Progressive Fascination with Choo Choo Trains

George Will explains why our progressive overlords are so obsessed with high speed rail: It’s about modifying our behavior.

OK, I get that...

What I don’t understand is how the rank and file (including fellow bloggers in Left Blogistan) can simply gobble up this nonsense and regurgitate it.

High speed rail, global warming, electric cars and a plethora of unproven theories taken as gospel belie a lack of thinking and critical analysis on their part. I’m not calling them dumb, just naïve and incredibly credulous. Even in densely-packed Europe, where rail travel is popular, it cannot make a profit and must be subsidized by government.

Back to George Will. He’s right. It’s about social engineering…

To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make. (George Will)

Further reading:
Robert Samuelson – High Speed Rail Folly
Ronald Utt – High Speed Rail Financial Disaster

Hundreds of Ways to Screw the Taxpayer

Our federal government is a clanking, soulless monster completely out of control. Good people like Senator Tom Coburn are looking to tame the beast.

Duplication of effort alone accounts for hundreds of billions in waste annually, according to the WSJ article, Billions in Bloat Uncovered in Beltway.

"The U.S. government has 15 different agencies overseeing food-safety laws, more than 20 separate programs to help the homeless and 80 programs for economic development."

OK, I can see food safety laws. I could even perhaps understand the government fostering economic development...  If I saw any evidence anyone in the federal government understood basic economics!  Given the current state of things, I’d say letting the federal government do “economic development” is kinda like allowing Freddie Kruger to perform heart surgery. The Homeless? The federal government has no mandate whatsoever to address that. It’s not in the constitution. Defund it.

The report says there are 18 federal programs that spent a combined $62.5 billion in 2008 on food and nutrition assistance, but little is known about the effectiveness of 11 of these programs because they haven't been well studied.

There is also nothing in the US Constitution that authorizes the federal government to take money from taxpayers and use it to hand out food to people. This is a function more rightly done at the local level, and better and more efficiently done by private charities. What does a DC apparatchik know about poverty in Denver or Detroit? Do they even care about the people they hand this stuff out to? Do they care if bums and welfare cheats are receiving benefits?

This is why faceless, mechanistic charity does not work, and in fact is not charity. There is no connection and no feedback loop.  The givers become callous cogs in a self-serving machine, turning the the entitled recipients into faceless, thankless wards of the state.


Here's More Wasteful Duplication...

"The agency found 82 federal programs to improve teacher quality…"

That clearly has failed—End it!

"80 to help disadvantaged people with transportation…"

Could you imagine President Washington and Congressman Adams handing out horses to those who have none?

"47 for job training and employment…"

That’s what schools and community colleges are for

"… and 56 to help people understand finances"

Government obviously does not understand finances. How in the hell does it expect others to do so? This is madness!

Many of my blogger buddies are probably tired of my Air Force budget cut stories from the Clinton 90’s, but they are apropos. He slashed the DoD budget, and to be fair to him, Bush the Elder started it. DoD ended up being the only department that took real, no kidding cuts, as opposed to others who just had their rate of increase slashed. Bottom line: It forced us to get rid of the dead wood and drop inefficient practices. We came out a leaner, meaner fighting force in the end.

Every corner of federal, state and municipal budgets should be slashed so they can experience the same beneficial process.

Government Unions are a Taxpayer Scam

Crossing the Mississippi heading east last summer, the Silverfiddle family van’s radio was tuned to a local Illinois station. We were subjected to angry government workers standing on the steps of the capitol shouting through bullhorns “RAISE OUR TAXES! RAISE OUR TAXES!. RAISE OUR TAXES!” Crowds of troublemakers bused in from Chicago provided the background chorus of hoots, chants and whistles.

“Of course that’s what they’d say,” my astute older daughter observed, “They get more out of the pay raise than they have to pay in the extra taxes!” I could have hugged her, but I was driving.

Government and Government Unions:  Partners in Crime

Unlike a private sector union, government unions are not adversaries of their employers. Instead they are a partner in crime of the government bureaucrats who pick our pockets:

Such unions are government organized as an interest group to lobby itself to do what it always wants to do anyway: grow. These unions use dues extracted from members to elect their members' employers. And governments, not disciplined by the need to make a profit, extract government employees' salaries from taxpayers. Government sits on both sides of the table in cozy "negotiations" with unions. (George Will)

They also pick the pockets of unwilling workers

The Unions have hijacked the public franchise and not only use it to squeeze increasingly more out of the taxpayer, but they turn the coercive power of the state against their own members as well.

In Indiana, a House committee on Monday approved legislation to change state law so that private-sector workers no longer would be required to pay dues or belong to a union that bargains on their behalf. Unions say this would erode union membership, and eventually their finances and political clout, if workers decided not to join or pay dues. (WSJ.com)

But don’t take my word for it!

Here are the words of a union kingpin, who explains the government-union shakedown racket better than I ever could…

Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the nation's largest public-sector union, said the moves in various state capitals to target state employees were an explicit effort to undermine a key source of Democratic funds.

"They know how much we spent in the last campaign," he said. "They're going to try and shoot us down."

The 1.6 million-member AFSCME last year tapped emergency accounts and took out loans as it poured more than $90 million into Democratic campaign efforts in the mid-term elections.

Overall, unions put around $400 million into the 2008 campaign to help elect Mr. Obama and other Democrats.

Big Money in Politics?  "Unions are Big Money"

You don’t blow that kind of cash for nothing, even if you're Charlie Sheen. It’s not a contribution, it’s an investment. They put in $400 million with the expectation of receiving much more from the democrats they elect. Here’s something else to consider the next time you hear some liberal whining about “big money” in politics:

But the unions are big money. Five of the top ten contributors to congressional and presidential campaigns since 1989 are labor unions according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In the last election, 10 of the top 20 PACs were union PACs. (Washington Examiner)

The unions and our governments are running a scam on us, and honest governors with the help of conservative legislators are blowing the lid off and smokin’ em out! That’s why the idiot astroturfers with beet-red faces are shouting themselves hoarse in the streets of state capitals while liberal lawmakers scamper and scurry for cover like the rats and cockroaches they are.

