Tag: politics

Front National wins in France

One wonders if the Socialists will try to take a page from the Greeks and ban the French nationalist party as a “criminal organization” before they get booted from office by the electorate.

France’s Front National swept to victory over the country’s mainstream centre-right opposition in a closely watched local election on Sunday in a vote widely seen as presaging big advances by the far-right party in next year’s European and municipal elections.

In the decisive second round of the poll for a departmental council seat representing Brignoles, a town in the south of France, the FN candidate comfortably defeated his rival from the UMP, the party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, by 54 per cent to 46 per cent.

The knockout blow came despite calls from President François Hollande’s Socialist party for its supporters and other leftist voters to rally behind the UMP candidate in a bid to block the FN. The left’s candidate in the poll, the incumbent Communist, was easily knocked out in the first round of the election last weekend.

Marine Le Pen, FN leader, called the vote “a great victory”. She cautioned that it was only a local by-election, but added: “This shows a desire for change among the French people, who are making their voices heard, who are mobilising. It augurs towns gained and hundreds, maybe thousands of municipal councillors [for the FN in next March’s local elections].’

The FN, riding on a wave of recession-fuelled disaffection with the two mainstream parties, is mounting its biggest campaign to date to make gains in both the local elections and the European elections that follow in May. Last week an opinion poll for the first time put the FN ahead in the running for the European poll, with 24 per cent backing the party, giving it a two-point lead over the UMP and five points over the Socialist party.

Manuel Valls, the interior minister, told the Financial Times in an interview last week, that it was possible the FN would emerge as the leading party in the European elections.

Across Europe, the globalists and transnationalists are all but finished democratically. From the UK to Eastern Europe, the trend is clear. Now the question is if they will go gracefully or otherwise, turning to violent, anti-democratic tactics while incessantly screaming “fascist” and “neo-Nazi” at the populist parties.

In the meantime, there isn’t any mystery about the growing mass appeal of Marine Le Pen and the Front National: 

 “I will negotiate over the points on which there can be no compromise. If the result is inadequate, I will call for withdrawal. Europe is just a great bluff. On one side there is the immense power of sovereign peoples, and on the other side are a few technocrats.”

Asked if she intended to pull France of the euro immediately, she hesitated for a second or two and then said: “Yes, because the euro blocks all economic decisions. France is not a country that can accept tutelage from Brussels.”

As I wrote in June, the Front has been scoring highest in core Socialist
cantons, clear evidence that it is breaking out of its Right-wing
enclaves to become the mass movement of the white working class.

Vive le franc! The Euro is finished once France turns against it.

Failing at surrender

Only the Republican Party could manage to try to surrender and then fail at it:

President Obama used his weekly radio address to reject the latest offer from House Republicans to end the fiscal stalemate. The outline of their proposal was released Friday and would have reopened government through December and lifted the debt ceiling for six weeks.

Heckuva job, Johnny! One wonders what master backup plan grand strategerist of the House Republicans has up his sleeve.

There is no default

I’m not the biggest fan of Powerline, given their full-throated preference for all things Republican rather than conservative, but Hindrocket has provided the best explication of why all the talk of a federal “default” is sheer nonsense.

So the question is, if Congress does not raise the current debt ceiling, will the federal government run out of money needed to pay its existing debts? The answer is clearly No. A reader supplies the math: 

 On average the federal government’s daily expenditures are about $16.7 billion; receipts are about $14 billion, implying an average daily borrowing requirement of about $2.7 billion. So the planned flow of revenues is now about $650 billion less than the planned flow of expenses…about $2.7 billion a [business] day, $650 billion annually.

So the “default” scenarios are bogus. Interest on the $16 trillion in debt is covered by a factor of about 10x by revenues! That puts the federal government deep into AAA land. Revenues would have to fall by a staggering 90% to jeopardize interest payments.

And, of course, retiring principal by “rolling over” maturing debt can never require an increase in the debt ceiling, since there is no net increase in the nation’s debt, even if the money used to repay the original principal is borrowed.

