And the Government Didn't Mandate It

Saw this Coke commercial last night. If you've bought a Coke in the last 80 years, you've had a hand in making Olympic dreams come true.


And you got a Coke. And the government didn't make you buy it, or make Coke donate. Imagine that.

Ungovernable?

Hat tip to BigSmartHuman

Tom Friedman thinks that they system is broken.

The sad and frustrating thing is, we are so close to being unstuck. If there were just six or eight Republican senators — a few more Judd Greggs and Lindsey Grahams — ready to meet Obama somewhere in the middle on deficit reduction, energy, health care and banking reform, I believe that in the wake of the Massachusetts wake-up call the president would indeed meet them in that middle ground to forge not just incremental compromises, but substantial ones on these key issues. But so far, the Republicans are having a good year politically by just being the Party of No.

In other words, if only those idiot voters in Republican and Blue-Dog D districts would let us cram this thing they don't think is a good idea down their throats anyway,  the system would "work".   Apparently, the system "working" means you get to pass your agenda.  If you run as a no-nonsense moderate reformer and win the presidency by a "solid majority" (what was it, 53%?) and then you govern from the far left and people don't like it and push back enough to frighten incumbents into withholding their votes ... the system is "broken".

(Plus I love how, with huge majorities, Democrats continue to blame Republicans for not being able to cram Socialism down our throats.)

Jay Cost says it's working just fine.  And I agree with him.

The solution the country ultimately settled on had five important features: checks and balances so that the branches would police one another; a large republic so that majority sentiment was fleeting and not intensely felt; a Senate where the states would be equal; enumerated congressional powers to limit the scope of governmental authority; and the Bill of Rights to offer extra protection against the government.

The end result was a government that is powerful, but not infinitely so. Additionally, it is schizophrenic. It can do great things when it is of a single mind - but quite often it is not of one mind. So, to govern, our leaders need to build a broad consensus. When there is no such consensus, the most likely outcome is that the government will do nothing.

The President's two major initiatives - cap-and-trade and health care - have failed because there was not a broad consensus to enact them. Our system is heavily biased against such proposals. That's a good thing.

 The Federal Government, set up by the Constitution, isn't there to be constantly "moving us forward" and "getting things done" ... the Constitution severely limits it to keep it from doing things huge chunks of the population doesn't want.  If it's not doing stuff, maybe it's because the stuff it's trying to do is stuff we don't want it to do.

Maybe it should just stick to it's enumerated powers and stop trying to blur the meaning of words like, oh, I don't know ... "is".

Just one more reason I love Sarah Palin

The number one reason is that she pisses all the right people off.

But this is a good one, too (click for a larger view).  After lefties went nuts over a few notes she wrote on her hand for a speech she was giving, she put it right back in their faces during her next public appearance.  This is not a photoshop.  This is Sarah Palin.

Love it!

She didn't say a word.  Didn't need to.

I keep putting off transcribing the bit of Andrew Breitbart’s interview with Glen Reynolds and Dr. Helen where he talked about what we need to do when confronted with the ridicule and derision that is foisted our way.  What Breitbart said basically was you should keep moving forward, right into it, towards them.  This is what Sarah is doing here. 

It works.

Show no fear.  Make no apologies.  You know who you are.  Don’t let them define you.

Rick Santelli Day Idea

Ok.  For some reason, I thought we were later in the month.  Rick Santelli day is NEXT friday, Feb 19.  Not today.

But last night I came up with an idea -- not a particularly new idea.  It's much like "I am Joe Wurzelbacher" and many others like it.

This one is, "I am a Tea Partier", kind of like "I am Simon Jester", only back in the face of those who snicker and call us "Tea Baggers".  As Breitbart said last weekend, keep walking in to it.  Keep moving forward.  Don't bat an eye.

It is to show America where the Coffee Partiers are wrong, and to show them we are not intimidated by them.

Go read that "I am Simon Jester" post.    If you agree with most of it... 80% or more ... You are a Tea Partier, whether you've been to one or not.

Write up a post, if you're a blogger, or make a YouTube video entitled, "I am a Tea Partier".  The content should be a bullet list of things about you that defy the stereotypes, such as the ones listed in the Coffee Party Manifesto and others you have heard and read.  "I am an engineer."   "I don't follow NASCAR".  It doesn't have to be long.  And you may or may not be, say, a NASCAR fan or a college graduate -- doesn't matter.  Just tell the truth about the stereotypes you don't fit.

At the end, repeat "I am a Tea Partier".

Post it February 19, perhaps with a picture of yourself.  I am probably going to post the first ever picture of me on this blog where you can see my face.

You have about a week.

Stimulus: Keeping Schools and Fire Stations Open

You've heard the argument.  Hey, if it weren't for the stimulus, well the state budgets would be in trouble.  And as everyone knows, when it comes to what we need to cut first, the American People demand that we cut Teachers and Firefighters and Police first and keep the funding for highway turtle underpasses.

