09.30.08
Posted in Culture war heroes, Ideology, Pakistan, Politics at 8:41 pm by Administrator
More than one person has accused my characterization of Democrats as Freedom-Haters as being over the top and unproductive. It’s cost me some BN readers and I think even a friendship or two.
Because being liked is rather important to me, I’ve frequently examined my employment of this term, asking myself, “Oh, Jeez, have I burned some bridges I’m going to regret?” I’ve looked back over the last seventy years of American history, made a point of seeing what FDR and Truman and JFK did right, reminded myself that the party of Jefferson has had in its ranks admirable people of principle – Scoop Jackson, Zell Miller, Joe Lieberman – figures who, however misguided on economic policy, understood what American exceptionalism was all about, as well as the spiritual nature of the foundation of the American experiment. In short, I’ve wanted to cling to some shred of possibility that the modern Democratic party was really just one of the two main American political organizations, the one whose overall orientation I agreed with less of the time than that of the other, but which was nevertheless operating out of good faith. I wanted to see it as still grown-up, embracing trustworthiness, sanity, bedrock love for America and freedom. I wanted it to be a legitimate force in modern society.
This year, more than the last twenty-five, has absolutely squelched the last ounce of hope against hope within me. There is no other conclusion but that the modern Democratic party is indeed the repository of Freedom-Hatred.
When this party can come up with a piece of social engineering like the Community Reinvestment Act (instituted under the Jew-hating utter failure Jimmy Carter) and turn over its implementation to a gang of thugs and intimidation artists like ACORN, with its bank fairs and voeter-registration fraud, and say, as Barney Frank and Maxine Waters did four years ago that they saw no problems with the viability of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and then have the nerve, when the whole thing leads to a financial crisis like our present one, to try and place the blame on “right-wing ideology” and an “unsupervised” free market, we are witnessing a chilling level of deception indeed.
When the monolithically Democrat-voting MSM does nothing to put together the whole picture conveyed by Barack Obama’s trail of thuggery – the attempt to have Missouri law-enforcement silence free speech, the phone-bank flooding of the Chicago radio station on which Stanley Kurtz and David Freddoso appeared as guests, clear back to his first run for the Illinois State Senate in 1996, when he directed his volunteers to discredit the legality of incumbent Alice Palmer’s nominating petitions, forcing her off the ballot – the result is that this affable and good-looking Stalinist is positioned with a five-point lead in the race for U.S. president five weeks from election day.
When the Speaker of the House goes to Syria to undermine America’s objectives in the mideast, when the Senate Majority Leader declares a war lost that the U.S. is now on the verge of winning and we are so deadened to evil that we will return them to their posts for another term, we have arrived at a foul scenario indeed.
Someone in the McCain campaign must address the moral level of what’s going on. We are not dealing with just another bunch of folks who see things a little differently.
At the very least, if McCain can’t find something to say about Obama’s Stalinism, the urgency of low taxes, dismantling Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and winning a decisive victory in the current world war, he needs to shut his stinking mouth about bipartisanship.
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09.28.08
Posted in Congress, Contact, North Korea at 6:10 pm by Administrator
Claudia Rosett in Forbes on how six-way-talk diplomacy with North Korea has brought us to the same damn juncture every earlier attempt at acting like we were dealing with reasonable, decent human beings did. The unique aspect of this time around is that rogue regimes with nuclear ambitions – and there’s one regime in particular that is very close to having nukes – have every reason to feel encouraged by the precedent set.
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Posted in Culture war heroes, Education, Ideology, Politics at 4:04 pm by Administrator
Barack Obama, Stalinist thug. Today, the state of Missouri, tomorrow the entire nation.
That is, unless we stop him with our voices and our votes.
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09.25.08
Posted in Auto industry, Culture, Free-market Economics, National Security, Radicalism in high places at 3:42 pm by Administrator
As of this writing, congressional leaders of both parties, both presidential candidates, and economic advisors are meeting in Washington to discuss the bailout plan W outlined in last night’s address to the nation.
