Speech Codes are Thought Codes

I caught a bit of Rush's Weekend in Review, and he was playing excerpts of some guy on msnbc, can't remember his name, who was breaking down the conservative counterattacks responding to the left's assaults on Herman Cain.

In a picture-perfect example of psychological projection, this young man with one name succinctly and brilliantly accused the right of employing the politically-correct left's favorite tactic:  Marginalize your ideological opponents, putting them beyond the societal pale, so you do not have to engage them in debate.

That's what a charge of racism is all about.  Rightwing tea partiers are all racists, so their ideas can all be ignored.  They're not worthy of a response.  It's a convenient dodge employed by the ideologically indoctrinated and the intellectually bereft.

"Those who control the language control the debate."

Imposing speech codes, placing certain words off-limits, and declaring as "hate speech" the legitimate criticism of certain protected groups and programs are common contemporary versions of the age-old tactics Orwell warned us of so many years ago. 

He expounded upon Oceania's peculiar language, Newspeak, in a short essay, The Principles of Newspeak:

The purpose of Newspeak was [...] to make all other modes of thought impossible.

This involved "stripping" words of "unorthodox meanings," "eliminating undesirable words" and reducing the vocabulary.

Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought.

In our own day, "racist" is a lazy epithet to be flung only at white conservatives.  Employ it in any other fashion not authorized by the cognoscenti, and the author will be met with either puzzlement or scorn.  You may as well call a cockroach a house slipper.  People of color (and the guilty white liberals who encourage such dangerous linguistic abuse) cannot.  Be.  Racist.  Period.

In the same vein, the word fascism cannot be used without causing an indignant uproar, even if the one using it can provide ten reasons and examples showing why the word is apt.  And God forbid you should criticize the collapsing panoply of federally-funded social services that have ushered us to the brink of bankruptcy.  That would make you a hater of minorities, the poor, and old people.

Thought corrupts language, language corrupts thought

In his essay, Politics and the English Language, Orwell observes...

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

[...]  But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.

Successful speech codes create a self-censoring feedback loop.  Taking away words is the removal of the building blocks of thought, impoverishing it, which in turn further impoverishes our speech, which further impoverishes our thoughts...

We can break this cycle of language abuse by refusing to obey speech codes and fighting their implementation at every level.  Laughing in the faces of hollow ideologues spouting the latest liberal meme won't stop it, but it will break the spell and attract critical attention that is the antidote to pseudo-intellectual claptrap designed to quash critical thought and free speech.

* - I found the "control the debate" quote in Google Books - Disciplining Dissent - Bruneau & Turk

Have Women Lost Their Civilizing Influence?

I stumbled across a provocative article entitled, Why Polygamy is Good for Women. I enjoy a good counterintuitive argument, so I dove in…

A lot of the knee-jerk reactions against polygyny are from people who can't add up. In a society with equal numbers of men and women, each man with four wives gives women the additional pick of three men […]

In the Sahel region of Africa, half of all women live in polygynous households. The other half have a good choice of men and a lot more bargaining power. (Tim Harford - Slate)

Could the same logic apply in the US? 

Large numbers of incarcerated males decrease the prospects for women. Add in that women as a cohort are more educated than men, and the disparity grows.

Most importantly, given shifting societal norms, does any of this even matter?

Women tightly guarding the gateway to carnal paradise has been the traditional means of putting respectable men in the marrying mood, but girl power has wrecked that.

In many circles, the girls compete with the guys to see who can be more promiscuous, to the detriment of themselves and their sisters, I think. It’s too easy to get free milk now, so only a fool buys the cow…

And with more and more girls willing to engage in public drunkenness, farting contests, and licentious vulgarities, crass behavior is no longer the exclusive domain of the male species.

Add to this the overall pornification of our society, and the female of the species has lost her mystique. Counterintuitively, psychologists believe this may explain why more men have retreated into internet porn and lap dances. Reality makes no sense so you gotta go hide somewhere, I guess.

What happens when your internal wiring is incompatible with the culture? 

I don’t know myself. I’ve been happily married for quite awhile, and God has blessed us with a pretty uncomplicated relationship. We simply and unselfishly try to make one another happy, and that’s important for a healthy marriage.

Driving home last week, I heard Dennis Prager discuss with callers what made their marriage a happy one. Almost every caller mentioned some variant of “doing something for or with my spouse that I really don’t want to do,” and much of it revolved around sex, with the man as the one wanting it when the wife was not particularly in the mood. It was a tie in with the question of why men cheat on their wives. 

Love as a Two-Sided Coin

Prager then presented a two-sided coin that sparked a lot of conversation:

For the women: Is it really so horrible to contribute 15 minutes to an activity that makes your spouse so happy and that may prevent him from sinning against you, your God, and your marriage?

For the Men: Is a few moments of adulterous pleasure really worth defiling your marriage, disrespecting your spouse, and offending your God?

Of course, the answer to both is, No. But we are irrational beings much of the time; and the whirling vortex of id, ego, emotions and sex leads to dark psychological chasms.

Let’s face it, were it not for sex, men would have no interest in women, and subsequently children. We men would abandon our towns and cities to roam the woods and mountains in armed bands, killing game, fighting, and brewing beer.

Idealizing women is not a condescension, and it is a shame that a small dedicated band of insurgents has succeeded in knocking themselves and their sisters from their pedestals.

Muslims Immigration: Even Open-Minded People Think it's a Bad Idea

This is a reprint from 2009.  I thought I'd run it since my last post on Islam in America got such a response.  As AOW concluded, immigration policy is something we can and must get control of.  Stop importing people who hate us and who have a history of spawning children who will grow up here and end up hating us... --Silverfiddle

** Unhinged DeviledEgg Rant Alert! ** 

If the thought of an "honor killing" on American soil doesn't disgust you and make you boil with patriotic rage, you're brain dead! 

I live in Europe, I've lived in North America, and I've lived in that armpit they call the Middle East. No contest which I think is better!

Close The Damned Gates!

Why the hell do Western nations continue to allow these troublemaking Muslims to immigrate? Look at a map.  Wherever there's trouble, angry turbaned men with beards are involved.

Our cultures are incompatible.  We enjoy pork bbq and beer, use toilet paper and refrain from female genital mutilation, for example.

Many Muslim immigrants refuse to assimilate, and the only way to have peace here in the West is to give in to their fleck spittled agitations at the expense of our cultural norms.  Not while I have breath in my body!  Better to close the gates!

