In The Land Of Fruits And Nuts

Santorum: 'Supply-Sider' for the Working Man???

2012-01-14T11:09:00.000-08:00

An interesting point. It is not enough to pitch the goodness of capitalism and the badness of the welfare state to the receptive "one percent" (sic--it's much larger than that), we mush also appeal to the "99 percent"(sic again, but still a large percentage)

'I'm someone who believes that making things creates wealth," says Rick Santorum. It is primary day in New Hampshire, and the former Pennsylvania senator and current presidential candidate is describing his plan to slash corporate tax rates. To encourage companies to make things, he would completely eliminate the federal income tax on manufacturers. For all other businesses, the rate would be cut in half, to 17.5% from 35%.

In other words, point out how Leftist tax policies have *driven* the manufacturing jobs of Joe Sixpack overseas!

Mr. Santorum also believes that making babies creates wealth. It's very difficult to grow an economy with a shrinking population, he says, pointing to the "demographic winter in Europe" as a cause of that region's troubles. To help avoid that fate in the U.S., he wants to triple the per-child tax credit and also cut individual tax rates.

The Leftist eco-fiends still harbor fears of a "Population Bomb" but the reality is that the modern industrial world--whether "post-capitalist" like the USA, Europe, Japan, and the little Asian Tigers, or "post-communist" like the former Warsaw Pact and Red China, are having too few babies, not too many:

Mr. Santorum argues that the cost of Europe's massive welfare states made it too expensive for young people to have families. He notes that with plummeting birth rates, many European countries have resorted to "baby bonuses" to try to reverse the tide, but the demographic picture remains bleak, while the costs of entitlement programs have exploded.

"Who are benefits promised to, overwhelmingly? Well, they're promised to older people. And if you have a society like Europe that is upside down where there are a lot more older people than younger people, you have economic calamity," he says. Asked if giving generous per-child credits will result in an even larger number of households exempt from the income tax and therefore amenable to more spending, he says his plan will drive growth and that, in turn, will bring more people on to the tax rolls. Elimination of deductions might also keep some people paying income taxes. He aims to balance overall taxes and spending at 18% of GDP. Spending has soared to 24% in the Obama era.

In other words, make "supply side economics" work for the working class. This working class, once called "Reagan Democrats", then "Perot-nistas", then "bitter clingers" by the Obamunist Commiecrats, is an important, perhaps THE important, piece of the GOP winning coalition. In general, though, the tale of years since has been the refusal of the Republican establishment to seal the deal. As Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam pointed out in their book "Grand New Party":

Over the forty years since, this problem – that the working class wants, and needs, more from public policy than simply to be left alone – has prevented the Republican Party from consolidating an enduring majority, despite all the right-wing intellectual victories and all the conservative electoral gains. It defeated Goldwater, it ruined Gingrich, and it crippled the domestic policy of George W. Bush. It was at the heart of a marginal conservatism’s 1964 defeat, and it lies at the heart of conservatism’s present crisis....

In a still-crowded field of non-Romneys trying to compete for the Republican nomination, Mr. Santorum could emerge in the Jan. 21 South Carolina primary as the man who can bring together the old Reagan coalition. A champion of cultural conservatives with a blue-collar background, he is also making the case for deep cuts in federal spending. His credibility on this last issue derives from the political price he paid for being an early promoter of Social Security reform, which caused him to lose his Senate seat once.

Nor does he give ground in our discussion. I ask if his corporate tax plan opens him up to criticism that he and President Obama are both favoring particular sectors of the economy, with Mr. Santorum picking manufacturing while Mr. Obama anoints green energy. "Oh, green energy is not a sector, I mean, come on. It's like a half-dozen companies," says Mr. Santorum.

Does this mean the Obama policy would be more legitimate if the president were favoring a larger group of Solyndras?

"He's talking about handing out tax-free grants and loans," says Mr. Santorum, who adds that his own plan "is a conservative approach. It's supply-side. It's cutting rates. Why are we cutting the corporate rate to 17.5% and making it simple? . . . Because we think it's what's necessary to grow the economy. . . . So if what's necessary to grow the economy in one sector of the economy is different from another, then why should we have the same tax rate?" He argues that manufacturing has been hit particularly hard by the costs of regulation and litigation.

To avoid a lobbying festival, Mr. Santorum says, the existing IRS definition of manufacturing, which includes companies that make and process goods, will remain in place.

"No, we're not going to have a free-for-all over who is a manufacturer. It's pretty clear if you're making products you're making products and if you're processing products like if you're an oil refiner, you're a processor. . . . You're making things, as opposed to a lawyer who is not a manufacturer." And while only a small percentage of Americans still work in manufacturing, Mr. Santorum says that such businesses have a powerful "multiplier effect" as they support various other enterprises.

We could do worse than that. If Rick Santorum is not the anti-Romney, perhaps he *is* the Working Man's Capitalist.

The Club For Growth Presdential Voter Guide

2012-01-06T13:54:00.000-08:00

Interesting! The Club for Growth has issued evaluations of where the remaining candidates stand on economic freedom. The topics covered include:
--Taxes
--Spending
--Free Trade
--Regulation
--Entitlement Reform
--School Choice
--Tort Reform
--Political Free Speech
--Political Activity and Endorsements

The following six candidates are evaluated:
Rick Santorum
Mitt Romney
Newt Gingrich
Ron Paul
Rick Perry
Jon Huntsman

And previous Club for Growth Presidential White Papers on candidates no longer seeking the Republican nomination can be found by clicking here.

Because the Club For Growth does not evaluate foreign policy, I suspect Ron Paul will look a lot better to the Club For Growth than he really is. However, the Club For Growth has *this* to say about Ron Paul:

But Ron Paul is a purist, too often at the cost of real accomplishments on free trade, school choice, entitlement reform, and tort reform. It is perfectly legitimate, and in fact vital, that think tanks, free-market groups, and individual members of Congress develop and propose idealized solutions. But presidents have the responsibility of making progress, and often, Ron Paul opposes progress because, in his mind, the progress is not perfect. In these cases, although for very different reasons, Ron Paul is practically often aligned with the most left-wing Democrats, voting against important, albeit imperfect, pro-growth legislation.

Ron Paul is, undoubtedly, ideologically committed to pro-growth, limited government policies. But his insistence on opposing all but the perfect means that under a Ron Paul presidency we might never get a chance to pursue the good too.

Compare the Club For Growth summary of Rick Perry with their summary of Mitt Romney. For Rick Perry, the Club For Growth says this:

When evaluating members of congress, it is somewhat informative to look at the partisan nature of their congressional district in the case of a House member or their state in the case of a Senator. When evaluating a Governor, it is even more instructive to judge performance in the context of the political climate of their state and the partisan and ideological composition of their legislature. Working in the environment in which a Governor finds him or herself, the operative question is often whether he or she improved or worsened the climate for economic growth.

The Texas tax and regulatory climate Governor Rick Perry inherited from Governor George W. Bush was already among the best in the nation. Further, during Perry’s entire long tenure as governor, the Texas Legislature has had conservative Republican majorities. So the bar for judging Perry’s performance should be set high.

It is quite clear that Perry did not move his state in reverse, or on the wrong course. In many instances, he merely maintained a positive status quo. In others, such as tort reform and regulations, he improved the Texas economic climate.

Still, his support for taxpayer-subsidized funds to lure jobs away from other states shows he has at times an interventionist streak rather than consistent free-market principles. His semi apology for the big government interventions of President Bush suggests a similar inclination.

You would think they would give Governor Romney a big break by this standard, considering leftist Massachusetts. But they say this about Mitt Romney, and I think accurately:

(Romney) labels himself as a pro-growth fiscal conservative, and we have no doubt that Romney would move the country in a pro-growth direction. He would promote the unwinding of Obama’s bad economic policies, but we also think that Romney is somewhat of a technocrat. After a career in business, quickly finding a “solution”seems to be his goal, even if it means more government intrusion as a means to an end. To this day, Romney supports big government solutions to health care and opposes pro-growth tax code reform – positions that are simply opposite to those supported by true economic conservatives.

All in all, I do very much agree with the Club For Growth. However the Club For Growth has two flaws:

(1) The Club For Growth does not look at the immigration issue, despite its undeniable economic consequences, as we are experiencing with our overwhelmed public services in California.

(2) The Club For Growth are very sanguine to the point of goo-goo about economic globalization and "Free Trade". Never mind that much of the rest of the world does not really practice free trade and we Americans are played for chumps this way again and again. And never mind that national security does trump free trade, at least in the mind of any sane patriot, no matter how devoutly capitalist.

This myopia about trade is apparent in their evaluation of Rick Santorum:

In perhaps the most important free trade vote of the last generation, Santorum voted against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, perhaps the most important trade vote cast during his career in Congress. Days before the vote, he said, “NAFTA will produce pockets of winners and losers across the country. Our area is unfortunately one of the losers."

That analysis, while arguably correct with regard to a small number of industries in Pennsylvania, ignores the fact that every single consumer in Pennsylvania benefited tremendously from NAFTA, as well as did many more affected industries.

Oh, really? That claim would be called "bullshit" by most Quaker State residents after nearly two decades, even if better for the rest of the nation.

In 2005, Santorum voted in support of an amendment that would impose a massive, job-killing 27.5% tariff on all Chinese imports if China didn’t readjust their currency upward.

Because having our most likely next major enemy profit by their currency manipulation is such a good thing? Really? Sorry, Red China is not Colombia or South Korea or other places where recent good free trade initiatives have been proposed. Red China is a nation building up its military--including its nuclear missile arsenal and an unprecedented "blue-water" (global) navy, most likely for a future military showdown against the USA and/or its Asian allies.

The Club For Growth, like the Wall Street Journal and some others, sometimes seem to wish to prove Vladimir Lenin's assertion correct, that "when the time comes the hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope with which to do it...."

"Keep Your Hands Off My Medicare!"

2012-01-05T13:32:00.000-08:00

Yes, there were senior citizens who opposed Obamacare who held up signs like that, and yes, the Leftists mocked them, as Medicare is a government program.

But the leftist mockery says more about the Leftists than it does about the senior citizens.

MediCare was supposed to be "self-financing" from the workers' payroll, right? Remember that, liberal Commiecrats? So you leftist statists were lying about that too, weren't you? Just like you lied about everything else, from the New Deal to the Great Society to the current Obamunism.

Meanwhile, Obamacare effectively dumps younger people who never paid a lifetime into Medicare into the program, increasing demand, and cuts payments to doctors, decreasing supply, while controlling prices. All of which means the existing seniors will get short shrift. You think they are not supposed to notice that, liberal Demunists? Really?

Or are they just supposed to do what you tell them to?

Just when the facts are that the retirement ages will have to be raised because people are living longer and there are fewer young workers in proportion to elderly retirees, Obamacare blatantly disregards these two inevitable facts.

And those who rely on Medicare *now* are supposed to just lay back and think of heaven, to which the New Obama oversight (rationing) panel will bring them to that much sooner.

Really, Leftists? You want to keep thinking you can pull off this crap? Even the naive elderly, who were raised on The New Deal and The Great Society, see through you now.

Rick Santorum: Not the Anti-Romney

2012-01-04T14:33:00.000-08:00

It's Wednesday after the 2012 Iowa caucuses and this morning I caught an hour of Rush Limbaugh insisting that Rick Santorum is not a "big government conservative". Rush was attempting to allay fears that former Senator Santorum is yet another politician positioning himself as a conservative while actually being just another ally of bloated government, proposing new government programs, regulations, etc. in areas where the federal government has little or no Constitutional mandate. That's the charge against Mitt Romney and those paying attention to the post-caucus punditry know that Santorum did quite well and is now poised to be this week's "anti-Romney".

