Delaware Libertarian

A different incarnation of this blog is now available ...

2011-10-07T14:15:00.000-04:00

Here.

It's not the same, but then again it never was.

More of This, Please

2010-09-23T00:51:00.054-04:00

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please."

Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God."

Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble
The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin.

Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires.
The latest controversy involves his "Taliban Dan" advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands."
An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husbands ought not concentrate on that verse, but rather should look at what the Bible tells them to do. Politico reports that the advertisement has been condemned by FactCheck.org and the Orlando Sentinel.

Regardless, an incumbent Congressman polling at 36 percent is in very deep trouble, especially in a swing district like this one. RCP currently rates the race as Leans Republican.

Of all the hyper-partisan leftist blowhards afflicting American political life one would be hard pressed to find a smug, obnoxious demagogue who better epitomizes the vicious, hate-filled degeneracy and deceit of America's political far left than the odious Alan Grayson.

Personally I'll take the soft-spoken churchie caught redhanded on camera actually giving a shit about his family and daring share this with others over the angry militant bombast who can think of nothing more important in life than how he and his thieving fellow travelers should be running everyone's life.

Florida's 8th can't do the country a fast enough favor by jettisoning this lunatic darling of the delusional statist control freaks currently in charge of the asylum in DC.

Clearly the screaching left is as oblivious as Grayson is to how arrogant megalomania and shameless earth-scorching aren't so constructive in advancing their tyrannical ideology, much less in imposing their incredibly-destructive policies on an unwilling nation.....loddy doddy everybody, as we used to say in the Army.

Fortunately it only took the country a bare election cycle's worth of pummeling by these ruthless soul-crushing, freedom-killing national socialist bullies to finally provoke the unyielding wrath of the nation's vast bulk of heretofore-silent citizens who actually produce the fruits on which these statist parasites can never ever engorge themselves enough.

Buh-Bye then there, Fred McMurray's Secret Mistake.

FLASHBACK REPOST: March 18, 2009: New Castle County Executive Chris Coons : A Rich Little Tax Raising Democrat

2010-09-18T12:43:00.002-04:00

Lest any New Castle Countian or Delaware voter forget, Chris Coons has made quite clear there is no such thing as an excess of government, only a shortage of taxation.

------------------------------------------

Well, it looks like another domino is falling in the chain of tax-raising Democrat autocracy that is government most anywhere in Delaware, with city, county, state, and federal government all solidly in the hands of tax more, borrow more, spend more Democrat politicians.

(Sorry, folks, but when you show me a government official from the Republican or any other non-Democrat political party in Delaware, or nationally, who is looking to raise taxes on the struggling citizenry I will gladly blast them just as forcefully).

On the heels of Wilmington Mayor Baker's promise that the city government will raise "taxes, fees, and anything we can", now comes blow # 2 to the double-taxed Wilmington residents, as well as a blow to all other home and property owners in New Castle County : a WHOPPING 25% increase in property tax rates.

Coons Seeks 25% Property Tax Hike
The News-Journal March 18, 2009

If approved by County Council, the tax hike would be the second biggest in county history and would raise an extra $21 million to help balance the $234 million budget for the 2010 fiscal year that begins July 1.
The average annual property tax bill would rise by about $100 to $501. Coons' spending plan also calls for a 10 percent increase in sewer fees.
The overall budget reflects the impact of the recession, particularly in housing. The county has depended heavily for years on a share of the statewide real estate transfer tax to balance its budget. Revenues from that tax have plummeted as home sales swooned.
"I think we've just gone overboard -- we've overspent," said civic leader Frances West, noting that residents will have to adjust to having less. "It's like raising kids. If you give them luxuries and then take them away, they're not going to be happy.

Coons' spending plan would trim personnel costs by $4.8 million, an amount he said could be achieved by laying off 75 to 100 employees.

[FEARMONGERING ALERT...]

If layoffs are needed, they would occur across the board and include public safety services such as police and paramedics.

Coons said he is continuing to negotiate with the county's six unions to see whether they would accept furloughs or some other form of payroll reductions.

So far, the unions have balked at Coons' proposed furloughs, suggesting that taxes instead be raised to save county jobs.

Personnel costs account for more than three-fourths of the county's spending.

News that Democrat Chris Coons intends to jack up property taxes on us all to make his political accommodations is no surprise. He is a personally very-rich Democrat, freshly-re-elected, making a tidy 6-figure paycheck on the public's backs while trying to carve himself out an incumbency career in Delaware politics.

Property taxes are but pocket change to someone as wealthy as Coons. Coons lives at 2301 Delaware Avenue in a nearly-4200 square foot, 6-bedroom, 4-bath stone mansion that sits on nearly half an acre of land in the high-dollar Highlands neighborhood in Wilmington. To give you a sense of the value, the property sold in 1981 for $225,000.00. Of course, what Coons paid for it is masked by a deed that cleverly states a purely-nominal sale price of $ 10.

Clearly Coons has no compassion for how close so many New Castle County residents are cutting it these days just to survive, much less afford to keep our homes. I happen to be one such resident.

I live in a rather energy-inefficient drafty old house built in 1886 in what was not too long ago a largely a crime-infested ghetto in a low-income census tract a stone's throw from downtown Wilmington. I have been struggling gradually to restore and modernize it for several years. I also run my own law practice out of it.

Every single penny counts and every extra bit of increased taxation hurts my efforts to eke out a living much less improve my home.

A "$100 to $501" average annual tax increase may not seem like much to those in the Delaware Democrat government protectorate, but such a massive single tax hike really heaps insult upon injury to the residents of New Castle County.

We are not insulated from the economic downturn the way the government elites like Coons can and do insulate themselves. We have no choice but to pay however much more the Coons Democrat county government decides it wants to coerce from us.

Wilmington residents like me will have to add Coonsies' increased property taxes to the (likely to increase) property taxes we also pay to the City of Wimington for all the services that the county would otherwise provide us but doesn't and for which Wilmingtonians nonetheless still pay New Castle County.

Yes that's right, folks. Many people outside Wilmington don't know that Wilmington property owners are double-taxed on our property, paying both City and County property taxes, though we only receive the 'services' of the city government!

Shame on you, Mr. Coons. While you have talked a good game about cutting here and there (with paltry personnel cost reductions a measly 2%) it is obvious you are more interested in servicing the bloat you and your Democrat party have made of county government, flowing out of the same government-centric mind that drives the lard-laden Wilmington patronage government racket.

You are clearly capitulating to the organized labor fatasses who dominate the Democrat party, who you need for any political future in it, and who are more than happy to exploit higher property taxes, holding hostage most peoples' biggest life investment : our homes, in order to continue theirs and your cozy ride on the public gravy train.

_____________________________________

Coons needs to tighten county government's oversized belt a helluva lot more. He needs to stop fearmongering with threats of public safety cuts. And he needs to tell the unions exactly where they can put their demands before hijacking yet more money from the citizenry.

No government should be immune from sharing in the severe economic constriction we are seeing now, especially and most severely reflected in the depressed values of the very housing upon which Coons wants to up the tax ante.

Coons must be wagering we'll all forget about these tax increases when he comes around again for our votes for whatever office he next seeks. (Don't count on it, buddy.)

I can hardly wait to see what tax hikes Jack Markell and the Democrat-run General Assembly have in store for us, to address the $606,000,000.00 budget shortfall they claim must be filled to keep Delaware's bloated state government rolling in clover.

I would be ecstatic to be proven wrong about this but I will not be holding my breath. I have a sinking feeling that the state tax domino will be the next to fall right on top of us, along with the myriad other Democrat tax increases we are seeing from top to bottom.

Contact your County Councilperson and tell them NO TAX INCREASES IN NEW CASTLE COUNTY!

In Her Own Words: Christine O'Donnell 2006 U.S. Senate Radio Commercial

2010-09-17T10:51:00.003-04:00

You be the judge.

Transcript:

My name is Christine O'Donnell, write-in candidate for U.S. Senate.

The biblical first fruits principle proves that, as the first state of our nation, Delaware has a unique responsibility to elect godly leaders.

There are two issues facing America next year that could force lawsuits on churches who refuse to ordain or marry homosexuals.

Neither of my opponents are pledging to protect the church body.

There's legislation that would make Delaware the global hub of embryonic stem cell research.

This expands our state's abortion tolerance and opens the door to human cloning in our backyards.

My opponent also wants to surrender our sovereignty to the United Nations.

The Washington Post once described Christians as poor, uneducated and easy to command when it comes to elections.

By writing me in on November 7th the body of Christ would come together and reclaim the authority we are given in government.

Delaware can elect a God-fearing U.S. Senator.

Learn more...[snip]

Direct from the Twilight Zone...

2010-08-20T15:37:00.003-04:00

“On Nov. 3 … there will be in Washington, D.C., a Democratic majority in the House and a Democratic majority in the Senate. That will be the case. If it weren’t illegal, I’d make book on it." - Vice President Joe Biden - August 20, 2010

Ummm. Yeeeeeah. *inching backwards*

Oddly, Joe's statement is technically true but not as he intended it. The massive new Republican majorities on the way will not actually be seated until January 2011 so on November 3rd the lameass lameduck economic-wrecking-ball Democrat Congress will still haunt America.

Good Lord, these people are so out of touch with reality it almost casts doubt on their mental stability.

Joe's ridiculously wishful statement that Democrats will even retain the House makes the "Recovery Summer" fantasy and the bogus "jobs saved" metric actually seem reasonable by comparison.

But, please Joe, by all means keep going.

CPAC: George Will's Outstanding (and often hilarious) Remarks

2010-02-22T13:23:00.003-05:00

Will has the crowd bursting out laughing probably more times than all the other speakers combined that day.

The guy has wit, irony and intelligence all rolled into one.

CPAC: This Ain't Your Daddy's "Conservative" Movement No More

2010-02-21T11:26:00.005-05:00

Perhaps another hopeful sign that conservatives, especially young ones, have increasingly had it with pseudo-moral social crusading bigots masquerading their prejudicial ideologies as conservatism:

CPAC crowd boos homophobe off stage
WASHINGTON -- Turns out CPAC isn't quite the place for insane jeremiads against homosexuality.

During a lightning round of two-minute speeches by young activists, Ryan Sorba, of the Young Conservatives of California, decided to bash CPAC organizers for inviting GOProud (a gay Republican group that's splintered from the Log Cabin Republicans) to have a booth at the event.

His rant began:

I'd like to condemn CPAC for bringing GOPride [sic] to this event. Civil rights are grounded in natural rights. Natural rights are grounded in human nature. Human nature is a rational substance in relationship to the intelligible end of the reproductive act of reproduction. Do you understand that?

But then the crowd began to boo, and shout back at him. ("Ron Paul!" was the loudest shout in the part of the ballroom where I'm sitting; he was due to speak not long after the lightning round ended.) And Sorba -- who's the author of a book called "The Born Gay Hoax," and whose speech at Smith College was shut down by protests two years ago -- got angry.

Civil rights when they conflict with natural rights are contrary... Will you sit down? The lesbians at Smith College protest better than you do. The lesbians at Smith College protest better than you do.

One conservative activist, Jeff Frazee of Young Americans for Liberty, shouted something trying to defend GOProud. (UPDATE: Frazee contacted Salon later Friday night to say he never said anything to Sorba, and was just sitting in the second row when Sorba started yelling at him. He says he figured Sorba could see him, and thought he was the source of the boos.) Sorba snapped back:

Guess what? You just made an enemy out of me, buddy.

h/t to Agitator Radley Balko who sums it up:

"So how long until this idiot gets caught in a public bathroom with a male prostitute?"

CPAC Surprise: Ron Paul Wins Presidential Straw Poll

2010-02-20T20:55:00.015-05:00

Ron Paul Wins Presidential Straw Poll at CPAC
Ron Paul has ended Mitt Romney's three-year run as conservatives' favorite for president, taking 31 percent of the vote in the Conservative Political Action Conference's annual straw poll.

Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas known for his libertarian views, ran for president in 2008 but was never a serious contender for the GOP nomination.

Romney, former Massachusetts governor and also a 2008 GOP candidate, has won the last three presidential straw polls at the annual conference. This year, he came in second, with 22 percent.

Sarah Palin, who didn't attend the conference, was a distant third in the straw poll, with 7 percent, followed by Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor, and Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana.

Perhaps it's not such a surprise since Congressman Paul represents the type of consistent constitutional conservatism that opposes over-reaching invasive government as much as a tool of religious "right" theocrats and Wilsonian neoconservatives as of social-engineering leftists.

Despite the histrionic flailings of Bushian neocons and the ever-present meddlings of moralizing social "conservatives", the reality is becoming clear that the driving energy and the emerging future of successful popular conservatism lie with conservatives unwilling to bastardize, betray and defile conservatism by ceding it to ideologies and agendas that, at core, are based around control, power and social uniformity.

The neocon/theocrat power nexus, so perfectly embodied in the Bush administration that so turned off the country and nearly destroyed the Republican party, is now looking for illicit redemption by (re-)insinuating its hybrid ideologies into the growing populist revival of true conservatism.

This is the persistent ilk of the mind that "big spending is ok, so long as same-sex unions [for example] aren't".

These are the false "conservatives" who believe that big government is only a problem when it is serving an ideology other than their own.

These are the duplicitous clannish partisans who talk a good game about limited government and liberty in their quest to seize power, only to betray that power itself is their true end game.

These are the ideologues who reveal themselves in such stunts as the Mt. Vernon Statement , going off the rails of constitutional conservatism by attempting to shoehorn justifications for ideological ends into the constitution such as:

It supports America’s national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world and prudently considers what we can and should do to that end

[Cue the neocons.]

The constitution neither explicates nor supports global messianism of any sort as the proper role of our national government, nor does it provide for a national interest in advancing global objectives.

The inevitable result of reading such Wilsonian liberal ends into the constitution has been to ignore or reject the unambiguous wisdom expressed by Mt. Vernon's original owner as he departed the presidency with stern warning against foreign entanglements, to any end.

This is not to say that the United States should be ignorant of or mute about tyranny and oppression in foreign lands.

This is not to say the United States should not make common cause with nation-states dedicated to securing the freedom of their people.

This is not to say that the United States should not offer international leadership towards peaceful relations and free commerce with and among all nations.

But the constitution simply does not empower our government to act as the arbiter of freedom and tyranny around the world.

The United States can best be a beacon of liberty by standing as an exemplar of a free society and a free people, not by misusing our national power and resources as an international police force.

It informs conservatism’s firm defense of family, neighborhood,
community, and faith.

[Cue the social "conservatives".]

This bland statement makes little sense other than to interject into conservatism an end so general as to be meaningless, except for what social "conservatives" want it to be.

Such sweeping social "conservative" rhetoric cannot mask the reality that what social "conservatives" really want is their rendition of "defen[ding] family, neighborhood, community, and faith" to inform constitutional interpretation so as to justify using the power of the state to advance their particular social or religious dogma.

Without need of PR stunt re-statements of belief, Ron Paul has successfully made the case for constitutional conservatism without taint of social or other ideologies beyond the elevation of individual choice and personal liberty over the creeping coercion of government-based collectivism.

Paul speaks to libertarians and conservatives who reject those who would add modifiers like "neo" or "social" to mutate conservatism into an expression of ideologies that are anything but conservative.

It is unlikely that the conservatives at CPAC who gave once-GOP-pariah Ron Paul their nod for president and the straw poll win did so because they believe Paul would be the strongest contender or the most adept candidate or the most skillful politician.

Most interestingly about the poll is that 54% of those who participated in the poll were between the ages of 18 and 25 years old. These young people surely don't believe Ron Paul himself is the future of conservatism as a successful grass roots political force.

But just as surely they do believe the ideas and principles that Ron Paul articulates are. As Paul himself often says when asked about the enthusiastic over-capacity crowds he draws on college campuses and with young people: "Well, freedom is popular!". Paul has gotten many young people excited about and engaging in the consonant causes of individual liberty and limited government.

The CPAC poll was a bold statement that not only has Ron Paul been the most consistent, unflappable, principled advocate for liberty and the most tireless champion of our constitution, but moreso that his expression of conservatism rooted in the constitution as a restraint on power rather than its handmaiden, an instrument of liberty rather than a statement of its limits, is what it's really all about.

News Roundup on the Decline of Union Muscle and the Rise of Its Wreckage

2010-02-10T23:29:00.011-05:00

The poor downtrodden unions just can't seem to catch that next break to further burrow themselves into an inordinate undeserved place at the top of the workforce heap, with no other justification than their use of raw political muscle and patronage.

Boo. Hoo.

Now that "card-check" is thankfully a fading memory from early 2009 Democrat unitary government over-reach, the defeat of the union shill Craig Becker to head up the NLRB pretty much closes their backdoor route to this and other power grabs afoot from the union bosses.

Senate stops Craig Becker nomination

Labor lawyer Craig Becker's nomination for a seat on the National Labor Relations Board failed on Tuesday afternoon, as a few Senate Democrats joined a unified Republican front to block a key Obama White House nomination.

The vote was 52-33 — 60 votes were required to proceed on the nomination. The stalled nomination is a blow to labor unions and showed fractures in the Senate Democratic Caucus, which can no longer rely on a 60-vote supermajority.

Becker has been nominated for a seat on the National Labor Relations Board, and he has strong union backing, but Republicans and a few conservative Democrats complained he was too cozy with Big Labor. The failure to get 60 votes on a procedural motion leaves the nomination stalled, and President Barack Obama has threatened to bypass the Senate and make a recess appointment if certain nominees are not confirmed.

The Democrats may yet force a recess appointment of Becker (of the exact type for which they excoriated George W. Bush), but Mr. Becker shouldn't get too cozy in the job. Just ask John Bolton how that works.

The unions' reaction is the expected one: threats.

Only this time the target is their erstwhile political chums, the Democrats.

Unions bash Democrats, warn of political fallout

Labor groups are furious with the Democrats they helped put in office — and are threatening to stay home this fall when Democratic incumbents will need their help fending off Republican challengers.

The Senate’s failure to confirm labor lawyer Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board was just the latest blow, but the frustrations have been building for months.

"Here's labor getting thrown under the bus again," said John Gage, the national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 600,000 workers. "It's really frustrating for labor, and a lot of union people are thinking: We put out big time in money and volunteers and support. And it seems like the little things that could have been aren't being done."

The 52-33 vote on Becker — who needed 60 to be confirmed — really set labor unions on edge, but the list of setbacks is growing.

The so-called “card check” bill that would make it easier to unionize employees has gone nowhere. A pro-union Transportation Security Administration nominee quit before he even got a confirmation vote. And even though unions got a sweetheart deal to keep their health plans tax-free under the Senate health care bill, that bill has collapsed, leaving unions exposed again.

Union leaders warn that the Democrats' lackluster performance in power is sapping the morale of activists going into the midterm elections.

"Right now if we don’t get positive changes to the agenda, we’re going to have a hard time getting members out to work," said United Steelworkers International President Leo W. Gerard, in an interview.

Can I get a big "Whaaaah!!", anyone?

Perhaps Democrats see the writing on the wall about the future of these top-heavy, inherently parasitic organizations that push narrow political agendas far outside the realm of helping working people generally, much less their actual members specifically:

Union Membership Drops 10%

Organized labor lost 10% of its members in the private sector last year, the largest decline in more than 25 years. The drop is on par with the fall in total employment but threatens to significantly limit labor's ability to influence elections and legislation.

On Friday, the Labor Department reported private-sector unions lost 834,000 members, bringing membership down to 7.2% of the private-sector work force, from 7.6% the year before. The broader drop in U.S. employment and a small gain by public-sector unions helped keep the total share of union membership flat at 12.3% in 2009. In the early 1980s, unions represented 20% of workers.

Labor experts said the union-membership losses would have a long-term impact on unions and their finances, because unions wouldn't automatically regain members once the job market rebounded. In many cases, new jobs will be created at nonunion employers or plants.

"The bad news for unions is twofold. When times are bad they lose members, and when times are good they don't recoup those members," said Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
.....
Unions also suffered a big setback with a Supreme Court decision on campaign financing that removed limits on corporate spending. While unions are also free of certain limits, companies and business groups could outspend labor in the future.

Some labor experts said labor's focus on politics came at the expense of organizing. "It's a year when the labor movement focused its energies on labor-law reform and health care," said Kate Bronfenbrenner, a Cornell University labor expert.

The Democrats also saw a reality that unfolded in Massachusetts, poetic justice for union fatcats pushing job-killing political agendas from lavish dues-coerced perches :

AFL-CIO Poll Shows Union Households Boosted [Massachusetts Republican Scott] Brown

Republican Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts Senate race was lifted by strong support from union households, in a sign of trouble for President Barack Obama and Democrats who are counting on union support in the 2010 midterm elections.
A poll conducted on behalf of the AFL-CIO found that 49% of Massachusetts union households supported Mr. Brown in Tuesday's voting, while 46% supported Democrat Martha Coakley. The poll conducted by Hart Research Associates surveyed 810 voters.

The finding, disclosed during an AFL-CIO conference call about the poll, represents a fresh problem for Democrats, who count on union leaders and union members as a pillar of the party's base.

Karen Ackerman, the AFL-CIO's political action director, said the results of the Massachusetts poll indicate "what we call a working-class revolt" in which voters were responding to the fact that no one was addressing their needs or interests. But she played down the support among union household members for Mr. Brown.

"Union voters are like any other voters, and they respond to the environment around them" and who they think will be on their side and fight for them, Ms. Ackerman said. "What happened in Massachusetts is that working families did not see the Democratic candidate as being on their side."

She added that the AFL-CIO has "very good success" reaching out to union voters and did have a union program in Massachusetts in support of the Democratic candidate, state Attorney General Martha Coakley. Still, she said the group does have concerns about the midterm congressional elections in November.

"Clearly, we're taking a serious look at this [working-class revolt] because, frankly, we know that 2010 elections are going to be very difficult," she said, adding that the group plans to move forward with a "very progressive political program."

Indeed. Forge ahead.

I mean, isn't it just self-evident why union households voted Republican : not enough aggressive "progressive" political shams fulfilled...[Yeah. Right. Gotcha.]

Returning from that side trip down lunacy lane, the forces of union corruption and avarice of course always have their last bastion of unperturbed perpetual trough-slopping : government jobs.

The expected results are coming to roost, with a vengeance, most notably in the (no longer so) Golden State.

Public Employee Unions Are Sinking California

Approximately 85% of the state's 235,000 employees (not including higher education employees) are unionized. As the governor noted during his $83 billion budget roll-out, over the past decade pension costs for public employees increased 2,000%. State revenues increased only 24% over the same period. A Schwarzenegger adviser wrote in the San Jose Mercury News in the past few days that, "This year alone, $3 billion was diverted to pension costs from other programs."

There are now more than 15,000 government retirees statewide who receive pensions that exceed $100,000 a year, according to the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.

Many of these retirees are former police officers, firefighters, and prison guards who can retire at age 50 with a pension that equals 90% of their final year's pay. The pensions for these (and all other retirees) increase each year with inflation and are guaranteed by taxpayers forever—regardless of what happens in the economy or whether the state's pensions funds have been fully funded (which they haven't been).

A 2008 state commission pegged California's unfunded pension liability at $63.5 billion, which will be amortized over several decades. That liability, released before the precipitous drop in stock-market and real-estate values, certainly will soar.

This little horror show is repeated all around the country, almost exclusively in Democrat one-party control urban centers, large and small.

Just look at little 'ol Wilmington, Delaware in which the government couldn't bend the taxpayers over fast enough last year to ensure that the public employee unions were sated. This was the only priority in handling the budget crunch the union-friendly Wilmington pols have created after 10 years of 10% annual growth in the city government.

Forget about Wilmington's decaying sewer system or the millions in public treasure already lost to and still being thrown down the "economic development" ratholes that have fed Democrat-electing non-public-sector union interests.

Gotta make sure those perks, pensions, and patronage positions are all safe and secure.

They'll deal with crumbling infrastructure some other time...

Michael Barone is about as succinct as it gets in his piece:

Public-sector unions bleed taxpayers

Growing up in Michigan in the heyday of the United Auto Workers, I long assumed that labor unions were part of the natural order of things.
That's no longer clear. Last month the Labor Department reported that private-sector unions lost 834,000 members last year and now represent only 7.2 percent of private-sector employees. That's down from the all-time peak of 36 percent in 1953 and '54.

But union membership is still growing in the public sector. Last year 37.4 percent of public-sector employees were union members. That percentage was down near zero in the 1950s. For the first time in history, a majority of union members are government employees.

In my view, the outlook for both private- and public-sector unionism is problematic.

Private-sector unionism is adversarial. Economic studies show that such unions do extract premium wages and benefits from employers. But that puts employers at a competitive disadvantage. Back in the 1950s, the Big Three auto companies dominated the industry and were at the top of the Fortune 500. Last year General Motors and Chrysler went bankrupt and are now owned by the government and the UAW. Ford only barely escaped.

Adversarial unionism tends to produce rigid work rules that retard adaptation and innovation. We have had a three-decade experiment pitting UAW work rules against the flexible management of Japanese- and European-owned nonunion auto firms.

The results are in. Yes, clueless management at the Detroit firms for years ignored problems with product quality and made boneheaded investment mistakes. But adversarial unionism made it much, much harder for Detroit to produce high-quality vehicles than it was for nonunionized companies.

As economist Barry Hirsch points out, nonunion manufacturing employment rose from 12 million to 14 million between 1973 and 2006. In those years, union manufacturing employment dropped from 8 million to 2 million. "Unionism," Hirsch writes, "is a poor fit in a dynamic, competitive economy."

Moreover, federal laws passed since the 1950s now protect workers from racial and sex discrimination, safety hazards and pension failure. They don't need unions to do this anymore.

