Obama Supporter Dislikes Republicans

Sweet Jesus, David Brooks is finally making sense: How Fox News & the GOP insanity caucus pushed him over the edge - Salon.com:

Finally? The man wrote multiple columns in support of Obama. He did EVENTUALLY have a bit of "buyers remorse", but seriously. If you are as far left as he is, it takes someone as far left as the NYTs or Salon to consider him a "conservative".

So he is worried about the "Freedom Caucus" in the house because it is "too extreme". Really. Has he ever looked at the Black Caucus? Is he aware that there is an avowed socialist running on the Democrat ticket for President and doing pretty well?

Apparently it is all "Rush Limbaugh's fault".

What David Brooks apparently liked -- if he actually as ANY "conservative" bones in his body is the old Pre William Buckley, Goldwater, Reagan, etc "Rockefeller conservatism" of green eyeshade balanced budgets and isolationism. A few "tokens" in office from time to time that couldn't get anything through congress because the Democrats held it for 50 years was the kind of "healthy opposition party" that they liked.

A toothless old lion kept sedated in it's cage that they could poke with a stick now and again.

Now this Republican party is supposed to be "revolutionary" -- they can't even put up a bill to defund the government paying half a billion a year to kill babies so BO can veto it !

Wow, "revolutionary" is a hard word to attach to that kind of spinelessness!



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New New Deal

Hillary Clinton & Democratic Debate -- Calling for a New New Deal Is Nothing New| National Review Online:



Generally a good and entertaining column by Jonah, but what really hit me is this as the summary:

It’s all just so exhausting. And I guess what I resent most of all is the fact that I will spend the rest of my life arguing with people who not only think that their faith in progressivism and the State is smart and modern, but that their opponents are the ones who are stuck in the past. And in the process, they’ll keep making the country worse, with every failure providing the latest evidence that now, now, is the time for a new New Deal.

It is indeed exhausting -- and sad. As he makes clear in the column, the "New Deal" wasn't new when it happened -- it was re-cycled Wilson WWI government centralized planning, which was stolen from Germanic Bismarkian Socialism of the 1880's, which was ... oh well, you get the idea. The concept of "wouldn't a free lunch be nice" is as old as Adam and Eve.



The results are predictable too -- like gaining weight at the holidays, hangovers, spending too much money, etc, etc -- we know the result, but we have an oh so human tendency to keep thinking "it's different this time".





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Dayton vs Walker

Minnesota vs. Wisconsin: Does the Progressive Paradise Win? | Power Line:



Mostly posting to keep track of the reality of the rather popular left wing meme that Minnesota is a "Progressive Paradise" and "Scott Walker Destroyed Wisconsin". Walker was elected in 2010, Dayton in 2011.



Building and destroying businesses takes a few years, and legislatures have an awful lot to do with it as well. Dayton has been "held back" if you are a D, or "prevented from destroying" if you are an R by having to deal with at least one house in Republican hands.



The bottom line is that it is hard to find any significant change in the trend lines in either state at this point.



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NY Times Danish Reality

Danes Rethink a Welfare State Ample to a Fault - The New York Times:

The picture meme isn't in the article ... but it should be!

I covered the insanity of BS (Bernie Sanders) thoughts on Denmark relative to the debate here. When you get far enough out on the left that even the NYTs thinks you have slipped the surly bonds, nature is telling you that you are a few sunflower seeds short in your trail mix!

Not a bad article -- you can almost see reality from there, high praise from me for the Times! A sample:

"With little fuss or political protest — or notice abroad — Denmark has been at work overhauling entitlements, trying to prod Danes into working more or longer or both. While much of southern Europe has been racked by strikes and protests as its creditors force austerity measures, Denmark still has a coveted AAA bond rating. But Denmark’s long-term outlook is troubling. The population is aging, and in many regions of the country people without jobs now outnumber those with them. "

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"Killing" Reagan, Patton, Books

Killing O’Reilly’s Reagan | Power Line:

I've read two of the Bill O'Reilly's "Killing" series -- Patton and Reagan. Both are pretty much "National Enquirer" / "People" / made for TV kind of fairly lurid, sensationalized and highly fictionalized works that are extremely light and easy reads. Apparently O'Reilly and his ghost author are highly interested in sexual dalliances -- both works were rife with them, shoestring coincidental connections, rumors, gossip, etc. -- or they merely believe that is what sells, which I guess I would be an example of ( I borrowed one, got the other as a gift).

