From Hot Air:

Don’t blame them. It was your elected representatives, in bipartisan fashion, who passed an anti-smoking statute last year requiring the FDA to impose more “graphic” health warnings on cigarette packaging. Evidently putting “you’ll get cancer” on the side of the carton is no longer deemed a sufficient deterrent to lighting one up, so now we’re actually going to thrust photos of putrefying flesh into smokers’ faces in hopes of steering them away. Coming soon, presumably: Mandating special flavor additives to ciggies so that you actually throw up while smoking…

Allahpundit’s exit question is exquisite:

Does this mean we’re ready for a law requiring pictures of dismembered fetuses on the walls of Planned Parenthood? It’s all about informed choices, after all.

But, of course, it isn’t about that, at all – its about providing funding for liberal advocacy groups who hate Big Tobacco. If they didn’t have this outlet, they’d have to get a real job. Naturally, this won’t stop government from raking it in off of tobacco taxes.

I’m a smoker. I like smoking. I know, all of us smokers are supposed to be wracked by guilt and we’re all supposed to say we hate it and wish we could quit. I don’t hate it and don’t wish that, at all. I still might quit, though things like this make me disinclined to do so.

Just to clear some things up – I agree with smoking bans in most places. Not in bars, because that is stupid – and if someone really wants a smoke-free bar, then let them open one up. But to mandate that every bar, everywhere, ban smoking when smokers really, really like to have a cigarette with their beer is asinine – un-American, too. Living in Vegas, I have the privilege of living in one of the last bastions of American smoking – but even here, it is coming to an end. More and more smoke-free areas of the casino…and I wouldn’t dream of lighting up without being sure that those around me also smoke (fortunately, its even money in Vegas that anyone you meet is a smoker). Smoking is a thing that some people really dislike – don’t like the smell, don’t like the concept. I’m entirely cool with keeping it as a private eccentricity. But I also just can’t stand fascism – and trying to scare me off of smoking by putting a corpse on my pack is fascist.

I’m fully aware of the health risks involved – but unlike wimpy liberals, I also know that I gotta die of something, some time. Its that old Redd Foxx joke…imagine all those people who never smoked and never drank, pissed off as they lie in bed, dying of nothing. Smoking might advance my date of death…on the other hand, it might not. Dad lived until 82 and almost the last thing he did on this earth was have a cigarette. Camel – unfiltered.

I’m just sick to death of these people – they’ve wrecked our whole world, but they want us to quit smoking. You’d figure that people who destroyed sexual morality and bankrupted a nation would be shy about pestering people on their smoking. But, nothing doing – they won’t stop until all fun, everywhere, is banned as everyone lives in a hovel on organic food rations while Al Gore flies around to lecture us.

No, thanks. I see lighting up these days as a means of striking a blow for liberty, and I’ll keep doing it just as long as I want to.

A Day to remember our un-payable debt:

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow

Between the crosses row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields. – Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

We voted last week and we owe that to the veterans – take time, today, to remember all of them. Pray for those are, right now, in harm’s way. Never forget that your duty to them is to make a nation worthy of their sacrifices.

From Politico:

…At least 15 Democrats have said publicly that they have lost faith in her ability to lead — a number backed up by as many as two dozen more who are indicating the same thing privately, while others haven’t yet taken sides.

Liberal Reps. Peter DeFazio (Ore.) and Marcy Kaptur (Ohio) sent a letter to colleagues asking them to support a plan to forestall leadership elections until December — a clear effort to give the anti-Pelosi forces time to coalesce. Democratic leaders plan to go forward with the leadership contests Nov. 17, according to sources familiar with a Wednesday afternoon conference call…

Given that slavish devotion to the leadership is the modern hallmark of the Democrat party, I doubt these few rebels will get their way. Fear of offending the Powerful will, I think, get most Democrats to fall in line.

Still, there are clearly fissures in the Democrat party. We should do what we can to encourage them – nothing like a split Democrat party to stand against in 2012. Though, of course, having one united behind Obama, Reid and Pelosi won’t be bad, either.

Verum Serum takes a quote out of the odious Ted Rall’s new book, The Anti-American Manifesto:

…Christian fundamentalists, the millennial end-of-theworlders obsessed with the Left Behind series about the End Times, neo-Nazi racists, rural black-helicopter Michigan Militia types cut from the same inbred cloth as Timothy McVeigh, allied with “mainstream” gun nuts and right-wing Republicans, have been planning, preparing, and praying for the destruction of the “Godless,” “secular” United States for decades. In the past, they formed groups like the John Birch Society and the Aryan Nations. Now the hard Right has a postmodern, decentralized non-organization organization called the Tea Party.