Public-sector unionism is a very different animal from private-sector unionism. It is not adversarial but collusive. Public-sector unions strive to elect their management, which in turn can extract money from taxpayers to increase wages and benefits -- and can promise pensions that future taxpayers will have to fund.

The results are plain to see. States such as New York, New Jersey and California, where public-sector unions are strong, now face enormous budget deficits and pension liabilities. In such states, the public sector has become a parasite sucking the life out of the private-sector economy. Not surprisingly, Americans have been steadily migrating out of such states and into states like Texas, where public-sector unions are weak and taxes are much lower.

Barack Obama is probably the most union-friendly president since Lyndon Johnson. He has obviously been unable to stop the decline of private-sector unionism. But he is doing his best to increase the power -- and dues income -- of public-sector unions.

One-third of last year's $787 billion stimulus package was aid to state and local governments -- an obvious attempt to bolster public-sector unions. And a successful one: While the private sector has lost 7 million jobs, the number of public-sector jobs has risen. The number of federal government jobs has been increasing by 10,000 a month, and the percentage of federal employees earning over $100,000 has jumped to 19 percent during the recession.

Obama and his party are acting in collusion with unions that contributed something like $400,000,000 to Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle. Public-sector unionism tends to be a self-perpetuating machine that extracts money from taxpayers and then puts it on a conveyor belt to the Democratic party.

But it may not turn out to be a perpetual motion machine. Public-sector employees are still heavily outnumbered by those who depend on the private sector for their livelihoods. The next Congress may not be as willing as this one has been to bail out state governments dominated by public-sector unions. Voters may bridle at the higher taxes needed to pay for $100,000-plus pensions for public employees who retire in their 50s. Or they may move, as so many have already done, to states like Texas.

Obama's Democrats have used the financial crisis to expand the public sector and the public-sector unions. But voters seem to be saying, "Enough."

It is certainly telling that the Teamsters is still run by a guy named Hoffa. It should be of little surprise to any rational person that these bloated organizations are finding less and less success imposing themselves on savvy 21st century working people, who don't see how they are protected or served by overpaid, overfed leaders' promoting grandiose, ultra-expensive leftist political schemes while bilking public treasuries at every possible turn.

Because, yes, union households pay taxes too.

(But then again, the Obama administration was more than happy to see that they don't).

UPDATE: Perhaps I stand corrected about the back door for "card-check". It appears that the federal contracting process is the next target for illicit union protectionism, with the usual bottom line that the process becomes (further) distorted and taxpayers get screwed.

Liberal Condescension? Whatever couldst though mean??

2010-02-07T09:08:00.007-05:00

In the Washington Post Professor Gerard Alexander of the University of Virginia handily breaks down the near-universal phenomenon of liberal condescension and contempt for anyone daring oppose their premises, presumptions, and/or grand designs for us all.

Why Are Liberals So Condescending?
By Gerard Alexander
Sunday, February 7, 2010; B01

Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.

It's an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation -- as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a "Bolshevik plot" -- and the country's failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. "We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government -- and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." During the 1950s and '60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to "the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind."

...This attitude comes in the form of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function.

The first is the "vast right-wing conspiracy," a narrative made famous by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her. This vision maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics...
{snip}

But, if conservative leaders are crass manipulators, then the rank-and-file Americans who support them must be manipulated at best, or stupid at worst. This is the second variety of liberal condescension, exemplified in Thomas Frank's best-selling 2004 book, "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Frank argued that working-class voters were so distracted by issues such as abortion that they were induced into voting against their own economic interests. Then-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, later chairman of the Democratic National Committee, echoed that theme in his 2004 presidential run, when he said Republicans had succeeded in getting Southern whites to focus on "guns, God and gays" instead of economic redistribution.
And speaking to a roomful of Democratic donors in 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama offered a similar (and infamous) analysis when he suggested that residents of Rust Belt towns "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" about job losses. When his comments became public, Obama backed away from their tenor but insisted that "I said something that everybody knows is true.
In this view, we should pay attention to conservative voters' underlying problems but disregard the policy demands they voice; these are illusory, devoid of reason or evidence. This form of liberal condescension implies that conservative masses are in the grip of false consciousness. When they express their views at town hall meetings or "tea party" gatherings, it might be politically prudent for liberals to hear them out, but there is no reason to actually listen.
The third version of liberal condescension points to something more sinister. In his 2008 book, "Nixonland," progressive writer Rick Perlstein argued that Richard Nixon created an enduring Republican strategy of mobilizing the ethnic and other resentments of some Americans against others. Similarly, in their 1992 book, "Chain Reaction," Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall argued that Nixon and Reagan talked up crime control, low taxes and welfare reform to cloak racial animus and help make it mainstream. It is now an article of faith among many liberals that Republicans win elections because they tap into white prejudice against blacks and immigrants.

Race doubtless played a significant role in the shift of Deep South whites to the Republican Party during and after the 1960s. But the liberal narrative has gone essentially unchanged since then -- recall former president Carter's recent assertion that opposition to Obama reflects racism -- even though survey research has shown a dramatic decline in prejudiced attitudes among white Americans in the intervening decades. Moreover, the candidates and agendas of both parties demonstrate an unfortunate willingness to play on prejudices, whether based on race, region, class, income, or other factors.

Finally, liberals condescend to the rest of us when they say conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety -- including fear of change -- whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic. Former vice president Al Gore made this case in his 2007 book, "The Assault on Reason," in which he expressed fear that American politics was under siege from a coalition of religious fundamentalists, foreign policy extremists and industry groups opposed to "any reasoning process that threatens their economic goals." This right-wing politics involves a gradual "abandonment of concern for reason or evidence" and relies on propaganda to maintain public support, he wrote.

Prominent liberal academics also propagate these beliefs. George Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley and a consultant to Democratic candidates, says flatly that liberals, unlike conservatives, "still believe in Enlightenment reason," while Drew Westen, an Emory University psychologist and Democratic consultant, argues that the GOP has done a better job of mastering the emotional side of campaigns because Democrats, alas, are just too intellectual. "They like to read and think," Westen wrote. "They thrive on policy debates, arguments, statistics, and getting the facts right."

Markos Moulitsas, publisher of the influential progressive Web site Daily Kos, commissioned a poll, which he released this month, designed to show how many rank-and-file Republicans hold odd or conspiratorial beliefs -- including 23 percent who purportedly believe that their states should secede from the Union. Moulitsas concluded that Republicans are "divorced from reality" and that the results show why "it is impossible for elected Republicans to work with Democrats to improve our country." His condescension is superlative: Of the respondents who favored secession, he wonders, "Can we cram them all into the Texas Panhandle, create the state of Dumb-[expletive]-istan, and build a wall around them to keep them from coming into America illegally?"

I doubt it would take long to design a survey questionnaire that revealed strange, ill-informed and paranoid beliefs among average Democrats. Or does Moulitsas think Jay Leno talked only to conservatives for his "Jaywalking" interviews?

These four liberal narratives not only justify the dismissal of conservative thinking as biased or irrelevant -- they insist on it. By no means do all liberals adhere to them, but they are mainstream in left-of-center thinking. Indeed, when the president met with House Republicans in Baltimore recently, he assured them that he considers their ideas, but he then rejected their motives in virtually the same breath.
Read the rest here.

It is safe to say that those with the pretension to believe they alone have a monopoly on the way things must be, along with the willingness and desire to force it on the rest of us "for our own goods", must condescend to anyone not in line with them 100%. Clearly condescension is pretty much hard-wired into the core of their ideology.

Summed up : "You should be grateful that we the enlightened are saving all you poor misguided fools from your pitiful selves, and f**k you [insert derogation e.g. "racist", "reactionary", "teabagging", "wingnut" ] fools who dare think otherwise!"

Nick Gillespie at Reason has commentary on Alexander's column in his post : "Liberals Wouldn't Have to be So Condescending if The People Who Disagreed With Them Weren't Such Idiots

Happy Hour With Mike Castle

2010-02-04T08:09:00.005-05:00

The campaign for U.S. Senate is now joined. New Castle County Executive Chris Coons has decided to take on Congressman Mike Castle. As an alumnus of Tower Hill School, it is nice to know the Senate seat will go either way to a Hiller. I believe it will be Castle ('57) rather than Coons ('80).

I will be giving every effort I can to the Castle Campaign, which was the first campaign for which I volunteered as a very young person in 1984.

Castle's record of service to Delaware is simply unparalleled.

For those who would attempt to make an issue of age or health in this race, think again. Mike Castle is as mentally sharp and physically spry as I have ever seen him. He is in excellent physical health and, from all I can see, truly fired up for this challenge. He's also only 4 years older than our esteemed Vice-President.

But don't believe me. See for yourself.....please join us in the Young Republicans of Delaware this Friday evening from 6-8 pm at Dead President's on Union Street in Wilmington for a Castle Campaign happy hour.

The guest bartenders will be the guests of honor...the Congressman himself and his lovely and gracious wife Jane.

WHO : Delaware Young Republicans

WHAT : Mike & Jane Castle Guest Bartender Happy Hour

WHERE : Dead President's Pub - 618 North Union Street - Wilmington, DE

WHEN : Friday February 5, 2010 6-8pm

WHY : TO MAKE MIKE CASTLE THE NEXT SENATOR FROM DELAWARE!

Obama/Biden's Big Government Crony Capitalism

2010-02-03T13:13:00.004-05:00

All those evil capitalists! Except of course for the special ones in the back pocket of Obama and big government Democrats, all giving each other financial back rubs...of course paid for by the public.

John Stossel's got the goods on these self-dealers, hiding behind a masquerade of public interest:

Big Government's Cronies
by John Stossel
Many window-making companies struggle because of the recession's effect on home building. But one little window company, Serious Materials, is "booming," says Fortune. "On a roll," according to Inc. magazine, which put Serious' CEO on its cover, with a story titled: "How to Build a Great Company".

The Minnesota Freedom Foundation tells me that this same little window company also gets serious attention from the most visible people in America.
Vice President Joe Biden appeared at the opening of one of its plants. CEO Kevin Surace thanked him for his "unwavering support." "Without you and the recovery ("stimulus") act, this would not have been possible," Surace said.
Biden returned the compliment: "You are not just churning out windows; you are making some of the most energy-efficient windows in the world. I would argue the most energy-efficient windows in the world."

Gee, other window-makers say their windows are just as energy efficient, but the vice president didn't visit them.

Biden laid it on pretty thick for Serious Materials: "This is a story of how a new economy predicated on innovation and efficiency is not only helping us today but inspiring a better tomorrow."

Serious doesn't just have the vice president in his corner. It's got President Obama himself.

Company board member Paul Holland had the rare of honor of introducing Obama at a "green energy" event. Obama then said: "Serious Materials just reopened ... a manufacturing plant outside of Pittsburgh. These workers will now have a new mission: producing some of the most energy-efficient windows in the world."

How many companies get endorsed by the president of the United States?

When the CEO said that opening his factory wouldn't have been possible without the Obama administration, he may have known something we didn't. Last month, Obama announced a new set of tax credits for so-called green companies. One window company was on the list: Serious Materials. This must be one very special company.

But wait, it gets even more interesting.

On my Fox Business Network show on "crony capitalism", I displayed a picture of administration officials and so-called "energy leaders" taken at the U.S. Department of Energy. Standing front and center was Cathy Zoi, who oversees $16.8 billion in stimulus funds, much of it for weatherization programs that benefit Serious.

The interesting twist is that Zoi happens to be the wife of Robin Roy, who happens to be vice president of "policy" at Serious Windows.

Of all the window companies in America, maybe it's a coincidence that the one which gets presidential and vice presidential attention and a special tax credit is one whose company executives give thousands of dollars to the Obama campaign and where the policy officer spends nights at home with the Energy Department's weatherization boss.

Or maybe not.

There may be nothing illegal about this. Zoi did disclose her marriage and said she would recuse herself from any matter that had a predictable effect on her financial interests.

But it sure looks funny to me, and it's odd that the liberal media have so much interest in this one company. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, usually not a big promoter of corporate growth, gushed about how Serious Materials is an example of how the "stimulus" is working.

When we asked the company about all this, a spokeswoman said, "We don't comment on the personal lives of our employees." Later she called to say that my story is "full of lies."

But she wouldn't say what those lies are.

On its website, Serious Materials says it did not get a taxpayer subsidy. But that's just playing with terms. What it got was a tax credit, an opportunity that its competitors did not get: to keep money it would have paid in taxes. Let's not be misled. Government is as manipulative with selective tax credits as it is with cash subsidies. It would be more efficient to cut taxes across the board. Why should there be favoritism?

Because politicians like it. Big, complicated government gives them opportunities to do favors for their friends.

I firmly believe that the Clintons in the 1990's finally killed any effective outrage that might arise to do something against blatantly self-serving conflicts of personal and economic interest between those giving and those receiving government largesse or favors.

Those who head up big government are no better than the pigs atop the big corporate and banking piles. It's why they're so cozy in bed together, raping the taxpayers.

I Knew Obama Had at Least One "Jobs Program" That Works

2010-02-03T09:04:00.005-05:00

The untold story of this is the excessive Cadillac gorging-at-the-trough-for-life benefits that public employees unions have managed to impose on governments from local to federal. They are bankrupting California as we speak.

The era of big government has returned with a vengeance, in the form of the largest federal work force in modern history.
The Obama administration says the government will grow to 2.15 million employees this year, topping 2 million for the first time since President Clinton declared that "the era of big government is over" and joined forces with a Republican-led Congress in the 1990s to pare back the federal work force.
Most of the increases are on the civilian side, which will grow by 153,000 workers, to 1.43 million people, in fiscal 2010.
The expansion could provide more ammunition to those arguing that the government is trying to do too much under President Obama.
.....
Mr. Obama says the civilian work force will drop by 80,000 next year, mostly because of a reduction in U.S. census workers added in 2010 but then dropped in 2011 after the national population count is finished. That still leaves 1.35 million civilian federal employees on the payroll in 2011.
From 1981 through 2008, the civilian work force remained at about 1.1 million to 1.2 million, with a low of 1.07 million in 1986 and a high of more than 1.2 million in 1993 and in 2008. In 2009, the number jumped to 1.28 million.
Including both the civilian and defense sectors, the federal government will employ 2.15 million people in 2010 and 2.11 million in 2011, excluding Postal Service workers.
.....
Even as the total number of federal employees rises, the ratio of employees to Americans has declined steadily, from one employee for every 78 residents in 1953 to one employee for every 110 residents in 1988 to one employee for every 155 residents in 2008.
The federal work force is older than the private-sector work force, which Mr. Light said raises the possibility of reducing the total number through retirements.
About 31 percent of the private work force is 50 or older, while 46 percent of the federal work force is 50 or older.
.......
The administration has called for federal workers to get a 1.4 percent pay raise next year, which Mr. Orszag said, "frankly, I think to a lot of Americans, sounds pretty good."
The American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents many government workers, said it was combing through the budget and did not have a comment.

The greed and manipulation of public employees' unions, who unlike in any other enterprise sit on both sides of the "negotiating" table, are making governments around the country frighteningly dysfunctional, operated largely as unaccountable scams to give something-for-nothing lifetime patronage to people with the type of second-rate ability and third-rate sensibility that the real world never rewards.

If you want to be enraged about how these patronage hogs fleece working taxpayers at every turn, without regard to the ultimate consequence that they are making even necessary government a practical and financially-unsustainable impossibility, just read :

http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/12/class-war

Class War

How public servants became our masters

Steven Greenhut from the February 2010 issue

In April 2008, The Orange County Register published a bombshell of an investigation about a license plate program for California government workers and their families. Drivers of nearly 1 million cars and light trucks—out of a total 22 million vehicles registered statewide—were protected by a “shield” in the state records system between their license plate numbers and their home addresses. There were, the newspaper found, great practical benefits to this secrecy.

“Vehicles with protected license plates can run through dozens of intersections controlled by red light cameras with impunity,” the Register’s Jennifer Muir reported. “Parking citations issued to vehicles with protected plates are often dismissed because the process necessary to pierce the shield is too cumbersome. Some patrol officers let drivers with protected plates off with a warning because the plates signal that drivers are ‘one of their own’ or related to someone who is.”

The plate program started in 1978 with the seemingly unobjectionable purpose of protecting the personal addresses of officials who deal directly with criminals. Police argued that the bad guys could call the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), get addresses for officers, and use the information to harm them or their family members. There was no rash of such incidents, only the possibility that they could take place.

So police and their families were granted confidentiality. Then the program expanded from one set of government workers to another. Eventually parole officers, retired parking enforcers, DMV desk clerks, county supervisors, social workers, and other categories of employees from 1,800 state agencies were given the special protections too. Meanwhile, the original intent of the shield had become obsolete: The DMV long ago abandoned the practice of giving out personal information about any driver. What was left was not a protection but a perk.

Yes, rank has its privileges, and it’s clear that government workers have a rank above the rest of us. Ordinarily, if one out of every 22 California drivers had a license to drive any way he chose, there would be demands for more police power to protect Californians from the potential carnage. But until the newspaper series, law enforcement officials and legislators had remained mum. The reason, of course, is that the scofflaws are law enforcement officials and legislators.

Here is how brazen they’ve become: A few days after the newspaper investigation caused a buzz in Sacramento, lawmakers voted to expand the driver record protections to even more government employees. An Assembly committee, on a bipartisan 13-to-0 vote, agreed to extend the program to veterinarians, firefighters, and code officers. “I don’t want to say no to the firefighters and veterinarians that are doing these things that need to be protected,” Assemblyman Mike Duvall (R-Yorba Linda) explained.

Exempting themselves from traffic laws in the name of a threat that no longer exists is bad enough, but what government workers do to the rest of us on a daily basis makes ticket dodging look like child’s play. Often under veils of illegal secrecy, public-sector unions and their political allies are systematically looting the public treasury with gold-plated pensions, jeopardizing the finances of state and local governments around the country, removing themselves from legal accountability, and doing it all in the name of humble working men and women just looking for their fair share. Government employees have turned themselves into a coddled class that lives better than its private-sector counterpart, and with more impunity. The public’s servants have become our masters.
Continued Here.

Some Unsung Heroes of the Massachusetts Miracle

2010-01-20T09:20:00.009-05:00

Here's a little honor roll of just the House Democrats who have ruled and continue ruling the Democrat roost on the Hill....and appear poised to rule it right back into political oblivion.

From the WSJ:

The Message of Massachusetts : A crisis is a terrible thing to exploit.
George Miller; David Obey

• Ed Markey of Massachusetts, first elected in 1976, helped to ram the cap-and-tax bill through the House and has pushed relentlessly for the EPA to declare carbon a pollutant under the Clean Air Act that didn't mention carbon.

• Wisconsin's David Obey, elected in 1969, is the House Appropriations chairman who steered the $787 billion stimulus to focus on Medicaid expansion and other transfer payments that have done nothing for economic growth.

• Henry Waxman, first elected in the Watergate class of 1974, deposed John Dingell in 2008 as too moderate to run the Energy and Commerce Committee. The Hollywood liberal is co-author of the cap-and-tax vote that will cost numerous Blue Dogs their seats.

Pete Stark; Henry Waxman

• Pete Stark, class of 1972, runs the health subcommittee on Ways and Means and has written most of the House health reform that has forced moderates to walk the plank on the "public option."

• George Miller, class of 1974 and chief enforcer for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has pushed to nationalize the college student loan market. Like Mr. Stark, he's from California.

• Barney Frank of Massachusetts, class of 1980 and chief protector of Fannie Mae, wrote the financial reform that would make too-big-to-fail the law for the largest banks. He has also pushed the mortgage foreclosure programs that have extended the housing recession by preventing home prices from finding a bottom.

Barney Frank; Ed Markey

It is the combination of all of these and other policies that has ignited the political revolt we are now seeing in Massachusetts, and first saw last November in Virginia and New Jersey. Had Democrats modified their agenda to nurture a fragile economy and financial system, they could now claim their policies worked and build on them later.

It's striking how most of these entrenched liberal Democrat Congressional lifers have been at this power game for as long or longer than many of us have been alive (and I'm pushing 40).

It's bad enough these people have been getting it wrong for 30-40 years, now they are getting so old they likely won't even be around to see the wreckage their ideology will visit on the country if brought even close to fruition.

Time to hang it up, fellas. Give the country a break and let the next generation of leadership throw the last shovels-full of dirt on your misguided, ever-failing Quixotic quest to socialize America.

From a Washington Post poll last weekend:

Fifty eight percent of respondents favor smaller government with fewer services while 38 percent prefer a larger government and more services, according to the poll.

The small government preference has climbed 4 points since the last time our pollsters asked the question in June and 5 points from almost the same time a year ago.

But by all means, Democrat statists, keep swimming upstream, endlessly scheming to fleece the people into muddling socialized mediocrity and dependency.

Your electoral fate awaits you. Hopefully sooner than you think.

Thank You, Democrats!

2010-01-20T08:32:00.011-05:00

Ahhh, so many people to thank this morning, on this sunny one-year anniversary of the coronation of Him.

Where to begin. Of course, Him Himself - Barack. And then there's Harry, Nancy, Joe, Barney....heck, too many to name here.....THANKS(!) to every one of you rabid ideological 20%ers who are leading the Democrat party and its denizens of national statism into defeat after ignominious defeat.

Your arrogance, tone-deafness, self-righteousness, smug paternalism, and smoldering megalomania are paying off in droves for the country with every race the voters have a chance to weigh in.

My advice to you: FORGE AHEAD! (The cliff awaits.)

By all means, force feed the country more of your grandiose schemes to save us all from all those millions and millions of silly misguided fools clinging to their constitution and their quaint out-dated notions that America is the "Great Republic", as President Kennedy once called it, rather than a test tube for the dictatorship of liberal dogma and hubris.

See how well that keeps working for you. Don't listen to those treacherous unenlightened DINOs like Lanny Davis who think we should "Blame the Left for Massachusetts".

Davis asks: "The question is, will we stop listening to the strident, purist base of our party who seem to prefer defeat to winning elections and no change at all if they don't get all the change they want."

I think we all know the answer to such a silly question...

Congratulations Massachusetts Republican Senator-Elect Scott Brown!

What's At Stake In Massachusetts

2010-01-18T15:33:00.006-05:00

From Richard Dunham at the San Francisco Chronicle's politics blog a tidy breakdown of what could be the fallout from tomorrow's election, averted or realized :

It's almost impossible to overstate the political significance of tomorrow's Massachusetts Senate election. Here are ten reasons why the election is so important nationally:
1. Massachusetts is one of the most Democratic states in the nation. It's the only state that voted for George McGovern over Richard Nixon in 1972 and it hasn't elected a Republican senator since 1972. Its entire congressional delegation is Democratic. A GOP win would shock the liberal Democratic establishment that dismissed the 2009 gubernatorial setbacks in Virginia and New Jersey as mere flukes.

2. Health-care reform is at stake. A victory for Scott Brown would deprive the Democrats of the 60 votes they need to push their brand of health-care reform through the Senate without any Republican support. That would be a huge defeat for President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. No way to spin that one.

3. Democrat-only legislative power would come to an end. If Senate Democrats were to lose in Massachusetts, they'd lose their tenuous 60-seat majority needed to push forward legislation without bipartisan support. That means that moderate Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine would instantly become two of the most powerful people on Capitol Hill. One way or another, the Obama agenda would have to be retooled or scaled back.

4. This is the "Kennedy" seat. For six decades, this particular Massachusetts Senate seat has been represented by Jack Kennedy, Ted Kennedy or a family designee (on a temporary basis). The symbolism of Republicans seizing the "Kennedy seat" is huge.
AP photo
Massachusetts State Sen. Scott Brown campaigns at the Wachusett Mountain Ski Area in Princeton, Mass., yesterday.

5. This is where the Boston Tea Party took place. New England "patriots" rebelled against high taxes by dumping tea into Boston Harbor some 235 years ago. Now, the new generation of "Tea Party patriots" is hoping to dump candidates (Democrat and Republican) who raise taxes and increase federal spending. Again, a big symbolic thing.

6. This is a test of the power of political independents. Fewer than one in eight Massachusetts voters admits to being a Republican. So GOP nominee Brown couldn't come close to victory without carrying independent voters by a wide margin and chipping away at the Democratic base. That's terrible news for Democrats looking ahead. If independents continue to flee the Democratic Party -- as they did in New Jersey and Virginia last year -- the midterm elections could be an absolute disaster for the ruling party.

7. It's a good indicator of voters' desire for divided government. Even in Massachusetts, many voters want to send a message to Democrats in DC: One-party government is not a good idea. A Brown win -- or even a photo finish -- would tell us that even some Democrats want a limit on the power of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

8. It could give a jump start to GOP recruiting efforts in other states. One of the keys to the Republican takeover of Congress is 1994 was a superb recruiting effort that enlisted big-name challengers to Democratic incumbents. If Brown wins in Massachusetts, the Texans atop the GOP congressional campaign efforts -- John Cornyn in the Senate and Pete Sessions in the House -- probably would have recruits lining up outside their offices to take on Democratic incumbents.

9. It's proof that Republicans don't have to be moderates to win on Democratic turf. Conventional wisdom holds that Republicans need to recruit moderate candidates to win elections in the North and Midwest. But Scott Brown is an unapologetic conservative. If he can win (or come close) in Massachusetts, it sends a message that conservative Republicans can play ball in "blue" America.

10. It would be a personal and political repudiation of President Obama. The president upped the political ante yesterday by flying to Boston for a rally with Democrat Martha Coakley. He told voters just how important her election was to him. By inserting himself into the race, Obama raised the stakes: If Massachusetts voters reject his personal appeal, it's a sign that the president's (remaining) personal popularity is not necessarily transferable to endangered Democrats.

Wow. No wonder the Democrats are flailing, thrashing, and desperately re-hashing.