We’ve got ‘em on the run, folks!

Sources:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703800204576158851079665840.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/us/22union.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Progressives of All Parties are Destroying America

The progressives of all parties who hijacked the federal bureaucracy have just about destroyed us. Sure, they started with good intentions, but we’re now morally, intellectually and financially bankrupt.

WASHINGTON—The federal budget deficit will reach a record of nearly $1.5 trillion in 2011 due to the weak economy, higher spending and fresh tax cuts, congressional budget analysts said, in a stark warning that will drive the growing battle over government spending and taxation.

As a percentage of the nation's economic output, the 9.8% deficit would be the second-largest since World War II, behind only the 10% level in 2009.

"This report is a reflection of the gross mismanagement of our nation's finances," said Rep. Tom Price (R., Ga.). "It should make every American think twice about the latest calls by the president to increase spending at a time when Washington can clearly not afford to pay its bills." . (WSJ – Deficit)

We’ve spent ourselves to the brink of bankruptcy, but most sickening of all is that we have nothing to show for it.

Social Security is going broke…

New congressional projections show Social Security running deficits every year until its trust funds are eventually drained in about 2037.

This year alone, Social Security is projected to collect $45 billion less in payroll taxes than it pays out in retirement, disability and survivor benefits, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday. (El Lay Times)

Obamacare will not save any money, and no, you can’t keep your coverage…

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two of the central promises of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law are unlikely to be fulfilled, Medicare's independent economic expert told Congress on Wednesday.

The landmark legislation probably won't hold costs down, and it won't let everybody keep their current health insurance if they like it, Chief Actuary Richard Foster told the House Budget Committee. (AP – Medicare Official Doubts)

Meanwhile, HHS is handing out Obamacare waivers, 733 and counting …

Over at HUD, they’re having a party with our money and creating failure, which justifies requests for even more taxpayer funds…

Even by Washington standards, $26 billion is a lot of money.

That’s the amount spent by taxpayers annually to provide housing for needy Americans. But there’s significant evidence that some of the monies have been poorly spent for years.

A joint investigation by ABC News and the Center for Public Integrity found that the Department of Housing and Urban Development has struggled to combat theft, corruption, and mismanagement in the more than 3,000 public housing agencies nationwide it funds, and particularly inside the172 that HUD considers the most troubled. (Public Housing – Private Frustration)

Now who want to stand up and deny that the progressive house of cards is collapsing?

End the Welfare State - Towards a New Morality

The Progressive Welfare State encourages irresponsible behavior and enslaves people, making them wards of the taxpayer and eventually rendering them helpless, and hopeless.  It would be less destructive to end all government assistance.

I tire of discussions dealing with how to incentivize the stupid, the irresponsible, the indigent and the downright lazy.  Our welfare system has produced multi-generational poverty and people too fat to leave their government-provided dwellings.  These government slums are gang-infested anyway, so it's not just the morbidly obese who are veritable prisoners in these cinderblock jungles.

Government concerns itself with so many questions.  How do we keep people off of drugs, get kids to go to school, make parents responsible, reduce crime...

A shared code of morality used to take care of much of this, but shame is dead and virtue sneered at.  We're left scratching our heads wondering how we can get irresponsible people to change their destructive behavior.

Natural Consequences

It's time to knock down the taxpayer-funded wall between irresponsible behavior and natural consequences.  You don't work you don't eat.  Blow your mind out on drugs and booze, and you will be living off the charity of others for the rest of your life--Uncle Sam won't help you.  Crank out all the kids you want, but you're paying for them.  You need food and housing?  Work for it like the majority of your fellow citizens do!

The safety net is now a hammock.  The progressive nanny state has spawned multi-generations of innocent victims who no longer know how to care for themselves, and it has also spawned legions of deadbeats gaming the system.  Left unchecked it will destroy America; it is already depriving us of the human capital we need to advance the economy. 

Cut off all public assistance

No housing, no welfare checks, no food stamps.  This would be a wonderful boon to those enslaved by progressivism.  People would learn again to be thrifty and self-sufficient.  Generous Americans would put their money in local charities that are better able to sort the deadbeats from the truly needy.  Best of all, families would grow closer and help one another, as it should be.  The moral choice between buying myself a new car or helping my broken down old Dad is crystal clear.

The beauty of this plan is that the incentives are self-evident and the consequences are natural

If sitting on your ass all day swilling sugared drinks and playing XBox instead of going to school has make you fat and stupid, you're going to have a harder time finding a job.  You will be unable to buy food and shelter, and you will be saddled with health problems.  That's not a nice life to look forward to, but at least you will serve as a warning to others.

WWJD?

Some will call this a cruel policy.  I was called all but un-Christian by a liberal in Left Blogistan for suggesting this in a thread.  WWJD?  I doubt he would advocate a government-run shakedown operation to "spread it around."   He commands us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, take care of the widows and orphans...  families used to do this until Uncle Sam stepped in, short-circuited our charitable activities and shook us down to build a multibillion dollar Frankenstein's monster.

This is why I say progressives are not evil.  They are merely delusional pollyannas who eschew time-tested ways and ignore human nature, instead preferring "modern," "scientific" nostrums cooked up by eggheads.  The more pointy-headed the intellectualism, the better.

They had a good run through the 20th century, but reality has a way of reasserting itself.  The progressive dream has turned into a nightmare, as it spawns an ever growing criminality, irresponsibility, dependency and despondency.  Time to try what's worked since the dawn of time.

A government check lasts days.  Virtue and character are timeless.