And, we need an anti-Romney. Romney is the neon "I Don't Get It" sign whose annoying, buzzing message is that the GOP establishment learned nothing about how to win elections or its constituents from 2010 and the TEA Party. Romney is this year's McCain, who many of us real, small government conservatives hoped was the last gasp of Republican presidential candidates nominated under the assumption that big government was okay with conservative voters, as long as "our" guy sat in the big chair. But, the epic fail that is big government - unconstrained by the Constitution, common sense, or any sense of fiscal responsibility - is not okay. In 2006 and 2008, voters told the GOP, "You aren't giving us much reason to show up at the polls." Putting another big government Republican statist on the 2012 ticket will result in another painful lesson for the GOP, which doesn't seem to realize that many Republican voters have no enthusiasm for politicians who are clearly just paying lip service to reducing government. Romney is an electoral disaster in a nice suit. If the 2012 Presidential race comes down to voting for one candidate who defends Obamacare or another candidate who defends Romneycare, well... Let's just hope the GOP can hold the House.

But, Rick Santorum? Rick Santorum is not a small government guy. Rick Santorum has a record and it's the record of a big government statist. And, no, I am not talking about his social conservatism. It's true that he's a traditionalist on social issues, for what that's worth. (So much for any hope of peeling away younger voters disillusioned with Obama.) But, the problem with Santorum is that he's also a straight up fiscal "I Don't Get It" statist. As in: Affirmative votes for Medicare Part D, for the "Bridge to Nowhere", for Ted Kennedy's No Child Left Behind, actually co-sponsoring the government-subsidized mortgage downpayment legislation, and so on. So, yes, Rick Santorum is undeniably another big government guy.

Johnson is out. Bachmann is out. Cain is out. Perry is dithering. Gingrich, articulation aside, is an another variation on Romney. Is there no GOP candidate with a record of opposing the expansion of the federal government? Is there no one to whom serious fiscal conservatives and TEA Partiers can look and say, "I am sure my vote for him is a vote for the limited government authorized by the Constitution?" Whatever the answer to that question, it is not Rick Santorum.

"The Bachelor(ette)": Wisdom for our times

2012-01-02T20:17:00.000-08:00

Truer words were never spoken, and on a rather tacky "Reality TV" (sic) show, at that:

"Good things don't end unless they end badly...." -- Ben Flajnik, "The Bachelor", spoken to Ashley Hebert.

That goes for politics and for economics even more than for pseudo-romantic relationships arranged on television.

"What I don't need you to do is sugar coat it," either.....

2012: The make or break year???

2012-01-01T20:38:00.000-08:00

In a 2008 radio interview, Barack Obama said:

" ... the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties."

And there you have it. There is a reason I call many of that political party Demunists, or Commiecrats.

No, Barack, it was NOT an oversight that the Founding Fathers never addressed the issue of the government taking your assets and giving them to who they deemed "deserving". Perhaps it's just an indication that George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison were cold, calloused individuals who enjoyed watching people suffer. That is what they teach in Multicommunist Ethnic Brainwash Studies 101 nowadays.

In the same interview, Chairman (Mao?) Obama went on to say that the Constitution:

"[says] what the Federal government can't do to you, but doesn't say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn't shifted ... and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was ... um ... because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change."

Excuse me? Do on your behalf? Those stupid Founding Fathers again. They didn't even think to put in the Constitution what the government must do on your behalf (which are code words for what it can do to you). What were those mentally challenged Old White fuddy-duddy guys thinking?

And what a tragedy it was that the civil rights movement didn't put together the coalition of powers that could bring about "redistributive change." Forget the fact that the Constitution never mentions the redistribution of anything. After all, as with man-made global warming, the debate is over: We all know that redistribution of wealth is the only moral way to operate a country, right? If we are caught alluding to the Constitution, Queen Nancy Pelosi herself simply laughs us off with, "Are you serious?"

America will go through a fundamental change in 2012 - guaranteed. Either the gains of Obama and his minions will not be reversed, which means we are that much closer to having our nation fundamentally transformed into a full-fledged socialist police state, then, ultimately, a communist police state.....

Or those in the Republican Party who still believe in freedom (and sadly, they do not seem to be anywhere near an overwhelming majority) will do whatever it takes to overthrow the "czars" and policies of the Obamunist oligarchy that now rules over us.

If the Republicans, after winning back the House and Senate - or even coming close - continue to act like RINOs / Republicrats / Demopublicans and ignore the Constitution, it will be a sad time indeed.

Having said this, the only way that a "fundamentally transformed America" can be avoided is if:
1. Free elections without significant vote fraud are held in 2010.
2. Conservative Republicans sweep into power.
3. Said conservative Republicans immediately began to repeal ALL unconstitutional legislation - including ALL federal government involvement in health care, ALL forms of federal government welfare, ALL federal government involvement in education ... and so on. State and local matters belong back in state and local hands.

In short, get rid of ALL Federal government functions other than providing a legal system for arbitrating national disputes, protecting the lives and property of American citizens, and providing for a national defense.

And we must spend enormous amounts of time and energy educating the anesthetized, sports-crazy, entertainment-crazy, vacation-crazy masses about the wonders of the free market. We must expain to them why liberty is the most valuable commodity they can ever possess. We must have enough love in our hearts to help them understand that liberty, not government handouts, gives them the best opportunity to achieve economic freedom.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Winter Of California

2011-12-21T20:49:00.000-08:00

On Winter Solstice Day, this grim essay seemed particularly apt. Some bold emphasis:

I am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near Carthage around A.D. 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455. Here are some updates from the rural area surrounding my farm, taken from about a 30-mile radius. In this take, I am not so much interested in chronicling the flotsam and jetsam as in fathoming whether there is some ideology that drives it.
Last week an ancestral rural school near the Kings River had its large bronze bell stolen. I think it dated from 1911. I have driven by it about 100 times in the 42 years since I got my first license. The bell had endured all those years. Where it is now I don’t know. Does someone just cut up a beautifully crafted bell in some chop yard in rural Fresno County, without a worry about who forged it or why — or why others for a century until now enjoyed its presence?

Yes, Victor, they do--when they have been taught that a beautiful bell made by old dead white guys doesn't count, and when they have no roots to the community at all.

The city of Fresno is now under siege. Hundreds of street lights are out, their copper wire stripped away. In desperation, workers are now cementing the bases of all the poles — as if the original steel access doors were not necessary to service the wiring. How sad the synergy! Since darkness begets crime, the thieves achieve a twofer: The more copper they steal, the easier under cover of spreading night it is to steal more. Yet do thieves themselves at home with their wives and children not sometimes appreciate light in the darkness?

But they don't have wives, and they really aren't sure where, or even who, are the children they have fathered.

In short, all the stuff of civilization — municipal buildings, education, religion, transportation, recreation — seems under assault in the last year by the contemporary forces of barbarism. After several thefts of mail, I ordered a fortified, armored mailbox. I was ecstatic when I saw the fabricator’s internet ad: On the video, someone with an AK-47 emptied a clip into it; the mail inside was untouched. I gleefully said to myself: “That’s the one for me.” And it has been so far. But I wonder: Do the thieves not like to get their own mail? Do their children not play Little League? Do they not want a priest at their funeral? Would they not like to drive their cars without worrying about holes in the street? Or is their thinking that a rich society can cover for their crimes without their crimes’ ever much affecting them — given that most others still do not act as they do?

I know it is popular to suggest that as we (age), everything seems “worse,” and, like Horace’s laudatores temporis acti, we damn the present in comparison to the past. Sorry, it just isn’t so. In 1971, 1981, and 1991, city street lights were not systematically de-wired. And the fact that plaques and bells of a century’s pedigree were just now looted attests that they all survived the Great Depression, the hipsters of the 1950s and 1960's, and the crime-ridden 1970s.
(...)
There is indeed something of the Dark Ages about all this. In the vast rural expanse between the Sierras and the Coast Ranges, and from Sacramento to Bakersfield, our rural homes are like stray sheep outside the herd, without whatever protection is offered by the density of a town. When we leave for a trip or just go into town, the predators swarm.

Last summer several cars drove into my driveway, the surprised occupants ready with all sorts of innocent-sounding inquiries: “We just are looking for a rental.” “Do you have scrap for sale?” “We’re having car trouble.” And so on.

All this serves as a sort of red/green traffic light: If someone comes out from the house, the driver poses the question and then abruptly leaves; but if no one appears, he strikes quickly. I remember three or four intruders I confronted this year who had trucks as nice as or nicer than my 2006 Toyota. Two had sports apparel more expensive than my jeans and sweatshirt. All were heavier than I. In other words, malnourishment, the desire for basic transportation, the need for clothing on their backs — all the classically cited catalysts for stealing — are not what is driving these modern vandals.

At a local gathering last week, lots of farmers — of a variety of races and religions — were swapping just such stories. In our new Vandal state, one successful theft begets another — at least once deterrence is lost. In my case, one night an old boat in the barn was stripped. Soon, the storage house was hit. Ten days later, all the antique bolts and square nails were taken from the shop. Usually — as is true with the street lights — the damage to the buildings is greater than the value of the missing items. I would have given the thieves all the lost items rather than have had to fix broken locks and doors.

Yes, you weenie leftists, the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys have had Chinese-, Hindu-, Japanese-, Mexican-, and Sikh American communities, along with the various European ethnics, for decades before you decried an alleged lack of "diversity".

I just spoke with another group of farmers at a rural fairground. Every single person I talked to has had the copper wire ripped out of his agricultural pumps within the last two years. The conduits taken from my own 15-horsepower and 10-horsepower pumps were worth about $200 at most. The repair bill was $1,500.

Most farmers have lost any steel or iron lying around their barnyards, whether their grandparents’ iron wagon hardware or valuable replacement furrowers and discs. Stories of refuse piled in their vineyards and wrecked cars fished out of their orchards are monotonous. Did the thieves never eat raisins, a peach, an almond? And did they not appreciate that if we did what they did we would all starve?
As I write, I am looking out the window toward my barn at a strange new trash pile that, presto, appeared overnight while I slept: all the accouterments of an old car — seats, dashboard, outside moldings, etc. — are heaped together, along with household garbage. What am I to do with it? I can’t burn it. (Believe me, an environmental officer would appear out of nowhere at the rising of the toxic smoke to fine me, as surely as he is absent when the garbage and refuse are tossed on the roadsides outside of town.) There is too much of it to pile into my $100-a-month Waste Management bin, where I put the plastic garbage sacks tossed by the mailbox each week. It would take two trips in my pickup to haul it to the distant county dump. So for now, the problem is mine, and not that of the miscreant who tossed it. Was he thinking, “Mr. Hanson has more time, more money, more concern over trash, or more neuroticism of some sort, and therefore is more likely to deal with my trash than I am”? — as if to say, “I can live in a neighborhood where wrecked car parts litter the road; he obviously cannot.” So are these tossers simply comfortable with refuse on our streets, or are they not, but, like irked toddlers with soiled diapers, expect someone else to clean up after them?

And is not that the point, after all? Behind the easy criminality of stealing metal or driving outside of town to toss your garbage is an implicit mentality, as frightening as it is never expressed. Someone will indeed take the garbage away. And someone indeed will have copper wire for others to harvest for their needs. And someone will pay the taxes and costs associated with the commission of the crime, efforts at prevention, and rare apprehension of the criminal. And lastly, someone most certainly should. In our crude radical egalitarianism, the fact that one has more, and another less, is de facto wrong, and invites popular remedies. Now, for every crime committed, a new sociology will arise to explain away its commission. We are back to the bankrupt French philosophers who asserted: “Property is theft!”

In the last 20 years, several vehicles have zoomed off the road and plowed into my rather short stretch of roadside vineyard. The symptomology has always been the same: The driver fled; no proof of registration or insurance was left behind. The cost of replanting the vines and replacing the stakes remained all mine. Even the car was towed away and impounded by the state for its fees. As I drive these days across the valley, I play a game of looking at vineyards abutting the road to spot newly replanted vines and fresh stakes; these car-induced blights are quite common. Occasionally, I see the Catholic version of the Orthodox iconostases so common on Greek roadsides — commemorative crosses and shrines erected to mark the spot where one driver did not survive the zoom into the vineyard or orchard.

I just asked a neighbor how many times he has been rammed at a rural intersection, with the other driver fleeing the scene and leaving the car behind (my tally: twice). He laughed and said, “None, but I can top you anyway. Last month a hit-and-run driver swerved off the road, hit the power pole next to my farm, and fled as the high-voltage cables fell onto my grape arbors — and smoked ten acres of overhead vineyard wire.”