ISLAM IS A RELIGION OF PEACE!!! DISAGREE AND I'LL KEEEEL YOU!!!

Unlike the DeviledEgg, foreign editor of The Australian Greg Sheridan is no xenophobe, but he declares, "Uncontrolled Muslim Influx a Threat to the West."

It is extremely difficult to talk honestly about Muslim immigration. All generalisations about it are subject to countless exceptions. Muslims are very different from each other.

Most are reasonably successful. But a much bigger minority end up with social, political, extremist or other problems resulting from a lack of integration than is the case with any other cohort of immigrants in Western societies. A lack of honest discussion about this results in bad policy.

He goes on to recommend a book by Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.

Jacob Laksin at City Journal recommends the book as well.

Polls show that some 70 percent of Britons believe that there are too many immigrants in their country. Majorities throughout Western Europe agree, and Muslim immigrants in particular are viewed with suspicion.

Europe is a Benignly Racist Continent
 
Despite the finger-wagging at America, many Europeans are fundamentally and unconsciously racist and insular. Here in Germany, people from the next village over are considered outsiders, fellow German speakers from Austria are treated as the enemy, and those who hail from farther afield have no hope of ever fitting in in the land of beer and bratwurst. 

Europeans are in a jam, trying to steer a course between the Charybdis of bigotry and the Scylla of cultural destruction. Worse, the entire continent is in denial. Muslims are to blame as well, especially when they display open contempt for their new home:

Yet the immigrants themselves are far from faultless. One of the immigration debate’s inconvenient truths is that Muslim immigrants have been so difficult to assimilate into European societies because they’re unwilling: many Muslims simply choose religious ties over national loyalties.

... 31 percent of British Muslims felt they had more in common with the people of Muslim nations than with their fellow Europeans.

I hope the US can learn the right lessons from Europe's immigration debacle. Reading Caldwell's book would be a good start, but cutting off all Muslim immigration is imperative.

I've got to stop now, that guy shouting from the tower is giving me a headache!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The DeviledEgg is prone to unhinged rants, childish outbursts, and fits of anger, but he's really a good egg once you get to know him. He is half German and half American and splits his time between the two countries. Western Hero is proud to add him to the team.

City Journal - Jacob Laksin
RCP - Greg Sheridan

Afghanistan is not Colombia

Neocons will happily watch others pay any price and bear any burden...

This article caught my eye…

Plan Afghanistan
Why the Colombia model -- even if it means drug war and armed rebellion -- is the best chance for U.S. success in Central Asia.

Strange though it may sound, success in Afghanistan would look a lot more like the success that has been achieved in Colombia over the last 10 years, rather than the success that we are hoping for in Iraq.  (FP – Plan Afghanistan)

The "Experts" are Wrong

Every now and then I stumble across “experts” discussing issues that I have unique insight into. This is one of them. I’ve deployed to Afghanistan and I’ve deployed to Colombia, so I know what I’m talking about here. To put it bluntly, Paul Wolfowitz and Michael O'Hanlon are full of shit and nobody in their right mind should listen to them.

Afghanistan is not Colombia, and what worked in Colombia will not work in Afghanistan, for a host of reasons.

The Colombian conflict, sparked by “El Bogotazo” back in 1948, eventually spawned the armed communist rebel organization known as FARC. Through all of the violence, Colombia has continued to be an intact country, and has a rich history of democratic republicanism going back to the early 1800’s.   Afghanistan has never been more than a loose confederation of heterogeneous peoples with little loyalty outside family and tribe.

Afghanistan’s many factions suffer from a paucity of shared institutions and values

Tribal rule and Sharia reign over this variegated patchwork of peoples. It is a Hobbesian nightmare of chaos and misery where life is nasty, brutish and short. In stark contrast, Colombia enjoys a tradition of western civilization, European jurisprudence and republican democracy that binds the country’s fairly homogenous population. The fact that Colombia has remained intact, and even thrived, as the FARC continues to melt deeper into the jungle, a whimpering shadow of its former self, makes these factors I mention self-evident.

Colombia has a serious government supported by patriotic citizens who are determined to defeat their common enemy

Indeed, with Colombia, we are aiding a central government fighting a rebel band that had lost the sympathy of the poor people they were supposedly fighting for. Even leftist sympathizers in other Latin American countries no longer give this ragtag band of kidnappers and drug dealers solidarity shout outs.

Unlike kleptocratic Afghanistan and its multifarious mistrustful factions, Colombia has enough honest politicians, judges, military and police willing to lay it on the line for the love of their nation, and the success they’ve enjoyed over the past 30 years in breaking the cartels and attriting FARC gives testament to that. Afghanistan is a sinkhole of corruption, with no one willing to give it up for a Greater Afghan Nation. Colombians do their own fighting; Afghan soldiers and policemen let us do their fighting for them, and shoot at us every chance they get.

Bogota is a peaceful city; Kabul is not… 

I could go on and on, but you must see my point by now. The Colombian people have a unity of purpose and a shared love of country and respect for her institutions that is non-existent in Afghanistan.  Colombians have tired of the violence; Afghans worship death and would happily let the blood orgy continue without end.

Add to this that our troops were able to partner with Colombian troops in a way that has been impossible to do with the Afghans. Colombian and American cultures are not really that far apart, especially when the Americans are Hispanic or understand Hispanic culture. At a remote outpost in rural Colombia, I saw a Colombian Army platoon and their Puerto Rican National Guard partners bid one another a tearful goodbye after having worked together for over four months on a radar project.

A “Plan Colombia” for Afghanistan will never work. It is naïve and foolish to think otherwise.  We should run, not walk, from this rancid and failed project known as Afghanistan.

Foreign Policy – Plan Afghanistan
AP – 13 Americans Killed in Taliban Bombing

OWS: “Unsafe and Unsanitary”

"Over the last week it was apparent that neither the demonstrators nor the city could maintain safe or sanitary conditions, or control the ongoing vandalism," Oakland Mayor Jean Quan said in a statement. (Alertnet)

It was bound to happen…

Fights Erupt Among OWS Protesters

Rapes and assaults among the squatting socialists have overtaken loud drumming and gender inequality as the primary concern at Occupy Wall Street. Solidarity for solidarity’s sake ain’t workin’ out so well.