Consequences

We are suffering the consequences of decisions made at the federal, state and local government level

These decisions were made by people we elected, so the pain we are going through is self-inflicted.  The first step on the road to recovery is to own up to our mistakes.  Victor Davis Hanson has a good article on the agitated state of those who are mired in a misery of their own making but still refuse to own up.

The problem as I see it is that government has protected us from the consequences of our actions.  Put more specifically, those areas of public and private life that are shielded from the results of irresponsible behavior become chaotic, dysfunctional, bankrupt.

Imagine if you were shielded from the consequences of your actions in your own personal life... 

You could cuss out the boss and beat up that annoying coworker in the parking lot and drive home satisfied in a car you decided to stop making payments on.  Drink till you fall down, buy a continuous stream of electronic goodies, to hell with the household budget.  No hangovers, kick the bills down the road... What a life! 

The real world doesn't work that way, and we know it.  Yet we allowed silver-tongued government orators to sprinkle magic pixie dust on everything and suspend disbelief.  

"Predatory Lending" and Other Government-Sponsored Ideas

Have you heard that public service radio spot about avoiding predatory lenders?  It encourages the blissfully ignorant to ask questions before they sign those mortgage documents.

Am I the only one who finds the idea of "predatory lenders" absurd?  Think about it.  If you suddenly found yourself flush with $10 million after hitting the lotto and decided you wanted to make more money, would you do so by "predatory lending?"  Would you accost poor people on the street, "Here, take this cash you can't pay back!"  Of course you wouldn't.  That would be a quick road to losing your newfound fortune.

End Government Backing of All Mortgages

Now, what if the federal government agreed to step in and assume responsibility for the loans you write, relieving you of all responsibility when the borrower defaults?  Then you'd probably hand the loans out like candy and get fat on the up front fees and interest you collect before the crash.  That is how the mortgage crisis happened.  The federal government, through Fannie and Freddie, shielded the lenders from the consequences of their shoddy lending practices.  The federal government now holds around 90% of all mortgages:  The good, the bad and the ugly, which means we're all on the hook for the irresponsibility of the government and our fellow citizens.

End Government Insurance of Wall Street

The Wall Street crash and subsequent raid on the US Treasury by Dirty Hank Paulson's band of pirates is a similar tale.  The DC-NY Axis of Evil plays a game of "heads Wall Street wins, tails taxpayers lose," encouraging wild speculation binges.  We shield big banking from the consequences of its actions and then wonder why the bankster bandits rip us off to pay their gambling debts.  If they had to worry about losing the house, or Guido busting their kneecaps, they would act responsibly.

Stop Rewarding Bad Behavior with Government Cash

Individual citizens who have no shame can cash in as well.  Swill sucrose-laden drinks, eat like a hog until you're too fat to fit through your front door, and you can collect disability, making a mockery of the system and tarring with the same shameful brush those who legitimately receive benefits.  Take drugs and drop out of school and you are eligible for government housing, food stamps and other taxpayer-funded assistance.  Crank out kids you can't afford and Uncle Sam will step in, shake down the taxpayers and reward you for your copious breeding habits.  Serial impregnators love that one.  They can knock her up and leave, knowing we suckers will pick up the tab.

It's time we faced up to the consequences of our actions, on a governmental as well as a personal level.

Populist Convergence

We on the right are waking up to some traditional liberal issues, and that's a good thing

I have often maintained that if the populists on the right and left ever realized they share common enemies, the jig will be up up for the DC-Wall Street-Big Business axis of evil.

Goldwater-Reagan conservatives have always despised DC (especially when we were the minority).  Recently we have awakened to the predations of Wall Street and Crony Crapitalists disguised as free marketeers.

Now if the libs could only see how government "help" mocks the rule of law and engenders corruption, inequality and unemployment.  If left and right could link up against this axis of evil, We The People could topple the established order, put government back on firm constitutional footing and strip corporations and banks of their taxpayer-funded government protections.

Daniel DiSalvo sums up the tea party view...

The movement's unifying belief is that government and special interests have created an interlocking directorate, to the detriment of average Americans. Washington colludes with Wall Street while state and local governments kowtow to public sector unions. Thus tea party activists, who are neither Goldman Sachs bankers nor public employees, see the system as rigged against them.

The only difference between the tea party view and the liberal view is that the liberal refuses to lump Uncle Sam in with the banksters and the fatcats.  These hopelessly naive dupes still see big government as the counter to big banks and big biz, ignoring the fact that these three very big pigs all publicly and noisily wallow in the same trough.

The tea partiers' energy springs from a suspicion of those on the receiving end of government largesse. This suspicion is rooted in the quintessentially American norms of independence and work, and especially in the belief that people should provide for themselves and live within their means. Tea party patriots believe many - from pin-stripped executives to double-dipping firefighters - are scheming with the government to gain an unfair advantage, often at their expense. Therefore, handing over more money to government - no matter its source - is anathema.

At some point the liberals must realize that one cannot worship big government while also calling oneself a populist. 

Where Left and Right Agree

Among the many possible explanations for the tea party movement's rise, Schoen and Rasmussen suggest that increased economic inequality is the taproot of its fury. On this point, their analysis chimes with that of many Democrats. While the American economy has grown well in recent decades, the fruits of that growth have been unevenly distributed.

Conservatives are waking up to your issues, lefties.  Will you shake our hand, or will you bite it?


The Populist Wave - Daniel DiSalvo

TSA is a Joke - Privatize It

Thousands Standing Around has earned some new nicknames:


The Security Asshats
Touching and Scanning at Airports
Touching Sensitive Areas
The Sleazy Administration


Trust them, we're told.  They're professionals.  As if that were a legitimate excuse for having our 4th Amendment rights violated. 


Remember when a TSA slug in Florida got arrested for beating down a fellow TSA slug? 

Why?  They were trying out the full-body porn scanner on one another, and one guy's package was embarrassingly small.  The others teased him incessantly, leading to the subsequent parking lot beat-down.