I agreed that I could not top that. Who could imagine electrified grapes? I wonder how much in taxes the hit-and-run driver has paid this year to make up for the cost of a utility pole, and the repair of downed wires and a vineyard’s trellising system? Even more frightening are the thousands in our society — journalists, politicians, academics, activists — who get up each morning more concerned about the fleeing "undocumented" driver who destroys power and vines than the victims who pay for the carnage.

The immediate reaction of the victimized in rural central California is predictable and yet quite strange. As in 5th-century North Africa, farmers feel that civilization is vanishing and they are on their own. The “authorities” of an insolvent state, like petty Roman bureaucrats, are too busy releasing criminals from overcrowded jails to want any more. The stories of cyclical releases are horrific: Criminals are not arrested and let go just twice a year, but five and six and ten times. Sometimes we read of the surreal, like this week’s story in my local Selma Enterprise of one criminal’s 36 arrests and releases — and these are only for the crimes we know he committed and was caught for:

TOP STORY

Chief says: Jail revolving door hurting Selma

Crime is Topic No. 1 in Selma, which makes the story of Adam Joshua Perez worth telling. Selma Police have arrested Perez 24 times since he turned 18 in October 2004. Charges against the Selma man have included burglary, theft, possession of narcotics, and weapons-related offenses, according to interim Police Chief Myron Dyck. In that time period, the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department also arrested Perez eight times, and the Kingsburg Police took him into custody four times, Dyck said. Fresno Police also were looking at him for some car thefts, Dyck added. He calls Perez (born Oct. 23, 1986) a career criminal who’s getting the benefit of a broken criminal justice system. And there are other people like Perez on Selma’s streets, Dyck said.

Yes, there are.

There is also an unspoken acknowledgment of how state and local law enforcement now works, and it is predicated on a cost-to-benefit calculus. Reporting to the local police or sheriff a huge pile of refuse in your yard — even when the address of the tosser can be found from power bills or letters — or the theft of a tool from the barn is simply not worth the effort. It is not even worth the cost and trouble of activating a high-deductible farm-insurance policy. I guess the reasoning is that you in fact will replace the stolen item, and even if the criminal were apprehended, the costs of arrest, trial, and incarceration — even without the entrance of immigration authorities into the matrix — are too steep for a bankrupt state.

Indeed, farmers out here are beginning to feel targeted, not protected, by law enforcement. In the new pay-as-you-go state, shrouded in politically correct bureaucratese, Californians have developed a keen sense of cynicism. The scores of Highway Patrol cars that now dot our freeways are looking for the middle class — the minor, income-producing infractions of the generally law-abiding — inasmuch as in comparison the felonies of the underclass are lose–lose propositions.

If I were to use a cellphone while driving and get caught, the state might make an easy $170 for five minutes’ work. If the same officer were to arrest the dumper who threw a dishwasher or refrigerator into the local pond among the fish and ducks, the arrest and detention would be costly and ultimately fruitless, providing neither revenue from a non-paying suspect nor deterrence against future environmental sacrilege. We need middle-class misdemeanors to pay for the felonies of the underclass.

The state’s reaction to all this is a contorted exercise in blaming the victim, in both the immediate and the abstract senses. Governor Brown wants to raise income taxes on the top two brackets by 1 to 2 percentage points, making them over 11 and 12 percent respectively. That our schools are near dead last in test scores, that many of our main freeways are potholed relics from the 1950s, that we just passed the DREAM Act to extend state financial support for college-age illegal aliens, and that the overtaxed are fleeing the state do not register. Again, those who in theory can pay, should — and should keep quiet about why they must suddenly pay a 12 percent income tax that was not needed, say, in 1961, 1971, or even 1991, when test scores were higher, roads better, and communities far safer.

There is, of course, a vague code of silence about who is doing the stealing, although occasionally the most flagrant offenders are caught either by sheriffs or on tape; or, in my typical case, run off only to return successfully at night. In the vast majority of cases, rural central California is being vandalized by gangs of young Mexican nationals or Mexican-Americans — in the latter case, a criminal subset of an otherwise largely successful and increasingly integrated and assimilated near majority of the state’s population. Everyone knows it; everyone keeps quiet about it — even though increasingly the victims are the established local Mexican-American middle class that now runs the city councils of most rural towns and must deal with the costs....official accounts in the media are either incomplete or censored to reflect a sort of Ministry of Truth groupthink.

Poverty, racism, class oppression, an uncaring society, government neglect, exploitation, greed — cite them all endlessly, as our coastal (liberal) lawmakers, academics, and bureaucrats largely do. But most of these elite groups also seek to live as far away as possible from rural central California, the testing ground where their utopian imaginations become reality for distant others. The influx of over 11 million illegal aliens has had a sort of ripple effect that is rarely calibrated. Sixty percent of Hispanic males in California are not graduating from high school. Unemployment in rural California (of legal Mexican Americans) runs over 20 percent. There is less fear now of arrest and incarceration, given the bankruptcy of the state, which, of course, is rarely officially connected even in small part to illegal immigration. Perhaps because illegal immigration poses so many mind-boggling challenges (e.g., probably over $20 billion lost to the state in remittances, the undermining of federal law, the prejudice shown against legal immigration applicants, ethnic favoritism as the engine of amnesty, subterfuge on the part of Mexico, vast costs in entitlements and subsidies), talking about it is futile. So most don’t, in fear of accusations of “racism.”

For those who do not leave the area, silence for now remains the norm. We pick up the litter from our farms on the implicit logic that the vandal — and, indeed, the state as well — expects us to, given our greater worry that his garbage would be likely to attract rats, flies, and other historical purveyors of illness. Dead cats, dirty diapers, used needles, baby carriages, shattered TVs, chairs, sofas, rotting lumber, broken windows, concrete blocks, tree limbs, used paint cans, household poisons, bags of used toilet paper and tampons, broken toys, fast-food boxes, toddler’s pools, tires, rotting chickens and dogs — anything that does not have easily detachable clean steel or copper — I’ve picked them all up from my vineyard and driveways.

I do not (yet) move wrecked Winnebagos and trailers onto my single-family-zoned rural parcel to garner rental cash, as do many of my neighbors. After all, some must not, if the careful zoning work of a century is to survive. When one dog in four is not licensed and vaccinated out here, we have a problem; when four out of four will not be, we should expect a 19th-century crisis. When there are three outdoor privies used daily behind a neighbor’s house, the local environment can still handle the flies, the odor, and the increase in the chance of disease; but if there were to be 100 in a half-mile stretch, civilization itself would break down.

Cynicism is the result. We pay no attention to news accounts of new state measures to check the source of metals presented at recycling centers, because we know these efforts are futile — as futile as the “seminars” in which we are told to fence everything in, to buy huge guard dogs, to install video cameras in trees, and to acquire electric gates — as if we were not so much being protected but being held prisoner.

I stay here, however, because I now ask: Why should we change our way of life rather than demanding that those who are changing it should look inward and themselves change?

"Black Friday" insanity

2011-11-27T08:29:00.000-08:00

As I watch the local and national TV news, I am shocked by the subtle egging on of the "Black Friday" shopping hordes--even on the relatively better Fox News. In a time of bad economic news, with personal debt at near record levels and with so many people paying off "underwater" housing mortgages, does this mad spending and camping out in front of stores for the latest Iphone or Xbox gizmo make ANY sense?

Perhaps the shopping mantra for the liberal media this year is this: We can't admit the Obamunist government mandates and Demunist economic "stimulus" policy, for which we were cheerleaders, utterly failed, and we know the future is hopeless, but we’re not going to allow the bad economy to ruin our "holiday" season.

The liberal media won't call it Christmas Season, of course.

Of course, I will shop for presents for my family and good friends too, but I will do it on my own sweet time and not get swept up in some media-driven frenzy. Nor will I go into debt for them. I don't think the supplies of goods are THAT low, and in this depressed economy, there will certainly be more discounted sales to entice me to buy in the future.

Then again, perhaps the Obamunists and their media apparatchiks are preparing us future proles for our lives under their socially rationed economic system, where we must stand in line for rationed goods like Cuba, or quickly spend our hard earned cash before it devalues in hyper-inflation like Argentina in the 1970's.

And under such economic policies, we will have to be prepared to be like the crazed shoppers who were pepper-sprayed on Black Friday at a Los Angeles Walmart by a woman who wasn’t about to miss out on one of the most sought after necessities of life — the new Xbox. Only next time, if the Obama Administration wins the 2012 elections and enough Demunists and RINOs hang on to their gerrymandered sinecures in Congress, next time the pushing, shoving, pepper spraying and even shooting may be over gasoline or bread or meat or even vegetables.

Perhaps the "Occupy" camps can be seen as training grounds for future Obama Red Guards. The Occupiers would be perfect candidates to put themselves in harm’s way to get their "fair share" of discounted playthings that they desperately need to keep their gray matter anesthetized. You could just picture many of them punching out the "rednecks" they hate, and then taking their electronic toys back to their Occupy Wall Street tents, and after taking some good drugs falling into a peaceful slumber, thinking to themselves, “Mission accomplished.” And the next day today, they will go back to the front lines fighting those "evil" guys on Wall Street for their Chairman Mao-bama— you know, the same Wall Street guys who have given Barack Obama more money than any candidate in history. But don't tell the Occupier dupes that!

I do not mean to imply that all, or even many, Black Friday shoppers are Occupy Wall Streeters or that all, or even many, Occupy Wall Streeters are Black Friday shoppers. Far from it. But the two groups have at least three things in common: They are very materialistic, they are angry about what they don’t have, and some have no qualms about resorting to mob violence.

When I use the word materialistic, I’m referring to wealth. And to be clear here, wealth is not what someone earns. Wealth is what someone owns. Wealth is cars and buildings and computers and television sets and iPods.

But wealth has to be created. It has to be earned by *somebody*. It takes money, management, and labor to produce all of those cars, buildings, computers, television sets, and iPods. The predicament that America now finds itself in is that there’s a lot of money and management around, but not enough good labor. At least not enough good labor at a cost that allows companies to manufacture goods at prices consumers are willing to pay.

Of course, there’s plenty of labor in places like China, India, Chile, Ecuador, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, and many other countries throughout the world. So it’s no mystery why these countries now produce a great deal of wealth.

The reason the Western world is broke is because it doesn’t have a workforce that is willing to work at wages that are competitive with non-Western nations. From Greece to California, from Italy to New York, the reason workers are unwilling to accept competitive wages is because they can afford to be choosy. Unemployment benefits (now extended to 99 weeks or more), food stamps (ditto), and other forms of "stimulus" welfare remove the motivation for Commiecrat ghetto lumpen proletariat to work at any job that is available to them, at whatever wage is being offered, in order to feed and clothe their families.Starvation no longer motivates people who are unemployed, because the government forces those with wealth to provide food, clothing, and shelter to those who don’t have them.

And with these factors removed from the survival equation, people can afford to camp out at Best Buy, Target, and Walmart for days on end and elbow, stab, shoot, and pepper-spray those who would stand in the way of their getting their fair share of stuff at the lowest possible prices.

Does this mean that people have to work 16 hrs a day for 10 cents per hour in order to compete with a Cambodian serf? Only if they have no more education than a Cambodian serf. Hopefully they went to school and learned a useful trade. NO, Bogus Ethnic Multicultural Commiecrat Studies Victimization is NOT a useful skill. "Social Justice" is also a worthless field. But if they actually studied in school, learned math, chemistry, physics, sciences, engineering, biology, a medical skill or perhaps computers, THEN they can make a good salary. They are not entitled to $30 per hour for sticking a bolt in a car door handle on an assembly line; those days are OVER! But if they can repair a transmission or restart some one's heart, or research how to get greater yields from grains, then they will certainly find jobs all over the place that pay $30 per hour. And that's ALL they're worth.

Then again, maybe not. The more productive business is bashed, the more it moves out of "blue" states, or now even out of this "blue" Demunist nation. (The "Red / Blue" political color scheme should be utterly the other way around, but I digress.) Perhaps they will study hard, like some US engineers, only to have the value of their study undermined by H-1B modern day indentured servant immigrants.