Rich Lowry sums this up nicely:

If Brown wins, Massachusetts will be a kind of repeat of New Jersey — with Democrats desperately trying to energize their side but losing the middle; hoping to transfer Obama's appeal to a politician people don't particularly like; relying on the mechanics of a turn-out operation; paddling against a strong backlash caused by the unpopularity of their agenda; and working overtime to smear their opponent.

Clive Crook offers them some sound advice at The Atlantic:

Democrats need to recover some sense of shock at what the polls in Massachusetts are saying...They also need to ask what the electorate will make of a response that says, "We don't care what the voters think. We know best."

I support healthcare reform; for all its flaws, I think the Senate bill is a big step forward. But supporters of the bill must take pause at its unpopularity, which the polls in Massachusetts underline. The plain fact is, the Democrats have failed to make their case. They need to ask why, and start trying to fix it.

Finding cunning ways to carry on regardless sends a message of contempt to the electorate, and one thing we know is that the electorate always gets the last word.

Two Most Ignorant Fantasy-Based Comments of the Week

2010-01-18T10:14:00.015-05:00

(And the week has barely just begun.)

#1

"As long as I have served ... I've never seen, as my uncle once said, the constitution stood on its head as they've done. This is the first time every single solitary decisions has required 60 senators. No democracy has survived needing a supermajority." - VP Joe Biden

I guess our "constitutional professor" VPOTUS forgets all those supermajorities that, for example, impede tooling with the very document that makes us a constitutional republic and not a democracy based on pure majoritarian tyranny.

Clue : Not all majorities have to be just 50% + 1 to be valid and desirable in a careful system of laws, checks, and balances - especially as the stakes get higher and the impact broader and deeper on the most numbers of citizens, especially if ALL citizens.

UPDATE : Some follow-up idiocy to Biden's comment comes from the American Prospect (subtitled, oxymoronically, "Liberal Intelligence").

"It would be nice if the executive branch, at least in the form of Biden, made clear their willingness to eliminate the filibuster in order to pressure Harry Reid et. al. to clean up their own mess."

I truly get the feeling these people just make it up as they go, no matter what aberrations or fabrications their mania requires in order that they have their way.

This writer clearly has no understanding of the notion of separation of powers, much less the basic prerogatives flowing therefrom, by which the legislative branch governs its own internal, especially procedural, affairs.

But hell, why not? If the Congress ever faces another presidential veto, perhaps they should just make clear their willingness to eliminate it in "pre-signing" statements perhaps.

Of course this is mild by comparison to the Democrat leftists' mind-boggling insertion of language in health care legislation that attempts to make parts of it, once passed, un-repealable.

The point is: where does it end with these people? How much singularity of power must these statists people have concentrated in their grubby hands before they are sated? How many political, historical, and constitutional protections must they destroy to achieve their all-powerful national government as little more than a majoritarian cosa nostra run by elitist electoral lifers?

That the nation is plagued by Machiavellians of such unhinged, untethered hubris, consumed to delusion that their ends justify any means, shows how far the leftists will go to defile and destroy anything that stands in the way of their will to power...even our basic understandings of self-governance and constitutional checks and balances.

#2

"The Obama administration’s troubles are the result not of excessive ambition, but of policy and political misjudgments. The stimulus was too small; policy toward the banks wasn’t tough enough; and Mr. Obama didn’t do what Ronald Reagan, who also faced a poor economy early in his administration, did — namely, shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations....And politics should be about more than winning elections. Even if health care reform loses Democrats’ votes (which is questionable), it’s the right thing to do." - Bearded New-York-Times-based leftist Keynesian Democrat economist shill. (If you can't guess who, stop reading because you are a moron.)

Biden's worried about democracy while Krugman prances through delusional ga-ga land where not even elections matter if your lust to rule the masses is for their own 'good'.......errr, the "right thing to do".

We'll see how far this attitude and its attendant force take the Krugmans of the world against citizen-voters motivated not by idol worship and cultish programmatic brainwashing, but instead by informed, intense, and intrinsic opposition to everything Krugman and his ilk would impose on us and, more importantly, how they would impose it : by force of their will, exercised in corruption of the seats of public power.

We're going to need to find a much stronger term than delusional megalomania to accurately describe the character on display above.

Massachusetts Senate Race : Scott Brown Surging in the Polls

2010-01-15T10:09:00.015-05:00

Despite certain wishful proclamations of delusional leftists that his "campaign is over" and similar mentally-disjointed tangential attempts to tie him in to their anti-tea party derangement, Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown is actually surging ahead in the polls, with Democrat candidate Coakley's own polls showing a potential upset victory for Brown.

Poll shocker: Scott Brown surges ahead in Senate race [Boston Herald]

Riding a wave of opposition to Democratic health-care reform, GOP upstart Scott Brown is leading in the U.S. Senate race, raising the odds of a historic upset that would reverberate all the way to the White House, a new poll shows.
Although Brown’s 4-point lead over Democrat Martha Coakley is within the Suffolk University/7News survey’s margin of error, the underdog’s position at the top of the results stunned even pollster David Paleologos.

“It’s a Brown-out,” said Paleologos, director of Suffolk’s Political Research Center. “It’s a massive change in the political landscape.”

The poll shows Brown, a state senator from Wrentham, besting Coakley, the state’s attorney general, by 50 percent to 46 percent, the first major survey to show Brown in the lead. Unenrolled long-shot Joseph L. Kennedy, an information technology executive with no relation to the famous family, gets 3 percent of the vote. Only 1 percent of voters were undecided.
[snip]
Yet even in the bluest state, it appears Kennedy’s quest for universal health care has fallen out of favor, with 51 percent of voters saying they oppose the “national near-universal health-care package” and 61 percent saying they believe the government cannot afford to pay for it.

The poll, conducted Monday through Wednesday, surveyed 500 registered likely voters who knew the date of Tuesday’s election. It shows Brown leading all regions of the state except Suffolk County.

“Either Brown’s momentum accelerates and his lead widens, or this becomes a wake-up call for Coakley to become the ‘Comeback Kid’ this weekend,” Paleologos said.

And with 99 percent having made up their minds, voters may be hard to persuade.

The poll surveyed a carefully partitioned electorate meant to match voter turnout: 39 percent Democrat, 15 percent Republican and 45 percent unenrolled.

Brown wins among men and is remarkably competitive among women - trailing Coakley’s 50 percent with 45 percent.

While Brown has 91 percent of registered Republicans locked up, an astonishing 17 percent of Democrats report they’re jumping ship for Brown as well - likely a product of Coakley’s laser-focus on hard-core Dems, potentially at the exclusion of other Democrats whom she needed to win over, Paleologos said.

For Coakley, Brown’s surge may be as ominous as the fact that her campaign’s peril is not fully recognized, with 64 percent of voters still believing she’ll win - a perception that threatens to keep her supporters home.

Brown’s popularity is solid. He enjoys a 57 percent favorability rating compared to just 19 percent unfavorable. Coakley’s favorability is 49 percent; her unfavorability, 41 percent.

No longer does Brown suffer from a name-recognition problem, with 95 percent of voters having heard of him statewide.

7News Political Editor Andy Hiller said, “Voters obviously think Brown is running a better campaign than Coakley. For months, it has been Coakley’s race to lose, and now in the last days that’s exactly what she may be doing.”

Let's face it, they may not have a firm hold on reality but reality sure is getting its hold on the Democrat national statists who have run amok this past year. It is increasingly looking like their megalomania and hubris have blown the whole deal for them with the majority of America's voters...even so far as the deep blue Taxachusetts....erstwhile Republican-proof (except for Romney).

Amazingly, this type of political and electoral damage is something Bush took YEARS to realize upon the Republican party. Now it looks like Democrat leftist statism on national parade has not only neutralized this damage but is rolling it back lickety-split (in less than a year, really).

Even better, this grotesque Democrat carnival of unbridled power lust, greed, corruption, arrogance and smarmy patronage is focusing and rallying counter-forces not just around opposition to the lefties' megalomania subsuming issues like health care "reform", but around the larger purposes of seriously limiting government power and bringing some semblance of fiscal sanity to (and citizen-based control over) DC's would-be masters of our universe.

Hard doses of such damaging reality and a growing tidal wave of real grass roots populist outrage, citizen organizing, and electoral defeats are making the hardcore partisan Obama leftists even more agitated, bizarre, and vicious than they were in their saccharine-sickening euphoric cult-like adoration of Barack Obama leading up to his coronation.

It has to be tough for these nasty lefties to watch the utter implosion of their self-deluding narrative that opposition to their grandiose statist fantasies is merely marginal. They are now watching all these 'marginal' forces taking out their elected viziers, one by one by one, if not at the very least forcing massive triage efforts, most revealingly through paid-off proxy thugs like the unions (SEIU, in particular, in Massachusetts).

Couldn't happen to a more deserving set of people.

The continued hardening (and increasing flailing) of their echo chamber / bubble ideology, as it comes apart at the seams before their very eyes, will likely see us visited with more and more delusion, deceit, and squealing and screaching of increasingly irrelevant and irrational rhetoric.

Their own new term "lefteabaggers" couldn't be more appropriate. Except that those using it against their ideological fellow travelers unwilling to defend Obama at all costs (no matter how much he mimics Bush's worst policies) appear most to fit their own definition of this vulgar slur.

As I watch all this carnage unfold, as reality and the human will to freedom conspire once again to halt the incessant march of leftist statism, I am reminded of the scene from Alien in which it is discovered that 'Ash' is an android after he goes violently berzerk, spewing milky ooze all over the entire room and everyone in it...

PHOTO : The American Left Wakes Up To Face Their Reality

Even if Scott Brown loses by a thin margin, such a result would be a serious harbinger of the ugly future in store for the messianic big government crowd...surely leading only to more berzerk spasticity from America's hind left quarters.

Enjoy your messy political doom, my lefty friends. You've earned it!

The Next (Republican) Senator from Massachusetts

2010-01-12T12:42:00.006-05:00

Damn, I already really like this Republican candidate for Senator from Massachusetts, State Senator Scott Brown.

“Gurgling” Dave Gergen, empty-suited establishment media gatekeeper, career presidential brown-noser, recent Obamaphile, and otherwise all around elitist jackass, gets put in his place with his hoity-toity attempt at a gotcha question, trying politically to exploit the memory of Senator Ted Kennedy against a Republican.

Shoved very skillfully and understatedly back up Gergen's ass (which to his mind, weighs a ton) is Gergen's typical DC inside-the-beltway elitist premise : that public seats of power belong to the personalities and the politicians who hold them (friends of Gergy, of course) rather than the people.

If the leftists can't read the writing on the wall about the closeness of the race for U.S. Senator from Massachusetts they are in for major shocks with every election ahead.

I am gathering that the left is just plain functionally illiterate or purposefully dismissive about how most Americans now feel (disempowered and disgusted) in relation to government and about the latest greatest government expansion schemes of lefty crusaders.

I can think of no better cosmic justice than filling "Teddy's seat" with a bright, feisty, limited government Republican.

Speaking of "Racism"

2010-01-11T08:03:00.009-05:00

Two paragons of leftist statism comment on the first black president in our history (before he was elected, of course) :

"A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee." - Bill Clinton (as recounted by Ted Kennedy)

Here's one from the man who just days ago characterized opposition to socialized health care as akin to support for slavery. Speaking of our (now) President, he assessed Obama's positives as a candidate by saying Obama is :

"[L]ight-skinned'...with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." - Harry Reid - Democrat Leader of the U.S. Senate

And, of course for good measure, let's not forget the Human Gaffe Machine cum VPOTUS, speaking of candidate Obama during the campaign:

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." - Joe Biden

Do I think any of these elitist power-lusting buffoons is racist? No, I don't.

Incredibly smug paternalistic hypocrites witlessly revealing who they really are as they look down their noses to make such unfortunate comments? Absolutely.

But more so, who am I (or anyone else) to sit in judgment of those with such deeply-contemptuous self-superiority towards a black politician.

Best to leave such incendiary accusations and hysterical rhetoric to all their faithful supporters, the experts in such tactics.

The Reality of America's Grass Roots Tea Party Movement (or "What He Said....")

2010-01-11T07:00:00.014-05:00

A writer for The Daily Beast, also a research fellow at (that oh so crazy, nutbag, racist) Hoover Institution at Stanford, writes a very balanced and incisive response to the superficial rantings of those whose neo-liberal politics of demonize-belittle-and-hate-thy-political-opponent blind them to the reality that the Tea Party movement is a broad grass roots example of "community organizing" at its finest....and a huge threat to their burning desire for control and power over everything and everyone under the sun.

With a dose of cold hard reality Tunku Varadarajan puts in their places the hate-filled and self-deluding leftists spewing incessant childish-if-not-so-vulgar-at-times invective against the nationwide storm of gathering protest against unfettered government power, control, corruption, and profligacy.

Varadarajan takes head-on the inherent elitism and self-importance of the media's legion fellow travelers to the hateful anti-populist left.

Varadarajan also handily disposes of the self-reinforcing dishonesty and mischaracterizations with which these haters from the left attempt by juvenile smears, blanket condemnations, and outright lies to destroy this movement they so fear (beneath all their bluster)...and fear it they damn well should.

In Defense of Tea Parties

David Brooks, The New York Times op-ed columnist, is a friend of mine. Flying always at 40,000 feet above ground, he strives to observe the political landscape with a dispassionate conservatism. His best columns are spare and thoughtful, and offer reliable contrast to the gaudiness of Maureen Dowd, the glibness of Tom Friedman, the mediocrity of Bob Herbert, and the mawkishness of Nicholas Kristof. Yet last Tuesday, in a column titled “The Tea Party Teens,” David made irrefutably clear that he, too—like so many others in the mainstream metropolitan media—is a cultural supremacist.

The column was about the Tea Party movement, which has, in the space of a year, come to inhabit—and inhabit raucously—the landscape that Brooks parses from his lofty perch. In the piece, he sets up a dialectic between “the educated class” on the one hand, and, on the other, a force that he identifies variously as “public opinion,” the “opposition,” and “the Tea Party movement.” The latter, a “fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against,” are, David writes, reflexively opposed to the beliefs of the educated class (to which he, naturally, belongs). They are, in effect, reactionaries.
[That last descriptor sure rings familiar to me as the latest label used against citizen-protesters by those sold on leftist dictates at all costs.]
Put to one side, for the moment, David’s exaggeratedly Hamiltonian belief in the natural leadership abilities of people like him, and ask this: What exactly is this “educated class,” and what leads him to think that those who oppose it are not, somehow, sophisticated? Forgive me, here, for bringing to the discussion a personal note. I have a cousin who is a Wellesley graduate, a widely traveled, thirty-something, multilingual daughter of Indian immigrants who lives in that most redneck of territories…Union Square, in Manhattan. She is a Tea Party supporter, and she wrote me these words in an email:
"I laugh, but also feel indignant, when I read that the tea parties are filled with angry white men, because it’s obvious that reporters are not attending the same tea parties I attended. The events were a mix of young and old, VERY mixed ethnicities (but yes, a majority white). Everyone to a person was courteous and polite, and the best part was the signs, which were funny and clever. It did feel very grassroots and very much a movement fueled by the people rather than by shadowy party apparatchiks. It felt cool to think that we were not going to be taken in by government and be told what was good for us. (Does that sound really hokey?) It felt good to be a part of a group of people who were saying “enough!” I’m a huge supporter of the tea party movement because I think it exists outside of the traditional parties and is a true manifestation of the voice of the citizen."
Not everyone in the movement is a Wellesley graduate, and I bring my cousin into the story only as a forensic counterpoint to David’s fixation with the “educated class.” America doesn’t really have a class system, but that fact makes it tough for people like David, who sometimes seem to wish it did.
The traditional solution has been to attend an Ivy League school if possible—or just cop an “intellectual” attitude if not—and then look down on the rest of America. When America was less of a meritocracy (and that was not so long ago), this solution was less damaging. Now that the country is run mostly by graduates of Ivy League schools, however, that they look down on the electorate is becoming not only vastly irritating to the electorate but also rather dangerous. Elitism, now, might have adverse political consequences —and a backlash.
David Brooks is not alone in his disdain: On right and left, “educated” people have given vent to their contempt for the Tea Party crowd, leading me to conclude that there must, surely, be considerable significance in a movement that has had scorn poured on it by such varied names as David Frum, who is also, like Brooks, a friend of mine; Michael Goldfarb, a former spokesman for the McCain presidential campaign; Paul Krugman; Chris Matthews; and Keith Olbermann. (For a full account of the media’s ill treatment of the movement, read A New American Tea Party, by John M. O’Hara.)
Many people, one might conclude, are afraid of the Tea Party movement: On the left, they are afraid that it will initiate a tidal wave that causes the loss of numerous House seats. On the right, the fear is that it will mount its own candidates and simply be a spoiler.
This fear would explain the sneering toward the Tea Partiers, the smugness with which they are looked down upon. As many in the movement note, you need only change the protesters ideologically and demographically, and you have merely another cool example of “community organizing.” Besides, the civic engagement and participation, as demonstrated by the Tea Party movement, seem to be very much like that which the communitarians (Michael Sandel and Michael Walzer) and the social-capital scholars (like Robert Putnam)—not to mention other high-minded and good-hearted men and women of the left—have for decades been calling for.
What bothers me, however, is that although ideological differences are at the bottom of the Tea Party assaults, the critique is almost purely aesthetic: The Tea Partiers, it is said, are crude, sloganeering, lemming-like, heartland Bible-Beltists who don’t understand policy or David Brooks’ subtleties.
(Interestingly, the Alexander Cockburns and Glenn Greenwalds do not attack the Tea Partiers, whom they see as possible grassroots disrupters of entrenched interests. Neither man went after Sarah Palin much, or quickly. The far left is better than the neo-liberal kind on such matters, in my view.)
It is hardly surprising that in times like these there should be a large, angry, populist movement. But populism does not conform to the standard left/right divide, and in different circumstances it can go either way. (A rather good Greenwald column makes this point, too.) The populist’s personality is driven as much by wounded pride as by economic concerns, and so he resents the cultural elitism of the liberal elites, including their patronizing desire to help him, as much as the economic elitism of the wealthy.
Yes, the populists fear and hate the big businesses and Wall Street; but—and this is the heartening thing—they have not let this turn them against capitalism and the free market.
They seem truly to have taken in the point, long emphasized by libertarians and others, that big business is not the same thing as capitalism or the free market, that it is in fact often their enemy.
Perhaps the Obama administration has finally driven this point home, as it has been an object lesson in how the party of big government is really in bed with big business, giving it all the bailouts and favors.
So by this reckoning, the Tea Parties would be a very serious development in which anti-big business forces would finally join with anti-big government forces to create a genuine free-market party that would maximize the opportunities of the little guy—like this small-business owner from California. (Note, this YouTube clip has nearly 250,000 hits and 6,000 comments.)
This video makes me emotional, because this woman represents an America that Tocqueville would have lauded. I will take her any day over the “educated class,” the bureaucratic mollusks and the defeatist sad sacks in Washington.
I do think the Tea Partiers are political amateurs, but the content of their politics is deadly serious. The professional politicians will dismiss them at their peril.

To my raging leftist brethren and sistern, take careful note and put aside your anti-logic and your histrionics for a moment and realize that you can toss mud, screach, squeal, and otherwise demean yourselves with childish and one-dimensional slurs against this large, growing, diverse organized protest movement across America - but it will never make the reality of it what your wishful hating wants it to be...

Liars, Damn Liars and Barack Obama

2010-01-07T16:55:00.002-05:00

The TSA In a Nutshell

2010-01-07T16:51:00.000-05:00

Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan to Retire. Good Riddance.

2010-01-06T00:13:00.008-05:00

I hope they are just two of many many more in a building wave of departures from Congress (voluntary or otherwise) of big corporate/big government Democrats.

Harry Reid is likely to be at the top of that list (involuntarily of course), joining Tom Daschle as the 2nd consecutive Senate Democrat Leader to be tossed from office by the constituents he so blithely betrayed term-after-term in Congress.

Clearly, the heat is on and many smarmy Democrat government lifers (in Dodd's case also a political family dynasty beneficiary) are beginning to see the writing all over the wall.

We saw such (forced) retirements with plenty of big government corporatist Republicans these last several years. (Good riddance, too.). Now it's the Democrats' turn.

All of the above-mentioned are likely to leave new Republican U.S. Senators in the wake of their careers of destruction from on high.

Of course, there will always be the last holdouts in the bunker to the bitter end.

One can only hope they don't get away with too much before the door slams their pampered derrieres on the way out.

No doubt, the spoils of K Street await them in their lifelong quests to do "public service." (Hah.)

Welcome Back, Dana Garrett!

2010-01-04T16:15:00.002-05:00

Well, once again we have an example of how blogging, once it gets into your system, appears nearly impossible to put down...for very long.

There are certainly examples of local bloggers who (at times, comically) bid adieu forever to their blogging, only to return within months if not weeks.

I am glad to see Dana Garrett has returned to the scene, with Delaware Watch back in force.

Now if we can just eventually get my erstwhile blog-colleague Steve Newton to reconsider his moratorium on blogging, things might actually get interesting again in the Delaware blogosphere.

Admittedly it has become quite two-dimensional and rote lately...and certainly I can't claim doing anything to remedy that. Such feats require the heavyweights...

Welcome back, Dana!

Parting Thought of the Year

2009-12-31T16:01:00.002-05:00

I don't know much about the rest of his political beliefs (he is purportedly the first person to call himself an anarchist and is also termed a socialist), but man did Pierre-Joseph Proudhon have it right in describing what it really means to be "governed", particularly if to the open-ended extent that totalitarians and collectivists, whether claiming to be left or right, would carry their endless scheming for control over humanity :

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, 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, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.

It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place(d) under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.
(h/t to John Stossel)

Amen.

Southern Avenger Lays Out the Scam of "Social Conservatism"

2009-12-31T14:55:00.006-05:00

As I have written here and elsewhere before, social(ist) conservatives are an aberrant sect of what are, in essence, statists who have hijacked the moniker of conservatism.

They have done so, I believe, in an attempt to mask their fundamentally-statist authoritarianism in matters of personal or private life behind the nominal and false claim that they are not, in fact, quite in philosophical league with the socially-permissive leftists they so abhor.

Irrespective of "social conservative" claims of distinction from their leftist brethren and sistern, their agenda is nonetheless fundamentally the same. Social "conservatives" are merely big government statists with a different agenda for control and social uniformity...but just as frightening an agenda if taken even close to its natural conclusion.

So-called "social conservatives" are the other side of the same hollow coin of collectivist control over the individual.

And "social conservatives" positively exude (albeit from different justifications and rationalizations) the self-righteous social moralizing and pseudo-moralism that subsumes leftist ideology vis a vis the need for a massive comprehensive welfare state.

All true conservatives, i.e. those truly interested in reducing the power, scope and control of government over the lives of individuals and - yes - families, should beware these trojan horsemen "social conservatives" who would bastardize conservatism and risk making the word "conservative" as much of an epithet as the term liberal has become for most Americans.

Federalism Resurgent? Some State Officials Begin Fighting Back Leviathan

2009-12-23T11:59:00.002-05:00

This is an interesting development, by which the Democrats' disgusting secretive self-dealing process of health care lawmaking-by-payoff is not being accepted merely as the ugly side of politics-as-usual deal cutting and vote buying.

Now actual prosecutors from various states are taking notice of the putrid stench of corruption permeating the Harry Reid health care monstrosity.

But of course, these are just partisan Republicans driven purely by political considerations, unlike those exemplars of moral and political virtue intent on ramming this shit sausage straight down the public's throats.

Several prosecutors probing health care deal
They question the constitutionality of ‘Nebraska compromise’
COLUMBIA, S.C. - The top prosecutors in seven states are probing the constitutionality of a political deal that cut a funding break for Nebraska in order to pass a federal health care reform bill, South Carolina's attorney general said Tuesday.
Attorney General Henry McMaster said he and his counterparts in Alabama, Colorado, Michigan, North Dakota, Texas and Washington state — all Republicans — are jointly taking a look at the deal they've dubbed the "Nebraska compromise."
"The Nebraska compromise, which permanently exempts Nebraska from paying Medicaid costs that Texas and all other 49 states must pay, may violate the United States Constitution — as well as other provisions of federal law," Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said.
McMaster's move comes at the request of Republican U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint of South Carolina. In a letter to McMaster, Graham singled out the deal to win Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson's vote on the massive health care bill the Senate is expected to adopt Thursday. Nelson held out as fellow Democrats worked to get 60 votes to foreclose a GOP filibuster and the bill was amended to shield Nebraska from the expected $45 million annual cost tied to expanding Medicaid programs.
"We have serious concerns about the constitutionality of this Nebraska compromise as it results in special treatment for only one state in the nation at the expense of the other 49," Graham and DeMint wrote.
Nebraska wasn't alone in getting Medicaid breaks. Vermont, Louisiana and Massachusetts also got help with their programs. Along with Texas, officials in Washington, Alabama, Colorado and Michigan confirmed they were working with McMaster.
Meanwhile on Tuesday, Tennessee's Republican Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey called for his state's attorney general to investigate the deal.
"Whether in the court of law or in the court of public opinion, we must bring an end to this culture of corruption," McMaster said. The negotiations "on their face appear to be a form of vote buying paid for by taxpayers," he said.
‘We'll assist anyone’McMaster is encouraging a South Carolina citizen to step forward to sue to challenge the measure if it is signed into law. "We'll assist anyone to the extent that we're able," McMaster said.
Also Tuesday, U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., said Republicans need to stop complaining about deals their colleagues made.
"Rather than sitting here and carping about what Nelson got for Nebraska, I would say to my friends on the other side of the aisle: Let's get together and see what we can get for South Carolina," Clyburn said.
For instance, Clyburn expects states will get more help covering Medicaid expansion costs. Critics say the federal government's coverage of 91 percent of those future costs will disappear, leaving states with huge holes in their budgets.
Clyburn says the legislation the federal share should be 95 percent, with states picking up no more than 5 percent.
South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford said the federal legislation is "well intended," but called it "fundamentally flawed in the same way the stimulus efforts were in that the states and the taxpayers are left footing the bill."
Sanford this spring was the nation's only governor to take a state legislature to federal and state court to block federal stimulus money.

