities. By segmenting the market of voters (if we can borrow a marketing phrase) into gays, blacks, latinos, women (particularly single), labor and bribing each group with different big gov agendas they have achieved enough numbers to win. This we know. This we can see. Somehow we (republicans) have to reshape the debate. We can't keep segmenting the electorate into groups and bribing each one lest we wind up with tyrannical government that controls too many sectors too many voters, whether tax paying or on entitlements, without each and every one of them becoming controlled wards of the "state".
This line of reasoning fits in to my thoughts about attracting more Blacks to the party. We have to do better than we have at convincing them that they are making a big mistake in being hard core democrats. The Dems may promise them entitlements but they are also using them to push the overall progressive agenda. And this agenda cares NOTHING about Blacks. It is about one world government, loss of US sovereignty, autonomy, less personal freedoms, more government control and dispersing wealth not strictly to them, but around the world. Some Blacks are fully aware of this. Just as they are finally achieving more in US society, they are inadvertantly supporting a party that is controlled by socialists who are planning to give it all away (except their own power).
Monica Crowley had a great guest on her radio show today. This is exactly the theme I was thinking. Mr. Bryant was head of the NAACP in the late 80's when he was asked to deliver a speech about pro abortion while representing the NAACP. He then realized he, as a Black man was being used, not for the agenda of Blacks, but for the agenda of the liberals. Folks, when her refused to give this speech, because he is anti-abortion, there were many calls for him to removed from his postion. He realized the DEm party is co -opted by the socialists and left it.
Check out this link and see for yourself. I think he is a great spokeperson for the teaparty. I think the right has to learn from this:
http://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?p=naacp+bryant+movie&VM=r
(I hope this workss - I cannot link here but typed in the link)
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There is really no need. Buraq will end big gov't to a degree even Reagan couldn't have imagined. Unfortunately, it will be through a crash that will make the Great Depression look like a sunny day.
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GM, if you are right and there is a giant crash, the Republicans have to in the words that Rahm Emanuel borrowed and expressed,
"let no disaster go to waste".
Repubs and teapartiers still have to be ready to seize back power when the time is right. If WE are not ready, the liberals, with a newer version of socialist, communist, one world government will be there to fill the void.
From history
Vladimir Lenin waited his entire adult life fighting for his bolshevik cause, shaping it, studying, re-shaping it more, studying more, getting his propaganda out there so to speak, when to his surprise the time was right several months after the Tsar lost power in 1917 to make his move. He had his supporters in place, he was known throughout socialist circles due to his propaganda newspapers, and he made his appearance back in Russia with his small circle of accomplices and by sheer force of will, determination, and single mindedness accomplished his goals. Interestingly, it appears he was coming to the conclusion the time to do this would not come in his lifetime. He was wrong. But he was ready nonetheless.
Fast forward to the present time and it is obvious there are no such visible leaders in our party. No one even close to a Lenin who comes to mind. No doubt many conservative thinkers including Newt are rethinking this all through. Till we have OUR ONE we have to hope they can shape things behind the scenes.
If I was younger and smarter I would have liked to have been part of it. The struggle for freedom has returned. Some don't see it. Some don't care,. Others are bribed. Some are only looking at their specialty groups agendas.
Time will tell. I dread the reality of of another 4 yrs of the present abomination.
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Oh, they have a plan. It's called Cloward-Piven. I don't think it's going to work out like they expect.
August 1, 2011
Cloward-Piven Paradise Now?
By Jeannie DeAngelis
Combine class warfare, demonizing the rich, getting as many people onto the welfare rolls as possible, and pushing the economic system to collapse and you have a flawless formula for Cloward-Piven 2.0 -- and a vehicle that ensures Obama remains in power.
Cloward-Piven is a much talked-about strategy proposed in the mid-1960's by two Columbia University sociology professors named Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The Cloward-Piven approach was sometimes referred to as the "crisis strategy," which they believed were a means to "end poverty."
The premise of the Cloward-Piven collective/anti-capitalist gospel decried "individual mobility and achievement," celebrated organized labor, fostered the principle that "if each finally found himself in the same relative economic relationship to his fellows ... all were infinitely better off."
The duo taught that if you flooded the welfare rolls and bankrupted the cities and ultimately the nation, it would foster economic collapse, which would lead to political turmoil so severe that socialism would be accepted as a fix to an out-of-control set of circumstances.
The idea was that if people were starving and the only way to eat was to accept government cheese, rather than starve, the masses would agree to what they would otherwise reject. In essence, for the socialist-minded, the Cloward-Piven strategy is a simple formula that makes perfect sense; the radical husband-and-wife team had Saul Alinsky as their muse, and they went on to teach his social action principles to a cadre of socialist-leaning community organizers, one of whom was Barack Obama.
As the debt crisis continues to worsen, President Obama stands idly by an inferno with his arms crossed, shaking his head, and doing nothing other than kinking the fire hose and closing the spigot. Spectator Obama is complaining that the structure of the American economy is engulfed in flames while accusing the Congress, which is trying desperately to douse the fire, of doing nothing about the problem.
Although speculative, if the Cloward-Piven strategy is the basis of the left's game plan, spearheaded by Alinsky devotee Barack Obama, it certainly explains the President's inaction and detached attitude.
The greatest nation in the history of the world is teetering on the brink of a catastrophic economic crisis. America was pushed to this point by a rapidly-expanding national debt and a stressed-out entitlement system; in the center of this crisis is the President, who insists on expanding it even further, all in the name "fairness" and "social justice."
As a default date nears and the President threatens seniors that there's a chance they may not receive their Social Security checks, it has been revealed that the federal government disperses a stunning 80 million checks a month, which means that about a third of the US adult population could be receiving some sort of entitlement.
Since the 1960's when Cloward-Piven presented a socialistic guideline to usher in the type of evenhandedness Obama lauds, America's entitlement rolls have swelled from eight million to 80 million. If the nation's ability to disperse handouts were ever disrupted, it's not hard to see how chaos would erupt should an angry army of millions demand what Cloward-Piven called "the right to income."
Couple the threat of dried-up funds for food stamps, Social Security, unemployment benefits and the like with the Obama administration's vigorous campaign to turn a tiny upper class of big earners into the enemy, and you have the Cloward-Piven recipe for anarchy and complete collapse.
If the worst happened, Saul Alinsky's biggest fan, whose poll numbers continue to plummet, could use mayhem in the streets to remain firmly ensconced in the White House. Alinsky taught his students a basic principle that community organizer Barack Obama learned well: "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Fiscal disintegration coupled with lawlessness would deliver the type of Cloward-Piven/Saul Alinsky trifecta that progressives have worked toward and waited decades for.
Barack Obama has spent the last 1,000+ days defying reason and choosing policy directions that seem nonsensical to the rational mind: a failed stimulus package; ObamaCare; growing the deficit to astronomical proportions; and cynically portraying wealth as immoral. Now, when cuts are the only fix to a budgetary balloon about to burst, a seemingly illogical President digs in and demands additional phantom dollars to spend on a system that is collapsing under the weight of unmanageable debt.
It's hard to figure out the method to the President's obvious madness, because based on Obama's approval rating, if the election were held today even Pee Wee Herman could replace Obama behind the Resolute Desk. Maybe the "method" isn't "mad" in the least!
Could it be that Barack Obama is purposely pressuring the system in a premeditated effort to foster a major crisis? One that would demand extraordinary measures to control by a President who could then mete out basic sustenance to Americans who would agree to anything to regain some sense of normalcy. And in the process successfully usher in the "socially just" system Barack Obama has dreamed of all his life.
While radical Alinsky/Cloward-Piven disciple Obama appears to be clueless and detached, it may be a ploy; he may actually be focused and engaged as he purposely pursues an Alinsky-inspired course of action to force the system to "live up" to its own rules. Obama's ultimate goal of once-and-for-all discrediting the capitalist system and replacing America's foundational economic and social tenets with a broad-based socialist one headed by progressive Marxists like himself, is actually within reach.
As Obama pushes and prods the US economy and instigates social unrest, it could be that he believes a Cloward-Piven-style utopia resides just beyond the horizon -- a progressive panacea where an election-free, classless society, thankful for a simple crust of bread, looks to Barack Obama to keep the peace by remaining in power indefinitely.
Therefore, unless all of America, regardless of class or political persuasion, pays attention to the potential for a bleak future that lies ahead and realizes the President's non-plan could be itself an actual calculated plan, the resulting consequences will affect everyone, as Barack Obama transforms a once great nation into Cloward and Piven's idea of paradise.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/cloward-piven_paradise_now.html
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(http://www.americanthinker.com/ACORN%20Networ.jpg)
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This is obviously why we know next to nothing about Brockman's time at Columbia.
Certainly he was indoctrinated by the politburo there. The Ivy politburo's are the masterminds and he is thier spokesman.
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It has been quite some time since I have read something this thoughtful, erudite, and perceptive:
http://rap.wustl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/George-Will-lecture-text.pdf
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2013: Welcome to Very, Very Scary Times
Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On January 2, 2013
On the One Hand…
These should not be foreboding years. The U.S. is in the midst of a veritable energy revolution. There is a godsend of new gas and oil discoveries that will help to curtail our fiscal and foreign policy vulnerabilities — an energy bonanza despite, not because of [1], the present administration.
Demographically, our rivals — the EU, China, Russia, and Japan — are both shrinking and aging [2] at rates far in excess of our own [3].
In terms of farming, the United States is exporting more produce than ever before at record prices. Americans eat the safest and cheapest food on the planet.
As far as high-tech gadgetry, the global companies that have most changed the world in recent years — Amazon’s online buying, Google search engines, Apple iPhones, iPads, and Mac laptops — are mostly American. There is a reason why Mexican nationals are not crossing their border into Guatemala — and it is not because they prefer English speakers to Spanish speakers.
Militarily, the United States is light years ahead of its rivals. And so on…
The New Poverty Is the Old Middle Class
We have redefined poverty itself [4] through government entitlements, modes of mass production and consumerism, and technological breakthroughs. The poor man is not hungry; more likely he suffers from obesity, now endemic among the less affluent. He is not deprived of a big-screen TV, a Kia, warm water, or an air conditioner. (My dad got our first color television during my first year in college in 1972, a small 19 inch portable; I bought my first new car at 39, and quit changing my own oil at 44.)
In classical terms, today’s poor man is poor not in relative global terms (e.g. compared to a Russian, Bolivian, or Yemeni), but in the sense that there are those in America who have more things and choices than does he: a BMW instead of a Hyundai, ribeye instead of ground beef, Pellegrino rather than regular Coke, Tuscany in the summer rather than Anaheim at Disneyland, and L.L. Bean tasteful footwear rather than Payless shoes. I was in Manhattan not long ago, and noticed that my cheap, discount-store sportcoat and Target tie did not raise eyebrows among the wealthy people I spoke to, suggesting that the veneer of aristocracy is now within all our reach. When I returned to Selma, I noted that those ahead of me at Super Wal-Mart were clothed no differently than was I. Their EBD cards bought about the same foods.
Put all the above developments together, and an alignment of the planets is favoring America as never before — as long as we do not do something stupid to nullify what fate, our ancestors, and our own ingenuity have given us. But unfortunately that is precisely what is now happening.
The New Hubris
These are the most foreboding times in my 59 years. The reelection of Barack Obama has released a surge of rare honesty among the Left about its intentions, coupled with a sense of triumphalism that the country is now on board for still greater redistributionist change.
There is no historical appreciation among the new progressive technocracy that central state planning [5], whether the toxic communist brand or supposedly benevolent socialism, has only left millions of corpses in its wake, or abject poverty and misery. Add up the Soviet Union and Mao’s China and the sum is 80 million murdered or starved to death. Add up North Korea, Cuba, and the former Eastern Europe, and the tally is egalitarian poverty and hopelessness. The EU sacrificed democratic institutions for coerced utopianism and still failed, leaving its Mediterranean shore bankrupt and despondent.
Nor is there much philosophical worry that giving people massive subsidies destroys individualism, the work ethic, and the personal sense of accomplishment. There is rarely worry expressed that a profligate nation that borrows from others abroad and those not born has no moral compass. There is scant political appreciation that the materialist Marxist argument — that justice is found only through making sure that everyone has the same slice of stuff from the zero-sum pie — was supposed to end up on the ash heap of history.
Read the News and Weep
That is not conspiracy talk, but simply a distillation of what I read today. On the last day of the year when I am writing this, I offer you just three sample op-eds.
A journalist, Donald Kaul, in the Des Moines Register offers us a three-step, presto! plan [6] to stop school shootings:
Repeal the Second Amendment, the part about guns anyway. It’s badly written, confusing and more trouble than it’s worth. … Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. Hey! We did it to the Communist Party, and the NRA has led to the deaths of more of us than American Commies ever did. …Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control.
Note the new ease with which the liberal mind calls for trashing the Constitution, outlawing those whom they don’t like (reminiscent of “punish our enemies” [7]?), and killing those politicians with whom they don’t agree (we are back to Bush Derangement Syndrome, when novels, movies, and op-eds dreamed of the president’s assassination [8].)
What would be the Register’s reaction should a conservative opponent of abortion dare write, “Repeal the First Amendment; ban Planned Parenthood as a terrorist organization; and drag Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi from a truck”? If an idiot were to write that trash, I doubt the Washington Times or Wall Street Journal would print such sick calls for overturning the Constitution and committing violence against public officials.
Ah Yes, Still More Redistribution
Turning to a column in The New Republic, John Judis, in honest fashion, more or less puts all the progressive cards on the table in a column titled “Obama’s Tax Hikes Won’t Be Nearly Big Enough [9]” — a candor about what the vast $5 trillion deficits of Obama’s first term were all about in the first place.
Here is the summation quote: “But to fund these programs, governments will have to extract a share of income from those who are able to afford them and use the revenues to make the services available for everyone.”
Note that Judas was not talking about the projected new taxes in the fiscal cliff talks, but something far greater to come. He understands well that the “gorge the beast” philosophy that resulted in these astronomical debts will require enormous new sources of revenue, funds “to extract” from “those who are able to afford them” in order to “make services available for everyone.”
That is about as neat a definition of coerced socialism as one can find. Implicit in Judas’s formulation is that only a very well-educated (and well-compensated) technocratic class will possess the wisdom, the proper schooling, and the morality to adjudicate who are to be the extracted ones and who the new “everyone.”
The Constitution — Who the Hell Needs It?
The third item in my year-end reading was the most disturbing. A law professor (could it be otherwise?) named Louis Michael Seidman enlightens us with “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution” [10] — yet another vision of what the now triumphant liberal mind envisions for us all:
As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.
Did Madison force Obama to borrow a half-billion dollars to fund Solyndra and its multimillionaire con artists?
Note Seidman’s use of “evil,” which tips his hand that our great moralist is on an ethical crusade to change the lives of lesser folk, who had the misfortune of growing up in America — a place so much less prosperous, fair, and secure than, say, Russia, China, the Middle East, Africa, South America, Spain, Greece, Italy, or Japan and Germany (in the earlier 20th century history) . When I lived in Greece, traveled to Libya, and went into Mexico, I forgot to sigh, “My God, these utopias are possible for us too, if we just junked that evil Constitution.”
White Guys Did It
The non-archaic, un-idiosyncratic, and anti-downright evil Professor Seidman presses his argument against his inferiors who wrote the “evil” document: “Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.”
Ah yes, old white male Madison, who lacked the insight, character, and morality of our new liberal technocrats in our successful law schools, such as, well, Mr. Seidman himself:
As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is. Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress – reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?
I suppose human nature changes every decade or so [11], so why shouldn’t constitutions as well?
I can see Seidman’s vision now: Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi decides that semi-automatic handguns, not cheap Hollywood violence or sick video games, empower the insane to kill, and, presto, their “considered judgment” and favored “particular course of action” trump the archaic and evil wisdom of “white propertied men.” But if we wish to avoid the baleful influence of white guys, can Seidman point to indigenous Aztec texts for liberal guidance, or perhaps the contemporary constitution of liberated Zimbabwe, or the sagacity of the Chinese court system?
The Law Is What We Say It Is
Note the fox-in-the-henhouse notion that a constitutional law professor essentially hates the Constitution he is supposed to teach, sort of like Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warning the Egyptians not to follow our own constitutional example, when South Africa has offered so much more to humanity than did Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, and others: “I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the constitution of South Africa.” [12] Ginsburg obviously vacations in Johannesburg, goes to Cape Town for her medical treatment, and has a vacation home and bank account in the scenic South African countryside.
Seidman looks fondly on Roosevelt’s war against the Constitution (especially the notion that law is essentially what an elected president who has proper “aspirations” says it is):
In his Constitution Day speech in 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt professed devotion to the document, but as a statement of aspirations rather than obligations. This reading no doubt contributed to his willingness to extend federal power beyond anything the framers imagined, and to threaten the Supreme Court when it stood in the way of his New Deal legislation.
No doubt.
Free at Last from Constitutional Chains
In the age of Obama, the constitutional law lecturer who once lamented that the Supreme Court had not gone far enough by failing to take up questions of forced redistribution, Seidman writes:
In the face of this long history of disobedience, it is hard to take seriously the claim by the Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text. Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper.
But I thought it was the Constitution, not the anti-Constitution or egalitarian good will, that separated us from Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Tojo’s Japan, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and most of the miserable places that one sees abroad today, from Cuba to North Korea, which all had and have one thing in common — the embrace of some sort of national, republican, or democratic “socialism” guiding their efforts and plastered about in their sick mottoes.
The progressive mind, given that it is more enlightened and moral, alone can determine which parts of the “evil” Constitution should be summarily ignored (e.g., the Second Amendment) and which should not be: “This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands. Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.”
Give Real Freedom a Chance
I am sure that history offers all sorts of examples where people without evil documents like our Constitution protected free speech and religious worship — out of “respect.” Ask Socrates, Jesus, six million Jews, 20 million Russians, or those with eyeglasses [13] during the days of the Khmer Rouge. Apparently, what stops such carnage is not the rule of constitutional law, but good progressive minds who care for others and show respect. I’ll try that rhetoric on the next thief who for the fourth time will steal the copper wire conduit from my pump.
So just dream with Professor Seidman:
The deep-seated fear that such disobedience would unravel our social fabric is mere superstition. As we have seen, the country has successfully survived numerous examples of constitutional infidelity…What has preserved our political stability is not a poetic piece of parchment, but entrenched institutions and habits of thought and, most important, the sense that we are one nation and must work out our differences. No one can predict in detail what our system of government would look like if we freed ourselves from the shackles of constitutional obligation, and I harbor no illusions that any of this will happen soon. But even if we can’t kick our constitutional-law addiction, we can soften the habit… before abandoning our heritage of self-government, we ought to try extricating ourselves from constitutional bondage so that we can give real freedom a chance.
I have seen their future and it is almost here right now. Scary times, indeed.
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reposted here by request:
I was listening to the Hinderacker Ward virtual radio show http://ricochet.com/podcast-episode-popup/content/view/popup/579456 and heard Kevin Williamson interviewed about his quite interesting article at National Review.
We must understand the successful attraction of the liberal/Democrat message better than they do to defeat it.
1. In general, people who vote with the progressives are economically more risk-averse compared with conservatives. "The Democratic party is in fact a coalition of financially risk-averse groups: Women, blacks, and Hispanics all exhibit a high degree of financial risk-aversion when compared with whites and men."
2. "economic inequality matters much more to Americans than conservatives like to admit." In poorer countries, people look see things in more absolute terms. As we get richer and basic needs are met, people look more at how are they doing compared to someone else.
3. "Conservatives see people as assets, and progressives see people as liabilities." This is a huge difference. He gives the GM bailout as example. Liberals see the bailout as keeping those people from all being unemployed and on assistance. Conservatives see the bailout as keeping them from moving to far more productive activities elsewhere. Same for abortion. Liberals see the 'unwanted' as just more mouths to feed, conservatives see the loss of tremendous human talent.
Williamson closes with the conservative turnaround in Sweden. "Sweden’s reform-oriented conservatives have been able to achieve a great deal not because they are moderate — they are quite radical by Swedish standards — but in part because they took the time to really understand their rivals’ motives and, unlike unsuccessful conservatives before them, did not treat their opponents’ concerns as illegitimate. Conservative reformers took into account Sweden’s egalitarian culture and its consensus-oriented politics rather than wage a Newt Gingrich–style armored assault."
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http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/336481/risk-relativism-and-resources-kevin-d-williamson
December 31, 2012 4:00 A.M.
Risk, Relativism, and Resources
Three things conservatives must know about progressivism in order to defeat it
By Kevin D. Williamson, National Review
(5 internet pages long at the link.)
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It's Pirate Time for the GOP The party needs to be unpredictable and bold—and grab some of Obama's issues.
By PEGGY NOONAN
It's official. Congress is now less popular than cockroaches and colonoscopies, though more popular than the ebola virus and gonorrhea. Really. The numbers came, this week, from a Public Policy Polling survey. The House and Senate have an approval rating of 9%.
GOP governors are the party's most esteemed leaders, but they're not in Washington. The Republican voice and presence in our national debates comes from its members on the Hill. They're the ones America sees on the news every day, which is unfortunate because they are, largely, deal makers, legislators and even plain speakers who are not necessarily gifted explainers or thinkers.
They are up against the Democratic voice and presence. That would be President Obama (approval rating in the low to mid 50s) and his White House. He is just off a major electoral win, commands the national mic, is about to be celebrated at a second swearing-in, and will soon give a nationally covered inaugural address. Also he just won on the fiscal cliff, for now. We'll see the blowback. Payroll taxes have just gone up, ObamaCare is yet to be fully instituted and will be costly, things are about to get more expensive for everybody. But at the moment he's king.
And what the Republican Party has each day going up against him—presenting the party's case, explaining its thinking—is a disparate and fractious lot of varying talent who, again, are connected to an institution less popular than cockroaches.
It doesn't, at the moment, seem a fair fight.
Normally we see Republican congressmen and senators in a gaggle, and their message always seems to get lost. They're usually talking about pieces of things, some part of a bill, or an amendment. Little they say seems to cohere, or to connect with a higher purpose, intent or meaning. What they say doesn't amount to a cacophony—it's not that lively. Their message always seems muted and blurred.
Congressional Republicans haven't been able to come up with an immediate and overarching goal or a strategy to achieve it. Many feel as if they're always in the dark, unclear on what the leadership is thinking or about to do.
But a goal and strategy are needed. Without them, everything will seem ad hoc, provisional, formless, meaningless. The public will see it that way, especially in comparison to the president, who seems these days to have a surer sense of what he's about, and a greater confidence that you've finally twigged on to it, too.
So here's an idea for Republicans in Congress. It has to do in part with policy, in part with attitude and approach.
They should starkly assess their position. It isn't good. They just lost an election, they're up against the wall, they have to figure out how to survive and thrive as a party that stands for something, while attempting each day to do the work that needs doing for a country in trouble. The challenges are huge, the odds long.
They can sit back and be depressed and whine. Or they can decide: It's pirate time.
And really, it is.
Now is the time to fight and be fearless, to be surprising, to break out of lockstep, to be the one thing Republicans aren't supposed to be, and that is interesting.
Now's the time to put a dagger 'tween their teeth, wave a sword, grab a rope and swing aboard the enemy's galleon. Take the president's issues, steal them—they never belonged to him, they're yours!
In political terms this means: Reorient yourselves. Declare for Main Street over Wall Street, stand for the little guy against the big interests. And move. Don't wait for the bill, declare the sentiments of your corner..
Really, it's pirate time.
Examples of what might be done:
If you are conservative you are skeptical of concentrated power. You know the bullying and bossism it can lead to. Republicans should go to the populist right on the issue of bank breakup. Too big to fail is too big to continue. The megabanks have too much power in Washington and too much weight within the financial system. People think the GOP is for the bankers. The GOP should upend this assumption. In this case good policy is good politics.
If you are a conservative you're supposed to be for just treatment of the individual over the demands of concentrated elites. Every individual in America making $400,000 a year or more just got a tax hike that was a blow to the gut. Regular working people are seeing their payroll deductions increase. But private-equity partners who make billions enjoy more favorable tax treatment. Their income is treated for tax purposes as a capital gain, so they're taxed at far lower rates. This is called the carried interest exemption, and everybody knows it's a big con.
The Republican Party should come out against it in a big way. Let the real rich pay the same percentage the not-actually-rich-but-formally-declared-rich are paying. If the Republicans did this they'd actually be joining the winning side, because carried interest will not survive the new era. If congressional Republicans care about their party they'll want it to get credit for fairness, as opposed to the usual blame for being lackeys of the rich.
Republicans make too much of order and discipline. Sometimes a little anarchy is a good thing, a little disorder a sign of creativity and independence of thought. If there are voices within the GOP that are for some part or parts of gun reform it would be good for them—and for the party—to come forward now. I love the Second Amendment and I'm not kidding, but I have to say tens of millions of assault weapons in the hands of gangbangers and unstable young men couldn't be what the Founders had in mind.
We need a little moderation here, a little give.
Finally, Republicans should shock everyone, including themselves, by pushing for immigration reform—now. Don't wait for the president, do it yourselves, come forward individually or in groups with the argument for legalization of who lives here now. Such bills should include border control and pathways for citizenship, but—and most important—they shouldn't seem punitive or grudging and involve fines and lines and new ways to sue employers. The world has changed. Ease up now. In the past 10 years immigrants, legal and illegal, have fought our wars. We need to hurry in those who are trying to bring gifts we need into the USA. Whoever comes here learns to love our crazy country, or at least appreciate it. If we do a better job of teaching them why the goodness we have even exists, we will do OK.
The point here is to have the GOP lead in terms of good policy. But it's also important for the Republicans to show the variety, disagreement and alive-ness that exists within the party. It is not some grim monolith, some thought-free zone, or was not meant to be. It's not bad to be unpredictable. Living things are.
Members should loosen up, speak for their corner, put together caucuses, go forward, move. Go on TV, dagger and sword, and make your case.
Really: It's pirate time.
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What illegal immigrants fought our wars, Peggy? B.S.
Unless she is talking about Buraq and Holder's war on the 2nd. amendment.
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Still, I like the core attitude about it being time for Reps to get radical.
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Not with the present leadership. Boehner and Cantor, along with Mitch McConnell, are spineless wimps when it comes to dealing with media wrath and Democrat hardball tactics. If Allen West were speaker, or someone of his ilk - we might have a chance. As is stands, Peggy Noonan's suggestions are a pipe dream.
Either the current Republican leadership is forced out in favor of tea-party types, or we are witnessing the effective death of the party as a national political force. It has become watered-down and nothing more than Democrat-lite.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIGzj6eIwWU
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This kid Ben Shapiro is on to something.
I was reading in the Economist an article on Richard Nixon's library. How origianlly the Watergate thing was downplayed but now it is run differently it is more the other way around.
The called him Tricky Dick. They call his political strategies "tricky".
Like going negative on opponents.
Mr. Shaprio would explain this a good example of why Republicans are losing.
The left calls Nixon's politics dirty, tricky.
When they do it, or BOama does the same thing, they call it playing "hardball".
Shapiro is good at pointing out the subtle differences from the MSM, and the Dem party party strategists.
Shaprio worked with Brietbart.
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http://www.rightwingnews.com/
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After Four Bleak Obama Years, an Opportunity
Republicans too often forget to link their calls for spending cuts with economic growth. .
by KARL ROVE
WSJ
As President Obama prepares to be sworn in a second time, it's a good moment to consider the state of the union during his era.
As of his first inaugural, 134.379 million Americans were working and unemployment was 7.3%. Four years later, 134.021 million are working and unemployment is 7.8%.
In January 2009, 32.2 million people were on food stamps and 13.2% of Americans lived in poverty. Now, 47.5 million receive food stamps and the poverty rate is up to 15%.
When Mr. Obama first took office, Social Security's trustees forecast it would go broke in 2041. Now the forecast date is 2037. Medicare's hospital trust fund will be exhausted by 2024, if not earlier.
On Jan. 20, 2009, the national debt stood at $10.627 trillion—or $34,782 for every man, woman and child. As of Tuesday, it had reached $16.435 trillion, or $52,139 for every American. The public debt was equal to 40.8% of gross domestic product on Jan. 20, 2009. By the end of last year, it had reached 72.8% of GDP and is forecast by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to hit 76.1% this year.
When Mr. Obama assumed office, median household income was $51,190. In 2011 (the last year for which data is available), median household income was $50,054. Household income declined more during the recovery, which began when the recession officially ended in June 2009, than it did during the recession, a first for America.
Last year, an average of 153,000 nonfarm jobs were created each month. At that rate, it will take 26 more months to get back to the number of jobs America had when the recession started in December 2007. Meanwhile, the workforce will have expanded by at least 8.6 million new people for whom there are no jobs.
It's worse for manufacturing. Last year, an average of 15,000 manufacturing jobs were created each month. At that rate, it will take nearly 10 years to reach the number (13,743,000) of such jobs America had when the recession started.
Since the recession ended three and half years ago, the economy has grown an average of 0.4% a year. That compares to 1.6% growth per year for the previous decade (which covered two recessions, including the "great" one), 2.6% growth per year for the previous 20 years, and 3.2% on average since World War II.
To create jobs and growth, Mr. Obama asserts that the federal government has only a revenue problem, not a spending one. But in the last fiscal year before he took office (2008), revenues were $2.524 trillion and outlays $2.983 trillion. This fiscal year, revenues are expected to reach $2.913 trillion—but outlays have jumped to $3.554 trillion.
It's those last data points in particular—outlays and spending—that present both challenges and opportunities for Republicans. Why? Because spending cuts in general and the abstract are popular, while spending cuts in the specific and concrete often are not.
To avoid coming off as just old-fashioned accountants wearing green eyeshades, Republicans will have to make a concerted effort to connect fiscal policy to economic growth and opportunity. Reductions in spending are a means to an end. Too often, Republicans speak as if they're the end in themselves.
Fortunately some party leaders understand this. For example, Rep. Paul Ryan recently spoke of "a vision for bringing opportunity into every life—one that promotes strong families, secure livelihoods, and an equal chance for every American." He credited free enterprise for doing more than anything else "to lift people everywhere out of poverty." And Sen. Marco Rubio has marveled that, as a son of a hotel bartender, he could aspire to serve in Congress and argued that "only economic growth and a reform of entitlement programs will help control the debt" that threatens the country's future.
GOP governors have added their voices to this line of argument. For example, Louisiana's Bobby Jindal wrote last month that "America is forever young because America is forever growing, leading the world . . . . All actions taken by Washington should be seen through this simple prism—will this help grow our economy?"
Facts matter, but they're not enough. It's life stories and narratives that capture the public's imagination. That's something every Republican must internalize in the spending wars ahead. We need to move not simply minds but also hearts, to show what the "right to rise" means for every American. There are powerful stories to be told. Republicans better learn how to tell them, passionately and effectively.
Mr. Rove, a former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, helped organize the political action committee American Crossroads.
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Fine for him to offer suggestions now, after a disastrous Romney campaign he helped orchestrate. I have very little respect for Karl Rove these days, as it's he and his type of inside-the-beltway don't "offend" the independents mentality that has lost us the last two elections. I'm not impressed with his performance or his advice - particularly over the course of this last election, where he tirelessly cheerleaded for Romney as the only candidate who could win, then advised him not to go after Obama aggressively in the campaign. Why anyone gives him any credibility at this point is beyond me.
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"Because spending cuts in general and the abstract are popular, while spending cuts in the specific and concrete often are not."
ccp: Well yeah. If 50% are getting benefits they will never be convinced to vote the other way.
"Republicans will have to make a concerted effort to connect fiscal policy to economic growth and opportunity"
ccp: We can't just focus on the debt and growth and ignore all the other social issues. We have to convince the country that government is NOT the answer to every single discomfort of humanity. Like restricting 300 million people from having guns to save "one life". Like keep one innocent person from jail while 100 guilty get off. Like making the entire business community have to spend tons to build wheelchair ramps, Like having us learn foreign languages to cater to newcomers and not the other way around . The cans have to make their case as how this can be better dealt with without more regulation. They don't. I fear we are becoming the party of one subject - the debt. While this is perhaps the biggest threat this country faces this is not going to win hearts and minds of 50% of the population.
"a vision for bringing opportunity into every life—one that promotes strong families, secure livelihoods, and an equal chance for every American." He credited free enterprise for doing more than anything else "to lift people everywhere out of poverty." [Ryan]
ccp: I am not sure how many people who are in the US any longer subscribe to this. Many appear not to subscribe to "equal chance for every...." They want security. They want some socialism. They don't want equal chance. They want equal outcomes.
"Facts matter, but they're not enough. It's life stories and narratives that capture the public's imagination. That's something every Republican must internalize in the spending wars ahead. We need to move not simply minds but also hearts, to show what the "right to rise" means for every American"
ccp: OK we need to inspire people to be what it used mean to be American. Now it means get the check, avoid as much taxes as possible because they are too ubiquitous, and how to game the system by both sides - those who are getting screwed and have to pay all the bills for the Democrat party vote buying and liberal politburo utopian everyone is equal vision or those who are jockeying to get these gifts.
This is what America has become. Thanks to the Democrat party led by their chosen spokesperson.
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Another piece offered for stimulating conversation even though I don't agree with all the points made:
Morning Jolt – January 17, 2013
By Jim Geraghty
The Difficulty of Selling Grown-Up Policies to an Adolescent-Minded Nation
There's a lot of wisdom in what Drew M. writes over at Ace of Spades:
How many people who voted for Mitt Romney or actual conservatives for Senate and the House want their Social Security and Medicare left untouched? How many of them give lip service to a flat tax proposal but would freak if their various tax credits and deductions were eliminated? How many of them talk a good game about getting rid of the Department of Education but would freak if aid to their kid's district were cut?
Of course Republicans are going to respond to these people. But these people who support all sorts of government spending while talking about "the damn government" and taxes are the problem.
It's simply too much to expect a political party to stand up to voters and say, "no". Politics is a market and voters have become consumers. If the GOP as a whole or an individual candidate won't give the customer what they want, they will find someone else to do business with. Consumers don't care about the health of the places they shop, they care that they get what they want. If Brand A doesn't have it but Brand B does, who cares so long as their needs are met.
What America needs is a movement that will not just tell people "no" but also convince them to stop being a consumer of government and look at themselves as they were meant to . . . an owner of the government. Once you own something your value set shifts. Owners care about efficiency, quality and the long term survival of the organization. Owners invest not simply take out.
No political party is set up to do this. It's irrational for someone selling a product to ask their customers to take on the responsibilities of ownership. Selling is about making things easier, ownership is about hard work.
I've been thinking about this for a couple of days. A slim majority of the voting public doesn't want what we're selling, but that doesn't necessarily mean the solutions we're offering are wrong. That slim majority of the voting public may think they're wrong, but a large portion of their assessment is driven by a dedication to ignoring the problems that we want addressed.
We're attempting to sell them policies of limited or reduced spending, but many Americans don't really see why spending has to be cut, or why the particular spending they like has to be cut. This doesn't make our concerns any less valid; it just means that a large swath of the voting public would like to pretend that adding roughly a trillion dollars to the debt each year is not that big a deal.
We're attempting to sell them various attempts at entitlement reform, but Americans again would prefer to believe the problem isn't that bad and can be taken care of later. We're right, and they're wrong, but it's particularly difficult to persuade people to undertake a painful remedy when they're not convinced that the problem exists.
I think you can argue that what constitutes "socially conservative policies" has gotten fuzzy beyond opposition to abortion and gay marriage. But broadly speaking, conservatives have wanted to see strong families, children in stable families, husbands and wives trying to work it out through tough times, making sure every child has a mom and a dad who loves them and hopefully a strong network of support from the rest of the family and the community beyond. We're attempting to sell the public a lifestyle of responsibility and putting others' needs first — particularly children's needs first — and it cuts against a culture of instant gratification and irresponsibility and perpetual adolescence.
We're (in part) attempting to sell them a foreign-policy/national-security stance that is variously strong/hawkish/interventionist, when they're exhausted from Iraq and Afghanistan and feeling pretty isolationist. I'm sure within our own ranks we have a bunch of folks who are seeing the appeal of isolationism right now.
So let's take Syria for example. I know the place is a pit of vipers, and that we're not even sure if there are many folks in the Syrian resistance who count as good guys. But when the U.S. doesn't intervene, or we use the Obama administration's approach of sorta-kinda intervention, giving the resistance some sorts of aid but not others, well . . . we see what we get: 60,000 deaths so far, perhaps 100,000 deaths in the year to come, millions of refugees, violence spilling into neighboring countries, and the risk of the country collapsing into anarchic bands of warlords and bands struggling to control the rubble.
I can hear the argument, "we can't save everybody; it's the Syrians' issue to work out; it's not our problem." But how many deaths does it take before it becomes our problem? Does anybody feel confident that at no point this won't become a major problem to our interests? How about if Assad starts tossing around chemical weapons? I'm not saying we have to invade tomorrow, but the administration's policy is, by and large, leave the place alone and hope for the best.
The opposition's policies lead to crushing debt, sluggish and anemic economic growth, miserable lives of dependency upon government, a chaotic world beyond our borders. They can coast along on luck for a while — help for the economy from a fracking boom they haven't managed to regulate to death yet, our enemies preferring low-level antagonism to direct confrontation — but sooner or later reality gets a vote, and it gets the deciding one. The problem is that a lot of damage can be done while we wait for the electorate to start absorbing the lessons from the School of Hard Knocks.
A Tragedy Spurs Us to Take Actions That Wouldn't Have Stopped That Tragedy
So I realize I should be outraged by Obama introducing 23 executive actions on gun violence, but . . . this is pretty much what we all expected, isn't it?
A friend who's more supportive of gun control than I asked me what I thought of the various proposals being put forth. I pointed out that almost none of the proposals would have made one bit of difference had they been in effect when the Newtown shooting occurred, suggesting that the purpose of the proposals was to make lawmakers and the public feel good about themselves, not to actually make it impossible for such a horrific even to occur again. In the end, there's not really a law that can prevent a woman from having such terrible judgment that she keeps dangerous weapons and a deeply disturbed son in the same house, short of absolute and total national confiscation of all firearms in private hands — a draconian step that the gun-control crowd insists they don't really want.
Among his "executive actions": "Nominate an ATF director." That's not an executive action; that's a reminder you write to yourself on a Post-It note.
Assault-weapons ban? It was in effect during the Columbine massacre.
Extended-magazine ban? You'll recall my brief flirtation with the idea. I'm now pretty persuaded that it would not have much of an impact on future mass shootings, since
a) a shooter can reload within a few seconds, with just a bit of practice;
b) most shooters in these cases carry more than one gun, so they'll be able to inflict quite a bit of mayhem before needing to reload;
c) there are already plenty of these magazines out on the market, and no one's seriously called for confiscating them all; and
d) you can manufacture them yourselves with 3-D printers, so you'll never be able to really shut down production of them.
Would smaller-capacity clips mean fewer fired shots before someone was able to intervene? Maybe, on the margins. But let's not fool ourselves about the impact we're talking about with this change. A gunman who brings two guns with the ten-round magazines the president wants to require can still fire 20 shots before that first several-second reloading pause; in a school, park, college campus, shopping mall, or other public place with a lot of unarmed potential victims, that's a lot of potential death and injury.
On Obama's list is "Launch a national dialogue led by Secretaries Sebelius and Duncan on mental health." Note that the Newtown gunman had no criminal record and had not been ruled mentally ill by a judge, meaning he would not have shown up in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. (He did try to purchase a rifle before the massacre but left the store without purchasing because he did not want to wait the two weeks required under Connecticut law.) Remember, despite a considerable history of odd behavior, the Tucson gunman was never legally declared mentally ill or a threat to himself or others. (After he was suspended from Pima Community College, the school said he could not be readmitted without "clearance from a mental-health official.")
I will be surprised if the "tighten our mental-health records" talk doesn't lead to a much lower threshold to be declared "mentally ill" and unfit to own a firearm. And whatever that new, lower, more vague and arbitrary threshold is, I'll bet it makes troubled individuals — or even not-so-troubled individuals — even more reticent to see a therapist, psychologist, or other mental-health professional.
But hey, at least the politicians get to say that they "did something."
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Rove deserves some credit. He did get the least articulate person to ever be in the white house elected twice though both times close.
But that is the most credit he deserves.
Again his thoughts while true still miss the mark.
O'Reilly thinks the electorate has changed and were past the tipping point so that more than half want big government. Even if they don't its too late because they are getting checks that they will not risk losing. Krauthammer says no that the rise of socialism is temporary and the pendulum will swing back. O'Reilly responds that he hopes it doesn't take a catastrophe before it does.
As an aside,
I unfortunately moved to NJ. It is scary to think that Gov. Christy comes the closest to beating Hillary in head to head polls. On one hand he held the line on some state taxes and confronted the state controlling unions mainly public education which along with the Democrat party has a stranglehold around the neck of taxpayers. On the other hand he wants the Feds to just hand him 60 billion - no questions asked. And he demagogues his own party. IT seems the only way to win in Democrat bastions is to not really be a conservative.
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Christie has some very good points, but not only is he weak on Islamo-fascist subversion, he has shown himself to be
a) a bit of an ego maniac, e.g. his speech at the Rep convention
b) not reliable e.g. sucking up to Obama in the aftermath of Sandy Hook
c) opportunistic e.g. lashing out at Reps for opposing a heavily pork laden bill
d) questionable listening skills
Not to mention no preparation on national or international issues.
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Good points, Crafty. I might add that Ann Coulter and many inside-the-beltway pundits (though I'm not sure about Karl Rove) were talking him up as a Presidential candidate this last time around - Coulter was practically ecstatic about the prospect. Another example of these people's inability to see that CONSERVATISM, properly articulated - is what wins elections against Democrats - not "appealing to the independents," or "moderating" conservative principles. Christie would have been an even bigger disaster than Romney. Glad he decided not to run.
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Rush may be on to something. His show today he was highlighting how Hillary got off easy today and that that is a prime example of the DC elites circling wagons to protect her. They were not simply protecting her because they care about her personally. But they care about their power. THEY are the elites. Not the private 1% ers. But them. It is them apart from the rest of America.
This could a theme Republicans can tinker with till they get a solid unifying message that everyone can understand.
It is not just about government. It is about government AND those "elites" around them. The, as I call them, the liberal politburo class. Included are some Republicans. Some media. Many academics. All those who plan what is best for us.
I know I am a bit vague or hazy here. But I think Rush made a brilliant allusion to a theme that Republicans can rally around. A theme they can banner to turn it around.
Obama uses a theme of the "99" ers against the 1%.
He of course uses race, minorities to divide and conquer. Repubs meekly respond with something about government is taking our freedoms. True but this is simply preaching to the choir IMHO.
I think a better theme is to bash those with major influence and power in DC as diminishing America.
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"(A)s I call them, the liberal politburo class"
Works for me :-D
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Only Rush can articulate a theme that resonates like he does.
If only we had Republican politicians with his expressive skills who combine it with more crossover political appeal.
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With regard to strategy it appears to me that the Republicans do bicker and strategize in public. This not only serves to highlight the fragmentation of the right giving intoxicated Obama/Biden even more confidence, but give our political enemies time to be prepared with their counter spin with the journalists blanketing all the major media outlets.
I don't know why we can't be more coordinated while having real conservatives quietly and discretely come up with better mass appealing strategies to counter the progressive "journey" as they call it.
Some billionaire - get together a coalition of very strict conservative repubs and very politically savvy pols to combine themes that are both constitutionally consistent within standard American traditions and beliefs and fit today's political demographics.
Someone should say to Blacks - do you all want to work for the post office. IF this is what you aspire to government to support you, then look at the Post Office's books. The whole charade will collapse.
Just when you are rising up to truly benefit from America you vote to give up your futures. Not to protect them. Why can't Republicans make this argument and make it every day.
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The Blaze calls this speech Epic Speech Gone Viral.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/07/prayer-breakfast-speaker-praises-jesus-gets-political-calls-political-correctness-dangerous-hammers-fiscal-irresponsibility/
Click where it says "watch the entire, 26-minute speech below"
Watch the entire video!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymT6kNKAw9c[/youtube]
WSJ entitled the piece that follows: Ben Carson for President
Amazingly he said these things right in front of the current President.
Excerpted: "...make time to watch the video of Dr. Ben Carson speaking to the White House prayer breakfast this week.
Seated in view to his right are Senator Jeff Sessions and President Obama. One doesn't look happy. ... Raised by a single mother in inner-city Detroit, he was as he tells it "a horrible student with a horrible temper." Today he's director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins and probably the most renowned specialist in his field.
Late in his talk he dropped two very un-PC ideas. The first is an unusual case for a flat tax: "What we need to do is come up with something simple. And when I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the universe, God, and he's given us a system. It's called a tithe.
"We don't necessarily have to do 10% but it's the principle. He didn't say if your crops fail, don't give me any tithe or if you have a bumper crop, give me triple tithe. So there must be something inherently fair about proportionality. You make $10 billion, you put in a billion. You make $10 you put in one. Of course you've got to get rid of the loopholes. Some people say, 'Well that's not fair because it doesn't hurt the guy who made $10 billion as much as the guy who made 10.' Where does it say you've got to hurt the guy? He just put a billion dollars in the pot. We don't need to hurt him. It's that kind of thinking that has resulted in 602 banks in the Cayman Islands. That money needs to be back here building our infrastructure and creating jobs."
Not surprisingly, a practicing physician has un-PC thoughts on health care:
"Here's my solution: When a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record, and a health savings account to which money can be contributed—pretax—from the time you're born 'til the time you die. If you die, you can pass it on to your family members, and there's nobody talking about death panels. We can make contributions for people who are indigent. Instead of sending all this money to some bureaucracy, let's put it in their HSAs. Now they have some control over their own health care. And very quickly they're gong to learn how to be responsible."
The Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon may not be politically correct, but he's closer to correct than we've heard in years."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323452204578292302358207828.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
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The Republicans on the cable shows keep going after Obama. I think this is off the mark.
The target is too narrow. They should not go after him. They must go after all leaders of the Democrat Party.
I mean Hillary is on deck while she begins a speaking tour just like Bill did for her in 2008 ; a quarter million a pop.
If we focus only on Brock we will miss the rest of the enemy assault.
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Obviously, with my continuing attack on "liberal fascism", I utterly agree :-D
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The Republicans on the cable shows keep going after Obama. I think this is off the mark.
The target is too narrow. They should not go after him. They must go after all leaders of the Democrat Party.
I mean Hillary is on deck while she begins a speaking tour just like Bill did for her in 2008 ; a quarter million a pop.
If we focus only on Brock we will miss the rest of the enemy assault.
It is the governing philosophies, not the person, we oppose, and the criticisms just deflect off of him anyway. But still this is a people business. We need to do both, impugn these policies and hold specific people accountable for their results.
The lost popularity of George Bush in his second term cost him (us) 1) the House, 2) the Senate, 3) all of his second term domestic agenda including energy. It meant that tax rates cuts would expire instead of becoming permanent. And the agenda that never happened should have included housing finance reform that might have prevented or alleviated the severity of 4) the financial collapse. Bush's lost popularity 5) guaranteed the election of the other party in the next Presidential election. That is a big swing for just convincing the people they have a lousy President. Bush partly deserved that. So does Obama.
If Pres. Obama is tied personally to the failed economy, even after reelection, it hurts his ability to move more legislation, more spending,more taxes. It hurts his ability to help Dem House and Senate candidates next year, it hurts the prospects of the next Dem nominee, and it hurts the future reputation of leftism.
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ALEXANDER'S COLUMN
The Next Sunrise -- The Light of Liberty
Illegitimi non Carborundum!
By Mark Alexander • February 21, 2013
"No morn ever dawned more favorable than ours did; and no day was every more clouded than the present! Wisdom, and good examples are necessary at this time to rescue the political machine from the impending storm." --George Washington (1786)
Dawn or Dusk?
From our family home in the mountains of East Tennessee, a sunrise has many of the qualities of a sunset. Indeed, when looking at a photograph of light over the Smoky Mountains, it can be difficult to discern whether it's dawn or dusk. That's in the eye of the beholder.
I enjoy both the morning and evening skies, but I'm a "sunrise" person. I live in anticipation of the light of the next sunrise, not the darkness of the last sunset.
I inherited that propensity from my father, tempered as a child of the Great Depression and a Naval Aviator during World War II. After the war, he returned home to grow a small business through innovation, dedication and hard work, and he raised a family through the turbulence of the '60s and the malaise of the '70s. He's in retirement now -- more active than many half his age -- and he celebrates his 90th birthday in two weeks.
My father has seen the best and worst of times. Given the wisdom of age, he clearly acknowledges the current threats to Liberty and the challenges facing our generation. He saw similar threats and challenges from FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society. But his concern about the current manifestation of socialist ideology notwithstanding, he is an eternal optimist -- living for every new dawn, every rising sun.
In my line of work -- as an analyst of political, social and economic trends, and a forecaster of their consequences -- sometimes it's difficult to hold fast to the "sunrise" perspective. But I can't help but see opportunity in any crisis, including the present. In addition to this predisposition for optimism, I'm also grateful for the example set by another eternal optimist and mentor, Ronald Reagan.
I wasn't around for the New Deal, of course, and I recall little of the Great Society years, but I do clearly recall the Great Malaise of the 1970s, with high unemployment and interest rates to match, runaway inflation, energy shortages, menacing threats from abroad, and a president who, though a man of good character, was wholly unequipped to handle the job. Then came President Reagan, who ably led our nation's about face, restored our national dignity, and seeded the longest economic expansion in history.
Ronald Reagan was a sunrise president. He heralded Morning in America. He focused on all that was good and right with America, the bright days ahead.
Reagan's spirit shines today in stark contrast to the darkness our adversaries promote. They appeal to the worst in their constituents -- their fears, doubts, greed, envy, brokenness, pessimism and dependence on the state.
Indeed, light is the mark of Liberty while darkness is the result of statism. But a physicist will tell you that darkness does not exist -- it is only the absence of light. So it is with the hearts and minds of men.
Post Your Opinion
This week, we observe the life of another sunrise president, George Washington, whose birthday (February 22, 1732) was spontaneously celebrated nationally from the date of his death in 1799 until 1879, when Congress officially established the observance.
Washington was not only the model of presidential character, but also the character of our nation. He endured great trials to lead his generation of American Patriots, those who pledged their Lives, Fortunes and sacred Honor to lay the foundation of American Liberty and Rule of Law. Those who don't know our great history are predisposed to think of our Founding Fathers' trials as distant and unrelated to those of the present day. And yet, as the old English proverb concludes, "the more things change, the more they stay the same."
For instructive insight into Washington as president, it would be sufficient to read his First Inaugural Address, delivered on April 30, 1789, and his Farewell Address of September 17, 1796. These two speeches embody the real George Washington, and the true spirit of a Patriot. They were written by his hand, not professional speech writers guided by focus groups.
In the former, he stated, "The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American People."
In the latter, he wrote, "The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their Constitutions of Government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish Government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established Government."
He made plain in his Farewell, "Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connexions with private and public felicity. ... Let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."
Washington's advice from the bleak days of 1777 is as applicable today as then: "We should never despair, our Situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again. If new difficulties arise, we must only put forth new Exertions and proportion our Efforts to the exigency of the times."
American Patriots, take heart. I am certain that at the end of the current long, dark night that there will be a bright new dawn for Liberty, just as the sun has dependably risen after the darkest of times throughout our history.
English theologian Thomas Fuller wrote in 1650, "It is always darkest just before the Day dawneth." The darkest hour of this era has yet come, but dawn will surely follow.
In the meantime fellow Patriots, as President Reagan's friend Barry Goldwater declared, "illegitimi non carborundum" (don't let the bastards get you down)!
Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis
Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
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Democrat policies doubled minority unemployment, collapsed wealth and did nothing to alleviate our heavily-demagogued income inequality.
"Meanwhile, the record of free enterprise in improving the lives of the poor both here and abroad is spectacular."
Yet Republicans haven't yet put a convincing answer on why prosperity-based policies are better for everyone. Minorities keep choosing failure based policies in the face of these facts. Brooks is Pres. of AEI. I think he identifies a key messaging problem. I'm not sure if he spells out the solution. Maybe you have to buy the book for that...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324338604578326350052940798.html?KEYWORDS=republicans+and+their+faulty+moral+arithmetic
Republicans and Their Faulty Moral Arithmetic
Conservative values and money issues are worth less than concern for the poor.
By ARTHUR C. BROOKS
In the waning days of the 1992 presidential campaign, President George H.W. Bush trailed Bill Clinton in the polls. The conventional wisdom was that Mr. Bush seemed too aloof from voters struggling economically. At a rally in New Hampshire, the exhausted president started what was probably the fourth campaign speech of the day by reading aloud what may have been handed to him as a stage direction: "Message: I care."
How little things have changed for Republicans in 20 years. There is only one statistic needed to explain the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. An April YouGov.com poll—which mirrored every other poll on the subject—found that only 33% of Americans said that Mitt Romney "cares about people like me." Only 38% said he cared about the poor.
Conservatives rightly complain that this perception was inflamed by President Obama's class-warfare campaign theme. But perception is political reality, and over the decades many Americans have become convinced that conservatives care only about the rich and powerful.
Perhaps it doesn't matter. If Republicans and conservatives double down on the promotion of economic growth, job creation and traditional values, Americans might turn away from softheaded concerns about "caring." Right?
Wrong. As New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown in his research on 132,000 Americans, care for the vulnerable is a universal moral concern in the U.S. In his best-selling 2012 book "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion," Mr. Haidt demonstrated that citizens across the political spectrum place a great importance on taking care of those in need and avoiding harm to the weak. By contrast, moral values such as sexual purity and respect for authority—to which conservative politicians often give greater emphasis—resonate deeply with only a minority of the population. Raw money arguments, e.g., about the dire effects of the country's growing entitlement spending, don't register morally at all.
Conservatives are fighting a losing battle of moral arithmetic. They hand an argument with virtually 100% public support—care for the vulnerable—to progressives, and focus instead on materialistic concerns and minority moral viewpoints.
The irony is maddening. America's poor people have been saddled with generations of disastrous progressive policy results, from welfare-induced dependency to failing schools that continue to trap millions of children.
Meanwhile, the record of free enterprise in improving the lives of the poor both here and abroad is spectacular. According to Columbia University economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin, the percentage of people in the world living on a dollar a day or less—a traditional poverty measure—has fallen by 80% since 1970. This is the greatest antipoverty achievement in world history. That achievement is not the result of philanthropy or foreign aid. It occurred because billions of souls have been able to pull themselves out of poverty thanks to global free trade, property rights, the rule of law and entrepreneurship.
The left talks a big game about helping the bottom half, but its policies are gradually ruining the economy, which will have catastrophic results once the safety net is no longer affordable. Labyrinthine regulations, punitive taxation and wage distortions destroy the ability to create private-sector jobs. Opportunities for Americans on the bottom to better their station in life are being erased.
Some say the solution for conservatives is either to redouble the attacks on big government per se, or give up and try to build a better welfare state. Neither path is correct. Raging against government debt and tax rates that most Americans don't pay gets conservatives nowhere, and it will always be an exercise in futility to compete with liberals on government spending and transfers.
Instead, the answer is to make improving the lives of vulnerable people the primary focus of authentically conservative policies. For example, the core problem with out-of-control entitlements is not that they are costly—it is that the impending insolvency of Social Security and Medicare imperils the social safety net for the neediest citizens. Education innovation and school choice are not needed to fight rapacious unions and bureaucrats—too often the most prominent focus of conservative education concerns—but because poor children and their parents deserve better schools.
Defending a healthy culture of family, community and work does not mean imposing an alien "bourgeois" morality on others. It is to recognize what people need to be happy and successful—and what is most missing today in the lives of too many poor people.
By making the vulnerable a primary focus, conservatives will be better able to confront some common blind spots. Corporate cronyism should be decried as every bit as noxious as statism, because it unfairly rewards the powerful and well-connected at the expense of ordinary citizens. Entrepreneurship should not to be extolled as a path to accumulating wealth but as a celebration of everyday men and women who want to build their own lives, whether they start a business and make a lot of money or not. And conservatives should instinctively welcome the immigrants who want to earn their success in America.
With this moral touchstone, conservative leaders will be able to stand before Americans who are struggling and feel marginalized and say, "We will fight for you and your family, whether you vote for us or not"—and truly mean it. In the end that approach will win. But more important, it is the right thing to do.
Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute and author of "The Road to Freedom" (2012).
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According to Carl Jung, whom I hold in great regard, humans have four basic functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition.
Different people have different hierarchy of these functions.
Working from memory, in about 10% of the population, thinking is the dominant function. One suspects e.g. our own GM to be in this 10% :-D I forget the number, but the dominant function of most people is feeling. Thinkers, for all their logic, often communicate ineffectively with feelers. One suspects e.g. our own GM to be and example of this :lol:
When I went to Mexico, in order to communicate with the people I learned to speak Spanish. To win elections, we need to learn the language of feelling, sensation, and intuition.
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As an INTP, per Myers-Briggs, my response is "Do you like feeling poor"? :-D
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No surprise to me that you would know your Myers-Briggs dategory already :lol: :lol: :lol:
Your witty response notwithstanding, one suspects your repondee would intuit your snarky intent :-D
May I offer for you consideration instead noting that the Secretaries of the Treasury under Clinton, Bush, and Obama all came from Goldman Sachs and the it is no coincidence that the negative interest rate policies of Obama screw the little guys like us who are just trying to save while the big banks get to borrow for free and lend to the Feds at a guaranteed and risk free profit?
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Let's see, the powerful pay lip service to ideas of "fairness" and looking out for the powerless while feathering their own nests and serving their own interests and engage in policies that harm those they allegedly advocate for.
I forget, is this the China thread?
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http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2013/03/10/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+daybydaycartoon%2FkUnt+%28Day+by+Day+Cartoon+by+Chris+Muir%29#006871
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This could be put in a number of threads but I put it here because it is important that this point be made well and loudly, lest Rooster Baraq gets away with crediting his crowing for the sunrise.
The Axis of Ennui
By DAVID BROOKS
Because I have to generate two columns a week for you, Dear Reader, I spend some time hunting for new ideas on the conference circuit. When you are on that circuit, you are perpetually under the illusion that you are hearing from the exciting, fresh people who are about to change history.
You’re hearing from, say, the brilliant technology entrepreneur Shai Agassi, who is starting a paradigm-shifting electric car company. You’re hearing from some wizard with a new solar-panel technology, or some new social-networking entrepreneur.
My main impression over the past five years is that the conference circuit capitalists who give fantastic presentations have turned out to be marginal to history while the people who are too boring and unfashionable to get invited to the conferences in the first place have actually changed the world under our noses.
Shai Agassi’s company, Better Place, for example, has generated glowing magazine profiles, but it has managed to lose more than $500 million while selling astoundingly few cars. He stepped down as the chief executive, and his replacement lasted only a few months. It turns out that the things that are sexy to politicians and paradigm-shifting to conference audiences are not necessarily attractive to consumers.
Meanwhile, the anonymous drudges at American farming corporations are exporting $135 billion worth of products every year and transforming the American Midwest. The unfashionable executive at petrochemical companies have been uprooting plants from places like Chile, relocating them to places like Louisiana, transforming economic prospects in the Southeast. Most important of all, the boring old oil and gas engineers have transformed the global balance of power.
By 2020, the United States will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer, according to the International Energy Agency. The U.S. has already overtaken Russia as the world’s leading gas producer. Fuel has become America’s largest export item. Within five years, according to a study by Citigroup, North America could be energy independent. “OPEC will find it challenging to survive another 60 years, let alone another decade,” Edward Morse, Citigroup’s researcher, told CNBC.
All of this was accomplished by people who exist largely beyond the reach of the lavalier-mike circuit.
Joel Kotkin identified America’s epicenters of economic dynamism in a study for the Manhattan Institute. It is like a giant arc of unfashionableness. You start at the Dakotas where unemployment rates are at microscopic levels. You drop straight down through the energy belts of the Great Plains until you hit Texas. Occasionally, you turn to touch the spots where fertilizer output and other manufacturing plants are on the rebound, like the Third Coast areas in Louisiana, Mississippi and Northern Florida.
Vanity Fair still ranks the tech and media moguls and calls it The New Establishment, but, as Kotkin notes, the big winners in the current economy are the “Material Boys” — the people who grow grain, drill for fuel and lay pipeline. The growing parts of the world, meanwhile, are often the commodity belts, resource-rich places with good rule of law like Canada, Norway and Australia.
Daniel Yergin, an energy guru, noted in Congressional testimony last month that the revolution in oil and gas extraction has led to 1.7 million new jobs in the United States alone, a number that could rise to three million by 2020. The shale revolution added $62 billion to federal revenues in 2012. At the same time, carbon-dioxide emissions are down 13 percent since 2007, as gas is used instead of coal to generate electricity.
Most of us have grown up in a world in which we assumed that energy was scarce, or even running out. We could now be entering a world of relatively cheap energy abundance.
Most of us have grown up in a world in which oil states in the Middle East could throw their weight around because of their grip on the economy’s life source. But the power of petro-states is on the wane. Yergin argues that the oil sanctions against Iran may not have been sustainable if not for the new alternate sources of supply.
We’ve grown accustomed to despotic regimes in Russia and Venezuela that live off oil and gas wealth. But those regimes are facing hard times, too. Gazprom is already offering roughly 10 percent discounts on existing contracts. The Nigerians and Venezuelans may find it hard to compete. People in China and elsewhere are wondering if the fracking revolution means that the 21st century will be another North American century, just like the last one.
What are the names of the people who are leading this shift? Who is the Steve Jobs of shale? Magazine covers don’t provide the answers. Whoever they are, they don’t seem hungry for celebrity or good with the splashy project launch. They are strong economically, but they are culturally off the map.
This revolution will not be plenaried.
■
PUBLISHED MARCH 11, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/opinion/brooks-the-axis-of-ennui.html
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It is popular wisdom that President Obama’s progressive social agenda is predicated on widespread support from the younger, hip generation. Certainly, concerns like gay marriage, marijuana legalization, abortion, the DREAM Act, gun control, women in combat, and blocking gas and oil exploration and pipeline transportation all get a lot of play on campuses and in popular culture. And these wedge issues supposedly represent the future direction of the country — a wise agenda for liberals eager to cement a majority constituency for decades to come.
But aside from the common-sense recognition that people become more conservative as they age and mature — and start paying taxes, and become financially responsible for their own children’s future — there is just as much likelihood that Barack Obama may inadvertently be building a conservative youth movement. Indeed, the new liberalism in all its economic manifestations is reactionary and anti-youth to the core. The administration seems aware of the potential paradoxes in this reverse “What’s the matter with Kansas?” syndrome of young people voting against their economic interests. Thus follows the constant courting of the hip and cool Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Lena Dunham, Occupy Wall Streeters, and others who blend pop culture, sex, youth, energy, and fad — almost anything to avoid the truth that today’s teenagers are starting out each owing a lifetime share of the national debt amounting to more than three-quarters of a million dollars. Those who ran up the debt enjoyed the borrowing, but won’t be around to pay back their proverbial fair share.
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University tuition has soared well beyond the rate of inflation, increases brought about by an inexcusable surge in administrative staffs, the reduction in teaching loads over the last few decades, the costs of subsidizing overly specialized and esoteric research, all sorts of costly new race/class/gender explorations, and a general expansion of non-teaching support staffs. Justification of such escalating costs was always based on the truism that college degrees represented a wise lifetime investment that ensured increased salary and better job security. That may still be true — in the long run — but bleak immediate employment prospects for those under 25, along with ballooning college loans, will eventually prompt a reexamination of such received wisdom. When academics at traditional universities trash private tech schools and on-line colleges, their criticism is not so much pedagogical as self-interested.
At some point, the huge campus speaking fees given a Michael Moore or a John Edwards, the off-topic rants of the English professor, and the proliferation of x-studies degrees that impart neither expertise nor marketability will be rethought by young consumers in terms of years of paying back high-interest student loans for brands that were not applicable to most employment.
Nearly every week, I receive a letter from a former student seeking help in finding a job. The common theme is a sense that something in their education went terribly wrong. Most fear that their present indebtedness is unsustainable and that their degrees are almost superfluous in today’s economy. There is also a vague resentment that no one in the self-interested university honestly apprised them of the odds stacked against them. It was about ten years ago when a student wrote me to complain that her professor’s skipping one of her classes had cost the student, in pro-rated terms, over $150. I wrote back to remind her to tally as well the interest charges on her tuition debt. Academics call such calculations consumerism, but students see what has happened to them as consumer fraud.
Apart from the elite of the Ivy League, most indebted students no longer look back at their professors and administrators as paragons of virtue or avatars of social change; instead, they see them as part of an establishment that sold them a bill of goods, one more interested in getting ever more customers than in finding jobs for those who bought their product on credit. The latest job figures show that among 20-to-24-year-olds, unemployment has risen (alone among various age cohorts) to 13.3 percent. For those in their prime working years (e.g., 25 to 34) unemployment is still high, at 7.4 percent. National debt per person has soared to over $53,000, a $20,000 surge in just the first 50 months of the Obama presidency. Most of the borrowing — both the Obama administration’s new borrowing and the older borrowing for payouts to those receiving pensions, Medicare, and Social Security — was the property of the Baby Boomer cohorts.
Those over 50, who mostly run the nation, have popularized something called “internship,” a non-paid or low-paid apprenticeship that might or might not eventually lead to employment, but that typically does not even pay the room and board of the worker in question. Fifty years ago such “jobs” would have been the source of labor unrest, as thousands hit the streets to argue that they were little more than indentured serfs, and their employers virtual feudal lords. Yet few complain today because these interns are largely middle class, and they have been told that obedience and subservience are just the sorts of traits that employers appreciate. In today’s liberal legal universe, a six-figure-salaried senior female executive can sue for vast sums over a sexist remark (something akin to the president’s recent quip that California’s attorney general was the best-looking such officeholder in the nation), while a penniless student or recent graduate who labors for free has no legal recourse.
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To a generation saddled with college debt and facing bleak job prospects, the current Democratic hysteria over any sensible reform of Social Security and Medicare increasingly sounds just as surreal. In fact, the only question left about reforming entitlements is not if, but when: whether those in their forties and fifties will share the pain of cutting back, or whether the escalating burdens of keeping the system solvent will fall entirely on a younger generation that will have bigger debts and smaller incomes.
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Tomorrow’s public employee is not likely to receive a generous defined-benefit retirement plan — but will still hear whining from his far-better-compensated superiors as to how unfair it is to question whether their own compensation is sustainable. And far fewer in the future will so easily land a government job at all: In California the unsustainable cost of the public work force is due not to overstaffing, but to too few younger taxpayers to meet the state’s existing obligations, given the lucrative compensation and retirement packages of a select elder few, who somehow believe that their own privilege is proof of their egalitarianism. Forgotten in the national acrimony over unfunded defined-benefit retirement plans for public employees is that the divide is not public versus private sector, or left versus right, but older versus younger. For the public unions the implicit message is something like the following: Keep borrowing to fund our generation’s unsustainable pensions and, in turn, we may concede that the next generation will never receive something so bankrupting to the public purse.
The soon-to-be-$17-trillion debt — run up largely by the Baby Boomer generation — will lead to decades of budget cutting, inflation, and higher taxes. A decade from now, as 30-somethings try to buy a home and raise children while they are still paying off their student loans, they may wonder why the national burden of repaying the debts of the better-off falls largely upon themselves. Indeed, a legacy of the Baby Boomer generation is the idea that it is natural for younger people to begin life with huge loans — not for a house or a car, but for an education of dubious market value.
The offspring of well-connected journalists, politicians, academics, professionals, and celebrities assure us in their documentaries and op-eds, and through their parents’ voices, that conservatives have lost the war for America’s youth. They certainly have, at least for a while, at in-the-news, private liberal-arts campuses. But for the vast majority of the state-schooled who have no such connections, little if any expectation of an inheritance, and lots of accumulated debt, there is nothing liberal about the values inherent in the present economy.
Given a choice between gay marriage, legalization of pot, and the banning of so-called assault rifles on the one hand, and, on the other, a good job with lower taxes, most young people will quietly prefer the latter. For that reason, conservatives should not outbid liberals to appear cool to new voters, but simply explain that a fair economy for all generations is no longer on the liberal agenda.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His The Savior Generals will appear in May from Bloomsbury Books.
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What Would Socrates Do?
In "The Art of Freedom," Earl Shorris describes his efforts to establish a set of courses that would teach the core texts of Western civilization to people living in poverty, whose school experience had scanted the canon or skipped it entirely..
by NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY
WSJ
Almost two decades ago, Earl Shorris, a novelist and journalist, told the editor at his publishing house that he wanted to write a book about poverty in America. The editor, to his credit, said that he didn't want just another book describing the problem. He wanted a solution. So Shorris, who had attended the University of Chicago on a scholarship many years before and who was greatly influenced by its Great Books curriculum, hit upon the idea of teaching the core texts of Western civilization to people living in poverty, whose school experience had scanted the canon or skipped it entirely. His Eureka moment came when he was visiting a prison and conducting interviews for another book he was planning to write.
He asked one of the women at New York's Bedford Hills maximum-security prison why she thought the poor were poor. "Because they don't have the moral life of downtown," she replied. "What do you mean by the moral life?" Shorris asked. "You got to begin with the children . . . ," she said. "You've got to teach the moral life of downtown to the children. And the way you do that, Earl, is by taking them downtown to plays, museums, concerts, lectures." He asked whether she meant the humanities. Looking at him as if he were, as he puts it, "the stupidest man on earth," she replied: "Yes, Earl, the humanities."
Poverty, Shorris concluded, was a condition that required more than jobs or money to put right. So he set out to offer the "moral life" as well. Beginning with a class of 25 or so students found through a social-service agency in New York, Shorris—along with a few professors he had recruited—taught literature, art history and philosophy. The first classes included readings in Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides and Sophocles.
Thus was born the Clemente Course in the Humanities, which is now the recipient of broad philanthropic support. It is offered to the poor in more than 20 cities around the United States, as well as in other countries, from South Korea to Canada. "The Art of Freedom" is a narrative of the program's founding experience as well as a meditation on the Western classics and their effects on readers. The book, sadly, appears posthumously. Shorris died last year at the age of 75.
The idea of the Clemente Course—named for Roberto Clemente, the baseball player who gave his name to the Manhattan community center where the course debuted—was to "educate a self-selected group of adults living in poverty," in classes taught by professors from nearby colleges and universities. The spirit of the Great Brooks program was a key part of the idea: There would be no chasing after trendy reading lists or narrow relevance. When Shorris went to recruit students in the South Bronx, in New York City, a white social worker asked him if he were going to teach African history. "No," he said. "We will teach American history. Of course the history of black people is very important in the development of the United States."
.The Art of Freedom
By Earl Shorris
(Norton, 302 pages, $27.95)
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Over time, Shorris began to add texts from the various cultures where the course was being offered—Native American myths, South Korean novels. But his focus on the Western classics was refreshingly relentless. He was accused "cultural imperialism," but the charge didn't seem to faze him. The Clemente Course now taught in Darfur, in the Sudan, teaches John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty."
Shorris had no patience for mediocrity in his project and insisted on only the best professors to teach Clemente's classes. When he had to find staff to teach in Chicago, he writes, "neither Chicago State nor the nearby community college . . . were up to the standards of the Clemente Course." In the classes he taught, he addressed his students with "Mr." or "Ms." He believed that a proper form of address conveys dignity and avoids the kind of casual relationship that most universities want their students and professors to have.
The Clemente Course differs from life at universities in other ways—for instance, by taking the Western classics seriously. How many college graduates have read Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides and Mill? It also differs in its sense of what the texts can do. Much of the liberal-arts curriculum in universities today is devoted to learning about oppression of one sort or another, but Shorris argued that the study of the humanities is a fundamentally optimistic endeavor. Not that Clemente texts are routinely cheery or anodyne. Shorris himself taught Dostoevsky, "the brilliant archeologist who dared to make us look deep into our dark sides." But Shorris did feel that, by reading and discussing classic texts, life was better or richer in some fundamental sense: more valued, more hopeful, more free.
One way that the humanities can help the poor in particular, according to Shorris, is by making them more "political." But, he writes, "I don't mean 'political' in the sense of voting in an election, but in the way Pericles used the word: to mean activity with other people at every level, from the family to the neighborhood to the broader community to the city-state." The humanities, he tells his first class, "are a foundation for getting along in the world, for thinking, for learning to reflect on the world instead of just reacting to whatever force is turned against you."
Shorris recounts the story of a young man in his first class—a 24-year-old with a history of violent behavior—who called him describing how a woman at work had provoked him. "She made me so mad, I wanted to smack her up against the wall. I tried to talk to some friends to calm myself down a little, but nobody was around." Shorris asked him what he did, "fearing this was his one telephone call from the city jail." Instead, he told Shorris, "I asked myself, 'What would Socrates do?' "
Ms. Riley's most recent book is " 'Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America."
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Credible because I find Scott Ramussen to be both conservative and an expert on public opinion. Usually this type of advise to the Republicans comes from the opponents.
Republicans Need to Get Over the Makers vs. Takers Mindset
By Scott Rasmussen - April 21, 2013
Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded comment that 47 percent of Americans are “dependent on the government” and “believe they are victims” isn’t the only reason he lost the presidential campaign. But the candidate himself acknowledged after the election that the comments were “very harmful.”
He added, “What I said is not what I believe.”
But many Republicans still believe it, and the “makers vs. takers” theme has a deep hold on the party. In private conversations, many in the GOP are whispering that Romney was right and that his only mistake was saying it out loud.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say something like, “Well, the half who favor government programs is the half who don’t pay any taxes.”
This is ridiculous — on many levels.
First, the overwhelming majority of those who don’t pay federal income taxes pay a whole variety of other taxes, including state and local taxes, payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, sin taxes and more. They don’t feel excluded from sharing the tax burden just because they don’t pay one particular tax.
It’s also worth noting that these aren’t the people pushing for higher taxes. At Rasmussen Reports, our most recent polling shows that people who make $100,000 or more each year are more supportive of higher taxes than those who make less.
Second, the 47 percent who don’t pay federal income taxes include large chunks of the Republican base. Many senior citizens fall into this category because their primary income is from Social Security. They don’t consider themselves “takers.” They paid money into a Social Security system throughout their working lives and now simply expect the government to honor the promises it made.
Third, low-income Americans aren’t looking for a handout. Among those who are living in poverty, 81 percent agree that work is the best solution to poverty. Most would rather replace welfare programs with a guaranteed minimum-wage job. Sharing the mainstream view, 69 percent of the poor believe that too many Americans are dependent upon the government.
Sixty-five percent of low-income Americans consider it “very important” for an economy to provide everybody with an opportunity to succeed. Interestingly enough, low-income Americans consider that more important than those who earn more.
But if I had to pick just one number to highlight how bad the 47 percent remark was, it would be this. Just 11 percent of Americans today consider themselves dependent upon government. Sure, some receive a Social Security check or an unemployment check, but that’s not dependence upon government. That’s cash received in exchange for premiums paid.
If they want to seriously compete for middle-class votes, Republicans need to get over the makers vs. takers mentality. We live in a time when just 35 percent believe the economy is fair to the middle class. Only 41 percent believe it is fair to those who are willing to work hard. Those problems are not created by the poor.
GOP candidates would be well advised to shift their focus from attacking the poor to going after those who are really dependent upon government — the Political Class, the crony capitalists, the megabanks and other recipients of corporate welfare.
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YES.
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The Rasmussen piece is actually good news, that people mostly don't see themselves as dependent on government. It clears the way for a pro-growth economic argument to gain ground. As JFK put it, a rising tide lifts all boats. The pro-growth argument is also the answer to funding the programs that benefit the people in real need.
OTOH, the turnout operation of the 11% who do see themselves dependent on government methodically identified by the Obama campaign was the key to the President's second victory.
Rasmussen: "If they want to seriously compete for middle-class votes, Republicans need to get over the makers vs. takers mentality. We live in a time when just 35 percent believe the economy is fair to the middle class. Only 41 percent believe it is fair to those who are willing to work hard. Those problems are not created by the poor."
Some of that effect is driven by media and the endless class envy politics. The message (which I think is mostly false) is pounded into our heads, then we poll that question and make further news with the polls. The rich are richer than the poor and the middle class. But: a) these groups change; there is still amazing income mobility in our economy, and b) chopping off big wealth only puts the poor and middle class in a worse situation.
Rasmussen has the ending exactly right. Because of this widely held perception, Republicans need to be all the more vigilant against supporting any subsidies, credits, deduction or rules that don't apply the same way to everyone.
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Re-posting by request:
"This seems to me a very powerful observation by Will. Would you please post it in the American Creed thread as well please?" TIA, Marc
To the reader, this means please read it twice. )
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"unfettered executive government uses debt-financed consumption and “regulatory conscription of private markets” to force spending “vastly beyond what Congress could have appropriated in the light of day.”
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-whats-behind-the-funding-of-the-welfare-state/2013/04/17/8686d412-a6bd-11e2-8302-3c7e0ea97057_story.html
What's behind the funding of the welfare state
By George F. Will,
The regulatory, administrative state, which progressives champion, is generally a servant of the strong, for two reasons. It responds to financially powerful and politically sophisticated factions. And it encourages rent-seekers to exploit opportunities for concentrated benefits and dispersed costs (e.g., agriculture subsidies confer sums on large agribusinesses by imposing small costs on 316 million Americans).
Such government inevitably means executive government and the derogation of the legislative branch, both of which produce exploding government debt. By explaining these perverse effects of progressivism, the Hudson Institute’s Christopher DeMuth explains contemporary government’s cascading and reinforcing failures.
Executive growth fuels borrowing growth because of the relationship between what DeMuth, in a recent address at George Mason University, called “regulatory insouciance and freewheeling finance.” Government power is increasingly concentrated in Washington, Washington power is increasingly concentrated in the executive branch, and executive-branch power is increasingly concentrated in agencies that are unconstrained by legislative control. Debt and regulation are, DeMuth discerns, “political kin”: Both are legitimate government functions, but both are now perverted to evade democratic accountability, which is a nuisance, and transparent taxation, which is politically dangerous.
Today’s government uses regulation to achieve policy goals by imposing on the private sector burdens less obvious than taxation would be, burdens that become visible only indirectly, in higher prices. Often the goals government pursues by surreptitious indirection are goals that could not win legislative majorities — e.g., the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of greenhouse gases following Congress’s refusal to approve such policies. And deficit spending — borrowing — is, DeMuth says, “a complementary means of taxation evasion”: It enables the political class to provide today’s voters with significantly more government benefits than current taxes can finance, leaving the difference to be paid by voters too young to vote or not yet born.
Two developments demonstrate, DeMuth says, how “delegation and debt have become coordinate mechanisms of legislative abnegation.” One is Congress’s anti-constitutional delegation of taxing authority to executive-branch regulatory agencies funded substantially or entirely by taxes the agencies levy, not by congressional appropriations. For example, DeMuth notes, the Federal Communications Commission’s $347 million operating expenses “are funded by payments from the firms it regulates,” and its $9 billion program subsidizing certain Internet companies is funded by its own unilateral tax on telecommunication firms. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, another freebooting agency not tethered to the appropriations process, automatically receives a share of the profits of the Federal Reserve banks.
A second development is “the integration of regulation and debt-financed consumption.” Recently, a Post headline announced: “Obama administration pushes banks to make home loans to people with weaker credit.” Here we go again — subprime mortgages as federal policy. Is this because lowering lending requirements and forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to securitize the loans worked so well last time? This illustrates DeMuth’s point about how unfettered executive government uses debt-financed consumption and “regulatory conscription of private markets” to force spending “vastly beyond what Congress could have appropriated in the light of day.”
High affluence and new technologies have, DeMuth believes, “led to unhealthy political practices.” Time was, the three basic resources required for effective political action — discretionary time, the ability to acquire and communicate information and persuasion skills — were scarce and possessed only by elites. But in our wealthy and educated society, interest groups can pressure government without being filtered by congressional hierarchies.
Legislative leaders — particularly, committee chairs — have lost power as Congress has become more porous and responsive to importuning factions using new media. Congress, responding to the increased difficulty of legislating, has delegated much lawmaking to specialized agencies that have fewer internal conflicts. Congress’s role has waned as that of autonomous executive agencies has waxed. The executive has driven the expansion of the consumption of benefits that are paid for by automatic entitlement transfer payments, by government-mandated private expenditures and by off-budget and non-transparent taxation imposed by executive agencies.
Government used to spend primarily on the production of things — roads, dams, bridges, military forces. There can be only so many of such goods. Now, DeMuth says, government spends primarily for consumption:
“The possibilities for increasing the kind, level, quality and availability of benefits are practically unlimited. This is the ultimate source of today’s debt predicament. More borrowing for more consumption has no natural stopping point short of imploding on itself.”
Funding the welfare state by vast borrowing and regulatory taxation hides the costs from the public. Hence its political potency. Until the implosion.
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This piece could also fit quite well in the Liberal Fascism thread, but I chose here because I think it makes points that WE need to make in communicatiing with our fellow Americans across the political spectrum.
I would note that this matter about the increasing irrelevance of the US Congress was made with considerable vigor and insight by Glenn Beck some two years ago when he was still at FOX.
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(MARC: Awesome piece, that was driving me crazy with every single sentence being a paragraph of its own-- so I took the liberty of editing it into what I perceive to be the paragraphs that should have been there to begin with.)
http://www.lee.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2013/4/what-conservatives-are-for
... making the positive case for conservatism: what conservatives are for.
In Washington, it is common for both parties to succumb to easy negativity. Republicans and Democrats stand opposed to each other, obviously, and outspoken partisanship gets the headlines. This negativity is unappealing on both sides. That helps explain why the federal government is increasingly held in such low regard by the American people.
But for the Left, the defensive crouch at least makes sense. Liberalism’s main purpose today is to defend its past gains from conservative reform. But negativity on the Right, to my mind, makes no sense at all. The Left has created this false narrative that liberals are for things, and conservatives are against things.
When we concede this narrative, even just implicitly, we concede the debate… before it even begins.
And yet too many of us – elected conservatives especially – do it anyway. We take the bait. A liberal proposes an idea, we explain why it won’t work, and we think we’ve won the debate. But even if we do, we reinforce that false narrative… winning battles while losing the war.
This must be frustrating to the scholars of the Heritage Foundation, who work every day producing new ideas for conservatives to be for. But it should be even more frustrating to the conservatives around the country that we elected conservatives all serve.
After all, they know what they’re for: why don’t we?
Perhaps it’s because it’s so easy in Washington to forget. In Washington, we debate public policy so persistently that we can lose sight of the fact that policies are means, not ends.
We say we are for lower taxes, or less regulation, or spending restraint. But those are just policies we advocate. They’re not what we’re really for. What we’re really for are the good things those policies will yield to the American people. What we’re really for is the kind of society those policies would allow the American people to create, together.
Together.
If there is one idea too often missing from our debate today that’s it: together.
In the last few years, we conservatives seem to have abandoned words like “together,” “compassion,” and “community”… as if their only possible meanings were as a secret code for statism. This is a mistake. Collective action doesn’t only – or even usually - mean government action.
Conservatives cannot surrender the idea of community to the Left, when it is the vitality of our communities upon which our entire philosophy depends. Nor can we allow one politician’s occasional conflation of “compassion” and “bigger government” to discourage us from emphasizing the moral core of our worldview. Conservatism is ultimately not about the bills we want to pass, but the nation we want to be.
If conservatives want the American people to support our agenda for the government, we have to do a better job of showing them our vision for society. And re-connecting our agenda to it. We need to remind the American people – and perhaps, too, the Republican Party itself – that the true and proper end of political subsidiarity is social solidarity.
Ours has never been a vision of isolated, atomized loners. It is a vision of husbands and wives; parents and children; neighbors and neighborhoods; volunteers and congregations; bosses and employees; businesses and customers; clubs, teams, groups, associations… and friends.
The essence of human freedom, of civilization itself, is cooperation. This is something conservatives should celebrate. It’s what conservatism is all about. Freedom doesn’t mean “you’re on your own.” It means “we’re all in this together.” Our vision of American freedom is of two separate but mutually reinforcing institutions: a free enterprise economy and a voluntary civil society.
History has shown both of these organic systems to be extremely efficient at delivering goods and services. But these two systems are not good because they work. They work because they are good. Together, they work for everyone because they impel everyone… to work together. They harness individuals’ self-interest to the common good of the community, and ultimately the nation.
They work because in a free market economy and voluntary civil society, whatever your career or your cause, your success depends on your service. The only way to look out for yourself is to look out for those around you. The only way to get ahead is to help other people do the same.
What, exactly, are all those supposedly cut-throat, exploitive businessmen and women competing for? To figure out the best way to help the most people. That’s what the free market does. It rewards people for putting their God-given talents and their own exertions in the service of their neighbors. Whatever money they earn is the wealth they create, value they add to other people’s lives.
No matter who you are or what you’re after, the first question anyone in a free market must ask him or herself is: how can I help? What problems need to be solved? What can I do to improve other people’s lives?
The free market does not allow anyone to take; it impels everyone to give.
The same process works in our voluntary civil society.
Conservatives’ commitment to civil society begins, of course, with the family, and the paramount, indispensable institution of marriage. But it doesn’t end there. Just as individuals depend on free enterprise to protect them from economic oppression, families depend on mediating institutions to protect them from social isolation. That is where the social entrepreneurs of our civil society come in. Just like for-profit businesses, non-profit religious, civic, cultural, and charitable institutions also succeed only to the extent that they serve the needs of the community around them.
Forced to compete for voluntary donations, the most successful mediating institutions in a free civil society are at least as innovative and efficient as profitable companies. If someone wants to make the world a better place, a free civil society requires that he or she do it well.
Social entrepreneurs know that only the best soup kitchens, the best community theater companies, and the best youth soccer leagues – and for that matter, the best conservative think tanks – will survive.
So they serve.
They serve their donors by spending their resources wisely. They serve their communities by making them better places to live. And they serve their beneficiaries, by meeting needs together better than they can meet them alone.
Freedom doesn’t divide us. Big government does. It’s big government that turns citizens into supplicants, capitalists into cronies, and cooperative communities into competing special interests. Freedom, by contrast, unites us. It pulls us together, and aligns our interests. It draws us out of ourselves and into the lives of our friends, neighbors, and even perfect strangers. It draws us upward, toward the best version of ourselves.
The free market and civil society are not things more Americans need protection from. They’re things more Americans need access to.
Liberals scoff at all this. They attack free enterprise as a failed theory that privileges the rich, exploits the poor, and threatens the middle class but our own history proves the opposite. Free enterprise is the only economic system that does not privilege the rich. Instead it incentivizes them put their wealth to productive use serving other people… or eventually lose it all. Free enterprise is the greatest weapon against poverty ever conceived by man. If the free market exploits the poor, how do liberals explain how the richest nation in human history mostly descends from immigrants who originally came here with nothing?
Nor does free enterprise threaten the middle class. Free enterprise is what created the middle class in the first place. The free market created the wealth that liberated millions of American families from subsistence farming, opening up opportunities for the pursuit of happiness never known before or since in government-directed economies.
Progressives are equally dismissive of our voluntary civil society. They simply do not trust free individuals and organic communities to look out for each other, or solve problems without supervision. They think only government – only they – possess the moral enlightenment to do that.
To be blunt, elite progressives in Washington don’t really believe in communities at all. No, they believe in community organizers. Self-anointed strangers, preferably ones with Ivy League degrees, fashionable ideological grievances, and a political agenda to redress those grievances. For progressives believe the only valid purpose of “community” is to accomplish the agenda of the state.
But we know from our own lives that the true purpose of our communities is instead to accomplish everything else. To enliven our days. To ennoble our children. To strengthen our families. To unite our neighborhoods. To pursue our happiness, and protect our freedom to do so.
This vision of America conservatives seek is not an Ayn Rand novel. It’s a Norman Rockwell painting, or a Frank Capra movie: a society of “plain, ordinary kindness, and a little looking out for the other fellow, too.”
The great obstacle to realizing this vision today is government dysfunction. This is where our vision must inform our agenda.
What reforms will make it easier for entrepreneurs to start new businesses? For young couples to get married and start new families? And for individuals everywhere to come together to bring to life flourishing new partnerships and communities?
What should government do – and just as important, not do – to allow the free market to create new economic opportunity and to allow civil society to create new social capital?
We conservatives are not against government. The free market and civil society depend on a just, transparent, and accountable government to enforce the rule of law.
What we are against are two pervasive problems that grow on government like mold on perfectly good bread: corruption and inefficiency. It is government corruption and inefficiency that today stand between the American people and the economy and society they deserve.
To combat those pathologies, a new conservative reform agenda should center around three basic principles: equality, diversity, and sustainability.
The first and most important of these principles is equality.
The only way for the free market and civil society to function… to tie personal success to interpersonal service… to align the interests of the strong and the weak… is to have everyone play by the same rules. Defying this principle is how our government has always corrupted itself, our free market, and our civil society. In the past, the problem was political discrimination that held the dis-connected down. Today, government’s specialty is dispensing political privileges to prop the well-connected up.
In either case, the corruption is the same: official inequality … twisting the law to deem some people “more equal than others”… making it harder for some to succeed even when they serve, and harder for others to fail even when they don’t.
And so we have corporate welfare: big businesses receiving direct and indirect subsidies that smaller companies don’t. We have un-civil society: politicians funding large, well-connected non-profit institutions based on political favoritism rather than merit.
We have venture SOCIALISM: politicians funneling taxpayer money to politically correct businesses that cannot attract real investors.
We have regulatory capture: industry leaders influencing the rules governing their sectors to protect their interests and hamstringing innovative challengers.
The first step in a true conservative reform agenda must be to end this kind of preferential policymaking. Beyond simply being the right thing to do, it is a pre-requisite for earning the moral authority and political credibility to do anything else.
Why should the American people trust our ideas about middle-class entitlements… when we’re still propping up big banks? Why should they trust us to fix the tax code while we use their tax dollars to create artificial markets for uncompetitive industries? Why should they trust our vision of a free civil society when we give special privileges to supposed non-profits like Planned Parenthood, public broadcasting, agricultural check-off programs, and the Export-Import Bank?
And perhaps most important, why should Americans trust us at all, when too often, we don’t really trust them? When we vote for major legislation… negotiated in secret… without debating it… without even reading it… deliberately excluding the American people from their own government?
To conservatives, equality needs to mean equality for everyone.
The second principle to guide our agenda is diversity. Or, as you might have heard it called elsewhere: “federalism.”
The biggest reason the federal government makes too many mistakes is that it makes too many decisions. Most of these are decisions the federal government doesn’t have to make – and therefore shouldn’t. Every state in the union has a functioning, constitutional government. And just as important, each state has a unique political and cultural history, with unique traditions, values, and priorities.
Progressives today are fundamentally intolerant of this diversity.
They insist on imposing their values on everyone. To them, the fifty states are just another so-called “community” to be “organized,” brought to heel by their betters in Washington. This flies in the face of the Founders and the Constitution, of course. But it also flies in the face of common sense and experience.
The usurpation of state authority is why our national politics is so dysfunctional and rancorous. We expect one institution – the federal government – to set policies that govern the lives of 300 million people, spread across a continent. Of course it’s going to get most of it wrong.
That’s why successful organizations in the free market and civil society are moving in the opposite direction. While government consolidates, businesses delegate and decentralize. While Washington insists it knows everything, effective organizations increasingly rely on diffuse social networks and customizable problem solving.
We should not be surprised that as Washington has assumed greater control over transportation, education, labor, welfare, health care, home mortgage lending, and so much else… all of those increasingly centralized systems are failing. Conservatives should seize this opportunity not to impose our ideas on these systems, but to crowd-source the solutions to the states.
Let the unique perspectives and values of each state craft its own policies, and see what works and what doesn’t. If Vermont’s pursuit of happiness leads it to want more government, and Utah’s less, who are politicians from the other 48 states to tell them they can’t have it? Would we tolerate this kind of official intolerance in any other part of American life?
A Pew study just last week found that Americans trust their state governments twice as much as the federal government, and their local governments even more.
This shouldn’t be a surprise – it should be a hint.
State and local governments are more responsive, representative, and accountable than Washington, D.C. It’s time to make them more powerful, too. In the past, conservatives given federal power have been tempted to overuse it. We must resist this temptation. If we want to be a diverse movement, we must be a tolerant movement.
The price of allowing conservative states to be conservative is allowing liberal states to be liberal.
Call it subsidiarity. Call it federalism. Call it constitutionalism. But we must make this fundamental principle of pluralistic diversity a pillar of our agenda.
And that brings us to our third guiding principle.
Once we eliminate policy privilege and restore policy diversity, we can start ensuring policy sustainability. Once the federal government stops doing things it shouldn’t, it can start doing the things it should, better. That means national defense and intelligence, federal law enforcement and the courts, immigration, intellectual property, and even the senior entitlement programs whose fiscal outlook threatens our future solvency and very survival.
Once we clear unessential policies from the books, federal politicians will no longer be able to hide: from the public, or their constitutional responsibilities. Congress will be forced to work together to reform the problems government has created in our health care system. We can fundamentally reform and modernize our regulatory system. We will be forced to rescue our senior entitlement programs from bankruptcy. And we can reform our tax system to eliminate the corporate code’s bias in favor of big businesses over small businesses… and the individual code’s bias against saving, investing, and especially against parents, our ultimate investor class.
That is how we turn the federal government’s unsustainable liabilities into sustainable assets.
The bottom line of all of this is that conservatives in that building need to start doing what conservatives in this building already do: think long and hard about what we believe, why we believe it, and most of all, remember to put first things first.
For conservatives, the first thing is not our agenda of political subsidiarity – it’s our vision of social solidarity. It is a vision of society as an interwoven and interdependent network of individuals, families, communities, businesses, churches, formal and informal groups working together to meet each other’s needs and enrich each other’s lives.
It is of a free market economy that grants everyone a “fair chance and an unfettered start in the race of life.”
It is of a voluntary civil society that strengthens our communities, protects the vulnerable, and minds the gaps to make sure no one gets left behind.
And it is of a just, tolerant, and sustainable federal government that protects and complements free enterprise and civil society, rather than presuming to replace them.
This vision will not realize itself. The Left, the inertia of the status quo, and the entire economy of this city stand arrayed against it.
Realizing it will sometimes require conservatives to take on entrenched interests, pet policies, and political third-rails. Many of these will be interests traditionally aligned with – and financially generous to – the establishments of both parties. And sometimes, it will require us to stand up for those no one else will: the unborn child in the womb, the poor student in the failing school, the reformed father languishing in prison, the single mom trapped in poverty, and the splintering neighborhoods that desperately need them all.
But if we believe this vision is worth the American people being for, it’s worth elected conservatives fighting for. What we are fighting for is not just individual freedom, but the strong, vibrant communities free individuals form. The freedom to earn a good living, and build a good life: that is what conservatives are for.
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On the previous, thanks Crafty. That was his speech format.
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This piece expands on that theme IMO. It answers a point I have pondered. People start off dependent, born with no marketable skills, then move slowly and hopefully to self-sufficiency. But dependency on people who know you, love you, set expectation for you, and followup on your progress is not at all the same as dependency without obligation as we have in our welfare system.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/346517/more-dependency
More Than Dependency
By Yuval Levin
April 24, 2013 11:20 AM
...The term dependency and the concept it describes point us toward a radically individualist understanding of that problem that is mistaken in some important ways. We are all dependent on others. The question is whether we are dependent on people we know, and they on us—in ways that foster family and community, build habits of restraint and dignity, and instill in us responsibility and a sense of obligation—or we are dependent on distant, neutral, universal systems of benefits that help provide for our material wants without connecting us to any local and immediate nexus of care and obligation. It is not dependence per se, which is a universal fact of human life, but dependence without mutual obligation, that corrupts the soul. Such technocratic provision enables precisely the illusion of independence from the people around us and from the requirements of any moral code they might uphold. It is corrosive not because it instills a true sense of dependence but because it inspires a false sense of independence and so frees us from the sorts of moral habits of mutual obligation that alone can make us free.
We reach for the idea of dependency because of the kind of arguments we often respond to from the left—arguments that seem like calls for common action instead of individual action. But we should look more carefully at those arguments. The problem with the “you didn’t build that” mindset, as becomes particularly clear if you read what the president said before and after that line, is not just that it denies the significance of individual initiative (though that’s an important part of the problem, and our culture of individual initiative, which is far from radical individualism, is a huge social achievement in America) but also that it denies the significance of any common efforts that are not political. The president took the pose of a critic of individualism, but in fact the position he described involves perhaps the most radical individualism of all, in which nothing but individuals and the state exists in society. Alexis de Tocqueville saw where this would go long ago:
I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native country.
Above all these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?
It is not hard to see why this kind of infantilization would strike us as first and foremost raising problems of dependency, but what Tocqueville shows so powerfully is that the trouble does not arise from a dearth of individual independence but rather from the error of radical individualism itself—from the separating of people from those around them. And that separation is not accidental but essential to a certain kind of liberalism.
To summarize (and so necessarily oversimplify some, to be sure): The utopian goal of the most radical forms of liberalism has always been the complete liberation of the individual from all unchosen “relational” obligations—obligations to the people around you that are a function of the family and community in which you live. Resentment against such obligations was a central and powerful motive in the radical late-18th century thought that gave us some (though not all) forms of modern libertarianism and the modern Left, and the defense of such obligations was central to the counter-arguments that yielded modern conservatism. (I might mention here, by the way, that these somewhat unfamiliar origins of the Left-Right divide are the subject of a forthcoming book of mine, which will be out later this year.)
These radicals originally thought that the liberation of the individual could result directly from the application of key liberal principles to politics, but when liberal ideals did not bring about their utopian aims, some of them abandoned the liberal principles rather than the utopian aims and sought to pursue that liberation by other means. The Left-leaning, and ultimately progressive, form of this resentment of unchosen obligations dealt with the fact that dependence cannot really be eradicated by calling for dependence only on a distant and (supposedly) morally neutral provider of necessities on whom everyone else is equally dependent.
We often think of this peculiar objective in terms of equality, but I think it is better understood in terms of the liberation of the individual from the constraints of community and family—from the obligations imposed by the place and time in which we happen to find ourselves. Breaking apart clusters of people into individuals who then all have the same relation to the state is a way of freeing those individuals from one another.