There’s no way to prove it, but I’d be willing to bet that a disproportionate number of those who had nothing better to do than camp out in front of superstores for several days prior to Black Friday are classified as “poor” by the federal government. But how in the world can poor people afford to go shopping for electronic toys?

Good question — and here are some facts about people whom the Census Bureau defines as “poor” that may help to answer it:
--43 percent own their own homes.
--80 percent have air conditioning in their homes.
--75 percent of poor households have a car, and 31 percent have one or more cars.
--97 percent have a color television set and 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.
--89 percent own microwave ovens.

Clearly, being poor in America is a whole lot better than being middle class in most other countries. In fact, so-called poor people in the U.S. live as well as those in the median American household of the early 1970s. So when you get right down to it, poverty is relative. But as the living standards of the poor rise, vote-hungry Commiecrat politicians simply make those rising standards the new baseline for poverty. And the RINOs meekly go along.

The "Super Committee" fails--GOOD!

2011-11-22T15:47:00.001-08:00

Dick Morris explains:

Mark Twain famously wrote that "no man's property or liberty is safe while the Legislature is in session." The same could have been said for the Deficit Reduction Super Committee. Now that it has reached an impasse, we can all breathe easier!

There is a fundamental, deep difference between the parties in Washington. Democrats want higher levels of taxes and spending and Republicans want lower levels of each. The gulf between them can only be adjudicated by the electorate at an election. That's the way we do it in a democracy. To split the difference in a spate of legislative deal making is to deprive our people of their right of self-government.

Because we are not Japan, we use our elections to air fundamental policy differences. Because we are not Italy, we come to conclusions and are not always looking to split the difference in fuzzy compromise.

For the last weeks many conservatives have been concerned that our Republican members of the panel would sell us out and go for a tax increase. Some, like Tennessee's Senator Lamar Alexander, urged one. For them to have agreed to a compromise would have been disempowering to the voters. It would have been a sin.

Now the great question looms before us: How large should government be? Should it consume the 41% of our national resources it now does or even less than the 33% it did when Obama took power? Let the debate begin and let the voters decide. And let one or the other party return to Washington in 2013 with control of both Houses and of the White House, determined to enact the will of the voters.

The insiders in Washington wanted a deal because they don't trust the voters. The insiders on Wall Street wanted one because they want predictability. But this decision is not to be made by insiders. It will be made by voters. It is not the triumph of gridlock, but of democracy. The absence of a deal is not a failing of our system, but a manifestation of its most glorious success.

We are still, after all, a democracy.

Not a surprise really.

Let’s get real here. Only the play-along-to-get-along media could hype a business-as-usual non-event like the supercommittee’s thumb-sucking task into sounding like the Cuban missile crisis — or at least the lead-up to the Super Bowl.
(...)
Sorry, but the truth is that the media’s hand-wringing over the supercommittee’s deficit-reduction work is nothing more than a monumental farce. By getting the public to focus on the choice of cutting $1.2 trillion from the budget over 10 years or triggering automatic spending cuts of $1.2 trillion, Congress is once again able to distract from what really needs to be done.

And by “really needs to be done,” I mean cutting a minimum of $1.5 trillion from the budget next year. Why $1.5 trillion? Because that’s what it would take to balance the current budget, which is already 10 times greater than it should be.

It’s all part of the same old Washington game, and the rules of the game are very simple: Democrats never agree to any serious spending cuts, and Republicans always give in (while pretending to be victorious, of course).

In other words, from the Democrats’ point of view, it’s: “Heads, I win; tails, you lose.” And from the Republicans’ point of view, it’s: “Just let us continue to eat in the Congressional dining room, work out in the Congressional gym and have access to insider stock-trading information, and we’ll go along with just about anything you ask of us.”

It never really mattered whether the so-called “spending cuts” came from the super committee or as a result of “automatic, across-the-board spending cuts.” Either way, the budget, the deficit and the national debt were guaranteed to continue to rise — and at an accelerating rate, at that.

What does this mean in terms of next November’s elections? Well, if the Republicans run a progressive candidate like Mitt Romney, once again allowing themselves to be intimidated by the Democrats’ constant admonishments that “voters want Democrats and Republicans to come together,” then they will have learned nothing from their Mush McCain mistake in 2008.

It’s scary to think about, but even Ann Coulter has fallen into the ageless trap of believing that conservatives should once again set aside their principles and nominate a candidate who can win. Not only is such a position unprincipled, it also yields either a losing Presidential race or a Republican President who does nothing more than carry the water bucket for Democrats. (Think George W. Bush.)

Perhaps the biggest tip-off that Romney has Democrats licking their chops at the thought of his winning the Republican nomination is that their liberal media cheerleaders keep insisting he is the candidate Democrats fear most. That’s a dead giveaway for just how badly they want him to be the Republican nominee. Trust me, the thought of running nonstop ads that feature Barack Obama thanking Romney for creating the model for Obamacare has them both salivating and cackling.

Of course, if voters bypass Romney and flee into the arms of Newt Gingrich, Democrats would also have a ball with some of Gingrich’s more infamous positions — supporting the Troubled Asset Relief Program, global-warming couch sessions with Nancy Pelosi, favoring an individual mandate for health care, and, worst of all, referring to Paul Ryan’s serious budget-cutting plan as “extreme right-wing social engineering.”

The important question of the day is not whether the super committee will “compromise” and work out a spending-cut plan or take the easy way out and allow automatic spending cuts to be triggered. Either way, you can be sure there will be no significant cutbacks in government spending.

A far more important question is: Will conservatives be smart enough and tough enough to understand that promising to cut the size and scope of government and put an end to the criminality in Washington is what got them elected to Congress in 2010?

Or will they misread the political climate once again and run scared — right into the arms of their socialist pals across the aisle — and hand the only Marxist President in American history a default victory that will give him the time he needs to finish the job of destroying what is left of the U.S. economy?

Why Liberals Want Gun Control

2011-11-07T14:45:00.000-08:00

Q: Why do Leftists, Liberals, Demunists and Commiecrats want "gun control"?
A: So we can't fight back when they foment mobs and unleash them upon our persons, homes, businesses or other property.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan shows the way:

Even after the bandanna-wearing, rock-throwing, fire-starting fringe demonstrators took over a downtown Oakland building and blocked off a street late Wednesday, Mayor Jean Quan did not want police to intervene.

Instead, Quan asked that police hold off on any confrontation until daylight - or, barring that, send in negotiators to try to work out a peaceful resolution.

"She didn't want to incite the anarchists any more than they already were," said one source who was in the city's emergency operations center when Quan stunned the assembled staffers with her comments.

Finally, interim Police Chief Howard Jordan, with the backing of City Administrator Deanna Santana, made the call for police to take action. Both were in the emergency center with Quan.

The following day, at a press conference with Jordan and Santana, the mayor praised police for their handling of the situation, while a stone-faced chief and city administrator stood by her side.

Quan's command center call was the latest example of the mayor's resistance to using police force on demonstrators, a position that is being reinforced both by her closest advisers and her family.

In fact, eyewitnesses say Quan's husband was among the banner-wavers blockading the port in a nonviolent action earlier Wednesday.

Quan said at a press briefing the day after last week's riot that she was still hoping for a "peaceful resolution" to the Occupy encampment outside City Hall.

Sure you do, Jean. Sure....

But when asked what her idea of a peaceful resolution was or how it might be achieved, Quan said, "I don't know."

It will only be achieved when those goons are turned back by armed law-abiding citizens with weapons.

The Liberal Democrat Powers That Be won't help; in fact, they show their sympathy with the window breakers, robbers and looters.

Editorial Cartoon from 1934, Still True Today

2011-11-06T06:28:00.000-08:00

But what has the Chicago Tribune, and ever other major newspaper, since come to?

The other plan of action they had was to infiltrate and slowly take control of the newspapers. Thank goodness for blogging.

"Occupy Oakland" savages need to be shot, run over

2011-11-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

And one brave developer threatened to do just that, and one brave driver did just that! In a sane society we would give these guys medals.

Here's to you, Phil Tagami:

...though some businesses have been targeted and vandalized by Occupy Oakland protesters, there is at least one businessman who refuses to be intimidated.

Phil Tagami is a well-known Oakland developer. Late Wednesday night, instead of going over paperwork or brokering deals, he was forced to defend a downtown building where he personally oversaw $50 million worth of renovations.

He also has an office there.

“We had people who attempted to break into our building,” the landmark Rotunda Building on Frank Ogawa Plaza outside City Hall, Tagami said. According to comments he made to the San Francisco Chronicle, Tagami grabbed a shotgun that he usually keeps at home, went down to the ground floor and “discouraged them.”

Although they didn’t get inside the building, vandals did scrawl graffiti on the outside walls during the post-midnight riot that broke out after Occupy Oakland’s daylong general strike, writes the Chronicle.

“I was standing there and they saw me there, and I lifted it – I didn’t point it – I just held it in my hands,” Tagami said. “And I just racked it, and they ran.”

Meanwhile, a driver trying to get out of the Oakland BART transit station, after one of these creeps started pounding on his car hood, accelerated and hit the creep! He is unidentified at present, but hats off to him as well. Hats off to the BART Transit Cops for letting him go, too.

Lesson of riots: You can't appease the savages, like the Men's Warehouse tried to do.

But I suspect the Commiecrats will try to prosecute these two guys. Why is that? Because they are in cahoots with the "Occupy" goons, as Mark Steyn points out:

Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, and the Oakland City Council have made "preserving disorder" the official municipal policy. On Wednesday, the "Occupy Oakland" occupiers rampaged through the city, shutting down the nation's fifth-busiest port, forcing stores to close, terrorizing those residents foolish enough to commit the reactionary crime of "shopping," destroying ATMs, spraying the Christ the Light Cathedral with the insightful observation "F**k", etc. And how did Mayor Quan and the Oakland City Council react? The following day they considered a resolution to express their support for "Occupy Oakland" and to call on the city administration to "collaborate with protesters."

That's "collaborate" in the Nazi-occupied France sense: the city's feckless political class are collaborating with anarchists against the taxpayers who maintain them in their sinecures. They're not the only ones. When the rumor spread that the Whole Foods store, of all unlikely corporate villains, had threatened to fire employees who participated in the protest, the Regional President David Lannon took to Facebook: "We totally support our Team Members participating in the General Strike today – rumors are false!" But, despite his "total support", they trashed his store anyway, breaking windows and spray-painting walls. As The Oakland Tribune reported: "A man who witnessed the Whole Foods attack, but asked not to be identified, said he was in the store buying an organic orange when the crowd arrived."

There's an epitaph for the republic if ever I heard one.

"The experience was surreal, the man said. 'They were wearing masks. There was this whole mess of people, and no police here. That was weird.'"

No, it wasn't. It was municipal policy.

In fairness to the miserable David Lannon, Whole Foods was in damage-control mode. Men's Wearhouse in Oakland had no such excuse. In solidarity with the masses, they printed up a huge poster declaring "We Stand With The 99%" and announcing they'd be closed that day. In return, they got their windows smashed.

I'm a proud member of the 1 percent, and I'd have been tempted to smash 'em myself. A few weeks back, finding myself suddenly without luggage, I shopped at a Men's Wearhouse, faute de mieux, in Burlington, Vermont. Never again. I'm not interested in patronizing craven corporations so decadent and self-indulgent that as a matter of corporate policy they support the destruction of civilized society. Did George Zimmer, founder of Men's Wearhouse and backer of Howard Dean, marijuana decriminalization and many other fashionable causes, ever glance at the photos of the OWS occupiers and ponder how many of "the 99%" were ever likely to be in need of his two-for-one deal on suits and neckties? And did he think even these dummies were dumb enough to fall for such a feebly corporatist attempt at appeasing the mob?

