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?

Realistic Except for Thinking It Can Be Avoided

Townhall.com::Blog

Conservatives ought to have figured out that "imperfect political power" is WAY better than "unmitigated disaster". The time to figure that out would have been '06, when they decided to "teach Republicans/Bush a lesson", it is way late at this stage.

We ALL get to take part in the "lesson" now, and it isn't pretty!

BOs Character "Glimmers" in Grandma Visit

ABC News: Glimmer of Obama's Character as He Visits Grandma

This is the white grandma that he indicated was "racist" because she was worried about black men at a bus stop. He could "no more disown Wright than he could her" ... but of course he DID disown Wright, and indeed his whole church of 20 years.

Visiting his dying Grandmother is "normal kind of nice", does ABC news NEED to use it as an extra character boost for their favorite Son? With the sub-text "Taking Time to Visit Sick Grandmother Couple Help Obama Connect With Voters"??? (or at least ABC news certainly HOPES SO, and believes that it SHOULD!!!)

Slow Joe Second Thoughts?

Political Radar: Biden to Supporters: "Gird Your Loins", For the Next President "It's Like Cleaning Augean Stables"

Man, this sounds all wrong, I thought BO was promising us that happy days were going to be here again if we just got his eminence elected. Now this from his VP:

"Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the
second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. "It will not be six
months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.
The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old
senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it
standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're
gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the
mettle of this guy."

Tested? Why in the world would anyone ever try to test the great and powerful BO? Worse, Joe seems to think that it may not go that smoothly:

. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not
financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence,
your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's
not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're
right."

Not apparent  that BO and a lefty Senator are right? Golly, I thought it was ALWAYS apparent that BO and company were right. What gives? Now BO has promised a "new kind of politics", and we know how little the Democrats and the MSM believe in useless finger pointing. Why Bush was responsible for a "recession" that had it's ONE down quarter  in the 4th Q of Clinton's last term! I'm CERTAIN that once BO takes over he will step up to the plate and we will immediately move forward without a "blame game". That kind of thing would be so "old politic", and this is the age of the "New BO".

Understanding BO

RealClearPolitics - Articles - The Audacity of Barack Obama

This is long, but not as long as Audacity of Hope, and I believe you get most of the benefit of having read that as well as some of "Dreams of My Father" as well. It isn't particularly anti-BO but it isn't BO adoration like most of the MSM either. I find this paragraph sums up a lot of what we need to know.

Thus the commentators who interpret Obama as a new kind of post-partisan political figure get it exactly wrong. It's true that he wants to stop "arguing about the same ole stuff," as he told Planned Parenthood; he wants to move beyond the decades-long debate between liberalism and conservatism. Bill Clinton wished for the same thing in 1992, as did George W. Bush in 2000. The 42nd and 43rd presidents had doctrines that they hoped would precipitate this magic synthesis--the Third Way, and compassionate conservatism, respectively. What's interesting, as political scientist James W. Ceaser noted in these pages ("What a Long, Strange Race It's Been," Spring 2008), is that Obama does not feel the need for such a doctrine. Nor does John McCain.

The 2008 race is taking place squarely within the familiar ideological framework of liberalism and conservatism, but with McCain promising some maverick departures from the norm (while still accepting the norm), and Obama talking up hope and the need for change. The change needed, however, is for nothing less than a full-blown electoral earthquake that will permanently shatter the 50-50 America of the past four presidential elections. He thinks liberals can get beyond the old debate by finally winning it.

The part that is not covered here is that I strongly suspect that BO seeks to "lock down" a lefty majority by suppressing conservative speech and thought via "The Fairness Doctrine", "Net Neutrality" (how to kill the conservative movement on the Web), removal of tax deductions for religious giving, mandatory head-start and mandatory "youth core" to be used for indoctrination. The left has long been after "unity", it is just that they are typically more than willing to get there via the gulag.

A BO Record!

Obama Takes in a Record $150 Million, But McCain Narrows Gap in Some Polls - WSJ.com

Wow, those Democrats and the MSM LOVED "campaign finance reform", and folks like Russ Feingold and that "Maverick" John McCain were HEROS for "standing up to the big money interests and trying to clean up politics". We heard a lot in those days about "Republicans buying elections" and "all the big donations from the rich to screw over the little guy". Yup, those were the days.

Now BO is breaking every fund raising record known to man and every spending record as well, and it is just fine! No calls for campaign finance reform at all! Now McCain thinks there will be "scandle", but I have my doubts--think the MSM and the big Dem majorities in congress are going to go snipping for bad smells in the BO camp? Give me a break, I wasn't born yesterday.

Understanding Palin Hatred

Loathing Sarah Palin

Good attempt to understand leftward leaning women's hatred of Sarah Palin. Much like this discussion of Arthur Miller, I think that he gets very close to the point. Liberals tend to believe that conservatives MUST be some sort of "narrow, unhappy, closed minded, brittle, inauthentic people". Much of what galls them in the case of Sarah and George Bush for that matter is "authenticity".

They hate it worst of all. They LOVE pointing out "hypocrisy", because it meets their expectations of "how everyone REALLY is". They assume that any moral or religious beliefs espoused are "fake", just like their stated positions on everything from poverty to the environment. They EXPECT that ALL people are willing to stand up and talk about the global warming CRISIS, yet fly in private jets, live in an energy hog home and buy a 100' houseboat like Al Gore.

Sarah Palin says she is against abortion, had a Down Syndrome son and her pregnant daughter is having her baby. Those kinds of things make liberals squirm -- they LOVE to say "what if it was YOUR Son that was dead in Iraq, how would you feel THEN"? So, do they make decisions on automobile travel in the same way? Look for the worst that can happen, decide that they would "feel awful", therefore it must be a bad idea! They love to talk about any Republican that supports the war that didn't serve in combat, BUT, when John McCain HAS served in combat, and BOTH McCain and Palin have children in Iraq, that is a total non-story!

Are conservatives consistent? No, of course not, just like liberals, conservatives are human, therefore far from consistent. BUT, they have a STANDARD and they believe that it is important to TRY to live up to that standard. When they do, they get applause from other conservatives and hatred from liberals. Liberals avoid the issue both by having no standards and applauding their folks independent of what they do -- thus Slick Willie can be a huge proponent of sexual harassment laws, yet harass women in the workplace and not lose the respect of his followers. In fact, the hypocrisy of a Billy C or an Al Gore tends to make their followers MORE comfortable. Most times the left doesn't even WANT to practice what they preach -- they want SOMEONE ELSE to give money to the poor, clean up the environment, pay taxes to balance the budget, etc.

So, we have this --

A few months ago Vanity Fair ran an article about the discovery that the playwright Arthur Miller, with his third wife, the photographer Inge Morath, 40 or so years ago had a Down syndrome son. Miller promptly clapped the boy into an institution--according to the article, not a first class one either--and never saw the child again. 