This is not a counter-force to individualism (as even serious people on the left sometimes suggest it is) but rather the most radical form of individualism—using government to atomize and pulverize society’s institutions. It is a mode of living that liberates us from local and generational attachments by subjecting us to intricate but morally indifferent rules imposed from a distance. Liberals like to think of such rules as morally neutral but they are more properly described as morally neutralizing—imposing on society the social libertarianism that liberalism takes for granted by defining society as legitimately consisting only of individuals and a state that is largely indifferent to their moral choices, with nothing in between.
What this engenders certainly involves some material dependence on the state, and that is what conservatives often react against, but more significantly it seeks to advance a sense of non-dependence on anyone else—a sense that you don’t need to depend on anyone you know and (perhaps more important) that no one you know needs to depend on you. That is how the welfare state really does encourage failures of responsibility, what we tend to loosely call dependency: If no one depends upon your working when you can and meeting your obligations, you’re simply less likely to do so. This is not quite dependence, and indeed at times it is its opposite. And if your needs are met without a reciprocal obligation on your part to those who help you meet them, you are less likely to be in the habit of work and discipline. This can be even more morally corrosive than mere dependence on the state, because it encourages the illusion of independence, and lifts us out of the layered networks of social obligation and commitment that give a thriving human life its form.
The problem created by the welfare state is thus not best understood as a problem of dependence but as the illusion of an impossible independence—an individualism so radical it renders all human relationships, including our relationships to the weakest and most needy of those around us, into non-binding optional arrangements, ignoring the realities of human life that make it necessary to guard human beings in their most vulnerable moments through an array of unchosen—or at the very least non-optional—obligations, especially in the family. The Left’s statist radical individualism that masquerades as a kind of communitarian collectivism pretends to offer a way for people to act together, but in practice it offers an escape from all mutual dependence and from the neediness of people who are not well positioned to pretend to be utterly autonomous.
Conservatives buy into this confusion when we describe the foremost vice of this system as dependency. Dependency is a fact of the human condition. The denial of that fact, along with the other facts of the human condition, is the characteristic vice of modern liberalism—a denial undertaken by bold assertion in liberalism’s libertarian form and by an exercise of technocratic prowess in its progressive form. Conservatism at its best acts as a restraint on this vice, and a reminder of the basic facts of the human condition. But of course we are not always at our best.
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The Goldberg File
By Jonah Goldberg
May 3, 2013
Dear Reader (including those of you who already saw the outlines of this “news”letter in a piece of toast in a Guadalajara restaurant),
As a pundit at the very top of the B list, or perhaps somewhere to the left of the meaty part of the bell curve of the A list, I'm often asked: Do you want fries with that?
Such exchanges give me special insights into the "real world" as Tom Friedman might say, his hands in the air making "air quotes" around "real world" as he explains to some billionaire Chinese bureaucrat why he is not only a wise man, but a handsome one.
The reason I bring this up is that I thought you might like to see how the sausage gets made -- which sounds a bit like an errant text message from Anthony Weiner.
Well, when I write columns about movies or TV shows, it probably means that I've been travelling a lot and haven't been able to follow the news as much as I'd like.
Hence, my column earlier this week on the movie Oblivion or my NRO piece on The Americans.
Also, when I've been traveling a lot, the news pegs in the G-File are a little dated and the transitions are a bit forced.
Conservatives and the Popular Culture
Speaking of pop culture, dated news pegs, and forced transitions ("I see what you did there" -- the Couch), a couple of weeks ago I was on a panel at Hillsdale College. It was sponsored by my friends at Liberty21, a scrappy new think tank.
The topic: "Can Conservatives Reclaim the Culture?"
First, I am not sure that conservatives ever claimed the culture in the first place. Sure, in retrospect it almost always seems like the past was more conservative than the present. But that doesn't mean the conservatives were dominating the culture in the past. It might mean that we've just gotten even more liberal since then.
But we can debate all that another time. The thing I wanted to get to is that I think the way the Right talks about popular culture is deeply flawed. If conservatives are going to persuade non-conservatives to become more conservative -- which is nearly the whole frickin' point of the conservative movement -- then going around wagging our fingers at every popular movie and TV show is probably not the best way to do it.
One way you persuade people to become more conservative is to explain to them how conservative they already are and build out from there. Persuasion is hard when your main argument is: "You're a complete idiot and everything you think you know is ridiculous and/or evil."
Moreover, there's a Jedi-like Manichaeism running through youthful liberalism: The Light Side is liberal; the Dark Side is conservative. It's like with little kids; tell them some food is good for them or that some dish has vegetables in it, and they'll preemptively hate it and refuse to eat it like a jihadi at Gitmo dodging a spoonful of peach cobbler. Tell college kids that something is conservative and they'll immediately assume it's not for them. We can spend all day talking about how stupid this pose is, but that won't do much for the cause.
The better way is to identify things that are popular and celebrate the conservative aspects of them. For instance, as I've written before, whenever a sitcom character gets pregnant, the producers make sure to talk up the character's "right to choose." But, at least since the painfully unfunny show Maude, the character always chooses to keep the baby, and once she does she acts like a pro-lifer. She talks to the fetus. She cares about what she eats. While NARAL considers what is in her belly to be nothing more than uterine contents, the mother-to-be gives those contents a name and acts like it's already a member of the family. I understand a big part of the pro-life agenda is to make abortion illegal. I get that. But if you could get more people to think abortion is wrong it would A) be easier to make it illegal and B) less necessary to do so.
Or just think about crime. Going by what liberals say they believe about the criminal-justice system, never mind the War on Terror, they should be denouncing vast swaths of what Hollywood churns out. Cops play by their own rules. Good guys use outright torture to get valuable information in order to save lives. But with the exceptions of 24 and Zero Dark Thirty I can't think of a time when the Left seriously complained about any of it.
Now if you point this out to some liberals, they'll say that's because "it's just TV" or "it's just a movie." But you know that if a TV show or movie came out demonizing gays, they'd be screaming bloody murder.
My point is that the Left has quietly surrendered the argument over big chunks of the popular culture, and because they don't complain about it, conservatives don't press our advantage. We spend too much time reacting to liberal bait and liberal cues. We act like the opposition, being more against them than for anything of our own. One small place to start is to understand this is our culture too.
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Some good points but a bit rambling which truthfully I find myself doing when I try to organize a strategy in my mind for Republicans.
But this "One way you persuade people to become more conservative is to explain to them how conservative they already are and build out from there"
is in sync with what Rove et al are getting at when they speak how conservative Latinos are. They are family oriented religious etc. So clearly they are figuring how to reach them as voters from this angle. I just don't know how we can compete with cold hard cash.
I doubt most vote their cultural beliefs anyway. Most of vote our wallets. It is the economy stupid.
I am not saying cold cash is specific to Latinos or any other cultural or ethnic group. It seems to be related to economic class. "The 47 %" whether English Spanish white black red yellow etc. If 47 % pay no fed income tax they will continue to vote for others to pay. So how do we combat that?
But what are the cultural wars? Are we just talking abortion and gay marriage?
Family as the nuclear unit?
Doing to our neighbor as we would like done to us?
How about honesty?
Faithfulness?
Law abiding?
Personal responsibility?
But what does any of this have to do with Democrats confiscating wealth to buy votes? That is the reason most people vote. Isn't that obvious?
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I haven't had a chance to go into these but here are names in a list that I hear about but know little beyond the titles:
http://usconservatives.about.com/od/conservativepolitics101/tp/Top-Conservative-Web-Sites.htm
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I'd like to suggest that the 47% number is a good example of the sort of negativity about which JG is writing. For example, it includes people on Social Security, military and other pensions, etc. i.e. not people who should be smeared as moochers. My understanding is that once such folks are filtered out of the data, the 47% number is way too high and that the actual number is significantly lower.
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Good points Crafty. I think Bobby Jindal alludes to the same thing. You have to love all the people or something like that.
But you bring up other related points. Can we afford for people to continue retiring at early ages? Can we continue spending on benefits? Med and SS account for the lions share so I read.
The whole concept that government should take care of us and that people are entitled is flawed as I think you and most on this board would agree.
How do we fight against the push for more and more. Education should be an entitlement. Health care for all. Birth control. Retirement.
And how can taxpayers, like me, not resent having to pay for all this. I am supposed to love all the people going on the dole?
JG takes the salesman angle. Or how to make friends ..... Or Zig Ziglar type sale. Find something we have in common and win them over. But isn't the lowest price going to win most of the time?
How do we combat envy? When we see Wall Street and Washington and Hollywood rolling in so much money they can't spend it fast enough?
I have no problem with successful, lucky or brilliant people getting rich. I am jealous but I want the chance to do the same. What I do wish for is that the wealthy only get the way by the same rules we all have to put up with. WE know the rules are not the same for many of these folks. I don't need to reiterate how corrupt and dishonest and criminal the entertainment industry is.
I really think the Repblicans can combat class envy better if they would just acknowledge corruption (and not just drugs and mafia and street crime but in politics, in wall street, in media, etc) and make a case that we need to enforce existing rules, we need better white collar crime enforcement etc perhaps we could get over the envy and soak the rich mentality.
I do ramble myself . I could make formulating a more organized plan a full time job. I enjoy brain storming though.
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Given the subject of this thread, my point is focused upon the counter-productive nature of the 47% number, how it affects our thinking, and how it diminishes our persuasiveness with others-- which is JG's point.
Of course we need to redefine "entitlements" and the fraudulent numbers with which they are reported to us need to be stated honestly by generally accepted accounting principles! Still, if anyone on SS, or a military pension, or another pension, hears us define them as a moocher we are being both unfair and unpersuasive.
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My own rambling 2 cents: CCP identified the problem far before Romney butchered it, far too many people are reliant the government. Of those, far too few realize a government check, deserved or undeserved, is dependent on the health and vigor of the private economy and the free market. Liberals make an even more explicit argument: by aiming at the top 1 or 2% to fund it all they are saying the dependent percentage is 98-99%.
Romney mangled together what only has limited overlap. He said there are 47% who just won't consider voting for him. It turns out that number was 51%. And something like 47% or 50% get a check every month from the government.
But the Obama coalition is a large, weird mix: rich elites, young people, Democrat voters with middle incomes, plus the underclass who see themselves as vulnerable and dependent. The people receiving support from the government include a very wide range too, including veterans who earned it, Social Security recipients who paid in their entire working life, government employees who do real work, etc. I would guess that it is 0% who see themselves as taking an undeserved check.
Politically you can't lump together in one statistic, the deserving with the waste, with the innocent people responding to the perverted incentives of our welfare system - and a badly designed welfare system is not the fault of the recipient. You will not win people over by blaming them. So we need to be aware of the CCP Principle, that 50% of families have a direct tie to a government check and this affects voting, but we move forward only by putting the focus on the positive: grow the economy with the policies of economic freedom.
Reagan doubled revenues to the Treasury in the decade of the 1980's. Funding for programs grew similarly. Obama is limiting his own big government spending ideas with his policies that cause economic stagnation.
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http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&load=8371&mpid=84
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In our world of perpetual campaign, while the co-defendants and co-dependents are squirming to shake off the scandal hook, conservatives and Republicans should launch a pro-jobs, nationwide campaign to roll out comprehensive tax reform, regulatory reform and a national free market energy plan, not just be the prosecutors of the corrupt administration.
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Doug,
Sounds good to me.
But how?
The Repubs are divided between the compromisers (establishment types ) and Teaparty types.
And the liberal media keeps pushing the Democratic coalition's social agenda to the front and center :
War on babes
Gays being insulted
illegals are being targeted because the are Latino
illegals have civil rights
Muslims are second class citizens
whites men are devils
etc.
The Democrat machine is controlled by the liberal agenda and seems much more unified in its message. I don't know how or why they are so successful at doing this. They have their talking points that just gets out all over the media and targets the emotions of all there coalition of voters. It is more personal. More emotional. Vote for us because you ARE gay, black, Spanish, single mother, we will get YOU what we need.
Republicans do not seem to be able to match this. First they seem more divided. The establishment compromisers and the Teapartiers. Tax reform, jobs, energy while all true and just, just doesn't have the same coat tugging affect of the lefts more up close and personal messages.
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Getting rid of the IRS via a national sales tax could have considerable appeal , , ,
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Getting rid of the IRS via a national sales tax could have considerable appeal , , ,
Who collects the national sales tax?
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I read in Louisiana Bobby Jindal's poll ratings tanked because he is trying to replace the state income tax with a state sales tax.
I don't know if it would fly nationally.
Same problem for a cross the board flat tax. The same half of the country that pays no tax will immediately and automatically be against this.
OTOH to borrow a re-used quote from Rahm (it was not an original line when he used it), "let no crises go to waste". *Now* seems like as good time as any to bring up tax reform.
Pessimistically I doubt it will have legs. But it is worth a try.
The Repubs have to have a broader more inclusive message about the dangers of the entitlement state and offer the better alternative. While they are trying they not succeeded so far.
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Getting rid of the IRS via a national sales tax could have considerable appeal , , ,
You get rid of the IRS as we know it by repealing the 16th amendment. Adding a national sales tax would be a way to make up some of the difference.
The likelihood that super majorities will support a zero tax rate on the income of the wealthy at this time being zero, the IRS
is not going away. You bring down their excesses by simplifying the laws and having them apply evenly. In this case, a simple reform for 501c3's and c4's might be that income can only be taxed once and to clarify that the first amendment is still valid. In other words, let people spend after-tax income on political speech anytime, any place, in any amount they want in this country.
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I agree with this: "Republicans don't have the argument right."
There are some opinions from the Dems and some from the Repubs. Both are inconsistent and in my view miss the point.
I am close to figuring it out the main concept in my mind though but the consultants are all over the map:
Repubs have the concepts right. They just can't be too right like Cruz. We need more middle of the road candidates who can appeal to groups like Reagan Dems. Didn't we just have that with Romney and McCain? The crats claim they come up with more centrist candidates? Yet Obama is as radical as they come. Yet he publically claims conservative issues and stances but behind the scenes is radical.
I dunno. The DCers still can't figure it out. Brock pulled in his political machine from Chicago. Do the repubs have anything equivalent? (of course more honest would be nice)
****GOP tries to pull off a delicate balancing act
GOP's dilemma: Mitt Romney makes his presidential election concession speech in Boston.
AP Photo: Rick Wilking, Pool. An election postmortem, commissioned by the Republican Party after Mitt Romney's loss last fall, said the GOP 'is increasingly marginalizing itself.'
AP 2 hr ago | By Charles Babington of Associated Press
The Republican Party wants to keep Tea Party die-hards, evangelicals and pro-lifers happy — but it also wants to win elections.
WASHINGTON — The Republican Party, after losing the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections, confronts a dilemma that's easier to describe than solve: How can it broaden its appeal to up-for-grabs voters without alienating its conservative base?
There's no consensus yet on how to do it. With the next election three years away, Republicans are tiptoeing around policy changes even as they size up potential candidates who range from Tea Party heroes to pragmatic governors in Republican- and Democratic-leaning states.
There's a partial road map, but it's more than two decades old, and the other party drafted it. Democrats, sick of losing elections and being tagged as out-of-touch liberals, moved their party toward the center and rallied behind Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton in 1992.
Strategists in both parties say Clinton's achievement, however impressive, may look modest compared with what a Republican leader must do to construct a new winning formula, given the nation's changing demographics.
"Our challenge was to get voters back," said Al From, a chief architect of Clinton's political rise. "Their challenge is harder: get voters to come into a new coalition."
That will be complicated, From said, because the Republicans' conservative base "is more demanding and more important" than the Democrats' liberal base.
An array of Republican campaign veterans agree. They say the party's loyal base of conservative activists — including evangelical Christians, anti-tax crusaders and anti-abortion advocates — is too big, ideological and vital to be treated with anything but great care and respect. Republicans will go nowhere if they lose a hard-core conservative every time they pick up a new unaligned voter with a more moderate message.
While they circle that conundrum, Republican leaders hope for a charismatic nominee in the mold of Clinton or Ronald Reagan. They yearn for someone who can appeal to less-ideological voters without prompting conservatives to feel their principles are losing primacy.
Several veteran strategists say Republicans should focus less on modifying their ideas than on improving their campaign mechanics and finding nominees with broader personal appeal than Mitt Romney, John McCain and Bob Dole.
"The foundation of the party as a conservative party hasn't been the principal liability but the principal asset," said GOP campaign strategist Terry Holt.
"Among every voter group, there are people who share our values," Holt said. The key to winning, he said, is to perform better at "micro-targeting" and other techniques designed to find and motivate potential voters.
In that area, he said, "the other party is about half a light-year ahead of us."
Arizona-based Republican consultant Eddie Mahe said finding a charismatic candidate is more important than tweaking policies. Given Americans' low opinion of politics, he said, "to sell the party as a party is nonsensical."
Instead, Mahe said, Republicans must pick a nominee who appeals "to the nonvoters, disinterested voters, the uninformed — whatever you want to call them — who are attracted to a personality, someone they feel good about."
The Republican who comes closest to that description, he said, is Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a Tea Party favorite. But Mahe said he doubts she could win a general election.
Dan Schnur, a former aide to President George W. Bush who teaches political science at the University of Southern California, said, "Parties don't remake parties. Leaders remake parties."
Schnur agrees that Clinton was a gifted politician, but he also had some help and luck, which Republicans will need, too.
Clinton has acknowledged that Gary Hart began tugging the Democratic Party from its liberal and outdated moorings in 1984 and 1988, even if he eventually fell short of the nomination. And a 1992 candidacy by New York Gov. and liberal hero Mario Cuomo might have doomed Clinton's lean-to-the-center strategy.
Republicans "need a Gary Hart before they get a Bill Clinton," Schnur said. And they may have trouble narrowing the ideological field in the 2016 primary and beyond, which could force the eventual nominee to embrace hard-right principles that excite GOP activists but turn off independent voters.
A 97-page postmortem, commissioned by the Republican Party after Romney's loss last fall, said the GOP "is increasingly marginalizing itself, and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future."
The report emphasized messaging and outreach more than possible changes to policies and proposals. "The party should be proud of its conservative principles," the report said, but it also must be more "welcoming and inclusive" to young voters, minorities and women.
From — who founded the Democratic Leadership Council, a key proponent of Clinton's 1992 agenda — says Republicans are on the wrong track. They must be more open to adjusting their policies, he said, if they want to win presidential elections.
In the early 1990s, From said, "people didn't trust Democrats on the economy, national security, crime, welfare." By pushing welfare reductions, community policing and other new ideas, he said, "we tried to systematically eliminate the obstacles. Republicans have got to do the same thing."
Clinton's 1992 team believed "if you get the argument right, people will vote for us," From said. "Republicans don't have the argument right."
Clinton campaign aide Paul Begala said parties that win presidential elections are "always more mainstream and more unified. Right now, the Republicans are neither."
Begala said liberal activists made only modest complaints about Clinton's shift toward the political center because they were sick of losing elections with nominees such as George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.
He said Republicans might need one more presidential loss to create a similar level of frustration, which can open the way to pragmatism and moderation. Nominating a Tea Party-leaning "true believer" such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas could do the trick, Begala said.
Holt, who has advised numerous GOP campaigns, said Republicans have already learned the lesson. "The most effective remedy for any party is an overdose of defeat," he said. "We've suffered that."
The Republicans' challenge is spelled out in exit polls from President Barack Obama's win over Romney. Nearly two-thirds of Republican voters labeled themselves as conservatives. But fewer than half of all Democratic voters called themselves liberals.
That indicates Democrats are working with a less-ideological, more flexible base, giving a nominee leeway to embrace issues that might attract non-aligned voters in the general election.
Republicans, on the other hand, depend on a more ideological base. That's one reason party leaders — for now, anyway — talk less of modifying party policies and more of changing mechanics, technology and messaging.
"The brand has suffered," Holt said, "but the values have been very consistent."
Associated Press polling director Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.
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A question from Jonah. He doesn't answer it in this piece. But there is an answer. It is the same reason Clinton pretends she is a middle of the roader.
Apparently the country is not truly ready for a communist. So he plays the wolf in sheep's clothing. That coupled with bribing just enough segmentations of the US population with tax money and the left get their agenda through. I think there is only one way to combat this. But so far the Roves et al still don't get it. They simply copy what the Democrats have been doing. Chasing them down the street like me chasing my dog when he gets off his leash.
*****Obama, The Non-Ideologue
By Jonah Goldberg
May 27, 2013 11:05 AM
I know the promotion phase for The Tyranny of Clichés has long since passed. But come on. The core point of my book is that liberals deny they are ideological. Indeed, ideological is a term they reserve for people who disagree with them. Liberalism is just pragmatic and reality-based. To the extent it is even idealistic at all it’s just that it wants to do good and, conveniently enough, whatever liberals want to do this week is the benchmark for what is good.
So here’s E. J. Dionne in what may be as pristine a distillation of liberal conventional wisdom as any I’ve read in a long while. After helpfully reminding the reader that the ranks of Obama’s opponents are teeming with crazy ideologues and racists and dismissing the IRS scandal(s) as wholly unrelated to the conservative brief against Obama, he writes of the president:
He’s an anti-ideological leader in an ideological age, a middle-of-the-road liberal skeptical of the demands placed on a movement leader, a politician often disdainful of the tasks that politics asks him to perform. He wants to invite the nation to reason together with him when nearly half the country thinks his premises and theirs are utterly at odds. Doing so is unlikely to get any easier. But being Barack Obama, he’ll keep trying.
What would be so terrible about simply admitting Obama is an ideologue (just like E. J.)? Making that concession doesn’t require saying Obama is wrong about anything. Dionne et al. could still say Obama is right. They could make the case that his policies are the best. They could still champion — or condemn – his compromises or his “pragmatism” (Ideologues can compromise, too).
But it’s not to be. For liberals, ideology is only something the other guys have. Liberalism is just doing the good and smart thing. If you think the good and smart thing is ideological, that’s just proof you’re a rightwing ideologue (or a racist!). The fact that doing good nearly always requires more government is just a coincidence.
© National Review Online 2013. All Rights Reserved.*****
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Ann Romney -> "breech of trust between government and the people".
Let me say this again. A message that simply points out government is too bid, is too corrupt is NOT a winning message all unto itself. It won't win. This is why Romney did not win. It can't work. Not when we have half the nation getting pay checks in one form or the other from the government. I am not optimistic the Republicans have any chance of figuring this out. The Romneys would be better off giving donations - not speeches. And Barbara Bush is correct. We have had enough Bushes. And I don't want a DA attorney bully like Cristie. We need someone inspiring not a large mouth narcissistic bully.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/ann-romney-obama-scandals-92030.html
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_YQ8560E1w&feature=player_embedded
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Noonan: Privacy Isn't All We're Losing
The surveillance state threatens Americans' love of country.
The U.S. surveillance state as outlined and explained by Edward Snowden is not worth the price. Its size, scope and intrusiveness, its ability to target and monitor American citizens, its essential unaccountability—all these things are extreme.
The purpose of the surveillance is enhanced security, a necessary goal to say the least. The price is a now formal and agreed-upon acceptance of the end of the last vestiges of Americans' sense of individual distance and privacy from the government. The price too is a knowledge, based on human experience and held by all but fools and children, that the gleanings of the surveillance state will eventually be used by the mischievous, the malicious and the ignorant in ways the creators of the system did not intend.
For all we know that's already happened. But of course we don't know: It's secret. Only the intelligence officials know, and they say everything's A-OK. The end of human confidence in a zone of individual privacy from the government, plus the very real presence of a system that can harm, harass or invade the everyday liberties of Americans. This is a recipe for democratic disaster.
If—again, if—what Mr. Snowden says is substantially true, the surveillance state will in time encourage an air of subtle oppression, and encourage too a sense of paranoia that may in time—not next week, but in time, as the years unfold—loosen and disrupt the ties the people of America feel to our country. "They spy on you here and will abuse the information they get from spying on you here. I don't like 'here.' "
Trust in government, historically, ebbs and flows, and currently, because of the Internal Revenue Service, the Justice Department, Benghazi, etc.—and the growing evidence that the executive agencies have been reduced to mere political tools—is at an ebb that may not be fully reversible anytime soon. It is a great irony, and history will marvel at it, that the president most committed to expanding the centrality, power, prerogatives and controls of the federal government is also the president who, through lack of care, arrogance, and an absence of any sense of prudential political boundaries, has done the most in our time to damage trust in government.
But again, you can always, or every four years, hire a new president. The ties you feel to your country are altogether more consequential, more crucial. And this is something we have to watch out for, and it has to do with the word "extreme," more on which in a moment.
How did we get here? You know. In the days after 9/11 all the clamor was for safety. Improve intelligence, find the bad guys, heighten surveillance. The government went to work. It is important to remember that 9/11 coincided almost exactly with the Internet revolution. They happened at pretty much the same time.
In the past 10 years technology sped up, could do more and more—big data, metadata. Capabilities became massive, and menacing.
Our government is not totalitarian. Our leaders, even the worst of them, are not totalitarian. But our technology is totalitarian, or rather it is there and can be used and abused by those whose impulses tend, even unconsciously or unthinkingly, in that direction.
So what's needed? We must realize this is a crucial moment: We either go forward with these programs now or we stop, and think. Some call for a conversation, but what we really need is a debate—a real argument. It will require a new candor from the government as to what the National Security Agency does and doesn't do. We need a new rigor in the areas of oversight and accountability—including explicit limits on what can and should be allowed, accompanied by explicit and even harsh penalties for violations. This debate will also require information that is reliable—that is, true—from the government about what past terrorist attempts have been slowed or stopped by the surveillance state.
The NSA is only one of many recent revelations and events that have the ability to damage the ties Americans feel toward their country. It's not only big stories like the IRS, but stories that have flown mostly below the media's interest. Here is one: There was a doctor in Philadelphia who routinely killed full-term babies for years, and no one wanted to stop him for years. It got out of hand—he was collecting body parts in jars—and he was finally arrested, tried, sent to prison. People who are not extreme—people, forgive me, who are normal—who followed the story watched in a horrified, traumatized wonder. "They have places where they kill kids in America now, and it's kind of accepted." Those who watch closely say there are more such clinics, still up and operating. There's a bill in Congress now to limit abortions after the fifth month, the age at which hospitals can keep babies alive. It's not an extreme proposal, not in the least, but it's probably going nowhere. It's been called anti-woman.
I feel that almost everyone who talks about America for a living—politicians and journalists and even historians—is missing a huge and essential story: that too many things are happening that are making a lot of Americans feel a new distance from, a frayed affiliation with, the country they have loved for half a century and more, the country they loved without every having to think about it, so natural was it.
This isn't the kind of thing that can be quantified in polls—it's barely the kind of thing people admit to themselves. But talk to older Americans—they feel they barely know this country anymore. In governance it's crucial to stay within parameters, it's important not to strain ties, push too far, be extreme. And if you think this does not carry implications for down the road, for our healthy continuance as a nation, you are mistaken. Love keeps great nations going.
Some of the reaction to the NSA story is said to be generational. The young are said not to fear losing privacy, because they never knew it. The middle-aged, who grew up in peace and have families, want safety first, whatever it takes, even excess. Lately for wisdom I've been looking to the old. Go to somebody who's 75 and ask, "So if it turns out the U.S. government is really spying on American citizens and tracking everything they do, is that OK with you?" They'll likely say no, that's not what we do in America.
The other day on Fox News Channel I saw 79-year-old Eugene Cernan, an Apollo astronaut. Mr. Cernan's indignation about the state of things was so sincere, so there. China had just blasted into space, bringing its pride and sense of nationhood with it. America doesn't do that anymore, said Mr. Cernan, we're not achieving big things. Now we go nowhere.
The interviewer, Neil Cavuto, threw in a question about the spying.
Yes, we're under attack, said Mr. Cernan, but "we can handle it," we can go after "the bad guys" without hurting "the good guys," you can't give up your own liberty and your own freedom.
Exactly how a lot of us feel about it, rocket man.
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Using M. Obamster's line "I am not proud of my country".
(she hasn't seemed to mind it now)
Lets trash the USA. Lets give it away to the world. Lets trash individual responsibility. Freedom. Privacy. Family. Oh that sounds like a great world the liberals are building.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/what-if-you-had-to-earn-american-citizenship/309398/
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http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2013/06/27/how-will-america-hold-together-n1628162/page/full
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Off of Yahoo political news this AM. This guy is some sort of pollster or political scientist? This says nothing. Does not get to the core problems and as always there is the eternal plug that Republicans can simply not get over "their hatred of Obama". If Republican politicians are listening to these kinds of consultants than it is obvious why they cannot win. I could write circles around this guy. I agree with Rush. Our leaders cannot be this "stupid". It has to be about the money. Like all else in the world. Republicans politicians are on the hook. LIke Armstrong said about biking, "you cannot win the Tour" without doping. One cannot stay in power in Washington without having to play the money game. Just won't happen. As for this article it reportedly answers why Americans are divided. After reading the article I see no answer listed. Yet this headline Yahoo news. Again this stuff gets headlines and as always there is the bash against Republicans slipped in there. I have to wonder if this part of the media propaganda machine from the left?
*****Why Americans Are Divided Between Two Political Parties
National Journal
Charlie Cook 5 hours ago
After President Obama’s rather comfortable victory over Mitt Romney last November, some Democrats thought the president could defy the laws of political gravity. They are now disappointed. So are Republicans who thought that controversies over Benghazi, the Internal Revenue Service, and domestic surveillance would bring Obama’s approval ratings crashing down into the 30s, if not the 20s, as has happened with some second-term presidents. Obama’s approval numbers have been on a very gradual decline and are now at the political equilibrium point where equal numbers of Americans approve and disapprove.
In Gallup polling the week of June 17-23, 46 percent approved and disapproved of Obama’s performance. If you take an average of the most recent polls by ABC News/Washington Post, CBS News/New York Times, CNN, Fox News, Pew Research, and NBC News/Wall Street Journal, all conducted either this month or last, Obama’s approval is a point higher, 47 percent, with a disapproval of, you guessed it, 47 percent. This puts Obama’s job-approval rating at basically the same place as George W. Bush’s at this point in his second term and behind the 55 percent and 58 percent levels where Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan were, respectively, at this stage.
The good news for Obama is that the economy is getting better. The bad news is that Washington and much of the news coverage in recent weeks have been focused on just about everything but the economy.
Of course, Republicans not only want to see Obama’s numbers drop but their party’s favorability ratings climb. So far, that hasn’t happened. Gallup polling shows that the percentage of Americans viewing the Republican Party favorably has been declining since the beginning of 2011. Most recently, in a June 1-4 poll, 39 percent rated the party favorably, 53 percent unfavorably, compared with 46 percent who saw the Democratic Party favorably and 48 percent unfavorably (which is certainly nothing for Democrats to cheer about). The other two major national polls asking about party ratings in the past two months indicated that the GOP’s brand damage has continued. The Pew Research Center pegged Democrats with 51/45 favorable/unfavorable ratings, in contrast to Republicans’ 39/53 ratings. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll put Democrats at 39/37 and Republicans at 32/41. Average the three polls together, and 45 percent gave Democrats a favorable rating and 43 percent unfavorable, compared with 37 percent with favorable views of the Republican Party and 50 percent unfavorable.
Even stipulating for a moment that the Republican brand is badly damaged, we can’t say that this will be the determining factor in the 2014 midterm elections. We know that in recent years the kinds of voters who have boosted Democrats in presidential years have a track record of staying home in midterms. Even some Democrats totally enamored with Obama are unlikely to show up and vote for a congressional candidate whom they don’t know.
Another potentially important issue is the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare.” Unquestionably health care, aided by a weak economy, was most responsible for Democrats in 2010 losing their House majority and a half-dozen seats in the Senate. In 2009 and 2010, during the height of the health care debate, some people decided that Obama’s proposal was terrific, many thought it was terrible, while still others were ambivalent. Few minds were changed in either direction during 2011 or 2012.
But what about 2013 and 2014, as more elements become operative? The Kaiser Family Foundation’s health tracking poll asks about current attitudes toward the health care law. At the moment, 35 percent have a favorable impression of the law, 43 percent have an unfavorable impression, and 23 percent remain undecided. Equally important, twice as many Americans, 30 percent, have a “very unfavorable” view, compared with just 15 percent who have a “very favorable” one. Indeed, the people who don’t like the ACA hate it (30 percent very unfavorable, 13 percent somewhat unfavorable), but the people who like it don’t necessarily love it (15 percent very favorable, 20 percent somewhat favorable). In recent months the unfavorable share has been gradually increasing, and the favorable share has been in a slow slide, although nothing earth-shattering. The key is those undecided in the middle, many of whom are cross-pressured on the issue. They may think we needed to do something about the affordability and access of health care, but they aren’t sure whether this law was the right way to do it.
The thing that makes it difficult for Republicans to capitalize on the ACA issue is that many in the party are so blinded by their hate for Obama and Obamacare that only the word “repeal” comes out of their mouths. This is something that is virtually impossible to achieve unless Republicans get at least 60 seats in the Senate, which is very unlikely to happen anytime soon. Smarter Republicans would say that “we need to fix Obamacare,” or that “we need to make changes to the law so it won’t screw up health care.” These sorts of arguments are more likely to resonate with voters outside of the party’s conservative base (keeping in mind that only 35 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservatives—25 percent are liberal, 40 percent moderate, according to the 2012 exit polls, roughly the same as in other national polls).
So, at the halfway point of 2013, we’re at a place where we still don’t know what the dominant theme will be in the 2014 midterm elections, and that probably won’t change until this fall, at the earliest.****
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It is this fact, that most Americans have no savings and live paycheck to paycheck that threatens this country, freedom from tyranny and the Republican party more than anything else in my very humble opinion. Whichever party can address this concern of the vast majority of Americans will win. So far the crats win because they offer taxpayer money to support people who are struggling. The Republicans still do not, don't even seem to be thinking correctly in these terms, are split in calculating they have to compromise, or completely not compromise. Both of these approaches are off base.
When people are living paycheck to paycheck who do you think they are going to vote for? The party that offers them public assistance or the party that preaches things like "constitution", freedom, lower taxes, jobs, jobs, jobs. All of the latter miss the mark. They are all correct but they alone are not the right message.
"They who answer this shall have all the power". Verse 1 from ccp.
So far the crats do the job. Of course at great harm to taxpayers and the country as a whole but for those living from paycheck to paycheck the rest is all back seat stuff.
"He who answers this will get the independents, more minorities, more races, maybe a few single mothers. As for gays who knows and who cares." Verse 2 ccp
http://rare.us/story/76-of-americans-live-paycheck-to-paycheck/
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By Robert D. Kaplan
A half-century ago, I was a little boy on a trip with my parents from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio, to visit relatives. We crossed Pennsylvania on the recently completed Pennsylvania Turnpike. Pennsylvania from the New Jersey border to the Ohio border was vast, with the magnificent Alleghany range, a subset of the Appalachians, in the broad middle of the state, heralded by the Blue Mountain tunnel. The interstate highway system built under President Dwight Eisenhower was gleaming and exotic back then, with lovely rest stops with real restaurants where you were waited on at tables -- not the slummy fast-food joints that disgrace rest stops today.
At one rest stop I picked up a collection of travel articles, written in easy Reader's Digest style, suited for my age. There was a story about a family driving west and stopping for breakfast somewhere in Nebraska, anticipating the sight of the Rocky Mountains where they were headed. "You have to earn the Rockies," the father said, "by driving through the flat Midwest." Earn the Rockies is a phrase that has stayed with me my whole life: It sums up America's continental geography – and by inference, why America is a world power. It summed up my yearning to travel and see mountains even higher than the Appalachians in Pennsylvania. Finally in 1970, when I was 18, I hitchhiked across America from New York to Oregon and spent a summer roaming the Rocky Mountains.
When my family made that trip a half-century ago, Alaska and Hawaii were new states admitted to the union only the year before. The United States now reached halfway across the Pacific, and yet in 1960 it still thought of itself as a continental nation, stretching from sea to shining sea. Nevertheless, if you were a Hawaiian, you thought of the continental United States as "the mainland." And if you were an Alaskan, it was "the lower 48." The term lower 48 always rang a bell for me, signifying as it did the contiguous 48 states that completed the temperate zone of North America between Canada and Mexico. Arizona was the 48th state, admitted to the union only in 1912. Until then, and throughout the 19th century, ever since the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, American presidents administered the West or parts of it as imperial overlords: governing places as territories that were not as yet states.
Indeed, the entire operating myth of American nationhood has had an east-to-west orientation. America's continental geography was perfectly appointed for gradual westering settlement. The original 13 colonies huddled around many natural, deep-water Atlantic harbors, with the Appalachians as a western boundary. Passes through the Appalachians enabled the pioneers to enter the Midwest, where a flat panel of rich farmland -- and the back-breaking labor required for it to bear crops, and to clear the forests on it -- ground down the various North European immigrant communities into a distinctive American culture. By the time the water-starved Great Plains and the Rockies beckoned forth another generation of settlers, the Transcontinental Railroad was at hand to complete the story of nation-building unto the Pacific.
Of course, the Rockies emblemized this whole saga: their sheer beauty and majesty helped make Americans feel that they were a special people, ordained to do great things; the utter height of these mountains provided settlers with the supreme logistical challenge. The Rockies are a signal example of how a physical environment can mold a people's character.
In fact, had the United States been settled from west to east, from California directly into the water-starved tableland of Nevada and Arizona, it is possible that the country would have begun as an oligarchy or some such authoritarian regime, in order to strictly administer water rights. This is partly the background to such great books of sea to shining sea nationhood as Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954) and Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert (1986). In a larger sense, the story of earning the Rockies is chronicled in such epics as Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Plains (1931) and Bernard DeVoto's lyrical trilogy of westward expansion, The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943), Across the Wide Missouri (1947) and The Course of Empire (1952). DeVoto wrote those books during World War II and some of the darkest days of the Cold War. Yet, by concentrating on the Rocky Mountains and all that they represented, he told Americans why they were great. DeVoto's prose, like the music of Stephen Foster -- of which DeVoto writes about so eloquently -- catches at dead center the very energy of Manifest Destiny.
DeVoto, repeating Henry David Thoreau's dictum, advised Americans that, metaphorically, they "must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe." DeVoto never left North America his whole life. He was not an isolationist but a geopolitical thinker who understood the continental basis of American power.
That continental basis is subtly shifting. I may be of the last generation that sees the United States in terms of its east-to-west historic geography of Manifest Destiny. Americans today do not take horses or trains, drive, ride buses or hitchhike across the continent. They fly. Our airports have been the new bus stations. Americans no longer experience the exhilaration of seeing the front range of the Rockies after crossing the flat prairie and Great Plains. They experience much less the regional diversity of the United States, as McDonald's and Starbucks deface the urban landscape. Our towns and small cities with their refreshing provincial aura have been transformed into vast, suburban conurbations, each integrally connected to the global economy. Cosmopolitanism is no longer restricted to the coasts. That is a good thing, even as something special has been lost.
Expansion of the Panama Canal and Global Shipping
At the same time, our southern border beckons more importantly than ever. The combined populations of Mexico and Central America have risen to half that of the United States and will go higher, as the average person south of the border is almost a decade younger than the average American. While Mexican drug cartels partly dominate substantial territory in northern Mexico, Mexico may be on its way to becoming one of the world's top 10 economies, with plans by some in Mexico City to connect more ports on the Atlantic and Pacific with more efficient road and rail networks. Meanwhile, the widening of the Panama Canal within the next two years may put a new economic emphasis on the Greater Caribbean, from America's Gulf Coast to northern South America. Latin history is certainly moving north, as the destiny of North America goes from being east-to-west to north-to-south.
The east-west, sea to shining sea world of my childhood and youth was a world of the Industrial Age nation-state, with all of its chill-up-your-spine myths. The north-south world will be one of globalization, as the United States dissolves into a larger planetary geography, where its epic pioneering past will be relevant only to the degree it helps America compete economically.
The lower 48 made Americans what they are -- a people of the frontier, forever seeking to earn the Rockies. The degree to which Americans can spiritually hold on to that geography will help them cross the new frontiers ahead.
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This is What Budget Cuts Have Done to Detroit ... And It's Freaking Awesome
Robert Taylor
This is What Budget Cuts Have Done to Detroit ... And It's Freaking Awesome
The language of budget cuts, austerity, and sequestration seem to dominate the media's landscape these days, instilling fear into Americans of vital government services being cut and chaos ensuing if governments aren't allowed to spend and borrow infinitely. Conservatives decry supposed cuts to the military-industrial-complex, and liberals bemoan that without government welfare transfer programs, there would be social Darwinism. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) even blamed the Benghazi scandal on — wait for it — budget cuts and the sequester.
Leaving aside the details on whether the U.S. budget is actually shrinking, one needs to look no further than the city of Detroit to find the spontaneous order, civic cooperation, and peaceful market forces that take over when government simply isn't around.
Detroit is absolutely bankrupt. The city faces a cash shortfall of more than $100 million by June 30. Long-term liabilities, including pensions, exceed $14 billion. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder wants to bail out Detroit's city government even further. Thanks to the financial situation of Detroit, emergency services like police and fire departments are being severely cut short. 911 is only taking calls during business hours. Homes have been abandoned making parts of the city look like a ghost town.
If our public servants are right and wouldn't dare lie and try to scare us, then chaos, anarchy and lawlessness should reign in Detroit now, right? Well, not exactly.
Dale Brown and his organization, the Threat Management Center (TMC), have helped fill in the void left by the corrupt and incompetent city government. Brown started TMC in 1995 as a way to help his fellow Detroit citizens in the midst of a rise in home invasions and murders. While attempting to assist law enforcement, he found little but uninterested officers more concerned with extracting revenue through traffic tickets and terrorizing private homes with SWAT raids than protecting person and property.
In an interview with Copblock.org, Brown explains how and why his private, free market policing organization has been so successful. The key to effective protection and security is love, says Brown, not weapons, violence, or law. It sounds a bit corny, yes, but the results speak for themselves.
Almost 20 years later and Detroit's financial mess even more apparent, TMC now has a client base of about 1,000 private residences and over 500 businesses. Thanks to TMC's efficiency and profitability, they are also able to provide free or incredibly low-cost services to the poor as well.
The reasons TMC has been so successful is because they take the complete opposite approach that government agencies, in this case law enforcement, do. Brown's philosophy is that he would rather hire people who see violence as a last resort, and the handful of Detroit police officers who actually worked with Brown in the earlier years and have an interest in genuine protection now work for TMC. While governments threaten their citizens with compulsion, fines, and jail if they don't hand over their money, TMC's funding is voluntary and subject to the profit-loss test; if Brown doesn't provide the services his customers want, he goes out of business.
This means that Brown is not interested in no-knock para-military SWAT raids, "officer safety" as the highest priority, bloated union pensions, or harassing people for what they have in their bloodstream. TMC works with its customers on the prevention of crime as well rather than showing up after the fact to take notes like historians.
The heroic Brown and TMC are a great example of how the market and civil society can and do provide services traditionally associated with the state far better, cheaper and more in tune to people's wants and needs. I have always believed policing, protection and security are far too important to be run by the state — especially in age of militarized Stormtroopers — and Brown is helping show why.
Law enforcement isn't the only "essential government service" that the private sector is taking over and flourishing in. The Detroit Bus Company (DBC) is a private bus service that began last year and truly shows a stark contrast in how the market and government operates. Founded by 25-year-old Andy Didorosi, the company avoids the traditionally stuffy, cagey government buses and uses beautiful vehicles with graffiti-laden exterior designs that match the heart of the Motor City. There are no standard bus routes; a live-tracking app, a call or a text is all you need to get picked up in one of their buses run on soy-based biofuel. All the buses feature wi-fi, music, and you can even drink your own alcohol on board! The payment system is, of course, far cheaper and fairer.
Comparing this company's bus service to say, my local San Francisco MUNI transit experience, is like comparing the services of local, free-range, organic farms in the Bay Area to the Soviet bread lines.
Not surprisingly, the city government, which has no time to protect its citizens, does manage to find the time to harass peaceful citizens in this spontaneous, market order. Charles Molnar and a couple of other students from the Detroit Enterprise Academy wanted to help make benches for the city's bus stops, where long-waits are the norm, equipped with bookshelves to hold reading material.
Detroit Department of Transportation officials quickly said the bench was "unapproved" and had it taken down. Silly citizens, don't you know only governments can provide these services?
The TMC and the DBC are just two of the larger, more visible examples of the market and voluntary human cooperation reigning in Detroit. "Food rebels," running local community gardens, are an alternative to Big Agriculture and government-subsidized factory farms. Private parking garages are popping up. Detroit residents are using Lockean homesteading principles to repurpose land amongst the rubble of the Fed-induced housing bubble. Community events like Biergartens and large, civic dining gatherings (with no permits or licenses!) are being organized privately. Even Detroit's artists are beginning to reflect this anarchic, peaceful movement in their artwork.
Detroit's city government may be in shambles financially, but the citizens of Detroit are showing what happens when people are given their liberty back. For centuries, libertarians have been arguing for strict limits on state power, the benefits of private, civic society, and the bottom-up, spontaneous order that arises where free markets and voluntary interactions dominate. Perhaps we shouldn't be so scared and sicken with political Stockholm Syndrome the next time politicos fear-monger over budgets cuts.
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The American Dream Is Alive And Well
By DICK MORRIS
Published on DickMorris.com on July 23, 2013
It may seem as if the poor remain poor, the rich stay rich, and the middle class has nowhere to go. It may appear as if we are not doing as well as our parents did. But each of these statements is disproven by a new study issued by Pew University. Instead, Pew found a churning with the rich moving down and the poor moving up in about equal numbers. It is as easy to escape the poverty of the bottom fifth as it is to fall out of the wealth of the top fifth. 57% of the bottom quintile -- the poor -- move out of poverty after twenty years while 60% of the top quintile -- the rich -- fall out in the same period.
Pew conducted a twenty year study of upward and downward mobility in our economy. It traced a sample of Americans from the mid eighties and early nineties through the end of last decade to measure their ups and downs in income and wealth. It also compared where they ended up with where their parents left off in order to determine generational upward or downward mobility.
The study found that 84% of Americans earn more at this point in their lives than their parents did in inflation adjusted dollars. And, it found an incredible amount of upward and downward changes in income over the twenty year period. Predictably, race and educational levels played a large part in the results. But the volatility of the upward and downward movements suggest an economy in flux rather than one stuck behind European-like class barriers.
The study divided Americans into five income bands for each 20% of the population. For our purposes, we'll call the 0 to 20% band the "poor" (even though the actual poverty rate is only 15%). The next band -- 20% to 40% -- we'll call "almost poor." The middle band -- 40% to 60% -- we'll call "middle income." The fourth band -- 60% to 80% -- lets label "near rich" and above 80% we'll call "rich."
The poor will average below $20,000 in household income. The almost poor will run from about $20,000 to $40,000. The middle will have a household income of $40,000 - $60,000 (median household income is about $50,000). The near rich will range from $60,000 - $80,000 and the rich will be above $80,000 (although they may not feel rich).
Of those who grew up in poverty, 57% have succeeded in leaving that condition twenty years later. 43% remain poor. 27% of the once poor become almost poor. 17% become middle income, 9% rise to near rich and 4% are truly rags-to-riches going from the bottom to the top in twenty years.
Mobility is also great for the almost poor. After 20 years, a quarter (24%) falls backwards into poverty. 20% remain almost poor. But a healthy 56% move up the ladder, a third into the rich and near rich categories.
For the rich, staying there is no assured thing. Of those who were in the top quintile (rich), only 40% stayed there twenty years later. 22% fell back to near rich but 18% fell down to poverty or near poverty.
So, if you are down, there is a better than even chance of going up. And if you are up, there is a better than even chance of dropping down!
Race had a lot to do with what happens to you. Half of blacks (53%) as opposed to a third of whites (33%) who were raised in the bottom of family income stayed there. And 56% of the blacks who spent their childhood in the middle income range fell back to poverty or near poverty compared to just 32% of whites.
And education was a key variable. Among those who were poor as children, 47% remained poor if they had no four year college degree. But only 10% stayed poor if they had one.
Geographically, the center for upward income mobility shifted away from the Sunbelt and the west coast to the northeast. The internationalization of the economy in New York and the surrounding area has lifted incomes and mobility prospects while the rest of the nation languished. Eight states -- six in the northeast -- had above average upward income mobility: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan and Utah. The southeast, once the growth center of the nation, languished behind as did the west coast.
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http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/stop-being-afraid-and-intimidated-by-liberals-islamic-terrorist-supporters?f=must_reads
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http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/stop-being-afraid-and-intimidated-by-liberals-islamic-terrorist-supporters?f=must_reads
Punch back twice as hard.
At least one is busy trying to shore up her husband's mayoral campaign, so her service to the MB must be suffering. Jihad ain't easy.....
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http://pjmedia.com/blog/a-fight-that-had-to-happen/
On the surface, the Christie-King-establishment vs. Paul-Cruz-libertarian donnybrook that has broken out over the last few days is about national security — specifically, the NSA snooping programs. In truth, national security is but the trigger to a much broader discussion that needs to happen. The fault lines that have developed over the last decade in the GOP have divided the party on spending, taxes, the size and role of government, immigration, gay rights, and America’s place in a changing world.
In short, the Republican Party is in the process of reinventing itself. And the debate now underway between the two dominant strains of conservative thought will not only determine the future of the Republican Party, but also have a great impact on who will be the GOP standard bearer in 2016.
Perhaps the biggest story in Republican politics in 2013 has been the rise of the libertarian right in the Senate and the man who has shown genuine leadership ability in facilitating that rise. Rand Paul has stepped into a leadership void created by the ineffectiveness of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and altered the tone and tenor of Senate debates. The power axis of Paul, Mike Lee of Utah, and Ted Cruz of Texas has given Senate Republicans something they haven’t had in years: voices that speak with a passion and coherence about principles while pushing a recognizable, consistent agenda.
It should come as no surprise that traditional, establishment conservatives would find a way to fight back. But Chris Christie as the messenger? The Northeast Republican has the credentials, but would hardly be the first choice of most establishmentarians. Despite still being mentioned as a possible candidate in 2016, many rank-and-file Republicans have virtually abandoned Christie, given his embrace of President Obama just days before the 2012 election and his apostate views on gun control and immigration reform.
But Christie may not feel he’s dead yet. Speaking at the Aspen Institute on a panel with other GOP governors, the New Jersey governor came down hard on Senator Paul and other libertarians for their opposition to the NSA surveillance programs.
As a former prosecutor who was appointed by President George W. Bush on Sept. 10, 2001, I just want us to be really cautious, because this strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now and making big headlines, I think, is a very dangerous thought.
Did he mean Rand Paul specifically?
You can name any number of people and he’s one of them. These esoteric, intellectual debates — I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation. And they won’t, because that’s a much tougher conversation to have.
Accusing the libertarians of being soft on terrorism exposes Paul’s main vulnerability. Indeed, the whole non-interventionist strain that runs through the libertarian right goes far beyond defending civil liberties and envisions a world with a greatly reduced role for America, a reduced military — indeed a revolutionary change in the national-security state.
Christie’s attack was followed by a similar assault from Representative Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and a politician desperately looking for an issue to ride to the Republican nomination in 2016.
The New Yorker didn’t pull any punches:
“To me the overriding concern here has to be national defense, national security, and not be apologizing for America,” King said. “When you have Rand Paul actually comparing [Edward] Snowden to Martin Luther King, Jr., or Henry David Thoreau, this is madness. This is the anti-war left wing Democrats of the 1960s that nominated George McGovern and destroyed their party for almost twenty years. I don’t want that happening to our party.”
To accuse Paul of virtually “blaming America first” (and to mention George McGovern in the same breath) is to throw down the gauntlet to the libertarians on issues that have defined the Republican Party for more than 40 years — unflinching support for national defense and a strong, aggressive foreign policy that puts America first.
For the knockout blow, King used the “I” word to describe Paul and the libertarian tribe:
“I thought it was absolutely disgraceful that so many Republicans voted to defund the NSA program, which has done so much to protect our country,” King said. “This is an isolationist streak that is in our party. It goes totally against the party of Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush. We are party of national defense, we’re a party who did so much to protect the country over the last few years.”
What the NSA program has to do with isolationism, King doesn’t say. But if there is anything that is going to keep the libertarians from rising to dominance in the Republican Party, it is the sense that they wish to take the GOP back to the days of Robert Taft and his brand of non-interventionist foreign policy. Taft opposed aid to the allies prior to our entrance into World War II. After the war, he opposed the U.S. joining alliances such as NATO, opposed U.S. participation in the UN, and generally felt that Fortress America, protected by the two great oceans, could afford us the security we needed.
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It is the Upper Midwest, the 'Rust Belt', one might confuse Wisconsin for Michigan, and Wisconsin's worst city Milwaukee no doubt has all the makings of the problems of Detroit, yet now the so-called dairy state is one of America's 5 fastest growing state economies.
Who knew? The voters. Twice.
Shrinking the size and scope of government is not an exciting, Hyde Park, Yes We Can agenda, but it does serve to re-energize the economy.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/5/the-wisconsin-model/
EDITORIAL: The Wisconsin model
Hard work and no more free rides for anyone
By THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Monday, August 5, 2013
The nation’s governors met in Milwaukee over the weekend to share tips about what to do to make their states better. Some of the governors had more to tell than others, but few more than Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin. He’s showing the rest of the nation what an actual economic recovery looks like.
Mr. Walker talked of the numbers from the Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia that put his state among the top five in economic growth. “We know that employers want stability, and while we can’t control all of the factors affecting job creation, this ranking is another sign that the work we are doing is improving the business climate in the state,” he said.
The results in Wisconsin were wrought by neither coincidence nor luck. Wisconsin earned them. The state’s voters made a conscious and distinct choice to break from the failed public policies of the past. Before Mr. Walker assumed office in 2011, public-sector unions ruled Madison, carving for themselves golden pension plans that nobody else had and Wisconsin couldn’t pay for, swelling the deficit to $3.6 billion. Unlike many of his colleagues, Republican or Democrat, Mr. Walker was willing to wager his own future to say no to greedy unions. Voters explicitly endorsed Mr. Walker’s agenda when they voted against recalling him, and by a comfortable margin.
This enrages liberals in a solid blue state with a large union membership. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. Lizz Winstead, co-creator of the “Daily Show,” appeared on Al Jazeera’s new American television network last week and her bile exploded. “I hate Scott Walker really down to the core of my being,” she said. Chanting demonstrators gathered in the Capitol rotunda for a “singing protest” against the new era of responsible budgeting.
Mr. Walker took away the free ride for state employees. They must now pay half of the contribution to their pension and 12.6 percent of the cost of their health insurance. Abuse of overtime, used to fatten prospective pensions, was eliminated. The changes added up to $1.9 billion in savings, and much of it was returned to taxpayers. So far this session, the Wisconsin legislature has approved across-the-board tax cuts, a manufacturing tax credit and a reduction in unnecessary regulation.
Before Mr. Walker took office, only 1 of every 10 businessmen said the state was headed in the right direction. Last month, more than 9 of 10 CEOs said in a survey by the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce trade association that they like where Wisconsin is headed. President Obama would cheer for numbers like that.
America’s economic future depends on local, state and federal legislators taking the lesson that good business is good for America. The Wisconsin model can work in other states. Washington could learn from it, too. They only have to try it.
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Some interesting historical background in this piece:
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The Tea Party’s Path to Irrelevance
By JAMES TRAUB
Published: August 6, 2013 218 Comments
WASHINGTON — THE Tea Party has a new crusade: preventing illegal immigrants from gaining citizenship, which they say is giving amnesty to lawbreakers. Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, recently told Politico that his members were “more upset about the amnesty bill than they were about Obamacare.”
They’re so upset, in fact, that Republican supporters of immigration reform, like Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have become marked men in their party, while House Republicans have followed the Tea Party lead by refusing to even consider the Senate’s bipartisan reform plan.
Tea Partyers often style themselves as disciples of Thomas Jefferson, the high apostle of limited government. But by taking the ramparts against immigration, the movement is following a trajectory that looks less like the glorious arc of Jefferson’s Republican Party than the suicidal path of Jefferson’s great rivals, the long-forgotten Federalists, who also refused to accept the inexorable changes of American demography.
The Federalists began as the faction that supported the new Constitution, with its “federal” framework, rather than the existing model of a loose “confederation” of states. They were the national party, claiming to represent the interests of the entire country.
Culturally, however, they were identified with the ancient stock of New England and the mid-Atlantic, as the other major party at the time, the Jeffersonian Republicans (no relation to today’s Republicans), were with the South.
The Federalists held together for the first few decades, but in 1803 the Louisiana Purchase — Jefferson’s great coup — drove a wedge between the party’s ideology and its demography. The national party was suddenly faced with a nation that looked very different from what it knew: in a stroke, a vast new territory would be opened for colonization, creating new economic and political interests, slavery among them.
“The people of the East can not reconcile their habits, views and interests with those of the South and West,” declared Thomas Pickering, a leading Massachusetts Federalist.
Every Federalist in Congress save John Quincy Adams voted against the Louisiana Purchase. Adams, too, saw that New England, the cradle of the revolution, had become a small part of a new nation. Change “being found in nature,” he wrote stoically, “cannot be resisted.”
But resist is precisely what the Federalists did. Fearing that Irish, English and German newcomers would vote for the Jeffersonian Republicans, they argued — unsuccessfully — for excluding immigrants from voting or holding office, and pushed to extend the period of naturalization from 5 to 14 years.
Leading Federalists even plotted to “establish a separate government in New England,” as William Plumer, a senator from Delaware, later conceded. (The plot collapsed only when the proposed military leader, Aaron Burr, killed the proposed political guide, Alexander Hamilton.)
The Federalists later drummed out Adams, who voted with the Jeffersonian Republicans to impose an embargo on England in retaliation for English harassment of American merchant ships and impressment of American sailors. This was the foreshadowing moment of the War of 1812, which the Anglophile Federalists stoutly opposed.
Finally, in the fall of 1814, the Federalists convened the Hartford Convention to vote on whether to stay in or out of the Union. By then even the hotheads realized how little support they had, and the movement collapsed. And the Federalists, now scorned as an anti-national party, collapsed as well.
Contrast that defiance with Jefferson’s Republicans, who stood for decentralized government and the interests of yeoman farmers, primarily in the coastal South.
They ruled the country from 1801 to 1825, when they were unseated by Adams — who, after splitting with the Federalists, had joined with a breakaway Republican faction.
In response, Jefferson’s descendants, known as the Old Radicals, did exactly what the Federalists would not do: they joined up with the new Americans, many of them immigrants, who were settling the country opened up by the Louisiana Purchase.
Their standard-bearer in 1828, Andrew Jackson, favored tariffs and “internal improvements” like roads and canals, the big-government programs of the day. The new party, known first as the Democratic-Republicans, and then simply as the Democrats, thrashed Adams that year. (Adams’s party, the National Republicans, gave way to the Whigs, which in turn evolved into the modern Republican Party.)
Today’s Republicans are not likely to disappear completely, like the Federalists did. But Republican leaders like Mr. Rubio and Mr. Graham understand that a party that seeks to defy demography, relying on white resentment toward a rising tide of nonwhite newcomers, dooms itself to permanent minority status. Opposing big government is squarely in the American grain; trying to hold back the demographic tide is quixotic. Professional politicians do not want to become the party of a legacy class.
The problem is that the Tea Party is not a party, and its members are quite prepared to ride their hobbyhorse into a dead end. And many Republicans, at least in the House, seem fully prepared to join them there, and may end up dragging the rest of the party with them.
The example of those early days shows that American political parties once knew how to adapt to a changing reality. It is a lesson many seem to have forgotten.
James Traub, a columnist at foreignpolicy.com, is writing a biography of John Quincy Adams.
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So I guess those that waited in line, sometimes for decades were stupid. Respecting US law is for suckers. Want to come to America, hire a coyote!
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http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/08/07/its-data-stupid-gop-cant-let-loyalty-and-power-trump-innovation/
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http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/08/07/its-data-stupid-gop-cant-let-loyalty-and-power-trump-innovation/
True, but what is the Republican equivalent of the Obama-Dem 'data mining' of 50 million food stamp recipients?
First R's will need to data mine the Dem data mine and blow the whistle on the operations that ran outside of the law.
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Yes, but isn't there much that the Reps can and should be doing to identify and connect with voters of their own?
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Yes, but isn't there much that the Reps can and should be doing to identify and connect with voters of their own?
Absolutely! Both of these groups have exceptions and overlap but I believe the opposite of a (long term) welfare recipient is a property owner in America. Conservatives should identify, track and communicate with every voter who owns every parcel in the country. (Someone should reach out to Martial Artists too, who tend to have a strong sense of individual rights, responsibilities and self reliance!)
And as we agreed before the last election, the challenge is in the clarity of the message. Instead, the last contest was fought in a thick fog of economic war. Screwups and sidetracks like perception of accepting apathy toward rape victims and building car elevators when we should be building voter databases cost us dearly, and perhaps permanently.
Now the focus is on in-fighting, Gov. Christy vs. Sen Rand Paul, for example, Powerline vs. Marco Rubio, everyone vs. Boehner. No reader of the newspaper in our town would have any ideas what conservatives, economic libertarians or smaller government advocates stand for. Just people who hate others and oppose progress. They even hate themselves.
The focus needs to be on areas of agreement, not our differences. Short, clear messages of what direction the country needs to turn to survive and succeed are a part of the answer IMHO.
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There is still reason to hope and fight for a better day. Here is one small example of why:
http://thehill.com/video/in-the-news/318031-conservatives-praise-liberal-actor-ashton-kutcher-for-touting-value-of-hard-work
BTW, Ashton is a student of Rigan Machado and Rigan introduced us to each other at a party. What a gentleman! Spoke to me like a real human being as he pummeled a bit a poolside with Rigan. He even came over to me as he was leaving to say "Nice meeting you" :-o 8-) 8-)
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Second post
A bit of humor here:
http://happyplace.someecards.com/24470/a-love-letter-to-the-nsa-agent-who-is-monitoring-my-online-activity
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https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=577594088928426&set=vb.100000335216866&type=2&theater
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This could go under race etc but I feel it fits better here as a good argument that Blacks should strongly consider coming back to the party of opportunity (Lincoln) and leave the party of stagnation and serfdom (Obama).
Instead we here the usual race bating propaganda at the 50 anniversary of MLK>
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Is Obama Good for Black Americans?
Mona Charen's column is released once a week.
Mona Charen August 23, 2013 SocietyBarack ObamaUnemployment
Buried in a New York Times story about the economy was this arresting statistic: Median family income for black Americans has declined a whopping 10.9 percent during the Obama administration. It has declined for other groups as well — 3.6 percent for non-Hispanic whites and 4.5 percent for Hispanics - but the figure for blacks is huge. This decline does not include losses suffered during the financial crisis and the recession that followed, but it instead measures declines since June 2009, when the recession officially ended.
That's not the only bad news for African-Americans. The poverty rate for blacks is now 25.8 percent. The black labor force participation rate, which rose throughout the 1980s and 1990s, has declined for the past decade and quite sharply under Obama to 61.4 percent. The black unemployment rate, according to Pew Research, stands at 13.4 percent. Among black, male, high school dropouts, PBS' Paul Salmon reports, the unemployment rate is a staggering 95 percent.
Does any of this affect the standing of the nation's first black president with black Americans? Not a whit, apparently. This is not to suggest that any president should gear his policies to one or another ethnic group. The president serves the nation as a whole, or should. But if unemployment, poverty and the black/white income gap had expanded under a different president to the degree is has under Obama (the income gap is now larger than it was under George W. Bush), it wouldn't go unreported and the president would not escape responsibility.
The advent of an African-American president surely brings psychic dividends to black Americans (and the rest of us, to a degree), but those intangibles may be pretty much all they get from his presidency. In terms of material prosperity, his leadership has delivered nothing but decline. He plays the psychological card very skillfully — showboating his identification with Trayvon Martin and sticking up for Henry Louis Gates — but more and more his gestures in this regard seem like substitutes for results.
Black poverty is up, employment is down and wealth is down. The dissolution of the black family continues unabated, with 72.3 percent of black children born to unmarried mothers. Black males constitute just 6 percent of the population yet comprise more than 40 percent of those incarcerated in state and federal prisons and jails. One-third of black men aged 20 to 29 are in the purview of the criminal justice system (incarcerated or on probation or parole).
The press resolutely ignores these figures, while the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party in Hollywood serves up distorted history to distract and pacify the public. The latest entry appears to be "The Butler," which misrepresents President Reagan (as I gather from those who've seen it) as, at best, insensitive to blacks, and at worst as racist. Eugene Allen, the actual White House butler on whom the film is supposedly based, kept signed photos of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in his living room (pictures of the other presidents he had served hung in the basement).
According to a 2008 Washington Post profile, Allen served eight presidents for 34 years until his retirement. He did not, as the movie portrays, resign to protest Reagan's policies on civil rights or South Africa. His wife happily reminisced to the Post about the time the couple were invited by the Reagans to attend a state dinner in honor of the West German chancellor. "Drank champagne that night," Mrs. Allen recalled with pleasure. The film apparently depicts the invitation as tokenism. The filmmakers also insert a horrific childhood "memory" for Allen — his mother being raped and his father shot by a white landlord. Didn't happen.
Would it interest black moviegoers to know that under Ronald Reagan's policies, median African American household incomes increased by 84 percent (compared with 68 percent for whites)? The poverty rate dropped during the 1980s from 14 percent down to 11.6 percent. The black unemployment rate dropped by 9 percentage points. The number of black-owned businesses increased by 38 percent and receipts more than doubled.
Obama's economic record is dismal because he is inflexibly attached to the wrong ideas. Hollywood is, of course, free to worship at his tattered shrine. But to smear Reagan — a man who deeply loathed bigotry in any form and actually improved the lives of all Americans including blacks — in an attempt to prop up the drooping Obama standard, is contemptible.
To find out more about Mona Charen and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM
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"under Ronald Reagan's policies, median African American household incomes increased by 84 percent"
"The poverty rate dropped during the 1980s from 14 percent down to 11.6 percent."
"The black unemployment rate dropped by 9 percentage points."
"The number of black-owned businesses increased by 38 percent"
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Market capitalism based on economic freedom is the best and only way of moving large numbers of people from poverty to prosperity.
How do we communicate that better is the question. We post here and Mona Charen gets published in many places but we are reaching ourselves mostly, preaching to the choir not reaching the people who are unemployed, in poverty or in need of or in search of a better life.
The answer in part is more charismatic leaders, a clearer message, make fewer errors and not allow ourselves to get distracted and off-message. But we also need to reach into more venues, not just the same audience over and over. We need to confront the Democrat demographic with the facts in more persuasive ways.
One big place we lose is the inner city. Democrats own the message and now own the get out the vote operation. Their message is vote Dem because Republicans want to take away what you have, free this and free that, from food stamps to housing vouchers, disability checks, Grandma's meds and your 'Obama' cell phone. They want you to be poor and themselves to be rich. If Republicans win you will lose they are told, but in fact, Dems are taking away your choices and opportunities while Republicans support a well funded safety net - just not in place of the American Dream.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/04/mia-love-asks-how-far-away-are-we-from-losing-the-american-dream/
http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/09/03/watch-kirk-cameron-talks-about-the-importance-of-creating-shaping-culture/?utm_source=Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2013-09-04_253826&utm_content=5054942&utm_term=_253826_253834
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"We lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right." --Thomas Jefferson
GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
Hope 'n' Change: Playing by the Same Rules
A level playing field?
On Thursday, the House passed the "No Subsidies Without Verification Act," 235-191, which would block ObamaCare insurance subsidy payouts until the Department of Health and Human Services implements a system to verify eligibility. Republicans aim to close a loophole that HHS created in July that allows people to apply for insurance subsidies without proving their income or whether their employer already provides federally approved health benefits.
HHS insists Republicans are overstating the opportunity for fraud and abuse because fear of future HHS and IRS audits will keep people honest. Yet this audit power hasn't prevented people from, for example, playing fast and loose with the Earned Income Tax Credit. The Treasury Inspector General estimates that a quarter of those credits go to ineligible recipients, and equivalent fraud in ObamaCare would mean $250 billion in wrongful income redistribution over a decade. Predictably, the Democrat-controlled Senate won't consider the House measure, though Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) introduced it, and the White House issued a veto threat. Team Obama needs the bodies to make the program work, and they don't want stricter rules blocking folks from getting their "fair share."
In related news, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) submitted a bill to subject members of Congress to ObamaCare just like the rest of America. This summer, the Office of Personnel Management quietly issued a blanket exception that allowed Congress and congressional staffers to continue to receive their generous health benefits and be exempt from having to enroll in ObamaCare. The excuse was that if Swamp-dwellers had to contend with ObamaCare, they might leave government service and seek more lucrative employment in the private sector. Republicans, who could have used this outrageous exemption as a powerful weapon against ObamaCare, were mum until now. Given Democrats' enthusiasm for the law, it seems only logical that they be forced to enjoy it like everyone else. As for the concern about Beltway brain drain, repealing the exemption is a perfect opportunity to trim the fat -- and ensuring that DC elites get a good taste of their own medicine.
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Taking the Fight to the Democrats
In Virginia's gubernatorial race, opponents of Terry McAuliffe may have cracked the playbook Democrats have used to win in states that ought to go Republican.
WSJ
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Democrats used the 2012 election to fine-tune a strategy for beating conservatives in conservative-friendly states. A handful of GOP players are now using Virginia's off-year gubernatorial race to trial-run a strategy for defeating that Democratic tactic.
Virginia so far has been a carbon copy of what Democrats did so successfully in last year's Senate and House races. The approach runs thus: A Democratic candidate, assisted by unions and outside partisan groups, floods the zone with attack ads, painting the GOP opponent as a tea-party nut who is too "extreme" for the state. The left focuses on divisive wedge issues—like abortion—that resonate with women or other important voting constituencies.
As the Republican's unfavorable ratings rise, the Democrat presents himself as a reasonable moderate, in tune with the state's values. A friendly media overlook the Democrat's reliably liberal record, and the lies within the smears against his opponent, and ultimately declares the Democrat unbeatable.
This is how Sen. Heidi Heitkamp won in North Dakota (while Mitt Romney won there by 20 points); how Sen. Joe Donnelly won in Indiana (Romney by 10 points); how Sen. Jon Tester won in Montana (Romney by 14 points). And this is how Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe hopes to beat his GOP rival, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.
The McAuliffe crew has for months slammed Mr. Cuccinelli as a whackadoodle social conservative—suggesting that the respected lawyer is against punishing rapists, against allowing divorce, against contraception. The latest McAuliffe ad presents an obstetrician who declares that Mr. Cuccinelli would "make all abortion illegal." Mr. McAuliffe's advertising rarely ventures into discussing his policy ideas.
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Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Terry McAuliffe campaigning for governor in Virginia in August.
The media have failed to challenge most of these accusations, showing considerably more interest in polls showing Mr. McAuliffe pulling ahead, while unfavorability ratings for Mr. Cuccinelli have increased—no doubt driven by the negative ads. The tenor of the campaign coverage: Mr. Cuccinelli is finished.
Enter a new conservative Super PAC, Fight For Tomorrow, which last week began running a creative TV ad against Mr. McAuliffe in the Washington and Richmond areas. Little is known about FFT (as a national Super PAC, it will be required to disclose its backers in January), but one thing is clear from conversations with those involved: The organization's primary focus is to directly take on the Democratic bare-knuckle strategy—and not just neutralize it, but throw it back at the attackers.
The concept behind FFT's ad is to give Virginia voters a context in which to view the McAuliffe attacks. The group's TV spot notes that there is a "gang" supporting Mr. McAuliffe: the leaders of the Democratic Party; an elitist media; Wall Street liberals; outside partisan groups; Hollywood.
Having specified who is doing the smearing on Mr. McAuliffe's behalf, the spot goes on to explain why the groups want Mr. McAuliffe to win: To impose an agenda that Virginians truly would view as nuts. Employing a potent list of "geography verbs," the ad finishes: "Tell these McAuliffe puppeteers, this is Virginia. We won't let you Detroit us with taxes and debt. You will not California Virginia with regulations that kill jobs, or Hollywood our families and schools. You will not bring District of Columbia tax and spend to our state. Tell them: You can't have Virginia."
One merit of the ad is that, while it directly addresses the left's scorched-earth campaign, it doesn't stoop to responding to the accusations against Mr. Cuccinelli. (The ad doesn't even mention the candidate.) Another attribute is that it switches voter attention away from the wild Cuccinelli caricature and onto all the failed Democratic policies—like the ones that produced soaring energy prices, health-care rationing and huge deficits—that Mr. McAuliffe seems desperate to avoid discussing.
Indeed, the whole idea here is to turn the tables, to get the GOP back on offense, rather than offering cringing defenses of positions that are in fact widely shared by a center-right country.
"The honest views of Terry McAuliffe and his liberal supporters are what are extreme, but they are hiding them, and doing so by running a smear campaign against Ken Cuccinelli," says Matt Mackowiak, the executive director of FFT.
While the FFT ad buy has been modest, Mr. Mackowiak says that a focus group testing the ad among Virginians showed that 27 of 28 people who watched the spot moved away from supporting Mr. McAuliffe. The ad had been slated to run only two days, but the response was so positive, he says, that the group extended the campaign to a full week. This comes even as a recent poll showed the race close within the margin of error, blowing up the media's early burial of Mr. Cuccinelli and giving his supporters new drive to take on the McAuliffe machine.
Whether or not the FFT campaign ultimately moves the dial, no one can fault that group's desire to confront what is now the standard Democratic playbook. If the GOP wants to start winning states it should be winning, that playbook is the nut it has to crack.
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Government should only be as large as the smallest of what the three parties, House, Senate and President, can agree.
De-funding bad government? Seems like everyone but a very few believe Ted Cruz and the House are on the wrong track. Why is it the right track to fund government programs that you oppose, not just Obamacare, but all of the waste, fraud, abuse programs characterized by not being a federal responsibility or engulfed in unintended consequences?
Consent of the governed? Obamacare had the (questionable) consent of the 111th congress (2009). It was upheld by Chief Justice Roberts and the (other) liberals on the Supreme Court. But the people today, and the 112th (2011) and 113th Congresses (2013) do not give their consent, in particular, the House of Representatives. The power to tax and spend begins in the House. Right? Is the House obligated to fund what a previous congress approved, that it now opposes? If so, why have new elections? We already know the law of the land.
De-funding Obamacare will shut down the government? No it won't. Only shutting down the government will shut down the government. The House already passed a bill funding everything but Obamacare. But Obama has the bully pulpit? Yes, but for every program he says Republicans in the House have shut down, defense, food stamps, Medicaid, etc., Republican in the House can pass funding specifically for those programs - individually - as he mentions them. Then how does that mud stick?
Republicans other than Cruz etc. say the de-funding has no end game, because their opponents will never cave.. But what is their end game? Fund everything you oppose. Surrender to your opponents because of their refusal to negotiate? Wait until one more program is fully in place with millions dependent on it? How is that strategy working for the repeal of anything else? One might recall that Reagan called for closing the US Dept of Education in 1982. 31 years flies by quickly and uneventfully when it comes to closing federal departments and programs, doesn't it?
The Supreme Court, we are told, tightened the meaning of the Commerce Clause. What programs ended as a result of that?
How about something simpler, stand up for what you strongly believe and live with the consequences.
One might ask Pres. Assad if Pres. Barack Obama is too strong to ever draw a red line and then cave under pressure.
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Comments?
***Peter King: ‘Vile’ phone calls by Ted Cruz allies
By TAL KOPAN | 9/26/13 9:26 AM EDT
Rep. Peter King, who has pulled no punches in criticizing Ted Cruz, said Thursday that supporters of the Texas senator have been bombarding his office with “vile” phone calls.
The New York Republican has called Cruz a fraud for his calls to defund Obamacare, and said the senator’s campaign this summer to get the House to pass a government funding bill that defunds the health care law led to some offensive phone calls to King’s office.
“The vehemence of the phone calls coming into the office. I don’t care, people can call me whatever they want … I haven’t heard such vile, profane, obscene language,” King said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday.
King said while the majority of Cruz fans are “good people,” he’s concerned about what sentiments Cruz has preyed on. While he doesn’t know if Republicans can reach Cruz, they should try to “heal tensions” with his supporters, he said.
(Also on POLITICO: John Boozman thrashes Ted Cruz for Obamacare tactics)
“I’m not saying Ted Cruz is responsible for all his supporters, but he has tapped into a dark strain here in the American political psyche here, and again, the most obscene, profane stuff you can imagine all from people who say they support the Constitution,” King said. “I think what we have to do is reach out to his people and let them know that they’re following a false leader here.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/peter-king-ted-cruz-phone-calls-97396.html#ixzz2g17l8or7****
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It is entirely possible that there were some rude and inappropriate phone calls but perhaps Rep. King should realize the anger is not Cruz's fault but that of the Congress for not taking on Obama's War on the Rule of the Law of the Land.
I confess to both bafflement and anger that somehow all of this is being described as the Cruz et al wanting to "shut down the government" and/or "default on our obligations" when the House/Reps have voted to fund everything except Obamacare. It is the DEMS/Senate who are voting to shut down government!!!
Yes? Or am I missing something here?
What a Kafkaesque world our government and its Pravdas have become!!! :x :x :x
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By CHARLES MURRAY
When I began to work on this lecture a few months ago, I was feeling abashed because I knew I couldn't talk about either of the topics that were of the gravest national importance. Regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, I have not publicly said a word on foreign policy since I wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times in 1973. Regarding the economic crisis, I am not an economist. In fact, I am so naive about economics that I continue to think that we have a financial meltdown because the federal government, in its infinite wisdom, has for the last two administrations aggressively pushed policies that made it possible for clever people to get rich by lending money to people who were unlikely to pay it back.
The topic I wanted to talk about was one that has been at the center of my own concerns for more than 20 years, but I was afraid it would seem remote from these urgent immediate issues. How times change. As of the morning of Feb. 24, this is the text I had written to introduce the topic: "It isn't usually put this way, but the advent of the Obama administration brings this question before the nation: Do we want the United States to be like Europe?"
And then on the evening of the 24th, President Obama unveiled his domestic agenda to Congress, and now everybody is putting it that way. As Charles Krauthammer observed a few days later, "We've been trying to figure out who Barack Obama is, where he's really from. From Hawaii? Indonesia? The Ivy League? Chicago? Now we know: he's a Swede."
In short, the question has suddenly become urgently relevant because President Obama and his leading intellectual heroes are the American equivalent of Europe's social democrats. There's nothing sinister about that. They share an intellectually respectable view that Europe's regulatory and social welfare systems are more progressive than America's and advocate reforms that would make the American system more like the European system.
Not only are social democrats intellectually respectable, the European model has worked in many ways. I am delighted when I get a chance to go to Stockholm or Amsterdam, not to mention Rome or Paris. When I get there, the people don't seem to be groaning under the yoke of an evil system. Quite the contrary. There's a lot to like--a lot to love--about day-to-day life in Europe, something that should be kept in mind when I get to some less complimentary observations.
The European model can't continue to work much longer. Europe's catastrophically low birthrates and soaring immigration from cultures with alien values will see to that. So let me rephrase the question. If we could avoid Europe's demographic problems, do we want the United States to be like Europe?
Tonight I will argue for the answer "no," but not for economic reasons. The European model has indeed created sclerotic economies, and it would be a bad idea to imitate them. But I want to focus on another problem.
My text is drawn from Federalist 62, probably written by James Madison: "A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained." Note the word:
happiness. Not prosperity. Not security. Not equality. Happiness, which the Founders used in its Aristotelian sense of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole.
I have two points to make. First, I will argue that the European model is fundamentally flawed because, despite its material successes, it is not suited to the way that human beings flourish--it does not conduce to Aristotelian happiness. Second, I will argue that 21st-century science will prove me right.
First, the problem with the European model, namely: It drains too much of the life from life. And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors--even more to the lives of janitors--as it does to the lives of CEOs.
I start from this premise: A human life can have transcendent meaning, with transcendence defined either by one of the world's great religions or one of the world's great secular philosophies. If transcendence is too big a word, let me put it another way: I suspect that almost all of you agree that the phrase "a life well-lived" has meaning. That's the phrase I'll use from now on.
And since happiness is a word that gets thrown around too casually, the phrase I'll use from now on is "deep satisfactions." I'm talking about the kinds of things that we look back upon when we reach old age and let us decide that we can be proud of who we have been and what we have done. Or not.
To become a source of deep satisfaction, a human activity has to meet some stringent requirements. It has to have been important (we don't get deep satisfaction from trivial things). You have to have put a lot of effort into it (hence the cliché "nothing worth having comes easily"). And you have to have been responsible for the consequences.
There aren't many activities in life that can satisfy those three requirements. Having been a good parent. That qualifies. A good marriage.
That qualifies. Having been a good neighbor and good friend to those whose lives intersected with yours. That qualifies. And having been really good at something--good at something that drew the most from your abilities. That qualifies. Let me put it formally: If we ask what are the institutions through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life, the answer is that there are just four: family, community, vocation and faith. Two
clarifications: "Community" can embrace people who are scattered geographically. "Vocation" can include avocations or causes.
It is not necessary for any individual to make use of all four institutions, nor do I array them in a hierarchy. I merely assert that these four are all there are. The stuff of life--the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one's personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships--coping with life as it exists around us in all its richness--occurs within those four institutions.
Seen in this light, the goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. And that's what's wrong with the European model. It doesn't do that. It enfeebles every single one of them.
Put aside all the sophisticated ways of conceptualizing governmental functions and think of it in this simplistic way: Almost anything that government does in social policy can be characterized as taking some of the trouble out of things. Sometimes, taking the trouble out of things is a good idea. Having an effective police force takes some of the trouble out of walking home safely at night, and I'm glad it does.
The problem is this: Every time the government takes some of the trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation and faith, it also strips those institutions of some of their vitality--it drains some of the life from them. It's inevitable. Families are not vital because the day-to-day tasks of raising children and being a good spouse are so much fun, but because the family has responsibility for doing important things that won't get done unless the family does them. Communities are not vital because it's so much fun to respond to our neighbors' needs, but because the community has the responsibility for doing important things that won't get done unless the community does them. Once that imperative has been met--family and community really do have the action--then an elaborate web of social norms, expectations, rewards and punishments evolves over time that supports families and communities in performing their functions. When the government says it will take some of the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, it inevitably takes some of the action away from families and communities, and the web frays, and eventually disintegrates.
If we knew that leaving these functions in the hands of families and communities led to legions of neglected children and neglected neighbors, and taking them away from families and communities led to happy children and happy neighbors, then it would be possible to say that the cost is worth it.
But that's not what happened when the U.S. welfare state expanded. We have seen growing legions of children raised in unimaginably awful circumstances, not because of material poverty but because of dysfunctional families, and the collapse of functioning neighborhoods into Hobbesian all-against-all free-fire zones.
Meanwhile, we have exacted costs that are seldom considered but are hugely important. Earlier, I said that the sources of deep satisfactions are the same for janitors as for CEOs, and I also said that people needed to do important things with their lives. When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent, it doesn't affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: "He is a man who pulls his own weight." "He's a good provider." If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing some theoretical outcome. I am describing American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn't. I could give a half dozen other examples. Taking the trouble out of the stuff of life strips people--already has stripped people--of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say, "I made a difference."
I have been making a number of claims with no data. The data exist. I could document the role of the welfare state in destroying the family in low-income communities. I could cite extensive quantitative evidence of decline in civic engagement and document the displacement effect that government intervention has had on civic engagement. But such evidence focuses on those near the bottom of society where the American welfare state has been most intrusive. If we want to know where America as a whole is headed--its destination--we should look to Europe.
Drive through rural Sweden, as I did a few years ago. In every town was a beautiful Lutheran church, freshly painted, on meticulously tended grounds, all subsidized by the Swedish government. And the churches are empty.
Including on Sundays. Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their "child-friendly" policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. Those same countries are ones in which jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And they, with only a few exceptions, are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, least often seen as a vocation, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.
What's happening? Call it the Europe Syndrome. Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. After the speech, a few of the 20-something members of the audience approached and said plainly that the phrase "a life well-lived" did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.
It was fascinating to hear it said to my face, but not surprising. It conformed to both journalistic and scholarly accounts of a spreading European mentality. Let me emphasize "spreading." I'm not talking about all Europeans, by any means. That mentality goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.
If that's the purpose of life, then work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with the higher good of leisure. If that's the purpose of life, why have a child, when children are so much trouble--and, after all, what good are they, really? If that's the purpose of life, why spend it worrying about neighbors? If that's the purpose of life, what could possibly be the attraction of a religion that says otherwise?
The same self-absorption in whiling away life as pleasantly as possible explains why Europe has become a continent that no longer celebrates greatness. When life is a matter of whiling away the time, the concept of greatness is irritating and threatening. What explains Europe's military impotence? I am surely simplifying, but this has to be part of it: If the purpose of life is to while away the time as pleasantly as possible, what can be worth dying for?
I stand in awe of Europe's past. Which makes Europe's present all the more dispiriting. And should make its present something that concentrates our minds wonderfully, for every element of the Europe Syndrome is infiltrating American life as well.
We are seeing that infiltration appear most obviously among those who are most openly attached to the European model--namely, America's social democrats, heavily represented in university faculties and the most fashionable neighborhoods of our great cities. There are a whole lot of them within a couple of Metro stops from this hotel. We know from databases such as the General Social Survey that among those who self-identify as liberal or extremely liberal, secularism is close to European levels. Birthrates are close to European levels. Charitable giving is close to European levels.
(That's material that Arthur Brooks has put together.) There is every reason to believe that when Americans embrace the European model, they begin to behave like Europeans.
This is all pretty depressing for people who do not embrace the European model, because it looks like the train has left the station. The European model provides the intellectual framework for the social policies of the triumphant Democratic Party, and it faces no credible opposition from Republican politicians. (If that seems too harsh, I am sure that the Republican politicians in the audience will understand when I say that the last dozen years do raise a credibility problem when we now hear you say nice things about fiscal restraint and limited government.)
And yet there is reason for strategic optimism, and that leads to the second point I want to make tonight: Critics of the European model are about to get a lot of new firepower. Not only is the European model inimical to human flourishing, 21st-century science is going to explain why. We who think that the Founders were right about the relationship of government to human happiness will have an opening over the course of the next few decades to make our case.
The reason is a tidal change in our scientific understanding of what makes human beings tick. It will spill over into every crevice of political and cultural life. Harvard's Edward O. Wilson anticipated what is to come in a book entitled "Consilience." As the 21st century progresses, he argued, the social sciences are increasingly going to be shaped by the findings of biology; specifically, the findings of the neuroscientists and the geneticists.
What are they finding? I'm afraid that I don't have anything to report that you will find shocking. For example, science is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that males and females respond differently to babies. You heard it here first. The specific findings aren't so important at this point--we are just at the beginning of a very steep learning curve. Rather, it is the tendency of the findings that lets us predict with some confidence the broad outlines of what the future will bring, and they offer nothing but bad news for social democrats.
Two premises about human beings are at the heart of the social democratic
agenda: what I will label "the equality premise" and "the New Man premise."
The equality premise says that, in a fair society, different groups of people--men and women, blacks and whites, straights and gays, the children of poor people and the children of rich people--will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life--the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and CEOs.
When that doesn't happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society. For the last 40 years, this premise has justified thousands of pages of government regulations and legislation that has reached into everything from the paperwork required to fire someone to the funding of high school wrestling teams. Everything that we associate with the phrase "politically correct" eventually comes back to the equality premise. Every form of affirmative action derives from it. Much of the Democratic Party's proposed domestic legislation assumes that it is true.
Within a decade, no one will try to defend the equality premise. All sorts of groups will be known to differ in qualities that affect what professions they choose, how much money they make, and how they live their lives in all sorts of ways. Gender differences will be first, because the growth in knowledge about the ways that men and women are different is growing by far the most rapidly. I'm betting that the Harvard faculty of the year 2020 will look back on the Larry Summers affair in the same way that they think about the Scopes trial--the enlightened versus the benighted--and will have achieved complete amnesia about their own formerly benighted opinions.
There is no reason to fear this new knowledge. Differences among groups will cut in many different directions, and everybody will be able to weight the differences so that their group's advantages turn out to be the most important to them. Liberals will not be obliged to give up their concerns about systemic unfairnesses. But groups of people will turn out to be different from each other, on average, and those differences will also produce group differences in outcomes in life, on average, that everyone knows are not the product of discrimination and inadequate government regulation.
And a void will have developed in the moral universe of the left. If social policy cannot be built on the premise that group differences must be eliminated, what can it be built upon? It can be built upon the restoration of the premise that used to be part of the warp and woof of American
idealism: People must be treated as individuals. The success of social policy is to be measured not by equality of outcomes for groups, but by open, abundant opportunity for individuals. It is to be measured by the freedom of individuals, acting upon their personal abilities, aspirations and values, to seek the kind of life that best suits them.
The second bedrock premise of the social democratic agenda is what I call the New Man premise, borrowing the old Communist claim that it would create a "New Man" by remaking human nature. This premise says that human beings are malleable through the right government interventions.
The second tendency of the new findings of biology will be to show that the New Man premise is nonsense. Human nature tightly constrains what is politically or culturally possible. More than that, the new findings will broadly confirm that human beings are pretty much the way that wise human observers have thought for thousands of years, and that is going to be wonderful news for those of us who are already basing our policy analyses on that assumption.
The effects on the policy debate are going to be sweeping. Let me give you a specific example. For many years, I have been among those who argue that the growth in births to unmarried women has been a social catastrophe--the single most important driving force behind the growth of the underclass. But while I and other scholars have been able to prove that other family structures have not worked as well as the traditional family, I cannot prove that alternatives could not work as well, and so the social democrats keep coming up with the next new ingenious program that will compensate for the absence of fathers.
Over the next few decades, advances in evolutionary psychology are going to be conjoined with advances in genetic understanding and they will lead to a scientific consensus that goes something like this: There are genetic reasons, rooted in the mechanisms of human evolution, that little boys who grow up in neighborhoods without married fathers tend to reach adolescence unsocialized to norms of behavior that they will need to stay out of prison and hold jobs. These same reasons explain why child abuse is, and always will be, concentrated among family structures in which the live-in male is not the married biological father. And these same reasons explain why society's attempts to compensate for the lack of married biological fathers don't work and will never work.
Once again, there's no reason to be frightened of this new knowledge. We will still be able to acknowledge that many single women do a wonderful job of raising their children. Social democrats will simply have to stop making glib claims that the traditional family is just one of many equally valid alternatives. They will have to acknowledge that the traditional family plays a special, indispensable role in human flourishing and that social policy must be based on that truth. The same concrete effects of the new knowledge will make us rethink every domain in which the central government has imposed its judgment on how people ought to live their lives--in schools, workplaces, the courts, social services, as well as the family. And that will make the job of people like me much easier.
But the real effect is going to be much more profound than making my job easier. The 20th century was a very strange century, riddled from beginning to end with toxic political movements and nutty ideas. For some years a metaphor has been stuck in my mind: the twentieth century was the adolescence of Homo sapiens. Nineteenth-century science, from Darwin to Freud, offered a series of body blows to ways of thinking about human beings and human lives that had prevailed since the dawn of civilization. Humans, just like adolescents, were deprived of some of the comforting simplicities of childhood and exposed to more complex knowledge about the world. And 20th-century intellectuals reacted precisely the way that adolescents react when they think they have discovered Mom and Dad are hopelessly out of date.
They think that the grown-ups are wrong about everything. In the case of 20th-century intellectuals, it was as if they thought that if Darwin was right about evolution, then Aquinas is no longer worth reading; that if Freud was right about the unconscious mind, the "Nicomachean Ethics" had nothing to teach us.
The nice thing about adolescence is that it is temporary, and, when it passes, people discover that their parents were smarter than they thought. I think that may be happening with the advent of the new century, as postmodernist answers to solemn questions about human existence start to wear thin--we're growing out of adolescence. The kinds of scientific advances in understanding human nature are going to accelerate that process.
All of us who deal in social policy will be thinking less like adolescents, entranced with the most titillating new idea, and thinking more like grown-ups.
That will not get rid of the slippery slope that America is sliding down toward the European model. For that, this new raw material for reform--namely, a lot more people thinking like grown-ups--must be translated into a kind of political Great Awakening among America's elites.
I use the phrase "Great Awakening" to evoke a particular kind of event.
American history has seen three religious revivals known as Great Awakenings--some say four. They were not dispassionate, polite reconsiderations of opinions. They were renewals of faith, felt in the gut.
I use the word "elites" to talk about the small minority of the population that has disproportionate influence over the culture, economy and governance of the country. I realize that to use that word makes many Americans uncomfortable. But every society since the advent of agriculture has had elites. So does the United States. Broadly defined, America's elites comprise several million people; narrowly defined, they amount to a few tens of thousands. We have a lot of examples of both kinds in this room tonight.
When I say that something akin to a political Great Awakening is required among America's elites, what I mean is that America's elites have to ask themselves how much they really do value what has made America exceptional, and what they are willing to do to preserve it. Let me close with a few remarks about what that will entail.
American exceptionalism is not just something that Americans claim for themselves. Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I'm thinking of qualities such as American optimism even when there doesn't seem to be any good reason for it. That's quite uncommon among the peoples of the world.
There is the striking lack of class envy in America--by and large, Americans celebrate others' success instead of resenting it. That's just about unique, certainly compared to European countries, and something that drives European intellectuals crazy. And then there is perhaps the most important symptom of all, the signature of American exceptionalism--the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies. It is hard to think of a more inspiriting quality for a population to possess, and the American population still possesses it to an astonishing degree. No other country comes close.
Underlying these symptoms of American exceptionalism are the underlying exceptional dynamics of American life. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a famous book describing the nature of that more fundamental exceptionalism back in the 1830s. He found American life characterized by two apparently conflicting themes. The first was the passion with which Americans pursued their individual interests, and made no bones about it--that's what America was all about, they kept telling Tocqueville. But at the same time, Tocqueville kept coming up against this phenomenal American passion for forming associations to deal with every conceivable problem, voluntarily taking up public affairs, and tending to the needs of their communities. How could this be? Because, Americans told Tocqueville, there's no conflict. "In the United States," Tocqueville writes, "hardly anybody talks of the beauty of virtue. . . . They do not deny that every man may follow his own interest; but they endeavor to prove that it is the interest of every man to be virtuous." And then he concludes, "I shall not here enter into the reasons they allege. . . . Suffice it to say, they have convinced their fellow countrymen."
The exceptionalism has not been a figment of anyone's imagination, and it has been wonderful. But it isn't something in the water that has made us that way. It comes from the cultural capital generated by the system that the Founders laid down, a system that says people must be free to live life as they see fit and to be responsible for the consequences of their actions; that it is not the government's job to protect people from themselves; that it is not the government's job to stage-manage how people interact with each other. Discard the system that created the cultural capital, and the qualities we love about Americans can go away. In some circles, they are going away.
Why do I focus on the elites in urging a Great Awakening? Because my sense is that the instincts of middle America remain distinctively American. When I visit the small Iowa town where I grew up in the 1950s, I don't get a sense that community life has changed all that much since then, and I wonder if it has changed all that much in the working-class neighborhoods of Brooklyn or Queens. When I examine the polling data about the values that most Americans prize, not a lot has changed. And while I worry about uncontrolled illegal immigration, I've got to say that every immigrant I actually encounter seems as American as apple pie.
The center still holds. It's the bottom and top of American society where we have a problem. And since it's the top that has such decisive influence on American culture, economy, and governance, I focus on it. The fact is that American elites have increasingly been withdrawing from American life. It's not a partisan phenomenon. The elites of all political stripes have increasingly withdrawn to gated communities--"gated" literally or figuratively--where they never interact at an intimate level with people not of their own socioeconomic class.
Haven't the elites always done this? Not like today. A hundred years ago, the wealth necessary to withdraw was confined to a much smaller percentage of the elites than now. Workplaces where the elites made their livings were much more variegated a hundred years ago than today's highly specialized workplaces.
Perhaps the most important difference is that, not so long ago, the overwhelming majority of the elites in each generation were drawn from the children of farmers, shopkeepers and factory workers--and could still remember those worlds after they left them. Over the last half century, it can be demonstrated empirically that the new generation of elites have increasingly spent their entire lives in the upper-middle-class bubble, never even having seen a factory floor, let alone worked on one, never having gone to a grocery store and bought the cheap ketchup instead of the expensive ketchup to meet a budget, never having had a boring job where their feet hurt at the end of the day, and never having had a close friend who hadn't gotten at least 600 on her SAT verbal. There's nobody to blame for any of this. These are the natural consequences of successful people looking for pleasant places to live and trying to do the best thing for their children.
But the fact remains: It is the elites who are increasingly separated from the America over which they have so much influence. That is not the America that Tocqueville saw. It is not an America that can remain America.
I am not suggesting that America's elites sacrifice their own self-interest for everybody else. That would be really un-American. I just want to accelerate a rediscovery of what that self-interest is. Age-old human wisdom has understood that a life well-lived requires engagement with those around us. That is reality, not idealism. It is appropriate to think that a political Great Awakening among the elites can arise in part from the renewed understanding that it can be pleasant to lead a glossy life, but it is ultimately more fun to lead a textured life, and to be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives. Perhaps events will help us out here--remember what Irving Kristol has been saying for years: "There's nothing wrong with this country that couldn't be cured by a long, hard depression."
What it comes down to is that America's elites must once again fall in love with what makes America different. I am not being theoretical. Not everybody in this room shares the beliefs I have been expressing, but a lot of us do.
To those of you who do, I say soberly and without hyperbole, that this is the hour. The possibility that irreversible damage will be done to the American project over the next few years is real. And so it is our job to make the case for that reawakening. It won't happen by appealing to people on the basis of lower marginal tax rates or keeping a health care system that lets them choose their own doctor. The drift toward the European model can be slowed by piecemeal victories on specific items of legislation, but only slowed. It is going to be stopped only when we are all talking again about why America is exceptional, and why it is so important that America remain exceptional. That requires once again seeing the American project for what it is: a different way for people to live together, unique among the nations of the earth, and immeasurably precious.
Mr. Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the recipient of AEI's 2009 Irving Kristol Award. He delivered this lecture at the award dinner earlier this month.