The Democrat partisan mania to pass something/anything to meet the artificial Obama health care legislation timeline (which, nauseatingly, has been largely admitted as based on the politics and timing of Obama's desired State of the Union Address triumphalism) and driven by the Democrats phony hysterical sky-is-falling urgency (only to have the public wait 4 years before any of the purported benefits arrive) has produced the most reckless, chaotic, single-mindedly-partisan trainwreck of a legislative process I have ever witnessed in my lifetime (covering at least 25 years closely following national politics).

Rand Paul is Rockin' It in the Bluegrass State

2009-12-23T09:51:00.009-05:00

Dr. Rand Paul looks poised to become the next junior Senator from Kentucky, if polling trends continue as they have.

As I have said before, Paul if elected would be the single most libertarian U.S. Senator in the last 50 years, if not more.

Paul has rocketed to the top of the polls from just months ago when he was pooh-poohed by establishment-type Republicans, much like the treatment his father Ron Paul received during his bid for the presidency.

Rand Paul entered the fray trailing behind establishment Kentucky Republican Secretary of State Trey Grayson. However, Paul has since taken a "commanding lead". His support is grassroots and based purely on the power of his ideas and the conviction with which he offers them up.

(Rand Paul has slightly more charisma than his father....which is to say very little. So this certainly is not about image and the usual type of personal popularity and affability factors that give rise to most politicians in America.).

Rand Paul's election as a Republican U.S. Senator would be a serious harbinger that the libertarian conservative uprising in the G.O.P. is not only real but quite consequential and arguably the future of the party, no matter the exhortations, caricaturizations and defamations by hysterical leftists to the effect that the Republican Party is dominated by some minority fringe of redneck troglodyte bible thumpers.

Except for intractable statists and totalitarian-minded would-be utopists, the basic notions of libertarianism are wildly popular amongst most human beings for the simple reason that freedom is cherished by human beings the world over.

Unless dumbed and numbed into a mindset of entitled servitude or servile entitlement, most thinking human beings value and instinctively yearn for physical autonomy, personal self-direction, and the basic ideals of individual distinction and accomplishment.

20% of the country self-identifies as "liberal". I would argue that it is about this same percent of the populace (20%) that possesses the requisite self-importance, arrogance, self-righteousness, and general dementia enough to actually think that the force (violence, when you get down to it) of geographically-inescapable public power should be the handmaiden for enforcing their hodge-podge political and social control agenda...whatever their fancy happens to be this month/year/decade/century.

At bottom it's always the same agenda : power, patronage, and control.

Freedom becomes only more popular, its proponents more in demand, and its foundational philosophies more influential in times such as we now live...with the ham-fist of forced nationalist collectivism hammering away --- big corporatism and big government working in tandem behind a grotesque masquerade of socialist pseudo-populism.

The now-riding-high-in-the-seat-of-power proponents of national collectivist mandates that heap increasingly crushing burdens on individuals, coupled to reckless fiscal profligacy with the public treasury, can look forward to a rising tide of broad, deep and fierce opposition to their perverse, manipulative machinations of national public policy and resources.

2009 has been an eye-opener, if not a big bucket of cold water thrown on the slumbering giant.

It is a godsend to liberty that the national leftists are so megalomaniacal in self-reinforcing delusions of social and historical grandeur that they are utterly oblivious the ground is shifting like quicksand beneath their feet.

Not that anyone would contend Kentucky is much of a state for leftist Democrats to pay attention to. But they would be wise to pay heed to the rapid rise of a populist-minded libertarian conservative like Rand Paul in a state in which the GOP has heretofore been largely a haven of country-club, internationalist, willing-to-sell-out-once-they-get-to-DC career politicians.

The leftists should take serious heed that their avowed mortal political enemy, the Republican Party, could be on the verge of sending to the United States Senate someone like Rand Paul - a consistent and unflappable opponent of the distorted quasi-religion that would have government power as the ultimate arbiter of all human interaction, if not the ultimate power over all humanity.

Rand Paul, if successful God willing, will not be the only defender of liberty embraced by the electorate in 2010 and beyond, when all is said and done.

There will be more...

Democrats : Party of Big Government and Big Business All Nice and Cozy In Bed Together

2009-12-09T13:32:00.006-05:00

Jonah Goldberg gets it right in this analysis.

The notion that big business is "right wing" has always been more sloppy agitprop than serious analysis. It's true that historically, big business is against socialism and communism -- and understandably so. Socialism and communism were once close to synonymous with expropriation of wealth and the nationalization of industry. What businessman or industrialist wouldn't be against that?

But many of those same industrialists saw nothing wrong with cutting deals with statist regimes. For example, the Swope Plan, put forward by Gerard Swope, president of General Electric, laid out the infrastructure for much of the early New Deal.

Yet the debate is always framed as if the choice is between "government intervention" on the one hand and free-market capitalism on the other. From 30,000 feet, that division is fine with me. My objection is the glib and easy association of big business with the free-market guys (Milton Friedman was no champion of public-private partnerships and industrial policy).
This identification allows self-described progressive Democrats to run against big business when they are in fact in bed with the fat cats.

For instance, the standard line from the Democrats is that the plutocrats and corporate mustache-twirlers oppose healthcare reform because, in President Obama's words, they "profit financially or politically from the status quo." That sounds reasonable, and in some cases it is reasonable. But it makes it sound as if Obama is bravely battling "malefactors of great wealth."

But that's not really how it works, as Timothy Carney documents in his powerful new book, "Obamanomics." In 2008, Obama raked in more donations from the health sector than John McCain and the rest of the Republican field combined. Drug makers gave Obama $3.58 for every dollar they gave McCain. Pfizer gave to Obama at a 4-1 rate, as did the hospital and nursing home industries. In 2008, the insurance industry gave more money to House Democrats than House Republicans. HMOs give to Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 60 to 40.
....

This pattern is hardly unique to healthcare. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, led by GE, includes many other Fortune 500 companies, including Goldman Sachs -- the company that has profited mightily from Obama's brand of hope and change.
CAP is an aggressive supporter of the Democrats' climate change scheme. Why? Because GE and company stand to make billions from carbon pricing, thanks largely to investments in technologies that cannot survive in a free market without massive subsidies from Uncle Sam. GE chief Jeffrey Immelt cheerleads big government as "an industry policy champion, a financier and a key partner."

Going back to U.S. Steel and the railroads, the story of big business in America is often as not the story of fat cats rigging the system. And the story of progressivism is the same story. The New Deal codes were mostly written by big business to squeeze out smaller competitors. The progressives fought for these reforms on the grounds that it's easier to steer a few giant oxen than a thousand cats.

But healthcare is the most troubling example of the trend. Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson notes that while everyone has been debating the government takeover of healthcare, what's really transpired is healthcare's takeover of government -- thanks to what he calls the "medical industrial complex." Already 1 in 4 federal outlays are for healthcare; government pays, directly or indirectly, for half of all healthcare costs; and the entire industry is heavily regulated. Obama's answer to this state of affairs is more -- much more -- of the same, on the phantasmagorial grounds that it will cut costs.

My biggest objection is not to what isn't true about the claim that the right is the handmaiden to big business, it's to what is true. Too many Republicans think being pro-business is the same as being pro-market. They defend the status quo against bad reforms and think they've defended economic freedom. The status quo stinks. And the sooner Republicans learn that, the sooner they'll deserve to win again.

Well said by Goldberg, especially about misguided Republicans who think supporting any business, especially big, is akin to support for free market capitalism.

But even moreso, enough of the tired lies of self-described "progressives" that they stand against big business, when the massive federal government they always seek to empower is the lifeblood of the crony corporatism that we all saw run to DC for bailouts and a whole panoply of assorted corporate welfare schemes.

There is damn good reason corporate lobbyists have never been fatter or sassier than when the so-called "progressives" are in charge. The social policy happy-talk smoke screens that these "progressives" peddle are but fancy distraction from the real goings-on as corporate interests fund and control "progressive" politicians who happily wield and expand federal power.

You want corporate influence in government to diminish? The ONLY way is to diminish the influence and power of government itself.

As I have said countless times to the stooges who actually buy the cock-and-bull that their leftist leaders in DC actually care about the interests of working Americans :

Be careful the big government you wish for. It just might get you.

It's About the Horrible Policies, Stupid

2009-12-08T11:09:00.038-05:00

Obama is now convincingly a minority president. No, I don't mean racially.

I mean Obama now joins George W. Bush not only in the continuation of neocon foreign policies and big government profligacy, but (inevitably) that this is leading him to now consistently poll below 50% approval...and falling.

At 46%, President Obama's latest job approval rating is the lowest ever in Quinnipiac polls, and he has an upside down rating for his handling of health care.
The new survey (Dec. 1-6, 2313 RV, MoE +/- 2%), released this morning, finds 44% disapproving of the job Obama's doing.
More than half (51%) of independents now disapprove of Obama's job performance, while 37% approve.

Similarly : Obama's 47 Percent Approval Lowest of Any President at This Point

The public's fast-growing disapproval of Obama's arrogant power-mongering should come as no surprise, except perhaps to the most reality-oblivious and purely-partisan hopechangelings now hunkering down in the bunker.

The public is quickly losing confidence in everything about the Obama presidency, as well it should.

Even the mile-wide, inch-deep veneer of public confidence that may have existed in the wake of Obama's ascension will not be regained, if ever, as long as Obama continues to be an arrogant partisan ideologue, pursuing a messianic agenda in willful disregard of the deeply-held reservations of scores of millions of Americans of all political stripes...essentially a redux of the way George W. Bush did business.

It took Bush several years to fall through the floor in public approval. Obama is on track to exceed Bush's free fall in its breadth and depth.

And why not? Obama's policies are akin to Bush's worst imperial presidential one-party hegemonic power fantasies and control ideology...on steroids.

Couldn't happen to a more deserving charlatan.

And indicators like this certainly don't bode well for the Democrats and their massive ad hoc slapdash schemes to centrally plan all American life around leftist pipe dreams.

I believe most thinking Americans implicitly understand that the rise of comprehensive welfare statism (on credit) with the Obamanation run amok spells a future of economically moribund life in which maintaining lower middle-class trappings is akin to luxury...but of course life is worth living 'cause you have "free" health care.

As in : "Hey your life will be muddling drudgery largely in service to voracious tax parasites, but at least you will be able to get that boil lanced on the cheap...and maybe even prolong your life of servitude by a year or two!"

Millions of Americans can see that if this Obama-led runaway train over the cliff to hell isn't stopped and fast that they will soon consider it a blessing simply to sustain a bare semblance of personal and familial economic stability, scraping by on what is left after the central planners get through with everyone's resources and wealth.

As I have said about Bush, I will say about Obama et al :

Always wrong. Never in doubt.

Obama's War

2009-12-02T16:04:00.004-05:00

I hope the president is pleased with himself now that he has earned himself the neocon mantle , praised by those bloodthirsty chicken-hawk war cheerleaders who are content with any bit of a loaf of aggressive middle east adventurism and interventionism. Only the most militarist will remain unsatisfied with Obama's splitting the loaf, in a truly half-assed attempt to politically hedge his decision to continue the waging of remote overseas wars by the United States.

No thinking citizen who listened to Obama's speech last night, complete with "19 hijackers", "9/11", "terrorist safe havens", and all manner of stock-in-trade Bush war-justifying catch phrases, could not help but feel Obama may as well have been reading from the Bush/neocon script, word-for-word.

As if the Obama national domestic profligacy and power-mongering isn't bad enough, now he has bear-hugged the worst elements of American foreign policy decision-making since Woodrow Wilson.

One thing consistent about Obama : the man never ever ever fails to grievously disappoint people of good faith who seek real change in this country.

So long, and thanks for all the fish

2009-11-24T10:26:00.003-05:00

The absence of new content here for the past few days has not been the result of any tragedy or work implosion.

I have been thinking seriously about multiple commitments and where in my life I can make the most difference.

Two years ago I started this blog on something of a lark, primarily to see what would happen, and to inject some of my own ideas into that whirlwind we all call the blogosphere. Several thousand posts later, I came to the realization that ... I'm done.

Not that it hasn't been fun, intellectually challenging, or even may have changed the minds of a few people on a few select issues... it has.

But as a whole, I've recently discovered, it's a never-ending personal commitment to an enterprise that neither pays the bills nor makes a significant enough change [as compared to other venues in which I work] to be worth continuing.

I only have a certain amount of time and energy available, and here's where it will be going in the near future:

1. To my family, first and foremost--a few extra minutes each day as my twins go through the teenage years.

2. To Delaware State Unversity, which needs some heavy shoveling to get out of the mess that the Sessoms' administration left us in, and which--as an organization--has finally recognized that fact. I have been spending multiple hours each week in labor negotations for a new faculty contract, working on personnel issues, and supporting my own dean. These are real projects, with real impacts on people, and I need to carve out some more time for them.

3. To my own serious writing--which has directly suffered thanks to this blog. I am hanging fire on three book contracts, and I have finally gotten started doing the serious work to meet some deadlines. It feels good, and there is actually a chance that some of my work might have serious impact on how America looks at its Civil War, or how the world has contextualized the Russo-German War from 1941-1945, and what that means for foreign policy and genocide studies. There are only so many books you can write in a career, and I've only written nine so far. Before senility hits I aim to double that number, but I cannot do it if I am pounding the keyboard here.

4. To my commitment to the News Journal's Community Advisory Board, which gives me a less frequent but much larger audience for commentary [no, A1, it won't be specifically libertarian-oriented commentary].

Not that it matters, but this has been a difficult decision, and I only really crystalized it last night while talking to Dana Garrett, who has recently reached the same conclusion.

I won't rule out doing this again some day in a different format, and I certainly doubt I will give up the habit of checking and commenting on local blogs. Maybe if I have something to say I will ask somebody for some space for a guest post every now and again.

But I've just reached the point where it's time to say, Thank you, to friends and critics alike, and to move on to other parts of the world.

I owe a special thanks to Tyler (for whom this is coming blindside out of the blue) and the two Brians who wrote so much good stuff here as well.

As Benjamin Disraeli once noted, much of being a successful party guest revolves around having the wisdom to know when it's time to leave.

It's time.

... and thinking about all those queers would be too distracting right now

2009-11-21T09:47:00.002-05:00

So--not surprisingly--the US Senate cancels scheduled hearings on repealing DADT:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A planned November hearing by the US Senate Armed Services Committee to consider ending a ban on gays serving openly in the US military will be postponed, a spokeswoman indicated Friday.

"We do not have a date" for the hearing, said the aide, Tara Andringa.

Note to America's LGBQT community: like free lunch, there will be equality tomorrow.

Breaking! DSU Trustees select Dr Harry Williams as next President

2009-11-20T17:23:00.003-05:00

No details on the maneuverings, but I have it confirmed that current Provost and Academic VP of DSU, Dr Harry Williams, has been announced as DSU's next President.

In my (always humble) opinion, the best choice available to them.

Good luck, Dr Williams. I look forward to working with you in your new role.

Tom Englehardt's seven reasons to get out of Afghanistan now

2009-11-20T08:41:00.002-05:00

... which he cast as if given in a speech by President Obama:

1. We have no partner in Afghanistan. The control of the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai hardly extends beyond the embattled capital of Kabul. He himself has just been returned to office in a presidential election in which voting fraud on an almost unimaginably large scale was the order of the day. His administration is believed to have lost all credibility with the Afghan people.

2. Afghanistan floats in a culture of corruption. This includes President Karzai’s administration up to its highest levels and also the warlords who control various areas and, like the Taliban insurgency, are to some degree dependent for their financing on opium, which the country produces in staggering quantities. Afghanistan, in fact, is not only a narco-state, but the leading narco-state on the planet.

3. Despite billions of dollars of American money poured into training the Afghan security forces, the army is notoriously understrength and largely ineffective; the police forces are riddled with corruption and held in contempt by most of the populace.

4. The Taliban insurgency is spreading and gaining support largely because the Karzai regime has been so thoroughly discredited, the Afghan police and courts are so ineffective and corrupt, and reconstruction funds so badly misspent. Under these circumstances, American and NATO forces increasingly look like an army of occupation, and more of them are only likely to solidify this impression.

5. Al-Qaeda is no longer a significant factor in Afghanistan. The best intelligence available to me indicates — and again, whatever their disagreements, all my advisors agree on this — that there may be perhaps 100 al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and another 300 in neighboring Pakistan. As I said in March, our goal has been to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and on this we have, especially recently, been successful. Osama bin Laden, of course, remains at large, and his terrorist organization is still a danger to us, but not a $100 billion-plus danger.

6. Our war in Afghanistan has become the military equivalent of a massive bail-out of a firm determined to fail. Simply to send another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan would, my advisors estimate, cost $40-$54 billion extra dollars; eighty thousand troops, more than $80 billion. Sending more trainers and advisors in an effort to double the size of the Afghan security forces, as many have suggested, would cost another estimated $10 billion a year. These figures are over and above the present projected annual costs of the war — $65 billion — and would ensure that the American people will be spending $100 billion a year or more on this war, probably for years to come. Simply put, this is not money we can afford to squander on a failing war thousands of miles from home.

7. Our all-volunteer military has for years now shouldered the burden of our two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if we were capable of sending 40,000-80,000 more troops to Afghanistan, they would without question be servicepeople on their second, third, fourth, or even fifth tours of duty. A military, even the best in the world, wears down under this sort of stress and pressure.

Sobering truths that our leaders seem unwilling to acknowledge....

In which I announce my candidacy for Congress in Delaware's Second Congressional District

2009-11-19T12:34:00.002-05:00

... because I think that I might actually have a shot there.

The incumbent has been so ineffective as to be virtually invisible on the issues that matter to Delaware.

He (or she, I could never tell) needs to go.

My platform is simple:

1) I promise to triple the number of jobs created or saved in the district under the current stimulus programs.

2) I promise to double the number of people in the district receiving Medicaid benefits, even if that means providing completely free health insurance to some people now paying for it, just to hit my targets.

3) I am calling for the dsitrict to receive three times as much beach replenishment funding as it received last year.

4) I am not Mike Protack.

5) I am a firm believer in term limits, so I will pledge not to serve any more terms in the House of Representatives that necessary for me to supplement my State retirement with a Federal plan of equal or greater value.

6) Oh, and I'm not Colin Bonini, either.

and, finally:

7) I have a bumper sticker that is not lifted from the Old Testament:

A bumper sticker, a Bible, and--oops--some Jews! Let's throw the whole thing out!?

2009-11-18T16:04:00.004-05:00

OK, it's tacky, and not really funny (neither were those T-shirts proclaiming that GHW Bush had wished that his wife had had an abortion before the nationa had an abortion for president), but is it really a reason to throw out the Old Testament?

Delawaredem thinks so, first noting that the significance of the Psalm is in Psalm 109:9--the next verse:

“Religious” conservatives have a new slogan that they are putting on bumper stickers and t-shirts.

“Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8″

What does Psalm 109:8 say?

“Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”

Well, that’s not bad. They are just praying for Obama to be replaced as President. Hey, I wanted Bush gone as President too, through his impeachment for war crimes. But let’s read the next verse that follows Psalm 109:8 which “religious” conservatives all so cleverly leave off the t-shirts and bumper stickers.

“Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

So, it is pretty obvious that anyone repeating, wearing, or using this slogan “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8″ is actually calling for the President’s death in some form. And they want him to die sooner rather than later.

From this, DD goes on to reach the argument that we should--as a society--toss out the Old Testament. Seriously:

No, today I will turn my ire against the Old Testament of the Bible, the text that provides these “religious” conservatives with their murderous ideas in the first place. Let me ask you a question.

Has any other book been responsible for more death and destruction over the last 5,000 years that this one?

All sorts of depravity are justified by its text. Slavery, genocide, and murder. To this day, David Anderson opposes homosexuality simply because the Old Testament says it is an abomination. To this day, people use its text to justify their wrongful behavior. Revenge is justified by the Old Testament. Discrimination is justified by the Old Testament. Hatred is justified by the Old Testament.

Have any of you ever read the Old Testament from cover to cover?

Uh, yes, as a matter of fact I have. But where are you going with this DD?

So if you believe that Old Testament is still relevant today, you believe in a God that is giant dick, who condones and actually encourages murder, slavery and genocide, who believes that some of His own children that He created in His own image are actually abominations destined for eternal flame. I am content to follow the New Testament and his commandment that we love rather than hate each other. But I suppose if your political ideology rests on hatred, it is useless [sic] to have the Old Testament around.

Few lines down, MJ--who happens to be Jewish--politely, ahem, points out to Delawaredem that, uh, gee, guy, the OT also happens to be the Hebrew Bible.... And DD responds:

Yeah, something I did not think about in writing this is the Jewish faith, which is based on the Torah, which is the Old Testament. Indeed, I write this from a perspective of being a New Testament follower.

The difference I think between Jews and Evangelicals is interpretation. Evangelicals take the Old Testament literally. And from my experience with my Jewish friends, the Jewish faith and people do not. Certainly the Jewish faith does not believe in genocide and slavery. Other aspects of the Old Testament that I speak of you will have to address with respect to the Jewish faith.

But I am certainly not intending to invite the destruction of the Jewish people when I say throw out the Old Testament.

So let's see, we started with Psalm 109, condemned the Old Testament as brutal and genocidal, then backed off and said, essentially, that it's all right for Jews to have the OT because they don't actually believe its true the same way certain Christians do.

There are so many things wrong with this that I am at a loss regarding where to start.

How about we quote all of Psalm 109, for example, which is being mis-used both by the people who printed the bumper stickers and their critics who only quote two verses:

1 O God, whom I praise,
do not remain silent,

2 for wicked and deceitful men
have opened their mouths against me;
they have spoken against me with lying tongues.

3 With words of hatred they surround me;
they attack me without cause.

4 In return for my friendship they accuse me,
but I am a man of prayer.

5 They repay me evil for good,
and hatred for my friendship.

6 Appoint [a] an evil man [b] to oppose him;
let an accuser [c] stand at his right hand.

7 When he is tried, let him be found guilty,
and may his prayers condemn him.

8 May his days be few;
may another take his place of leadership.

9 May his children be fatherless
and his wife a widow.

10 May his children be wandering beggars;
may they be driven [d] from their ruined homes.

11 May a creditor seize all he has;
may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.

12 May no one extend kindness to him
or take pity on his fatherless children.

13 May his descendants be cut off,
their names blotted out from the next generation.

14 May the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the LORD;
may the sin of his mother never be blotted out.

15 May their sins always remain before the LORD,
that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.

16 For he never thought of doing a kindness,
but hounded to death the poor
and the needy and the brokenhearted.

17 He loved to pronounce a curse—
may it [e] come on him;
he found no pleasure in blessing—
may it be [f] far from him.

18 He wore cursing as his garment;
it entered into his body like water,
into his bones like oil.

19 May it be like a cloak wrapped about him,
like a belt tied forever around him.

20 May this be the LORD's payment to my accusers,
to those who speak evil of me.

21 But you, O Sovereign LORD,
deal well with me for your name's sake;
out of the goodness of your love, deliver me.

22 For I am poor and needy,
and my heart is wounded within me.

23 I fade away like an evening shadow;
I am shaken off like a locust.

24 My knees give way from fasting;
my body is thin and gaunt.

25 I am an object of scorn to my accusers;
when they see me, they shake their heads.

26 Help me, O LORD my God;
save me in accordance with your love.

27 Let them know that it is your hand,
that you, O LORD, have done it.

28 They may curse, but you will bless;
when they attack they will be put to shame,
but your servant will rejoice.

29 My accusers will be clothed with disgrace
and wrapped in shame as in a cloak.

30 With my mouth I will greatly extol the LORD;
in the great throng I will praise him.

31 For he stands at the right hand of the needy one,
to save his life from those who condemn him.

Wow. This is some pretty grim stuff.

Note that the references in 109:8-15 are prayers for judgment against an evil person, someone who abuses the poor and curses [in the semi-magical sense] the righteous. OT scholars might explain to DD and our bumper-sticker owners that psalms and prayers like this actually represented an ethical and moral advance in the Middle East during the time in question, and that even Biblical literalists have difficulty reading abstract intercessory psalms as true pieces of history.

Somebody should also probably explain that the doctrine of Biblical Literalism and Biblical Inerrancy originate in the Reformation as a rejection of a professional clergy. The Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches had always held the position that the Bible was not mere history, but a much more important document filled with allegory, spiritual meaning, and--most significantly--the need for interpretation. That's why the Catholic Church did not encourage Bible reading as such. The Literalists are essentially a political response: if the Bible means only what it says, and if the Bible is objectively accurate as history, then it does not need interpretation. Anyone who reads or hears the Scripture can understand it.

To some of us this sounds suspiciously like dumbing down the Bible by ignoring 1,500 years of Biblical exegesis of the NT and another 500-800 years on top of that for the OT. Evangelicals, however, developed the doctrine that the Fall of Man (original sin) so compromised human reason that we can only receive the Bible, not interpret it.

But is it time to give the OT the old heave-ho because the ancient Israelites were, ah, a rather bloodthirsty, genocidal lot?

Aside from the rather important question of cutting yourself off from one of the major intellectual sources of the Western Intellectual Tradition (which doesn't really seem to be much of problem for DD), what bothers me about his suggestion is that it is tantamount to saying that some documents, some ideas, are just to prone to misuse by some folks that those ideas ought to be eliminated from society.

Forget about the millions of Jews who have lived careful, blameless lives attempting to delve the meaning of Torah and Talmud.