Most people would have taken this for a heartless act, one should have thought, especially on the part of a man known for excoriating the putative cruelties of capitalism and the endless barbarities of his own country's governments, whether Democratic or Republican. Yet, so far as one can tell, Arthur Miller's treatment of his own child has not put the least dent in his reputation, while Sarah Palin's having, keeping, and loving her Down syndrome child is somehow, by the standard of the liberal woman of our day, not so secretly thought the act of an obviously backward and ignorant woman, an affront to womanhood. 

"Her greatest hypocrisy," proclaimed Wendy Doniger, one of the leading feminist lights at the University of Chicago, "is her pretense that she is a woman."

There you go, one can't "be a woman" and not support and take part in the modern feminist sacrament of abortion. See, liberals are the "open minded nice folks" -- the only "catch" is that you MUST agree with them!

SNL Great Bailout Skit

WSJ, Change Defined

A Liberal Supermajority - WSJ.com

I had continued to hope that a lot of the worst I had been concerned about in this Blog would not come to pass. The WSJ runs down a littany here that coveres most of it without collection of guns, removal of deductability for religous contribution and further indoctrination of the youth through mandatory head start and mandatory "public service".

More than ever, it will be important for those Americans that retain transcendent values to realize that this life is very short compared to eternity, and even in a gulag, it is possible to be happy with a focus on the truely important.

BO Trys Humor

Game try, standup is very hard to do, but if one can tell character by ability to do comedy, the wrong guy is leading.

Priceless McCain Humor

Wow, John ought to go into comedy! He laid on some real funnies. I wonder if BO has any sense of humor? Be interesting to see his segment, I'll have to try to find it.

Shatner On Guns

Simple, direct, gets the point across. Nice drama, poor defensive technique. Center of mass, keep firing.

Lady in CA that had been attacked and killed assailant: "Why did you fire 7 rounds into the perpetrator?"

Answer: "That was all that was in the gun".

Spread The Wealth Around

Hey, BO as Mr Robbing Hood ... goin to take from the greedy and give to the needy! Of course some of the "greedy" are not very likely to sit still and get fleeced, so what always ends up happening is that the total pie shrinks and the needy end up suffering more than the supposed hard working "greedy". Socialists never learn.

Worst Case Scenario

Worst Case Scenario

Fred Barnes isn't known for being very "out there" on the right, but sadly, he agrees with me that a BO administration would likely try to wipe out the conservative viewpoint in the media through use of "The Fairness Doctrine". The other big move he points to is the removal of the secret ballot in union organization so that thuggery can come back to power in union organization.

Wow, I wish moderate conservatives were not starting to agree with me about how bad this thing could get!

BO and Acorn

Obama and Acorn - WSJ.com

Acorn -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- has been around since 1970 and has 350K members. It picks up taxpayer money to "get out the vote", which turns out to be "the Democrat Vote", and as in many things Democrat, a huge number of the "voters" turn out to be duplicate, dead, or both. The following, quoted from the article gives a bit of background:

Acorn uses various affiliated groups to agitate for "a living wage,"
for "affordable housing," for "tax justice" and union and environmental
goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform. It was a
major contributor to the subprime meltdown by pushing lenders to make
home loans on easy terms, conducting "strikes" against banks so they'd
lower credit standards.

Isn't that special. To have tax dollars used to help union goals, sub-prime loans and against things like school choice. Here is some information on the quality of the "voters" that they get out.

Then there's Lake County, Indiana, which has already found more than
2,100 bogus applications among the 5,000 Acorn dumped right before the
deadline. "All the signatures looked exactly the same," said Ruthann
Hoagland, of the county election board. Bridgeport, Connecticut
estimates about 20% of Acorn's registrations were faulty. As of July,
the city of Houston had rejected or put on hold about 40% of the 27,000
registration cards submitted by Acorn.

Where is the BO in all of this?

During his tenure on the board of Chicago's Woods Fund, that body
funneled more than $200,000 to Acorn. More recently, the Obama campaign
paid $832,000 to an Acorn affiliate. The campaign initially told the
Federal Election Commission this money was for "staging, sound,
lighting." It later admitted the cash was to get out the vote.

So we have a Presidential candidate that formerly worked for a corrupt left wing election fraud organization and later has funneled them over a million dollars. News story? Nah, only in the WSJ and occasionally with the McCain campaign. The MSM is "unbiased", so they needn't cover it.

BO Thugocracy

Michael Barone : The Coming Obama Thugocracy - Townhall.com

I've covered most of this, but it is really pretty amazing that the MSM isn't just a LITTLE concerned about First Amendment rights. I guess having BO in power means that there doesn't need to be an opposition.

Republican Rage?

Michelle Malkin » Crush the Obamedia narrative: Look who’s “gripped by insane rage”

Apparently a few boos and a couple names directed at his Deity BO is a horrible racist rage. We have comparisons between McCain and George Wallace but of course THAT is NOT "name calling".

Michelle pulls in a few 10's of examples of a SMALL part of the lefty rage of the last 7 years that includes a lot of "F**K Bush" bumper stickers and T-Shirts, lots of "Kill Bush" stuff in all sorts of methods and just TON of stuff in absolutely all sorts of obscenity, hatred, threats and some of the most completely uncivil false and scurilous accustations in US history. MSM concern? Zero. BO gets some Boos or accusations of "terrorist" just because he palled around with a guy that helped blow up buildings and is unrepentent? Well, "horrible, insane racist rage".

Seems obvious.

When Will They Remove This One?

I imagine that this will get pulled from the web as well as everything else pointing out that the Democrats are the source of the sub-prime debacle has. Guess the age of BO Fascism must already be here, truth has to be removed at every quarter.

Palin Abused Power

Panel: Palin abused power in trooper case - CNN.com

Boy, the MSM and Democrats can be REALLY quick on investigations! When Slick Willie was in the White House, "Troopergate", where Arkansas troopers said that he used them for his personal bimbo delivery service, "palace guard" to keep Hillary away, and they were summarily fired if Hillary or Bill didn't like something they did was "no news". Gee, Palin working to get a guy that tazered a 10-year old and drank beer in his squad car fired is an "abuse of power". Want to bet that these folks would be JUST as outraged if she HADN'T tried to get him fired for those offenses? I think the REAL issue here is that they don't like Sarah Palin!

How Does One Get Confidence?

A Market Meltdown That Won't Stop: Is This Rational? - TIME

Gee, Time magazine may even be starting to realize that removal of confidence from the public can have a downside rather than just the upside that they believe it will have of electing BO.

But as necessary as those moves may be, the stock market — the most visible gauge of investor sentiment — has not been convincingly reassured. Why doesn't the news of government's quick and sweeping response stop the slide? "The news has got nothing to do with it," says Jeffrey Saut, chief investment strategist at Raymond James. "What it is, is a sequence of events that have brought us into crash mode." Saut traces that sequence of events from the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which wiped out the stockholders of those institutions, to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which did the same to that company's investors, to the run on money-market mutual funds, to the run on Washington Mutual, to the House's unexpected failure to pass the bailout bill the first time around.

