Tolerance, Cooper Firearms

Politics prompted her assault, Augsburg student says

Cooper Ousts CEO for Obama Support

One of the members of the Board Of Directors of Cooper Firearms happened to be at the same Deer Camp that I was at this past weekend, so I learned of the Cooper situation. I shared the fact that a Cooper Board Member happened to be at camp and immediately heard of the "horror" of the "infringement on free speech" that the Cooper story entails from a Democrat.

To make a slightly longer story simple, the Founder and President of Cooper Firearms decided to donate $3K+ to BO and did an interview indicating that he was going to vote for him. Cooper employees, customers and stores that carry their products started to indicate their displeasure, up to and including canceling orders and not wanting to do business with Cooper. The Board of Directors asked for and received the Presidents resignation. Democrats and Media types were immediately apocolyptic about "McCarthyism" and "infringement on free speech". Here is an example from the USA Today Article, they make sure to "tell us how to think" about the Cooper incident -- nobody is quoted as explaining why one may want to remove a gun company executive that is poking his customers in the eye.

"It's a really McCarthyism at its worst," said Bob Ricker, executive
director of the American Hunters and Shooters Association, which has
endorsed Obama. "That's really why our organization was formed, was to
deal with this craziness. If you're a gun owner, but you have a
contrary view to some of these wackos, they will go out and try to
destroy you."

Now, in the top article, a young woman at Augsburg is assaulted by 4 other women, receives a concussion, and we get relatively straight up reporting until close to the end we get:

"She was surprised by how politically active the campus was," Annie's mother said. "She got a lesson right off the bat." 

In October, a 20-year-old McCain campaign volunteer in Pennsylvania
made up a story of being robbed and having the backwards letter "B"
scratched on her face in a politically inspired attack. 

Police and Augsburg University say they have no reason to suspect Grossmann was not assaulted.

Seems VERY important to point out that a month ago a McCain campaign volunteer made up an attack, right? I mean, Tawana Brawly famously made up a rape charge, so I'm sure that every article about a young black woman claiming rape properly includes a reference to that famous hoax. Right?

Not a lot of concern about the young woman beat up for wearing a McCain button, but lots of crocodile tears for a CEO whose constituency disagrees with his politics. Let's take a look at this a bit closer.

First of all, remember the important quote from Ronald Reagan; "A Liberal will defend your right to agree with them to their dying breath"! The "liberal" idea of "free speech" is that people can say anything that they want that is agreement with the standard liberal position, and NOBODY ought be able to respond in any negative way.

Conversely, if anyone is making speech that is out of step with the liberal opinion, their speech ought to be muzzled (EG "Fairness doctrine") or with either actual or implied violence (Union Card Check). Liberals are unconcerned with someone being beat up for showing support for McCain. It is something that they can at least "understand"--how could a "decent person" be a supporter of McCain?

Think about Joe Lieberman. How much do Democrats enjoy HIS "right to free speech"? Not so very much I think. How well do Democrats tolerate Clarence Thomas as a black man not holding the views that "blacks ought to have"? Is their animosity for him even stronger than say a Scalia or a Roberts? I think it is pretty clear. How do you think Democrats and abortion supporters would react to an official of Planned Parenthood sending money to and saying they were going to vote for a Pro-Life Republican??? I think we don't need to think very long on that one.

"Free Speech" means that EVERYONE is free to respond LEGALLY to your speech!!! If a gun CEO decides to support Obama and enough of his "constituency" wants him removed, then that is a LEGAL result of his "speech decision". We don't have freedom at all if those hearing your speech aren't allowed to respond LEGALLY to your speech. But note the difference -- there is little concern, and even the suggestion of "untruth" to a young woman being beaten for her rather paltry wearing of a button as speech. Democrats LOVE to boo down Republican speakers (they were doing it at the convention), for some reason Republicans rarely boo or protest even though those actions can be legal. They are often "tacky" and in many cases downright boorish.

Republicans tend to do things like write letters to the board or company, indicate that they would rather not do business with someone that they see as likely aiding and abbedding the destruction of their constitutional rights. This however is seen by the MSM and the left as "McCarthyism". We seem to be entering a new phase of Democrat dominance where their natural tendency to suppress the speech of those they disagree with as "hate speech", "racist", "religious" (to get it removed from the public square) or simply "biased" (as in "fairness doctrine"). Bias is of course a view that isn't "liberal".

Where Do Republicans go from Here?

RealClearPolitics - Articles - The GOP Looking Glass

No real answers in this column, but a decent job of laying out the problems. Bush never was a "Reagan Conservative" and in many ways, neither was Reagan--the legend took on conservative luster over time. Reagan had his share of tax increases (FICA in '82, Income in '86), he certainly didn't have a balanced budget and Sandra Day O'Conner certainly wasn't a very conservative Judge. All that said, Reagan is my favorite conservative figure--he just happened to be human.

Bush did "No Child" with Teddy Kennedy (getting the feds in education), perscription drug, signed campaign finance, Sarbanes/Oxley and worked on immigration reform that was awful close to amnesty. Throw in the stimulus packages and a few other things and Bush did an awful lot of "triangulation" just like Slick Willie. The difference is that the MSM and the Democrats aren't going to give a Republican any "points" just because he does what one would think they would like -- Democrats HATE Republicans and it IS personal! "Policy" is great, but Democrats are driven by POWER, a policy that kills people or destroys their lives is FINE if it gets Democrats in POWER!!

Apparently, such was not so with at least some Texas Democrats, and Bush got the false impression that he could work reasonably with Democrats. VERY bad idea in Washington! I don't know if Bush learned that lesson, but the rest of us sure ought to have! It appears however that such is not the case:

In one corner, there are a large number of bright, mostly younger, self-styled reformers with a diverse -- and often contradictory -- set of proposals to win back middle-class voters and restore the GOP's status as "the party of ideas" (as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it).

In another corner are self-proclaimed traditional conservatives and Reaganites, led most notably by Rush Limbaugh, who believe that the party desperately needs to get back to the basics: limited government,low taxes and strong defense.

What is fascinating is that both camps seem implicitly to agree that the real challenge lurks in how to account for the Bush years. For the young Turks and their older allies -- my National Review colleagues Ramesh Ponnuru, Yuval Levin and David Frum, the Atlantic's Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, New York Times columnist David Brooks et al -- the problem is that Bush botched the GOP's shot at real reform. For the Limbaugh crowd, the issue seems to be that we've already tried this reform stuff -- from both Bush and McCain -- and look where it's gotten us.

So how would one "reform" and deal with Democrats when all they want is you out of Washington, and don't really care what it costs them, their consituency or the world in general in blood and treasure as long as they end up in power? What part of what has happened to Bush and McCain is it that the "reformers" still haven't understood? They want to give the Democrats guns rather than knives and THEN see if they make nice with Republicans?

Unfortunately, someone still needs to come up with a set of ideas that some CURRENT leader and CURRENT set of voters will rally around. Demanding that we get Reagan and Reagan's ideas back has at least one very clear hole (unless we are going to clone him or something), and likely two, since without the USSR/Cold War and likely more than a few other problems (like Reagan's deficits in todays dollars would make even the biggest pro-deficit Republicans blanch), that strategy is all about "wishful thinking". Yup, the "old days" of Reagan may have been grand, but today is today, not 1980!

Ready To Rule on Day 1!

Hey, this might be "chilling" if BO were a Republican, but since he is a "D", I guess "rule he will"!!!

My how perspectives change for the MSM and the liberals.

Uninteresting Election Fraud

FOXNews.com - Minnesota Ripe for Election Fraud - Opinion

I've been noticing that all the "new votes" in the MN election seem to be for Al Franken. Nothing unusual, dead and imaginary voters are something like 97% Democrat. What is just a bit unusual is that the local press here seems to have no interest in what is happening "somehow" the Coleman spread just seems to keep shrinking and the recount hasn't even started.

I'm predicting a Coleman loss  by at least a thousand votes. There tends to be very little limit on either the dead or fictional voter, and given the preponderance of Democrats in the camp, they seem guaranteed to prevail. Can you imagine there being much curiosity in the press about a Franken victory? Some sort of an investigation by the BO justice department? How about a call for an investigation by the MSM?

Me neither -- little fairness doctrine to get Fox on the run and even this kind of "nuisance reporting" ought to be history. "Unity" -- the kind of America where everyone can vote -- but only the "good people win!

BO Like Lincoln and FDR?

