We went to our local Lincoln Day dinner last night and got a full dose of Republican politics. It’s a lively time for the party with fresh candidates popping out of the woodwork everywhere you look. A lot of tea party energy was in evidence, however I sensed a retrenchment on the part of the GOP establishment. If they think they know best how to defeat the left, they “have some ‘splainin’ to do” about how their past leadership brought us a Democrat state government and two Democrat senators. Tea party candidates have no prospects as a third party, however it’s unreasonable to expect GOP guardians to just morph into constitutional conservatives and incorporate tea party fundamentals. Conservative principles have been on the table all along and they weren’t sufficiently compelling to the GOP the last time they had the majority. We will get Republicans elected next Fall because the left have scared the crap out of mainstream America with their Weather Underground/Ayers/Alinsky/Muslim Brotherhood/socialist revolution. But I worry that the self-interest of the GOP old guard will come before the “self-evident truths we hold.” Many battles lie ahead.
the system
The system works. It wouldn’t be the system long enough to become the system if it didn’t. That said, the system exists in a state of corrupt flux. As any human expression built with human fallibility and imperfect knowledge, only divine intervention could enable humans to create a more perfect existence than themselves. So we defer to our flawed nature, soldier on, and hope for the best. That’s the system.
Mike Rosen had a caller the other morning who wouldn’t accept Rosen’s point that political party trumps person. Pete Boyles would have agreed with the caller. He too votes for the person over the party. 2009 went down as a disaster for one party leftist government–an abject proof of Rosen’s thesis.
The system involves a lot more than casting votes in November. Our civic conscience and prescriptions for ethical society hinge on education, accurate perception, a true knowledge of the history of what has worked and what has not, and humility. Too many use their vote as a mirror for preening their self image. They’re the ones tuning up their self esteem with congratulatory back slapping and snippets of sound-bite love for the downtrodden. Notwithstanding civic duty, the system accepts all motivations including the most base and the most naive.
The left’s approach holds that the good is objectively obvious and that everyone should be required to contribute to it. Their systemic safety net sounds charitable, but in practice leads to unchecked corruption, the denial of free will, the prevention of moral choice, and a worsening of the human condition. While the good may be objectively obvious to many people, manifesting the good by force always makes things worse.
The right holds that what is good can only be individually and voluntarily created. They know that coercion nullifies moral choice–that it is the act of choosing the good over the bad that makes something good.
The left avoid this topic like the plague because it reminds them of their pro-choice position where they insist on preserving the legal license to choose to kill babies–which they think is a good thing. And so go the pitfalls of their relative morality.
Anyway, the right’s approach has in fact produced the greatest good for the greatest number of people whenever it has been the controlling philosophy. The left continues to attack it for want of a systemic safety net, even though the left have repeatedly demonstrated that systemic safety nets don’t work.
At the end of the day, the system that most empowers individuals to create their own good has the endorsement of the weight of history. George Will has observed in many columns that the brilliance of the American system lies in its’ ability to produce governmental gridlock. And who wouldn’t want to have the 800 lb. gorilla in the living room securely shackled?
Individual empowerment by default through the frustration of systemic government coercion may not be pretty, but it’s the system that works best for us. The Founders designed a self-limiting American government in order to protect our freedom to live and pursue happiness. They knew that only free people so engaged could build a great nation.
Since the founding of America, however, huge national mistakes harming millions of people have been repeatedly committed in the name of social progress in our country, and in many nations throughout the world. It’s time for the left to face the facts that it (a) has no monopoly on good intentions and that (b) good intentions do not justify forcing progressive programs on the country.
One definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. The only thing progressivism (and it’s close cousins socialism, fascism and communism) ever delivered is destruction to the fabric of their societies. We can no longer afford to stand by while America consumes itself in the fire of progressive passion. The failed progressive experiment must end and we can use the system to do it.
Don’t wait for November to get into the system. By then, 99% of the political season’s governmental product will be formed. The American system is a continuum of free speech, critical analysis, study of history, and the endless task of trying to avoid repeating our mistakes. I believe the system can be operated so that we quit making the big progressive national mistakes that harm millions of people. We must end the experiments in the name of social progress. We are human beings, not lab rats for entertaining progressive social scientists.