I DID find them entertaining -- which there is nothing wrong with in its place as long as people don't start believing that what they are reading is in any way "real", just because it purports to be.

Sometimes people that read my blog assume that I watch a lot of Fox News. I don't -- I watch very little of it because in general, it is PRIMARILY concerned with ratings and making money, which I and Steven Hayward believe that Bill O'Reilly is as well. Again, I'm fine with that -- until the Bernie Sanders way completely takes over, private business needs to be concerned with finding a niche and making money. NPR would be concerned about that as well if they didn't feed at the public trough and rely on lots of left wing donors to support their coverage for the left and the far left view of the world.

A lot of the Reagan books assertions we have heard before -- primarily from Kitty Kelly, Nancy and astrology, Alzheimer's while he was in office, affairs for both of them, etc. -- and as Hayward points out, they have all been solidly debunked before from real sources rather than rumors.

If you don't read much history, you may actually learn something from the books, but like pretty much anything (and more in this case), be pretty critical of the most titillating stuff. Kind of like the fishing lure that really achieved it's purpose once you bought it (catching a fish is purely optional!), the book is entertaining and people are buying it. That is what counts in the game that O'Reilly is playing here -- think of them as a male version of a "Romance Novel" and enjoy in moderation.

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Eyes On Balls

Obama Gets a Clue? | Power Line:

In the linked PL column there is the hope that BO's decision to more or less "stay the course" in Afghanistan constitutes his waking up and realizing what is happening in the world. Unlike the claim made for Carter in the column, I really don't expect BO to be reading Churchill any time soon. The PL guys do a good job of being hopeful.



How many times did we hear from say 2003 on that W had "taken his eye off the ball on Afghanistan"? Thousands at least.



BO tried to "lead from behind" (behind W) and attempt a "surge" in Afghanistan. His Afghanistan casualties exceeded 2x W's in 2014 . I covered how little of the deaths were reported here -- now we see how sadly this policy is failing in Afghanistan.



So the sacrifice we made in Afghanistan in lives and treasure is too precious to walk away from but Iraq wasn't? Am I the only one that would like to hear BO explain the logic of why THAT is??? If you look at the location of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Europe -- let alone Israel for those of us who care, WHY is it that Afghanistan is of greater strategic importance than Iraq? Obviously, it is not -- not that we ought to allow it to become a haven again, but Iraq is far more strategic.



Is it even possible for the MSM to sustain any criticism of BO? Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Crimea and Syria. Where is US foreign policy not a complete disaster? Nowhere -- it's a consistent disaster everywhere!



90% of the media is simply part and parcel of "The Party - Democrat" -- we may as well be the old USSR and call of "Pravda" (Russian for truth).



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Black Votes Matter

How The Democratic Presidential Candidates Responded To The Black Lives Matter Question | ThinkProgress:

One of the marks of a totalitarian system is its ability to get all its adherents to mindlessly utter some phrase or make some sign. "Heil Hitler" is an example, now we have "Black Lives Matter".

On the left there is some disappointment that Hillary didn't jump up and make the statement like BS did.

Civilized free people believe that all human lives matter -- "All lives matter" for short. Including Police, babies, even white people!  Can't be saying things like THAT if you are a Democrat!

When your freedom is removed you are required to repeat a phrase like a trained parrot -- just like the parrots on stage last night.

The Democrats need an energized Black Voter base to show up in enough numbers so they can have some justification for the volume of fraud they need out of those districts. If the polls are empty it is going to be hard to claim that 150% of the voters showed up at the polls!