Forget about the hundreds of millions of Christians who never seek to use the OT as an excuse for violent or petty behavior.

Instead, condemn the Book itself rather than the individuals you think are misusing it--sort of the way we are exactly NOT supposed to condemn the Quran or Muslims in general for the acts of some radicalized killers.

There are passages both appalling and beautiful in the OT, and a desert moral code that can chill you to the bone with its stonings and ritual killings. There is the Agedah of Abraham willing to kill his son at God's command, and the centuries old question of how that should be interpreted. There is fodder for those who want to ostracize or kill people over their differences: Middle Eastern tribes were not hallmarks of tolerance. There is even the complete redefinition of the OT by NT scholars who distorted the original meanings of the stories in order to prefigure Christ or create an intellectual consistency between Yahweh and the God of the NT.

There is also a huge missing link of Hellenistic Jewish religious material that ties together the latest books of the OT to the NT tradition.

But we need to get rid of it, DD says, because some people are too hateful and too idiotic to understand more than superficial, literal interpretations.

[What happened, I wonder, to the Earth's angular momentum when God made the sun stand still for several hours?]

This argument ignores the fact that thoughtful Christians have been dealing with the more gory and vengeful parts of the OT for decades, even centuries. Take theologian and novelist C. S. Lewis on--of all things--Psalm 109:

In his marvelous book, Reflections on the Psalms, C.S. Lewis observed:

In some of the Psalms the spirit of hatred which strikes us in the face is like the heat from a furnace mouth. In others the same spirit ceases to be frightful only by becoming (to a modern mind) almost comic in its naivety. Examples can be found all over the Psalter, but perhaps the worst is in 109 (p. 20).

Lewis suspects that it may be best to leave such psalms alone. But then he says that we must face “facts squarely.”

The hatred is there — festering, gloating, undisguised — and also we should be wicked if we in any way condoned or approved it, or (worse still) used it to justify similar passions in ourselves (p. 22).

Lewis refers to these psalms as horrible, devilish, cruel, hateful, and evil. He believes that Psalm 109 — and the poetry of its kind in the psalter — should point us back to the evil we carry within and teach us each how to behave with goodness, humility, and love.

Psalm-expert Dr Amy Cottrill of Birmingham Southern University makes two critical points about such Psalms: their bellicosity and their disconnect from mainstream Judeo-Christian thought:

The psalm writers clearly have no qualms complaining to God about their pain.

"These are people that believe God cares about their pain and suffering enough that in order to relieve you, God will kill the enemy," she said. "The psalmist isn't just expressing pain, he wants something done about it. The prayer is: `God, kill my enemy.'"

Psalm 109 calls for curses upon the enemy: "May his days be few; may another seize his goods! May his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow! May his children wander about and beg; may they be driven out of the ruins they inhabit! May the creditor seize all that he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his toil! Let there be none to extend kindness to him, nor any to pity his fatherless children!"

In Psalm 58, the writer calls for the enemy to be punished: "The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance; he will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked."

The bad guys are portrayed as deserving of big-time vengeance.

"This is very bellicose literature," Cottrill said. "It's very violent. They are asking God to go kill their enemy."...

She finds them to be starkly different in worldview from the modern religious sensibilities of Jews and Christians.

"Most mainstream religious people do not think of God as a religious warrior," she said. "The psalmists did. To them, God is all-powerful, but God is also very personal, very close. They definitely feel they have access. Sometimes they barter with God, saying, `If I die as a result of this suffering, who is going to praise you?' That's a pretty bold view."

Moreover, consider the fact that serious evangelicals, such as the scholars who publish in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, have been coming to grips with the language in Psalm 109 and similar OT passages for a long time:

As Peter C. Craigie suggests, these "expressions of vindictiveness and hatred" cannot be "purified" simply because they are in Scripture, and they are the psalmist's "natural reactions" to evil and pain, and "the sentiments are in themselves evil." The sentiments may also be understood as a product of the limited perspective of the psalmist being an OT believer. William L. Holladay points out that the imprecations exhibit "a very different spirit" from the one set forth in the NT, partly because the OT understands the human nature as "the undivided self," and the psalmists are "wrong about the location of evil," not distinguishing the sinner from sin.

Thoughtful Evangelicals have recognized that this difficult exists not just in an academic theological sense, but in the day-to-day expressions of ministers in their pulpits:

It is notoriously difficult to preach on the Psalms. Some think, moreover, that it is inappropriate to try because the Psalms have a different, quite distinct function in the liturgy....

The Psalms are poems of particularity and must not be treated as a generic statement about the human condition. These are the words, tried and tested, by persons in a particular community and pertain only to those persons in that community. At the outset the preacher must resist privatized interpretation.

The ones who speak here are Israelites who carry with them and bring to expression the long experience and the myriad of remembered texts concerning their life with God. The Psalter belongs in the OT and is surrounded by ancient memories of rescue, treasured accounts of miracles and promises from God, durable commands that have been variously honored and violated, and hopes awaiting fruition. The Psalms are “thick” in the sense that all this accumulated poignant reality is present in the utterance of the Psalms; and the preacher must attend to all that thickness.

Or, consider again, conservative Catholic writer Mark Shea, discussing the concept of righteous anger provoked by horrible inequities [in a piece based on Psalm 109]:

As Christians, of course, we cannot give our voice to such cursing. Jesus has very clearly told us that we must love our enemies and bless, not curse, those who despitefully use us. But that does not mean the Old Testament curses are bad or without value. In them, if we know what we are looking for, we see outrage at evil in chemical purity and know it as a gift of God. For righteous anger is not sin if we use it as God intended: as fuel for the engine of moral action. Anger only becomes a sin when we do not put it in the gas tank of action, but instead pour it on ourselves and others and set it on fire. Then it consumes us. The use of anger, like the use of gasoline, is not to bathe in it and drink it, but to turn its energy toward pursuing the redemptive, active love of God.

The staggering depravity that provoked the curses of our Jewish ancestors (and our own curses above) deserves cold, implacable hatred. It is the only decent response of a child of God. But our hatred must be directed at the sin, not the sinner.

In other words, despite the willingness of political partisans to jump on this bumper sticker as evangelicals trawling for assassins, there is considerable evidence that Christians--Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical--have been seriously wrestling with language like this for years.

But that's all irrelevant, apparently, when the wrong people start using Biblical rhetoric: instead of trying to understand it, or contextualize it, we need to throw it out.

Frank Schaeffer suggested on the Rachel Maddow show that no Christians are reacting against this partisn political usage of Psalm 109. Consider the respones of The Beatitudes Society or the The Mattew25 Network. I hope to see more such voices.

I think that what Delawaredem misses is that there is a continuing battle for the soul of Christianity.

On the one hand are the Christianists, who think that their ethic should be government-enforced policy.

On the other hand there are the Christians who view their religion as a private but potent part of their lives, and who have a rich heritage of religious and political dissent for the improvement of the human condition rather than the imposition of ritual law.

And on the gripping hand there those who see within the Christianists the chance to finally strike a death blow at religion itself, by equating virtually all belief with insanity and fanaticism.

I do not believe DD is one of those people, but I do believe that his position aids and abets them in precisely the same fashion he has formerly accused me of aiding and abetting those who plot violence against the government or the President.

Shorter: I don't think that we only have a choice between David Anderson's Christianity and no Christianity at all.

Only view this if you need proof that marijuana kills (at least the common sense of some LEOs)

2009-11-18T15:55:00.002-05:00

Nose-spur warning: put down the coffee.

[h/t Kids Prefer Cheese]

Leviathans

2009-11-17T17:20:00.002-05:00

There appears to be some sort of basic human compulsion that urges us to (a) amass wealth; (b) build larger and larger, increasingly hierarchical organizations; and (c) control other people's behavior even when said behaviors do not represent a threat to us.

Otherwise I am at a loss to explain the reality of modern society that corporations spend their time attempting to emulate the worst abuses of the State, while simultaneously courting the State to provide them with special status and structural advantages over their smaller competitors.

It intrigues me--and, quite frankly, disappoints me--that many if not most libertarians fail to see the reality that corporations do not represent the free market in action, but actually represent the overt use of anti-competitive State powers to distort the markets in their favor.

Corporate owners enjoy State protection from personal liability for the use of force or fraud.

Corporations enjoy due process rights as artificial persons equal to those guaranteed to US citizens.

Corporations never have to face the issue of inheritance because they are functionally immortal.

Corporations lobby the government for special tax breaks, tax credits, tariff protections, environmental waivers, anti-trust exemptions, and other welfare benefits not available to citizens or small businesses.

Corporations that manage to become "too big to fail" become entitled to life support taken from our tax dollars.

Senior corporate managers enjoy a virtual swinging door relationship with the segments of the government designed to regulate their activity, many moving into and out of those positions [complete with their stock options] every time the White House changes hands.

Corporations often actually lobby for forms of regulation that will suffocate their smaller competition, while being bearable for an organization with hundreds if not thousands of employees.

Corporations willingly accept the role as tax collector/whore for the State.

My point--between the Military/Industrial Complex, the Heatlh Insurance/Pharma Complex, and the other various forms of corporate governance.

Don't get me wrong: I do not favor the idea of simply expanding government regulatory powers in order to have one Leviathan replaced by another.

But at the same time it is important to realize that protecting corporations is far from protecting the free market.

More Like This, PLEASE!

2009-11-17T15:26:00.014-05:00

Judge Andrew Napolitano is one of the most passionate, articulate, and unflappable advocates of liberty and limited government around today...

He is the author of 2007's A Nation of Sheep, as well as The Constitution in Exile: How the Federal Government Has Seized Power by Rewriting the Supreme Law of the Land.

Kiss Your Freedoms Goodbye If Health Care Passes
Why we cannot afford to sit out this fight
Andrew Napolitano November 16, 2009

Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn't care about the Constitution, it doesn't care about your inalienable rights. If this health care bill becomes law, America, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it, and privacy as you have enjoyed it will cease to be.
Last week the House of Representatives voted on a 2,000 page bill to give the federal government the power to micromanage the health care of every single American. The bill will raise your taxes, steal your freedom, invade your privacy, and ration your health care.
Even the Republicans have introduced their version of Obamacare Lite. It, too, if passed, will compel employers to provide coverage, bribe the states to change their court rules, and tell insurance companies whom to insure.
We do not have two political parties in this country, America. We have one party; called the Big Government Party. The Republican wing likes deficits, war, and assaults on civil liberties. The Democratic wing likes wealth transfer, taxes, and assaults on commercial liberties. Both parties like power; and neither is interested in your freedoms.
Think about it. Government is the negation of freedom. Freedom is your power and ability to follow your own free will and your own conscience. The government wants you to follow the will of some faceless bureaucrat.
When I recently asked Congressman James Clyburn, the third ranking Democrat in the House, to tell me "Where in the Constitution the federal government is authorized to regulate everyone's healthcare," he replied that most of what Congress does is not authorized by the Constitution, but they do it anyway.
There you have it. Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn't care about the Constitution, it doesn't care about your inalienable rights, it doesn't care about the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, it doesn't even read the laws it writes.
America, this is not an academic issue. If this health care bill becomes law, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it, privacy as you have enjoyed it, will cease to be. When Congress takes away our freedoms, they will be gone forever.
What will you do to prevent this from happening?
We Can't Sit Back and Allow the Loss of Our Freedoms
We elect the government. It works for us. As we watch the Democrats' plans for health care take shape, we can only ask how did our government get so removed, so unbridled, so arrogant that it can tell us how to live our personal lives?
On Saturday November 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. 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. It claims the power to regulate any activity, tax any behavior, and demand conformity to any standard it chooses.
[Sort of reminds of a certain leftist hive we all know 'round here.]
The Founders did not give us a government like the one we have today. The government they gave us was strictly limited in its scope, guaranteed individual liberty, preserved the free market, and on matters that pertain to our private behavior was supposed to leave us alone.
In the Constitution, the Founders built in checks and balances. If the Congress got out of hand, the states would restrain it. If the states stole liberty or property, the Congress would cure it. If the president tried to become a king, the courts would prevent it.
In the next few weeks, I will be giving a public class on Constitutional Law here on the Fox News Channel, on the Fox Business Network, on Foxnews.com, and on Fox Nation. In anticipation of that, many of you have asked:
What can we do now about the loss of freedom? For starters, we can vote the bums out of their cushy federal offices! We can persuade our state governments to defy the Feds in areas like health care—where the Constitution gives the Feds zero authority.
We can petition our state legislatures to threaten to amend the Constitution to abolish the income tax, return the selection of U.S. senators to state legislatures, and nullify all the laws the Congress has written that are not based in the Constitution.
One thing we can’t do is just sit back and take it.

Leave it to a snarky Reason blog commenter, in the first response to the Judge's article, to pull out an old cinematic nugget to make light :

"Listen! And understand! That government is out there. It can't be bargained with! It can't be reasoned with! It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!"

or this one :

"First they came for the uninsured, but I did nothing because I had insurance..."

LOL. And a more sober portent :

"Napolitano is spot-on, and he doesn't even address the meta-political effects of Stalinized health care, namely that this will forever shift the terms of the debate in a way that will turn today's Republicans into today's Democrats (just witness the R's breathless defense of Medicare in the current debate) and will allow the Democrats to move even further left.
Once Obamacare proves to be ineffective in controlling costs and delivering services, as it inevitably will, the Left will demand we spread the decay of nationalization to health care's feeder industries. The Blob will spread, and our liberty will die a slow death."

And we still don't know what the mission is

2009-11-16T23:31:00.002-05:00

Sometimes it doesn't take paragraphs of analysis to get the point across.

From Politics Daily:

Half a million Americans have served two 12-month tours in Iraq or Afghanistan; 70,000 have served three combat tours; and 20,000 have served five or more deployments, according to Defense Department data.

That's one out of every 600 American citizens.

A two-day hiatus followed by some quick hits

2009-11-16T22:50:00.002-05:00

Soccer-induced fatigue rendered me incapable of producing any posts for nearly two days. No, not me: my daughter's team, the Western Family YMCA Bandits, won the statewide Kohl's Cup Tournament for rec leagues on Sunday, going 4-0-2. My daughter (who would like you all to know that she has not been infected with that libertarian thing) plays goal and allowed exactly zero goals in six games. [The Bandits also won the regular season in their league, due in no small part to her .33 goals against average.]

The weather was wonderful this year, but then--moments after winning--we had to rush out to the Charter School of Wilmington open house [for both of the twins]. This is high-school shopping season in Delaware, where choice and charter combine to produce a cross between selecting a college and a sorority/fraternity rush experience. It's kind of like speed-dating with high-school teachers.

So I've been a bit behind in everything, and--frankly--I'm still exhausted. So here are some quick notes.

If all goes as planned (and the plan changed several times last week), I will make my inaugural appearance in the pages of the News Journal as a member of the Community Advisory Board, with an editorial regarding Delaware State Unversity and the State budget. It will be interesting, because while I don't let it all hang out, there will be several lines to make some insiders (maybe even some Trustees) cringe.

I note with almost filial pride that my old friend of thirty-plus years, Waldo, has at least briefly captured the status of Number One political blog in South Carolina, according to Blognet News. The big swinging bloggers of the Palmetto State (most of whom are GOPers) keep trying to figure out who the hell he is. For them, three absolutely useless clues: F. A. Mignet; people Will Rogers never met; and Six's Circus.

Over at Alphecca, Jeff has the best line of the week, whether you agree with his political prediction or not. Forecasting disaster for the Democrats, he suggests that in 2010, they are going to get stomped like a narc at a biker rally.

The local winner in that category is donviti, at his new digs, The Wage Slave: Big business rules in Delaware and like helpless date rape victims we allow the criminals to continue their deviant behavior year after year after year.

On the other hand, David Anderson has the scariest straight [and I mean that in the most humble, Biblical way] line of the week, referring to the recent Oprah interview of Our Lady of Wasilla: It is Sarah Palin at the top of her game. Sarah has game? No shit? The nicest thing I can think to say about Sarah these days is that she is the Wayne Root of the GOP, but with better legs and plucked eyebrows.

Meanwhile, in my wife's hometown, the University of Rochester (NY) has discovered what may be the key to non-macho-behaving little boys in ... their mothers' urine. Yeah. Uh, seriously.

And on that relatively substance-free note, it's off to bed. Real content tomorrow. Lunch will be free then as well.

The wrong conclusions: American liberals are not Nazis (and I am amazed I have to say this)

2009-11-14T10:59:00.003-05:00

As much as I like Jeff, who blogs at Alphecca, he's way off the deep in with this obvious comparison of the Obama administration's initiatives and Hitler's Nazis in Austria and Germany, as presented by Kitty Werthmann in North Dakota.

Werthmann, who lived in Austria during the Nazi regime, delivered a blistering comparison between what happened under the Nazis and what is supposedly happening today under the current administration.

Here are a few excerpts:

Once the Nazis took control, the people no longer voted for government positions anymore; all positions down to the local level were filled by appointment.

In the interest of a supposedly more efficient government, the Nazis decided to centralize all government between Germany and Austria.

Hitler nationalized (socialized) the banks, health care, automobile production, education, and more....

Werthmann said Hitler expanded “equal rights” for women, which resulted in far more women going out into the work force. The government created state-run child care and began molding the minds of children at a very young age.

Austria had private health care prior to the Nazis, and the quality was good. But the government took over the health care system, and when health care became “free” the doctors quickly became overloaded by frivolous use of the system. Surgeries of a more important nature, however, had waiting lists of about 18 months because of all the “hypochondriacs” abusing the system.

Werthmann said that if a doctor prescribed a medicine not on the government-approved list, the government would take the cost of the medicine out of the doctor’s salary.

Welfare became a “huge apparatus,” said Werthmann. Everyone had access to subsidized housing, food stamps, heating subsidies and many other benefits until everyone–regardless of salary–reached the prescribed standard of living.

“That’s called socialism,” she said. Werthmann cited the exchange between Joe the Plumber and Presidential Candidate Obama about “spreading the wealth” as a sign that it’s already begun here.

Werthmann, however, papers over quite a few significant differences. Let's start with why the Austrians voted in the Nazis:

Austrians were looking to Germany where they saw prosperity and law and order, while they had near anarchy in their own country. With only a border between them, speaking the same language and having a similar culture, they believed the promise of prosperity from Adolf Hitler. Politically in their country, on one side was the National Socialist Party (Nazi) and the other was the Communist Party.

The communists were growing stronger as a party because of their promises, as well. When the country had to decide between Nazis and Communists, most of the people came to the realization they were a country with a Christian background and could not bring themselves to vote for the atheistic communists. Austria voted the Nazi Party in to power.

Notice the absence in this formulation of (a) the liberal and/or Christian Democrats, who actually held parliamentary majorities in both countries before the Nazis; (b) the omission of the particularly rabid anti-Semitism in Austria that made the Nazi message appealing; (c) the territorial revisionism and desire to have a redo of World War One; (d) the overtly racist appeal of the Nazi program of ethnic superiority to all slavs and untermenchen; and (e) the fact that the Nazis came to power in Germany not through free elections unmarred by violence any more than the Nazis came to power that way in Austria.

In other words: what was wrong with Hitler was socialism, not militarism, racism, or genocidal fervor.

Ms. Werthmann, presented as a survivor of socialism in a macabre effort to create and equivalent to a holocaust survivor, is baldy equating American liberals to genocidal Nazis.

I neither like nor support many of the Obama administration's policies, but I will not be silent while somebody makes the self-serving argument that compares them to the policies of one of the leading mass murderers of the previous century.

Jeff, you should have done a little more thinking before you gave this nutcase a forum.

Terrorism and hate crimes: rethinking a position

2009-11-14T09:55:00.004-05:00

One of the hallmarks of the current American political discourse is ossification: you can no longer seriously grapple with issues, because to be seen even considering a possible change in thinking is a sign of weakness and betrayal.

The initial responses to my last post on the radicalization of American politics in response to the Fort Hood massacre is a case in point: an anti-abortion proponent jumped right in to essentially disavow the existentance of radicalized anti-abortion groups, implying that I had said there were only radicalized anti-abortion groups.

The comment cites the case of Abby Johnson as a non-violent anti-abortion activist who is being harassed by a Planned Parenthood gag order, leaving out two salient facts made clear with the link provided in the comment: (1) Johnson is not prohibited from protesting, just talking about confidential medical and staff information; and (2) it would be illegal for her to share confidential patient health information in the first place.

Of course there are legitimate anti-abortion groups, but there are also homicidal nutcases out there, with web pages, mailing lists, and apparently plenty of people will call the killing of physicians justifiable homicide.

Likewise, the commenter suggested that the difference between anti-abortion groups and Islam is that identification with Islam is a much greater predictor of violence:

However, the laundry list of people snapping, and murdering or attempting to murder others in the name of radical Islam, happens more frequently with larger, more organized incidents on an almost quarterly basis.

There is documented evidence that radical Islam imams openly advocate the murder of non believers, Americans, and U.S. soldiers. These imams reach hundreds, not a just a handful of followers.

Nice try, but essentially irrelevant to my point. First, it ignores dozens of violent anti-abortion incidents. Since the mid-1970s, aside from nine murders, there have been 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, and 3 kidnappings committed against abortion providers.

And yes, there are plenty of radical Islamic imams around and they preach violence and hatred, based--as Clifford Thies notes at Libertarian Republican--on an interpretative dogma of the Quran called abrogation, which is today just about as controversial, either in concept or application, among Muslims as the evangelical concept of literal Biblical inerrancy is with millions of other Christians.

[It is also important to understand that many Muslims who apply the principle of abrogation to their faith do not reach radicalized or violent conclusions.]

All of which brings me around by a very twisted thought process [sorry about that, but if you didn't this happened here you don't stop by regularly] to the question of terrorism and hate crimes.

I have long opposed hate crime legislation, based on the idea that murder is murder, assault is assault, etc., and that to develop specific crimes and sentences based on intent [not premeditation, but intent] is at best futile and at worst an egegrious extension of State power.

But there have always been aspects of this position that bothered me: are kids who spray random graffiti at a cemetery guilty of the same crime as people who spray-painted swastikas on Jewish graves?

Then townie76 asked why it was necessary to categorize the Fort Hood killer as a terrorist--why not just call him a murderer and have done with it?

Well, I thought, because to call him a terrorist is to make the linkage between his actions (violent murder) and his political intent (advancing the cause of radicalized Islam). Based on the evidence we currently have, being a nutcase does not completely explain his crime. Being a radicalized Islamic nutcase who is attempting to intimidate and strike fear into American soldiers and their families is a far better explanation.

The act of killing soldiers at Fort Hood appears to have been not just an act of violence by a disturbed individual, but a politically motivated act of violence by a disturbed individual.

He went on his killing spree because his victims--non-Muslims--had become acceptable not as individuals but as a class of people victims to kill. Their shared attribute? They were infidels perceived as a danger to Dar al Islam. They were therefore not people but a threat--vermin to be eradicated.

Which then led me to the uncomfortable question of how this asshole differed from the guys who killed Matthew Shepard. Shepard was killed not because of who he was as a person, but as a representative of a class of people: queers who threaten the existence the America his murderers fantasized they were protecting. They saw Shepard as being as much a threat to them as Al Qaeda sees American soldiers on Saudi soil, and they therefore felt justified in eliminating that threat.

They were making a political statement that homosexuals will not be tolerated here, just as people who tied hangman's knots and burned crosses were making a political statement that the blacks in American better learn their place and not be uppity.

Is it, I wondered, legitimate to equate terrorism to hate crimes, with the primary difference being the level of organization or the amount of destruction done by the killers?

Are Muslim honor killings in America best described as hate crimes or terrorism? Is one the retail form and another the wholesale form?

Perhaps. I am still not personally sure about the boundaries between them [although commenters will show up and set me straight in my ignorance, never fear].

But I am sure of this: from a societal perspective there is a difference between killing [maiming, attacking, etc.] someone because of the potential for personal gain, or because of heated emotions, or for personal revenge, than there is for executing the same murder/attack/assault against somebody just because they represent a particular group considered to be threatening, with the intent of not just killing that person but sending a message to the rest of the queers, bitches, negroes....

Do both categories overlap? Of course they do.

Do I still have profound reservations about the potential for the State to misuse hate crimes legislation? Yep.

Is there still a difficult line for me between hate speech and protected political speech? You bet.

But I cannot wrap my mind around declaring a war on terror and defining some murderous acts to be terrorism, while not being intellectually consistent enough to label other murderous acts as hate crimes.

I don't think you can make policy based on the concept of terrorism without acknowleding the existence of hate crimes.

So for Hube, Redwaterlilly, Waldo, and others, here's an admission of intellectual weakness in a world of absolutes: My position on hate crimes was fundamentally flawed. You were right all along.

Of course Major Hasan qualifies as a terrorist--but that is the beginning rather than the end of the question

2009-11-13T09:59:00.003-05:00

To note: despite Hube's characterization, in the only post I have written about Fort Hood, I described Major Hasan as a lone-wolf terrorist.

By lone wolf I mean that there is currently no evidence that his massacre at Fort Hood was ordered by, directly supported by, or part of the specific agenda of any given group. He attended a radical mosque, he attempted contact with Al Qaeda, he became more overtly radical--but there still seem to be the primary characteristics of a lone wolf about him. Obviously, new data could change that interpretation.

By terrorist I mean that he committed violence for a specific political/religious/ideological reason, at the very least to encourage other Muslims to do so, and to instill a sense of fear in Americans--especially American soldiers--that they can never be safe from retribution. Those are avowedly political objectives for murdering people who have done nothing except belong to a specific population, and that is the classic definition of terrorism.

The fact that his political objectives for murdering people were the furthering of his view of Islam, and the fact that there is a strong congruency between his known views and those espoused by radical Islam make it legitimate to call this an act of radical Islamic terrorism.