The idea is that it will restore the financial system’s health quickly enough that the American taxpayer will realize a return on its outlay of $700 billion. Sounds good, but also quite iffy.
It doesn’t look like a purely free-market solution to this is in the offing, since this catastrophe has its roots in a fuzzy melding of the public and private sectors. That said, I hope and pray there will be a camp within the assemblage meeting with W that will press for the way forward that comes the very closest possible to such a plan.
As every grown-up knows, the other side of the freedom coin is responsibility. Underneath the layers of bundled mortgages and deals and cleverly wrought instruments for growing wealth and government guarantees against failure lie actual exchanges of money for for promises to pay it back at a given interest rate. Someone said, “Yes, I’ll loan you this amount of money on terms involving this amount of time for paying it back at this rate of return,” and someone else saying, “Okay, is this the dotted line where I sign?” If either of them thought it unlikely that he or his organization could make good on what they were freely obligating themselves to, they’re not particularly wise individuals, are they?
Now, compound that by all the subsequent operators who saw home prices rising and said, “Hey, man, even if a lot of these loans are risky, bundling them together in this favorable market is a cool way to make some cheddar!” We have to presume that the folks on this level understood the degree of risk in what they were doing as well. Don’t we?
It looks to me like our culture’s zeal for ever-more slickly designed gizmos, with ever-more bells and whistles – think iphones and Blackberries and voice-activated GPS devices – permeated the financial world. The main difference, it seems to me, is that microchips and plastic and steel and aluminum aren’t inherently risky substances. You combine them into this product or that, and you can rely on them to do their thing as what they are. Mortgages and other loans, in contrast, may, shall we say, decay over time. They may fall prey to slow payment or even default. This makes designing super-fancy financial products out of them kind of a shaky proposition.
So what I hope gets trumpeted loudly at the gathering in Washington today is this: Let’s determine to the best of our ability who is responsible for each of the various aspects of this mess and hold them accountable as much as possible and minimize the burden to the American taxpayer, who needs to see his or her overall burden reduced anyway, as much as possible and as soon as possible. Free people keeping their own hard-earned money is the real key to moving pst this perilous moment.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 3:15 pm by Administrator
Jerome Schmitt at The American Thinker has a great piece on MIT Meteorology Professor Richard S. Lindzen’s report “Cilmate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?” and Schmitt’s own experience with the relationship between the doling outof grant money and the necessity of coming to the “correct” conclusions about worldwide climate.
The upshot is that Al Gore and his minions, with degrees in areas like “government” rather than any weather-related science, have strong-armed their way into postions of arbitration, distorting the amassing of actual knowledge of how our atmosphere really works.
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09.24.08
Posted in North Korea at 2:38 pm by Administrator
The EU – The EU, mind you- says Iran is on the verge of upfitting a long-range missile with a nuclear warhead.
And, on the other side ofthe Asian land mass, North Korea is kicking out IAEA inspectors and restarting the Yongbyon plutonium facility.
Also, I just heard Jed Babbin on Greg Garrison’s radio show a little while ago saying that a reliable source has told him that there are a million jihadists training in the remote, mountainous semi-autonomous region of Pakistan.
As the W era comes to a close, I’m afraid I’m coming to the conclusion that it is basically the administration’s luck tht has kept its cluelessness from having worse consequences than it has had. We have patty-caked in Six-Way Talks, an Annapolis summit between Israel and those who wish to destroy it, and “regional-security” pow-wows in Baghdad with the apocalyptic mullahs’ representatives, and all we have to show for it is that what is going to happen hasn’t happened yet.
I understand that finance and energy are on the nation’s front burner right now, but the threat from our enemies hasn’t gone away. There’s not much road left for kicking this can. The situation of twenty years ago looks like a luxury from the present vantage point. Oh, to have all hose options again.