Like Lincoln and FDR, Obama faces nation in crisis - Yahoo! News

One doesn't have to do much as a Democrat President to start the comparisons with Lincoln and FDR. This comparison is on the basis of "challenges" -- oh, let's see, I think the "divisions" in the country are REALLY close to those before the civil war. Don't you?? The MSM figures we are in a DEPRESSION after all--so, that would be the comparison with FDR. Do you suppose that we can have "WWIII" to "help" the BO comparison there? Seems like a really good idea!

I guess it is unsurprising, most of the MSM would figure BO compares favorably with Jesus, a comparison with a couple of Presidents that the media sees as "decent" would seem like a letdown. I wonder if they remember that Lincoln was a REPUBLICAN. What's up with that? Interesting to note that the Democrats had declared the Civil War as "unwinnable" by the end of his first term, and it was widely thought he would fail to be re-elected.

Have Democrats ever met any other kind of war than an "unwinnable one"?

Worry, But Be Happy

www.dcexaminer.com >> Opinion

I found this to be an excellent column, and I agree with it strongly. I'd add that "being a conservative means that there are more important things than politics". I believe that is the fundamental reason that the left is always so angry that they have any political opposition at all. They feel strongly that all their positions are "intelligent, just, progressive and well reasoned" -- they have a hard time understanding why there would be any legitimate opposition, other than out of "evil". To a lefty, there is "no higher power" -- or ideas, so the ones they have are by definition "ultimate".

It is important for conservatives to do as this article says. While we may worry about the worst happening, we need to always hope and pray for the best. We need to accept our human weakness and practice what we preach. We may have heard and said in church 1K times to "not store up treasure where moth and rust corrupt", but when some of the "treasure" that we have stored up on what we ought know is the illusion of security is lost or corrupted, the fact of our faith is often less real than the stating of it.

I'm happy I've not seen any conservatives talking about "leaving the country", or crying in their beer over "how stupid Americans are" as we saw endlessly from the left in '04. We ought also take note on where the Democrats were wrong again:

1. They asserted that "if this country didn't vote for Obama, it would be racist". So, since it DID vote for Obama, it ISN'T racist, nor would it have been had it NOT voted for him. It is the same country stupid!
2. During the Bush adminstration there was A LOT of pointless whining about how "dissent was being tamped down", and supposedly all the elections that had been won had been won due to "diebold and dirty tricks". Either Diebold just goes to the higher bidder and BO had more money, or this charge was malarky all along.
   

The Decency of George W Bush

Michael Gerson - The Decency of George W. Bush - washingtonpost.com

I know of nothing that Bush has done to warrant the hatred that has been heaped upon him from the left, the right, and the MSM. One would hope that a president can have some individual control over a decision to have oral sex with an intern in the oval office. It seems less understandable how one would control all the intelligence of the whole world on WMDs turning out to be wrong and the plans and results for initial action in Iraq turned out to be ineffective. Every leader has suffered because those relied upon to do their job failed to do so. Having never led, Obama awaits the learning of this most basic lesson of leadership.

Certainly a left that cares little as to the cost of gaining power is to be expected to react with glee at any situation that can be turned against a Republican. At one time, parts of the MSM would have had the honor to show some sort of even handedness in order to maintain some semblance of being "unbiased", but a major event of the last 8 years is that the days of the MSM having any connection with the truth are likely gone forever.

The right is a little harder to understand, but I believe that when the going got tough (as it inevitably does when one is doing something real), the right wing decided "we would rather have Reagan". The realization that the loonies of the right could in their own way be every bit as looney as those on the left was one of my "major life lessons" of the last 8 years. Unsurprisingly, neither Reagan or his ghost returned, and now we have Obama. May the right wing be ever happy, the "lesson" is being taught!

Here are a couple good quotes from here, it is all worth reading. I find that I am ever the iconoclast--the more Bush is reviled, the greater my respect for him. My highlight below is perhaps one of the finest testaments to his deep Christian faith. My guess is that "deeper decency" is something we will see very little of the next four years.

For years, critics of the Iraq war asked the mocking question: "What
would victory look like?" If progress continues, it might look
something like what we've seen.


But that humanity is precisely what I will remember. I have seen
President Bush show more loyalty than he has been given, more
generosity than he has received. I have seen his buoyancy under the
weight of malice and his forgiveness of faithless friends. Again and
again, I have seen the natural tug of his pride swiftly overcome by a
deeper decency -- a decency that is privately engaging and publicly
consequential.

Before the Group of Eight summit in 2005, the White House
senior staff overwhelmingly opposed a new initiative to fight malaria
in Africa for reasons of cost and ideology -- a measure designed to
save hundreds of thousands of lives, mainly of children under 5. In the
crucial policy meeting, one person supported it: the president of the
United States, shutting off debate with a moral certitude that others
have criticized. I saw how this moral framework led him to an immediate
identification with the dying African child, the Chinese dissident, the
Sudanese former slave, the Burmese women's advocate. It is one reason I
will never be cynical about government -- or about President Bush.
For some, this image of Bush is so detached from their own
conception that it must be rejected. That is, perhaps, understandable.
But it means little to me. Because I have seen the decency of George W.
Bush.

The Emerging Republican Minority

Harold Meyerson - A Real Realignment - washingtonpost.com

The MSM tends to hide "the real story", but sometimes they let the truth leak. I suspect that 90%+ of the lower income wards of the lefty sheep pen would think that "Doctors, Lawyers and other evil professionals" are all "a bunch of nasty Republicans". Yes, during the 50's, that was the truth. No longer -- I've seen the numbers, while not as Democrat as blacks (93%), the numbers for proffessionals are in the mid 70's% Democrat. Here is a truthful quote from this fine article:

Six years ago, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira argued in their book "The Emerging Democratic Majority" that the political transformation of professionals -- among the most Republican of voting blocs during the Eisenhower era, and today among the most Democratic -- was a decisive factor in pushing the nation toward the Democratic Party, as was the steady Democratic drift of female voters.

As Meyerson crows here, the little people are on the run--and soon to be confined to America's "rural backwaters". Ah yes, a confident Democrat telling the truth of what they believe, a lot like BO and his "bitterly clinging" comments. The sheep rarely get exposed to such things though, and it seems that these days they are so lost that they don't even know their enemies from their friends.

Indeed, eight years after Karl Rove stormed into Washington proclaiming that he would create a 21st-century version of the Republican realignment that emerged from William McKinley's victory over William Jennings Bryan in 1896, today's emerging Republican minority looks confined to Bryan's base in America's rural backwaters. The future in American politics belongs to the party that can win a more racially diverse, better
educated, more metropolitan electorate. It belongs to Barack Obama's Democrats.

See, the Democrats actually ARE a party of elites looking at those "rural backwater voters" that are "bitterly clinging to guns and religion". That is what they REALLY think ... but of course since that might not get them elected, the MSM does all it can to minimize their real views.

Already, New Friends for BO

The Associated Press: Iran leader offers Obama landmark congratulations

Hey, "I'm A Dinner Jacket" (Ahmadinejad) has offered congrats to BO! First time since '79 that one of our new Presidents has received such an honor from the great state of Iran! Change!

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday
congratulated Barack Obama on his election win — the first time an
Iranian leader has offered such wishes to a U.S. president-elect since
the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

"Liberal" Attached to a Democrat is a Sham and a Shame

Lieberman may have day of reckoning with Democrats - CNN.com

How many times have you heard Democrats and the MSM decry "partisanship" and "ideology" in Republicans? Basically all the time. Is John McCain my favorite Republican? Certainly not -- I absolutely decry his supposed "bi-partisan" campaign finance reform, and it actually serves him right to have Obama be the first candidate since Watergate to opt out of public election financing in the general election and thus have completely unrestrained money raised and spent. McCain was outspent 5 to 1 or worse, and NOBODY knows where all the BO money came from or went -- nor will they ever. There isn't such a thing as a "principled Democrat" -- if there were, they would be a Republican. No principled person that talked about "excess money in politics" or "the need for campaign finance support" could stand by while BO made a mockery of every attempt to control excesses of campaign money from all sources that has been made in the last 30 years!! If anyone ever needed any more proof that "principled Democrat" was an oxymoron, this election provided it.

The picture of Lieberman and McCain embracing tells a story however. There are no more moderate Democrats (only LEFT Democrats) and very few actual Conservative Republicans. Bush Sr and Jr were both moderate Republicans, and McCain is even more moderate. Lieberman WAS a moderate Democrat before they drummed him out of their party.

Here is a telling quote from the supposedly "new kind of cross the isle politician" BO camp:

During the speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, Lieberman
said, "Sen. Barack Obama is a gifted and eloquent young man who I think
can do great things for our country in the years ahead, but, my
friends, eloquence is no substitute for a record, not in these tough
times for America."

