Tag: politics

Not being a Republican, a conservative, or a wonker, I am completely unconcerned with who happens to work at the various Washington wankfeststhink tanks. That being said, I hardly think it’s astonishing to learn David Frum has continued to travel along the leftward path trod by David Brock and others before him.

With Mike Allen’s account of his exchange with David Frum, we apparently have David’s version of his departure from AEI: Donor pressure forced AEI president Arthur Brooks to fire him. “But the elite isn’t leading anymore,” David is quoted as saying. “It’s trapped. Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained. I think Arthur took no pleasure in this. I think he was embarrassed. I think he would have avoided it if he possibly could, but he couldn’t.”

I have known and liked David and Danielle Frum for many years, and what I am about to write will end that friendship. I regret that. But his statement goes beyond self-serving. It is a calumny against an organization that has treated him not just fairly but generously…. I also think that for David to have leveled the charge that Arthur Brooks caved in to donor pressure, knowing that the charge would be picked up and spread beyond recall, knowing that such a charge strikes at the core of the Institute’s integrity, and making such a sensational charge without a shred of evidence, is despicable.

Merowr! Despicable calumny… that’s excellent. This tempest in a teapot should be good for a few amusingly overheated columns over the next few weeks, to say nothing of random sideshots over the years. Having read a pair of David Frum’s books and interviewed him, I think he’s an interesting thinker who is about as genuinely and deeply conservative as Lady Gaga. Frum is one of those unique political analysts whose superior ability to recognize a problem is inversely proportional to his ability to recommend a reasonable solution to it.

I don’t see much value in the wank tanks anyhow. Begging copious donations from a lot of people in order to give it to a few people who have never accomplished anything material in their lives to sit around and think grand thoughts strikes me as an excellent way to kill a lot of trees without producing anything of value. I haven’t seen any evidence that the wank tanks have a better track record for putting out significant books than the average non-fiction publisher. As for the American Enterprise Institute, I see they’ve got something like 13 Fellows who supposedly pay attention to the economy and U.S. monetary policy, precisely none of whom were capable of figuring out that perhaps keeping interest rates near zero just possibly might cause an investment bubble that could perhaps have some small effect on the economy.

(rolls eyes) Seriously, what in the name of Milton Friedman are you doing if your entire job is to pay attention to monetary policy and you don’t even know what obvious effect certain monetary policies will have on the economy?

With all of the unfunded public pension liabilities that are so rapidly accruing, there is virtually no chance that the federal government isn’t going to transform the 401k plan into a centralized pay-out-as-needed one like Social Security:

One of the nation’s largest labor unions, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), is promoting a plan that will centralize all retirement plans for American workers, including private 401(k) plans, under one new “retirement system” for the United States. In effect, government pensions for everyone, not unlike the European system and regardless of personal choice.

For those who have more than the median 25k in their 401k, I suspect the penalty for early withdrawal may eventually be seen as cheap at the price.

Chad the Elder has an interesting link to a WSJ article at the Fraters Libertas. He also notes that Obamacare has probably destroyed Mitt Romney’s chances at the 2012 nomination, the hapless denials of Captain Underoos notwithstanding. However, I found this comment following the article to be both illuminating and astounding in terms of how the lunatics on the Left regard the political fallout from the health care bill:

To all my Republican friends. They have met their Waterloo. The bill that was passed by the House on Sunday is not socialized medicine. It is so far from that agenda that the GOP overstated the case. To the public they were the party of NO.They will not repeal it and in November they will be slaughtered. Pelosi gave a young President a spine that he lacked. She encouraged him to invest all of his political capital to promote this bill. People all over the world were tuned in to the pre vote and vote on Sunday. Their impression was that the Tea Party people were a bunch of racist crazies. The whites in this country must accept the fact that in 10 years we will become a minority. President Obama was empowered by the stand he took. He reached out his hand to a reluctant GOP and they slapped him down in a racist and demeaning way. This vote in the House was more significiant than the vote in November 2008. This President is now empowered to be another FDR.

You see, there are many Americans who eagerly anticipate living in a Third World hellhole with a corrupt nomenklatura. They don’t want anything to do with liberty or the cultural traditions of the West. And those conservatives who are so foolish as to support immigration have been actively doing their work for them for the last 24 years. As for the political analysis, the only correct point is that Obama has been empowered by acting decisively. To gain popularity in the polls, you have to lead them, not follow them. While the Congressional Democrats will get destroyed in November, Obama may well come out of this very well. If the bill is perceived to have ruined the health care system, it’s Pelosi’s bill. If it is perceived to have been a success, he’ll take the credit.

And, if he has to work with a Republican House and Senate, he’ll work towards a magnificent bipartisan immigration reform, importing tens of millions of third-worlders. Remember, the economy is already toast, and he still has an out by sacrificing the bankers.