2-13-10 Repub Breakfast
Speakers (click to enlarge)
—————————————————————————————-
YouTube videos:
Scott Wills reporting on candidates for county offices in 2010
Hope Goetz on the state of the county
PJ Trostel breakfast sponsor and candidate
Rick Stone on Republican strategy
Jerry Bishop on getting back to the Constitution
Mike Holler:
The constitutional crisis caused by progressive Democrats and progressive Republicans
mornin’
rights of terrorists
Beth Shelly reports today,
PAGE 2A – WEST ELBERT COUNTY SUN – THURSDAY FEBRUARY 11.2010
“Early this morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” there was a discussion about our freedoms and who they are set aside for, particularly the 14th Amendment, which defines citizenship and keeps our civil and political rights from being abridged or denied.The Nation’s Chris Hayes . was speaking on the rights of suspected terrorists, particularly the issues of indefinite detention and whether should they be “Mirandized” or not. He stressed the point that the U.S. Constitution’s protection of legal rights not only applies to legal citizens, but, unpopular as that is today, it also applies to terrorist suspects, much as it does to illegal immigrants who are arrested on American soils.
But in the Bush administration, in the name of public safety, those legal rights were curtailed for certain terrorist suspects. A Feb. 9 editorial in the Wall Street Journal titled “Cheney’s Revenge” asserts that despite efforts little has been done by the Obama administration to move away ` from that stance. The editorial cites the President’s desired closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities and his administration’s backing down of trying 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other enemy combatants in civilian court.
In response, Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough said, “I know Bush did it, but that doesn’t make it right,” adding it is something we are still “muddling through.” Meanwhile, Mort Zukerman of U.S. New & World Report counters, saying the Supreme Court allows for different rules to apply than what exist for U.S. citizens.
Forty years ago it was civil rights. Today it is the rights of terrorist suspects.An ongoing process, to be sure, on how to apply our legal protections. But it began more than 230 years ago with our first president and changed significantly with , the election of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.
Understanding the “muddling” and shifting public opinion that occurs over time, it is the basic concept of democracy and freedom that we celebrate with Presidents’ Day. Hope you all get a chance to sit back and reflect on it this weekend.”
Well , it won’t take a weekend to reflect on this. First, the 14th Amendment, “Citizenship Rights.”
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Was the Christmas day bomber born or naturalized in the U.S.? Was KSM? No. They’re not citizens of the U.S. Where do the Nation’s Chris Hayes and reporter Beth Shelly come up with the notion that 14th Am. protections were intended to apply to non-citizens? Certainly not in the text of the Constitution so amended.
The government’s legal authority to deal with non-citizen terrorists comes in the body of the Constitution under Article 1, Section 8, “Powers of Congress.”
“The Congress shall have Power ….
To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;
To declare War … and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To …. repel Invasions;
To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”
Article 1, Section 9, “Limits on Congress” also applies.
“The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
Fruit of Kaboom and KSM are invading members of a multi-state Islamic religious sect who have declared war on the United States. The 14th Amendment body of law protects individual citizen rights against the government. It doesn’t protect members of invading armies who are in a fight to destroy the government. Yet the left would have us buy into this absurdity in order to create a public political forum for attacking conservative politicians. They would subvert the Constitution–that protects them too–to score political points in the modern media-charged democratic process.
Enjoy your weekend.
Essayists meet Commissioners
Winners of Elbert County Republican Women’s Essay Contest meet Commissioners.
Bonniwell on Voorhis
not the party of no
GOP Idea Man Charts Course For Solvency
By GEORGE F. WILL
Posted 02/05/2010 06:25 PM ET
In 2013, when President Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor, is counting his blessings, at the top of his list will be the name of his vice president: Paul Ryan. The former congressman from Wisconsin will have come to office with ideas for steering the federal government to solvency.
Not that Daniels has ever been bereft of ideas. Under him, Indiana property taxes have been cut 30% and for the first time, Standard & Poor’s has raised the state’s credit rating to AAA.
