Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
San Fran Nan says insurance companies are “villains.” There’s also a bit of disconnect in her message. She says that support among the American public for “public option” is growing. She’s looking at different polls from everybody else. Or she may be lying. That’s actually more likely.
Dakota Voice on Cash for Clunkers.
BDs and Freedom-Haters reach a deal, paving the way for concrete legislation to be voted on in September.
Key bone thrown their way: There would still be a public option, but nobody would be forced to join. So you’d still have a government entity “competing” with private companies. Big thumbs-down from BN.
As RightPundits observes, it’s more crucial than ever to hammer the BDs while they’re home for recess so they’ll go back and tell San Fran Nan and Henry Waxman “I just can’t suport it. It would be political suicide.”
I guess you’ve noticed that lately I haven’t posted much beyond links to items about new developments on a number of fronts – health care, TCM’s exacerbation of the Skip Gates situation. It’s not for lack of such developments; they come down the pike hourly now. (A terror group based in North Carolina with one member still loose?)
What I’ve been looking at is the utter, grim predictability of our current juncture. I mean this on the level of TCM and the FHer-controlled Congress as currently composed, but also on a scale that involves looking back along a much longer timeline.
Where we find ourselves economically and politically in this country is the result of a gain in momentum much like that in the realm of nuclear proliferation. We can employ hindsight to spot precient portents in the designs of Iran and North Korea going back thirty years – really, more, in North Korea’s case. Likewise, we can see, upon examining what FDR was up to as far back as 1933, where that vector would lead without a sufficient check on its force. The signs became even more egregious in the mid-60s, with LBJ’s War on Poverty and Great Society measures. What keeps that from being more clear than it is as a harbinger of our present perilous state is the fact that LBJ at least still embodied the anti-Communism that tempered the domestically collectivist leanings of Truman and JFK. This, of course, made LBJ a square old warmonger in the minds of the radicals. Beginning in 1968, when LBJ bowed out of the scene and the rock-and-roll ethos thoroughly permeated all aspects of our culture, the radicals moved in to combine welfare-state collectivism with their own Aquarian peacenik notions of a world that could move beyond war. Between then and the 1972 election cycle, they went to law school and went to work for news media and generally came to “work within the system,” ala Saul Alinsky. Beginning that year, with the candidacy of George McGovern, the Democratic Party put forth radical, post-American candidates for President and seats on Capitol Hill pretty consistently. They ususally lost in presidential races, except in the cases of the victories of Carter and Clinton, when the GOP had committed some blunder that couldn’t help but drive the voting public away. The Democractic party became, as we here at BN emphasize every chance we get, the repository of freedom-hatred in the United States.
And, of course, in 2008, the FHers fielded their most radical slate to date, starting at the top with TCM. It was the perfect storm of political circumstances – a handsome, glib, fairly hip, fairly new candidate whose ethnic makeup providedthe ideal means for liberal Americans to assuage the racial guilt they had continued to impose on themselves decades after the civil rights movement had achieved victory. His attributes were so compelling that they easily put the kibbosh on any talk of his radical upbringing or radical associations since becoming an adult.
As many pundits have said – and you’re seeing more of this recently – he never overtly tried to conceal what he was about. He just knew that his confluence of qualities tailor-made for a celebrity-worshipping culture would relegate examination of his radicalism to the back burner.
And now the fruits of what we’ve chosen are upon us. A faux-stimulus bill that was really a porkfest, a budget that saddles the country with a debt level never seen, and government-owned car companies and banks.
Even if the rest of the agenda, which includes the real centerpieces of it all, cap-and-trade and socialist health care, never gets enacted, this nation is seriously damaged.
That’s the kicker, though. Cap-and-trade passed the House. It seems unlikely to pass the Senate, at least in Waxman-Markey form, but then again, the fact that hundreds of ostensibly sane grown-ups, elected by the ostensibly freedom-loving and well-informed public, have taken it as far as they have doesn’t speak well of the maturity level or the spiritual fortitude of our small-r republican form of self-government as we actually put it into practice. Freedom-Hater-style health care seems to be cracking up in the face of public opinion that gets more negative by the day, but let us not forget the determinatin of radicals to achieve their aims. Their means for doing so do not necessarily have to be Constitutional.