Or, say, giving parents of disabled school children iPods.  Because, you know, the whole system would collapse if we didn't give people iPods.

The Green Police

I thought this commercial was funny if it meant to be.  But it was creepy in that in today's political climate we can't be really sure whether or not it was supposed to be funny.  Yeah, because last summer … out in California … you know the coasts are always the “leaders” and the rest of the country follows… they passed this in San Francisco.

That’s right.  It is already a crime to throw an orange rind down your garbage disposal somewhere in this country.

Just a reminder: Rick Santelli Day is Friday Feb 19

The spark that ignited the movement.

Stay tuned for the Clue Batting Cage's Celebration.

Is it Crazy to Call Obama a Socialist? Redux

You know.  It just occurred to me, after that last post where people were tired of us calling Obama a Socialist... here it is in a nutshell, and even shorter.

Do you believe in mandatory redistribution of wealth by the state?  Yes?  Then you're a Socialist.

We're not calling you names.  Don't complain about what you're being called if that's what you are.  Either embrace the title, or be something else.  You can't reject the title and keep the belief.

Update:  I have since edited up a video to go with this post.

The Coffee Party Movement

I shit you not.

I saw one of my progressive facebook “friends” join this the other day.  I had to go check it out.

THE COFFEE PARTY
Expresso yourself.

We are bored of loud marching angry bagger buffoons and ignoramus knuckle dragging dumb right wing-nuts. We've had enough of the President being called a Socialist, Communist, Terrorist and Traitor and being accused of being born in a foreign country.

You had it too? Then you have found a home my friend.

Join the Coffee party! Dedicated to the fun of insulting politically simple minded knuckle headed baggers..

Are you a dumb stump who thinks that President Obama wants to extinguish the elderly and socialize your medicine for a future vision of communist empire America for the New World Order???

We're not the party for you BOZO!

The Coffee Party is the place for American brothers and sisters to do their sanity check after watching these hate filled poser "patriots" perform their clown acts of ignorance. Come here to vent, post content or simply to check it. Come here to introduce new ideas. Come here to have intelligent talk. Talk politics, and the state of what's going on in our country. Tea is becoming repulsive on the American political landscape and our answer is satire, facts and fun!

[snip]

“Bagger” “buffoon” “ignoramus” “knuckle dragging” “dumb” “nuts” “simple minded”  “knuckle headed” “bozo” “hate filled”  “poser ‘patriots’” “clown acts” “ignorance”

“Dedicated to the fun of insulting politically simple minded knuckle headed baggers.”

It goes on.  Nope.  No "hate" there.  No ignorance, either.   Hmm-mmm.

Hey Coffee Party People.  Go educate yourself.  Here’s a clue from the Clue Batting Cage.  If you don’t like being called a socialist, don’t be one.

If your "sanity check" is Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, or Chris Matthews ... yeah.  Patients in charge of  the asylum, and all that.

I am Simon Jester as Well

This is good. No. Really good.

I've heard of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", but I really never knew anything about it. Not even that "TANSTAAFL" was coined in it.

I was paid a nice compliment by Morgan over my recent post when he said that it was the best Tea Party Manifesto he'd read... but this one is pretty darned good, too. Lengthier, but better. Way better.

Simon Jester: a pen name for a subversive doggerel, caricatured as a little horned devil with pitchfork and tail, sometimes stabbing a fat man. He was quickly adopted by Loonies in general, and cartoons and verses that he had not produced appeared everywhere, becoming the Revolutionary equivalent of "Kilroy Was Here" in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".

I think I just might be Simon Jester as well.

Paul "Teddy Kennedy" Krugman on the Filibuster

Paul wants to end the filibuster.

The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government.

When one party wants to "fundamentally transform" the country and the other kind of likes the way it was originally designed, and the former party is in power... I'm kinda glad it's not functioning.   No, really.

Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.

Kind of like Ted Kennedy got the Massechusetts legislature to repeal the Governor's right to appoint replacement Senators when they were afraid they might lose John Kerry's seat and they had a Republican governor, but hurriedly re-granted it when it was clear Ted's seat itself was about to be vacated by his demise and they had a Democrat for a governor.

One rule for thee, but not for me.   Wanna take bets on who would want to put the filibuster rule back once Republicans gain a majority?

Mr. Krugman goes on...

Don’t hold your breath. As it is, Democrats don’t even seem able to score political points by highlighting their opponents’ obstructionism.

Do the words "filibuster-proof majority" mean anything to you, Paul?  The Democrats have huge majorities in both chambers, one of them so massive that there would be no way for Republicans to stop anything in the Senate -- and the Democrats want to blame the Republicans for being "obstructionists".