Defecators, urinaters and masturbators shut down Occupy Madison…

A neighboring hotel's staff alleged voiced concerns about having to recently escort hotel employees to and from bus stops late at night due to inappropriate behavior, such as public masturbation, from street protesters. (Cardinal)

Hell’s Kitchen

Liberal propaganda outlets deny it, but the kitchen staff at the squalid Wall Street camp is fed up with the moochers. The NY Post has direct quotes from some of the “Hell’s Kitchen” workers:

“We need to limit the amount of food we’re putting out” to curb the influx of derelicts, said Rafael Moreno, a kitchen volunteer. A security volunteer added that the cooks felt “overworked and underappreciated.” (NY Post)

Welcome to the 53%, you drumming dummies!

These unwashed Marxists and academia agitators are learning what responsible people who live in the real world already know: Open the door to bums, deviants and freeloaders, and soon the responsible working people will tire of carrying everyone else. An old lady way back when called this phenomenon, Atlas Shrugging, I think…

When you hoist the freak flag, don’t be surprised when the freaks show up

They are also seeing the downside of fluffing your ranks with false solidarity. Letting in anyone and everyone has its disadvantages. We’re not all good people. There are murderers, rapists and generally bad people among us, and any group must police its own ranks if it wants to maintain its legitimacy and safety.

This is why the tea partiers have not joined the anti-capitalist unwashed rabble collectively known as OWA.  

Free market triumph

Happy All Saints Eve

How do you like your bank fees?  Hidden or clearly stated?

Congress passed a law to “protect consumers” by banning credit card companies and banks from charging merchants a fee for each transaction.

Banks complied, and merchants pocketed the difference, saving the consumer nothing.

Next, Bank of America did the honest thing and announced a flat $5 per month fee for cardholders to make up for the revenue congress took from them.

Result: Consumer is $5 per month poorer and store owners are marginally richer. Thank you Dick Durban and Congress!

Now comes Chase, Citigroup and others saying they will not charge cardholders a fee, giving consumers a clear choice. Unlike government action, the free marketplace gives consumers more choices, as merchants compete for our dollars.

Thanks to the free market, a customer can now choose to do business with a bank that explicitly charges her the fee, or she can go with the bank that hides if from her.

Daily News Corner

A Civil Religion

Sharia Law in America...  

Some want to ban it, but that would be unconstitutional.  Churches, sports leagues, and all manner of civil organizations are entitled to their bylaws so long as they do not run afoul of our constitution or our laws.  Individual practices may be found illegal, but the government cannot place a wholesale ban on a religion.

The problem, of course, is that vast numbers of Mohammedans now enjoying the ease and comfort of living in the modern western world insist upon dragging with them abhorrent cultural practices that violate our societal norms and our laws.   That is what we should adamantly oppose.

A Threat to One Religion is a Threat to All Religions

Those who would outlaw Islam (as if that were possible) must realize that a threat to one religion is a threat to all.  So the duty of a constitutional conservative or libertarian is to stand for the right of Muslims to practice their faith so long as it is done within the bounds of our constitution.

A Civil Religion

Our founding fathers consciously chose to put no religion above another, but to instead foster a civil religion, perhaps in the spirit Jean Jaques Rousseau.  I doubt he played much of a role in the philosophical development of the founders, but he expresses the non-sectarian zeitgeist of the age.

"Tolerance should be given to all religions that tolerate others, so long as their dogmas contain nothing contrary to the duties of citizenship."  -- Jean Jaques Rousseau

In his chapter on Civil Religion, Rousseau put all religions into one of three categories:

• "The true theism, what may be called natural divine right or law."  This is religion at its most elemental; man worshiping God without intervening pastors, altars and dogmas.  It is the God upon which our country was founded.
• State Religions, including theocracies. Think the Pantheons of Rome, Greece, Iran, and the ancient Israelites.
• Religions which conflict with the state. He placed Roman Catholicism in this category. He described such religions as one "which gives men two codes of legislation, two rulers, and two countries, renders them subject to contradictory duties, and makes it impossible for them to be faithful both to religion and to citizenship."

He praised the adherents of "Mahomet" for having crafted a religion in their own lands of the second category, where there is no contradiction between political and religious morality.  How things have changed since 1762!  Muslims have burst the bounds of their own homogeneous societies and have now displaced Catholics as the disturbing influence pitting the pious ululating hordes against the western states that invited them in. 

The philosopher also recognizes the salutary effects of personal morality on society: "it matters very much to the community that each citizen should have a religion."   And it's no business of the state "provided they are good citizens in this life."

The US Constitution:  A Civil Profession of Faith

There is therefore a purely civil profession of faith of which the Sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject.

Theological Intolerance is Incompatible with a Free Society

By theological intolerance, he means being intolerant of those who do not share your religion.  This quote is best understood by imagining it coming from an intolerant religious bigot:

It is impossible to live at peace with those we regard as damned; to love them would be to hate God who punishes them: we positively must either reclaim or torment them.

Rousseau then explains why...

Wherever theological intolerance is admitted, it must inevitably have some civil effect; and as soon as it has such an effect, the Sovereign is no longer Sovereign even in the temporal sphere: thenceforce priests are the real masters, and kings only their ministers.  

This is the standard to which we must hold every American.  Muslim, Christian, Atheist.  It matters not what your faith is, so long as it's practice does not violate our civil religion. 

(Rousseau - Social Contract, Book IV, Chapter 8, Civil Religion)

College: It's Not Just For Smart People!

Philosophy Major

Red diaper rash ranters are marching on Wall Street and squalling for free stuff.  Among their list of demands is "free college education."

Graduates from prestigious universities with advanced degrees in Lesbian Dance and Ethnic Studies are shocked and outraged to find they are unemployable.  And they want you and I to pay off their substantial and ill-considered student loans.

They should be marching on the colleges and universities that screwed them.  They should be occupying the offices of the counselors who steered them away from math and science and instead put them on the path that leads to angry activism, unemployment lines and the crash of unwarranted self-esteem.

Higher education is ripping us off, according to the Mercury News:

Nationally, college is getting less affordable every year... Overall, tuition increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2006, while median family income increased 147 percent and the consumer price index 106 percent, the study found.

When is Congress going to drag college administrators before its pompous committees and demand Big Education stop gouging the consumer?

Finally, here's a link to a hilarious look at the 10 Most Worthless College Degrees.

The article counts them down from 10 to 1. Here are a few excerpts:

9. Philosophy:
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: This isn’t ancient Greece: No one is going to pay you money, or allow you to sodomize their attractive son, in exchange for your knowledge of existence. Never has there been an employer who’s said “Man, we’re having all kinds of problems, I wish we had someone on our team who could reference and draw conclusions from the story of Siddhartha that would pull up our fourth quarter numbers ...