The fact that he is possibly also batshit nuts does not invalidate any of the preceding: he was in the legal sense of the word an effective moral actor because his crime was not only premeditated but very carefully planned.

Shorter: the 9/11 hijackers were also batshit nuts, but that doesn't mean they weren't terrorists.

[In fact, batshit nuts may be a terrorist job requirement.]

Having said that, let's think about the Murderer at Fort Hood in tandem with the following cases:

The anti-abortion murderer of Dr George Tiller;

The white supremacist who committed murder at the Holocaust Museum;

The guy in Pittsburgh who murdered several cops because he thought President Obama was going to take his guns.

[You will note that I am not using their names; I spit on all of them by refusing to use their names--the Fort Hood Murderer as well from this point on.]

There is no hard evidence that any of these four killers operated under the direct instructions of a specific group. Did they have relationships--both virtual and personal--with others who shared radicalized views about Islam, abortion, white supremacy, and gun rights? Absolutely.

Were there in all four cases probably indications that we had radicalized and pretty deranged folks out there? You bet.

Now here's the rub:

Were the people who advocate for the causes of radical Islam, radical anti-abortion, radical white supremacy, and radical gun-rights paranoia responsible for their actions?

This is a tough nut for both the Left and the Right because....

If the Right demands that radical Islam [and by extension almost any Muslim] be held accountable for the Fort Hood murderer, then the Right also has to admit a linkage between the radical anti-abortion groups [and by extension all anti-abortion folks] and Dr Tiller's assassin.

But if the Left demands that linkage between the radical anti-abortion groups [and by extension all anti-abortion folks] and Dr Tiller's assassin, then the Left has to admit that radical Islam [and by extension almost any Muslim] should be held accountable for the Fort Hood murderer.

See, you can't have it both ways.

If radicalized speech advocating even theoretical violence is to be held accountable for actual acts of violence by folks who were radicalized but are acting as lone wolf terrorists, then virtually all radicalized speech must be held so accountable, including the radicalized speech of people like Paul Krugman who castigate political opponents as traitors, a word as full of unhidden messages as the description of the GOP as being equivalent to the Taliban.

Likewise, the use of commie is not meant to invoke Karl Marx and a philosophical/political system, but to invoke the image of Stalin and the Great Terror.

The fact is that American political dialogue has become increasingly radicalized in all directions, which I guess is one of the gifts of 9/11. Huh?

Think of it this way: 9/11 forced America into an "us or them" mindset [I'm not saying it wasn't a legitimate response]. The problem is that "us or them" mindsets in foreign policy and world outlook have a way of penetrating into all other areas of your life and discourse.

9/11 shook us to the core: our way of life, some people abruptly realized, could be extinguished. Psychologically speaking, once any threat is identified as that dangerous, all other perceived threats can appear to be equally dangerous, and your political opponents become your ideological oppoonents.

But.... and without having an answer for the world's problems this is as good a place as any to end up....

We are still moral actors and the Murderer of Fort Hood still made a moral choice based on radicalized Islam.

Therefore he is without question all at once an Islamic terrorist, a lone wolf terrorist, and batshit nuts.

Which will satisfy nobody, but if I really cared about that I'd have a larger audience.

President Obama's gay-bashing Christian problem

2009-11-12T10:28:00.002-05:00

I am reminded by the abrupt re-appearance of Pastor Donnie McClurkin, the rabidly anti-gay minister and early Barack Obama supporter, in a series of You-Tube videos chronicling his opinon that gay people are vampires that there is a specific reason why the President does not take any serious action on the issue of civil rights for gay Americans. [We've covered the Obama-McClurkin links here before.]

It's against his religion.

Aside from McClurkin (whose views then-Senator Obama distanced himself from, but whose support he has continued to court and enjoy in a back-channel wa) and anti-gay zealot Rick Warren (to whom the President gave a national platform at his inauguration), there is also the Circle of Five. NYT:

President Obama has been without a pastor or a home church ever since he cut his ties to the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. in the heat of the presidential campaign. But he has quietly cultivated a handful of evangelical pastors for private prayer sessions on the telephone and for discussions on the role of religion in politics.

All are men, two of them white and three black — including the Rev. Otis Moss Jr., a graying lion of the civil rights movement. Two, the entrepreneurial dynamos Bishop T. D. Jakes and the Rev. Kirbyjon H. Caldwell, also served as occasional spiritual advisers to President George W. Bush. Another, the Rev. Jim Wallis, leans left on some issues, like military intervention and poverty programs, but opposes abortion.

None of these pastors are affiliated with the religious right, though several are quite conservative theologically. One of them, the Rev. Joel C. Hunter, the pastor of a conservative megachurch in Florida, was branded a turncoat by some leaders of the Christian right when he began to speak out on the need to stop global warming.

But as a group they can hardly be characterized as part of the religious left either. Most, like Mr. Wallis, do not take traditionally liberal positions on abortion or homosexuality. What most say they share with the president is the conviction that faith is the foundation in the fight against economic inequality and social injustice.

That is, I suppose, one way of thinking about social injustice, although here's another one:

Rev. Jakes refers to homosexuality as “brokenness” and has claimed that he wouldn’t hire a sexually active gay person. But it seems T.D. can’t even keep his own son off the D.L. (down low). His “sexually broken” heir was arrested earlier this year for cruising a Dallas Park in search of gay men.

Wallis, the chief executive of Sojourners, a Christian magazine, holds “traditional” views on homosexuality and abortion, according to the Times article. Although Wallis has taken some affirmative steps on GLBT equality, he prides himself on not being a part of “the religious left.”

Rev. Caldwell has endorsed Metanoia, an ex-gay ministry designed to “help homosexuals understand with God’s help that ‘change [is] possible.” When the GLBT community worked to elect Obama, this is not what we thought he meant when he promised “change.”

Back to the NYT to find the President on the phone, praying with the man who considers homosexuals to be broken and admits he wouldn't hire one:

Bishop Jakes said he had been tapped for several prayer phone calls — the most recent being when Mr. Obama’s grandmother died in November, two days before the election. “You take turns praying,” said Bishop Jakes, who like the other ministers did not want to divulge details of the calls. “It’s really more about contacting God than each other.”

Truth of the matter: President Obama depends heavily on 95%+ of the African-American vote, as do most Democrats with national aspirations. And that African-American voting block, as a demographic, is significantly more homophobic than other groups.

In which I prefer the Mormons to the idiots apparently running the Diocese of Washington DC

2009-11-12T10:06:00.002-05:00

But, you know what? Individual subdivisions of the Catholic Church are entitled to whatever policy positions they like, as long as they get out of the business of taking the government's money.

From WaPo:

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn't change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care.

Under the bill, headed for a D.C. Council vote next month, religious organizations would not be required to perform or make space available for same-sex weddings. But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay men and lesbians.

Fearful that they could be forced, among other things, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, church officials said they would have no choice but to abandon their contracts with the city.

The key word in this piece is fearful.

It becomes time for Catholics who actually believe in the teachings upon which our church is supposedly founded, to stand up and be counted.

Organizations to which I belong that promote genocide or homophobia...

2009-11-12T09:16:00.003-05:00

... because some of our commenters have the strange idea that belonging to any organization whatever makes you responsible for any sins ever committed by that organization or removes all credibility from your views.

They also seem to believe that belonging to any organization represents a blanket public statement that you endorse every single idea ever put forth by that organization.

So I thought it would be important to list for my readers those organizations with which I have been involved that engage in genocide, oppression, homophobia, or discrimination, so that everyone can understand why my views on virtually any subject are completely worthless.

1) I spent twenty-one years of my adult life as a member of an organization that engaged in relentless genocidal wars across the North American continent, has on many occasions bombarded innocent civilians, has used nuclear weapons against undefended cities, and which has engaged in personnel management policies which have (or, in several cases, continue to do so) openly discriminated against African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, female Americans, and LGBQT Americans. Yes, he said sadly on the day after November 11, I am a veteran of the US Army.

2) At the age of forty-five, I made the decision to join an ecclesiastical organization that has--at best--an uncertain record in terms of human rights. This 2,000-year-old organization has engaged in wars, politics, genocide, governmental corruption, and even child abuse. Its leaders here on Earth have proven time and again to be fallible, sometimes even miscogynist, anti-Semitic, or anti-gay. These acts are not, of course, ameliorated by the hundreds of millions of followers who have attempted to live good lives, caring for their family, their neighbors, and even strangers they will never meet in an attempt to live up to the ideals put forth by the organization's founder and first spiritual leader. Nor does it matter that many of the people inside this organization have been (and continue) to work openly and actively for change, nor that former Presidents and current Senators, Governors, and Representatives belong to this organization. It is has sordid history and those involved should be suspected of war crimes until proven innocent. Yes, I joined the Catholic Church. Before that I belonged to the Presbyterian Church (more or less), which has only been less genocidal because, apparently, it has not had as many centuries to work at it, but which did participate in the cultural genocide of Native Americans and offered any number of apologies for slavery. Crap--I'm beginning to see the point: any religious belief of any sort renders me incapable of meaningful civic participation.

3) I also belong the to the Libertarian Party. This is an interesting one. Since it has only been in existence since 1971 it did not participate in defending slavery or establishing Jim Crow-era segregation laws or refusing to support Federal anti-lynching laws like the Democrats. Nor did it take part in massive resistance, active military interventions, or the rigging of the tax codes in favor of gigantic corporations like the Republicans. In fact, the Libertarian Party has never been much more than a political debating club, since its handful of elected officials nationwide are pretty much confined to small municipal city council positions. But the Libertarian Party is inherently more dangerous than the Democrats or the Republicans because it actually challenges the idea of State supremacy in all walks of American life, and because it dares to suggest the possibility that people on balance might be better able to regulate their own affairs than the government. In particular, the LP supports the idea of private property. It is curious to discover that telling the truth about the fact that the State in America and elsewhere has been (and continues to be) the greatest engine of harmful discrimination, and visualizing a society in which such differences would be handled ... differently but also justly, is so dangerous that anonymous commenters feel threatened enough to take segments out of an ineffective political party's platform and insist they represent some sort of loyalty oath. Moreover, to insist that an outsider gets to use a political platform (you wonder how many of the millions of Dems and GOPers have the slightest idea what their platforms advocate, but no matter) as the arbiter of who can call himself or herself a Libertarian, a Republican, or a Democrat.

4) I belong to a labor union, specifically the American Association of University Professors. Anyone who knows history should understand that labor unions in the American past have been responsible for violence and even racism. They have often failed to accept or champion causes of gender equity. They have been conclusively shown to engage in corrupt politics. All of those workplace safety, child labor, and employee benefit things aside, labor unions are clearly the next worst thing (besides the Republicans) to the Nazi Party. Even my own union, the AAUP, was silent during the 1928 purge of homosexual students and professors from Harvard University. I hang my head in shame that I have chosen to beling to such an offensive organization that is also at odds with many of the principles of the Libertarian Party. Go figure: I must not only be one inconsistent son of a bitch, but an intellectual whore as well.

5) I work for an employer that does not recognize gay partners, and that clearly (by Federal regulation) discriminates in favor of certain applicants for positions. That would be my HBCU [historically Black college/university) Delaware State University. You see, the Federal government makes HBCU a legal status which can only be maintained by have at least a 63.5% ethnic minority population. Wow. I work for a State-funded organization that says we will never allow more than one-third of our students to be white. I am really feeling the urge to slit my wrists.

6) I have worked for an organization of the Federal government that is synonymous for trampling the civil rights of all Americans: the Department of Homeland Security. We should ignore the fact that I was hired specifically to teach State and Local Preparedness Officers the limits of their authority and why the US Constitution should govern their actions. I took money several years ago from DHS, and that makes me culpable for every time you have to take off your shoes to get on an airplane.

7) I was an Eagle Scout. Oh, the horror of it. I belonged to, and accepted awards from, and have allowed my son and my grandson to participate in an organization that does discriminate against gays. The fact that I have consistently worked to have that organization change that policy, and the fact that most local organizations of the Boy Scouts with whom I have ever been associated do not implement that policy is immaterial. At age eleven I should have known that it was an immoral, Hitler-Youth-like organization, and I should have spit on those neckerchief-wearing jackbooted thugs.

8) Over the years, at various times, I have contributed money and taken out memberships in organizations as varied and despicable as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association, the Organization of American Historians, Doctors without Borders, the Association of the US Army, the National Council for the Social Studies, the SPCA, the Fraternal Order of Police, Outright Libertarians, the American Library Association, the Avalon Hill Wargamers' Association, the YMCA [that "C" still stands for Christian, you know], the United Way, and the American Civil Liberties Union. I am sure that a detailed examination of each of these organizations will reveal dark histories of genocide, oppression, and general anti-American behavior.

Here, of course, is the problem: the only way to avoid belonging to organizations that you may disagree with in part is to disengage and claim the vapid moral superiority of not belonging to anything. Otherwise, any twit can come along and suggest that your membership card invalidates any other political or social opinion you might have. Or they can feel empowered to go look up lines from that organization's constitution, creed, or platform to insist from the safety of their trolling anonymity that you can't be trusted because--gasp!--you once belong to an organization which entertained thoughts they don't consider to be politically correct.

This is essentially a fatuous cop-out against actually participating in society, because all such participation requires interaction, and neither people nor organizations ever change unless you are willing to associate with, interact with, and help them change. And since most of the advances that will be made are tiny, local, and virtually invisible to the high-minded commenters who proclaim themselves superior to those who actually become involved, your life and positions can be written off as a hypocritical waste.

Shorter version for those who prefer to hide their own inaction with their anonymity: bite me.

Mmmm. Mmmm. Nothing like "reality-based" Government (from the "reality-based" left)

2009-11-12T08:42:00.015-05:00

It is just so much easier to lie and fabricate than to live up to all that hope/change with some honesty and accountability, admitting that the Obamaleft's hyper-government solutions are a big honkin' epic FAIL, arguably prolonging the pain and joblessness (just as FDR did through the Depression), except for those few (and some purely fictitious) blessed with Obama stimulus patronage .

And when your plans (predictably) FAIL, what better to cover up your FAIL than to double down on your economy-killing Keynesian pipe-dream with.....yet MORE of the same.

Of course, the endlessly Orwellian lexicon-manipulating Obamamob, who are beginning to make the Bush II administration sound like straight talkers, are at least clever enough not to use the same terminology as their first and ongoing epic fail.

This time it will be "additional investments".

Blech, what a transparent charlatan, that one.

Stimulus dishonesty

Job numbers keep proving to be exaggerated

Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 12:43 a.m.
First it was The Associated Press refuting the Obama administration’s claims for jobs saved or created nationwide by February’s $787 billion economic stimulus measure. Then it was The Sacramento Bee refuting the claims that state agencies had made for California. Then it was the Chicago Tribune refuting the claims that state agencies had made for Illinois.
The errors were not of a minor or technical nature. They were egregious.
AP reported that “some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two, three, four or even more times.” The Bee reported that California State University said “the $268.5 million it received in stimulus funding through October allowed it to retain 26,156 employees” – more than half its statewide work force. The Tribune reported that Illinois education officials grossly inflated job-saved numbers, sometimes saying school districts had saved more jobs than their total number of employees.
This is a scandal and should be treated as such. It’s not government as usual. Instead, it appears to reflect a decision to distort government data collection to support explicitly political agendas.
With U.S. unemployment now topping 10 percent, the Obama administration is struggling more than ever to fashion credible counterarguments to the assertion made by this editorial page and many pundits and economists that the massive stimulus measure was a poorly thought-out pork fest that wouldn’t work. What’s the easiest way to defend the stimulus? Make up claims about its glorious results.
Politics also appears to be driving state agencies in their willingness to prop up this bogus narrative. It helps them make the case that they should get even more borrowed money from the federal government that they never will have to repay.
Such dishonesty should be completely unacceptable – especially at the federal level. We trust the Office of Management and Budget to provide honest figures on the size of the deficit and the national debt. We trust the Labor Department to provide honest statistics on unemployment and job gains and losses by sector. We trust the Commerce Department to provide honest numbers on monthly imports and exports and the gross domestic product. We trust the Environmental Protection Agency to provide an honest accounting of air and water pollution levels.
[TN Note: I DO NOT share their trust of these agencies.]
All of these statistics end up helping shape the public debate on the most crucial issues of the day. If these numbers can’t be trusted, we can’t have an honest debate. Wen it comes to the economic stimulus package, it sure looks like the bama White House doesn’t want an honest debate. Instead, it is going to relentlessly push the very dubious claim that the stimulus was a huge success – no matter what.
We are struck yet again by the contrast between the hopeful and idealistic tone of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and the bare-knuckles Chicago-style politics of his White House. If this hardball approach goes beyond the usual arm-twisting to the routine twisting of government statistics for political purposes, that will be a grim day for America.

It should be no mystery, but damn scary to the one-party controllers of our entire government, that the public is growing restless in its fatigue with the down-your-throat, in-your-face, up-your-ass Obama government, now that the public's collective hangover from last year's Obamaphoria is only getting worse.

Or perhaps it is just the symptoms of detox withdrawal from Hopium addiction.

Did you ever wonder....

2009-11-11T19:19:00.003-05:00

... that given our government's apparently insatiable appetite for our money, why it is we don't have universal health care already?

Some folks suggest profits for Big Insurance and Big Pharma, but the thought occurs to me that even the most economically successful country in the world can only be plundered to a certain extent before it collapses, which means that our leaders have consistently had to make choices.

Shorter: the government has enough tax revenue either to institute a welfare state or a warfare state, but not both at the same time.

Gee. Guess which one our leaders have picked, and continue to pick, despite all high-sounding pretenses to the contrary.

Mormon Church supports what many Delaware conservatives don't: equal rights for LGBQT Americans in terms of housing and employment

2009-11-11T12:42:00.003-05:00

Still trying to figure out what this means after they helped bankroll the attack against same-sex marriage in California, but it's progress.

From Joe My God:

Hours after the LDS Church announced its support Tuesday night of proposed Salt Lake City ordinances aimed at protecting gay and transgender residents from discrimination in housing and employment, the City Council unanimously approved the measures. "The church supports these ordinances," spokesman Michael Otterson told the council, "because they are fair and reasonable and do not do violence to the institution of marriage." They also are consistent with Mormon teachings, he said. "I believe in a church that believes in human dignity, in treating people with respect even when we disagree -- in fact, especially when we disagree." Normally more deliberate, the council opted to vote after dozens of residents in the overflowing crowd expressed their support. "Guaranteeing a right to fair housing and fair employment is not an issue of compromise," Councilwoman Jill Remington Love said. "We are a stronger, better city this evening. I'm proud to serve on a City Council where this isn't even controversial."

Because only the government can truly institutionalize discrimination....

2009-11-10T20:03:00.004-05:00

We visit Phoenix AZ where the government has ruled that middle-class communities have the right to prevent the feeding of homeless people there.

From Coyote [via AZ Republic]

A Phoenix ordinance banning charity dining halls in residential neighborhoods withstood a challenge by a north-central Phoenix church.

Retired Arizona Supreme Court Justice Robert Corcoran, serving as a hearing officer, ruled Monday that feeding the homeless at a place of worship can be banned by city ordinance. The decision affects all Phoenix churches with underlying residential zoning.

Over the summer, city officials maintained that CrossRoads United Methodist Church, 7901 N. Central Ave., violated Phoenix zoning code by feeding the poor and homeless on its property, a use that can only occur in commercial or industrial zones.

Fortunately, we can assure Anonone [who worries that a Libertarian society would enshrine colored only signs] that the motive behind the people who do not want to allow homeless people to access food at churches in their neighborhoods is NOT discrimination--it's merely respect for the law and order that only the State can provide:

You will be relieved to know that this has nothing to do with a wealthy people fearing that their Xanax-induced equilibrium will be upset by actually seeing a poor person in their neighborhood. We are assured as such by Paul Barnes, a “neighborhood activist” who presumably participated in the suit to stop the Church from holding pancake prayer-breakfasts:

“It’s not a problem with homeless people in wealthy neighborhoods. That would be a matter of prejudice. This issue would be setting churches up to avoid zoning ordinances.”

Wow, I am so relieved. And we all know what a problem it is when churches are organized solely to evade zoning regulations. Why, just last week the First Baptist Church and Gas Station as well as the United Methodist Church and Topless Bar opened right in my neighborhood.

See, Anonone was absolutely right about governments and discrimination: the power of the State is what works to protect the downtrodden. Damn vicious, genocidal, oppressive churches think they can waltz in anywhere and start feeding poor people whenever they please.

We'll show them respect for law and order and non-discrimination.

Ah, but those damn discriminatory libertarians would have argued that since the church owned the property, it could choose to feed poor people any damn time it pleased. Obviously, that's conduct that needs to be regulated.

And as for those who continue to argue about gay soldiers and "the morale of the troops"

2009-11-10T19:54:00.002-05:00

Notice that they didn't actually discharge him, even though they knew he was gay, until after his second 15-month tour in Iraq. But then they made sure his Honorable Discharge marked him as queer.

[h/t Joe My God]

For those who keep dragging out the old "cornerstone of civilization" argument...

2009-11-10T19:52:00.001-05:00

... Dan Savage makes the killer historical point about the fact that traditional marriage has generally been about women as property, which is apparently the past that opponents of same-sex marriage yearn to recapture.

[h/t Joe My God]

Anita Done

2009-11-10T13:54:00.005-05:00

In case you missed it, Mao-loving Obama WH uppity-up Anita Dunn has been tossed overboard, err...she wants "to spend more time with her teenage son."

Reason's Tim Cavanaugh sends it up :

Jake Tapper reports that Anita Dunn, tongue-chewing White House communications director, acolyte of Mao Zedong and Mother Theresa, and a frequent surprise guest in the Hit & Run comment threads, has been ousted by counterrevolutionary enemies of the people.
Tapper, a running dog of the American Imperialist Broadcasting Company, says that Dunn was not made a non-person by capitalist stooges, but rather is leaving voluntarily.

Dunn Pictured With Her Husband, Holding Their Cat "Chairman Meow"*

*h/t - hilarious pseudonymous Reason blog commenter.

And, as usual, the Libertarian Party will miss this boat as well

2009-11-10T08:27:00.003-05:00

Thanks to the underlying homophobia evidenced by the likes of Bob Barr and Wayne Root (both of whom conveniently believe that States have rights when it comes to policies like same-sex marriage), the Libertarian Party is missing its opportunity to pick up the undying loyalty of one of the most activist segments of the electorate: the LGBQT community.

As Waldo puts it:

Waldo admits: he got suckered by the Traditional Democratic Party Approach to gay rights: do the dinners, promise the moon, and kick the can down the road to the election cycle that, like Godot, never comes. We hang one simply because indifference is better than the active hate the GOP would be pursuing if they were in power.Time to, as Pam Spaulding says, cut off the gayTM.

Waldo then goes on to cite Americablog's well-documented list of nearly forty Obama administration slights and broken promises to the gay community, including such winners as

Asking a religious right activist who claims to have been “cured” of his homosexuality to headline campaign events in South Carolina. Then letting the anti-gay bigot spend half an hour, on stage, haranguing gays at the Obama event.

Refusing for months to interview with LGBT newspapers during the campaign, while his opponent did repeatedly.

Flubbing question on whether gays are immoral.

Inviting anti-gay activist Rick Warren, who helped pass Prop 8 in California, to give the invocation at the inaugural.

Inviting a gay bishop to the inaugural festivities, then not beginning the TV broadcast until the gay bishop has finished and left.

Here's the thing: the Libertarian Party could become the party of civil rights for all Americans, and still remain true to its core principles.

Just think

1. We want the government out of marriage all together in a best case scenario, but as a stop along the way require the government to play by the Constitution and allow any two consenting adults to get hitched without examining their genitalia.

2. Libertarians may differ over defense and foreign policy, but how about supporting the equal rights of all willing American citizens to join the US military?

3. Libertarians acknowledge personal liberty as the major lynchpin of our philosophy. How about adding a spirited defense of the personal liberties of LGBQT Americans to our daily lexicon, and pointing out the inconsistencies of the two mainstream parties?

4. Actively campaign for equality in contract and family law for LGBQT families.

The irony is this: it would be in keeping with our stated philosophy, but it will never happen because--as Waldo points out from time to time--the Libertarian identification with Republicans allows us to bring homophobic social conservatives into the tent at the expense of those who actually need our advocacy.

Leslie Gelb exposes the truth about Afghanistan and General McChrystal's numbers game

2009-11-09T08:11:00.002-05:00

It's in today's Daily Beast, and even though it has been said here and elsewhere before, reaching the MSM with this story is a good thing. General McChrystal is being not just disingenuous but damn near dishonest, as Leslie Gelb details:

The key for McChrystal is getting the 44,000 troops in battle within the next 12 months. But that just can’t be done. The most optimistic assessment comes from Kimberly Kagan of the ever-optimistic, fighting Kagans (the others being Bob and Fred). According to The Wall Street Journal, her recent study for the Institute for the Study of War assessed that “it would be difficult to move enough troops from other posts to deploy anywhere close to 40,000 troops before next summer at the earliest." U.S. armed forces are so thinned out and ill-prepared from having to fight two wars and stay ready for a slew of other conflicts that it is indeed “difficult,” if not outright impossible, to deploy the requested troops in time to head off McChrystal’s mission failure. And don’t forget the nightmarish delays caused by the military’s nightmarish bureaucracy. Senior military officers I’ve spoken with predict 16 to 18 months at best. McChrystal knows these delays very well, so why is he asking for what he realizes he can’t get —and predicting mission failure if he doesn’t get them?

Read the whole thing.

The bottom line: we have no mission in Afghanistan (which is why President Obama can't settle on a strategy) and our soldiers continue to be maimed and killed ... for no good reason.

But, hey, we passed one of several different versions of health insurance reform, so why bother thinking about tens of thousands of American men and women still in harm's way to deliver on a campaign promise?