But in January 2010, Ryan released an updated version of his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a cure for the most completely predictable major problem that has ever afflicted America.
Some calamities — the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 — have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America’s Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.
Funding entitlements — especially medical care and pensions for the elderly — requires reinvigorating the economy. Ryan’s map connects three destinations: economic vitality, diminished public debt, and health and retirement security.
To make the economy — on which all else hinges — hum, Ryan proposes tax reform. Masochists would be permitted to continue paying income taxes under the current system. Others could use a radically simplified code, filing a form that fits on a postcard.
It would have just two rates: 10% on incomes up to $100,000 for joint filers and $50,000 for single filers; 25% on higher incomes. There would be no deductions, credits or exclusions, other than the health care tax credit (see below).
Today’s tax system was shaped by sadists who were trying to be nice: Every wrinkle in the code was put there to benefit this or that interest. Since the 1986 tax simplification, the code has been recomplicated more than 14,000 times — more than once a day.
At the 2004 Republican convention, thunderous applause greeted George W. Bush’s statement that the code is “a complicated mess” and a “drag on our economy” and his promise to “reform and simplify” it. But his next paragraphs proposed more complications to incentivize this and that behavior for the greater good.
Ryan would eliminate taxes on interest, capital gains, dividends and death. The corporate income tax, the world’s second highest, would be replaced by an 8.5% business consumption tax. Because this would be about half the average tax burden that other nations place on corporations, U.S. companies would instantly become more competitive — and more able and eager to hire.
Medicare and Social Security would be preserved for those currently receiving benefits, or becoming eligible in the next 10 years (those 55 and older today). Both programs would be made permanently solvent.
Universal access to affordable health care would be guaranteed by refundable tax credits ($2,300 for individuals, $5,700 for families) for purchasing portable coverage in any state. As persons under 55 became Medicare-eligible, they would receive payments averaging $11,000 a year, indexed to inflation and pegged to income, with low-income people receiving more support.
Ryan’s plan would fund medical savings accounts from which low-income people would pay minor out-of-pocket medical expenses. All Americans, regardless of income, would be allowed to establish MSAs — tax-preferred accounts for paying such expenses.
Ryan’s plan would allow workers under 55 the choice of investing more than one-third of their current Social Security taxes in personal retirement accounts similar to the Thrift Savings Plan long available to, and immensely popular with, federal employees. This investment would be inheritable property, guaranteeing that individuals will never lose the ability to dispose every dollar they put into these accounts.
Ryan would raise the retirement age. If, when Congress created Social Security in 1935, it had indexed the retirement age (then 65) to life expectancy, today the age would be in the mid-70s. The system was never intended to do what it is doing — subsidizing retirements that extend from one-third to one-half of retirees’ adult lives.
Compare Ryan’s lucid map to the Democrats’ impenetrable labyrinth of health care legislation. Republicans are frequently criticized as “the party of no.” But because most new ideas are injurious, rejection is an important function in politics. It is, however, insufficient.
Fortunately, Ryan, assisted by Republican representatives Devin Nunes of California and Jeb Hensarling of Texas, has become a think tank, refuting the idea that Republicans lack ideas.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/ArticlePrint.aspx?id=520346
perspectives
Of course, it is not fair to compare our current American democratic leaders with the Bolsheviks.Yes, they both use the same slogans in their speeches.
Yes, they both stir up envy and class warfare to distract from their failures.
Yes, both political movements sought control of the banks as the foundation for their new egalitarian vision.
And yes, they are both opposed to free speech, as was made clear by the reaction of American leftists to the recent Supreme Court decision.
But you would never find a Czar anywhere in the Soviet government.
By SVETLANA KUNIN
evenin’
9th Annual Essay Contest
——————————————————————————-
Sheriff Frangis’ Keynote Speech
Pat Tillman – An American Patriot
A Perfect Example Of An American Patriot
God Bless Our Troops – The Loyal Dedicated Soldier
——————————————————————
——————————————————————
——————————————————————
——————————————————————
——————————————————————
mornin’
Can caucus-o-crats become conservatives?