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A Parable
Today, a parable for those who are losing hope in America’s future…I hear people lamenting every day that the government is too powerful, young people don’t understand concepts like freedom and privacy anymore, and we’ve gone too far down the wrong track ever to come back again. But maybe we can all learn a lesson from the Judean date palm tree. TreeHugger.com reports that for over 3,000 years, that tree provided shade and fruit to the people of the Middle East. But then came the Roman army, which wiped the date palm out. After 1500 years, archeologists unearthed a jar of seeds. The seeds spent another 40 years in a drawer, until an Israeli university researcher planted one, just to see what would happen. Miraculously, it sprouted and flowered. It’s now the oldest known tree seed ever to germinate. So when you hear that American values are gone and will never come back, remember the Judean date palm tree. As long as people carry the seeds of what made America great in their hearts, it’s never too late to make a comeback.
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Silver Linings on the CR and DC Debacles
Great News for Conservatives -- If...
By Mark Alexander • October 17, 2013
"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately." --Benjamin Franklin (1776)
Despite a colossal political blunder derailing the conservative Republican Continuing Resolution strategy three weeks ago, which in turn led to furloughs (read: "paid vacations") for about 17% of "non-essential" federal employees, which in turn collapsed approval ratings for anyone with an "R" after their name, which in turn resulted in Republican submission to Barack Obama's agenda, there are three silver linings on the horizon that will pay rich political dividends.
Each of these favorable outcomes will greatly benefit the campaigns of conservative Republicans for a generation if, and only if, there is a cease-fire in the foolish and fatalistic "Tea v. GOP infighting," which undermined the outstanding CR strategy House conservative were advancing on schedule four weeks ago.
I'll get to those opportunities in a moment, but first, let me recap where we were just four short weeks ago:
In mid-September, Republicans had Barack Obama and his Leftist NeoCom cadres on the ropes, getting pounded and losing ground fast. Obama was plagued with the IRS, Benghazi and Syrian scandals, among a growing list of other failures, which were thoroughly undermining his second term agenda.
Making matters worse for The Party of Obama, the inevitable launch of ObamaCare (the so-called "Affordable Care Act") on October 1, a day after the deadline for the CR, was, by all accounts, going to be a cascading disaster -- not just from a technical standpoint but also from a political standpoint in the months and years to come.
Ahead of the CR deadline in September, the conservative House Republican strategy was to attach amendments to the Continuing Resolution which would 1) force Demo senators to go on record with a vote against defunding ObamaCare; 2) then force Demo senators to go on record with a vote against delaying ObamaCare; and, finally 3) force a vote on a CR with an amendment to require all members of the legislative and executive branch to comport with ObamaCare regulations and requirements.
The third amended CR, which by all accounts had enormous popular national appeal across political lines, would have passed the Senate and received Obama's begrudging signature. The first two "defund" and "delay" amendment votes would be lead anchors on many 2014 Demo campaigns.
Then, against a backdrop featuring wall-to-wall coverage of the ObamaCare launch disaster (technical failures, lack of enrollees, sticker shock for the few who successfully navigated the site, new questions about privacy, etc.), Republicans would be in a strong position to enter the debt ceiling debate with a wish list of other amendments, including tax reform, approval of the Keystone pipeline, regulatory and entitlement reforms including means-tested Medicare, a "chained" Consumer Price Index (CPI) and other conservative budget measures.
(For the record, this is not "hindsight 20/20" analysis, but precisely the winning strategy conservative House Republicans were advancing in early September -- which now seems like a political lifetime ago.)
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So, how did conservatives convert a win to a loss?
Unfortunately, a unilateral diversion by Sen. Ted Cruz derailed the conservative House CR and DC strategy, leaving House and Senate Republicans on defense with no way out and no ability to recover. Undoubtedly Cruz is smart -- after all, he is a graduate of Princeton and magna cum laude from Harvard Law. But he just completed his first course in political strategy, and failed, though he gained a lot of admirers who will be chastising me for daring to break with Cruz's self-destructive orthodoxy.
Consequently, establishment Republican Senate and House leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner acquiesced to Demo demands, passing a status quo CR and Debt Ceiling agreement, ending the paid furlough and allowing the federal government to continue borrowing money to pay debt service on money it already borrowed -- basically a Ponzi scheme -- as we soar through the $17 trillion national debt mark. It punted any CR debate to January 15 and debt ceiling debate to February 7. (Oh, and members of Congress and their staffs will still receive their taxpayer-funded subsidies for health benefits.)
On the Senate vote Cruz said "I have no objections to the timing of this vote, and the reason is simple. There's nothing to be gained from delaying this vote one day or two days, the outcome will be same." In a tragic case of irony, that is precisely the position he should've taken four weeks ago.
Obama, who has singlehandedly increased the nation's debt by 55%, could hardly contain his glee when signing the "deal."
For the record, I have never witnessed such a dramatic reversal of political fortunes in the span of one month. The ability of a few Republicans to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory," be they of the "establishment" or "conservative" ranks, is astounding.
Disagree if you will, but the consequences are clear. For example, in July, Republicans had a 12-point lead with independents. Now Demos lead by nine -- a dramatic shift in a political group that typically determines national election outcomes. And the GOP's overall favorability rating has dropped by 10 points to 28%. In the words of John Adams, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
(Oh and while all eyes were on Washington Wednesday, in the New Jersey Senate race to fill the seat of the late Frank Lautenberg, Democrat Cory Booker trounced conservative Republican Steve Lonegan.)
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So, what are the positive outcomes of this debacle, opportunities which have the potential to grow the ranks of conservative Republicans in the House and Senate in 2014 and beyond -- if, as I wrote, moderate and conservative Republicans will lock arms and take the fight to our Leftist adversaries rather than each other?
First, this is the BIG one.
Obama, the consummate narcissist, having even embraced the name "ObamaCare," will himself, along with every member of the House and Senate with a "D" after their name, suffer a significant reversal of political fortune after ObamaCare is implemented. And this will continue as long as ObamaCare exists.
Why?
Because from October 1 forward, with increasing frequency, Americans of every political stripe who have any issue with health care, whether a hangnail or heart transplant, a delay in a doctor's office or in critical care for a loved one, will tie blame for their discontent like a noose around the necks of Obama and his Democrats, who were solely responsible for forcing this abomination upon the American people. (And that was the basis for the derailed Republican strategy to force Democrat House and Senate votes on the "defund" and "delay" measures!)
Additionally, dealing with government clerical minions in this new bloated bureaucracy will be no different than dealing with any other huge government bureaucracy -- endless and infuriating. No matter how Fab-Tastic ObamaCare may be for some Demo constituencies, Democrats are going to be the target of every health care complaint -- and that includes Hillary Clinton.
Of course, there will be other pitfalls -- like the centralization of health and tax records within massive data hubs, many of which will inevitably be compromised and used for fraudulent purposes. Just wait until medical and tax records are accessible to 20,000 additional government clerks in the O'care bureaucracy.
Within the "Terms and Conditions" source code of the ObamaCare web site, at least when it's working, is this disclaimer: "You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication or data transiting or stored on this information system. At any time, and for any lawful Government purpose, the government may monitor, intercept, and search and seize any communication or data transiting or stored on this information system. Any communication or data transiting or stored on this information system may be disclosed or used for any lawful Government purpose."
And state exchanges have equally troubling "privacy policies," like Maryland's, which notes that it will "share information provided in your application with the appropriate authorities for law enforcement and audit activities." And now there are warnings about impostor O'care sites collecting private information -- for resale or identity theft. It's all downhill from here!
"What is going to happen," Barack Obama recently crowed, "is when it's working and everybody is really happy with it, Republicans are going to stop calling it 'ObamaCare.'"
That's wishful thinking. Beginning this week, Obama's dream of socialized medicine will become an ever more terrifying nightmare. Actually, as the ObamaCare promises and propaganda fade to black, as I have previously suggested, we should refer to this behemoth as "DemoCare."
If Republicans successfully herd the inevitable health care consumer dissatisfaction and anger in the direction of Democrats, the electoral rewards will be substantial in 2014, 2016 and beyond. Of course, given the Republican performance in the last month, that's a big "if."
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Second, the consequences of the "Republican Sequester," as Obama dishonestly frames it, and the current partial government shutdown, have had far less impact than trumped up by the Democrats, despite their "make 'em suffer" strategy of shutting down high-profile operations such as national parks. The consequence is that a lot of Americans have now learned firsthand that the nation doesn't fall apart when more than 1/6th of "non-essential" government clerks and bureaucrats are not on the job. (Who would've guessed!)
Today, most Americans know someone who is a federal government employee (not including uniformed military personnel or postal workers). That fact, in and of itself, should be alarming.
There are tens of thousands of good civilians working in government, but millions more are now the "walking dead," many of whom came into their job with a good work ethic but lost it to oppressive bureaucratic erosion. On the other hand, many enter government service because they know that little is required. The result is a costly, bloated and spirit-sapping bureaucracy rife with waste and poorly utilized personnel.
This gross bureaucratic inflation was made plain in a recent GAO report, "Actions Needed to Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication," and echoed in countless analytical reports such as the Wall Street Journal's "Billions in Beltway Bloat." Last week, Time magazine featured an analytical piece titled "Most of Government is 'Non-Essential'."
Of course, eliminating "non-essential" government jobs is next to impossible because those who hold them are shielded from discipline or termination by their public sector unions.
Early in Ronald Reagan's second term, I met with one of his agency heads -- a final interview for a job I thought I really wanted.
That meeting went well, but I was offered some advice regarding government employment before being offered the post. Having reviewed my thick application file (yes, this was back when a file contained actual paper), and having paid particular attention to an extensive personality profile, this career military officer and senior Reagan appointee looked me in the eye and said: "If you come up here and take this post, you won't make it six weeks before you kill somebody."
After some elaboration, I declined the post.
In the years since, I have known many very bright and capable government employees, particularly in agencies with law enforcement or intelligence functions. I have to tip my hat to them because they have a much higher threshold for dealing with non-essential bureaucrats who are indifferent, incompetent, unmotivated, overpaid and underworked -- and who outnumber them 10-to-1! Indeed, a universal truth pertaining to bureaucracies is this: As size increases, accountability decreases.
So, this question is now embedded in the minds of voters across the nation: Is it possible that only half the current government "workers" could accomplish everything that the full contingent accomplish now, under the right management? Or, metaphysically speaking: If a government shuts down and no one notices, did it really need to be so big?
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And the third silver lining?
There is the opportunity to gain some discernment about political process, and to understand that building up toward common goals, rather than tearing down over disagreements, is the only way to continue adding conservatives at every level of government. Democrats have held the House for the better part of the last seven decades, and the Senate for many of those years. It will take more than a few election cycles for the modern Tea Party movement to restore the integrity of our Constitution.
Indeed, there is clear evidence of a conservative shift in public opinion as noted in a recent Washington Post guest editorial by Cornell political scientist Peter Enns. This shift is nationwide -- but keeping that momentum going will require some serious soul searching, and coalitions based on common objectives.
Finally, did I mention that the returns on these silver linings will be significantly diminished unless there is a cease-fire in the foolish and fatalistic "Tea v. GOP infighting"? Yes, I think I did.
As always fellow Patriots, keep your eyes set upon the ultimate prize, Liberty! In the words of John Hancock at the dawn of our Republic, "We must be unanimous; there must be no pulling different ways; we must hang together."
Pro Deo et Constitutione -- Libertas aut Mors
Semper Fortis Vigilate Paratus et Fidelis
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The Wisdom of 'Mr. Republican'
What advice would Robert Taft have for the tea party and the GOP establishment?
By Peggy Noonan
Oct. 17, 2013 6:05 p.m. ET
Are the Republicans in civil war or in the middle of an evolution? Sen. Robert A Taft (1889-1953) says it need not be the former and can be the latter. Taft, known in his day (the 1930s through '50s) as "Mr. Republican," possessed a personal background strikingly pertinent to the current moment. He was establishment with a capital E—not just Yale and Harvard Law but a father who'd been president. And yet he became the star legislator and leader of the party's conservative coalition, which had a certain Main Street populist tinge. Taft contained peacefully within himself two cultural strains that now are seemingly at war.
In his personal style he was cerebral, courtly, and spoke easily, if with limited eloquence. The secret of his greatness was that everyone knew his project was not " Robert Taft " but something larger, the actual well-being and continuance of America. His peers chose him as one of the five best U.S. senators in history, up there with Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.
What would he say about today?
Senator?
"Nice talking with you even though I'm no longer with you. Out golfing with Ike one day and felt a pain in my hip. Thought it was arthritis, turned out to be cancer. It had gone pretty far, and I was gone soon after."
Why did they call you "Mr. Republican"?
"Well, I suppose in part because I never bolted the party, and, in spite of what were probably some provocations on my part, no one managed to throw me out either. But I felt loyalty to the GOP as a great institution, one that historically stood for the dignity of the individual versus the massed forces of other spheres, such as government. I stayed, worked, fought it out."
What is the purpose of a party?
"A theater critic once said a critic is someone who knows where we want to go but can't drive the car. That can apply here. It is the conservatives of the party, in my view, who've known where we want to go, and often given the best directions. The party is the car. Its institutions, including its most experienced legislators and accomplished political figures, with the support of the people, are the driver. You want to keep the car looking good. It zooms by on a country road, you want people seeing a clean, powerful object. You want to go fast, but you don't want it crashing. You drive safely and try to get to your destination in one piece."
In the current dispute, he says, "both sides have something to admit. The GOP will not be a victorious national party in the future without the tea party. The tea party needs the infrastructure, tradition, capabilities—the car—in order to function as a fully coherent and effective national entity." He feels more sympathy toward the tea party than the establishment. "Their policy aims, while somewhat inchoate, seem on the right track. They need to be clearer about what they're for—intellectually more ordered. They can't lead with their hearts."
The establishment? "My goodness—lobbyists, consultants. I gather there's now something called hedge-fund billionaires." The establishment has a lot to answer for. "What they gave the people the past 10 years was two wars and a depression. That loosened faith in institutions and left people feeling had. They think, 'What will you give us next, cholera?' "
The tea party, in contrast, seems to him to be "trying to stand for a free citizenry in the age of Lois Lerner. They're against this professional class in government that thinks we're a nation of donkeys pulling their wingèd chariot.
"Their impatience with the status quo is right. Their sense of urgency is right. Their insight that the party in power has gone to the left of where America really is—right on that, too."
But the tea party has a lot to learn, and quickly. "It's not enough to feel, you need strategy. They need better leadership, not people interested in money, power and fame. Public service requires sacrifice. I see too many self-seekers there.
"The tea party should stop the insults—'RINO,' 'sellout,' 'surrender caucus.' It's undignified, and it's not worthy of a serious movement. When you claim to be the policy adults you also have to be the characterological adults. Resentment alienates. An inability to work well with others does not inspire voters."
They should remove the chip from their shoulder. "Stop acting like Little Suzie with her nose pressed against the window watching the fancy people at the party. You've arrived and you know it. Forget the obsession with Georgetown cocktail parties. There hasn't been a good one since Allen Drury's wake." Taft paused: "You can Google him. He wrote a book."
Most important? "I don't like saying this but be less gullible. Many of your instincts are right but politics is drowning in money. A lot of it is spent trying to manipulate you, by people who claim to be sincere, who say they're the only honest guy in the room. Don't be the fool of radio stars who rev you up for a living. They're doing it for ratings. Stop being taken in by senators who fund-raise off your anger. It's good you're indignant, but they use consultants to keep picking at the scab, not to move the ball forward, sorry to mix metaphors. And know your neighbors: Are they going to elect a woman who has to explain she isn't a witch, or a guy who talks about 'legitimate rape'? You'll forgive politicians who are right in other areas, but your neighbors and the media will not. Get smart about this. Don't let the media keep killing your guys in the field. Make it hard for them. Enter primaries soberly. When you have to take out an establishment man, do. But if you don't, stick with him but stiffen his spine."
What should the establishment do?
"Wake up and smell the Sanka! Listen, reason, talk. Advise in friendship. Be open to debate and get broader, ask yourself questions. Deep down, do you patronize those innocents on the farms, in the hinterlands? Or perhaps you understand yourself to be a fat, happy mosquito on the pond scum that is them? You had better get a mind adjustment on that, and soon. You're better than nobody. You had a good ride for 30 years. Now you're going to have to work for it."
How will a big merge happen?
"Day by day, policy by policy, vote by vote, race by race. On both sides they'll have to keep two things in mind. A little grace goes a long way, and 'A kind word turneth away wrath.' "
Ted Cruz ? Here Taft paused. "That fellow is a little self-propelled." Another pause. "We had a saying, 'Give him time and space to fall on his face.' " Others with him on the Hill, however, are "good, smart, intend to make America better, and will be a big part of the future."
And don't forget, Taft says, "the first Mr. Republican. Abe Lincoln. First inaugural: 'We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies.' Members of the party should wake up every day saying those words."
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Noonan's piece was good till this end part:
*****Ted Cruz ? Here Taft paused. "That fellow is a little self-propelled." Another pause. "We had a saying, 'Give him time and space to fall on his face.' " Others with him on the Hill, however, are "good, smart, intend to make America better, and will be a big part of the future."
And don't forget, Taft says, "the first Mr. Republican. Abe Lincoln. First inaugural: 'We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies.' Members of the party should wake up every day saying those words."****
If it wasn't for Cruz we wouldn't even be having this conversation. I wonder who the "others" on the Hill are who are good and so smart and will be a big part of the future? Would she care to elaborate? I can't think of too many.
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I agree with your disagreement with her on this point.
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The Tea Party and the Entitlement Fight
How ObamaCare realigns the parties on Social Security and Medicare.
By
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Updated Oct. 18, 2013 7:38 p.m. ET
The circus and suspense were overdone. George Soros, the liberal superinvestor, explained to Germany's Der Spiegel last week: "The government shutdown and the threat of default is an elaborate political theater but markets can anticipate the outcome: no default and a defeat for extremists in the Republican Party."
The bond market, for instance, was far more discombobulated by the Fed's "taper" threat than by a supposed default threat. Vastly overinterpreted by the media was the sell-off of a single issue of T-bills (which matured right near the alleged Oct. 17 deadline) because money funds need to be instantly liquid in all circumstances.
A bipartisan majority always stood ready in the House to approve a debt-ceiling hike, but the alarmist claim went that relying on Democrats would cost John Boehner his speakership.
Yeah, if for some inexplicable reason he had called a vote before the imaginary drop-dead date (thoughtfully supplied by the Obama Treasury), depriving the tea party caucus of its chance to make its point. But why would he do such a thing? He let the GOP radicals make hay up to the fake deadline, then got a standing ovation from his own caucus for orchestrating the outcome that was supposed to sink his career.
Scorekeepers judge the tea party caucus and Republicans to be net losers from the ordeal. The polls (for what they're worth) seem to confirm it. But don't be so sure. Tea-party activists have good reason to suspect their stand will pay electoral dividends in the months and years ahead.
Not appreciated is the powerful new meme Mr. Obama has handed them, which will transform entitlement politics in our country. The new "conservative" position will be to defend Social Security and Medicare, those middle-class rewards for a life of hard work and tax-paying, against Mr. Obama's vast expansion of the means-tested welfare state for working-age Americans.
This will discomfit traditional free marketers. They know Medicare and Social Security are generous in excess to the taxes that beneficiaries paid into them.
Indeed, good conservatives of a certain feather disapprove of universal entitlements because they are universal, believing government interventions should be need-based and temporary if possible.
But this reformist conservatism (to which your columnist also subscribes) appears to have had its last hurrah. That hurrah came and went when President Bush failed to interest the country in converting a tax-and-transfer retirement system into one based on private accounts. Paul Ryan (and many others) will have to make some adjustments. Look for means testing possibly even to evolve into a new pejorative in Republican mouths, suggesting undeserved benefits for groups that mostly vote Democrat.
Team Romney was already trying out the new meme in the last election, casting ObamaCare as a threat to Medicare. "Defund ObamaCare" will turn out to be a slogan of genius that resurfaces again and again as the Affordable Care Act, because of its flawed design, needs more and more public funding to keep it afloat. Republicans secretly love the idea that Democrats will be stuck with the Obama welfare state, setting up fights in our overstretched republic between Mr. Obama's "unearned" handouts and the "earned" handouts of the traditional entitlements.
Mr. Obama, by the way, walked into this not just with the substance of his policies, such as stipulating for budget-scoring purposes that ObamaCare would be funded in part by Medicare cuts. Or his huge expansion in unemployment benefits and food stamps. Or the shocking increase in Americans collecting disability as a way to hide out from a bad job market.
He walked into it by choosing in his first term not to focus on the agenda that the public manifestly wanted him to pursue, which was jobs, jobs, jobs.
Recall that every signature domestic initiative of the Reagan, Clinton and Bush administrations passed with bipartisan votes because politicians at the time wanted to be in sync with the public's priorities. Republicans did not fail to cast a single vote for ObamaCare because they were an unusually obstreperous minority. They simply had zero incentive to join the president in pursuing an agenda that wasn't the public's.
To date, Mr. Obama seems not in doubt that the outcome was worth it, though it led to Democrats losing the House, the normal, hygienic outcome when a president ignores the public's priorities. For his own purposes, maybe it was worth it. But even the least clued-in now understands that ObamaCare was somehow at the root of what the country endured this week, which voters will keep in mind as ObamaCare pratfalls continue until the next election.
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Doug writes<
"I share all your frustration, anger, disappointment, etc and then some! To answer you literally, Republican is a brand that is still winning half of the elections, holding the House, a 30-20 lead in Governorships, a majority of state legislatures, well over the 40 Senator threshold, threatening (for a 3rd try) to take back that majority. That is with no leader, clarity or message. Also should have won the Presidency in 2012.
At the start of the tea party movement I thought the uniting message was cut spending first. Reduce the size and scope of government, especially federal government. Lower tax rates along with a booming private sector can follow. But this was in reaction to Obamacare passage in particular, the greatest expansion of government power in this country ever.
Failing to take the Senate, failing to take back the Presidency, failing to get these expansions struck down in the Court, and failing to defund it, all lead us to starting over, carrying all this damage and with a dispirited base. We are fighting to get back to where we were, which was in a faltering economy with a huge government and even more people not contributing.
We actually need to both defeat the establishment Republicans and unite with them, a daunting proposition.
Each state, house district etc., IMO, needs to choose the most conservative candidate - that can win in that state or district. Same for the Presidency. They need to be focused and disciplined, not make the mistakes that sank others recently. Get a message and stay on message; this is not about rape abortions, secession, or shooting our way out of this mess.
We need a vision and some visionaries. A shining city on a hill. Tell people the positive things about a realistic, America-2014 and beyond vision. Move past the liberal terminology and definitions of the issues. As Newt once did, ask questions that poll well and favor our side. Would you like more government control over your life or more personal freedom and economic opportunity? Would you like to stop others from succeeding or improve your own lot on life? Do you like jobs, businesses, schools, health care, and everything else controlled mainly by Washington or closer to home? Do you think public sector people should have far bigger salaries, pensions, benefits and shorter work days than the private sector people who support them or be in line with the rest of the economy?
At some point there are demographic groups such as unemployed young people who will begin to see that the move toward Stalinism isn't helping them. Hope and change meant sit still and demand things. These things tend to swing like a pendulum. At some point people open up to a different message. But we didn't made good use of the turns we had to govern and we haven't presented a coherent alternative while out of power, so we are now paying that price."
All excellent points. It mostly works for me. Yet I sense something is missing. It is all beautiful talk but I still think this misses the mark.
Older people have suggested to me it is much tougher to get ahead then it used to be. Competition is much greater. One member of household out working was more common. Now two must work. College degrees are far more expensive. Way ahead of the cost of living and wages. Worse a college degree used to almost guarantee a good job. Now even advanced degrees don't.
There has to be more specific ways in which republicans speak more than just ideals. Freedom, less government, less taxes, etc.
This is just not enough. Something is missing.
This will not beat Hillary who all is about identity politics and her apparent phony story about conciliation and compromise.
Doug, I agree with you but the message is still short and unsatisfactory. It is not a winner IMHO. Unless times get so bad the Repubs win by default.
" As Newt once did, ask questions that poll well and favor our side. " Why can't we come up with BETTER answers to the questions that don't poll well and favor our side?
Ignoring these questions or changing the subject is exactly the problem I am talking about.
We like it or not half the country wants answers to such questions. We can't just change the subject. We must answer them but do it better.
If someone asks why is it not one Wall Streeter went to jail the answer should not be to change the subject.
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Or put another way, how can we win people over by ignoring their questions and by posing answers to questions they are NOT asking?
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THAT is a very interesting formulation , , ,
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A great analogy would be a patient who come in to my office and gives me a few questions.
My response,
Change the questions, rephrase them and give answers to questions he didn't ask and then tell the patient, "this is what you need to do and why".
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Or put another way, how can we win people over by ignoring their questions and by posing answers to questions they are NOT asking?
Yes, precisely!
Start ignoring false questions and answering real ones.
False question are questions based on false premises. In politics, they are endless. How come Republicans want to starve the poor, take away Grannies' meds, don't care about working people, only care about the rich, care only about themselves, don't have a plan of their own, only know how to say no, hate government, hate black people, are war mongers, etc. How come Republicans want people to raise a family on $8 an hour? How come they want to stop 20 million people from getting health insurance? The more we answer these questions, the deeper the hole we have dug.
The question that resonated in the Dem electoral takeover that began in 2006 was the income inequality farce, that reinforces the false choice between siding with rich people and siding with poor or middle class people. It originated with some of the liberal thought wonks, was brought forward by people like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman, and then repeated ad nauseam by liberal candidates and office holders. We had John Edwards' "Two Americas", we had the surge of Howard Dean from the left, we had the changeover of congress to Pelosi-Reid-Obama et al right as the economy was hitting 50 consecutive months of job growth, and then we had the elevation of the Senate's most liberal member to President. During that time we also had the elevation of the CRAp, fairness-based lending, to the top of our national housing policy with Republicans (including Newt!) jumping in to defuse Democrats 'it's all so unfair' argument. It ended in a crash, but by their measures and even when Dems controlled all branches and all chambers, we still have the rich getting richer - at an alarming rate!
What do we know about income inequality?
a) It is badly measured and greatly overstated,
b) It is a fact, not an issue, and
c) Focusing on this false injustice leads you to all the wrong policy choices.
Back to part two of the CCP axiom: "posing answers to questions they are NOT asking?"
Yes! What are the questions middle voters REALLY are asking? (or should be)
Aren't they really asking something like this: How can we raise up everyone's prosperity and quality of life?
If so, the argument might be between the performance of state run economies over time and across the globe versus the more free economies and we would win with every look at the data.
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Loving and Hating America
Posted By Walter Williams On October 22, 2013
As I’ve documented in the past, many leftist teachers teach our youngsters to hate our country. For example, University of Hawaii Professor Haunani-Kay Trask counseled her students, “We need to think very, very clearly about who the enemy is. The enemy is the United States of America and everyone who supports it.” Some universities hire former terrorists to teach and indoctrinate students. Kathy Boudin, former Weather Underground member and convicted murderer, is on the Columbia University School of Social Work’s faculty. Her Weather Underground comrade William Ayers teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bernardine Dohrn, his wife, is a professor at Northwestern University School of Law. Her stated mission is to overthrow capitalism.
America’s domestic haters have international company. 24/7 Wall St. published an article titled “Ten Countries That Hate America Most” (http://tinyurl.com/lqgtm42). The list includes Serbia, Greece, Iran, Algeria, Egypt and Pakistan. Ranking America published an article titled “The U.S. ranks 3rd in liking the United States” (http://tinyurl.com/9x9hm8k). Using data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, it finds that just 79 percent of Americans in 2011 had a favorable view of Americans, compared with Japan and Kenya, which had 85 and 83 percent favorable views, respectively. Most European nations held a 60-plus percent favorable view of Americans, compared with countries such as Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey, with less than 20 percent favorable views.
An interesting facet of foreigners liking or hating America can be seen in a poll Gallup has been conducting since 2007 asking the questions: “Ideally, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move permanently to another country, or would you prefer to continue living in this country? To which country would you like to move?” (http://tinyurl.com/6rtwczu) Guess to which country most people would like to move. If you said “the good ol’ US of A,” go to the head of the class.
Of the more than 640 million people who would like to leave their own country, 23 percent — or 150 million — said they would like to live in the United States. The U.S. has been “the world’s most desired destination for potential migrants since Gallup started tracking these patterns in 2007.” The United Kingdom comes in a distant second, with 7 percent (45 million). Other favorite permanent relocations are Canada (42 million), France (32 million) and Saudi Arabia (31 million), but all pale in comparison with the U.S. as the preferred home.
The next question is: Where do people come from who want to relocate to the U.S.? China has 22 million adults who want to permanently relocate to the U.S., followed by Nigeria (15 million), India (10 million), Bangladesh (8 million) and Brazil (7 million). The Gallup report goes on to make the remarkable finding that “despite large numbers of people in China, Nigeria, and India who want to migrate permanently to the U.S., these countries are not necessarily the places where the U.S. is the most desired destination. Gallup found that more than three in 10 adults in Liberia (37 percent) and Sierra Leone (30 percent) would move permanently to the U.S. if they had the opportunity. More than 20 percent of adults in the Dominican Republic (26 percent), Haiti (24 percent), and Cambodia (22 percent) also say the same.” That’s truly remarkable in the cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone, where one-third of the people would leave. That’s equivalent to 105 million Americans wanting to relocate to another country.
The Gallup poll made no mention of the countries to which people would least like to relocate. But I’m guessing that most of them would be on Freedom House’s list of the least free places in the world, such as Uzbekistan, Georgia, China, Turkmenistan, Chad, Cuba and North Korea.
I’m wondering how the hate-America/blame-America-first crowd might explain the fact that so many people in the world, if they had a chance, would permanently relocate here. Maybe it’s that they haven’t been exposed to enough U.S. university professors.
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Doug,
First, sorry about the Giants and Vikings :-o.
Doug writes,
" In politics, they are endless. How come Republicans want to starve the poor, take away Grannies' meds, don't care about working people, only care about the rich, care only about themselves, don't have a plan of their own, only know how to say no, hate government, hate black people, are war mongers, etc. How come Republicans want people to raise a family on $8 an hour? How come they want to stop 20 million people from getting health insurance? The more we answer these questions, the deeper the hole we have dug."
I absolutely agree that the Republicans do not appropriately answer these questions. But these are questions people have.
I don't think one can win anyone over by simply ignoring or rephrasing these questions. We need to answer them.
Doug writes,
****What do we know about income inequality?
a) It is badly measured and greatly overstated,
b) It is a fact, not an issue, and
c) Focusing on this false injustice leads you to all the wrong policy choices.****
Number one there is huge income inequality. The top controls huge amounts of the country's wealth. I agree it is not an injustice, but would you not agree there are injustices? Would you agree the wealthy do get privileges the rest of us do not get? I am not against them. But people see the right totally ignoring some at the top who are ripping off the system. There are people at the bottom doing the same thing with welfare fraud, disability fraud. My point is we should strive for fairness at the top and bottom. I want a system based on competition and hard work, conceding that luck and talent often separates those who do better than others.
So what. It is still by far the best way.
Just to call it a "false injustice" is very evasive. I don't think this will persuade anyone. We need better responses. I wish I was retired. I would like to spend the time and give it a go.
We are having trouble winning people over because WE ARE NOT LISTENING to them. We are not answering them. We are not really offering a choice. We are not reaching them. Convincing them WE (REPUBS) offer the better way of life.
I think Rove and the Bushes and other Rinos think the compromise and concession is the way to listen to others. I don't agree with that. That is a losers take IMHO.
OTOH, if a guy with the completely flawed character of McAuliffe can win Virginia and indeed his numbers improve just by having Hillary stand next to him, another with a flawed dishonest personality than maybe we are finished. THAT is very discouraging! :cry: :cry:
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I don't love this guy much and while I disagree all of his prescriptions for anything he does have one valid point. The middle class in the US is dying. Remember when one could put their money in a local bank and they would pay us 5% interest without fees, without minimums? Now banks TAKE as much from us while we park our money with them! That is one example of the difference between years past and now. No one can save anything. One may argue with the exact number but when most people in the US are living from paycheck to paycheck we as a country have a big problem. Republicans are not speaking TO these people. They just speak about debt, freedom, smaller government, etc. I get it. I agree with the concepts. But most Joes want to hear what we can do for them! We ALL know the Clintons will frame the debate so average people who don't spend much time thinking about political philosophy will understand. They will frame it in a way to tug at people's emotions. That is why she will win. Of course, they have a complicit media. And they are world class liars. And they repeatedly commit fraud, cover ups, and take no responsibility for screw ups. And the media lets them get away with it because they are liberal or want to hop on the money and power train.
So IMHO Reich is a crazy communist liberal. Yet his points about the sinking middle class is DEAD ON. So what say we? Less government, more tax breaks, less regulation. OK fine. So how does that help or connect with the average Joe who doesn't know the difference between the AHA and Obamacare? My answer it doesn't. And that is why folks we lose.
*****Robert Reich: The triumph of the right
By Robert B. Reich, Tribune Content Agency
Posted October 23, 2013 at midnight
Conservative Republicans have lost their fight over the shutdown and debt ceiling, and they probably won’t get major spending cuts in upcoming negotiations over the budget.
But they’re winning the big one: How the nation understands our biggest domestic problem. Conservative Republicans say the biggest problem is the size of government and the budget deficit.
In fact, our biggest problem is the decline of the middle class and the increasing ranks of the poor, while almost all the economic gains go to the top.
The Labor Department reported Tuesday that only 148,000 jobs were created in September — way down from the average of 207,000 new jobs a month in the first quarter of the year.
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Many Americans have stopped looking for work. The official unemployment rate of 7.2 percent reflects only those who are still looking. If the same percentage of Americans were in the workforce today as when Barack Obama took office, today’s unemployment rate would be 10.8 percent.
Meanwhile, 95 percent of the economic gains since the recovery began in 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent. The real median household income continues to drop, and the number of Americans in poverty continues to rise.
So what’s Washington doing about this? Nothing. Instead, it’s back to debating how to cut the federal budget deficit.
But the deficit shouldn’t even be an issue because it’s now almost down to the same share of the economy as it has averaged over the last 30 years.
The triumph of right-wing Republicanism extends further. Failure to reach a budget agreement will restart the so-called “sequester” — automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that were passed in 2011 as a result of Congress’s last failure to agree on a budget.
These automatic cuts get tighter and tighter, year by year — squeezing almost everything the federal government does except for Social Security and Medicare. While about half the cuts come out of the defense budget, much of the rest come out of programs designed to help Americans in need: extended unemployment benefits; supplemental nutrition for women, infants and children; educational funding for schools in poor communities; Head Start; special education for students with learning disabilities; child-care subsidies for working families; heating assistance for poor families. The list goes on.
The biggest debate in Washington over the next few months will be whether to whack the federal budget deficit by cutting future entitlement spending and closing some tax loopholes, or go back to the sequester. Some choice.
The real triumph of the right has come in shaping the national conversation around the size of government and the budget deficit — thereby diverting attention from what’s really going on: the increasing concentration of the nation’s income and wealth at the very top, while most Americans fall further and further behind.
More cuts in the deficit will only worsen this by reducing total demand for goods and services and by eliminating programs that hard-pressed Americans depend on.
The president and Democrats should reframe the national conversation around widening inequality.
They could start by demanding an increase in the minimum wage and a larger Earned Income Tax Credit. (The president doesn’t even have to wait for Congress to act. He can raise the minimum wage for government contractors through an executive order.)
Framing the central issue around jobs and inequality would make clear why it’s necessary to raise taxes on the wealthy and close tax loopholes (such as “carried interest,” which enables hedge-fund and private-equity managers to treat their taxable income as capital gains). It would explain why we need to invest more in education — including early-childhood as well as affordable higher education.
This framework would even make the Affordable Care Act more understandable — as a means for helping working families whose jobs are paying less or disappearing altogether, and therefore are in constant danger of losing health insurance.
The central issue of our time is the reality of widening inequality of income and wealth. Everything else — the government shutdown, the fight over the debt ceiling, the continuing negotiations over the budget deficit — is a dangerous distraction.
The right’s success in generating this distraction is its greatest, and most insidious, triumph.
Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, is a columnist for the Tribune Content Agency.*****
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Working with some themes I have raised previously:
1) Go after "The War on Savers" i.e. artificially low interest rates. The WOS is a liberal fascist subsidy to the Big Banks and Wall Street paid for by the savers of America.
2) Make interest income on savings tax free.
Separately, the post about Sen. McCain sending up a trial balloon about running again got me thinking about the theme I have been raising here for a few years now-- the paradigm shift in foreign affairs.
The GOP is associated with a muscular foreign policy-- in the Bi-Polar World against the Russian Empire and in the Uni-Polar Moment with Afpakia and Iraq. The former no longer exists, and with regard to the latter, the American people, not without considerable reason, have come to doubt the competence of our government to lead or even navigate present day waters.
It occurs to me to say the following:
1) Wave the flag proudly for the exceptional role that America played in the world from the rise of Hitler to the fall of the Soviet Empire
2) Acknowledge that Bush made major errors in Afpakia and Iraq. In Afpakia, he started well, but took his eye off the ball due to Iraq. We should have continued to pay attention or left. In Iraq, the major flaw was to go in far too light to establish a new order and for this Rumbo deserves the lion share of the blame-- and Bush for taking his advice. However, some the Dems get huge blame for not just disagreeing in patriotic fashion, but in sabotaging our efforts. Ultimately Bush got it right with the Surge and handed off a win to Baraq. In my strong opinion, we need to hammer the point that Baraq threw away a win and that from this major historical error flows the subsequent disastrous trajectory.
3) That said, it is too late now to undo and we must look forward from here. In the new Multi-Polar World, the US's over arcing strategic concept is , , , what?
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3) That said, it is too late now to undo and we must look forward from here. In the new Multi-Polar World, the US's over arcing strategic concept is , , , what?
This discussion is purely academic as long as Obama remains in the White House. He believes the United States is a bully, responsible for most of the ills of the world, and needs to be cut down to size. Obama is no different in this regard from other radical leftists. He is accomplishing this goal quite effectively in my estimation. I think it's all quite deliberate - note well his active support of the Muslim Brotherhood. Until this man leaves office - and frankly, I have serious doubts at this point that he has any intention of doing so - the U.S. government will continue to be perceived by its enemies as a "paper tiger," its threats nothing but empty talk and no action. Obama has accomplished his objective.
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I disagree that this is academic. Indeed IMHO it is a key variable in the essential task of WINNING back the White House. Do we really want 8 years of Hillary?!? If not we had better address this issue. Romney's tin ear on this, e.g. with regard to Afpakia cost him as did McCain's attitude as well.
Quite correctly voters will want to know what is our vision for the Middle East? Iran? China/the South China Sea? etc.
For decades a strong military and strong foreign policy was a bulwark of Republican votes-- now it is not.
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It still is a bulwark of CONSERVATIVE votes. The Republican Party leadership, however - is at war with its base. The few exceptions - Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Louie Goehmert, et. al. are the way forward. The old dead, rotting wood - McCain, McConnell, Boehner - and the younger appeasers - Ryan, Cantor, Woodall, and many others - must be defeated and removed from office. The current Republican Party is doomed with its present "leadership" of eunuchs.
If this nation would simply adopt Reagan's posture of "peace through strength, trust but verify," as we would with a proper Constitutionally Conservative leader - our standing on the world stage would be restored. This isn't going to happen from within the Federal Government. The plan Mark Levin outlines in his book "The Liberty Amendments" I believe - is the only way to stop this nation's accelerating decay, short of civil war. Those are the cold, hard facts. The federal government is now unmoored from the Constitution. We have a completely lawless President. We have an impotent Congress willing to capitulate to his every thuggish demand, and a media which might as well be literally state-controlled. They're relentlessly promoting the leftist agenda and protecting this President voluntarily. I repeat - Congress is now impotent. If the STATE LEGISLATURES don't force a return to Constitutionally-limited government, we are doomed. I see no other solution, as I say - short of an armed patriot resistance against a tyrannical federal government. That would be a most unfortunate development, but quite possibly necessary if the Founders' vision is to be preserved.
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Ummm , , , the world is not bi-polar or uni-polar anymore, and with good reason the American people doubt the competence of their government to execute foreign policy, be it Bush or Obama. Cruz, Rand Paul, and others are a major force within the Rep Party.
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Columnist Jonah Goldberg: "In the recent internecine conservative donnybrook over the government shutdown, the insurgents insisted they were in an ideological struggle with the establishment. But there was precious little ideology involved. Instead, it was a fight over tactics and power. The Republican Party almost unanimously opposed Obamacare, and the Republicans who've been in office far longer than Cruz & Co. have voted more than three dozen times to get rid of the disastrous program. And yet, the latecomers to the battle talk as if the veterans in the trenches were collaborators the whole time. ... But the real source of that frustration is not the insufficient conservatism of the establishment; it's the insufficient power and popularity of conservatism coupled with the very real failures of the GOP to reverse conservatism's fortunes over the last two decades."
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Crafty quotes Jonah Goldberg:
"it's the insufficient power and popularity of conservatism coupled with the very real failures of the GOP to reverse conservatism's fortunes over the last two decades."
I think this is in line with what I am talking about. How can we reverse conservative's fortunes if we are not listening and responding to the real concerns of so many?
"the insurgents insisted they were in an ideological struggle with the establishment. But there was precious little ideology involved. Instead, it was a fight over tactics and power"
Well yes. A guerilla resistance war vs. a full scale retreat with management of decline.
We keep debating in circles. It all comes down to how do we convince people that government is not the answer to all the world's ills. Indeed it will mostly make things worse.
Half the US gets a check from the other half. How do we combat that? I hear a lot of ideas on the board. But they speak only to the 50% who are working and shelling out the dough.
Does Jonah offer any ideas to reverse the decline? Jonah is suggesting both ways are flawed.
It just might take a giant crash of the pyramid of cards the left has shoved down our throats.
BTW if I read one more lefty state how Reagan was willing to compromise while in the same breath point out he ballooned the debt - why he did that because of the Democrats in the Houses!
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Dealing with the horrific effects of leftist policies is the only thing that will wake some up.
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Dealing with the horrific effects of leftist policies is the only thing that will wake some up.
Yes, but even then the answer in this mindset is double down on failure.
CCP has posed a difficult question, once we have more than half the people on the taking/riding side of the equation, how do we win elections. As Rush put it after the last election, how do you beat Santa Claus if he can offer you free everything.
Romney was half right and half wrong about the 47%. 41% today (RCP poll average) look at abject failure and say good job. Half of Americans rely on some government benefit or subsidy, but they aren't all the same people as the core liberal vote. Plenty of liberal voters are rich and in high tax brackets, Plenty of swing voters are professionals living in nice neighborhoods, working and paying in. Plenty of people who take a check from the government vote conservative and plenty more are swing voters. The sell has gotten harder but it isn't as mathematically impossible as the premise suggests. As always, you have to win on the margin.
CCP argues we need more than platitudes. Some of it in the eye of the beholder. When I hear empty platitudes like economic freedom it brings a tear to my eye for all the people denied theirs and those who died fighting for it. I also connect it in thought with the things like the Heritage index that show economic freedom synonymous with prosperity, also with peace and a clean environment.
The message will soon come down to who more than than how. Bad candidates or undisciplined ones cost us the Senate, and arguably the Presidency. A Margaret Thatcher for example can bring what you see as platitudes to life with real meaning. Finding the next Reagan is another platitude but good people are stepping forward.
Messaging needs to be both offense and defense, not necessarily from the same messenger. Someone noteworthy needs to be in immediate response mode (remember the Clinton war room) calling out this administration and other liberals on their BS and drivel as fast as it comes out. Then true leadership needs to be on offense, relentlessly pushing what could, would and should be the agenda to address our challenges.
Most of all, as we say in tennis, we need to cut back on our unforced errors!
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Doug thanks.
I am not trying to beat a dead horse. By the way, Rush, has been marvelous since the last election. There is just no one like him. For me he is top radio dog! Crafty is top board dog. :-D
I wonder like GM if we need a crash for those who vehemently defend their "entitlements" to wake up.
Most people are employees not employers. So they are kind of followers not leaders. So offer them free stuff and they will "kill" for it. This is not a racial thing. It is a economic class thing. We see these people all over the message boards, on cable, in our daily endeavors. They despise Republicans. They feel they are entitled. They can't earn it for whatever reasons. So dammit life is not fair and we need government to give us our due.
Reagan brought in many blue collar types. I think because he brought back the spirit of pride in AMerica. TOday the demographics are different. I am not sure why but ASians Latinos and Blacks do not seem to aprreciate American traditional values. Perhaps because they come from different countries that have different types of values. It certainly does not help when children come here and our schools no longer teach them to think of America with pride. That may be a big part of it. You know this identity politics thing.
We need to combat that I think. We are ALL AMERICANS. We are not women. We are not men. We are not Latino. We are not white, black, Asian etc. WE are all in this country and are together. Do you want us to be the best or keep tearing ourselves apart?
These are most of the core of other issues.
But back to the economic side;
As Reich, and has others, are correct in pointing out : Without a thriving middle class we are all either the very few rich or the very many struggling poor. And that is a big problem. Repubs need to connect more than with as Doug nicely describes "platitudes".
Please my fellow Repubs and Tea Partiers -
More than just platitudes - dudes. 8-)
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Guys - please read my previous post once again. Neither Crafty nor anyone else is addressing what I state there. You folks are acting as though the solution to our problems is to work within the current establishment party leadership, against an immovable leviathan of leftist media. I repeat - the Federal Government is BROKEN, Congress is currently IMPOTENT, and any solution to these problems must come from the STATE legislatures. We're in a post-constitutional era as far as the Federal Government is concerned. They are lawless. This navel-gazing about how things SHOULD be IF the system worked is not getting us anywhere.
That is the sense in which I mean the discussion is academic at this point. Until the root cause is addressed, nothing else is going to work long-term.
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The crash is coming. Stein's law can't be avoided. Be politically active, but understand that not much can be done until the crash. We are all in for the Cloward-Piven log ride and it's going to suck like nothing in recent history. Guns, ammo, food, training and some gold and silver are the best focus for your energies now. If possible, get far away from urban areas as you possibly can.
The clock is ticking.
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G M:
My sentiments exactly. I couldn't agree more strongly. I'm well aware that many if not most Americans (who are not and never do pay attention) think that this line of thinking is crazy. All of my best friend's father's Jewish friends and family told him he was a crazy, chicken little, alarmist nut-job when he warned them to get out of Austria in 1938 and moved here to the U.S. Most of those people died in the death camps. We are at an analogous point in history right now in this country. Ignore it at your own peril.
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Denial is very comforting. Humans are capable of immense self delusion. Hey, it's just train ride to temporary housing. The sign out front says work will make us free. Papa won medals fighting for Germany in the great war, Germany would never betray us.
Similar words have been spoken in different languages. Khmer, Ukrainian, Mandarin,to cite a few.
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Obj: "Guys - please read my previous post once again."
I agree with much of it and I like Mark Levin, but you lost me on this point:
"The plan Mark Levin outlines in his book "The Liberty Amendments" I believe - is the only way to stop this nation's accelerating decay"
Right now we can't get 50% to agree with us, so instead we will get 75% to agree with us and pass amendments wiser, stricter, and smarter than what the founders could write and shrink government to something far smaller and less intrusive than what voters support now. How?
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Doug:
It has to be a grass-roots effort. No, it won't be easy, and it is far from certain it will succeed, or how long it may take. Indeed - even Levin himself concedes that it is POSSIBLE that we may be past the point at which this plan can be implemented before collapse/catastrophe occurs. I acknowledge that as well. But what is the alternative you would suggest?
Remember that only about one-third of the colonists supported the American Revolution. To say the leaders of that movement faced daunting odds is a huge understatement - even today, many would say their success was nothing short of miraculous. We may be destined for severe trials, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. I'm open to alternative suggestions - I just haven't seen any that I think are as good or better than Levin's. One thing is certain - I'm NOT going to curl up in the fetal position and accept defeat.
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Ultimately I think we have to engage in the culture wars in a "happy warrior" way-- and win. If we win, we do not need to write a new C. If we lose, we will lose in the writing of a new C.
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Ultimately I think we have to engage in the culture wars in a "happy warrior" way-- and win. If we win, we do not need to write a new C. If we lose, we will lose in the writing of a new C.
While I formulate my own answer to obj, may I ask Crafty, what do you mean by the "culture wars"?
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The various expressions of the fundamental vision disagreement that now afflict our country such as
a) guns and self-defense vs. the sheeple
b) the nanny state vs. freedom
c) gay marriage, gay parenting
d) pre-birth life life vs. abortion
e) free minds and free markets vs liberal fascism
f) etc.
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second post:
Obviously this could go under the Glenn Beck/Tea Party thread, but I put it here because of Beck's diagnosis of what RB is saying.
http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/10/25/glenn-agrees-with-socialist-revolutionary-russell-brand/?utm_source=Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2013-10-25_269490&utm_content=5054942&utm_term=_269490_269497
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The various expressions of the fundamental vision disagreement that now afflict our country such as
a) guns and self-defense vs. the sheeple
b) the nanny state vs. freedom
c) gay marriage, gay parenting
d) pre-birth life life vs. abortion
e) free minds and free markets vs liberal fascism
f) etc.
Thanks for that. Before you posted 'engage in the culture wars', my thinking was to mostly put 'social issues' that divide us aside and at least electorally build a majority that can agree on economic issues. Maybe I am wrong on that.
This year we stopped new gun control efforts without putting it front and center in elections. Of course not without a fight.
On abortion, I believe in the slow fight of changing hearts and changing minds ahead of forcing view on others with new laws the way liberals do with their causes. Without majority support in 38 states, this doesn't get resolved either way in the constitution.
The gay marriage issue is lost from a conservative point of view, and not worth putting on the front burner. The gay parenting issue is odd - with gayness being the opposite of the instinct to form families. The breakdown of marriage and family is now a miserable, overwhelming fact in this country. How we move forward on that I have no idea. That loss is closely tied to the rest of our problems.
Foreign Policy is going to divide us in the next Presidential season. Many conservatives are becoming screw the rest of the world isolationists while others like Marco Rubio sound very Reaganesque (and like Obj) in terms of peace through strength. Peace through Strength is right, but people have become very skeptical about interventions.
The happy warrior point, made earlier, is crucial. There is a lot of negativity on our side, anger, despair, etc., deservedly. But we need to put on a face that is persuasive with optimism and a positive plan. We need to focus on moving the needle ever so slightly with everyone we come in contact with. This isn't about narrowing our allies down to a smaller group that agree perfectly with us. It is about making our viewpoint more appealing to those in the middle, and bringing people in. We need far greater participation from within our own core groups and we need to chip away at liberal, Democratic loyalty from their core constituencies. Most of the latter has gone uncontested and that is a big part of our failure.
Strategies and tactics matter. We are getting KILLED in the ground game, far short of where we need to be in the money game, completely lost in the major media game, getting our asses kicked in messaging, etc., - yet we are still winning roughly half of elections and losing big ones by only a handful of percentage points.
Obj: "One thing is certain - I'm NOT going to curl up in the fetal position and accept defeat."
That is the key. There are ups and downs but this fight never ends.
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An undercurrent of bigotry? He misses the point. As does the guy in the following article. My friend and colleague who I noted in another post who is Indian understands. He said in one generation his people have come here and worked hard. They were not welcomed with open loving, adoring arms. Yet look at them achieve and achieve and achieve. They are the American Dream. How many other countries can groups move into and accomplish so much. Does anyone think there are many Latino countries or African countries or Middle or Far Eastern countries where an outside group with different culture and appearance could come in and accomplish so much?
I might have posted this already but post again to sync with BD's post on Tea Party thread. We don't need people to make blatant racist hatred comments. That said there is hate on all sides of the aisle to go around. This guy to me is a coward. He surely does not really believe in Conservative values if he quits the party over this. And what do Mexicans expect. They come here illegally by the millions walking or driving over the boarder, set up shop, and go to our schools, pay no income taxes, property taxes, in some cases even get other benefits, use our ER services, turn around and accuse us of being racist white bigots and then expect us to respond with a hearty welcome? But it is not just about Mexicans. There are millions of others from other countries coming here as well.
That said I do feel terrible reading the stories of narco-terror in the countries south of the border. And much of those drugs come here and the drug user dirtballs here are feeding the money to the murderous bastards there.
http://www.salon.com/2013/05/14/why_i_quit_the_republican_party/
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http://townhall.com/video/krauthammer-republicans-hit-the-disastrous-obamacare-rollout-hard-n1732559
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http://freepatriot.org/2013/10/29/video-inner-city-blacks-sound-off-on-why-they-are-abandoning-obama-and-the-democrat-party/
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"The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations." --George Washington
"Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives." --John Adams
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." --Thomas Jefferson
"Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it." --John Quincy Adams
"National honor is national property of the highest value." --James Monroe
"Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood -- the virtues that made America. ... We can have no 50-50 allegiances in this country. Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all." --Teddy Roosevelt
"We identify the flag with almost everything we hold dear on earth, peace, security, liberty, our family, our friends, our home. But when we look at our flag and behold it emblazoned with all our rights we must remember that it is equally a symbol of our duties. Every glory that we associate with it is the result of duty done." --Calvin Coolidge
"He serves his party best who serves the country best." --Rutherford Hayes
"America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand." --Harry Truman
"There is nothing wrong with America that the faith, love of freedom, intelligence and energy of her citizens cannot cure." --Dwight Eisenhower
"And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." --John F. Kennedy
In the words of Thomas Paine: 'These are times that try men's souls.' We need more than summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. ... We must draw anew on the individual strength, ingenuity, and vision that built America. But our gaze is not set on the past; it's firmly fixed on tomorrow. ... You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children (America), the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done." --Ronald Reagan
Let me bookend these quotes with another from George Washington: "No country upon earth ever had it more in its power to attain these blessings than United America. Wondrously strange, then, and much to be regretted indeed would it be, were we to neglect the means and to depart from the road which Providence has pointed us to so plainly; I cannot believe it will ever come to pass."
To that end, I am reminded of these words from John Wayne: "Sure I wave the American flag. Do you know a better flag to wave? Sure I love my country with all her faults. I'm not ashamed of that, never have been, never will be."
Fellow Patriots, let us thank God for our great nation every day. And if this day was our last, may our final words be as those of Continental Army volunteer Nathan Hale prior to being hanged by the Red Coats in 1776: "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."
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http://freepatriot.org/2013/10/29/video-inner-city-blacks-sound-off-on-why-they-are-abandoning-obama-and-the-democrat-party/
“They take us for granted. They feel like we are going to vote for them (democrats) anyway, but if there was a republican out here doing what he said he’s going to do, I would vote for him.”
“I think they are self-motivated and their interests aren’t in the community and in a lot of cases, they don’t even live in the community.”
I like this post. The support that most blacks have for Dems came mostly from people telling them how to vote and what is in their best interest (government programs). But the status quo sucks and they are vulnerable to the persuasion that could come from hearing a different view - if our message was clear, understandable and effectively presented to them. Most real persuasion happens face to face. Most tea partiers, libertarians, conservatives, do not live in 'the community' either, from the point of view of inner city blacks. That is a hard one to overcome. Escaping failed Dem rule of the cities is one reason why most conservatives already moved further out.
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Twenty-Five Signs
Chris Banescu
How do you know when you have successfully argued and defended your position when debating with leftists or progressives on Facebook (or face-to-face)?
Look for these telling signs (not necessarily in this exact order):
1. They call you an "extremist, radical, racist, Teabagger, heartless capitalist, or FoxNews cultist."
2. They declare that "you're a 'hater' or you're angry."
3. They ignore the facts and evidence you present, and challenge your "motivations" instead.
4. They accuse you "insulting" any liberal, progressive, or leftist that you criticize, and remind you that you have no right to question.
5. They question your intelligence, experience, education, ethnic background, and/or religious beliefs.
6. They denounce you as "intolerant and judgmental."
7. They demand that you "get off your high horse."
8. They claim that you "lack empathy for others", that you're "selfish" or "evil."
9. They accuse you of not loving ordinary people, and hating the poor, the children, the elderly, and the disabled.
10. They denounce you for not being a "true" Christian.
11. They insist that Christianity proclaims and supports socialism and communism.
12. They tell you to shut up!
13. They condemn you for judging others. They lecture you that Christians are not allowed to judge others. (Think about that judgmental accusation for a second... Ironic, isn't it?)
14. They become enraged and call you angry and hateful again when you apply their own standards of judgment to their own comments and opinions.
15. They blame you for being belligerent and hardheaded.
16. They're outraged that you continue to speak/post and stand your ground.
17. They insist they're not progressives or leftists, despite the evidence you provided to the contrary.
18. They declare themselves "moderates" and call you a "right-wing extremist."
19. They presume to know your mind and heart, and tell you what you think and why.
20. When you expose their fallacies and logically defend your arguments with more objective information, they quickly change the subject or suddenly claim that they're too busy to waste time with you.
21. They almost immediately proceed to misrepresent your actual views on an entirely new issue, attempting to distract and place you on the defensive. They assert erroneous opinions and ascribe them to you; then demand that you explain yourself.
22. When you ignore this diversionary tactic, they accuse you of being too stupid or cowardly to answer.
23. When you stay on topic, they pretend that you're the one who misunderstood what they were saying and doing. They tell that you can't debate logically.
24. They complain that they can't tolerate you any longer. (See note 6 above... Yes, the irony is lost on them!)
25. They de-friend or block you from Facebook to prevent future interactions with you. (De-friend means they are very annoyed. Block means they really despise you and fear your very presence anywhere on Facebook. They run and hide to avoid you permanently.)
These tactics indicate that many leftists and progressives are not interested in debating with those with whom they disagree. They emote instead of reason. They focus on personalities rather than principles. They don't engage the ideas. Instead, they attack, obfuscate, impugn, accuse, name-call, belittle, insult, abuse, and defame anyone who disagrees with them or challenges their beliefs.
You are not their neighbor, but their foe.
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I have great respect for Charles Krauthammer, but this piece makes quite a bit of sense to me:
http://nationalreview.com/article/362259/republican-embrace-welfare-state-andrew-c-mccarthy
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CK is out hawking his book.
I have been more frequently disagreeing than agreeing with his arguments the last few years.
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My experience of him is via the roundtable on Bret Baier's Special Report. Even when I disagree with him I find him intelligent and thoughtful. I agree with him quite a bit.
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Krauthammer is very sharp, no doubt. Great insights. But like everyone else right now he seems to have no idea what the way out of this mess is.
In the Stewart conversation he left the impression that welfare state programs were an unequivocal success. That can't be his view. No intelligent person on the right can see good from those without also seeing irreparable damage done to our society. Maybe he can explain what he meant. I think what he is saying is that a winning candidate on the right will reform these programs, not end them. Conservatives accept a safety net, just not one this large and distorted.
He explains the recent Ted Cruz v. establishment split on the right quite well. We all are want to end Obamacare, but disagree on the tactics. That is not a huge philosophical divide to bridge.
What I don't understand and didn't hear from the so-called more reasonable voices on the right, such as the WSJ editorials, CK, and Rove-type establishment figures is just how they will end Obamacare if not through de-funding. Even as it implodes, we only have the votes to de-fund, not repeal. When will we have 60 votes in the Senate, control of the White House, control of the House simultaneously to repeal as Dems did to deem it passed? This will all happen either never, or after Republicans sound like liberals, or else too late to stop an entrenched program that million hundreds(?) are counting on for their health care.
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I wonder if we could ask the fund-Obamcare Republicans and the starting-to-doubt-Obamacare Democrats to at least draw the line with not funding this trainwreck one damn dime above the level of the estimates on which it was sold and deemed passed.
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An excellent thought, but let's take it over to the Health Care thread.
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Concluding a short rant on income inequality on Powerline is this concise truism:
"The GOP must be the party of opportunity. As long as voters understand that Republicans stand for upward mobility and Democrats are the party of establishment cronyism, the future will be bright." - John Hinderacker, http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/12/who-are-the-rich-we-are.php
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YES!!!
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The Left Learned Wrong Lessons from Nazism
Tuesday, Dec 10, 2013
The only way to understand what is happening to America in our time — and for that matter, in Europe since World War II — is to understand the left.
And one way to understand the left — and its enormous appeal to many decent people — is to understand what it learned from World War II and the Nazi experience. The lessons people draw from history go a long way toward explaining how they view the world and how they behave.
Unfortunately, virtually everything the left learned from the unique evil known as Nazism has been wrong.
The first lesson was that the right is evil, not merely wrong. Because Nazism has been successfully labelled “right-wing,” virtually every right-wing position and leader has been either cynically or sincerely characterized by the left as a danger to civilization. That is why the right is so often labelled fascist and compared to Nazis. Vast numbers of people in the West truly believe that if the right prevails, fascism will follow.
Of course, Nazism was not right-wing — certainly not in American terms. How could it be? Right-wing means less government, not more. Nor was it left-wing, even though “Nazism” was an abbreviation for National Socialism.
Nazism was sui generis. It was radical racism combined with totalitarianism; and racism as a doctrine is neither right nor left.
We have no contemporary movement of any major significance that is Nazi-like. The closest thing we have is Islamist hatred of non-Muslims — but even that is mostly religion- rather than race-based.
The association of Nazism with right-wing is one reason many Jews loathe the right. In the Jewish psyche, to fight the right is to fight incipient Nazism.
The second lesson the left learned is directly related to the first. If the right is so evil that, if allowed to prevail, Nazism will follow, then surely the left must be beautiful and noble. And that, of course, is how the left sees itself — as inherently beautiful and noble. After all, how can the opposite of Nazism be anything but noble?
The third erroneous lesson is a deep fear and loathing of nationalism. Since the Nazis committed their crimes in the name of nationalism (race-based nationalism, to be precise), nationalism must be curbed. That explains much of the left’s contempt for Americans who wave the flag — indeed, the left has rendered the term “flag-wavers” a pejorative term.
How else to explain the fact that on American national holidays one finds so many more flags displayed in conservative areas than in liberal ones? The trauma of World War I had already killed nationalism in much of Europe. And World War II did that for the left in America.
The left regards any assertion of American national identity — not merely flag-waving — as chauvinism bordering on fascism. When the left charges Americans who fear the dilution of American national identity that could follow citizenship for tens of millions of illegal immigrants with “xenophobia,” and “racism,” it is not only a cynical attempt to cultivate Latino votes for the Democratic Party. It is also a sincere belief that conservative concerns about American national identity are reminiscent of chauvinist bigotry.
The most obvious example of left-wing opposition to American nationalism is its cultivation of “multiculturalism” as a replacement for American national identity. For the left, American citizens are no longer Americans first and foremost; we are African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic- or Latino-Americans, Native-Americans, etc. The left celebrates what precedes the hyphen far more than the “American” that follows it. As a result, America no longer instills traditional American values and an American identity on either those born here or in its immigrants, which is the reason for the right’s concern over illegal immigration, not bigotry and xenophobia.
A fourth lesson the left learned from Nazism has been that no judging of cultures is permissible. Because the Nazis deemed Jews and others as inferior, we are no longer allowed to judge other cultures. In the post-World War II world of the left, all cultures are equal. To say that the contemporary Islamic world, or that black inner city culture, has serious moral problems that these cultures need to address is to be labelled dangerously racist — again reminiscent, for the left, of the Nazis who declared other groups (inherently) defective. For the left, the only cultures one may judge adversely are white American and religious Jewish and Christian.
Fifth and finally, the left has affirmed pacifism as an ideal. One would think that the most obvious moral and rational lesson to be learned from the Nazi experience is the need to fight evil. After all, if decent nations were not as militarily strong as they were, and were not as prepared as they were to use that might, the Nazis would not have been defeated, and many millions more “non-Aryans” would have been enslaved and murdered. But the left, including, sad to say, Germany, did not draw that lesson. Instead of learning to fight evil, the left has learned that fighting is evil — and it has taught this to two generations of Americans.
To amend Santayana’s famous dictum, it is those who learn the wrong lessons from history who are condemned to repeat it.
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Scrap the Welfare State and Give People Free Money
A guaranteed income would reduce the humiliations of the current welfare system while promoting individual responsibility.
Matthew Feeney | November 26, 2013
http://reason.com/archives/2013/11/26/scrap-the-welfare-state-give-people-free
“Although a basic or guaranteed income would have to be financed through taxation it has been proposed by a number of classical liberals and libertarians.
One of the most prominent proponents of the negative income tax, which guarantees a basic income, was Milton Friedman, the nobel-prize winning economist and free-market advocate. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek express support for a “minimum income for everyone” in the third volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty. The American radical Thomas Paine proposed a national income in this pamphlet Agrarian Justice, and “
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http://allenbwest.com/2013/12/amazing-video-black-people-erupt-al-sharptons-town-hall-meeting/
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What follows is a post by a FB friend on FB:
"So, WV is looking at one of the worst disasters it has ever experienced. Its directly related to energy companies. It's clear they didn't inform the DEP of any leaks or contamination. Water is 9 counties or more isn't even fit to TOUCH. You can't even boil it clean. If you boil it it put the hazards in the air.
"Seriously, someone takes an AR to a school and dramatically kills 12 little kids and the national media is all over it in seconds. People immediately rally behind banning dangerous weapons. BUT if we slowly poison our children with the water they drink, see a pattern of ignoring safety and environmental concerns and destroy the land we love, no one jumps to ban anything or even put tighter restriction or regulation on HAZARDS? Something is very, very, wrong and it needs to change."
I post this cry of anger and frustration here because it is one that we should be answering and frankly our side really does not. It is something we need to rectify.
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Ranting back...
What follows is a post by a FB friend on FB:
"So, WV is looking at one of the worst disasters it has ever experienced. Its directly related to energy companies. It's clear they didn't inform the DEP of any leaks or contamination. Water is 9 counties or more isn't even fit to TOUCH. You can't even boil it clean. If you boil it it put the hazards in the air.
"Seriously, someone takes an AR to a school and dramatically kills 12 little kids and the national media is all over it in seconds. People immediately rally behind banning dangerous weapons. BUT if we slowly poison our children with the water they drink, see a pattern of ignoring safety and environmental concerns and destroy the land we love, no one jumps to ban anything or even put tighter restriction or regulation on HAZARDS? Something is very, very, wrong and it needs to change."
I post this cry of anger and frustration here because it is one that we should be answering and frankly our side really does not. It is something we need to rectify.
First, terrible tragedy! Second, how is this political? "Our side" favors recklessness? "Their side" favors safety? We don't have enough environmental safety laws? Government has been hands off on energy? I don't think so.
"...see a pattern of ignoring safety and environmental concerns and destroy the land we love"
- The water quality in America has never been better in our lifetimes. Industrial safety has never been better. Distorting facts doesn't solve problems. The totalitarian governments with NO private sectors ALWAYS have worse environmental records than freer countries. What industry in America is more highly regulated than energy?
"It's clear they didn't inform the DEP of any leaks or contamination."
- That's sounds to me like a multiple felony allegation which may be true, but not a sign of an unregulated industry or a political side that doesn't care.
When you are in the middle of crisis, Fukushima or this one, it might seem reasonable to question everything and accuse everyone. I have no idea what failed here. In between crises, we as a society are constantly opposing policies that would power us more safely. For example, pipelines are safer than trucks and rail, we know that yet we block pipelines. Fracking natural gas is cleaner than coal, yet we attack fracking. Transporting gasoline is dangerous yet we have no new refineries in America since the 1970s. Nuclear is safer and cleaner than all the rest and we block it at every turn. We let investments in shiny green objects like Solyndra distract us away from real investments in real solutions. And those people who oppose all major energy sources seem to consume the most.
Clean water will be delivered into disaster areas using fossils fuels made possible by the fact that we are (still) a very prosperous, energy-based society.
In this case, the regulations and safety inspections already required should have prevented this and the company at fault should pay for the cleanup. I don't understand the implication that our side thinks people should not be responsible for their actions. Isn't it exactly the other way around.
Like a plane crash to an airline, a chemical spill to an energy company is not how you maximize profits.
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This being "The Way Forward" thread, my intended point here is one about communication.
According to Jung, people operate through four modalities: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. IIRC about 60% of the population has emotion as its dominant modality. If we wish to reach this 60%, we need to communicate in emotional language.
One of the conclusions I reached from my three Congressional campaigns is that most people "think backwards"-- they choose the position that expresses their emotions, then learn facts and reasons to justify them. This is why so few people change their minds when confronted with more facts and superior reasoning. Intuitively, emotional people know they do this-- and thus assume that everyone else does too. In other words they must be reached on the emotional level first.
So, as I see it, the question presented is how do we speak effectively to the emotions that this person just expressed?
First it seems to me we must say "Nail the bastards!"
Second we must make a refrain out of "The free market says that all costs to a transaction must be born by buyer and seller. When this is not the case it is a violations of the rules of the free market and a proper area for governmental action." We must make clear that our objection to "regulation" is when it is outside of this area and is simply a matter of liberal fascist nanny know-it-all do-gooders looking to impose their ideas on everyone else and that OF COURSE our heart is into punishing the nefarious who would pollute our environment, our country, our planet. Where there are such nefarious deeds, we need to be at the forefront of those calling for the proper exercise of police power.
Third, with these emotional foundations laid, then we can look at the facts and bring reason to bear and stand a chance of being heard.
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Thank you, good points.
"most people "think backwards"-- they choose the position that expresses their emotions, then learn facts and reasons to justify them. "
This is true. I support the search for how to address these people emotionally.
For me, the only way I know is to persuade backwards, hoping that confronting the 'facts' and the logic will find its way back to the emotions. We can react with nail the bastards before knowing the cause or the facts, but I can't let the implication go that this spill (or the financial crisis of 2008) happened because government got too small. Regulated failures happen when government gets too incompetent, not too small.
The best way to get government more focused and effective in its crucial responsibilities like protecting public health and safety is to quit sending it into the areas that are not its responsibility.
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"hoping that confronting the 'facts' and the logic will find its way back to the emotions."
How is that working for us?
Good talking point about govt limited to its proper functions tends to be more effective and more efficient.
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"hoping that confronting the 'facts' and the logic will find its way back to the emotions."
How is that working for us?
Lousy, agreed, though we are winning roughly half the elections with no leader or clear message.
I know you are right about emotions and I fully support that effort, but I don't know how to change emotions first.
Continuously and consistently confronting false 'facts' and failed logic is still necessary; liberals are not entitled to their own set of 'facts': Reagan made the economy worse. Energy production is unregulated. This will only affect the top two percent. Ted Cruz shut down the government. We ended the war in Iraq. Poor people are poor because rich people are rich. Republicans want dirtier water and dirtier air. Democrats care more about the poor. Young people will do better under Obama. The housing crash was caused by the failure of the free market. Healthcare was a free market before Obamacare. Minimum wage raises incomes. Not building the pipeline (or investments in crony solar) will help us move away from oil. Compassion is measured in dollars spent. A 3% increase is a slash in a program. Al Qaida is on the run. Etc. etc. Most of these get left un-rebutted most of the time. You can keep your health plan. Except for the hard left, people's emotions begin to shift when they find out they are being lied to.
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Maybe this will help-- I'm not saying we change emotions, I AM saying we show them that our heart is good and that we share the same values (e.g. "clean planet good, dirty water bad, cute fuzzy animals good, landscape littered with plastic bags bad, etc") and that therefore the facts and logic that we bring can be trusted because they are in service of the same values.
Does this help?
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368054/escaping-rat-maze-welfare-state-jonah-goldberg
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/10/the-depressing-psychological-theory-that-explains-washington/?wpisrc=nl_wnkpm
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This could go under 2016 Presidential but most certainly (IMO) goes under 'the way forward' for whomever wants to take the lessons learned reforming swing state Wisconsin on to national reform.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/what-scott-walker-learned-from-surviving-his-recall-election/article/2542540
During the uproar over his reforms to Wisconsin's labor laws, Republican Gov. Scott Walker got used to shrugging off bad polls. He was jarred out of his complacency one day though when a woman asked him, “Scott, why are you doing this?”
That was because the woman was his wife, Tonette. He had assumed she understood what he was doing, only to learn that she was skeptical, too.
“If my own wife didn’t see why we needed to change collective bargaining, how could I expect the voters of Wisconsin to see it?” he recalled. He then redoubled his efforts to explain his reforms.
The anecdote comes from Walker's recently-published account of his epic 2011 legislative showdown and subsequent recall election, Unintimidated: A Governor's Story and a Nation's Challenge. It isn't the definitive account -- that would be last year's More Than They Bargained For: Scott Walker: Unions, and the Fight for Wisconsin, by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters Jason Stein and Patrick Marley -- but it is a candid, inside look at Walker's trials.
He draws a lot of lessons from the experience, and not always ones other conservatives will automatically agree with. He is simultaneously a bold, swing-for-the-fences guy and a pragmatic leader mindful that he governs a swing state.
Walker makes clear that he believes public-sector unionism is incompatible with good, effective government. He argues it is inherently corrupt because the unions' political clout makes elected officials indebted to them.
His initial plan was to simply end it in the Badger State altogether. But Republican statehouse leaders nixed this, cautioning that many would see it as an attack on the workers themselves.
Instead, their compromise allowed collective bargaining, but ended automatic dues deduction from workers’ paychecks, required annual union recertification votes and limited bargaining mainly to wages.
“The changes actually improved our bill because they put the unions’ fate in the hands of their own members,” Walker wrote. Many union members apparently appreciated this. Walker won 25 percent of their vote in the 2012 recall.
He warns that “austerity is not the answer.” Simply cutting government is not enough and will actually drive people away in hard times. Walker consistently made the case that his reforms would free up money to prevent government worker layoffs or drastic cuts in services. For example, they enabled Wisconsin schools to competitively bid for health insurance rather than using a union-affiliated company, saving millions.
Picking your battles wisely is another theme. Walker’s reforms were audacious but doable. Republicans had majorities in both statehouse chambers at the time. Even after 14 Democrats fled the state to deprive the GOP of a quorum, all that was needed was a little tweaking to push the bill through.
Turning the other cheek is also advocated. The governor was subjected to a torrent of abuse in 2011-12, but never responded in kind. This enabled him to claim the moral high ground. When he won the recall, he was tempted to use the protester’s chant, “This is what democracy looks like,” in his victory speech — but didn’t. He didn’t want to rub their noses in it.
And finally, Walker was, by his own admission, simply lucky. The state only allowed recall elections after the targeted official had been in office for a year, which gave him time to argue his reforms were working. He would have lost otherwise, he writes. A bitter split between the Democrats and the unions over who would challenge him also helped.
Conservative principles don’t automatically equate to electoral success. To win, he argues, Republicans must present themselves as forward-thinking reformers addressing real problems — and beholden only to the people: “When you set the pace of reform, voters will see you as someone who is constantly trying to make things better. And your opponents will be forced to respond to your agenda rather than setting one for you.”
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http://capitalismmagazine.com/2014/01/re-state-union-obama-said/
What Obama Should Have Said
John Stossel (2014.01.30 )
President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday wasn’t what I wanted to hear. This is what the president should have said:
“I cannot imagine what I was thinking when I pushed Obamacare. I now see it is folly to entrust government, which cannot balance its books and routinely loses track of billions of dollars, with even greater power over health care.
“If something as simple as a website is too much for government to get right, imagine what government will do to complicated medical pricing and insurance plans.
“Foolishly, my plan destroyed many sensible insurance plans — some offering catastrophic-only coverage for a lower price — exactly the insurance so many people need.
“I see my fellow Democrat, Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia, seated nearby. I take to heart his comments, which he can safely make now that he’s retiring from Congress, about how Obamacare is economically doomed, with few young people signing up but sick old people taking money out. The math doesn’t add up.
“Now that I think about it, it would be better to end government involvement in health care altogether and let people shop around for the best free-market plans, including catastrophe-only plans, depending on individual needs. Let’s try that. In fact, let’s see if I can revise other items in my agenda so they work better for consumers …
“Minimum wage laws, for example. Although a higher minimum is popular with people from both parties, minimums make no sense. The law cannot make an employee who a company values at $5 an hour become worth $10. Minimum wage laws just increase unemployment by eliminating some jobs. They don’t do the poor any favors. Let’s repeal them.
“And let’s get the feds out of the preschool business! Government does a bad job with K-12 education. Why would we think our central planning should expand? My education department funded studies of Head Start, and we were all astounded to learn that they have no effect. It’s insane to do more of something that our own research shows does not work. Education should be left to local governments and parents.
“Immigration: It’s odd that I’m seen as a friend to immigrants, given that I’ve deported more of them than the previous president did. But if we don’t want people breaking immigration laws, the best thing to do is simplify the law. Conservatives worry that people will come here to mooch off the welfare state or commit crimes. So how about letting people in with quick and simple procedures focused on checking for crime and terrorism, but saying no immigrant is eligible for welfare? That compromise makes sense.
“National Security Agency surveillance: After all the outrage over the Patriot Act, you must have been surprised, America, to discover that the NSA does even more snooping under my presidency. I will not abandon the basic governmental duty to keep citizens safe, but we should limit snooping to people whom we have probable cause to suspect might be terrorists.
“Climate: I think the greenhouse effect is real, but the evidence that humanity’s contribution to it will cause dire problems is debatable. Better to reduce Environmental Protection Agency micromanagement and let America get as rich as possible. This will help us cope with environmental side effects and afford the research necessary to find better sources of energy. Global warming is a theoretical problem. We have real problems, like reducing our debt and getting clean water to the world’s poor.
(more at link)
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Some fair points made here, but some blind spots too IMHO. One of the reasons Romney was a bad candidate was he was tone deaf on this issue e.g. when Newt started talking about an elderly Grandma who had been here for decades, Romney hardcore savaged him. (FL debate IIRC). Different people speak different languages. Around here we speak logic, but far more folks speak emotion. An effective leader, e.g. Reagan, does both at the same time.
===========================
Speaker John Boehner is at it again, holding his finger in the air to see which way the media's wind is breaking on amnesty. Boehner has announced his plans to bring up immigration reform at a GOP retreat, with an eye towards legalizing the status of millions of illegal aliens presently in the United States. The familiar tropes are all there: we have to do better with Latinos, we have to do make inroads with minorities, we have to have a bigger tent, we got hammered by Hispanics in 2012 and so on and so forth.
Here's what establishment Republicans don't understand: Hispanics didn't hammer Republicans in 2012. They hammered Mitt Romney, because Mitt Romney stunk as a candidate. In 2008, Republicans nominated John McCain to be their presidential candidate, and McCain supported amnesty. McCain did worse among Hispanics than George W. Bush, who pursued tougher immigration enforcement.
It's the candidate, stupid, and when a party nominates a candidate that requires you to hold your nose before you can vote for him, that candidate is going to perform badly among all demographics. How do we know this? Because McCain lost a presidential election to an opponent who hadn't even served a full term in the Senate. Romney lost an election to Obama after Obama lost over seven million voters from 2008 to 2012, with record unemployment and deep dissatisfaction over the economy.
The answer for the Republican Party is to nominate candidates who don't stink, and to nominate candidates who don't open their mouths to switch feet with remarks about legitimate rape. The answer is for the Republican Party establishment to take a long hard look at itself and realize that it's the problem, instead of blaming policies that include enforcing the law.
We're keeping the heat on the GOP establishment, with our efforts in South Carolina to hold Lindsey Graham's feet to the fire. We're sending a message to the Democrats, going after seven of their vulnerable seats with an eye towards picking up Senator Mark Warner's seat in Virginia as well. We intend to put candidates in place who understand that enforcement is what the American people and Hispanic Americans both want.
It's time to make it clear to the GOP establishment that the Hispanic community's problem is the same problem the Republican base had: awful candidates who don't inspire or connect with voters. That's why the establishment loses elections.
Your donation is helping us turn the tide, and ensure that the fight against crony capitalism, big government, and the GOP's own self-destructive tendencies is successful. John Boehner is too stupid to see it, but we'll send him a message even he won't get confused in 2014. Amnesty for illegals is not what Americans want. It's not even what Hispanics want. Good candidates who we believe actually give a damn about our concerns are what we want.
Sincerely,
Jay Batman
Director, Research and Messaging
Western Representation PAC
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"We're sending a message to the Democrats, going after seven of their vulnerable seats with an eye towards picking up Senator Mark Warner's seat in Virginia as well"
And what is Warner's response? He just came out in support of the Democratic candidate. These establishment guys just think too much of themselves not Americans.
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RNC Launches Black History Push
The Republican National Committee has launched a Black History Month ad
campaign that also honors recipients of this year's Black Republican
Trailblazers Awards. The RNC has made minority outreach a priority after the
2012 election, recognizing that Republicans have ceded far too much ground to
Democrats when it comes to engaging minority voters. Democrats have won and
held the loyalty of black voters over the last several decades by claiming to
offer them opportunities while holding them in an endless cycle of government
dependency -- the poverty plantation (http://patriotpost.us/alexander/14816),
if you will.
The fact that Democrats hold such an overwhelming majority of black votes year
in and year out represents a sad historical irony. The Republican Party was
founded in 1856 with an anti-slavery platform, and it was Republican votes
that added the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Jim Crow
was a Southern Democratic invention, and for decades it was Democrats who
stymied the advancement of civil rights legislation. Yet, leftist propaganda
would have us believe that the GOP has a long history of racism. Just the
opposite is true. Democrat President Lyndon Johnson may have been behind the
push to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but he was also responsible for
creating welfare programs that have not done anything to improve the lives of
minorities -- and arguably the opposite -- for over 60 years.
Yet the GOP has a lot of work to do to reverse this long-entrenched lie that
is perpetuated by the Leftmedia. They can start by communicating the real
history of the Republican Party, and explain that the GOP platform is actually
in the best interest of everyone, including minorities. Blacks embrace
Democrats because they have been led to believe there is no alternative but
state dependence. It's up to the GOP to spread the word that opportunity comes
from personal responsibility and Liberty, not government subsidies.
Democrats have very successfully politicized race, making it an issue of
conflict in electoral politics. But all people deserve freedom of opportunity,
and Republicans need to push that message. After all, as Mark Alexander wrote
Wednesday, Liberty is colorblind (http://patriotpost.us/alexander/23173).
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"Tepid" "mild" applause - thus wrong message. :-( Perhaps he could say we will expand government to twice the give away rate and then would have had thundering applause. :x
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/02/09/rand-paul-warns-his-former-home-state-texas-could-turn-blue/
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Disagree. Very much a necessary message IMHO and my respect to RP for "getting it" and making a point of saying it.
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Disagree. Very much a necessary message IMHO and my respect to RP for "getting it" and making a point of saying it.
I agree with Crafty here. I don't like group or demographic politics, but that is the game being played. Better to be in the mix than to lose by default.
Republicans don't need to win 51% or 100% of blacks or Hispanics, but they do need the people who are like minded to feel welcome and join in.
It is not true that Democrats have the best policies for 94% of blacks and 73% of Hispanics.
40 percent of Texas Hispanics identified as conservative. Only 18 percent claimed to be liberal. Sixty-eight percent of Texas Hispanics support increasing border security as part of immigration reforms; 10 percent opposed it. I know they vote Dem, but there is cause for concern in the numbers for Dems as well. http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/ted-cruz-and-hispanic-vote
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http://JesseB.opendrive.com/files/NV8yMzU1MTQzNF9yS295Mw/Week%201.jpg
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Week two of my campaign
http://jesseb.opendrive.com/files/NV8yMzU1MTg0N19GRHNhTg/Week%202.jpg
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Week 3 of my campaign http://jesseb.opendrive.com/files/NV8yMzU1MTkwOF9nOXlSWA/Week%203.jpg
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While awaiting my editor to give me weeks 4 and 5, we now jump to Week 6 from my 1992 Campaign:
http://jesseb.opendrive.com/files/NV8yMzU1MTkwOV9HQ2pKUA/Week%206.jpg
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Some time ago I suggested the way forward for the Republican party is not just to scream smaller government but to scream smaller government that is with the same fairness to all. We all know it is a rich man's world as put so apply by Dick Morris the other day. But to not even acknowledge the reality of this is in my humble opinion why Republicans can only hope to win by default. I know others on the board don't agree with me on this.
It seems to me this article By Noonan speaks in the same vein I speak though from a different angle. I like something Crafty said about getting rid of the extravagant overwhelming regulation that only rich people can navigate as one way to speak to making the road straighter for all. We all abide by the same rules.
In any case Peggy here is seems to be discussing this phenomenon without differentiating between party lines. Both sides are amongst the "elite". And all are decadent:
*****Peggy Noonan's Blog
Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.
Search Peggy Noonan's Blog1 . February 18, 2014, 7:58 PM.
Our Decadent Elites.
Watching Season 2 of “House of Cards.” Not to be a scold or humorless, but do Washington politicians understand how they make themselves look when they embrace the show and become part of its promotion by spouting its famous lines? Congressmen only work three days a week. Each shot must have taken two hours or so—the setup, the crew, the rehearsal, the learning the line. How do they have time for that? Why do they think it’s good for them?
“House of Cards” very famously does nothing to enhance Washington’s reputation. It reinforces the idea that the capital has no room for clean people. The earnest, the diligent, the idealistic, they have no place there. Why would powerful members of Congress align themselves with this message? Why do they become part of it? I guess they think they’re showing they’re in on the joke and hip to the culture. I guess they think they’re impressing people with their surprising groovelocity.
Or maybe they’re just stupid.
But it’s all vaguely decadent, no? Or maybe not vaguely. America sees Washington as the capital of vacant, empty souls, chattering among the pillars. Suggesting this perception is valid is helpful in what way?
I don’t understand why members of Congress, the White House and the media become cooperators in videos that sort of show that deep down they all see themselves as . . . actors. And good ones! In a phony drama. Meant I suppose to fool the rubes.
It’s all supposed to be amusing, supposed to show you’re an insider who sees right through this town. But I’m not sure it shows that.
We’re at a funny point in our political culture. To have judgment is to be an elitist. To have dignity is to be yesterday. To have standards is to be a hypocrite—you won’t always meet standards even when they’re your own, so why have them?
* * *
I wonder if the titans of Wall Street understand how they look in this.
At least they tried to keep it secret. That was good of them!
They are America’s putative great business leaders. They are laughing, singing, drinking, posing in drag and acting out skits. The skits make fun of their greed and cynicism. In doing this they declare and make clear, just in case you had any doubts, that they are greedy and cynical.
All of this is supposed to be merry, high-jinksy, unpretentious, wickedly self-spoofing. But it seems more self-exposing, doesn’t it?
And all of it feels so decadent.
No one wants to be the earnest outsider now, no one wants to play the sober steward, no one wants to be the grind, the guy carrying around a cross of dignity. No one wants to be accused of being staid. No one wants to say, “This isn’t good for the country, and it isn’t good for our profession.”
And it is all about the behavior of our elites, our upper classes, which we define now in a practical sense as those who are successful, affluent and powerful. This group not only includes but is almost limited to our political class, Wall Street, and the media, from Hollywood to the news divisions.
They’re all kind of running America.
They all seem increasingly decadent.
What are the implications of this, do you think?
They’re making their videos, holding their parties and having a ball. OK. But imagine you’re a Citizen at Home just grinding through—trying to do it all, the job, the parenthood, the mowing the lawn and paying the taxes. No glamour, all responsibility and effort. And you see these little clips on the Net where the wealthy sing about how great taxpayer bailouts are and you feel like . . . they’re laughing at you.
What happens to a nation whose elites laugh at its citizens?
What happens to its elites?****
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Although the following WSJ editorial overlooks the point that Bush was a big amnesty supporter, still it addresses questions we must address:
By Jason L. Riley
Feb. 19, 2014 5:51 p.m. ET
Rand Paul, the GOP senator from Kentucky who is eyeing a White House run, recently warned that his former home state of Texas "will be a Democratic state in 10 years" if Republicans don't do a better job of winning over minority voters. Mr. Paul is understandably concerned about the GOP's dearth of racial and ethnic diversity in a country that is fast becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. But Texas may not be the best example of the party's outreach woes.
To begin with, every state-wide office in Texas is occupied by a Republican, which has been the case for the past two decades. Moreover, Mitt Romney won Texas by a 16-point margin in 2012, which was wider than John McCain's margin of victory there in 2008 and suggests that Texas has gotten redder in recent years in presidential elections.
Then there's the Gallup poll released earlier this month, which found that Texas Hispanics trend Republican at a much higher rate (27 percent) than Hispanics nationwide (21 percent). Given that Texas is home to the country's second-largest Latino population after California, that finding is not trivial.
"Hispanics in Texas are more likely to identify as Republican than are Hispanics elsewhere, and the Republican Party in Texas has seen more growth in Hispanic support over the past five years than the Democratic Party," Gallup found. "While this has not changed the overall equation—Democrats still lead big among Texan Hispanics—it does suggest the GOP may be more competitive with this bloc than many assume."
Mr. Paul was making a point about overall demographic trends in the country that are undeniable. Hispanics are 17 percent of the population today and projected to climb to 30 percent by 2050. Some 27 percent of students enrolled in the University of California system, the nation's largest, self-identify as Hispanic.
Still, demography is not political destiny. Many Republicans are too eager to write off the Latino vote, but the Texas experience shows that this would be a mistake. Latinos are proven swing voters and tend to share the politics of their neighbors, as the political scientist Michael Barone has noted. Puerto Ricans in Harlem may be reliably Democratic, but Mexican-Americans living in Orange County, Calif., are more likely to lean Republican. Republicans in Texas seem to be doing a much better job of making Latinos feel welcome in the party. National GOP leaders should take note.
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It is being said Obama may be delaying push for immigration (amnesty) reform till after '14. If true than isn't this a cynical comment on how pols abuse the intent of voting?
If it is not popular than delay it and not make it an issue till after an election and then when that is over ram it down the voters throats against their wills.
The disdain for wants and needs for Americans is so palpable.
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I don't agree with this assessment of the Republican Party or where it should go, but this is the FIRST time I recall reading any Economist article that is [sort of] positive on the Republican Party. Some of the proposals are again new versions of government programs but a few do streamline some things.
*****The Republicans
Hell, maybe
The “party of no” is offering some fresh ideas
Feb 15th 2014 | WASHINGTON, DC | From the print edition
THE House passed a bill on February 11th to raise the debt ceiling (the legal limit to how much America may borrow) without conditions attached. The Senate followed suit the next day. With luck, this marks the end of congressional games of chicken over whether America will default on its debts and torpedo the world economy. It also made the Republican Party look less like a protest movement and more like a part of the government, which in fact it is.
Many Republicans are coming round to the view that they need to be more than “the party of no”. On February 10th Heritage Action, a ferocious conservative campaign group, held a day-long jamboree of policy ideas. Speaker after speaker talked about how important it was to put forward fresh proposals. The notion that policies formulated by Ronald Reagan may need some tweaking 40 years later has also gained ground. “To many Americans today, especially to the underprivileged and middle-class, or those who have come of age or immigrated since Reagan left office, the Republican Party may not seem to have much of a relevant reform message at all,” said Mike Lee, a senator from Utah, in a barely reported speech before Christmas.
Blocking schemes that come from the president or from the Senate, where Democrats have a majority, has an obvious appeal for a party whose unifying idea is that government is too big. “Hell no” may also prove to be a workable strategy in this year’s mid-term elections, which are likely to be low-turnout affairs that reward intensity of feeling. Moreover, recent examples of naysaying, such as the postponing of immigration reform and the refusal to extend unemployment benefits, suggest that the party is not ready to question many of its core beliefs. Yet some Republicans who represent purplish states or have national ambitions are doing just that.
Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida, has proposed rolling the federal government’s many anti-poverty programmes into a single fund, to be spent by states on plans of their own design. Paul Ryan, a congressman from Wisconsin, has made admiring noises about Britain’s universal credit, an attempt to simplify welfare payments and reduce the high effective marginal tax rates that claimants face when their earnings rise. At the moment the earned-income tax credit, a negative income tax that boosts the earnings of ill-paid parents, does little for the childless. Senator Rubio has also proposed a wage subsidy for low-paying jobs which, unlike the earned-income tax credit, would treat people with and without children equally.
John Thune, a senator from South Dakota, has proposed replacing the extension of unemployment insurance with a payroll tax holiday for companies that hire the long-term unemployed. He also favours a scheme to lend $10,000 to people in this category to help them to move somewhere where they can find a job. These ideas borrow from work by Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, who suggests that the federal government act as an employer of last resort and hire people who have been out of the labour market for a long time.
If one thread runs through these ideas, it is this: that getting people back to work at a time of high unemployment may require more than just cuts to benefits, and that lower taxes and deregulation may not improve wages for low earners on their own. This willingness to interfere with markets extends to health-care policy, the area where there is most disagreement between Republicans and Democrats. Lanhee Chen of Stanford University reckons that the Obamacare fight has improved the quality of Republican counter-proposals, which now aim to cover pre-existing medical conditions, reduce costs and extend coverage—as Obamacare is meant to do.
The urge to say no to everything is still strong. A reminder of that came when the Senate Conservatives Fund, a campaign group which has spent $8m already in this electoral cycle, responded to the passage of the debt-ceiling bill in the House by announcing its intention to replace John Boehner, the most senior Republican in Congress, as Speaker. “Successful political movements”, says Senator Lee, “are about identifying converts, not heretics.” By that measure the Republicans still have some way to go. But at least the arguments the party is having with itself have become more adventurous.
From the print edition: United States
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Henninger: The Growth Revolutions Erupt
Ukrainians want what we've got: The benefits of real economic growth.
By
Daniel Henninger
Feb. 26, 2014 7:32 p.m. ET
All future histories of the Obama presidency will analyze the phrase "leading from behind"—the idea that the U.S. superpower should behave as no more than a co-equal partner in managing the affairs of the world. Chapters will be devoted to laying this revisionist template over Libya, Syria and Iran. There is one area, though, in which the returns are already in on this new notion of American leadership: For five years, the U.S. has been leading the world economy from behind. It's not pretty.
Across the postwar period, the U.S. has been the "engine" that pulls the world economy. That engine has sputtered the past five years, with annual U.S. growth rotating around 2% rather than the historic average above 3%. Economies elsewhere are faltering or choking. Even China is decelerating. The European Union this week predicted weak growth through 2015.
After the great recession ended in early 2009, the normal post-recession growth spike in the U.S. never happened, meaning the world's people missed out on a lot of productive economic activity. And don't hold your breath. According to the Congressional Budget Office's outlook report this Feb. 4, "The growth of potential GDP over the next 10 years is much slower than the average since 1950." Not slower. Much slower.
Enlarge Image
Hang around the Washington political and pundit class these days, and you get the impression this doesn't matter much. We'll muddle through low growth till the sun comes out again. Raise the minimum wage, create more tax credits or spend $300 billion pouring federal concrete, and the clouds will part.
You think so? Let's try to describe as provocatively as possible the future that a slower U.S. economy will produce, and we don't mean the coming Medicare-cost bomb. If the American economic engine slows permanently to about 2%, you're going to see more fires around the world like Ukraine and Venezuela. At the margin, the world's weakest, most misgoverned countries will pop, and violently.
No one in our politics should be so naïve as to think that in a dangerously low-growth world, the U.S. won't have to get "involved." Weakening economies breed anger and political volatility, as in the 1930s, and if the flames get high enough, there will be U.S. boots on the ground somewhere.
The Arab Spring erupted just three years ago. As in Ukraine or Venezuela, the scenes from Middle Eastern capitals were the same: thousands of young demonstrators (a million in Cairo's Tahrir Square), bonfires and bloodshed. Yes, it's about political freedom and corruption, but left unseen because it can't be photographed in these upheavals is the reality of economic hopelessness.
Enlarge Image
People attend a rally in Independence Square in Kiev on Wednesday. Reuters
Mainly that means massive joblessness, notably among young people. It's 39% in Egypt and 38% for university graduates in Tunisia. We are witnessing growth revolutions. Why are Ukrainians fighting and dying to join the low-growth European Union? Because the EU has a system that makes real economic growth theoretically possible, unlike erratic Russia. Aligned with the EU, a free Poland has grown, even if Italy and France have frittered away what they had. France reported record unemployment this week.
The U.S. and Western Europe have lived through these recent years with the illusion that economic mediocrity can't be so bad because they've had no Orange Revolutions on their lovely streets. In fact, these vain and decelerating advanced economies are living off the accumulated inheritance of a century and a half of good growth.
Angus Maddison, the late and eminent economist for the OECD, produced a famous chart in 1995, depicted nearby. For the longest time—basically from after the Garden of Eden until the 19th century—economic benefit for the average person in the West or Japan was flat as toast. The Mona Lisa aside, there was a reason someone back then said life was nasty, brutish and short. Then suddenly, new wealth spread broadly.
Maddison describes 1820 till 1950 as the "capitalist epoch." He means that admiringly. The tools of capitalism unlocked the knowledge created until then. What came to be called "economic growth" gave more people jobs that lifted them and their families from the muck of joblessness and poverty. Maddison also noted that much of the world did not participate in the capitalist epoch. No wonder they revolt now.
This history is worth restating because the importance of strong economic growth, and the unavoidable necessity of a U.S. that leads that growth, may be disappearing down the memory hole of public policy, on the left and even among some on the right. Both share the grim view that the U.S. economy is flatlining, and the grim fight is over how to divide what's left.
There is no alternative to strong economic growth. None. They know this in Beijing, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Warsaw, Bratislava, Taipei, even Hanoi. The missing piece is a global growth agenda led by a U.S. president and Treasury secretary who aren't fundamentally at odds with capitalism. The revival of tax reform announced this week (and on these pages) by House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp is a start.
In a puckish moment, Angus Maddison did say that income inequality was rather minimal in the 11th century. Now those were the days.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
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CPAC 2014 Highlights: Making the Case for Liberty
The American Conservative Union hosted the Conservative Action Political Conference (CPAC) in Washington, DC, this past weekend. Here are some highlights from the roster of speakers, in no particular order:
Rand Paul: "Imagine with me for a moment, imagine a time when Liberty is again spread from coast to coast. Imagine a time when our great country is again governed by the Constitution. Imagine a time when the White House is once again occupied by a friend of Liberty. You may think I'm talking about electing Republicans. I'm not. I'm talking about electing lovers of Liberty. It isn't good enough to pick the lesser of two evils. We must elect men and women of principle, and conviction and action, who will lead us back to greatness. There is a great and tumultuous battle underway for the future, not of the Republican Party but the future of the entire country."
Rick Perry: "It's time for a little rebellion on the battlefield of ideas. ... I am here today to say, we don't have to accept recent history. We just need to change the presidency. It's not too late for America to lead in the world, but it starts by leading at home."