Albert Einstein ... introduced by George Bernard Shaw

2009-11-09T08:02:00.001-05:00

Can you even imagine being in the room?

[h/t Cosmic Variance]

George Orwell would be proud: Freedom means Oppression

2009-11-07T21:44:00.005-05:00

Consider the person who writes this in the wake of the Fort Hood massacre:

The Muslims in this country have to cooperate with law enforcement to identify the jihadists among us, so we can be protected from them. Otherwise, at some point, the threat of spontaneously-arising jihadists from the Muslim community will convince us that we need Muslims to pass through metal detectors or otherwise be made secure from them.

Now imagine the same paragraph rewritten to feature anti-abortion Evangelical zealots [who target abortion providers for murder]:

The Evangelicals in this country have to cooperate with law enforcement to identify the anti-abortion zealots among us, so we can be protected from them. Otherwise, at some point, the threat of spontaneously-arising zealot assassins from the Evangelical community will convince us that we need Evengelicals to pass through metal detectors or otherwise be made secure from them.

I have not written about Fort Hood because the torrent of words so far has not facilitated understanding and guided sensible future policy--it has simply reiterated the simplistic mirror positions of opposing political camps.

Fort Hood was lone-wolf domestic terrorism.

So was the assassination of Doctor George Tiller.

Both killers spawned from a religious culture whose edges are tinged with the dangerous extremism, whose uncensored voice is the unfortunate but absolutely necessary pre-condition of a free society.

Go back and read the first paragraph, which tells you that our fears will lead us to cower behind metal detectors while burying our convictions that the Bill of Rights is essential, not simply preferred, in a free society.

Robert Heinlein often said that you could not coerce free people, only kill them.

Part of me is glad that he is no longer alive to see the cowards taking over.

Stoopid stoopid Americuns should be borrowing more money while out of work

2009-11-06T23:15:00.003-05:00

Let's see....

10.2% unemployment. Check.

Millions more unable to afford health care and afraid they will either lose their homes or their jobs. Check.

Many worried Americans trying to pay off their credit cards, stop buying unnecessary shit, and actually save some money. Oh. No. Sound the alarm:

WASHINGTON -Consumers borrowed less for a record eighth straight month in September amid rising unemployment and tight credit conditions. Economists worry the declines in borrowing will drag on the fledgling recovery.

The Federal Reserve said Friday that borrowing fell at an annual rate of $14.8 billion in September. That's the biggest decline since July and was larger than the $10 billion drop economists expected.

Americans are borrowing less as they try to repair cracked nest eggs and replenish rainy day funds in a dismal jobs market. Many are finding it hard to get credit as banks, hit by the worst financial crisis in decades, have tightened lending standards.

Borrowing by consumers for revolving credit, including credit cards, fell at an annual rate of 13.3 percent in September, the same as August. This category has declined for a record 12 straight months.

Borrowing for non-revolving loans, including auto loans, dropped at an annual rate of 3.7 percent in September after edging up 0.1 percent in August. The August gain reflected the surge in car sales as consumers rushed to take advantage of the government's Cash for Clunkers program.

The $14.8 billion overall decline in borrowing left total consumer credit at $2.46 trillion in September. The 7.2 percent annual rate of decline followed a 4.8 percent drop in August. The Fed's report doesn't include mortgages or other loans secured by real estate.

While economists have worried for years about the low rate of U.S. savings, the concern is that consumers could derail the recovery if they begin socking away too much of their incomes. Consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of total economic activity.

This is why it is now necessary for the government to begin spending money it doesn't have--because you won't.

Somebody will, of course, show up here and explain the stimulus and multipliers to me (ignoring the fact that I discussed them in exhaustive detail back at the time), but the most important fact in this story is actually the final short sentence that I quoted: Consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of total economic activity.

This only happens when the State interferes--as it has for decades--with the flow of credit to incentivize more and more people to purchase more and more shit that they don't need and really don't even want in order to (supposedly) provide more other people jobs producing and marketing shit that people don't need or really even want.

Only in this sort of managed (by idiots and Alan Greenspan) economy could we reach the point wherein deciding to live within your means becomes an economic crime punishable by generation-beggaring tax increases, because if people won't spend money they don't have on shit they don't need or want, the government must do it for them.

And I'm not talking about those little dipshit criticisms like we saved 900 jobs with stimulus spending at a company that only employs fourteen peopel, either.

I'm talking about roads and bridges and all that critical damn infrastructure that we all gotta go get shovels and repair.

See, this is the government's plan: over-reliance on foreign oil and the internal combustion engine is ... bad. We need a new economy based on mass transit (especially that yummy light rail nobody actually ever rides) and eating all our food from little organic neighborhood gardens so that we can make all those smelly, carbon-producing highways and bridges that are blighting our country and shrinking the icebergs obsolete.

In ten years we shouldn't need all that infrastructure because we'll be in the new Aquarian age of alternative energy.

So we'll just spend several hundred billion now to rebuild it all so that it will be in good shape when we stop using it, years before we are finished paying for it.

Stoopid Americuns. Stop living within your means. It is unpatriotic, treasonous, actually. Paul Krugman would round you up and lecture you to death except that we need you to have babies to pay the taxes to cover the spending we must do on your behalf.

My theory is that you ought to just say the hell with it and go back to maxing out whatever credit you can find.

That way the government will declare you a hero and you can at least enjoy the useless trinkets until the nice men come and take it all away to send you to debtor's prison.

Now I understand why Bernie Madoff made sense to so many people.

Signs of the apocalypse: Dave Burris and Donviti both back

2009-11-06T14:42:00.001-05:00

... and both worth reading.

Dave Burris.

Donviti's The Wage Slave.

Visit often. Comment. Cringe. I will.

Serious question: will this be considered a racist statement?

2009-11-05T21:57:00.003-05:00

In a WaPo story criticizing the Obama administration for a long series of mistakes in Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, this sentence appears:

Daniel Levy, a veteran Israeli peace negotiator now at the Century Foundation in Washington, summed up the administration's efforts in recent days as "amateur night at the Apollo Theater."

Given that the Apollo Theater is one of the historic landmarks of African-American culture....

On the other hand, you can't lampoon the Century Foundation as rightwing...

And Daniel Levy cannot be written off as some hardline conservative....

So in the good spirits of "see, Hube, I found one before you did [finally]" I have to wonder how this one will be treated by the pundits. If at all.

Don't worry if you can't find H1N1 vaccine for your kids: Goldman Sachs has its supply

2009-11-05T21:42:00.002-05:00

... courtesy the rest of the government:

To the list of hundreds of schools, hospitals, and community health centers that have received limited allocations of the H1N1 swine flu vaccine, you can now add some of New York's largest employers. In the past week or so 13 companies, including Citigroup (C) and Goldman Sachs (GS), have begun receiving small quantities of the vaccine, according to city health authorities....

According to the city, Goldman has requested 5,300 doses.

Obviously a much higher priority than schools, daycare facilities, nursing homes....

[h/t Waldo]

Shame on the Diocese of Wilmington

2009-11-05T19:55:00.004-05:00

Bankrupt and pleading poor mouth with regard to settling child sexual abuse cases, on 16 July 2009 our Diocese still found $200 to send to Maine for the campaign to overturn same-sex marriage.

Look, the Catholic Church is against same-sex marriage. But to discover that in our cash-strapped Diocese the decision was made to send even a nominal amount to a political campaign multiple states away is shameful.

From what I understand of the economics of our charities, the Diocese just spent enough on that to have fed an additional hundred or so of Wilmington's poor on Thanksgiving.

I guess I should just be happy that we didn't send $50,000--like the Arch-Diocese of Philadelphia did.

Great intel we were getting from that Wali Karzai...

2009-11-05T10:49:00.003-05:00

You'd think he might have helped the CIA twig to the fact that most of the American-trained Afghan police force had, uh, been infiltrated by the Taliban:

Following this morning’s incident, in which a long-serving Afghan policeman shot five British soldiers and then disappeared into the Helmand Province, the status of the nation’s police force in increasingly coming under question.

Officials say the police have been successfully infiltrated “at every level” by the Taliban, meaning even seemingly loyal police, today’s attacker served without incident for three years for instance, could be ticking time bombs just waiting for the order to attack.

Corruption and incompetence are long-standing issues with the nation’s police force – as one British soldier put it “we were literally training them how to point a gun on the ranges, and telling them why you should not stop cars and demand ‘taxes.’”

Which is probably the reason why the CIA is so disappointed to be caught having paid of for eight years an opium-dealing scumbag with access to the highest levels of the pot of corruption that passes for the US-puppet Afghan government.

By don't try telling that to anybody around here trying to do the faux outrage bit.

Now Here's A Famous Member of Congress's Son Whose US Senate Campaign I Can Support Wholeheartedly

2009-11-05T08:25:00.007-05:00

Congressman Ron Paul's son, Rand, has now risen to the top of fundraising and polling in his pursuit of a U.S. Senate seat from that great state of Kentucky.

via Agitator Radley Balko :

Rand Paul Takes Lead in the Polls
Over at the blog In the Agora, Joshua Claybourn notes that libertarian (and Ron Paul offspring) Rand Paul has taken an early polling lead for the Republican nomination to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.). Paul has already raised far more money than his opponent, Kentucky’s GOP establishment-backed Secretary of State Trey Grayson. But Paul has also been able to convert dollars into poll points. He has jumped 14 points in the last three months.
Claybourn, an attorney and writer just across the Ohio River in Evansville, Indiana observes:
Rand Paul is a strong states’ rights advocate who wants the federal government out of people’s lives. He opposes federal drug laws and says the U.S. government should not outlaw gay marriage because only churches should be in the marriage business. He is skeptical of foreign interventionism and doggedly Constitutional about any engagement. But more than anything he likes talking about fiscal issues and the need to scale back government intrusion in economics and reform the nation’s fiscal policies…
Libertarian intrusions into Republican primaries are nothing new. But what separates Rand Paul from most other libertarian candidates (including his father) is that Rand is not a novelty act. He is a known commodity as a long-time practicing ophthalmologist in western Kentucky. Along with tremendous intellectual heft, Rand is a polished public speaker with a professional presence. In short, he is an ideal candidate for the libertarian cause.
All of which would explain why the national GOP is trying like hell to make sure he doesn’t get the nomination.

Kentucky is definitely a solid Republican state. Rand Paul, if the GOP nominee, would almost surely win in 2010, especially given the anti-Washington, anti-Obama, anti-Democrat momentum building across the country.

But Rand Paul will surely, like his highly-courteous father, run on a largely positive libertarian agenda, without getting into the business of attacking opponents personally.

A U.S. Senator Rand Paul would be, without question, the most libertarian American citizen to ever hold a seat in the United States Senate (in modern times anyway).

Mitch McConnell's head might explode....not to mention the insufferable Lindsey Graham.

I know I will be sending a donation.

David Anderson & Hugo Chavez : Socialist Birds of a Feather

2009-11-05T08:08:00.010-05:00

Hey David, it's not just all about economics.

Socialism seeks to socialize a nation (or the world) to mandated norms of behavior and lifestyle, most usually accomplished by state control of economic ways and means.

But we all know such totalitarian statism is never content with, nor limited to, expropriating just your wallet...

VENEZUELA: Homophobia Stalks the Streets - in Uniform
By Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Nov 4 (IPS) - One Friday at around midnight, on Villaflor Street, a favourite spot for gays and lesbians in the Venezuelan capital, Yonatan Matheus and Omar Marques noticed two Caracas police patrol vans carrying about 20 detainees, most of them very young.

When Marques and Matheus, who are gay leaders of the Venezuela Diversa (Diverse Venezuela) organisation, approached to find out what was happening and take pictures, they were picked up too.

"Like most of those arrested, our identity documents and mobile phones were taken away, we were beaten, our sexual orientation was insulted in degrading language, and we were refused permission to speak to the Justice Ministry officials and members of the National Guard who were present," Matheus told IPS.

The vans set out for the Caracas police headquarters with their load of detainees, but Marques, Matheus and two minors were left by the main highway crossing the city. They had to walk to the city centre, where they contacted officials at the Ombudsman's Office to file complaints.

This incident in October was one of the multiple arbitrary arrests carried out against the GLBTI (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transvestite, transgender and intersex) community, within the framework of Operation Safe Caracas, a campaign to crack down on crime involving personnel from several police forces and the National Guard, a military body with police functions.

The Venezuelan capital, with five million people living in the metropolitan area, is one of the most dangerous cities in the world; the annual murder rate is in excess of 135 per 100,000 population. In the third week of October alone there were 65 murders, and the central morgue has been stretched beyond capacity several times this year.

"Operation Safe Caracas has meant more insecurity, because it adds police harassment to attacks by common criminals and homophobic citizens," César Sequera of the Venezuelan GLBTI Network, a recently formed coalition of groups defending the rights of sexual minorities, told IPS.

In Caracas and the oil-rich western state of Zulia, where Venezuela Diversa is also active, "so far this year nine transsexual persons have been killed in violence related to their condition, so one of our most urgent claims is proper guarantees for the right to life," Matheus said.

Astrid, a transvestite sex worker who finds her clients among drivers on Libertador Avenue in Caracas, told journalists that "sometimes the police stop us, take our money and even force us to have sex with them under threat of being beaten or dropped off in a dangerous part of the city."

......................

The non-governmental organisation Citizen Action against AIDS (ACCSI) carried out a 2008 survey of 742 people in the GLBTI community in Caracas and the western cities of Maracaibo and Mérida, to investigate negative experiences with the police.

Half the interviewees said they had experienced situations in which their rights had been violated, although most did not report them, out of fear or a sense of shame. The most common behaviours they complained of were verbal aggression (36 percent), extortion (20 percent), physical aggression (12 percent) and deprivation of freedom (11 percent).

"GLBTI persons suffer strong rejection in Venezuela, because of dogma, social prejudice and mistaken medical or psychiatric diagnoses," said Edgar Carrasco, who directed the survey. "And the worst of," he added, "is that the discrimination and impunity is related to the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic."

The depth of this rejection was spelled out to IPS by Fernando, a 22-year-old cookery student who came to Caracas "practically in headlong flight, because if we are excluded in Caracas, where gays gather in large groups to go out or spend time together, imagine what it's like in a small town full of prejudice like Altagracia de Orituco," in the central plains of the country, where agriculture and ranching are the main activities.

Article 21 of the 1999 Venezuelan constitution states that all persons are equal before the law and, consequently, discrimination based on race, sex, creed or social condition is prohibited.

On this basis, the Supreme Court ruled in March 2008 that no individual may be discriminated against by reason of his or her sexual orientation in any way that implies treating him or her in an unequal fashion.

Yet based on article 77 which protects marriage between a man and a woman, in the same ruling the Supreme Court refused to equate the rights of stable homosexual unions with those of heterosexual married couples.

Sequera of the GLBTI Network emphasised that "many of our rights are still being infringed: in the first place, respect for our identity and self-image, and secondly the right to health, since we are often denied access to public and private health care centres, and we aren't even considered as possible blood donors, for example."

Matheus also complained of "employment discrimination in terms of access to jobs and treatment in the workplace, as well as discrimination in schools and educational institutions, where we are harassed by teachers and other students, leading many of us to drop out."

"But police harassment remains a serious concern, because in effect it abrogates our right to freedom of movement, to use the public thoroughfares of this country, or to freely and peacefully go to night clubs or shopping centres to exercise our right to leisure and entertainment, just like everybody else," Matheus concluded. (END/2009)

I hope David Anderson and his homophobic compadres over at "Delaware Politics" are happy to be in league with Hugo Chavez's government.

And lest David come here and try to put gauzy white gloves on his own rendition of the iron fist applied to same-sex couples, splitting hairs that he and his fellow travelers in the U.S. of A. aren't just as authoritarian and troglodytic as Huggy Chavez's regime.....save it, David.

Socialism can, and often does, rise out of (pseudo)-religious underpinnings. I am sure David knows all about so-called "liberation theology".

Arbitrary state denial of equal rights, on the bases of superstition, fear, and/or hatred, is no less abhorrent because it hides behind religion, rather than merely a sick secular desire to control. In fact, to me, using religious faith to such ends is even worse in its blazing hypocrisy....especially from those claiming "Judeo-Christian faith".

Jesus Christ would positively rail against your self-serving ideology of self-validating intolerance and obeisance to state power, as long as it enforces (by majoritarian will) your narrow ends, purely at the expense of others in a vulnerable minority position in society.

CIA paying off Harmid Karzai's drug-trafficking brother...

2009-11-05T06:55:00.004-05:00

... is what the headlines should read, instead of attempting manufacture phony outrage and comparison with the Cheney/Libby leaking of Valerie Plame's name a few years ago.

Predictably, the two-bit press--both nationally and locally--attempts to make this a serious issue, ala Rasmussen:

Well, last week, The New York Times again published on the front page the name of an alleged CIA-paid undercover asset. This time, it was none other than Ahmed Wali Karzai, the powerful brother of the Afghan president. The Times cited, on background, Obama administration "political officials," "senior administration officials" and others as its sources to the effect that Karzai has been secretly on the CIA payroll for eight years and has been helping the United States with intelligence, logistic and base support for our special forces, and recruiting and running an Afghan paramilitary force on the instruction of the CIA -- as well as being a major narcotics trafficker.

This may well be the most egregious compromise of an extraordinarily valuable and inflammatory secret CIA operative in our history. It was leaked not after the policy was carried out -- as in the Plame case -- but just weeks before the president will be making his fateful strategy and manpower decision for the Afghan war. It is also just days before the runoff election in Afghanistan, which may well be affected by the release of this shocking information.

Let's count the ways this is idiotic:

1) It is our stated national policy in Afghanistan to suppress the opium trade; we have cited all sorts of moral and developmental reasons. Instead, we discover the CIA facilitating that trade by supporting Wali.

2) We have now admitted that far from being guarantors of a fair and free electon in Afghanistan we have been paying off the brother of the man internationally known to have rigged the vote--possibly using funds provided by the CIA.

3) Saying that Karzai had been secretly on the CIA payrol for eight years is NOT (I say again for the theologically impaired, NOT) the same thing as making him an extremely valuable ... secret CIA operative. He is at best a paid foreign asset with no allegiance to the US beyond money, and as such is not covered by the same laws which applied in the Plame case.

4) Rumors about Wali being involved with US intelligence gathering have been circulating for years. What's amazing is that the Rasmussen story converts him into something like a betrayed American patriot when in reality he is operating on the same level as the UN Secretary General's relatives who corruptly profited from the oil-for-food program in Iraq. He's at best a wanna-be warlord that we use for convenience sake, and the risks--if any--he has taken have been for his own bottom line.

5) Finally, given the history of the Karzai family, you have to wonder in the long run how many American GIs might have been killed or wounded based on information this guy was willing to sell to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Most warlords and druglords in that part of the world are quite willing to play both ends against the middle. Nothing known about Wali suggests that he is any different.

Nice try, guys.

Go back to red-baiting; you're better at it.

I pledge allegiance to the United States of Sodom

2009-11-04T12:05:00.004-05:00

My friend Waldo first introduced me to the term Christianist, and--for a brief time--I thought it was a derogatory term for Christian. Then I realized that the definition was something more like this:

one who advocates the reordering of society and government in accordance with fundamentalist Christian interpretations of the Bible.

Which explains the following local reaction to the defeat of same-sex marriage in Maine yesterday:

Now let’s get back to marriage. Praise GOD! We are still the USA and not the United States of Sodom. We understand that marriage is between a man and woman not some pc fiction.

USA equals fundamentalist Biblical principles of the type espoused by evangelists like the late Carl McIntyre [hero to the same commenter above], described by First Things' TImothy George as having "a knack for gutter politics," and who was notable for such mainstream ideas as total abstinence from alcohol, a radical apocalyptic eschatology ("he had once spoken of the “Roman terror” as a worse threat to American freedom than communism"), making almost no "distinction between true Christianity and superpatriotic Americanism," and repudiating the Reverend Billy Graham thus:

WHY does Dr. Graham always advise converts to “go to the church of your own choice,” instead of directing them to fundamental assemblies?

WHY is he allowing himself to be drawn into the modernistic ecumenical movement that is gaining such momentum each passing year?

WHY did he allow smoking at the banquet in New York City on September 17, 1956, with prayers being offered by modernists?

WHY did he (as did Cardinal Spellman) recommend a moving picture, “The Ten Commandments”? Does he endorse the theater for believers?

WHY doesn't he wake up to the fact that fundamentalism can't “play ball” with modernism anymore than the USA can with Communism?

WHY this statement, Dr. Graham: “The Catholic Church has been very friendly to me anywhere I have gone”? Tsk! Billy!

Leonard Sweet quite accurately described McIntyre as “a mental and spiritual oaf who presented himself as an absolute rectum of rectitude," one of whose favorite sports was castigating anyone and everyone who disagreed with his theology as a commie or a modernist.

It was McIntyre among others who so reviled the 1952 Revised Standard Version of the Bible that they inspired book-burnings--or should I say "Bible burnings"?--because the RSV editors had the temerity to translate correctly the verses in the origional Hebrew Isaiah 7:14 as "Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." This corrected the mistranslation of the Septaguint [LXX] Greek translation that was in use by the Jewish community during the 1st Century AD; but McIntyre and his ilk considered only the King James Version of the Bible to be infallible Holy Writ, challenging both the Christianity and patriotism of anybody who disageed.

In fact, being anti-Catholic was so tied up with being a fundamentalist that in 1945 McIntyre wrote: "As we enter the post-war world, without any doubt the greatest enemy of freedom and liberty that the world has to face today is the Roman Catholic system."

This is the hero of the local blogger who has no difficulty with red-baiting, and who accuses anybody who disagrees with him of attempting to inaugurate the United States of Sodom.

Sodom is an interesting reference for a Christianist to use, given the literal meaning of Genesis 19:7-8, when Lot is attempting to save the two guests in his house by offering to let strangers rape his daughters:

... 7and said, "I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. 8 Behold, I have two daughters who have not known man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof."

So by suggesting that same-sex marriage advocates are trying to initiate a United States of Sodom, our local blogger is not just making a political statement, he is arguing by analogy that allowing gay people to marry is the equivalent of child rape.

In what context is Carl McIntyre cited by our local blogger as a hero?

Since I have been recently accused of taking him out of context, let's try the whole comment:

Personally, I have always been a fan of Carl Mcintire and Col. Domer so red baiting wouldn’t bother me anyway. It’s the reds that bother me. She is no more a Republican than the next commie lib and I would appreciate it if she made it official like she is hinting. The party is stronger without a 5th column. That is all I am saying.

OK, we've done with Carl McIntyre, so let's handle red-baiting, beginning with its implications for educators:

During the 1930s financial pressures and political factionalism combined to imperil the principle of academic freedom, by which teachers are free to instruct without the imposition of political or ideological agendas. Conservatives in groups such as the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) repeatedly attacked the schools as bastions of communist propaganda and sought to have school boards restrict the curricula of public schools and require teachers to sign loyalty oaths. After the Democratic landslide in the elections of 1936, conservatives, smarting from wholesale repudiation at the polls, turned their attention to the schools, attempting to turn them into bastions of conservative philosophy. Although historians normally date the onset of "red-baiting," or "witch-hunting" for communists, after World War II, for teachers red-baiting began in the 1930s.

Red-baiting led to loyalty oaths, and inevitably to McCarthyism, which is enjoying a strange resurgence today [and was, truth be told, enjoying that resurgence in terms of the rehabilitation of Joe McCarthy's reputation, long before Barack Obama], which led to massive abuses of personal and civil liberties on par with the worst Patriot Act abuses.

Thanks to the First Amendment [of which Carl McIntyre did not approve]:

You have the absolute right to venerate someone like Carl McIntyre with his robust anti-Catholic prejudices.

You have the absolute right to stand up and say red baiting wouldn’t bother me anyway.

No matter how stupid such positions make you look.

I also have the right to refuse to allow your Christianist [as distinguished from Christian--which to me would include Catholics and others who do not share your insistence that only fundamentalist evangelicals can determine what the faith means] attempts to mischaracterize Americans with different sexualities or different political opinions to stand.

Shorter version: don't expect me not to call you out for acting like a bigoted buffoon.

PS--to donviti: I guess you win. Sorry.

If Rolling Stone is correct, then both Generals Petraeus and McChrystal need to go

2009-11-03T19:36:00.004-05:00

... because in this country Generals execute the policies of the civilian government, they don't set it.

This article deserves a full read:

In early October, as President Obama huddled with top administration officials in the White House situation room to rethink America's failing strategy in Afghanistan, the Pentagon and top military brass were trying to make the president an offer he couldn't refuse. They wanted the president to escalate the war — go all in by committing 40,000 more troops and another trillion dollars to a Vietnam-like quagmire — or face a full-scale mutiny by his generals.

Obama knew that if he rebuffed the military's pressure, several senior officers — including Gen. David Petraeus, the ambitious head of U.S. Central Command, who is rumored to be eyeing a presidential bid of his own in 2012 — could break ranks and join forces with hawks in the Republican Party. GOP leaders and conservative media outlets wasted no time in warning Obama that if he refused to back the troop escalation being demanded by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander overseeing the eight-year-old war, he'd be putting U.S. soldiers' lives at risk and inviting Al Qaeda to launch new assaults on the homeland. The president, it seems, is battling two insurgencies: one in Afghanistan and one cooked up by his own generals.

First things first: General David Petraeus stands no chance whatever as a Presidential candidate. He would make the McCain campaign appear thoughtful and well organized. Barack Obama's wet dream should be that the GOPers nominate him.

Second things second: General McChrystal has been openly insubordinate and--so far--has not even demonstrated his ability to do anything besides ask for more troops. In fact, since replacing General McKiernan, he actually seems to be losing the war more quickly than his predecessor, despite having thousands more troops under his command.