The tea party movement led the way back to fundamental conservative principles, a trend now shown to have legs. Will the Colorado Republican caucus club become born again conservatives? Will they send their RINOs packing? Will they give up their liberal ways? If they don’t, they’ll lose again.
Colorado Republicans Strain to Ride Tea Party Tiger
“In late November, hoping to avoid a primary fight in the governor’s race, Mr. Wadhams and Mr. McInnis introduced a “platform for prosperity,” echoing the language and demands of the Tea Party groups: less government intrusion, protecting states’ rights under the 10th amendment, opposition to federal stimulus bills.
But that was not enough for the Tea Partiers. They were angry that another candidate, Dan Maes, who has been endorsed by at least three Tea Party groups across the state, was excluded from the drafting of the platform.”
Thomas Sowell – Are Republicans “Due”?
“Minorities have been the biggest losers from numerous liberal policies promoted by the Democrats — whether in maintaining the monopoly of failing public schools for the sake of the teachers’ unions, restricting the building of housing for the sake of the environmentalists, turning criminals loose in minority communities for the sake of the American Civil Liberties Union and like-minded “progressives” or artificially expanding unemployment among minority young people with minimum wage laws.
All that needs to be explained — and explaining is what Republicans have been neglecting for years, except for Ronald Reagan, who knew that you can have your big tent and your principles at the same time, but only if you took the trouble to make your case to the public in plain English.
Republicans have the time to do some real homework on issues and on explaining issues. Whether they will use that time for that purpose is the big question for them — and for the country.”
Will GOP Hear Scott Brown’s Clear Message?
“An across-the-board tax cut is the fairest pro-growth message of them all. Lower tax rates for everybody. Get out of the box of rich people and class warfare. For the Ted Kennedy Democrats, that box has been a loser for decades. But for timid Republicans always on the defensive, now is the time to break out and adopt the Scott Brown theme.
This is what Reagan did. This is why the Gipper touted JFK’s across-the-board tax cuts. Republicans must now be bold and fight for across-the-board tax relief, for families, individuals, and businesses, along with smaller government, fewer services and across-the-board spending cuts.”
Saul Bellow
Op-Ed: Papuans and Zulus by Saul Bellow
Despots do not accept the autonomy of the literary imagination. Freedom of the imagination, dangerous to them, is related to the independence of the soul. This independence is not peculiar to artists, it is common to all human beings.
….In the U.S., we were protected in the past by a sense of humor. In the days of Mark Twain, of Mr. Dooley and H. L. Mencken, we were still able to kid ourselves. Mencken’s wicked jokes on Boobus Americanus — his term for the average man — had a salutary influence on the discussion of public questions and on public behavior. Sometimes crude, openly prejudiced but often very funny, he banged away at the professors, the politicians and the Jim Crow South. But fanatics and demagogues had far less influence in those pre-sensitive days. Child gangsters did not then kill the kids who “dissed” them.
Righteousness and rage threaten the independence of our souls.
Rage is now brilliantly prestigious. Rage, the reverse of bourgeois prudence, is a luxury. Rage is distinguished, it is a patrician passion. The rage of rappers and rioters takes as its premise the majority’s admission of guilt for past and present injustices, and counts on the admiration of the repressed for the emotional power of the uninhibited and “justly” angry. Rage can also be manipulative; it can be an instrument of censorship and despotism.
As a onetime anthropologist, I know a taboo when I see one. Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo.
We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists.
As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.
Saul Bellow, professor of literature at Boston University, won the Nobel Prize in 1976.
Pikes Peak region
a choice? a right?
This is not a right to choose. It’s a license for homicide.
Blood Confession – How Lying Marketers Sold America on Unrestricted Abortion – David Kupelian
“In 1985, intrigued by the question of what really happens during an abortion in the first three months of a pregnancy, Nathanson decided to put an ultrasound machine on the abdomen of a woman undergoing an abortion and to videotape what happens.
“We got a film that was astonishing, shocking, frightening,” he says.