Black votes are like the conventional explosive in a nuclear weapon used to compress the fissionable material to create the runaway nuclear reaction -- you have to have enough Black Voters show up to allow your massive Democrat nuclear fraud machine to manufacture 10's of thousands of votes in our larger cities!

So they matter to Democrats BIG TIME!

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BS Flavored Danish

Scandiphilia and Income Inequality | Power Line:

Good summary at PL on the fact that the Scandinavian welfare paradise that BS (Bernie Sanders) imagines to exist ran out of other people's money a while back and they have had to adjust. It turns out that you can't kill ONLY the golden goose (the 1%) to pay for your "Free Stuff", you have to dredge up some serious chicken feed from all the barnyard prisoners -- like a 25% VAT tax on everything you buy!

Canada has been forced to adjust similarly, and in fact both Canada and Denmark are now more free and better places to do business than the old US of A! We do indeed hate big money grubbing corporations, and we have been proving it by sending them packing with high taxes and anti-business regulation for a few decades already! No wonder our level of workforce participation is back to mid 1970's levels!

Here is some data on Denmark specifically if you want to scrape a little BS off your Danish!

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Nearing "The Day After Tomorrow"

We’re closer to a ‘Day After Tomorrow’ ice age than we thought - The Washington Post:

The article is worth a read for at least entertainment value, but the bottom line is that the Warmists are hedging their bets with the idea that the "pause" in warming now nearing 20 years in length might quickly slip into COOLING! ... ****BUT**** !!!!!

Yup, you guessed it, that cooling will be CAUSED by warming, which is caused by humans and CO2. Such has been "settled". As Karl Popper pretty much tautologically said: "A theory that explains everything explains nothing".

That used to be trotted out by atheists against God for obvious reasons, but if "Global Warming" or "Climate Change" explains ALL things that happen to the climate, then it really explains nothing.

If you look at the tired old Vostok ice core data, our temps have peaked 4 times previous to this time in the last 500K years and then plunged. None of our current historical models include advanced carbon burning civilizations in the previous peaks, so while it is possible we are having an effect, it seems pretty clear that the planet warms in 100K year cycles and spends most of it's time far cooler than it is now.

As least future generations will have the satisfacting of knowing that in this case, the cooling was caused by humans!

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Moral Ecology, Naming Disaster

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/10/donald-trump-and-the-decline-of-americas-moral-ecology.php

The linked column chooses to name our moral decline as "Moral Ecology" based on an article from David Brooks. As "Closing Of The American Mind" might say, the morals you make up are a lot less likely to be really believed than the ones that are a few thousand years old. Make it so nearly nobody believes that how they live has the potential to affect how they spend eternity, and "morals" become "suggestions".

"Suggestions" to the real "god" of the modern world, and especially America -- **ME**!!! David Brooks identifies the problem in this following quote, but unless people have been totally asleep or so far into denying the obvious to miss that BO is a narcissist beyond previous imagination for an American President, this isn't very newsworthy. Sure, "The Donald" is another of the species, but in a nation that gets all thrilled over the Kardashians, the person formerly known as Bruce Jenner, etc, etc, the cult of me is considered to be high moral fiber, so who can really be surprised?

Over the past several decades we have built a moral ecology around the Big Me, around the belief in a golden figure inside. This has led to a rise in narcissism and self-aggrandizement.

So we have shooters that "just want to be famous".  When there are no morals or even standards, fame is just about all their is. Wealth is bad if you aren't famous -- but fine if you are.

At one time kids wanted to be astronauts, now they want to be mass killers. For "progressives", that must be progress. The latest is always best -- or is it possible that "progress" sometimes isn't?

Closing Of The American Mind, Allan Bloom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind

After a lot of rememberance (some of it false), I re-read the book that along with National Review and Ayn Rand was one of the early works that led me to "open my mind" to the ancients, the classics, philosophy and the radical ideas of thinkers not sanctioned by the modern academy or culture. Call it the inverse of the kind of relativist, collectivist,  politically correct education that Bloom laments in this work. I find the following explains the title and purpose of the work.