JW writes of her loss of faith in the GOP:

Finally somebody has printed what I think. Not that I made it up first, but you’ve put clarity and the printed word to what is so patently obvious. I’ve been a Republican all my life (50 years) and it just makes me sick now. I’ve lost my enthusiasm and hope for the future. So many commentators in the last 24 hours are spouting “we’ll take it back!” or “they’ll listen to us now if we shout and fight!” blah blah blah.

Don’t they get it? Nobody is listening, except the choir.

My husband says retribution will occur in the next election. But even if they all get voted out, who do we have to replace them? McCain? Palin? The ones at the top of the heap don’t really amount to much. It’s the pile underneath that is either rock or sucking sand…

We own a small business. Since we are classified as a “mine”, even though all operations are above ground (and we don’t strip mine) we are subject to the whims of MSHA (the Federal Mine Safety Administration). Since the Sago disasters, MSHA has become a monstrosity and out of control. I could go on and on, but for one example- our company has received a safety award from this organization every year (we have no employee accidents) and at the same time, were fined over $[quantity] in 2009 for “violations”. On top of this, other federal and county taxes, fees, inspections, payroll taxes, etc. are putting us under. I warned my family almost two years ago that ‘universal’ healthcare would put us out of business and it needed to be worked against. Didn’t hear a word back from any of them. As far as I know, my entire family is Republican.

I communicate with my Senator and Representative. They heard my voice. I don’t know what else to do.

There is nothing else to do except to leave the country to its fate and look to provide for and protect your family. When the masses stampede into madness, there is no talking them out of it. Just get out of the way and let them run off the cliff. I’ve been telling people that it is too late for several years now; the election of George W. Bush sealed the deal that was in the works since Reagan failed to cut government spending as well as taxes. That failure, combined with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, planted the seeds for the harvest now being reaped.

I am sure that most of the conservative media will be full of vigor and inspiring words this week. But you may wish to remember that I was one of the very few right-wing commentators to point out the total uselessness of the Tea Party movement. And, for all their signs and fury, they signified nothing when it came down to interrupting the political process and its long march towards American serfdom. The movement is irrelevant because it is a near certainty that even a full Republican House, Senate, and White House would not repeal Obamacare… after all, did they do anything about abortion, Social Security, Medicaid or Medicare when they were in power? No, they actually created a new entitlement program and invaded two countries that posed zero threat to the American people instead.

You cannot fix a problem by applying more of what helped cause it. America is no longer free. Get used to it. The absence of human liberty is, after all, very much the norm for the greater part of human history.

UPDATE: Republicans aren’t even going to try to repeal Obamacare. Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) told HuffPo today that Republicans won’t run on an across-the-board repeal of new health-care laws. “There is non-controversial stuff here like the preexisting conditions exclusion and those sorts of things,” the Texas Republican said. “Now we are not interested in repealing that. And that is frankly a distraction.”

Put that in your tea and drink it….

Thomas Sowell rolls with a familiar Republican refrain:

Too many critics of the Obama administration have assumed that its arrogant disregard of the voting public will spell political suicide for congressional Democrats and for the president himself. But that is far from certain.

True, President Obama’s approval numbers in the polls have fallen below 50 percent, and that of Congress is down around 10 percent. But nobody votes for Congress as a whole, and the president will not be on the ballot until 2012.

They say that, in politics, overnight is a lifetime. Just last month, it was said that the election of Scott Brown to the Senate from Massachusetts doomed the health-care bill. Now some of the same people are saying that passing the health-care bill will doom the administration and the Democrats’ control of Congress. As an old song said, “It ain’t necessarily so.”

The voters will have had no experience with the actual, concrete effect of the government takeover of medical care at the time of either the 2010 congressional elections or the 2012 presidential election. All they will have will be conflicting rhetoric – and you can depend on the mainstream media to go along with the rhetoric of those who passed this medical-care bill….

The last opportunity that current American citizens may have to determine who will control Congress may well be the election in November of this year. Off-year elections don’t usually bring out as many voters as presidential election years. But the 2010 election may be the last chance to halt the dismantling of America. It can be the point of no return.

We haven’t heard that before, have we? Of course, as Pat Buchanan points out, electing Republicans to the House and Senate can’t possibly make any positive difference because they’re only going to import more Democrat-voting immigrants anyhow.

In other words, the point of no return has already been passed. Obamacare isn’t a warning sign, it is an exclamation point.

One guess as to the race of the teacher who hung an effigy of Obama to protest Obama’s support for teacher accountability:

A teacher at a failing school where he and all his colleagues are being fired hung an effigy of President Barack Obama in his classroom, apparently in reaction to Obama’s support of extreme measures to ensure accountability in schools. The teachers union on Thursday condemned the effigy, discovered Monday in the teacher’s third-floor classroom at Central Falls High School, saying it was wrong and cannot be condoned under any circumstances….