“It was made into a film called The Silent Scream. It was shattering, and the pro-abortion people panicked. Because at this point, we had moved the abortion debate away from moralizing, sermonizing, sloganeering and pamphleteering into a high-tech argument. For the first time, the pro-life movement now had all of the technology and all of the smarts, and the pro-abortion people were on the defensive.”
Nathanson’s film provoked a massive campaign of defamation on the part of the pro-abortion movement, including charges that he had doctored the film. He hadn’t. “I was accused of everything from pederasty to nepotism. But the American public saw the film.”
In 1987 Nathanson released another, even stronger film called Eclipse of Reason, introduced by Charlton Heston. “The Silent Scream dealt with a child who was aborted at twelve weeks,” said Nathanson. `But there are four hundred abortions every day in this country that are done after the third month of pregnancy. Contrary to popular misconception, Roe v. Wade makes abortion permissible up to and including the ninth month of pregnancy. I wanted to dramatize what happens in one of these late abortions, after the third month.
“They took a fetuscope, which is a long optical instrument with a lens at one end and a strong light at the other. They inserted the fetus-cope into the womb of a woman at 19 1/2 weeks, and a camera was clamped on the eyepiece and then the abortionist went to work. [Read more…]
mau-maued savings and loan
IBD Editorials
The War On Banks
Posted 01/14/2010 06:50 PM ET
Financial Crisis: The White House wants to impose a stiff new tax on banks to punish them for their role in the financial meltdown. That’ll really get them lending again … won’t it? We have to admit we’re a little perplexed. The White House and Congress have complained over and over again about the banks’ “failure to lend” to get the economy moving. Yet they now want to impose massive new taxes on the industry through an Orwellian “Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee” — supposedly to recoup TARP bailout funds and rein in bank risk-taking.
“When you try to value the degree of benefit that they received from this exceptional government assistance … this is essentially the least they could do,” a senior White House official told the Washington Post. Such thinking defies reason. The fee would add $90 billion to banks’ taxes over the next decade. And as we’ve noted repeatedly, anything you tax, you get less of. Tax the banks, you’ll get less lending. Guaranteed. Consumers will pay the “bank” tax, not banks. Moreover, suggesting that banks aren’t “paying back” is simply false. The TARP program doled out nearly $250 billion to the banks, many of which were forced to take the money. Yet, as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner noted recently, the government expects to earn a $20 billion profit from its TARP loans. Compare that with the government’s own mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which, as of the third quarter, had a combined book value of negative $4.8 billion. Treasury has already injected $111 billion into Fannie and Freddie, giving it a real loss on a mark-to-market basis of $115.8 billion.
Nevertheless, Congress recently lifted the $200 billion caps on cash infusions to the two agencies. They are now entitled to unlimited funding to cover any level of continued losses. So who’s really losing money here? This is so destructive of our financial system that we can only think it must be intentional. Indeed, it’s been a long-held desire among those on the left to control the nation’s private financial system — to harness its massive amounts of capital as a funding source for their social-planning agenda.
To do that, they need a compliant banking sector — one that fears being pilloried for its admittedly bad behavior during the financial meltdown. That role is being played by the Financial Crisis Commission. This ad hoc group kicked off a year of hearings this week with a sideshow attack on bank executives — but not a word about Fannie and Freddie, the bankrupt government entities that caused the meltdown in the first place.
It gets worse. Also this week, the Justice Department announced that it would go after banks and mortgage lenders for “bias in lending.” Yet this is the very thing that led to the debacle that brought our financial system to its knees. In his latest book, “Architects of Ruin,” Peter Schweizer argues plausibly that all of this is part of a long-term campaign to give extreme-left “community activists” control of our banks. Starting in the 1960s, and spearheaded in Chicago by far-left “organizer” Saul Alinsky, it has worked like a charm. Today our banks seem terrified of being publicly mau-maued for supposed racial and class insensitivity. They dare not stand up for themselves.