Paul, the reason the Democrats can't score political points on this is that Americans are not stupid.

15 Minutes

Well.  Looks like my 15 minutes of relative fame may be here on account of this post.

After Morgan picked up this post on his blog, Kevin picked it up over at The Smallest Minority -- and my hit counter started going nuts (well, for me anyway).  Now it looks like a few other people have picked it up, such as Rick over at whizbang.

I'm flattered.  Humbled.

And glad.  Because it needs to be said.

These ideas I expressed are not new.  I've learned them various places throughout my life. Some from my own life's experience.  From my dad.  From Ronald Reagan.  Thomas Sowell.  Johah Goldberg.  Ayn Rand.  And lots of others.  But they didn't come up with the ideas on their own, either.

Our founders discussed these concepts at length, which is why we ended up with the Constitution we ended up with.   It's not a "religious" belief I have in our founders.  It's just the more I read about the thought that went into the making of our country, the more impressed I am with their ... dare I say it, since it's such a new-agey word ... holistic thinking.

It was designed to curb the worst in human nature and its abuse of power.  The economic system was designed to harness "greed" -- or the desire to better one's lot in life -- and to re-direct that energy into productivity & innovation that's good for everybody.  The ideas are based on human nature -- which doesn't change.

So thanks, all ye who linked me.  This humble blog is honored.

Clippy on Climategate

As seen on Michael Mann's computer ... this is brilliant!

Via The Smallest Minority, via Borepatch . Too good not to shamelessly snag and re-post here for all 6 of my readers. :-)

Borepatch.  Hmmmm.   That reminds me.  I should go fire some ordinance so I have some guns to clean.  Do they need dusting if they're just in the gun safe?  ;-)

Time for Tea - A Work In Progress

I'm an amateur photographer.  I've never tried this "still life" thing before ... but I'm getting this together.  Hopefully by the end of next week I'll have the final version.  This is the basic idea.

Lots of technical problems, and some compositional adjustments.  But I think it's cool so far.

Stay tuned for the final version.

Krugman says "Don't Panic"

Paul Krugman, one of my "no go's" because his vitriol in the past has pissed me off too many times, got "the big click" from me friday for the first time in a long time.

The title of the column is "Fiscal Scare Tactics".   Maybe a part of me wondered what "Nobel Prize Winning Economist Paul Krugman" (as the MSM always introduces him) had to say about our huge budget deficits and slippping credit rating and the people we're making ourselves beholden to.  I wanted some good news.  Maybe he had an argument that would convince me that everything's going to be OK if we keep on this path.

Alas, a little ways down in the article he says:

the large deficit the federal government is running right now isn’t the result of runaway spending growth. Instead, well more than half of the deficit was caused by the ongoing economic crisis, which has led to a plunge in tax receipts, required federal bailouts of financial institutions, and been met — appropriately — with temporary measures to stimulate growth and support employment.
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True, there is a longer-term budget problem. Even a full economic recovery wouldn’t balance the budget, and it probably wouldn’t even reduce the deficit to a permanently sustainable level.

Soooooo.... even without what the Obama administration is doing, the huge spending of a boat load of money that we don't have -- and we had a full recovery, our budget still sits at an unsustainable level. 

And that's supposed to make me feel better .... how?????

It couldn't possibly be that we're overextended.  It's just that our income has gone down.   All of this overextension is just an inconvenient side detail, right?  Government's not too big, we're just not bringing in enough tax revenue!

They only spend 1/3 of the first $787 billion (now I read actually $862 billion) in the first year and want yet another stimulus jobs bill...

And we're being "hysterical" when we talk about wasteful government spending in the face of a very deep recession.  Paul goes on to say, much like Obama's "spending freeze" (I know I'm bleeding profusely, but I vow not to cut myself anymore after this time) after another year ...

So once the economic crisis is past, the U.S. government will have to increase its revenue and control its costs.

Yeah, I'll stop charging things on my credit cards after this spending spree. I promise.

Rick Santelli Day is a Two Weeks from Today

Keep watching.

Is it Crazy to Call Obama a Socialist or a Fascist?

Well that's what we keep hearing, as Morgan recently noted, and I've seen out there in internet land, and from pundits on TV. 

We have people haughtily calling us stupid and insane for calling a spade a spade, as if we, like most of them, don't really know what the words mean.   As I said in one comment on a YouTube video out there:

if Socialized Medicine isn’t socialism … if nationalizing companies isn’t socialism … if redistribution of wealth isn’t socialism … maybe we have different dictionaries.

So ... no. It's not crazy.

Read your history, they admonish us.   Well I have.  And it's apparent that either they haven't, or they're banking on the fact that a lot of people haven't and that we will just buy what they're saying, cower before their derision, and Shut Up.   Fortunately knowledge is a good inoculation against such ridicule.