So what will actually happen if Congress doesn’t increase the debt ceiling by approximately October 17? The government’s debt obligations will be paid, but reductions in other spending will start to become necessary. In effect, leaving the debt ceiling as is would function as a spending cut. This is why the Democrats hate the idea so much. They know there is zero chance of default, but they are horrified at the prospect that voters and taxpayers may find out that there is a relatively simple way to bring about spending reductions that would create, in effect, a balanced budget. Hence the hysteria.

If Republican senators and representatives give in to the Obama administration for fear of a nonexistent threat of federal “default”, which is actually a real threat of reduced federal domestic spending, it will underline the fact that they have no genuine reason to exist.

As Rand Paul and others have pointed out, there are 10x more tax revenues than are required to pay the interest on the debt. It is absurd to say the Federal government is in any danger of debt default than to say a man who makes $10k per month is in imminent danger of losing his house because he has to make an $850 mortgage payment every month.

UPDATE: Apparently the minor fact of the threat being nonexistent wasn’t sufficient to prevent the leading Republicans from aggressively pursuing surrender:

House Republican leaders said Thursday they will offer a temporary increase in the federal debt ceiling in exchange for negotiations with President Obama on longer-term “pressing problems,” but they stopped short of agreeing to end a government shutdown now in its 10th day.

In a news briefing following a closed-door meeting of House Republicans to present a plan to raise the debt limit for six weeks, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said, “What we want to do is offer the president today the ability to move a temporary increase in the debt ceiling.” He described the offer, to be presented to Obama in a White House meeting with House Republicans on Thursday afternoon, as a “good-faith effort on our part to move halfway to what he’s demanded in order to have these conversations begin.”

Boehner did not immediately provide specifics of the plan. But the speaker made clear that House Republicans are not agreeing to Obama’s demand that they pass legislation to fund the government with no partisan strings attached, thereby ending the first government shutdown in 17 years.

To scare the Left

I love that the name of this painting is STAND YOUR GROUND.  It represents everything that the Left is against: Freedom, America, Guns, Whites, Men, Masculine Strength, Morality, and Self-Defense. To say nothing of Art that isn’t government-funded, anti-traditional, and readily confused with a child’s fingerpainting.

I should like to see what the artist could do with the subject MOLON LABE. It appears the Third Revolutionaries may have their own Jacques-Louis David.

The sham of democracy

The gloves are coming off and faux democratic secularists around the world should expect no quarter or mercy from the next duly elected Muslim government to take power somewhere in the Arab world:


An Egyptian court
on Monday banned the Muslim Brotherhood from carrying out any
activities in the country and ordered the seizure of the group’s funds,
widening a campaign to debilitate the Islamist movement of deposed
President Mohamed Mursi.

“The court bans the activities
of the Muslim Brotherhood organization and its non-governmental
organization and all the activities that it participates in and any
organization derived from it,” said the presiding judge Mohammed
al-Sayed.

The court ordered the government to seize the Brotherhood’s funds and administer its frozen assets. The
army-backed government is waging the toughest crackdown in decades on
the Islamist group, which says it has a million members. Security forces
killed hundreds of its supporters and rounded up thousands more since
Mursi was deposed by the army on July 3 after mass protests against his
rule.

The Brotherhood won parliamentary and presidential elections after veteran autocrat Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in 2011.

So, what Turkey and Egypt have taught the Muslim fundamentalists is that if they play by the rules, win popular support, and get duly elected, the secular elite will utilize the military to overturn the elections, ban them, and deprive them of their accumulated assets.

But at the same time, that same secular elite is going to encourage them to settle all throughout the West. So now we have a large group of people who have learned that there is absolutely no point in being restrained by the laws and have no legal alternative to violence, and are being actively aided in spreading as far and wide as possible.

This should end well.

And it is an object lesson to everyone who asserts that the democratic system is the correct and proper way to manifest societal change. It isn’t.  Beyond a certain point, the will of the people is observably not permitted.  Now, I have no sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood, but I have to question the idea that it is wise to make it so abundantly clear to everyone, particularly those who are quite willing to turn to violence, that there is absolutely no benefit to participating in a democratic system.