4. English Lit:
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: If someone can spend a weekend with a box of Cliff’s Notes and have only a slightly less conversational knowledge of what you spent 4 years studying, you probably don’t have the most employer friendly degree. ...

An Open Letter to Liberal Americans

I wrote this over a year ago and forgot about it.  I think it still applies today... 

I am a conservative with pernicious libertarian tendencies who believes we should examine our politicians and probe their logic, not worship them.  We should be skeptical, very skeptical, of everything that proceeds from their loquacious gobs.  I also don't want any of them feeling too comfortable up there in the District of Criminals.

Thomas Jefferson said it best:

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
--Thomas Jefferson

I think George Bush was no conservative, but I believe he is a sincere and honest man, as politicians go.  He is not Hitler, he was not in on any 9/11 conspiracy, and VP Cheney didn't shoot holes in the New Orleans levees with his Halliburton cannon.  If you back me into a corner, I will reluctantly admit that Bill Clinton was a pretty good president, private peccadilloes aside.

I have a grudging respect for Hillary Clinton, although I disagree with her politics.  She's a hard worker and she does her homework. 

Conservatives and Liberals will never agree on many subjects, but here are three things I hope we can all agree upon:  1) Make the politicians prove it; 2) Listen to one another; 3) Dial it back.

Make Them Prove It
I will start by pleading guilty to not paying attention as George Bush and the GOP went wilding with our money.  My days of not standing up and questioning those I voted for are now over.

We are living in the age of rampant, naive credulity, and it needs to stop.  Our default position should be to disbelieve anything a politician says until she can prove it.  While we're at it, let's make them defend their big ideas in light of the US Constitution.

Taking this hyper-skeptical approach will keep them from tragically wasting our blood and our treasure.  There is a selfish partisan interest here as well.  By holding our own politicians and candidates' feet to the fire, and spitting them out when they're found to be full of crap, we preserve the reputation of our respective parties. 

No more letting them lie to us with a wink and a nod just to get elected.  The incinerator at the bottom of the memory hole has been extinguished.  With the internet, America's digital memory is now infinite.   Lying and political shape-shifting doesn't work in an age when I can sit in my underwear and research everything a politician has said since he was in grade school. 

I share no ideology with Dennis Kucinich or Bernie Sanders, but they are probably two of the most honest politicians in DC, and I can at least admire them for that.

Listen to One Another
Left and right are poles apart, by definition.  No one should have to listen to hysterical ideologues screaming insults, but we should lend an ear to reasoned voices on the other side.  You don't have to compromise your principles to do it, and you may learn something. 

Wanna know one area where the right has jumped on the lefty bandwagon?  Opposition to crony capitalism.  Conservative mistrust most likely springs from a different motive, but we've seen the light!  We agree with you that government should not be in bed with corporations and bankers.  No special favors!

Another area where the right has seen the light?  The primacy of the US Constitution.  A few years ago, only libertarians and liberal social activists referred to that venerable document.  Granted, the left narrowly focused in on the bill of rights, usually the 1st, 4th and 5th Amendments, but they could nonetheless claim to be bigger constitutionalists than their ideological adversaries on the right.

No more.  Our disillusion with traditional Country Club Republicanism stacked upon our distaste for postmodern liberalism has left us nowhere else to go.  So let's rally 'round the constitution and argue over what those words mean.  It is so much more productive than the tired bread and circuses of Republican team versus the Democratic team and "my politician is better than your politician."

Dial It Back
I have excoriated President Obama.  I got so mad once that I put red Mickey Mouse ears on him.  He's the president, so I should have more respect, as I thought the left should have shown President Bush.

I remember thinking at the time that George Bush did not make the case for invading Iraq.  But everybody this side of Russ Feingold was too scared to call him on it, so off we went.

I cut him too much slack because I liked him (I still do).  I blindly trusted him on everything from the Patriot Act to No Child Left Behind.  Some of that stuff needed to be done, but no one on the right seriously questioned him.  We did not have a critical debate.

You know what would have made it easier for me to part ways with Bush on some of these issues?  If foaming-at-the-mouth leftists had not been jumping all over him like a mob of diseased orangutans, vomiting insults and hysterical rage at him.  Had much of that legitimate criticism been well-stated and not couched in ad hominem, I would have found it much easier to jump on board.  I was in the military at the time, and it seriously seemed like it was President Bush and us against the world.

We're All Americans
We will never agree on abortion, gay marriage, or health care, but we should all agree that no politician gets a free pass.  We the People can also all agree on a few founding principles like a wall of separation between business and state, and a kick in the bum for crony capitalists and the corrupt political hogs who wallow with them.  Maybe we can even be friendly to those on the other side who are not spewing hatred our way.

Am I dreaming?  Probably, but I feel compelled to say this in the name of ideological ecumenism.

I'm Kurt Silverfiddle, and I approve of this message.

Ron Paul is Right for America

OK, I hate the way Dr Paul talks about foreign policy, although I largely agree with him, and it disturbs me that he attracts so many neo-nazis and 9/11 troofers.  It's true that the scariest thing about Ron Paul are his followers.

What continues to attract me is his domestic policy.  He has the most comprehensive and fact-based plan of all the candidates.  Romney's may be more detailed, and Gingrich may have bigger ideas with more facets than a rare gem, but Ron Paul focuses in on big government and its big spending ways.  It is a personal freedom and economic liberty agenda.

Cut Spending...

$ Cut $1 trillion in spending during the first year
$ Eliminate five cabinet departments (Energy, HUD, Commerce, Interior, and Education)
$ End airport rape and grope operations by abolishing Thousands Standing Around
$ Abolish corporate subsidies
$ Abolish foreign aid
$ End foreign wars
$ Return most other spending to 2006 levels

Regulation...

* Repeal ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and Sarbanes-Oxley
* Thorough congressional review and authorization before implementing any new regulations issued by bureaucrats
* President Paul will also cancel all onerous regulations previously issued by Executive Order.

Oh, and Ron Paul was right about the Federal Reserve...

No, it's not an evil Zionist cabal, but the GAO audit did uncover a fetid nest of crony crapitalism.  The GAO report is dry and stuffed with diplomatic language like "...opportunities exist to strengthen its conflict policies."  

No kidding. The place is a virtual revolving door of special interests, and it hands its friends the newly printed cash, so they can use it to maximum leverage before it pollutes the larger marketplace, diluting its value. The Washington Examiner reports...