As angry as Americans may be with the banks, they need to see these moves for what they are: An outrageous attempt to seize control of a private banking sector that needs profits to grow. If you cherish having a credit card, securing a home loan based on your ability to pay or getting money to start a small business, you will oppose this attack on banks with all your might.
abortion and the holocaust
In the latter days of World War II, the crematoriums in Germany burned 24 hours a day to dispose of Europe’s declared undesirables. Many Germans benefited economically from the redistribution of wealth and property from those undesirables, and from the occupied territories. The Reich kept the existence of the ovens quiet and attempted to destroy all evidence of them as the Allies advanced on positions where they had operated. At Dachau the American army found the crematorium wired with explosives and were able to defuse it before it could be blown up.
Though it took more than a decade for the status of the undesirables to deteriorate from persecution to extermination in the holocaust, in the end the linkage between extermination and the improvement of the average German’s economic status was firmly established.
A very similar linkage exists today with the practice of abortion sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court, and with the perpetuation of sexualized lifestyles in America and escape from the financial and liberty burdens presented by raising children.
The holocaust and abortion both involve mass death linked to benefits conferred upon a demographic majority. America, Russia and their allies defeated the culture of death that the Third Reich had become. Today, who will save America from the genocide it now perpetrates on the most defenseless of its own people?
Every baby should see a sunrise.
the matrix
tea
My cup of tea today is Dong Ling with a spoonful of honey. It’s rumored to be medicinal. We’ll see if it turns the tide against the chest cold inhabiting my lungs since 2010 began. Leave out the honey and you won’t find a more bitter tea drink. It must be good medicine since it requires a spoonful of sugar, though I’ll have to wait for the outcome before I can say for sure.
Outcomes get short sheeted these days in politics. Politicians, their appointees, handlers and apprentices, devote themselves with great linguistic artistry to public products with no measurable outcomes. The art of government today is to a) get the money, to b) do the things you want, without c) creating any grounds for critical assessment of what you did.
Politicians in Congress, the Executive branch, and the Judiciary, at all levels of government from the local to the federal, skillfully parse out causes from effects. Like paints on a canvas, causes and effects are freely blended to fit social, economic, political, regulatory, judicial, and administrative theories as the need arises. This soup of ad-hoc connected parts and theories oozes out of the public bureaucracy to bind us with an endless stream of laws, orders and judgments, each layer more unfounded than its precedents.
As political men become more estranged from American reality, the passion employed by their defenders becomes more intense. Fanaticism goes up as reality fades.
In 2009, tea partying got serious. Tea partyers are a sober bunch of stakeholders in the American ideals that have guided our country to outcomes of success, peace, wealth, learning, growth, health, stability, strength, spirituality, accountability, morality and freedom. Tea partyers connect real causes to real effects. Their social, economic and political philosophies integrate to, and reflect reality. As a people connected to causation, they understand that reality has its limits. They know we live in a world of scarcity, of limited means and unlimited wants. They know that power corrupts people, and that governments are run by people.
Real causation radically departs from our modern political culture based on selling the illusion of unlimited means to the fulfillment of unlimited wants. Ironically, while attempting to satisfy all of men’s desires, modern politicians actually prevent the lasting accomplishments necessary to advance mankind’s condition and capacity. This happens because they force wealth into their unsustainable visions instead of the outcomes that free men would otherwise choose–outcomes that would actually produce something to improve the human condition.
The meaningful class divisions in America today are not between the rich and the poor, or the legal resident and the illegal alien, or between those covered by health insurance and those without health insurance (albeit who still have access to free health care.) All of those divisions are surmountable by free people acting within the bounds of the American constitutional system.
The key class division in America, not so easily overcome, is between those who create/consume (sell & buy) political illusions, and those who don’t. This boundary separates the brainwashed believers in statist myths from citizens with free minds. Multiple wars were fought in the 20th century over this division and some continue today. The statist disease is pernicious. It promises the easy buck and appeals to scammers and the get rich quick crowd.
The tea I’m drinking at the moment will not cure me because I want it to. Thousands of words of slick marketing, executive orders or tortured judicial reasoning will not change that fact. Neither will thousands of pages of incomprehensible legislation.
Cheney’s 12/29 statement, etc.
“As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.“He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war.
But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war.”