"This is a confidence game," says Saut, "and the public has lost confidence not only in financial institutions but also in their elected officials." And confidence, unfortunately, is much easier to lose than to gain.

Nice that Time is starting to figure this out NOW! Would have been a bit better if they had figured it out while they were braying about "recession" in the middle of mutiple quarters of GROWTH!! Once people start to believe in the UNreal, how in the world are they going to get them back to believing in the real?

McCain Proposal Backlash

McCain faces conservative backlash over mortgage plan - CNN.com

I suspect that the MSM has a hard time understanding this, the thought probably crosses their mind: "Isn't he THEIR candidate"?? I'm sure the idea of ideas/principles being more important than political power is something that they can't even fathom. It is something that I believe that Republicans in general and conservatives in particular have not figured out.

To be "conservative" means having some transcendent ideas and values that are more important that ANYTHING else. If they aren't more important, then they aren't "transcendent". Not all conservatives think that deeply about this stuff or get into the big words, but "God", "America", "Personal Responsibility", "Family", "life" ... one or more ideas almost always are of bigger import to a conservative than the day to day hustle and bustle. While the primary mover of a liberal is always emotion, for a conservative, the emotions will usually be secondary to some idea or set of ideas.

I've thought at written a lot on the question of Bush / Republican Congress either having been imperfect enough on conservative ideals to warrant the abandonment of them by the right side of the Republican base. My general thought has been that while I was heavily disappointed in a number of things (earmarked pork, Abramoff, drug benefit, insufficient troops in Iraq, etc), I felt that given the direness of both our national security / economic conditions and the sad state of politics and proposals on the left, Republicans would have been FAR better served to continue to work to get folks elected and strive to change the direction from inside the party. No matter, in '06 they stayed home in droves or voted for "independence" candidates and we suffered and are still suffering the consequences.

I haven't decided yet if I can hold my nose enough to go out and vote for McCain after the $300 Billion proposal in the debate. He is a guy that conservatives have never been able to trust, and it shows that he is very much STILL that guy!!

BO Magic

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Obama's Magic

Read it all, it covers a few of the fallacies very well. I especially liked this paragraph:

Next up, Mr. Obama will re-regulate the economy, with no ill effects
whatsoever! You may have heard that for the past 40 years most
politicians believed deregulation was good for the U.S. economy. You
might have even heard that much of today's financial mess tracks to
loose money policy, or Fannie and Freddie excesses. Our magician will
show the fault was instead with our failure to clamp down on innovation
and risk-taking, and will fix this with new, all-encompassing rules.
Presto!

Where McCain has really let us down is by thinking that the populist rhetoric of "blame Wall Street / CEOs / Business" is acceptable. The reason FDR could never fix the depression is because you can't sit around and blame the folks that have to get you out of the hole you are in for all the known ills. It really matters not at all "who is responsible", what matters is "where do we go from here". Railing against "Wall Street" is just going to have all the productive parts of the society sit on the sidelines until the windbags get through yelling.

"The little guy" can't work until there is some place for him to work. You can scream all day long about how much you hate "Wall Street", but what we need is a TEAM EFFORT. We just succeeded in "benching Wall Street". Congratulations!

Confidence, Reality, Rights

Listening to MPR today I heard the economist that they tend to bring in whenever there is big financial news talk about how "the underlying US economy is sound, what we have is a financial liquidity problem caused by sub-prime mortgages". Yesterday, on NPR, I heard a discussion about the Financial Bailout in Britain of $1 TRILLION, which is something like 1/3 of their total GDP, MUCH larger than the US $700 Billion, especially compared to GDP (1/3 vs 1/13).

Here we have a more or less standard view from Thomas Frank's, author of the book "The Wrecking Crew".

Here's what I mean: You've got people in the Republican Party whose philosophy is one of cynicism towards government and one of complete disrespect towards particular branches of government. ... They've run these branches of government completely in reverse, put people in charge of them who don't believe in the mission, and done everything else to make government accountable not to the voters, but to the business community. 

This has resulted in disaster in numerous cases. Now, when you look upon the disaster, do you say this is because government doesn't work? Or do you say, this is because a philosophy of government doesn't work? The obvious conclusion to anybody watching this stuff unfold is to say government just can't do anything right -- look how badly it's botched this job. 

But the correct answer is that government obviously does work in certain circumstances, in other countries, and it's even worked here when it wants to. What they're doing right now at the Fed and the Department of Treasury is they're playing the game exactly right -- they're intervening decisively, quickly -- they're doing it exactly right. When the chips are down and when it's something conservatives care about, they can make government work.

So, if Europe is the shining star of where "government regulation works", why would England need a BIGGER percentage bailout then the US? Wouldn't that mean that the "standard story" is wrong? The issue is NOT the "free market economy" if in fact in MORE socialist oriented, more controlled economies the situation is WORSE??

I become more and more convinced that what we are seeing is a "tipping point". In the US, the MSM and the Democrats have moved completely beyond any sense of reality on a list of fronts so wide that it defies description -- Iraq/Surge, Economy/Markets, Rights/Responsibility, are all examples.

In the late '90s we were CONSTANTLY lectured that "Bill Clinton has brought us prosperity, if you keep hounding him, the market might drop". The market dropped because the "prosperity" was nothing but the Internet bubble, BUT, the MSM had a point they really didn't realize--it is DANGEROUS for a nation/world to lose all confidence in their leadership and institutions.

It appears that we may now be beyond that tipping point where people have enough confidence to allow the system to continue to operate. My personal belief is that BO and the Democrats have realized that they WANT to get back to the 30's, for them that was the BEST OF TIMES!! They see BO as a "new FDR", sort of an "inverse Reagan", but in order to get what they want, they NEED to have DISASTER, and they NEED to "blame it on Republicans / the market / business"!!!

The worst part of the slump in the '30s happened between the 32 elections and FDR taking office the following spring. Hoover had lost all confidence from the public and the congress and the government stood idly by and let all manner of institution fail. Hoover begged FDR and company to help him do something, but in a way that only Democrats can do, they realized that it was in their political best interests to let things get as bad as possible before they came in so they could look better when it improved. Sadly, it never did improve until WWII -- none of the stuff that FDR did ever worked!!

Bush has been as powerless as Hoover was since '06, and the Democrats have worked him like a puppet on everything but the Surge. Barney Frank and company kept the pedal to the metal on Feddie and Fannie, giving as many seedy loans as they possibly could. The Dems took credit for the "stimulus", but gave Bush the blame for the deficit it added to. Economic numbers ceased to make a difference--we were in a RECESSION, no matter how much growth there was. Normally, trying to claim that our economy was "broken" when it obviously wasn't (and still probably isn't except for CONFIDENCE) would seem absolutely stupid for people that live here as all the media people do, but the MSM emotional hatred for Bush / Republicans has blinded them to the effects of a complete destruction of confidence in the both the Government and Business systems.