Our idiotic, suicidal and apologetic government refuses to profile, or even deny citizenship to terrorists, so we all must now be treated as criminals and strip searched.  Welcome to progressive America!

This useless bureaucratic carbuncle known as TSA was the price George Bush had to pay to democrats in exchange for implementing real security measures like hunting terrorists down to their fetid hidey-holes, torturing them, and killing them.

Time to disburse the Thousands Standing Around
John Stossel relates a conversation he had with Israeli security consultant Rafi Sela.  Israel privatized airport security in 1995, and there has not been one hijacking.  Sela points out the inherent flaw in the TSA model:

"The problem in America is that from day one the US decided to hold the stick on both sides. Which means it's both the regulator and the operator, which is unheard of in [Israeli] security… [here it] is all done by private contractors.”

Get it?  Our government provides the "security" and also evaluates its compliance.  Wouldn't you love a gig like that?

According to a leaked 2004 TSA report obtained by USA Today, inspectors packed hidden bomb materials in everyday carry-ons to test security. Screeners at Los Angeles International Airport missed about 75% -- but San Francisco screeners, who work for a private company instead of the TSA, missed only 20%.

In their publicly available report, the TSA concluded that “privately screened airports have met the standard articulated in ATSA that contract screening operations perform at the same level or better than federally screened operations.”

Again, it’s because you can fire a bad contractor, but you can’t fire the government.

So a better model would be to privatize security operations and shrink TSA down to a small bureau of security professionals who set the standards contractors must follow and monitor and test them for compliance.

* - This is a repost from back in May.  I'm getting 200 hits per day on it (I think because of the picture) so I thought I'd "Front Page" it...

Links:
CNN - TSA Follies
Stossel - Privatize TSA

My Town: Liberals Hate Us

Liberals Hate Colorado Springs
I live in the beautiful city of Colorado Springs, home to five military installations, Focus on the Family and the lesser-known Cook Ministries.

For a religiousrightwing redoubt, we have a lot of diversity here as well, including liberal politicians, a famous liberal arts college, and the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission.  We even boast a thriving gay community that tends more towards quiet domestic partnerships than the bathhouse flamer lifestyle.


How we handled the homeless problem
Liberals screamed and tore their hair out over the callousness of the conservatives who advocated shutting down the homeless Obamavilles that had sprung up in the wooded areas of our fair city.  It had gotten out of hand, and it wasn't doing these people any favors to let them "camp" on city property.  The county followed suit with its own camping ban.

So, one year later, what is the result?

"We've reached out to over 600 homeless campers, all the people that were down there camping at that time, and we've managed to help 470 some. About 71 percent of the population," Holmes said.

He said some of the campers were placed on buses to reunite with family, some joined substance abuse programs, and some are back in the workforce. (Colorado Connection)

See? Nothing a firm hand up and a little tough love can't remedy.

How we handled the tax problem
The Denver hopium smokers got all giddy back in January when the city of Colorado Springs announced severe cutbacks due to us greedy tea party extremists voting down all proposed tax hikes.

Left Blogistan is still abuzz with excited tales of the decline and fall of the hated rightwing bastion known as Colorado Springs.  Dark, potholed streets, houses burning out of control, rampant crime...  In the fevered imaginings of the left.  They spin these fantasies and pass them along, never realizing they are actually describing failed liberal projects like Detroit or Chicago.




Every breathless blog posting can be traced back to a piece of liberal conjecture disguised as news in the Denver Post:

COLORADO SPRINGS — This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled. (Denver Post)

This is my favorite part:

"If a playground burns down, I can't replace it," Schroeder said. Park fans' only hope is the possibility of a new ballot tax pledged to recreation spending that might win over skeptical voters.

I ran into a bovine herd of naive lefties in Left Blogistan who bought all this propaganda hook, line and sinker.  They tried to tell me I was wrong, about my own city!  I live here, they don't.  They finally shut up, a rare opportunity where a lib realizes they are wrong and the propaganda may be mistaken.  We had a good back and forth, here is a summary of what I told them.

The dire liberal predictions have not come true

Playgrounds and parks are green, and not one of them has burned down, believe it or not. Citizens pack out their trash and pitch in to clean up neighborhoods and common areas, which is to be expected from responsible conservatives.

Some street lights are dark, but can be turned on if you pay for it. A few weeds are growing up here and there, but we're forcing our politicians to live within our means!

Finally, contrary to what the liberal morons in the media tell you, Colorado Springs is very diverse. We've got head shops ("medical" marijuana dispensaries) all over town and we are home to Colorado College, a venerable bastion of unbridled liberalism.

We also have a thriving gay community. Gay couples actually shop, hike and generally enjoy themselves in broad daylight right here in in James Dobson's Godly kingdom! And there has never been any intolerant attacks!

This should teach you a lesson to not to believe the bullshit spewed from people with an agenda. 

Believe it or not, that shut the lefties up. 

I wrote about our tax beatdown last November. The city officials who had been threatening us with certain calamity ended up finding money to keep cops and firemen on the payroll.  Imagine that...  I guess nobody notified Left Blogistan.

Read it here: Western Hero - It Takes a Village of Angry Taxpayers

Protesting the Protesters

Instead of simply reporting on conservative and libertarian uprisings, the press decided to take up the cause of the ancien regime and do combat with the tea partiers. 


“Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic” --Fyodor Dostoyevsky









Reductio Ad Absurdum: Who gets there faster, Big Government Advocates or Tea Partiers?

The press is good at taking something an ordinary American says at a Tea party and deconstructing it down to absurdity, often going after syntactical errors or poorly constructed arguments. "See?" They say, "These people don't even know what they're protesting!"

The cognoscenti say "This lady receives social security and medicare and she's protesting big government! What a hypocrite!" This statement is itself illogical and dishonest: Protesting a system you're coerced to participate in is hardly hypocritical, but anyway...

They find one little loose thread and pick at it until they unravel the fabric.