I don't "stand with the 99%," and certainly not downwind of them. But I'm all for their "occupation" continuing on its merry way. It usefully clarifies the stakes. At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement's aims: They're anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life – just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth. What's happening in Oakland is a logical exercise in class solidarity: the government class enthusiastically backing the breakdown of civil order is making common cause with the leisured varsity class, the thuggish union class and the criminal class in order to stick it to what's left of the beleaguered productive class. It's a grand alliance of all those societal interests that wish to enjoy in perpetuity a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. Only the criminal class is reasonably upfront about this. The rest – the lifetime legislators, the unions defending lavish and unsustainable benefits, the "scholars" whiling away a somnolent half-decade at Complacency U – are obliged to dress it up a little with some hooey about "social justice" and whatnot.

But that's all it takes to get the media and modish if insecure corporate entities to string along. Whole Foods can probably pull it off. So can Ben & Jerry's, the wholly owned subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch corporation UniLever that nevertheless successfully passes itself off as some sort of tie-dyed Vermont hippie commune. But a chain of stores that sells shirts, ties, the garb of the corporate lackey, has a tougher sell.

The class that gets up in the morning, pulls on its lousy Men's Wearhouse get-up and trudges off to work has to pay for all the other classes, and the strain is beginning to tell.
Let it be said that the "occupiers" are right on the banks: They shouldn't have been bailed out. America has one of the most dysfunctional banking systems in the civilized world, and most of its allegedly indispensable institutions should have been allowed to fail. But the Occupy Oakland types have no serious response, other than the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by government-funded inertia.
(...)

At heart, Oakland's occupiers and worthless political class want more of the same fix that has made America the Brokest Nation in History: They expect to live as beneficiaries of a prosperous Western society without making any contribution to the productivity necessary to sustain it. This is the "idealism" that the media are happy to sentimentalize, and that enough poseurs among the corporate executives are happy to indulge – at least until the window smashing starts. To "occupy" Oakland or anywhere else, you have to have something to put in there. Yet the most striking feature of OWS is its hollowness. And in a strange way the emptiness of its threats may be a more telling indictment of a fin de civilization West than a more coherent protest movement could ever have mounted.

Michelle Malkin posts what the lamestream media apparatchiks won't.

When You Have Lost Stephen Colbert.....

2011-11-01T19:30:00.000-07:00

...it is time to pack it up and go home. "Occupy Wall Street" dupes get clowned. Even liberal weenie Stephen Colbert realizes they are a joke.

It's everything you'd hope it would be, and more. I would try to narrow down a few highlights for those who are pressed for time, but it's spectacular from start to finish. Especially entertaining is Colbert's interview with the "female-bodied" facilitator named "Ketchup," and her smirking consensus comrade.

Happy Halloween!

2011-10-31T00:01:00.000-07:00

They put Election Day close to Halloween for a reason...

The hidden Obama inflation tax

2011-10-23T13:21:00.000-07:00

It has been suggested in some quarters that The Tea Party Movement and their Republican allies have nothing to complain about because neither the Obama administration, nor Nancy Pelosi in her heyday of 2009-2010, raised tax rates. In fact, it is claimed through credits that the Democrats in Congress actually lowered taxes "for 95% of the population!"

Leaving aside the absurdity of cutting income taxes for that 47 percent of the population who pay no income taxes, this utterly ignores the hidden tax of inflation that is simmering away. The Fed has printed more money to pay for Barry and Nancy and Harry's "stimulus". This means more money is going after the same goods and services in our economy. This means the money you or I hold is worth *that much less*. In effect, our money *was* taxed away by Barry and Harry and Nancy, through the mechanism of currency devaluation and corresponding price inflation. You may have noticed prices creeping up in the stores already.

When Pelosi's Congress spent more money than they collected in taxes, and with nearly a *trillion* dollars of "stimulus" they certainly did that, they authorized the Treasury Department to borrow from the public by selling Treasury bills, bonds, and notes. The Treasury offers these securities for sale at public auction, and they are bid for and purchased by banks, pension funds, trusts, corporations, individuals, and above all foreign interests. These are widely considered to be the safest IOUs around. After all, they are guaranteed by the U.S. government.

Inasmuch as Treasury securities are offered at auction, there is no chance they will not be purchased. The Treasury can offer as high a rate of interest as is necessary to attract buyers. Thus, investors, including individuals, pension funds, banks, and life insurance companies needing safety of principal are induced to sell other private debt securities such as bonds, savings accounts, and certificates of deposit, and buy the government IOUs.

Sale of government securities thus absorbs the savings of individuals and corporations. The more that government borrows, the less money that is left over for other borrowers. As a consequence, other borrowers must offer higher and higher rates of interest in order to attract funds. Thus, when the federal government runs deficits, it tends to raise interest rates, and this in turn causes the cost of doing business to rise. As a result, business activity slows down, and both businesses and consumers curtail spending and the economy moves toward recession. Which also explains why Pelosi's and Reid's and Obama's "stimulus" was utterly ineffective.

However, all of the last paragraph assumes a money supply that is kept the same. Enter the "quantitative easing" (printing more money) of Ben Bernacke and the Federal Reserve.

It is widely believed that the Fed is sympathetic with the problems recessions create for politicians, and lowers interest rates in order to keep those politicians in favor with the public. That is not the case at all. The Fed is not a federal agency. It is owned and run by the banking industry. In fact, it is relatively insulated from political pressure, Democrat or Republican, but it has other reasons to act.

What are they? A recession means bad times for the banks. People stop borrowing, corporations lose business, and bank profits drop. When borrowers get into trouble, banks get into trouble. If the recession turns into a full-scale depression, widespread bank failures may result, as they did in the 1920s. Since the Fed is an organization made up of banks, it is clearly in the best interests of those running it to ward off the recession by lowering interest rates. And it does so by expanding the money supply.

When the Fed determines that interest rates should be lowered, or at least prevented from rising any further, it contacts private dealers who make the market in (i.e., who buy and sell) U.S. government securities. The Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve meets and issues orders to purchase Treasury securities. (Remember, these are the same T-bills and bonds that created the rising interest rates in the first place by absorbing the savings of individuals and corporations.)

The Fed pays the dealers for the securities with Federal Reserve checks, which the dealers then deposit in their banks. The bond dealers' banks then forward those checks to the Fed (where the banks have their reserves on deposit), and the Fed credits the reserve accounts of the banks.

Now the bank has new reserves against which it can make loans. These fresh reserves are just like new deposits from customers, and can be expanded by the same process that all bank deposits are expanded. Under reserve requirements in effect at any point in time (the Fed can change them at will), these reserves can be expanded by five, six, or seven times through what is calls "fractional reserve banking." Thus, when the Federal Reserve buys $1 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, the banks can loan out $5, $6, or $7 billion to borrowers.

Where did the Fed get the money to buy the Treasury securities? It created it out of thin air. It credits the reserve account of a bank by a simple bookkeeping entry. What does the Fed have to back up its IOUs? It has the IOUs of the U.S. Treasury, that is, the Treasury's bills and bonds.

The Federal Reserve accounts thus balance: They show a liability of the bank reserves and the offsetting asset of Treasury securities. The Federal Reserve Notes in your pocket or checking account mean that the Fed owes you money, and these are in turn backed up by the T-bills they hold - which means that the government owes the Fed money. The U.S. government continues to issue more and more IOUs to cover its ever-growing deficits, and the Fed continues to buy these up and issue its own notes in their place.

This whole process is known as "monetizing" debt, which means that the debt of the federal government is turned into money. The government borrows money to meet its deficits, and the IOUs it issues eventually are converted into Federal Reserve Notes. Those greenbacks in your wallet that you think of as money are only government IOUs broken up and reissued by the Fed. And as a result of what the Fed did, your hard earned money is worth that much less...

Thus, in the long run, there is no difference between Nancy and Harry and Barry and the other liberals in the government fighting a recession by taxing money from you and giving it to "green jobs" or "the needy", and the Fed doing much the same by buying up Nancy and Harry and Barry's Treasury bills and giving the banks new reserves. The only difference is in the timing. The effects of government borrowing are almost instantly offset by the effects of government spending. But when the Fed monetizes the government debt, it takes months, or even years, for people to offset the influx of new money by raising their prices. The Fed action just postpones the inevitable a bit longer than the government action does.

Federal deficits, then, are the primary cause of continued inflation of the money supply. Once banks have loaned out their depositors' money to the maximum limit set by reserve requirements, the only source of new dollars is the Federal Reserve.

Dirty Laundry

2011-10-09T18:48:00.000-07:00

Saw a link to this T-shirt at cafepress earlier. I think it's a pretty good response to those whose T-shirts express the idea that "Our totalitarians are cool."

The text reads “My Che and Mao t-shirts are in the wash”. Not bad. And, the back depicts the numbers of people killed by the Soviets and the Maoists next to the number killed by the Nazis (hint: each of the former racked up a higher body count), with a general admonition against totalitarianism.

California: A Warning From History

2011-10-08T16:58:00.000-07:00

Tom McClintock bluntly tells it like it is. Congressman Tom McClintock delivered the following speech to the Council for National Policy. Excerpts below:

I want to welcome this groundbreaking scientific expedition to the savage lands of the Left Coast. You are here in California to answer an important theoretical question and now you have your answer.

Yes, this is what Barack Obama’s second term would look like.

Study it. Fear it. And then go home and make sure that it never happens to the rest of the country.
(...)
Mark that well, because if we lose this struggle for the future of our country, you too someday will live in a California – only without the nice climate.

Bad policies. Bad process. Bad politics. Those are the three acts in a Greek tragedy that tell the tale of how, in the span of a single generation, the most prosperous and golden state in the nation became an economic basket case.
(...)
One thing – and one thing only – changed (over the last decades): public policy. The political Left gradually gained dominance over California’s government and has imposed a disastrous agenda of radical and retrograde policies that have destroyed the quality of life that Californians once took for granted.
(...)
I submit to you that no conceivable act of God could wreak such devastation. Only acts of government can do that. And they have.

We conservatives espouse principles of individual liberty, free markets, constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, the protection of natural rights – not out of some slavish devotion to ideology, but because all human experience has shown these principles to be the most certain means to achieve a prosperous and happy society. If you want to see the opposite of that – come to California.

James Madison said the trickiest question the Constitutional convention confronted was how to oblige a government to control itself. History records not a single example of a nation that spent, borrowed and taxed its way to prosperity; but it offers us many, many examples of nations that spent and borrowed and taxed their way to economic ruin and bankruptcy. And history is screaming this warning at us: that nations that bankrupt themselves aren’t around very long, because before you can provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty – you have to be able to pay for it.

California may not have invented deficit spending but we certainly refined it into a science. Before the crash of 2008, when California was taking in more money than ever in its history, it was already running a nine billion dollar deficit, under a Republican governor elected on the pledge to “cut up the credit cards.”

Here, Tom points out how Ah-nold and a good many RINO Republicans did their part in ruining this once great state.

Federal spending increased 26 percent in the last three years literally consuming and squandering the wealth of the nation at the worst possible time. Yet consider this: from July of 2005 to July of 2008, California increased its spending by 31 percent, under a Republican governor elected on the pledge to “stop the crazy deficit spending”. You can see how well that’s worked for us.

If stimulus spending, massive deficits and burgeoning government bureaucracies were the path to economic prosperity, California should be leading the nation from the top rather than from the bottom. After we lost the nation’s triple-A credit rating this summer specifically because of chronic deficit spending, it should surprise no one that California suffers the lowest bond rating in the nation for precisely the same reason.

Our regulatory burdens are also years ahead of the rest of the nation – we’ve had our own version of "Cap and Trade" on the books for five years now, and even though the bulk of these restrictions yet to take effect, investors make decisions every day anticipating their impact.

This has already proven utterly devastating to energy generation, cargo and passenger transportation, cement production, construction, wine making, agriculture and manufacturing. When he signed this legislation, Gov. Schwarzenegger promised that this would produce a cornucopia of new "green" jobs.

How’s that working out? Up until the autumn of 2006, California’s unemployment rate tracked fairly steadily with the national unemployment numbers. But beginning in that quarter, California’s unemployment rate moved steadily beyond the national numbers. Today it stands at 12.1 percent – three full points above the national rate. You can’t blame the national economy for that – you have to find something specific to California that occurred in the autumn of 2006 to explain this divergence. I submit that the only significant event in that period was the signing of AB 32.