Bobby Jindal: "I spent a lot of 2012 going around the country saying that President Obama was the most liberal and most incompetent president in my lifetime ever since Jimmy Carter. Now having witnessed the events abroad these last several days: To President Carter, I want to issue a sincere apology. It is no longer fair to say he was the worst president of this great country in my lifetime, President Obama has proven me wrong."
Mike Lee: "We have concrete, specific proposals to help lower-income families overcome welfare, improve education and job training, and rescue at-risk communities with too few jobs, too few fathers, and too little hope. We have solutions to end cronyist privilege and corporate welfare, to close the Beltway Favor Bank, and put America's political and corporate elites back to work for the rest of us. And we have introduced legislation to rescue America's working families from the middle class squeeze. To make it more affordable to raise and educate their kids, and afford health insurance and a home of their own. We have an agenda. And contrary to the Establishment's advice, we're not hiding it from the media or the American people, or from you. It's time for the Republican Party to stop talking about Ronald Reagan and start acting like him."
Ted Cruz: "You want to lose elections, stand for nothing. ... Defend the Constitution -- all of it. ... We need to repeal every single word of ObamaCare."
John Bolton: "Our biggest national security crisis is Barack Obama. This is a president that does not believe in American exceptionalism, a president uninterested in national security and America's place in the world, who considers our strength part of the problem, that we are the cause of international tension. This is like looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. But that is Barack Obama's world."
Marco Rubio: "There is only one nation on earth capable of rallying and bringing together the free people on this planet to stand up to the spread of totalitarianism. ... America must be involved in leading the world."
Dr. Ben Carson: "[W]e have got to get back to the same mentality that Americans had in the pre- Revolutionary days. They got together with their friends and their neighbors and their associates and they talked about what kind of America do we want to have, what we want to pass onto our children. And they encouraged each other, and that is how a bunch of ragtag militia men defeated the most powerful army in the world at that time. You need to go out and talk to people."
Sarah Palin: "I love coming back here because there are always so many young people, or as you're known by the folks across the river, the ObamaCare suckers. ... Turns out you have the change they were waiting for -- you have the fives, the tens, the twenties."
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This catches my attention:
"This was the point raised in 1953 by Robert Nisbet’s “Quest for Community,” arguably the 20th century’s most important work of conservative sociology. (I wrote the introduction when it was reissued.) Trying to explain modern totalitarianism’s dark allure, Nisbet argued that it was precisely the emancipation of the individual in modernity — from clan, church and guild — that had enabled the rise of fascism and Communism."
=========================================================================================
Ross Douthat
IN the future, it seems, there will be only one “ism” — Individualism — and its rule will never end. As for religion, it shall decline; as for marriage, it shall be postponed; as for ideologies, they shall be rejected; as for patriotism, it shall be abandoned; as for strangers, they shall be distrusted. Only pot, selfies and Facebook will abide — and the greatest of these will probably be Facebook.
That’s the implication, at least, of what the polling industry keeps telling us about the rising American generation, the so-called millennials. (Full disclosure: I am not quite one of them, having entered the world in the penultimate year of Generation X.) A new Pew survey, the latest dispatch from the land of young adulthood, describes a generation that’s socially liberal on issues like immigration and marijuana and same-sex marriage, proudly independent of either political party, less likely to be married and religious than earlier generations, less likely to identify as patriotic and less likely — by a striking margin — to say that one’s fellow human beings can be trusted.
In political terms, the millennials are liberals on the surface, which is why the Pew report inspired a round of discussion about whether they’re likely to transform electoral politics in the short run (no, because cohort replacement is slow, and it’s Generation X that’s actually moving into positions of influence right now), whether they will push our political debates leftward in the long run (probably, because youthful voting patterns tend to persist across the life cycle), and whether this gives the Democratic Party a hammerlock on the future (it doesn’t, because political coalitions always adapt and fracture in unexpected ways).
But the millennials’ skepticism of parties, programs and people runs deeper than their allegiance to a particular ideology. Their left-wing commitments are ardent on a few issues but blur into libertarianism and indifferentism on others. The common denominator is individualism, not left-wing politics: it explains both the personal optimism and the social mistrust, the passion about causes like gay marriage and the declining interest in collective-action crusades like environmentalism, even the fact that religious affiliation has declined but personal belief is still widespread.
So the really interesting question about the millennials isn’t whether they’ll all be voting Democratic when Chelsea Clinton runs for president. It’s whether this level of individualism — postpatriotic, postfamilial, disaffiliated — is actually sustainable across the life cycle, and whether it can become a culture’s dominant way of life.
One can answer “yes” to this question cheerfully or pessimistically — with the optimism of a libertarian who sees such individualism as a liberation from every form of oppression and control, or the pessimism of a communitarian who sees social isolation, atomization and unhappiness trailing in its wake.
But one can also answer “no,” and argue that the human desire for community and authority cannot be permanently buried — in which case the most important question in an era of individualism might be what form of submission it presages.
This was the point raised in 1953 by Robert Nisbet’s “Quest for Community,” arguably the 20th century’s most important work of conservative sociology. (I wrote the introduction when it was reissued.) Trying to explain modern totalitarianism’s dark allure, Nisbet argued that it was precisely the emancipation of the individual in modernity — from clan, church and guild — that had enabled the rise of fascism and Communism.
In the increasing absence of local, personal forms of fellowship and solidarity, he suggested, people were naturally drawn to mass movements, cults of personality, nationalistic fantasias. The advance of individualism thus eventually produced its own antithesis — conformism, submission and control.
You don’t have to see a fascist or Communist revival on the horizon (I certainly don’t) to see this argument’s potential relevance for our apparently individualistic future. You only have to look at the place where millennials — and indeed, most of us — are clearly seeking new forms of community today.
That place is the online realm, which offers a fascinating variation on Nisbet’s theme. Like modernity writ large, it promises emancipation and offers new forms of community that transcend the particular and local. But it requires a price, in terms of privacy surrendered, that past tyrannies could have only dreamed of exacting from their subjects.
This surrender could prove to be benign. But it’s still noteworthy that today’s vaguely totalitarian arguments don’t usually come from political demagogues. They come from enthusiasts for the online Panopticon, the uploaded world where everyone will be transparent to everyone else.
That kind of future is far from inevitable. But as Nisbet would argue, and as the rising generation of Americans may yet need to learn, it probably cannot be successfully resisted by individualism alone.
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I gave a little rant yesterday over in Monetary policy about how are our problems (and solutions) are not monetary. That said, I thought the followup should go here - on the optimistic side, or else in a doomsday thread.
ccp: Doug, So how long can we go on with this charade?
It hasn't really occurred to me that we won't snap out of this. The world and the economy looked this bad just before the Reagan revolution. The table is set and we are one good leader away from solving this, IMO.
When we were poised to win a tea party victory in 2010, GM said and I agreed that this was a two election fix. From there we won the House but blew TWO good chance to win the Senate and an almost perfect opportunity to take back the White House.
Yet the same opportunity is still presenting itself, $4 trillion in debt later and with a deteriorating workforce and work ethic. Is it too late now? No. Is is to late if we blow it again? God help us! I don't know. At some point if we choose the policies of Venezuela or Greece, we will get the results of Venezuela or Greece - or Haiti or the Republic of the Congo, with our goal of perfect income equality even as it approaches zero.
Nate Silver, of fame for his perfect Obama victory predictions now says the R's will pick up 6 seats in the Senate, plus or minus 5. (http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2014/0323/Nate-Silver-s-new-Senate-forecast-could-terrify-Democrats-into-action-video) Assuming he is right at 6, Republicans could easily lose the Senate in 2016 even while taking the White House. If we are going to turn this ship around, the number of new Republican Senators this year needs to be closer to the 11 that are winnable than the 6 that are expected.
Pew published recently that new voters will soon be majority non-white. Dems think that means majority Dem because they own non-white vote. (http://washingtonexaminer.com/pew-white-majority-over-next-generation-more-than-50-non-white/article/2546219) But they have not earned their vote with the results of their policies and owning non-whites has been illegal for 150 years. Wise, older black conservative Thomas Sowell says, as I have said, the Republicans don't need to win the black vote but they need to chip the Dem black vote down from 90% to 80%, a critical mass that would allow all blacks to believe they have a choice - especially a school choice! (http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell032514.php3) [Similar arguments obviously can and need to made with Hispanics, women, gays, Asian-Americans, young people etc.]
What we have gained through Obama is clear data that the liberal, leftist policies don't work, for white or non-white, at home or abroad. What we do with that new data from a policy and marketing challenge is up to us.
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We are past the point of no return.
The hard reboot is coming.
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The Goldberg File
By Jonah Goldberg
April 18, 2014
Editor's Note: Jonah will be back to filing your favorite "news"letter next week. In the meanwhile, we editorial lackeys thoroughly enjoyed reading this blast-from-the-past G-File originally sent on November 30, 2012, and we trust you will too.
Dear Reader (Well, maybe not so dear. It occurs to me that going by the logic of the White House, you people should be presenting me with proposals for this parenthetical gag and then I'll decide which one I'll deign to use),
I know it's been a while, and for those of you new or recently signed up to this fully operational "news"letter let me say a few things. 1) Booger! 2) Hitler was a "man of peace," and 3) you are not a zombie.
As longtime readers of this product may recall, point one is a reference to the inaugural episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, where Johnny Fever ("That's 'Doctor Johnny Fever' to you kid" -- The Couch) is lured from his exile in disco and called back into doing Rock and Roll. His career had taken a bad turn when the FCC dinged him for saying "booger" on the air. Andy Travis, WKRP's new station manager, tells him he can not only do Rock and Roll again, but he can even say "booger" on the air if he wants to. Jack Fowler, NR's publisher, made me a similar offer when he asked me to revive the old Goldberg File. The Doctor was well-pleased , and so was I.
I bring this up because I just want to emphasize that I get to write about what I want here. We have a lot of new subscribers coming and, even though in my imagination you all talk to each other, in reality some of you don't know the score and have been complaining. So there it is. B to the double Oh to the G, E-R.
Hitler the Moderate
Twice this week I wrote columns I didn't like that much, and that always puts me off my feed. When you have to grind out two syndicated columns a week, this happens. The muse, that selfish tramp, decides to stay in bed all day watching reruns of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. And you're left hunting and pecking letters on the key board without the power of Greyskull coursing through your fingers. Or something like that.
The first column, on Mohamed Morsi, was perfectly passable, but it wasn't fun to write, and I just didn't get to make the point I wanted to make.
Well, like the cummerbund on a really fat man at a super classy cheesesteak-eating contest, the G-File is here to catch the crumbs so I can take a second bite. Which brings me to point No. 2.
The point I made about Morsi is that simply because he opted not to join Hamas in a war against Israel right now doesn't mean he's a moderate.
The point I wanted to make is that there's no inherent conflict between what we routinely describe as "pragmatism" and being a fanatic or even an ideologue.
Consider the man in the mustache.
In a major speech in May 1933, Hitler proclaimed he had set "only one great task" for himself and his government: "to secure peace in the world." The National Socialist Party craved "from its innermost heart to live in peace and friendship." He continued to hit this note throughout most of the 1930s. In 1935: "National Socialist Germany desires peace from its innermost ideological convictions. . . . Germany needs peace and desires peace."
Historian Ian Kershaw writes, "Since the Munich Agreement, there was, it seemed, little room for doubts about Hitler's diplomacy, and his speeches in the spring and summer of 1939 – especially his highly effective rebuff of President Roosevelt on 28 April – made a considerable impact, seeming to confirm to many Germans that his underlying aims were to preserve peace, not to wage war."
It's also important to remember that Germans weren't the only ones who bought Hitler's peace talk. For years, in America and the U.K. it was respectable, albeit debatable, to claim Hitler was a "man of peace." Wyndham Lewis, an oddball and right-wingish character, said as much in his 1931 book,Hitler. He recanted in 1938 with the book The Hitler Cult. But just as Lewis was coming to his senses, many on the left were losing theirs. Forget Neville Chamberlain. In 1938 former Labor Party leader and president of the British Peace Pledge Union, George Landsbury, proclaimed, "I think Hitler will be regarded as one of the great men of our time." Landsbury was also apparently the head of War Resisters' International and chairman of the No More War Movement.
Hitler's peace propaganda in the 1930s did exactly what he needed it do: buy him time. In a secret speech to the German press in 1938, Hitler explained:
Circumstances have compelled me to speak for decades almost solely of peace. Only through continued emphasis on the German desire for peace and intentions of peace was it possible for me . . . to provide the German people with the armaments which were always necessary as the basis of the next step. It goes without saying that such a peace propaganda which has been cultivated for years also has its doubtful side; for it can only too easily lead to the view being formed in the minds of many people that the present regime identifies with the determination and the will to maintain peace under all circumstances.
Pragmatic Fanaticism
My aim here is not to preach the usual -- albeit wholly valid -- sermonettes about the follies of appeasement and the need for vigilance and all that. Rather, it's to point out that even though Hitler meets just about everyone's definition of a fanatic and at least most folks' understanding of an ideologue, he was still capable of what sensible people took to be moderation and pragmatism. And it wasn't all propaganda or Teutonic Jedi mind tricks, either. Hitler was a pragmatist, particularly on the world stage but also with regard to economics, when it suited his purposes. For instance, when the fascist chancellor of Austria Engelbert Dollfuss (yes, you read that right)was deposed in a Nazi coup, the fascist dictator of Italy Mussolini sent troops to the Austrian border to defend Austrian independence from Nazi aggression. Hitler backed down, renounced the coup, and played nice. He was after all, a "pragmatist."
Indeed, pragmatism in political affairs is in no way incompatible with ideology, and yet they are one of the intelligentsia's (and would-be intelligentsia's) favorite false antipodes.
That's right, I used the phrase "false antipodes" and I liked it. But if that bothers you, feel free to substitute "ersatz orthogons."
Yes, yes, I know I wrote a whole book on how pragmatism and ideology aren't what people think they are, but this is sort of a new point. There is something about the modern mind in general and the liberal mind in particular that seems incapable of grasping that ideologically dogmatic people can also be reasonable.
Obama isn't an ideologue, we're constantly told, he's a pragmatist! Why? Because he doesn't automatically and indiscriminately take the cartoonish left-wing position. I can't count how many times I've read or been told that Ted Kennedy was a "pragmatist" because he was willing to work with conservatives to achieve his profoundly ideological goals. And yet, if you call him an ideologue, the Morning Joe types roll their eyes as if calling a left-wing ideologue an ideologue is something only a right-wing ideologue would do.
President Obama marveled at Mohamed Morsi's "pragmatism" because Morsi didn't punctuate his ululating with chants of "Death to Israel!" Moreover, Morsi opted not to go to war with Israel now. Both Obama and Joe Klein took this as proof that Morsi's a "moderate." To me this is like someone in 1935 saying Hitler was a "moderate" for not invading Poland before he was ready to invade Poland.
Note: I'm not saying that I know Morsi will invade Israel. The future is unknowable. He may end up more constrained by the Egyptian people than he'd like. Who knows? What I am saying is that it is idiotic to conclude that Morsi isn't ideologically committed to the tenants of the Muslim Brotherhood (which includes eventually erasing Israel), simply because he refused to let Hamas dictate his agenda to him. The pragmatist Morsi used his success with the cease-fire to parlay it into seizing dictatorial power – power Morsi the ideologue needs to take care of business.
Politics as the Zombie Walks
In other words, ideologues and fanatics (not the same thing, by the way) can be intelligent and patient, too.
And yet, sometimes all it takes for liberals to forget this is to stop saying the obviously stupid stuff and obtusely pushing in the same direction over and over again. We have defined ideology down to the point that so long as you don't behave like a zombie, you're pragmatic. And yes, this brings me to point No. 3, or as my inner Dadaist likes to say, "Melting Clock!"
Just as Charlie don't surf, zombies don't strategize. They smell fresh human flesh and they walk in that direction. If they hit a wall, they walk into the wall or maybe slide around it, gliding along their shoulder, like a drunk trying to find the back of the 7-11 to throw up. What they don't do is think about how to get where they need to go. They take the path of least resistance, but always head in the same direction.
This is how many people think of ideologues. The assumption is that ideology is a high-bleach-content brainwash, making temporary concessions, reasonable adjustments, or intelligent course corrections impossible. The ideologue, like the zombie, walks into walls over and over and over again like a wind-up toy with an eternal spring. But that's not a description of what an ideologue does, it's a description of what an idiot does.
Take Van Jones ("please!"). He's still a radical. But he realized that talking like one turned people off. His epiphany wasn't to have reasonable convictions, it was to sound like he did. "I'm willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends," he once explained when he decided to stop touting his Marxism.
President Obama clearly had a similar revelation at some point in the mid-1990s. And conservatives could learn a lot from him.
Moderate This
I deliberately avoided using this G-File for yet another post-election post-mortem. The stink of recriminations fills the air like the stench of stale flounder in the men's bathroom at a trimethylaminuria clinic. But I just can't help myself.
"Moderation in all things." That was Aristotle's advice. Lost to history is the fact that Aristotle drunkenly blurted this out while swinging from an elaborate sex-trapeze in a Macedonian brothel ("I think you should spend a few more minutes googling that" – the Couch).
I don't think it's great advice, truth be told. Nearly all categorical statements can be falsified. There are certainly areas where moderation is either ill-advised or moderation is simply a trite phrase meaning "something less than extreme." I am not moderate in my hate for Nazis or my love for my daughter. Etc., etc.
That said, Republicans could stand to learn how to sound more moderate. Barack Obama usually (though not always) sounds reasonable as he moves the country on an unreasonable path. Ronald Reagan, almost always sounded reasonable when he was staking out fairly strong ideological positions. Both men took advantage of the fact that their seeming moderation elicited immoderate condemnations from their opponents. Nothing drives your opponents more crazy than being utterly reasonable. And nothing makes demonizing or delegitimizing your opponents easier than letting them shriek unreasonable things for you. The Republicans need to get back to being the party that elicits unreasonable shrieking from their opponents. Not the other way around.
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I have posted often here about the evils of baseline budgeting because of how it clouds reality. The following article makes a closely related point.
No Accounting Skills? No Moral Reckoning
By JACOB SOLL
April 27, 2014, 9:04 pm
SOMETIMES it seems as if our lives are dominated by financial crises and failed reforms. But how much do Americans even understand about finance? Few of us can do basic accounting and fewer still know what a balance sheet is. If we are going to get to the point where we can have a serious debate about financial accountability, we first need to learn some essentials.
The German economic thinker Max Weber believed that for capitalism to work, average people needed to know how to do double-entry bookkeeping. This is not simply because this type of accounting makes it possible to calculate profit and capital by balancing debits and credits in parallel columns; it is also because good books are “balanced” in a moral sense. They are the very source of accountability, a word that in fact derives its origin from the word “accounting.”
In Renaissance Italy, merchants and property owners used accounting not only for their businesses but to make a moral reckoning with God, their cities, their countries and their families. The famous Italian merchant Francesco Datini wrote “In the Name of God and Profit” in his ledger books. Merchants like Datini (and later Benjamin Franklin) kept moral account books, too, tallying their sins and good acts the way they tallied income and expenditure.
One of the less sexy and thus forgotten facts about the Italian Renaissance is that it depended highly on a population fluent in accounting. At any given time in the 1400s, 4,000 to 5,000 of Florence’s 120,000 inhabitants attended accounting schools, and there is ample archival evidence of even lowly workers keeping accounts.
This was the world in which Cosimo de’ Medici and other Italians came to dominate European banking. It was understood that all landowners and professionals would know and practice basic accounting. Cosimo de’ Medici himself did yearly audits of the books of all his bank branches; he also personally kept the accounts for his household. This was typical in a world where everyone from farmers and apothecaries to merchants — even Niccolò Machiavelli — knew double-entry accounting. It was also useful in political office in republican Florence, where government required a certain amount of transparency.
If we want to know how to make our own country and companies more accountable, we would do well to study the Dutch. In 1602, they invented modern capitalism with the foundation of the first publicly traded company — the Dutch East India Company — and the first official stock market in Amsterdam. But it was through an older and well-maintained culture of accountability that they kept these institutions stable for a century. The spread of double-entry accounting to the Netherlands during the early 1500s made the country the center of accounting education, world trade and early capitalism. Well-accounted-for provincial tax returns allowed the Dutch to float bonds at dependable 4 percent interest rates. The Dutch trusted their managers to know how to keep good books and make regular interest payments, while paying off state debt.
Every level of Dutch society practiced double-entry accounting — from prostitutes to scholars, merchants and even the Stadholder, Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange. Painters regularly depicted merchants keeping their books; Quentin Metsys’ “The Money Changers” (circa 1549) showed that even skilled accountants could be fraudulent. In other words, the advantages and pitfalls of accounting were at the fore of public consciousness.
Not only did the Dutch have basic financial management skills, they were also acutely aware of the concept of balanced books, audits and reckonings. They had to be. If local water board administrators kept bad books, the Dutch dyke and canal system would not be well maintained, and the country risked catastrophic flooding.
This desire for accountability was what pushed the Dutch to reform their financial system when it began to collapse under the weight of fraud. The first shareholder revolt happened in 1622, among Dutch East India Company investors who complained that the company account books had been “smeared with bacon” so that they might be “eaten by dogs.” The investors demanded a “reeckeninge,” a proper financial audit.
While the state did not allow the Dutch East India Company’s books to be audited in public, Prince Maurice did do a serious internal audit, and Dutch burghers were satisfied with both company and state accountability. A cultural ideal was set. For the next century, it became common practice for public administrators to have portraits of themselves painted with their account books — sometimes with real calculations in them — open, for all to see.
These historical examples point the way toward achievable solutions to our own crises. Over the past half century, people have stopped learning double-entry bookkeeping — so much so that few know what it means — leaving it instead to specialists and computerized banking. If we want stable, sustainable capitalism, a good place to start would be to make double-entry accounting and basic finance part of the curriculum in high school, as they were in Renaissance Florence and Amsterdam.
A population well-versed in double-entry accounting will not immediately solve our complex financial problems, but it would allow average citizens to understand the nuts and bolts of finance: balance sheets, mortgage interest, depreciation and long-term risk. It would also give them a clearer sense of what financial accountability really means and of how to ask for and assess audits. The explosion of data-driven journalism should also include a subset of reporters with training in accounting so that they can do a better job of explaining its central role in our economy and financial crises.
Without a society trained in accountability, one thing is certain: There will be more reckonings to come.
Jacob Soll, a professor of history and accounting at the University of Southern California, is the author, most recently, of “The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations.”
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"I have posted often here about the evils of baseline budgeting because of how it clouds reality."
To pick up on your introduction and the theme of the piece, the best replacement for baseline based budgeting is not status quo based budgeting, but ZERO-based budgeting. Every line item of every program should have to justify every dollar requested in every budget, based on past, positive results - and do that in conjunction with an approved Unintended Consequences Impact Study attached to it. We should not be touting only the positives of a program (or tax or regulation) without also acknowledging and measuring the harm that each is doing.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/04/28/well-this-is-awkward-watch-americans-fail-miserably-trying-to-answer-some-of-the-easiest-questions-on-the-u-s-citizenship-test/
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Yes this is unbelievable. :cry: To think some of these idiots vote. Of course 40% will always vote for the government to continue handing them more and blame someone else for their woes.
These people interviewed appear to be born American. At least they don't have any foreign accents. I've heard years ago that immigrants used to be more up to date on our history than many born here.
I don't think that is even remotely true now in the sense that the people coming here are much less of European ancestry and from countries with less in common than Europe had with us.
They are much more expectant of government subsidies today.
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I don't often post off of Drudge because I figure we all can see it easily but I think this video highlights the crucial problem facing "America" today. It shows quite clearly the wrapped hatred of the liberals for our country and how they love to foster hatred, anger, jealousy, envy, racism, and the blame someone else game to garner support for more centralized governmental power. This is the central issue we face in America IMHO. Who is going to win this debate. Unfortunately, as long as big gov keeps buying votes 40% will not even listen to the debate. They won't care. They just want subsidies paid for by others. ("The rich") Always the "rich".
The closest people able to respond to the socialist view are some talk show hosts and a few others like VDH etc. I still have not heard one well known politician deal with this effectively. We have no mouth piece in politics. No one represents many of us. I liked Santorum's points on the 2016 Presidential thread that I posted a few days ago.
www.deadline.com/2014/04/hot-trailer-dinesh-dsouzas-america/
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http://www.steynonline.com/6309/after-america-arrives-early
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Well, that was depressing , , , :cry:
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The cover up of Benghazi and the complicity of the entire Democrat establishment either by ideology, bribery, and extortion is one of the threats to our country @ this time.
I don't recall any other time in history wherein we had top members of a Presidential administration cover up a terrorist attack on Americans and just before an election and there appears to be No accountability.
For those of us who are old enough to remember Watergate the comparison is stark. I was 15 or 16 at the time and I remember vividly how the MSM in newspapers and TV news networks were ALL OVER this story driving it home till Nixon resigned before he was impeached. Most people in the beginning didn't even pay attention or care. Most people still favored Nixon. In retrospect I am not even sure that when he resigned he might not still have had more favorable voters than not.
The MSM were tripping and stepping over each other to get him (the Republican) with hysteria and demonical fervor.
Fast forward to the present. Any objective person can say the Benghazi cover up is far worse then was Watergate. Bernstein says, but Nixon's crimes were not just about Watergate but an entire "shadow" government. Don't we see an entire shadow government and press now??
The entire integrity of the Presidential Office is at stake in my opinion. If there is no accounting of this and it is allowed that it is OK for such deceit to be inflicted on our people without holding those responsible then we are finished. Clinton started this kind of thinking. He may be popular but he did great damage to the integrity of the Office or the Presidency as well as our country.
Republicans must not let this stand. Not just for political reasons but for the future integrity of that office and our country.
If the MSM continues to threaten Fox, talk radio, Republicans away from this. "They risk it backfiring", "nothing there", "already old story", " we already investigated this as did the (Democratic controlled) Senate and all the rest.
Almost all the Dow companies have ties to Clinton Foundation. So what about the 1% ers? Republicans have to reach out to the ALL voters and point this out.
Today the Democratic Party is the Socialist Party. Propaganda and all. Big problem for our future.
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Woof All:
Thanks to Boko Harum somehow, all of a sudden, it has become politically correct to notice Islamo Fascism.
Why is this?
There was what I think to be a revealing comment from the Obamas. "Those could have been our daughters." Forgive me my candor, but the thought crosses the mind that this is because they were nice looking black girls, just like the Obamas daughters. Somehow, the ongoing barbarism of Islamo Fascism prior to the big kidnap and slave sale of Boko Harum did not register for them. What of the Afpakian girls with acid thrown in their faces? What of the pogroms against the Coptics in Egypt, the murderous fascism in Syria and Iraq towards the Christians there?
Those of us for whom these people were real too, even though they were of different races from us, were accused of Islamophobia.
Now, Islamophobia is "in".
It seems to me that this is a wonderful moment for us to welcome the Dems, Libs, and Progressives to Islamophobia.
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African slaves were traded by muslims long before the first European ever got into the game. Muslims still trade in African slaves today, funny how Buraq's minister's friend Louis Farrakhan never mentions this.
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I found the following piece interesting on more than one level. I post it in this thread for its observations relevant to growth, opportunity, income inequality, and related matters. http://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/2014/05/08/why-alibabas-long-tail-makes-amazons-look-like-a-bobcats/ Properly understood I think there are some worthy aphorisms that would help us make our case.
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I can't post under "future of Republican party" ; it is locked.
So I post here. Good lead article on Breitbart today:
Rise of the 'Obama Republicans'
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by Craig Shirley 21 May 2014, 10:48 AM PDT 710 post a comment
The 1980 campaign brought about the dissolution of the old New Deal Coalition and the rise of the Reagan Democrat, a phrase coined by Newsweek political writer Peter Goldman after that historic election.
Yet all campaigns cannot be viewed as isolated incidents but rather as a river flowing from one through the next. Conservative Democrats broke with Adlai Stevenson in 1952 to support Eisenhower and many broke with Hubert Humphrey in 1968 to support Republican Richard Nixon or George Wallace, another Democrat.
By 1972, many conservative Democrats supported Nixon over George McGovern so at least in presidential campaigns, culturally conservative Democrats were already moving away from their historic home. Only the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, a southern populist reformer--and Watergate--and Betty Ford’s liberalism--forestalled the inevitable.
The Gipper’s massive victory in 1980 was fueled by more that 30 percent of Democrats nationwide, who took a powder on Carter after he moved to the left. Reagan received the same amount in the 1984 election in part because he’d done nothing to disappoint them and the liberal establishment nominated Walter Mondale, a good man who was trapped in a New Deal past.
Reagan ran again as the anti-establishment candidate of the future and swamped the lifetime Democrat, ironically with the help of Democrats. Yet the Establishment Republicans simply could not abide by the realigning elections of 1980, 1984, and 1994.
By the final years of the last century, some inside the GOP wanted the Reagan Revolution to be over, thus the phrase “compassionate conservative.” George W. Bush ran and lost the popular vote in 2000 without once ever calling for a spending cut or the elimination of one single wasteful federal program. After that, the GOP would continue to embrace the persona of Reagan--they had little choice--but no longer would they embrace the American conservative philosophy of the Gipper.
Hence, the stirrings of the Obama Republicans.
What has altered the storyline in the past several years is not the emergence of the Tea Party but rather the permanent entrenchment of Big Government Republicans, aka Obama Republicans. President Obama has had that much effect on the national debate, which has had a direct effect on the national Republicans.
The last gasp of principled conservatism may have come in 2010 with the rise of the Tea Party, but this also gave rise to the countervailing force of the Obama Republicans, resulting in the nomination of Mitt Romney in 2012.
In spite of losing five of the previous six presidential contests, it is the Obama Republicans who now rule the party apparatus of the GOP. Obama Republicans have also spread out among the state bureaucracies, the academies, Wall Street, Detroit, and nearly all of corporate America.
They have bought into Obama’s Oligarchy of big business and big government doing business together, at the expense of the little guy.
Obama supported TARP. Bush supported TARP. The ruling classes supported TARP. Wall Street supported TARP. Therefore, $750 billion--initially--was taken from the rest of the country to “rescue” the corrupt elites of Wall Street.
And never one prosecution or investigation. The greatest wealth transfer in American history and the elites of both parties were in on the score. The Republicans pulled of the heist and the Democrats drove the getaway car.
Other examples abound.
The new Obama Republicans are members of the bureaucratic classes, are pro-government, pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, pro-NSA, and pro-amnesty. They are sophisticated, urban, and have utterly nothing in common with the Tea Party Reaganites. Indeed, they are culturally closer to Obama’s and Romney’s view of the world than Reagan’s.
Power is everything. Power vindicates all. The shady forces of the national GOP party committees supported a pro-abortion, pro-Obamacare stalker in Oregon’s senate primary because she is a) a woman and b)…? The national GOP plays the very same identity politics that Obama and the Democrats have played for years by embracing one victim group after another. (Shirley & Banister assisted Jason Conger in Oregon’s GOP primary because he was the ethical conservative candidate.)
The Obama Republicans are fueled in part by old Bush speechwriters and neocons and High Tories who sometimes make a pass at talking about conservatism but that is mainly to keep the yokels at the grass roots guessing. Mostly though, they spend their time bashing the Tea Party Reaganites.
There is a dialectic to American presidential politics which occurs every generation or two. From Jefferson’s “New American Revolution” to Jackson’s “Democratic Populism” to Lincoln and the rise of the Republican reformers to Teddy Roosevelt and then to FDR’s “New Deal” and two generations later to Reagan’s “New Federalism,” and now to Obama, 28 years after Reagan--right on schedule--we may be witnessing a paradigm shift again in American politics.
It should be no surprise that the Republicans on Capitol Hill offer nothing of opposition to Obama. They can best be labeled the “Rollover Caucus.” Oh, they will run commercials and mouth platitudes to fool conservative voters to get their money and their votes for this fall, but everybody knows they’ve signed on to Obamacare because their corporate masters in the insurance companies and pharmaceutical industries told them to do so. They have always supported immigration reform because, again, their corporate masters told them to do so.
The Administrative state is here to stay, as long as the status quo holds. The only question now is how long the Tea Party Reaganites stay with a party which is fundamentally opposed to them and despises them.
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"Separation of Corporation and State!"
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"Separation of Corporation and State!"
I agree
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A Third Strategy for Congressional Republicans
In the 20th anniversary year of the Contract with America, it is time to confront the need for a new Republican strategy to defeat Obamaism.
Many Americans believe they are watching increasing lawlessness, incompetence and dishonesty in President Obama and his administration, and that this poses an increasingly powerful challenge for the Congressional Republicans. The scale of the threat and the breadth of Obama's activities leaves them feeling angry and hopeless.
In just the last few weeks, President Obama has released terrorists without consulting Congress, failed to coordinate on the collapse in Iraq, allowed thousands of children to illegally enter the United States, issued extraordinarily destructive (and probably illegal) new, job-killing rules from the Environmental Protection Agency--and the list goes on.
Meanwhile, the President has been presiding over the corruption and collapse of the Veterans Administration with at least 51 sites in 29 states and the District of Columbia already implicated in wrongdoing. (See this interactive map for more.)
Most Republican supporters see the Congressional response to the Obama Administration as too small, too slow, or too weak to be effective.
Both their oath of office to defend the Constitution and the rising fear and anger of their constituents require the Congressional Republicans to develop a new strategy.
Most of the Washington elite discounts the depth of anger among conservative Americans about what they see as literally the destruction of their country. Most of our elites shrug off the fears, alienation and hostility these conservative Americans feel toward a president they view as weakening the nation, destroying the rule of law, and undermining the values they believe in and live by.
There have been two initial Republican strategies to respond to Obama. Both have failed.
First, there has been the strategy of heroic but suicidal frontal assaults. Obama has the power of the presidency, the support of an overwhelming majority of the news media and an extraordinary willingness to say whatever is needed with no regard for the truth.
Given the President's advantages, any poorly thought-out frontal attacks are as doomed as frontal attacks against machine guns were in World War I. The shutdown last full is a classic example of choosing a fight where the other side has all the advantages. Luckily for the Republicans, the Obamacare implementation disaster was so extraordinary that it rapidly erased any damage done to Republicans by inflicting much worse damage on Obama and the Democrats.
Second, faced with the enthusiasm of some of their colleagues for suicidal heroics, a number of Republicans decided that a better strategy was to do nothing, pick no fights, and take no risks. This strategy of minimal effort was endorsed by a consulting class which loves to focus its candidates on raising money to buy negative ads (a strategy which blew up disastrously for Majority Leader Cantor in Richmond this week). The power of the consulting community's hostility to positive ideas and positive solutions cannot be underestimated.
The problem with the take-no-risk, pursue-no-ideas, offer-no-reforms, fight-over-nothing strategy is that it is ultimately self defeating.
First, we are told we should take no risks so that we can get through the 2014 election because then we will win control of the Senate and gain 8 to 12 seats in the house. Then we will be told that we should take no risks in 2015 because we want to focus on keeping control of the Senate and wait for a presidential nominee who will tell us what to do. Of course, having taken no risks, avoided all fights, and developed no new solutions, our candidate will have a bare cupboard for a platform and will be told to run on an anti-Hillary ad campaign.
If we win a purely negative campaign in 2016 (remember the 2004 anti-Kerry campaign), we will have no political capital to reform anything.
If we lose the presidency in 2016, we will face a newly elected chief executive who will claim a mandate and will try to move America even further toward big government bureaucracy and leftist values. And we will have had no practice at fighting and winning.
For both practical and moral reasons, doing nothing, avoiding fighting and offering no ideas is a losing strategy.
So if suicidal fights are bad and doing nothing is bad, what is the third strategy?
A THIRD STRATEGY FOR CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS
Republicans need a new strategy of running a John Wooden-style full court press against the Obama Administration.
They can't beat Obama and his media allies in one single, narrowly focused frontal fight.
On the other hand, the are so many different things going wrong that Obama and his media allies can't defend themselves against a hundred different fronts, each eroding the administration's position and building an alternative governing majority for Republicans.
This new strategy requires a series of large changes for the Congressional Republicans.
1. First, they must announce and emphasize a new strategy of dramatically improving America through better solutions. This is not a political strategy. This is a strategy of creating a better future for America. The core concept--that we can break out in virtually every aspect of government by looking for best practices throughout the private sector and by looking for the new capabilities being developed by pioneers of the future--should be emphasized in every committee and subcommittee.
They should contrast the incompetence, inefficiency and at times corruption of the old bureaucratic systems with the potential speed, accuracy, accountability and transparency of new modern systems. Developing a 21st century veterans service system would be a logical starting place since the VA is so clearly collapsing and corrupt. The VA transformation would be a good template for transforming other departments and for thinking through the challenge of an Obamacare replacement.
2. Every subcommittee has to be empowered to hold hearings, undertake investigations, and develop issues. For example, a subcommittee should be on the border this weekend investigating the flood of children pouring into the United States.
The scale of activism required means that leadership has to rely on training and planning to create a culture of decentralized activism. It is impossible to centrally plan and implement a multiple-front campaign. Subcommittee chairs and their staffs need to be trained and then released to learn by doing. The key steps that every member and staff needs to be prepared for are:
• explaining why this hearing matters and what the struggle to change and improve things is all about;
• explaining how this particular hearing or bill relates to the values and goals of the American people so their lives will be better;
• explaining what the current administration and the current systems are doing wrong and how that is hurting people;
• explaining how our replacement would improve things and what the principles that explain it are;
• explaining how your life will be better if we succeed in changing the law and the bureaucracy.
3. Each area of investigation and policy development needs to have language developed which gives Republicans moral dominance in debating Democrats about those issues. We have to train ourselves to understand the importance of winning the argument in the media. We also have to work to talk in common, everyday language so people understand that we care about them and their lives. As Jack Kemp taught us, "People have to know that you care before they care that you know." Learning to both speak about the impact on people’s lives and to win the argument will make a huge difference.
4. Wherever possible, focus the fight on Obama's bureaucrats rather than Obama. The news media may have a lot of sympathy for the president, but they don’t have it for the bureaucrats. Look at the coverage of the VA scandal and you can see the enormous gap between media affection for Obama and willingness to be very tough with his subordinates.
5. Develop new solutions for new coalitions and constituencies. FDA reform, for example, could appeal to virtually every person concerned with finding cures for diseases. Fighting to allow Uber to serve its customers attracts an amazing number of young people. A new veterans service system that put veterans in charge of their health and gave them a smartphone solution that made them (rather than the bureaucracy) the key player in their care could attract a lot of veterans. The opportunities are endless. In many cases the new solutions threaten the old order (often unionized bureaucrats and their lobbyists) and many Democrats will simply not be allowed to be for a better future because of their allies (take the Keystone pipeline as an example).
6. As issues and solutions develop, turn them into bills in the House and amendments in the Senate and begin peppering Democrats with difficult choices. They can be in favor of their folks back home and of a better future, or they can side with Obama and a poorer, less desirable future for the American people.
This new strategy could meet the passionate desire of our base for a fighting party and could erode the Obama administration and set the stage for a catastrophic Democratic defeat in 2016.
There is a lot of operational detail to develop about this new third strategy but it is clearly more promising than the strategies of suicidal defeat or passive conflict avoidance.
Your Friend,
Newt
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A Letter from a Republican to Hispanics
Tuesday, Oct 5, 2010
I am writing to you as a concerned and sympathetic American who is a Republican. My sentiments do not represent every American — that would be impossible. But I believe the following represent most Americans.
First, a message to those of you here illegally:
You may be very surprised to hear this, but in your position, millions of Americans, including me, would have done what you did.
If I lived in a poor country with a largely corrupt government, a country in which I had little or no prospect of hope for an improved life for me or my children, and I could not legally get into the world’s freest, most affluent country, the country with the most opportunities for people of any and every background, I would do whatever I could do to get into that country illegally.
Mexico and many other Central and South American countries are largely hopeless places for most of their people. America offers hope to everyone willing to work hard. Who could not understand why any individual, let alone a father or mother of a family, would try to get into the United States — legally preferably, illegally if necessary?
Now that I have made it clear that millions of us understand what motivates you and do not morally condemn you for entering America illegally, I have to ask you to try to understand what motivates us.
No country in the world can allow unlimited immigration. If America opened its borders to all those who wish to live here, hundreds of millions of people would come here. That would, of course, mean the end of the United States economically and culturally.
If you are from Mexico, you know that Mexico’s treatment of illegal immigrants from south of its border is far harsher than my country’s is of illegal immigrants. All it takes is common sense to understand that we simply cannot afford to take care of all of you in our medical, educational, penal and other institutions. However much you may pay in sales tax, most illegal immigrants are a financial and social burden in those states to which most them move.
Yes, many of you are also a blessing. Many of you take care of our children and our homes. Others of you prepare our food and do other work that is essential to our society. We know that. As individuals, the great majority of you are hardworking, responsible, decent people.
But none of that answers the question: How many people can this country allow into it?
The moment you have to answer that question is the moment you realize that Americans’ worries about illegal immigration have nothing to do with “racism” or any negative feeling toward Hispanics.
Those who tell you it is racism or xenophobia are lying about their fellow Americans for political or ideological reasons. You know from your daily interactions with Americans that the vast majority of us treat you with the dignity that every fellow human being deserves. Your daily lives are the most eloquent refutation of the charges of racism and bigotry. The charge is a terrible lie. Please don’t believe it. You know it is not true.
Democrats will act as your defenders by telling you that opposition to your presence here is race-based. There is no truth to that. As you probably know in your hearts, you have come to the least racist place on earth. The vast majority of us could not care less if your name is Gonzalez or Jones. That’s why the chances are 50-50 that the child of Hispanic immigrants will end up marrying a non-Hispanic American.
One more thing: Many of you desire to return to your homelands. This is understandable, as many of you did not come here in order to become American but in order to earn the money that would allow you to afford to return home and lead a better life there. But as understandable as that is on an individual level, you must understand that that having millions of people in our midst who feel no bond to our country and who do not want to become one of us is a serious problem. You would feel the same about people who came to your countries to make money and use your country’s medical, social, educational and other services paid for by the people of your country.
It is also a moral problem. There are countless people around the world who wish to come to America in order to become Americans, not just to earn money here. Many of you are taking their places. That is not fair to them or to America.
So, the truth is, in fact, simple: If you were an American, you would want to stop illegal immigration, and if most of us were you, we would do what you did to get into America. Neither of us is bad. You care about your family. We care about our country.
Now, a note to those of you who are here legally and to those of you who are American citizens.
First, while many of you understandably sympathize with the plight of fellow Latinos who are here illegally, you surely must understand that America cannot afford unlimited illegal immigration. This may well create a tension between your mind and your heart, and between your ethnic heritage and your allegiance to America.
If it does, your fellow Americans ask that you be guided by your mind (and we, believe, conscience) and by your concern for America. If anyone knows how extraordinarily welcoming America has been to Latinos — from Mexico to Cuba to South America — it is you. For your sake as well as America’s, please do not succumb to the politics of victimization that are used solely and cynically to get your support for the Democrat Party.
Finally, and most important, by voting for Democratic Party candidates, you are voting for a type of government more like the ones most Latinos fled. Take the Mexican example. The Democratic Party is, in most important ways, an American version of the PRI. For 70 years, the PRI governed Mexico and brought its economy to its knees because of vast government spending, the squashing of individual initiative, a bloated bureaucracy, unsustainable debt and the subsequent devaluing of the Mexican peso.
Why, for God’s sake, would you want to see that replicated in America? The very reason America has been so prosperous and so free — the very reasons you or your ancestors, like almost every other American’s ancestors, came here — is that America has had more limited government and therefore more liberty than any other country in the world. The Republican Party represents all that you or your parents came to America for — and why you left Mexico and other countries: individual opportunity and individual responsibility. It is also the party that represents your social values.
Admittedly, the Democratic Party appeals to your emotions. But a vote for the Democratic Party is a vote to make America like the Mexico of the PRI. And a vote for the Democratic Party is a vote to undo the great American achievement of uniting the children of immigrants from all over the world as Americans.
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Is it the Eric Cantor loss, or the Dave Brat win. The Brat campaign was not single issue on anti-amnesty. Immigration came up but was not the center of the agenda that won. Look at what won:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:online.wsj.com/articles/kim-strassel-what-dave-brat-taught-conservatives-1402614856
What Dave Brat Taught Conservatives
A real free-market agenda remains more popular than redistribution.
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL WSJ
June 12, 2014 7:14 p.m. ET
With Washington determined to take a lesson away from Dave Brat's rout of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, let's make sure it's an enduring one. Let's talk "reform" conservatism.
Yes, immigration came up in this race, though it didn't get ugly until the end. It happens that Mr. Brat, an economics professor, spent the bulk of his campaign rallying voters to a traditional free-market, pro-growth economic agenda. It centered on a tough criticism of crony capitalism and a clarion call for a flatter and more efficient tax code.
Mr. Brat reprised his themes for Fox News's Sean Hannity the night of his victory, explaining: "We need to take free markets seriously. That means we have to put an end to all these tax credits and tax deductions and loopholes. [Michigan Rep.] Dave Camp had a good bill which simplified the tax code and had a Reagan-esque 10 and 25 percent rate. That made sense and it was going to be pro-growth." This clearly resonated with the 56% of voters who chose to rout a sitting majority leader.
Mr. Brat's victory is surely awkward for a new wing of the conservative movement that has taken to arguing that the whole free-market, supply-side, Reaganesque agenda is passé. Humbly declaring themselves the "reform" conservative moment, this group has made some waves with their manifesto "Room to Grow"—including introductions by former Bush speechwriter Pete Wehner and National Affairs Editor Yuval Levin. "Room to Grow" has some interesting ideas, all overshadowed by the book's central premise: That conservatives need to embrace government to better endear themselves to the "middle class."
The authors are clear that politics, not principle, needs to drive conservative policy. Nowhere is that clearer than in the chapter by former Bush Treasury official Robert Stein on tax policy. A summary: Marginal tax rates are no longer popular because they don't give much to the middle class. Republicans instead need to embrace redistribution and lard the tax code with special, conservative-approved handouts for said middle class—namely a giant tax credit for children, similar to that proposed by Utah Sen. Mike Lee. (The book has many more tax-credit suggestions, too.)
Absent from the chapter is any recognition of why Reagan, and the party, embraced tax cuts. It's this thing called "economics." Cutting taxes on capital—and cutting high marginal rates—spurs investment, which grows the economy, which benefits everyone, including the middle class. The good politics follows. The middle-class beneficiaries of Reagan's economic boom showed their own appreciation by signing up for a conservative political realignment that lasted decades.
Mr. Stein never uses the word "capital" in an entire chapter on tax policy. It's also devoid of a corporate tax reform—perhaps because talking about "corporations" isn't a middle-class thing. Defenders of the new agenda have struggled to explain how tax distortions are "pro-growth." AEI scholar James Pethokoukis has taken to arguing that supply-side economics is about a greater supply of children and to justify redistribution. Mr. Levin and National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru this week explained that conservative redistribution is now acceptable, since it counters liberal redistribution.
The biggest cheerleaders for the conservative "reformers" are liberal commentators such as Ezra Klein. No surprise: They understand that "Room to Grow" is a capitulation to the left's inequality and middle-class talking points. They are more than happy for future tax fights to center solely on which party gets more money to divvy up among Solyndra, parents, welfare, farmers and so on.
What matters to the "reformers," explained New York Times columnist Ross Douthat last year, in praising the Lee tax plan, is moving conservative tax policy beyond "1979." This again confuses policy and politics. Good economic policy doesn't have a sell-by date. ( Adam Smith ? Ugh. He is just so 1776.)
What can require periodic overhaul is political messaging. The "reformers" are right that, politically, selling a cut to a 39.6% top rate is harder than was Reagan's job of selling a cut to a 70% rate. What they miss is that the past 40 years have provided entirely new and powerful selling points for a flatter, cleaner code. Americans have grown frustrated with the insane complexity of taxes, furious over the crony loopholes, and wary of the power all this hands abusive IRS bureaucrats.
Which gets us back to this week's rout. Mr. Cantor never endorsed the more dramatic proposals of the "reformers," though he spoke broadly kind words about "Room to Grow." His "Making Life Work" agenda made him a poster boy of that new GOP impulse to focus on populist initiatives that cater to the middle class.
Mr. Brat openly derided "Making Life Work," referring to its "catchy little phrases to compete with Democrats for votes." As he told Mr. Hannity: "I do not want the federal government trying to make my life work." Mr. Brat also ably tied together the cronyism/complexity/growth arguments to make the case for real tax reform (rather than Democrat-lite tax spending).
The hallmark of conservative policy innovation is the use of markets to limit government and expand citizen freedom and choice. That's reform. The lesson of the Brat-Cantor race is that the traditional reform concept is still popular (and populist). At least when it's delivered with economic understanding and conviction.
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Yes.
I would note that apparently Brat's opposition to the Ex-Im Bank, a.k.a. the Bank of Boeing, led to a 2+% drop in its stock the next day.
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Yes.
I would note that apparently Brat's opposition to the Ex-Im Bank, a.k.a. the Bank of Boeing, led to a 2+% drop in its stock the next day.
The issue of funding the export-import bank splits the right. On the surface, it is a pro-business program helping businesses and jobs. Other countries do it. But more importantly, it is a question of where in the constitution is the federal government empowered to do things like this? If nowhere, then end it.
It is a test your principles (or character) to oppose the over-reaches of government and subsidies that seem to benefit you.
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Ideas for Renewing American Prosperity
If you could propose one change in American policy, society or culture to revive prosperity and self-confidence, what would it be and why?
July 7, 2014 7:53 p.m. ET
Editor's note: With the Journal's 125th anniversary coming at a time of slow U.S. growth and reduced expectations, we asked some Journal contributors to answer this question: If you could propose one change in American policy, society or culture to revive prosperity and self-confidence, what would it be and why? Their replies are below.
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Return to Constitutional Government
By George P. Shultz
Let's get back to governing in the way called for by the Constitution. In the executive branch, this means that the president governs through people who are confirmed by the Senate and can be called upon to testify by the House or the Senate at any time. They are accountable people.
Right now, the White House is full of unconfirmed and unaccountable people responsible for various subjects and, all too often, the cabinet officers work through them. The right way is for the president to regard his cabinet as part of his staff. That way, you have access to the career people—something unavailable to White House staff. I have had the privilege of leading four units of government and, believe me, when you work with career people, they will work with you and they have lots to offer. Among other things, management will improve, something that is sorely needed today. Of course, for this system to work, presidential slots must be filled, so the Senate should give nominees a prompt up or down vote.
Don't you think it's also about time Congress lived up to its constitutional duties derived from the power of the purse? Continuing resolutions are a total cop-out. The way to build a budget is to set a framework and then work from the bottom up: Hold hearings, understand what the departments and agencies are doing, and help set priorities. That way, the budget will be up-to-date, and such a process, which is in large part operational in character, will get everyone into more of a problem-solving mode. So, better budgeting will also reduce knee-jerk partisanship.
Our country's prosperity and self-confidence will improve when we see an executive branch that can set sensible policies and execute them: management matters. And we will be better off if Congress does the hard work involved in executing the power of the purse.
Mr. Shultz is a former secretary of Labor, Treasury and State, and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget.
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Fix the Jobs-Killing Tax Code
By Paul Ryan
If I could make just one change in Washington, it would be to fix the tax code.
No other reform would inspire as much confidence because no other policy is as big a drag on our economy. Today, the tax code is about four million words long. Taxpayers spend six billion hours a year just figuring out how to comply. But the tax code is more than confusing; it's also unfair. Riddled with over $1 trillion in loopholes, the current code punishes free enterprise and rewards political influence. And to top it all off, we impose high marginal tax rates—including the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world—which are nothing more than barriers separating working families from job creators.
Related Video
A look back at the role of Opinion over the past 125 years and the lasting effects the editorials have had on The Wall Street Journal and the world.
Instead of pushing people out, we should bring people in. True tax reform would both broaden the base and lower the rates, so small businesses would have room to grow and job creators would come back to our shores. Economist Glenn Hubbard says tax reform could boost economic growth by anywhere from half to a full percentage point a year over a decade. And if economic growth were just half a percentage point larger, the federal government would save an additional $1.57 trillion over 10 years. Only by paying down our debt and growing our economy can we create jobs and increase take-home pay. Only then can we expand opportunity for all.
To pass such a vital reform, after years of gridlock, would show the country that Washington can still get something done. And our country would show the world that, 125 years since The Wall Street Journal began, "free markets and free people" is still the way to go.
Rep. Ryan, a Republican, is chairman of the House Budget Committee.
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Encourage Two-Parent Families
By Heather Mac Donald
The disintegration of the two-parent family is the greatest long-term threat to American prosperity and cultural health. Nearly half of all births in the Millennial Generation (18- to 33-year-olds) occur outside of marriage; the national average is 41%. Children raised by single mothers fail in school and commit crime at much higher rates than children raised by both parents. These children's social skills—needed to become productive, self-sufficient adults—are weaker on average. Single-parent households are far more likely to be poor and dependent on government assistance. But more consequential than the risks to individual children is the cultural pathology of regarding fathers as an optional appendage for child-rearing. A society that fails to teach its young males that they are unambiguously responsible for their offspring will have a hard time inculcating other fundamental duties.
Unfortunately, family breakdown isn't amenable to public-policy solutions, since it results from something more profound than misguided tax structure or welfare rules. Though many factors are at play, the biggest culprit is feminism's devaluing of males and the conceit that "strong women" can do it all. Reversing the trend of fatherlessness will require public figures, from President Obama on down, to violate feminist taboos and start speaking at every opportunity about the essential contributions that fathers make to the formation of their children. Family decline will be stemmed only when it is widely understood that care provided by both biological parents is the most powerful social and economic advantage that any child can enjoy.
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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Limit Government and Restore the Rule of Law
By John H. Cochrane
America doesn't need big new economic ideas to get going again. We need to address the hundreds of little common-sense economic problems that everyone agrees need to be fixed. Achieving that goal requires the revival of an old political idea: limited government and the rule of law.
Our tax code is a mess. The budget is a mess. Immigration is a mess. Energy policy is a mess. Much law is a mess. The schools are awful. Boondoggles abound. We still pay farmers not to grow crops. Social programs make work unproductive for many. ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank are monstrous messes. These are self-inflicted wounds, not external problems.
Why are we so stuck? To blame "gridlock," "partisanship" or "obstructionism" for political immobility is as pointless as blaming "greed" for economic problems.
Washington is stuck because that serves its interests. Long laws and vague regulations amount to arbitrary power. The administration uses this power to buy off allies and to silence opponents. Big businesses, public-employee unions and the well-connected get subsidies and protection, in return for political support. And silence: No insurance company will speak out against ObamaCare or the Department of Health and Human Services. No bank will speak out against Dodd-Frank or the Securities and Exchange Commission. Agencies from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Internal Revenue Service wait in the wings to punish the unwary.
This is crony capitalism, far worse than bureaucratic socialism in many ways, and far more effective for generating money and political power. But it suffocates innovation and competition, the wellsprings of growth.
Not just our robust economy, but 250 years of hard-won liberty are at stake. Yes, courts, media and a few brave politicians can fight it. But in the end, only an outraged electorate will bring change—and growth.
Mr. Cochrane is a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a Hoover Institution senior fellow.
===================================
Look to the States, Not to Washington
By Darcy A. Olsen
Conservatives often lament, "If we could only find the next Ronald Reagan . . ." The reality is that even President Reagan failed to turn the tide in Washington. The federal government has been tightening its grip for a century. We cannot afford to indulge in this knight-in-shining-armor fantasy.
But what if the solution to the Washington problem isn't in Washington? In the Federalist Papers, James Madison wrote that federal and state governments, each with explicit protections for liberty, would provide a "double security." Alexander Hamilton argued that if either government violated the peoples' rights, they could "make use of the other as the instrument of redress."
The Framers understood that the rival of power is power, and the only power sufficient to rival Washington is the collective body of the 50 states. The Founders didn't give us one constitution—they gave us 51. The Constitution provides a floor for freedom, not a ceiling. State constitutions can augment freedoms far above the federal baseline.
Skeptics say federalism is dead, states have become too dependent on Washington. That is too often true—but not always. When the Supreme Court gutted private-property rights with the Kelo decision in 2005, the solution didn't come from Washington. Instead, 45 states strengthened their own constitutional protections. When the Obama administration threatened to impose "card check" rules to unfairly help unions organize businesses, the solution didn't come from Washington. Instead, states drew up laws that are now protecting millions of workers.
State citizens and state lawmakers must do what the Framers equipped us to do: Put on the full armor of liberty. Then it truly will be morning again in America.
Ms. Olsen is the president and CEO of the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix.
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Unleash Molecular Medicine
By Peter W. Huber
In the past three decades, drug designers have learned how to craft molecules that modulate specific molecular targets—hence "personalized medicine" that fits precisely targeted drugs to patient-specific molecular profiles. Now, rapidly emerging are literally personal treatments created by reprogramming the genetic code in the patient's own cells.
Scientists have recently developed precise tools for adding, deleting or replacing genes inside live cells—tools that can do in hours or days what took months or years using other gene-editing tools. Reprogrammed stem cells—the progenitor cells that spawn all the rest of our cells—have the unique potential to provide complete cures for a wide range of currently incurable disorders, most notably the thousands of rare but often deadly diseases caused by hereditary genetic factors. Immune-system cells reprogrammed to attack cancers and other diseases have shown enormous promise in early trials.
Unlike conventional drugs, human cell therapies can be synthesized from scratch, one patient at a time, with tools compact and cheap enough to land in hospitals, clinics or laboratories that serve doctors in private practice. The technologies can be used to generate, at relatively low cost, a limitless number of biochemically distinct therapies precisely tailored to the individual patient's needs.
Washington's drug-approval process, grounded as it is in a one-size-fits-all perspective on how drugs are supposed to operate, and anchored in clinical-trial protocols and statistical methods developed decades ago, is lagging far behind the science. We need a regulatory process that can keep pace with a rapid proliferation of highly customized therapies that are grounded in a mechanistic understanding of molecular biology. This will require fundamental changes in clinical-trial protocols and in the type of evidence that is required for drug approval.
Mr. Huber is the author of "The Cure in the Code" (Basic Books, 2013).
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Liberate Uber—and the Lemonade Stand
By Paul Otellini
It seems that hardly a summer passes nowadays without a story about how an enterprising child somewhere had his or her budding entrepreneurial hopes dashed by some bureaucrat shutting down a lemonade stand. Recently we have seen this same drama play out on a larger stage with regulatory moves to impede Web-based "disruptive" businesses like Uber, the innovative transportation service that has had to battle entrenched taxi cartels and sympathetic regulators. America is becoming an increasingly difficult place to do business, small or large.
We can and must be better. We must put in place a comprehensive approach to allowing free markets to function and capital to flow. Markets should determine the success or failure of businesses. What we need is neither hard nor unknown. First, review all of our regulations from the federal to the local level to ensure they make it easier to start and run businesses and employ workers while maintaining the essentials of health and safety that we have come to expect. Second, create competitive tax rates that incentivize U.S. companies to operate here and foreign companies to locate here.
Simply put, make America the best place to open and run a business. Unleash the creative spirit of American workers and entrepreneurs to do what they do better than anyone: create new products and technologies that improve the human condition. This edition of The Wall Street Journal celebrates 125 years of its existence. I can only imagine how readers of that first edition would react to our world today. They would certainly be amazed at the living standards we have and the wonderful gadgets we employ. But I think they would be appalled at how difficult we make it for people to build their dream, including that lemonade stand on the corner.
Mr. Otellini is the former president and CEO of Intel.
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Listen to Peter Drucker On Regulations
By George Gilder
In 1966, the eminent management sage Peter Drucker wrote about government regulation in "The Effective Executive" that "at a guess, at least half the bureaus and agencies" in government "regulate what no longer needs regulation." He added: "There is a serious need for a new principle of effective administration under which every act, every agency, and every program of government is conceived as temporary and as expiring automatically after a fixed number of years—maybe ten—unless specifically prolonged by new legislation following careful outside study."
When Drucker wrote, the U.S. was by far the leading force in world capitalism, and most regulatory bodies were relatively new. Today the U.S. is falling far behind Asian leaders in capitalist vitality. Not only is the U.S. less free than Hong Kong, it is less capitalistic by many measures than China, allegedly a communist country. China now boasts government revenues of just 17% of GDP, compared with U.S. revenues of 26% of GDP.
The key problem is the same one that Drucker identified in 1966—a glut of regulations and programs that no longer serve their purposes but which constitute a nearly insuperable barrier for creative new enterprise. Twenty years ago, initial public offerings in crucial technology domains exceeded mergers and acquisitions by a factor of 20. Today there are eight mergers and acquisitions for every IPO. Large companies that can deal with the mazes of government rules increase their dominance by purchasing potential rivals.
Most efforts focus on making regulations more efficient. But efficient performance of futile or obstructive functions makes the problems worse. What we need is what Peter Drucker recommended: expiration dates for regulations.
Mr. Gilder is the author of "Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism" (Regnery, 2013).
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Focus on Developing Human Capital
By Michael Milken
The late social scientist Gary Becker once showed that at least three-quarters of national wealth can be found in the knowledge, skills and experience of people—what he called human capital. There are three ways to increase human capital: Expand knowledge and skills through education; extend the length and quality of life by investing in health; and welcome skilled immigrants.
• The focus in education should be on the classroom. We give Oscars to actors, Grammys to singers and Nobel Prizes to scientists. Recognizing that effective teachers and principals are the most important school-based factors influencing student achievement, the Milken Family Foundation launched an awards program nearly 30 years ago to provide similar recognition for great educators. An affiliated public charity, the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, has developed extensive programs to ensure skilled, motivated and competitively compensated teachers.
• At least half of economic growth since the Industrial Revolution can be traced to improvements in public health and the results of medical research that have more than doubled average lifespans world-wide. We can now prevent or cure many of the infectious diseases that plagued mankind for millennia. America's greatest health challenge, representing 75% of current health-care spending, is the burden of chronic diseases. Public-health programs emphasizing prevention and wellness will help reduce that burden. And to assure progress against all diseases, the National Institutes of Health budget should be restored at least to the 2003 level, when it was 25% higher in real dollars.
• Immigration restrictions that keep out highly skilled workers, investors and entrepreneurs are counterproductive. These ambitious people can stimulate economic growth and create more jobs for all Americans. We should greet them with open arms.
Policies that expand human capital in these three areas will increase America's productivity and help sustain our global leadership.
Mr. Milken is chairman of the Milken Institute.
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Set This Goal: A Great Teacher for Every Child
By Michelle Rhee
Great teachers change lives. They don't just follow lesson plans—they relentlessly motivate and inspire. The students of these teachers emerge from school with the skills and knowledge needed to reach their dreams. So to revive America, I would set this goal: Make sure that every child has a great teacher.
It's no secret that in the U.S. hard work doesn't always lead to success. For far too many families, their ZIP Code or income level virtually guarantees a lifetime of struggle. The problem is complex, but a better public-education system can help fix it. Each day, students across the country are forced to attend schools that fail to prepare them for life—simply because of where they happen to live.
How should we improve America's schools? It starts with great teachers. Research shows that teacher quality is the single most important in-school factor affecting student performance. We need rigorous, practical and accountable teacher-preparation programs. We need comprehensive classroom support and professional development to help teachers improve their craft. We need to recognize and reward the best teachers for their impact on students—not just how long the teachers have been on the job. There is no more important profession than teaching, and it's about time our laws and policies reflected that.
Many states and districts have already implemented some of these reforms, and students are benefiting. Tennessee and Washington, D.C.—both of which have invested heavily in teacher-quality reforms—boasted the largest gains in the country on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, "the nation's report card." And as shown recently in Vergara v. California, the courts have started getting involved in states that haven't passed policies to support great teachers. To move America forward, every state should follow suit.
Ms. Rhee, former schools chancellor for Washington, D.C., is the founder and CEO of StudentsFirst.
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Pull the Plug On Crony Capitalism
By Carly Fiorina
To achieve America's economic comeback, we need to end the era of crony capitalism where out-of-control, bloated government and big businesses join forces at the expense of main-street entrepreneurs.
As Washington continues to expand overly complex and expensive tax codes and regulations, written by an alliance of corporate lawyers and government bureaucrats, the victims are the small-business owners who are the country's backbone. As a result of these regulations-on-steroids, innovation, business creation and job growth are being stifled.
Who is looking out for innovative newcomers as well as the neighborhood dry cleaners, the corner taqueria, the coffee shop and the lawn-care company? Not Washington. Government bureaucracies like complexity because it keeps them busy and funded. Americans can see that too much government actually causes the problems that big new programs are meant to solve. Wall Street bailouts, the housing crisis and the tragedy of ObamaCare are just a few examples of overbearing government.
More small businesses are failing and fewer are starting than at any time in the past four decades. This trend must be reversed. Until it is, our economy will not produce the jobs we need, nor will we be ready to lead.
It is time for a great American comeback. We will know we have succeeded when a single mother raising her two kids can easily open a new business in her neighborhood without having to worry about burdensome and costly regulations.
Ms. Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, HPQ -0.31% is chairman of the Unlocking Potential Project.
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Move Elections To Weekends
By Juan Williams
Republican Rutherford B. Hayes won the 1876 presidential race by one electoral vote. He lost the popular vote. But he respected Americans who voted: "To vote is like [paying] a debt, a duty never to be neglected, if its performance is possible." Hayes was right—and we should encourage the "performance" of voting by holding elections on weekends. It is the one step that can enhance voter turnout and boost confidence that the people remain in control of the government. Legislation to move Election Day to weekends has already been introduced in Congress. A group called "Why Tuesday?" has been working for the past decade to highlight the benefits of weekend voting.
The group notes that the U.S. ranks last in voter turnout among Western democracies in the G-8. The key difference is that five of those other countries have weekend voting. Limiting voting to a single day during the week is a big challenge for people who have to get to the polls before or after work. On Election Day, they often have to juggle traffic jams, unexpected meetings and day-care pick-ups or drop-offs—in addition to trying to vote. The No. 1 reason people give for not casting a ballot is "too busy/couldn't get time off to vote."
In the past two presidential elections the nation has seen record turnout. But only about half of eligible voters got to the polls. Meanwhile, faith in the direction of the country and government has plummeted. Giving Americans the best chance to feel a part of the democratic process is key to reinvigorating trust in our elected leaders and the idea of self-government that is the basis of our liberty and prosperity.
With the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act coming next year, weekend voting is an idea whose time is here.
Mr. Williams is a political analyst for Fox News and a columnist for the Hill.
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Cut Taxes and Watch The Economy Take Off
By Stanley Druckenmiller
My change in policy would be aggressive tax reform. At the corporate level, I would change the rate to zero and eliminate all subsidies, without exception. At the individual level, I would eliminate all deductions and institute a flat tax with three income thresholds. Capital gains and dividends would be the same as earned income. The only tax subsidy at the individual level would be the Earned Income Tax Credit. My guess is that growth would accelerate and all the talk of secular stagnation would end.
Mr. Druckenmiller, founder of Duquesne Capital, is the CEO of Duquesne Family Office.
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Make a Grand Fiscal Bargain
By Kelly Ayotte
My grandfather, a decorated World War II veteran, recently passed away at age 98. He worked two jobs, provided for six kids, and he never used credit cards. The men and women of the "Greatest Generation" understood that you need to live within your means. They also worked hard to leave the country better off than they found it.
With over $17.5 trillion in debt and tens of trillions more in unfunded liabilities, our nation's credit card is maxed out. Republicans and Democrats, with presidential leadership, need to finally reach the much talked about, but elusive, grand fiscal agreement that will put America on a strong financial footing and create a pro-growth economic climate.
First, the agreement must address the long-term drivers of the national debt—entitlement programs. Social Security and Medicare are headed for insolvency as early as 2033 and 2026, respectively. If we don't update these programs to reflect the nation's changing demographics, they won't be there for the people who need them.
Second: tax-code reform. The existing code is mired with favoritism and crony capitalism that doesn't drive economic growth. The code should be made simpler and fairer, with rates reduced for individuals and businesses. Otherwise, we'll continue to see American companies relocate abroad, costing jobs in the U.S.
Tax reform should also allow U.S. businesses to bring back the trillions parked overseas because of our uncompetitive corporate tax rate—so they can invest here, creating jobs while also adding money to the Treasury for priorities like paying down the debt.
The "Greatest Generation" had the courage to fight for America's freedom and prosperity. It's time for our leaders today to honor that sacrifice and secure the futures of generations to come.
Sen. Ayotte, a Republican, represents New Hampshire in the U.S. Senate.
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Inspire Real Hope, Not The Bumper-Sticker Kind
By Arthur C. Brooks
The one thing America needs most right now is hope. I realize how ironic that sounds. After all, "hope" was exactly the theme of President Obama's winning 2008 presidential campaign. Unfortunately, that promised hope neither elevated the American spirit nor renewed our economy: Six years later, a higher percentage of Americans have lost hope, with more saying the country is "on the wrong track" than when he took office. We are mired in the longest streak of pessimism since Watergate.
The poet Emily Dickinson once defined hope as "the thing with feathers." Hope as a campaign slogan was even less substantial—little more than a nebulous emotional state associated with what we imagined the president could do for us. A 2008 study in the journal Motivation and Emotion shows that this sort of vague hope is actually negatively associated with a sense of personal agency. It is tied to distant goals that we can't control, like hitting the lottery or depending on the largess of a faraway government.
Real hope—the practical kind that America has traditionally possessed and needs again—is very different than a bumper sticker. Social scientists describe it as the combination of two phenomena: possibility and responsibility. Real hope is the intersection of "it can be done" and "I can do it if I work hard." Studies show that this makes individuals likelier to take initiative and earn their success. This is the restless optimism that built our nation.
To revive American growth and confidence, we need real hope, not campaign hype. That requires a policy agenda not of unbounded government, but of jobs, entrepreneurship and education reform. Most important, though, it means leaders who have hope in the American people—to revive our national greatness through private initiative, hard work and personal responsibility.
Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute.
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Head Off the Looming Pension Tsunami
By Clifford S. Asness
We have not saved enough for the retirements that we have promised people, public or private. Moreover, that problem is greatly understated by current reporting methods. This may seem an undramatic candidate for addressing one of our biggest problems, but that's part of my point. Unlike hurricanes or wars or debt ceilings, we don't have to deal with retirement funding today. However, this problem grows and eventually will metastasize. Until the looming pension crisis is dealt with, one way or another, no one's retirement is secure, no government fiscal projections are fully credible, and no one's property is safe against extreme and unpredictable taxation.
It is an open secret that many official assumptions about future returns on retirement savings are too high. As a result, amounts put away to fund these obligations are much too low. Furthermore, decisions are made on incomplete inaccurate information. For instance, answers to questions like "can I retire now?" or "can we afford this dividend?" might come out very differently with more honest acknowledgment. A proper accounting for likely portfolio returns and liabilities, and mandatory funding (corporate, state, municipal, everyone) would lend light and discipline to this murky and fractious area.
The system we have now of "you choose how much you forecast you will earn on your portfolio in the future and then back out how much you need to save" is a great moral hazard. Organizations make overaggressive assumptions and ensure that in the not-too-distant future it will be someone else's problem—only likely much bigger. When the inexorable math eventually become unavoidable, contributions will have to go up (leading to rising taxes for government obligations or falling earnings for corporate ones) or benefits cut. We face the same trade-offs now; waiting with eyes closed simply means that the remedies required will likely be far crueller after years of quiet progression and poor decisions based on bad information.
Mr. Asness is managing and founding principal of AQR Capital Management.
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Deregulate Labor Markets Now
By Richard A. Epstein
Wide-ranging deregulation of labor markets would produce an immediate economic jolt without costing taxpayers a dime. Labor markets are hobbled every day by ever-more-intrusive regulations and taxes, with two costly consequences. First, they reduce the opportunities for gains from trade between employers and employees. Quite simply, if the cost of regulatory or tax compliance exceeds the joint gains from the transaction, the deal is off. Second, these regulations add huge administrative expenses, both in the direct costs of government enforcement and in private compliance costs. We should never spend tax dollars to reduce productive activity.
So we have to bid farewell to the egalitarian mantra that we can lift the nation up out of its doldrums by raising minimum wages to living wages, by tightening overtime regulation, by strengthening public and private unions, by expanding family-leave protection, by continuing with aggressive enforcement of the antidiscrimination laws based on race, sex and age, by imposing a health-care mandate on employers, and by extending unemployment benefits. The tragic truth is that these feel-good measures hit hardest at the bottom end of the labor markets, especially minority teenagers desperate to gain work experience. Employers won't hire if they think that reforms are short-term gimmicks. Protectionist policies never work. But long-term stable reform could and should reverse those dismal unemployment and labor-participation figures.
Mr. Epstein is a law professor at New York University Law School.
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Fix the Way We Do Public Works
By Charles Murray
I have a dream, a modest but inspiriting one, in which the government performs one of its few legitimate functions by repairing and improving the nation's public infrastructure—competently. In this dream scenario, contracts are awarded on the basis of cost and the contractor's track record, and not, as they are today, on whether the workers are unionized or have the correct ethnic and gender diversity. Decisions about projects in this dream are not subjected to review by 13 different environmental and development bureaucracies. Yes, a proposal to build a new superhighway across the Everglades gets a hard-eyed assessment, but a proposal to replace an existing bridge across the Hudson is evaluated on its engineering merits and routine eminent-domain concerns—and that's it.
The inspiriting part of the dream is that as I drive down a highway that is being repaired in the middle of the day, I don't drive past a few miles of idle construction equipment while a lone bulldozer scrapes away. Instead, I see the level of activity typical at a commercial construction site. Projects that once took years are finished in months. Repairs that once took months are finished in weeks.
But then reality crashes into my reverie: How many state and national laws would have to be changed, how many regulatory bureaucracies would have to be reined in? Could Congress or any president—not just this one—ever be expected to accomplish such changes? The American polity is critically sclerotic. If we don't come up with solutions, it will soon be terminal.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Find a Better Way To Tax the Rich
By Sheila Bair
Apple. AAPL -0.80% GE. Caterpillar. CAT -1.03% Google. GOOGL -0.77% These are marquee names in the drama of foreign tax dodges. But really, can you name one top U.S. corporation that hasn't moved some portion of its business out of the country to reduce its tax bill?
Like it or not, foreign tax havens have become a routine part of American business. Maybe it's time for government to throw in the towel. For 25 years, we've left the top corporate rate at 35%, while other (smarter) countries have cut theirs. Corporate tax revenues have eroded, while millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in profits have left our shores.
Is a corporate income tax even feasible in a globalized and digitized economy? We aren't taxing something tangible like people or property, but rather an extremely portable legal structure. It's kind of dumb to impose high corporate taxes on doing business here when it's so easy for companies to go somewhere else (where labor is probably cheaper too). By eliminating corporate income taxes, we would ease pressure on U.S. wages, bring back jobs and repatriate an estimated $2 trillion in profits stashed elsewhere.
Many will argue that this would be a giveaway to the rich. But the current system isn't taxing rich shareholders, it's taxing the corporate entity—and much of that tax is passed on to employees and customers. Today's policies actually favor the wealthy with lower taxes on capital gains and dividends to mitigate the impact of "double taxation." It would be smarter to tax corporate profits once, at the shareholder level, and apply the same, higher rates to capital gains and dividends that apply to us working stiffs.
The corporate income tax may appeal to our inner Robin Hood, but its economic impact has turned into a Greek tragedy. Time to bring down the curtain.
Ms. Bair is a former chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (2006-11).
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Rediscover Men's And Women's Differences
By Harvey Mansfield
Amid the damage caused by bad ideas in our time, let us not overlook that done by the scourge of feminism—together with the male timidity and misplaced male gallantry that suffer it to proceed unopposed. Feminism has established the rule of gender neutrality in our society, a conclusion drawn from its doctrine that the sexes have no essential differences and are interchangeable. In practice, no one consistently follows this preposterous idea, endorsed neither by science nor by common sense. Only the minority of feminist women assert it (even while demanding special treatment for women). But it is a powerful minority that has been taught at our finest, and our average, institutions of so-called education.
Gender neutrality presents itself in plausible guise as the way to avoid sex discrimination, so as to give women a fair shake in the competition for jobs. But it goes far beyond this reasonable goal to an attempt to erase sex differences. The two sexes are to imitate each other, and each to follow the worst in the other: Women are to imitate predatory and aggressive males, men to imitate passive and submissive females.
The result of gender neutrality is to justify women in more extreme partisanship for their sex than they ever encountered in faltering male chauvinism. It is also to encourage them in the game of charmless, loveless sex that feminists offer in place of romance. The change we need is to rediscover our sexes and to make both of them more assertive of their differences, so that their attraction to each other becomes more interesting (and more fruitful) than under the grim domination of feminism. We may then find that men and women make couples, each sex making its contribution, rather than uneasy partners in selfish pleasure.
Mr. Mansfield is a professor of government at Harvard and a senior fellow of Stanford's Hoover Institution.
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Transform Education With the 'Long Game'
By Wendy Kopp
When comparing the American education system with those of other developed countries, the best we can say is that ours performs about average.
In part, our poor standing is due to an enormous and unforgivable opportunity gap between the most marginalized children and their more privileged peers. But even in our top-performing state, Massachusetts, high-school graduates are on average at least two years behind their peers in the world's top performers.
Ensuring America's strength and prosperity will require our making a serious commitment to educating our children. It will mean embracing higher standards that demand critical thinking, just as other countries have. It will mean engaging in what I've come to call the Long Game—the long-term, all-out effort to build the capacity within and outside schools to ensure all students meet these standards.
For years, we've been looking for a quick education fix—giving parents vouchers, for instance, or supplying students with computers. But if we've learned anything, it's that there is no one silver-bullet solution. Vouchers work only if parents have a large number of high-quality alternatives to choose from, and technology is powerful only when used in the service of classrooms and schools with clear missions, strong cultures and capable faculty—not as a replacement for them.
Transforming American education is going to take massive investments over many years, investments not only of dollars but also of our most valuable resource: the time and energy of our most promising, diverse leaders. It is slow and deep work because it requires change from millions of teachers and administrators, parents, policy makers and civic leaders. But embracing this Long Game is the only way to realize the rest of our aspirations.
Ms. Kopp is founder and chairwoman of Teach For America and CEO of Teach For All.
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I have given money to this group:
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Marc F.,
As it stands now, the GOP will never win another presidential election. Let me explain what I mean:
The American electorate has changed, and with it - so too has the formula to win elections. The GOP's goal of turning out their base of older, white voters and winning over independents is no longer sufficient to win presidential elections. For too long the GOP has been content with just appealing to white voters. We will never heal America and win consistently until conservatives are just as successful in attracting minority voters as white voters. Both President Reagan and Mitt Romney won the white vote by 20 points - Reagan won in a landslide but Romney lost.
The white share of the vote has dropped 15 points over the past 6 presidential elections, and only 20% of the nation's population growth over the next 15 years will be white. By 2016, minorities will account for more than 30% of the vote and more than 80% of that vote goes to Democrats - and that number could surpass 50% by 2030.
Right now, minorities give Democrats a solid base of 24% of the total vote count. Add in the white vote, and Democrats will maintain AT LEAST 51% of the vote in all future elections. At this rate, it will be mathematically impossible for the GOP to win another presidential election without engaging minority voters.
And the best way to engage minority voters is to recruit black conservatives to run for public office and push them to victory - which is precisely what Black America's PAC (BAMPAC) is doing! Please support BAMPAC's efforts with your most generous contribution TODAY.
Let me tell you, the solution to this problem is not as difficult as it may seem. In fact, the best solution will result in the destruction of the Democratic Party. For decades, liberals have promoted misguided racist policies that have denied opportunities to the poor, corrupted our morals, and bankrupted our nation. They've done it by manipulating minorities with the Big Lie that Republicans are all racists - and that lie is guarded by the liberal media like the gold at Fort Knox because they know the truth could send their house of cards crashing down on top of them.
This lie is liberal kryptonite - they die politically if the truth overcomes their lies. The adversity currently facing the GOP because of liberal racist propaganda could is a great opportunity that could ultimately end up leading to their political downfall.
You and I must penetrate the fog of lies and get the truth to minority communities throughout America by supporting conservative minority candidates like Mia Love and Tim Scott.
So please make your most generous contribution of $75 to help BAMPAC push conservative minority candidates to victory. Now, I'm not asking you to abandon conservative values by "handing out" support to minority conservatives because they are minorities. Quite the contrary - let me tell you something about conservative minorities...
I speak from experience when I tell you that black, Hispanic, and Asian Republicans are firm in their commitment to conservative principles because they are tested on their beliefs every single day by Americans with ill-conceived notions that conservatism only works for old, white men.
You and I both know that's not true, but that message doesn't reach minority communities because of intentionally propagated lies about conservatism and incitation of racial tensions by liberals hoping to maintain an iron grip on the minority vote.
The truth is simple: conservative minority candidates - like Mia Love and Tim Scott - are on the political front-lines fighting to break down the racial divide in politics.
The message of conservatism easily resonates with minorities, but the message can't penetrate the liberal fog of lies without conservatives like Mia and Tim. It is no longer acceptable for you and me to know the truth without fighting to discredit the lies. So join the fight by making a contribution of $75 or more to BAMPAC TODAY.
BAMPAC is run by black conservatives whose goal is to destroy the negative outlook on conservatism in minority communities in order to bridge the racial divide in politics.
We do this by supporting conservative minority candidates as they spread the message of conservatism where it is needed the most - throughout America's minority communities. That's why BAMPAC is so important. BAMPAC's efforts to overcome the GOP's minority gap are absolutely vital to overcome the lies propagated by liberals to maintain their iron grip on minority voters.
So please make your most generous contribution of $75 or more TODAY to help BAMPAC reach minorities with the message of conservatism. You and I can't allow the recent influx of minority Republican candidates throughout America go down in defeat. We must work together to push these "tried and true" conservatives to victory, so they can protect our conservative values in Washington and spearhead the minority outreach the GOP so desperately requires.
If you and I fail, then we lose this golden opportunity to usher in a new era in American politics by bridging the racial divide that keeps minorities voting Democrat. Those votes will turn into bigger government, higher taxes, increased deficit spending, further erosion of our God-given rights, and the rapid decay of morality in America.
Do your part TODAY with a donation of $75 or more to BAMPAC. If you can't afford $75, then please contribute whatever you can afford.
BAMPAC is committed to pushing "tried and true" conservatives like Mia Love and Tim Scott to Washington. But BAMPAC can't forge a new path for the GOP without your help. Time is running out to make a change in 2014, so please take action today.
Thank you for your support.
Sincerely,
Alvin Williams
President and CEO
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The Goldberg File
By Jonah Goldberg
July 18, 2014
Dear Reader (including the president of the United States whenever he gets to this after dealing with many important fundraisers),
If you've been reading my stuff over the years, you'll find a number of common themes ("And recycled jokes. Let's not forget those." — The Couch). One such theme is that liberalism hides behind seemingly value-neutral or benign language in order to advance a value-laden and not necessarily benign agenda. That was the basic idea behind The Tyranny of Clichés. Conservatives argue as conservatives. Liberals tend to argue not so much as liberals, but in a variety of disguises, each of which tries to draw on authority unearned by liberalism itself. Indeed, the history of American liberalism can be understood as a series of costume changes. A new nominally non-ideological discipline emerges — political science, engineering, public health, psychology, environmentalism, neuroscience and, these days, various forms of data prestidigitation — and liberals flock to it. They don the latest fashionable version of the white smock and say — à la Bill Murray in Ghostbusters — "back off man, we're scientists." Or to be more fair, they claim to be speaking for the scientists, engineers, psychologists, and other experts. "We're not ideologues, we go with the facts." This game was old when Walter Lippmann came out with his Drift and Mastery. After all, Karl Marx, the Babe Ruth of this sport, had long before insisted that his shtick wasn't opinion or even mere analysis, but a new science.
In 1962, John F. Kennedy delivered the commencement address at Yale. He explained that "political labels and ideological approaches are irrelevant to the solution" of today's challenges. At a press conference the same year, he expanded on the idea. "Most of the problems . . . that we now face, are technical problems, are administrative problems." These problems "deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men" and should therefore be left to the experts to settle without subjecting them to divisive democratic debate.
Today, the political landscape is littered with earnest, well-intentioned, and often, incredibly sanctimonious liberals who insist that they are simply pursuing truth and fact regardless of ideology. This, of course, remains Obama's favorite pose. It runs through the "scientific consensus" argle-bargle on global warming. When Chris Hughes took over what has long been considered the flagship magazine of American liberalism, he ridiculously vowed that, "the journalism in these pages will strive to be free of party ideology or partisan bias." The same conceit is behind Vox.com and "explanatory journalism," which everyday sinks further and further into liberal Ronburgundyism. (Coming soon at Vox: "Fifteen Reasons Why San Diego Really Does Mean 'Whale's Vagina' in German — And Why That Has To Change.")
It's Biden's Party
Speaking of Ron Burgundyism, remember Joe Biden's vice-presidential debate with Paul Ryan? He'd flash those teeth like a flounder that accidentally picked up a set of dentures. He'd laugh like the crazy guy on the bus who knows the driver is really following the chem trails in the sky because you can still get a Snickers bar for less than a dollar. He'd guffaw at any suggestion he or the president did anything wrong — ever — and shout "malarkey" at the idiots and knaves who thought otherwise. And, sadly, it largely worked. I'm beginning to think Biden was simply ahead of his time. So much of elite liberalism these days is little more than bluster and self-satisfied blather.
For instance, I am so disappointed in John Oliver's HBO show, Last Week Tonight. I like Oliver's stand-up and his stints on Community. But his approach is simply Bidenism refined. The show begins from the premise that liberal conventional wisdom is not only right but obviously so and then simply works backward to "prove it." In Britain, populist tabloids are condemned by people of Oliver's persuasion for simply confirming the prejudices of the working class. Last Week Tonight is a similar effort for the more upscale — and often more prejudiced — HBO demographic. He doesn't tell his audience anything it doesn't want to hear, he just gives them new and occasionally funny reasons to feel good about themselves. The only difference between his show and the typical MSNBC host's is that Oliver is funny on purpose.
The Dogma Business
Anyway, I kind of wandered off from where I planned on going with all of this. For the record, I'm not saying that politicians, pundits, and other partisans should not consult the opinions of scientists and other experts. Of course they — we — should. We learn new and interesting things all of the time. What I am saying is that liberalism is constantly rebranding itself as solely an explanation of reality and it constantly needs to rebrand itself because reality keeps revealing that it isn't.
What worries me — a lot — is that reality is coming to the rescue of liberalism. No, I don't mean that the crooked timber of humanity has grown straight or that it now
makes sense that the Pentagon hold bake sales to pay for bombers. What I mean is that progressives are quicker to seize on the political opportunities created by a changing culture.
What is commonly called "political correctness" doesn't get the respect it deserves on the right. Sure, in the herstory of political correctness there have been womyn and cis-men who have taken their seminal ovulal ideas too far, but we should not render ourselves visually challenged to the fact that something more fundawomyntal is at work here.
Political correctness can actually be seen as an example of Hayekian spontaneous order. Society has changed, because society always changes. But modern American society has changed a lot. In a relatively short period of time, legal and cultural equality has expanded — albeit not uniformly or perfectly — to blacks, women, and gays. We are a more heterodox society in almost every way. As a result, many of our customs, norms, and terms no longer line up neatly with lived-reality. Remember customs emerge as intangible tools to solve real needs. When the real needs change, the customs must either adapt or die.
Many conservatives think political correctness forced Christianity and traditional morality to recede from public life. That is surely part of the story. But another part of the story is that political correctness emerged because Christianity and traditional morality receded. Something had to fill the void.
I wish more conservatives recognized that at least some of what passes for political correctness is an attempt to create new manners and mores for the places in life where the old ones no longer work too well. You can call it "political correctness" that Americans stopped calling black people "negroes." But that wouldn't make the change wrong or even objectionable. You might think it's regrettable that homosexuality has become mainstreamed and largely de-stigmatized. But your regret doesn't change the fact that it has happened. And well-mannered people still need to know how to show respect to people.
Identity politics is only part of the story, and not even the most important part. Medical, technological, and economic changes are almost surely far more important than changing demographics alone. A society where individuals are vastly more autonomous than they were a century ago is simply going to have different codes of conduct and manners. The telephone, television, and the car did more to liberate young people from the moral cocoon of their families and communities than any libertine intellectual fad (you can be sure that driverless cars, for instance, will change society in unimaginable ways). Democrats recognize this, which is why they've cynically exploited changes in family structure, female labor participation, and reproductive technology and declared that Republicans have declared war on women. It's not remotely true, but it is effective.
Now, I don't actually think Christianity is necessarily inadequate to the task of keeping up with the changes of contemporary society. (The pagan Roman civilization Christianity emerged from was certainly less hospitable to Christianity than America today is. You could look it up.) But Christianity, like other religions, still needs to adapt to changing times and the evolving expectations of the people. I'm nothing like an expert on such things, but it seems to me that most churches and denominations understand this. Some respond more successfully than others. But it's hardly as if they are oblivious to the challenge of "relevance."
My concern here is more about mainstream conservatism. I think much of what the Left offers in terms of culture creation is utter crap. But they are at least in the business of culture creation.
The New Manners
And that brings me back to where I started. I began this "news"letter talking about how liberalism hides behind seemingly non-ideological language in order to advance an ideological cause. Think of political correctness in those terms. Progressives are steadily dismantling the beautiful cathedrals of traditional manners and customs, arguing that they're too Baroque, too antiquated. They use the sledgehammer of liberation rhetoric to destroy the old edifices, but their fidelity to liberty is purely rhetorical. In place of the old cathedrals they build supposedly functional, modern, and utilitarian codes of conduct. But these Brutalist codes are not only unlovely, they are often more prudish than traditional approaches. Like some Six Sigma seminar participants holed up in a Holiday Inn conference room, Harvard is currently gathering its finest minds to draw up the procedures for sexual conduct and consent. The end result will surely be a clipboard check-list to rival that of any Jiffy Lube manager's in both romantic appeal and sexiness.
What I would like to see from conservatives is recognition that some of the cathedrals are outdated. But instead of arguing that they should be razed and replaced with Jacobin Temples of Reason with rites and rituals grounded in abstraction, why not argue for some long overdue updating and retrofitting? I guarantee you more women prefer a modified version of the traditional process of wooing, courting, and dating before sex than the "modern" schizophrenic system of getting drunk enough for a same-day hook up but not so inebriated to forget to get a signature on the consent form. Traditional notions of romance and respect are far better tools than the mumbo-jumbo campus feminists have to offer. The problem is that the mumbo-jumbo feminists are fighting largely uncontested.
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Great article. Jonah is evolving into one of the great writers and *thinkers* on the right.
He has excellent points. I guess he is saying the Catholic Church and Orthodox Jewry should be more socially liberal yet still promote and uphold many traditional tenets.
This part below is hysterical and great. :-D Did he really come up with these electrically funny jokes:
****What is commonly called "political correctness" doesn't get the respect it deserves on the right. Sure, in the herstory of political correctness there have been womyn and cis-men who have taken their seminal ovulal ideas too far, but we should not render ourselves visually challenged to the fact that something more fundawomyntal is at work here.****
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RIGHT ANALYSIS
How Conservatives Can Win the Hearts and Minds of Hispanics and Women
The Left has a perceived monopoly on female and Hispanic voters. After all, it has its "war on women" refrain and the push for amnesty for illegal immigrants. Leftists proclaim the government gospel for the common man, and in so doing, they have won the hearts and minds of the downtrodden -- or so they assume.
The conservative movement needs to rebrand and return to its core values to snatch this near-victory from the Left.
Examine the numbers and it appears the Democrat Party has picked the demographics to pander to in order to win for generations to come. Women outnumber men in this country 161 million to 156.1 million, and women are more likely to vote, with 63.7% of them voting in the election that gave Barack Obama his second term. The turnout for men was 59.7%.
The Hispanic population has climbed steadily since the 1970s. There are now 54 million Hispanics in the U.S. In the next 30 years, whites will become a minority, something that probably leaves the Left tickled pink because 78% of Obama's support came from minority groups. Indeed, Pew Research Center said the Hispanic population surpassed the white population in California this year.
These numbers appear likely to produce long-term wins for Democrats, but demographics this large fracture into subgroups that conservatives can reach with their message. In essence, conservatives should take advantage of the Democrats' own divide and conquer strategy, winning those who are receptive to Liberty. Not all women want the Left's version of "reproductive rights." Not all Hispanics are illegal immigrants or wards of the state.
Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, believes if conservatives vigorously reach out to Latinos, they can find allies in the Hispanic community. He recently released a book about his fellow Hispanics called "A Race for the Future: How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic Americans."
"Nobody came here to be Balkanized into different neighborhoods," Gonzalez said. "They came here to succeed."
Mexican culture has been with America from the beginning. Mexicans lived inside Texas when it was incorporated into the rest of the states, for example. The tortilla is just as American as hamburger (German), pizza (Italian) and apple pie (Dutch).
Don't think Hispanics are one homogeneous group. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. Cubans landed in Florida to escape communism.
Gonzalez said the word "Hispanic," as used to describe all people hailing from the Spanish-speaking world, only came into use in the 1970s when the government designated "Hispanics" a minority group. This time of social upheaval and the influx of Latino immigration created the heavy Democrat support found among Latinos, according to Gonzalez:
"That millions of immigrants, the majority from Latin America, began arriving just as the United States was being hit by a social and cultural tornado receives surprisingly little analysis. This whirlwind, after all, ripped up norms that had been in place for generations. These new immigrants had no memory of what the country had been like. In the media, in schools and in entertainment, they began to hear dubious reinterpretations of America and a denigration of traditional values. For many of them, 'assimilation' meant adopting the emerging standards of a rapidly evolving country."
And Democrats have treated women in the same manner -- as ignorant dupes who can only vote Democrat. Thanks to the Left's rhetoric and polices, women view the Republican Party as "stuck in the past" and "intolerant," according to a Republican study leaked to Politico. The study found 49% of women dislike Republicans, while only 39% view Democrats with distain. But those numbers almost flip if women are married and possess a college education, with 48% supporting the GOP and 38% backing Democrats. No wonder Democrats want to destroy marriage.
R.R. Reno of First Things offered a thoughtful response to the Politico story, and an even better rebuttal to a Slate rejoinder.
Reno argues Democrats tap into women's sense of vulnerability:
"[M]y explanation of the profound difference between single and married female voters involves a final assumption: The Democratic Party is the party that promises to expand government to take care of people whose lives aren’t working out. This doesn’t mean Republicans are cold-hearted. It’s just that, for many different reasons, Republicans don’t think government can or should take care of all our needs.
"Put those assumptions together, and I have an explanation for why single women vote so heavily for Democratic candidates: Their inability to achieve a core life-goal (marriage) makes them feel vulnerable, and so they vote for the party that promises to use government to protect the vulnerable."
America has people -- the poor, immigrants, single moms -- that are vulnerable. They're afraid that if rules and regulations are thrown back, then the more powerful -- the big business, the men with fists -- will grab power in the vacuum and do harm. And how will the weak get more power without the benevolent power above that keeps them safe? They don't realize progressives need to keep them poor and weak in order to preserve their own power. The question for lovers of Liberty is this: How do we empower people to pull themselves up through hard work, to self-govern?
This is where the conservative movement must rebrand. Instead of poorly delivering the same message, hoping that minorities are convinced into voting for the same white male politicians, conservatives must embrace more diverse leadership and show that conservative policies made that advancement possible. Let's welcome female politicians who support Liberty and conservative ideals with their own unique governing style. Let's fill the school boards with concerned mothers and town councils with Latino businessmen. Then, let's unfetter the people by decentralizing the government -- kicking the power back to the local level. And we'll see who will be the party of the people.
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The piece is right. The liberal hold on these groups is based on a combination of lies, deception and fallacious thinking on the liberal side. Also peer-group following and momentum. You just are a Dem and hate or distrust Republicans and never gave it any critical thought. Combine that with sloppy thinking and poor messaging on the conservative side and you have electoral victory without producing any positive results. Witness Obama v. Romney, 2012.
Most conservative messaging is aimed at firing up the base while alienating all others. It should be aimed at conservatives clarifying what they believe, which is not putting the needy out to pasture, and putting a positive face on it all to those who should be open to a conservative message or philosophy.
Example: Paul Ryan said he was wrong to say "we are a nation of makers and takers". That is badly over-simplified. His mother with social security survivor benefits was a taker, at least in any way that is helpful to say politically. Nor are relatives of mine who take a retirement benefit from the government that they earned working. Some of those comp plans were poorly negotiated and retired people way too early costing the people way more than they should but are not either the fault of the recipient not the best place to focus going forward.
Liberal policies harm liberal constituent groups. If we can't make that case today and offer persuasively a better alternative, when will it ever be easier?
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http://theweek.com/article/index/268182/this-is-what-happens-when-republicans-actually-enact-their-radical-agenda
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http://theweek.com/article/index/268182/this-is-what-happens-when-republicans-actually-enact-their-radical-agenda
Kansas lowered the top, state income tax rate from 6.45 to 4.9%, and lowered all the other rates too. In the short run, no new rush of business has flocked to Kansas. Places like South Dakota, Texas and Florida already have lower tax rates still. Their real objective was to slow the rate of people retiring and leaving Kansas with their money and investment income. Well that would take time to show in the numbers, and slowing an exodus isn't going to show as in increase anyway. In any case, it was over-promised and over-sold. Taxes should have been cut only by the amount they were willing to cut spending.
The Kansas tax cuts had no chance of stimulating the economy when they were rolled out simultaneously with these new federal government tax increases:
Chained CPI tax increase
Itemized deduction cap.
Death tax hike.
Buffett rule.
Tobacco tax hike.
IRA and 401(k) plan restrictions.
Carried interest capital gains tax hike.
Energy tax hikes.
Tax increases on international income.
Financial system tax increases.
Obamacare Individual Mandate Excise Tax
Obamacare Employer Mandate Tax
Obamacare 3.8 percent surtax on investment income
Obamacare Excise Tax on Comprehensive Health Insurance Plans
Obamacare Hike in Medicare Payroll Tax
Obamacare Medicine Cabinet Tax
Obamacare HSA Withdrawal Tax Hik
Obamacare Flexible Spending Account Cap
Obamacare Tax on Medical Device Manufacturers
Obamacare Cut for Medical Itemized Deduction
Obamacare Elimination of tax deduction for employer-provided retirement Rx drug coverage
Obamacare Blue Cross/Blue Shield Tax Hike
Obamacare Excise Tax on Charitable Hospitals
Obamacare Tax on Drug Companies
Obamacare Tax on Health Insurers
Obamacare Bio-fuel tax hike
Reading this partial list of federal tax increases coinciding with the Kansas tax rate cuts, a 1.6% state tax cut had no chance of having a stimulative effect.