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09.20.08
Posted in Culture war heroes, Free-market Economics, Politics, War at 4:43 pm by Administrator
The first thing that stood out for me in Joe Biden’s comments about upper-income Americans getting a tax hike was, like it was for most people, his characterization of it being “patriotic.” As disingenuous Marxist double-speak goes, it wasn’t any too artful. One needn’t be a genius to see through it.
Since I first heard about it, though, another word from his remarks has been foddr for much of my pondering: “take.” He said “We’re going to take that money and put it in the pockets of the middle class.”
“Take.” If ever a word hammered home with zero uncertainty the coercive power of the state, that’s the one.
Rule of law is perhaps the aspect of our American experiment in liberty that requires the most intellectual refinement to discern clearly. Yes, we are ruled by laws, not the whims of individuals in particular positions, but by definition law is a construct backed by a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That’s why the West’s greatest thinkers on the subject have said that we mut be supremely careful what we etch into law regarding the dos and don’ts of human conduct. We must not take short-cuts in our consideration of what is just and proper and what maximizes liberty, dignity and individual sovereignty.
The best minds on the case have concluded that a major way in which liberty is maximized is letting people keep nearly all the money they earn or otherwise lawfully acquire. To receive money in exchange for one’s time / talent / skills and then use that money as one sees fit is at the core of putting an individual in charge of the making of choices and of the right to define well-being as one so chooses.
And, Joe, who is this “we?” I think we can strip away any grandiose notion of “the American people” and get to the essence of what he’s talking about when we consider this monopoly on power: he means the government.
Biden isn’t the first to use “take” in the context of people and their money this campaign season. Earlier this year, Hillary Clinton spoke of taking oil company “windfall” profits and establishing a government fund for atlernative-energy development.
The first step in a state moving toward totalitarianism, toward massive restructuring of society, is getting the public used to the idea that taking the most important of a person’s belongings – his capital – is legitimate when used to make circumstances more “equal” and “fair.”
I’m all the time coming ups with topics of speeches or debate remarks that McCain, Palin and GOP congressional candidates ought to use. A major examination of the implications of this word “take,” it seems to me would be particularly juicy and beneficial at this time.
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Posted in Congress, Middle East, North Korea at 4:17 pm by Administrator
Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post details what the uranium missing from Isfahan indicates about how far along Iran’s nuclear-bomb program is. It’s too late for ecoonomic pressure, of either the governmental-sanctions kind or the capital-markets-disinvestment kind, to work. Israel will have to bomb Natanz.
What this will do, says Glick, is buy the world a couple of years to get serious about the above measures, plus covert measures to undermine the mullahs’ regime.
Her column is one of those in which the last line is key to all that has come before. She says, “Too bad Israel doesn’t have a government.”
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09.18.08
Posted in Culture, Human freedom, Ideology, Politics, Radicalism in high places, War at 5:55 pm by Administrator
I think the appropriate way to regard the tofu-and-sprout-munching, peace-and-social-justice, agnostic, save-the-planet types – the ones who were the first on your street to get an Obama yard sign – is with pity. The deepest kind of pity, the pity that’s just a microinch removed from scorn and contempt, but does qualify as pity. For these people really swallow the lie. They’re awash in Kool-Aid. After all the evidence that their man is not only a fake, a Marxist and a liar but a thug, they still see him as the change-and-hope prophet he appeared to be last winter.
I’m not talking about the hate-crazed vanguard doing the flooding of radio station phone banks or hacking Sarah Palin’s e-mail account or cynically taking Rush Limbaugh quotes out of context for Spanish-language ads. I’m not talking about the economic charlatans in his camp – most notably his running mate, he of paying-higher-taxes-is-patriotic fame – or the 9/11-was-America’s-chickens-coming-home-to-roost crowd. I mean the nice folks down the block, the ones you see at the farmers market or the wine bar or your kids’ soccer matches. The ones who, gosh darn it, just want things to be fair and peaceful.
About all that can be done in these remaining forty-plus days is to whittle away at their numbers. As it becomes easier to expose the ugliness behind the big grin, the confident stride, the thoughtful tone of voice, those numbers can indeed be wuittled.