Two things that made the 30's as bad as they were was the constant thrashing of new government programs that added uncertainty to the economy coupled with the criminalization of normal business behavior. We are deep into both of those problems at this point. If we could have acted quickly and decisively on the underlying liquidity problem with the bailout when it first came up, MAYBE it would have been enough to get a re-start, but we couldn't. We needed to play a bunch of politics first. When both the far left and the far right are in agreement -- as they were against the bailout, my rule of thumb is "watch out".

So, we have heard a bunch of braying about "CEO Pay", "golden parachutes", "billions for Wall Street, nothing for Main Street", etc. Unfortunately we have heard it from both parties and McCain and Palin have joined in to suggesting more programs and blaming "Wall Street and not Main Street". Maybe emotionally satisfying for some, but this plays right into the Democrats hands in pushing us over the cliff.

CEO pay and golden parachutes are about CONTRACTS. The BEDROCK that allows our current western civilization to live even close to the manner that we have become accustomed is the enforceability of contracts!! When the government decides that it is going to break existing contracts that people have negotiated in good faith and legality at the time they negotiated them, then NONE of our contracts are safe. Say GE is in dire straits and decides that Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM, now retired, is the best man to get them moving. Lou looks at the situation and sees that, yes indeed, the odds are very long and the work will be very hard. Does a guy that is already worth 100's of millions have to work for potentially FREE in order for him to come on board?

The most logical thing for both parties is for GE to give him a "golden parachute" of say "50 million", but stock options / etc that are POTENTIALLY worth 100's of millions if he can pull it off. If Lou takes the job, there is no doubt he wants to win, but one isn't going to give up retirement with 100's of millions to go do a very hard job that may well be impossible knowing that if it can't be saved you walk away with nothing. If GE and Lou negotiate that contract, but the government now says "no golden parachutes", how many decades will it before there is enough faith in the rule of law to allow the retention of such talent for needed activity? A very long time to NEVER is the right answer, and even worse, if that contract isn't safe, why is ANY contract?

Essentially, all the Government involvement can be lumped under that same idea. The government is able to change the rules of the game during the game, and they have now decided to do that on a daily basis. The most likely effect of that kind of uncertainty is to have more and more people sit on the sidelines waiting to see when the game is going to stabilize. Why jump in when you aren't really even sure what game you are jumping in on? Worse, things like Sarbanes Oxley and other laws now being contemplated may put you in JAIL for actions that you took that were LEGAL at the time you took them, but are LATER declared illegal!!!

There isn't such a thing as "risk free business or investment". The riskiest things tend to have the highest potential for BOTH loss and gain. Sometimes there are boundaries put on that say "that has so little chance of return, it is illegal" ... the folks that are selling that are just making money off the selling, they aren't selling a legitimate product. Society certainly CAN make those kinds of laws, but it does so at the peril of missing some excellent opportunities for innovation and growth. Today's "stupid idea" in finance like technology, may well be tomorrows "big deal". OR, as in mortgage backed securities, yesterdays great idea may well be pushed beyond some boundary and become today's debacle. AFTER THE FACT a whole bunch of things look completely obvious. I ought to have bought Microsoft Stock in '85 and sold it right before the 2K crash. OBVIOUS, but only in hindsight.

So, the markets are in free fall, and all the kings horses and all the kings men can't put confidence back in again. In my opinion, starting in the '30s we set ourselves on the road to become a nation where a whole bunch of things were "rights and entitlements" vs "responsibilities and privledges". We had a "right" to retirement without savings (FICA), free medical care for the aged (medicare), food, shelter, clothing ... and eventually, even a home of our own(CRI, Sub-prime). Only problem is that very very few things are ACTUALLY "rights". About the only "right" that can be given all the people is the "right to opportunity", which is essentially the "right to work and keep the vast majority of what you earn". That is the only fundamental right that a government can really provide, and by providing it, the magic of free enterprise produces wealth beyond compare.

Apparently, the "right to home ownership" as expressed by the Community Investment Act proved to be "one fake right too far", BUT both parties and the MSM have decided to "blame the market" rather than blame the producers of fake rights -- the government (and those that elect it and avail themselves of the fake rights, US). The reason for that is because as the critics of the American experiment had predicted long ago, the reason the government did what it did is because the politicians were elected by people that wanted a lot of fake rights. We ALL really "want them" if we don't look too deeply at the COST of those fake rights. Ultimately, that cost is the loss of our freedom, our prosperity and any security that we thought we had.

So, will people come to their senses prior to that happening, or will they go on blaming the business and markets that make all the money that has created the greatest living standard in the world, or will they realize that all the supposed "rights" that they have created are completely illusionary without the business and market activity that produces the resources needed?? I'm completely unsure at this point, and obviously, so are a whole bunch of other people. Say your prayers, and do your part to try to get people to understand that paying attention to reality is critical to the financial health of the whole world.

How Distasteful, A Whole Year Old!

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive - McCain targets Obama’s year-old comment on Afghanistan « - Blogs from CNN.com

Rest assured, we have never and will never hear about any comments by Bush, McCain, or Palin that are over a year old--AND, if we do, the MSM will be putting the fact that the comment is "over a year old" in the HEADLINE!

We all know that anything that a Democrat may have done that was suspect is "old news", and not worth being brought up. Naturally, the inverse is true for anything they have done that might be considered marginally good.

Liberals Rethink Free Speech

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Liberals Rethink Free Speech

Good article, the only thing he is wrong on is that it is a "rethink". Yes, yes, BO and company is already trying to suppress political speech, but this isn't a new activity for the left and we certainly haven't seen anything yet if he gets elected.

Ever since the US lefty socialist/fascist/communists stole the term "liberal" from the conservative right where it belongs, people get confused. The left has ALWAYS hated unregulated POLITICAL speech, it is freedom to burn flags, scream obscenity and show pornography is the speech that they seek to protect. The only political speech they want to allow is that which agrees with them.

The collective left will ALWAYS be STRONGLY against the speech of those that believe in individual responsibility, transcendent meaning of any sort, and values that are other than fluid and relative. They have always and will always seek to stamp true freedom of thought and speech out through any means possible including the incarceration or murder of those that speak or think in ways they see as "lying", "hateful", or "divisive". They believe that we ought be one big happy collective that operates exactly as they think we ought operate!

Thinking differently from a lefty is about the most immoral thing that they can imagine!

What's The Matter With Victims?