The result: The Kansas economy has not grown. The state government is taxing stagnant income at a much lower rate than before, therefore taking in sharply reduced revenues. Gov. Sam Brownback is in trouble. Sen Pat Roberts is in trouble too, for different reasons.
Forbes says maybe the cuts need more time to show results:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/taxanalysts/2014/07/16/what-went-wrong-in-kansas-maybe-nothing/
Forbes liked the cuts better in 2013:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rexsinquefield/2013/10/04/how-kansas-governor-brownback-schooled-missouri-on-tax-cuts-and-showed-the-region-how-to-grow/
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Thank you Doug.
Are the deficits the only big issue? I vaguely remember reading that there were some other issues as well.
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Thank you Doug.
Are the deficits the only big issue? I vaguely remember reading that there were some other issues as well.
I don't know. i would assume it is also the refusal to address the problem. Maybe others know.
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I hope there is something positive learned from the Kansas tax rate cut experience. You will not see and cannot promise "supply side" results when you improve one factor by a point or two while other factors are moving 20-fold in the opposite direction. Supply side economics means to address ALL the policies that are unnecessarily hampering productive economic activity. States need to compete with neighboring states on tax rates but they also need to pay their bills and balance their budgets. Credibility is lost when our side screws up and over-promises. Bigdog made this point, that there are examples out there of the Laffer curve not working, but it really means that practitioners including Prof. Laffer are not always following it by its true and full meaning. The Laffer Curve does not suggest that all tax cuts pay for themselves. Economic phenomena, no matter how valid, need to be expressed with the caveat, all other things are held constant. In this case, it wasn't and they weren't.
President Bush gave supply side a bad name without ever trying it. He cut tax rates, and revenues surged! But he also presided over huge spending increases that take valuable resources from the productive economy. And he let regulations, bureaucracy, crony government and everything else bad for the economy keep right on growing. And so we had a ticking, economic time bomb, set off with the election of the anti-supply-side, Pelosi-Obama-Reid congress.
When everyone knows tax cuts won't last, in Kansas now or during the last two years of the Bush administration nationally, the stimulative effect disappears. You are left with applying a lower rate to a depressed income to get insufficient revenues, while investors and employers are already making their decisions based on the higher, future rates.
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Doug,
Thank you for the very detailed and articulated response.
Our side needs to be immediately ready with rapid fire answers like yours. And be able to hit the airwaves with responses just like the Clinton mob did in the 90's. For any slight or criticism they would flood every took show immediately with hours with coordinated talking points.
We have nothing like it.
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Reflections on the Contract with America – 20 Years Later
Originally published at CNN.com.
On Wednesday I had the privilege of meeting with S. Ganbaatar, a member of the Mongolian Parliament.
When he entered the room, Ganbaatar walked up excitedly to examine a framed document that has hung for years in my offices. The document is a list of commitments to the people, signed by dozens of candidates for public office who promised to vote on a specific policy agenda if they were elected to office. It's framed alongside a picture of the candidates who signed and campaigned on it. Many of them went on to be elected in a historic vote that tossed out a party that had held power since the 1920s.
Ganbaatar was looking at a framed copy of the 1996 "Contract with the Mongolian Voter." That contract was, as the Washington Post reported the next year, "the most widely distributed document in Mongolian history." The Mongolian voters -- with a 91% turnout -- elected the democratic opposition, which four years earlier had held just six seats. With a program of "private property rights, a free press and the encouragement of foreign investment," they defeated the Communist Party that had ruled since 1921.
Ganbaatar, who was elected to Parliament as an Independent in 2012 and is already one of his country's most popular politicians, recounted emotionally how the Contract with the Voter was a watershed event in modern Mongolian history. The ideas in that document, he told me, "gave us our freedom."
Mongolia's peaceful, democratic transition of power from the communists to a republican government was one of the few hopeful stories to come out of the former Soviet states in the early years after the Cold War.
It was fitting, but only a coincidence, that Ganbaatar visited just a few days before the 20th anniversary of the Contract with America, the inspiration for Mongolia's Contract with the Voters.
On September 27, 1994, more than 350 candidates for Congress gathered on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to sign a pledge to the American people, a promise to vote on 10 key reforms if we won a majority in the House of Representatives. That campaign, which I helped organize, earned Republicans control of the House for the first time in 40 years.
The Contract was a campaign document. It laid out a common-sense program that was designed to earn the support of the broadest possible range of Americans. Its assortment of policies included everything from changes to how the House did business to items on the budget, welfare and tax policy.
But more than any particular proposal, the important thing about the document was its form: It was a contract, a real commitment to reform and accountability and renewal. It sought above all to "restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives."
We knew Americans deserved a clear and unambiguous account of what we planned to do, and believed reform required their explicit support -- and that if we broke faith with them, we wouldn't deserve to hold power. So we invited people to vote us out again if we didn't follow through.
But we did follow through -- in an extraordinary first hundred days that kicked off one of the most productive Congresses in American history. In addition to being a campaign document, the Contract was a management document that told us how we would govern. It led directly or indirectly to all of the achievements that would soon follow, including four straight balanced budgets, welfare reform, and the largest capital gains tax cut in American history.
In retrospect, it's clear that the Contract also marked an enduring political realignment. When the Republican House majority was sworn in in 1995, there was only one Republican in the House (Bill Emerson from Missouri) who had ever served under a majority -- and he had done so as a page. Two years later, we became the first Republican majority that had been reelected since 1928. And since the Contract, Republicans have held the House for 16 of the past 20 years, and should continue to hold it for the foreseeable future.
As a detailed commitment to passing specific bills, the Contract was the first document of its kind in American history. It has now been replicated in other countries, like Italy and Mongolia, not because of its policy content, but because it expressed a hope in the heart of every voter -- an aspiration that, in the case of the U.S. -- didn't end with the election of 1994 and certainly did not begin there.
The Contract was, quite literally, a renewal of a pre-existing commitment, one that had not been honored. It was the commitment that elected representatives of the people remain accountable to the people.
This social contract is essential to self-government, but too often, our leaders abandon it once they join the political class. They forget about who put them there, they contrive to shield themselves from "tough votes," and they stretch further the restraints on their powers under the law.
There's nothing like a visit by a legislator from a place where, for the better part of the last century, lawlessness reigned, to remind you that the contract between the people and their representatives must be constantly renewed and ardently defended.
Your Friend,
Newt
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Free People, Free Markets
The lessons from 125 years show how to revive American prosperity.
Updated July 7, 2014 9:32 p.m. ET
Surveying a century and a quarter of journalism is a bracing exercise—at intervals depressing and inspiring. Depressing because bad ideas never die. But inspiring because a free society can rescue itself from periods of decline and despond not unlike the current moment. This is one lesson of 125 years of Journal editorials that promote free people and free markets.
It won't surprise our long-time readers that the debates over principle have changed little over the decades even as events have. We opposed high tariffs when they were the patent medicine of the Republican Party in the 1920s as much as when they are now the resort of labor Democrats. We endorsed cuts in marginal tax rates when Andrew Mellon and Calvin Coolidge proposed them in the 1920s, when Walter Heller and JFK did the same in the 1960s, and when Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan did it again in the 1980s. Each tax cut was followed by renewed growth.
Related Video
A look back at the role of Opinion over the past 125 years and the lasting effects the editorials have had on The Wall Street Journal and the world.
There have been mistakes along the way, notably the endorsement of Hoover, whose austerity program turned recession into Depression. We would also not repeat the too-easy counsel of retreat from Vietnam we offered in 1968. The lesson we draw from that conflict and those in Iraq and Afghanistan is not to start wars you don't intend to fight vigorously enough to win.
Another lesson is how the political pendulum swings between freedom and equality, those competing poles of Western political thought. These columns emphasize liberty, but on occasion those who prize equality can provide a necessary corrective. The best example is the civil-rights movement, which used federal power to break the government-enforced tyranny of Jim Crow.
Yet those who promote freedom typically do better by equality than the progressives who elevate equality do by freedom. The progressive project invariably descends into subsidy and mandate to coerce men and women who resist the commands of those in power. See ObamaCare.
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And what of the current moment? Seen through 125 years of setbacks but generally forward progress, it looks all too familiar. The bubble and bust of the last decade gave progressives a renewed chance to govern, this time with a rare supermajority. President Obama and Nancy Pelosi turned to the old nostrums that government spending can conjure growth, that regulation can productively steer investment, and that equality should be the main goal of economic policy.
The results have been predictable: An historically slow recovery now going on five years, declines in real household income except for the rich, the slowest pace of startups in decades, and a barnacled leviathan state that botches a website in the era of Amazon and lies about its waiting lists for veterans.
Perhaps worst of all has been the impact of these failures on American comity and confidence. Gridlock is built into the American Constitution, but the current rancor and paralysis reflect a deeper anxiety about U.S. governance. The public has begun to believe that the country's best days are past and the future belongs to others—perhaps China.
This pessimism contributes to a zero-sum politics that on the right becomes a hostility to immigrants, and on the left a disparaging of the successful. Both impulses lead to policies—income redistribution, rejection of human talent—that compound economic decline. And decline in turn leads to an inward-looking mood that pretends that if America ignores the world's disorders they will somehow leave America alone.
One particular challenge today that wasn't evident a half century ago is the entitlement burden—fiscal in its demand for ever-higher taxes, but also psychological in sapping the incentive to work and succeed. The Reagan restoration saved us from Europe's welfare fate for a time but Mr. Obama's progressive reversal has revived the danger of an entitlement state that is too big to afford but also too big to reform.
Yet for all our current ill temper, the lesson of 125 years is that the national direction can turn, and quickly. Experts said the aftermath of World Wars I and II would be depression, but government shrank and America boomed. In the 1970s the successive failures of Vietnam, Watergate, the energy crisis and inflation led many American elites to wonder if democracy was capable of defeating Communism. A decade later, amid the Reagan boom that added a Germany to U.S. GDP, those anxieties had washed away and the Soviet empire had disintegrated.
The answer to our current slow growth and self-doubt isn't a set of magical "new ideas" or some unknown orator from the provinces. The answer is to rediscover the eternal truths that have helped America escape malaise and turmoil in the past.
These lessons include that markets—the mind of free millions—allocate scarce resources more efficiently and fairly than do committees in Congress; that the collusion of government with either big business or big labor stifles competition and leads to political cynicism; that government will be respected more when it does a few things well rather than too many poorly; and that innovation and human progress spring not from bureaucratic elites but from the genius of individuals.
Above all, the lesson of 125 years is that whatever our periodic blunders Americans have always used the blessings of liberty to restore prosperity and national confidence. A free people have their fate in their own hands.
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"This pessimism contributes to a zero-sum politics that on the right becomes a hostility to immigrants, and on the left a disparaging of the successful. Both impulses lead to policies—income redistribution, rejection of human talent—that compound economic decline."
Typical of the WSJ.
The rest is ok.
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That it can be, and is, often used disingenuously does not mean that it is without merit. Wisely selected immigrants can bring much benefit to America.
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"Wisely selected immigrants"
Yes. Welcoming invited guests is a very different concept than just leaving the door open.
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"That it can be, and is, often used disingenuously does not mean that it is without merit"
Well wait a second Crafty. I never posted or said let's keep the Werner Von Braun(s) out of the country.
But when we have people coming in and setting up shop from all around the world we have a huge problem. Most of us a paying for this. As many of half the children born in local hospitals are to illegals. Who gets the bill? And family members who are here with Medicare yet they cannot speak one word of English and some live in their native countries. How are the getting around the system and getting us to pay their health care costs? Just a tip of the iceberg.
And yes most will vote Democrat and yes the one's in the Southwest have already altered the political landscape.
And the ones in the NE and South have bolstered the Democrat Party.
Lets not down play this. I get it about winning their "hearts and minds" but....
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It's time for a 'way forward' discussion. We need to a) stop or slow down the Obama era growth of government, b) govern in a way that keeps control of congress in the next election cycle, c) make proposals that are realistic and possible to pass now, and d) set the table to win back the Presidency.
Bipartisan policies imploded at the end of the Bush years. Wrongheaded policies like government-based mortgage finance were supported by Democrats and many elected Republicans known as RINOs. The Obama years in contrast involved mostly a straight partisan divide, like Obamacare on one side and trying to repeal it on the other. This election saw the first split in the Democrats, with 'red state Democrats' trying to running away from the President's agenda for their own survival.
Now we have divided government in a divided nation and need to build gently on this to win going forward. Many Dem voters lost faith in their party and policies, but have not yet jumped fully to the other side.
Some conservatives are now pretending we hold all the cards. But we hold more like half the cards and should proceed with that in mind. There needs to be a way forward for the right in between RINOism and purity. We need proposals that follow, not violate, our principles, and attract support from the middle. We need to take small steps in the right direction and make the left's accusations against us clearly false. When they say handouts to the rich, starving the poor, taking away Granny's meds, shutting down roads and bridges or anything like that, we need to be ready to show it is not true.
Here is the beginning of a list, not in order of importance:
1) Crack down on Cronyism.
2) End Too Big to Fail. Big enterprises get the protections that small enterprises receive.
3) De-criminalize small quantities of pot at the federal level.
4) Take the lead legalizing safe, over-the counter birth control.
5) Give anti-abortion activism an anti- late term abortion focus.
6) Drop the subject of gay marriage. Let the states and courts sort it out.
7) Repeal or cut only the taxes that are really unpopular and unproductive for now. No Democrat ran on a platform of supporting the medical device tax. Most Democrats won't oppose its repeal. No Democrat ran on having the US corporate tax rate highest in the world, driving out our best companies. No reasonable Dem will oppose reform. Pass what can be passed now with at least some bi-partisan support and put it on President Obama's desk.
8.) Replace and re-name Obamacare. Take a version of what Dick Morris called the Republican plan, get some support from the other side and re-name it. Provide tax credit subsidies for all who need them to buy health insurance and incorporate the basic consumer protections. Insurers cannot discriminate based on pre-existing conditions nor can they either terminate coverage or raise rates when their customers become ill. Eliminate the coercive aspects of ObamaCare. Nobody has to buy insurance nor does any employer have to offer it. Those who do purchase insurance can get as much or as little coverage as they want. One size will no longer attempt to fit all. Extend Medicare coverage to those who are sickest with the highest medical bills, so the government pays for all their costs.
9) Pass real immigration reform. Enforce our borders, really, enhance security overall, and offer a tough set of criteria for staying here legally if you are already fully established here and contributing positively to the well-being of the country. Make the main parts inseparable; people here stay legally only if the inflow stops.
10) Restrain and prioritize spending but have every statement about restraint start with the affirmation that we are committed to retaining a safety net for the truly needy.
11) Pass laws that require adherence to constitutional law, such as a law requiring Presidents to go to congress in order to launch military interventions of the type he launched in Libya. Limit the UN and other international encroachments on national and individual liberty. Reaffirm specific states' rights and responsibilities in federal law.
12) End the federal 21 drinking age. They vote. They drive. They serve. Leave it to the states.
13) Keep the internet private, tax free, and retain US sovereignty over it.
14) Last (for now) but not least, reform the dual mission of The Fed.
Comments?
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The pubs are on double secret probation with the public. Don't fcuk it up!
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Good idea and good start to the conversation Doug.
Here's some thoughts from Newt:
A Suicidal Presidency?
Originally published at CNN.com.
President Obama seems determined to launch a two-front war with the new Republican Congress. The bigger news has been about his threatened executive order on immigration. The White House, however, has also indicated a determination to greet the new Senate majority leader from coal country with a series of very expensive environmental regulations necessitated by the climate agreement he announced with China.
Before he takes these steps, President Obama should take a few days off and read a couple of books about President Woodrow Wilson's last two years in office.
There are a lot of parallels between the two presidents. Both were college professors. Both liked to hide on a golf course (Wilson holds the record having played more than 1,000 rounds as President). Both were powerful orators. Both had deeply held convictions. Both disliked the Congress.
The collapse of the Wilson presidency after the 1918 midterm defeat is a cautionary tale for President Obama. Republicans gained 25 seats in the House and five seats in the Senate, enabling them to control the Senate by a narrow 49-47 margin.
Wilson did not seem to realize how powerful that Senate control was, even if by a close margin. He also did not realize how deeply senators feel about their prerogatives and constitutional authority.
Wilson's reaction to the new Republican Senate was to defy it. He went off to the peace conference of Versailles which ended World War I with no Republican senators in the delegation. He wrote the League of Nations treaty (the forerunner to the United Nations) refusing to compromise with Republicans in the Senate.
When the Republicans insisted on adding some limitations to the treaty, Wilson fought them. He went to the country and launched a nationwide speaking tour. The tension and exhaustion led him to collapse with a stroke on October 2, 1919. The incapacitated president was protected by his wife, who in effect ran the administration until he left office.
The American people repudiated Wilson by an enormous margin in the 1920 elections. Republican Warren Harding won 404 electoral votes and more than 60% of the vote. In the House, Republicans gained 62 seats for a 302-131 majority. In the Senate, Republicans gained 10 seats for a 59-37 majority.
President Wilson had presided over the destruction of the Democratic Party -- and it did not become competitive again until the Great Depression a decade later.
President Obama seems determined to reject the American people. He set the terms for this election on October 2 at Northwestern University when he declared that his "policies were on the ballot." The American people took him at his word and defeated Democrats at every level.
When the President's party loses the Senate, additional seats in the House, a number of governorships, and almost 300 state legislators, the American people have spoken.
Republicans today have more state legislators than any time in the party's history. Republicans also control more state legislative bodies than any time in their history. Republicans have very likely tied and may surpass their post World War II high-point in membership in the U.S. House, making Speaker Boehner the most successful Republican Speaker in electoral terms since Longworth in the 1920s.
If the president's opponent reaches those kind of high-water marks after a 160-year history, something big is happening.
Pollster Kellyanne Conway reports that 74% of last week's voters wanted President Obama to work with Congress rather than unilaterally issue an executive order on immigration. Gallup reports that 53% of the American people want the new GOP Congress to set priorities while only 36% favor President Obama setting the priorities. This is a striking decline for the President from 2012 (Obama is down 10 percentage points and Republicans are up 11 points in two years).
If President Obama defies the will of the American people, he will destroy the Democrats' chances in 2016. Democrats in 2014 had to hide from Obama. By 2016, at this rate, they will have to repudiate him. That would all but guarantee their party's defeat, with a party descending into internal strife and the pro-Obama hard-liners fighting with anti-Obama Democrats who just want to survive. Hillary Clinton would find it a nearly impossible environment for a campaign.
There are more immediate consequences to an Obama war on Congress. The Congress will fight back, and the Congress has more tools to fight with than the President does (the spending power, committee hearings and oversight power, and taking votes, to name a few).
Congressional tools are so extensive and so misunderstood that they deserve their own column.
It will be interesting to see how the White House reacts to the new Congress. Outgoing majority leader Harry Reid has protected the President from a lot of difficult choices by controlling the Senate so tightly.
As a result, President Obama and his team may not even fully understand the disaster they could be creating by declaring war on Congress. Reading of Wilson's catastrophic experience might temper the Obama White House. If not, the new Republican Congress will defeat it.
Your Friend,
Newt
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Obama doesn't care.
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Newt the comparison is far from great. Obama will make 5 million illegals suddenly legal. The other ten million will be made legal before he leaves office. He uses his aces in the hole one a time.
And I certainly pray we don't get a Warren Harding in 2016! Wow what a triumph he was Newt!
Or for that matter Jeb Bush. Bush One gave us Clinton. Bush Two gave us Obama. Folks end of the story - end of the Bush era. That says it all. Any Repub who must run for the nomination against Jeb simply use THIS slogan.
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It is an argument I have called tax vs. charity or welfare vs. charity. John Stossels frames it well in the this piece called Governing vs. Giving, which is really government forced redistribution vs the free will of giving and accepting responsibility with assistance.
Personally I find that since the government has taken my income, with my taxes more than 100% of take home income, and nothing left over, and they are spending the majority of that on redistribution, I really have no time or interest in charity unless and until we change that dynamic.
It is the essence of the differences between the two competing philosophies and the smoking gun of liberalism that they don't trust people to do the right thing without coercion. Instead of helping people, we spend trillions and trillions pretending to help people.
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Governing vs. Giving
John Stossel
http://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2014/12/17/governing-vs-giving-n1932615/page/full
It's the season for giving.
That doesn't mean it's the season for government.
Government creates loyalty in the minds of citizens by pretending to be Santa Claus, doling out gifts and favors. Politicians claim they help those unfortunates who aren't helped by coldhearted capitalism.
The truth is, government gets in the way of charity, making it harder for people to help others and for the poor to help themselves. It also gets in the way of commerce, which is what really makes people better off.
When I was in college, President Lyndon Johnson declared "an all-out war on human poverty. ... For the first time in our history, it's possible to conquer poverty." I believed him. But then I watched government poverty programs fail. America spent trillions of your dollars on the poor, and the poor stayed poor.
Actually, the poverty rate did fall after the "War on Poverty" began. But it had already been falling prior to initiation of welfare. Sadly, the poverty rate stopped falling about seven years after Johnson's programs began, mostly because government handouts encouraged people to be dependent.
Simple capitalism does much more for poor people. On my show this week, Marian Tupy, editor of HumanProgress.org, speculates on why people don't appreciate that.
"Our minds evolved tens of thousands of years ago when we lived in small groups of between 50-200 people," says Tupy. "We would go out, kill game, bring it back, share it." The idea of everyone getting an equal share still makes us feel warm and cozy.
"Some of the anti-capitalist impulse goes back to that hunter-gatherer mentality and not comprehending the complexity of the market economy," says Tupy. "The complexity outpaced our ability to understand it.
But even those who don't understand markets should open their eyes and acknowledge its benefits: World-wide, wherever economic freedom is allowed, millions of people have lifted themselves out of stoop labor and miserable poverty.
Of course, not everyone can reap the benefits of markets. The sick, the mentally ill and other truly helpless people need a hand.
But why assume government must provide that help? Government doesn't do anything very well. Why not let private charity handle it?
I once assumed there was too much poverty for private charity to make much of a difference. But now I realize there is plenty of money, and private charity would do much more if government didn't discourage it.
When the welfare state took over poverty relief, it crowded out "mutual aid" societies that the poor ran for themselves.
They were like a cross between private unemployment insurance and "moose" or "elks" lodges that encouraged members to help each other out. They were better at helping the poor because their members, unlike government poverty workers, were free to make judgments about who deserved help and who didn't.
Today, there are fewer mutual aid societies because people say, "Why do it myself when we already have giant welfare bureaucracies? My taxes pay for Obamacare, food stamps, housing vouchers and so on. I'll let the professionals handle it."
But those "professionals" do a poor job.
Fortunately, charities still try to do what government cannot do. I give money to the Doe Fund, an organization that helps addicts and ex-cons discover the benefits of work. I give because I can see the results: Doe Fund participants work as caterers, exterminators and street-cleaners, and they do it with a spring in their step.
Somehow, the charity teaches these men (they only work with men) to take pride in work. That pride changes people. Unlike other ex-cons, those who are Doe graduates rarely go back to jail.
If government didn't discourage it, more charities would do even better work with the poor. Human beings don't sit around ignoring the suffering of their neighbors. But we are most likely to neglect these moral tasks when government insists it has everything covered.
Get government out of the way and just watch what we can do.
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"Personally I find that since the government has taken my income, with my taxes more than 100% of take home income, and nothing left over, and they are spending the majority of that on redistribution, I really have no time or interest in charity unless and until we change that dynamic."
Ditto Doug. I was on the check line of a shopping center when the cashier asked me to donate to some charity. I said I already work roughly five months a year for the government. Isn't that a darn 'nuff? What I should give more? Are you kidding?
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Of course I get the point but sorry gents, but I find myself sideways to your logic here.
PS: It definitely irks me when a cashier asks me for a donation. I don't go shopping to get guilt tripped.
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We'll see what ccp says, but Karl Rove actually has something right here. (http://www.rove.com/articles/562) For the next two years we will be living under divided government. We want to make things better where we can, stop Obama from making things worse, and set the table for winning more in 2016. Think of Gingrich's Contract with America. There are things that both poll well and fall on the conservative side of the policy spectrum. Find specific areas that some Democrats will support, even one Democrat, that move us in the right direction and that are popular. Pass them. Call them bipartisan, and put them on Obama's desk to either sign or leave open as unfinished business. Rove identifies votes that already got bipartisan support (at the link). There are many more. For one thing, we won the last election; we should be on offense. Let the unpopular, lame duck go on defense vetoing popular measures, small steps that move the country, the economy and our security forward.
Karl Rove:
"It will be important in the new Congress that Republicans advance a reform-minded conservative governing agenda that has bipartisan support. Before scoffing at this, consider that House Republicans have already passed scores of bills with Democratic support, only to see them die in the Senate.
The GOP should set a bipartisan tone by taking these bills up again, starting with measures to help the economy. For example, this past session 158 House Democrats voted for a GOP measure expanding access to charter schools. Another 130 House Democrats backed a Republican bill to end the expensive wave of junk lawsuits over patents.
While Mr. McConnell says the Senate will first take up the Keystone XL pipeline, there are other opportunities on energy: 46 House Democrats voted with Republicans to expedite exports of liquefied natural gas, 28 to expand oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico, and 26 to expedite infrastructure for the development of natural gas.
Between 32 and 36 House Democrats also backed GOP measures to ban taxes on Internet access, to make it easier and less costly to invest in small businesses, to make government rule-making more transparent, and to stop an EPA proposal that would subject every stream, pond and ditch to federal jurisdiction.
Since Republicans want to move a comprehensive corporate tax-reform package, the fact that 53 House Democrats supported making permanent the immediate expensing of new equipment and software purchases, and 62 voted to make the research and development tax credit permanent, is a sign some Democrats will help make the tax code more growth-oriented.
There’s also evidence Democrats will help undo some of ObamaCare’s damaging provisions, like its definition of full-time work as 30 hours a week and its employee and employer mandates."
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Pasting this here from the Glibness thread
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_STATE_OF_UNION_GOP_RESPONSE_TEXT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-01-20-22-28-22
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Budget reform, tax reform, replacing Obamacare, this is a very specific and optimistic take on where we could be headed right now.
The Post-Obama Triumph of Conservatism
By Peter Ferrara
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/02/the_postobama_triumph_of_conservatism.html
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg3Xzh2cXD8
Hat tip to Glenn Beck radio this morning.
One minute, 39 seconds.
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Improving the GOP’s Free-Market Pitch
Capitalism’s virtues don’t easily reduce to sound bites, but that isn’t a reason to give up.
By
Douglas Coate
March 9, 2015 7:12 p.m. ET
20 COMMENTS
As an economics professor, I have sympathy for market-oriented Republican candidates who at times seem unable to explain their economic philosophy in sound-bite form. As Milton Friedman said, the arguments for capitalism are subtle and sophisticated, while the arguments for collectivism are simple and emotional. There are at least four cornerstones of limited-government, private-property, market-price economies that create prosperity but that are not intuitively obvious and require analysis and thought to appreciate.
One is Adam Smith ’s idea of the invisible hand. Smith argued that individuals in market economies, although motivated by self interest, will be guided by an invisible hand to take actions that benefit society as a whole. A farmer works hard to grow wheat at the lowest possible cost. When he tries to sell his wheat at a high price, however, he discovers that other farmers have also worked hard to grow wheat at low cost and competition with them pushes prices down close to production costs.
This is not the outcome planned for by our self-interested farmer and his competitors, but it is great for the rest of us who get cheap food.
A second is trade. Trade between people within and across countries leads to the division of labor. People can specialize in what they do best and trade with others for what the others do best. This makes everyone more productive and more prosperous.
ENLARGE
Photo: Corbis
This holds even for trade between peoples of highly developed countries and peoples of less-developed countries. We all have a comparative advantage in something because of differences among us and in the resources we command. Self-sufficiency at the individual or country level may be a romantic ideal, but it also means subsistence living.
A third is the market-price system. From property rights and trading come market prices as suppliers and demanders interact based on the information and resources each possess. These prices in turn guide our plans and actions as consumers or producers.
A high-school graduate makes the decision of whether to go to college or not based on the information reflected in prices. What is the price or wage of a college graduate in the labor market? What is the price or wage of a high-school graduate? What is the price of a college education? A factory owner in a market economy chooses how labor intensive or capital intensive to make his production process by looking at the wages of workers and their skills alongside the prices of the different production technologies he could use.
A factory manager in the old Soviet economy, not blessed with a market-price system, relied on the information or allocations of a central planner to guide his use of workers and machines in the production process. But the central planner was largely playing a guessing game. He did not have market prices to keep him up to date on the skills of workers in different locations and on the technologies available to them.
The fourth is that the productive resources of land, labor and capital are guided to their best use. This results from the constant feedback provided by the profit-and-loss system and from the lack of discrimination when governments are hands off.
Labor, the most important resource in market economies with educated work forces, is fully utilized, for example, because employers hire the best workers they can at prevailing wages to maximize their profits. And it is in their best interest to treat them well thereafter so they won’t leave. Any differences in wages by characteristic, such as race or gender, that do not reflect productivity, are quickly arbitraged away in the pursuit of profit. Why hire men if women are cheaper?
The counters to these arguments are that our economic system should not be based on selfishness but on caring, that international trade leads to the exporting of jobs to low-wage countries, that the best and brightest should be assembled to plan our economy because the plans of ordinary people reflected in market prices are not informed, and that discrimination and unfair treatment are everywhere if employers are free to hire, fire, pay and promote without oversight.
Nice sound bites, appealing to the emotions, and probably characteristic of too much of the K-12 and college education in this country. But, to paraphrase Friedrich Hayek, “these views lead us down the road to serfdom.” For peaceful and prosperous lives, based on personal responsibility and voluntary cooperation, capitalism is the way.
Unfortunately, I am not sure how best a political candidate might argue for capitalism and limited government in a sound bite. Maybe by borrowing from Gary Becker : “Over the past 25 years, a billion people have escaped poverty as their countries moved away from command and control, toward capitalism and freedom.”
Mr. Coate is professor of economics at Rutgers University, Newark.
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David Ziegelheim
David Ziegelheim 4 hours ago
First...it isn't free markets, it is competitive markets. "Free" markets imply no regulation; it that situation bad actors virtually always take advantage of unsuspecting buyers and sellers. Competitive markets provide protections from bad actors (e.g. title insurance on real estate) and have processes to maximize the flow of information and trust between buyers and sellers (e.g. Amazon reviews, eBay guarantees).
Second, nearly all the mechanisms Prof. Coate discussed are the how behind the "invisible hand". Trade, price mechanisms (really the 4 P's), allocation of resources are the how of the invisible hand. And really they all track back to those price mechanisms that let a Big Mac, an iPhone, and a BMW all be evaluated under the same system.
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IAN C MADSEN
IAN C MADSEN 6 hours ago
Another effective tool is reductio ad absurdum. For instance, against minimum wage hike advocates, ask them why not raise it to $30 per hour. For those who want ever higher tax rates, why not say that they should go to 99%, even 110% for the very 'rich'. For those who are against free trade, go them one better and suggest no exports or imports of any kind. For those who are against luxury and abundance, recommend taking everything from everybody and not giving it to anyone at all, but just sit there to decay and become part of the Earth. There are more. Another tack is to point out that those places that are most market-friendly have the highest standards of living, highest growth rates, and lowest unemployment and poverty levels. Ask why there have to be so many laws and tax codes; why not strict but fewer ones, if they are so concerned about legality and equity? Eg., a flat 20% tax rate, no deductions; no corporate tax, as salaries and dividends are taxed at personal level.
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David Rodman
David Rodman 7 hours ago
First, use the term free markets and never use the Marxist term capitalism.
Second, go on the offensive instead of trying to make economists of everyone.
Point out that every time anyone promises to deliver more for less using government, they are selling a pipedream and trying to increase their own power.
They are selling an empty promise that government can't deliver on because:
1. Politicization - Using government turns economic decisions into political decisions, which further political interests, not economic interests, which is the point.
2. Fewer minds means poorer decisions - The few deciding for the many can never equal the power of the many deciding for themselves.
3. Corruption - the inevitable and exceedingly corrosive result of concentration of power. Examples abound.
4. Monopolization - no competition means no incentive to improve service, much less provide reasonable service at all.
These truths are self evident, irrefutable and unavoidable.
The way to change minds is to be tenacious in attacking false and self-serving progressive promises and narratives.
The light must be boldly shined on the emporer to show everyone he has no clothes.
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https://www.facebook.com/conservative50plus/videos/10153168045905873/
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417601/riot-plagued-baltimore-catastrophe-entirely-democratic-partys-own-making-kevin-d
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third post of the day:
You’re not supposed to say this in polite company, but what went up in flames in Baltimore Monday night was not merely a senior center, small businesses and police cars. Burning down was also the blue-city model of urban governance.
Nothing excuses the violence of rampaging students or the failure of city officials to stop it before Maryland’s Governor called in the National Guard. But as order starts to return to the streets, and the usual political suspects lament the lack of economic prospects for the young men who rioted, let’s not forget who has run Baltimore and Maryland for nearly all of the last 40 years.
The men and women in charge have been Democrats, and their governing ideas are “progressive.” This model, with its reliance on government and public unions, has dominated urban America as once-vibrant cities such as Baltimore became shells of their former selves. In 1960 Baltimore was America’s sixth largest city with 940,000 people. It has since shed nearly a third of its population and today isn’t in the top 25.
The dysfunctions of the blue-city model are many, but the main failures are three: high crime, low economic growth and failing public schools that serve primarily as jobs programs for teachers and administrators rather than places of learning.
Let’s take them in order. The first and most important responsibility of any city government is to uphold law and order. When the streets are unsafe and crime is high, everything else—e.g., getting businesses to invest and create jobs—becomes next to impossible.
Opinion Journal Video
Best of the Web Today Columnist James Taranto on riots following the death of a black man in police custody. Photo credit: Getty Images.
People also start voting with their feet. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has stated that one of her goals is to attract 10,000 families to move to Baltimore. Good luck with that after Monday night.
It’s not that we don’t know what to do. Rudy Giuliani proved that in New York City, which he helped to revive in the 1990s starting with a revolution in policing that brought crime rates to record lows. A good part of this was policing in areas that had previously been left to the hoodlums.
His reward (and that of his successor, Mike Bloomberg, who built on Mr. Giuliani’s policies) was to become a villain of the liberal grievance industry and a constant target of attack. Few blue-city mayors elsewhere have been willing to take that heat.
Or take the economy. In the heyday of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the idea was that the federal government could revitalize city centers with money and central planning. You can tell how that turned out by the office buildings and housing projects that failed to attract middle-class taxpayers. Baltimore’s waterfront is a gleaming example of this kind of top-down development, with new sports stadiums that failed to attract other businesses.
The latest figures from Maryland’s Department of Labor show state unemployment at 5.4%, against 8.4% for Baltimore. A 2011 city report on the neighborhood of Freddie Gray—the African-American whose death in police custody sparked the riots—reported an area that is 96.9% black with unemployment at 21%. When it comes to providing hope and jobs, we should have learned by now that no government program can substitute for a healthy private economy.
Then there are the public schools. Residents will put up with a great deal if they know their children have a chance at upward mobility through education. But when the schools no longer perform, the parents who can afford to move to the suburbs do so—and those left behind are stuck with failure. There are many measures of failure in Baltimore schools, but consider that on state tests 72% of eighth graders scored below proficient in math, 45% in reading and 64% in science.
Our point is not to indict all cities or liberals. Many big-city Democrats have worked to welcome private investment and reform public education. Some of the biggest cities—New York, Boston and San Francisco—have also had inherent economic advantages like higher education and the finance and technology industries.
But Baltimore also has advantages, not least its port and one of the nation’s finest medical centers in Johns Hopkins. If it lacks the appeal of New York or San Diego, that is all the more reason for city officials to rethink their reliance on high taxes, government spending and welfare-state dependency.
For a time in recent decades, it looked like the reform examples of New York under Messrs. Giuliani and Bloomberg and the growth of cities like Houston might lead to a broader urban revitalization. In some places it did.
But of late the progressives have been making a comeback, led by Bill de Blasio in New York and the challenge to sometime reform Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Chicago. This week’s nightmare in Baltimore shows where this leads. It’s time for a new urban renewal, this time built on the ideas of private economic development, personal responsibility, “broken windows” policing, and education choice.
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"This week’s nightmare in Baltimore shows where this leads. It’s time for a new urban renewal, this time built on the ideas of private economic development, personal responsibility, “broken windows” policing, and education choice."
Yes. All of that, especially personal responsibility.
Seeing how not to live and govern tells us something about the way forward if we don't like the current path, but all the momentum seems to be in the other direction.
From my experiences as an inner city landlord I have tried to warn of what is happening and how our policies are tied to these lifestyle choices and behaviors. In 19.9% of American households now, 1 in 5, no one works. In America's inner city, that proportion is way higher. At some point what we have is something like a third world country just outside of our downtowns and off of the freeways the rest of us travel.
Rich, white liberals and the 49-52% who vote with them keep talking about doing more for the have-nots, right while they take away the ladder up. 50 years into a failed war on poverty, they still don't notice what they are taking from the program recipients by making everything free, from their home, food, healthcare, down to their smartphone and data plan.
It can be quite ugly to see what fills the void in human nature when personal responsibility is removed.
One time in Mpls someone broke all the first floor windows in an apartment building I owned. An eyewitness tried to tell the police in a car what had happened. The cop rolled his squad car window down partway, heard what she said and told her she should report this to the landlord.
When the riots end, the people will return to their taxpayer supported homes with cable TV, cigarettes, air conditioning, and blaring music. If Baltimore is at all like Minneapolis, the City enforcers will come out and start writing orders and tickets to the landlords to get the rubble cleared and windows repaired or face condemnation and prosecution. In Washington, the rich and powerful liberals along with the media and rinos will again tell us that any cut, of any amount, to any program, will harm the children. Not so. It is the existence, expansion and proliferation of these programs that remove all personal responsibility that is hurting the children more than anything else.
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These powerful words from our "brother in arms" GM are worthy of discussion here:
I have raised my right hand multiple times and sworn to protect and defend the Constitution. That constitution means nothing to those in power now. I believed in the inherent wisdom and goodness of the American people. I seriously question that now.
The rule of law and the constitution lie in tatters and the public seems to be more interested in Bruce Jenner's gender crisis. And what better metaphor for America than the Bruce Jenner of my childhood on a Wheaties box as an American Olympic hero and the Bruce Jenner of today preparing to have his smeckle surgically turned into a vajayjay. America today is just as unimaginable and unrecognizable.
We have alleged americans cheering for the jihadists targeting a brave American standing for core American freedoms. Our president does nothing to protect her from the enemies he has allowed to fester in our midst.
This is becoming a country not worth bleeding for, much less dying for. I am not renouncing my country, it is renouncing me and everything I have spent my adult life defending. If we continue down this path, then I am done. I went into law enforcement because I saw it as a sacred calling. I used to encourage talented people to consider it as a career or volunteer opportunity. I no longer do so.
So, what's on TV?
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"I am not renouncing my country, it is renouncing me and everything I have spent my adult life defending."
Yes and while the faux leader professes to represent us he promotes this trade agreement that is essentially a secret and expects us to trust him. The Nike CEO expects us to believe her when she tells us how good it is for us and for lower consumer prices. All the while farming jobs by the millions overseas. Wow I can get my basketball shoes for a discount therefore I am thrilled.
And of course this Marxist who does everything he can to berate America stands in front of an American flag while giving us another con job.
Yep. I feel the same way.
I feel sorry for the honest law enforcement officers who have spent years protecting us.
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Teaching Better Civics for Better Citizens
American students are alarmingly unfamiliar with the essential elements of democracy.
ENLARGE
Photo: Corbis
By
Sandra Day O’Connor And
John Glenn
May 12, 2015 7:03 p.m. ET
WSJ
The results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), released last week, revealed that our country’s eighth-graders aren’t just failing at civics and history. They fundamentally do not understand our democratic system of government, and have shown no significant sign of progress since they were last tested in 2010.
The scores from the test known as the Nation’s Report Card show that only 18% of the students are proficient in history, and less than a quarter are proficient in civics. For example, fewer than one-third of students tested knew that “the government of the United States should be a democracy” is a political belief shared by most people in this country.
Education policy leaders have correctly recognized the importance of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) to prepare children for the jobs of the future, and to enable the U.S. to compete in the 21st-century marketplace. The NAEP tells us that if schools ignore civics and social studies, they risk excluding students forever from American democracy. While we fully support the vast resources committed to promote STEM subjects, we seriously question the cost of doing so at the expense of the humanities.
Civic education cannot be an afterthought. Citizenship is a skill that must be taught over time with the same devotion we give to reading, math and the pursuit of scientific knowledge. We believe that it should be taught alongside and integrated with these subjects.
More civics courses alone is not the answer. Civics education itself needs an overhaul that makes it relevant to digital learners. This is why we have joined forces to create games and digital content that meet students where they are—online and gaming—and help them create a sort of “muscle memory” for citizenship. We want to give students an immersive civic-education experience that inspires them to learn how to use the legal system, the legislature and the electoral process to solve problems in their communities and effectively communicate with their government.
As the next election nears, it’s not enough to have young people read about elections in history books. Digital games such as “Win the White House,” a product of the Web-based nonprofit education project founded by Justice O’Connor, put students inside a virtual election. They can learn how to navigate the process and experience its complexities in a way that is fun and engaging and on their terms.
Nationally, more than 72,000 teachers have created accounts with iCivics, giving digital civic education to more than 7.5 million students. It is now used by more than half the nation’s middle-school social-studies teachers, and that is cause for celebration. The question is how to reach the other half.
This month we are launching iCivics Ohio, a partnership between the John Glenn College at Ohio State University, the Capitol Square Foundation and Justice O’Connor’s iCivics. The partnership could give to every student in Ohio access to state-of-the-art digital civic-education experiences—from iCivics.org and other resources—that include state-specific curricula and lesson plans specifically for Ohio teachers. We hope that every other state will consider similar opportunities.
We know what works in civic education. The Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools’ Six Proven Practices provides a blueprint that every state can adapt to fit its own curricula. The practices include: classroom instruction, discussion of current events and controversial issues, service-learning, extra-curricular activities, school governance and simulations of government processes.
Citizenship begins long before students can vote. Civic education will help them exercise their vote, and participate in our democracy, in an informed manner. The NAEP results indicate that it’s not the students who are failing to learn, but we who are failing to teach them.
Ms. O’Connor, a retired U.S. Supreme Court justice, is the founder of iCivics, a nonprofit company producing digital civics curriculum for schools. Mr. Glenn is a former astronaut and former Democratic U.S. senator from Ohio (1974-99).
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I see frustrated conservative talking about flying the flag upside down as we head into the fourth of July. Are we a nation in distress?
Ten years ago the Supreme Court created a right for local governments to take private homes and send people down the road in order to accommodate the wishes of their preferred private, special interests.
This week the Court, twisting like a pretzel, interpreted Obamacare to say the exact opposite of what it does in order to preserve the law rather than leave it to the law writing branch to fix, change or repeal it. The next day they ended the legislative process across the country to make marriage, where a man and a woman become husband and wife, a constitutional right for gay couples. With 4 anti-constitutional liberals on the Court, we are now ruled by the whim of one or two erratic appointees of former Republican Presidents on both social and economic issues.
The question is not what to do about shiny objects like gay marriage. The question is how to go forward from here. Of course this overlaps with 2016 Presidential because the question also necessarily becomes who best to lead.
Let's take these two issues first. Obamacare became the law of the land through a number of large deceptions, a one-time super-majority, and deeming a bill passed that wasn't. It was upheld originally by making it something we were promised that it wasn't and then funded by those sworn to repeal it.
I heard Ted Cruz' irate reaction to these decisions. He, for one, drew a line earlier against funding Obamacare, but his party punted away their constitutional power of the purse back to the media and the Saul Alinsky executive branch. Yes Ted Cruz would stand up for limited government and constitutional principles. But he aims his arguments at the minority of conservatives who already agree with him. The good he could do as President, such as appoint great Justices is subject to the question of being him marginalized into unelectability. Scott Walker also stood up strongly against the rulings. Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio opposed the decisions but took more conciliatory tones, FWIW.
Gay Marriage was coming anyway and Republicans in Congress are already funding O'care and ready to make a "temporary fix" on subsidies. So the question remains, what is the way forward? We don't just need a leader who is right on the issues. We need leadership that can successfully make the arguments, connect with more people and move public opinion.
Meanwhile, we will are paddling upstream against a really strong current. 99% of colleges have been taken over by liberal teaching and an even higher percentage in the k-12 public schools. 84% of O'care enrollees are subsidized, no longer able to take a disinterested view. Most Hispanics know someone personally affected by the immigration reform debate. Most gays don't know it is Republicans who would actually give them far more liberties. Most Jews aren't impressed that Republicans are now the defenders of Israel and most blacks have never voted for a Republican. Most unemployed, recent college grads think redistribution grows the economy. All network news and nearly every major newspaper are in lockstep with DNC talking points.
Is there still a way forward?
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"Meanwhile, we will are paddling upstream against a really strong current. 99% of colleges have been taken over by liberal teaching and an even higher percentage in the k-12 public schools. 84% of O'care enrollees are subsidized, no longer able to take a disinterested view. Most Hispanics know someone personally affected by the immigration reform debate. Most gays don't know it is Republicans who would actually give them far more liberties. Most Jews aren't impressed that Republicans are now the defenders of Israel and most blacks have never voted for a Republican. Most unemployed, recent college grads think redistribution grows the economy. All network news and nearly every major newspaper are in lockstep with DNC talking points."
And we have an Republican governor hugging Al Sharpton in a show of love, we have Monica Lewinsky receiving a standing ovation, and probably 70 million people in the country born somewhere else and all with a family member affected by immigration and a party that is in disarray and without leadership and a President with outright Communist ties and few if anyone who seems to care.
Were done. Where can we go? Levin keeps talking about State Legislators. The Left has control of the 90 % of propaganda machine as you point out. That won it for them.
That and making so many people dependent on government, and bringing in millions of people from other countries who want the good life but without the American ideals of responsibility, capatilism, competition, freedom from government etc.
Only way out I see is a catastrophy that might wake up enough people to the reality of losing our freedoms and a prospect of total government Wall Street fascist control.
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We are fcuked.
Until the hard reboot.
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http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/07/the_united_states_is_a_dying_country.html
True.
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Tell that to Bezos, Page, Zuckerberg, Brin, and Goldman Sachs CEO.
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We are fcuked.
Until the hard reboot.
I'm looking forward to it. There is a "reckoning" that needs to occur... a statement of the "way things are going to be."
Most people lack the stomach for it.
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http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/07/the_united_states_is_a_dying_country.html
True.
Self-inflicted and still available. Worse than self-inflicted, some are doing this to the rest of us. More a homicide than an 'evolutionary process'.
If not for copyrights I would call the political path to steer away from this national death, die less often.
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Opportunity for All,
Favoritism for None.
- Jim DeMint, Heritage Foundation
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/31/us/koch-brothers-brave-spotlight-to-try-to-alter-their-image.html?emc=edit_th_20150731&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
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From abortion thread, this crosses many topics.
I love this:
"As a pragmatic matter, the President appoints Justices and Senators confirm them. Roe v Wade a wrongly decided case for anyone reading the constitution for what it says. The issue will go back to the states someday if conservatives ever win elections and govern accordingly. States then will choose different levels of restrictions. The issue shouldn't be the center of this election except to know where everyone stands on it.
Further on the politics is the idea of a conservative coalition. At the end of the current battle for the nomination, the various groups need to come together to win. If you want secure borders, sitting out or voting Dem won't get that done. If a pro-lifer wants to advance that cause, electing Dems won't do that. If you want a freer economy, sitting out or voting Dem doesn't get you there. For those who want a return to constitutional principles, same. If you are in any of these groups, you need to know who your friends and enemies are."
Rather an optimist aren't you? Does the name Souter or Kennedy mean anything? They were thought to be conservative. And as to the Pubbies, they don't care about the base. Look at Boehner and McConnell, plus all the others. Look how they treat the Tea Party and Ted Cruz.
Not an optimist, just choosing between fighting on or quitting.
Souter was a mistake made by HW Bush who was not a conservative in the first place. I supported Jack Kemp as the rightful heir to the Reagan legacy but Kemp didn't rise well enough as a candidate and people didn't make the right choice in the primaries. So we keep engaging and fighting on, earlier and earlier in the process.
Kennedy was Reagan's (third) choice after the media and the public allowed Bork to be Borked. That said, Justice Anthony Kennedy is to the right of Trump - I digress. Back to that winning elections thing, Dems had a 55-45 majority during that appointment-confirmation fiasco. Controlling the Judicial Committee process was ... Joe Biden.
In the first two years of Obama, some here admitted this disaster needed a two election cycle fix, and if we fail, it might be too late to ever save this country. (We failed and it might be too late to save the country - I hate being right.) The table was set to re-take the House and the Senate in 2010 and we needed a real President to win in 2012. Of that, we only took the House, screwed up the Senate for two more cycles and then allowed Obama be the worst President ever reelected.
Now, again, we fight on or give up. We finally won majorities in the House and Senate, but the majority within the majority of the House is not very principled and control of the Senate requires 60 votes, not 54. (R's also lead Dems 31-18 with Governorships and hold 70% of state legislative bodies.)
In 2016, best case, we elect a good President, hold the House and barely hold the Senate. It will still be hard or impossible to enact real change. The leaders we elect need to be as conservative, as charismatic and as persuasive as possible. Getting angry white men angrier and motivated alone will never work again. Soccer moms, yoga moms, wishy washy suburban men like my non-political friends, young Hispanic families, college grads in their 20s, along with all the traditional conservative voters all need to hear our message and start considering it. We need to chip some liberal vote momentum away from inner city blacks, Jewish vote and gays. Even women, did I already mention them?
We also will need win the attention of all Dem (and moderate R) Senators who hold seats in Republican states, like Reagan did with Democrat Blue Dog House members.
On the Presidential side, it comes down to who can best sell our message. We have to win the election AND win the agenda, not just point to personal flaws in the opponents. Even then, there is far more work to do than to pick one good leader.
Mentioned elsewhere, the squishy Republican congress people in the middle like my Representative will vote for whatever power base will win and keep them in power, whether that is a new, Reagan-like movement or a Boehner/JEB one. We need to build our own power base up. We don't need to tear theirs down; they did it for us.
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Frankly the best thing to do is to prepare to rebuild after the collapse that is coming.
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Posting to the way forward by request.
Liberal writer on a liberal site goes into excruciating detail about the trouble Dems are in. Kind of sad, really. wink
The NY state senate is R controlled?! The largest non-Calif state with unified Dem control is Oregon with 1% of the US population. Republicans have unified control of 25 states. Thank you President Obama.
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http://www.vox.com/2015/10/19/9565119/democrats-in-deep-trouble
Democrats are in denial. Their party is actually in deep trouble.
Updated by Matthew Yglesias on October 19, 2015, 7:00 a.m. ET @mattyglesias matt@vox.com
The Democratic Party is in much greater peril than its leaders or supporters recognize, and it has no plan to save itself.
Yes, Barack Obama is taking a victory lap in his seventh year in office. Yes, Republicans can't find a credible candidate to so much as run for speaker of the House. Yes, the GOP presidential field is led by a megalomaniacal reality TV star. All this is true — but rather than lay the foundation for enduring Democratic success, all it's done is breed a wrongheaded atmosphere of complacence.
The Republican Party doesn’t want to believe its voters agree with Trump. But they do.
The presidency is extremely important, of course. But there are also thousands of critically important offices all the way down the ballot. And the vast majority — 70 percent of state legislatures, more than 60 percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state — are in Republicans hands. And, of course, Republicans control both chambers of Congress. Indeed, even the House infighting reflects, in some ways, the health of the GOP coalition. Republicans are confident they won't lose power in the House and are hungry for a vigorous argument about how best to use the power they have.
Not only have Republicans won most elections, but they have a perfectly reasonable plan for trying to recapture the White House. But Democrats have nothing at all in the works to redress their crippling weakness down the ballot. Democrats aren't even talking about how to improve on their weak points, because by and large they don't even admit that they exist.
Instead, the party is focused on a competition between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton over whether they should go a little bit to Obama's left or a lot to his left, options that are unlikely to help Democrats down-ballot in the face of an unfriendly House map and a more conservative midterm electorate. The GOP might be in chaos, but Democrats are in a torpor.
Democrats have been obliterated at the state level
The worst part of the problem for the Democratic Party is in races that are, collectively, the most important: state government.
Elections for state legislature rarely make the national news, but they are the fundamental building blocks of American politics. Since they run the redistricting process for the US House of Representatives and for themselves, they are where the greatest level of electoral entrenchment is possible.
And in the wake of the 2014 midterms, Republicans have overwhelming dominance of America's state legislatures.
In what Democrats should take as a further bleak sign, four of the 11 states where they control both houses of the state legislature — Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Illinois — have a Republican governor. This leaves just seven states under unified Democratic Party control.
Republicans have unified control of 25 states. Along with the usual set of tax cuts for high-income individuals and business-friendly regulations, the result has been:
An unprecedented wave of restrictions on abortion rights
The spread of union-hostile "right to work" laws into the Great Lakes states
New curbs on voting rights, to further tilt the electorate in a richer, whiter, older direction
Large-scale layoffs of teachers and other public sector workers who are likely to support Democrats
Admittedly, one of the Democrats' seven states is California, which contains more than 10 percent of the nation's total population. But Texas and Florida combine for more people than the Golden State, and the GOP also dominates Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina — all of which are among the 10 largest states by population. Democrats' largest non-California bastion of unified control is Oregon, home to only about one percent of the American people.*
As of 2012 or so, Democrats thought they had a solution to this. Hard-right GOP governors in places like Wisconsin and Florida had become unpopular and were clearly overreaching — reading a wave driven by the poor economy in 2010 as an ideological mandate for sweeping conservative policy change. And that worked in Pennsylvania's 2014 gubernatorial election — Tom Wolf rode a backlash against then-Gov. Tom Corbett's hard-right policies to victory. But Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Rick Snyder, and even Maine's Paul LePage were all reelected. And while the old plan didn't pan out, no new one has risen to take its place.
The GOP is flexible
Liberals accustomed to chuckling over the ideological rigor of the House GOP caucus won't want to hear this, but one of the foundations of the GOP's broad national success is a reasonable degree of ideological flexibility.
Essentially every state on the map contains overlapping circles of rich people who don't want to pay taxes and business owners who don't want to comply with labor, public health, and environmental regulations. In states like Texas or South Carolina, where this agenda nicely complements a robust social conservatism, the GOP offers that up and wins with it. But in a Maryland or a New Jersey, the party of business manages to throw up candidates who either lack hard-edged socially conservative views or else successfully downplay them as irrelevant in the context of blue-state governance.
Democrats, of course, are conceptually aware of the possibility of nominating unusually conservative candidates to run in unusually conservative states. But there is a fundamental mismatch. No US state is so left-wing as to have created an environment in which business interests are economically or politically irrelevant. Vermont is not North Korea, in other words.
But there are many states in which labor unions are neither large nor powerful and non-labor national progressive donor networks are inherently populated by relatively affluent people who tend to be emotionally driven by progressive commitments on social or environmental issues. This is why an impassioned defense of the legality of late-term abortions could make Wendy Davis a viral sensation, a national media star, and someone capable of activating the kind of donor and volunteer networks needed to mount a statewide campaign. Unfortunately for Democrats, however, this is precisely the wrong issue profile to try to win statewide elections in conservative states.
Republicans have a plan
Any serious article about the prospects for Democratic Party policymaking in 2017 starts with the premise that Republicans will continue to hold a majority in the US House of Representatives. This presumption is built on four premises:
The natural distribution of population in the United States tends to lead the average House district to be more GOP-friendly than the overall population.
GOP control of most state legislatures lets Republicans draw boundaries in a way that is even more GOP-friendly than the natural population distribution would suggest.
Incumbents have large advantages in House elections, and most incumbents are Republicans.
So-called "wave" elections in which tons of incumbents lose are typically driven by a backlash against the incumbent president. Since the incumbent president is a Democrat, Democrats have no way to set up a wave.
One striking fact about this is that the presumption of continued GOP control is so solid that you don't even get pushback from House Democratic leaders when you write it down. Privately, some backbench Democrats express frustration that the leadership has no plan to try to recapture the majority. In their defense, it's not like anyone outside the leadership has a great plan either.
But this isn't just a parochial issue for the House Democratic caucus. It means that the party's legislative agenda is entirely dead on arrival at the federal level. And it's particularly striking that this stronghold of conservatism comes from the exact institution that so frequently generates embarrassing headlines for the GOP. House Republicans act extreme in part because they know they can get away with it.
The GOP, by contrast, has basically two perfectly plausible plans for moving its agenda forward. One is to basically change nothing and just hope for slightly better luck from the economic fundamentals or in terms of Democratic Party scandals. The other is to shift left on immigration and gain some Latino votes while retaining the core of the party's commitments. Neither of these plans is exactly brilliant, innovative, or foolproof. But neither one is crazy. Even if you believe that Democrats have obtained a structural advantage in presidential elections, it's clearly not an enormous one. The 51 percent of the vote obtained by Barack Obama in 2012 was hardly a landslide, early head-to-head polling of 2016 indicates a close race, and there's always a chance that unexpected bad news will hit the US economy or impair our national security.
Winning a presidential election would give Republicans the overwhelming preponderance of political power in the United States — a level of dominance not achieved since the Democrats during the Great Depression, but with a much more ideologically coherent coalition. Nothing lasts forever in American politics, but a hyper-empowered conservative movement would have a significant ability to entrench its position by passing a national right-to-work law and further altering campaign finance rules beyond the Citizens United status quo.
The first step for Democrats is admitting they have a problem
In some ways, the Democrats' biggest disadvantage is simply their current smugness. A party that controls such a small share of elected offices around the country is a party that should be engaged in vigorous debate about how to improve its fortunes. Much of the current Republican infighting — embarrassing and counterproductive though it may be at times — reflects the healthy impulse to recognize that the party lacks the full measure of power that it desires, and needs to argue about optimal strategies for obtaining it.
On the Democratic side, the personal political success of Barack Obama has created an atmosphere of complacency and overconfidence. If a black guy with the middle name Hussein can win the White House, the thinking seems to be, then anything is possible. Consequently, the party is marching steadily to the left on its issue positions — embracing same-sex marriage, rediscovering enthusiasm for gun control, rejecting the January 2013 income tax rate settlement as inadequate, raising its minimum wage aspirations to the $12-to-$15 range, abandoning the quest for a grand bargain on balancing the budget while proposing new entitlements for child care and parental leave — even though existing issue positions seem incompatible with a House majority or any meaningful degree of success in state politics.
Whatever you make of this agenda substantively, there's no way to actually enact it without first achieving a considerably higher level of down-ballot electoral success than Democrats currently enjoy.
But instead of a dialogue about how to obtain that success, Democrats are currently engaged in a slightly bizarre bidding war between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to see whether Congress in 2017 will reject a legislative agenda that is somewhat to the left of Obama's or drastically to its left. The differences between them are real, of course, and at least somewhat important.
But the much more significant question facing the party isn't about the White House — it's about all the other offices in the land. The problem is that control of the presidency seems to have blinded progressive activists to the possibility of even having an argument about what to do about all of them. That will change if and when the GOP seizes the White House, too, and Democrats bottom out. But the truly striking thing is how close to bottom the party is already and how blind it seems to be to that fact.
* Correction: Earlier versions of this article said that Minnesota or Washington was the biggest non-California Democratic-controlled state, but in fact the Republicans control one legislative house in both of those states
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It appears that Vox=retarded in Latin.
I never knew.
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"Democrats are in denial. Their party is actually in deep trouble"
Certainly some truth to this. That is why the party has to resort to lies, bribery, extortion, pandering to the "coalition", flame charges of racism, sexism, discrimination, and flood the borders with people who just love benefits and often mistrust whites and "Yankee" imperialists. The leftist media lets them get away with it. That is the biggest problem in MHO.
I don't know how we can have a free society with leaders who are allowed to lie. That was what the media was supposed to do and keep that in check.
Can anyone imagine Hillary using all the wheels of government at her disposal to intimidate, threaten, any opposition?
It seems that only the people who understand what that means are those who lived under communism. And those of us old enough to remember the cold war.
Speaking of the cold war I read so much now that Eugene McCarthy was out of control. Yet I also read how the Soviets did infiltrate our top secret branches of government. So I don't believe the liberal re writing of that either.
And now we have reports of how China and all our enemies are stealing our intellect like crazy. Well all these foreign students are not pledging allegiance to us are they? And for God's sake our universities have money making campuses all over the world. While this may attract talent to the US it certainly allows much to be stolen.
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http://www.hoover.org/research/are-all-men-created-equal
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I'm no fan of the American political dynamic where a perplexing event is picked up by the 24/7 news cycle, framed in a linear left/right light which ignores complexities and subtleties, then gummed to death by talking head hacks who make a living casting events in stark terms congruent with their monolithic political affect, with all sides of the issue embracing the notion that we must Do Something Now creating eternal excuses for ever growing government to step in and fill whatever vacuum the clamor is castigating, whether it makes any damn sense or not.
Here's a tale of a gent who made a big impact an hour a day that few know about. As we contemplate how best to move forward where the current existential threat the media has embraced as a two-dimensional passion play is concerned, I think it is prudent to reflect on the cultural aspects of the current conflict, understand that freedom is easier to sell than theocratic bondage, and hence make sure an element of our response involves leveraging our cultural assests:
https://reason.com/archives/2015/11/21/the-dj-who-helped-win-the-cold
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Superb post Buz!
8-) 8-) 8-)
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/opinion/sunday/who-turned-my-blue-state-red.html?emc=edit_th_20151122&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
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More thoughts on winning the war culturally.
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/syrian-refugees-and-good-strategy
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More thoughts on winning the war culturally.
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/syrian-refugees-and-good-strategy
1. Bring in masses of unvettable islamic savages.
2. ???
3. PROFIT!
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http://dailysignal.com/2015/12/03/5-ways-paul-ryan-wants-republicans-to-do-more-than-oppose-obama/?utm_source=heritagefoundation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=morningbell&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRovuqzNZKXonjHpfsX87%2B8sW6eygYkz2EFye%2BLIHETpodcMTcFqNLDYDBceEJhqyQJxPr3NLtQN191pRhLiDA%3D%3D
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http://dailysignal.com/2015/12/03/5-ways-paul-ryan-wants-republicans-to-do-more-than-oppose-obama/?utm_source=heritagefoundation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=morningbell&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRovuqzNZKXonjHpfsX87%2B8sW6eygYkz2EFye%2BLIHETpodcMTcFqNLDYDBceEJhqyQJxPr3NLtQN191pRhLiDA%3D%3D
What a breath of fresh air! I was getting sick of hearing conservatives like Mark Levin trash Ryan before he starts work. This is exactly what the Speaker of the House should be doing.
These issues merge with the Presidential race. I would like to see the leading Republican candidates come together on things like a tax plan, an immigration plan, Republican replacement for Obamacare, and ISIS strategy rather than fight each other. Most of it has to go through the House and Senate anyway, so who better to start forging the consensus than the sitting Speaker. We also need to nationalize the Senate races. It will take a positive agenda to have a chance to defeat the electoral alternative of divided government - that will repeal, reform and delete nothing.
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Good morning Doug,
"I was getting sick of hearing conservatives like Mark Levin trash this Ryan before he starts work."
Yes Mark does trash the Republicans. He is too tough on Ryan. But I agree with him on Boehner and McConnell that they are too weak.
But, I give a lot of credit to Mark. Without him and other outspoken conservative holding the Rhinos feet to the fire we would wind up with the likes of Jeb Bush who IMHO is NOT who we need and would not stand up to the left. We need warriors. But just opposing Obama is by itself wrongheaded. We do need visionaries and leaders who can contrast themselves with a future vs the endless anti American barrage of the left.
Ryan I recall did reach out to Mark after he came out with his book and Mark rather did blow him off. I don't know the details but I thought he was a bit rude to Ryan when he could have done more to merge their minds and in a more constructive way hash out the differences.
I agree with you about Trump. I like his standing up to the PC crowd but I worry greatly about his personal attacks as well as any commitment to conservatism which I doubt is real.
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ccp, I like Mark Levin too. A little less so when he spends all his time eating our own. The far right of our party (that includes me) does not have even a majority of Republicans in the House. Criticize leadership when they are weak, fine, but rip them to scorched earth is counterproductive. I was going to write to him, point out that he is harder on Rubio than he is on the Ayatollah. Very Obama-like thinking, but even Obama doesn't do that to his own party. Michelle Malkin too. Great, great commentator, but then just goes off on Rubio like he is ISIS. Like I argue to PP, Rubio may not be your first choice, but he isn't your enemy. Ann Coulter too. Brilliant when she is on your side and ruthless when she isn't. Was in love with Romney and now Trump, candidates who are overall more moderate than the ones she hates. Her two point are electability and unwillingness to bend at all on immigration. Choose one.
Trump is going to win a two-way general election without half the Republican party? I don't think so. Make a point but be careful where you throw flames, unless you really do believe that life ends and nothing matters if your own guy, with a 44% ceiling, doesn't win.
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By Phil Gramm And
Michael Solon
Dec. 20, 2015 4:06 p.m. ET
163 COMMENTS
President Obama seems to aspire to join Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan as one of the three most transformative presidents of the past hundred years, and by all outward signs he has achieved that goal. But while Roosevelt and Reagan sold their programs to the American people and enacted them with bipartisan support, Mr. Obama jammed his partisan agenda down the public’s throat. The Obama legacy is built on executive orders, regulations and agency actions that can be overturned using the same authority Mr. Obama employed to put them in place.
An array of President Obama’s policies—changing immigration law, blocking the Keystone XL pipeline, the Iranian nuclear agreement and the normalization of relations with Cuba, among others—were implemented exclusively through executive action. Because any president is free “to revoke, modify or supersede his own orders or those issued by a predecessor,” as the Congressional Research Service puts it, a Republican president could overturn every Obama executive action the moment after taking the oath of office.
At the beginning of the inaugural address, the new president could sign an executive order rescinding all of Mr. Obama’s executive orders deemed harmful to economic growth or constitutionally suspect. The new president could then establish a blue-ribbon commission to review all other Obama executive orders. Any order not reissued or amended in 60 days could be automatically rescinded.
Then there’s the trove of regulations used largely to push through policies that could have never passed Congress. For example, when President Obama in 2010 couldn’t ram through his climate-change legislation in a Democratic Senate, he used decades-old regulatory authority to inflict the green agenda on power plants and the auto industry.
This is far from the only example: Labor Department rules on fiduciary standards; the National Labor Relations Board’s ruling that franchisees are joint employers; the Environmental Protection Agency’s power grab over water ways; the Federal Communications Commission’s attempt to regulate the Internet as a 1930s telephone monopoly. All are illustrations of how President Obama has used rule-making not to carry out congressional intent but to circumvent it.
If the new president proves as committed to overturning these regulations as Mr. Obama was to implementing them, these rules could be amended or overturned. And because Senate Democrats “nuked” the right of the minority to filibuster administration nominees, the new president’s appointees could not be blocked by Democrats if Republicans retain control of the Senate.
To accelerate this process, the new president should name cabinet and agency appointees before the 115th Congress begins. He could declare an economic emergency and ask the agencies to initiate the rule-making process promptly. On the first day in the Oval Office the president could order federal agencies to halt consideration of all pending regulations—precisely as President Obama did.
Even when the Obama transformation is rooted in law, by demanding legislation that even the most liberal Congress in 75 years could not vote for in detail, he was forced to avoid program details, granting vast power to agencies to determine actual policy during implementation. Dodd-Frank granted extraordinary powers to financial regulators by leaving objectives vaguely defined: What the Volcker rule on bank trading means, what constitutes an acceptable “living will” for a financial institution, how international regulatory decisions work within U.S. law, and much more. If the new president nominated able, committed cabinet and agency leaders, many of Dodd-Frank’s worst provisions could be revised or reversed without legislative action.
As Congress debates repealing Dodd-Frank, the new president’s appointees could ensure that no financial institution is too big to fail, that Federal Reserve bureaucrats are removed from corporate boardrooms and that penalties for misconduct fall on individual offenders, not on innocent pensioners and other stockholders. The new president’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director will have the unilateral power to overturn each and every barrier erected against mortgage, auto and personal lending.
The Affordable Care Act also grants substantial flexibility in its implementation, a feature Mr. Obama has repeatedly exploited. The new president could suspend penalties for individuals and employers, enforce income-verification requirements, ease the premium shock on young enrollees by adjusting the community rating system, allow different pricing structures inside the exchanges and alter provider compensation. These actions could begin dismantling the most pernicious parts of ObamaCare and prevent its roots from deepening as Congress debates its repeal and replacement.
By relentlessly pursuing an agenda that was outside the political mainstream, Mr. Obama became the most polarizing president of the past century. Had he compromised with his own party and a handful of Republicans, much of his vision might have been firmly cemented into law on a bipartisan basis. But by doing it his way, Mr. Obama built an imposing sand castle that is now imperiled by the changing tides of voter sentiment. All the American electorate must do now is choose a president totally committed to overturning the Obama program—and Obama’s sand castle will be washed away.
Mr. Gramm, a former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Solon was budget adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and is currently a partner of U.S. Policy Metrics.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uE-tqe0xsQ
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From another thread:
American Creed= Free minds, free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of contract, right of self-defense (hence guns and knives, etc) property rights, privacy, all connected with responsibility for the consequences of one's action. All this from our Creator, not the State nor majority vote.
Simple and brilliant. Not too many writers since the Founders ever stop and express this so clearly.
I would like to share this with my daughter pondering how to approach the issues as she comes out of a confusion called college. Share this with Bigdog too. He runs into a few young people. And Conrad.
Someone please tell the Syrian refugees and the people crossing our border, America isn't just a place on the map, it is a creed we share.
Creed = a set of beliefs that guide one's actions.
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I am honored you think it worthy of sharing with your daughter. Please feel free.
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I just emailed the Conservative review to inquire if they have a scorecard for governors like they do for senators and congressmen.
It is a good resource for those who want to get an objective measure of the conservativeness, if you will, of our elected officials.
Amazingly there are a few Republicans who are less conservative then many Democrats. Even a few who score lower than even Pelosi or Reid!
I wonder about this Niki Halley SC governor. She sounds like a rhino to me. I don't trust her.
ESPECIALLY when even Democrats are lauding her speech. That is a huge red flag to me!
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In the tumultuous political times we are currently witnessing heading into this election year, it seems appropriate to be reminded why conservatism is the only chance America has to return to some semblance of normalcy after eight years of progressive politics. Enter the Republican senator from Nebraska, Ben Sasse, who was recently asked by NBC's Chuck Todd to define conservatism. Sasse was more than happy -- giddy really -- to be asked such a question and delivered a most eloquent answer:
America is the most exceptional nation in the history of the world because the U.S. Constitution is the best political document that's ever been written. Because it says something different than almost any people and any government has believed in human history.
Most governments in the past said, "Might makes right and the king has all the power and the people are dependent subjects." And the American founders said, "No! God gives us rights by nature and government is just our shared project to secure those rights."
Government is not the author or source of our rights and you don't make America great again by giving more power to one guy in Washington, D.C. You make America great again by recovering a constitutional republic where Washington is populated by people who are servant-leaders, who want to return power to the people and to the communities. Because what's great in America is the Rotary Club, it's small businesses, it's churches, it's schools, it's fire departments, and it's little leagues across this country. What makes America great is not some guy in Washington who says, "If I had more power, I could fix it all unilaterally." That's not the American tradition
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"For years, conservatives have told themselves the pretty bedtime story that they represent a silent majority in America — that most Americans want smaller government, individual rights and personal responsibility. We've suggested that if only we nominated precisely the right guy who says the right words — some illegally grown Ronald Reagan clone, perhaps — we'd win. Donald Trump's impending nomination puts all of that to bed. ... In order to rebuild, conservatives must recognize that they think individually; leftists think institutionally. While the left took over the universities — now bastions of pantywaist fascism hell-bent on destroying free speech — the right slept. While the left took over the public education system wholesale, the right fled to private schools and homeschooling. While the left utilized popular culture as a weapon, conservatives supposedly withdrew and turned off their televisions. Withdrawal, it turns out, wasn't the best option. Fighting back on all fronts is. Republicans need to worry less about the next election and significantly more about building a movement of informed Americans who actually understand American values. That movement must start with outreach to parents, and it must extend to the takeover of local institutions or defunding of government institutions outright. The left has bred a generation of Americans who do not recognize the American ideals of the Founding Fathers. Pretending otherwise means flailing uselessly as demagogues like Trump become faux-conservative standard-bearers." - Ben Shapiro
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This article and others like show that the the establishment RIGHT is FINALLY getting it. It took Trump. It took Brexit. I don't know how many believe in these concepts or agree with them (this is still a threat to many of them) but at least many if not all of them are FINALLY GETTING IT:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437142/brexit-vote-racism-xenophobia-were-not-cause
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VDH in his usual eloquent detail shows how he "gets it" . So now I would like him to advise us on what to do about it. Especially when we are up against the strategies of the left. Buy votes, corruption, propaganda, and racial , gender and ethnic tactics .
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437454/american-elite-and-american-people
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Is this our time to think like we are on Dunkirk?
What is very interesting he doesn't mention Trump once. He obviously has no confidence in Trump.
He also assumes that if we retreat and try to regroup that things will get worse and we can simply blame it on Dems and then come back driving the enemy back across the battle field to victory. This is a huge assumption. A huge gamble with EVERYTHING on the line. All or nothing if you ask me.
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/07/listen-conservative-conscience-ep42
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I took my dogs for a walk yesterday and was thinking about the analogy of Dunkirk when I remembered how lucky the British and the world was. All Hitler had to do to completely capture the British army (and some French ) was to send in his armored divisions. His not doing so was one of his biggest blunders. I don't recall why he didn't. I think it was he was being too cautious but he sent the tanks in the entire British army would have been captured and Britain lost.
Do using this analogy does anyone really think the Democrats would not send in the tanks if Hillary won? The SCOTUS would be probably 6 to 3 liberals for possibly decades.
No I cannot come to the conclusion we should hope Trump loses so the Republicans can "regroup" and plan "Normandy". Time is not on our side.
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Laura Ingraham states the theme should be
"Do we trust ourselves or the 'elites'?" If we can shift the mentality away from race, gender, sexual preference, and free this and that at least for the "independents" then we have a chance IMHO:
http://www.lifezette.com/polizette/independence-new-capitalism/
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I am glad to see this on Conservative Review today. I agree with the opinion. Interesting he compares Trump to both Samson and John Brown :lol:
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/07/why-i-hope-donald-trump-wins
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We have tried to define the American Creed from our point of view and chart a course for getting back on that track. Crafty wrote:
American Creed= Free minds, free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of contract, right of self-defense (hence guns and knives, etc) property rights, privacy, all connected with responsibility for the consequences of one's action. All this from our Creator, not the State nor majority vote.
Sometimes I lament this would be a lot easier if the left was right. Maybe we don't need individual rights, would be better off ruled by a faraway leftist world government. Wouldn't it be great if lifting up the incomes and lives of all low wage earners was as simple as passing minimum wage law to any number mandated. Wouldn't it be great if we could have left Saddam Hussein in power pursuing nuclear weapons, supporting terrorism and nothing bad would have come out of that. Or we could leave Iraq without a status of forces agreement and nothing bad would happen. Wouldn't it be great if we could just let Russia be the 'world's policeman' in the Middle East, it will come out fine and the US didn't have to do all the heavy lifting. Let China benevolently dominate the South China Sea. Wouldn't it be great if we could endlessly tax the rich and they would ignore the disincentives and keep earning, producing, investing and growing jobs and the economy, and if all of our basics like healthcare for everyone could be free to us, paid for by someone we don't even know or not even paid for at all...
Maybe a way of backing into a 'way forward' strategy is to ask the important questions backwards. What are all the falsehoods we would have to believe true for the left to have the best path forward and our vision wrong?
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I'm feeling a bit uneasy with "responsibility for the consequences for one's action" because of potential for it being misapplied to progressive purpose.
Therefore I now change it to:
"American Creed= Free minds, free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of contract, right of self-defense (hence guns and knives, etc) property rights, privacy, all connected with responsibility for the disrespect for the rights of others. . All this from our Creator, not the State nor majority vote."
"Maybe a way of backing into a 'way forward' strategy is to ask the important questions backwards. What are all the falsehoods we would have to believe true for the left to have the best path forward and our vision wrong?"
A bit leery of this; is there a risk of this putting the attention on them instead of us?
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“the CDC has determined that conservatism can’t be spread by casual contact.”
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How about a proposal :
we rename the party the *Freedom for All Party*.
Most people don't get the concept of "Republican" .
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http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=8504
The Low-Trust State
Posted on September 7, 2016
Social trust is one of those things that we know is important to economic growth, sound government and social stability. When the people of a society generally trust one another and wish to be trusted by others, their society prospers. The question that always arises is over causality. Some would argue that altruism is a biological trait that scales up to social trust. Others would argue that good government and the rule of law encourages positive economic growth, which in turn increases social trust. It is one of those topics that keeps academics busy.
The distinguishing characteristic of low-trust societies is a near total lack of trust in the state by the people. Russians, during the old Soviet Union, understood that everything that was said by the state was a lie of some sort. In fact, the only thing they could trust from the Bolsheviks was that whatever they said was untrue. This amplified the natural distrust of Russians as they did not have an authority to which they could appeal in order to arbitrate disputes. Contracts have to be enforceable before anyone will enter into them.
The point here is that you can debate the causality of social trust, but a society with a corrupt and untrustworthy state is going to be a low-trust society. Alternatively, to use the language of the pseudo-sciences, social trust correlates with public corruption. The causal arrows may point one way or both ways, but public corruption is a good proxy for social trust. There are measures of public corruption and the most popular is from these guys, who publish downloadable statistics every year for the pseudo-sciences.
Trust in the state is always going to drift over time, but you can spot some trends. Just take a look at the US over the last few decades. In the 1980’s, the savings and loan crisis put a lot of people in prison. Even some politicians got dinged for getting too cozy with the crooked bankers. A decade later we had the dot-com bubble and the accounting scandals, but no one went to jail. They just lost money. Less than a decade later we had the mortgage crisis and the crooks got bailed out by the government with taxpayer funds. This is a trend worth noticing.
Now, look around at what we are seeing today. The Clinton e-mail scandal is so outlandish, it is now threatening the rule of law. In the 70’s, Nixon was run from office from 18 missing minutes of tape. Clinton erased 17,000 emails, some may have been under subpoena. It is blazingly obvious that she and her cronies violated Federal law by mishandling classified information. The most logical explanation for all of this is they were selling it for cash through that ridiculous charity they run. A charity that has systematically violated the law with regards to accounting for donations.
How is it possible that this woman and her flunkies are not in jumpsuits waddling around Danbury FCI?
The first problem is the head of state appears to be a pathological liar. This Iran story is the sort of thing that used to bring down governments. It was certainly the sort of thing that should have administration officials hiring lawyers in preparation for the FBI visit. That would require an FBI that is not equally corrupt. Of course, the FBI is a product of the political class and ours is proving to be astonishingly corrupt. Today we learn that the politicians are conspiring to rig public hearings, which are the bedrock of popular government.
A certain amount of public corruption is to be expected. Politics will always attract shady characters, but it should also attract honest characters too. These are the folks that enjoy the boring work of good government. They police the system, enforce the rules and make public appeals for cleaning up the problems. Today, those people either do not exist or they have become too afraid to speak up. The American political class looks a lot like a corrupt police precinct. The crooks are in charge and they have inverted morality so that the honest fear detection by the corrupt.
It is not unreasonable to think that we may have passed the point where the political class can be expected to reform itself. Their unwillingness to even try to thwart the rise of these vulgar grifters from the Ozarks suggests the the political elite has lost the capacity to feel shame. Anyone willing to defend Hillary Clinton to the public is someone, who will lie about anything, violate any law, violate any taboo. That is a person lacking in anything resembling a soul. A political class populated with such people is a ruling class at war with itself, the very definition of a low trust state.
The truly frightening thing is that the only institution the public trusts is the military. Take a look at what is happening with the sports ball players protesting during the national anthem. This coming Sunday is 9/11 and even the most reptilian of Progressives are saying such a protest on that day would be a slap in the face to the men and women who serve the country. When no one trusts the ruling class, and the military is the only institution in which the public has faith, there is always one result. It does not have to be that way, but that’s the way it has always been.
At some level, some portion of the public understands this. The Trump phenomenon is not about Trump in the conventional sense. There’s a lot not to like about the man, but he is honest, he loves his countrymen and he is not doing this for the money. Whether or not he understands his role and the movement he is leading is unknown. Maybe his election will just be a false dawn and what follows is what always follows the onset of a low-trust state. If things are going to turn out different for us, Trump will win and usher in an era of reform.
Otherwise, what comes next will be much worse.
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http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/restatement-on-flight-93/
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http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/after-the-republic/
After the Republic
By: Angelo M. Codevilla
September 27, 2016
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Don't agree with the articulation here 100%, but overall the analysis is worth considering:
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/restoring-americas-economic-mobility/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid&utm_content=101316c&utm_campaign=restoring-americas-economic-mobility
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with a party that extorts money from some to give benefits to others?
ttp://www.nationalreview.com/article/441595/voter-demographics-diversifying-republicans-falling-behind
Without simply trying to pander even more?
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Outstanding question.
Reagan-Kemp answer: Growth, Opportunity, win-win.
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For all our foresight about the Clintons, and our anger at her supporters and the pravdas who deceive them, we must also remember too what a profoundly flawed messenger Trump has been for the American Creed.
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For all our foresight about the Clintons, and our anger at her supporters and the pravdas who deceive them, we must also remember too what a profoundly flawed messenger Trump has been for the American Creed.
Watching Hillary and Dem closing commercials, Trump is quite the flawed messenger based on these clips of un-Presidential utterances. We warned Pat and others about that. Commercials show children watching a TV with Trump saying nasty, bleeped things. Clinton is worse but not on the surface level.
On policy, he is partly right and partly wrong. A muddled message for me but he is connecting with other people on other levels, anger about globalization etc.
We still don't have a candidate who can explain why capitalism is better than socialism and freedom better than tyranny.
Wrong direction polls 2:1 over right course and we have a toss up election running against more of the same - at best.
It's an easy call for me to vote for him versus a crook who has her policies all wrong. But it's a hard time to our use influence with others, moderate and liberal, to persuade them this is the time to jump to our side.
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https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/11/opportunity-ahead-a-conservative-mandate-if-we-can-keep-it
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President George W Bush made this statement in his first press conference after the 2004 election that was perhaps the start of his rather sudden fall:
"The people made it clear what they wanted, I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/04/uselections2004.usa20
This week conservatives and Republicans won the Presidency, Senate, House, 32 Governorships and close to 70% of the state legislative chambers across the fruited plain. Someone wiser than George W Bush used to say something about the excessive end zone dance celebrations we often see, "act like you've been there before'. That was former Minnesota Vikings Head Coach Bud Grant. The play was designed to go to the end zone. That's where you expected it to go. You are a professional, paid to do that and you did it. Give the ball to the referee and get back to your team ready to play the rest of the game.
If Republicans or Trumpists think they already won it all, achieved it all, have political capital and are going to stick it to the other side just because of the outcome of the close vote count on Tuesday night, they might soon learn otherwise. There is work to do.
21 million people will lose health insurance in January if Trump and the Republicans simply cancel Obamacare without having a better plan in place. Whatever the legislation is, it needs to go through a 51-49 Senate where rules require 60 votes - depending on what the meaning of rules is. There will be a fight.
Tax reform has been talked about since the Harding administration. Yes it can be done. No it won't be easy.
The Penny Plan to cut spending is simple. Telling Sean Hannity you support it was easy. But no one has ever done it.
The first Supreme Court nomination is all but ready, coming from a list made and released. Getting and winning a vote on the nominee is another matter. A couple of Democrats on the committee (and all their activists) might still be pissed off.
20 or so candidates opined on how they would defeat ISIS. Trump was the least specific about it. Yet ISIS controls a good part of the Middle East and has attacks already planned all over the west. This isn't a debate question anymore. The plan you're not going to telegraph to the enemy needs to be in place, like now. Good morning Mr. President, here is your briefing. Guess what? The real attack on the homeland isn't in the briefing. Have a nice day.
Building the wall isn't an artist's rendition anymore. Deciding who to deport and how isn't a political hypothetical anymore.
And for the Republicans in Congress, writing or repealing real legislation isn't as simple as opposing a President from the other party. Real laws have real consequences, unintended ones too.
Britain, Canada and Mexico have all signaled willingness to re-open trade deals. There is a hint of an opening with China too. That doesn't mean these countries will accept our terms. Simpler and better trade deals is a great idea. The threat of a 40% tariff on consumers, a trade war or a new depression is not.
How about the federal dilemma of addressing the legalization of marijuana happening in many of the states, still against federal law. Is there going to be a civil war against Colorado, Washington, California, Oregon and Massachusetts over pot laws or is the federal government going to make accommodation for what is now a reality in the states? Even if legalization was a bad idea...
Nice election. Everybody deserves a little credit. We defeated an incompetent, inexperienced candidate under federal investigation with no charisma by -300,000 votes.
Now there is work to do.
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”Nice election. Everybody deserves a little credit. We defeated an incompetent, inexperienced candidate under federal investigation with no charisma by -300,000 votes. “
Doug wins best line of the week! :-D
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A lot of wisdom in that!!!
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Wow..... put that way, just wow.
Edit: I'll add Doug, that not only do I agree with GC and GM, but that it is nice to have someone a little more to the Left around. You point out things that hadn't occurred to me, the leftist politicians being angry for instance. Senate 60 vote rule.
I have often wondered, just exactly what it was, Obama told every Republican in all of those last minute, phone calls and private meetings, in order to get them to flip their vote for Obamacare. Did he threaten them with death? Who knows... but they certainly flipped.
It will be interesting to see Trump's strategy. Similar to what you have stated... this isn't a game show anymore. "You're fired," isn't going to cut it.
It is curious what Obama said to them though, in order to get that to pass. Hell, they hadn't even read it. I read it and it took me a week. What did he tell them?
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Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442376/american-political-polarization-federalism-cure?utm_source=nr&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=unity-federalism&utm_content=roy
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This piece is addresses themes we have explored here previously and IMHO is worthy of serious contemplation.
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A Trump-Ryan Constitutional Revival
Wariness of Trump might inspire Republicans in Congress to give up lazy delegation and relearn the art of legislating.
By Christopher DeMuth
Nov. 25, 2016 5:11 p.m. ET
A central purpose of the American scheme of checks and balances is to draw out the distinctive strengths of the two political branches, executive and the legislature, while containing their distinctive weaknesses.
The scheme has not been working well of late. The consequences are unbridled executive growth into every cranny of commerce and society, and a bystander Congress. We have lapsed into autopilot government, rife with corruption and seemingly immune to incremental electoral correction.
These pathologies were a significant cause of the Trumpian political earthquake. And one of the many astonishing results of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Republican sweep on Election Day is that they have set the stage for a constitutional revival.
No, not by President Trump’s nominating and the Senate’s confirming Scalia-worthy constitutionalists to the Supreme Court and lower federal courts. That prospect was widely understood and apparently on the minds of many voters. Rather, the new president and Congress are poised to revive constitutional practices in their own branches.
One of these practices is results-oriented policy making—so-called transactional politics—an approximation of what the Founders meant by “deliberation.” Another, “checks and balances,” is vigorous policy competition between the executive branch and Congress. Both practices have fallen into disuse in what had seemed, until now, to be a continuing downward spiral of dysfunctional government.
A standard complaint about Washington politics is that it has become hyperpartisan and gridlocked. The complaint is lodged by Democrats and Republicans when they are not getting their way, and they are right. The federal government is frequently hostage to ideological posturing in both parties and pre-emptive rejection of compromise with the evildoers in the other party. Recent examples include ObamaCare—a huge (in the pre-Trump sense of the term) expansion of the welfare state enacted on strictly partisan lines; the collapse of the 2011 Obama-Boehner debt-reduction deal following a White House stab at new tax increases; the Ted Cruz-inspired 2013 government shutdown; and the constant Tea Party sabotaging of the Republican leadership at the least hint of legislative compromise.
Spectacles such as these have given rise to a new school of political realism, led by Jonathan Rauch,Richard H. Pildes,Frances E. Lee and other scholars. Their essential argument, in Mr. Rauch’s words, is “that transactional politics—the everyday give-and-take of dickering and compromise—is the essential work of governing and that government, and thus democracy, won’t work if leaders can’t make deals and make them stick.”
The realists vary in their personal politics. They are united in understanding that, in a nation of diverse and conflicting views, civil peace and productive government require more than trumpeting one’s own positions and seeking to defeat one’s opponents at the ballot box. They also require accommodation through dialogue, negotiation and practical compromise.
The Trump insurgency was long on trumpeting. The president-elect fought his way to victory with unorthodox, fiercely controversial policy positions, insulting criticism of his opponents and the Washington establishment, brazen defiance of every canon of political correctness and a taste for overstatement and talent for entertainment.
All of this was, however, accompanied by a strong basso continuo: the candidate’s business experience, financial independence, and fabled prowess at negotiation and “the art of the deal.” Office seekers always say that their particular experience is what the times require, but Mr. Trump was doing more. When reporters complained that his brief, broadly worded tax-reform proposal lacked specifics, he replied dismissively that detailed campaign position papers are media fodder of little interest to voters. If he were elected, the specifics would depend on negotiations among “me and lots of congressmen and lots of senators.”
In combination, candidate Trump’s audacious policy positions, belligerent rhetoric and zest for deal making seem designed to establish his bona fides as the people’s own Washington wheeler-dealer. The postelection reports on his “backing off” or “reneging” on some of his campaign commitments miss the larger dynamic. The Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito reports that many Trump voters are also thorough political realists who trust their man. The president-elect, in his election night remarks, insisted that his victory would be as “historic” as everyone was proclaiming only if he did a “great job” parlaying it into practical results.
In attempting to make great on his electoral triumph, President Trump will not have the reflexive support of party stalwarts on Capitol Hill that his recent predecessors have enjoyed. His triumph in the Republican primaries was a hostile takeover. He treated congressional Republicans and their leaders with contempt throughout the campaign. Many of them made clear the feeling was mutual, and some refused to support him.
The bruises will heal to some extent—and practicing politicians have to be impressed at how the outsider’s bold proposals and roughhouse style attracted millions of new voters. Yet sharp differences will remain. While some of the president-elect’s positions are solidly Republican (ObamaCare replacement, tax reduction, deregulation), others are nervous-making departures (immigration) and some are outright heresies (trade protectionism, antitrust activism, public-works projects). And Mr. Trump’s aversion to entitlements reform has undercut House Speaker Paul Ryan’s long and careful preparations for finally facing up to the problem.
Under the circumstances, Congress is bound to recover and assert many of its long-neglected legislative prerogatives. In recent decades, our scheme of separated powers has been supplanted by party solidarity between presidents and their congressional co-partisans. (“Separation of Parties, Not Powers” is the title of an influential 2006 study of this development by Daryl J. Levinson and Richard H. Pildes.)
Members of Congress have increasingly acted out of loyalty to party rather than to Congress as an independent constitutional branch. They support or obstruct administration initiatives along partisan lines, and when in support they receive fundraising and bureaucratic favors from the president in return. During periods of party-unified government, congressional majorities delegate broad lawmaking powers to the executive, as in the Affordable Care and Dodd-Frank acts, that are almost impossible to recover when divided government returns. Congressional minorities allied with the president, employing the Senate filibuster and other supermajority rules, ensure that Congress turns a blind eye to executive abuses, as in the recent IRS and Veterans hospital scandals.
Party partisanship is one (not the only) cause of the emergence of unilateral executive government. That’s where the president and the hundreds of agencies reporting to him exercise legislative powers that previously required congressional action. But our new president is more populist than partisan, and the Republican Party has suddenly become, thanks to him, a true big-tent party, as heterogeneous and raucous as the Democratic Party of the mid-20th century.
If the congressional Republicans want to be full players in this new dispensation, they are going to have to reinstitute annual budgeting and appropriations for executive-branch agencies. This is essential for calibrating how the funds are spent, and also for using “budget reconciliation” to begin reforming the Senate’s incapacitating supermajority rules.
If they want to participate in charting new courses for health-care, tax and immigration policy and financial regulation, they are going to have to give up lazy policy delegation to the executive and relearn the arts of legislating and collective choice. And if President Trump should try to settle these and similarly momentous matters through Obama-style executive decrees, they are going to have to cry foul and make it stick.
The hard intraparty contention of the 2016 campaign has prepared the congressional Republicans for this. President-elect Trump’s obvious relish for transactional politics, and the largeness of his ambitions, suggests that he is prepared as well. The likely evanescence of Barack Obama’s Congress-free domestic and foreign initiatives—the already voided immigration policies, the Clean Power Plan, the Iran deal, national rules for bathroom etiquette—should inspire everyone to stay at the table. It is true that candidate Trump expressed admiration for President Obama’s executive unilateralism. But it is also true that Congress often resorts to equally dubious micromanagement of executive-branch operations. Herein are the makings for a mutually productive entente.
These would be healthy developments for our constitutional order. Presidents have the strengths of action, decisiveness, high aspiration and a national political mandate—along with the weaknesses of overreaching, insularity and concentration of power. They oversee a bureaucratic empire too vast for any one man to keep track of, and so powerful that abuse and corruption are commonplace.
Congresses have the strengths of full-spectrum political representation, 535 state and local mandates, and responsiveness to shifting popular concerns and a soft spot for human-rights minorities at home and abroad—along with the weaknesses of parochialism, irresolution, decision-by-committee and herd mentality.
We need more of the strengths and less of the weaknesses. But transactional politics and interbranch rivalry are no guarantee of happy outcomes, which depend ultimately on the constitution of the participants. The record of tough-guy political outsiders is less than great. Businessman Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, and muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, came to office promising to upend the status quo. But when they discovered how entrenched and hard-bitten the status quo really was, they promptly folded, contented themselves with mere celebrity, and accomplished nothing.
A separate risk is from the bipartisan innovation, going back to the 1970s, of continuous borrowing and increasing debt to sustain popular entitlement spending for the time being. Relaxing the fiscal constraint—the need to match spending on current consumption with current tax revenues—can make results-oriented political bargaining all too easy. With these and other temptations abundant in modern politics, we may say that constitutional government is a necessary but not sufficient condition of democratic recovery.
Mr. DeMuth is a distinguished fellow at Hudson Institute. He was formerly president of the American Enterprise Institute and worked at the White House and Office of Management and Budget in the Nixon and Reagan administrations.
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As always the LEFt has to turn everything into a race issue. It is not about race. It is about our country. It is about globalism vs nationalism. It is not because Brock is Black or the witch had female genitalia. The Right has to shift the phony arguments . They have not done a good enough job.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/poll-racial-vulnerability-linked-youth-vote-choice-080820556--politics.html
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http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/12/16/newt-gingrich-incredible-reason-why-trump-could-succeed-in-turning-washington-upside-down.html
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One has to wonder if tax breaks and deregulation get enacted will we all do better or will the wealthiest imply control 99.99 % of everything vs the 99 % now?
I am thinking the former but if we are astounded by the masses of wealth into the hands of just a few now wait for 4 to 8 yrs of this. I don't begrudge others for getting rich if done honestly and by the same the rules the rest of us have to follow. And if everyone else who contribute benefits.
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to political causes with conservative principals:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/koch-political-network-spend-300m-400m-over-2-001528120--election.html
I strongly recommend they donate to this website and its' staff of writers who have been dedicated to debating political issues with a view from the Right.
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To inquire about how to make donations email me at crafty@dogbrothers.com :-D
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So much win.....
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/01/23/white-house-website-takes-down-all-spanish-language-content.html
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Newt wrote above regarding the transition: "If Trumpism succeeds in replacing the 80-year-old bureaucratic model of government...[he will get credit]" Big deal. If Trumpism succeeds, this nation will survive and prosper.
Trump has made many significant moves, but seems to be stuck on the largest ones. One reason we can't move on the big items is that there doesn't seem to be an overriding theme.
He scaled back the scope of the EPA and things like that. Nothing in the bureaucracy was lost that won't return if the other sides just takes charge again. He got what seems to be a good Justice into the seat that was Scalia's. A similar victory for a Breyer or Ginsburg seat would be real change, but the conservative justices are aging at the same rate. Believers in the American Creed won't hold the Court without holding the Presidency and the Senate too, and no side will hold all the seats of power for an extended period without giving the people a reason. Meanwhile no lower court appointments or confirmations are happening.
The only things we have going for us is the proof of the failure of leftist overreach and current Democrat disarray. Republicans have been quietly winning massive electoral gains and yet haven't succeeded in changing the thinking much across the country. The Republican party seems hopelessly divided, the freedom seekers are in the minority, and the President is still chasing shiny objects.
We haven't moved much past the pinnacle of failure symbolized by the Republican Presidential debates with 17 candidates all attacking each other instead of painting a vision. Rand Paul doesn't know he lost, nor does Lindsay Graham and others. John Kasich is still running for President, planning to challenge Trump in 2020 no matter how the Presidency goes. Same with almost all of the others. Rubio has been choosing his battles carefully, mostly in line with the President, Cruz too, but neither conceding who will represent which faction in the next go round much less uniting on a single vision.
Molly Ball, leftist at The Atlantic made a good point to Hugh Hewitt. If Trump flipflops from wrong to right in the eyes of much of the conservative movement, it is still a flip flop. Enforcing a redline in Syria, backing off of a currency fight with China, staying in NATO, NAFTA, no new tariffs etc. Great, but at some point he loses his base without gaining anyone else.
Who else leads our movement if not Trump? If Trump fails, the next President isn't going to be Republican, nor is the future Senate and House.
The only answer I can think of is to go Reaganesque, which means Simplify.
1. Peace through strength, as he seems to be doing, but articulate it, everyday. Defense budgets can't have waste and they can't go up and down. Defense needs funding and purpose, which is to build enough to deter war and loss of life.