The most troublesome revelation in the GAO audit is the extent to which insiders benefited from their positions and access during the crisis. The GAO found 18 instances in which current and former members of the Fed affiliated with banks and other companies received emergency loans from the board, including General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and JP Morgan Chase. In the case of General Electric, its CEO Jeffrey Immelt served on the New York Fed, which loaned his corporation $16 billion in emergency funding during the crisis.

One of Goldman Sachs' directors, Stephen Friedman, was chairman of the board of the New York Fed. Friedman also owned substantial stock in Goldman Sachs during the same period in 2008 when the New York Fed voted to allow Goldman to operate as a commercial bank as well as an investment bank. That approval meant Goldman got access to loans from the Fed at highly favorable rates. Fed ethics guidelines prohibit a Fed governor from owning stock in a firm being considered for commercial status, but Friedman received a waiver and continued buying Goldman stock.

As for JP Morgan Chase, its chief executive officer, Jamie Dimon, was on the New York Fed board when the company got $29 billion in emergency loans. In addition, Dimon was able to secure approval from the New York Fed for an 18-month exemption...   (Washington Examiner)

President Obama is chummy with these crony crapitalists and he's OK with them using taxpayer money as their personal stash.  President Paul would put a stop to it.

Happiness is Iraq in the Rear View Mirror

President Obama has announced our troops will be out of Iraq by Christmas, and we should all rejoice. Now, if we could get him to make the same command decision about Afghanistan...

Heritage laments this development, worrying that it "might jeopardize the progress that has been made in Iraq." I worry about that too, but Iraq is a sovereign country and they've asked us to leave.  We have tired of one another, as the quiet collapse of talks to keep troops there has testified.  They want to take the training wheels off, and we have no choice but to comply.

CATO has the better take...

This costly and counterproductive war—launched under false pretenses, sold to the American people as a cakewalk and an operation that would be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues—may finally, mercifully, be coming to an end. I certainly hope that is the case.

Our troops performed heroically, and they have ushered a people out of dictatorship.  We've given the Iraqis a republic, if they can keep it.

DoD's Army Moves Out, State Department's Army Moves In

I read in Wired that the State Department will fill the vacuum with a private army of 5,500 security contractors at a cost of over $3 billion! I ask, it it worth it?

It's a sign of trouble that the State Department needs its own private army.  How can you build goodwill traveling around in armored convoys?  With all that firepower, international incidents will happen, innocent Iraqis will be killed, and the populace will be screaming for blood. No diplomatic immunity for the security contractors, so we will simply allow the accused to sneak out of the country, adding more fuel to the fire.

Why do we need such a large State Department presence there? Iraq has no special value to us, there are no warm cultural affinities.  Why the fortress in Baghdad?  Why all the consulates polkadotting a hostile land providing targets for violent hatred?

We should put a small embassy among the others in Baghdad, and put a consulate up in Kurdistan and hire the Pesh Merga to guard it, which is what we do in many other countries.

Bloomberg - Will Troops Leave Iraq Better Off?

Mr Obama, You're No Reagan!

Deroy Murdoch, a most astute man, does us a favor by assembling a concise catalog of Obama's economic blunders...

"Under Obama, federal spending has risen from 20.7 percent of gross domestic product to 25.3 percent, Washington’s largest slice of apple pie since 1945."

"Obama’s spend-o-rama includes federally funded green jobs that Boskin dismisses as “the leprechaun economy.” The apotheosis of this blarney was last month’s $1.2 billion Energy Department loan guarantee to SunPower Corporation of Richmond, California. Its solar-equipment project promises 15 permanent positions. Cost per job-created: a staggering $80 million." (NRO-Deroy Murdock)

Reagan's Recovery vs. Obama's Sagging Non-Recovery

Boskin compared snapshots of Obama’s and Pres. Ronald Reagan’s post-recession recoveries, 27 months after each downturn hit bottom.

In September 2011, on Obama’s watch, non-farm payrolls had grown 0.6 percent, yielding 841,000 jobs since June 2009.

Under the tax-cutting, business-boosting Reagan, non-agricultural employment swelled 8.7 percent, generating 7.7 million new jobs. (NRO-Deroy Murdock)

How Mr. Volker Would Fix It

Reading that comparison reminded me how Obama, to much fanfare, brought the venerable Paul Volker on-board as a convenient counter-weight to his socialist advisers who were discomfiting those serious people not in a hopium-induced daze those first heady days of the Obama Presidency.

It calmed people down, and then Obama proceeded to completely ignore the former Fed Chair who tamed Carter's dreaded stagflation and ushered in the historically-unprecedented Reagan economic boom. Volker has offered his advice on how to fix this mess. It's too wonky to go into here, but it involved breaking up anyone too big to fail, no more government underwriting Wall Street gamblers, putting the different financial functions into their own boxes and jailing those who stray, among other things. You can read the whole thing here: Volker's Advice.

Free Market Ideas for Increasing Employment

For the libertarians among us, taking advice from a former Fed Chairman just won't do, so Reason Magazine has an article entitled Get a Job! that is chock full of free-market remedies sure to get people back to work.

The ideas are too simple-minded and timeless for the progressive eggheads powering Obama's economic failure: Less regulations, less government intervention in the marketplace, no more government bureaucrats picking winners and losers...

Free marketeers know that government cannot power the recovery.  The path to economic success begins with economic freedom. Bill Frezza explains:

Do you sometimes wonder why economists are accorded such respect and influence given the fact that they claim knowledge over the unknowable, promote theories that are untestable, and make forecasts for which they are never held accountable? Isn’t that the definition of a witch doctor?

If engineers were held to the same standards, bridges would collapse as often as banks, planes would fall from the sky (if they ever got off the ground), and cyclical blackouts would be a permanent feature of our electrical grid. But at least they would get to visit the White House.

This gets to the heart of why we should take all macro economic advice with a grain of salt.  It is a soft science, useful for gaining insight, but incapable of predicting market behavior.  Government-planned economies fail, free markets succeed. 

Have you ever watched engineers from different schools argue on Sunday morning talk shows about the validity of Bernoulli’s Principle or Ohm’s Law? No? Yet economists, like rival witch doctors, get red in the face promoting diametrically opposed economic remedies, sometimes sharing Nobel Prizes in the same year for theories that directly contradict each other. Take $2 trillion and call me in the morning. (Bill Frezza - Fundamental Fallacies of Macro Economics)

Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls...