The GOP Blames the Victim - WSJ.com

Thomas Frank's wrote the liberal screed "What's the Matter With Kansas" in which he talks about how the right created the culture war to convince average people that there were things more important than their "self interest". You know, like God, family, truth, honor, the right to life, freedom, the right to bear arms, patriotism and that kind of drivel. Franks is of course smart enough to realize that all those things are meaningless--the only thing that makes sense is for folks to vote for protectionism, unions, socialism and state control of everything. Everyone knows that is the only RATIONAL thing that can be done for the common man!

Note how cleverly Franks has risen above "the blame game" here. He certainly isn't pointing any fingers is he? That is the kind of foolish things that only Republicans do. We are all aware that the government hasn't had any role at all in our financial system since "Republicans took control" in '80. No indeed, it has been just one long "free market party" without any SEC regulations, banking regulations, Sarbanes Oxley, taxes or none of that good solid Democrat stuff. No indeed, those Republicans wiped that all out.

Yes, I guess I agree with him 100%, and I bet Martha Stewart, the Enron guys, Michael Milikin, and a whole bunch of other folks would agree. We have had nearly 30 years in the financial wild west. No wonder this happened and the government is completely blameless!

I Wish Hugh Hewitt Were Right, Financial Meltdown

Townhall.com::Blog

This is a great little job of writing, and I wish fervently it could be true, even though I believe it is not. The main place I take exception is this paragraph:

The hard left's seven year rage against George Bush has disfigured the politics of the country, but it hasn't infected the large center or demoralized the principled right. Three quarters of the country know the sort of enemy we face around the globe and sense as well the seriousness of the economic risk that faces us and which must be met and managed from maturity and a belief in growth and capitalism's essential genius. The country has never embraced class warfare, and knows that a lurch to the left now would cripple the vast engine of productivity that is the key to a steady recovery of confidence.

I think the seven years of rage HAS disfigured not only the politics, but the emotions of a large majority of Americans. The political parties and the MSM now operate with a horrid scorched earth view in which the destruction of anything is acceptable in the quest for raw political party. The fever pitch of buying votes with earmarks, entitlements, unsustainable mortgages, environmental policies that kill the economy--the list is always growing and we rush headlong to the abyss with both parties promising it all without even a hint of mechanism to deliver.

Somewhere in the 7 year rage -- maybe when everyone's prediction that Iraq had WMD became "Bush lied", maybe when a non-story about Valerie Plame became a "special prosecutor probe", maybe Katrina, or maybe just over the course of the years when less than 2 consecutive quarters of GDP slide became "recessions", an economy growing at 2+% became "bad" and a successful Surge in Iraq dropped from the news like it had never happened.

We lost our national grip on reality. To look at the sub-prime meltdown that started under Carter, accelerated under Clinton as the government pushed their Freddies and Fannies to make riskier and riskier loans, and was fanned by Democrats as late as 2005 as they voted down legislation pushed by McCain.

They now call it a "market failure",  simply deciding to make up a story that suits what the MSM wants, but that is the story that is winning! The market is being blamed for what government created over nearly 40 years!

People are "mad as hell".  It isn't clear that they have any idea what to do to fix their anger, and it appears that we will turn 100% the wrong way causing all sorts of unpredictable harm before more of the population is forced to return to reality based thinking.

Slow Joe Bag O Donuts

An Everyman on the Trail, With Perks at Home - NYTimes.com

Yes, Joe is really a pauper for a Senator. His little hovel of a 6,800 sq foot lakefront home worth something close to $3million pretty much proves that! He does knock down about $250K a year, again, peanuts for a Senator. Easy to see why he feels that taxing the snot out of anyone that makes over what he makes is "patriotic". Somehow, I bet for a guy that makes $100K it is just as "patriotic" to make those "greedy folks" that make over $100K pay through the nose. Hmm, come to think of it, I bet that kind of logic works with a lot of people independent of income! "The folks that make more money than ME ought to pay A LOT more in taxes ... of course, **I** pay TOO MUCH in taxes and ought to pay LESS!!

I think I just restated a piece of human nature!

Does Friedman Know He is in the Boat Too?

Op-Ed Columnist - Rescue the Rescue - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

I like Thomas Friedman. I've read a couple of his books. Yes, he is mostly a NYT limousine liberal, but he is smarter than the average of that genre and a decent writer. So what gives with this?

I’ve been frightened for my country only a few times in my life: In 1962, when, even as a boy of 9, I followed the tension of the Cuban missile crisis; in 1963, with the assassination of J.F.K.; on Sept. 11, 2001; and on Monday, when the House Republicans brought down the bipartisan rescue package.

Does being Democrat REALLY mean that you NEVER have to take responsibility? What is the use of giving them the majority of votes in the House if they can't get their party together and vote for something that they supposedly believe in? There have been a number of votes over the years where the Republicans have needed basically their whole caucus to get them through and the MSM and the Democrats have really enjoyed pointing across the isle and saying "you'll be sorry" in what I guess counts as "bi-partisanship" in their books.

Is there some holy writ that says that Democrats are deserving of "political cover" when they do something that might be unpopular with a bunch of voters but really needs to be done? Somehow, the whole idea of "political cover" seems rather foreign. If Tom and his Democrat buddies are convinced that the bailout is a really really good idea, why is it that the Democrat party that has a 36 seat majority in the House doesn't have the responsibility to line up behind it? They somehow  need over 1/3 of the Republicans as WELL, even though they can pass it with LESS than their whole caucus voting for it??

I tend to agree that not passing this is going to do way more damage to everyone than passing it would have, but it seems to me that the MSM and the Democrats have successfully convinced over 50% of the country (maybe even 80%) that you really can let the fat cats end of the rowboat sink without your end sinking. I think the 80% of the folks are nuts, but this IS a Democracy (yet, at least until BO and his fascist buddies get it in their clutches), so maybe we just need to see how the boat sinks? or maybe it doesn't--I'm not a Democrat, I'm fine if I'm wrong and it turns out to be a better deal for us all than I imagined. I don't need to snatch defeat from victory as in the surge in Iraq just to prove that I'm smarter than that stupid Bush.

How in the world can a supposedly smart person blame the OTHER party when your party holds a 36 seat advantage in a house that only requires a majority to pass something? I guess there is NEVER a reason to give Democrats power, because they simply will not accept RESPONSIBILITY! 

Slow Joe Bag O Donuts

An Everyman on the Trail, With Perks at Home - NYTimes.com

Yes, Joe is really a pauper for a Senator. His little hovel of a 6,800 sq foot lakefront home worth something close to $3million pretty much proves that! He does knock down about $250K a year, again, peanuts for a Senator. Easy to see why he feels that taxing the snot out of anyone that makes over what he makes is "patriotic". Somehow, I bet for a guy that makes $100K it is just as "patriotic" to make those "greedy folks" that make over $100K pay through the nose. Hmm, come to think of it, I bet that kind of logic works with a lot of people independent of income! "The folks that make more money than ME ought to pay A LOT more in taxes ... of course, **I** pay TOO MUCH in taxes and ought to pay LESS!!