After his speech, Obama adviser Robert Gibbs
said that "Joe Lieberman ought to be ashamed of himself for some of the
things he said tonight, not as a Democrat but as an American."

Let me get this straight. Democrats who have uttered any slur that comes to their mind about a Republican President or Vice President during war are OUTRAGED if anyone questions them in any way, but the Democrat nominee for VP in 2000 should be ashamed AS AN AMERICAN for claiming that a candidate for President ought to have some leadership experience? 

"Liberal" used to mean someone with the intellectual capacity to at least hold a couple opposing ideas in their head at the same time and still function without exploding. The left in this country is the farthest thing there is from intellectually "liberal". They can't stomach someone that believes that the highest job in the land might require some leadership experience. The other meaning of "liberal" is allowing INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM ... of thought, finance, speech, association and property. The current Democrat party wants to regulate political speech with the "Fairness Doctrine" and remove the indidual right to a secret ballot with union "card check". Those bills are FASCIST, and the farthest thing in the world from "liberal".

RhamBO

Power Line - No more Mr. Nice Guy?


So BO picks Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, a man "affectionately" referred to as "RahmBo". Extremely partisan, extremely profane. I love the description by Paul Begala (a Slick Willie hatchet man) of his style as "a cross between a hemorrhoid and a toothache".

Much like the Powerline guys, this isn't a surprise since I never bought the "new kind of politician" rhetoric anyway. BO plays old fashioned politics--"Just Win Baby"!!! The MSM of course is just very happy when his kind of politics wins, so it seems fine to them.

Happy Days, Hail BO!

It is fun to watch the media enjoy the Obama victory. I couldn't help but wonder if Colin Powell had ever run as a Republican and won, what kind of attitude would the MSM have had? I suspect it would have been a long way from the unadultrated joy they were able to feel today. They would have found it "ironic" that the first black elected was a Republican, although Lincoln and the Republican party risked it all to fight the Civil War and the Democrats presided over Jim Crow and all the lynching for 100 years. A KKK recruiter (Robert Byrd) still sits in the Senate today, however, to the MSM, it would be "ironic" if a black Republican had been the first elected!

The reality of a 400+ point Dow sell-off the day after the election was little reported. Perhaps investors didn't get the memo of how good BO is going to be for the economy?

I was glad to not hear of any conservatives thinking they would leave the country because he was elected, nor really very little in the way of ill will at all. A far cry from the attitude of a Paul Wellstone that refused to shake VP Dan Quayle's hand at a Washington function. I hope all conservatives are civil, and I expect them to generally be.

In the unlikely event that my little blog ever got famous, I'd give up the BO schtick over the President. The main reason I do it is a lot like Rush Limbaugh poking fun at how the MSM treats Republicans every day. "Dubya", "Ronnie Raygun", "Shrub", "F*** Bush", etc. BO would not want to be "BHO" since it is considered an "affront" to use his middle name. I wonder if Chief Justice Roberts will be able to say "Hussein" when he swears him in? Potentially he will have to change back to his real name "Barry Sottero" which he had for most of his childhood. Then he would be "BS", which may end up being more appropriate.

Why do conservatives tend to wish the new president well even though we suspect he will declare war on all that makes America exceptional? Simply because we are usually Christians first, Family people 2nd and Americans 3rd ... with a close 4th being some sort of profession or career that serves both our country and provides the finances so we can be responsible for ourselves and contributing members of society. Our fervent hope is that Obama and the Democrats will be successful in getting the economy growing again, even though every piece of evidence we see says that they will not be.

It is fun to watch the media. They are positively giddy. I remember so well '92 when they were beside themselves with the pure joy of a Clinton election and a Democrat majority in both houses of congress, but this is even better. I suspect it harkens back to '64 when LBJ whacked Goldwater.

How different from when I turned on NPR the morning after the '94 election and they were playing Johnny Cash ... I didn't really need to hear the results to know what happened! They were on the verge of tears -- and there was positive fear that the evil Newt Gingrich was to be Speaker of the House!

Gee, I wonder if the "sanctity of the fillibuster" might kind of change now? Remember how HORRIBLE it was that Republicans were talking about "the nuclear option" for appointments? I 'm sure the "unbiased" MSM will be 100% supportive of a Republican fillibuster now! Kind of like how big an issue campaign finance was this year. NOT!

Oh well, being in the opposition is kind of fun. Now Saint BO will need to actually deliver on some of his brilliance--that is often a bit harder than reading a teleprompter smoothly!

View From the Top

Took my Max up to the top of the big hill behind the house that lets me look over the whole city and thought a bit about 30 years ago on election day. My recollection is that I didn't vote, nor did I watch anything on TV. I'd voted for Carter in '76, but by 1978 it was already pretty obvious that he wasn't a good president and that the future of the US wasn't looking very bright under his policies. I still didn't care much about politics though, but I probably had picked up my first National Review and started to consider that maybe there were "other views" than the MSM, standard man in the street outlook.

So, 30 years later on a nice warm evening with a stiff breeze from the south I sat and looked back at city lights of which a large majority would not have existed in '78. The two years that followed '78 proved that Carter was a REALLY bad choice. Reagan was elected in '80, the direction of the country changed and we went through the longest and largest piece of growth in American history. It was a great time to have a career, get married and raise a family. I'm very thankful to Ronald Reagan.

In '33 the Dems took over big, the market tanked shortly and it never got back to it's '29 highs until '53. They similarly took over in '65, the last market peak in '66 was not exceeded until '83. So does anybody expect the Democrats to do better this time around? My guess is that most of the voters either don't know the history or don't care. I think a lot of folks have simply bought the MSM view that "Bush has been a disaster and we need change"--they weren't in any mood to look any deeper than that. I also suspect that a significant number of folks at least think that they are now "anti-business" or "anti-market". They apparently believe that America can somehow have "prosperity without productivity", or that we can somehow have productivity wihtout business, markets and profits. I believe they are horribly wrong, but we will get a chance to see if I learn something .

10 Reasons to Vote For McCain

David Frum: 10 reasons to vote for John McCain - Full Comment

Nice article, I suspect that in two years we will wish we had another shot at this vote. I loved his #1 reason, but the whole list is well thought.

1) John McCain is white, the son and grandson of admirals, married
to a wealthy heiress – and yet he has experienced degrees of suffering,
despair, and defeat that not one in a million of us can imagine. Barack
Obama wears a black skin and carries an exotic name. In the United
States, people of darker color have faced oppression and discrimination
for centuries. But in Barack Obama's own life, he has known nothing but
an easy and welcoming path to success since he was 18 years old.
Privileged John McCain has known more absolute degradation than any man
ever to contest the presidency. Obama was born in adversity, but he has
smoothly risen to a place where he is most comfortable with those for
whom things are most easy.

Thanking Bush

RealClearPolitics - Articles - An Election Day Note: Thanks, President Bush

Andy Brietbart gets my vote as the most courageous words for election day. Like Andy, I too still like Bush. I think Bush has honestly done what he thought was right to the best of his ability at every step, and I believe his ability is far superior to what the vast majority think it is. I have long argued that if Al Gore had been elected and by some miracle had done exactly what Bush has done, he would be viewed as a heroic and excellent President by the MSM. For one thing, they would have HAILED the perscription drug legislation as a hugely wonderful thing!

Nice Buck!

Once-in-a-lifetime shot - JSOnline

Goofball For President

Unfortunately, it is probably too late for you to change your mind by the time you see this.

Talk About Timely!

Palin didn't violate ethics law, 2nd probe finds - CNN.com

Golly, they completed the investigation the night BEFORE the election! How timely! I have to give them credit for not doing the day after the election. Now, we must remember, Democrats never do "dirty politics" -- Bush's DWI showed up the Friday before the 2K election, and just last week there was a lawsuit against Norm Coleman's wife in MN. Both were COMPLETELY UNRELATED to "Democrats or politics"! Now I'm not sure who "proved this" or how they did it, but it must be a fact since the MSM has never indicated that either had anything to do with politics or the Democrats, so I'm sure they didn't!!

A Positive Spin On the BO Presidency!

OBAMA 2012: HIS TRIUMPHS ABROAD - New York Post

It really needs to be read to be appreciated, but it does the heart of someone who listens to a lot of NPR good. I suspect that we will be able to listen to this kind of "insight" in ALL media in the next couple of years -- heck, they have a really good start already! 