Nazi is short for Nationalsozialist … which was a term for supporters of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or the National Socialist German Worker’s Party.

Be very suspicious about any political movement with the word “workers” in the title.  They're all brothers.  Communism, Socialism, Fascism, and Nazism.

Fascism was the Italian National Socialist movement. Hairs are split about how “socialistic” national socialism really was because the global socialists (eg: the Soviets) considered it “right-wing” socialism, which is probably why the term is used to smear conservatives. Either way, they were collectivist systems. And does it really matter if the state runs the corporations or the corporations run the state? Either way, the State and Corporations are one in these systems.

National Socialism was considered “right-wing” because (again, by its close relative just to its left) of it’s emphasis on strong, strict, social controls.

But are you really going to try to convince me that the Soviets and the Maoists didn’t use strict social control?

I think the globalists kid themselves about how different they really are, and how egalitarian they really are.  The Ruling Class always develops, and it always has special privileges.

I also think the reasons they object to the term "socialist" are 1) bad connotation due to abuses of socialist governments in the 20th century (in other words, it's bad marketing) and 2) they really think that they can do this gradually, without a bloody revolution, and everybody will just be happy once we all see how wonderful it is.  So in other words, no boody revolution, no "Socialism".

But they fail to see ... the reason that we are anti-socialist has little to do with the bloody revolution aspect.  It has to do with the fact that, as a political philosophy for running a state and its economic system, it doesn't work.  And it doesn't "not work" because of the bloodiness of the revolution or the iron-fistedness of the State --- it doesn't work because it rewards sloth and punishes productivity and innovativeness. (And the iron-fistedness of the state becomes necessary because it doesn't work!)

It is inherent in human nature to want to better one's lot in life.  Generally speaking, when bettering one's lot in life while following rules that keep you from confiscating from others -- you better others' lives as well.  You produce.  "Money", in reality, is a representation of production. (A portable proxy, if you will.)  The more you produce as a nation, the wealthier your nation is ... the better you do.  The less incentive to produce, the less will be produced.  The poorer your country will be.

So what you end up with is lower production, and confiscation from the productive to redistribute to the non-productive.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

Sounds great, on the surface, but it ain't human (or animal) nature.  On top of that, who decides what your abilities are, and who decides what someone's needs are?   And if I "need" more because I'm not performing up to my ability ... how does that get resolved?

By force.

That's right.  The state must either force me to work, or force someone else to support me.  If neither really works, then everybody gets poorer.   This will not stop the state from continuing to use force, though, and it will use more and more of it as time goes on in more and more desperate attempts to keep control.  This happens eventually every time.  It is inevitible, because of the nature of what we are, and that is homo sapiens.  It gets bloody one way or the other, because at some point someone's going to rebel against being used.

We know that.  We don't want to go there.  Which is why we resist.   If we resist too much for their liking when they have enough power, we will be liquidated (too many of us to imprison).   That's the way they roll.   If they don't have enough power, they will be subdued and discredited when we win.  The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. If we do not resist and let it happen, eventually the iron fist of the state will, as I discussed above, become tyrannically oppressive at some point anyway.  It has to.

Because state socialism is incompatible with human nature.  Human compassion works well at the level of the free individual, where one is free to decide when, to whom, and how much, and nobody is coerced into anything else.

Update: I have since edited up a video to go with this post. It just barely scratches the surface.

PJTV Covering the Tea Party Convention Live

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. 

Go check in when you get a chance.  Pretty cool.

I was at the Galord Opryland hotel for a conference once.  Neat place. 

Rick Santelli Day is Coming

I hereby declare next friday (a week from this friday) ... Feb 19 ... Rick Santelli Day.

We owe the man.

Pass it on.  :-)

Tax Break "Chickens" Are Coming Home .... To Roost

The big tax break we got last year, remember that?

The one Joe Klein pontificates about when he sneers at Americans who think that most of the $787 billion stimulus money was wasted ... that one.  The one that left you with a few extra dollars in your paycheck last year.  (Oh, and you HAVE to watch Glenn's 15 minute takedown of that article.... w-o-w.  Fun!  But I digress.)

I don't know if I mentioned this on the blog at the time, but if you were paying attention you would have noted that for working married couples ... the way it was being handled could be a problem.

See, what they did was take less in taxes out of your paycheck last year ... as if you were the sole income earner in your family.  And if your spouse were working too ... same with him or her.

Problem is, if you both work that means you got twice as much money as intended.  And the bill for the difference is coming due in April.

As I predicted back then, I don't think this will help Obama's numbers any.

Last year, as soon as I found out about this, I calculated how much too much they were leaving in our combined paychecks, and had them take out that much more out of mine for the rest of the year.

But I suspect most working couples did not.

So when those people do their taxes this year, they're probably going to be in for a bit of an unpleasant surprise.   

Wonder if this kind of thing will make the news?