But remaining numbers there will be. The enemy in this war has been quite effective at convincing them to sip the Kool-Aid.
Yes, war. And what it is is the domestic front in the overall world war, the one that manifests itself in Iran’s uranium enrichment program, joint Venezuelan-Russian naval exercises, Russian invasion of Georgia, new and more powerful engines for North Korean long-range missiles, bombings in India, Iraq and Yemen. It’s a war in which we face an array of enemies who share a hatred of the goodness that lies at the heart of our greatness. We love freedom, we know it is a gift from almighty God, and we know it is the key to our prosperity and progress. And they hate us for it.
So let the minions of the Marxist From Chicago “get in [your] faces.” You’re prepared. Meanwhile, take every opportunity to compel the nice folks down the street to wake up. Feed them ideas. Lace your conversation with noble principles. A lot of them can be convinced to value their own freedom and prosperity, to see truth and smell falsehood. The rabid types are too far gone, but a lot of the nice folks down the street can be reached.
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09.17.08
Posted in North Korea at 5:12 pm by Administrator
Car bomb and gun battle at the gate of the US embassy in Yemen. Ten dead. Well, sixteen, if you count the slugs posing as humans who did the attacking.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 4:55 pm by Administrator
This Freedom-Hater no-drilling-where-the-oil-actually-is sham coming out of the House is going to get the Big V from W. Ace of Spades also includes the phone number of the Republican Senatorial Committee, so you can let the Gang of 20 know what you think of this outbreak of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome in that chamber.
Heck, here’s the phone number right here: (202) 675-6000.
I’m about to make my call. If these idiots succeed with their “compromise,” the GOP will have given away its absolutely best domestic issue in this campaign-season home stretch.
As we always say here at BN, “reaching across the aisle” is another way of saying “roll over on your back, expose your underbelly and invite the Freedom Haters to claw out your entrails.”
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09.15.08
Posted in indy colts at 9:58 pm by Administrator
And the Colts’ points all happened in the fourth quarter. That’s the way they’ve won the games that have been the most satisfying to watch since the Dungy - Manning era got underway.
Minnesota defensive end Jared Allen says he had great fun keeping Peyton off-stride, but also says, “I’ve got a ton of respect for him.”
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Posted in Blogosphere, Ideology at 5:25 pm by Administrator
The Marxist From Chicago actually tried to persuade Iraq’s government to hold off on planning US troop withdrawal until he became president.
We’ve seen this kind of seditious behavior before out of the FHers, but the Marxist From Chicago has now become the embodiment of it.
This needs to be trumpeted from every media outlet of every type in this nation.
If you were a soldier, a pilot or a Marine serving in Iraq next January and this sorry excuse for an American became president, could you really take him seriously as your Commander In Chief?
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Posted in Free-market Economics, Human freedom, Natural disasters, State of the union address at 5:14 pm by Administrator
In Colorado Springs this morning, The Barracuda serves notice that the mentality of “Wheee! Let’s take some more wacky risks with a bunch of anonymous people’s money! If it goes sour, Uncle Sam will bail us out!” will get nowhere come January.
This whole thing has at its core our age’s disconnect between choices and responsibility. Yes, risk is an honorable thing when the possible outcomes have been considered and weighed, but when the name of the game becomes over-the-top-clever repackaging of basic loan and investment transactions in forms ever more remote from the original exchanges of hard-earned money, it gets harder for those doing the repackaging to see how it can all come tumbling down. It reminds me of the line in the Mose Allison song “Middle Class White Boy”: “I just wanna do everything wrong and still pick up first prize.”
Once again, Madame Vice President tells the people in plain English what’s going on – and what she and President McCain won’t enable.
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09.08.08
Posted in indy colts at 5:35 pm by Administrator
Not the way to start a new season in a new stadium, but it’s not the end of the world. Bob Sanders, Peyton Manning, Coach Dungy et al all concurred that Chicago just outplayed them.
Makes me not feel so bad about my off-nights as a musician.
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