"Actually openness results in American conformism -- out there in the rest of the world is drab diversity that teaches only that values are relative, whereas here we can create all the lifestyles we want. Our openness means we do not need others. Thus what is advertised as a great opening is a great closing. No longer is there hope that there are great wise men in other places and times who can reveal the truth about life." 

The book is a survey of the leading thoughts to Western civilization and what has become of them in the American University. The basic answer is that there is no truth, and therefore all points of view are somewhat equivalent, although the most "progressive" is favored, since it is current. Science is king -- but alas, Science has no values or meaning  beyond "it works" and "we have lots of detailed data about stuff", so thought is atomized along with matter. The post Nietzsche world of philosophy is summarized thusly:

"The revelation that philosophy finds nothingness at the end of it's quest informs the new philosopher that mythmaking must be his central concern in order to make a world."

Once God and Religion are gone, there is a vacuum that must be filled by myth, because man does not live by mere fact.

The first time I read this book, I struggled mightily with it -- and was not sure that I got it at all, but it made me aware that in my single minded focus to attain a career through college education, I had completely missed even a rudimentary understanding of the culture that had created the world I was intent to seek my livelihood in with all haste.

When I re-read it ... I assume in the late '90s, I was better equipped and felt that I understood it, this time it was a relative breeze. Education does work -- even autodidacticism.

My false memories were related to how early I thought it was written and that I must have read it sooner -- I thought it was written in the 1960's, it was published in '87. It DOES cover a lot of discussion of the '60s, which is where I must have gotten the idea.

It was more popular than I imagined -- I read it on the Kindle this time which included an afterword by Andrew Ferguson. Bloom died of AIDs in 1992, five years after the book was published. That fact no doubt figures heavily into some of the criticism of the work out in Wikipedia (linked at the top) relative to people claiming that young people coming out for gay rights and "marriage" is "proof of morality". One would hope that anyone who read the book would realize that it is rather proof of "all things being relative" in the now even more closed American mind.

Must all alcoholics be in favor of prohibition or of complete license to consume alcohol? Must all alcoholics hold any specific view relative to alcohol? Why would not the same be true of someone with homosexual tendencies? Will we someday state of alcoholics as a group that "You are born with a genetic disposition to alcoholism. If you do not drink, you are not being true to yourself"?

Such inconsistency -- and in fact, the creation of a mind so closed that it may not dare recognize the inconsistency in the previous paragraph is the core of what "Closing" teaches. The actual open mind is open to the possibility of truth, error and even paradox. It is willing to continue to seek "the good", even transcendent, divine truth rather than be closed to even the potential. It may not find what it seeks, but it does not discount it, and it does not give up the quest because the current times assert it MUST not exist.

I'm glad that I came full circle and re-read this one probably for the last time. It opened my mind, and the mind of America has closed beyond what I suspect even Bloom might have imagined since his death.

Moving Extreme

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/10/who-you-callin-extreme.php

Good PL post relative to a study that shows (unsurprisingly) that when Republicans are called "extreme", it is relative to CURRENT Democrats -- which have moved FAR to the left from what they were even ten or twenty years ago ... witness Hillary tacking LEFT to compete with Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist, while her husband Bill, tacked RIGHT and the whole Democrat push of the '90s was CENTRIST!

Not anymore ... it is now EXTREME! The assumption of the left or "progressive" view is that a nation ALWAYS moves left -- moving left, to more government, more control, more regulation, less personal freedom in every area save morality, etc is "progress". The left assumes that the ultimate state of mankind must be absolute control from a centralized authority with all people living in some relation to that authority -- both enslaved and completely dependent at the same time (which is a definition of slavery).