This is a valid line of attack in logical argumentation, but these reporters are still being dishonest. Their role is not to debate newsmakers, but report the news. They expose a logical error or mangled syntax to discredit the messenger and, by implication, her message. All good and fair, but this obscures the larger truth, and I think they do it on purpose.

“Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.”
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The Meta-Narrative: You may have discredited this particular example, but the larger truth still remains

The left makes the same cry I am now making when they find recourse in the "meta-narrative." e.g. "Maybe the latest racist attack was a hoax, but racism still exists!"

Or, "OK, so that family Newsweek claimed was driven to bankruptcy by health care costs is not really broke. They own expensive real estate. But medical costs really do bankrupt some families!"

The press eats this propaganda up and spreads it like manure, where a thousand liberal fantasies bloom. No argumentation, no logic examinations, just channeling the emotion.

Things like racism and health care problems are real, but hard to put a quantitative finger on. Bad things happen.  As Dr Sowell points out, in a nation of over a quarter billion people, improbable events are commonplace. The press can be relied upon to point out every obscure event that buttresses the liberal cry that, "something must be done!"

“Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel”
-- Ivan Turgenev

We don't need no stinking meta-truths!
The present conservative and libertarian concerns are valid: We really are in debt, our government really has invaded every corner of our lives, and people really don't trust institutions anymore. These are measurable, objective facts. We don't need meta-truths: The real thing is on display!

* Unemployment at 10%, while the "stimulus" removes capital from the marketplace, leaving businesses unable to expand and hire more people.

* Government taking our money from the US Treasury and giving it to politically-connected banks, businesses and unions

* Government apparatchiks telling us how to sneeze, how to wash our hands, and a gaggle of nattering nannies scolding us about nutrition, compassion and racism

* A government insinuating itself deeper and deeper into our lives with endless tangles of red tape

* Government spending money it does not have, and encouraging citizens to do the same, putting us in hock to China, devaluing the dollar and eroding our savings

Politicians, liberal agitators, and their enablers in the press launch a farrago of rhetoric and argumentation to defend it all, but common sense people who know nothing of formal logic and debate do know that our nation cannot survive if this continues.

The jig is up. 


Obama picture source:   https://billstclair.com/

The First Cut is the Deepest

Ezra Klein criticizes the GOP's Pledge for America as being short on details, and it is.  But it's meant to be a manifesto more than a line-by-line laundry list.  Also, with the Democrats floundering, the GOP sure doesn't want to give them anything to grab on to.

Detroit News concludes that, yeah, there's nothing new in their message:  It's a much-needed back to basics.

"Oh yeah?  Wacha gonna cut?  Huh?  Huh?"  Shout the screaming lefties.  Obama, like all good liberal demagogues, slyly suggests that they want to kill old people and starve children.  It's lefty propaganda, but there is a grain of truth.

No Easy Cuts 
There are no easy cuts, so those of us who want to shrink government need to do some thinking.

The Left Way:  The Center for American Progress, a progressive organization, has taken their stab at balancing the budget.  The document, A Thousand Cuts, seems designed more to scare people off of the small government path, but at least it is a serious and sincere effort.

The Right Way:  Paul Ryans Roadmap.   It's a thing of beauty, and it's been scored by the CBO.  As a bonus, the website is attractive and easy to navigate.  Most important, the roadmap is not the end of the discussion.  Ryan himself portrays it as a starting point for a national dialogue, and Americans are ready for such as discussion.   

You can also go read the Pledge to America...  If you can find it.  Google it and every hare-brained commentary on it will show up ahead of the GOP's official site.  Then, when you finally find it, it's a damned pdf document that's 10 bajillion gigabytes and takes forever to load.   The Republicans, God bless 'em, are so inept and rolling stuff like this out.

How Government Grows

Insanity:  Big government uses a failure of big government to justify more big government.  

Steve Chapman observes that the FDA is using the salmonella outbreak to plead for more power (and taxpayer money).

We should have seen that coming. In the private sector, entities that fall short of doing their jobs find themselves forced to shrink. In the public sector, the opposite is typically true. Failure is an option, and often a beneficial one.


The Federal Reserve Board and Treasury facilitated the 2008 financial crisis? Then obviously we have no choice but to give them even more responsibility. The Securities and Exchange Commission let Bernie Madoff rob investors? A bigger SEC will be a smarter SEC.

Poisoned Eggs in Left Blogistan

It's not so much the taxes we pay that irks us.  It's that we get incompetence, failure and malfeasance in return.  A rightwing insurrectionist from Denver named manapp99 sums it up nicely.  Enjoy!


No one minds paying taxes for services. What bugs the shit out of most sane people is paying for services and not getting them.

We paid for food inspections and still got poisoned eggs, beef, spinach etc.

We paid for oil rig inspections and still got a huge blow out in the gulf.

We paid for the SEC and still got Bernie Maddoff even though they were warned about him in the 90's.

We paid for border patrol and still got 20 million illegals.

We paid for public schools and still have an increasingly poor educational delivery system.

We paid for our congress men and women to regulate the investment houses and still got the global meltdown.

We pay for fair laws and adequate police protection and still get cops beating up citizens such as we had here in Denver recently.

We also get massive government failures that have no end in sight like the war on drugs.

We pay for thousands of overlapping intelligence agencies and still get failures on intel in Iraq and Iran.

We pay for a fair legal system and still massive unfairness such as the powder to crack cocaine laws.

We have paid millions of government workers to fail at their jobs and can't even fire them due to the public service unions.

With all the failures of government to do the jobs they were paid for it is reasonable to expect that if we paid for government health care we would get similar results.

Imagine paying government to have your tonsils out and getting your testes removed.

It is not that far fetched for a government worker to mistake the two. After all they both begin with T and there are generally two of them. A small mistake in filling out form 1524 instead of form 1542 and your a eunuch. And guess what? You can't sue because the government exempts itself from most law suits.