Heraclitus

Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee. -- John Donne

Z had a thought provoking post on Muammar Khadaffi's bloody exit from this world. The comment thread was full of thoughtful comments as well. I'm glad I'm not the only one grasping for a way to sort this out. Few of us kick up our heels and celebrate at these events, and that's a good thing. He met a well-earned end, but violent actions devoid of law or justice are an offense to humanity.

On the face of it, the cries from the international justice types is pretty funny, demanding a full accounting of Khadaffi's death.  The man brutalized a population for 40 years, and they don't expect a little retribution, some catharsis? 

The jostled videos of the dictator being beaten, dragged by his hair and ultimately laid out dead was a glimpse into the dark reality of human nature.  The monkeys escaped and turned on the zookeepers, cracking their heads open with rocks and tearing them to pieces.

Wars, executions...It is all a debasement of humanity, and as such, a debasement of each one of us.  This is why justice properly ordered and properly carried out is so important, and why wars without end, even when conducted via pilotless aircraft from 50,000 feet, will eventually corrupt a people and blacken their souls.

We all know injustice when we see it, and it most often it flows from an abuse of power. 

Shakespearean Power Failure

In Shakespeare's play, Measure for Measure, Claudio is condemned to die for knocking up his betrothed before the nuptials.  In act II, Isabella, Claudio's holy and virginal sister, pleads for mercy to Angelo the magistrate. 

Angelo rightly reminds her that True Justice lies not in some sappy sentimentality or misguided empathy.  True Justice, God's Justice, Nature's Justice, is blind to emotional appeals and always balances the scales.

Counterpoised against a righteous exercise of justice is abuse of power.  Isabella laments how men harshly wield the power lent to them by God:

O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength;
but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant.

Abuse of power is timeless...

Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder.
Nothing but thunder!

She reminds us that God loans power and authority to man so that we many model our societies upon His justice.  But "proud man..."

Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he 's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep...

Abuse of power is human nature.  We forget we are "dust and to dust we will return."  Flush with pride and earthly arrogance, we forget we are fit for infinity, and we end up as angry apes who make the angels weep.

WH - Power is the Most Abused Drug

Sic Semper Tyrannis

President Obama went on Safari, killing a defanged, declawed, compliant old lion, already hobbled into docility.  All that's missing is a picture of the "brave" hunter standing astride his prey, brandishing the blunderbuss, oversize pith helmet propped  up only by his cartoonishly large ears...

Khadaffi was once a dangerous beast, killing American GIs in Germany and bringing down an airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, among many other bloody predations. His eccentric behavior and outlandishly gaudy costumes brought to mind perhaps a darkly dangerous Michael Jackson of North Africa.  And the busty female bodyguards...

What happened to them?  Given the track record of Islamic fanatics, they're lucky they're not pretty young men...

Khadaffi...  

President Reagan defanged him. President Bush got him to cooperate with us on the war on terror. Peace Prize Nobel Laureate Barack Obama killed him, despite Khadaffi calling him friend.  This sends a clear message to dictators everywhere: Do not cooperate with the United States. Dig in. Murder, maim, threaten and brandish chemical and nuclear weapons. Anything but crack the door open. Especially after Obama turned on US amigo Hosni Mubarack.

Does anyone think Basher Assad will go out any other way than Tony Montana at the end of the movie Scarface? Does anyone think that there are any horrors he will not author to avoid Khadaffi's fate?

Obama Should Run on His Foreign Policy Record

We Americans love us a mess a Ferner Killin'! And the progressive life-haters especially cherish the opportunity to publicly wallow in a death when it is cloaked in the odor of humanitarian sanctity.

Obama has set a record for killing more people than any other Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

That's some change! And it's quite a feat. Terrorist pederast Yassir Arafat was the previous record holder.

The world is now a safer place.  Unless you are a dark-skinned Chadian trying to get the hell out of Libya...

Quieter Wars

Our Libyan adventure not yet complete, Obama turns his gaze southward and sends 100 military advisers to Uganda. If done properly, it could be a good thing.

Stalwart conservative Jonah Goldberg points out that this action is authorized by congress, and furthers our goals of assisting South Sudan and Uganda.  It is not a matter of vital national security, but rather a case of us providing military assistance to friendly nations who have requested our help.  We already have USAID and Peace Corps people on the ground providing medical, humanitarian and economic assistance.

For a less rosy view, see Gene Healy's Reason article, Obama's Latest Military Adventure.

I don't criticize Obama's "Leading from Behind" baloney...

I think he stumbled upon it after dithering and flailing about, and I don't like the formulation, but the US and the rest of the world could use more of it. Regardless of where you come down on the Libya questions, it was refreshing to see other countries take a leading role in the Kadhaffi beatdown.

I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the wisdom of the Libyan operation, but just saying that if the situation arises, I'd like to see more like that and less like Afghanistan. Libya worked where Afghanistan has not for a host of complex reasons, but one simple fact is that the Libyans wanted it and they took matters into their own hands. John Barry writes about all this in his Daily Beast article, America’s Secret Libya War.

National Security First

Ron Paul famously stated that he would not have pulled the trigger on Bin Laden, and he stands on a firm, non-interventionist principle when he says it. But the fact that it makes lefties stand up and cheer gives me pause.  You should never tell your enemies exactly what you will or won’t do. Keep ‘em guessing. As for principles, it’s a very unprincipled world out there.  The constitutional principle of national defense comes first.  Take your stand on any other and you could end up making it upon a pile of rubble.

Military Assistance:  Helping those who help themselves

While I'm against any further large-scale land invasions, I am for small-scale military assistance operations, if legally authorized and diligently overseen. We've conducted thousands since the end of World War 2, but only a few ended up in larger conflagrations.

Military assistance builds goodwill with other nations, allows us to collect intelligence, and provides an opportunity for our soldiers to build professional relationships with fellow warriors in other countries.

Central America benefited from this in the 1980's, resulting in defeated Marxist rebels throwing down their arms and forming political parties. Our pre-9/11 forays into the Stans laid the groundwork for the blitzkreig toppling of the Taliban by the Norther Alliance partnered with our Special Forces.  The Philippines have almost rolled up Abu Sayyaf thanks to their hard soldiering backed up by our non-combatant assistance.

Meanwhile, we continue to kill terrorists in Yemen and Pakistan from the air, although it is unclear whether this is furthering US national security goals.