The left clearly owns all of the points Cheney mentions above….not a close call. As to the inference from those points that Obama thinks we’re not at war, as a private citizen protected by the 1st Am., the former Vice President has every right to his rhetorical flourishes no matter how much they vex demleftys.
Speaking of the 1st Am., I assume everyone now needs to keep a current backup of their computer handy for when the TSA goons show up at your door to seize your equipment.
denial kills
It’s “Jihadis” Mr. President, not “alleged suspects.” The terrorists are warriors for Islam: “And we will continue in this path, Allah willing, until we reach our goal so that religion is all Allah’s.”
Mr. President, your political correctness will get people killed. You’re not going to win the war by wealthy jihadis with constitutional due process. You’re just enabling and encouraging them.
Their statement: [Read more…]
fresh as the day it was written
Hard Truths About the Culture War
Robert Bork
Moral liberalism and the decadence of culture.
What began to concern me more and more were the clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society-a rot and decadence that was no longer the consequence of liberalism but was the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism. . . . Sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. -Irving Kristol, “My Cold War”
Equivocation has never been Irving Kristol’s long suit. About the fact of rot and decadence there can be no dispute, except from those who deny that such terms have meaning, and who are, for that reason, major contributors to rot and decadence. We are accustomed to lamentations about American crime rates, the devastation wrought by drugs, rising illegitimacy, the decline of civility, and the increasing vulgarity of popular entertainment. But the manifestations of American cultural decline are even more widespread, ranging across virtually the entire society, from the violent underclass of the inner cities to our cultural and political elites, from rap music to literary studies, from pornography to law, from journalism to scholarship, from union halls to universities. Wherever one looks, the traditional virtues of this culture are being lost, its vices multiplied, its values degraded-in short, the culture itself is unraveling.
These can hardly be random or isolated developments. A degeneration so universal, afflicting so many seemingly disparate areas, must proceed from common causes. That supposition is strengthened by the observation that similar trends seem to be occurring in nearly all Western industrialized democracies. The main features of these trends are vulgarity and a persistent left-wing bias, the latter being particularly evident among the semi-skilled intellectuals-academics, bureaucrats, and the like-that Kristol calls the New Class.
But why should this be happening? The short answer is the one Kristol gives: the rise of modern liberalism. (The extent to which he would agree with the following argument about the sources and future of modern liberalism, I do not know.) Modern liberalism grew out of classical liberalism by expanding its central ideals-liberty and equality-while progressively jettisoning the restraints of religion, morality, and law even as technology lowered the constraint of hard work imposed by economic necessity. Those ideals, along with the right to pursue happiness, are what we said we were about at the beginning, in the Declaration of Independence. Stirring as rallying cries for rebellion, less useful, because indeterminate, for the purpose of arranging political and cultural matters, they become positively dangerous when taken, without very serious qualifications, as social ideals.
The qualifications assumed by the founders’ generation, but unexpressed in the Declaration (it would rather have spoiled the rhetoric to have added “up to a point”), have gradually been peeled away so that today liberalism has reached an extreme, though not one fears its ultimate, stage. “Equality” has become radical egalitarianism (the equality of outcomes rather than of opportunities), and “liberty” takes the form of radical individualism (a refusal to admit limits to the gratifications of the self). In these extreme forms, they are partly produced by, and partly produce, the shattering of fraternity (or community) that modern liberals simultaneously long for and destroy. [Read more…]
HD Radio
(click to enlarge)
An HD Radio Listening Test in Denver
The multicast HD stations that require an HD receiver haven’t yet, apparently, caught on with advertisers, so you can hear a great deal of incredible music in HD right now with very little, if any, advertising. I’m a fan of classic alternative and at our location in Kiowa, the above receiver we bought for Christmas brings in 93.3-2 (KTCL’s classic alternative multicast station) very clearly and without commercials. What a treat!
center of gravity
Only a year ago it sounded extreme to categorize the U.S. Democrat government as socialist. Now it’s become the exception to see it referred to in more moderate terms. Republicans fooled themselves that compromise and occupation of a mythical middle ground were a sustainable political philosophy. The absence of a philosophy could never have become a philosophy. That’s like elevating agnosticism to the level of a religion. Sure, it’s a belief, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s an empty belief. And so goes the moderate fallacy–smoke and mirrors that dissolved to nothing at the hands of dedicated socialist ideologues.