Our relations with the Muslim world have rarely, if ever, been better.
The current $320 per barrel price of oil allows long-oppressed states
to develop themselves without the yoke of neo-colonialism or invasive
efforts to force democracy upon their populations. As UN Ambassador
Ayers noted, "We can state with pride that the US not only respects,
but embraces cultural differences."

All Saints Day Scare

Anne Rice comes to Jesus - CNN.com

One doesn't need to read this with much care to see how non-serious the journalist and reviewers see a noted vampire author turning Christian. The idea of "redemption" so goes against the popular culture; "You are what you are", the best you can do is "be authentic". How the random universe managed to somehow give each person this "are" is not explained, but randomness is very witty in in the popular view.

Christianity is not popular with the elite -- believers are fools, they don't "get it", and the secular intelligentsia in every age KNOW that THEY have "got it". The "it" of that age is always "the latest it"--so therefore it must be "best". Even though evolution for example says NOTHING at all about "perpetual improvement", and we well know that natural systems in which something that at least WE currently "explain" as "randomness" is at work are just as happy to kill as to cure. To the random system as a whole, even "survival" would only be "it happens to work as long as it works" kind of thing--a random universe has no "desire" or "bias" for there to be life at all, let alone our assumed individual "random self to be true to".

The idea that there are no guarantees whatsoever that "the latest knowledge is best" doesn't fit very well-the fact that we are "here now" seems like it OUGHT to mean that this is the best time we could have been here! The idea of any "discoverable transcendence" or even worse, the idea that lives could be changed by this "thing that doesn't exist" is especially scary to the vast secular world. I still argue that one of the core hatreds of Bush is that a late bloomer with a drinking problem could find Jesus, change, and become President. Right off, it hits most secular folks as "phony and simple minded". If such redemption is possible, wouldn't we have a better secular pill or procedure to pull it off without resorting to the messiness of God?

Maybe Ann Rice sought out Jesus because she "had hard times"--her husband died and she got diabetes. Well, maybe so--I suspect that even the most secular of reporters will note that all humans face the "hard times" of death. Some of us need something to make us realize that and some of us don't. Life is very short and death is very long, whatever the circumstances that help one realize that fact, it seems that it is worth giving some thought. You will be dead much longer than your career, marriage or how long you live in your current home. Probably you spent some time thinking about those decisions, some people never own a home, get married, or have a job, but I gaurantee you that death will not be avoided.

Arrogance and Inexperience

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Ego and Mouth

Thomas Sowell on what we are getting into.

Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise-- whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team-- is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipate

The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama's trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges-- very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in real world.

The signs of Barack Obama's self-centered immaturity are painfully obvious, though ignored by true believers who have poured their hopes into him, and by the media who just want the symbolism and the ideology that Obama represents.

MSM Bias As Editor Career Extender?

ABC News: Media's Presidential Bias and Decline

This is a good short story on media bias, The fact of bias is obvious to all but the most ardent and credulous lefty and covered in nearly excruciating (though recommended) detail in the "Bias" books by Bernie Goldberg, but this is still well written and much shorter than the books.

It has a twist at the end that I hadn't fully considered relative to the "perfect storm" that seems intent on electing BO. I'm sure that much like major corporations, the average age in the news room is getting a bit long in tooth and there are too many folks "running out the clock". The "Fairness Doctrine / Return of Unions for 50+ers in the newsroom" is an interesting angle--especially to a 50+er at a corporation.

Gee, maybe I need to look on the "bright side"--protect my job for another decade with a union? Sure, it would destroy the company, but so what? Don't I have a RIGHT to employment in my golden years?

Special thanks to the Vegas readership for pointing this one out.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -- and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway -- all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself -- an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country …

The Cloward-Piven Strategy

American Thinker: Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis

One of my maxims on understanding the left --- When they accuse the right of something, it usually means that the gambit that they are making accusations of is well known and heavily used by the left already.

One of the accusations by a surprising number of lefties was that "The War On Terror"  is a manufactured crisis to keep the right in power. It seems a little hard to imagine that 9-11 was an "inside job", but a shocking number of lefties buy that, or the only slightly less harder to swallow idea that "Bush lied about WMD" -- since the "lie" would have involved Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Colin Powell, the entire CIA and DOD and only about 90% of all intelligence agencies in the world plus the UN. They agreed Saddam had WMD, they just disagreed over the US doing something about it.

The Subprime debacle and subsequent financial meltdown doesn't require a lot of imagination to fan into a "conspiracy theory", but more accurately it fits into a whole series of overall left activities that had the objective of "breaking the capitalist system". They didn't know exactly which one would malfunction, but they were pretty sure that one or more of them eventually would. A look at this site can be a bit scary. The specifics of the Cloward-Piven Strategy are here. In short, "manufactured crisis to achieve a result".

The whole idea of the "radical left" is something that the MSM would have you believe doesn't exist in this country. In their narrative, the "far right" (America's constant danger) chased communist spies that never existed in the McCarthy era, hung around with "The Military Industrial Complex" to manufacture a cold war with the benevolent USSR and hideously morphed into the "Religious Right", "Neocons" and other "well documented" elements of the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy"--an organization so well known and factual that a First Lady could talk about it in all seriousness on NBC's Today Show in the '90s and still be elected Senator from NY.

The "organized right" with all it's nefarious connections to "The Trilateral Commission" and all manner of corporate and religious connections involving "Jews", "The Pope", "The Military" and all other elements is well known by the MSM. Utter the phrase "Un-American" --  as Michelle Bachmann was led into doing by Chris Matthews, and the specter of "McCarthyism" is roused from its grave in an instant.

Strangely, one can go through a bunch of schooling and live a long MSM fed life and come to the conclusion that "there is no organized left". Strange.

I'd argue that the main reason that Americans don't realize anything about "the left" is the same reason that a fish is going to have a hard time telling you what it means to be "wet". Post FDR, we have been so far toward the left and fed by a MSM that finds the views of the left to be way more factual than the average "Sunday Christian" finds the teachings of Christ, so that like the fish, we just don't know about being "left".

We live in the "Obamanation", that I often refer to as BOistan.

False Optimism Based on Facts

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Obama's Economic Mythology

Great article that covers the fact that the MSM, BO and the Democrats are lying about what has happened to the poor and middle class over the past 30 years. ALL Americans have had stunning success in that time, BUT, since the MSM / Democrats have managed to convince everyone that they HAVEN't had good times, a bunch of actions that are nearly certain to kill prosperity are going to happen.

How To Create More Democrats

Why Democrats Will Target the Investor Class in 2009 - Capital Commerce (usnews.com)

We pretty much know what creates Republicans--belief in God, Family, personal responsibility, hard work, thrift, etc

So what will Democrats likely do once they get in? Well, naturally:

• replace religion with "unity and support for BO"
  
• replace family with "domestic partners", mandatory head start, "youth programs"
• replace responsibility with government "rights" of all sorts so there is no sense of responsibility to work
• replace hard work with union seniority, government restrictions / incentives / disincentives for job actions
• and thrift ... well, that is the subject of the linked column, the coming attack on the investor class.
  

I'd say there are 3 things that give you an 80%+ odds of being Republican:

1. Practicing Christian (you go to church, do your best to follow Christ)
2. Married with kids--especially one marriage.
3. You have consistently invested something from say 5-10% of your income in the stock market
   

The linked article covers what Democrats are likely to do to try to destroy #3. Essentially, increase taxes on investing at the front end and at the back end and provide incentives to take government alternatives that create more dependency on the government. They will go further by putting "government money" into business to crowd out private capital ... socialism/fascism that politicises business so business becomes just one more part of an oppressive and inefficient state.

Why does #3 tend to make you a Republican? He touches on this in the article. If you actually believe in the ideal of America, you believe in WE THE PEOPLE ... NOT, "We the Government". Free people freely interacting in a free market has created the greatest standard of living for the greatest number of people in world history. If you believe in that, then you invest in it and discover the truths of the real world of which markets are just a part.

• It is HARD (in fact impossible) to predict what will go up and when and when it all will go up
• Nobody is "in control" ... not the rich, not labor, not the government, NOBODY. The force of human ingenuity is greater than the comprehension of any person or persons if it is allowed to operate relatively freely.
  
• Markets ... and luck, weather, business, prices, opinion, sports teams, etc WILL "fluctuate" ... the only way to rid yourself of the fluctuation is "least common denominator, little or no growth or opportunity"

How To Judge BO

CONCEDE!!!