We cannot completely retreat from the world, since its problems now routinely wash up on our shores.  Helping friendly countries help themselves may not be vital to our national security, but done properly, it can further our national interests.

See Also:
Kevin Drum - Should US Troops be in Uganda?

America's Last Stand

The 2012 elections are the last stand.  For progressives as well as small government conservatives and libertarians.  It is America's Last Stand

The economy will not improve

The situation of ordinary citizens will become even more parlous, and government will be forced to "DO SOMETHING!"

That something depends upon which party is in power.  Liberals see the mess we're in and blame free market capitalism, ignoring the fact that we haven't seen that rare bird in a hundred years.

Yeah, we had some variants and hybrid strains, but it's not been a free market, but rather a very locked-down and expensive one.  Just ask entrepreneurial outsiders trying to pole vault in over the regulatory walls governments have erected at the behest of the insiders.  Progressive "solutions" will only make it worse.

Welcome to The Crisis

We are in a crisis, and the progressives see it has their last, best hope.  Hence the desperate cry, "The revolution is here!"   No, it's not, but progressives will keep asserting it, telling the big lie long enough until it becomes the truth.  The Obama campaign, flush with Wall Street Cash and it's own fat cat bankers and plutocrats (Daley, Immelt, etc), will demagogue the Occupy Wall Street protests to its own political advantage

This sums up the Occupy Wall Street agenda pretty well:

But the dominant feature is a fierce hatred of anything capitalistic-individualistic profit seeking, large scale enterprise, banks, joint-stock companies, department stores, "international finance and loan capital," the system of "interest slavery" in general; the abolition of these is described as the "basis of the programme, around which everything else turns."

[...] it is not a proletarian but middle class socialism, and that it is, in consequence, inclined to favour the small artisan and shop keeper and to set the limit up to which it recognizes private property somewhat higher than does communism.

[...] In the case of the wealthier capitalists, state control and restriction of income will leave little more than the name of property, even while the intention of correcting the undue accumulation of wealth in the hands of individuals has not yet been carried out.

That was written by Friedrich Hayek in 1933, and he wrote it about Hitler's socialist party.

They aim for modern-day Germany, but their agenda is from National Socialist Germany

It's scary enough that they aim for present-day Germany as their model, where government takes over half of what you make and spreads it around, and puts a lot more rules on you like no gun ownership and mandatory recycling.  Imagine paying $6 for a gallon of gas and living in half the space you live in now.

Only our government is not efficient like Germany's, so we will end up performing a sclerotic slide reminiscent of post WWII Great Britain, only without the sharp musical mockery of a Pink Floyd or the cultural parody of Monty Python...

... And we'll continue sliding all the way back to 1933...

Public-private partnerships, with governmental panels drawing up business plans and picking winners and losers will be the norm.  Free-market capitalists, libertarians, Christians and other free thinkers will not be marched off to gas chambers; we will instead be either broken to the will of the state or branded enemies of the Brave New Society, unable to find work or participate in the government-controlled marketplace.

Laugh if you want to, but that is where collectivism always leads, without exception.  Again, Hayek explains:

The inherent logic of collectivism makes it impossible to confine it to a limited sphere. 

Beyond certain limits, collective action in the interest of all can only be made possible if all can be coerced into accepting as their common interest what those in power take it to be.

At that point, coercion must extend to the individuals' ultimate aims and ideas, and must attempt to bring everyone's Weltanschauung into line with the ideas of the rulers.  (Hayek - Nazism is Socialism)

* - Hat tip to Fuzzy Slippers for sparking this post.  I am a Hayek fan but had forgotten his short essay on why Nazism is socialism.  Please go read her blog post on this subject here:  Fuzzy Slippers - Everything Old is New Again

Obama's "Jobs" Program: Government Money is Stupid Money

Money taken out of the economy via taxation is a net negative.  Beyond infrastructure and the enumerated constitutional duties, government does not and cannot spend your money more efficiently that you can yourself.  

Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat trying to unseat Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, delivered a tart message with dictatorial undertones to the nation's greedy rich:

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. . . . -- Elizabeth Warren

Despite such lectures by Ivy League professors who enjoy burning strawmen, conservatives are not anti-government nor anti-tax. It's all about proportion. Famed economist Henry Hazlitt says it best:

A certain amount of taxes is of course indispensable to carry on essential government functions. Reasonable taxes for this purpose need not hurt production much. The kind of government services then supplied in return, which among other things safeguard production itself, more than compensate for this. (Henry Hazlitt)

If government would limit itself to just funding that infrastructure liberals continually blather on about, we would not be having these arguments, and we would not be mired in this economic morass.

Elizabeth Warren's factory owners benefit not at all from the cawing aviary of special interest rent-seekers now roosting in thousands of government agencies and gobbling billions of dollars in taxpayer contributions.    Also, Warren's factory owner, along with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and even famous tax dodger Warren Buffet, paid far more for those roads than did the other 99% of America.

Taxes Kill Economic Activity

we took a look at British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne's still new (2011) program of increased taxes directed at oil and gas companies operating in the North Sea. Amazingly, the chancellor's tax hike took a 52% year-over-year chunk out of the area's second-quarter drilling activity. (The Fastest Way – David Lee Smith)

According to the author, Global consultant Woods Mackenzie estimates Obama’s proposed tax and regulation on the gas and oil industry “would lop off about 700,000 barrels a day of oil-equivalent production at a cost of some 170,000 industry jobs.”

Let's Go All The Way

Obama wants to claw back the special exemptions, loopholes and tax breaks gas and oil lobbyists have cajoled and bribed out of congress.  Fine. But don't stop there. Do it across the board. Make GM, their union partners in crime, and Wall Street welfare queens give us back the tens and hundreds of billions in taxpayer money they've absconded with.

No loopholes, no special deals for any group. If the Obamacrats are not willing to do this, then they are not serious, but are instead demagoguing the issue for naked partisan gain.

It's a simple calculus:

When a corporation loses a hundred cents of every dollar it loses, and is permitted to keep only 60 cents of every dollar it gains, [...] its policies are affected. It does not expand its operations, or it expands only those attended with a minimum of risk. (Henry Hazlitt – Economics in One Lesson)

A better approach is to categorically and unapologetically remove all government loans, subsidies, tax breaks, loopholes and special exceptions. Period. Again, Henry Hazlitt explains:

Each private lender risks his own funds. [...] When people risk their own funds they are usually careful in their investigations to determine the adequacy of the assets pledged and the business acumen and honesty of the borrower.