It is, technically, true

Obama points out that raising the debt ceiling does not, in itself, increase the national debt:

Raising the debt ceiling doesn’t increase the nation’s debt, Pres. Obama declared in a speech today. In a speech at the Business Roundtable headquarters in Washington, D.C., Obama dismissed concerns about raising the debt ceiling by noting that it’d been done so many times in the past:

“Now, this debt ceiling — I just want to remind people in case you haven’t been keeping up — raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt; it does not somehow promote profligacy.  All it does is it says you got to pay the bills that you’ve already racked up, Congress.  It’s a basic function of making sure that the full faith and credit of the United States is preserved.”

Obama went on to suggest that “the average person” mistakenly thinks that raising the debt ceiling means the U.S. is racking up more debt: “It’s always a tough vote because the average person thinks raising the debt ceiling must mean that we’re running up our debt, so people don’t like to vote on it, and, typically, there’s some gamesmanship in terms of making the President’s party shoulder the burden of raising the — taking the vote.”

It’s true.  Just like increasing your credit limit on your credit card doesn’t increase the amount of money you owe; you don’t owe more money until you go out and spend more.  However, the fact that you are asking for a higher credit limit does, in most circumstances, indicate that you intend to spend more money than you presently can.

I’m going to miss the Obama administration.  I knew it would be amusing and incompetent, but I had no idea he would take it to this level.

That was easy enough

Last week, Chelm Wiseman insisted that I and others were wrong about Israel’s support for American intervention in Syria and repeatedly insinuated that our doubts about the supposed Israeli non-interest in American military action in Syria was somehow anti-semitic.

Here are some selections from his comments. The response to the third is mine:

  1. You have only supposition to support they accusation that Israel is in
    favor of a Syria war. If Israel is not behind it then it follows that
    the “elite Jews” are pursuing their own interest (like all elites
    everywhere) not Israel’s. 
  2. You are seeing what you want to see here. This supports my point. The
    fact that they even have to phrase it like this indicates that there is
    not clear support from the Israel. They are not putting obstacles in the way of a US strike? Not exactly an ringing endorsement.
  3. Yes, but there is no source for that either and it comes after a
    statement about Israel deliberately trying to stay on the sidelines of
    the debate. NYT is not a friendly source for Netanyahu, so they can not
    be relied upon to portray him accurately. Stop pretending that they are.

    “I caught you out blatantly misrepresenting the NYT article,
    Chelm. And I can, and will, easily find reports of the Netanyahu
    government’s support for American military action in Syria from other
    sources, so banking on the NYT misrepresenting the Israeli government’s
    position was an unwise move on your part.”

And here is a report from Reuters on Tuesday:

Israel wants to
see Syrian President Bashar al-Assad toppled, its ambassador to the
United States said on Tuesday, in a shift from its non-committal public
stance on its neighbor’s civil war.

Even Assad’s defeat by al
Qaeda-aligned rebels would be preferable to Damascus’s current alliance
with Israel’s arch-foe Iran, Ambassador Michael Oren said in an
interview with the Jerusalem Post.

His comments marked a move in Israel’s public position on Syria’s two-and-1/2-year-old war….

“We
always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who
weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran,” Oren
said in the interview, excerpted on Tuesday before its full publication
on Friday.

Note that this is a move in Israel’s public position.  Its private position remains unchanged from before: it wants Bashar Assad to go and it wants America to make that happen. Now, there is nothing wrong with the Israeli position. It may well be in the Israeli national interest; I’m certainly not in any position to judge that. The problem is with those American Jews and their Christian Zionist allies who seek to elevate the Israeli national interest above the American one.

And if it is intrinsically anti-semitic to be pro-American, well, there are an awful lot more anti-semites out there than I had previously imagined.

Publishing bias and the new vertical markets

In which I take exception to Standout Author Larry Correia’s take on Cedar Fort’s decision to cancel a publishing contract given to a gay writer:

So Cedar Fort really likes a book submitted to them and says that they
think it will sell well. Cedar Fort gives a contract to these two
authors. They write their author bios. One mentions his “partner”
instead of his wife. Cedar Fort flips out and drops them.