When a cop makes a mistake and storms the wrong home (as happened in Denver a few years back) and shoots an innocent man, the government just takes some more of our, their customers, money and pays off the grieving family. No one in the government gets charged with murder, no one goes to jail and the innocent taxpayer (customer) gets punished monetarily.

A Threat to One Right is a Threat to All Rights

I got into an argument with an old friend and fellow lifetime NRA member over that organization’s support for campaign finance legislation that restricts free speech in exchange for an exemption for itself.

Good on the NRA for defending our Second Amendment rights. Bad on them for squashing the First Amendment in the process.

Things really got heated when I excoriated our NRA for toying with the idea of endorsing Harry Reid. Reid Voted for the Brady Bill, Erik Erikson reminds us.  Politico explains how politics in America makes such bedfellows possible:

First, Reid has a fairly favorable lifetime rating from the NRA. And then there’s the $61 million for the Clark County Shooting Park, earmarked by Reid, which led Wayne LaPierre, chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association, to call Reid “a true champion” of the Second Amendment at an event commemorating the opening of the 2,900-acre park in April. (Politico)

So Reid bribed the NRA with $61 million of taxpayer money, and they in return call this petty statist "a true champion." Disgusting.

Legislation as a Money-Making Scam
It is bad enough that congress exempts itself from its own laws. It is a truly despotic government that enacts laws threatening our individual liberties in order to sell those rights back to the highest bidder. This is extortion--a sickening theft of our birthright.

Progressive America, Negotiated Rights
Natural Rights are down the toilet. The Kagan hearings confirmed that. Congress can make us eat our veggies and progressive jurists like Kagan will stand aside because they see nothing wrong. And she will be confirmed in a cakewalk.

If government can make a free man play “mother may I” in order to keep firearms, it can also make a free woman ask permission to exercise her God-given right to free speech. Once we open negotiations on our fundamental rights, we’ve already lost. Government ceases to be the protector of our rights and now becomes the gatekeeper, telling us which rights we may exercise, when and where.

Welcome to Progressive America...

Governments Make More on Oil than "Big Oil" Does

The gulf is an environmental disaster and gas prices are going up.  Big Oil is girding its loins against Obama's Plouffian onslaught



As the president dodges and lectures tonight, here's a little perspective on Big Oil's "obscene" profits. 


$  Profit from a gallon of gas:  Around 10%
$ Average tax on a gallon of gas:  15% - 20%

Profit is shared between the oil company, transporter, and gas station.  The gas station gets almost no profit at all, which is why they have all morphed into convenience stores.  Free market innovation!  Tax is federal, state and local.

The Tax Foundation points out that Big Oil is paying record taxes as well. What the demagogic politicians don't tell us is that Uncle Sam's cut of those record profits is almost 50%! Add in all taxes big oil paid to all governments, and one sees that governments are making more money off of petroleum than the oil companies are!

Here's the chart from the tax foundation. My HTML skills aren't the best, so if the chart is unreadable just go to the tax foundation's web site:

"Big Oil" made $20 Billion in net profits in the first quarter of 2008. "Big Government" made $47 Billion. Who's calling who obscene?

* I originally wrote this during the gas price spike of '08, but the basic facts have not changed.

Plug The Damn Hole!

It's The Big Government, Stupid!

The Crash of 1929 kicked off the great depression and moved the country left.  Now, there appears to be a movement of similar magnitude to the right.  But is it political?

It may be that the movement being seen now is less an ideological statement by Americans and more a reflection of a broad loss of confidence in big institutions, including the government.

To the extent that Democrats are the ones who have offered up government programs as the solution to the nation's recession-induced woes, then they are the ones being hurt more now, because the public simply lacks any deep faith in government's competence to solve those problems.  (Gerald Seib - WSJ)

It's The Big Government, Stupid!

Excellent summation.  Many of us are not so much anti-Democrat as anti-big government, which explains why we aren't letting big government Republicans off the hook either.

FEMA formaldahyde trailers, Wall Street Watchdogs turned porn-surfing horndogs, and now Obama's staged outrage, fecklessly commanding his hapless staff to "Plug the damn hole!"

America, We Have a Problem

It gets worse...

WASHINGTON – Staff members at an agency that oversees offshore drilling accepted tickets to sports events, lunches and other gifts from oil and gas companies and used government computers to view pornography, according to an Interior Department report alleging a culture of cronyism between regulators and the industry. (Yahoo News)  See also WSJ - Regulators Accept Gifts

Yeah, some of it happened on Bush's watch.  So what!  It's the Big Demican-Republicrat, Statist Government, Stupid!  They had no plans to deal with such a catastrophe, no prepositioned assets...  They were literally partying and playing with themselves on our dime, and now this happens.

Plug The Damn Hole?

Yeah!  Plug the damn hole in the US Treasury!

Plug the damn hole that the toxic political lies and BS are spewing out of!

Plug your damn hole and do your damn job!

Obama's Big Government Speech

President Barack Obama is no constitutional scholar


He has written no books or papers on the subject and has done no research. He lectured at a College in Chicago for a few years, and now he lectures all of us. Anyone who pays attention to this man's preachable moments will find herself dumber as a result.

President Barack Obama took aim Saturday at the angry rhetoric of those who denigrate government as "inherently bad" and said their off-base line of attack ignores the fact that in a democracy, "government is us."

WRONG! We are a Republic, not a mob-rules, everybody belongs to the state social democracy. The government is definitely not "us!" The government is a body established by the people via a constitution to manage certain public functions. The progressives have hijacked that simple concept and stretched it all out of shape. Progressive President Barack Obama is a product of their 100 year Long March.

Obama used his commencement speech at the University of Michigan to respond to foes who portray government as oppressive and tyrannical - and to warn that overheated language can signal extremists that "perhaps violence is ... justifiable."

The Road to Tyranny is Paved with Good Intentions
If extremists are out there who think that "perhaps violence is justifiable," then the government is justified in taking a "strong hand" to "protect the people," right? See where this leads?