Right-wing organizational names change, but they amount to the same thing: the reactionary sociopolitical force—the sole force—poised to fill the vacuum when collapse occurs. The scenario outlined by Margaret Atwood’s prescient novel The Handmaid’s Tale—rednecks in the trenches, hard military men running things, minorities and liberals taken away and massacred, setting the stage for an even more extreme form of laissez-faire corporate capitalism than we’re suffering under today—is a fair guess of how a post-U.S. scenario will play out unless we prepare to turn it in another direction…

I’m worried about the guy; the bile is obviously just spilling over in his heart. He won’t have to worry about the teabagger fascists taking over as he’ll have a heart attack long before we get ’round to that.

While Rall has always been extreme (stupid, too), he does speak the mind of the left – just more clearly and forthrightly than most of them are willing to go. They do think we’re a bunch of racist, redneck, fascist, hate-filled, bigoted creeps bent on destroying everything not like us. Which is just a bizarre view to hold – if I were like that, my primary enemy, as there are so many more of them than there are liberals, would be Protestants. What do I care about some freaky liberals in San Francisco when right down the street I might have people who deny the Real Presence?

But, I get along with my Protestant brothers and sisters. I even go as far as being enthusiastic for black candidates for office, and have a very high regard for some gay people. Our liberal friends refuse to understand this, because if they ever did, they’d no longer be able to hate us. And if they stopped hating us, they’d have to listen to our ideas, and then either agree with them or come up with rational opposition.

But, as we can see from Rall, “rational” doesn’t fit well with liberalism. Its an entirely attitudinal thing. Its about how you view yourself – and, more importantly, how you view yourself as a wonderful person, no matter if you’ve never done a decent act in your life. Some liberals have, to be sure, but to be a liberal means to feel morally superior even when you’re a complete creep. Rely on it, Al Gore is proud of himself – never loses a wink of sleep over the fact that he has a carbon footprint as large as a coal-fired power plant…he’s a liberal, and therefore wonderful, and there’s an end on it.

There’s not much we can do for the Ralls of this world, other than pray for them. But we must keep in mind this blinding, irrational hatred they feel. It may come out in violence, but it is more likely to just come out in a truculent effort to block us, no matter how clear and necessary are the policies we advocate. It will be unthinking opposition, and thus at times harder to fight (battling crazy people is always hard). But reason will always win over irrationality.

From the Telegraph:

A Christian woman has been sentenced to hang in Pakistan after being convicted of defaming the Prophet Mohammed.

Asia Bibi, a 45-year-old mother-of-five, denies blasphemy and told investigators that she was being persecuted for her faith in a country where Christians face routine harassment and discrimination…

Just a terrible crime – and yet another reason, if it is necessary, why Sharia law has no place in the United States.

Pray for this poor woman and her family – and for the barbarians who have sentenced her to death for nothing.

From Your Tango:

The number of American women without children has risen to an all-time high of 1 in 5, a jump since the 1970s when 1 in 10 women ended their childbearing years without having a baby, according to the Pew Research Center.

About 1.9 million women aged 40-44—or 18 percent—were childless in 2008, an 80 percent increase since 1976, when just 580,000—10 percent of those in that age bracket—had never given birth, the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey shows.

Childlessness has increased across racial and ethnic groups and most education levels…

Taxes, education, health care, war, gay marriage, global warming…all completely trivial and pointless debates next to the concept of not having children. Quite simply, if we don’t have children, we don’t have a civilization – don’t have anything, at all.

I realize that in this matter I’m a bit of Mr. Hypocrite – married late, have no children of my own. But given a choice between staying silent and watching my civilization die and the risk of being charged with hypocrisy, I’ll take the risk. We really need to get a handle on this issue, or there won’t be any issues to get a handle on.

We have diligently enacted polices and pursued social ideas which have been directly inimical to family formation and child-rearing. We’ve crushed the farming, manufacturing and mining jobs which form the basis of stable, long-term employment; we’ve turned people’s heads with propaganda for a life of luxury; we’ve allowed pornography and varied smut to pervade our society; we’ve degraded any sense of sexual honor among the young; we’ve provided welfare which cuts out the need for fathers; we’ve ceased to ostracize men who don’t live up to their responsibilities and women who will have children by a series of men they never marry…its like we’ve been on a mission to commit slow, national suicide.