And I should note that although we’ve devastated California’s once recession-proof economy with these ridiculous regulations, the Earth stubbornly continues to warm and cool as it has for billions of years.
(...)
California (once) had embarked on an aggressive program of hydroelectric and nuclear power construction that promised an era of clean, cheap and abundant electricity. But beginning with the first “small is beautiful” administration of Jerry Brown, these programs were abandoned in favor of “green energy.” We now have the most stringent renewable energy requirements in the nation.

Which helps explain why California is the home to such stunning green energy success stories as Solyndra. We have among the highest electricity prices in the continental United States. We have the lowest per-capita electricity consumption in the nation as well. And every day, our government spends part of our sky-high electricity bills to lecture us to conserve more.

We completed our last major dam in 1979. Last year, environmentalists diverted 200 billion gallons of water from central valley agriculture for the enjoyment and amusement of the Delta Smelt – a three-inch long minnow that has become the environmental left’s pet cause. This single action destroyed thousands of jobs and laid waste to a half million acres of the most fertile farmland in America. It is no coincidence that four of the ten metropolitan areas suffering the highest unemployment rate in the country are all in California’s Central Valley.

Meanwhile, up north on the Klamath River, California has found a new partnership with the Obama administration as they proceed to tear down four perfectly good hydroelectric dams capable of producing 155 megawatts of the cleanest and cheapest electricity on the planet — enough to power 155,000 homes. This is due, we are told, to the decline of the salmon population. The Iron Gate Fish Hatchery on the Klamath produces 5 million salmon smolts each year – 17,000 of which return as fully-grown adults to spawn – but they don’t include them in the population count. To add insult to insanity, when the Iron Gate Dam is destroyed, we will lose the Iron Gate Fish Hatchery.

We have the most aggressive mass transit program in the country – although we have not added significant capacity to our highway system in a generation. Californians consistently pay among the highest taxes per gallon of gasoline in the country and yet make among the lowest per capita expenditures on our roads. And what a surprise: we also have among the highest congestion rates in the country.

We have the largest population of illegal aliens in the country, consuming somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 billion in direct state expenditures. A few years ago, the Los Angeles County Sheriff reported that fully 25 percent of the jail inmates were illegal aliens. For years, California has provided in-state tuition for illegal aliens at the expense of California taxpayers – and with the signing of the California Dream Act four days ago, they will also have access to taxpayer-financed grants. Meanwhile, CSU (The California State University system) has increased tuition 22 percent in just two years.

I’ve noticed a few of you on your cell phones no doubt checking to be sure that your return reservations are confirmed.

But I need to remind you that the Obama administration is pursuing exactly the same policies nationally – and so far with the same results. When you step off the plane back in your home state, just remember that all your plane trip will buy you is a couple of years if we lose the fight in 2012.

The second act of this morality tale is how bad process accommodated and amplified bad policy.

The Left loves to throw the term “dysfunctional” at our governing institutions. In the last week, the Democratic governor of North Carolina seriously opined that we ought to postpone congressional elections so that congressmen would “do the right thing.” Peter Orzag this week wrote of wanting to shift even more decision-making from our elected representatives to elitist boards appointed by our betters.

We have reached this point not because of a failure of our republican institutions, but because of a failure to respect those institutions.

Again, California is a pioneer, but the rest of the country is fast catching up. In the 1960’s, California’s legislature was respected throughout the country as the model for others to follow. It was professional, it respected process, and it worked. It did a few things, but it did them exceedingly well. It left local schools, local governments and local revenues in local hands. But beginning in the 1970’s this began to break down.

The humility that kept Sacramento from sticking its nose into the business of local governments gave way to the hubris that the state knew better what was important to local communities than those communities themselves. The appalling breakdown of federalist principles at the national level now geometrically compounds this problem.

But at the core of this breakdown was the abandonment of our basic republican structure of government – and it began right here.

Our parliamentary institutions have evolved over centuries to distill diverse viewpoints to a common direction within constitutional boundaries. When this process is applied, it works extremely well.

For a quarter of a century, I watched as these brilliant checks and balances that had produced reasonably punctual and reasonably balanced budgets for over a century, and nurtured the most prosperous economy in the nation, were gradually abandoned in the name of liberal efficiency.

Slowly, inexorably, decision-making that had been done broadly and independently by the two houses of the legislature — involving the active participation of every elected representative — was usurped by an extra-constitutional abomination called the “Big Five.”

See if any of this sounds familiar: The “Big Five” is essentially a super-committee that meets behind closed doors outside the scrutiny of the public, sidelining the legislature, short-circuiting the independent judgment of the two houses, and then in the eleventh hour drops its decision into the laps of the legislature for a take-it–or-leave it vote that cannot even be amended.

Czars, anyone?

I know I don’t have to connect the dots for anybody here. Ladies and gentlemen, it does not work. California’s plague of chronically late and chronically unbalanced budgets coincides quite clearly with the disintegration of the legislative process and the replacement of parliamentary institutions with handpicked super-committees.

Which brings me to the third act of this Greek Tragedy – bad politics.

Last November, while the rest of the country was celebrating historic Republican gains (including a shift of 63 U.S. House Seats, six U.S. Senate Seats, 680 state legislative seats, 19 state legislatures and six governors), the statewide Republican ticket in California – despite massively outspending the Democrats in the best Republican year since 1938 – lost every statewide race and even lost ground in the state legislature.

Republicans nationally now hold more state legislative seats than in any year since 1928. In California, they hold fewer than at any time since 1978!

That is not because the voting population of California has lost its collective mind and it is not because the state is divinely ordained to be run by morons.

I would like to *believe* this, Tom, but unfortunately too many eco-weenie fools, too many atomized souls without extended family and local community who now seek government as their new authority figure, and too many illegal aliens might mean that we are doomed, Tom.

It happened because Dick Armey is right: “When we act like us we win, and when we act like them we lose.”

Republicans lost the 2006 and 2008 elections not because voters abandoned Republican principles, but because they looked at the Republicans and concluded that the Republicans had abandoned Republican principles.

Although this is undeniably true as well.

During the Bush years, Republicans had increased federal spending at twice the rate of Bill Clinton; they left our borders wide open; they approved the biggest increase in entitlement spending since the Great Society and that turned record budget surpluses into record deficits to launch this brave new era of stimulus spending.

Thanks, Karl Rove!

I last visited with the CNP in Washington in May of 2009. What a depressing meeting that was! Obama enjoyed 66 percent public approval. The week before, a conference of self-appointed Republican leaders had concluded that “we had to put the Reagan era behind us” and we had to be “mindful and respectful that the other side has something and that we have nothing and you can’t beat something with nothing.” (I won’t mention names, but his initials were Jeb Bush.)

Thank God House Republicans didn’t take that approach.

In the aftermath of that debacle, House Republican leaders resolved to restore traditional Republican principles as the policy and political focus of the party and they achieved something no one at the time thought possible: they united House Republicans as a determined voice of opposition to the Left and they rallied the American people.

Republicans rediscovered why we were Republicans, and Republican leaders rediscovered Reagan’s advice to paint our positions in bold colors and not hide them in pale pastels.

The result was one of the most dramatic watershed elections in American history.

California Republicans did exactly the opposite, and ended up replaying the disaster of 2008 while the rest of the country was enjoying one of the greatest Republican landslides ever recorded.

In California, the Democrats attacked Republicans for imposing the biggest state tax increase in American history. The Democrats attacked Republicans for obstructing pension reform to protect the prison guards union. These attacks had the unfortunate element of being true.

Meanwhile, the (California) Republican ticket attacked Arizona’s immigration law. (RINO) Republicans attacked the Proposition that would have stopped AB 32 – California’s version of Cap and Trade.

The sad truth is that (in California) we were more like the Democrats than the Democrats.

A few days after the election, a Republican leader whose mission in life has been to redefine the Republican Party in the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger said he just couldn’t explain the results.

I can. We didn’t need to redefine our principles. We needed to return to them. House Republicans did. California Republicans did not. Any questions?

Great parties are built upon great principles and they are judged by their devotion to those principles. Since its inception, the central principle of the Republican Party can be summed up in a single word, Freedom.

The closer we have hewn to that principle, the better we have done. The farther we have strayed from that principle, the worse we have done.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln warned the nation that two incompatible and irreconcilable philosophies, freedom and slavery, competed for our future and reminded us that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” “I do not believe the house will fall,” he said, “but I do believe that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

Today two incompatible and irreconcilable philosophies — freedom and socialism — compete for our nation’s future and the stage is set for one of the greatest debates in the history of the American Republic.

We are winning that debate. But we have to stand firm.

What has happened to California and now is threatening our country is the inevitable consequence of bad policy, bad process and bad politics – and the good news is, that’s all within our power as a people to change.

I believe that if Californians rediscover these self-evident truths, Jerry Brown will be to California what Barack Obama has been to the rest of the country – a giant wake-up call. And if Americans rally behind these truths, together, we will write the next great chapter of the American Republic: that just when it looked like America would fade into history as just another failed socialist state, this generation of Americans rediscovered, revived and restored those uniquely American principles of individual liberty and constitutionally limited government, rallied under a bold banner held high by the traditional party of freedom, and from that moment America began her next great era of expansion, prosperity and influence.

But what happens when a sizeable percentage of Californians, out of either ideology brainwashing or opportunism (yes, illegal alien coddling Wall Street Journal cheap labor greedheads, that means *you*) can never, ever, rediscover these self-evident truths?

"Warmists Think We're Stupid"

2011-10-05T17:20:00.000-07:00

Ross Kiminsky delivers the devastating point:

We have nearly eliminated smallpox and polio, two of the greatest scourges of eras past. In other words, we adapt to our environment -- in those cases when we can't adapt our environment to us.

For that reason, it defies common sense to believe that man-made global warming, even if it were real, would have the devastating impact that its anti-capitalist, wealth-redistributionist proponents claim.

Now we have the results of a much broader study, commissioned by the Reason Foundation, which points in exactly this same direction of adaptability. The study, entitled "The Amazing Decline in Deaths from Extreme Weather in an Era of Global Warming, 1900-2010" is summarized thus:

Aggregate mortality attributed to all extreme weather events globally has declined by 98% since the 1920s, in spite of a four-fold rise in population and much more complete reporting of such events.

Other highlights from the study's findings:

• "Droughts were the most deadly extreme weather category between 1900 and 2010, responsible for over 60 percent of extreme weather deaths during that time. The worldwide death rate from droughts peaked in the 1920s when there were 235 deaths a year per million people. Since then, the death rate has fallen by 99.9 percent. The study finds that global food production advancements, such as new crops, improved fertilizer, irrigation, and pesticides, along with society's better ability to move food and medical supplies, were responsible for reducing the number of deaths in times of severe drought."

• "Floods were to blame for 30 percent of the deaths during the timeframe studied, making them the second most deadly extreme weather category. The death rate for floods topped out in the 1930s at 204 deaths a year per million people. Deaths from floods have fallen by over 98 percent since then and there was an average of approximately one flood death per year per million people from 2000 to 2010."

• All of this while the advent of storm-finding and storm-reporting technologies have massively increased the number of reported extreme weather events. (This is not to say that the actual number of such events has increased, just the reporting thereof.) Of course, the same technology which allows storms to be reported allows them to be prepared for.

If people adapt, as we manifestly do, to almost anything thrown at us, it is difficult to take seriously the doomsday scenarios proffered by the UN's IPCC and their grant-chasing "scientists," supported by radical environmental leftists whose motivation is more to impoverish the west than to "save the planet."

That is why their "solutions" all involve two things: Curbing energy usage and production (which is to say, curbing humans' standard of living), and redistributing wealth from richer people and richer nations to poorer people and poorer nations. But if they really cared about the impact on people, rather than satisfying their own self-loathing as members of the human race, or even worse as Americans (gasp!), they would focus on aiding and speeding adaptation rather than trying to do the atmospheric equivalent of stopping continental drift.

For example, Denmark's Bjorn Lomborg, a professor of environmental economics, is a believer that global warming is man-made yet still argues that massive wealth-destroying policies are the wrong way to go. Instead, we should focus on much cheaper and more effective projects such as increasing clean water supplies in the third world.