But the government almost invariably operates by different standards. The whole argument for its entering the lending business, in fact, is that it will make loans to people who could not get them from private lenders.

This is only another way of saying that the government lenders will take risks with other people's money (the taxpayers') that private lenders will not take with their own money. (Henry Hazlitt – Economics in One Lesson)

And that is the crux of the problem, and that is why private sector spending is inherently more efficient than government spending.

Obama blew a trillion dollars and we've got nothing to show for it but more economic misery.  We would be stupid to give him one more dime, let alone another $500 billion.

I Wracked and I Ran

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I make exceptions for the Middle East and the Muslim world, which gave us this definition of byzantine:

byzantine (from thefreedictionary.com)
a. Of, relating to, or characterized by intrigue; scheming or devious; b. Highly complicated; intricate and involved

That could also apply to our government, but they are not as smart as the Middle Eastern schemers, and we are broke...

Great powers gradually being shunted off the world stage have increasing difficulties getting their way: Itsy-bitsy colonial policing operations in dusty ramshackle outposts drag on for years and putter out to no obvious conclusion.  (Mark Steyn)

We've blown more that half a trillion dollars in South Asia trying to spackle over a 7th century crack in the modern-day global time-space continuum, with nothing to show for it.  We've shed our blood for people who hate us.  Liberals are outraged; conservatives should be.

The last thing we need is one more bloody foray into the bazaar

The Islamic world spawns lies wrapped in conspiracies that are encased in enigmas. And when they want to drag the west into it, they wrap it in photos of doe-eyed starving children and tie it up with sympathetic bows of womens rights and ribbons of religious tolerance and human rights. A horror-filled package wrapped in shiny paper and dime store baubles to appeal to naive western sentiments.  And happily peddled by American warmongers who have never been to war.

Put more bluntly, Ahmad Chalabi suckered us into Iraq, and this latest "Iranian plot" is more of the same.  For what purpose, I don't know.  All I do know is the whole thing stinks, and right now we'd be foolish to believe anything coming out about this.

If Frank Gaffney and Bill Kristol and other chicken-hawk dime store heroes want to attack Iran over this, they can raise their own damned army and go do it themselves.

The Zeta angle is more troubling

We have a far more serious situation brewing to our south, and we keep it going by participating in the criminal gangs' fundraisers, buying all they can send us and snorting it up our noses.  We jail gang members, where they make important business connections and alliances, and then spring them so they can head south to spread the latest American criminal techniques across Central America.

Which border is more important?  The one between Afghanistan and Pakistan?  Or our own Mexican border.  Which region is more important?  South Asia, or North America?

See also:
Andrew Napolitano - Government-generated Plots
Punching Holes in the Iran Plot

Breakfast News Burrito

ffffound.com

You can have that with spicy red socialist sauce, green environmental chiles, and a side of blue conservative pancakes.  Oh and don't forget a big centrist cup of joe!*

Here are some news links I collected this past week but didn't blog about...




What are those inscrutable communists up to?

The Colorado State Patrol finally did the right thing and cleared out the urine-soaked pot smokers who were infesting the grounds of our golden-domed capitol.  Zuccotti Park in New York remains a socialist sewer, much to the consternation of  frustrated business owners who used to make money there before the creeps and freeloaders moved in and scared all the business away.

Matt Labash, an observant writer at Weekly Standard, infiltrated the Occupy Wall Street Proletariapalooza and survived to tell us about it.  His report from the communist encampment at Zuccotti Park, Eyewitness to History,  is an entertaining must-read.

On that same subject, I agree with George Will's latest column:  Here's to a Long Life for Occupy Wall Street.  Conservatives have the tea parties, who tend to vote Republican.  The left has the stinking freeloaders protesting having to pay for stuff, and the Democrats have already thrown in with them.  We should look forward to that contest going national.

And in other fun News…

... The Vice President threatened to rape and murder more people if congress failed to pass Obama’s jobs bill...

... Obama Fights The Lord's Army, with Sarah Palin tweeting, "I told ya so!"

Saudis say Iran must 'pay the price...'

... and offer to hold Uncle Sam's coat while we do the oily dictator-kingdom's dirty work.  Again.

Finally, some humor, because we need it...

- If people from Poland are called Poles, why aren't people from Holland called Holes?

- If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?

- If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?

- When someone asks you, A penny for your thoughts, and you put your two cents in, what happens to the other penny? Or do you get change?

- Why is the man (or woman) who invests all your money called a broker?

- Why do croutons come in airtight packages? It's just stale bread to begin with.

- Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist but a person drives a race car not called a racist?

- Why are a wise man and a wise guy opposites?

- Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?

- If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed?

Have a good week!

* - Thanks to Finntann for the idea for the title and into

There They Go Again…

Desperate democrats have hijacked the legacy of Ronald Reagan in a vain attempt to save their skins

First they ridiculed him. Then he beat Carter and they reviled him. Now they are revising him beyond all historic fact in order to advance their sinking, discredited agenda. At long last, they have no sense of shame.

Any time you see conservatives do something to great effect, you can expect the libs will follow with their own twisted imitation...

Obama talked about “Cleaning up” after Bush because the Bushies talked loudly of fumigating the White House after Clinton’s many misadventures.  The Tea Parties begat the left’s Communist Kook Coffee Klatches (or whatever the failed project was called) and now the Occupy Wall Street human bowel movement is touted as the left’s tea party movement and Arab Spring all rolled into one.

Reagan and Kennedy:  Two Conservative Presidents

The conservative comparison that really burned the liberals' asses was that of Reagan and Kennedy’s tax and economic policies, complete with audio recordings of JFK touting free market principles that are anathema to the modern day democrat party.  Indeed, Kennedy sounds like a small government conservative tea partier.  And the left is struck dumb at the realization that their martyred hero is a Reagan doppelganger.

Finally, they’ve struck back.  They shamelessly ignore recorded history and turn Reagan into a compromising “fair share” taxaholic who enjoyed an era of unprecedented political goodwill.

Steven Hayward has written a comprehensive article debunking this Democrat party myth-making surrounding President Reagan.  They hated him worse than they did Bush, and Hayward puts the tax raising issue in its proper context, reminding us that the net tax cuts under Reagan were gargantuan, he doubled GDP and he saved Social Security for the next generation.

Go here to read the excellent article, The Liberal Misappropriation of a Conservative President.

See also: 
Reagan vs. Obama
Obama Compares Himself to Reagan...  Again