She said that the teacher had been issued a “strong letter of reprimand” and that she considered it an internal matter.

This strikes me as one of those cases, rather like those rape and assault newspaper reports where the description of the attacker is unaccountably absent, where you can reliably deduce the color of the responsible individual by the fact of its absence from the report. In this case, that deduction tends to be supported by the fact that every show on ABCNNBCBS is not presently populated by angry race-hustlers decrying how this is a prime example of the racism that still pervades America in the year 2010.

Of course, I could easily be wrong. For all I know or care, Rhode Island could be entirely populated by the Chinese.

I wonder what the average over/under is on how long it takes a government to misuse, abuse, or publicly release the statistical data it originally gathered under the aegis of keeping it completely secret:

Patients’ medical records go online without consent

Patients’ confidential medical records are being placed on a controversial NHS database without their knowledge, doctors’ leaders have warned. At present 1.29 million people have had their details placed on the system. A further 8.9 million records are due to be added by June. By the end of next year, the NHS hopes to have more than 50 million uploaded. The “summary” records contain basic medical information including illnesses, vaccination history, and could include medication patients have been given. Ages and addresses are also included.

Seriously, who still falls for the idea that government can collect data without abusing it in some way, shape, or form? Where are the usual suspects? Forget the libertarians, you would think the pro-abortionists and gays, at the very least, would be totally up in arms about anyone being able to go online and see how many infants a woman has murdered and find out who is rolling with six strains of herpes in a suspicious location. And what bizarre mutation of “liberalism” could possibly entail placing the most intimate information about millions of people in the public’s hands?

Keep in mind that this is almost surely going to be a consequence of Obamacare. Once you give the government complete control, you can expect absolutely no ability to influence whatever madness results.

David Cameron’s backtrack on the promised Lisbon referendum was more revealing and will arguably be more electorally self-destructive than George Bush’s disavowal of “Read my lips.”

it is interesting to see that the Conservative lead started to narrow shortly after the Tories reneged on a pledge to hold a referendum on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty in the event that they were to be elected…. Then there was the spectacle of Ken Clarke, the most Europhile senior Tory, being dispatched to meet with EU high-ups in Brussels.

It is now clear that the so-called Conservative party is totally useless, they’re nothing more than the centrist wing of the UK’s EU party. Those who wish to see the restoration of a strong and independent UK, or at least an independent and sovereign England, shouldn’t even consider voting Tory. In effect, there is no Labour, there is no Tory, there is no LDP, there is only the BNP on the left, the EU party in the center and UKIP on the right. As of now, those are the only relevant choices for UK voters, which comes down to voting UKIP or abstimmen auf Deutsch.

As much as it pains me to say it, it appears that Al Franken may have actually been correct about Rush Limbaugh:

“The Republican Party has — because of you, because you let them hear from you — not gone bipartisan. They have not joined this failure. In fact, there are people in the House (from John Boehner to Mike Pence, to Eric Cantor, to Paul Ryan) who are doing everything that they can. Jim DeMint over in the Senate, Tom Coburn over in the Senate, these people, especially now don’t deserve to be bashed or lumped in a generalized way with all the bad apples in Washington because all of them there are not bad apples.” . . .

“The point at this stage is to support the conservatives in and outside public office. I certainly would not have ignored the other team on the field, the Democrats. They’re the only reason we’re in this mess. The Democrat Party is the only reason we are threatened with the things we’re threatened with. The Democrat Party. Solely. They own it. There’s no evidence I see of anybody colluding with the Democrats on this health care business. There’s not one Republican vote in the Senate for it.

Right, because it’s HEALTH CARE that people are upset about. And the Tea Party movement is all about the need to invade Iran and Obama is the most evilist president ever except we have to support him abroad because otherwise Goldman Sachs will fall to the Taleban, too few Mexicans will enter the country to pay for another AIG bailout and the terrorists will win. The fact is that with the exception of a very few principled men, such as the winner of the recent CPAC straw poll, they’re pretty much all bad apples in Washington, Democrats and Republicans alike. A Republican administration pushed through TARP. A Republican administration bailed out the banks. A Republican presidential candidate put Wall Street’s interests ahead of the American people and his own presidential campaign! A Republican-appointed central banker created the housing boom, the housing bust, and the global financial crisis.

The DEMOCRATS are the only reason the USA is in this mess? Limbaugh must be a complete economic illiterate because that is nothing less than a monstrous lie. The Democrats surely haven’t helped one iota, but the destruction of the American economy was a distinctly bipartisan effort. Abandon Rush Limbaugh, abandon the Republican Party, and abandon the so-called conservatives. They have the same relationship to the Democrats and liberals that a high-class escort does to a street hooker. They may look prettier and speak a little more pleasantly, but they’re still nothing more than whores for the State.