People are becoming skeptical of man-made global warming not just because the warmists' mathematical models can't explain the lack of warming since 1998 and not just because Climategate proved how utterly corrupt "climate science" has become. But it's also because the solutions proposed, i.e. to stop using energy, are based on an obvious, even if never-ever-ever-ever-stated by the left, premise that people who live on 21st century Earth are too stupid to adapt to a changing environment -- even though we have as a species, even without the benefit of modern technology, done just that for millennia.

Reason's new study is just confirmation of what we all know in our gut: that "climate change," even if it were partially caused by man, is not the threat the left claims and not to be responded to by cutting our own economic throats, whether by cap-and-trade policies or by incinerating billions of dollars on the altar of "green energy" as our savior. Indeed, actually incinerating the money may have generated more energy for our nation than Solyndra and the like have, proving perhaps that while humans are not inherently stupid, bureaucrats and politicians may be a special case.

Hank Williams Jr. has a point

2011-10-04T19:43:00.000-07:00

As caustic as he was, his apology is spot-on here:

Some of us have strong opinions and are often misunderstood. My analogy was extreme – but it was to make a point. I was simply trying to explain how stupid it seemed to me - how ludicrous that pairing {of John Boehner and Barack Obama} was. They’re polar opposites and it made no sense. They don’t see eye-to-eye and never will. I have always respected the office of the President.

Every time the media brings up the tea party it’s painted as racist and extremists – but there’s never a backlash – no outrage to those comparisons….

Hosts actually ON the payroll of ESPN laughed when Mike Tyson joked about raping Sarah Palin, and.........crickets. Nothing happened to them.

How can they deny a liberal media double standard when we turn on our televisions and see it daily?

Outstanding take on the "Occupy" phonies

2011-10-03T21:09:00.000-07:00

It's as phony as it gets. This quote sums it up perfectly:

Hate (Wall) Street or not, the problems we face didn't begin there. They began in Washington D.C. It wasn't the Street that squandered the Social Security Trust Fund or decided that the economy would look better with a 15 trillion dollar deficit. The Street certainly played its role in suggesting to the politicians which side of the river to throw the money in, but it was at best a bagman. And the robbers are still off the Potomac, smirking their way through Senate sessions, and trading email notes with the organizations behind the populist protests.

Yosemite National Park--Visitor Advisory

2011-10-02T12:11:00.000-07:00

Animals that formerly were self-sufficient are now showing signs of belonging to the Democrat Party. They have apparently learned to just sit and wait for the government to step in and provide for their care and sustenance. This photo is of a black bear in Yosemite National Park, California, turned Democrat. He's nicknamed Bearack Acorn Obearma. It is believed that he has become a campground organizer......

Thanks to Jim Bell for inspiration and the photo(shop?).

Thomas Sowell: Defending Rick Perry

2011-09-27T20:38:00.000-07:00

OK, so Rick Perry can't speak well, like another Texas Governor that comes to mind:

But that does not mean he's wrong. Thoms Sowell outlines the defense:

The current outbreak of "gotcha" attacks on Texas Governor Rick Perry show one of the other pitfalls for those who are trying to pick a national leader. The three big sound-bite issues used against him during the TV "debates" have involved Social Security, immigration and a vaccine against cervical cancer.

Where these three issues have been discussed at length, whether in a few media accounts or in Governor Perry's own more extended discussions in an interview on Sean Hannity's program, his position was far more reasonable than it appeared to be in either his opponents' sound bites or even in his own abbreviated accounts during the limited time available in the TV "debate" format.

On Social Security, Governor Perry was not only right to call it a "Ponzi scheme," but was also right to point out that this did not mean welshing on the government's obligation to continue paying retirees what they had been promised.

Even those of us who still disagree with particular decisions made by Governor Perry can see some of those decisions as simply the errors of a decent man who realized that he was faced not with a theory but with a situation.

For example, the ability to save young people from cervical cancer with a stroke of a pen was a temptation that any decent and humane individual would find hard to resist, even if Governor Perry himself now admits to second thoughts about how it was done.

Many of us can agree with Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's contention that it should have been done differently. But it reflects no credit on her to have tried to scare people with claims about the dangers of vaccination. Such scares have already cost the lives of children who have died on both sides of the Atlantic from diseases that vaccination would have prevented.

The biggest mischaracterization of Governor Perry's position has been on immigration. The fact that he has more confidence in putting "boots on the ground" along the border, instead of relying on a fence that can be climbed over or tunneled under where there is no one around, is a logistical judgment, not a question of being against border control.

Sorry Tom, but a fence is utterly obviously needed, as it would help the boots on the ground. And in turn, boots on the ground help prevent destruction of, climbing over, or tunneling under the fence. The two *go together*, and it is not an either/or issue. Here, Rick Perry did an epic fail.

In fairness, Governor Perry DID order the National Guard (to the extent he can, he doesn't have absolute control) to the border, along with the Texas Rangers and the Texas Guard (Texas's own militia, basically). Further, he championed the Sanctuary Cities bill which would have denied state funds to any city declaring itself a sanctuary city. He also championed and signed Texas's shiny new Voter ID law, which helps minimize the potential for political chicanery. What good is it to Illegal Alien Hispander when the illegal aliens will be prevented from voting?

But Thomas Sowell is right about this:

Those of us who disagree with Governor Perry's decision to allow the children of illegal immigrants to attend the state colleges and universities, under the same terms as Texas citizens, need at least to understand what his options were. These were children who were here only because of their parents' decisions and who had graduated from a Texas high school.

Governor Perry saw the issue as whether these children should now be allowed to continue their education, and become self-supporting taxpayers, or whether Texas would be better off with a higher risk of those young people becoming dependents or worse. I still see Governor Perry's decision as an error, but the kind of error that a decent and humane individual would be tempted to make.

I have far more questions about those who would blow this error up into something that it is not. Error-free leaders don't exist -- and we don't want to end up settling for a warm body.

Ultimately, this is not about Governor Perry. It is about a process that can destroy any potential leader, even when the country needs a new leader with a character that the "gotcha" attackers demonstrate they do not have.

San Joaquin Valley's New Crime Wave

2011-09-18T22:35:00.000-07:00

From the local TV news: "Thieves Make Off With Vineyard's Irrigation System":

MODESTO (CBS13) — Thieves crushed a grape crop when they took off with the tools that help a local vineyard to grow.

Grape grower Frank Rashid was on track for a record-breaking year.

“See how beautiful?” said Rashid, gesturing toward his grapes.

But in an instant, thieves crippled all of his hard work.

“A lot of trouble for me, [and] the grapes; I can lose the crop, you know,” said Rashid.

Bad guys stole the grape irrigation system worth more than $10,000. And now, his petite syrah grapes are starting to shrivel away.

Rashid says someone walked on to the 14-acre family vineyard over the weekend and went straight for the pair of tanks.

Each tank has a pump.

“And we have here a flush controller,” said Rashid.

A valve and a motor, and that’s not all.

“These parts would hold the filter pressure pump, and they took it out,” said Rashid.

In his 12 years of growing grapes, Rashid has never been hit by thieves. He believes the criminals will cash in his equipment as scrap metal. He plans to install a fence — and even cameras — to protect his crop.

“It’s not just hurting me, it’s hurting the winery, everybody,” said Rashid.

With his livelihood and his business on the line, Rashid hopes to replace the irrigation system by the end of the week. If it’s not installed in time, he fears the crop will be completely destroyed in one week.

If illegal aliens are “doing the jobs Americans won’t do”, so we are told ad nauseum, they are also stealing the pumps Americans won’t steal.

Of course the liberal Demunist Commiecrats and their media apparatchiks will claim it is "racism" to claim illegal aliens, or their former anchor baby now teenage children, did this. But who else besides Mr. Rashid would know about his irrigration system? It would likely be young men without authority in their lives, and it would have to be someone who knows someone working the property, and black inner city youth didn't drive out there, and white or asian suburbanites didn't either.White rural youth? Possibly, but they would be too busy working on, or guarding, their own family farms. Think about who the thieves might be, and how they got there.

And President Obama mocks those who want more sensible border policies with tales of moats and alligators.

And this sort of theft has increased up and down the San Joaquin Valley. What has changed over time? A "multicultural" education system that condones this crime, and an influx of rootless single men, who are the most likely to engage in thieving. Victor Davis Hanson explains:

...readying oneself for the next break-in — so our inland “California Corridor” has become (a way of life for farmers) from Bakersfield to Sacramento.

More specifically, I have been on the lookout around my farm for a predatory, nearly new, grey/silver Toyota truck that drives in and then speeds out — always a day or so before the nocturnal theft. He’s clever, this caser — and audacious too, like a wily Sherman tank prowling through the hedgerows. (Why, if poor, is he not home growing a tomato garden or scouring the roadside for the ubiquitous tossed aluminum cans and plastic bottles?)

On three separate occasions from June to August, I have had copper wire stripped out of pumps, the barn ransacked, and the two locks pried off the shop and various things stolen. (Why did they steal buckets of 1900 antique bolts and square nails and leave alone a drill press and grinder? Ease of recycling? Ignorance?)

When Metal Grows Legs

One of the stranger things in the California Corridor is to periodically walk around a barnyard and notice: “Hmm, that set of rusted furrowers is gone? Hmmm, what happened to those sections of 2-inch pipe? Hmmm, didn’t I have an old compressor next to the shed? Have I got dementia, or wasn’t there once upon a time three metal ladders leaning against the shop?” It is as if they became animate, grew legs, and quietly walked off in the sunset.

Hippo Regius

Twice I ran into the barnyard to see the truck, with its two gangbanger youths, peel off in clouds of dust. (And, yes, as a CSU ex-professor, I know the party line: the dominant culture neglects/exploits/oppresses/fill in the blanks the “other” to such a degree that he sometimes must lash out, or, on occasion, to find validation, might just do something illegal like steal buckets of antique nails, or illogical, like in poverty buying a new truck, and thus so disturbs/finally wins the attention of those with privilege and their self-constructed norms. Been there and heard that for thirty years).

The Toyota is always around when theft occurs, and always speeding off when anyone spots it. Rural California is also like North Africa circa 420 AD: the few family farms left are mostly fenced or walled, the dogs large, the owners armed — trying to survive against organized Vandal attacks. All we need are mosaics in the courtyard portraying happier times as a testament to future archeologists. Maybe a “Cave Canem!” on the doorstep.

I know of no neighboring farm that has not been broken into or fought/scared off such intruders.(...)
Then and Now

So it is that in 1935 poor people scraped and saved to cast a bronze plaque for their Depression-era new city hall, and in 2011 rather more affluent people ripped it off to melt it down for a layaway payment on some chrome rims or another round of meth.
(...)
Jaws on Wheels

Seven days ago, I left to teach here at Hillsdale for my month vacation. My son, back home on the farm — he often rushes out armed when trucks come into the driveway at night — called. He mentioned in passing that the Toyota was back, Jaws-like circling around the farm in short bursts of speed to see if anyone was there. (The modus operandi (for these thieves) in the rural California hinterlands is to drive into a farm, check if anyone comes out, if so, either peel out or even stay put to “inquire” about a “rental” or “work.” If no one comes out, then break a window, grab a TV or computer and speed off. Also: Please do not suggest, “call the sheriff”; I have, and even “filled out a report” over the phone, no less. Enough said. And yes, I probably should sell the 140-year-old farm and move away, but also probably won’t. Why leave and give in to barbarism? There are still far more good than lawless people in the valley.)

Stealing Up For a Truck?

My point in this long excursus? Note the description “late-model Toyota.” I think it is a Tacoma, maybe 2009-11, so not a cheap truck by any means.

Earlier another youth drove in without seeing me mowing the lawn. I ran up; startled he stammered, “Hey, mister, I’m only looking for scrap metal to buy.” (What is it with the national epidemic with good wire or scrap metal?)

Obamunist inflation in commodity prices, partly.

I’ll pass on his shoulder to finger sleeve tattoos, the ink drops under the eyes, the shaved head, wife-beater T-shirt, the inked-in but impressive religious icon tattooed on the neck, and the whole nine yards. As I wrote earlier, I immediately noticed brand new hot-water tanks, still in their labeled cardboard containers, in the bed of his truck. They seemed very “metal” to me, but not very “scrap.” Words were exchanged and he backed out.

