Tag: politics

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.

Ron Paul wins the CPAC straw poll:

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, a stalwart foe of government spending, won a blowout victory Saturday in the annual Conservative Political Action Conference presidential straw poll. With participants naming “reducing the size of federal government” as their top issue, the 74-year old libertarian hero captured 31 percent of the 2,400 votes cast in the annual contest, usually seen as a barometer of how the GOP’s conservative wing regards their potential presidential candidates.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney finished second with 22 percent of the vote, ending a three-year winning streak at CPAC. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin finished third with 7 percent of the vote, followed by Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty at 6 percent and Indiana Rep. Mike Pence at 5 percent.

Needless to say, this straw poll win won’t be trumpeted by the NY/DC Axis Republicans the way it would have if Romney or Jindal had won. It is astonishing how they continue to argue that a liberal Mormon from Massachusetts or an Indian from Louisiana is going to have more national appeal than the libertarian Texan who everyone now knows was correct about the failed World Democratic Revolution, correct about the financial crisis, and correct about TARP and the banking bailouts.

Ron Paul would have beaten Obama because his positions were in alignment with the American people rather than with the financial elite. John McCain couldn’t because his weren’t. McCain had the election and threw it away by siding with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and the Federal Reserve rather than with the voters. Look at the alternatives now. Romney is a liberal Mormon; he’s about as electable as an Aztec priest. Palin is a political rock star, but she’s a lightweight and won’t be running if she has any sense at all because she’d be throwing away a very lucrative career in what passes for political commentary these days. Jindal is a lightweight who looks and talks funny. Pawlenty is an unprincipled snake, which is probably why the neocons are talking him up. I don’t like Huckabee, but he’s probably the only other serious candidate in the bunch.

With apologies to Ann Coulter, if you call yourself a conservative but don’t support Ron Paul due to his foreign policy, you’re neither economically literate nor are you truly conservative. It doesn’t matter how afraid of Iranian nukes you are or how sexually aroused you become at the thought of invading foreign lands because the great terrorist hunt and the world democratic revolution are rapidly coming to an end for lack of funding. This will become abundantly clear with the first failed Treasury auction or when the bank meltdowns begin to pick up speed. Ron Paul is the only Republican candidate who realizes this, which is precisely why he is the only viable Republican candidate in 2012 in much the same way that he was the only viable candidate in 2008.

Running another Wall Street-approved, neocon-vetted presidential candidate is about the only way the Republicans can guarantee an Obama victory in 2012. So, it won’t surprise me in the least if that is precisely what they do. If, on the other hand, they actually want to win, the ideal candidacy would probably be a Paul-Palin ticket. The economic situation is not about to get better, so the bipartisan appeal of Paul’s message is only going to grow.

It seems Robert Costa is, along with Jonah Goldberg and John Derbyshire, one of the few remaining voices of sanity at National Review: “There may have been some boos, but Paul was by far one of the more popular speakers at CPAC this year. “End the Fed!” was one of most-heard chants and his “Campaign for Liberty” group was everywhere… Unlike the 2012 wannabes, Paul doesn’t play coy: He has a manifesto and wants to broadcast it. Period. No worries about the media spin or whether the speech gets headlines (see Pawlenty, Tiger doctrine). And, instead of the usual anti-Obama talk, Paul framed a hefty chunk of his CPAC address upon a critique of Woodrow Wilson. And the crowd dug it.

Some older CPAC attendees don’t seem to care much for the Texas congressman, sure, but many young activists seem to regard him as a hero of sorts. When he talks about the debt, like he did on Friday, calling it a “monster” that will “eat up” our future, it was with a passion that you can’t fake in politics. He also didn’t mind challenging many of the room’s security hawks on foreign policy. “There is nothing wrong with being a conservative and having a conservative belief in foreign policy where we have a strong national defense and don’t go to war so carelessly,” Paul said. That line was met with a lot of silence, some nods, but, based on my conservations with activists afterward, strong respect from many for not simply pandering.”

Paul Krugman inadvertantly explains the Order ab Chao mechanism:

None of this should come as a big surprise. Long before the euro came into being, economists warned that Europe wasn’t ready for a single currency. But these warnings were ignored, and the crisis came.

Now what? A breakup of the euro is very nearly unthinkable, as a sheer matter of practicality. As Berkeley’s Barry Eichengreen puts it, an attempt to reintroduce a national currency would trigger “the mother of all financial crises.” So the only way out is forward: to make the euro work, Europe needs to move much further toward political union, so that European nations start to function more like American states.

It works like this. The government enacts a stupid policy doomed to failure. When the policy inevitably fails, the government swoops in to fix it by expanding its power. Repeat as needed. The European Union has been attempting to turn itself into a continent-wide empire for decades; now that the inherent contradictions of the Euro that were known to every economist since the idea was first broached have revealed themselves, they are being used to justify eliminating the last vestiges of national sovereignty that remain to the “member states”. There is no government failure so big that the government will not attempt to use it to expand the scope of its power. Regardless of whether their policies fail or succeed, both results are cited as evidence that more centralized power is required. On a side note, Krugman is incorrect. Spain was not fiscally responsible and could easily have prevented both its housing boom and subsequent bust despite its lack of control, (which you will recall it gave up of its free accord), over its own currency.

As for the fate of the Euro and the European Union, I suspect that the “unthinkable” will not only become entirely thinkable, it will eventually become the reality. Krugman’s refusal to contemplate the breakup of either isn’t based on any political or economic analysis, it’s mere ideological ostriching.