Gird Your Loins

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

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

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

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

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

Obamanomics, Triumph of Hope Over Experience

An Obamanomics Preview - WSJ.com

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

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

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

The quote from this article that is obvious is:

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

Truth In Reporting

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unimaginable November 5th?

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Long National Nightmare

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

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

The Mote In Your Brother's Eye

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

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

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

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

Burying the Liberal / Conservative Hatchet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Me-Too Conservative

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

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

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

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

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


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

Franken on Christ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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