And, in a sense, that is what we have been doing. Work of the Enemy, this is. It is the old, anti-Christian heresies of the past, rising again in the modern age and telling us that the material is evil, life is worthless, responsibility a mindless drudgery. In ages past, we fought these ideas off – in modern times, we’ve lowered all defenses, and all the destruction has flooded in to the world.

We’re dying off. Make no mistake about it – if we don’t start having children, again, then the story of our nation is told. A new Christian civilization will eventually arise over the ruins of the first, but there is no requirement that the United States and our unique way of life endure. If we want it, then we’d better change – better change back to a society of honor, decency and strict morality.

21 years ago, today, that wall came down:

From CNN Money:

As the U.S. economy struggles to recover from a deep recession, the number of Americans filing for bankruptcy continues to rise dramatically.

In the federal government’s fiscal year 2010, which ended September 30, more than 1.5 million non-business bankruptcy filings were processed, according to data released Monday by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. That’s up more than 14% from fiscal 2009, when about 1.3 million personal bankruptcies were filed…

Up and up and up it goes – people simply don’t have the money to cover all the debts wracked up during the bubble. And what is the government’s plan to fix this? Create another bubble by printing money and giving it away, willy nilly.

We are broke, my dear people – flat busted and disgusted. We must allow the crash to take its full course and then start anew from the real wealth we still retain. There is no quick fix, there is no painless way out of this. The longer government keeps up the printing presses and borrowing like mad, the longer the day of reckoning is put off and the worse the eventual crash will be.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

Are you getting yours? Or have you pre-ordered it? Tell us if you plan to read it!

Myself, I am excited to read it. I have been looking forward to Bush’s memoir since, pretty much the end of his presidency. So, it’s been roughly two years of waiting, and everything we’re hearing about it tells us it’s going to be quite the read.

This article in the New York Times notes that the advocates of high speed rail in the United States were hit pretty hard by the November 2nd results. Most notably, the incoming Republican governors of Wisconsin and Ohio have indicated they’ll carry out their campaign promises to kill proposed high speed rail systems in their States. One does not wish to argue with the governors – the State’s have very bad finances right now and so large, expensive projects are not really doable. This is especially true when some of the proposals appear of dubious worth.

Overall, though, I am an advocate of high speed rail. For my State of Nevada, I’d like to see high speed rail lines coming in from San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco – mostly, of course, so we can steal business from that over-taxed, over-regulated and de-facto bankrupt State (sorry, Californians, but we’re going to be rather mercenary and predatory given the way you’ve elected to commit economic suicide by putting Brown back in the governor’s office. Goodness, what were you thinking?). I want Nevada to become a manufacturing and distribution center for the United States – high speed rail from the coast will make that possible…and, eventually, we extend the rail lines in to the east. I also want us to vastly increase our mining, farming and ranching industries – and all of these need the ability to move large, bulky items swiftly from place to place.

It is my view that our transportation system does need a major upgrade – especially in moving large quantities of goods over long distances at low cost. This will take some government action, but the best action government can take is to clear regulatory hurdles to setting up the manufacturing needed to make the trains as well as providing lost-cost right-of-way for the new network (which, though, will mostly follow the current rail lines…though the whole road bed will have to be re-engineered for the much higher quality needed for high speed rail). If there is a genuine economic need in this, private funds will easily pay for the overwhelming bulk of the direct, monetary cost. Anyone who says Uncle Sam or the States have to take a leading financial role merely means they want to build a rail line no one will use.

Of course, all of this is just part and parcel with a new economic paradigm which encourages the making, mining and growing of things. Productivity is the only way we’ll get out of our economic morass. And if we’re really going to do things which will allow us to compete price-wise with the rest of the world (and especially China) then we’re going to need vastly more efficiency throughout our economy. High speed rail fits right in with this – certainly on the major lines where the bulk of our over-land trade goes.

A new American economy requires us to cast aside the stale, dead policies of the past. No more boondoggles for favored groups; no more hand outs to corporations who grease the most DC palms; no more making things which don’t work. It is time to really think about what we want, and then about how to get it. High speed rail has its vital place in our new economy, but we daren’t let grafting politicians get hold of it, or we’ll have a 300 mph training running banksters and bureaucrats from New York to DC while useful goods amble along at 50 mph in the old system.