Joe the Plumber "Public Notoriety"

Hot Air » Blog Archive » Ohio official OK’d records search on Joe the Plumber


If you are Bill Clinton, BO, or John Edwards, then the media has so little curiosity about looking at your background or activities that even when obvious difficulties arise, it is difficult to see the MSM cover them. If you are Sarah Palin or even Joe the Plumber, then the MSM is going to dredge through all sorts of stuff including "sealed records" finding whatever dirt they can.

Simple!

Libertarian Right Republican Disenchantment

Instapundit.com

This from an Instapundit reader, I think he has it exactly right. We are ALL heavily influenced by the MSM--sometimes just in attempts to think differently from them if you are an iconoclast like me, but one has to realize that "I disagree with everything that X says" is a VERY profound form of inflence. I certainly try to avoid that as well, but I'd be an even bigger fool than I already am if I thought I typically succeeded. I've long thought that essentially what happened to Bush / Republican party is that the far right of the party got ticked about what "actual governing" was like rather than "criticizing the opposition". Was there a lot to criticize about the last 8 years? Absolutely, it is SUPPOSED to be conservatives that realize that there is ALWAYS going to be PLENTY to criticize about government!! The question is a bit like a root canal or procto --- the idea that a "good one" is going to be "everything you hoped for" is a bit unreasonable!!! HOWEVER, what we tend to forget is that a bad one can be really bad ... eg 30's, 65-82 kind of deal.

If the libertarians are disgusted with the GOP and conservatives are disgusted with the GOP (see e.g. Mark Tapscott and others who have floated the idea of a new party), is there a theory which would explain both trends? Yes. I think you can blame the MSM. Seriously.

GOP politicians are still politicians and they learn early not to fight with those who buy ink by the barrel. Conservatives who expect that the GOP is going to step in front of the MSM-driven train to defend principle are destined for a letdown. Few are going to commit political suicide and those who do aren't around next term to do it again. Conservatives don't need a new party. They need a new news media.

I think the libertarian discontent with the GOP is also driven by the MSM. Let's face it, libertarians who voted for Reagan are not leaving the GOP over gay marriage. Can anyone summarize all the legislation and regulation that the GOP has enacted which has alienated libertarians? There's nothing much there. What there has been is a constant drumbeat from the MSM and Hollywood to demonize conservatives. The standard cultural portrayal is a cartoon. But over time, it seeps into the subconscious and becomes perceived fact. I really think the disenchantment is due more to the cartoon than reality.

Part of History That Won't Get Told

Orders for durables rise 0.8% in Sept., lifted by aircraft - MarketWatch

The longer I'm alive the more I suspect that most people that lived through an era and paid reasonable attention to what was actually happening would scarcely recognize the "general historical view" that ends up being accepted by people in the future reading history. Part of this is simply the need for humans to arrive at a "story" that has a narrative form that "makes sense to humans". We know that everything no longer revolves around us, but we live in the constraints of our gray matter and existence which needs to have a "simple, historical, narrative story that"makes sense".

In many cases, that alone is enough to make the "story" wrong in a lot of significant ways, add some biases (which we all have), sprinkle in the fact that everyone's picture (including mine) is RADICALLY incomplete, and pretty soon, "historical reality" starts to look more like a cartoon of something that might not even be recognizable to those that were alive and not total sheep during the era.

It appears that the fact is that we never had a recession prior to the 4Q of 2008 (two successive quarters of negative growth) -- it seems unlikely that with a lot of corporations reporting reasonable numbers in 3Q that GDP is going to be negative. HOWEVER, kind of like Katrina, Valerie Plame, Global Warming, "lying about WMD", Bush/Cheney supposedly "creating" connections between Iraq and 9-11, etc, we live in an era when manufactured reality IS reality for 90% of the population. Therefore, "We have been in a recession" for something like a year now, so when we now have what appears to be a real downturn at least impending, it CAN'T just be a "recession" -- therefore, "Depression".

Kinda like the little kid that lies about what happened to his homework, the lies just have to keep getting bigger. The PROBLEM is that with the economy, a major part of economic activity depends on what people think! When 90% of people believe we are in a recession ... and then a bunch start to think we are in a depression, that can have a really big effect on how they behave.

Worse, when they are told that the "fault" lies with "capitalism and too little regulation", and they start to believe that as well, then LESS capitalism and MORE regulation is likely to be the "fix"--which of course makes the situation worse, and now we have what is commonly referred to as a "death spiral".

The Meaning of Joe the Plumber

Everyone knows about "Joe the Plumber", the guy that asked BO about why he wanted to raise his taxes, to which BO said "He wanted to spread the wealth". Since I've read BO's own book and some other analysis, I think it is VERY safe to say that BO believes that taking money from the set of people that earn it and giving it to some set that government feels is more "deserving" is EXACTLY what is coming -- I'm trying out "BOcialism" as a good name for it. But that isn't really what I think the concern is.

The press wasn't very interested in the answer given by the guy that is running for president. No, they didn't like the question, so they went after Joe. They found out he had some problem with his plumbers license, owed some back taxes and was divorced. They tried to insinuate he was a wife abuser because he had made a donation to a woman's shelter (seems like an odd thing for abusers to do), but it turns out that giving some money to woman's shelter is just something they do in divorce cases where he lives -- go figure.

After 8 years of hearing "chilling" whenever some singer got booed for saying something stupid about the ware or some company didn't invite someone to speak that called Bush a war to criminal, 9-11 an "inside job" or a ton of other things, the MSM going after a guy that ASKS BO A QUESTION doesn't concern anyone??

All these other folks were PUBLIC FIGURES that took it on themselves to pop off at the mouth about the president or the war and what happened to them was a direct result of a position that they explicitly took.

Joe ASKED A QUESTION!!! Now I'd be embarrassed too if a plumber was more able to get an isightful answer out of BO than any official media person, but folks are so smitten with BO they don't see any problem at all with our lovely national media going on a fishing expedition to discredit a PLUMBER because he asked a legitimate question of a guy that wants to be PRESIDENT???!!! Golly, the question from a PLUMBER was just too tough and got old BO to tell the truth, now THAT is something that can get those old MSM folks really riled up.

Note the "slight" difference here. They have armies of reporters digging through the garbage and interviewing everyone that they can get their hands on in Alaska frantically trying to dig up dirt on Palin, but BO, their "shining star" needs their HELP to deal with Joe the Plumber! Oh, and BTW, no concerns about a "chilling effect" when a private citizen is investigated because he asked a questions of his supreme odiferousness BO!

Welcome to the Depression

The Age of Prosperity Is Over - WSJ.com

Actually, they won't remember "This Administration and Congress", much like "Hoover" it will be "The Bush Depression". The panic of the right wing of the Republican party in '06 that ushered in Democrats in both houses had a huge effect. Once most of his own party abandoned him, Bush was REALLY a lame duck and unable to do anything but fortunately virtually stand alone and win the war in Iraq.

People forget that Democrats really look to the 30's as a GREAT ERA! It ushered in a much larger government and policies that allowed Democrats to hold sway for a very long time. Democrats love to tinker with big government, they don't really care if it works, it is what they like to do, just like us computer programmers if left to our own devices will often just "write some code" to "see what happens".

Welcome to BOcialism

Shame, Cubed by Bill Whittle on National Review Online

Kind of like "Bolshevism" ... BO socialism. Trying that one on for size.

One doesn't really need to listen to old radio broadcasts to realize that this BO is an old fashioned re-distributor that will reduce the size of our economy and keep trying to pass the smaller and smaller remaining pieces around to buy votes for his coalition. But apparently Whittle did, and now he has got it and is worried.

Hugging and Guns

It was a weekend when there wasn't a ton of "must do" items, so some fun was had. Friday evening we had a nice steak dinner with another couple and then went to the John Hassler Theater in Plainview to see "Don't Hug Me". Lots of fun poked at Scandinavians, cold winters, little towns in MN, marriage and romance and a few other topics. Lots of corny little songs like "I'm A Walleye Woman in a Crappie Town" and "I Want to go to The Mall of America".

Saturday AM it was up to Froyum's Sports just West of Zumbrota to look over some firearms with an eye toward picking up potentially the "last of an era" with potential gun bans likely if the outcome of the election is as expected. Froyum's is just "a bit" off the beaten path so to speak, and the organizational structure of the store is "eclectic" shall we say, but Eric and his wife are folks for whom guns and shooting are a passion and not just a business. Besides, their "shop cat" is very friendly!

Gander Mountain got my Remington 870 20GA drilled and I mounted my Bushnell Red Dot and headed out to the range. I keep forgetting how much shotguns kick ... I put a lot of slugs through the Remington and my single shot rifled 20 GA backup open sight backup gun, but by the end of the day I was feeling confident and did a little "recreational shooting".