Here’s the point: he too drove a brand new truck, this one a custom-painted fire-engine red Dodge, hopped up, with an expensive stereo blaring.

Chrome-rimmed Poverty?

Where are we going with this?

Yes, I confess once more to the same destination as the flash mobs and the London riots. What we think in the West now as too little is far too much. Both these thieves could trade in their multi-thousand-dollar trucks for cash to buy food, rather than steal the property of others and cause mayhem to make their payments. Heck, the rims alone are worth $1000.

(Thieves and gangbangers create a climate of general fear; they ruin the sense of tranquility, and they betray 150 years of collective labor of the now dead to create civilization from near nothing. Shame on them. Americans should not need to have armored rural mail boxes.) To suggest that they could do without the trucks or go without the dole, is not — channeling the president’s most recent speech warning against anti-government zealots — the same as wanting children to suffer from mercury poisoning or to render us helpless against the healthcare industry or to destroy government and want to start over from scratch.

(...)

Subsidizing Stasis

Maybe it is a fine and noble thing that the Obama administration vastly extended unemployment insurance. And, bravo, that nearly 50 million are now on food stamps. But a tragic voice from the past warns us that the more we diminish human incentives and guarantee a sort of cushioned permanent poverty, two things result: one, fewer people scramble to find productive work; and, two, envy sharpens as they begin to turn on their benefactors as being cheap, or mean-spirited in never giving quite enough to ensure parity with “them.” A cherry-red new truck or silver Toyota is never quite what others might have.

Epitaph

The problem with those who invaded my farm this summer was not poverty, but too much — at least in the sense of driving late-model trucks as they sought to destroy the lives and tranquility of others to get things that, by the very fact of their mode of transportation, they did not need. For the last two years, I have witnessed two constants: late-model cars in the valley shopping centers, an epidemic of obesity apparent to the naked eye, majorities on plastic food stamp debt cards, without apparent work in mid-morning, and a general unhappiness in the check-out lines that the government, state, city, etc. is not doing enough for them. All that is coupled with a media message of a cruel, heartless society that needs to do more for its oppressed — and a popular culture that damns any so witless and heartless for pointing the contradictions out.

Welfare on Top and Bottom

The welfare state, aside from being broke, is eroding initiative and warping reality — both for the elite at the top, like the executives who just milked a half-trillion dollars in sweetheart loans from some idiotic “green” bureaucrat, to the late-model truck drivers robbing productive farms to pay for their stereos and hydraulic-lifters.

Jerry Brown: Still Governor Moonbeam? Not really....

2011-09-17T12:14:00.000-07:00

Although he has a reputation for wackiness, he is actually more predictable than you might think:

After nine months back on the job, however, Brown has proved that his Moonbeam image is outdated. As the legislative session winds down, it’s tough to survey the bills that Brown has signed and vetoed and not conclude that he resembles his two predecessors, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brown’s former chief of staff, Gray Davis.

For example:

Brown rejected SB 168, which, according to Ballot Access News, “makes it illegal to pay circulators on a per-signature basis, if they are working on initiative, referendum, or recall petitions.” By effectively prohibiting people from working as paid signature gatherers, unions had hoped to double the costs of initiative drives, which they view as the main way conservatives undermine the labor agenda. Brown also vetoed a bill that would have forced signature gatherers in initiative campaigns to wear signs branding them as paid gatherers. In doing so, he sounded downright libertarian: “I choose not to go down this slippery slope where the state decides what citizens must wear when petitioning the government.”

Conservatives are also thrilled by Brown’s veto of “card-check” legislation for farm workers—a measure that would have eliminated the secret ballot for union votes—though he did later sign a compromise bill making it easier for farm workers to unionize. (Brown signed the original legislation granting farm workers the right to organize 30 years ago.) He also vetoed a bill that would have mandated that union members dominate local civil-service commissions, which regulate rules and standards for government employees. And in vetoing a bill requiring children to wear ski helmets, Brown again sounded a libertarian note: “While I appreciate the value of wearing a ski helmet, I am concerned about the continuing and seemingly inexorable transfer of authority from parents to the state. Not every human problem deserves a law.”

Earlier this summer, however, Brown angered social conservatives with his approval of a bill that mandates the teaching of a gay-friendly curriculum in public schools, and he has signed various environmental and green-jobs bills into law. One of them was the atrocious SB 2X1, which requires that 33 percent of California’s electricity be generated from alternative, “renewable” sources by 2020. He gave a rousing speech attacking Republicans at a labor rally in Las Vegas recently, saying, “I refuse to let the Republicans and the non-union contractors get away with their schemes to reduce wages.”

Jerry Brown plays eco-fiends and gay militants, but that isn't surprising. He is, however, much less of a union stooge than one might expect. So what to conclude?

Brown is paddling right and left. He usually paddles more to the left than to the right, but nothing too radical is going on here. He’s not much different than Schwarzenegger, who repeatedly caved to public-employee unions and signed aggressive environmental legislation but mostly rejected “job-killer” bills too ridiculous even for California. Conservatives’ enduring tolerance for Brown stems largely from the hope that he could still do the unexpected. Brown might yet take on the public-employee unions, even though they spent $30 million on his behalf to help win back the governorship. Brown might close the gaping budget deficit. Brown might actually be, as many reporters described him last year, the “Nixon goes to China” governor who reforms public-employee pensions.

It’s probably the case that Brown won’t do any of those things, which would be disappointing but unsurprising. Steering too far left or right will lead him to some rocky shoals. More than anything else, someone with Brown’s instincts seeks calmer waters—like most conventional politicians.

Truth Still Hurts: At Least 70 Avowed Socialists In Democrat Party

2011-09-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

Never mind Barack Obama and his commie pals. Congress has been crawling with communists for years....

In October 2009, the "Democratic Socialists of America" released in its newsletter a list of 70 members of the U.S. Congress who are members of the organization. And it is a Who's Who of Commiecrat Creeps:

Co-Chairs:
Raúl M. Grijalva (AZ-07)
Lynn Woolsey (CA-06)

Vice Chairs:
Mazie Hirono (HI-02)
Dennis Kucinich (OH-10)
Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX-18)
Diane Watson (CA-33)

Senate Members:
Bernie Sanders (VT) -- but at least he is honest

House Members:
Neil Abercrombie (HI-01)
Tammy Baldwin (WI-02)
Xavier Becerra (CA-31)
Robert Brady (PA-01)
Corrine Brown (FL-03)
Michael Capuano (MA-08)
André Carson (IN-07)--One of two Farrakhan followers in Congress. False claims of "Tea Party lynchings"
Donna Christensen (Virgin Islands delegate)--not such a big deal, but still there.
Yvette Clarke (NY-11)
William "Lacy" Clay (MO-01)
Emanuel Cleaver (MO-05)
Steve Cohen (TN-09)
John Conyers (MI-14)
Elijah Cummings (MD-07)
Danny Davis (IL-07)
Peter DeFazio (OR-04)
Rosa DeLauro (CT-03)
Donna F. Edwards (MD-04)
Keith Ellison (MN-05)--One of two Farrakhan followers in Congress
Sam Farr (CA-17)
Chaka Fattah (PA-02)
Bob Filner (CA-51)
Barney Frank (MA-04)
Marcia L. Fudge (OH-11)
Alan Grayson (FL-08)
Luis Gutierrez (IL-04)
John Hall (NY-19)
Phil Hare (IL-17)
Maurice Hinchey (NY-22)
Michael Honda (CA-15)
Jesse Jackson, Jr. (IL-02)
Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX-30)
Hank Johnson (GA-04)
Marcy Kaptur (OH-09)
Carolyn Kilpatrick (MI-13)
Barbara Lee (CA-09)
John Lewis (GA-05)
David Loebsack (IA-02)
Ben R. Lujan (NM-3)
Carolyn Maloney (NY-14)
Ed Markey (MA-07)
Jim McDermott (WA-07)
James McGovern (MA-03)
George Miller (CA-07)
Gwen Moore (WI-04)
Jerrold Nadler (NY-08)
Eleanor Holmes-Norton (DC delegate))--not such a big deal, but still there.
John Olver (MA-01)
Ed Pastor (AZ-04)
Donald Payne (NJ-10)
Chellie Pingree (ME-01)
Charles Rangel (NY-15)
Laura Richardson (CA-37)
Lucille Roybal-Allard (CA-34)
Bobby Rush (IL-01)
Linda Sánchez (CA-47)
Jan Schakowsky (IL-09)
José Serrano (NY-16)
Louise Slaughter (NY-28)
Pete Stark (CA-13)--Pro-Illegal Alien Traitor.
Bennie Thompson (MS-02)
John Tierney (MA-06)
Nydia Velazquez (NY-12)
Maxine Waters (CA-35)--Burn LA Burn and Free OJ Simpson
Mel Watt (NC-12)
Henry Waxman (CA-30)
Peter Welch (Vermont)
Robert Wexler (FL-19)

The DSA is a political action committee and bills itself as the heir to the defunct Socialist Party of America. It's chief organizing objective is to work within the Democratic Party as the primary, but not sole, method of achieving public ownership of private property and the means of production.

"Stress our Democratic Party strategy and electoral work," explains an internal organizing document. "The Democratic Party is something the public understands, and association with it takes the edge off. Stressing our Democratic Party work will establish some distance from the radical subculture and help integrate you to the milieu of the young liberals."

But, actually, the number of those sympathetic to the socialist, in fact outright communist, goals of the DSA is substantially higher than 70. There is a close association between the DSA and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. At that time, the caucus website was actually hosted by the DSA. The Progressive Caucus website has since become an official U.S. government website as it remains today.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus website boasts 81 members as well as resource links to numerous pro-communist publications and organizations. Those links include Mother Jones magazine, Moveon.org, OneWorld, The Nation magazine, ACORN and the Institute for Policy Studies.

The DSA makes clear its preference for working within the Democratic Party for the change it seeks. "Many socialists have seen the Democratic Party, since at least the New Deal, as the key political arena in which to consolidate this coalition, because the Democratic Party held the allegiance of our natural allies," the group states in the "Where we stand" section of its website. "Through control of the government by the Democratic Party coalition, led by anti-corporate forces, a progressive program regulating the corporations, redistributing income, fostering economic growth and expanding social programs could be realized."

In addition to a national program of "massive redistribution of income from corporations and the wealthy to wage earners and the poor and the public sector," the DSA also calls for a breaking down the American-style notions of nationalism and national sovereignty.

"A program of global justice can unite opponents of transnational corporations across national boundaries around a common program to transform existing international institutions and invent new global organizations designed to ensure that wages, working conditions, environmental standards and social rights are 'leveled up' worldwide," the group says on its website. "The basis of cooperation for fighting the transnationals must be forged across borders from its inception. Economic nationalism and other forms of chauvinism will doom any expanded anti-corporate agenda."

It also states in the group's mission statement: "A democratic socialist politics for the 21st century must promote an international solidarity dedicated to raising living standards across the globe, rather than 'leveling down' in the name of maximizing profits and economic efficiency. Equality, solidarity, and democracy can only be achieved through international political and social cooperation aimed at ensuring that economic institutions benefit all people. Democratic socialists are dedicated to building truly international social movements – of unionists, environmentalists, feminists, and people of color – that together can elevate global justice over brutalizing global competition."

While the DSA tries to paint distinctions between its brand of socialism and communism, before scrubbing its website following the WND expose 12 years ago, the site included a song list that included:

--"The Internationale," the worldwide anthem of Communism and socialism.
--"Red Revolution" sung to the tune of "Red Robin," with these lyrics: "When the Red Revolution brings its solution along, along, there'll be no more lootin' when we start shootin' that Wall Street throng. ..."
--"Are You Sleeping, Bourgeoisie?" Lyrics included: "Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping? Bourgeoisie, Bourgeoisie. And when the revolution comes, We'll kill you all with knives and guns, Bourgeoisie, Bourgeoisie."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a longtime member of the Progressive Caucus and served on the executive committee. She was not, however, listed last year as a member of the DSA.