Huh? Subsidiarity? What’s that? Well, its this:

The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co- ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.”

Boiled down, what is meant is that you should leave things to be done on the lowest social level possible. We are burdened – in government and business – with behemoth organizations which simply grind up society. Can a bureaucrat in DC really tell what sort of assistance is needed in Omaha? Not at all – but the bureaucrat’s rules dictate what the people of Omaha will have to do, regardless of how absurd, expensive or counter-productive it is.

Similarly, can a CEO based in New York City really tell what the business needs are in Boise? Not a chance – but down will flow the dictates and the people in Boise will try to implement a business plan drawn up by people who have never been within 500 miles of the place. It just doesn’t work.

Remember, it was the considered decisions of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, AIG, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the United States Treasury which got us in to our current mess. Nothing small in any of that – nothing which was actually in touch with the day to day needs of average people. Its not surprising it failed – it is surprising that it didn’t fail, sooner.

I bring this up because Deal Hudson over at Inside Catholic writes up how Governor Christie of New Jersey is implementing governing ideas based upon subsidiarity:

…At a time when most prominent Catholic politicians — Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and John Kerry — have advocated federal government solutions to problems like health care, Gov. Christie is pushing in the opposite direction by releasing a New Jersey Privatization Task Force Report.

In the 57-page report, the Task Force proposes privatizing the state’s motor vehicle inspections, housing construction inspections, turnpike toll booths, state parks, psychiatric hospitals, as well as contracting for highway maintenance work, and outsourcing worker’s compensation claims and all pension, payroll, and benefit payments systems…

That is subsidiarity with teeth. The concept here is not, as our liberals would say, that we’re abandoning the poor. They want to believe that because they can’t imagine a world without a government bureaucrat telling them what to do – but we imagine a world in which people take care of themselves and their neighbors. Which is the sort of world we used to have, before we started first creating monster-sized corporations, then created a double-monster-sized government to be the senior partner of a two-headed, society-eating dragon.

A new – or, more accurately, a revived – America must come of this crisis. As with all problems, it is moral – theological – at its base. What sort of society do we want? Do we want to be free men and women who look after each other? Or do we wish to be slaves – slaves to the super-State using the super-Corporation as its enforcer? I choose to be free – and I am delighted that in people like Governor Christie, we’re seeing at least some in leadership start to get it.

From Allahpundit at Hot Air:

The text’s not online yet but it sounds like they scaled back the accusation from the entire movement to simply certain unspecified people within it. Which is the safe route, of course. Smearing everyone would go too far even by the standards of some liberals, including The One…

From this point on, anyone with any sense of decency should have nothing to do with the NAACP. The TEA Party is not racist – and given what we see here, it is likely there are more racists in the NAACP than in the TEA Party. I am sick to death of this – I am not racist; I do not associate with racists; I do not tolerate racism – when some liberal says groups I belong to has racist elements they are essentially saying that I am a racist. I’m furious at this sort of thing.

A once proud and useful organization has gone entirely in to the gutter. Shame on them.

UPDATE: Sarah Palin weighs in:

I am saddened by the NAACP’s claim that patriotic Americans who stand up for the United States of America’s Constitutional rights are somehow “racists.” The charge that Tea Party Americans judge people by the color of their skin is false, appalling, and is a regressive and diversionary tactic to change the subject at hand…

Agreed.

Drug and rape a teenager – that, apparently, gets you forgiven in Europe.

Excuse me, this just makes me so giddy…

Robert Gibbs, Barack Obama’s chief spokesman, got into hot water this week for daring to speak the truth – that the Democrats could lose control of the House of Representatives in November. But it could be even worse than that.

Contrary to pretty much every projection until now, Democratic control of the Senate is also starting to coming into question. While Mr Obama’s approval ratings have continued to fall, and now hover at dangerously close to 40 per cent according an ABC-Washington Post poll published on Tuesday, the fate of his former colleagues in the Senate looks even worse.

In the past few days polls have shown Republican challengers taking the lead over previously safe Democratic incumbents, such as Barbara Boxer in California and Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. Indeed, given the uniformly negative direction in the numbers, it is now quite possible the Republicans could win the Senate seats formerly held by both President Obama in Illinois, and Joe Biden, vice-president, in Delaware.

Everyday I get a little more excited about November. Many say that it took Jimmy Carter to get this country to elect Ronald Reagan… I think the Obama Mistake of 2008 will usher in a long era of Republican Rule.

From the Associated Press:

Republicans in the Senate are backing a plan to shave $20 billion from President Barack Obama’s budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

The cuts amount to about a 2 percent trim from the $1.13 trillion requested by Obama for agency budgets annually funded by Congress. Senate Budget Committee Democrats have proposed a $4 billion cut…

A $20 billion cut is, of course, not enough – but still contrasts sharply with the Democrat’s absurd $4 billion cut which is nothing more than a campaign gimmick designed to allow threatened Democrats to say they voted to “reign in out of control government spending”.

We need to start thinking in terms of a 25%, across-the-board reduction in spending – and that is just a start. Unless we very swiftly get our budget under control, we face absolute national bankruptcy and complete economic collapse. If we don’t do this, dear people, then we face a future of not just 10 or 15% unemployment, but 50%…not just three or four years of recession, but decades of Depression.

It is really that serious. We cannot sustain this debt and eventually the time will come when we can’t borrow any more – and if we’re not balanced by then, the whole thing falls apart. Money will go in to hiding, everyone will be afraid to make any economic move, at all – government will freeze up (normally, a good thing but in such a circumstances, it would actually be bad). The have announced that our deficit has been $1 trillion through June – how much longer does anyone thing we can keep that up? A year? Two?