I took the Bushmaster .223 out with some 2 new 20 round and a 30 round Brownells magazine that I had picked up in the AM. Was shooting Wolf steel jacket rounds that are nice and cheap and everything fed through the gun with no problems. I got into the 30 round mag, had an "orange peel" target out at 50 yds and started working on my rapid fire. It is clear why they worry about "assault weapons" ... very little kick, lots of sound, but with the slotted muzzle brake keeping it on target as fast as one can pull the trigger is relatively easy. It tore the bull out of the target and it looked like 25+ of the rounds made it through inside the rings--maybe more, some of the holes were clearly multiple rounds. As I set it down with a nice warm barrell I got a round of whoops and cheers from folks at adjoining benches. In at least that crowd, the "Assault Rifle" is a cool toy.

Finished off the day finally watching "Office Space" after so many folks have told me that I just had to see it. It was a funny film, although I think I found it much more humorous now that I don't live in a cube any more!

The BO Temptation

This one is just so good I pulled it in off NRO. Levin is sure that "a changed America will survive". Is he adequately considering the potentials for destruction of the conservative voice in the media and on the web? How about direct government control over vast swaths of American business and potentially much greater dependency on government but huge swaths of the American public?

Just read it!!

Saturday, October 25, 2008

The Obama Temptation [Mark R. Levin]

I've been thinking this for a while so I might as well air it here. I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country - not yet anyway - but I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. I can't help but observe that even some conservatives are caught in the moment as their attempts at explaining their support for Barack Obama are unpersuasive and even illogical. And the pull appears to be rather strong. Ken Adelman, Doug Kmiec, and others, reach for the usual platitudes in explaining themselves but are utterly incoherent. Even non-conservatives with significant public policy and real world experiences, such as Colin Powell and Charles Fried, find Obama alluring but can't explain themselves in an intelligent way.

There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama's name on it, which adorns everything from Obama's plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff.

Even the media are drawn to the allure that is Obama. Yes, the media are liberal. Even so, it is obvious that this election is different. The media are open and brazen in their attempts to influence the outcome of this election. I've never seen anything like it. Virtually all evidence of Obama's past influences and radicalism — from Jeremiah Wright to William Ayers — have been raised by non-traditional news sources. The media's role has been to ignore it as long as possible, then mention it if they must, and finally dismiss it and those who raise it in the first place. It's as if the media use the Obama campaign's talking points — its preposterous assertions that Obama didn't hear Wright from the pulpit railing about black liberation, whites, Jews, etc., that Obama had no idea Ayers was a domestic terrorist despite their close political, social, and working relationship, etc. — to protect Obama from legitimate and routine scrutiny. And because journalists have also become commentators, it is hard to miss their almost uniform admiration for Obama and excitement about an Obama presidency. So in the tank are the media for Obama that for months we've read news stories and opinion pieces insisting that if Obama is not elected president it will be due to white racism. And, of course, while experience is crucial in assessing Sarah Palin's qualifications for vice president, no such standard is applied to Obama's qualifications for president. (No longer is it acceptable to minimize the work of a community organizer.) Charles Gibson and Katie Couric sought to humiliate Palin. They would never and have never tried such an approach with Obama.

But beyond the elites and the media, my greatest concern is whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue. This may seem a harsh term to some, and no doubt will to Obama supporters, but it is a perfectly appropriate characterization. Obama's entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The "change" he peddles is not new. We've seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government. Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it's $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich." The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class). And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good. The "hope" Obama represents, therefore, is not hope at all. It is the misery of his utopianism imposed on the individual.

Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He's not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks "fundamental change," i.e., to remake society. And if the Democrats control Congress with super-majorities led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he will get much of what he demands.

The question is whether enough Americans understand what's at stake in this election and, if they do, whether they care. Is the allure of a charismatic demagogue so strong that the usually sober American people are willing to risk an Obama presidency? After all, it ensnared Adelman, Kmiec, Powell, Fried, and numerous others. And while America will certainly survive, it will do so, in many respects, as a different place.

10/25 09:29 PM

Smellin Like BO

Power Line - ObamaFraud: Still Not News

Sure is nice to not have all those MSM folks all sanctimonious about "money and politics" this year. Man, they REALLY used to HATE the "big money interests". I remember when someone told me in the spring that BO didn't "take money from the special interests" and I looked it up on the web and found that he was getting huge donations from the financial folks--at the time I was thinking; "What's up with that? Do they really think that BO is going to be good for the economy?". Now we know -- "good for sub-prime loans and covering their tracks".

He certainly IS "different". Now money is pouring in by the 10's and HUNDREDS of millions and he is the FIRST candidate since Nixon to not take Federal matching funds. So all those leftys that complained and complained about  the "big money Republicans" and "buying elections" have a guy taking money from who knows where with no controls at all and they LOVE IT!

It ought to be fun to be a liberal -- no morals, no standards, no responsibilty--wonder why it is that they are always so angry? They always claim they are the smartest, the best, the most caring, the most concerned and most of all just plain "nice", yet every time you turn around they are screaming and yelling about something. The old world just never seems to give them all they were "owed". I'm sure they will be happy when BOs hundreds of millions get him the election he so richly deserves and the world is sunny and bright! It will be fun to watch those happy liberals smile as all their plans provide the success that their brilliance has always known would be theirs if they just had the controls of the ship of state!

Smooth sailing ahead!

Master Bedroom

With all the happenings of the late summer I came to realize that I never really did a "final" on the master bedroom project. We moved in during August, but the loss of our niece made that event seem quite small in comparison.

The first picture shows the two big windows, fireplace and Sony LCD 46" on the NE main wall. The addition is 24' x 18' and hangs out over our old deck making it a covered deck.

The 2nd picture is standing in the corner of the room looking back to where I shot the first one from. It shows the refrigerator, wine rack, granite counter, bed, and entrance to the walk-in closet. If you look at the top, you can see where the vaulted ceiling begins, that was the wall of our old bedroom for 13 years.

BTW, we have had the beds for a few years now, they are "hospital beds" with latex mattresses -- the head and the feet can be adjusted up and down. I have had some back problems and a bicycle accident in 2003 that resulted in broken ribs, a broken collar bone and a broken shoulder blade. I slept in a chair for a couple months and realized how nice it would be to have an adjustable bed. When our mattress cleared 10 years old, we went this way and have been very happy. I have sinus and acid reflux issues, so I always sleep with my head elevated -- it is pretty much a waste for my wife unless she is reading, but she MIGHT get older at some point as well.

The 3rd picture is looking across the room from the corner next to the bed and shows the air tub and the two chairs that are used for watching the TV. The TV is on a swing arm so it can be aimed at the chairs or at the bed. The two big windows look out on our back yard that is down a 20' hill and about the size of two football fields end to end. We have woods behind the yard and no neighbors that direction, so we likely will not be doing shades on those windows. In the summer we look right out into the middle of two large cottonwood trees that are about 30 yards down the hill, now the leaves are off and we can see the bare trees and hopefully soon the white snow in the back yard.

I grew up in a small farmhouse in northern WI, spent a few years in an even smaller farmhouse when I started work and in between lived in a home with a "master bedroom" that was something like 10x14' with no walk-in and no bath, and the previous 13 years lived in the old room that was like 12x16' but had a VERY small walk-in and very small bathroom.

Do we "need" this bedroom? Certainly not -- I've worked at a large corporation for 30 years and my wife has worked there for 25. We have seen a lot of our friends laid off, and fully realize that without timely breaks and lucky decisions, we could have been laid off as well. We "stole our home" in the mid-90's when local housing values were down. No doubt we would have trouble getting all the money we have in it today given all our renovation out if we had to sell today, but we don't, and it is pretty unlikely that we will be forced to sell. We "live in the country" about 2 city blocks from a major Wal-Mart shopping center, yet when you sit out at our firepit in the evening, you would be hard pressed to know how close you are to the city. We drive about 1 mile to work-when we do drive, often we can work from home.

I'm 52 -- my wife is very young and not aging, but she may age someday. After having back problems, a bike accident and a broken elbow in the past 10 years, I realize that as one gets older it is possible to have to spend more time in a "bedroom setting" than one might like to contemplate. Even when healthy, it is likely that something like "8 hours" may be spent there. So, on the "investment front", we decided that it was "worth it" for us. One of the great things about the US in the last 30 years has been that it is possible to work hard and make those kinds of decisions for yourself. Will that be the case going forward? Who knows, I'm thankful to be able to watch the world go by from our little "daily retreat".