There are two schools of thought with dealing with the Left.  Larry’s is presently the dominant one among conservatives, which is that one should play by idealistic rules of ideological fair play that are observably no longer in effect. He notes, correctly, that this decision by Cedar Fort to blackball homosexuals is no different than the decision by major Manhattan publishers to blackball writers of the political Right.  He writes:

I keep seeing authors get black listed for their political opinions, and
since the publishing industry is mostly in Manhattan, it is usually
writers who lean right (righters?) that get blackballed. Of course, when
I talk about this on the internet, proper goodthinking people tell me
that’s crazy talk.

As one of the few writers who has been blackballed by both left-wing Manhattan publishers AND right-wing regional publishers, (Thomas Nelson canceled the contract for Media Whores when it discovered that I was going to address various Fox News figures in addition to the mainstream media figures they expected to be targeted), I actually think it is a positive development that these publishing biases of left and right are exposed and made more visible to the reading public.

The observable fact is that all publishing houses are ideologically biased and none of them are solely motivated by business concerns due to the fact that the editors are human, and their financial interests in the publishing houses for which they work is generally negligible.  Their bias is further compounded by the fact that none of them has any real ability to know what will, and what will not, sell well, which means that they will always be free to indulge their ideological biases with regards to every writer who does not already have an established track record of considerable success.

My opinion is that it is a serious mistake for the Right to attempt to remain above the fray and refuse to play by the rules established by the Left.  As the example of Fox News shows, as the example of Larry’s own exceptional literary success shows, the Right has considerable economic power.  However, the Right has long played into the hands of the Left by being more than willing to financially sustain the Left while the Left is doing its level best to financially starve the Right. Many conservatives fall all over themselves to proclaim how eager they are to read books by gay black handicapped communist Che Guevara enthusiasts in a futile attempt to establish their cultural impartiality.

Which means that in the cultural civil war, the Left is playing the role of the ruthless Union while the Right is playing the role of a Confederacy that is too gentlemanly and refined to take the opposition seriously.  You may recall who won that war, and how.

I fully accept that no matter how many books I write, no matter how many games I sell, Tor and its filthy editors will never publish my books.  That is absolutely and entirely fine with me.  I never wanted to have anything to do with such despicable creatures, which is why I never submitted anything to them even prior to the changes in the publishing industry that are rendering the mainstream publishers less necessary than before.  I have no problem with the fact that the 4,000 daily readers of Whatever will never buy my books or with the fact that many left-wing fans of epic fantasy will prefer to wait another five years to slog through George R.R. Martin’s next interminable self-parody than read A Throne of Bones.  I realize, as I expect Larry does as well, that there are thousands of SF/F readers who will never even look at The Grimnoire Chronicles because they are written by an avid gun enthusiast and published by Baen Books.

And, in like manner, left-wing writers should learn to accept that right-leaning publishers will not work with them and an increasing number of right-leaning consumers will not read their works.  The age of the uniform mass market and its ideological impartiality is over and the age of ideologically-based vertical markets is upon us. The sooner everyone on the right side of the ideological aisle embraces that fact and begins to act accordingly, the sooner we will be able to stop swimming in the moral filth, breathing in the philosophical effluvia, and wandering aimlessly throughout the creative wasteland of the Left.

Larry, I have no doubt, will disagree with my opinion.  So will a number of other writers on the Right. And that’s fine, as we can disagree about this and debate this without feeling any need to excommunicate each other or rigidly enforce a dogmatic consensus because we are not rabbits of the Left.