Now that the Rubicon is crossed and government is inside and directing our major industries, our major financial firms, our securities markets, our doctor’s offices, our private waters, our open lands, and our formerly-take-home income, what’s next?
Well, [Read more…]
The Merchants of Cool
“MERCHANTS OF COOL”
“THEY WANT to be cool. They are impressionable, and they have the cash. They are corporate America’s $150 billion dream.”
That’s the opening statement in PBS’s stunning 2001 Frontline documentary “The Merchants of Cool,” narrated by author and media critic Douglas Rushkof. What emerges in the following sixty minutes is a scandalous portrait of how major corporations—Viacom, Disney, AOL/Time Warner, and others—study America’s children like laboratory rats in order to sell them billions of dollars in merchandise by tempting, degrading, and corrupting them.
Think that’s a bit of an overstatement?
It’s an understatement. [Read more…]
ECR Breakfast 12/12/09
DanMaes.mp4————————————————————————————————
GregBrophy.mp4 ————————————————————————————————
————————————————————————————————
————————————————————————————————
Commissioner Schwab read a recent press release and then took a question from Mr. Happel.
————————————————————————————————
been there, done that
“The 1941 pension reform also introduced mandatory health insurance, the lack of which had been considered a “persistent societal shortcoming, threatening the welfare of pensioners.” Monthly contributions were set at one reichsmark with exemptions for widows and orphans. Previously, retirees had had to apply for state relief assistance or take out private insurance, which few of them did. The new regulations took effect in August and November of 1941.”
“Significantly, the will to achieve social reform was strongest among those leaders within the Nazi Party who were also the most actively involved in pushing forward the agenda of ethnic genocide.”
Gotz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War and the Nazi Welfare State, Holt Paperbacks, 2008. p. 56.
hidden in plain view
Back on September 25th, a few thousand Muslims gathered on Capitol Hill, a number well short of the 50,000 the event planners were shooting for and hoping for.
An ACT! for America team, led by two of our Florida chapter leaders, was on hand for the event, and was able to interview a number of the Muslims who attended.
|
All three of these videos are now available for public viewing, and we encourage you to view them and pass this email on to others. For if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth 10,000.
|
it’s what’s for dinner
Colorado Beef Council Video
what Harvard did not teach Obama
Just as national socialism gradually evolved through good intentions and the nurturing of a socialist constituency, so our own brand of U.S. federal socialism grows. Obama and the leftists in congress track closely with the German national socialists of the 1930s. Every one of these movements in history came to a very bad end. What hubris to think our governments and courts could take over industry and banking, rewrite finance and contract law, redistribute wealth between the top half and the bottom half of the population, and ration medicine, while creating no negative consequences. We cannot know the future, but on this well-traveled road, we know, for many, it will be deadly and horrible.
Excerpts from “Hitler’s Beneficiaries: plunder, racial war, and the Nazi welfare state” by Gotz Aly, 2005.
ANY INVESTIGATION into Hitler’s ascent must thus examine the give-and-take relationship between the populace and the Nazi leadership. It is a matter of historical record that the party hierarchy was, from its earliest days, extremely unstable. The mystery is how it managed to stabilize itself, if only temporarily, so that the regime could survive for twelve spectacularly destructive years. Solving this mystery requires a more precise rephrasing of the general question “How could Nazi Germany have happened?” Namely, how did National Socialism, an obviously deceitful, megalomaniacal, and criminal undertaking, succeed in persuading the great majority of the German people that it was working in their interest? [Read more…]
British health system fails
As Congress acts on their leftist mythology to impose nationalized health care on America, the Brits document the folly of their own mistake.
Daily Mail, Saturday, November 28, 2009: 3,000 needless deaths every year
Daily Mail Comment, Saturday, November 28, 2009: Paying the ultimate price for NHS targets
The Daily Telegraph, Saturday, November 28, 2009: Want to fix the NHS? Go private