The assumption though is that if you "properly educate" the masses, that total enslavement to a collective cause is the proper state of the mass of humanity -- once people are "sufficiently educated", they will willingly salute their complete dependence for everything including their daily direction from the state. This has all been covered in plenty of fictional works -- from Orwell's "1984" to Huxley's "Brave New World", as well as in plenty of works of non-fiction -- "The Gulag Archipelago" leaps to mind, as well as the excellent reality fiction "The Lives of Others" about East Germany.

This constant slide to the left has been going on in this country at least since Wilson, and really before. It is enough to make one wonder if it really and truly actually is inevitable!

The Immigration Drive of '65

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 -- Its Effect Today | National Review Online:

Excellent article covering the 1965 Immigration Reform that I covered here ... losing America to cultural and racial overrun was not inevitable. The left claims one of its favorite reasons for the outcome "unintended consequences" -- like their poverty programs destroying the inner city family, their economic programs destroying the economy, their social programs driving the nation to destruction by debt -- the programs of the left are FAMOUS for "unintended consequences". They always find them "surprising", but if you read of some of their leaders, like Saul Alinsky, it certainly looks like the damage they do is actually by design!

A worthy though somewhat pedantic read on how our culture was changed by legal invasion.

The article seems to think it can be fixed now -- unfortunately, looking at the demographics and birth rate,  that hardly seems likely.

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Pleading The 97%

Climate Change -- Statistics Aren't What They Seem | National Review Online:

One is reminded of a witness consistently pleading the 5th Amendment -- or my only pleading for my sins, "I plead the Blood of Christ"!

If you send up someone to talk about Climate Change at a Senate hearing, doesn't it reflect pretty badly on the cause at hand -- maybe unless it is a religion, which really ought to be considered, if the only response the witness has is to plead a completely bogus statistic? (covered in the past here)

It is worth following the link and seeing the idiotic responses on video ... and a more detailed explanation on where the 97% comes from than mine of you care. I guess after the stench of BO we are a people with no potential for embarrassment.

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SNL Contributes, Citizens United

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-goldberg-1011-20151010-story.html

The headline on the Daily Beast's review summed it up well: "'Saturday Night Live' Premiere Basically a Hillary Clinton Campaign Ad." And, as the Daily Beast's senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon notes, it wasn't just the skit with Ms. Clinton's walk-on that was a gift. It was almost the whole show.

The preponderance of left leaning thought in the MSM is well known -- this just happens to be a fairly egregious example, but as the few people of conservative views that listen to some NPR, look at NYTs, etc, know, the daily drip-drip-drip of story selection and dutiful left only views probably has greater effect.

Again, "Saturday Night Live" has the same First Amendment rights as The New York Times and The Washington Post. But you know who else has the same free-speech rights as the mainstream media? You and me — and George Soros, Charles and David Koch and every other citizen of the United States.

It would seem that any "fair minded person" would conclude that if the rights of the first amendment apply to partially corporations like "The Corporation for Public Broadcasting", NBC, CBS, NYTs, etc, etc, then it would obviously apply to individuals and other private corporations. Public Broadcasting even picks up a very partisan half billion or so from the government -- more in Minnesota. For some reason, the left assumes that only private money carries the "follow the money" admonition. Public money is free from any special interest from its beneficiaries.

In the arguments before the court, the Obama administration took the position that the government could even ban books during election season if those books amounted to "express advocacy" for a candidate, even if that advocacy took the form of a single mention of a candidate. 

The court rejected that argument, and President Obama, along with most liberals, have never forgiven the justices. Hillary Clinton is so opposed to the ruling, she has made amending the First Amendment a cornerstone of her campaign.

The Democrats hate the First Amendment relative to politics rather more than they hate the 2nd -- for if they get their way on the 1st, the level of their control ratchets up significantly. They demand nothing less than government control of political speech -- where the vast 99% Democrat unionized federal bureaucracy reviews all political materials, broadcasts, books, contributions, etc to make sure that they were "proper".

In their world, we will have achieved "fairness" when this blog is censored -- which in this case, would mean "removed" for anything other than just my personal observations on life. My views are clearly not in proper support of THE PARTY!