Hoping For Reality to Die

Harold Meyerson - Slow Rise for a New Era - washingtonpost.com

Harold seems to think that markets and governments are equally real. How would one arrive at that conclusion? The government produces nothing, the markets and the business they represent produce everything. The government and the chattering classes all live off the production of business people whose value is ultimately expressed in the market as well as the income and taxes from which the government skims it's take. One can try a Soviet style system, but all we know says that will take our $13 Trillion economy down to something more like $3 Trillion or less where the top 1% are all in government and hold even a larger % of the now much reduced wealth than the top 1% do today.

"Free Markets" can no more die than gravity can die. The free market lived on as "black market" even in the USSR and operated quite well, though not officially. Our markets have never been close to fully "free", and they likely never will be. The government has very much enjoyed the longest period of growth in US history and the US people have very much enjoyed all the improvement in standard of living due to the lessening of government intervention which Reagan and others were able to accomplish. Did growth vanquish all problems? No, of course not, humans are still just as flawed as ever on BOTH the government and business side, but BOTH sides have grown tremendously over this period. Does the fact that something is "natural" mean that it has no problems? No again, just ask a guy that just fell from a 30 story building if gravity has "negative side effects".

Meyerson is a perfect example of what "ideologue" means. Less government = bad, more government = good ... independent of what the discussion is about. His faith in "government" is every bit as strong as any faith in "Reaganism" that republicans may have.

When God Doesn't Make Sense

The subject book by Dr James Dobson is a really good read for someone that either has or seeks a strong Biblical grounding on dealing with tragedy in the life of a believer. Very much UNlike Rabbi Kushner, Dr Dobson believes in a sovereign God that is loving, just and very caring -- just so beyond our human understanding that our attempts to pin him down or indicate what he can and can't do are beyond futile.

Dobson doesn't claim to have all the answers, he tries to illuminate what he can from the Bible and experience he has had. A quote that hit me hard after listening to well meaning people at our nieces funeral was: "I find it irritating when amateur theologians throw around simplistic platitudes, such as "God must have wanted the little flower named Bristol for his heavenly garden". He points out that we will have to wait until we are on the other side of the river until we understand God's plan, and it is foolish to make believe that we can make sense of it here.

A paragraph that I really liked:

I hope you will see that the discomfort is intensified by a misunderstanding of time. Our journey here has the illusion of permanence about it. Billions who went before us thought the same thing. Now they are gone-every one of them. In truth, we're just passing through. If we fully comprehended the brevity of life, the things that frustrate us-including most of those occasions when God doesn't make sense-wouldn't matter so much.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

The subject book by Rabbi Harold Kushner is a well recognized book on the subject of trying to understand grief in the context of God and faith and loved by many. His son Aaron was diagnosed with progeria ("rapid aging") at 3 and they knew it was terminal at a young age. He died at age 14. Certainly, a tragic event and one that drove Rabbi Kushner to question God, faith, life, etc as it would any father.

I think the book may well be useful to many people, but I have a lot of theological and philosophical concern with it. I found the key words in the book to be:

I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die for whatever exalted reason.

So why is it God's responsibility to be the kind of God that one can worship more easily? From the perspective of an infinite God, are those really his only options? What is it that limits his options? How we think and feel?

Rabbi Kushner has a lot of thoughts about how God can and can't be -- in my mind, there isn't much reason to believe in a God that is not SOVEREIGN. I may or may not "agree / understand / be able to explain" a whole host of things about an infinite God, but I believe the least that my lowly person can do is recognize that it is he, not me, that is sovereign.

Kushner argues that we ought not be angry at God because his god is "limited"--god really can't prevent bad things from happening, so he ought not be blamed. While I enjoyed some of his discussion of Job, I disagreed with his conclusions and felt all the way through the book that if one was to believe in a god that was as small as Rabbi Kushners, one may as well be an atheist.

BO Fascism Begins?

Obama’s Assault on the First Amendment by Andrew C. McCarthy on National Review Online

Excellent overall article. BO and minions have already begun the fascist process of intimidating free speech.

In St. Louis, local law-enforcement authorities, dominated by Democrat-party activists, were threatening libel prosecutions against Obama’s political opposition. County CircuitAttorney Bob McCulloch and City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, abetted by a local sheriff and encouraged by the Obama campaign, warned that members of the public who dared speak out against Obama during the campaign’s crucial final weeks would face criminal libel charges — if, in the judgment of these conflicted officials, such criticism of their champion was “false.”

"False"? From the POV of BO supporters, it would be IMPOSSIBLE for ANYTHNG about his worshipfulness that isn't an accolade to be anything but "false". One of the hallmarks of free speech used to be that you could yell anything you wanted about a politician without fear of state reprisal. Apparently, "free speech" in a BO state just means you are allowed to say as many nice things about him as you want--if you don't agree, be sure to shut up.

There is a troubling reportthat the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Section, top officials of which are Obama contributors, has suggested criminal prosecutions against those they anticipate will engage in voter “intimidation” or “oppression” in an election involving a black candidate. (Memo to my former DOJ colleagues: In a system that presumes innocence even after crimes have undeniably been committed, responsible prosecutors don’t assume non-suspects will commit future law violations — especially when doing so necessarily undermines the First Amendment freedoms those prosecutors solemnly swear to uphold.)

Now that sounds great. According to Democrats, Saddam Hussein saying on multiple occasions that he would destroy the US and clearly doing everything that he could to obtain WMD wasn't enough to warrant a pre-emptive attack. But one can ANTICIPATE what US citizens will engage in voter "intimidation or oppression"? Gee, I wonder what would constitute "intimidation"? Known Republicans be present at the polls maybe?

The last paragraph is a good one ... but please read it all.

Regardless of the legal landscape, however, it is the political consequences that matter. Day after day, Obama demonstrates that the “change” he represents is a severing of our body politic from the moorings that make us America. If we idly stand by while he and his thugs kill free political debate, we die too.

BO Book Author for VP Debate Moderator?

Power Line: A shocking conflict of interest

Shocking? I can't imagine being shocked by any sort of MSM conflict or bias. How in the world could they be more in the tank for BO? The only thing that "shocks" me is when they ask him any question tougher than "Is there anything you would like us to do for you Mr Obama"?

People Acting Like Government (George Will)

RealClearPolitics - Articles - A Vote Against Rashness

The financial crisis points out that the US as a country over the past 50 years or so followed a path in both government and personal finance of getting what we want today, planning to (maybe) pay for it tomorrow. Food, shelter, clothing, education, retirement, medical care and respect have moved from things that needed to be earned to "rights" that ought be "freely available".

Of course, in the real world, there is very little that is "free". Both government and private individuals have enjoyed the separation of "buying" from "paying", but in so doing they have believed that the buying part can continue without much significant needing to happen on the payment side until "later".