2. Grow the economy. Like it says on the hard to find, not ready for prime time, tax proposal. It needs to be spoken, shouted, explained repeated, argued and won. Why do economies grow? HOW do they grow? Why do they stagnate? How did our existing policies lead to this stagnation? Where will it lead if we do nothing? How do these pro-growth proposals Make America Great Again? Win the argument and then do it.
3. We saw a spending plan with cuts. Then nothing. EXPLAIN why we need to shrink the size and role of government and then do it. Not pretend cuts, negotiating cuts, but structural cuts.
4. In true Trump form, fight the media head on, starting with the static scoring of his health and tax plans is ANTI-SCIENCE. Explain why the status quo is wrong, isn't working and has to be changed.Take them on and win. Don't go on a listening tour of a divided country in disarray where the loudest voices are the worst ones. Give us the right answer and LEAD! Pass the best set of policies that can be passed and do it now.
Or live under leftists for the rest of our lives and our children's and grandchildren's lives because that is where we are heading if we fail to figure this out and do something about it RIGHT NOW. [my humble opinion]
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It has been 100 days. He has never held elected office. For all his fukups, I'd say a pretty good case can be made that he is a very quick study.
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https://www.conservativereview.com/articles/mark-levins-advice-to-sean-hannity-fight-back-and-sue
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The U.S. Needs New Theories for National Security Success
Every major American national security victory began with a theory for success. Those theories were used to build strategies, which were then executed through operations and tactics. Success always begins with a theory, and you cannot achieve success in national security without first starting with a theory.
For example, President Lincoln developed a theory for defeating the Confederacy in the early days of the Civil War based, in part, on General Winfield Scott’s plan to blockade the South by controlling the nation’s coasts and waterways. The influence of Scott’s 1861 Anaconda Plan contributed to the North’s overall strategic initiatives throughout the war, which led to the Union’s victory in four years.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and their chiefs of staff constructed a theory for victory in World War II over a three-week period around Christmas of 1941, just weeks after the United States had formally entered the war. The Allies achieved victory in Europe and Japan in the spring and summer of 1945, respectively.
The National Security Council outlined a theory of Soviet containment in a 1950 paper called NSC-68, which President Harry Truman used to initiate a long-term strategy of alliances. Forty-one years later, the Soviet Union collapsed – just as the Security Council’s theory suggested it would.
Now, look at today.
Sixteen years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States is not winning the war on terrorism – or many of the other major national security challenges we face.
Consider:
• Islamic supremacism is more powerful today as a transnational movement than it was on September 11, 2001.
• The Taliban is still in Afghanistan and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan.
• The Iranian dictatorship is steadily growing in power and influence.
• North Korea’s nuclear weapon and missile program is proceeding at an accelerating rate.
• We are unable to respond effectively to Russia’s system of hybrid warfare, which utilizes political pressure, propaganda, and fluctuating violence to achieve warlike outcomes, while avoiding full war.
• Cyber and intellectual property theft by China have been debilitating our nation for at least a decade.
The list goes on and on.
This ineffectiveness in the face of aggression is not due to a lack of resources or willpower. Instead, it is largely because we lack appropriate theories for success for national security. Without the right theories, we cannot develop sustainable and executable strategies that will lead us to victory. While America meanders aimlessly on the world stage, reacting to one crisis after another, our competitors are taking advantage.
The Chinese and Russian regimes work every day to dominate us through economic development, alliance building, technological advancement, and long-term investments that have the potential to strengthen their military capabilities. This is all part of an ongoing competitive engagement that looks nothing like the wars we have fought in the past – but remains no less threatening to our survival.
Further, our theory gap creates more deadly challenges. Since we are failing to keep nuclear weapons away from places such as North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan, we must also develop a doctrine for minimizing American casualties during a potential nuclear war.
So, what can we do?
We must renew the basis of American power. This requires developing a national security theory of succeeding in education and the economy. It also requires assessing the national security implications of public health crises, like the opioid crisis.
A unhealthy, uneducated, and unproductive America will not sustain a global national security system and may not even be able to defend itself.
Specifically, to be successful over the next 20 years, we must develop national security theories for:
1. Shrinking and eventually eliminating Islamic supremacism as an ideology capable of recruiting soldiers willing to engage in terrorism.
2. Creating an American response to the Russian model of hybrid warfare which operates with the same capabilities.
3. Developing systems, strategies, and structures for sustaining continuous competition with China and Russia.
4. Being prepared for constant change across every career, institution, and system brought about by emerging technologies.
5. Constantly communicating with Americans and allies to help people understand that mastering the scale and pace of change will be the key to success.
This is a daunting agenda, but it is historically and realistically the right agenda. Anything less will increase the risk of America’s defeat within the next generation.
Your Friend,
Newt
P.S. This newsletter focused on challenges from abroad, but America faces threats from within as well. The Left is determined to erase our history and undermine the values and principles that have made America prosperous and free.
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Polarization Is an Old American Story
Gordon Wood, the noted historian of early America, says Adams’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans were far more divided than today’s political parties.
By Jason Willick
Feb. 2, 2018 6:22 p.m. ET
WSJ
Providence, R.I.
He’s been called the “dean of 18th-century American historians,” but Gordon Wood’s biggest claim to fame is that Matt Damon once mentioned him in a movie. In a barroom scene from 1997’s “Good Will Hunting,” a haughty Harvard grad student bloviates in a bid to impress two women. Mr. Damon’s character, a working-class prodigy, cuts him down to size: “Next year, you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about, you know, the prerevolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.”
Mr. Wood says a student told him about the mention immediately after the film’s Cambridge, Mass., premiere. But he is fond of pointing out that he isn’t the historian Mr. Damon’s character most admires: “If you want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s ‘People’s History of the United States,’ ” Mr. Damon says in another scene. “That book will really knock you on your ass.”
And the truth is that today the pompous grad student would be likelier to quote Zinn’s progressive indictment of America than Mr. Wood’s work. “I’m considered on the wrong side,” Mr. Wood, energetic and alert at 84, tells me over lunch at the faculty club of Brown University, where he is a professor emeritus. “American history is now a tale of oppression and woe. And if you don’t say that . . .” he trails off.
Mr. Wood graduated from Tufts in 1955, served in the U.S. Air Force in Japan—“I was lucky, I was between two wars”—and enrolled in Harvard’s graduate history program in 1958. He had hoped to study with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. , but the latter was gearing up for the Kennedy presidential campaign. Mr. Wood enrolled in a seminar with Bernard Bailyn, a just-tenured early-American historian, and never looked back.
Over six decades of work on the colonial period, the Revolution and the Founding, Mr. Wood has accumulated virtually every award available to historians—the Bancroft Prize for “The Creation of the American Republic,” a Pulitzer for “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” and the National Humanities Medal, which President Obama presented him in 2010.
But as his star rose, his field suffered an extended decline amid the late-20th-century backlash against “dead white males.” Experts on revolutionary politics retired and weren’t replaced. Social history—“bottom up” accounts of marginalized groups—gained prestige. The New York Times reported in 2016 that in the previous decade universities posted only 15 new tenure-track openings for American political historians of any kind.
“I understand what they’re doing, and it’s important,” Mr. Wood says of the social historians. “We know more about slavery than we ever did.” But he argues the academic literature has grown unbalanced, neglecting crucial questions, including about the political divisions that shaped the early republic. “It’s not that they’re wrong about the killing of the Indians and slavery, but there are other things that happened too, and it’s a question of which ones do you emphasize.”
He describes the attitude of some of these scholars: “I want to show how bad things were so people will wake up and do something about the present.” Many Americans tune out instead. Weary of “one tale of oppression after another,” they turn to popular historians, many of whom have no formal training in history.
Meanwhile, many scholars retreat further into narrow subspecialties and esoteric jargon. These days, he says, professional history is “almost like a science” in that the work is unintelligible to laymen. But whereas “physicists can show us what they’ve done” by engineering real-world applications, historians’ work must stand on its own. They have a responsibility to make it vivid and meaningful for the broader public.
What happens when they abdicate this responsibility? For one thing, a lack of historical perspective can lead to apocalyptic thinking about the present. “History is consoling in that sense,” Mr. Wood says. “It takes you off the roller-coaster of emotions that this is the best of times or the worst of times.”
His latest book, “Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, ” provides an illustration. The antagonism between Adams’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans in the 1790s was far more fundamental, and therefore more threatening, than American partisanship today: “I think we’re going to survive easily,” Mr. Wood says.
By contrast, Adams, Jefferson and their coalitions came close to killing the republic in its cradle. They disagreed on as fundamental a question as whether the new republic should be democratic. Jefferson had a romantic faith in democracy and the wisdom of ordinary people; Adams predicted that “democracy will infallibly destroy all civilization.”
Jefferson’s view was partly self-serving. “The leadership of the Republican Party, which is the popular party, is Southern slaveholders,” Mr. Wood says. “They don’t fear the people,” because the gentry-aristocracy effectively controlled electoral outcomes. Jefferson was akin to today’s “limousine liberal” in that he was insulated from the policies he promoted. (Eventually, his ideas would prove potent in arguing against slavery.) Meanwhile, Adams’s Federalists “are coming from New England, where you have far more egalitarian societies, far more democratic societies,” he says. “But for that very reason, the leaders are more scared of populism, of democracy.”
That may make Adams sound like a member of today’s “establishment.” Yet some of his other ideas would be more amenable to populists like Donald Trump. Adams said to Jefferson, in Mr. Wood’s paraphrase: “You fear the ‘one’ of monarch, I fear the ‘few,’ meaning the aristocrats.” Adams argued that domination by oligarchs was a grave threat to liberty. “It’s his way of justifying the strong executive who will act as a check on the few,” Mr. Wood says. Adams wanted the executive to have some of the powers of the Crown.
That was anathema to Jefferson, whose life mission was “the elimination of monarchy, and all that it implies, which is hereditary rule, hierarchy and corruption.” He saw around him “a world of privilege in which ordinary people are abused. . . . From our point of view, he’s very sympathetic because he’s destroying that world,” Mr. Wood says.
The Federalists feared that Jefferson’s leveling vision would prove destructive to mediating institutions. Mr. Wood cites a recent book by political scientist Patrick Deneen, “Why Liberalism Failed,” which argues that the West’s commitment to individual autonomy—in both markets and culture—has undermined communal connections, leaving people lonely and isolated. That’s what the Federalists feared—“this awful kind of world, where the individual is alone and without any kind of connections with anyone.”
Another Jefferson-Adams disagreement that still resonates is what we now call “American exceptionalism”—the idea that “we’ve transcended the usual definition of a nation, and that we had a special responsibility in the world to promote our way of life.” Jefferson strongly believed it. He thought that “war is caused by monarchs” and “republics are naturally pacific,” so peace would follow if the American model were adopted everywhere. In that sense, he sounded very much like today’s liberal internationalists and neoconservatives. To Adams, meanwhile, America was “just as sinful, just as corrupt as other nations”—a view both Presidents Trump and Obama have sometimes echoed in different ways.
The most poignant comparison, however, is the bitterness of the divide. For much of the 1790s, neither Adams’s Federalists nor Jefferson’s Republicans “accepted the legitimacy of the other,” Mr. Wood says. “And of course, the Federalists never thought that they were a party. They were the government,” and Jefferson’s Republicans a malignant faction trying to take the government down. The Republicans, for their part, “thought that the Federalists were turning us into a monarchy and reversing the American Revolution.”
We hear plenty of similarly apocalyptic rhetoric today, but much of it is cynical and self-consciously exaggerated. What was striking about the 1790s, Mr. Wood emphasizes, is the extent to which each party sincerely believed the other posed an existential threat.
The differences came to a head as Americans split over the French Revolution, which Jefferson saw as vindicating his idea of human liberation and Adams as confirming his fears about how a society might be rent apart. The Federalists alleged Republican collusion with France—and unlike today’s skirmishes over Russian meddling, there was then an acute fear of invasion and mass defection. There was organized violence in Philadelphia, the capital, which to Federalists “seemed to be dominated by all these Frenchmen.” The terrified Federalist Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts to suppress dissent. “We came close to a civil war in 1798,” Wood says. “It didn’t happen, and therefore historians don’t take it seriously.”
Adding to the chaos were Alexander Hamilton’s imperial designs. “Hamilton is full of visions of what he’s going to do with this army,” Mr. Wood says. He’s going to “go into Mexico maybe, and he’s going to ally with some of the leaders in South America” in a grand anti-French alliance. In a swipe at popular history, Mr. Wood says the “Hamilton” musical offers a “distorted” picture of a man who was really an antiliberal “Napoleonic figure”: “Things might have gotten to a point where Hamilton actually sends an army into Virginia,” the Republican stronghold.
In the campaign of 1800, Adams’s allies viewed Jefferson much the way opponents saw Donald Trump 216 years later—“stirring up trouble” and “destroying legitimate leaders.” Jefferson won, and Adams declined to attend his successor’s inauguration. The transfer of power was so momentous that Jefferson called it “the Revolution of 1800.” At that point, Mr. Wood observes, the Federalists “assume that he’ll fail so badly that they’ll be back into power before long.” They assumed wrong—the Federalists never won the presidency again and faded altogether by 1820.
Mr. Wood has written that most of the Founders “who lived on into the early decades of the nineteenth century expressed anxiety over what they had wrought.” Federalists rued the excesses of democracy, which undermined their aspirations for classical deliberative politics. “People began saying, look, if I don’t have people of my own kind in the government, I don’t feel confident,” Mr. Wood says. “You don’t trust people who aren’t like you, and that’s what feeds the anti-elitism,” which today takes the forms of populism and identity politics.
As for the Republicans, the federal government grew beyond anything they imagined. Today, limited government is associated with conservatism, “whereas in the late 18th century, it’s the radical position.” Jefferson believed a strong state would exacerbate unearned privilege and lead to monarchy. Yet America’s sprawling government today—the welfare state at home and military abroad—largely exists to promote Jeffersonian values of equality and American exceptionalism.
The ways in which both Adams’s and Jefferson’s visions have been frustrated illustrates one of Mr. Wood’s broad insights about the value of history. “History is a conservative discipline in that the one lesson that comes out of it is, nothing ever works out the way you think it’s going to,” he says. “That’s why Nietzsche said if you want to be a man on horseback, forget history, because it’ll stifle you—you’ll get full of doubts.”
History could teach today’s partisans on both sides that their ideas are less radical than they think, that the American republic is stronger than they fear, and that the nation’s divisions are more surmountable than they imagine. At a time when serious historians are proving less and less capable of reaching the wider public, Americans could do worse than to regurgitate lessons from Gordon Wood.
Mr. Willick is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.
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https://www.city-journal.org/html/age-outrage-15608.html
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A Hillary Staffer Goes to CPAC
‘Try not to get killed,’ a friend warned. But I was greeted with open arms.
By Annafi Wahed
March 1, 2018 7:19 p.m. ET
111 COMMENTS
‘Make sure to check in with us!” one friend told me. “Try not to get killed,” another warned. I wasn’t off to a war zone or a spy mission in Moscow. I was riding a bus from New York to Washington to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference.
To be sure, I’m a tiny, talkative South Asian woman who spent four months on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign staff. I wasn’t exactly in my element surrounded by people in “Make America Great Again” hats chanting “Lock her up! Lock her up!“ But there was more to CPAC than that. In four days, I spoke with more than 100 conservatives, most of whom greeted me with open arms and thanked me for being there and having an open mind. They happily engaged me in meaningful political conversation and invited me for drinks and after-parties.
Where some saw a circus, I saw a big tent. I spoke with Jennifer C. Williams, chairman of the Trenton, N.J., Republican Committee and a transgender activist. Twenty feet away, I spoke with a religious leader who opposes same-sex marriage. While a panelist touted capital punishment, several attendees crowded the Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty booth. Hours after President Trump recast Oscar Brown Jr. ’s song “The Snake” as an ugly anti-immigrant parable, several influential Republicans were asking me, a naturalized citizen, how they can support my startup.
In retrospect, I’m embarrassed at how nervous I was when I arrived. I found myself singing along to “God Bless the USA” with a hilariously rowdy group of college Republicans, having nuanced discussions about gun control and education policy with people from all walks of life, nodding my head in agreement with parts of Ben Shapiro’s speech, and coming away with a greater determination to burst ideological media bubbles.
Among liberals, conservatives have a reputation for being closed-minded, even deplorable. But in the Washington Republicans I encountered at CPAC, I found a group of people who acknowledged their party’s shortcomings, genuinely wondered why I left my corporate job to join Mrs. Clinton’s campaign in 2016, and listened to my arguments before defending their own positions.
Although CPAC attendees were as passionate about policy as my liberal friends, they took a more lighthearted approach. At one after-party, they alternated between taking selfies with Milo Yiannopoulos and engaging in a thoughtful, substantive discussion with a Democrat. One notable exchange: I exclaimed, “Of course the Department of Education is necessary!” which drew the rejoinder, “Great! Let’s make 50 of them!”
As I look back on all the people who greeted me warmly, made sure I didn’t get lost in the crowd, and went out of their way to introduce me to their friends, I can’t help but wonder how a Trump supporter would have fared at a Democratic rally. Would someone wearing a MAGA hat be greeted with smiles or suspicion, be listened to or shouted down?
At Hillary rallies, we always filled the stands with our biggest supporters. At CPAC, most of the few liberals in attendance had media credentials, as I did. I’m new to this, but shouldn’t we want to engage with people who aren’t convinced of our viewpoints? Why aren’t there more conservatives at Democratic rallies and more liberals at CPAC? What are we afraid of?
Ms. Wahed is founder of TheFlipSide.io, a daily digest of liberal and conservative commentary.
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/28084/exclusive-jordan-peterson-joins-prager-carolla-no-christian-toto?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=062316-news&utm_campaign=benshapiro
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/memorial-day-remembering-patriotism-of-deeds/#slide-1
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/opinion/failure-educated-elite.html
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https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2018/05/28/real-conservatives-refuse-to-kneel-before-their-liberal-overlords-n2484875
Real Conservatives Refuse To Kneel Before Their Liberal Overlords
Kurt Schlichter |Posted: May 28, 2018 12:01 AM
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
There's a great scene in the movie Witness where a bunch of bullies start picking on some Amish farmers, and then they pick on Harrison Ford, who is sporting Extreme Mennonite drag. They knock off his straw hat, laugh at him, and then he beats the crap out of them.
The bullies are shocked, stunned, and bewildered. Why, he’s not supposed to fight back! Why, the Amish, they’re better than that! But Harrison’s not. As his buddy says, he’s from Ohio.
I am not better than that either. How about you?
Because today, being “better than that” means being willing to allow other people to control you by defining you, and the definition is always “a pushover.” You’re supposed to be “conservative,” our conservasuperiors tell us, and we must therefore rigidly adhere to their precious “conservative principles.” But these bear no resemblance to real principles, much less conservative ones.
Allow me to sum up these fake principles:
Don’t ever fight.
Don’t presume to exercise your own right of free expression.
Lose like a gentleman.
Yeah, no. Hard pass, Fredocons.
Last week, the NFL, broken by our informal boycott, took action against those kneeling jerks, and the elite – including its True Conservative™ collaborators – wet their collective panties all over the Internet about it. How horrible – we flexed our muscles, stopped watching these pampered jerks’ antics, and the NFL caved. We’re not supposed to do that. We’re supposed to behold these goofs’ glorious free speech, which consists of waving middle fingers in our mugs, and just nod politely. We aren’t the ones who should be exercising our freedom of expression. We are the ones who are supposed to cave. We are always the ones who are supposed to cave.
I guess we missed the memo.
Oh, and how Task Force Pearl Clutcher lectured us for not adequately defending the First Amendment that a bunch of us were physically defending when the vast majority of them were back home getting their masters in 17th century philosophy and sipping Zimas. Worse, they shamefully took to the enemy microphone that is the New York Times op-ed page to scold us and spew out exactly what the liberals wanted to hear – that we conservatives should never, ever take our own side in a fight.
Apparently, the going rate for professional conservatives is thirty pieces of silver and a byline in American Pravda.
Liberals never seem to have this blue falcon problem, because they understand power. But then, those of us less concerned with getting an invitation to talk to donors at the National Weekly Liberty Forum for Eagle Family Liberty Standard Coalition and Cruise than not having progressive Birkenstocks ground into our faces forever, understand power too. And, scandalously, now we’re using it.
The liberals were likewise beside themselves at the results of our push back, prompting them to go into one of their trademark sessions of coordinated but inept gaslighting. Why, how dare we Normals take offense at this peaceful protest of love!
Baloney.
This kneeling thing was mindless performance art designed by these leftist jerks, and enabled by the liberal elite and its slobbering media lapdogs, to insult us to our faces by committing an act of calculated disrespect to our country and to the Normal Americans who built it, feed it, and protect it.
It was a scam and a lie from the word “hike.” This dimwitted protest was always directed at us, and no one else. If it wasn’t us, who was it? The America-loathing elite that was cheering them on?
These preening primadonnas did not have to choose the football game venue, one we attend to escape from things like politics and condescending lectures. They did not have to choose the National Anthem, a symbol of the country we love and serve. If these overpaid, pampered, posing fools wanted to protest whatever it is they are protesting, they could have done it differently, but then doing it differently wouldn’t have freaked out the squares. That was the point, and now they are mad because we took their insult exactly as they intended it to be taken.
And they aren’t even man enough to admit it. Their new story is that this has nothing to do with us Normals, that it's not an insult. No, it's a heartfelt plea for…something. I guess the pig-cop socks and Castro T-shirt were gestures of respect.
Let’s get real. They wanted to rub our faces in their contempt, to laugh at us as we had to endure it, humiliated by our own powerlessness. We were supposed to just sit there and take it. We are never supposed to use our own power to fight back.
RECORD SCRATCH!
Oops. Look who’s laughing now. Turns out we can throw a punch as well, and did, slugging the feckless NFL right in the wallet. You want to politicize everything? This is politicizing everything. Enjoy. We’re playing by the New Rules too.
I warned them they would hate the New Rules.
But gosh, we can’t do that. Oh well, I never! “How dare you Normal Americans get militant and actually fight back,” whine the kneelers of Team Principles. Real conservatives don’t fight back. See, that’s not who we are.
No, that’s not who they are.
We understand something the Conservative, Inc., goofs never seem to figure out. They howl that all we are about these days is “owning the libs” and “winning,” but here’s the thing. Sometimes, you have to win. Sometimes, you have to stop yapping and start performing. Once in a while, you have to put points on the board. Otherwise, people stop listening to you. It’s possible to spend your whole career inside Conservative, Inc., drifting from cheesy think tank sinecure to lame magazine scribbling gig, never actually winning anything. But out here, in America, we want to, and need to, prevail. Our rights and our dignity are merely theoretical constructs to the Fredocons, and are of no significance to them. But our rights and dignity matter to us. And we are acting and voting accordingly.
These cruise-shilling nags have delivered nothing but tiresome scoldings and a never-ending series of capitulations. No wonder they can’t seem to sell out those two-twin bed deluxe cabins along the Lido Deck anymore.
No wonder Normal Americans turned to someone like Donald Trump when these pathetic losers were only offering us more defeat and more humiliation at the hands of our enemies in the culture war.
We reject the bizarre notion that we are somehow obligated to stoically take guff from people who despise us without responding because doing so is “unconservative.” We decline to be commanded by conscientious objectors.
Here’s how we roll. When the enemy deploys its power against us, whether it’s some football jerk dissing us via Old Glory or some tech titan deciding to not allow us access to social media, we will fight back using whatever power we have. We’ll bankrupt the NFL before we just sit there watching them flip us off. And we’ll leverage our political power to regulate the Twittfacegrams into submission if they keep trying to exclude us from participation in our own culture. There is no conservative principle that requires you to not use your most effective weapon in your own self-defense. None.
“But that’s not conservative!” the sissies whimper.
That’s true only if you adopt a definition of conservatism that presumptively surrenders whenever it meets resistance. The simple, undeniable fact is that punishment works. Retaliation works. If you want the Old Rules back in effect – I’d prefer that – then you need to teach the enemy that it can’t apply New Rules without feeling the same pain it inflicts. That’s a real conservative principle.
Unilateral disarmament doesn’t work.
Remember, nothing in conservatism ever obligates you to accept an end-result where you must silently endure disrespect, where you are excluded from participation in your own governance, or where your rights are voided. None, though a bunch of allegedly conservative racketeers disenfranchised by the revolution that led to the election of Donald Trump are still trying to sell you on that idea.
Laugh at them and their fussy complaints about how you fail to conform your life to their labels. Fight back. Remember, militant Normal Americans aren’t from Washington. They’re from Ohio.
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Picking one pearl of wisdom (famous people agreeing with me) out of a column full of astuteness.
"The goal of government in a Western constitutional state should be conceived of in terms of economic growth, such as by achieving an annual GDP rate of 3 percent or greater..."
https://www.hoover.org/research/ten-paradoxes-our-age
Ten Paradoxes Of Our Age
by Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, June 6, 2018
9. The goal of government in a Western constitutional state should be conceived of in terms of economic growth, such as by achieving an annual GDP rate of 3 percent or greater, an unemployment rate of 4 percent or lower, and a rising middle-class per capita income—not an increase in state subsidies, state bureaucracies, and state regulations. Those in the state who exude empathy often cannot deliver it; those in the private sector who rarely mention compassion, often deliver it. A good job, not state sustenance, is the fountainhead of a good life.
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/27/federalist-society-yale-history-conservative-law-court-219608
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in Main:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2018/10/08/icymi-susan-rice-challenged-susan-collinss-seat-n2526053
only a smidgen worse then Collins anyway.
Susan Collins Liberty score - lower the Democrat !
We need more conservatives
Yes Collins is likable but is there no possibility of anyone with more conservative views then her winning in Maine.
Is it as bad as California or New Jersey ? I don';t know. :|
Just for a quick comparison here is the dreaded Nancy Pelosi's score is 10% even Adam Schiff's is higher @ 16 % !
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Scandinavia often used against free market
https://mises.org/power-market/socialist-scandinavian-countries-skyrocket-lassiez-faire-index?fbclid=IwAR00nQORHhjUX88_Dwzbkf0qTXxGMVJ_O4LWS0-YxrWCs3bJoWl0nDvLdyI
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"SOCIALIST" SCANDINAVIAN COUNTRIES SKYROCKET UP LASSIEZ-FAIRE INDEX"
now link that to this:
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/overwhelmed-refugee-flows-scandinavia-tempers-its-warm-welcome
coincidence?
stagnation in a social democrat country that mass immigration did not fix by itself ? Shocking :roll:
so lets do it here too - keeps the statists in power.
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Today we start anew with a fresh sense of national pessimism. If you are liberal leftist Democrat, you just lost the Senate and the Federal Courts for a long time.
If you are conservative and a limited government, free market advocate, you lost all the cities and now lost the suburbs, the places were people live. The conservative margin in Texas was 3 points and moving away. Colorado gone. Nevada lost. Midwest lost. Nearly lost Arizona and Florida running against really bad candidates. Montana is a toss up??!! Are you kidding? And that was a good year for Republicans in the Senate?
We lost the Governor race in MN and the state House. Keith Ellison is the state's new AG. Scott Walker lost Wisconsin. My congressman lost by 11 points in a seat Republicans held since JFK. He was Chair of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress during strong economic times. No matter. That wasn't the issue. My state house rep lost in a suburban district where R's held it since statehood.
As soon as the economy does well, people turn to other issues. ISIS was defeated; no one noticed. When war ends and peace sets in, people turn to other issues. People take success for granted then turn to past failure for new answers. Stuck on stupid, government can run things better than free people??
Without repeating rants of the past too much, our side sucks at messaging.
With no messaging to the contrary, people address the affordability of future healthcare concern with policies that make employment and incomes go down and healthcare costs go up. They forget the peace through strength they enjoy requires strength to keep the peace and that the vibrancy of the private economy they enjoy requires the basic economic foundations that make a private economy thrive.
Without clear messaging on our side the Left just keeps advancing.
Take Barack Obama for example, he not only didn't achieve economic growth or healthcare security, he didn't want those. He and they want you insecure and dependent on them. When you lose, they win and tell you how much they can help. And it works, absent a different message.
We want more and more and more people to be strong and self-sufficient. To make their own choices and pay their own bills, not everyone else's. How, outside of a Trump rally to Trump supporters, do you message that and win over independents and well-meaning, more moderate Democrats?
Trump needs to continue reforming regulations that never went through Congress in the first place. One great example of a major advance that can be done without an act of Congress is to index capital gains to inflation. He can make a historic agreement with China and he can put more constitutionalists on the Court.
Then what? There is no agenda going forward. That was the problem with yesterday's election. They outspent us in every race. Why? Without an agenda, what do we give money to? I gave money to my congressman do he could shun Trump and me and coddle Democrats and Dem issues and he lost. Republicans acted like their work is done and a large number of them retired without finding a replacement that could hold their seat. The outgoing Republican Governor of Maine said he's moving to Florida because of the tax rates. Maybe he could have waited until Wednesday to announce that. One more Governorship lost along with the redistricting that goes with it. Without a positive agenda and successful communication of it we lose the next election and the next.
Our work isn't done and the playing field keeps getting worse. Should we just give up or start working harder and smarter with an emphasis on smarter?
Any ideas?
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From conservative review , by Dan Horowitz one of the minority of very smart Jews (along with Levin) on our side:
For me I sadly and with moral down think he kind of paints this through rose colored glasses but he as he always does , have some good points:
https://www.conservativereview.com/news/10-observations-on-the-failed-blue-wave/
I am sure we will be seeing more thoughts about this in the future.
I do think if Trump was smoother and more inclusive we would not have seen this outcome.
Yes I know all politics is local but I just don't think it that simple this time.
Sometimes the gut beats all the darn reams of data statistics and chart drawing.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/democrats-demand-changes-to-constitution-pursue-national-power/?fbclid=IwAR1ZzA9SxOauH191ukGJIrDQwFcIK1-rTXQtCiGScsN89YpKXnNNr-AFgvo
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I agree that Trump has not expanded our party ; I disagree that the Trumpsters war is with the rinos (like Jonah) . It certainly is the LEFT. I am not sure whether we have MORe support from rinos or not is the issue. It is can we attract more young independents or fence sitters.
Why can we never attract more minorities
why are they so fervently glued to their crat party?
Trump has not really reached out . Saying "what you got to lose" [to black voters to vote for him] ain't the answer!
https://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/trump-republican-party-midterm-losses-governing-coalition/
I think Trump has best shot at being Rep nominee in 20 but I predict he would lose against many crats
We are a downward sprial
My head is not buried in the sand .
We lose Arizona ? 20 % latino . the states with the second most illegals . Any coincidence . Ann Coulter has had it right as did I for years.
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Florida just legalizes 1.x million felons to vote.
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"Florida just legalizes 1.x million felons to vote."
yes ; seems like this story is under the radar but this will turn Florida over to the Democrats for good .
We're done.
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https://www.psypost.org/2018/11/identifying-with-the-united-states-shrinks-the-moral-differences-between-conservatives-and-liberals-52595
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https://www.psypost.org/2018/11/identifying-with-the-united-states-shrinks-the-moral-differences-between-conservatives-and-liberals-52595
“The caveat is that when you look at how many liberals feel deeply aligned with the U.S., it’s less than the number of conservatives who feel that way about their country. So really it’s a minority of liberals who have similar ‘groupy’ values like conservatives. Also, we need to see whether these findings extend to other countries.”
I'd like to see the raw numbers of leftists who "feel deeply aligned with the U.S." I suspect it's the same percentage of extremely physically attractive feminists you find in the feminist population. :roll:
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The goal should be to keep our values relevant and we are fighting for our political lives against that has no scruples no whims no compromise towards socialized statism
and globalism.
We need someone who is going to STAND UP to this . This is what we should be about . Conservatism through nice talk and reaching across the aisel to shake hands and have polite debate is dead.
The enemy party is not playing that way.
Some will not accept this I guess. We don't have the medea the academics to promote conservative values . I never hear fighting spirit from the never trumpsters rinos etc
It is always gentlemanly like discussion and "problem solving" and "working together" .
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/post-trump-republican-party-unity-essential/
The question in not how do we get rinos and never trumpers on board with the trumpers.
the question is how to beat back the progressive onslaught.
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GM who posted Kurt S here before asks , like all of us, what happens after Trump?
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2018/12/20/who-could-possibly-replace-trump-n2537757
So far no answer but some possibilities
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GM who posted Kurt S here before asks , like all of us, what happens after Trump?
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2018/12/20/who-could-possibly-replace-trump-n2537757
So far no answer but some possibilities
Always good to read !
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/republicans-can-win-minority-voters/
seems like good ideas
but I am not holding my breath
Of course Trump won't do this - too much to ask.
Maybe he would go to one Black Church who would be willing to listen to him and give one speech and then turn around and claim how he reached out to Blacks. :roll:
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/republicans-can-win-minority-voters/
seems like good ideas
but I am not holding my breath
Of course Trump won't do this - too much to ask.
Maybe he would go to one Black Church who would be willing to listen to him and give one speech and then turn around and claim how he reached out to Blacks. :roll:
"Scott also distanced himself from President Trump, who had suggested that the controversial death-toll numbers from Hurricane Maria had been exaggerated for political purposes. (The estimated death toll ranged from 16, as first reported, to nearly 4,700, reported by Harvard researchers, to nearly 3,000, reported a year later by George Washington University.)"
On that question, it depends on where the truth is.
Minority voters cover a wide range, Cubans differ from Puerto Ricans, are different than inner city blacks, immigrant blacks, Mexican Americans are politically different than Chinese Americans, Somalis different than people who escaped Iraq under Saddam and so on.
The reach out must go two ways. The Trump and Republican message should be the same as JFK, a rising tide lifts all boats. Let's support the rising tide - growing economy - and lift all boats, like theirs. Trump brags about impressive economic improvements among minority groups, record low Hispanic and black unemployment for example. The rest of the Republicans seem to have no podium and no message.
First, I hate group politics but here goes. Black women as a group are very liberal, more liberal than white women. Black men are not a group. Way too many are lost from our productive culture and mostly apolitical. MANY other black men are hard working, supporting families and middle class or better. They do not necessarily live in so-called black or minority communities. They are most certainly a target market for conservatism.
Many Hispanic families are hard working and tax paying, should have the same economic incentives to support growing our economy and protecting our borders. Some already vote Republican and Trump may actually be raising that number.
Our welfare system is destroying American families especially at the lower economic end and black families are hit disproportionately as has been documented by economic researchers like Thomas Sowell for decades.
Democrats talk a minority game but their policies make things worse. The opportunity to win people over has been sitting there for a very long time. That does not mean pandering or competing with Democrats on their playing field, fee goodies etc. To me it means talking to them as adults, families, workers, business owners, taxpayers and voters. What kind of country do you want to raise your children and grandchildren in and start drawing distinctions between our policies and theirs.
That's what I thought the 17 candidates for the R nomination would do for in 2016 and they didn't. Elected Republicans and campaigning Republicans spend roughly 0.0% of their time explaining why our policies bring better results for the country and the people.
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9 + minutes long:
https://www.conservativereview.com/news/levin-we-have-a-fighter-in-the-white-house/
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Rush Limbaugh yesterday was saying it is a waste of time answering people like Kamala Harris and her "health care is a right", "Medicare for everyone" proposals with the answer that we can't afford it, can't pay for it. That argument is ineffective. We don't pay for anything anymore. And her proposal is that someone else, not you, will be paying for it.
After long analysis he came back that the answer is lines and waits. If you don't allocate with cost, you allocate by making people wait.
He is partly right with this but we need more, much more. It is going to take all the intelligence and messaging that we can come up with to counter the polls that show that there IS a free lunch.
He is right on the problem and right on the economics. If you make all healthcare free for 330 million people (and then increase the flow of people inward), demand is essentially unlimited, supply IS limited and the resulting massive shortages are managed with service denials in the form of wait times. 40 weeks in Canada is nothing compared to what can happen in the US.
That is right for healthcare, lose your private healthcare plan and you will lose healthcare accessibility. But about the wider argument of socialism and Leftism. We make sound arguments that seem to resonate with the fewer and fewer people, real economic arguments that are either received as right wing platitudes or not heard at all.
To me the argument against Left and against socialism is the coercion. People think they can have socialism or just parts of the Venezuelan plan with freedom and not tyranny but they can't. It takes force and threat of state force to take away liberties and taking away liberties is what Leftism and socialism is. I don't know how to express that in a way that gets the attention of the young people and the voters in and around the middle.
Your liberty to choose you plan, your provider, your doctor and earn money somewhat freely and spend it with free choice must necessarily be taken away to get to what Kamala and so many other 'Democrats' are describing.
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I heard Rush discuss that too.
He is right in a way
the free stuff crowd is never going to give a hoot about the costs since they are all certain the burden will be on others
I thought of another approach.
We have to make this a *generational issue* and move away from the *class disparity argument*
We have to convince all younger people that universal single payer government controlled health care will drive up the debt
and how that WILL certainly be a disaster up and coming to them .
We cannot afford more government debt . But we need more concise counter arguments to help control health costs otherwise
Keeping drug prices down - particularly for generics seems like a good start.
My biggest complaint about Trump is zero discussion of the debt
What truly good business man would not be concerned about the cost side of the equation . Schultz is correct about his focus on it IMHO.
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https://americanmind.org/features/state-of-the-union-2019/american-needs-to-relearn-economics/
It will take more than a Presidential address for America to relearn that when it comes to economic policy, we need to put markets and property first.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is more important than Nancy Pelosi. That’s because whether infamous or impolite, Congresswoman Pelosi’s snub of President Trump will pass. With her proposal to raise the top marginal rate on the income tax to 70%, the junior congresswoman from New York has managed a larger feat. Ocasio Cortez has shoved the edifice of economic discourse to the left.
A few years ago, economic consensus stood solidly in the center. Even the wildest proposals from progressive Democrats in Congress could not budge it. They simply did not gain attention when they argued for raising top tax rates beyond 50%. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal differs only because it seems to be gaining acceptance among fellow Democrats and more importantly, many citizens. Especially younger ones. Coming on top of another successful push, that of Thomas Piketty on income inequality, the movement is not mere “slippage.” It’s the beginning of a landslide.
Why does an idea gain traction now when it couldn’t in the 1990s? The trouble is the instability of the (formerly centered) economic consensus. In the 1990s or the 2000s the public remembered, in some kind of general way, what a 70% top rate did to the economy in the 1970s. In today’s squeaky tight labor market, few imagine that unemployment could stay above 5% for long. Few imagine the stock market could stay flat for a generation. But for an entire decade in the era of the 70% rate, the decade of the 1970s, unemployment could not get below five percent. From 1966 to 1982, almost a generation, and all years when the 70% rate was in force, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hung in the same frustrating place, just below the 1000 level. If you’ve experienced that, you remember it.
It took a while for the country to see the link between high tax rates and slow growth. There were other factors at work – inflation. And people of in the 1970s could tell themselves that back in the 1950s, good years for employment and markets, the top income tax rate had stood even higher, above 90%. But taxes did matter in the 1960s and 1970s. The difference was that in sealed economy U.S. business confronted scant competition. But when markets began to open, our tax competitiveness hurt our growth. In a global economy, a 70% tax rate was and is fatally uncompetitive. Only when more pro-growth tax policy became consensus, in the 1980s, did our economy begin to improve—the shift had bumps and took a painful half-decade –and gradually return to being the engine young people assume it always was.
President Trump ought indeed to recall this record when and if he gives the State of the Union. But an exhortation, even from a President, or a Senator, or a 2020 presidential candidate won’t waken the country from its economic amnesia. Nor will training up potential candidates in supply-side bootcamp, as valuable as that is. The amnesia is simply too powerful. The 1970s and its miseries lie too far back. For common sense to penetrate, we need changes in our educational and policy institutions. Those changes are tough, but not more costly than funding elections. Schooling up new candidates in supply-side doctrine is useful, but insufficient. When it comes to imparting economic knowledge, free marketeers should be playing the long game, not merely the election cycle.
Undertaking to change curriculum in established grammar and secondary schools is like undertaking to eliminate a cabinet-level department of the federal government – near impossible. But fortunately nowadays there are workarounds. As I type this, both the charter and the independent schools are expanding. Many of them do teach economics: the Basis Schools, growing fast, are a good example. So are extracurricular programs that impart economics to secondary school students. “Extracurricular” sounds ditsy, but it does not have to be. Eagle Scouts will tell you that the scouting experience did far more to shape their character than any individual curriculum. Alumni of high school debate will report the same thing. At the Coolidge Foundation, we developed a high school debate program in which, by now, thousands of teens have debated tax increases, pro and con. If we and other debate programs could reach hundreds of thousands instead of thousands, we would shore up the discourse of the center.
Attempting to penetrate faculties of established colleges is again, too often, a fool’s errand. Colleges offer more promise, as Hillsdale, Claremont, Pepperdine, Grove City, and the King’s College in New York have shown. But we need more colleges. Penetrating faculties of other established colleges is again, too often fool’s work. But starting new colleges is possible: my fellow Coolidge board member, Robert Luddy, is in the process of creating one in North Carolina.
Think tanks too have the capacity to open minds. Without Heritage, the Hoover Institution, Cato, and the American Enterprise Institute, the tax cuts of the recent decades would scarcely have been possible.
Each generation though needs its own new think tanks. What could the markets think tanks of the 2020s look like? First of all, they’d put markets first. My own sense is that using the tax code to foster social goals, a strengthening trend in the profit world, is counterproductive. That’s simply because doing so diverts from the main emphasis of straightforward growth. A child credit is nice. But economically speaking, a child credit is to a capital gains tax cut, as a playpen is to a race car. Only truly markets-oriented cuts permit the quality of growth that can preclude large tax hikes in future.
Another neglected area is property rights. Many of our current institutions demur when it comes to spotlighting property rights, for fear the term “property” sounds selfish. But the truth is that property is the beginning of all markets. (“Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing,” as Coolidge said.) Particularly valuable nowadays would be institutions that analyze data through the lens of classical liberalism. For though Rep. Ocasio Cortez is liberal, she’s not liberal in the classical sense. Advice for the new era can be boiled down. Introduce policies, along with policy-appropriate candidates. Play the long game, not the short. Build your institutions
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https://story.californiasunday.com/freedom
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He describes DARVO as "a tactic of abusers when confronted where they deny, attack, and then shift blame. The term came from studies of emotional abuse and sexual trauma, but DARVO behavior shows up in many contexts." He also views it as "a form of psychological warfare."
DARVO is a behavioral response that perpetrators use when met with their own wrongdoing. It is an acronym for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. As Mr. Giesea puts it, "DARVO is a gaslighting tactic to shift blame."
Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/jussie_smollett_and_the_information_warfare_of_the_left.html#ixzz5gC5YYDD0
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=115&v=_gcG14LmDTQ
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tucker-carlson-laments-americas-cultural-decline-why-is-this-happening/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202019-03-30&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=cTPGG5Nd_Cw
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@ 10:45 EST
for anyone interested
he is trying to redirect conservatives toward the future against the old elite guard
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heard a rumor that Hawley writes his own speeches
something sent to me I read he wrote seems like 'might be' on right track but a bit scant on details.
https://www.stltoday.com/news/national/govt-and-politics/hawley-in-maiden-senate-floor-speech-wednesday-will-continue-elites/article_2ecb2297-0e67-591e-b73d-bcafb080e962.html
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OK, let's keep an eye on him.
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"Elites vs middle class"
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/josh-hawley-attacks-silicon-valley-elites/
I agree there is the clash and civil war in these terms
but I do not see it as a complete picture
I mean it is more about Conservatism vs Progressivism to me.
elites vs middle class paints this as more of a class struggle then political ideology struggle .
Will consider the concept.
"Maybe " a winning formula to win over more to the Republican side - not sure yet.
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http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world?utm_source=pocket-newtab&fbclid=IwAR3LQj2ixGhqPircMpIRx6gaPCJWnqwsWkc3rwlmDRXVIgnp6vUcm8U_i6Q
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I have found this guy very annoying on multiple occasions
so he gets no sympathy from me but this article that defends his ( to my disagreement) illustrates my overall point:
what choice DO we have?
if not Trump then who?
so what is the point of bashing forever and ceaselessly Trump?
https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-bizarre-conservative-twitter-mob-gunning-for-david-french/
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Vichy republicans, like French, deserve scorn.
I have found this guy very annoying on multiple occasions
so he gets no sympathy from me but this article that defends his ( to my disagreement) illustrates my overall point:
what choice DO we have?
if not Trump then who?
so what is the point of bashing forever and ceaselessly Trump?
https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-bizarre-conservative-twitter-mob-gunning-for-david-french/
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https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2019/06/14/george-will-on-the-gop-the-conservative-party-became-fixated-on-what-id-call-crybaby-conservativism/
Why he continues to be stubborn in thinking intellectual purity alone will uphold the Constitution when the reality is we have a party that is ripping it up and is on a long march for total control and socialism is beyond me.
If we did not have political strategy to keep the right in power as long as possible we will not have a right and we will be all subjects and not citizens.
he pooh pahs the media academia celebrity complex as just a distraction - Republicans spend too much time crybabying about it.
As though it is not important against the grand ideals of the Founders.
Yes one can look at Trump as an abomination but he is the only one who fights for the country against the Left's onslaught. Will would rather have had Hillary Clinton:
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2016/06/26/george-will-i-left-the-gop-because-im-a-conservative/
And he still would. His logic ends with reality.
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George Will reminds you to not complain while they load you and your family onto the boxcars.
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2019/06/14/george-will-on-the-gop-the-conservative-party-became-fixated-on-what-id-call-crybaby-conservativism/
Why he continues to be stubborn in thinking intellectual purity alone will uphold the Constitution when the reality is we have a party that is ripping it up and is on a long march for total control and socialism is beyond me.
If we did not have political strategy to keep the right in power as long as possible we will not have a right and we will be all subjects and not citizens.
he pooh pahs the media academia celebrity complex as just a distraction - Republicans spend too much time crybabying about it.
As though it is not important against the grand ideals of the Founders.
Yes one can look at Trump as an abomination but he is the only one who fights for the country against the Left's onslaught. Will would rather have had Hillary Clinton:
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2016/06/26/george-will-i-left-the-gop-because-im-a-conservative/
And he still would. His logic ends with reality.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=8IgekVVqwkk
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=8IgekVVqwkk
Tucker is correct.
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https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/30/birthday-of-the-day-kyle-plotkin-cos-for-sen-josh-hawley-r-mo-1390741
additionally the more I see how we are being controlled and progandatized by the BoonGoogle Screw us/book in our wallets a zon
the more I think Halley may be on to something
with regards to us vs " elites"
I am just not sure of the word "elites" tho, to describe their power . It may be to general and not specific enough
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/07/19/josh-hawley-liberal-language-police-lost-their-minds-over-cosmopolitan-scandal/
From Paul Krugman:
***
Paul Krugman
✔
@paulkrugman
If you're Jewish and the use of "cosmopolitan" doesn't scare you, read some history https://twitter.com/BennettJonah/status/1151278921649987584 …
***
Funny I don't recall him coming out and accusing the magazine Cosmopolitan of being anti- semitic.
God is this guy a moron . Unbelievable he wins a Nobel .
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https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/its-america-save-western-civilization?fbclid=IwAR2qq2IqBTdDYdWVL5wfB3Swyn5tgfydZHTSSUGx1O8zNSytiDMGVcalfII
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https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/the-sick-man-of-europe?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR27mwG4rDX9my4LmcX6y1WboneViYUvjXboNF2DHzwCJYwVcmE19MsvtnY
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https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/10/21/true-north-outlines-14-conservative-principles/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=true-north-outlines-14-conservative-principles&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTXpNNVlUUXdZVGhsTkdRNCIsInQiOiJFOFNOY1NDMUluRjlXblFSUmZ1bG9UMEp1TFFhdk1wXC94Q3RXVDg2YnpmME5RNnp6TGhpcU9aY3d4UnpJQ1pTc0tLblozYkFSU3d0ZExraGhXc2I5d3VuMFB0SGFQaHdjN1dZOUcxb1NPQUt5RmdDVTViZWFBRWpPYml4cHplZHYifQ%3D%3D
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Does America Still Have a Common Creed?
The U.S. has an unmatched capacity for absorbing newcomers. Yet historian David M. Kennedy worries that the country no longer agrees on a shared identity or purpose.
By Jason Willick
Nov. 27, 2019 7:53 pm ET
ILLUSTRATION: KEN FALLIN
Stanford, Calif.
As the Seventh U.S. Army prepared to seize Axis-held Sicily in July 1943, Gen. George S. Patton sent the troops a message. “When we land,” Patton said, “we will meet German and Italian soldiers whom it is our honor and privilege to attack and destroy.”
Patton is famous for his martial exhortations, but Stanford historian David M. Kennedy paraphrases his Sicily address to highlight what it said about immigration. “Many of you have in your veins German and Italian blood, Patton said, “but remember that these ancestors of yours so loved freedom that they gave up home and country to cross the ocean in search of liberty,” whereas the Germans and Italians targeted in the Allied assault chose to remain “as slaves.”
The American soldiers Patton was talking to, Mr. Kennedy tells me, were “the sons of those immigrants who’d come 20, 30 years earlier.” A great wave of immigrants, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, had arrived in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Germans had been coming since before that. These groups “were thought to be unassimilable,” Mr. Kennedy says. Yet Patton effectively told them, “I’m counting on your being so assimilated that you can kill your ancestors or your relatives.”
The general thus colorfully rejected ethnic nationalism and gestured at an American creed that could encompass anyone committed to defending American values. Today, the 78-year-old Mr. Kennedy, author of “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War,” a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2000, sees this creed faltering. He worries that “in this big, throbbing, pulsing, kinetic, diverse society,” a sense of American “common purpose and common belonging” is being lost. Incompatible views of identity and immigration are fracturing politics.
“Societies that have deep, chronic, intergenerational ethnic differences inside the same body politic don’t have particularly encouraging histories,” Mr. Kennedy notes. “The basic human instinct to prefer one’s own kind to another is impossible, I think, to eradicate entirely.” That means forging “a coherent society out of people who are different in their origins and aspirations is a project,” and a fragile one. America’s capacity for absorption has been exceptional.
One early observer of American pluralism was J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a Frenchman living in 18th-century New York. In his “Letters from an American Farmer,” he asks, “what, then, is the American, this new man?” British settlers formed the core of the colonies, but Crèvecoeur “acknowledges all of the different peoples that have come to America,” Mr. Kennedy says, like “the Germans, and the French, and the Huguenots, the Dutch.” Crèvecoeur said “they all were melding their identities into this new creature under the sun.”
In the 21st century the notion that Crèvecoeur was even looking at a diverse society, Mr. Kennedy says, seems “kind of quaint.” Besides enslaved African-Americans, “they’re all Europeans, they’re all white, what’s the diversity here?” Yet this mix of nationalities was unprecedented in the Old World.
Mr. Kennedy doubts the “psychological distance” between groups in America is greater now than then. Imagine if we could compare the perception of Germans in 1785 to that of Poles in 1905 to that of Asian and Hispanic immigrants today. “My instinct is that the sense of difference is pretty comparable over time,” Mr. Kennedy says.
Then why are the politics of immigration so fraught today? One answer is polarization. As American identity fractures deeply into red and blue versions, new arrivals are losing a common ideal of citizenship into which they can assimilate.
Immigrants are also regarded by the political parties not only as workers or neighbors but as a voting bloc. Democrats tout America’s declining white share of the population as a key to their long-term governing majority; Republicans fear the opposite. Restrictionism on the right is rooted not only in cultural difference but also a fear that more immigration risks a loss of political power.
Immigration politics didn’t always sort neatly along party lines. During the wave of immigration between 1890 and 1914, immigrant votes were “up for grabs,” Mr. Kennedy says. “The political identity of immigrants and immigrant-descended communities really didn’t solidify” until the New Deal, after a 1924 law and the Great Depression reduced immigration. Franklin Roosevelt appointed a far larger number of Catholic judges than had the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations. This showed that Democrats were “out trying to recruit loyalty in these immigrant communities, which were largely Catholic and Jewish.”
Mr. Kennedy sees today’s Republican Party as having all but “conceded that they will not make any inroads in immigrant communities,” as “nativist elements” in the GOP “seem to have gained the upper hand.” Yet the left’s changing approach has also made the politics of immigration more divisive. “In the last generation or two,” Mr. Kennedy says, “diversity became not just an observed fact, but something to be valorized in its own right.”
The dominant American view until the late 20th century was that “we welcome all kinds of people but we expect them to assimilate into some range of standard values, behaviors, aspirations, ambitions.” Now, diversity itself has become the paramount value in parts of American culture. When celebrating difference replaces creedal values like liberty, fair play and respect for the Constitution, that undercuts “the project of assimilation,” Mr. Kennedy says.
Diverse societies need stories, even myths, to articulate what they have in common or what they are working toward collectively. Mr. Kennedy suggests that academic historians no longer contribute to this national understanding. When he was trained in the 1960s, most historians agreed on a “master narrative about American history.” It was based on the “perfection of the idea of democracy of this country.” That process was “incremental, slow, back and forth” but you could “still trace the arc.” And it gave Americans a way to talk about their national project.
Academic history is dominated today by “subsidiary questions” about “ethnic or racial or gender” groups, Mr. Kennedy says. These are “all interesting and legitimate stories in their own right,” but they have “squeezed energy out” of “the big, integrative, long-term project.” He worries that “the history of America is no longer the history of America—it’s about things that happened in America. But the fact that they happened in America is kind of incidental to the story.”
Mr. Kennedy is clearly alarmed by Donald Trump’s anti-immigration politics. But from “a purely analytical or historical point of view,” he says, it should not be surprising. “There seems to be a threshold percentage of immigrants in the population that triggers a pretty robust nativist reaction. And the threshold,” based on the reactions in the 1850s, 1920s and today, “seems to be somewhere in the 11%, 12%, 13% range.”
Some trends suggest the reaction could abate. Mr. Kennedy says absorption in the early 20th century was accelerated by the fact that the immigrant stream “was highly variegated in terms of ethnicity, religion, language, culture.” The fact that “quite literally, Polish Jews could not talk to Greek Orthodox could not talk to Sicilian Catholics,” he says, reduced the sense of challenge to U.S. English speakers. By contrast, Hispanic immigrants exceeded 50% of all new arrivals in the early 21st century, with those from Mexico making up the majority.
Yet the immigrant stream has diversified once again in the past decade. Asia now tops Latin America as the No. 1 source of new arrivals. “Asia’s a big place, as Europe was 100 years ago,” Mr. Kennedy says, and “Filipinos and Chinese and Laotians and so on don’t easily fit into one cultural category.” In that sense “we’re returning to a more familiar historical pattern where immigrants come from a variety of places.” That could reduce political frictions that come with immigration. So would “consistent and robust economic growth,” Mr. Kennedy says, which “lubricates all kinds of social issues.”
If the American creed is exceptional in its ability to fold immigrants into its fabric, so it also is in its resistance to socialism, Mr. Kennedy suggests. He points to the German sociologist Werner Sombart’s observation that America’s early embrace of “more or less full political rights,” at least for white men, prevented European-style socialism from taking root in the 19th century. Despite the label’s brief revival in the Democratic primary, “my own view is that it still has a lot of toxic residue in big parts of the body politic,” he says.
Mr. Kennedy recently returned from a teaching trip in China, where the rules of national membership couldn’t be more different than in the U.S. The idea that one could “show up as blond, blue-eyed Irish German Caucasian and say, ‘I want to become Chinese,’ ” Mr. Kennedy muses—“the proposition kind of defeats itself as soon as you articulate it.”
The Chinese are deeply worried about “their integrity as a society and their coherence,” Mr. Kennedy says. “They’ve been ruled by outsiders for centuries in the Manchu dynasty,” he observes. They’ve faced severe “internal divisions, and the country has been fragmented and come back together, and fragmented again.” Asia’s geography adds to Beijing’s anxiety about social cohesion, given that China has “land borders or the near equivalent with 14 other countries.”
By contrast, the American story has been one of almost linear ascension. Its two neighbors are relatively weak and friendly, and it has only fragmented politically once in its 243-year history.
The ultimate manifestation of China’s drive for homogeneity is its treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang province. Mr. Kennedy visited Kashgar, a city in Xinjiang, though he didn’t enter the internment camps where more than a million Muslim Uighurs are undergoing “re-education.” Still, Mr. Kennedy says, “I could not have imagined a security surveillance state of that density and weight.”
“Every 250 meters, there’s a fortified police station,” Mr. Kennedy says. “Every intersection, there’s a little riot squad of cops, waiting to go. There are surveillance cameras everywhere, just absolutely everywhere. You go into a little noodle shop, mom-and-pop noodle shop, half the size of this room—you go through a metal detector, and there’s an armed security officer standing right there.”
Throughout U.S. history, the sense of what it means to be an American has been shaped by the country’s external enemies. Americans repudiated, or saw themselves as repudiating, monarchism in the revolution, imperialism in World War I, fascism in World War II and communism in the Cold War. Mr. Kennedy notes that “an adversary that is challenging enough” can “mobilize, and discipline, and focus, and even deprive citizens of certain things in order to get the common purpose achieved.”
China’s disregard for individual rights, equality and pluralism draws attention to America’s remarkable national success at sustaining all three. Some policy makers and intellectuals in Washington hope a “new Cold War” could unite Americans and revitalize the American creed.
As for Mr. Kennedy, he says the jury is still out on China’s ambitions. And he doesn’t think the U.S. can count on its Cold War model for national unity. “You can’t go home again,” he says, citing the famous Thomas Wolfe novel. Maintaining stable and inclusive politics amid unprecedented diversity is “not just going to happen automatically—you have to think hard about it and work at it.” That means recognizing that the U.S. has never been an ethnic state or a hodgepodge of groups, but a “national community” that stands for a distinctive creed, still worth aspiring to.
Mr. Willick is an editorial page writer for the Journal.
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https://tnsr.org/2019/12/whither-the-city-upon-a-hill-donald-trump-america-first-and-american-exceptionalism/
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https://bigleaguepolitics.com/uk-school-forces-6-year-olds-to-write-gay-love-letters/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUR9UIscLGU&feature=emb_logo
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Saw Caldwell on Tucker the other night and was VERY impressed. Just ordered the book.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/a-new-conservative-theory-of-why-america-is-so-polarized.html?utm_source=fb
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Josh Hawley and team working on vision for future
I hear.
The Hawley team points out Trump can still turn it around - they are supportive.
I am not inclined to think so sinceDJT is who he is and half the problem IS style.
The other is he is not clearly articulating what he plans to do - yet.
Can he do it in way to bring in the swing voters - ?
Just saying socialism vs freedom is nice hash tag but many are still waiting to hear alternatives to socialism for education and health care etc.
Can Trump truly articulate this in meaningful ways beyond hashtags, name calling , etc?
--------------------
That said , any ideas for me to send up ?
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MAGA—for All
Trump needs to give voters a reason to support him. He’s working on it.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
June 18, 2020 6:48 pm ET
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Potomac Watch: Trump needs to give voters a reason to support him. He’s working on it. Images: Getty/Bloomberg Composite: Mark Kelly
President Trump convened a roundtable last week in Dallas, which the media described as a talk on police and race relations. It was much more. Some Republicans are beginning to hope it was the basis of a compelling second-term agenda.
As national unrest continues, Democrats are intent on limiting this debate to law-enforcement brutality and “racism.” Mr. Trump’s Dallas event was an effort to broaden the discussion into one about “advancing the cause of justice and freedom.” Part of that, Mr. Trump said, was working together to “confront bigotry and prejudice.” As important, he added, is providing “opportunity” to every American.
The Trump And GOP Police Reforms
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The president handed it over to Attorney General William Barr, who called education the “civil-rights issue of our time” and argued for school choice. Housing Secretary Ben Carson discussed efforts to use telemedicine to remedy health-care disparities. Scott Turner, executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council, touted the success of “opportunity zones,” created in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which have funneled tens of billions of dollars into distressed communities.
Mr. Trump campaigned in 2016 to work on behalf of “forgotten” Americans—whether they be in struggling blue-collar areas, inner-city minority communities, or rural towns. As fate would have it, both the coronavirus and George Floyd’s death have shined a spotlight on glaring disparities in the country. The white-collar elite work safely from home in shut-down cities, while hands-on workers and small-business owners become economic statistics. The focus on rare cases of police abuse has resurfaced the all-too-common reality of so many African-American communities—crime, high unemployment, poor health care, failing schools.
In those bleak headlines is an opening for Mr. Trump to embrace a second-term “opportunity” agenda, a promise that free-market policies won’t only revive the struggling economy but throw it open to those forgotten Americans. So far, Mr. Trump has seemed content to let the race with Joe Biden boil down to a debate over the past four years and whether the Democrat is too radical or too incompetent to be trusted. Those points will certainly energize the Republican base. But making inroads with independents, minority voters and suburban housewives will require something more concrete and aspirational. Why not an “American Dream” theme?
That’s the case many Republicans are making to the White House, even as they think about how to refine it. One benefit of such an agenda is that it doesn’t require the administration to try to package a theme around disparate or expensive proposals like infrastructure or tax credits. It gives the president something more to pitch than a return to lost prosperity. And it provides the Trump campaign with an opportunity to make inroads with minority voters—crucial in a close race.
The greatest merit of an opportunity agenda is that it rests on core conservative policies and principles. It’s about tailoring them—and ramping them up—to serve struggling communities. That’s the brilliance of opportunity zones, which South Carolina’s Sen. Tim Scott got included in the 2017 tax reform. He harnessed the power of smart tax relief and directed it at underserved, struggling communities. School choice is, likewise, about providing minority parents the opportunity to rescue their kids from crummy schools. Health-care choice is about giving poor Americans the opportunity to escape Medicaid. Deregulation is about providing more Americans the opportunity to engage in entrepreneurship.
Even better, the Trump administration already has the record, people and infrastructure to build on this theme. The common and absurd claim that Mr. Trump is “racist” has always been belied by the diversity of his administration and the programs it has pursued. Sentencing reform. An unprecedented focus on vocational education. Funding for historically black colleges. Tackling the opioid epidemic. Mr. Trump in 2018 set up the Opportunity and Revitalization Council, which Messrs. Turner and Carson oversee. In May the council put out a report brimming with case studies and best practices for spurring investment in economically distressed areas.
Promoters also note that an American Dream theme is optimistic and inclusive—a needed contrast to perpetual Democratic anger, partisan and racial animus, the fear and gloom of the virus. The administration aside, that kind of positive agenda could prove a lifeline for Senate Republicans who have been provided little that is forward-looking to campaign on, and who aren’t running against Mr. Biden.
But perhaps the best argument for this agenda is that Mr. Trump already believes in it. Advisers note that there’s a reason he talks so frequently about the historically low black and Hispanic unemployment rates; he’s genuinely proud of them. The 2016 slogan was “Make America Great Again.” It would be no lift for Mr. Trump to add a couple of words and sell what he has done, and what he could with four more years. “Make America Great Again—for All.”
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quote author=ccp
"Josh Hawley and team working on vision for future" - Good.
"Trump can still turn it around" - Absolutely! All the facts are on his side IMHO. It all needs to be presented with a GREAT plan going forward.
"[Trump] is not clearly articulating what he plans to do - yet." - House, Senate Republicans too!
"Can he do it in way to bring in the swing voters - ?" - Yes. Turn out the base and win the center with one message, as simple and direct as possible.
"Can Trump truly articulate this in meaningful ways beyond hashtags, name calling , etc?" Yes he can and he must!
"socialism vs freedom is nice hash tag but " - That is the choice, but must presented in a way that people choose freedom. Why is that so hard? Right now people keeping drifting toward socialism. Reverse that right now, reverse it powerfully and persuasively, especially with young people, or lose it all.
"many are still waiting to hear alternatives to socialism for education and health care etc." - Take the best of the proposals, and start getting on the same page. We are getting beat by the straw man argument: support the full speed move to socialism or suffer the Republican alternative is only rich people go to school or get health care - and the masses get nothing.
Republicans have supported trillions and trillions in spending programs. Democrats have opposed the reforms that would make these programs work. More money is not the answer. Too much federal money is what is screwing up college costs and healthcare. Advance school choice and a college system that utilizes distance learning and fundamentally reduces costs or doesn't get federal support. Introduce competitive systems and choices into health care.
"That said, any ideas for me to send up?" - What an opportunity! I'll take a shot at it. Who else is in? Speak now or watch this nation spiral the rest of the way down.
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Can the Republicans reach millennials?
Why can't the speakers explain that - yes it sounds nice to have someone else pay for your tuition
or the government forgive all the loans etc.
But in the long run you WILL be sorry when you are older trying to make a living and having a family and career and realize your freedoms are gone and you were conned.
Open up transparency in health care - make it truly price competitive
Conservative means for enviromental protection - posted here in past.
not just more taxation (another tax? carbon tax)
Stop the identity politics crap
And promote we are AMEricans
Stand up to BLM extortion but at the same time promote minorities are far better off with freedom and less government and promoting black families not government replacing fathers etc
Clean up the streets in Failed Democrat states cities .
Improve availablitily of health care to the mentally ill
And stop spending us into oblivion
CAn this be a start
can this be done
Agree with Doug - it must be.
Wish I had more time and means to help .
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Two part plan:
1) Conservative principles explained - [No one takes the time to do that.] For example, the free enterprise system lifted more people out of poverty than any and all others combined.
2) Liberal dogma answered. That's what's missing in K-12, our liberal colleges and the one sided mainstream media. Every
Leftists assertion needs to be answered. Dividing Americans into groups is - divisive. Equality of outcome isn't the a path to prosperity. Employment requires employers. Profits serve an important purpose, move resources to their most valued use. Capping wealth doesn't lift up the poor. Smearing the police doesn't make us safer. Minimum wage laws don't spread wealth.
Coming back to fill these in. Competition, not regulation, is what drives down costs. Being American doesn't prevent the laws of economics from applying to us. Drive out investment and workers suffer. Drive out the private sector and the public sector loses necessary financing. Enact the policies of the Venezuelan revolution and the results that happened there happen here.
I would like to come back to fill these in.
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"Conservative principles explained - [No one takes the time to do that.] For example, the free enterprise system lifted more people out of poverty than any and all others combined."
" Every
Leftists assertion needs to be answered. "
YES.
AGREE 100 %
every time Biden and fellow mobsters promise to regulate give more away control open borders our side has to have the answers ready at the tip of their tongues from local , state to national pols.
Yet we are not all on board with the same message and often unprepared.
We need Dinesh D'Souza like articulation or VDH like
Trump has the oratory skills , but sadly , I don't think he has the intellectual capacity to do this.
He can make grand statements about " big " and "beautiful" and "this country will never be socialist" and the other side are a bunch of assholes
liars "scumbags", but he never really makes the case.
Ingraham last night was saying how she believes Biden will NOT debate Trump now the polls have him ahead.
That means Trump is going to have to go out and make the case with out a head to head debate if that belief becomes reality .
I am probably nauseating everyone on this board with my pessimism but 4 yrs later I think it is obvious what we are going to get.
Like Andrew McCarthy pointed out , Trump does not seem to realize how slim he won in '16. It really was by a pubic hair. The same game plan is not going to work this time - just won't. But he keeps doing the same.
Yes he had good record on economy but you know the old saying - "what are you going to do for now"
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The third piece of the puzzle is to organize. No one can point to one voice, one source for direction from our side or rapid response, so Trump's tweet fills that void. Instead of taking away Trump's tweet, build some better.
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ccp: "I am probably nauseating everyone on this board with my pessimism"
- You have a credibility that comes from your (brutal) honesty. IMHO.
With polls the way they are and the 2018 losses, it shouldn't be hard to persuade Republicans to play like they're behind late in the 4th quarter.
I don't want to (just) win "Trump's reelection". I want to win the larger war for hearts and minds.
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"I don't want to (just) win "Trump's reelection". I want to win the larger war for hearts and minds."
I do believe we win the ideological/practical arguments.
But the Left wins on emotion and short term bribery (longer term it does not work) .
I don't know why Trump could not simply have worn a mask to set and example
Of course we needed to re open the economy but of course we needed to continue distancing and masks
but he did not
and of course Bill Gates is up there on CNN yadda yadda yaddying about how right he was/is etc. and the the split screen of all the DNc/CNN people nodding like bobble heads with phony very stern concerned smug faces .
All so frustrating and unnecessary.
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"I don't know why Trump could not simply have worn a mask to set an example"
- He didn't want that to be the image of his Presidency.
"and of course Bill Gates is up there on CNN yadda yadda yaddying about how right he was/is etc. and the the split screen of all the DNc/CNN people nodding like bobble heads with phony very stern concerned smug faces."
- Trump shut down flights from China Feb 1, minutes after China/W.H.O. admitted the problem. No one else would have done that.
The right action would have been to shut down flights from China AND from every place (Europe) that did not shut down their flights from China. The right timing was months earlier in hindsight but we did not have that information or justification back then.
Another right action would have been to have stockpiles of sanitizers and good masks. His predecessor left him depleted but he can't fully blame them because it was year four of his presidency.
WHO let us down. CDC let us down. Homeland Security let us down. FDA let us down. UN let us down. 'Smart' government planning with mass transit, urban density and nursing homes for the elderly let us down. So the lesson learned is to turn further to the people who put their trust in Big Government agencies and international organizations? I don't follow that. The real lessons learned comes from G M posts here. Gun sales are up. Don't count on government for safety, for security. Don't trust the food supply. Buy your own masks and disinfectants before the crisis, and before the next crisis. Distance between neighbors is good. Private transportation will always be needed. Stay away from mobs. Don't give the government or anyone else all your information - or all your money - or any of your trust.
If the government even had a savings account with your social security, your retirement money in it, they just blew it in the first month of the crisis. Quoting someone here, plan accordingly. My point of this is to vote for the person or party who called out adversaries like China and deep state agencies who have none of our interests in mind and started to take action on that. It wasn't Bill Gates, or Biden. So much more needs to be done before we let them screw it all up again.
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". - He didn't want that to be the image of his Presidency."
but now we have the image of him being a hard ass not wearing a mask
and the numbers going up due to people refusing to wear masks and distance
which is worse?
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/reaganmccarthy/2020/07/01/yaf-polling-n2571640
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". - He didn't want that to be the image of his Presidency."
but now we have the image of him being a hard ass not wearing a mask
and the numbers going up due to people refusing to wear masks and distance
which is worse?
Don't know. Here is Jon Huntsman campaigning (not winning):
(https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/AEgoD_EcGbZ1lahv7URwWIPU9KA=/0x0:2400x1282/1220x813/filters:focal(1008x449:1392x833):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/67003739/merlin_2822298.0.jpg)
I'd be happy with a campaign performed on the written word if we can't see their face, but Biden writes none of his own words, except his mis-speaks.
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Pompeo Takes On the Politicization of Human Rights
He defends the spirit of 1776 and 1948 and has harsh words for the New York Times ‘1619 Project.’
By Walter Russell Mead
July 16, 2020 1:14 pm ET
The Twitter mobs aren’t going to like the Commission on Unalienable Rights’ report, which the State Department released Thursday. The commission, chaired by longtime Harvard legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon, contradicts virtually every element of the new political orthodoxy.
To say, as the commission does, that property rights are a necessary basis for any meaningful concept of human rights is to break so many taboos that one hardly knows where to start. To claim in addition that religious liberty is among the foremost of human rights, that America’s founding was the most significant event in the history of human rights, and that national sovereignty is human rights’ most important defender is, for many human-rights activists, the worst kind of blasphemous trumpery.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who convened the commission and asked his former professor to lead it, doubled down on the combative and incendiary nature of the report. “Our rights tradition is under assault,” he said Thursday. “The New York Times’s ‘1619 Project’ . . . wants you to believe that our country was founded for human bondage.”
The contention that U.S. history is simply a story of oppression is “Marxist ideology,” he told his audience in Philadelphia. “The Chinese Communist Party must be gleeful when they see The New York Times spout this ideology.”
“This is a dark vision of America’s birth,” Mr. Pompeo continued. “It’s a disturbed reading of history. It is a slander on our great people.”
Though both he and the commission report acknowledge the dark sides of U.S. history, Mr. Pompeo summarized their central contention about America’s role in the global fight for human rights in nine memorable words: “America is special. America is good. America does good.”
The Commission on Unalienable Rights advances three main ideas. First, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, though it reflected a global consensus, was shaped to an extraordinary degree by the values of the U.S. founding, and by America’s long struggle to live up to those values.
Second, progress on human rights comes not from transnational bodies or “global governance,” but from the efforts of sovereign nation states to follow America’s example by attempting to conform their practices to the noble idea of liberty. Bolstering the sovereignty of nation-states is, he and the report argue, necessary to secure human rights.
Third, successful human-rights diplomacy requires a concentrated focus on the relatively small number of rights that are recognized by a genuinely global consensus. In 1948 the U.N. consulted with philosophers and others from many non-Western as well as Western cultures. In the final product, the Universal Declaration restricted itself to the rights that found support all around the world. That consensus in turn gives the declaration its legitimacy. To human-rights activists looking to expand the list of universal rights—for example to include same-sex marriage—these arguments sound hopelessly reactionary. A 60-page report that praises property rights but does not mention trans people can expect some harsh blowback.
In a phone interview Wednesday, Mr. Pompeo defended the commission’s approach. For him, a growing disconnect between some human-rights advocates and the principles and history of American engagement with human rights undermines domestic U.S. support for rights-based diplomacy—and reduces the efficacy of such diplomacy overseas. If American history is reducible to racism, and the principles of the Declaration of Independence are simply high-toned hypocrisy, why should other countries pay attention to U.S. human-rights advocacy?
The argument Mr. Pompeo and the commission want to make is two-edged. Against many contemporary activists, it upholds a limited concept of unalienable, God-given rights grounded in sovereign nation-states. This approach offers more opportunity for constructive diplomacy. Identifying issues where more respect for the rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration can enhance a country’s security and advance its development opens the door to rights advocacy that is less confrontational and more successful. The opportunities around the world are numerous. Requirements for transparent law courts can reassure foreign investors. Universal basic education can forge a better-qualified workforce.
Simultaneously, Mr. Pompeo and the commission want to argue that an approach to human rights based on the Universal Declaration is not some malign construction by anti-American globalists that must be resisted, but a natural expression and extension of U.S. values. Human-rights advocacy along these lines, the argument runs, is as American as apple pie—and something that even Jacksonian populists can embrace.
Given the passions of the moment, the Unalienable Rights Commission report is likely to spend the next few months as a political football. But it is a thoughtful and carefully reasoned document that may serve as an important landmark in future debates. Incendiary centrism has its uses.
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https://www.revolver.news/2020/07/red-bull-fires-black-lives-matter-employees/
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red bull takes no bull...
it is austrian company
makes me want to switch from my daily zero calorie Monster energy drink to RB!
bravo!
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Working on bumper stickers for the election season:
Federal Government Racist?
De-fund it.
More?
Cancel the constitution?
Fugetabout your right to abort.
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vote for Trump and the conservative national interest or vote against him and see the Rep. Party get crushed along with the future of the country:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/burn-the-republican-party-down-11596149482?mod=djemalertNEWS
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vote for Trump and the conservative national interest or vote against him and see the Rep. Party get crushed along with the future of the country:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/burn-the-republican-party-down-11596149482?mod=djemalertNEWS
Thanks ccp. She doesn't write with the clarity she once had writing for Pres. Reagan. By the end I wondered, what exactly is she saying, to whom?
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I noticed Hershel Walker gave credit to the movie 'Uncle Tom' with Larry Elder, Candace Owens, Herman Cain and other black conservatives for helping with his political conversion.
https://uncletom.com/ $20.
code 'larry' gets 20% off, but they add $8 dvd shipping handling and state tax. No fee for 'on demand' viewing.
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https://www.outkick.com/big-john-thompson-proved-winning-advances-the-cause-of-black-people-more-than-whining/
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/and_now_for_something_completely_different_colby_covington_the_mma_champ.html
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/and_now_for_something_completely_different_colby_covington_the_mma_champ.html
Nice!
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Far out 8-)
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As far as I am concerned
all rinos who voted for Biden should have no place in the direction of the party going forward
that means scarborough mike steele
scaramooch
krystal
we don't need the mccain
family either
or past NJ gov Whitman etc
they can vote for anyone they want but I don't want them playing king makers for *us*
just my 2 cents
the ones who stuck with Trump are all good with me.............
another cent thrown in .
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campus indoctrination
https://www.leadershipinstitute.org/aboutus/mission.cfm
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Any ideas?
Analysis from election is that young people came out to vote. We're now into 50 years of liberal and leftist control of schools, K-12 plus especially college. They set the indoctrination, but what makes so many of them left is peer pressure, group think. They are not doing independent thinking even outside of the classroom. What do we have that competes with that, that competes with a 6th decade of that? I think we have the facts on our side. But that's it.
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https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/24890953/4-Wright-final-design-pp32-45(1).pdf
here we are 56 yrs later and the Right can still not overcome this.
despite failures of Democrat policies
My father voted for LBJ. because he saw those commercials of the little girl watching the mushroom cloud (I remember that too)
and said he thought Goldwater was crazy if he would use atomic bombs.
I am not sure what he thought about the Vietnam war started by JFK and exponentially increased by LBJ
though I know he would have supported America and the soldiers involved.
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They think they can just march in and take over
with them in charge telling the rest of us where they know we should go:
https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2020/11/08/the-lincoln-project-geniuses-vow-to-resurrect-the-gop-n1131697
as far as I am concerned these people have NO place in the future of the party
thanks to them we might not have a party
and had lost ground for decades
Trump needs to start forming his replacements before these self serving people start in collecting more money
their policies sold us out for 30 yrs
they ignored us during Trump
and they will ignore us again
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https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/11/08/sd-gov-noem-we-gave-al-gore-37-days-to-run-the-process-trump-voter-deserve-same-consideration/
she would crush JEB and his mob
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An actual piece of VERY good news: Dem Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia stated tonight in interview with Bret Baier of FOX Special Report that he would oppose any effort to end the filibuster.
The man has proven himself to be a mensch before-- including voting against his own party when it voted to end the filibuster on judicial nominations (which backfired gloriously, but I digress , , ,) voting for Kavanaugh and in other ways as well.
The significance here is that even if the Dems win both seats in the January runoff in GA, they will not be able to end the filibuster, which is the sine qua non of packing the Supreme Court, packing the Senate (DC and Puerto Rico) and packing we the American people with 22 million illegal aliens.
RESPECT for the American Senator Joe Manchin!
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https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2020/11/19/wed-be-at-war-with-each-other-rod-dreher-imagines-president-trump-governing-during-a-second-term/?utm_source=twtydaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&bcid=bf2dc9dd81e2b73bac14012727728307
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To which a friend comments:
===========================
It's not "We would be at war with each other" - we are at war with each other, though the violence has been low level (but expensive) and carried out by proxies and outliers.
Trump's side cannot afford to let this go. Even if it doesn't return him to the White House three things need to happen.
1) Significant evidence of voter fraud has to be gathered and presented to the public even if we never know if it affected the outcome of the election.
2) Some people caught cheating have to be sent to prison to do hard time in a real joint.
3) The Biden administration has to be crippled by opposition in every way possible.
This could be summarized as, the cost of stealing an election has to be made prohibitively high.
-
"the cost of stealing an election has to be made prohibitively high."
- May I add a hundred exclamation points to that.
-
To which a friend comments:
===========================
It's not "We would be at war with each other" - we are at war with each other, though the violence has been low level (but expensive) and carried out by proxies and outliers.
Trump's side cannot afford to let this go. Even if it doesn't return him to the White House three things need to happen.
1) Significant evidence of voter fraud has to be gathered and presented to the public even if we never know if it affected the outcome of the election.
2) Some people caught cheating have to be sent to prison to do hard time in a real joint.
3) The Biden administration has to be crippled by opposition in every way possible.
This could be summarized as, the cost of stealing an election has to be made prohibitively high.
If there was fraud, there shouldn't be a Biden administration.
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Exactly. Which precisely brings us to the question presented to my first post of the day on this thread.
-
https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2020/11/19/wed-be-at-war-with-each-other-rod-dreher-imagines-president-trump-governing-during-a-second-term/?utm_source=twtydaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&bcid=bf2dc9dd81e2b73bac14012727728307
Goolag is trying hard to hide the article.
https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2020/11/19/wed-be-at-war-with-each-other-rod-dreher-imagines-president-trump-governing-during-a-second-term/
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If there was fraud, there shouldn't be a Biden administration.
Right. Further on that, IF there was widesread fraud such as vote changing software, and IF said perps get away with it and take power there is no (peaceful, electoral) way following that to take back power. The win is absolute and permanent. Cf. Chavez, Maduro, Venezuela.
In 2004 Chavez faced a recall election. Exit polls indicated he lost 40-60. Official vote said he won 60-40, a 40 point swing. Obvious at least to me, he cheated via central computer vote total manipulation.
Jimmy Carter "observed" the election. Colin Powell 'certified' it thinking they had more important things going on, and the socialist totalitarian regime never faced a real election again.
In this case the pre-election polling was false making the cheat harder to notice.
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Benjamin Franklin: "A Republic, if you can keep it"
2020: NOPE
If there was fraud, there shouldn't be a Biden administration.
Right. Further on that, IF there was widesread fraud such as vote changing software, and IF said perps get away with it and take power there is no (peaceful, electoral) way following that to take back power. The win is absolute and permanent. Cf. Chavez, Maduro, Venezuela.
In 2004 Chavez faced a recall election. Exit polls indicated he lost 40-60. Official vote said he won 60-40, a 40 point swing. Obvious at least to me, he cheated via central computer vote total manipulation.
Jimmy Carter "observed" the election. Colin Powell 'certified' it thinking they had more important things going on, and the socialist totalitarian regime never faced a real election again.
In this case the pre-election polling was false making the cheat harder to notice.
-
historian see today like early 1900s as a repeat in this sense:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?477722-1/isolationism
I need to see whole segment to sort it out in my own mind
not sure exactly what their final conclusions are at first partial viewing.
-
https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/30/the-amorality-of-the-lefts-equality-extremism/?fbclid=IwAR19prVblqSf1DKsDcjPfpk4bYXyHzAy7b6Fq9JADVcEFAJek7WGVPWqels
-
https://dailycaller.com/2020/12/18/donald-trump-nominates-charlie-kirk-1776-commission-advisory/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2680&pnespid=j7ZotvJDXFCNe_HmQayrSnZ8Ru1O9aOYxZbahwfJ
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/12/18/trump-taps-conservative-giants-to-lead-1776-commission-n1219741
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https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/16/will-america-split-history-says-yes/?fbclid=IwAR1vVcE5VDnRAfqf8VmWbleqs0WTmvLSMlCVnyGwcmnbNChH6xUKorbza-Q
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https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/why-americas-founders-didnt-want-democracy/?fbclid=IwAR1YGvX6mAj4MfmdABjOuUKqk7k2J8UZr45QFmCSnU3wdEzlLvUsF1i9Ht4
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https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/07/great-debate-edmund-burke-thomas-paine-yuval-levin-shaun-rieley.html?fbclid=IwAR3nV1wr9c6vhhjgb3ez_lL35v-NObAwUPDpZ6pQZTGYZFZFUEpPpAFrE-Y
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Glenn Beck said this morning, paraphrasing, 'I support succession. Theirs.' If liberals want to leave our constitution, our system, our country, our freedom, I support that. Let them give up their rights. I won't give up mine.
----
I support liberalism, collective health care, welfare state, high taxes, giving up self defense, green new deal, all of it, on an opt in, opt out, basis. They can have all of it as long as I retain the right to opt out. Let's have separate rules but still live and socialize among each other. Consensual government. Cooperate where we can agree and run on separate rules where we cannot.
Next time Republicans cut tax rates and Democrats go nuts about how wrong that is, the reduced tax rates won't apply to them.
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Thatcher believed that, in the end, you could only succeed by preparing and thinking. As she said, "First you win the argument, then you win the vote."
https://www.heritage.org/commentary/margaret-thatchers-lesson-triumph-do-your-homework
Once in awhile Trump was brilliant at making the policy argument (and he earned 75 million votes). Parts of the debates were about issues. But most of the time the argument was about votes and labels, not about which side of an issue or policy question is right and why.
On the forum we do issues and try to get things right. But are we reaching enough people and changing any minds?
I still don't know how to do that. I can't make others focus on what I think (know) is important.
Trump and Loeffler successfully painted Warnock as a Socialist and a Castro sympathizer. Then he won. No one, it seems, takes the time to make the case that being a socialist and a Castro sympathizer is a bad thing.
The so-called right wing has right wing media. We can talk to ourselves and sharpen our opinion arguments to a degree. What we don't have are mainstream sources that everyone would want to get information from that don't have left wing bias and don't have right wing bias. I hate that I have to read right wing sources to get facts that don't fit left wing doctrinaire.
Addressing the continuing leftward indoctrination issue is a must in all 'way forward' discussions.
"First you win the argument." No. First you must find a way for those you want to persuade to hear the argument.
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Now address massive and blatant electoral/vote fraud.
Thatcher believed that, in the end, you could only succeed by preparing and thinking. As she said, "First you win the argument, then you win the vote."
https://www.heritage.org/commentary/margaret-thatchers-lesson-triumph-do-your-homework
Once in awhile Trump was brilliant at making the policy argument (and he earned 75 million votes). Parts of the debates were about issues. But most of the time the argument was about votes and labels, not about which side of an issue or policy question is right and why.
On the forum we do issues and try to get things right. But are we reaching enough people and changing any minds?
I still don't know how to do that. I can't make others focus on what I think (know) is important.
Trump and Loeffler successfully painted Warnock as a Socialist and a Castro sympathizer. Then he won. No one, it seems, takes the time to make the case that being a socialist and a Castro sympathizer is a bad thing.
The so-called right wing has right wing media. We can talk to ourselves and sharpen our opinion arguments to a degree. What we don't have are mainstream sources that everyone would want to get information from that don't have left wing bias and don't have right wing bias. I hate that I have to read right wing sources to get facts that don't fit left wing doctrinaire.
Addressing the continuing leftward indoctrination issue is a must in all 'way forward' discussions.
"First you win the argument." No. First you must find a way for those you want to persuade to hear the argument.
-
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/breaking-patriots-made-way-inside-capitol-pence-evacuated-lawmakers-sheltering-place/
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/breaking-patriots-made-way-inside-capitol-pence-evacuated-lawmakers-sheltering-place/
https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1346905425543917573
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/breaking-patriots-made-way-inside-capitol-pence-evacuated-lawmakers-sheltering-place/
https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1346905425543917573
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/breaking-patriots-inside-nancy-pelosis-office-emails-open-screen/
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/392006.php
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/breaking-patriots-made-way-inside-capitol-pence-evacuated-lawmakers-sheltering-place/
https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1346905425543917573
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/breaking-patriots-inside-nancy-pelosis-office-emails-open-screen/
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https://www.theblaze.com/news/georgia-democrat-vernon-jones-joins-gop--?utm_source=theblaze-dailyPM&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily-Newsletter__PM%202021-01-06&utm_term=ACTIVE%20LIST%20-%20TheBlaze%20Daily%20PM
to list for '24?
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https://www.theblaze.com/news/georgia-democrat-vernon-jones-joins-gop--?utm_source=theblaze-dailyPM&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily-Newsletter__PM%202021-01-06&utm_term=ACTIVE%20LIST%20-%20TheBlaze%20Daily%20PM
to list for '24?
OUR VOTES COUNT!
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/23/transmitting-the-truth-about-americas-founding/
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/thoughts-on-the-1776-commission-and-its-report/#slide-1
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https://www.brenthamachek.com/post/understanding-and-embracing-the-role-of-the-21st-century-american-dissident
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/02/nullifying-the-bullet-fee/
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https://populist.press/rush-limbaughs-replacement-has-officially-been-announced/
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I'm good with that 8-)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzaTyn4g3E4&t=1s
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I LOVE this term!
=================
“The Parasitic Mind” is not the first book to rail against postmodernism and its negative cultural fallout, but the book’s animating metaphor is original and compelling. Saad argues that the ideological forces governing the progressive mindset that have undermined our Enlightenment-inspired attachment to empiricism, reason and the scientific method are “idea pathogens.” These cognitive pathogens mimic brain parasites in animals that, for example, can cause mice to stop fearing cats, or moose to turn in endless circles, robbing them of their survival instincts.
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America Needs History and Civics Education to Promote Unity
A plan to help teachers instill an understanding that is complete and honest but not cynical.
Editor’s note: This article is signed by six former U.S. education secretaries: Lamar Alexander, Arne Duncan, John King, Rod Paige, Richard Riley and Margaret Spellings.
Following years of polarization and the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the world’s oldest constitutional democracy is in grave danger. We stand at a crossroads, called to protect this democracy and to work toward unity. Current and future generations will look back to examine how we chose to act, and why.
A key part of our task is to reinvigorate teaching and learning of American history and civics in our nation’s schools. A constitutional democracy requires a citizenry that has a desire to participate, and an understanding of how to do so constructively, as well as the knowledge and skills to act for the common good. Yet a history and civics education for the 21st century must also grapple with the difficult and often painful parts of our history—including enslavement, segregation and racism, indigenous removals, Japanese-American internment, denials of religious liberty and free speech, and other injustices.
We need teaching and learning that pursues an account of U.S. constitutional democracy that is honest about the wrongs of the past without falling into cynicism, and appreciative of the American founding without tipping into adulation. To turn pluribus into unum, we need curriculums that achieve a more plural and complete story of U.S. history, while also forging a common story, the shared inheritance of all Americans.
Regrettably, civics, which teaches skills of participation and the knowledge that sustains it, and history, which provides a frame of reference for the present, have been sorely neglected over the past half-century in U.S. schools. This cannot continue to be the case.
Right now, we collectively spend about 1,000 times more per student on science, technology, engineering, and math education than we do on history and civics. Where civics education is taught, it is often hampered by a lack of consensus about what to teach and how.
But there is a way forward that will let us rebuild civics and history alongside STEM education.
Despite our differences on policy and priorities, we believe that the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy provides a promising path. The project is the result of a 19-month collaboration among more than 300 scholars, educators, practitioners and students from diverse backgrounds. The ambition of this plan is to re-establish civics and American history as essential components of education.
The Roadmap aims to renew the study of history and to rebuild civic education from the ground up, by providing guiding principles for states, local school districts and educators across the U.S. They, in turn, can establish their own standards and tailor curricular materials to their local communities. For example, using the plan, Texas may choose to devote more attention to the war between the U.S. and Mexico in the 1840s, while Massachusetts may choose to look more closely than others at the early phases of the colonial conflict with Great Britain, in which Boston played a dominant role. The plan recommends key content and instructional strategies for history and civics at every grade level. And it does so with an eye toward meeting the wide-ranging needs of today’s students.
The Educating for American Democracy Initiative offers a new vision for history and civics that supports educators in dealing effectively with fundamental tensions inherent in civic learning, integrates a diversity of experiences and perspectives throughout, and cultivates civil disagreement and reflective patriotism. As an example, the Roadmap can help teachers guide conversations among students about how we can integrate the perspectives of Americans from all backgrounds when analyzing the content of the philosophical foundations of American constitutional democracy. The recommendations of the Roadmap weave history and civics together and inspire students to learn by asking difficult questions, such as “What does our history reveal about the aspirations and tensions captured by the motto E pluribus unum?” then seeking answers in the classroom through facts and discussion.
Importantly, the Roadmap is not a set of national standards or a national curriculum. It is instead a call to action to invest in strengthening history and civic learning. It lays a foundation to deliver opportunities for excellence in civic learning equitably to all students.
The American K-12 education system has always worked to respond to the needs of the nation. The early republic emphasized history, reading and math. In the mid-20th century, the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik and the dawn of an era of global economic competition drove a turn toward investment in STEM education. And during the early part of this century, our attention has turned to preparing students from marginalized communities to succeed in high school and college.
Now the fragility of our democratic institutions is in plain sight. This is the time to give priority to history and civics education for American children.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmmnKdU2sok
Watch, share.
Also Nike:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDWLSAdf48o
And American Airlines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg89CSkoSuI
Short, hard hitting ads.
With new Biden Left rules such as banning 'stepped up basis' on inheritance where you can't leave your after tax nest egg to your children, why not spend it now and make an impact? The Left controls every institution you can name except maybe Hillsdale college and Fire Hydrant of Freedom. It's time to ignore election cycle timing of political ads and start bringing these 'woke' people down a notch - every chance we get.
Credit: consumersresearch.org
I was going to say, donate, but looks like their website is under attack.
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You aren't voting, or donating your way out of this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmmnKdU2sok
Watch, share.
Also Nike:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDWLSAdf48o
And American Airlines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg89CSkoSuI
Short, hard hitting ads.
With new Biden Left rules such as banning 'stepped up basis' on inheritance where you can't leave your after tax nest egg to your children, why not spend it now and make an impact? The Left controls every institution you can name except maybe Hillsdale college and Fire Hydrant of Freedom. It's time to ignore election cycle timing of political ads and start bringing these 'woke' people down a notch - every chance we get.
Credit: consumersresearch.org
I was going to say, donate, but looks like their website is under attack.
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Coca Cola has been around 135 years without a backlash like this. The product IS poison. Pissing off the only people who might defend their right to make it and sell it was a bonehead move of historic proportion.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/06/08/jack-ciattarelli-wins-republican-primary-for-new-jersey-governor/
gotta rid us of the Goldman Sachs multimillionaire leftist elitist
( looking out for the plebs) democrat Phil Murphy whose NJ was Last state to get rid of mask mandates outdoors and indoors I believe
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https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/marjorie-taylor-greene-evolution-130522823.html
she is NOT the way forward
overall
IMHO
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https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/marjorie-taylor-greene-evolution-130522823.html
she is NOT the way forward
overall
IMHO
Typical leftist smear job. She fights. Unlike 90% of republicans.
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"Typical leftist smear job. She fights. Unlike 90% of republicans."
yes I get it but why can't we have fighters who do not at times sound like idiots
Like Trump or Greene?
maybe think for 15 seconds before you open your big trap.
Like Desantis
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"Typical leftist smear job. She fights. Unlike 90% of republicans."
yes I get it but why can't we have fighters who do not at times sound like idiots
Like Trump or Greene?
maybe think for 15 seconds before you open your big trap.
Like Desantis
Most politicians on either side are idiots.
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https://americanmind.org/features/red-lines/
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https://k12.hillsdale.edu/Curriculum/The-Hillsdale-1776-Curriculum/
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/14/life-liberty-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness/
-
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/14/life-liberty-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness/
American freedom is vanishing in front of us.
-
Under attack-- and it will vanish if we don't fight for it.
-
Under attack-- and it will vanish if we don't fight for it.
1. They can't win if we won't surrender.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/they_cant_win_if_we_wont_surrender.html
The losing team decides when it's over. That puts us in the driver's seat. :wink:
2. Right Direction - Wrong Direction. THIS defines the game today. Not right-left. Not red-blue. Not are you better off now than you were 4 years ago. It's simpler than that. Every policy choice either leads us in the right direction or in the wrong direction. Start your scorecard.
Real Clear Politics average: 32% say the country is moving in the right direction (under Dem rule). 60% say wrong direction. The 32% know this is failure, but approve of the direction. These are the unwinnables from our point of view, only 32% of the country. All the rest are either on our side or potentially persuadable.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/direction_of_country-902.html
Here's an example defining right direction, wrong direction. Trump handed Biden a recovering economy (and a warp speed vaccine). The GDP growth rate was 6%. Today it is 1%.
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=1791.msg133596#msg133596
https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow
GDP growth is what pays for everything we need collectively, from balancing the budget to healthcare to infrastructure to clean energy and zero emissions. Poor people and poor countries can't and don't do that. If you don't have increasing revenues from a growing economy, you can't do more with bridges, helping people or cleaning up the environment.
Our policies brought Black and Hispanic unemployment to all time lows.
Their policies brought back inflation, high gas prices and record numbers leaving their jobs.
https://news.yahoo.com/us-inflation-reaches-highest-rate-045822300.html
https://www.wibc.com/blogs/mock-n-rob/gas-prices-surged-more-than-42-since-biden-took-office/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/business/economy/workers-quitting-august.html
The difference has never been clearer or simpler or easier to make the argument.
Yes, we will vote our way out of this and this is how.
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You can’t outvote vote fraud.
Under attack-- and it will vanish if we don't fight for it.
1. They can't win if we won't surrender.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/they_cant_win_if_we_wont_surrender.html
The losing team decides when it's over. That puts us in the driver's seat. :wink:
2. Right Direction - Wrong Direction. THIS defines the game today. Not right-left. Not red-blue. Not are you better off now than you were 4 years ago. It's simpler than that. Every policy choice either leads us in the right direction or in the wrong direction. Start your scorecard.
Real Clear Politics average: 32% say the country is moving in the right direction (under Dem rule). 60% say wrong direction. The 32% know this is failure, but approve of the direction. These are the unwinnables from our point of view, only 32% of the country. All the rest are either on our side or potentially persuadable.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/direction_of_country-902.html
Here's an example defining right direction, wrong direction. Trump handed Biden a recovering economy (and a warp speed vaccine). The GDP growth rate was 6%. Today it is 1%.
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=1791.msg133596#msg133596
https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow
GDP growth is what pays for everything we need collectively, from balancing the budget to healthcare to infrastructure to clean energy and zero emissions. Poor people and poor countries can't and don't do that. If you don't have increasing revenues from a growing economy, you can't do more with bridges, helping people or cleaning up the environment.
Our policies brought Black and Hispanic unemployment to all time lows.
Their policies brought back inflation, high gas prices and record numbers leaving their jobs.
https://news.yahoo.com/us-inflation-reaches-highest-rate-045822300.html
https://www.wibc.com/blogs/mock-n-rob/gas-prices-surged-more-than-42-since-biden-took-office/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/business/economy/workers-quitting-august.html
The difference has never been clearer or simpler or easier to make the argument.
Yes, we will vote our way out of this and this is how.