Calling tea partiers dangerous and racist is the pretext to shutting them down, or at least placing them beyond the pale of civil society. That is the agenda, paint them all (half the country!) as fringe kooks.  Their crazy, dangerous ideas about some archaic document are just not worth listening to.

"But what troubles me is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad," said Obama...

Who the hell says that? Other than a flock of Hooteries in a house trailer? This is a classic straw man argument.

Freddie's Fat Fannie Crushed The Economy

The speech goes downhill from there as he uses public roads and our military to justify big government (why didn't he bring up health care?), while ignoring the bureaucratic blubber that clogs our nation's arteries.

He then rolls out that ridiculous liberal idea that "too little government" caused the financial meltdown, when Freddie's fat Fannie was plopped right down in the middle of it all. Just ask Democrats Barny Frank and Chris Dodd, who received hundreds of thousands from the big bankers...

Party of The State vs. Party of The People

Folks, big government is all they got. Everything they offer requires them to dip into our pockets so they can provide it.  Big Government is the clanking, crushing, belching machine the progressives have hijacked to ram their horrible, collectivist, anti-American ideology down our throats (or up some other orifice.) 

If big government is discredited (and it already is in the minds of many), the progressive movement, and the craven Democratic party, is through. They have no other means to reshape society in their own twisted image.

We have the founders, and their small government, personal responsibility agenda.  We have a vision, a vision of basic human liberties as espoused by the founders.  These freedoms cost nothing, and allow everyone to be free to succeed or fail on their own merits.  Government facilitates that by safeguarding our liberties and protecting our nation, and yes, smacking big corporations when they break the law. 

We Have the Advantage
Having the authors of the constitution on our side is a great advantage.  Here's another: The flaming red fact that we are broke. And the Big Progressive Machine grinds to a halt without money.  Freedom and liberty cost nothing, and America has proven time and again that a free people in a free market generate wealth and drive an economy that produces real jobs so people don't have to go begging to Big Daddy Government.

* - H/T to Political Melange, who has a great analysis of this speech
* - All quotes from: AP My Way - Obama Takes Aim

Freedom

You hear that word bandied about a lot lately, from left and right, and from the founding fathers to Mel Gibson in his final scene in Braveheart... FREEEEDOMMMM!

... We want our Big Macs and Cardiac Catheterization too...

Negative Liberty

Many "freedoms" are documented in our Constitution, specifically in The Bill of Rights: freedom of religion,speech, the press, assembly, petition, the right to bear arms, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. These "freedoms" are clearly documented limitations on the ability of government to interfere with the individual; they are political freedoms protecting the sovereignty of the individual from coercion by the state. The freedoms in the Constitution are termed "negative liberties" or the freedom from restraint. These freedoms are somewhat unique in that once they are possessed they are generally retained at little to no cost. Defending them may have significant cost, but the freedom of religion in and of itself costs us practically nothing.

Po$itive Liberty

Lately on the left you have been hearing a lot about freedom and rights; freedom from poverty (housing, clothing, transportation, possessions?), freedom from illness (right to medical care), freedom from starvation (right to food). These freedoms are termed "positive liberties", and generally involve power. The power to achieve self-realization or the ability to fulfill one's potential. Positive liberty is often described as the ability or entitlement to achieve one's ends, while negative liberty is described as the freedom from being forcibly prevented from achieving those ends. Positive liberties generally come at a significant monetary cost to society at large, in that the group must pay for the individual.

The distinction between positive and negative liberty is perhaps the clearest distinction between social liberals on the left and classical liberals on the right. The minimalist government established by our founding fathers was one of negative liberty. Government was seen as a necessary evil and established within a framework of checks and balances designed to enforce its restrictions and limit its actions. The governments of FDR's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society were ones of positive liberty, a paternalistic government whose main objective was in taking care of its members.

The Freedom to Fail

As stated previously, negative liberties come with little monetary cost, they do however have a cost. The primary cost of negative liberty is tightly bound to the freedom it provides, and that is the freedom to fail. Negative liberty is a liberty of non-interference, you can, to steal from the Army, "Be all that you can be", but the flip side of that coin is you can be an abject and miserable failure as well. You can choose not to purchase medical insurance, you can take that money and invest it or spend it, but if you contract cancer or heart disease you will suffer the consequences of your freedom of action. If you used the money to buy a boat, or frittered it away on entertainment, you are going to die. If you had to spend it on food, that is also part of the consequences of the freedom to fail.

We seem to have become a very, very risk averse nation... or more precisely, consequence averse. We want the freedom to do whatever we want, but we want the safety net that prevents us from dying of AIDS in a culvert due to the choices that we have made; we want our Big Macs and our cardiac catheterization too. We also tend not to want to sacrifice the luxury SUV in order to pay for the medical insurance of the seven kids we've had.

What are you willing to pay?

We seem to be trending more and more towards positive liberties, but the price of positive liberty is our negative liberties, the freedom of interference in our lives by the state. Isaiah Berlin noted in "Two Concepts of Liberty" that the danger of the pursuit of positive liberty was the danger that a paternalistic state can force upon its people a certain way of life, because the state deems that way to be the rationale course of action and is what the people should desire, whether they desire it or not.

There is a lot of paternalistic state being bandied about lately, from the government mandating that you purchase health insurance to the government proposing to regulate the amount of salt that is allowed to be in your food. Is it that far a stretch to the government regulating the number of calories allowed to be in your meal? What with the "nationwide obesity epidemic"? Each positive liberty comes at the cost of the erosion of our negative liberties, comes with the cost of more and more government interference in every aspect of our lives.

Grow Up!