The Republican move is long-awaited, not nearly enough and should start the real debate about what we will do about our debt.

Conservative class warfare.

Economic optimism is insane.

GOP maintains lead in “generic ballot“.

Update on Catholic professor fired for teaching Catholicism in a class about Catholicism.

NRA – becoming part of the Establishment? Rumbles on the right about the NRA’s possible endorsement of Reid, and other outrages.

Michelle Obama proves that idiocy in her family is not combined to President Obama.

Berwick: our government-funded Dr Death.

Allahpundit has an excellent article about all the Presidential-prep stuff Sarah Palin is doing, and some of the normal Presidential-run stuff she’s not doing. Do read the whole thing, but to boil it down – she’s getting together the means of a massive, grass-roots campaign, spreading campaign cash around in key States, but she isn’t building the normal political infrastructure of a campaign. Is she getting in? Is she just thinking about it? Or is she just getting in to it differently than most establishment candidates?

As for me, I’m still not sure she’s in. There is certainly a lot of prep work being done, but I still don’t see the definitive information which would make me think she’s going to go for it. In fact, of all the 2012 prospects, Mitt Romney is the only person I count as “in” (and even he’s still got some wiggle room to gracefully withdraw if the polls in mid-2011 don’t favor him).

On the other hand, as I’ve said before, if Palin runs, she gets the Republican nomination. To be sure, a great deal of the GOP establishment would be against her (but not all, she’s built some bridges to some parts of it) and the MSM would go in to an orgy of anti-Palin screeches…but, she’d win it, if she sought it. Only someone more “outsider” than Palin could take it away from her.

The fact that the liberal establishment entirely and the GOP establishment partially despises her is the key to understanding why she’d win: the people are heartily sick of the establishment. Allahpundit notes that a lot of GOP prospects are setting up to run on a “competence” platform against Obama’s manifest failures. A good idea, but it doesn’t capture the mood of the electorate, especially the GOP electorate. Obama was said to be competent – he was going to replace the supposedly incompetent Bush, remember?

What is wanted is someone who will be on the side of the people – just as the Democrat primary in 2008 revolved around who was least like Bush (and that was why I picked Obama out as the Democrat nominee as early as September of 2007), the 2012 GOP primary will revolve around who is least like the people in government. Romney has many good points; so does Pawlenty. Mitch Daniels has been a superb governor of Indiana. Any one of them, nominated by the GOP, would get my enthusiastic support against Obama – but can any one of them credibly present themselves as outsiders who will go to DC to clean out the crooks who have wrecked our nation?

Not hardly. To find someone with her ability to do this, you’d have to go to Christie in New Jersey (the only man, I think, who could possibly derail Palin in the primaries), or to Allen West in Florida (but he’s not even managed to win a House seat…his time will come, but not before 2016, at the earliest). Outsiders. Anti-government. People vs Powerful. The Second American Revolution.

That is what 2012 will be – and if Palin runs, she wins.

From Fox News:

The six-month election recount that turned former “Saturday Night Live” comedian Al Franken into a U.S. senator may have been decided by convicted felons who voted illegally in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

That’s the finding of an 18-month study conducted by Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, which found that at least 341 convicted felons in largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul voted illegally in the 2008 Senate race between Franken, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman.

The final recount vote in the race, determined six months after Election Day, showed Franken beat Coleman by 312 votes…

It was clear, early on, that Democrats were doing a replay in Minnesota of what they had done in 2004 in Washington – a close race with the Democrat slightly behind, and they just kept finding votes until they had enough to put the Democrat slightly over the top. They also tried this in Florida in 2000, and failed.

The preservation of our democratic way of governance requires absolute security of the vote – there must never be even the slightest shadow of the doubt that the person holding the seat won it fairly. Right now, there is no such certainty in the 2008 Minnesota result and the only recourse is for the Senate to expel Franken and thus allow the people of Minnesota to use their constitutional means of selecting a Senator to legitimately hold the seat.

A new, fair ballot would be the best means – even if it ends up returning Franken to serve out the rest of his term (though he should be thoroughly investigated to ensure he did nothing criminal as regards the 2008 vote). This is not a small issue; this is not just politics as usual – this is the viability of a government of, by and for the people. It doesn’t take many fraudulent elections before all of them are mere criminal conspiracies. We must do the right thing here.

Just can’t take the heat for what they’ve done.

From the New York Times:

In a private meeting with White House officials this weekend, Democratic governors voiced deep anxiety about the Obama administration’s suit against Arizona’s new immigration law, worrying that it could cost a vulnerable Democratic Party in the fall elections…

Which is correct. Poll after poll shows the American people strongly support Arizona’s actions. Given the number of hispanics in Arizona and the polls in that State, there is likely a large minority of hispanic voters who back the bill. Obama and his politicized Justice Department are gambling that stern action against Arizona will bring hispanic voters to the polls for Democrats in November – Democrat governors are realizing that even if this is the case (and its not a certainty, at all), it won’t be enough to overcome the level of voter support for the measure.

Obama is playing this as if the 2008 result meant that the American people had openly opted for leftist governance. He seems to have forgotten that his win was predicated upon running away from overt leftism – he won, as it were, as a post-partisan healer who could bring the reforms so long sought by the American people.

Running center and governing left has turned the Democrat’s massive 2008 victory to ashes – now sensible Democrats are seeking to reduce the damage. Obama, on the other hand, is doubling down – and could be turning a bad loss in November in to a political catastrophe.

Question: Is Obama smart enough to see it? Is he humble enough to accept reproof from his peers?

Time will tell.