-
Dick Morris
on newsmax today
cannot find a link to it yet
but he points out how the "infrastructure " bill
whether it is 3.5 T
or 1.5 T
will be a disaster for the Republican party (and anyone who calls him/herself a taxpayer)
he had a guest on who actually studied the multi 1,000 page bill
and deep within it are provisions
that will exponentially expand union bosses power
force everyone to unionize
initially with the Federals paying for it
only to get everyone addicted to more taxpayer handouts
so when the Feds back off paying for it the States will be forced to pay
and the "red"states will thus have to increase tax rates
those that do not do income tax will have to
the employees in the red states will have to unionize
driving up wages prices
and dragging the red states into the slums like the blue states
in other words wipe out red state advantages
NO AMOUNT OF INFRASTRUCTURE BILL IS GOOD FOR US
NOT even 10 cents!
of course the god damn romneys will fold or cowardly pretend they are so bipartisan and cut a deal with his big DUMB face smiling and proclaiming how it is only 1.5 trillion
all the while the devil is in the details
stake holders HAVE put pressure on manchiin and semena
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LA port ranks 338 in the world for efficiency
in other words it is totally inefficient
we can thank unions for this
prices back logs of supply chain
thank the unions
speaking of unions, lets take a close look at one of the teacher's union heads,
weingarten
who is as close to a mob boss as can think of :
https://celebhook.com/what-is-randi-weingarten-net-worth-riches-and-fortunes-of-the-head-of-aft/
anyone care to guess she has more than 1.5 mill stashed away somewhere?
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https://www.unionfacts.com/employee/National_Education_Association/BECKY/PRINGLE
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https://www.newsmaxtv.com/Shows/Dick-Morris-Democracy/vid/1_j4w7s7jm
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Ummm , , , not seeing how that is "The Way Forward" :-D
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well by stopping the "infrastructure bill"
is one step in the right direction
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Not really what the thread has in mind-- looking more for winning strategies, articulations, etc.
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https://americanmind.org/salvo/being-dangerous/?fbclid=IwAR2qp8yxHn22ZU2t7fWq1D290YFSygE5D4ohNgE8ETd3k22bNHDFkxP1HW0
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https://americanmind.org/salvo/being-dangerous/?fbclid=IwAR2qp8yxHn22ZU2t7fWq1D290YFSygE5D4ohNgE8ETd3k22bNHDFkxP1HW0
Your community is your country. The FUSA is Brandoned.
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https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/04/the-age-of-entitlement-christopher-caldwell-chuck-chalberg.html
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Christopher Caldwell’s “The Age of Entitlement”
good food for thought
I like the analogy
like Roosevelt saved capitalism
Reagan saved the 60s
yes Reagan did nothing to slow spending
I guess to get his increase in spending for the military he allowed the crats to spend like wild drunks at a casino
and yes Reagan also made a grave error in granting amnesty to illegals
setting it up for todays debacle
Was he (RR) in cahoots or snookered on this issue - good question
is Trump the last gasp
I hope not, but do think so.......
ask GM
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I have read the Caldwell book. VERY good, highly recommended.
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"yes Reagan did nothing to slow spending
I guess to get his increase in spending for the military he allowed the crats to spend like wild drunks at a casino"
- That is right. Reagan never had the House of Representatives on his side so he never controlled the budget. He could get what he wanted, not just military spending but defeating the Soviet Union, only through conceding something important to the Democrats. The actual dollars of that social spending then were survivable but the trend of spending going up and up and up was not. One other point on Reagan's compromising to get what was most important to the country at the time, he got reelected, won 59 states. The Reagan revolution was stopped and erased in its tracks if Mondale won, and much of the success came in his second term and beyond.
"and yes Reagan also made a grave error in granting amnesty to illegals"
- Once again, that number of illegals granted amnesty, bad policy, was survivable, but the trade he made was with scoundrels, so the future number coming in accelerated instead of being stopped as promised. One fault of honest people with character is they don't always see right away the deceit in others.
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In evaluating Reagan also to be kept in mind is that the interface of baseline budgeting projections based upon Carter era inflation levels and the unexpectedly rapid decline in inflation due to Volcker at the Fed meant that the meaning of the nominal increases in spending per the baseline became increasingly "real" and decreasingly "nominal".
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House Freedom Caucus to help push state lawmakers’ agendas
BY KERRY PICKET THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The House Freedom Caucus plans to broaden its reach into state legislatures to provide conservative policymakers with resources and tools to push their legislative agendas.
The State Freedom Caucus Network will be led by longtime GOP strategist Andy Roth and House Freedom Caucus Executive Director Justin Ouimette, and has the direct support of the House Freedom Caucus.
The State Freedom Caucus Network is intended to give support to conservative state lawmakers who have limited resources compared to what is available at the national level, a senior GOP aide close to the Freedom Caucus told The Washington Times.
“There are people or people in states that want the same thing here in Congress. The Freedom Caucus exists to speak for the millions of Americans that feel like this place has forgotten them,” Rep. Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican who was recently elected the new chair of the Freedom Caucus and assumes the role Jan. 1, said in an interview. “It stands for transparency, fairness in government and constitution. They want the same thing in the states.”
The House Freedom Caucus can help provide state-level lawmakers resources such as staffing, communication, strategy, tactics and logistics that give them the space to deliver their message more effectively while pushing back on their own leadership from time to time.
House Republican leadership has not spoken to Freedom Caucus staff about the new program, according to the GOP aide.
Much of the collaboration includes key caucus members in Congress repeating their messages, retweeting their tweets, visiting their regions to promote what they’re doing, appearing in media with them and writing op-eds in their local newspapers.
“All of that obviously matters at the federal level, but there’s a lot more noise to filter out at the state level when you’re in a fight,” the GOP aide said.
“Everything can focus on that, and you know, with the Freedom Caucus brand, the hope is not only do you know that they’re serious about following through on doing what they said they were going to do, but that they’re going to have the backup to stick around, politically and carry out that mission.”
The House Freedom Caucus sees the expansion into the states as an opportunity to pick up on issues to campaign on during the 2022 midterms. The HFC wants to zero in on federal money that funds critical race theory training, vouchers for school choice and resisting vaccine mandates.
“It’s definitely a hope that we have enough states that push on a single issue that we can show. It’s not just sort of grassroots to federal, but that every level of conservative Republican is crying out for a policy fix,” the GOP aide said.
As of now, it is unknown which states the State Freedom Caucus Network will launch. However, a slew of state lawmakers likely to be part of the new initiative could very well become a farm team for the next congressional class of House Freedom Caucus members.
The HFC sees this new state network as a way to show off new up-and-coming conservative political talent who will be pre-vetted if they decide to run for higher office one day.
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Former Trump national security adviser H. R. McMaster argues in a chapter titled “Overcoming the Chinese Communist Party’s Campaign of Co-Option, Coercion and Concealment” that corporate shareholders should demand that U.S. corporations follow a 3-point oath in their dealings with China.
Do not transfer sensitive technology that gives the CCP a military advantage or unfair economic advantage.
Do not help the CCP stifle human freedom and perfect its police state.
Do not compromise the long-term viability of companies in exchange for short-term profits.
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Former Trump national security adviser H. R. McMaster argues in a chapter titled “Overcoming the Chinese Communist Party’s Campaign of Co-Option, Coercion and Concealment” that corporate shareholders should demand that U.S. corporations follow a 3-point oath in their dealings with China.
Do not transfer sensitive technology that gives the CCP a military advantage or unfair economic advantage.
Do not help the CCP stifle human freedom and perfect its police state.
Do not compromise the long-term viability of companies in exchange for short-term profits.
Amen. Adding one:
4. You shouldn't need to be told this.
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Constitution’s preamble explains America’s mission statement
By David Azerrad
Editor’s note: This is one in a series examining the Consti-tution and Federalist Papers in
today’s America.
The preamble to our Constitution was a last-minute addition to the document that, according to the courts, has no substantive legal meaning. Yet it contains the noblest articulation of the mission statement for our country. America exists not just to secure the rights of its people or to allow them to get ahead in life, but also to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
From the outset, the Constitution distinguishes between liberty and its blessings, and in so doing, teaches us that not all uses of liberty will yield blessings. The Founders would find laughable the libertarian and liberal claims that unbridled sexuality, drug legalization, obscenity and the celebration of perversity are blessings of liberty. They would be appalled to see their own language invoked by the likes of David French to defend “Drag Queen Story Hour” at the local library as a blessing of liberty.
With the Preamble, the Constitution also teaches us to think of ourselves not just as rights-bearing individuals, but also as custodians tasked with transmitting to our posterity the blessings of liberty we inherited from our forefathers. “We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them,” Lincoln long ago observed. “They are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors.” These blessings, therefore, do not really belong to us, but to our posterity. We are not at liberty to squander them, but must transmit them whole to the next generation, who in turn, must do the same for their children. Americans are thus bound together across time in an intergenerational compact among the living, the dead and the not-yet-born.
If we are to discharge our solemn duties, then we must first ensure that there be a posterity. This has very much become a problem in our time. Not only has the fertility rate hit a new historic low of 1.64 children per woman, but it is also well below the replacement rate (2.1). Like the rest of the developed world, we seem to be losing the will to live.
Of these births, a disproportionate share are the children of immigrants. Since 1965, America has witnessed the largest migration in recorded human history (precise numbers are hard to come by, but 65 million newcomers is a reasonable estimate). To quote former President Bill Clinton, “No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time.” Unlike earlier European immigrants, these more recent arrivals come from cultures more dissimilar to ours.
Many will surely assimilate and become part of our posterity. But the incentives for doing so grow weaker with each passing year. Modern technology allows all to remain connected to their homelands, while our elites mercilessly disparage America, inviting newcomers and natives alike to despise it.
Merely having posterity is ultimately not enough. Our children must be raised in such a way that they, too, can live as free citizens. “When we are planning for posterity,” Thomas Paine warned, “we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.”
Who today can look to the next generations and feel confident about our country’s future? Millennials and Generation Z are not just the “wokest” generations, they’re also the most physically and mentally frail. They’ve been to school but their teachers have, for the most part, failed to instill in them a love for their country and an appreciation of its complicated, but nonetheless triumphant past.
The fault ultimately lies not with them, but with previous generations. When the domestic onslaught against America began in the 1960s, those to whom the country had been entrusted capitulated. They did put up some good fights and some of the old blessings of liberty were not extinguished (we still have a First and a Second Amendment). On the whole, though, the Silent Generation and the baby boomers presided over the country’s decline and saddled subsequent generations with an unconscionable level of both financial and moral debt.
The task now falls to the growing number of “unwoke” among the young to revitalize this great nation. However ill-prepared they may be, they realize that the current course is unsustainable. They see that liberty may disappear in their own time. In fact, all it takes is a new, relatively mild COVID-19 variant to shut down businesses, churches and schools. They already feel the crushing boot of censorship and see the persecution of political enemies by the regime and their corporate allies.
The odds are long, but the cause is not lost. The regime is powerful, but also incompetent and hated by a growing number of people. The backlash is brewing. It just needs to be mobilized, deepened and harnessed to rebuild the blessings of liberty for posterity.
• David Azerrad is an assistant professor at Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government in Washington.
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https://online.hillsdale.edu/courses/american-citizenship-and-its-decline
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=80&v=Fq-uqWOD090&feature=emb_logo
https://www.policyed.org/intellections/common-sense-solution-our-civics-crisis/video?utm_term=0_0d7dc39948-49dd0b8529-73401809&utm_campaign=49dd0b8529-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_06_01_06_39_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=202191050&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9bqZFJ5oRVVxYauGifWSYDC__KJgpbP6hbKIBegSMjn0tO6lZqggOtP5PfLfHsgaPR2UnUzAqWIY1V_wosh6NDZXSCYA&utm_source=PolicyEd%20Newsletter
https://www.hoover.org/research/civics-education-let-it-bloom?utm_campaign=Newsletter&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=202191050&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8j-9DB6E7KEzEZiuJCd-KAj23wpW-p6t_OZWXHWNsiRM8sOl6tu1WODCOPWXDd5HUvRK6Ja-XypUrFGeNbOwTkO8FLqw&utm_content=202190997&utm_source=hs_email
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How to fix this?
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-zaibatsu-ization-of-america/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=203567535&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9raEvbB7thnoNlWY8t8wY-dQFM5McqXrntYZMHhRyGRvgwveN8fbqhsgZZpihvPtyoOrIgJGmGnBqigvltARsWwt9F3A&utm_content=203567535&utm_source=hs_email
Salvo
02.09.2022
15 minutes
The Zaibatsu-ization of America
Joel Kotkin
US-IT-lifestyle-Amazon-internet-technology-economy-computers
Our tech overlords have forsaken innovation for consolidation.
Enthusiasts of “the new economy” long cherished the notion that it would be different from the unenlightened, sluggish, and piggish older one. Yet our economy seems increasingly to resemble not some hippy capitalist utopia, but the deeply concentrated economy of pre-war Japan.
At the time, Japan had developed an economic model around a handful of large corporate conglomerates called zaibatsu. Organized as a “financial clique,” with a bank at the center, these firms extended their interests into virtually all economic activity. They included Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda. Mitsubishi led the way in shipbuilding, steel, and of course aircraft, being the creator of the famous Zero fighter.
Until bested by their onetime allies in the military, the zaibatsu dominated Japan. The war initially benefited them, but ultimately ruined their businesses as Japan was devastated. Yet they were so essential to the function of the economy that they were gradually rehabilitated during the U.S. occupation, recreating their historic pattern of using smaller firms as convenient subordinates.
Today we see the rise of a few companies, who have moved into virtually every aspect of our economy. The nerds of Silicon Valley are no longer just interested in gadgets to make life better but are seizing control of both the production and dissemination of information. Arguably the greatest beneficiaries of a pandemic that hooked people ever more on their products, the tech giants now have the capital to lead the drive into space and the forced march to electrical vehicles, while also looking into dominating more prosaic fields like healthcare and finance.
The zaibatu-ization of America’s economy presents an enormous problem of governance. Our constitutional structure is based on the notion of many competing players. When concentration became too evident, and politically potent, as during the early decades of the last century, measures were taken to slow, and even reverse, over-concentration. Yet in the past few decades, the largest emerging corporate interests—Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon—and a handful of large financial institutions gained unprecedented control over the economy. By last summer six tech firms, including Tesla, accounted for half the value of the NASQAQ 100. By 2020, the five largest tech companies had total revenue amounting to half of those of all state governments combined.
The new tech industry rose dramatically in the eighties. Achieving an almost mythological status, these companies faced few barriers to ascendency. Unlike corporate rivals in sectors like energy and telecommunications, there was little to prevent their hegemony over the digital domain. They have extended that rule to other fields in a way that would have made zaibatsu executives, or further back, powerful feudal daimyo envious. In virtually every key field— operating systems, social media, search, the cloud—a handful of firms now dominate. For example, Google and Apple account for nearly 90 percent of all mobile browsers worldwide, while Microsoft by itself controls 90 percent of all operating system software. Three tech firms now account for two-thirds of all on-line advertising revenues, which comprises the vast majority of all ad sales.
Small business are now waiting to be gutted. Amazon secretly mined sales data from independent sellers who were using the company’s e-commerce platform in order to guide Amazon’s development of cheaper knock-off products. Google has been fined billions of dollars for giving preferential treatment to its own shopping service on its search site and has been accused by one of its few competitors, the much smaller Duck Duck Go, of manipulating browser extensions to drive customers from rival products. Apple continues to place strict limits on who can join its App Store and how developers can receive money from apps.
Days of Innovation Past
We are a long way from the early days of Silicon Valley, a remarkable mashup of new and old companies, full of enthusiasts eager to build new products that often challenged the existing corporate hierarchy. I personally witnessed the exciting birth of this revolution; now these same companies are the hierarchy, and like hierarchies in general, they have become oppressive towards competitors and far less creative than they once were.
They are busily taking control of the means of information. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google already dominate the cloud and are now seeking control of underwater cables; in the past decade the large tech giants have boosted their share of undersea cable traffic from less than ten percent to roughly two-thirds.
The CEOs may still wear hoodies and speak woke, but they essentially seek, like other monopolists, to consolidate their market position, making them both essentially risk-averse, anti-competitive, and overweening. Mike Malone, who has chronicled Silicon Valley over the past quarter century, sees the Valley as having lost much of its egalitarian ethos; the new masters of tech, he suggests, have shifted “from…blue-collar kids to the children of privilege,” while also moving away from the production ethos that made the Valley so inspiring and egalitarian. “An intensely competitive industry,” he suggests, has become enamored with the allure of “the sure thing” backed by massive capital. If there is a potential competitor, they simply buy it.
Yet in many ways, the new tech zaibatsu differ from their Japanese counterparts in critical ways, particular in terms of place and national loyalty. The traditional Japanese business combines, like their German equivalents, had an international ambition, but were solidly tied to national interests. They wanted a diversified economy, which at the time was based around the key industries of the time—shipbuilding, aircraft, and steel. These all required a domestic concentration of skills, capital, and plants. Competition came from foreign firms, but managers worked to limit penetration into domestic markets.
Our new chieftains have no national allegiance. Today’s corporate hegemons see themselves not as national identities, but global ones. They don’t even depend much on our own education system: some 75 percent of Silicon Valley’s workforce are not even citizens. Many are H-IB indentured servants, “technocoolies,” brought in short-term contracts to do work they don’t have to pay Americans to do.
The Rich Have More Money
The rich, as Fitzgerald noted, may always have been “different” from us but, for the most part, they used to identify as Americans, and with few exceptions, rallied to the nation’s cause in time of crisis and foreign confrontations. The new elites represent something very different. They largely see no need, for example, to confront China’s challenge for global preeminence, as long as they can get a piece of the action. Virtually all our elite, particularly on Wall Street as well as Silicon Valley, is betting on China, and seem far less than interested in helping America, or liberal capitalism, stand up to autocracy than making ever more profits in the short-term. Their advocacy for “zero-carbon,” which will make energy far more expensive, reflects a priority expressive of both virtue signaling and an opportunity to make profits, even at national expense.
Apple’s $275 billion deal with China, which guarantees the firm’s continued dependence on the Middle Kingdom, and also promises to hand over technology to the center of an emerging authoritarian world-state, epitomizes the antinational tech perspective. China certainly has trained the tech oligarchs well to ignore human rights violations in Xinxiang and Hong Kong, as was made frightening clear by one of them who claims, probably correctly, that “no one” cares about these issues. Perhaps they won’t stand up against an invasion of Taiwan as long as Xi gives them the microchips they need once the party has secured control of the island republic’s fabled fabs.
But if the American zaibatsu are uninterested in the prosperity or health of their fellow countrymen, they have broad ambitions to control virtually all aspects of American culture, politics, and news. This has had a chilling effect on free speech. If the different companies and individuals represented a diversity of opinion that might be a neutral matter. But, with few exceptions, virtually all the tech companies embrace the same progressive politics, particularly on issues like the environment, gender, and race that do not directly assault their own wealth and power.
This process reflects the milieu in which these companies operate. For one thing, they are almost all centered in two places—the San Francisco Bay Area and the Puget Sound—that have long been among the deepest blue areas in the country. They recruit heavily from both foreigners, who are now told not to embrace supposedly corrupt “American values,” and from elite colleges where political indoctrination has made many CEOs, notes the Bay Area Council’s Jim Wunderman, “afraid of their own employees.”
Donald Trump’s 2020 loss may have been caused by his far from adept handling of the pandemic, but also efforts heavily financed by tech oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on getting the desired electoral result. The oligarchs had many business reasons to detest both Trump and his loudly nationalist policies, and have openly boasted, as pointed out in Time (owned by Salesforce’s Mark Benioff) of their success in removing the former President.
Consolidation
The oligarchs increasingly are moving to consolidate their hegemony. The big media backed by the oligarchs tends to be woke, and their donations often go to groups that are at best left of liberal. The Washington Post under Jeff Bezos, an unrepentant and voracious capitalist, has become more far-left progressive than under its previous more genteel, though clearly liberal, owners.
In the largest platforms, increasingly, Covid and climate policy skeptics—even when highly credentialed are consigned to the digital gulag. Unlike traditional media barons, they don’t have to worry much about losing customers, because, , notes Peter Thiel, they operate from the high space of monopoly or oligarchy, where their market shares reach 80 to 90 percent. As Mike Lind has noted, these are exemplars of “tollbooth capitalism,” which receive revenues on transactions that far exceed anything they lose on media.
This influences their approach to culture and entertainment. A woke television series may not do well, much like the remakes of popular movies, the premium cable stations could be losing their audience at a rapid rate, but in the end, this represents little more than petty change to the oligarchs while vastly increasing their influence and access to celebrities. Amazon Prime, for example, in 2020 spent $11 billion on entertainment content, barely a rounding area in a company enjoying over $330 billion in revenues.
The consequences for the future of society, however, is less than trifling. In entertainment. Netflix, essentially a creation of the venture capital industry, turned out to be just the harbinger. Now Apple has its own studio, as does Amazon, which is also looking to buy MGM. The streaming world is run from Palo Alto or Seattle, not from Hollywood. And as we move into the much larger game industry, Microsoft struck a $75 billion deal for Activision, expanding its already enormous presence in videogames. Meanwhile, while the much touted metaverse— now the latest Wall Street dream—could turn experience into a branded product for the new overlords.
In the coming years, there is still an opportunity to control, and limit, the zaibatsuing of our economy and society. Some, including right-wing libertarians, place their bets on “creative destruction” to limit oligarchic power. And to be sure, we may see even some of the mega-giants change hands, or merge, and an occasional new player could emerge. But in the “one and done” era, there’s not much evidence for such wishful thinking; these firms generally are not losing market share, and, if they do, they can acquire new opportunities by buying competitors, much as Facebook, now Meta, swallowed Instagram, What’sApp and then Oculus, whose technology stands at the core of the metaverse.
For the current Administration, with strong ties to both tech and Wall Street oligarchs, the future presents difficult choices. The public is increasingly skeptical about the tech zaibatsu, fearing for both privacy and censorship. The far left driving the party, epitomized by Senator Bernie Sanders, is constitutionally hostile to ultra-wealth corporate powers, and demands harsh constraints on their power. Smaller tech firms, like Yelp, Sonos and Y Combinator also are seeking constraints on zaibatsu power.
But something more important than the political fate of Joe Biden is at stake. Zaibatu-ization essentially undermines the promise of liberal capitalism. The current order is not winning over the populace; a strong majority of people in 28 countries around the world, according to a recent Edelman survey, believe capitalism does more harm than good. More than four in five worry about job loss, most particularly from automation. Rising inequality and general fear of downward mobility have boosted support for expanded government and greater re-distribution of wealth.
Instead, we will have to see some policies, as we saw over 100 years, that control these firms or even break them up, as occurred to their Japanese equivalents after the Second World War. Their well-financed backers in Washington, with firms like Meta, Amazon and Google employing lobbyists on right and left, will resist. But here’s to think that the public is not quite as stupid as the hegemons believe. They know that the tech zaibatsu limit economic opportunity and competitions while threatening free speech and our basic privacy. The question is whether Washington has the appetite to control them before it’s too late.
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second
https://americanmind.org/salvo/men-and-the-future-of-america/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=203567535&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--9a1Xq61yYktYEh_CvKZod5E-F_xxxGGa6UGDnk1wxV98B-ENuF91Tj_YOhvB5Y89kRWdiuX-SEGaxUY-rnYPYvBCVVw&utm_content=203567535&utm_source=hs_email
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" some 75 percent of Silicon Valley’s workforce are not even citizens. "
is this right ? :-o
"Instead, we will have to see some policies, as we saw over 100 years, that control these firms or even break them up, as occurred to their Japanese equivalents after the Second World War. Their well-financed backers in Washington, with firms like Meta, Amazon and Google employing lobbyists on right and left, will resist. But here’s to think that the public is not quite as stupid as the hegemons believe. They know that the tech zaibatsu limit economic opportunity and competitions while threatening free speech and our basic privacy. The question is whether Washington has the appetite to control them before it’s too late."
probably already too late ......
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Freedom is in retreat in the US lately and around the world. I will try to find the source for that besides our own lying eyes.
The Chinese model of authoritarianism is gaining ground here and others around the world are becoming neutral about the fact that China is becoming the greatest power as the US recedes.
Covid created a political climate that allowed for "emergency" authoritarian rule in a formerly constitutional republic.
Republicans having a good year in 2022 off year elections - IF THEY DO - does not change all that. In fact it barely changes anything. Better committee assignments?
Fire Hydrant of Freedom stands for, um, freedom. )
Some of us here (me in particular) are aging. Need to find a way to make a bigger difference, sooner rather than later.
Many, many people are becoming are becoming cynical about the liberal Left woke BS - without embracing the alternative.
How do we reach more people with better, stronger, clearer, more persuasive messages and solutions?
Now is the time.
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You aren't voting your way out of this.
Freedom is in retreat in the US lately and around the world. I will try to find the source for that besides our own lying eyes.
The Chinese model of authoritarianism is gaining ground here and others around the world are becoming neutral about the fact that China is becoming the greatest power as the US recedes.
Covid created a political climate that allowed for "emergency" authoritarian rule in a formerly constitutional republic.
Republicans having a good year in 2022 off year elections - IF THEY DO - does not change all that. In fact it barely changes anything. Better committee assignments?
Fire Hydrant of Freedom stands for, um, freedom. )
Some of us here (me in particular) are aging. Need to find a way to make a bigger difference, sooner rather than later.
Many, many people are becoming are becoming cynical about the liberal Left woke BS - without embracing the alternative.
How do we reach more people with better, stronger, clearer, more persuasive messages and solutions?
Now is the time.
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I didn't say vote. I already do that. I said, do more.
You aren't retreating and surrendering your way out of this.
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Wrap your head around the fact that the American Republic is deader than J. Epstein (If he isn't on Pedo Island II and a NYC Homeless man was buried in his place). Stolen elections have consequences and the left will NEVER voluntarily give up power again. There is NO RULE OF LAW anymore. IF BurnLootMurder targets you and/or your daughter, don't expect the MN authorities to protect or defend you or avenge your victimization. You are just tax cattle of the wrong pallor and you live only as long as some BLM/Antifa/3rd world savage (With a very high IQ) doesn't decide otherwise.
You aren't voting your way out of this.
Freedom is in retreat in the US lately and around the world. I will try to find the source for that besides our own lying eyes.
The Chinese model of authoritarianism is gaining ground here and others around the world are becoming neutral about the fact that China is becoming the greatest power as the US recedes.
Covid created a political climate that allowed for "emergency" authoritarian rule in a formerly constitutional republic.
Republicans having a good year in 2022 off year elections - IF THEY DO - does not change all that. In fact it barely changes anything. Better committee assignments?
Fire Hydrant of Freedom stands for, um, freedom. )
Some of us here (me in particular) are aging. Need to find a way to make a bigger difference, sooner rather than later.
Many, many people are becoming are becoming cynical about the liberal Left woke BS - without embracing the alternative.
How do we reach more people with better, stronger, clearer, more persuasive messages and solutions?
Now is the time.
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"How do we reach more people with better, stronger, clearer, more persuasive messages and solutions?
Now is the time."
We need clear message headlines AND GOALS
new contract with America
closer to election so Dems/media/ivy leagues cannot have time to cut it off at the knees
We need it to COUNTER LEFTist policies and sound convincing
We need to explain with the messages and goals exactly what we are fighting for and what will happen if we don't win.
40 to 45 % of people will not give a shit what we do or say
So we are reaching out to the rest
I am not optimistic facing all the powerful forces against us.
but agree we have to keep fighting
"voting will not get us out of this mess"
yet I do not hear any alternatives -
just innuendos
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9JwrV0t0Qs
Less time playing tennis/golf, more time on the range, getting ready for the two-way range.
"How do we reach more people with better, stronger, clearer, more persuasive messages and solutions?
Now is the time."
We need clear message headlines AND GOALS
new contract with America
closer to election so Dems/media/ivy leagues cannot have time to cut it off at the knees
We need it to COUNTER LEFTist policies and sound convincing
We need to explain with the messages and goals exactly what we are fighting for and what will happen if we don't win.
40 to 45 % of people will not give a shit what we do or say
So we are reaching out to the rest
I am not optimistic facing all the powerful forces against us.
but agree we have to keep fighting
"voting will not get us out of this mess"
yet I do not hear any alternatives -
just innuendos
-
"Many, many people are becoming are becoming cynical about the liberal Left woke BS - without embracing the alternative."
yes and when we see Biden poll numbers in the toilet
many of those who disapprove
are mad they did not get free tuition
more reparations
and their free stuff agenda is being hurt by Biden administration screwing things up
more then they are suddenly Republican ....
-
quote author=ccp
"...we have to keep fighting..."
THIS.
------
Prepping and range shooting is plan b. protect what you have left.
G M: The Left will not give up power.
'Giving up power' is incremental. You don't think there will be a new Speaker of the House next January? 30 or maybe 218 House Democrats do.
With a member suffering a stroke, R's lead in the Senate right now 50-49. You don't think winning a few seats there this year matters or is possible?
With what ought to be a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court, you don't think Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett joining Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito on crucial constitutional votes (like gun rights), or stopping their next anti-constitutional appointee matters?
In my congressional district MN-3, a fake moderate Dem holds votes 99% Nancy Pelosi, holds office with the support of suburban parents whose kids got masked, 'vaccinated' and taught they are racist - we shouldn't waste effort on an energetic challenge to his seat? I strongly disagree.
We've been through this before and I don't follow you there. As mentioned with aging, I don't have time to argue whether it matters. IT ALL MATTERS. Margin of victory (and of defeat) matters. Michele Tafoya co-chairing Kendall Qualls campaign matters. To everyone who cares, doing more matters. Every state legislative district race matters. Every school board election matters. Who we pick for 2024 matters.
My arguments, if I could reach them, go out to the Leftists to challenge them on the dismal results of their failed policies, and to the independents and undecideds who deserve to hear another side of it before they fully make up their mind and vote.
-----------------------------------------
ccp: many of those who disapprove
are mad they did not get free tuition
more reparations
and their free stuff agenda is being hurt by Biden administration screwing things up
more than they are suddenly Republican ....
- Yes but they are learning that free everything isn't free, isn't everything, and more often than not does not help them.
The inflation tax is hitting everyone, those economically challenged the hardest. Getting the government to pay your food, phone, heat, electricity, internet, health care, transportation and so on is a hassle, promotes the underground economy that doesn't fund your neighborhood and is contract with the government to stay poor for the rest of your life and to wish that for your children and theirs. You get all the free stuff, keep your income low as they require, and then find out the other party believes in you, supports school choice, respects your freedom and educational and economic potential. If only people would put out the message.
We can change people's lives and their votes, especially with the utter failure of the Leftist policies becoming so obvious.
-
Remember when the republicans had power, so they ended Obamacare like they promised?
quote author=ccp
"...we have to keep fighting..."
THIS.
------
Prepping and range shooting is plan b. protect what you have left.
G M: The Left will not give up power.
'Giving up power' is incremental. You don't think there will be a new Speaker of the House next January? 30 or maybe 218 House Democrats do.
With a member suffering a stroke, R's lead in the Senate right now 50-49. You don't think winning a few seats there this year matters or is possible?
With what ought to be a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court, you don't think Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett joining Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito on crucial constitutional votes (like gun rights), or stopping their next anti-constitutional appointee matters?
In my congressional district MN-3, a fake moderate Dem holds votes 99% Nancy Pelosi, holds office with the support of suburban parents whose kids got masked, 'vaccinated' and taught they are racist - we shouldn't waste effort on an energetic challenge to his seat? I strongly disagree.
We've been through this before and I don't follow you there. As mentioned with aging, I don't have time to argue whether it matters. IT ALL MATTERS. Margin of victory (and of defeat) matters. Michele Tafoya co-chairing Kendall Qualls campaign matters. To everyone who cares, doing more matters. Every state legislative district race matters. Every school board election matters. Who we pick for 2024 matters.
My arguments, if I could reach them, go out to the Leftists to challenge them on the dismal results of their failed policies, and to the independents and undecideds who deserve to hear another side of it before they fully make up their mind and vote.
-----------------------------------------
ccp: many of those who disapprove
are mad they did not get free tuition
more reparations
and their free stuff agenda is being hurt by Biden administration screwing things up
more than they are suddenly Republican ....
- Yes but they are learning that free everything isn't free, isn't everything, and more often than not does not help them.
The inflation tax is hitting everyone, those economically challenged the hardest. Getting the government to pay your food, phone, heat, electricity, internet, health care, transportation and so on is a hassle, promotes the underground economy that doesn't fund your neighborhood and is contract with the government to stay poor for the rest of your life and to wish that for your children and theirs. You get all the free stuff, keep your income low as they require, and then find out the other party believes in you, supports school choice, respects your freedom and educational and economic potential. If only people would put out the message.
We can change people's lives and their votes, especially with the utter failure of the Leftist policies becoming so obvious.
-
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/067/964/835/original/33dcddaedfc8eab6.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/067/964/835/original/33dcddaedfc8eab6.jpeg)
Remember when the republicans had power, so they ended Obamacare like they promised?
quote author=ccp
"...we have to keep fighting..."
THIS.
------
Prepping and range shooting is plan b. protect what you have left.
G M: The Left will not give up power.
'Giving up power' is incremental. You don't think there will be a new Speaker of the House next January? 30 or maybe 218 House Democrats do.
With a member suffering a stroke, R's lead in the Senate right now 50-49. You don't think winning a few seats there this year matters or is possible?
With what ought to be a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court, you don't think Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett joining Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito on crucial constitutional votes (like gun rights), or stopping their next anti-constitutional appointee matters?
In my congressional district MN-3, a fake moderate Dem holds votes 99% Nancy Pelosi, holds office with the support of suburban parents whose kids got masked, 'vaccinated' and taught they are racist - we shouldn't waste effort on an energetic challenge to his seat? I strongly disagree.
We've been through this before and I don't follow you there. As mentioned with aging, I don't have time to argue whether it matters. IT ALL MATTERS. Margin of victory (and of defeat) matters. Michele Tafoya co-chairing Kendall Qualls campaign matters. To everyone who cares, doing more matters. Every state legislative district race matters. Every school board election matters. Who we pick for 2024 matters.
My arguments, if I could reach them, go out to the Leftists to challenge them on the dismal results of their failed policies, and to the independents and undecideds who deserve to hear another side of it before they fully make up their mind and vote.
-----------------------------------------
ccp: many of those who disapprove
are mad they did not get free tuition
more reparations
and their free stuff agenda is being hurt by Biden administration screwing things up
more than they are suddenly Republican ....
- Yes but they are learning that free everything isn't free, isn't everything, and more often than not does not help them.
The inflation tax is hitting everyone, those economically challenged the hardest. Getting the government to pay your food, phone, heat, electricity, internet, health care, transportation and so on is a hassle, promotes the underground economy that doesn't fund your neighborhood and is contract with the government to stay poor for the rest of your life and to wish that for your children and theirs. You get all the free stuff, keep your income low as they require, and then find out the other party believes in you, supports school choice, respects your freedom and educational and economic potential. If only people would put out the message.
We can change people's lives and their votes, especially with the utter failure of the Leftist policies becoming so obvious.
-
Doug writes:
"The inflation tax is hitting everyone, those economically challenged the hardest. Getting the government to pay your food, phone, heat, electricity, internet, health care, transportation and so on is a hassle, promotes the underground economy that doesn't fund your neighborhood and is contract with the government to stay poor for the rest of your life and to wish that for your children and theirs. You get all the free stuff, keep your income low as they require, and then find out the other party believes in you, supports school choice, respects your freedom and educational and economic potential. If only people would put out the message.
We can change people's lives and their votes, especially with the utter failure of the Leftist policies becoming so obvious."
ccp:
I fear we still need more pain
under Democrats to drive this point home ...
though for now, looking good for '22.
afterwards
don't know
we need a new birth of freedom
without violence ? hope so but not holding my breath
-
(https://i0.wp.com/stonetoss.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/democrats-are-the-real-racists-comic.png?fit=625%2C300)
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/067/964/835/original/33dcddaedfc8eab6.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/067/964/835/original/33dcddaedfc8eab6.jpeg)
Remember when the republicans had power, so they ended Obamacare like they promised?
quote author=ccp
"...we have to keep fighting..."
THIS.
------
Prepping and range shooting is plan b. protect what you have left.
G M: The Left will not give up power.
'Giving up power' is incremental. You don't think there will be a new Speaker of the House next January? 30 or maybe 218 House Democrats do.
With a member suffering a stroke, R's lead in the Senate right now 50-49. You don't think winning a few seats there this year matters or is possible?
With what ought to be a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court, you don't think Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett joining Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito on crucial constitutional votes (like gun rights), or stopping their next anti-constitutional appointee matters?
In my congressional district MN-3, a fake moderate Dem holds votes 99% Nancy Pelosi, holds office with the support of suburban parents whose kids got masked, 'vaccinated' and taught they are racist - we shouldn't waste effort on an energetic challenge to his seat? I strongly disagree.
We've been through this before and I don't follow you there. As mentioned with aging, I don't have time to argue whether it matters. IT ALL MATTERS. Margin of victory (and of defeat) matters. Michele Tafoya co-chairing Kendall Qualls campaign matters. To everyone who cares, doing more matters. Every state legislative district race matters. Every school board election matters. Who we pick for 2024 matters.
My arguments, if I could reach them, go out to the Leftists to challenge them on the dismal results of their failed policies, and to the independents and undecideds who deserve to hear another side of it before they fully make up their mind and vote.
-----------------------------------------
ccp: many of those who disapprove
are mad they did not get free tuition
more reparations
and their free stuff agenda is being hurt by Biden administration screwing things up
more than they are suddenly Republican ....
- Yes but they are learning that free everything isn't free, isn't everything, and more often than not does not help them.
The inflation tax is hitting everyone, those economically challenged the hardest. Getting the government to pay your food, phone, heat, electricity, internet, health care, transportation and so on is a hassle, promotes the underground economy that doesn't fund your neighborhood and is contract with the government to stay poor for the rest of your life and to wish that for your children and theirs. You get all the free stuff, keep your income low as they require, and then find out the other party believes in you, supports school choice, respects your freedom and educational and economic potential. If only people would put out the message.
We can change people's lives and their votes, especially with the utter failure of the Leftist policies becoming so obvious.
-
Remember when the republicans had power, so they ended Obamacare like they promised?
That "Republican" "majority" included McCain, Flake and so on. We give up because McCain broke his promise?
As mentioned, picking the right candidates matters.
-----------------------
The media are against us, year 60. Oh poor us. Let's give up the country then.
We found out, most obvious in the past 5 years, we don't have a media. Paraphrasing Glenn Reynolds, we have Radical Left partisan operatives with by lines. They didn't investigate Trump Russia; they merely repeated what they heard, when it advanced their narrative. Now we know they were wrong. Now we know they don't care and will continue to get crucial things wrong.
We have right and left media and they don't intersect. Why don't we, our side, change that? Again, what I mean by do more. I will put up money, 1/millionth ownership, to build a new newspaper and new network that doesn't lean left, right or center, just investigates hard and reports real news better than anyone on the planet. That wouldn't be hard. The bar is low.
-
"Let's give up the country then."
You don't have a country anymore. Give up your illusions.
The only country we will have is the one we rebuild on the ruins of what was the American Republic.
Remember when the republicans had power, so they ended Obamacare like they promised?
That "Republican" "majority" included McCain, Flake and so on. We give up because McCain broke his promise?
As mentioned, picking the right candidates matters.
-----------------------
The media are against us, year 60. Oh poor us. Let's give up the country then.
We found out, most obvious in the past 5 years, we don't have a media. Paraphrasing Glenn Reynolds, we have Radical Left partisan operatives with by lines. They didn't investigate Trump Russia; they merely repeated what they heard, when it advanced their narrative. Now we know they were wrong. Now we know they don't care and will continue to get crucial things wrong.
We have right and left media and they don't intersect. Why don't we, our side, change that? Again, what I mean by do more. I will put up money, 1/millionth ownership, to build a new newspaper and new network that doesn't lean left, right or center, just investigates hard and reports real news better than anyone on the planet. That wouldn't be hard. The bar is low.
-
"You don't have a country anymore. Give up your illusions."
- Give up, give up, give up. Tell it to someone else. I'm not giving up.
"The only country we will have is the one we rebuild on the ruins of what was the American Republic."
- Give the tyrants complete power, then take over. Like the freedom seeking uprising about to overthrow the regime in China? I'm not buying it.
Don't give the tyrants another inch. And why should we? Everything is leaning our way right now because of Leftist overreach. Right up until we win part of it back and screw it up again. How do we not win the argument with the Left this time around?
Take state control of the six most recent swing states, and more, and the next steal can be stopped. But not if we spend every minute fighting our own side.
-
Keith Ellison is your AG. Leftist militias can do as they wish on your streets without police interference. At least 2 million illegals have streamed over the border as a direct result of the stolen election. Luckily, all we need to do is vote in the right republicans! If we can just vote hard enough to outvote the vote fraud!
"You don't have a country anymore. Give up your illusions."
- Give up, give up, give up. Tell it to someone else. I'm not giving up.
"The only country we will have is the one we rebuild on the ruins of what was the American Republic."
- Give the tyrants complete power, then take over. Like the freedom seeking uprising about to overthrow the regime in China? I'm not buying it.
Don't give the tyrants another inch. And why should we? Everything is leaning our way right now because of Leftist overreach. Right up until we win part of it back and screw it up again. How do we not win the argument with the Left this time around?
Take state control of the six most recent swing states, and more, and the next steal can be stopped. But not if we spend every minute fighting our own side.
-
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/why_nearly_40_percent_of_gen_z_identify_as_lgbtq.html
-
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/why_nearly_40_percent_of_gen_z_identify_as_lgbtq.html
https://wilderwealthywise.com/war-youre-soaking-in-it/
-
"War, You’re Soaking In It"
indeed
many good points
succint
" Warfare in our current time starts to look like what someone did to the Iranians: drop in a virus that makes their centrifuges that they were using to process nuclear material break. Imagine the electrical grid being as reliable as Venezuela’s grid. Sure, it could be enemy action. But with current trends, it could also be our own ineptitude at running things in a world where hiring by merit seems to be a thing of the past.
What happens if every tenth financial transaction in our electronic payment system is “missed”? How many days until the payment infrastructure is shut down and the entire country is in chaos? What happens if Walmart™ experiences failure in the logistics and tracking system for the billions of dollars worth of goods that it handles? How many people does Walmart© feed?
Due to the current emergency, Walmart™ has announced that they’ll open a second register.
These are all warfare, and don’t require a single soldier or a panzer division. Moreover, this is exactly the type of warfare that has already been planned and prepared for in Moscow and Beijing."
reading this the question becomes :
Is this how our CIVIL WAR will be conducted
problem with this is the LEFT controls most geeks
-
"Keith Ellison is your AG."
I don't know why this is me vs you. He is "my" AG because of lost elections, twice. Urban and suburban voters not knowing that is wrong and "my" message not getting out. I warned about him before most heard of him.
Meanwhile R's won 50%of the House seats and the state Senate in a state that was furthest left a few Presidents ago.
Ellison will go the way of the way of the suburban vote. Isn't that tied to the better messaging point you are so quick to shoot down? Suburbs decide most close states. Dies inflation, collapse and mayhem favor them? I don't think so.
We don't need MN to win national elections. It's not one of the 6 closest, even though Hillary beat Trump in '16 by 2 points.
How does "give up" get Keith Ellison, and Omar and Phillips out?
-
It's not me vs. you. It's us vs. those who destroyed the republic and want you, me and our families in camps and/or mass graves. I'm just pointing out the dire situation you are in because of where you are. If you are in a location where the left holds the levers of power, you are on the razor's edge.
"Keith Ellison is your AG."
I don't know why this is me vs you. He is "my" AG because of lost elections, twice. Urban and suburban voters not knowing that is wrong and "my" message not getting out. I warned about him before most heard of him.
Meanwhile R's won 50%of the House seats and the state Senate in a state that was furthest left a few Presidents ago.
Ellison will go the way of the way of the suburban vote. Isn't that tied to the better messaging point you are so quick to shoot down?
We don't need MN to win national elections. It's not one of the 6 closest, even though Hillary beat Trump in '16 by 2 points.
How does give up get Keith Ellison, and Omar and Phillips out?
-
" more time on the range, getting ready for the two-way range"
Also known as "Peace Through Strength". How does the saying go? If we would have Peace, then let us prepare for War.
-
" more time on the range, getting ready for the two-way range"
Also known as "Peace Through Strength". How does the saying go? If we would have Peace, then let us prepare for War.
Unfortunately, we are already at war, though it's totally one sided at this point.
-
https://www.yahoo.com/news/sex-scandal-missouri-cost-gop-195024581.html
I don't know what other thread to post this.
I don't really follow Missouri politics
My nephew no longer works for Hawley
He went out on his own with some others in a start up .
He does keep in touch with Josh and remains embedded in GOP politics though.
-
saw it last night but I found to be so rousing I needed to see it again:
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/02/18/mark-levin-the-largest-political-party-in-this-country-hates-america/
-
A magnificent distillation of how we got to where we are and what lies ahead.
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-continuing-crisis/?fbclid=IwAR1FY3_pIsP4y1cqRq327hxBo3XVYNAlPt8LIBx7eU8mk_ykNDfwYoSfNZg
-
CD post above:
"The Continuing Crisis
The election and its aftermath."
by Michael Anton
"VDH like" ability to 'summarize' nicely what we see, feel, and think!
Especially the 2020 election summary of the grift we had shoved down our throats
-
https://www.scribd.com/document/560483746/11-Point-Plan-to-Rescue-America#from_embed
-
https://americanmind.org/salvo/ukraine-and-the-american-future/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=205069079&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9hrGPCzeW2gfz--EGzMPDv7Ud9DpiO2ZH2eIKnxw4P3kZ4qqLCoZv1nLsv9OTryhHDdQY40zhd-PGXtjQQ1KSBcrrI3g&utm_content=205069079&utm_source=hs_email
-
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/kat-cammack-disney-florida-parental-rights/2022/04/06/id/1064528/
I really like this
instead of listening to Obama et al smugly telling "who we are [commies subservient to elites]
and we are the wrong side of history
lets start spitting it back in their faces
WE are on the "right side of history" - which we are
-
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/kat-cammack-disney-florida-parental-rights/2022/04/06/id/1064528/
I really like this
instead of listening to Obama et al smugly telling "who we are [commies subservient to elites]
and we are the wrong side of history
lets start spitting it back in their faces
WE are on the "right side of history" - which we are
https://www.rainn.org/news/grooming-know-warning-signs
SEXUAL ASSAULT
Grooming: Know the Warning Signs
JUL 10, 2020
One tool common to those who sexually abuse kids is grooming: manipulative behaviors that the abuser uses to gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught. While these tactics are used most often against younger kids, teens and vulnerable adults are also at risk.
Grooming can take place online or in-person. It’s usually employed by a family member or someone else in the victim’s circle of trust, such as a coach, teacher, youth group leader or others who naturally have some interaction with the victim.
Though grooming can take many different forms, it often follows a similar pattern.
Victim selection: Abusers often observe possible victims and select them based on ease of access to them or their perceived vulnerability.
Gaining access and isolating the victim: Abusers will attempt to physically or emotionally separate a victim from those protecting them and often seek out positions in which they have contact with minors.
Trust development and keeping secrets: Abusers attempt to gain trust of a potential victim through gifts, attention, sharing “secrets” and other means to make them feel that they have a caring relationship and to train them to keep the relationship secret.
Desensitization to touch and discussion of sexual topics: Abusers will often start to touch a victim in ways that appear harmless, such as hugging, wrestling and tickling, and later escalate to increasingly more sexual contact, such as massages or showering together. Abusers may also show the victim pornography or discuss sexual topics with them, to introduce the idea of sexual contact.
Attempt by abusers to make their behavior seem natural, to avoid raising suspicions. For teens, who may be closer in age to the abuser, it can be particularly hard to recognize tactics used in grooming. Be alert for signs that your teen has a relationship with an adult that includes secrecy, undue influence or control, or pushes personal boundaries.
Grooming Family and Community
Grooming behaviors are not only used to gain a victim’s trust, but often are used to create a trustworthy image and relationship with their family and community. Child and teen sexual abusers are often charming, kind, and helpful — exactly the type of behavior we value in friends and acquaintances. You don’t need to be suspicious of everyone who is kind to your child; most people are well intentioned and trustworthy. But you should be on guard that this type of behavior is sometimes just a mirage, a way for an abuser to gain your trust so they have more direct access to your child (and make it less likely that the child will be believed if they speak up about the abuse). You should also talk to your kids about risks and boundaries, and make sure they know that they can come to you if anyone crosses a line.
-
Good post on a very important subject, but probably better to post about it here:
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=1438.msg14562#msg14562
-
Good post on a very important subject, but probably better to post about it here:
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=1438.msg14562#msg14562
Grooming children is now a standard practice for public school teachers. That's fueling the screaming about Florida's bill.
-
I get that. Please take it to the Parenting thread.
-
Great story.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/04/05/justice-barrett-heckled-onstage-at-reagan-library-it-didnt-work-out-well-for-the-heckler-n1587284
The program was interrupted by a heckler who screamed that Barrett was an “enslaver of women,” apparently because of her anti-abortion position.
Without batting an eyelash, the mother of seven responded to the heckler.
“As a mother of seven, I am used to distractions and sometimes even outbursts,” which elicited a round of applause and laughter from the capacity crowd.
-
well it is a step in the right direction:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2022/04/07/republicans-sweep-tuesday-elections-as-2022-red-wave-builds-n2605613
VOTE harder !!! :-D
only way out of this short of guns
or capitulation
-
well it is a step in the right direction:
...
VOTE harder !!! :-D
only way out of this short of guns
or capitulation
Freedom isn't free anymore (and never was).
"Vote harder", whether sincere or mocked, means doing ALL those things within the process and to protect the electoral process.
Everyone (who cares) does everything they can to make a difference every available minute of every day - if you understand the seriousness of it - or we all lose; this is a war, political so far.
How hard do people think it is to win back freedom from tyranny after we piss it away? Freedom isn't what follows the collapse, sorry.
Ask the people of the Soviet Union that lived without freedom for 90 years (and then 30 more) or Cuba, NK, Venezuela or the locked-down millions in China right now. Once you lose your right to free speech, free assembly * and level playing field consensual government (and arms), it's nearly impossible to win back - and can't be done without outside help. There is no USofA coming to help us when we fall.
* Can't assemble at a public university, can't even assemble in a private club because it is already infiltrated: https://www.startribune.com/conservative-minnesota-think-tank-says-its-a-victim-of-cancel-culture/600163096/
It's time to fight back.
Death caused by very very old age is when we give up.
-
AMEN.
-
""Vote harder", whether sincere or mocked"
it was sincere
a rib to GM :-D
-
https://qz.com/2152116/could-the-student-debt-crisis-lead-to-a-recession/?utm_source=YPL
how disgusting
staring down election losses
they now want an executive order to give away another free largess
at the expense of all those who did actually pay for college and tax payers
I thought Congress held purse strings?
what legal scholars are they referring to besides Harvard democrat partisan Larry Lib who will say anything to get Dems elected
-
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2077876/a-glimpse-of-ideal-america
-
Second
God Does Bless America
Conrad Black
Conrad Black
May 2, 2022 Updated: May 2, 2022biggersmaller Print
Commentary
The consequences for the country of the Biden administration’s cascade of blunders in every policy area are serious, and the vacuum created in the world by the evaporation of American leadership is dangerous and worrisome.
But no one who felt the agonies of the Trump–Russia collusion fraud and the fatuous Trump impeachment trials, and the enthronement of megalomaniacal scientists in order to justify shutting down the economy so that Trump could be blamed for an economic depression, and who was disgusted by the unconstitutional changes to voting and vote-counting rules and the abdication of the judiciary in addressing these issues, can fail to find the disintegration of the Biden regime and its media allies somewhat amusing.
Chris Wallace, formerly of Fox News, led the lionization of Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose professional and administrative competence are not at issue but who was transported by the great eminence suddenly conferred upon him to lead the nation in a zig-zag pattern of changes of pace and opinion that continues still and undoubtedly resulted in a great deal of needless economic and psychological hardship.
Fauci white-washed the role of the Chinese Communist Party and of the World Health Organization, both of which we are now almost certain were duplicitous and negligent in not doing all that was possible to prevent the spread of the coronavirus from China. Fauci also appears to have disguised his own organization’s role in financing the research that may have accidentally led to the creation and escape of the coronavirus. The entire anti-Trump media was responsible for the lionization of Fauci far beyond what his performance warranted, but Wallace started the ball rolling with an infamously sycophantic interview.
His conduct as moderator of the first presidential debate was also so partisan that it was, as Trump himself stated in the course of the debate, almost as if he were debating two opponents. Just as the media during the campaign permitted Joe Biden to remain in his basement in Delaware while they conducted his campaign for him by smearing the Republican administration, Wallace effectively provided the same service during the first debate (though it must be said that Trump did himself no favors by his gratuitous bellicosity and over-frequent interruptions).
Wallace gave a fair exposé of his biases when he pronounced Biden’s platitudinous and monosyllabic inaugural address as the best that had been delivered of all the 16 that he had heard, starting with John F. Kennedy’s celebrated remarks in 1960.
In most cases, it’s distasteful and unsportsmanlike to celebrate the setbacks of other people, and I moderately reproach myself for doing it here, but there’s something naturally just and exquisitely symmetrical in the quick sequence of Wallace leaving Fox News for CNN, declaring his pleasure at joining “Jeff Zucker and his great team” and helping launch the CNN streaming service, as that network lost almost 75 percent of its primetime viewers, Zucker resigned, the new streaming service attracted approximately 5/100 of 1 percent of adult Americans, and it was shutdown after approximately three weeks. Though he was undoubtedly well paid for his brief sojourn on the CNN streaming service and will be back somewhere, the professional whereabouts of Wallace are unknown.
The exposure of the apparent fraudulence of Black Lives Matter (BLM) is another welcome development: Who can forget the ludicrous spectacle of Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) marching with them a few days after the tragic death of George Floyd and declaring his adherence to the movement, as many of the nation’s largest and stupidest corporations deluged BLM with hundreds of millions of dollars of contributions without, apparently, the elemental verification that these were authentic charitable donations. It’s clear that they were not, that the corporate donors emancipated themselves from the least professionalism or thoroughness before pitching out the shareholders’ money in a manner that is probably not tax-deductible and went to an organization that originally became well known for condoning the murder of white policemen, and is now an alleged tax cheat. Even as corporate America was opening up its wallet, BLM’s leader in New York (Hawk Newsome) threatened to burn America down.
The tragedy and the outrage on the southern border in which more than 2 million people surge into the country illegally, annually, in a process more reminiscent of the barbarians overwhelming the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. than it does any recognizable form of immigration, vastly enriches the brutal Mexican drug importing and slave-trading gangs. It has from the start been more infuriating because of the uninterrupted mendacity of the Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas. From his first weeks in that job, as the Trump wall was stopped and the new president effectively invited the desperate and the derelict of the world to come to America and straight onto the welfare rolls and into its public health and education systems, and millions have answered, Mayorkas was doggedly announcing, “The border is closed,” as the other half of the split television screen showed pictures of large numbers of people walking or wading or swimming across the border at various sites and all hours.
What must surely be the coruscation, the ne plus ultra of the hypocrisy and incompetence of the whole Bidenization phenomenon must be Mayorkas’s happy announcement at a congressional committee this past week that his department was setting up a “misinformation and disinformation board” to correct falsehoods in the media and that it was being led by a person who has already proved herself to be a compulsively untruthful, rabidly partisan myth-maker who had stooped to putting on the Internet her own screechy rendition of the Mary Poppins song in the service of the full canon of Trump-hating mythology. It’s humorous, but it is, unfortunately, insane.
Vladimir Putin is supposedly causing inflation, the oil companies are themselves responsible for the decline in American oil production, and no one has any idea what America’s war aims are in Ukraine other than to prevent Russia from taking over the entire country. It’s a pitiful and contemptible administration, but events elsewhere have reassured Americans who are seeking it that God does bless America. Otherwise, Russia, which could easily have humiliated the West by simply seizing another chunk of Ukraine and leaving it at that, has bungled this invasion so badly that if Putin thinks he can take the Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine and continue to shower missiles down on the populated areas of the whole country indefinitely, NATO will have to give Ukraine the ability to reply against Russian territory. All Putin’s huffing and puffing about nuclear weapons is just buffoonery when all you will need to do to end the war with no attacks on Russia itself is accept a quarter of a loaf. China will have to take note of the Ukraine fiasco—Taiwan is a highly sophisticated, very well-armed island 110 miles of open water away from China. Invading it would be a terrible challenge, and the Chinese should understand that.
This awful time of poor government in the United States will disabuse both parties of mindless lurches to the left, will reinstall a sensible Republican administration and Congress, and the blunders of America’s rivals in the world will make the international cost of the Biden fiasco reasonably affordable.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
-
"This awful time of poor government in the United States will disabuse both parties of mindless lurches to the left, will reinstall a sensible Republican administration and Congress, and the blunders of America’s rivals in the world will make the international cost of the Biden fiasco reasonably affordable."
Oh? No more cheating at the elections from now on? Such good news!
Second
God Does Bless America
Conrad Black
Conrad Black
May 2, 2022 Updated: May 2, 2022biggersmaller Print
Commentary
The consequences for the country of the Biden administration’s cascade of blunders in every policy area are serious, and the vacuum created in the world by the evaporation of American leadership is dangerous and worrisome.
But no one who felt the agonies of the Trump–Russia collusion fraud and the fatuous Trump impeachment trials, and the enthronement of megalomaniacal scientists in order to justify shutting down the economy so that Trump could be blamed for an economic depression, and who was disgusted by the unconstitutional changes to voting and vote-counting rules and the abdication of the judiciary in addressing these issues, can fail to find the disintegration of the Biden regime and its media allies somewhat amusing.
Chris Wallace, formerly of Fox News, led the lionization of Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose professional and administrative competence are not at issue but who was transported by the great eminence suddenly conferred upon him to lead the nation in a zig-zag pattern of changes of pace and opinion that continues still and undoubtedly resulted in a great deal of needless economic and psychological hardship.
Fauci white-washed the role of the Chinese Communist Party and of the World Health Organization, both of which we are now almost certain were duplicitous and negligent in not doing all that was possible to prevent the spread of the coronavirus from China. Fauci also appears to have disguised his own organization’s role in financing the research that may have accidentally led to the creation and escape of the coronavirus. The entire anti-Trump media was responsible for the lionization of Fauci far beyond what his performance warranted, but Wallace started the ball rolling with an infamously sycophantic interview.
His conduct as moderator of the first presidential debate was also so partisan that it was, as Trump himself stated in the course of the debate, almost as if he were debating two opponents. Just as the media during the campaign permitted Joe Biden to remain in his basement in Delaware while they conducted his campaign for him by smearing the Republican administration, Wallace effectively provided the same service during the first debate (though it must be said that Trump did himself no favors by his gratuitous bellicosity and over-frequent interruptions).
Wallace gave a fair exposé of his biases when he pronounced Biden’s platitudinous and monosyllabic inaugural address as the best that had been delivered of all the 16 that he had heard, starting with John F. Kennedy’s celebrated remarks in 1960.
In most cases, it’s distasteful and unsportsmanlike to celebrate the setbacks of other people, and I moderately reproach myself for doing it here, but there’s something naturally just and exquisitely symmetrical in the quick sequence of Wallace leaving Fox News for CNN, declaring his pleasure at joining “Jeff Zucker and his great team” and helping launch the CNN streaming service, as that network lost almost 75 percent of its primetime viewers, Zucker resigned, the new streaming service attracted approximately 5/100 of 1 percent of adult Americans, and it was shutdown after approximately three weeks. Though he was undoubtedly well paid for his brief sojourn on the CNN streaming service and will be back somewhere, the professional whereabouts of Wallace are unknown.
The exposure of the apparent fraudulence of Black Lives Matter (BLM) is another welcome development: Who can forget the ludicrous spectacle of Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) marching with them a few days after the tragic death of George Floyd and declaring his adherence to the movement, as many of the nation’s largest and stupidest corporations deluged BLM with hundreds of millions of dollars of contributions without, apparently, the elemental verification that these were authentic charitable donations. It’s clear that they were not, that the corporate donors emancipated themselves from the least professionalism or thoroughness before pitching out the shareholders’ money in a manner that is probably not tax-deductible and went to an organization that originally became well known for condoning the murder of white policemen, and is now an alleged tax cheat. Even as corporate America was opening up its wallet, BLM’s leader in New York (Hawk Newsome) threatened to burn America down.
The tragedy and the outrage on the southern border in which more than 2 million people surge into the country illegally, annually, in a process more reminiscent of the barbarians overwhelming the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. than it does any recognizable form of immigration, vastly enriches the brutal Mexican drug importing and slave-trading gangs. It has from the start been more infuriating because of the uninterrupted mendacity of the Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas. From his first weeks in that job, as the Trump wall was stopped and the new president effectively invited the desperate and the derelict of the world to come to America and straight onto the welfare rolls and into its public health and education systems, and millions have answered, Mayorkas was doggedly announcing, “The border is closed,” as the other half of the split television screen showed pictures of large numbers of people walking or wading or swimming across the border at various sites and all hours.
What must surely be the coruscation, the ne plus ultra of the hypocrisy and incompetence of the whole Bidenization phenomenon must be Mayorkas’s happy announcement at a congressional committee this past week that his department was setting up a “misinformation and disinformation board” to correct falsehoods in the media and that it was being led by a person who has already proved herself to be a compulsively untruthful, rabidly partisan myth-maker who had stooped to putting on the Internet her own screechy rendition of the Mary Poppins song in the service of the full canon of Trump-hating mythology. It’s humorous, but it is, unfortunately, insane.
Vladimir Putin is supposedly causing inflation, the oil companies are themselves responsible for the decline in American oil production, and no one has any idea what America’s war aims are in Ukraine other than to prevent Russia from taking over the entire country. It’s a pitiful and contemptible administration, but events elsewhere have reassured Americans who are seeking it that God does bless America. Otherwise, Russia, which could easily have humiliated the West by simply seizing another chunk of Ukraine and leaving it at that, has bungled this invasion so badly that if Putin thinks he can take the Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine and continue to shower missiles down on the populated areas of the whole country indefinitely, NATO will have to give Ukraine the ability to reply against Russian territory. All Putin’s huffing and puffing about nuclear weapons is just buffoonery when all you will need to do to end the war with no attacks on Russia itself is accept a quarter of a loaf. China will have to take note of the Ukraine fiasco—Taiwan is a highly sophisticated, very well-armed island 110 miles of open water away from China. Invading it would be a terrible challenge, and the Chinese should understand that.
This awful time of poor government in the United States will disabuse both parties of mindless lurches to the left, will reinstall a sensible Republican administration and Congress, and the blunders of America’s rivals in the world will make the international cost of the Biden fiasco reasonably affordable.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
-
From GM on the Fed bitcoin inflation thread:
"the votes that matter:
Your Sheriff (If your Sheriff doesn't have any real authority, that's a clue it's time to move).
Your DA.
Your County Commissioners
Your School Board.
You better be in the reddest county in the reddest state you can find.
Time is very limited at this point."
Trying to think this through.
What would be the effect if all conservatives moved to the reddest states possible?
We would really have a totally divided country.
But then what?
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From GM on the Fed bitcoin inflation thread:
"the votes that matter:
Your Sheriff (If your Sheriff doesn't have any real authority, that's a clue it's time to move).
Your DA.
Your County Commissioners
Your School Board.
You better be in the reddest county in the reddest state you can find.
Time is very limited at this point."
Trying to think this through.
What would be the effect if all conservatives moved to the reddest states possible?
We would really have a totally divided country.
But then what?
Your chances of survival greatly improve. Read up on the Spanish Civil War.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2289897/imagine-a-next-president-with-vast-support
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2289897/imagine-a-next-president-with-vast-support
That works for me.
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https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Resized_img3536.jpeg
(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Resized_img3536.jpeg)
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who are "those people"
she is referring to?
-
who are "those people"
she is referring to?
Those who think we are going to vote our way back to Reagan's America.
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"Those who think we are going to vote our way back to Reagan's America."
that is only one part of it but it is an essential part
Reagan America is gone as we knew it
lets say we don't vote at all....
let them win all elections from here on in.
Would that be smart?
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Local is all you can hope to control.
The Deep State will steal national elections just like they did in 2020.
"Those who think we are going to vote our way back to Reagan's America."
that is only one part of it but it is an essential part
Reagan America is gone as we knew it
lets say we don't vote at all....
let them win all elections from here on in.
Would that be smart?
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I reject pre-emptive concession.
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ccp: "lets say we don't vote at all....
let them win all elections from here on in.
Would that be smart?:"
[Doug] No.
Why would we surrender or have a shooting war over something that could be solved as simply as:
a. Have one election day with polling places.
b. Require voter ID.
c. Count the votes in plain view.
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ccp: "lets say we don't vote at all....
let them win all elections from here on in.
Would that be smart?:"
[Doug] No.
Why would we surrender or have a shooting war over something that could be solved as simply as:
a. Have one election day with polling places.
b. Require voter ID.
c. Count the votes in plain view.
Please show me the jurisdictions with those voting requirements.
Meanwhile, 18-19 state have vote fraud by mail in place permanently.
Oh look:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/06/go-mail-votes-catapult-radical-karen-bass-ahead-primary-challenger-8-point-swing-la-mayoral-race-final-results-wont-known-days-weeks/
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A powerful example GM, but still it does not engage with the idea that we must make every effort this coming election. This may be our last chance to overwhelm the fraud.
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A powerful example GM, but still it does not engage with the idea that we must make every effort this coming election. This may be our last chance to overwhelm the fraud.
You can't outvote vote fraud. They will always "find" enough votes to win. Did you ever play "3 card Monte" in NYC?
Why not?
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Tangent regarding three card monte:
Back in the mid 80s Paul Vunak was my martial arts teacher/friend/business partner (No longer! But that is a different story haha) We were in NYC and there was a three-card monte game going on and he wanted to play. I pointed out to him the pickpockets at work as people revealed where their wallets were as they played the game. Then! Miracle! Someone shouted out "The Police!" and they all scattered to the wind.
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The difference between 3 card Monte and vote fraud.
Law enforcement tried to shut 3 card Monte down.
Tangent regarding three card monte:
Back in the mid 80s Paul Vunak was my martial arts teacher/friend/business partner (No longer! But that is a different story haha) We were in NYC and there was a three-card monte game going on and he wanted to play. I pointed out to him the pickpockets at work as people revealed where their wallets were as they played the game. Then! Miracle! Someone shouted out "The Police!" and they all scattered to the wind.
-
Actually, I suspect the cry of "The Police!" was from one of the pickpocketing gang as a signal to scatter to the winds while befuddling the marks.
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Actually, I suspect the cry of "The Police!" was from one of the pickpocketing gang as a signal to scatter to the winds while befuddling the marks.
Understood.
If I recall correctly, Philadelphia Police Officers actually forced republican poll watchers out of vote counting locations.
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That is my understanding as well.
-
(a. Have one election day with polling places.
b. Require voter ID.
c. Count the votes in plain view.)
"Please show me the jurisdictions with those voting requirements."
————
I think you know, a, b, c above are rules we need, not where we are now.
Something like 80% support voter ID. It can be done.
Where I live, Democrats have arguably stolen an election or two that had 1/10th or 1/100th % margin.
On that margin, I agree with you. If we don't truly defeat them and leave it a virtual tie, expect to lose.
How that translates to: why bother, give up, hand it all to them, is beyond me.
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Exactly so.
-
Your ideas for reform are nice. So is the idea of playing "president and intern" with a clone of Cindy Crawford in her prime.
Both are equally unrealistic.
The dems have 18/19 states that have adopted vote by mail fraud.
How many states have adopted the immensely popular reforms you have suggested?
Will they be in place in time for the midterms?
Or the next presidential election?
(a. Have one election day with polling places.
b. Require voter ID.
c. Count the votes in plain view.)
"Please show me the jurisdictions with those voting requirements."
————
I think you know, a, b, c above are rules we need, not where we are now.
Something like 80% support voter ID. It can be done.
Where I live, Democrats have arguably stolen an election or two that had 1/10th or 1/100th % margin.
On that margin, I agree with you. If we don't truly defeat them and leave it a virtual tie, expect to lose.
How that translates to: why bother, give up, hand it all to them, is beyond me.
-
18-19 is roughly the number of states where Republicans and what we see as constitutionalists currently have no say. Yes, we need keep shrinking that number.
Flip side of that coin, 30 is roughly the number of states where the Left cannot get votes to pass their woke amendments, repeal or rewrite the second amendment for example, which is why they behave this way, through the deep state, instead of going through the channels set up by the Founders.
-------
"How many states have adopted the immensely popular reforms you have suggested?
Will they be in place in time for the midterms?
Or the next presidential election?"
That is the point of elections, bringing our representative government back for discipline. If 80% support it and they can't pass and implement it, out they go.
Keeping our eye on the ball, keeping the focus on what is most important is hard. Sometimes we get sidetracked by other issues, shiny objects and by the cancer of negativity.
The challenge we face is monumental, but way easier that what the colonists faced,
what freedom seeking residents of China, Russia, Venezuela face, what freedom seeking residents of Nazi Germany faced, and what we will face if we don't do this right now.
If one person who cares sits out one more election, all of what you say, this can't be fixed through elections, comes true.
-
The systemic rot is beyond the ability of elections to cure.
The Feral government exists outside the constitution, with no loyalty towards it's ideals or limitations.
The Feral government blatantly performed a coup, removing a duly elected president for the unforgivable sin of not being from the DC Uniparty.
Where in human history can I find an example of a vote being respected by the junta that overthrew a constitutional republic?
The American Republic was not kept. It is lost.
If there is to be another, we will have to rebuild it.
Control what you can control. Be realistic. We will see very dark times very soon.
Plan accordingly.
18-19 is roughly the number of states where Republicans and what we see as constitutionalists currently have no say. Yes, we need keep shrinking that number.
Flip side of that coin, 30 is roughly the number of states where the Left cannot get votes to pass their woke amendments, repeal or rewrite the second amendment for example, which is why they behave this way, through the deep state, instead of going through the channels set up by the Founders.
-------
"How many states have adopted the immensely popular reforms you have suggested?
Will they be in place in time for the midterms?
Or the next presidential election?"
That is the point of elections, bringing our representative government back for discipline. If 80% support it and they can't pass and implement it, out they go.
Keeping our eye on the ball, keeping the focus on what is most important is hard. Sometimes we get sidetracked by other issues, shiny objects and by the cancer of negativity.
The challenge we face is monumental, but way easier that what the colonists faced,
what freedom seeking residents of China, Russia, Venezuela face, what freedom seeking residents of Nazi Germany faced, and what we will face if we don't do this right now.
If one person who cares sits out one more election, all of what you say, this can't be fixed through elections, comes true.
-
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-way-forward/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=217588961&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--_53rfhBioPzQxiFkE1seEMOgpl6HzYFYX8C8GDyPwpwvJaPeMeqNqvs-9qglibvJxYbnib7obW-qJLYLTE4c_eHtzTQ&utm_content=217588961&utm_source=hs_email
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https://wabcradio.com/podcast/larry-kudlow/
Newt was on show ~ minute 20 to minute 44 (corrected at 7:30EST)
The best I have ever heard Newt
He is getting closer to the political solutions for Republicans and his take on Trump '24.
I used to find Kudlow totally boring yrs ago - all I ever heard him say was one trick pony ->
we need more growth over and over again
He seems to have much more broadly fanned out to many more topics
and even comedy as he is funny when he is on Gutfield.
Larry has become one of my favorite hosts.
-
https://wabcradio.com/podcast/larry-kudlow/
Newt was on show ~ minute 20 to minute 24.
The best I have ever heard Newt
He is getting closer the political solutions for Republicans and his take on Trump '24.
I used to find Kudlow totally boring yrs ago - all I ever heard him say was one trick pony ->
we need more growth over and over again
He seems to have much more broadly fanned out to many more topics
and even comedy as he is funny when he is on Gutfield.
Larry has become one of my favorite hosts.
We need more growth. )
-
Newt begins at 21:10.
-
:-o
-
???
-
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/stop_calling_them_democrats_theyre_communists.html
-
agree
but even worse and unfortunately labelling them commies
is not uniformly a negative now :
https://victimsofcommunism.org/annual-poll/2020-annual-poll/
it is the free shit mentality for all
-
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/we-are-not-first-civilization-collapse-we-will-probably-be-last?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=859
-
This essay engages with a challenging question.
https://www.aier.org/article/the-revolutionary-trigger/
-
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/11/09/there-would-have-been-a-red-wave-but-one-group-saved-the-left-from-being-completely-obliterated-n1644558
:-o
-
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/11/09/there-would-have-been-a-red-wave-but-one-group-saved-the-left-from-being-completely-obliterated-n1644558
:-o
CNN National House Exit Poll
R+ 13 65+
R+ 11 45-64
D +2 30-44
D +28 18-29
#GenZ did their job.
7:52 PM · Nov 8, 2022
----------------------
I will self censor my thoughts about the politics of my daughter's generation.
I hate to say it, but let them live with inflation, abortion, open borders, unverified mail in elections, high interest rates soon to cause joblessness and wage losses of their peers unlike anything they have seen that come hand in hand with these policies.
----------------------
Supporting just a tinge of economic freedom is too extreme for them, but Ilhan Omar? No problem!
✔︎ Ilhan Omar (i) DFL 214,217 75.2%
Cicely Davis Republican 70,698 24.8%
100% of precincts reporting
My daughter's "religion" professor (at a formerly conservative college) was atheist and her economics professor was Marxist (or decidedly and admittedly to the Left).
Over 99 percent of University of Wisconsin system professors’ political donations benefit Democrats
https://www.thecollegefix.com/over-99-percent-of-university-of-wisconsin-system-professors-political-donations-benefit-democrats/
This is what we're up against. But it isn't the professors alone doing this. It's the numbers above. Their peers are all liberal - at an age where what your peers think is everything. Breaking out of that bubble will require a series of real world learning experiences, like getting mugged and carjacked. Even then, it's conservatives' fault.
-
One further thought on that, the under 30s didn't watch their 401k's and IRA's tank.
They did watch their ability to buy a house disappear if they didn't buy one already, but no one explained to them in their own language why it all happened.
-
"Over 99 percent of University of Wisconsin system professors’ political donations benefit Democrats"
that is one unbelievable stat
that is worse than DC itself!
this generation will one day learn what REAL fascism is .
they think Trump is fascism ?
and what it is like living under government control under elites and China .
I do think we need to speak more about climate change
somehow
which may reach them
and without destroying the entire fuel based economy
watch how Fettermen will be handled, managed, and covered for
one will think he is a genius with a speech impediment after the media covers for him
just like fumbling biden
-
https://www.conservativereview.com/horowitz-understanding-desantis-shocking-election-results-and-the-red-state-revolution-we-need-2658623016.html
FWIW :
I don't agree with his analysis at all
I assume this is Mark Levin's position
-
What in your opinion is wrong with it?
-
It seems to me the bottom line he is rationalizing DeSantis is the future
and does make it clear - sort of - that Trump is not:
" The problem with the Republican Party is not Trump per se, although it’s hard to see his mix of style, inconsistent messaging, and weak policies and personnel being the winning formula going forward"
[DUH]
I don't understand what was weak about GOP messaging.
DeSantis won in a mostly red state
he won over a lot of hispanics
big time
but many are Cuban hispanics who were there post Castro
and those in Florida are not the same as Cubans in AOCs community
or maybe those Latins flooding over the border. those in AOC community appear to be more the free check crowds
so is this realistic on a national scale ?
" They have no vision, and they stood for nothing. They produced nothing of the quality of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America."
perhaps they should have produced McCarthy Gingrich new version sooner
rather then waiting till after the election
" Therein lies the problem. While it is puzzling that voters would choose Democrats given the state of the economy and security, let’s face it: Republicans barely disagree with Democrats on the issues"
what is he talking about ?
the differences were not stark?
I must be missing something but then again I did not follow individual campaigns
It may be the Republicans are not addressing issues that need to be addressed
perhaps we need to start addressing Climate Change
(not by destroying the fossil fuel economy ) at least acknowledge it as something to be careful about and not simply denying it or arguing it is all bullshit like we do
"Maybe we should celebrate the end of all abortion or birth control
maybe offer a consistent reasonable approach" - most want some abortion and to try to outlaw birth control is in my view totally NUTS
also
1) the RNC chairwoman was certainly making contrasts
not sure why he bashes Fox
does he like newsmax better? [I do]
I love Levin but I have not seen him change many minds
His listeners like me are already in the choir
Perhaps he simply cannot get his message out to those who need to here it.
BUT they ain't going to play him on PBS or in academia
We kept laughing at the Democrats recently by saying it is a messaging problem
I am not sure if it is that or the people in this country do not like our message
lets figure that out first
then when we get that right
figure out how to get past the f''g media tech academia lawyer cabal to get the message out
Maybe we will have to wait till '24 if DeSantis runs
for surely no one but the die hards are listening to Trump anymore
-
Thank you.
-
Great post ccp.
"DeSantis won in a mostly red state
he won over a lot of hispanics
big time
but many are Cuban hispanics who were there post Castro
and those in Florida are not the same..."
I was thinking the same thing. DeSantis is doing something right, maybe everything right, but that success doesn't transfer automatically nationwide.
The Cuban Americans have never been able to convert the Mexican Americans or others. I don't know about the Puerto Rican Americans, with a strong population in both Florida and NY (AOC).
I remember MN politicians having no connection in Iowa, Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachman, Amy Klobuchar, and a Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker not connecting in MN.
I support DeSantis. I like having two term (twice elected) Governors if possible for chief executive. But he will have to introduce himself and win people over in PA, AZ etc from scratch.
DeSantis has great success in Florida where they know him and great potential nationwide, but pulling it off is far from automatic.
Trump was fully known nationwide when he entered politics, for better or for worse.
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"those in AOC community appear to be more the free check crowds"
this reminds me of an office I worked in that had some young Latino women.
Good workers and friendly
What is interesting even though they were in their 20s they knew ALL the ropes on how to get government checks. - this benefit, that benefit. They were even advising patients how to do it.
What I am saying does anyone think that those in NJ/NY will vote for "freedom" "work" "anti abortion". "smaller government"
vs fee checks if you qualify and know to apply?
I never asked them but hard to think they were Republicans
Some maybe could be convinced but I waver on how many.
remember most of America is living on paycheck to paycheck
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sn4zc5RLDs&t=2s
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This makes great sense to me:
‘Conservative’ Is a Bad Label for Republicans’ Good Policies
The narrative of ‘progress’ is far more attractive than the prospect of standing athwart and ‘yelling Stop.’
By Hyrum Lewis
Nov. 25, 2022 12:24 pm ET
WSJ
Since their disappointing showing in the midterm elections, Republicans have been trying to explain what went wrong. The answers they have come up with—Donald Trump was a handicap, they appealed exclusively to the base, their candidates weren’t likable—all have merit, but there is a deeper and more longstanding issue: Republicans have a narrative problem that originates with the idea of “conservatism” itself.
Prevailing political mythology holds that the Democratic Party’s policies are “progressive”—meaning they promote change toward greater justice—while the Republican Party’s are “conservative”—meaning they try to slow or arrest this progressive change. As William F. Buckley Jr. put it, a conservative is someone who “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” In this framing, there is a natural momentum toward progress in human affairs (“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King Jr. said), but conservatives resist this progress out of concern for excessive disruptions or the ability of the public to adapt to change.
There are two big problems with this political mythology. First, it’s false. Each party stands for a bunch of unrelated policies that are connected only by happenstance, not philosophy. What does abortion have to do with tax rates? Ideologues are uncomfortable with the reality that each of our two political tribes stands for some policies that strike them as correct and others that seem incorrect, so they have invented grand ideological narratives about “progress” and “conservation” to give the illusion of coherence to policies that are incoherent.
Second, this political mythology inherently disadvantages the Republicans, since the narrative of progress is far more attractive than the narrative of conservation. It was progressive change that abolished slavery, gave women the right to vote, and achieved civil rights for racial minorities, so conservatives are stuck with the impossible task of arguing that these changes were somehow bad, that they were enacted too quickly, or that “this time it is different.” Technological progress is good, medical progress is good, moral progress is good, and if we don’t want to stop progress in those realms, why would we want to stop progress in politics? By characterizing their policies as “conservative,” Republicans imply that they would rather accommodate the backward and bigoted than stand up for justice and the rights of victims.
The conservative narrative might work among actual bigots or voters who don’t think in terms of grand narratives, but it will inevitably lose among cultural elites. This is the main reason academia, Hollywood, the media and tech corporations are so alienated from the Republican Party: Cultural leaders demand a morality-affirming narrative, and the story that says intellectual elites can be in the vanguard of history, leading the charge for progressive change, is far more attractive than the story in which they stand “athwart history, yelling Stop.” If we are going to bundle unrelated policies together using ex post facto stories, the “right side of history” story will always win over the “not too fast” story. And given a choice between progress and conservation, thoughtful people looking for a moral politics will, unsurprisingly, almost always choose progress.
The problem for Republicans isn’t that all of their policies are bad, but that the story they use to unify and justify their policies is bad. Why is it that unpopular and extreme measures—such as the mutilation of children under the guise of “gender-affirming care”—have become so widely accepted among cultural elites? Because the label “progressive” endows these policies with the moral force of historical inevitability.
Why is it that obvious and sensible measures—such as the freedom to cut hair without onerous licensing requirements—are somehow controversial? Because the label “conservative” associates these policies with backwardness and bigotry. It makes Republican policies seem guilty by association with evil causes such as segregation, slavery, and male-only suffrage and historical villains such as John C. Calhoun, Stephen A. Douglas and Bull Connor, who were actually all Democrats. Republicans need to advance policies on the idea that they are right, not because they are unified by a label that has such negative associations. By acceding to the progressive-conservative framing and adopting the narrative of “conservatism,” Republicans have unnecessarily handicapped themselves.
To avoid long-term underperformance of the kind we saw on Election Day, Republicans need to jettison the conservative narrative and move beyond the idea that all their policies stand against progressive change. They should replace the morally flawed conservative narrative with a more principled, positive one that can attract educated voters. Donald Trump is undoubtedly a millstone around the Republicans’ necks, but so too is the narrative of “conservatism” that serves to repel most cultural elites except those few who prefer stasis to progress.
Mr. Lewis is a professor of history at BYU-Idaho and a co-author of “The Myth of Left and Right,” coming in January from Oxford University Press.
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I thought we had way forward for Republican thread but can't find it so this makes next most sense:
honestly I though Repubs were out there for this election cycle
ballot harvesting
boy did I overestimate the RNC :-o
of course we need to go out and get votes. ; was it not obvious
I was told they had many thousands of workers .....
I like the way Harmeet Dhillon talks the talk on FOX news lately
I would rather have her the Rhonda McDaniel who was RNC chair for 6 yrs
and 3 losing election cycles. I agree it is time for Mitt Romneys niece ( :-o) to fade into another role :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qcCPJbA2Oo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmeet_Dhillon#:~:text=Harmeet%20Kaur%20Dhillon%20(born%201969,called%20Dhillon%20Law%20Group%20Inc.
of course will she be able to unseat a swamp creature?
who has not realized we MUST fight the Dems at their own game
all the while they are flooding us with illegals and calling for citizenship for all :x
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https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2022/12/12/amnesty-will-destroy-the-gop-n2616991
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https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2022/12/12/amnesty-will-destroy-the-gop-n2616991
.
They reveal their true colors as they leave office. No recourse from the voters, but permanent attention on the pitiful news shows.
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Has American Democracy Been a Hallucination for Nearly 60 Years?
Roger L. SimonRoger L. Simon December 16, 2022 Updated: December 17, 2022biggersmaller Print
Call it a democracy, call it a democratic republic, call it a constitutional republic, call it anything you want—it doesn’t really matter what America is if there is truth to what Tucker Carlson was reporting the other night via a source who had “direct knowledge” of still-hidden documents concerning the Kennedy assassination, implicating the CIA.
If indeed the CIA was in any way involved in the assassination of JFK on Nov. 22, 1963, then anything that has happened in the public sphere in our country since that day has basically been a hallucination created by an intelligence agency far deeper than most of us—certainly me, since I was never much given to conspiracy theories—ever imagined.
The affairs of the day—RNC chief Ronna McDaniel revealed to be a profligate spender on her own luxury travel, not on Republican candidates; Donald Trump releasing self-aggrandizing NFT pseudo-art as a fundraiser (rest in peace, Johannes Vermeer); even Elon Musk’s exposure of the multiple mendacious censoring creeps behind Twitter, although that has an eerie similarity—pale by comparison to CIA involvement and, therefore, massive coverup for decades in the JFK assassination.
That former CIA director Mike Pompeo declined to appear on Carlson’s show to discuss this is not insignificant. We all know about 51 intelligence officials—John Brennan and others who fallaciously claimed two years ago the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. They have to have known otherwise. Now this?
Why are 3 percent of the Warren Commission documents on the assassination still being hidden after those nearly 60 years with all the major players dead, if not to hide something of serious importance from the American public?
It’s time to reconsider Oliver Stone’s “JFK” that, though I admired Oliver’s filmmaking, I originally thought to be a crackpot.
The Kennedy assassination has special ramifications for me because it occurred on my 20th birthday. I was a Dartmouth student at the time and drove down to spend the weekend with my girlfriend at Skidmore (Saratoga Springs, New York) and sat in a motel room stunned and mesmerized watching Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, live on the black and white television.
I cannot remember seeing anything more inexplicable in my life. How could this have been allowed to happen only hours after the assassination? In retrospect, it becomes even more incredible. In a certain sense, I now feel that most of my adult life, what I have thought was real, has been erased.
Although most of us of a “certain age” have our own personal stories, that’s the relatively minor part. Historically, for our country at large, the Kennedy assassination was a disaster. It led to the ascendance of Lyndon Johnson and his “Great Society” social programs.
What actually occurred because of these programs was the not-so-gradual destruction of the black family, the women having been financially induced via handouts to marry the state instead of the men who normally would have been their husbands. The statistics on the decline of the black family and the rise of single-parent households are well known, as are the results that the black community and the rest of us live through on a daily basis. What becomes of a man, black or white, who no longer has the responsibility of being a father? LBJ was in many ways the godfather of Black Lives Matter, not to mention the hugely sad violence in the streets of our biggest cities, most notably Chicago.
If all this is true, the question becomes how do we get out of this hallucination that is more powerful than, though not unrelated to, the mass formation psychosis described by the Belgian academic Mathias Desmet.
To begin with, we need the full information, every document, and we need it now. Without the public being able to review that last three percent we can go no further. We should be calling for that—loudly.
The Everly Brothers perhaps put it best, although in another context.
“Wake up, little Susie, wake up
We’ve both been sound asleep
Wake up little Susie and weep
The movie’s over, it’s four o’clock
And we’re in trouble deep.”
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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https://www.theblaze.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-victim-blackmail-videos
:-D
"I noted the presence of many Orthodox Jews to Ryan Mermer, head of Jewish engagement of the RNC. He said, “We’re proud of everything we’ve done. The Jewish Republican vote is now 33% nationally and, in Florida, it’s 45%, the highest it’s ever been.”
:-o :-D
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https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CV3ysAA2P54
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https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/miss-usa-rbonney-gabriel-wins-miss-universe-competition
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The FOX morning show this morning was joking that they didn't know that this still existed.
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"The FOX morning show this morning was joking that they didn't know that this still existed."
who knew?
but I miss the swim suit competition instead of the weird and sometimes woke outfits they wear now.
:-D
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Love the sniveling by the outgoing Miss who put on weight.
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We all know the term RINO.
I propose the term AmINO: American In Name Only.
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https://spectator.org/america-is-becoming-a-corrupt-country/
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How America Can Win the Information War
Confirm Elizabeth Allen, whose office produced a brilliant video called ‘To the People of Russia.’
By Joe Lieberman and Gordon Humphrey
March 17, 2023 2:55 pm ET
When Xi Jinping visits Moscow next week, Vladimir Putin will doubtless ask for weapons to replenish his badly depleted arsenal. Whatever scheme they concoct will further endanger U.S. national security and that of our allies.
A broader danger confronts us in the new axis of evil that spans Europe, the Middle East and Asia. China and Russia have combined with Iran. All three are determined to replace U.S. leadership in the world and to destroy freedom wherever it exists. China’s threats to take Taiwan by force, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Iran’s threats to “annihilate” Israel raise the possibility of simultaneous aggression. Together, this axis may confront us with one of the most serious challenges ever to our security, values and prosperity.
The threats to global stability and the US homeland are growing. How will the war in Ukraine end? Can China and the US develop a less combative relationship? Join historian and Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead and editorial page editor Paul Gigot for an interactive conversation on the threats to US security.
To prevail, the U.S. must employ every tool of national power. Regrettably, one of the most forceful and inexpensive weapons has withered over the last 20 years: advocacy—the marshaling of truth and fact to persuade foreign audiences. Recall the important part played by the U.S. Information Agency in winning the Cold War. Its Voice of America broadcasts persuaded Soviet citizens that life on our side of the Iron Curtain was better than theirs.
VOA didn’t rely on news alone; it employed editorial writers and even contracted for made-in-Hollywood films. If sole reliance on news sufficed, today’s war criminal and serial violator of human rights, Mr. Putin, wouldn’t stand high in Russian polls. Instead, the U.S. must bring back advocacy meant to persuade. That’s where wits come in.
Defeating propaganda with truthful advocacy is more difficult than in USIA’s heyday. Our adversaries outspend us by orders of magnitude and, using bots and social media, dump disinformation into millions of computers, eyes, ears and brains every day. They have massively stepped up their game. So must we.
Overtaking adversaries requires the president to order explicitly the development of a long-term program of advocacy surpassing that of our adversaries in budget, creativity and technology. Leading such an effort requires an official who is highly experienced in communications and public relations and who has the heft to overcome bureaucratic timidity and inertia. President Biden has nominated precisely such a person, Elizabeth Allen, to be undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs.
Ms. Allen served as deputy communications director at the White House when Mr. Biden was vice president. That background indicates she’ll have the ear of the president whenever the bureaucracy needs a push. That’s vital to success.
The office is charged by law with “detecting and countering disinformation emanating from abroad” and actively advocating the “values and policies of the United States.” The Senate would serve the nation well by speedily confirming Ms. Allen with a bipartisan vote.
While public diplomacy is on the minds of senators, they should join with their colleagues in the House to review thoroughly all aspects of our messaging of foreign citizens. To quote a recent Heritage Foundation paper: “The State Department’s public diplomacy programs abroad are skewed toward fringe aspects of U.S. domestic social issues and away from core, enduring U.S. values. ‘Woke’ diplomacy does not fit within the State Department’s own strategic plan and does not advance U.S. national security.”
As a prototype demonstrating the kind of advocacy that should be produced at scale, consider the first-of-its-kind video made recently by the undersecretary’s office, “To the People of Russia.” It echoes Mr. Biden’s assurance to the Russian people: “You are not our enemy.”
It’s a masterpiece of advocacy, richly illustrated, that begins by recalling the time when as allies the U.S. and Russia won World War II. It speaks of our cooperation in space and compliments the Russian people for their great contributions to the arts and sciences. Toward the end, a clip of Mr. Putin’s war appears, accompanied by the words: “We do not believe this is who you are. We stand with each of you who seeks to build a more peaceful future.” The video played on Telegram, the platform widely used by Russians seeking alternatives to Moscow’s propaganda.
Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president and now deputy chairman of the Security Council, was outraged after viewing the video, labeling the U.S. government “sons of bitches” for what he called use of the techniques of Joseph Goebbels. That Mr. Medvedev found the video offensive attests to the Kremlin’s fear of a popular uprising like that in Iran.
The office of undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs hasn’t had a Senate-confirmed occupant in more than five years, which speaks volumes about the neglect of the power of advocacy. To leave so important a national-security post filled by a series of short-term, temporary acting officials is unacceptable.
The U.S. invented the internet and virtual private networks that defy most censorship. Until it gets serious about advocacy it will continue to lose the information war by default. The price is the continuation of a 17-year-long decline in the number of free nations and, ultimately, a sharp decline in the West’s security, freedom and prosperity.
Mr. Lieberman was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2000 and a U.S. senator from Connecticut, 1989-2013. Mr. Humphrey was a Republican U.S. senator from New Hampshire, 1979-90.
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The video "To the People of Russia" referenced in the preceding:
https://commons.america.gov/results?language=en-us&term=%22To%20the%20people%22&sortBy=relevance&date=recent
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu99k7f5y-g
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https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/132/468/813/original/413acdc3f341e685.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/132/468/813/original/413acdc3f341e685.png)
You owe our corrupt, illegitimate government NOTHING.
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I would submit that the same applies to the currently greater threats coming from the executive branch.
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https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/conservatives-win-all-the-time
:-D
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https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/conservatives-win-all-the-time
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https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/conservatives-win-all-the-time
Delusional
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https://sign1776.com
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https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/135/829/453/original/b378f29eb01813d5.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/135/829/453/original/b378f29eb01813d5.png)
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In response I would note the relevance of the part of Genesis wherein eating the apple of knowledge is what got us thrown out of the Garden.
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In response I would note the relevance of the part of Genesis wherein eating the apple of knowledge is what got us thrown out of the Garden.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
I interpret that as the big bang and the formation of the universe.
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
I see that as the stage where prehumans became sentient.
As far as the way forward, we must become "Neo-Amish", meaning we are selective in the technology we use. Insuring our own food supply outside the technocorruption is essential.
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https://100percentfedup.com/based-grandpa-stands-up-for-his-beliefs-and-refuses-to-dance-with-drag-queen-on-show-im-a-man-of-god-video/
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https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/135/790/374/original/dff31abf4844ba04.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/135/790/374/original/dff31abf4844ba04.jpg)
American teens, late 1940s
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https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/135/790/374/original/dff31abf4844ba04.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/135/790/374/original/dff31abf4844ba04.jpg)
American teens, late 1940s
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/136/090/783/original/6ddbe8f607697774.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/136/090/783/original/6ddbe8f607697774.png)
American women in the 70s
No tats, no piercings, no muffin tops, no penises...
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And no fatties!
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and no youngsters sitting next to each other but speaking to each other via smart devices
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Not without resonanc, but to go further it must address the fundamental challenges that arise from economic fragmentation-- witness Brexit, where the ties were much weaker.
https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/28/the-great-american-opt-out-a-matter-of-willingness-willfulness-and-will/
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second
https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/28/a-political-not-an-academic-argument/
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Third:
Some interesting points mixed in, and some go over the top.
https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/27/conservatives-lost-the-culture-war-and-the-trump-agenda-is-the-only-path-forward/
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Fourth
https://www.theepochtimes.com/tucker-carlson-video-nets-60-million-views-in-under-24-hours_5226591.html?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-04-28-1&src_cmp=breaking-2023-04-28-1&utm_medium=email&est=Jf7S5B8EP7Zr1KbY3s%2BjoakiwSydMTBZOw0IJ8jTzkGcZ8eSwtalC%2F2GnhcJrhGu0Ftj
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Third:
Some interesting points mixed in, and some go over the top.
https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/27/conservatives-lost-the-culture-war-and-the-trump-agenda-is-the-only-path-forward/
The American Republic is dead. The next one will be overtly Christian and Heritage American. Civic Nationalism brought us to the currently unfolding disaster. That is if the end times aren’t here, which may well be the case.
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https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/136/621/131/original/427751bac4b2b510.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/136/621/131/original/427751bac4b2b510.png)
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http://arbalestquarrel.com/the-modern-american-civil-war-collectivism-versus-individualism/
THE MODERN AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: A CLASH OF IDEOLOGIES
PART THREE*
“A closer look at the arguments on both sides often shows that they are reasoning from fundamentally different premises. These different premises—often implicit—are what provide the consistency behind the repeated opposition of individuals and groups on numerous, unrelated issues. They have different visions of how the world works.” ~ from A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, by Thomas Sowell, Economist and Social Theorist; Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
“You will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve YOUR freedom. I hope you will make a good use of it.” ~John Adams
“Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.” ~Benjamin Franklin
A CLASH OF IDEOLOGIES; A NATION AT A CROSSROADS**
No one can reasonably doubt that the United States is in the throes of a major cataclysmic event. Two factions face off against each other in mortal combat for the soul and psyche of this Country. We see, in the desperation of one faction, the lengths at which it will go in its bid to regain control of its agenda. That faction through its proxies in Washington, comprising Congressional Democrats and Centrist “Bush” and “McCain” Republicans, has maintained control for the last three decades. That faction has exerted a stranglehold on the Country, slowly squeezing the lifeblood out of the Nation and its citizenry through control, inter alia, of Congress; the Federal bureaucracy; the federal courts; the mass media; and, of course, through the Federal Reserve, part of the Central Banking system–the brainchild of Mayer Amschel Rothschild–that has extended its tentacles around the world, up to the present day.
The Leftist faction was well on its way toward completing the items on its agenda, as Barack Obama was ticking off the items during his two terms in Office. Hillary Clinton was poised to be elected U.S. President. Leftists of all stripes were smugly confident. After all, hadn’t virtually all the exit polls predict a win–a landslide. They were certain that Hillary Clinton would secure the U.S. Presidency.
Even if many on the Left would have preferred the Socialist, Bernie Sanders, as President, they knew, full well, that Hillary Clinton, would faithfully proceed, in the footsteps of her predecessor, Barack Obama, toward accomplishment of the Leftist agenda.
Had Clinton prevailed in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, she likely would have re-nominated Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, to the high Court; or, if not him, then she certainly would have nominated someone like him, someone who shares Judge Garland’s jurisprudential philosophy and jurisprudential approach to case analysis–a man who had no fear of legislating from the Bench; a man who would contort and distort the dictates of the U.S. Constitution beyond anything the framers of that historic and sacred Document had intended or would have wished for. And, with control of two critical Federal Branches, the Executive and Judiciary, along with control of the mass media apparatus and the massive federal bureaucracy, the actual composition of Congress would, likely, have been, at least, in the short term of less critical importance. But, Clinton did not make it into the White House. Leftists, in our Country, including the internationalist billionaire benefactors of Leftist groups and causes, were thunderstruck, and they were already plotting their revenge, even before Donald Trump took the Oath of Office, as set forth in Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution.
SEATING JURISTS ON THE SUPREME COURT WHOSE JURISPRUDENTIAL APPROACH TO CASE ANALYSIS COMMENCES WITH AN ABIDING LOVE FOR, DUE RESPECT FOR, AND DUE REGARD GIVEN FOR THE IMPORT OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION AS WRITTEN, AND WHO INTERPRET FEDERAL STATUTE ACCORDING TO THE PLAIN MEANING OF THE TEXT, WAS CERTAINLY ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT GOALS IF NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT GOAL OF PRESIDENT TRUMP, AS IT MOST CERTAINLY WAS FOR THE MILLIONS OF AMERICANS WHO VOTED FOR HIM.