W0uld I rather be back to living in my little farmhouse and have our niece back? Absolutely, in a heartbeat -- I could think of a whole long list of things that I would "rather have", but there are a set of things we can control somewhat and a really really big set of things that we can't control at all. I could also spend all my time whining about how much the market has gone down, how much CEOs make, how bad BO is likely to be for the country and wishing that this or that had happened in a different way over the previous 52 years -- but most of the time, I don't. I have the "gift" of HAVING to look at 100's of angles of almost everything that goes by my nose, but I've learned to let a lot of just "flow around me".

Sometimes that makes me slower than molasses in January-- but I've learned to adapt. I force myself to "limit the stream" or I certainly could not get out of my own way. Thankfully, my wife is an "action person". I would NEVER have made the decision to build the bedroom without her. It is very easy to get used to something that nice, but I strongly believe that folks that have never had such a thing tend to give it a lot more significance than it warrants. There is a long list of things that I've "pressed my nose up against the glass" wanting during my life, and a more limited, but still significant list of things that have been "achieved" (with plenty of luck and help from others).

Health, love, peace of mind, faith, values, family, friends, a great football team (hard to beat Green Bay), good pets (Tiger is typing this part) ... the list goes on and on. ALL are more important than "a really nice place to live". I'm VERY happy and thankful to have the nice bedroom, and hope that we can enjoy it for a long time to come. It is our little "cabin" that we get to utilize all the time, and a wonderful retreat from the stresses of our world. If you come and visit, you are welcome to spend a couple nights there -- but be warned, it was too many nights spent in nice places like Bluefin Bay on the N shore and nice hotels in the cities that caused us to have too many ideas!

Gird Your Loins

Gird your loins, folks, an international crisis looms - David Reinhard - The Oregonian - OregonLive.com

Wow, if McCain was talking like this they would have the padded room ready. When is the last time you heard "gird your loins" from a rational person not in church? Naturally, this is a non-story since it doesn't reflect "all that well" on either the sanity of the Democrat VP candidate or the prospects for his young apprentice BO as he looks to make history by being the first "Commmunity Organizer" to be President. Note, Bill Clinton was declared our first black president in 2002 by Nobel Prize winning Toni Morrison and many other lefty news outlets, so that must be true). Teaser:

What is it about West Coast fundraisers that prompt the two of you
guys to let fly with the family secrets? In San Francisco, we learned
Obama believes that bitter small-town Pennsylvanians cling to God and
guns. In Seattle, Biden warned that Obama will face an international
crisis in the first months of an administration. Heaven knows what we
would find out if Biden let 'er rip in Portland.

Don't voters deserve to know this before Election Day? Please reply
with the candor you demonstrated in Seattle and San Francisco.

Yes, I'd like actual campaign reporters to ask such questions of
Obama and Biden between now and Election Day. But this year, for the
first time, I've given up on the prestige media to think it's their job
to do so. I now depend on the likes of Joe the Plumber.

Obamanomics, Triumph of Hope Over Experience

An Obamanomics Preview - WSJ.com

As I've been saying for awhile, we are already in the "change". Democrats took over congress in '06, and they definitely promised a lot of change, now they just don't seem to be willing to admit that "they delivered".

Economic growth is pretty much 100% about people investing and working with the belief that they will be able to improve their lot in life by keeping a lot of the positive results of their investing and working, or suffering the consequences if they guess wrong and invest in or work at the "wrong things". When the government promises to allow them to keep less of the rewards of that investing and working, or worse yet indicates that BAD decisions in what mortgage to take out, bank to invest in, or work decisions will be REWARDED with bailouts, income credits, extra programs, etc, the net result tends to be that intelligent folks work less, invest less,  and sit on the sidelines and wait for government to "get the rules straight".

That would seem to be pretty much where we are now. The government is promising a bunch of rewards for those that have made poor decisions and a bunch of penalties for those that have made good decisions. Tax what you want less of, subsidize what you want more of; the rule is as old as mankind itself. So we are taxing folks that have selected good jobs, good investments, lived in their means, etc and we are subsidizing folks that have failed to find descent work, invest in anything and lived outside of their means. Gee, I wonder what decisions and actions we will get more of and which ones we will get less of?

The quote from this article that is obvious is:

If we may borrow a phrase, this is the triumph of hope over experience.
The one thing Washington hasn't failed to do in recent years is spend,...

Truth In Reporting

Meridian Magazine:: Ideas and Society: Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

I suspect that this guy actually IS a Democrat, although since it looks like he is a family man and probably a Mormon, he has little in common with today's Democrat party and no doubt won't be writing for any MSM source in the future. It all needs to be read, but I'll throw in a teaser.

The point is that the cause of the housing crisis being the sub-prime loans that the Democrats pushed is completely obvious, yet unknown to most Americans. The connections to Obama are obvious and easy to find. I've written a lot about WHY I think the press has come to this point (their hatred has overshadowed their reason), but this guy does a good job of just laying out what is happening without trying to analyze the why.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has
revealed his ignorance and naïveté time after time — and you have swept
it under the rug, treated it as nothing.Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

Unimaginable November 5th?

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Long National Nightmare

I always have a soft spot for those that go against the conventional wisdom. NY Giants defeat New England Patriots in Super Bowl? Jets Win? Mets Win? or has he points out, Truman over Dewey?

I'll believe it if I see it ... BUT, I would be very worried about rioting in the streets were this to happen. The left just doesn't have that same "reasoned approach". Watch George Will, and then watch Keith Oberman, and see if you notice any difference.

The Mote In Your Brother's Eye

Who are left-wing haters to point fingers at John McCain?
I've covered this before, but it just keeps happening. The left tends to think that any small slight they suffer is some "chilling, nazi, etc" horror. So after 9/11, they were beside themselves about all the flags waving and people wearing flag lapels and such. It was "horribly jingoistic". When Dixie Chicks uttered some anti-Bush rhetoric in England and their FANS decided that they didn't need to buy CDs from entertainers that didn't represent the country they loved in the way they wanted it represented, that was TERRIBLE!

So, now we have BO and company threatening the pulling of FCC licenses if they don't like some political speech and the whole MSM equating any criticism of BO with "racisim", and that is naturally just fine. Nothing "chilling" about any of that!

Facism is GOVERNMENT taking over PARTS of private and business life and converting them to "political enterprises" where your politics count for more than your merit. If they took over ALL of it, it would be communist. If they didn't take it over, but just taxed everything like crazy to "share the wealth" it would be SOCIALIST. So note, when BO tells Joe the Plumber that he wants to "share the wealth", that part is socialist, and it doesn't matter one whit if BO is black, red, white, or purple. Racism is when Rev Wright says in his "Audacity of Hope" sermon on which BO titled his book that: "It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a
day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…That's the world! On which hope sits!"

The idea of racism is that "white folks" part. If someone said "black socialists", then THAT would be racist, but there are plenty of black and white communists, socialists, fascists and capitalists ... there are also plenty of greedy blacks, reds, yellows and all colors of the human spectrum. To accept the flawed nature of humanity is obvious to all, save liberals who choose to believe that human flaws are only due to poor parenting, poor government, or the fact that conservatives exist.

Burying the Liberal / Conservative Hatchet

http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/reforming-big-government/

Long but very good. The bottom line of all this is that the welfare state keeps winning, but only because we aren't paying for it. The bills are increasingly coming due and we will need to face the facts that:

1. There WILL be "welfare" for some lower percentage of the population -- we need to decide on that number.
2. There CAN'T be "welfare for everyone" -- the bumper sticker is "Vote Republican: We can't ALL be on Welfare". But due to Social Security and Medicare, we just THINK that we can!
3. Give the bottom 10-20% Welfare, everyone else has to have INCENTIVES to take care of themselves (and that 10-20%) ... or we won't even have enough economy to help that bottom 20% before long!

But, the article is VERY well written and I've summarized a shorter version. First, the main point of the liberal/conservative argument is presented:

If the expansion of the welfare state is the reason liberals get up and go to work in the morning, its contraction is the reason conservatives do. Almost any page from the writings of Ronald Reagan will demonstrate this point. To pick just one example, Reagan told the American Bar Association in 1983, "It's time to bury the myth that bigger government brings more opportunity and compassion.... In the name of fairness, let's stop trying to plunder family budgets with higher taxes, and start controlling the real problem—Federal spending."

This argument—over the proper size of America's welfare state—has been going on for 75 years. Three things might prevent it from going on another 75, but two of them are unlikely. The first is that one side will score a decisive victory over the other, winning (so to speak) all the arguments and all the elections. The second is that the two sides will split the difference in a way they both feel reasonably happy about. The third, less far-fetched possibility, is that the debate will not be resolved but abandoned—after political and intellectual exhaustion motivates the combatants to redefine what they're arguing about.