So we arrive at today. It appears that at least home ownership really isn't an affordable "right", it has to drop back to being a privilege. How about retirement without saving for it? How long can the Social Security Ponzi scheme continue to provide some Americans with the short term reality, while certainly providing most of us with only the long-term fantasy? How likely is it that this or one of the other "pseudo rights" that liberal thinking has foisted on us will take down those of us that have worked, saved, and paid the taxes over a long period right along with those that have just pointed the finger of blame at "big business", "CEOs", "Wall Street", or some other supposed agent of evil?

Depression Time?

Power Line: The Bailout mess, where is Barack Obama?

Both the far left and the far right seem to be ready to let the house burn and "blame Bush". I guess that is an option, but once it is burned, we just have a burned house, some number of bodies, and then what? Certainly the Democrats managed to make Hoover into a goat and FDR into a saint, but in real historical terms, what did that net us? Rather than a couple years of downturn, FDR managed to give us a decade, and without WWII it is hard to tell how much longer it would have gone.

So let's assume for the moment that our leadership continues to fiddle while Rome burns, BO gets elected, and we have a good rip-snorting deep recession or depression that gets blamed on Bush. Who gets hurt? I'm sure in absolute dollar losses, the rich get hurt the "worst", but that is sort of like in a famine, the big fat guy loses 50% of his body weight and feels better, while the skinny guy loses 30% and dies.

The far left and the far right are both mad as hell, and in general, they have both decided to direct their anger at Bush. It appears that they are angry enough to see their own 401K accounts drop a ton, lose their jobs and who knows what else. I lived through the '70s, and heard enough about the 30's to be sick of it forever, but it looks to me like there are a whole lot of folks that don't understand the risk being taken. I suspect that a lot of the oldsters think that Social Security will carry them through to the grave in fine form, so maybe it is good to let the young folks suffer a bit -- give them some "character". I also think that a lot of folks believe that they "can't be hurt much" or "the rich guys will get hurt more". The media helps them think that, but it is unfortunately wrong. The price of sheephood is often too high.

Comparing BO to McCain

Power Line: McCain leads, Obama follows

The post does a good job. Don't expect the MSM to tell you that McCain worked to get Fannie/Freddie regulated better and BO voted against it!

Long Detail on Bailout With Context

America's bail-out plan | The doctors' bill | The Economist

This is a long article, but worth the read for those that want to get beyond the MSM / political sparring over the "bailout". The chart above is useful because it shows that bailouts aren't new or unusual, and if one puts this one in the context of the size of the US economy, it isn't nearly as large as the MSM would like us to believe.

My contention is that they have decided "crisis is good for BO, so let's make the crisis as big as we can". As I've said before, if you were told that you would have to invest 1/13th of your salary in your company in order to continue to get the full 13/13ths next year, and have an excellent chance of getting the whole 1/13th back in 5 years or so, I doubt it would take long to decide. When the MSM keeps throwing around the figure $700 Billion though, it just sounds "too big to believe" the US Budget is over $3,000 Billion ($3 Trillion) EVERY YEAR!!!

Here are a couple of especially good excerpts from the article:

The consequences will probably not be so far-reaching. The true cost to taxpayers is unlikely to be anywhere near $700 billion, because many of the acquired mortgages will be repaid. The expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet reflects a fear-induced demand for cash, which drove the federal funds rate above the 2% target.

Yet predictions of a sea change towards more invasive government are premature. The Depression witnessed a pervasive expansion of the federal government into numerous walks of life, from trucking and railways to farming, out of a broadly shared belief that capitalism had failed utterly. If Mr Paulson and Mr Bernanke have prevented a Depression-like collapse in economic output with their actions these past two weeks, then they may also have prevented a Depression-like backlash against the free market.

Right vs Privledge

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Bailout Blues

The whole thing is very well worth reading, but the bottom line here, as it is in so many things is that those that EARN IT have the PRIVILEGE of home ownership. When you try to make something that is NOT a "right" into one, you risk your economy learning that nature provides very few rights, and those are the ONLY rights that are guaranteed.

Any reader who has followed me for some time will guess that I am
appalled by the (purported) $700 billion bailout that U.S. President George W. Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have organized, yet cannot reasonably oppose it at a moment when the markets are close to a true meltdown. I am further appalled by the spectacle of the Democrats in the U.S. Congress, exploiting the emergency to affix massive quantities of poorly disguised pork to the blunderbuss bill.

And finally, appalled by the media and chattering heads calling the whole mess a "crisis of capitalism" when the plain facts show the opposite. The whole "subprime mortgage" instrument was invented by bankers specifically to assuage heavy-handed Congressional demands to swell the number of minority and low-income homeowners, 20 years ago. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were already bloated quasi-government
bureaucracies, dangerously freed from many conventional market disciplines. And among the chief beneficiaries of the current bailout are the most extravagant contributors to the Democrat Party.

As one of my more knowing correspondents put it: "Wall Street loves money but hates free markets, because free markets distribute economic benefits to those who earn them, rather than to those best able to seize them."

The capitalist investment bankers stand accused, rightly, of having invented brilliant kiting schemes -- ultimately to deliver credit to customers who hadn't earned it. Their "greed" is irrelevant -- everyone is trying to make money. The point is that the schemes themselves were basically unsound. The lesson is that when home ownership is considered a "right" instead of a privilege, it is not only the housing market that goes bottom up.

This is a lesson no one wants to learn, so it will take time to sink
in. But any attentive reader of the Wall Street Journal can know today,what his neighbors may never even hear tomorrow: that this marketcrack-up, like every other, came not from observing the basicprinciples of capitalism, but from trying to deny them in the face ofnature.

Way Way Back in 2003, Freddie and Fannie

New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae - New York Times

Nobody in the MSM needs to look of course, but WAY back in 2003, that bastion of conservative thought, the NYT ran this column pointing out how WRONG Bush was about the need for more Freddie and Fannie regulation, and how RIGHT brilliant Democrats like Barney Frank were in opposition to any more control, because there were NO PROBLEMS!

'These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

''I don't see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,'' Mr. Watt said.

See, it is GREAT to be a Democrat. You take a position AGAINST more regulation when the administration and the Republicans propose it, and THEN, when it is clear that you were WRONG, the MSM forgets that and let's you blather about Bush failing to regulate. Note also how it is clear even in 2003 that the Democrats understand that if these agencys are regulated like they should be, it will mean "less bargaining power for poorer families". That is regrettable, but it isn't like taking out high risk loans turns out to be FREE is it!!! If you want to do that, why not try to vote a federal subsidy through in the open rather than sink the credit markets and then blame them for the sinking!!

This is the same kind of brilliance as BO saying "The surge will make things worse"!!! Of course, we have a press that does equal treatment -- the fact that Bush thought there were WMD (along with EVERYONE else) and we never found it is something they ignore just as much as they ignore BO being wrong about the surge.

Killing the Goose?