Obama family tied to Muslim Brotherhood

WND cites Egyptian reports that Malik Obama, Barack Obama’s half-brother, is connected with the Muslim Brotherhood:

Malik Obama’s oversight of the Muslim Brotherhood’s international investments is one reason for the Obama administration’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to an Egyptian report citing the vice president of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, Tehani al-Gebali

In a news report on Egyptian television of a Gebali speech, translated by researcher Walid Shoebat, a former Palestinian Liberation Organization operative, Gebali said she would like “to inform the American people that their president’s brother Obama is one of the architects of the major investments of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

This is interesting, but the one thing that makes me unsure about Obama still practicing what he once, supposedly by accident, referred to as “my Muslim faith”, is that he hasn’t cut off American aid to the Egyptian military regime, as he is required to do by law.  If Obama was still a Muslim – and make no mistake about it, he was a Muslim even if he is not now – one would assume that he would have been quick to undercut the government that replaced the Brotherhood’s Morsi regime.

Less than inconceivable

While liberals are staggered with the probability that the Lightbringer would be more accurately described as the Liebringer, I think the defense has a fairly credible case. Not a very flattering one, to be sure, but credible:

But just as it is utterly absurd to claim Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn’t lie before Congress (and some reporters thankfully admitted that truth in the open), it has now become almost silly to insinuate or assume that the president hasn’t also been lying. Why? Because if that’s true — if indeed he hasn’t
been deliberately lying — then it means he has been dangerously,
irresponsibly and negligently ignorant of not only the government he
runs, but also of the news breaking around him.

Think about three recent presidential declarations. A few weeks back, the president appeared on CBS to claim that the secret FISA court is “transparent.” He then appeared on NBC
to claim that “We don’t have a domestic spying program.” Then, as
mentioned above, he held a press conference on Friday to suggest there
was no evidence the NSA was “actually abusing” its power.

For
these statements to just be inaccurate and not be deliberate, calculated
lies it would mean that the president 1) made his declarative statement
to CBS even though he didn’t know the FISA court was secret (despite knowing all about the FISA court six years ago); 2) made his declarative statement to NBC but somehow didn’t see any of the news coverage of the Snowden disclosures proving the existence of domestic spying and 3) made his sweeping “actually abusing” statement somehow not knowing that his own administration previously admitted the NSA had abused its power, and worse, made his statement without bothering to look at the NSA audit report that Gellman revealed today.

So
sure, I guess it’s possible Obama has merely been “wrong” but has not
been lying. But the implications of that would be just as bad — albeit
in a different way — as if he were deliberately lying. It would mean
that he is making sweeping and wildly inaccurate statements without
bothering to find out if they are actually true. Worse, for him merely
to be wrong but not deliberately lying, it would mean that he didn’t
know the most basic facts about how his own administration runs. It
would, in other words, mean he is so totally out of the loop on
absolutely everything — even the public news cycle — that he has no idea
what’s going on.

The reason the Left has such a hard time understanding Obama’s behavior is because they are inextricably wedded to a false assumption, which is that he is highly intelligent.  I have been pointing out for years that the guy not only isn’t particularly bright, but he isn’t even particularly interested in his presidential responsibilities.  It’s hard for the media, particularly the political media, to understand that latter point because nearly everyone in the political game is in it for the power.

The reason the Right has such a hard time understanding Obama’s behavior is because they are inextricably wedded to a different false assumption, which is that Obama has an agenda. He doesn’t. He’s never been in politics for the power. He doesn’t give a damn about what he can do and he doesn’t have a particular agenda. Forget the Republican paranoia; I don’t think there has ever been a post-FDR president who was less likely to even think about seeking four more years.

Obama got into politics for the same reason rock stars get into music. He can’t wait to get on the Clinton lecture circuit, have no responsibilities, get away from Michelle, and travel around the world with his very close male friends being applauded for walking on stage and reading his teleprompter. I still contend that if the decision had been left up solely to Obama, he would not have run for re-election. He not only made the second term Reagan look like a paragon of presidential engagement in his first term, but has rendered himself the lamest of ducks without even being crippled by a major internal scandal or losing the Senate.

Obviously, what Obama has been saying about the NSA is not true. But when one considers both his intelligence and his observable level of interest in his presidency, I think Occam’s Razor strongly suggests that it is the alternative explanation that is the correct one and he has no idea what is going on in his administration.

It’s not that Obama lied to you, my progressive friends, it’s that you lied to yourself about him.