Reagan and W believed that they were going to "win the argument", so does BO ... as did FDR and probably Johnson. I too believe that BO will be unable to actually "win the argument" **IF** he plays within the Constitution. What I'm worried about is that he realizes that and is willing to go well beyond the Constitution in control of the media, business in general, mandatory influence of youth, sanctions against religion, etc. Hopefully not. If not, then I think this author is right--reality is in the process of intervening in the argument.

Now, the reality of conservatives inability to contain the welfare state is brought out:

This table reveals that the welfare state battle between liberals and conservatives has been as evenly matched as the one at Little Big Horn between Sitting Bull and Custer. Real, per capita federal spending on Human Resources was 15 times greater in 2007 than in 1940. Whatever else it may tell us, this 1,394% increase is one more demonstration of the power of compound interest. You achieve that huge expansion over 67 years with an annual growth rate of 4.10%, which doesn't sound so formidable.

So, we keep increasing benefits for EVERYONE and expecting less and less people to pay for them ... and we keep borrowing more and more. SO:

The baby boomers' retirement will be the best documented, least surprising policy challenge in American history—and still we are not prepared for it. Herb Stein's Law remains operative, however: if something can't go on forever, it won't. Entitlements can't go on, indefinitely, laying claim to a bigger portion of the federal budget and the GDP. Once the furniture is engulfed in flames we will finally start shopping for fire extinguishers.

We all know that we have had a crisis brewing for a long time, it isn't going away, and there is every sign that we are going to elect BO and make it even worse. How do we get out of this? By changing the argument to something that can maybe work!

Supply-side tax cuts did little to necessitate or even facilitate reducing the welfare state, and there is no reason to believe an explicit campaign for that goal will succeed where Barry Goldwater's failed. Given all that, conservatives need to weigh the costs and benefits of putting liberals' minds at ease by explicitly renouncing the war against the welfare state, the one that's barely being waged and steadily being lost. They could do so by making clear that America will and should have a welfare state, and that the withering away of the welfare state is not the goal of the conservative project, not even in the distant future. What libertarians will regard as a capitulation to statism is better understood as conceding ground conservatives have been losing for 75 years and have no imaginable prospect of regaining.

The political advantage of this concession is that it leaves conservatives positioned to argue for a better, smarter, and fairer welfare state. "Liberalism needs government," says Cohn, "because government is how the people, acting together, provide for the safety and well-being of their most vulnerable members." Very well, but in a society that is remarkably prosperous by global and historical standards, shouldn't "most vulnerable members" be construed as referring to the most vulnerable 5, 10, or 25% of the population—not just the abjectly miserable, let us concede, but people confronting serious threats or problems? Yet when it turns out, time and again, that the effective meaning of liberal welfare and social insurance programs is to elicit compassion and government subventions for the most "vulnerable" 75, 80, or 95% of the population, it's hard not to feel scammed.

It is really more like the "most vulnerable 100% of the population" -- we are ALL at least TOLD that we are going to get the benefits of Social Security and Medicare. The reason for this is that liberals are trying to win the argument by buying ALL of the votes!

Liberals, in short, should take Yes for an answer. 75 years of their rhetoric about defending the most vulnerable among us really has persuaded the American people, who are fully prepared to support, on the merits, government programs to help the needy. For everyone else—the vast majority who are not needy—public programs are not the best or only expression of the public interest in economic security. Government should give them incentives to enhance their own economic security, without paying the freight charges to send their money round-trip to Washington.

I'd argue that the point that is missed is that most liberals aren't even close to only about "helping the needy", they are really about HURTING THE RICH! Many many liberals have decent homes, decent cars, plenty of food, plenty of at least "basic luxuries", BUT, they are locked into envy because "somebody has more" and they are absolutely convinced that is somehow "hurting them" ... the rich are "taking their money" and they are itching for some heavier duty class warfare.

For many of them, they are "economic suicide bombers" that really don't care if their actions hurt themselves worse than the "rich guy", they just want to be sure that he is hurt. Unfortunately, that kind of attitude is going to be MUCH harder to deal with than just the already difficult task of getting conservatives and liberals to give up on the hope for the complete win and vanquishing of the opposition with commensurate boot licking and abject apologies".

The Me-Too Conservative

RealClearPolitics - Articles - The Birth of the Me-Too Conservative

I agree completely with Blankley on his conclusion, but not so much on where he sees the origins. Much like any movement, the seeds of the failure of the "Reagan Brand" were there at the inception. In order to gain power, a lot of compromise was required -- big Social Security tax increases, big deficits, still growing government. ALL of the folks in government are politicians. The offensive linemen from the Packers and the Vikings have a WHOLE lot more in common with each other than they do with "the man in the street". They happen to be on different teams, but that is actually minor compared with what they share -- the same is true of Democrat and Republican politicians.

What looks like "small issues" have a way of growing over 30 years or so kind of like gaining a pound or two each year. The "Thousand Points of Light" from Bush Sr and the "Compassonate Conservatism" of W along with lots of earmarked pork for all sorts of Republican districts back home stacked on top of the Democrats made a whole bunch of folks "Me-Too" long ago. When the going got tougher in W's 2nd term (as it always does in 2nd terms -- see Iran Contra, see Monica), the Reagan Brand was too fluffy around the middle and not able to work through the difficulty. The "real conservatives" got fed up and walked off the field to "teach the rest of them a lesson" in '06, and what a lesson it has been already! Unfortunately, like a lot of "lessons", it is a long way from being over.

So, we will have to rebuild from the ashes, and probably do it under a lot of duress from control of conservative media and potentially even  sanctions against those that hold conservative views relative to religion and morality through loss of income / deductions or worse. Freedom has never been free. I loved his last two paragraphs:

Peggy's unconscious fear may be that it will be precisely Sarah Palin
(and others like her) who will be among the leaders of the
about-to-be-reborn conservative movement. I suspect that the
conservative movement we start rebuilding on the ashes of Nov. 4 (even
if McCain wins) will have little use for overwritten, over-delicate
commentary. The new movement will be plain-spoken and socially
networked up from the Interneted streets, suburbs and small towns of
America. It certainly will not listen very attentively to those
conservatives who idolatrize Obama and collaborate in heralding his
arrival. They may call their commentary "honesty." I would call it --
at the minimum -- blindness.


The new conservative movement will be facing a political opponent that
will reveal itself soon to be both multiculturalist and Eurosocialist.
We will be engaged in a struggle to the political death for the soul of
the country. As I did at the beginning of and throughout the
Buckley/Goldwater/Reagan/Gingrich conservative movement, I will try to
lend my hand. I certainly will do what I can to make it a big-tent
conservative movement. But just as it does in every great cause, one
question has to be answered correctly: Whose side are you on, comrade?

Franken on Christ

Vulgar mockery of Christians: Is this what we want in a U.S. senator?

Ah yes, the old "MN Nice". Franken isn't really "from Minnesota" in any real sense of course, he is a NY and Hollywood kind of creature, so the term "crude" can just be converted to "sophisticated" as far as the MSM is concerned. I'm probably the only living human that has read a couple of his books and a couple of Ann Coulters books. They are book ends of political pornography -- lots of nasty abuse of the other side and accolades for their own. Running Al from the left is exactly the same indication of how out of whack our poltics has become as running Ann from the right would be.

Since I'm the only one that has read books by both of them, I guess I'm the only one to see that. To Ann's credit, she is much better looking and I've never seen her go into a screaming tirade of obscenities at anyone or resort to physical violence, but in the interests of trying to get lefties to understand what they are doing, I'll do her the disservice of a direct comparison.

Here is a typically "nice" piece of Franken humor, I think it WOULD be REALLY funny for him to go the Mohammed route, those "religion of peace" folks REALLY know how to take a joke!

Franken finds Christ's crucifixion to be a barrel of laughs. For
example, in his 1999 book, "Why Not Me?" he wrote about his discovery
-- as a fictional former president -- of "the complete skeleton of
Jesus Christ still nailed to the cross" during an archeological dig. At
the Franken Presidential Library gift shop, visitors can buy "small
pieces of Jesus' skeleton." 

"We would like to display Jesus' skeleton at some future point,"
Franken went on. "It's merely a matter of designing and building an
exhibition space ... . Until then he's very comfortable in a box down
in our basement near the geothermal power station."

Very funny. Anybody want to try a joke like that about Mohammed?