“To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so…. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. And to think that there are democrats among us who pretend that there is any good in government; Socialists who support this ignominy, in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity; proletarians who proclaim their candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic! Hypocrisy!”

Epilogue

General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, was first published in French as Idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siècle.

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Affordable Health Care for America Act, Section Summaries (more…)

October 23, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

America’s Obama Obsession
Anatomy of a passing hysteria.

By Victor Davis Hanson

For 30 months the nation has been in the grip of a certain Obama obsession, immune to countervailing facts, unwilling to face reality, and loath to break the spell. But like all trances, the fit is passing, and we the patient are beginning to appreciate how the stupor came upon us, why it lifted, and what its consequences have been.

HOW OBAMA WON
Barack Obama was elected rather easily because, in perfect-storm fashion, five separate trends coalesced last autumn.

1) Obama was eloquent, young, charismatic — and African-American. He thus offered voters a sense of personal and collective redemption, as well as appealing to the longing for another JFK New Frontier figure. An image, not necessarily reality, trumped all.

2) After the normal weariness with eight years of an incumbent party and the particular unhappiness with Bush, the public was amenable to an antithesis. Bush was to be scapegoat, and Obama the beginning of the catharsis.

3) Obama ran as both a Clintonite centrist and a no-red-state/no-blue-state healer who had transcended bitter partisanship. That assurance allowed voters to believe that his occasional talk of big change was more cosmetic than radical.

4) John McCain ran a weak campaign that neither energized his base nor appealed to crossover independents. McCain turned off conservatives; many failed to give money, and some even stayed home on election day. Meanwhile, the media and centrists who used to idolize McCain’s non-conservative, maverick status found Obama the more endearing non-conservative maverick.

5) The September 2008 financial panic turned voters off Wall Street and the wealthy, and allowed them to connect unemployment and their depleted home equity and 401(k) retirement plans with incumbent Republicans. In contrast, they assumed that Obama, as the anti-Bush, would not do more bailouts, more stimuli, and more big borrowing.

Take away any one of those factors, and Obama might well have lost. Imagine what might have happened had Obama been a dreary old white guy like John Kerry; or had Bush’s approvals been over 50 percent; or had Obama run on the platform he is now governing on; or had McCain crafted a dynamic campaign; or had the panic occurred in January 2009 rather than September 2008. Then the trance would have passed, and Obama, the Chicago community organizer and three-year veteran of the U.S. Senate, would have probably lost his chance at remaking America. (more…)

“One perceives as if by a flash of lightning in the night why, in the twentieth century, the Nazi and Communist tyrannies could snatch power from the nerveless hand of the old order.  Hobbes wrote that the life of the savage, the man in a state of nature, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  Therefore, seeking safety and creature-comforts, men submit themselves absolutely to the power of the state.”  Kirk, The Roots of American Order.

And what geo-convulsions will our children endure to kill the 21st century Leviathan unleashed by the Left in America?

Video: Olkjer Thrashing Demonstration 10 18 09

Limbaugh’s So ‘Divisive’ The Left Had To Make Up Lies About Him

By MARK STEYN
Posted 10/16/2009 07:54 PM ET

Here is a tale of two sound bites. First: “Slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.”

Second: “The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Tse Tung and Mother Teresa. Not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is: You’re going to make choices. … But here’s the deal: These are your choices; they are no one else’s.

“In 1947, when Mao Tse Tung was being challenged within his own party on his own plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai-Shek and the nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army. … They had everything on their side. And people said ‘How can you win? How can you do this against all of the odds against you?’

“And Mao Tse Tung says, ‘You fight your war and I’ll fight mine.’ You don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things. … You fight your war, you let them fight theirs. Everybody has their own path.”

The first quotation was attributed to Rush Limbaugh. He never said it. There is no tape of him saying it. There is no transcript of him saying it. After all, if he had done so at any point in the last 20 years, someone would surely have mentioned it at the time.

Yet CNN, MSNBC, ABC, other networks and newspapers cheerfully repeated the pro-slavery quotation and attributed it, falsely, to Rush Limbaugh. And planting a flat-out lie in his mouth wound up getting Rush bounced from a consortium hoping to buy the St. Louis Rams.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the talk show host was a “divisive” figure, and nondivisive figures like the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson expressed the hope that, with Mr. Divisive out of the picture, the NFL could now “unify.”

The second quotation — hailing Mao — was uttered back in June to an audience of high school students by Anita Dunn, the White House communications director. I know she uttered it because I watched the words issuing from her mouth on “The Glenn Beck Show” on Fox News. But don’t worry. Nobody else played it. (more…)

Dems Go Nuclear

Posted 10/16/2009 07:54 PM ET

Health Care: Democrats seem set to use the “nuclear option” to ram their government health takeover into law. Bipartisanship already looked dead; now it looks extinct.

The health care revolution the Democratic Congress has planned — with its inevitable medical rationing, thousands of dollars in increased insurance premiums, and coverage of illegal aliens — may get placed on the familiar fast track used to spend hundreds and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars this year.

Instead of the 60 votes needed in the Senate if proper parliamentary rules were followed, passing this reshaping of the medical system as a “budget reconciliation” measure would mean only a simple majority was needed.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., accused of cheating on his taxes, last week held a hearing to let the House version of the health reform bill be passed this way. As the Washington weekly Human Events reports, Democratic leaders “have apparently invoked the ‘nuclear option’ to shut out Republicans and ensure the bill is passed before the end of the year.”

So all those “town hells” during the summer, where senators and congressmen were given an earful about passing secretly written thousand-page bills without reading them, will be ignored. (more…)

Child Protection Team [CPT] really needs citizen oversight.  I’m not doing it anymore because I ended up getting poached on by the sheriffs department for revenue and the only way I could send a message to the powers that be that poaching on citizens is wrong was to withdraw my services as that citizen.  It wasn’t a great solution but you don’t always get to make perfect choices.

Anyway, my problem has nothing to do with the necessity of having a citizen sit on that weekly committee.  The CPT committee must have a citizen representative who is personally outside of the system.  That means one who is not in any law enforcement agency, not in the provision of mental health services, not in the department of social services, not in the child advocacy program, not in the district attorney’s office, not a school counselor, and not a local physician.  CPT is the nexus where all of those powers cooperate, and taken together, they can bring a tremendous amount of power–force–to bear in citizens’ lives. (more…)

Senator Hank Brown spoke at the monthly Elbert County Republican breakfast October 10th. Check out the short video clips linked below the following pictures.

Hank Brown on Republican Solutions 

Hank Brown on Democrats and Deficits 

Hank Brown on the Public Option 

Hank Brown on Individualism vs Collectivism 

I’m sure everyone who reads this blog is familiar with the “Tea Party” protest in Washington DC last month.  It was an adult response to overbearing government, expressed within constitutional parameters by people strongly vested in the American dream.  On the surface it stands in stark contrast to the anarchist G20 protest in Pittsburgh a couple weeks later where all hell broke loose and riot police acted to disburse demonstrators.

The DC protest was a perfect picture of order, and the Pittsburgh protest was extreme disorder.  While DC was a mature and law-abiding exercise in civil dissent and Pittsburgh was an adolescent riot that provoked a violent response, both events constituted dissent from current governance and power structures. (more…)