Third things third: The US military doesn't actually have available the 60-8,000 troops that McChrystal is demanding. At least not without breaking the back of our force rotation.

Final things final: We have no mission in Afghanistan. Even General McChrystal admits there are fewer than 100 Al Qaeda operatives left in the country. We are helping fight out a thirty-year-long ethnic civil war, while destabilizing Pakistan with our ham-handed influence. {Oh, but Al Qaeda could get Pakistan's nukes, the warlords cry. Hey, has anybody actually looked at how unstable and unpredictable the Pakistani government is? They threaten to nuke India roughly every other Tuesday.]

The troops who have continued to fight, die, and be mutilated in Afghanistan are my brothers and sisters, and they are being betrayed by their own Generals, who have now placed their own egotistical stake in winning above what's good for American policy.

It's funny....

2009-11-03T18:02:00.004-05:00

.... when I get a link--either positive or negative--from Delawareliberal I get a noticeable jump in my traffic reports--sometimes a couple hundred extra hits in a day.

But when Delaware Politics notices me .... nothing.

I wondered why.

Here are the current Alexa rankings.

Delawareliberal [rank] 742,247 [sites linking in] 160
Delaware Libertarian [rank] 1,305,533 [sites linking in] 90
Delaware Politics [rank] 4,193,377 [sites linking in] 34

That would seem to explain a lot.

Time to remove the Diocese of Portland (Maine) tax exempt status

2009-11-02T18:11:00.003-05:00

Given that the Bishop of the Diocese instructed Marc Mutty, his Director of Public Relations, to go on leave from the Church in order to run the anti-same-sex marriage campaign in Maine, while continuing to pay his salary from Church coffers.

Funny how that little detail is missing in the latest AP coverage of the story:

Marc Mutty, on leave from a job with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland to run the Stand for Marriage campaign, said in a homestretch appeal for donations that the election "is about the future of marriage in Maine, and thus the nation."

"It is about whether marriage will continue to be between one man and one woman as God intended and human history has affirmed, or if we will plunge our state into a radical social experiment of 'any two will do,'" he said.

The diocese coordinated $550,000 in contributions to the repeal campaign and has criticized Baldacci, a Catholic and former altar boy, for signing the marriage law.

In fact, $23,995.21--or 4.4% of the money raised in collection plates at target second collections while priests asked parishoners to consider What Would Jesus Do? about gay marriage--has gone to pay Mr. Mutty's salary since June.

Mutty denies that any funds come from the church collection plates, but admits that some parishoners might be a bit hacked off at not using the money to, say, help the poor or something....

But Marc Mutty, a leader of the group seeking to repeal the law who is on leave from his work at the diocese, said parishioners should know the donated funds were not taken from the collection plate.

"The money is dedicated revenues that were provided by a donor for causes such as these and money from the collection basket or any of those types of things would never be used," he said....

Mutty said he understands why people get upset when they see that the diocese spent money on this issue, regardless of where the money actually came from.

"There's no question that some would say that it's a shame we have to spend this kind of money on this kind of issue when we should be spending it on the poor or those kinds of things," he said.

It's those damn queers--can't you see that they want to get married specifically to cause poor people to starve because the Church can't run the Food Banks while telling people about the immiment collapse of Western Civilization.

Oh, by the way: it appears that Mutty is simply lying.

From Clerical Whispers:

The Diocese of Portland, Maine has asked parishioners to donate in a second collection on Sunday to raise money to help repeal the state's same-sex marriage law.

Officials said donations like the ones collected at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception will go to pay for television ads aimed at overturning the state law that legislators passed last spring, WMTW News 8 reports.

In fact, the entire sordid affair, in which the opposition to same-sex marriage is in fact being bankrolled by four big religious groups, calls out for a yanking of tax-exempt status for the Diocese.

This burgeoning theocracy is what our local zealot David Anderson represents as his sort of democracy:

The legislature foisted same sex marriage on the voters of Maine as part of the 6 for 6 campaign. PPP shows a majority of it’s voters are not enthused and the traditional marriage measure may have majority support.

And for my liberal friends: President Obama has plenty of time to campaign for New Jersey's Jon Corzine, but other than his usual vague no-timeline swipe at saying he'll allow LGBT Americans to die openly for their country ... someday ... he has done in Maine exactly what he did in California last year: washed his hands of the whole idea of standing up for the rights of some of his strongest supporters.

Yea, yeah, I know. Limited political capital and all that.

... and just in case you thought all those bail-outs were working out ...

2009-11-02T17:57:00.004-05:00

From Politics Daily:

The Treasury Department's purchase of nearly $46 billion of Fannie Mae's preferred stock made U.S. taxpayers major owners of the government-sponsored enterprise. This investment so far has not been very profitable for the taxpayer --- Fannie Mae lost just under $40 billion in the first six months of this year. The government has already spent $91 billion propping up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Not to worry, however, because the Treasury Department North (aka Goldman Sachs) has got its hand out again:

As if $22 billion in bonuses were not enough, Goldman Sachs would now like to obtain another $1 billion in tax benefits from the federal government.

As with the $12.9 billion that Goldman Sachs received from the U.S. Government via payments made to the American International Group, Goldman Sachs would obtain an indirect federal benefit by using tax credits the government provided to Fannie Mae to offset its own profits and thus its federal tax payments. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Goldman Sachs might be purchasing up to $1 billion of Fannie Mae's tax credits.

Just for the record I proudly allow my children to have sex with demons

2009-11-02T11:04:00.003-05:00

... or at least that's what Pat Robertson's CBN says I did when I let the little tykes go out Trick-or-Treating:

Decorating buildings with Halloween scenes, dressing up for parties, going door-to-door for candy, standing around bonfires and highlighting pumpkin patches are all acts rooted in entertaining familiar spirits. All these activities are demonic and have occult roots.

The word "occult" means "secret." The danger of Halloween is not in the scary things we see but in the secret, wicked, cruel activities that go on behind the scenes. These activities include:

Sex with demons

Orgies between animals and humans

Animal and human sacrifices

Sacrificing babies to shed innocent blood

Rape and molestation of adults, children and babies

Revel nights

Conjuring of demons and casting of spells

Release of "time-released" curses against the innocent and the ignorant.

Another abomination that goes on behind the scenes of Halloween is necromancy, or communication with the dead. Séances and contacting spirit guides are very popular on Halloween, so there is a lot of darkness lurking in the air.

I do, however, draw the line at necromancy. [By the way, you moron, necromancy is not "communication with the dead" it is the use of the dead as a source of power for magic. Geez. At least get your f**king heresies straight.]

This page can now only be seen as a cached image, because for some reason Pat Robertson decided to take it down when a few apparent Satan-worshippers started to notice it.

The author and devoted readers of this sort of crap are, I might note, the bulwarks of David Anderson's deeply religious America, and are also the same people sworn to protect us from that evil same-sex marriage if they have to kill off the democratic process to do it.

Obama Administration continues to expand Bushco State Secrets doctrine; supporters remain silent

2009-11-02T10:35:00.003-05:00

This is what Senator Barack Obama said of the Bush State Secrets doctrine while running for President in 2008 [and defending his own vote for telecom immunity]:

I wouldn't have drafted the legislation like this, and it does not resolve all of the concerns that we have about President Bush's abuse of executive power. It grants retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that may have violated the law by cooperating with the Bush administration's program of warrantless wiretapping. This potentially weakens the deterrent effect of the law and removes an important tool for the American people to demand accountability for past abuses.

Here, Glenn Greenwald explains, is the stunning reversal in recent Obama Administration DOJ filings on the issue:

The Obama administration has, yet again, asserted the broadest and most radical version of the "state secrets" privilege -- which previously caused so much controversy and turmoil among loyal Democrats (when used by Bush/Cheney) -- to attempt to block courts from ruling on the legality of the government's domestic surveillance activities. Obama did so again this past Friday -- just six weeks after the DOJ announced voluntary new internal guidelines which, it insisted, would prevent abuses of the state secrets privilege. Instead -- as predicted -- the DOJ continues to embrace the very same "state secrets" theories of the Bush administration -- which Democrats generally and Barack Obama specifically once vehemently condemned -- and is doing so in order literally to shield the President from judicial review or accountability when he is accused of breaking the law.

The case of Shubert v. Bush is one of several litigations challenging the legality of the NSA program, of which the Electronic Frontier Foundation is lead coordinating counsel. The Shubert plaintiffs are numerous American citizens suing individual Bush officials, alleging that the Bush administration instituted a massive "dragnet" surveillance program whereby "the NSA intercepted (and continues to intercept) millions of phone calls and emails of ordinary Americans, with no connection to Al Qaeda, terrorism, or any foreign government" and that "the program monitors millions of calls and emails . . . entirely in the United States . . . without a warrant" (page 4). The lawsuit's central allegation is that the officials responsible for this program violated the Fourth Amendment and FISA and can be held accountable under the law for those illegal actions.

Rather than respond to the substance of the allegations, the Obama DOJ is instead insisting that courts are barred from considering the claims at all. Why? Because -- it asserted in a Motion to Dismiss it filed on Friday -- to allow the lawsuit to proceed under any circumstances -- no matter the safeguards imposed or specific documents excluded -- "would require the disclosure of highly classified NSA sources and methods about the TSP [Terrorist Surveillance Program] and other NSA activities" (page 8). According to the Obama administration, what were once leading examples of Bush's lawlessness and contempt for the Constitution -- namely, his illegal, warrantless domestic spying programs -- are now vital "state secrets" in America's War on Terror, such that courts are prohibited even from considering whether the Government was engaging in crimes when spying on Americans.

Here's an excerpt from the brief filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of the plaintiffs:

Defendant's argument is breathtaking. If the Executive successfully uses the state secrets privilege to dismiss this case at the pleading stage, there will be virtually no check left upon the ability of an overly-aggressive Executive to violate the rights of ordinary Americans.

Here is the response from all the folks--both locally and nationally--who were so stridently agonizing over President Bush's destruction of the US Constitution:

[source]

Red-baiting and vomit: the new face of David Anderson's Delaware Politics

2009-11-02T08:24:00.003-05:00

Having remained silent on the continued drift of Delaware Politics toward loonie-land long enough, two recent David Anderson posts simply cannot be ignored.

The mildest is his reportage on the attempt to roll back same-sex marriage in Maine, which is conspicuous by its absence of reporting the tactics being utiized by the proponents of reversing the legislature. Quoth David:

The legislature foisted same sex marriage on the voters of Maine as part of the 6 for 6 campaign. PPP shows a majority of it’s voters are not enthused and the traditional marriage measure may have majority support.

First, I loved the use of the word foisted. The anti-same-sex marriage crowd complains if the institution is supported by the courts [judicial activism], then whines when it is passed by the elected legislators [foisted on the voters], and then suddenly demands an Anschluss-like plebiscite. The Democratic process is only fair when it returns exactly the result they want.

But here's the plank in David's eye: refusing to acknowledge the lengths to which conservative Christians and their leaders are willing to go to subvert the process. From Waldo:

The Catholic Bishop of Portland has been demanding special collections to fund his anti-marriage campaign even as he is closing parish churches for want of money from his million-dollar mansion.

This is David Anderson's America? Where the churches are closing parishes due to lack of money, while demanding extra collections to reverse the legislative process even as some of their own members object?

What about the Bishop of Portland foisting his priorities on the poor people who now won't find food banks or the other traditional Catholic charities available to them because their leaders have decided it's more important to get into politics, and justify their actions by actually asking What Would Jesus Do?

In other news, David has now proudly stooped to Red-baiting other American citizens running for political office, characterizing former the former GOP candidate in New York's 23rd Congressional District as a Commie Lib and opining fatuously:

When you have a card check, gay marriage supporting, tax hiker, big spending, government health care, cap and trade, abortion funding candidate, you have someone that is anathema to the America I love. If you tell me that person is a Republican, you just make me vomit.

Let's check out what makes you anathema to David Anderson's America--stopping first to note the interesting use of that religious reference (Anathema=a formal ecclesiastical curse accompanied by excommunication).

Do you support labor organizing? David suggests you are a commie lib and not an American.

Do you believe in same-sex marriage? David suggests you are a commie lib and not an American.

Did you agree with the stimulus? David suggests you are a commie lib and not an American.

Do you support health insurance reform? David suggests you are a commie lib and not an American.

Do you support cap and trade? David suggests you are a commie lib and not an American.

Do you support abortion rights? David suggests you are a commie lib and not an American.

Ironically, there are several items on the above list that I do not personally support. But to suggest, as folks on the extremes of the Far Left and Far Right are now doing, that to hold a different political opinion somehow makes you less of an American, is not just to fail to understand the Democratic process, but to be actively attempting to subvert it.

Over the past year I have called out people on the Left who have stepped across that line, and I call out David Anderson now.

You have moved into the same dangerous ground so proudly held by extremists of every philosophy that you are the one endangering that which you say you seek to save.

Here's a question for you

2009-11-01T11:28:00.003-05:00

First, the set-up about Goldman Sachs' potential violations of securities laws via McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.

Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

The details are fascinating, and you should read them.

But here's the question:

Since Goldman Sachs is now effectively the US Treasury Department, will it have to waive sovereign immunity for the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate and, if necessary, prosecute the corporation?

Just asking.

The DEA and elderly patients in nursing homes: Government living down to my expectations

2009-10-31T10:43:00.003-04:00

You know the Drug Enforcement Administration has for years interfered in the ability of patients in chronic pain to access medical marijuan, but did you know that our Drug Gestapo also interferes in the delivery of prescription pain medication to your elderly relatives in nursing homes?

WaPo:

Heightened efforts by the Drug Enforcement Administration to crack down on narcotics abuse are producing a troubling side effect by denying some hospice and elderly patients needed pain medication, according to two Senate Democrats and a coalition of pharmacists and geriatric experts....

The DEA has sought to prevent drug theft and abuse by staff members in nursing homes, requiring signatures from doctors and an extra layer of approvals when certain pain drugs are ordered for sick patients.

The law, however, "fails to recognize how prescribing practitioners and the nurses who work for long-term care facilities and hospice programs actually order prescription medications," Kohl and Whitehouse write. They conclude that delays can lead to "adverse health outcomes and unnecessary rehospitalizations, not to mention needless suffering."

Most nursing homes do not have pharmacies or doctors on site, adding to delays for patients who fall ill late at night or in transition from a hospital.

Yeah, I'm glad we spend bazillions of dollars on a Federal agency to prevent the victimless crime of providing Percosett to senior citizens in completely controlled residential medical environments.

The idea that an occasional nurse might steal a bottle of pain meds is obviously far more important than relieving the pain of tens of thousands of old people.

Military SF author David Drake on Afghanistan (sort of)

2009-10-31T10:10:00.002-04:00

If you don't know who David Drake is, you don't read science fiction. He is a Vietnam vet (with the Blackhorse) whose experiences there caused him literally to recreate military science fiction based on his experiences there. He is the creator of Hammer's Slammers, which is [if its not an oxymoron] some of the most realistic combat writing about wars that never happened that you will ever find.

Recently I have been reading a Baen books reprint of some of Mark Geston's classic SF that has an introduction written a few years back by David Drake. Drake is making the point the he first encountered Geston's work on returning from Vietnam, which causes him to take a four paragraph detour into Vietnam as an American experience.

What strikes me about this piece is what would happen if you changed the names.

Vietnam = Afghanistan
Eisenhower = Bush
Lebanon = Iraq
JFK/LBJ = Obama
McNamara = Gates
Westmoreland = McChrystal

Here's the original; you make the changes yourself:

When I entered college in 1963, the Vietnam War was a squabble in a distant place. There'd been similar squabbles in my memory--rather a bad one in Lebanon, for example--but that had been with Eisenhower as President. Now our president was Kennedy and shortly Johnson; and perhaps more important their Secretary of Defense was Robert S. McNamara, a technocrat and a monster.

By the time I got my undergraduate degree in 1967, Vietnam was a storm that had broken over America and the world, shredding society and bodies. Tens of thousands of Americans had died, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.

That war was building without plan or purpose. Each previous failure was used as the reason for a further, greater effort; which would fail in turn, as by then everybody knew it would fail.

General Westmoreland announced light at the end of the tunnel, shortly before the tunnel collapsed on him in the form of the Tet Offensive. Politicians lied--to themselves, first, I believe, but to everyone else as well. And the war went on and would go on, and on. There was no end, and no hope.

What struck me most about this segment was

1) We have not yet withstood the Taliban's version of the Tet Offensive, which was ultimately North Vietnam's greatest military defeat and greatest political victory. We may not see one in that form because the Taliban insurgency is a somewhat different kind of opponent than North Vietnam. But I think it would be foolish to assume that if President Obama decides on a massive escalation of the Afghan War that we will not see some military response designed to kick in before the reinforcements arrive. It may actually have already started, but our media is far worse at war reporting today than it was in 1968. Strange, huh?

2) I think that the defense/industrial establishment learned more lessons from Vietnam than the anti-war movement did. What we see in Afghanistan, and how it is packaged for us in the corporate media is a result of those lessons learned, and intentionally keeps slaughter in that part of the world from becoming as visceral a part of the American consciousness as did Vietnam unwinding on the evening news in 1967-72. When people question why there is no strong anti-war movement today, I think the simple answer is that a strong anti-war movement depends on at least the silent support of a significant portion of our citizenry, which is achieved by constant access to the major media outlets. The new anti-war movement by and large doesn't understand that it was castrated before it began, and seems not to realize that media coverage of demonstrations is more important than the demonstrations themselves [a lesson, ironically, that Tea Partiers understand quite well. How times change.].

Afghanistan: the link between rumor and reality

2009-10-30T14:50:00.002-04:00

Maybe, just maybe, it's because the Obama administration has recently floated the idea of paying off Taliban followers to stop fighiting, that more and more people find plausible the idea that NATO is using its own headquarters to move the insurgents areoundt the country.

Clueless Liberal Assclown of the Week : William Greider

2009-10-30T13:44:00.003-04:00

The Nation's William Greider pens perhaps one of the more idiotic screed's coming from the fiscally-reckless left, at least this week.

Greider not only advocates MORE MORE MORE spending from the porcine Democrat gluttons running the national government, flying headlong into the historic face of failure after dismal failure of Keynesian voodoo, but he also demands wilful ignorance of the fact that incomprehensible mountains of this disgusting national spending orgy are all BORROWED BORROWED BORROWED.

October 28, 2009

The deficit hawks are flapping their wings and making a
terrible squawk about the government's gusher of red ink. Good grief, a federal deficit of $1.4 trillion! What will become of us?

The gloom chorus includes GOP heavies and right-wing frothers, the editors of the Washington Post and other pinch-penny establishment journals, Blue Dog Democrats and even some of Barack Obama's own advisers.
[Keep going, Billy boy. It's the whoooole world that's all wrong....not you. Also, how convenient he only mentions just this year's federal budget deficit, as if this mind-boggling number exists as the only symptom of criminally-stratosopheric levels of national debt.]
Never mind the bloody mess we're in, they insist. People should hunker down and accept their pain. Suffering is good for the soul.

[A flip straw man statement, exposing typical 1960's-type self-serving, self-indulgent piggery, i.e. ME. NOW. NO LIMITS. NO END. ALL GAIN. NO PAIN.]

This nonsense, grounded in ignorance and discredited nineteenth-century bromides, is a recipe for continuing the economy's downward spiral and could prove poisonous for the country.
[Oh how very clever! Those who choose not to ignore the fiscal insanity Greider advocates are the ignorant ones, uttering "discredited...bromides", of course none as true and noble as the absurd leftist bromides with which Greider's article is utterly suffused.]
The hawks claim self-righteous rectitude in their warnings, but their real intent is to stymie the very spending programs that can deliver economic recovery and relief to battered citizens.
[Goddamn right on the former intent to stymie this lunacy. Full of shit as to the latter proclamation about "spending programs". That's exactly and only what they are : programs to SPEND SPEND SPEND, with almost no coherent objective other than to flood borrowed money into the economy. We should all just conveniently disregard the inherent contradiction and ostensible failure of "stimulus", whereby new employment would supposedly come from taxing existing employment now ... and well into the far far far distance future (if the likes of Greider cling to even just the pretense that their deficits will, or should ever, be repaid).

In an October 21 editorial arguing against just such additional spending, the Post warned citizens to disregard progressive commentators (like myself) who offer the example of World War II, when the government ran deficits many times larger than the current one. "In the deficit debates to come," the Post insisted, "Mr. Obama should heed the hawks."
Wrong. The mobilization for World War II produced one of the most remarkable success stories in US economic history. War production not only overcame lingering weaknesses from the Great Depression but transformed the economic system into the modern powerhouse that became the platform for our long-running postwar prosperity. All this was achieved by the government, largely with borrowed money. By war's end Washington had piled up federal debt totaling around 120 percent of annual GDP (nearly double today's debt level).
During the wartime emergency the government took charge of the economy and rapidly shifted the industrial system to armaments while suppressing domestic consumption. Deficit spending force-fed the rapid development of new technologies and new basic industries. In a few short years, economic output expanded by about 75 percent. Despite rationing and wage and price controls, Americans at large were replenished: per capita income rose by almost 70 percent (with industrial jobs opened to women and blacks), and since people could not consume much, the savings rate reached extraordinary levels--23 percent of incomes. The government borrowed these savings and spent them in the national interest. The store of personal savings fueled the pent-up consumer demand driving postwar prosperity.
[Jesus, what a bunch of cobbled together revisionist nonsense, comparing apples to bowling balls. Like all good progressive statists, Greider sees achieving the totality of government control over all aspects of human life and activity as a "war", morally and practically analagous to the 20th century's epic worldwide struggle against the very people who are Greider's ideological predecessors (albeit with genocidal proclivities). It's as though he's saying "But on the flip side of the millions of deaths and mass destruction, the massive government spending it necessitated was just ducky, and we should learn from its benefits."]

The United States needs something similar today--a jump-shift in economic strategy that redirects private capital and incomes into public investment for industrial renewal and for greater social protections, while households are allowed to dig out of their debts and restore personal savings.
In economic terms, the nation is much weaker today than it was in the 1940s--indebted and dependent on foreign creditors. We will not in any case return to the "happy days" prosperity that followed World War II. But the nation needs another dramatic jolt--a strategy that addresses the depth of our predicament and gets serious about the solutions.
[50+ years of welfare statism and national corporatism, now on steroids with the corporate leftists running the show in DC, and Greider wants to answer their imploding failure with an escalation of the same corrosive, destructive policies that led us into this disease of accelerating stagnation inherent when the parasite becomes more robust and voracious than the host on which it feeds.]

To ensure recovery, the Obama administration may need to launch public employment programs--directly creating jobs when the private economy can't seem to. It can beef up environmental construction and jobs like weatherizing buildings for greater energy efficiency. It can pour bigger bucks into building high-speed rail systems. It can finance smaller firms that are innovating with green technologies and create market demand by purchasing their products.
[Totally speculative nonsense. Greider's half-assed wish list for his own utopian ga-ga world, in which economic realities must give way to lefty fantasies, paid for by coercing more and more resources from those of us who must operate in the real world.]
Far from proposing deep restructuring, Obama and his lieutenants are instead predicting prosperity right around the corner. They are going to be disappointed. As the severity of our condition becomes clearer to people, events may drag the president toward considering more drastic actions. Certainly, public support will build for more fundamental solutions. The usual influential voices will insist there's nothing Americans can do but accept our fate. People and politicians must have the nerve to ignore them.
Let's hope President Obama and the political community brush aside the deficit hysteria and do what they need to do to restore the economy: that is, spend more money--a lot more money--and run up even larger deficits for some years to come. The time to pay down the deficit will come only after the economy recovers. If politicians surrender to the budget scolds, the nation will be stuck in this ditch for a long, long time.

Ah yes, Greider. To hell with accountability, responsibility, or even sanity...let's keep digging harder...we'll get out of this ditch your ilk put us in.

I'm reminded of the Simpsons episode when Homer runs for garbage commissioner on the slogan "Let someone else do it!!".

The ignorant, reckless left never ever bothers to answer for their pillaging on the backs of generations to come, and they never will. There is no defense. Just their disgusting, self-righteous will to power and quasi-religious authoritarian hubris.

At least Greider is honest about his and the American left's disregard for anything beyond the short-term satiety of their utopian pipe dreams and bloated special interest constituencies.

These people are utterly nauseating beyond belief.

Why it sometimes all seems to perplexing, as explained by one of our leading philosophers

2009-10-30T10:43:00.002-04:00

I spend a lot of time reading Waldo and have developed such a vicarious appreciation of South Carolina politics that I am currently trying to figure out how to detour around the Palmetto State on my next trip from Delaware to Disney.

What Waldo teaches me (when whatever I am drinking is not spurting out of my nose) is that huge numbers of Americans who are otherwise apparently competent to dress themselves and drive to work every day are not really functioning at an intellectual level necessary to deal with the moral dilemma and cultural nuances of modern life.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett comes closer to explaining this phenomenon in brief academic terms than anyone else I have ever read [once you add one tiny fact to his explanation]:

There's a mismatch between the modern versus ancestral world. Our minds are equipped with programs that were evolved to navigate a small world of relatives, friends, and neighbors, not for cities and nation states of thousands or millions of anonymous people. Certain laws and institutions satisfy the moral intuitions these programs generate. But because these programs are now operating outside the envelope of environments for which they were designed, laws that satisfy the moral intuitions they generate may regularly fail to produce the outcomes we desire and anticipate that have the consequences we wish. ...

Here's the missing fact that associates with this phrase--Our minds are equipped with programs that were evolved to navigate a small world of relatives, friends, and neighbors:

That small world is essentially a tribal world, and recent anthropological studies have shown that, on a percentage basis, warfare in neolithic tribal societies was actually generated far more casualties than modern warfare.

Shorter Dennett: we still have not moved beyond the compelling urge to deal with people with different views by hitting them over the head with large sticks.