The government seems to be pretty happy taking $3 Trillion PER YEAR out of a $13 Trillion dollar PER YEAR Economy. Even if getting out of the sub-prime debacle actually cost a Trillion, how many folks would spend 1/13th of their income to make the best effort they could to keep making the other 12/13ths? It doesn't seem to be a hard decision at all when one looks at it that way.

I'm waiting to find an article or politician that explains it as clearly as Paulson did during the Senate Testimony. The GOVERNMENT strongly pushed Freddie and Fannie to take more sub-prime loans in order to keep housing starts moving and lower and lower income people getting homes. Then, after Enron, they passed Sarbannes Oxley that put LEGAL restrictions on the rating of the financial instruments that a business could keep on their balance sheet. Sounded good at the time.

When Bear went down, Moody's and Std and Poors started looking at the "mortgage backed securities" and discovered that sub-prime was everywhere. They downgraded the rating. Once they did that, the Financial Officers and the CEOs HAD to sell the mortgage backed securities--they were ILLEGAL to keep on their balance sheet. Selling them was and is stupid, but they had no choice--the law says sell or GO TO JAIL!! Wham, credit instruments that were 97% secure and had maybe dropped to 95% secure at the worst now had to be DUMPED, and none of the businesses that would normally buy them could make any use of them. Even though on the long term their value is almost certainly secure, they are no longer LIQUID--nobody will buy them TODAY. Meltdown caused by an unintended side-effect of well intentioned government regulation.

BUT, SOX was "Bi-Partisan" BOTH guys like Dodd and McCain voted for it--because they thought it was good. I'm sure there is plenty of blame to go around, Wall Street is certainly not blameless, but Washington is FAR from blameless, and it isn't for the reasons that they seem willing to admit. So they are playing "chicken" with the $13 Trillion US Economy that could take the whole world into a depression. Why?

Well, hey, BOs poll numbers bumped up on the crisis, so crisis must be good! I'm convinced that the MSM and the Democrats could care less if they drive the country to 70% of the population starving and the other 30% killed by terrorists. As long as they can blame Bush and get power it will be more that fine with them!

Unless our elected idiots choose to continue to playing politics rather than fixing an unforseen problem that they had a very large role in creating, there is no way that anything over 10-15% of those mortgages are going to default. The $700-$1Trillion "exposure" is very likely to turn them a PROFIT, just like the Chrysler bailout (that was MUCH less of a good idea) and actually the S&L bailout even eventually turned a profit.

I think the people that make the $13 Trillion a year are perfectly willing to be demonized if that is the price to keep the economy running. Better to have a bunch of prima donas that have never produced anything but hot air in their life going "shame, shame, I told you so" when a big hunk of the problem is actually of their creation than to actually let the credit markets dry up and destroy the business "goose" that keeps turning out that $13 Trillion every year. Do Dodd and BO understand that? I really wonder to sit and listen to them, but I believe they must. They simply don't care about ANYTHING but raw political power, no matter what the level of damage caused!

I Can't Believe BO Would "Miss"

Commentary: McCain's Latino ad hits target, Obama's misses - CNN.com

Patriotic for the Other Guy to Pay More

Biden calls paying higher taxes a patriotic act - Yahoo! News

We just saw Biden's tax returns. Funny how it is ALWAYS "patriotic" for the guy that makes just more than you to pay a lot more in taxes. Gee, if THAT is so "patriotic" wouldn't it be UNpatriotic for the 4 out of 5 to get tax CUTS?

Are taxes "patriotic" or aren't they? Did our founding fathers mention $250K, or was that a random number "patriotism" cutoff that just HAPPENED to be basically at Biden's income?

Maybe he copied the figure from somewhere ... in his case, that is something that I would certainly believe.

Time Explains Financial Markets

How Financial Madness Overtook Wall Street - TIME

In general I think this is a pretty good article. I'll summarize and add my spin:

• Markets, like any somewhat natural phenomenon have cycles
• We all want to "control / regulate / moderate" the markets to some extent. Like natural phenomenon (flooding, disease, storms, etc) this is sometimes possible to SOME extent, but at the absolute, out of our control.
  
• Since markets are human created, the psychology of humans has a lot to do with their movements. Greed and fear are two operative feelings that drive fluctuations.
  
• We layer "technology" until nobody completely understands what we built. Financial technology is the same -- we aggregate, derive, hedge, etc until it SEEMS that we have a way to "control the risk", and even "gain from the risk". For some durations of time, maybe we do--but again, the induction problem. We will never KNOW that. Tomorrow ALWAYS has the potential to be "completely new", in both good and bad ways. We doubt that it WILL be--in either the good or bad ways, but it certainly can surprise any of us.
  
• People overreact--in all directions. Too high, too low, too much, too little, too fast, too slow, etc. It is part of human nature. In government, in business, in families--it goes with the flawed nature of humanity.
  

So, where does that all leave us. Bottom line, we don't know, but PROBABLYThe "crisis" isn't as big as the MSM would like us to believe.  We better HOPE that McCain and Bush are right when they say that the economy is "fundamentally sound". It is hard to see how they would NOT be right given the standard of living, corporate profits, etc, but since a lot of it can come down to psychology, it may be that enough of the public has been scared enough by some of the mis-reporting that we may yet get a huge general crash that will be to nobody's benefit.

My favorite piece of that mis-reporting is the CONSTANT statement (repeated in this article) that the Freddy/Fanny bailout is $6 TRILLION. That would be if ALL the mortgages in the US defaulted. How likely do you think THAT is??? The CBO said it was likely a $25 BILLION exposure. That is a LONG way from $6 TRILLION. Do these folks have a death wish? It IS possible to get large masses of people to do really stupid things -- HG Wells War of World radio broadcast if you aren't a believer.

"News" from AP or BO Campaign Material

Power Line: If You've Opposed One Bridge, You've Opposed Them All


PL does a great job here. AP is trying to get you to think that Palin is doing some "special favor" for her town. PL makes it extremely clear that there isn't any truth in that at all, this is simply an attempt to get the uninformed to dislike Palin.

Republicans Control Congress?

Wall Street turmoil gives Dems opening - CNN.com

I could have swore that in '06 the Republicans went down in the fall elections because of "insufficient oversight", "corruption" and "the poor economy". We have now had nearly 2 years (or all the time we ever get to vote for) of Democrats running both the House and Senate. But ONLY the PRESIDENT is responsible for the economy?

Wait, we had a really good economy in '06 -- does that mean that the MSM thinks that REPUBLICANS did a good job to bring that about?

I'd think that we have a classic case of "a pox on both your houses" here with the R in the WH and the D in Congress, but the MSM seems to think that is not the case. Wonder why?

Change You Can Taste!

Obama Waffles.com: Edible Election 08 Souvenir

The Rev Wright "missing" on the side is pretty cool. These guys have at least as much creativity as the Bush "mis-speak" calendar"!