With the surprising election of Donald Trump as our Nation’s 45th President, and with Republican control of Congress—especially, the U.S. Senate—and too, with Trump’s nomination of one strict Constitutional constructionist and originalist, Neil Gorsuch, presently sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court, and a second strict Constitutional constructionist and originalist, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, just confirmed as Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the U.S. Supreme Court now securely has a conservative-wing majority, albeit with one important caveat. Chief Justice Roberts is considered the new swing vote moderate. Chief Justice Roberts is, though, a more reliable conservative than retired Justice, Anthony Kennedy. So, where does this leave Leftists, and their agenda?
Leftists and Leftist mobs are left scurrying about hither and yon; ranting and raving. The Leftist agenda seems to be on the verge of collapse or, if not, then, for the moment at least, the work of effectuating the Leftist agenda has certainly appreciably slowed. And, with the Left’s failure to derail Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the high Court, that critical item of the Leftist agenda–preventing a conservative-wing majority, is a failed item. And the Leftist faction knows it. Leftists know that federal and State legislation that fails to cohere with the United States Constitution will not be allowed to go unchallenged. They know that, with Brett Kavanaugh on the high Court, those challenges will be taken up for high Court review. An “assault weapons” case, like the Kolbe and Friedman, would henceforth be heard. Leftists know that, if lower Courts continue to ignore the precedents of Heller and McDonald with impunity, there will now be a day of reckoning, and those lower Courts that so act with impunity will be called on the carpet for it.
Democratic Party control of the Judiciary, is, then, critical to completion of the Leftist agenda and that can only be accomplished through election of a Democrat as U.S. President, along with Democratic Party control of the Senate. Failure to win the White House in 2016, and failure to control the Senate explains why Democrats have, themselves, gone off the rails in their attempt to derail the confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh to the high Court.
And Americans have seen just how far Democrats are willing to go. After Judge Kavanaugh acquitted himself well in defending the vicious personal assault against him, they would not, could not admit even that much. Democrats speciously, even ridiculously, claimed that Judge Brett Kavanaugh has shown that he is unfit, temperamentally, to sit on the high Court, ostensibly because he happened to have the seeming audacity of displaying emotion and in having displayed righteous indignation in defending his character, his reputation, and his honor against a scurrilous, flimsy, rambling, barefaced, unsupported, uncorroborated public attack; an attack engineered by the Democratic Party leadership and by those Democrats sitting on the Senate Judiciary Committee, as they desperately sought to prevent, by any means they could drum up, the Senate confirmation of a highly qualified Judge–however outrageous, patently unethical, and, perhaps, even illegal those means may be.
These “Leftists” cared not one whit that they would be damaging, possibly, irreparably, the character and reputation of an honorable man. And they cared not at all that doing so would also endanger the life, safety, and well-being of Judge Kavanaugh and that of his family. They operated callously, maliciously, and reprehensibly, completely beyond the bounds of reason, and ethics, and human decency. Democrats sitting on the Judiciary Committee are utterly shameless. Their machinations and subterfuge rest well beyond the pale of human decency, let alone beyond the pale of what would count as proper U.S. Senate etiquette, decorum, and propriety. Americans have not, for decades, seen anything like the public spectacle they bore witness to that took place over several days of Confirmation Hearing. Democrats appeared, by turns, as circus clowns, sanctimonious inquisitors, and, as members of a cabaret burlesque troupe–many things, indeed, but not solemn, dignified members of the United States Senate, that a few Americans might have mistaken them to be.
The disgusting displays of Democrats during the course of the Hearing, and the actions orchestrated by Democrats and by their allies behind the scenes is just a foretaste of what the American public may come to see, and would have every reason to expect if a liberal-wing Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, perhaps, or Stephen Breyer, retires or resigns from the high Court before President Trump’s first term in Office ends, and President Trump thereupon nominates a third Judge to sit on the high Court. Keep in mind that, according to USA Today, Justice Ginsburg is 85 years of age, and Justice Breyer is 79.
If one more conservative-wing Trump nominee can be confirmed–assuming one of the liberal-wing Justices, Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Stephen Breyer, retires–the conservative-wing majority, barring any unforeseen event, will be stronger yet, virtually impervious to Leftist attempts to complete the hijacking of the Nation and the Nation’s Constitution.
The Leftist faction knows that it has suffered a profound defeat having failed to derail the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh or at least to delay a vote on the confirmation until after the 2018 Midterm elections, when it hopes to gain Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.
LEFTISTS KNOW WHAT IS AT STAKE IN THE COMING MIDTERM ELECTIONS. CONSERVATIVES SHOULD KNOW WHAT IS AT STAKE, TOO.
So, with the 2018 Midterm elections around the corner, Leftists are frantically, frenetically engaged in sketching out new strategies in a bid to regain traction so that they can continue jumpstart the Leftist agenda. Republicans must not sit back and relax.
The Leftist leadership, Congressional Democrats, and their billionaire internationalist benefactors know this; they know that they have been hamstrung, and they are literally exploding with rage. They have no cogent argument to make in their defense. Mobs of activists are enlisted to shout down conservative voices and anyone else who disagrees with the Leftist agenda. Mass demonstrations, violent outbursts, visible threats to those they target all point to the singular desperation of this faction. They can do nothing now, but flail about. So, the first order of business for Leftists is for Democrats to regain control of the U.S. Senate. But, even with a substantial number of reliable Democrats in the Senate, along with several swing votes in the U.S. Senate, that would not mean that more Democratic nominees for Federal Court seats, at all levels, would be confirmed. For, only the President of the United States can nominate federal judges, although Democrats can and in fact have blocked confirmation of many of Trump’s nominees to sit on the lower federal Courts. So, then, the second order of business for Leftists is to make sure that Democrats can regain and hold control of the U.S. Senate through 2020 with the goal then of retaking the U.S. Presidency with a reliable Leftist. Once that step is accomplished, Democrats will be able once again to nominate reliably Leftist judges to sit on the federal Judiciary and will be able to confirm those Leftist Judges. Then Leftists will find themselves in a stronger position to reset the political and social direction of the Country, albeit with a little more difficulty now that the highest Court in the Land sits a reliable four Justice Conservative wing + one moderate/conservative Chief Justice majority.
CONTRARY TO WHAT SOME AMERICANS MAY THINK, THE PRESENT SITUATION IN THIS NATION IS DIRE. WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF A CIVIL WAR.
We see two distinctive political/social factions fighting for control of the Country’s direction. Two visions for our Country are coming into sharp focus, into sharp relief. Whichever side ultimately prevails will see its world view realized. But, what are those two world views? How would each vision, if realized, affect this Country, and affect the lives of the Country’s citizenry and affect the Constitution upon which the foundation of our Nation rests? We begin with this assertion: the two visions–the two world views–for this Country and for its people, rest on two mutually exclusive frameworks. Only one of the two can be realized. Democrats are a proxy for one vision. Republicans are a proxy for the second. It is not, then, a simple matter of a Republicans versus Democrats conflict that we are seeing. That is too simplistic. To frame the issue in terms of Republicans versus Democrats trivializes the matter before us.
We are engaged in a Civil War. The central question before the Nation, then, can be stated thusly:
Shall the Country continue to exist as an independent Sovereign Nation and free Republic as the founders conceived and intended, with the Nation’s Constitution, laws, and judiciary intact and supreme, subordinated to no external system of laws and external tribunals; or, will the Country, as an independent Sovereign Nation and Free Republic, see its status as a singular, unique, independent, sovereign Nation State, at once diminished, impaired, or severely truncated?
If the independence and sovereignty of the United States is impaired, we must consider a corollary question, namely, whether the supremacy of the Nation’s Constitution, its laws, and jurisprudence will similarly be impaired. And, if the United States finds its sovereignty and independence curtailed by pacts and treaties it happens to enter into with foreign entities through which such foreign elements insinuate their power and authority over this Country’s Government and institutions, will we then see the United States, as an independent sovereign political entity, subsumed into a new transnational political, economic, financial, and social framework, requiring that the Nation’s system of laws be subordinated to or otherwise replaced by foreign law and foreign jurisprudence? If such events were to occur, then this Nation and its Constitution will, de facto, cease to exist.
If such were to occur we would see the United States and the American people effectively subordinated to the governance and will of a new transnational political, economic, financial, and social system to which the Nation would henceforth belong. This is not conspiracy. This is not alternative history. This is fact. The events that have played out before us in recent months dispel perfunctory dismissal of the seriousness of the situation facing the Nation and its people. We have seen clear and categorical attacks on the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution, and on the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We have seen lower U.S. District Courts and U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal flaunting the rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court and flaunting the President’s Article 2 powers. We have seen indisputable, irrefutable evidence of high level federal bureaucrats having conspired against and continuing to conspire against the United State President; and we have seen indisputable, irrefutable evidence of high level bureaucrats actively attempting to sabotage the Administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. We have seen indisputable, irrefutable evidence of the leadership of a few States openly defying Federal law; and in open revolt against Federal Officers tasked with enforcing Federal law. We see a Press, misusing its sacred right under the First Amendment. It has undertaken a campaign of disinformation and misinformation. It routinely smears the President, in a reprehensible attempt to discredit him, to isolate him, to prevent him from doing his job on behalf of the American people; and, in that reprehensible attack on the President, the Press has also attacked the very institution of Office of the U.S. Presidency, and, in so doing, has attacked our institutions, our Nation, and our people. We have seen an insidious attempt to question the sanctity of the very notions of, ‘Nation State,’ and of ‘Citizen of the United States.’ We see raging mobs in the Streets, on university campuses, and in the Halls of Congress. We have seen lunatics harassing both Government officials and members of Congress. We see sacred statues toppled; history rewritten; our Nation’s Flag disrespected; our system of laws defied. None of this is accident. It is all by design.
Ever since Donald Trump assumed the mantle of President of the United States, the ruthless, secretive, seditious, extraordinarily powerful, and inordinately wealthy forces that have worked to disassemble this Nation, have had to come out of the shadows, albeit reluctantly. What they could not accomplish quietly, within the interstices of the Nation’s laws and institutions, they have come to realize they must use brute force. These forces are fomenting violence, anarchy, in a crude but, as they see it, necessary attempt, to force the Country back on the path they had established for the Country, a path that the Clintons, and Bush, and Obama–the willing accomplices of the Leftist agenda–had quietly, inexorably directed this Nation and its people to.
As we continue to explore the two visions of the Country–one ascribed to the Leftist agenda, and the second ascribed to the Conservative cause–we need to take a closer look at the two factions–one of whom we have referred to here as “Leftist” and the other that we have alluded to as “Conservative.” We must take a closer look at these two factions, and we begin with a consideration of the labels heretofore used as descriptors for them, even as we find all those descriptors to be inapt. We explain why. We then consider better descriptors that better encapsulate the beliefs, precepts, assumptions, aims, and ultimate goals of each faction, each side, in this conflict. We will then take a close look at several of those beliefs, precepts, assumptions, and aims, and show the logical end point realizations of each.
WHAT EXPRESSIONS BEST DESCRIBE THE TWO FACTIONS?
In describing the two factions, the two combatants, we have considered various terminology and rejected that terminology because we considered the verbiage are either vague and ambiguous, and therefore likely to create confusion, or too narrow in scope or range, and therefore deficient as descriptors. We have heretofore employed the expressions, ‘Democrat,’ ‘Leftist’, ‘Progressive,’ ‘Liberal,’ and ‘Radical’ loosely and often interchangeably to denote one faction. And, we have employed the expressions, ‘Republican,’ ‘Conservative,’ and ‘Populist’, loosely, often interchangeably to denote the other faction. But, these expressions, as well, are too vague or ambiguous and too limited in range to be effective for our purpose here. Furthermore, they have been so overused that they are tantamount to clichés. A couple of the expressions may be considered to be, simply, pejoratives. Lastly, a few of the expressions, may readily, or, at least, arguably suggest ideas, beliefs, and precepts of both factions, as there exists significant overlap. Or, the expressions are simply and essentially empty and vacuous vessels, and so serve no useful, functional purpose.
We have also considered using the expressions, ‘Globalist’ or ‘Internationalist’ or ‘Transnationalist’ to describe one faction and the expression, ‘Nationalist’ to describe the other faction. But these expressions as delineated come up short as apt descriptors, as they, too, have been overused; are, in fact, inaccurate descriptors; and, in reference to the term, ‘Nationalist,’ have been used as a term of disparagement, as the mainstream media, when writing or talking about President Trump or anyone who supports him, equates the President’s nationalist fervor with fascism, even though President Trump is clearly not a fascist and the term ‘nationalism’ does not denote ‘fascism’ and should not be construed as synonymous with ‘fascism.’ But, the allusions are there, operating as a meme.
A well-learned attorney, and legal scholar with whom we have discussed the matter, suggested that the expressions, ‘Collectivist,’ and ‘Individualist’ are the best terminology to be used to describe the belief system of a member of one faction or the other.’ And we concur. These two expressions are precise, carry no connotation of disparagement, have not heretofore been used by anyone, to our knowledge, to describe the two factions; and broadly embrace all beliefs, precepts, presuppositions and aims of the two groups facing off in this modern civil war taking place in America, but without any overlap. Therefore, mutual exclusivity in both the connotation and denotation of the expressions, as applied to each of the respective groups, is faithfully maintained. The expressions, ‘Collectivist’ and ‘Individualist,’ then, are the two expressions we will use as referrers and descriptors for each of the two factions at war with each other.
Now, let us consider several of the basic belief systems, precepts, and ultimate goal and logical outcome of the Collectivist and Individualist philosophies. We will see in this delineated list two competing visions for our Country, one of which, taken to its logical conclusion, results in the ultimate dissolution of the Country as an independent, Sovereign Nation State, together with the dissolution of the Nation’s Constitution and system of laws, and the other which preserves the Country as an independent, Sovereign Nation State, with its Constitution and laws intact.
We thus have two distinct, mutually exclusive visions of the Country and of the world; two distinct notions of law and government, and of the relationship of man to government and to each other—two distinct visions, only one which can be realized; and two ever diverging paths, only one, of which, our Nation can take! Our Nation is at a crossroads.
COLLECTIVISTS VERSUS INDIVIDUALISTS
COLLECTIVISTS’ BELIEFS, PRECEPTS, PRESUPPOSITIONS AND AIMS APROPOS OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE AMERICAN CITIZENRY
1) The ‘nation state’ is an archaic concept. The United States must eventually be subsumed into a new transnational political, economic, cultural, and social framework. This new framework will consist of the relics of the old western nation states, to be overseen by a world financial and technocratic conglomerate that will prescribe uniform rules of operation, behavior, and conduct of the various units and populations within it.
2) Since the concept of ‘citizen’ is tied to rights and liberties, privileges and immunities of a select group of people within the nation state, called “The United States Of America,” and, as this nation state, as a political construct, is, eventually, to be dismantled, a concept of ‘citizen of The United States’ will no longer be meaningful. Individuals who were once perceived as citizens of The United States will henceforth be considered “subjects” within a greater, transnational political, economic, financial, cultural, system of governance, comprising people of diverse cultures.
3) Diverse populations of people who inhabit vast regions throughout the world are henceforth to be integrated into a new global political and social and economic and financial and cultural world community.
4) Since there nation states will no longer exist, there will no longer exist national borders to be protected. Hence, the subjects of this new transnational political, social, economic and cultural paradigm are free to travel to and reside in any geographical unit within the span or global reach of the new system of governance that the subject wishes to travel to and reside in. Such entry and exit points that had once demarcated geographical borders of nation states dismantled are henceforth erased.
5) The U.S. Constitution which includes the rights and liberties of the citizens, codified in the Bill Of Rights, is meaningful only within the context of The United States, as an independent sovereign nation state. Once the United States ceases to exist, it follows that the U.S. constitution will be rendered ineffective and obsolete. Hence the political entity that existed as “The United States” is dissolved, along with the various states within the Union. The Nation will be subsumed within the new broad transnational system of global governance.
6) The U.S. Constitution need not be formally repealed. It simply will, upon the formal dismantling of The United States, have no legal force or effect. the governing board—the rulers—of this new system of global governance will prepare and implement a new legal and administrative framework for the system’s governance. This new legal and administrative framework—consisting of a new system of laws, rules, regulations, along with a new jurisprudential philosophy and methodology for handling civil disputes that happen to arise and criminal conduct that must be adjudicated—will be established, handled through civil and criminal tribunals, dispersed throughout the global system of governance. A constitution for the vast populations residing in this new world order may or may not be drafted. It may be useful, but is not required. The global system of governance will control the populace with a vast network of intelligence and police apparatuses. a standing army, with barracks throughout the global system of governance will also be established and maintained.
7) All populations that reside in the new global political and social, and economic framework are subject to the jurisdiction of this new transnational system of governance. This transnational system of governance will be created and enforced by overseers, appointed by the new global governing board, to mete out justice and to set forth those privileges the subjects may have and enjoy. such privileges that the subjects of this global system of governance enjoy may be refined, modified, or eliminated, as the global governing board sees fit.
8) Substantive and procedural rights are perceived as all man-made constructs. since it is decreed that, for political purposes, no creator exists, it follows, there are no natural fundamental rights intrinsic to man, endowed by a creator upon man. such rights and liberties that subjects have are deemed mere platitudes as subjects have no inherent rights or liberties as such, but, rather, privileges bestowed upon them, denoted by licenses, that are presented to subjects by the overseers of the new transnational system of global governance. licenses shall be surrendered to the overseers on demand or as prescribed by such laws and regulations, seen as edicts, that the governing board happens to create. and, since rights and liberties are no more than or other than licenses bestowed on subjects, they can easily be ceded to the overseers upon demand. It shall be declared, then, that no subject within the new transnational system of governance can claim any right or liberty as a matter of personal right, as no such personal rights exist inherently in man.
9) Thus, all rights, privileges, and liberties are considered man-made constructs and artifices. The governing board may, at its pleasure, modify or eliminate outright such rights, liberties, and privileges as it deems necessary, as the members of the governing board hold exclusive power and authority throughout the reach of the global system of governance.
10) The ethical system utilized by the governing board of this transnational system of governance, as applied to the subjects therein, is based on the notion of utilitarian consequentialism. This is a system of ethics in which “the good” is defined in terms of ‘utility’ maximization. What constitutes ‘the good’ is anything the rulers of this transnational system of governance, through their overseers, define ‘the good’ as applied to and as maximized for the greatest number of people.
11) Morality: the concept of ‘moral good’ is determined by the consequences of one’s actions alone—not by one’s intention to do a good or evil act. What constitutes “moral goodness” in the broadest sense is, then, that which benefits the collective—the majority of people. What benefits the collective, does not necessarily also benefit the individual. In fact, what benefits the collective may be deleterious and detrimental to the individual. Thus, for example, if the ownership of firearms for self-defense is considered beneficial to the individual but detrimental to the masses, then firearms’ ownership must be curtailed. Similarly, if free speech, and free association among particular groups are deemed to harm collective cohesion, then freedom of speech and freedom of association are inferred to be contrary to maintenance of the ‘moral good,’ the moral fiber of the populations and must be constrained. Acts that neither benefit the collective nor are deemed harmful to the collective are considered to be morally neutral. Morally neutral acts are acts that can be tolerated.
12) Results desired outweigh adherence to any constitution created or to any laws established. If the results to be achieved conflicts with the law as applied, then, the law must give way to the result to be achieved. Thus, the political or social end to be achieved or desired shall always override the constitution, if there is one, or such laws, rules, and regulations that are made. If, then, a desired political or social end to be achieved or desired can be achieved in no way other than by ignoring, suspending, or abrogating such laws, rules, and regulations, then such laws, rules and laws shall be suspended, abrogated, or simply ignored. Thus, the means to be achieved always justifies the end sought. thus, all laws, rules, regulations, or codes of conduct are merely ad hoc and, therefore, ultimately illusory.
13) Thus, “law” is whatever the governing board essentially says law is. The governing board may create or suspend law by simple proclamation or government edict. Law is adjusted by demand or need to obtain a particular result. Order is maintained by force. the governing Board may, periodically, create disorder, too, as a political device to achieve their goals.
14) Individual ambition and motivation and desire is contained and constrained. It is collective will—the will of the masses—shaped, molded and periodically contorted, distorted, and then reshaped, remolded and reconfigured by the rulers as to garner, essentially a condition of neutral political stasis. It is this state of neutral stasis that is ultimately desired. So, it is that neutral stasis that is considered the “ultimate good” and it is thus that utility is maximized, and “the will” of the masses—“the will” of the collective is achieved.
15)The vast populations of the world that fall under the domain of this new transnational system of global governance will be reduced to penury and servitude.
16) “Popular opinion” overrides the effect and impact of the constitution, if there is one, and overrides such laws that are created. But, ‘popular opinion’ as understood by collectivists is less a spontaneous public response to perceived grievances, emanating from the public, and more a political and social device, used by those who wield power to create the illusion that the masses, the collective ‘will,” wields power to affect political and social change and that the desire to do so emanates from the masses. It does not. Popular opinion is driven by the demand of those in power to achieve a desired end, as power—its creation and use—falls within the purview of government, not the people. This illustrates, once again, that all law is ad hoc for the collectivist. Law, as such, is an artifice, another tool of government to be used as a mechanism of control. The transnational system of governance is a system of governance ruled by men—the rulers of this transnational system of governance; it is not a system ruled by law.
17) Individuals, or groups of individuals, that, from time to time, happen to rise up against the global system of governance will be quashed by the police and army, if necessary. but, generally, the governing board will use the subjects, themselves, to constrain dissent. use of the populace itself, as a self-righteous horde, is preferred, to maintain order, as police and army standby at the ready. the illusion is maintained that the populace—the collective, the masses, themselves—are the rulers, as this fosters the false notion that it is the collective will that operates to create cohesion, order, and perpetual harmony in society. But that notion is the supreme, ultimate myth since governmental power and authority does not rest in the people, but in government itself and government is not answerable to the people, but only to itself, as it is the ruling “elite”—ever shadowy and secretive, who wield actual power and authority.
18) Eventually, the unique history, culture, traditions, and values that identify the peoples of the various independent nation states will be forgotten, dissolved in the mists of the past. A new history will be drafted; a new culture, set of traditions, and set of core values will be created for this new amorphous mass of people that inhabit the vast lands overseen by the rulers of this global system of governance. A single currency will be used throughout the system of governance, and a single language adopted throughout the realm. the ministers of propaganda will periodically monitor and revise language to maintain homogeneity in thought and action among the subjects of this vast global system of governance.
The vision of the proponents of Collectivism is inconsistent with the vision the founders of our Nation had for our Country. In fact, it is anathema to the vision of our founders.
In the next segment we look at the founder’s vision. It is the vision of Individualism, and, up to this point in time, it has prevailed, albeit Collectivists have been slowly, quietly replacing it with their own vision.
With the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency, Collectivists have had to come out of the shadows. Their vision for the Country is on full display through the antics of Democrats and through raging mobs of agitators, and, through the creation of and utilization of “false flag” operations. Collectivists are testing the limits of the American public’s patience for and tolerance to the changes they seek to impose on the Nation. They are doing this to soften the resolve of the American people; to disassemble the legal, social, financial, economic, and political framework and fabric of this Nation in order to pave the way for the ultimate dismantling of the Country as an independent Sovereign Nation State, thereby paving the way for the Country’s inclusion into a new transnational, global system of governance.
If anyone should doubt what Collectivists are planning, keep in mind the steps they have taken to date that, even a few short years ago would have been so ludicrous as to be dismissed out-of-hand. Many of these Collectivists have, in fact, called for massive revision of the Constitution, and an end to the very concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘citizen’ as commonly understood and defined.
Collectivists have lost power to effectuate the changes they seek, the changes to society that had been quietly unfolding through the the administrations of two Bushes; Bill Clinton; and Barack Obama; and which would have continued through the administration of a second Clinton, Hillary, or that of a third Bush, Jeb.
INDIVIDUALISTS’ BELIEFS, PRECEPTS, PRESUPPOSITIONS AND AIMS
1) the concept of the ‘nation state’ is not archaic. it is not to be perceived as applicable only to past eras. it is as basic and fundamental, and pertinent, and useful a construct today as in any past century. And, The United States as a Nation State is to be understood as an independent sovereign entity, neither beholding to nor subordinated to any other nation, commonwealth of nations federation of nations, or governmental entity of any kind; nor beholding to or subordinated to any one individual or group of individuals or to any corporate or financial entity of any shape or kind.
2) The United States is a political construct, created by the people of The United States, through the nation’s Constitution. Since the Nation and its Government were created by the people, the Nation and its government can only be dismantled by the people of The United States, if they so wish, in accordance with the Constitution they conceived, ratified, and implemented, or where the existence of tyranny in, of, or by government so demands it.
3) The federal government created by the people of The United States has only such power and authority as codified in the Constitution of The United States. The powers and authority of the federal government are limited, created by the people, through the Constitution. Ultimate power and authority rests with and vests in the people themselves, not in government.
4) The concept of ‘citizen’ is tied inextricably to the concept of a ‘nation state.’ Certain rights and liberties, privileges and immunities exist for those people who are deemed citizens.
5) Rights and liberties, privileges and immunities cannot be and must not be summarily curtailed, contained, restrained, or erased, except as prescribed by and in full accord with and compliance with the Constitution and laws of the United States. And, those rights and liberties deemed fundamental, natural, unalienable, as set forth in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution, can never be eliminated by law or even by the Constitution, as those rights exist independent of the Constitution—are simply codifications of rights existent in the American citizen, him or herself. As codifications of preexistent rights and liberties they serve merely as reminders to those servants of the people, in government, that such fundamental, natural rights are bequeathed to man by the Creator. They are not privileges bestowed to man by government. If the servants of the people forget that fact, there is one right in particular—the right of the people to keep and bear arms—shall forever remain as a potent reminder to those who serve the people that true power and authority rightfully exists, has always existed, and shall always exist in the people themselves, and not in their servants. Thus, among the unenumerated rights and liberties of the citizenry, such specific fundamental, unalienable, natural rights and liberties exist are so indelibly linked to the Nation as a free Republic, that the containment or abrogation of those rights and liberties is equivalent to the destruction of the Nation as a free Republic.
6) As the United States is an independent, sovereign nation, its Constitution and laws can never lawfully be abrogated or subordinated to the laws of any other nation or international or transnational body, federation, or commonwealth of nations. Thus, no person, group of people, nation, federation of nations, or entity of any kind outside the U.S. has authority over, nor shall such person or entity lawfully exert authority or power over the United States or its citizenry.
7) As no person, group of people, nation, federation of nations, or entity of any kind external to the U.S. has authority over, or can lawfully exert authority or power over the United States or over its citizenry, similarly, no person, group of people or influences internal to the U.S. shall operate to relinquish authority of the Nation to an external power or force of any kind; nor shall any person or group of people or influences within this Nation denigrate or subvert the ultimate and absolute authority of the citizenry of this Nation; nor shall any person, or group of people or influences within the Country restrain or subvert the sanctity of the autonomy of the individual citizen
8) As a legitimate, independent, sovereign ‘nation state,’ the geographical borders of The United States are physically demarcated. the government of the United States has the right and the duty to protect the integrity of its borders from any intrusion by aliens who dare to cross the nation’s borders illegally and who dare remain in this country illegally.
9) Thus, no one, not a citizen of the United States, can claim entry into this country as a matter of right, but may only enter and remain in the United States as the laws of this Nation and the Nation’s Constitution so prescribe.
10) Those individuals who presume to enter this country as a matter of right, and do so, in a manner inconsistent with the nation’s laws and Constitution, have illegally transgressed the nation’s laws and Constitution. Such individuals are deemed, ‘illegal aliens,’ not ‘undocumented aliens’ nor ‘undocumented immigrants,’ nor ‘nondocumented citizens.’ When individuals have transgressed our Nation’s laws, they are not privileged to remain within our nation’s boundaries; nor are they entitled to the full panoply of rights and liberties, privileges and immunities that exist for the American citizen. Thus, those individuals, who enter this country illegally, are subject to prosecution and either confinement or deportation, as dictated by law and by the U.S. Constitution, and, further, such individuals rightfully merit public condemnation, not public approbation.
11) The sanctity of the individual American citizen is not to be denied. Morality proceeds from the idea that whatever is in the best interests of the individual generally overrides the interests of the multitude, the Collective. the ‘morally good’ is defined in terms of those actions that serve the best interests of the individual American citizen, so long as the interest obtained does not negatively impact the life, liberty, and property, of another individual. A person’s intention to do good or evil, as well as all consequences stemming from that intention, determine that which is morally good as opposed to that which is deemed morally evil.
12) the dictates of the U.S. Constitution, and the strictures of law must always be adhered to if this Nation is to be deemed truthfully to be a Nation that is governed by laws and not by men.
13) No person, regardless of station in life, or personal monetary wealth, is considered to be above the law, on the basis of that station in life, or on the basis of ones’ personal financial means.
14) Our Nation’s Constitution and its laws—statutes and body of case law—dictate a person’s rights, duties, and responsibilities in our nation.
15) No person or political body shall contrive/conspire to ignore our nation’s Constitution or system of laws, or the rights and liberties existent therein; nor shall any person or political body establish its own set of ad hoc rules to be applied whenever that person or that political body so wishes in order to accomplish either a personal or political end; nor shall any person or political body contrive or conspire to apply laws unlawfully to denigrate, or disparage another person, or to deny to a person such rights, liberties, and procedural due process to which that person is entitled; nor shall any person or political body create ad hoc laws or rules to do same.
16) The Nation’s history, traditions, and core values are sacred and sacrosanct. The Nation’s history, traditions, and core values are not to be abrogated, as they define our Nation. The Nation’s history, traditions, and core values create, together, this Nation’s identity, and the identity of its people.
17) Popular opinion does not, never did, and never will control or supersede the Nation’s Constitution or laws or the supremacy of the fundamental rights and liberties codified in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution.
18) Results are never more important than adherence to the Constitution and laws of the Land. If the goal to be achieved conflicts with the law as applied, then law must never give way to the goal desired. No political or social end to be achieved shall ever dictate when or if, or how the Constitution or the laws of the Land ought to be or might be suspended, constrained, or abrogated.
19) If the desired political or social end to be achieved conflicts with the Constitution or the Nation’s laws, it is the political or social end that must be forsaken, never the Constitution nor the Nation’s laws.
20) Thus, suspension or repudiation of the Nation’s Constitutional precepts and laws must never be and can never be justifiably or rightfully suspended in favor of achieving the political or social end. For, it is understood that the danger of suspension, containment or abrogation of the Constitution or laws to achieve a political or social end is detrimental to the preservation of a free Republic and a free people.
21) Thus, preservation of the Constitution and of the laws of the Land and of the Nation’s system of jurisprudence always outweighs the achievement of a particular political or social goal or end. The attainment or realization of any political or social goal, however seemingly critical to the well-being of this Nation or its people at a particular moment in time or necessitated by seemingly perceived changed circumstances, can never and must never be deemed more critical than strict application of the Nation’s Constitution and laws, that attainment or realization of a particular goal shall suffer cause to ignore, contain, constrain, or abrogate, whether for the particular moment or henceforth, forever.
22) Thus, the desire to achieve any political or social end can never justify the suspension or abrogation of the sacred precepts of the constitution and laws of United States.
WHERE DO AMERICANS FIND THEMSELVES AT THIS JUNCTURE, NOW THAT JUDGE KAVANAUGH HAS BEEN CONFIRMED AS AN ASSOCIATE JUSTICE OF THE U.S. SUPREME COURT?
With Brett Kavanaugh now on the high Court, the Individualists’ vision for this Country now has a better chance to prevail in the decades ahead than the vision of the Collectivists. Had Hillary Clinton prevailed in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, and thereupon nominated individuals to the high Court who view the Constitution of the United States as a “Living Document,” susceptible to massive judicial and legislative revision, the direction of this Country would have continued along the path created for it by the Bush and Clinton clans, and by Barack Obama. Americans would have seen the eventual loss of this Country’s independence and sovereignty, and, concomitantly, Americans would have seen the loss of the fundamental, unalienable rights guaranteed to them, as codified in the Nation’s Bill of Rights. The losses would have been drastic, and those losses would have been assured. Thankfully, a dire future for this Nation and its people is less likely to happen now, as the election of Trump has enabled the Nation to pivot back to the path laid out for us by the founders of the Nation. But, there is still much work ahead for the American people. We must remain ever vigilant. Be mindful of this fact: if, after the 2016 Midterm Elections, the Democrats—as a vehicle of the forces of Collectivism—gain majority control of the House, they can create serious obstacles to President Trump’s goals to bring this Nation back on track toward preserving the vision of this Nation as understood by this Nation’s founders.
Collectivists want their power back; they want to place their agenda back on track. After the 2016 midterm elections we will see whether Collectivists regain some of their lost power by retaking the House of Representatives. Those who espouse Individualism can prevent that. Americans will have to choose the kind of Country they want or whether they still want a Country at all.
The forces of Collectivism, as we have seen, are capable of planning and implementing the most obscene, insidious stratagems to frustrate the efforts of the Trump Administration and thereby frustrate the will of the American people. These Collectivists are ruthless, relentless, and seemingly impervious to defeat. They have unlimited stores of cash, along with extremely effective organizational skills. They are masters of propaganda. They control legions of agitators. They know how to whip the ill-informed among us into a frenetic, raging mob, urging them to coerce and intimidate law-abiding citizens, including Government officials and members of Congress. They are absolutely bent on getting their way. We must see to it that they don’t.
____________________________________________________________
*Note: to readers: This is a substantial revision of Part Three.
**After the fact, the Arbalest Quarrel came across a website, “Freedom Keys,” that does a good job in setting forth critical differences between the two mutually distinct and incompatible groups: Collectivists and Individualists. What the Arbalest Quarrel does, distinct from the creators of that website, is to take the key predicates of each group and draw the necessary inferences as to what the precepts and beliefs of each group mean and the end toward which the particular belief systems and basic axioms of these two distinct, divergent groups, point.
WHERE DO AMERICANS FIND THEMSELVES AT THIS JUNCTURE, NOW THAT JUDGE KAVANAUGH HAS BEEN CONFIRMED AS AN ASSOCIATE JUSTICE OF THE U.S. SUPREME COURT?
With Brett Kavanaugh now on the high Court, the Individualists’ vision for this Country is now more likely to prevail in the decades ahead than is the vision of the Collectivists. Had Hillary Clinton prevailed in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, and thereupon nominated individuals to the high Court who view the Constitution of the United States as a “Living Document,” susceptible to massive judicial and legislative revision, the direction of this Country would have continued along the path created for it by the Bush and Clinton clans, and by Barack Obama. Americans would have seen the eventual loss of this Country’s independence and sovereignty, and, concomitantly, Americans would have seen the loss of the fundamental, unalienable rights guaranteed to them, as codified in the Nation’s Bill of Rights. The losses would have been drastic, and those losses would have been assured. Thankfully, a dire future for this Nation and its people is less likely to happen now, as the election of Trump has enabled the Nation to pivot back to the path laid out for us by the founders of the Nation. But, there is still much work ahead for the American people. We must remain ever vigilant.
The forces of Collectivism, as we have seen, are capable of planning and implementing most obscene, insidious stratagems to frustrate the efforts of the Trump Administration and thereby frustrate the will of the American people. These Collectivists are ruthless, relentless, and seemingly impervious to defeat. They have unlimited stores of cash, along with extremely effective organizational skills. They are masters of propaganda. They control legions of agitators. They know how to whip the ill-informed among us into a frenetic, raging mob, urging them to coerce and intimidate law-abiding citizens, including Government officials and members of Congress. They are absolutely bent on getting their way. We must see to it that they don’t.
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https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/136/954/337/original/7ebce8d7287a7089.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/136/954/337/original/7ebce8d7287a7089.jpg)
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Not sure where to put this-- lots of graphs, so I post only the link. Is this something you guys can see.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid19-crisis-is-officially-over-everything-changed-605b31ae?mod=hp_lead_pos5
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Not sure where to put this-- lots of graphs, so I post only the link. Is this something you guys can see.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid19-crisis-is-officially-over-everything-changed-605b31ae?mod=hp_lead_pos5
I can see I am required to subscribe.
Paywalled.
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Not sure how the formatting will work out here:
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END OF AN ERA
The Covid–19 Crisis is Officially Over.
Everything
changed.
The World Health Organization declared an end to the pandemic emergency. The reshaping of American life is among the lingering side effects.
By Stephanie StammFollow
and Danny DoughertyFollow
Updated May 5, 2023 9:44 am ET
SHARE
TEXT
The alarms sounded in March 2020, and Americans cloistered at home, sheltering from a pandemic killing at times thousands a day. Many people free to work remotely left their big-city lives for suburbs and rural communities. Americans everywhere have settled into more homebound routines for meals and entertainment. Yet even with the deadly crisis fading, the U.S. has yet to recapture the level of happiness enjoyed before the virus SARS-CoV-2 transformed our world.
...where we live changed.
The flexibility of remote work allowed many people to flee coastal urban areas and settle in more-affordable rural and central parts of the U.S. Suburbs and smaller cities claim most of the growth.
Divisions of the U.S.
West North Central
East North Central
New
England
Mountain
Largest gain
Middle Atlantic
Largest loss
Pacific
South
Atlantic
West South
Central
East South
Central
Change in county populations from 2020 to 2022, by census division
City core of large metros
Suburban and outlying areas of large metros
Medium and small metros with populations < 1 million
Rural counties
6
%
5
The New York City metro area lost over 400,000 people
4
Overall
change
in region
3
2
1
0
Mountain
West
South
Central
South
Atlantic
–1
–2
East
South
Central
West
North
Central
New
England
East
North
Central
Pacific
–3
Middle
Atlantic
Note: Data for Connecticut not included due to recent boundary changes.
Source: WSJ analysis of Census Bureau data
...work changed.
The job market has shifted. Some industries, such as leisure, hospitality and healthcare, are pulling ahead. Retail and manufacturing are cooling.
Job openings by industry in February 2020 and March 2023
OPENINGS PER 100 JOBS
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Total nonfarm
2020
2023
Manufacturing
Retail
Transportation, warehousing and utilities
Professional and business services
Health care and social assistance
Leisure and hospitality
Government
Leisure and hospitality jobs have climbed to more than eight openings per 100 jobs
Note: Data are seasonally adjusted. The openings rate is total job openings as a percentage of employment plus openings at the end of the month.
Source: Labor Department
Americans are still working at home a lot. Offices are only about half as full as before the pandemic.
Office occupancy, 5-day rolling average
100%
90
Prepandemic rate
Week ending March 6
98%
80
70
Week ending
March 29
49%
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
March 2020
'21
'22
'23
Source: Kastle
...spending/finances changed.
Some pandemic habits are sticking. People continue to spend more on home, personal and recreational goods, such as sporting equipment, audio-visual gear and musical instruments.
Change in consumer spending from 4Q 2019
60
%
Recreational goods
40
Home furnishings
20
Clothing and footwear
Motor vehicles
0
Recreation services
–20
–40
2020
'21
'22
'23
Note: Seasonally adjusted
Source: Commerce Department
...eating changed.
Americans are grabbing more meals at fast-food restaurants and other quick-service spots. Fewer people are having restaurant meals.
Restaurant and food service industry food and beverage sales, 2019–’23
Total
Bars
and taverns
–10.6%
Full service
–9.2
Quick service*
1.9
*Includes fast-casual restaurants, cafeterias, buffets, snack bars and social caterers
Note: Adjusted for inflation
Source: National Restaurant Association
While nearly 90% of Americans shop for some groceries in stores, the dollar amount of online grocery shopping has quadrupled during the pandemic.
Monthly online sales for groceries by receiving method
$8.0
billion
Pickup
$3.5 billion
$1.9
billion
Delivery
3.2
Ship-to-home
1.3
2019*
’20
’21
’22
’23
*Figures from August of that year, used as a proxy for 2019
Note: Except for 2019, all figures from March of each year.
Source: Brick Meets Click/Mercatus Grocery Shopping Survey, 2019–’23.
...how we entertain ourselves changed.
People entertain themselves at home, too. The popularity of streaming services is finding a new level based on huge surges during the pandemic.
Net paid subscribers change*
0.6 million
2019
2.0
2020
2.5
2021
4.0
2022
-0.2
2023
*February of each year. Includes both new and converted (from trial) subscribers. Adds are when number of new subscribers is higher than cancels. Net losses are when cancels are higher than adds.
Note: Includes Apple TV+, Discovery+, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Netflix, Paramount+, Peacock, Showtime, Starz.
Source: Antenna
...school changed.
Test scores declined after children struggled with remote schooling.
Average reading scores and achievement levels
2022’s average score dropped five points since 2017
2022’s average score dropped seven points since 2017
BASIC
PROFICIENT
4th grade
’19
’17
BASIC
PROFICIENT
8th grade
200
210
220
230
240
250
260
270
280
’19
’17
Source: National Assessment of Educational Progress
...health changed.
Americans aren’t visiting the doctor quite as frequently as they did before the pandemic.
Adults with a visit to a doctor in the last 12 months
86
%
85
84
83
82
81
80
79
78
Q1 2019
'20
'21
'22
Source: Kaiser Family Foundation
But people make more remote telehealth appointments, the majority for behavioral health.
National telehealth visits
80 million
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Q1 2019
'20
'21
'22
Source: Trilliant Health
...our happiness changed.
Overall, Americans say they are less happy—some much less so.
Level of happiness of polled
CHANGE
FROM 2018–23
60%
Pretty happy
+0.2 pct. pts.
50
40
30
Not too happy
+17.5
20
10
Very happy
-19.6
2010
'12
'14
'16
'18
'21
'23
Source: WSJ/NORC poll of 1,019 adults, conducted on March 1-13, 2023; margin of error +/-4.1 pct. pts. Data prior to 2023 from the General Social Survey annual surveys of 2,000-2,500 adults; margins of error range from +/-2.2 pct. pts. to +/- 3.1 pct. pts.
Brianna Abbott, Ben Chapman, Peter Grant, Heather Haddon, Jaewon Kang, Sarah Krouse, Chastity Pratt and Max Rust contributed to this article
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https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/destined-live-quiet-times-progress-walter-russell-mead-via-meadia
You Are Not Destined to Live in Quiet Times
Humanity’s third major technological revolution is leading us into a future more promising and also more dangerous than any since the dawn of history. It’s coming faster than you think.
BY
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
MAY 07, 2023
Via Meadia
Walter Russell Mead analyzes the revolutionary changes upending American life in the hope of rekindling the American dream for Gen Z and beyond
The COVID pandemic and the rise of AI have something in common. Between them, they have upended one of the most consequential debates among American tech analysts, and largely refuted the claim that progress in America was coming to an end—that the Adams curve was flattening out as a Great Stagnation cooled the dynamism of American life.
The case for stagnation was a strong one. Current technologies, advocates warned, were providing diminishing returns, and productivity growth in American life was slowing. The regulatory burden on innovation in the United States inexorably grew. Compared with the optimism that accompanied earlier innovations like electricity, indoor plumbing, the internal combustion engine, antibiotics, refrigeration, and mass communications, Americans in the internet age seemed noticeably more risk averse and pessimistic about the future.
The stagnationists make some important points. But as my friend Tyler Cowen noted in his seminal 2011 book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, stagnation was never likely to be more than a pause. By 2020, Tyler saw the pause coming to an end as advances in medicine, battery technology, computing, and distance-working made themselves felt.
The alternation between a sense of stagnation and one of dizzyingly rapid change reflects, I think, the complexity of human society’s progression up the Adams curve. As a hiker begins to climb a mountain, it becomes harder to see the summit, and harder still to see—as the trail winds through forests and takes you up onto ridges and down into valleys—whether you are in fact making any progress. But along the way, there will be moments when you get a clear view of the summit looming above you and the immense distances you have already climbed, and those doubts will be stilled.
The advent of AI and the COVID pandemic provided two such moments of clarity. The swift appearance and rapid development of practical AI applications on a mass scale has surprised and alarmed many people close to the industry. Geoffrey Hinton, widely credited with developing the intellectual foundation for modern AI, resigned from Google last week to warn about the dangers of an invention so disruptive that he regrets helping to develop it. Hinton’s warning follows a letter signed by some well-regarded tech analysts and industry leaders ranging from Steve Wozniak to Elon Musk cautioning that the unchecked development of AI could pose a threat to the stability or even the survival of civilization as we know it.
The pandemic also showed us how far we have come. When COVID hit, and a panicked population looked for ways to stay safe, Americans discovered something that made this pandemic different from all others: The development of both the hardware and software in the enormous invisible realm we vaguely refer to as “the internet” had reached the point where the majority of the productive activities of American society could be conducted by tens of millions of people without leaving their homes.
But the impact of internet-empowered work from home (WFH) went far beyond helping us get past COVID. Without anybody really noticing, and with some of the world’s most acute observers lamenting the end of progress, the technological basis for a total transformation of the American workplace, urban landscape, and even family had quietly taken shape offstage. The characteristic workplace of the Industrial Revolution, the large, centralized workspace to which white-collar workers commute like clockwork five days a week, is no longer an economic necessity. The megacity of the Industrial Revolution, with an economically dominant central business district surrounded by rings of suburbs, is no longer a natural and inevitable form dictated by the nature of work. The potential for mass WFH also points toward a profound change in the nature of the family of the industrial era—when, uniquely in human history, most children and most parents in nonelite families spent most of their waking hours living separately from each other.
Productivity statistics, which essentially divide the value of a worker’s output by the amount of time spent on the job, do not capture these realities. Time spent at a desk is one thing, but the time spent commuting matters if we want to think more holistically. According to Census Bureau figures, the average commuter in the New York metro area spent roughly 75 minutes per day or 375 minutes per week commuting in 2019, the last year before the pandemic. During the pandemic, those workers produced essentially the same work without the commute, an efficiency gain of 15.6%. Factor in the reduced costs (gas, tolls, depreciation on cars, and bus and train fares), and it’s clear that the WFH model offers significant increases in the efficiency of work.
The ultimate impact on social productivity is likely to be higher still. The vast and cumbersome transit systems that the pre-internet economies required are costly to build and maintain. They contribute significantly to both public and private costs. If future economic growth can be unshackled from the need to endlessly expand these systems, so that cities and states do not have to invest such eyewatering sums in adding new lanes to existing freeways or building and operating new transit systems, a lot of money will be freed up. Similarly, workers will have fewer costs even as they enjoy more free time.
The big waves of change we call economic revolutions don’t just increase the amount of economic activity in a particular society. They change the nature of economic activity in ways that can be difficult to capture or understand. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, many economists shared the view of the physiocrats that agricultural production was the true basis of society and that all others were parasites. For them, agricultural productivity was the only kind that mattered. Industry, finance, and the service sector were irrelevant and unproductive. For these economists, developments like the early steam engines and spinning jennies were meaningless epiphenomena.
That would change. The Industrial Revolution would force shifts in economic theory and promote massive changes in the way economists measured and valued economic activity. Similarly, today as the economy develops and both the means of production and the objects of production mutate into radically new forms, we will have to develop new ideas about how the economy works and new measurements to tell us how well we are doing. Progress in the industrial era involved, among other things, developing new and faster ways to move commuters to and from the workplace. Progress in the information age may mean finding ways to help them achieve greater productivity without leaving their homes.
For all the talk of stagnation, the Adams curve remains a basic fact of contemporary life, and our society can expect new waves of both social and economic change as the 21st century proceeds. The best way to understand how that reality shapes our political and cultural environment is to step back from the present and look at the long view—at the role that technological and social development has played in the story of our kind. The picture that emerges is both promising and troubling.
The story of our species is full of surprises and plot twists, but just about as far back as we can explore the fossil record, the human family seems to be preoccupied with two principal fields of activity.
First, from the time of our remote ancestors to the present day, human beings have never stopped developing new tools and thinking up new ways to harness natural objects and forces to achieve human ends. Second, we’ve never ceased weaving thicker and more intricate webs of society, language, and culture. (The third thing we keep doing, having fights with other groups of humans, is, I think, best seen as a byproduct of our web-weaving activity.)
Whether measured by social or technical development, we’ve come a long way. Our culture and our technology are both unrecognizably complex compared to the achievements of our forebears. Our ancestors chipped flints on the savannah; today our telescopes scour remote galaxies for signs of the origins of the universe. We once lived in small family units and survived on what we hunted and gathered. Today we build vast cities and feast on exotic foods imported from all over the world.
Materialists like Karl Marx would say that technological progress drives cultural development. Idealists will tell you that it’s the culture and above all the ideas that drive events. To understand the arguments, think of the piano. Materialistically inclined musicologists argue that progress in the construction of new and more sonorous pianos allowed Ludwig van Beethoven to develop increasingly complex music. Their colleagues of a more idealistic or romantic bent would maintain that the unceasing demands by Beethoven and his contemporaries for better pianos to play the music they heard in their heads drove piano manufacturers to build instruments that kept the customers happy.
These chicken and egg controversies are hard to settle, but for my part, I’ve always thought Aristotle had the right approach. His definition of human beings as political animals points us to an understanding of human nature that integrates the “spiritual” and “material” elements of our lives into a seamless whole. As animals, we are grounded in the material world, but it is also part of our nature to engage with the world of abstractions and cultural meaning that go into our common existence. We are amphibians, intellectual and spiritual beings who spontaneously and naturally engage in logical reasoning, aesthetic creation, and moral discernment; and we are physical beings who live and act in the material world from which we draw our sustenance.
Whether you go with the materialists, the idealists, or us incarnationists, the outlines of the story are the same. As far back into the distant past as we can peer, human beings have been developing tools and techniques to impress their will on the natural environment, and they’ve been interacting with each other to create an ever-thicker web of social interaction and cultural meaning.
This may seem tediously obvious, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the decades, it’s the importance of interrogating the obvious. What could be more obvious and even humdrum than an apple falling from a tree? Many of the great discoveries and achievements come about because a determined person grabs hold of some apparently obvious phenomenon, demands to understand it and, like Jacob wrestling with the angel, says “I will not let you go until you bless me.”
There are three admittedly obvious things about the long story of human progress that I find indispensable when it comes to making sense of our times. The first is that while technological change and social and cultural change go hand in hand, they do not always move in the same direction or at the same pace—a fact that is particularly important when the pace of change is extremely rapid.
Living as we do in a time of rapid technological and social change, the gap between the world our institutions and cultural values took shape in and the conditions we live in today means that many of our most important institutions do not work very well. It is as if we were trying to run the software of the 2020s on computer hardware and operating systems from the 1990s.
Our political parties and institutions took shape long before the internet and social media existed. Our government bureaucracies, our schools, and our legal system were all built for conditions that no longer exist. Many of our labor market policies assume that people will work for one employer for most of their working lives.
Unfortunately, this is not just a matter of institutional hardware. Many of our political ideas and ideological assumptions also reflect the conditions of an earlier era. If society’s operating system is running on the equivalent of a long-outdated version of Windows, that makes real reform difficult to imagine, and harder still to carry out.
The bad news is that this creates a pervasive and self-reinforcing sense of alienation and frustration as people interact with many different institutions that are not fit for the purpose. The good news is that thinking clearly about these gaps and their causes can help us develop a reform agenda that can substantially improve the way America works—and those changes, because they make our institutions more efficient as well as more effective, will often save money rather than require greater spending.
It looks as if we are entering an age of permanent revolution, in which radical technological and social changes cascade across the world largely nonstop.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/destined-live-quiet-times-progress-walter-russell-mead-via-meadia
The second feature of the story of human progress that matters today is that we happen to be caught up in one of the three great waves of change that most historians dignify with capital letters and associate with revolutions. The Neolithic, Industrial, and Information Revolutions all mark major milestones in the human story. The reality that we are now living through one of them is a fundamental feature of our time and one of the chief causes behind many of the problems and controversies we face.
Revolution is one of the most overused words in the political lexicon, but no lesser word adequately describes the scale, disruptiveness, and consequences of these three explosive events in the human story. The Neolithic Revolution, as the wave of changes connected to the development of settled agriculture is often called, was much more than a revolution in the ways people fed themselves. It was, literally, the dawn of history, as the first writing systems developed to handle the greater needs for permanent recordkeeping and commercial transaction under the new conditions. Those systems did not just enable the rise of bureaucracies and mercantile trade. Oral traditions were written down, forming the basis of organized religion. Scientific enquiries and philosophical debates could transcend the limits of space and time, as scholars could read the words of their predecessors.
The Neolithic Revolution was a time of explosive social change. The rise of cities and the elaborate political structures needed to govern them are just some of the consequences of the shift. Class systems developed along with increased specialization of labor as the relatively homogenous communities of previous eras gave way to a world of kings, nobles, priests, merchants, artisans, peasants, and slaves. Armies with professional soldiers appeared for the first time, along with wars of conquest.
The consequences of the Industrial Revolution were similarly far-reaching. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, cavalry officers still charged across battlefields sword in hand. The last great war of the industrial era concluded with the detonation of nuclear bombs. From the Enlightenment and the French Revolution to the rise of Marxism and the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the intellectual and political movements of the last 250 years have transformed the face of the world and led humanity on a series of adventures both magnificent and tragic.
The development of railroads, automobiles, and airplanes introduced changes in human culture and civilization that we still struggle to process. Unprecedented developments in mining, industry, and methods of energy generation and transmission have covered the Earth with the works of mankind. Urbanization, the rise of the industrial working class, the growth of nationalism, the development of mass public education, the cultural impact of mass entertainments like Hollywood movies: Each of these changes emerged from the all-conquering impact of the Industrial Revolution.
These are still early days, but the Information Revolution seems fated to be more dramatic still. A cascade of interlocking, interrelated social and technological change is driving global upheaval at an unprecedented speed. Before its work is done, the Information Revolution is likely to drive social, political, cultural, economic, and geopolitical transformations more sweeping and profound than anything the Industrial Revolution produced.
This is both a wonderful and a terrifying thing. On the one hand, humanity is becoming more productive and affluent than ever before. Already the average person with a cellphone has faster access to more information than anybody in the history of the world. New methods of research incorporating artificial intelligence have already accelerated the development of new treatments for disease, and the promise of these and similar technologies is only beginning to be fulfilled.
But that is not the whole story. New technologies enable government and corporate snooping on a scale that would have astounded (and delighted) Josef Stalin. Manufacturing and clerical jobs have been automated out of existence or outsourced to poor countries at rates that match the collapse of family farming in the 19th and 20th centuries. IT-enabled weapons and cyberattacks could make wars even deadlier and harder to avoid. Global and national financial systems, experiencing unprecedented rates of change and development as AI and other new technologies enable financial markets to achieve levels of complexity and velocity that the unaided human mind cannot comprehend, could experience devastating crises costing trillions of dollars and upending millions of lives.
Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution continues across much of the world. Factories are still springing up in rice paddies across Asia; the first textile mills are popping up in some African countries. The massive migration to the cities across much of Africa and Asia continues even as the disruptions of the Information Revolution reverberate around the globe. The children of illiterate herdsmen scan social media on their cellphones. The world has never seen anything like this concatenation of explosive transformations, and the world that emerges from this era will be like nothing humanity has ever seen or dreamed.
This brings us to another feature of the ancient story of human progress that matters especially in our era: the tendency of human development to accelerate and intensify over time.
For thousands of years, the pace of humanity’s growing technological prowess and social complexity was almost unnoticeable over an individual lifespan. Archeologists can trace the spread of new techniques for chipping flints and making tools through prehistoric human society; historians and archeologists can work together to understand the spread of new metalworking techniques in the Bronze and Iron ages. But change was slow, and many people around the world never saw a tool or had an idea that would not have been familiar to their grandparents. And even when change happened, it was usually seen as an exceptional development, a stone falling into a pool that would, after the ripples died down, resume its previous and natural calm.
But over the last 700 years, the rate of human progress began perceptibly to pick up steam. Starting in Western Europe, the rate of technological and social change accelerated as a new kind of dynamism made itself felt. Windmills, double-entry bookkeeping, cannons, printing presses: World-changing inventions poured forth at an unprecedented rate.
This acceleration changed the way that history works. The Neolithic Revolution, associated with settled agriculture and the invention of writing, came thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was only about two centuries old when the Information Revolution started to hit late in the 20th century. Increasingly, especially with advances in genetics and the science of the brain coming so quickly, it looks as if we are entering an age of permanent revolution in which radical technological and social changes cascade across the world largely nonstop. For people in our time, rapid and accelerating change is the norm; we hardly know anymore what stability feels like.
Much of the intellectual history of the last two centuries revolves around the efforts of great thinkers to wrap their heads around the Great Acceleration. The family of intellectual and political movements generally known as the Enlightenment grew out of the recognition of thinkers ranging from Voltaire to Goethe that something fundamental in the human condition had changed. Philosophers like Kant and Hegel were not just, like many of their predecessors, interested in unraveling the nature of existence. They found themselves drawn to the study of change. They were aware that the social and technological basis of European society was changing from decade to decade and even year to year. They wanted to understand what this meant, why it was happening, and what it portended for the future.
A heightened awareness of human progress and its impact on events led to the integration of philosophy and politics. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it.” Those words inscribed on Karl Marx’s tomb highlight the new sense of mission that impelled generations of thinkers to turn their understanding of the historical process into a concrete political program. Liberals and socialists developed competing programs to accelerate the process of progress and share its benefits more widely based on their understanding of the technological and sociological forces at work.
These debates still echo in politics today, but many 21st-century thinkers and activists have increasingly moved from a fascination with the fact of change to an alarmed analysis of the effects of its relentlessly accelerating rate. Change itself is old hat for us today. In 18th-century Europe, reflective people understood that the rate of historical change was significantly greater than in past times, and they were conscious of ongoing progress in technology and society as the unavoidable background of their own lives. In the 21st century, we don’t just feel the presence of progress. We feel the acceleration of progress as the Information Revolution unfolds. It is the consequences of that acceleration—both as we experience it today and as we extrapolate it into the future—that engage our attention and, increasingly, our concern.
Apocalypse used to be a religious, even a mythological concept. But in our time, it is becoming a political possibility.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/destined-live-quiet-times-progress-walter-russell-mead-via-meadia
Progress in small, measured doses is an exhilarating and energizing thing. But can there be too much of it? Can an individual or a society overdose on progress? Can the rate of social, economic, cultural, and technological change drive a particular society into a political, psychological, and moral spiral of crisis and dysfunction?
Judging from the history of the Industrial Revolution, the answer is yes. The Russian Revolution and the Nazi rise to power are only two examples of societies overwhelmed by the social and political stresses that rapid modernization brought. The Industrial Revolution and the international conflicts that accompanied it shook the foundations of social order around the world and produced a uniquely stressful international situation. Tested to the breaking point by the combination of the domestic and international consequences of the Industrial Revolution, Germany fell into one kind of abyss, Russia into another.
They were not alone. The multiethnic, multicultural states that characterized much of 18th- and 19th-century Europe disappeared in orgies of bloodletting as the Hapsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires dissolved. The collapse of Iran into the dismal fanaticism of the Islamic Republic, the serial disasters of Maoist China, genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and beyond: Each of these tragedies has its own distinct set of causes and consequences, but without the domestic and global upheavals associated with the Industrial Revolution and its numerous transformations of the human arena, it’s unlikely that any of these tragedies would have occurred.
The Anglo-American world was spared the worst of these upheavals, and after the horrors of World War II much of Western Europe and Japan seemed to have made their peace with the Industrial Revolution. During the long Cold War era, and with even more confidence after the fall of the Soviet Union, most people in these societies assumed that the political stability and social peace they had finally managed to build was a lasting and permanent achievement.
But is it? What if the Information Revolution, as seems likely, arrives faster, propagates more widely, hits harder, and digs deeper than the Industrial Revolution ever did?
As the rate of change increases globally, even the nimblest and most adaptable societies must struggle to adjust. The social and political unrest and dissatisfaction in the United States, leading some to fear an irretrievable breakdown in our political system, reflects America’s difficulties in coming to terms with the latest wave of tech-driven social and economic change.
America’s difficulties are not unique. Both democratic and authoritarian political systems around the world are facing new strains under the pressure of economic disruption, cultural conflict, and the corrosive impacts of social media.
The sense is widespread today, among elites as well as among the public at large, that the dogs of technological and economic change have slipped the leash: that things are happening to us faster than we can understand, much less control. “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” as Emerson wrote in the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution. Today, as I’ve written before, many feel that we don’t surf the web as much as the web surfs us.
Faced with the evident consequences of an accelerating rate of progress on an already-frayed social fabric, both intellectuals and activists have, since the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, looked for ways to slow, stop, or reverse the incoming tide. It didn’t work for King Canute, and it didn’t work for the 19th-century Luddites or the 20th-century Agrarians. Genies are not easily persuaded to return to their bottles. Progress is not going away, and change is not going to slow because humanity would like a mental health break.
The answer to the perils of progress cannot be less progress. As we’ve seen, the processes of technological and social development that we call progress are grounded in human nature itself. William Blake might have moaned about the “dark Satanic mills” overspreading the beautiful English countryside as the Industrial Revolution lurched into existence, but those mills could no more be stopped from proliferating than the sun can be stopped from rising.
Nor should those mills have been stopped. For all the evils of the Industrial Revolution, and for all the toxic social and environmental consequences we have inherited from it, both the material and social conditions of human life substantially improved because of it. Billions of people moved from illiteracy to fuller participation in the riches of human knowledge, from subordination to fuller participation in political and cultural life, from subsistence to affluence and from bondage to freedom. To cite a much higher authority, the blind saw, the deaf heard, the lame walked, and the poor had good news shared with them.
The Industrial Revolution was both soaring triumph and searing tragedy, glorious cultural and scientific achievement and unspeakable cruelty and crime. Far from being unique to that epoch, the mix of great good and great evil is what we see wherever we look in the long annals of our kind. The rise of the Roman Empire, the allied victory in World War II, the decolonization of Africa, and the history of the United States of America all combine these features of extraordinary accomplishment and shocking horror.
That is how we human beings roll. Our story of progress is not a made-for-children television special. History is rated X, not G, crammed to the bursting point with violence, injustice, foul language, nudity, and smoking. We’ve sailed on bloody seas to get to where we are, and the outlook is for more of the same. Trigger warnings should be posted in every delivery room. The world is not a safe space, and the arc of history is nobody’s poodle.
The way to cope with the onrushing waves of change and upheaval at home and abroad is to use the unprecedented financial, technological, cultural, and intellectual resources that progress creates to address the wrenchingly urgent and stupefyingly complex problems it inevitably brings. As a political movement the Luddites made nothing better for anyone. It was the wealth that the Industrial Revolution created, and the new forms of social and political organization that accompanied it, that allowed reformers to make the mills less dark and satanic over time.
If we are to surf the waves of change now rolling toward us instead of being overwhelmed by them, it will be because we have the wit, the wisdom, and the maturity to keep our psychological balance as we learn to bring the unprecedented resources of the Information Revolution effectively to bear on the unique demands of our time.
That would be a difficult task if the only challenge we faced came from the accelerating pace of change that defines our era. But there is one other complexity to consider. As the pace of change surges at an ever-increasing rate, the prospect of a fundamental change in the conditions of human existence looms larger from year to year. Will AI supersede humanity, leaving us inferior to the machines we have made? Will we upload our consciousness into cyberspace, perhaps downloading again into cloned designer bodies? Will we blow ourselves up in a nuclear holocaust or destroy ourselves in a series of climate catastrophes?
Apocalypse used to be a religious, even a mythological concept. But in our time, it is becoming a political possibility. The Silicon Valley tech lords speak of the Singularity even as some of them invest billions in longevity and consciousness research they hope will make them immortal. Climate activists warn of an imminent catastrophe even as the great powers rearm.
Progress has done many things for us, and few of us would exchange the dentistry, for example, of our time with that of even the recent past. But progress turns out to be paradoxical. Human ingenuity has made us much safer from natural calamities. We can treat many diseases, predict storms, build dams both to prevent floods and to save water against drought, and many other fine things. Many fewer of us starve than in former times, and billions of us today enjoy better living conditions than our forebears dreamed possible.
Yet if we are safer from most natural catastrophes, we are more vulnerable than ever to human-caused ones. Not only do we all live under the shadow of nuclear weapons and artificial general intelligence. We also live under the threat of financial catastrophe from the unanticipated convulsions of a banking system that few of us, and perhaps none of us, really understand. The impact of human industrial and agricultural activity on the natural environment threatens our future whether from climate change globally or the effects of air pollution in our hometowns. The social anomie characteristic of a decadent Blue Model society combined with the availability of cheap drugs contributes to more than 100,000 premature deaths in the United States each year. The 20th century saw stunning advances in medicine that saved millions of lives; millions more were lost in the fierce and unrelenting wars and repressions of that terrible time.
While the ever-accelerating and ascending wave of human progress has brought us to peaks of achievement and affluence that our ancestors could scarcely imagine, it has both failed to keep us safe from the most dangerous predators of all and—to the degree that the rate of progress has become a major force of destabilization—progress itself may now be the greatest source of danger humans face.
As I wrote in my last essay, we live in a singular century, and it is impossible to grasp either the psychology or the politics of our time without considering how this new reality affects a world that is already laboring under unprecedented stress.
Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College, and the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_for_Choosing
when one looks at the state of affairs today
this quote has never been more apropo:
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
indeed the threats he spoke of in '64 are alive well and many more times today than then .
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I will not have any sunset years in a totalitarian society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_for_Choosing
when one looks at the state of affairs today
this quote has never been more apropo:
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
indeed the threats he spoke of in '64 are alive well and many more times today than then .
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https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/family.jpeg
(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/family.jpeg)
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https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/d15bd3e2fe277f5d.jpg
(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/d15bd3e2fe277f5d.jpg)
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I would submit that the American Revolution succeeded in great part because there was a coherent articulation by our Founding Fathers of what we now call the American Creed around which the American people could rally.
I would submit that plenty of Americans are already awake to the dangers around us, but a coherent vision as to what to offer in response is , , , seriously underdeveloped. This forum seeks develop and articulate such a vision.
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https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UrFVuw0ErfY
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I would submit that the American Revolution succeeded in great part because there was a coherent articulation by our Founding Fathers of what we now call the American Creed around which the American people could rally.
I would submit that plenty of Americans are already awake to the dangers around us, but a coherent vision as to what to offer in response is , , , seriously underdeveloped. This forum seeks develop and articulate such a vision.
Along those lines, the task at hand, I believe, is to identify all the issues on our side that are or could be 60-40, 70-30 and 80-20 issues, not focus the fight on 50-50 issues or worse.
Newt did that. Reagan did that.
We are not winning the 50-50 elections right now with all the funny business going on - so stop trying to fight on a 50-50 playing field.
Along those lines, stop letting them frame the issues. It's time to go on offense
Someone tell me an issue we can win 60-40 that involves attacking or demotivating our own side. These supermajority issues are designed to unify, not divide.
You have to win elections to make any difference.
Top ten examples of 60-40 or better issues: enforce the border, end inflation, general prosperity, fight crime, get fentanyl off the street, call boys boys, end human trafficking, election integrity, power the grid, legalize cars and gas stations, makes food affordable, and so on.
Coincidentally, didn't DeSanrtis just win a swing state 60-40?
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I would submit that the American Revolution succeeded in great part because there was a coherent articulation by our Founding Fathers of what we now call the American Creed around which the American people could rally.
I would submit that plenty of Americans are already awake to the dangers around us, but a coherent vision as to what to offer in response is , , , seriously underdeveloped. This forum seeks develop and articulate such a vision.
Along those lines, the task at hand, I believe, is to identify all the issues on our side that are or could be 60-40, 70-30 and 80-20 issues, not focus the fight on 50-50 issues or worse.
Newt did that. Reagan did that.
We are not winning the 50-50 elections right now with all the funny business going on - so stop trying to fight on a 50-50 playing field.
Along those lines, stop letting them frame the issues. It's time to go on offense
Someone tell me an issue we can win 60-40 that involves attacking or demotivating our own side. These supermajority issues are designed to unify, not divide.
You have to win elections to make any difference.
Top ten examples of 60-40 or better issues: enforce the border, end inflation, general prosperity, fight crime, get fentanyl off the street, call boys boys, end human trafficking, election integrity, power the grid, legalize cars and gas stations, makes food affordable, and so on.
Coincidentally, didn't DeSanrtis just win a swing state 60-40?
Yes, strangely enough, right after aggressive investigation and prosecution of vote fraud.
Obviously just a coincidence!
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/26/desantis-voter-fraud-defendants-florida-00053788
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The chicken or the egg? The ability to conduct "aggressive investigation and prosecution of vote fraud" came out of (drum roll) winning an election. By a hair the first time, only with Trump's support, he said, (unified party), not with the back biting he's doing now.
But winning a 60-40 election (in a recently 50-50 environment) comes from governing well, hiring well, leading a team and getting popular things done for the people.
Prosecuting 20 people sends a message to thousands who might otherwise think about doing that next time. Same thing could happen with rank and file FBI agents. Fake a FISA warrant for your boss, and do hard time. Think about that. Being a whistleblower might pay better.
"Deep state" has not shown they can win an otherwise landslide election against them. Maybe in Venezuela, 2004. Not here, yet.
'Right or wrong direction' polling is now 3-1 against, with Democrats clearly in charge. Hand in hand with that is inflation and the managing of the economy, HUGE margin against the Dems. On the other side of that coin is this, when has the table ever been set better for our side - to advance the American Creed?
The hyped promises of socialism, modern monetary theory, critical race theory, gender 'affirmation', etc. are all hogwash, for anyone to see, no matter your race, religion, orientation or income level..
Inflation in particular offers three directional choices. 1. Ignore it and hope it will go away (while you keep doing the things that are causing it). 2. Root canal budget constraints (that alone are never enough). 3. Growth economics (cf Reagan 1983, Clinton-Gingrich 1997). What a HUGE opportunity for a leader to step forward and win with OPTIMISM! Right while young voters are wondering what course forward is the alternative to Bidenomics, someone with the national podium could step up and tell them - what they learned in school is wrong. We can't have an economy of all lawyers, bureaucrats and distributionists. Someone has to produce something, and from a public policy point of view, that comes from easing the roadblocks to doing that.
Even the fighting of climate change requires prosperity to move forward, and even the leftists will admit that when pressed on the costs of their ideas.
What a truly insane time to give up (IMHO).
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Well said.
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The chicken or the egg? The ability to conduct "aggressive investigation and prosecution of vote fraud" came out of (drum roll) winning an election. By a hair the first time, only with Trump's support, he said, (unified party), not with the back biting he's doing now.
But winning a 60-40 election (in a recently 50-50 environment) comes from governing well, hiring well, leading a team and getting popular things done for the people.
**How many republicans do this?**
Prosecuting 20 people sends a message to thousands who might otherwise think about doing that next time. Same thing could happen with rank and file FBI agents. Fake a FISA warrant for your boss, and do hard time. Think about that. Being a whistleblower might pay better.
**Yes. Let's see a list of all the deep state members currently being prosecuted. Is Lois Lerner doing time? Eric Holder? Let me know when Ilhan Omar get her fraudulent citizenship stripped and she is deported. Those raids on Epstein's client should start any day now...**
"Deep state" has not shown they can win an otherwise landslide election against them. Maybe in Venezuela, 2004. Not here, yet.
**2020 was a landslide election, unless you think Biden actually got 81 million votes. The most popular president in American history!**
'Right or wrong direction' polling is now 3-1 against, with Democrats clearly in charge. Hand in hand with that is inflation and the managing of the economy, HUGE margin against the Dems. On the other side of that coin is this, when has the table ever been set better for our side - to advance the American Creed?
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3609791-record-percentage-says-us-headed-in-wrong-direction-nbc-poll/
Red wave!!!
The hyped promises of socialism, modern monetary theory, critical race theory, gender 'affirmation', etc. are all hogwash, for anyone to see, no matter your race, religion, orientation or income level..
Inflation in particular offers three directional choices. 1. Ignore it and hope it will go away (while you keep doing the things that are causing it). 2. Root canal budget constraints (that alone are never enough). 3. Growth economics (cf Reagan 1983, Clinton-Gingrich 1997). What a HUGE opportunity for a leader to step forward and win with OPTIMISM! Right while young voters are wondering what course forward is the alternative to Bidenomics, someone with the national podium could step up and tell them - what they learned in school is wrong. We can't have an economy of all lawyers, bureaucrats and distributionists. Someone has to produce something, and from a public policy point of view, that comes from easing the roadblocks to doing that.
Even the fighting of climate change requires prosperity to move forward, and even the leftists will admit that when pressed on the costs of their ideas.
What a truly insane time to give up (IMHO).
How many of your lefty friends are ready to vote R?
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It is the independents that we need to get.
I would add that IMHO that six week cut-offs for abortion loses us a lot of votes. I fear this will hurt DeSantis a lot.
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It is the independents that we need to get.
I would add that IMHO that six week cut-offs for abortion loses us a lot of votes. I fear this will hurt DeSantis a lot.
:roll: OY f'ing Vey!
You are NOT voting your way out of this anymore than the Lakota were going to Ghost Dance the massive herds of Bison back into existence.
At some point, this will sink in.
The one true branch of government IS NOT GOING TO VOLUNTARILY GIVE UP POWER EVER!
Remember when the American people voted for white genocide, just like they did in europe?
NO?
Because NO ONE did.
Yet it is happening.
What's the current polling supporting letting Multidrug Resistant TB infected illegal aliens into public schools with independent voters?
How much support among registered dems for allowing PLA Spec Ops troops to be imported into the US?
This is the Fire Hydrant of Normalcy Bias.
:roll:
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"I would add that IMHO that six week cut-offs for abortion loses us a lot of votes. I fear this will hurt DeSantis a lot."
Agreed!
of course this is LEFT wing poll but
I can believe the numbers . Look the independents -
https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/the-trump-indictment/
real clear politics
this is bad
trump > biden by 7 points
Desantis > biden by 1
Magas will run with this.
DeSants needs to start appealing to independents in my view
not just appeal to Conservatives - he needs to prove he has best chance of winning in general .
I still don't believe the Dem candidate will be biden - no way
it could be clodoucher whitmire or newsless
harris butti rfkj
it will not be biden
ESPECIALLY WITH NUMBERS LIKE THESE
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What Now for the Men and Women Without a Country?
Roger L. Simon
June 14, 2023Updated: June 19, 2023
Commentary
I woke up this morning feeling as if I were a man without a country.
The place where I was born no longer existed.
It’s been that way for some time but now is approaching the point of no return.
I imagine that many others, millions, are feeling that way now that Donald Trump has been indicted for a second time, with a third very much in the wings.
It’s not that I love Trump so much. I respect what he has done but on occasion have cringed. He’s human, like the rest of us.
It’s just that the actions against him are so beyond rationality, so built on rage, conscious and unconscious, that they have obliterated the most noble governmental experiment in human history—the United States of America.
My friend Tucker Carlson puts the blame on Trump’s comments about the Iraq War. The 45th president had the temerity to say it was a mistake, that it “destabilized” the Middle East and created more problems (deaths) than it solved.
Those remarks threatened the establishment, dependent on what we used to call the military–industrial complex, to a degree they could no longer countenance him.
Partly.
But I don’t think that was enough to engender a reaction to Trump that’s so excessive that even the late, lamented Fox News is running a chyron as direct as “Wannabe Dictator Speaks at the White House After Having His Political Rival Arrested.”
And in any case, Trump was always somewhat inconsistent in his reactions to the Iraq conflagration.
I think the problem runs deeper than merely a misbegotten war. The potential for reelection of the 45th president threatens everything about the “progressivism” that has dominated our politics since Woodrow Wilson was in office, with only the relatively short interregnum of Ronald Reagan’s terms.
The unelected deep state has become increasingly entrenched to the extent that it controls virtually every aspect of our lives and employs who knows how many people not only inside the Beltway but also in all 50 states.
We now live in a society that’s more socialistic, astonishingly, than Western Europe, where the metastasizing transgender epidemic, at least, is looked upon askance. They think we’ve gone crazy on gender dysphoria—and we have. For them, this iteration of Marxism is finally too much.
As recently as a few years ago, all this was unimaginable.
COVID-19 cemented the situation.
So it’s more than just the Iraq War. It’s, in a word, everything.
What then do we men and women without a country do?
In a June 13 op-ed, the New York Post’s estimable Michael Goodwin wrote:
“Watching the Tuesday circus in Miami and listening to media poohbah pronouncements about the gravity of the moment, I recalled a conversation with a friend about the indictment of Donald Trump.
“He repeated a phrase he had heard recently: ‘We’re not voting our way out of this.’
“‘This,’ of course, is a reference to the great divide tearing America apart, and Exhibit A is a Democratic president’s willingness to use the Department of Justice as a weapon against his leading Republican rival.”
Of course, we should try to “vote our way out of this,” but what if that friend of Goodwin’s is correct? What if things are too far gone, the system too corrupt, for that to work?
The choices are grim.
In the old days—during the Vietnam War—we knew many who fled to Canada. Nothing could seem more ridiculous now.
If I were looking for a safe haven these days, I would choose Eastern Europe, where the agony of life under communism is well known to the populace and their governments act accordingly. Few of us, however, speak Estonian, and many of us are too old to learn.
Moreover, everyone, Eastern Europe included, is dependent on us. As we go, so goes the planet. A future somewhere between communist China and the World Economic Forum (WEF) will be the fate of all humans.
Personal agency will have been the lifestyle of some ancient civilization.
In my interviews with Vivek Ramaswamy, the presidential candidate has spoken of the sacrifices we will have to make to decouple from communist China.
Difficult as that is, we will have to decouple from more than that. The sacrifices will be even greater.
Every patriotic citizen must put his or her personal ambitions aside now—or at the very least push them far to the rear—and focus their efforts on bringing back our constitutional republic.
The good news—in fact, the great news—is that in doing this, you will become happier perhaps than you have ever been.
You will be living an authentic life.
We can rewrite WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab’s “You will have nothing, and you will be happy” as “You will have yourself, and you will be happy.”
Go for it.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNzpriXhAJc
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https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2023/08/29/why-young-americans-are-not-taught-about-evil-n2627671
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September 4, 2023
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The Genius of Labor Day
By: George Friedman
Editor's note: To mark the Labor Day holiday, we are republishing this article, originally released in 2020.
Labor Day became an American Federal Holiday in 1894. Most other countries celebrate Labor on May 1. That date had been a pagan celebration, but in the late 19th century, European socialists adopted it as the annual holiday devoted to labor with marches and riots.
Industrialization brought labor problems to the United States with some nasty consequences. American workers wanted more money, better working conditions and recognition. Money and better conditions were hard to give. So labor suggested a holiday, and management and Congress was enthused. A holiday not built around an armed uprising was just the thing. But May 1st was a reminder of everything they wanted the workers not to think about.
So, the first Monday in September was chosen. Being the last weekend before children returned to school, it created a three-day, family oriented holiday. Rather than marching under the red flag, families headed to the beach or lake or wherever for a final summer outing. The vendors at these places thought it was a delightful idea. And so, Labor Day became not a day to plan revolutions but a time to kick back and have a beer, and for the vacation industry to have one last summer blow-off.
Think about it. The threat was a European style revolution. The solution was a holiday, one the kids wouldn't let the workers ignore. Those making money out of summer got a three-day weekend to peddle their wares. The workers were recognized for being workers, and at least that beef was taken care of. And some of the Christian churches who were not happy with a pagan holiday being Labor Day were also appeased.
To get a sense of the difference between the U.S. and Europe when facing political and economic chaos, the American solution was to turn a revolution into a marketable event, keep the churches quiet, and let the kids call off the union meeting.
Happy Labor Day, and think about its pure genius.
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https://americanmind.org/salvo/founding-fathers-and-red-caesar/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=280081211&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--Yg2mkXnw0x9y_3NYqPEt7_y_Gf_L7Rb0F-i7QAqijDq2IOVQand34oz2A6uoonUxFNin6D0_GF0DxLhaqDuFFfIJH3Q&utm_content=280081211&utm_source=hs_email&fbclid=IwAR0QEvdKXMwSsg3oUWwJUa22Dh5phT8vZ5cYSjFX3dIO06OSUiUpR36qsl8
Those who speak plainly about our regime’s decay are not the ones responsible for it.
If three things in life are inevitable, they are death, taxes, and bad-faith hit pieces against the Claremont Institute. The last of those things (well, maybe the others, too) seems to be occurring much more frequently nowadays.
The most recent screed from The Guardian’s Jason Wilson is a panicked warning about growing discussion on the Right of a “Red Caesar”—an extralegal ruler who, judging that the oligarchic ruling class has forfeited its legitimacy as a representative government, will take advantage of the chaos to impose order from the Right through autocratic means. It opens by quoting Hillsdale College professor Kevin Slack, who reports in his latest book that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.” (In the interest of full disclosure, I am an alumnus of the Claremont Institute’s Publius fellowship program and took several of Dr. Slack’s classes as a graduate student at Hillsdale College.)
But Slack did not invent the term “Red Caesar”—that was essayist and former Trump Administration official Michael Anton, who weighed the possibility that civic decay might bring us to the point in the cycle of regimes at which either a Red or a Blue Caesar, on the model of Augustus, could seize the reins of power. Wilson does not treat this argument in full—he presumably has no problem with a potential Blue Caesar. It’s the Red variety he fears, and so he condemns Slack for even accepting Anton’s premise: that a cronyist government has supplanted republican government by way of the administrative state and media apparatus. This assessment strikes Wilson as “conspiratorial and extreme”; to me it seems like a plain assessment of the facts.
Certainly, to observe that such conditions could facilitate the rise of a Red Caesar is not to welcome or invite that outcome. To the contrary, Anton and others are dismayed that the republic should have even arrived at the point at which the possibility can even be countenanced. But even to discuss the possibility of regime change (except regime change in a leftward direction) is enough to raise accusations of anti-Americanism.
In his typical hysterical fashion, Damon Linker warns that a Trump victory in 2024 will lead to martial law and soldiers in the streets. Such concerns ring hollow from those who supported the curtailment of civil liberties with Covid lockdowns and unconstitutional vaccine mandates and made excuses for or even cheered on rioters and looters in the summer and fall of 2020. But that aside, any serious political inquiry into our own times will necessarily raise questions over the stability of the current regime and what will succeed it.
Linker, who fancies himself as a student of Leo Strauss, should know that Strauss himself pointed to Caesarism as the likely alternative to a failed republic in his “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero.” The histrionics over theoretical discussions of Caesarism reveal a deeper epistemic fear that an objective approach to political science could lead one to doubt the viability or legitimacy of the status quo.
Red Caesar is not, à la Martin Heidegger, a plea for a god to save us. It is an acknowledgment that the independent, liberty-loving people who once constituted the ruling majority in America are dead and gone. Distressing as that is, it is a fact. Any sober observer who has not decided against the possibility in advance will acknowledge that rule by strongman is one eminently possible outcome of our current downward trajectory. But to say so is not to wish it so. As Slack pointed out in his response, all this talk about Red Caesar has been spurred by the fact that republican, constitutional government has already been eroded, if not entirely discarded.
The Most Miserable Habitation
Far from being anti-American autocrats, then, those on the Right who raise the possibility of a Red Caesar are working in the same intellectual tradition as our founding fathers, who recognized that a republic lacking virtue and the rule of law will not long endure. It will degenerate into some kind of despotism or debauched oligarchy. John Adams, perhaps the most astute student of political philosophy and history in his generation, recognized the possibility that a Caesar (Red, Blue, or otherwise) would arise from the ashes of a ruined republic.
Adams, the first vice president and second president of the United States, played an underappreciated role in the formulation of American constitutionalism. In addition to drafting the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, the oldest operating constitution in the world, his 1776 pamphlet “Thoughts on Government” influenced multiple state constitutions and, by extension, the future Constitution of the United States.
Following Montesquieu, Adams argued that all governments are founded upon a dominant principle or passion in its people—fear, honor, or virtue. Most governments are founded upon fear and produce misery for mankind. It was the last of these, virtue, which made a republic the best form of government. A republic, said Adams, depends upon the virtue of the people and best preserves their safety and happiness.
He defines this mode of government as “an Empire of Laws, and not of men.” Only a moderate, courageous, just, and wise people will preserve their liberty and the rule of law against the temptation of vice and slavish devotion to an elite class. It was for this reason that Adams served as legal representative for the redcoats who fired on the mob in the 1770 Boston Massacre, even though he publicly opposed Parliament’s assaults on the rights of the colonists. A nation that descends into mob rule will never preserve a free government and may even willingly surrender its rights in exchange for momentary pleasures.
President Adams famously wrote in a letter to the Massachusetts state militia that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” No other statement from a founding father is quoted so frequently in defense of traditional Christian morality. But it raises an obvious and alarming question: What happens if that morality is not restored? Adams’ letter to the militia was no mere pep talk, but a prophecy about the likely future of an America without virtue.
Just before his famous line on the need for a moral people, Adams wrote: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” If Americans do not voluntarily restrain themselves through religion and morality, they will lose the protections of their Constitution. They will no doubt be restrained—but by a government whose animating passion has changed from virtue to fear. They will suffer a despotism of their own design.
Adams warns that a wayward, hypocritical foreign policy will be the canary in the coal mine. “But should the People of America,” he writes, “once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practicing iniquity and extravagance; and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour frankness & sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and insolence: this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world.” What could better describe a government that claims to uphold the rules-based international order while it spies on its own citizens, elected officials, and allies, extrajudicially murders citizens and children abroad, sacrifices its own soldiers to maximize the intake of refugees (read: reliable future voters for the Democratic Party), and risks nuclear war to prop up foreign money launderers? Adams’ son may be heralded as a prophet for warning that America will lose her liberty if she goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy. But his father deserves some credit for the insight, too.
Adams’ forecasts grew even darker over time. He foresaw that decline might be inevitable. “Commerce, luxury, and avarice” he wrote to Benjamin Rush, “have destroyed every Republican Government.” Eventually the virtue of the people would give way to decadence. The nation would be a victim of its own success. Such a government might maintain the trappings of a republic: “it may still exist in form” but it “is lost in essence.” Once it succumbs to corruption and greed, it will never return to its free, republican way of life. As Adams later asked Thomas Jefferson, “Have you ever found in history one single example of a Nation thoroughly Corrupted—that was afterwards restored to Virtue—and without Virtue, there can be no political Liberty.”
From this degenerated republic, as Adams wrote in an earlier letter to Jefferson, an “artificial aristocracy” would form, built upon wealth, power, and “corruption in elections.” This artificial aristocracy (in reality, an oligarchy) will bilk the people for its own advantage. But it will not last forever. “The everlasting envies, jealousies, rivalries and quarrels among them, their cruel rapacities upon the poor ignorant people, their followers, compel these to set up Caesar, a demagogue to be a monarch and master, pour mettre chacun a Sa place [to put them in their place].” There you have it in black and white: a founding father ruminating on a future Caesar rising up to crush a sclerotic oligarchy. Who knew that the founders were MAGA extremists?
Observation Is Not Invocation
Propagandists for the ruling class will balk at claims that America is an oligarchy. After all, we still have elections. But what good are elections that are bought and paid for by billionaires and rigged by intelligence officials? And even when the disfavored candidate wins, the national security state assumes veto power over foreign policy, plots treason with our rivals, and labels his supporters as domestic terrorists. The all-too-candid Chuck Schumer gloated that the intelligence agencies have “six ways from Sunday” to strike at duly elected officials. Phony dossiers and military-led impeachment attempts are just two of them. Adams had their mark two centuries ago. An oligarchy that hides behind the corpse of democratic institutions is still an oligarchy.
Adams warned that a future Caesar will be cut from the same cloth as the oligarchs that he replaced. Yet this is precisely why oligarchic capture is such a grievous crisis: there may be no way back from it, and no way forward except Caesarism. Among exclusively bad options, the people may be left with no alternative except to mitigate the decay by hoping for an autocrat who at least militates for order rather than further chaos and recrimination—a Caesar rather than a Sulla.
Conservatives who speculate about the possibility of a Red Caesar are responding to a legitimacy crisis caused by our ruling class. They recognize that there is a cycle of regimes, that corrupted governments do not last forever, and that, unfortunately, virtuous republics do not magically reappear once lost. They are not anti-American. That title should be reserved for those who sell out to foreign rivals, prosecute citizens for self-defense, stock porn in libraries, retaliate against parents for speaking out at school board meetings, disbar lawyers for challenging election illegalities, and condemn the Betsy Ross flag as a terrorist symbol—those, in other words, who have created the conditions under which it even becomes plausible to worry about a Caesar in the first place. Those who speak plainly about those conditions are not wishing them upon us. They are already here.
America today is increasingly an empire not of laws but of corrupt men. Those who point this out are not conspiracy theorists or dangerous militants, as far-left outlets like The Guardian claim, but simply men with functioning eyes and ears. They have seen that impartial due process and morality, the twin pillars of the rule of law, have long been eroded. They are right to ask, as the most pessimistic of our founders once did, whether this nation can long maintain its liberty.
Casey Wheatland is a senior lecturer in political science at Texas State University. He holds a Ph.D. from Hillsdale College and is a 2021 Publius Fellow.
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https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/what-now
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/top-10-takeaways-from-tuesdays-election-and-what-it-means-for-2024-post-5525789?utm_source=Morningbrief&src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2023-11-09&src_cmp=mb-2023-11-09&utm_medium=email&est=38LwMcbma4U9gnysp6EiWEAB3FqSfsLCaRtmReI4a4L4GBTPa43A7Fk8Bi8%3D
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/va-ag-miyares-maps-national-plan-to-replace-soros-prosecutors
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A Facebook saga about Christian nationalism and the ‘appeal to authority’
America was founded on biblical principles
By Everett Piper
Last week, in response to the evergrowing accusation that anyone who believes the fact that America was founded on biblical principles is a deranged Christian nationalist, I posted these three quotes on Facebook: “The general principles on which the Fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity.” — John Adams
“The birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior. The Declaration of Independence laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity.” — John Quincy Adams
“The only true basis of all government [are] the laws of God and nature. For government is an ordinance of Heaven, designed by the allbenevolent Creator” — Samuel Adams
Well, as predictable as the sunrise, one of my Facebook trolls (I’ll call him “Skip”) shouted with hyperventilating opprobrium: ”You’re cherry-picking! This nation was founded on the separation of Church and State. Thomas Jefferson was an atheist!”
Not wanting to get into a social media titfor- tat, I decided that rather than use my own words, I’d let Thomas Jefferson (whom my friend brought up) and several other of our nation’s subsequent leaders speak for themselves. Here’s a smattering by way of example:
“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God, [and] that they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” — Thomas Jefferson
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. … Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation deserts the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice.” — George Washington
“In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Savior gave to the world was communicated through this book. But for it, we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man’s welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it.” — Abraham Lincoln
“Now, the best religion the world has ever had is the religion of Christ. A man or a community adopting it is virtuous, prosperous, and happy. … What a great mistake is made by him who does not support the religion of the Bible!” — Rutherford B. Hayes
“I assume the arduous and responsible duties of president of the United States, relying upon the support of my countrymen and invoking the guidance of Almighty God. Our faith teaches that there is no safer reliance than upon the God of our fathers, who has so singularly favored the American people in every national trial and who will not forsake us so long as we obey his commandments and walk humbly in his footsteps.” — William McKinley
“The teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally — I do not mean figuratively, I mean literally — impossible for us to figure to ourselves what that life would be if these teachings were removed. We would lose almost all the standards by which we now judge both public and private morals; all the standards toward which we, with more or less of resolution, strive to raise ourselves.” — Theodore Roosevelt “The same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe — the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” — John F. Kennedy
My friend Skip responded: “This is an argument from authority. This is an example of your problem! You must have something to be subservient to.”
I ignored the obvious — that Skip doesn’t understand Socratic fallacies — and simply asked, “And by what authority do you claim to discount all authority?”
“My own,” he shouted. “Ah - there we have it,” I said. “You have declared yourself to be the only measure of right and wrong, good and evil. All authority rests in you and only you. You have achieved Nietzsche’s ‘will to power.’ You, my lost friend, have just decided that you are God. Welcome to the ranks of Robespierre, Diocletian, Nero, and Hitler. Your appeal to authority is yourself.”
God help us, for God is the only one who can.
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"God help us, for God is the only one who can."
Great post!
I would add, God help us to help ourselves.
We "leave it in the hands of God" - only after we have all done everything humanly possible to fix it ourselves, to reverse the course we are on.
When Eastern Europe was in full oppression, I cringed when I saw Church leaders in Poland help bring comfort to the people in their oppression, rather than help lead and organize the overthrow of the regime. Later it became clear they were instrumental in the overthrow and I stand corrected.
Today again it appears (from where I sit) the Church mainly stands with the oppressors. Meanwhile the church of anti-Judeo-Christianity is deeply in bed with the state and the state schools raising our young.
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" Today again it appears (from where I sit) the Church mainly stands with the oppressors. Meanwhile the church of anti-Judeo-Christianity is deeply in bed with the state and the state schools raising our young."
The Church like the DNC both see mass immigration as a means to increase their members.
Most are Latinos and most are Christians.
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https://americanmind.org/salvo/everything-is-still-fine/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=283731205&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-934zaYYmO6wK_yXvczVDPDPwreSors6tWpl28pLD3QDiLCm_dTpqQu-q7--g9yD1bO_mfdS7tr_yDGK-lqqArb9b_S7w&utm_content=283731205&utm_source=hs_email
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"the world of higher education has become an enemy of truth, justice, and the American way. The saturation of the institution of higher education by the ideology of DEI is the capstone of the process. But the same applies to just about every other major institution in American life — the national security establishment, the military, corporate America, the press, the media at large, and public education from kindergarten on. If there is an exception, it doesn’t come to mind offhand."
"We need a plan of action like the one that won the Cold War, which we actually seem to have lost on the home front."
- Scott Johnson, Powerline
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/12/her-name-was-magill.php
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Important to articulate that point!
Tis a small thing, but on my FB page (approx 1900 following) I regularly post pithy quotes from our Founding Fathers, as well as links for pieces of American history, stories of American heroism, etc.
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agree
We don't celebrate George Washington because he owned slaves , which everyone knew since he became public historical figure. We celebrate him because of his massive courageous contributions towards the establishment of America.
We don't celebrate Martin Luther King because he cheated on his wife, consorted with prostitutes or was found to be laughing witnessing a woman being raped, or because he plagiarized other people's lines for his speeches.
We didn't erect statues and call a street MLK Boulevard in every inner city in the nation for these reasons.
We celebrate his contribution to racial equality in the US peacefully.
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Point well made, and the MLK example is particularly useful for purposes of rhetorical pugilism.
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Another one that defies categorization as I couldn’t find a polling thread. Poll finds many Americans believe the end of the world is upon us, with religious folks and Republicans more likely to believe it than the left side of the aisle.
One of the (perhaps unintended) consequences of ongoing “climate crisis,” Covid, and other politicized doomsaying is a swath of populations expecting the end to be nigh. For the young in particular I believe this incessant thrum of doom meant to serve political ends is a gross disservice:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/08/about-four-in-ten-u-s-adults-believe-humanity-is-living-in-the-end-times/
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https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=1768.100
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Our American Creed is in grave danger.
I'm in the middle of listening to something
and would like to take a moment to jot down something that was said for deeper rumination:
a) Lies spread faster than Truth
b) Democracy cannot survive based upon Misinformation and Lies
Seems to me there are some deep implications here.
c) The theoretical super power of democracy is that we can listen to all sides and sort it out while authoritarian societies cannot.
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Our American Creed is in grave danger.
I'm in the middle of listening to something
and would like to take a moment to jot down something that was said for deeper rumination:
a) Lies spread faster than Truth
b) Democracy cannot survive based upon Misinformation and Lies
Seems to me there are some deep implications here.
c) The theoretical super power of democracy is that we can listen to all sides and sort it out while authoritarian societies cannot.
Good points. I would add from where I sit,
1) There seems to be a demand for lies, misinformation, deception, "spin" (on the Left) to promote or back up views that fail without that.
Example, they wanted, needed a distinction between Trump and Biden on classified documents. Trump tried to cover it up, Biden didn't so it's not two systems of justice. But so did Hillary. Bleach Bit. No prosecution.
2) I would add projection as an important tactic in deception. We cover up our deception by accusing you of it.
3) Also 'missing information' is a big part of misinformation. So many examples. Not one Democrat reading the NYT everyday would know that revenues grew when marginal tax rates were cut. Do they know social spending perpetuates poverty? 60 years to study it and still no clue? Not one story. Do they know we spend 40% more than we take in, while they propose to worsen that? Do they know the earth has only warmed by one degree in 100 years? In the scientific scale of degrees Kelvin, that is a 1/287 (0.0035) movement. Hunter's laptop? The checks Joe received? Do they really not know about rape and human trafficking at the cartel controlled border? Two million rapes not mentioned in the SOTU, and then mocked in the response. And on and on.
“Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.”
― David Burge
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Good points adding to the analytical framework.
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Recent years are but a continuation of the foundation laid in his first two terms by our current true president-- all that matters is getting across the finish line of Complete Power Always.
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https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/03/25/voter_i_am_leaving_the_democratic_party_over_healthcare_everything_they_said_was_not_true.html
9.5 minute video, zero expense, powerful persuasive message. Nothing fancy. I can put this under healthcare politics but we've already covered the points there. The real question is how do we reach more people and not just preach to our choir.
This guy told his story, detailed and meaningful, heartfelt and real life. Not propaganda or repeating talking points. And if it is, it's really brilliant.
He made a self video, put it on Twitter, and somehow got it linked with the main columnist of real clear politics this morning.
The Forum here is an amazing resource. We have millions of page views, but don't know if that's just the government surveilling us. We follow the day to day. We follow the nation and the world and history and explore the most difficult topics, but when do we try to summarize what is most important of what we have learned and share it to a wider audience?
We have national elections decided by 40,000 votes? What if you (or I) had nine and a half minutes to talk to a million undecided voters between now and the election, what would you want to tell them?
Young people watch video-based media and this guy is clearly trying to reach young people with what he has learned, in quite a non-threatening, non-imposing sort of way.
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A powerful point Doug.
I am germinating some ideas in this respect, , ,
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https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/why-the-constitution-wont-save-you?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=330796&post_id=142965660&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=z2120&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email