Paternalism is hard to argue against, each paternalistic action in and of itself is predominately good, is made with ostensibly the best of intentions. Your parents after all were, or should have been, paternalistic: "Don't touch that, it's hot", "don't eat all those jellybeans, you'll get sick", "don't stay out past ten, you won't be able to get up for school in the morning". Unless you are a sociopath you are socially, culturally, and biologically conditioned to be paternalistic. The problem is we are also conditioned to resist that paternalism at a certain point, we grow up, we rebel against mommy and daddy and their rules, move out, and make our own way in the world.

So you need to think, and ask yourself, what kind of parents do you want? Do you want parents that respect your growth and maturation, that give you the freedom to be yourself, that give you the freedom to make bad choices, fail, and learn from them? Or do you want mommy telling you to put your coat on when you go outside when you are 42? Or telling you not to put so much salt on your food at your 20th wedding anniversary?

What kind of government do you really want? Think about it!

The Sons of Liberty

As long as we are resurrecting flags of the Revolutionary War such as the Gadsen (Don't Tread On Me) Flag, the flag pictured above is the flag of "The Sons of Liberty" also known as the rebellious stripes flag and is believed to have been created by Samuel Adams in 1767 for the Stamp Act Rebellion. It is considered by some to be the first flag of the American Revolution.

~Finntann~

Of Course Government is Broken

The image of the benevolent politician working tirelessly for the public good still makes some of us feel all warm inside, like when we think of Santa Clause or our childhood days.

But like those warm conjurings, it is at best a distant memory or at worse a complete fantasy that never was.  Mr. Smith has left the building.

D. W. MacKenzie has brilliantly summed up my thoughts on politics and government

American politics is not broken: it is working in the dysfunctional way that it should be working, given its unwieldy size and scope.

What may be breaking are naïve idealistic beliefs that politicians can use a large and intrusive government to serve "the people." And the demise of such beliefs would be a good thing.

The Solution?  A Strictly Limited Constitutional Government

We certainly should not give bureaucrats power over healthcare — or any other commercial industry for that matter.

There is, however, a third option. Strictly limited constitutional government is relatively immune to both special interests and ideologues. Constitutional government limited to providing internal and external security can be evaluated by objective criteria.[4]

A return to limited government would, of course, mean much greater reliance on private enterprise and unhampered markets. The record of private institutions is, when carefully examined, strong.[5]  Source:  (Mises-MacKenzie)

Federal Failure

It's The Education, Stupid!

Evan Thomas, in an otherwise useless Newsweek article, observes:

Grade inflation is so out of control in the nation's high schools that 43 percent of college-bound seniors taking the SATs have A averages—even though SAT scores have remained flat or drifted slowly downward for years.

The Federal Government Killed our Education System

Decline in public education can be traced back to the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a 60's version of No Child Left Behind. Indeed a straight line to hell can be drawn from that date, through the 1979 establishment of the Education Department, to where we are now.

The deeper the federal government and the teachers unions get into education, the dumber our students become and the more it costs us. This should provide a lesson for those who want more government involvement in healthcare.

Over 200 years ago, the nation's Founders understood that federal intervention into state, local, and family concerns like education would be futile. They knew that the federal government would be too distant and unwieldy to solve problems in the nation's diverse cities, towns, and hamlets.

It's a major reason why the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution declares that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people," and why the Constitution makes no mention of education at all. (CATO - Neal McCluskey)

Diversity Killed the Health Care Bill

Why is the health care bill so contentious, with seemingly irreconcilable demands? Because we are a diverse collection of people. We were never meant to have a national politburo imposing one-size-fits-all, we-say-so regulations on us.

Each state should hammer out its own solutions based on the particular needs of its residents. I don't want a Vermont solution here in Colorado, and I'm sure Oregon doesn't want Texas telling it what to do.
It's time to let 50 experiments bloom, as the founders intended.

It's Official: Liberals are now Part of the Problem

CNN Poll:  Majority of Americans See Government as a Threat

Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government's become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.

Forty-four percent of those polled disagree. (CNN Poll)

Guess Who Made Up The 44% Who Love Big Government?
Remember when liberals protested government?  Now that they have infested academia, mass media, and ...  The Government!  They use these powerful soapboxes to harangue the proletariat and rally them to the cause of government.  The bigger and more oppressive the better.  

Here's the breakdown of the CNN poll by ideology:

* 63% of Independents see government as a threat

* 70% of Conservatives agree with that proposition

* A puny 37% of Democratic sheeple think the Federal Government is too big

Here's Why

Ross Kaminsky, American Spectator explains:

In the last few years, government employment -- and thus the taxes required to fund it -- has been growing while private businesses across the nation have had to cut back to survive. As THIS chart from Americans for Limited Government shows, since December 2007 the private sector has lost over 7 million jobs while government has added about 100,000 jobs.

By 2008, the federal worker was making double -- yes double -- the private sector worker.

Public Pension Plans (unlike our private sector 401Ks) are choking state and local governments:

"A $1 trillion gap… exists between the $3.35 trillion in pension, health care and other retirement benefits states have promised their current and retired workers as of fiscal year 2008 and the $2.35 trillion they have on hand to pay for them."

The unions which represent government workers, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), are accumulating power, money, and influence, especially over Democrats, and using these as a self-reinforcing mechanism to acquire more.

Follow The Money (From the Unions to the Democratic Coffers)

In 2008, unions contributed $74.5 million to political candidates, of which $68.2 million went to Democrats.  Since 1990, unions have contributed over $630 million to Democrats (more than 12 times their contributions to Republicans.)

The ever-pithy Michael Barone sums is up beautifully: 

"Public-sector unionism tends to be a self-perpetuating machine that extracts money from taxpayers and then puts it on a conveyor belt to the Democratic Party."

So government unions use their poorly-paid liberal confreres in the private sector as campaign shock troops to get Democrat elected.  Government workers get paid more, private sector workers get paid less, making them angrier, and the cycle repeats.  It will be interesting to see when these good-hearted unemployed liberals realize they're getting screwed.

It's a self-licking liberal ice cream cone, and we're footing the bill...