So we have a president without a partiotic bone in his body, whose vision has nothing to do with the United States of America as Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, or even Wilson, LBJ or Carter understood the concept. Our president and his ideological soulmates in leadership positions in Congress are deliberately wrecking the economy. They are so convinced of their Aquarian messianic powers that they won’t and can’t behave the way normal human beings who love freedom, dignity, common sense and civilization would when dealing with the likes of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, al-Qaeda, Hamas and Hizbollah.
So I’ve been marinating in my alarm and disgust, and trying to act upon my inspiriations to be a force for the opposite of what’s prevailing in the society in which I live. I write this blog. I hopefully make music that ennobles those who listen to it. In my personal life, I strive to be a good husband, friend, citizen of my community and seeker after God, doing what I can to imbue my household with a sense of fun, safety and an atmosphere where virtues such as loyalty, integrity and commitment to clarity are upheld.
I’d like to see more signs than I do that we’re going to squeak by without major discomfort. I mean major, of the kind that Cubans experience daily. We’ve had way too many brushes with the unthinkable lately for me to sanguinely assume that to be the case.
I think what it boils down to is a race between the American people getting a clue – which is happening, much to my delight and relief – and the ability of our Freedom-Hating overlords to pull any more fast ones over on us.
Rancor and bitterness causes latest FHer attempt to ram through a socialist-healthcare vote to break down in the House. Blue Dogs claiming they’ve been lied to by their party’s leadership.
Cool question to ponder: can any of them be peeled away?
Patterico’s Pontifications has a well-rounded take on TCM’s press conference.
I haven’t yet mentioned, or posted a link to the video of, Black Chamber of Commerce head Harry Alford’s beautiful and glorious smackdown of California Freedom-Hater Barbara Boxer at that Senate energy hearing the other day. I would be remiss not to do so, so here it is.
Overall, he’s 10th of 12th since this kind of polling began in the 1940s.
Fail, Barry, fail!
TCM has held up Rochester, Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic as a model of great health-care provision. The official Mayo response to his socialist vision, though, declares it a non-starter. The situation is infused with that don’t-be-putting-words-in-our-mouths vibe that characterized the situation in Peoria a while back when TCM tried to say Caterpillar would start rehiring soon – only to be firmly disputed by Cat’s CEO.
There’s this weird disconnect between TCM’s claim that the American people want socialist health care signed into law before the August recess and the poll numbers cited in the post below. It’s more accurate to say that the American people are getting wise to his regime’s Stalinist designs.
Premiums will be cheaper through the government, but that will be meaningless, too, since you’ll make it up in taxes.
One beautiful and glorious aspect of the current moment in this unfolding: a significant erosion in TCM’s approval numbers on this and various other policies.
Sink, Barry, sink!
The Oscar Arias-mediated attempt – by somebody or another – to get Honduras to go mushy on its own constitution has broken down. Only term in this BBC report I would take issue with is “crisis.” This isn’t a crisis. The Supreme Court and the Army tossed Zelaya out for illegally trying to extend his presidency. Now things are back to normal and the OAS, the UN and TCM all need to shut up about it.
Can you imagine the gall of our State Department, calling Ambassador Oren in to demand something like that?
You may have heard by now about the Congressional Budget Office’s assessment that FHer-style health-care reform can never be affordable.
It’s now part of the public record and disseminated through out the media, new and “mainstream,” but the zeal of the commandantes to make it law doesn’t seem diminished in the slightest. The Blue Dogs say they’ll vote against it, but a.) with a 40-seat FHer majority in the House, they are not crucial to passage anyway, and b.) some will undoubtedly fold under the icy glare of San Fran Nan. Let us not forget that cap-and-trade narrowly passed in this body recently.
In the meantime, you’ll find this busting of health-care myths at Stumbling On Truth edifying.
I may have some observations and reflections to fold into various streams of thought as time goes on, but for now, I think Ed Driscoll at Pajamas Media, and the various people he quotes, sums up my initial response.
. . . of the Israeli variety, in the Suez Canal. Looks like Iran’s nuke program may experience a setback soon.
