Remember When…..Obame Said “I Take the Constitution Very Seriously”?

tiredoflibbs52 Comments

Then, Candidate Obama:
“You know, I taught Constitutional Law for ten years. I take the Constitution very seriously,” he said. “The biggest problems that we are facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all…

“And that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m president of the United States of America.”

How soon they and he forget!

Now, King Obame 1st with ANOTHER threat to bypass Congress:

And predictably, the mindless drones of the left applauded obame both times, then and now.  As usual, depending who is in the White House, the left will oppose such actions when a non-proggy is in the office and applaud worse actions when one of their own is in the office.

The latest tactic by the left is to bring up the NUMBER of Executive Orders that obame has issued.  It is indeed less than other Presidents, but they don’t want to discuss the CONTENT of those orders since in most cases they violate the rights of the citizen (FDR EO9066 – internment of the Japanese Americans) or violate the Constitution as in obame’s own words that he won’t use EOs or signing statements and “not go through Congress at all”.  Remember as a candidate, he originally emphasized the “checks and balances” of our government and how important it was to maintain it.  He was going to reverse the damage that evil Bush was doing.

Ah, memories…..

And, Meanwhile, the World Burns Down

Mark Noonan42 Comments

We’ve got stories that Venezuela’s government is importing Cuban mercenaries to suppress revolution while the President of Ukraine has fled Kiev.  Elsewhere, Syria is still a blood bath, the Taliban are poised to return to power in Afghanistan five minutes after we leave and the war clouds continue to grow in the Asia-Pacific theater.

Just when do we start to get some of that “smart diplomacy” that Obama promised?

Here’s the thing – if you ever wondered what would happen if American power were removed from the scene, here ya go.  This is what a post-American world looks like.  To put it bluntly, as the smoke cleared over the radioactive rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world became peaceful only in so far as America prevented war.  Through nearly four years of global battle and at high cost in blood and treasure, the United States emerged in 1945 as both the arbiter of the world and its guarantor of peace.  All the UN organizations; all the international talk-shops; all the treaties and discussions and agreements and alliances – all were completely pointless except that the United States stood behind them.  No one on this earth then (or even now, actually) wanted to ever fight us, again, in a general war.  Small wars on the side could be managed, but no one ever wanted to re-awaken the Sleeping Giant.  To do so was national suicide.  As long as our power was there as a standing threat, everything could be kept under control.

Take America out of the equation and very quickly everything would fall apart.

And so it has, because we are out of the equation.  While our power is intact, the President of the United States refuses to use it and the world knows he will not.  This is because Obama – that child of modern American indoctrination dressed up as education – believes absolutely that the problems the world has had since 1945 were caused by us, rather than kept from getting out of hand by us.  Obama was told in school that if there was a war or oppression some where, then it was because the United States did it – he never learned that the war or oppression was kept from becoming completely horrific simply because we were there, and at will could utterly destroy whomever was making war or causing oppression.  The world now knows that no matter what anyone does, Obama simply will not do anything about it – and so it just goes from bad to worse out there.  Believe it or not, people can be downright evil – they don’t have to be forced to be evil by a clever CIA plot.  I know this will simply stagger our liberals, but its just one of those hard facts of life.

The world is in more danger of a long, general war than at any time since the 1930’s.  We’ll see how it comes out.  Hopefully we can keep out of any war until at least January 20th, 2017 because more fearful than Obama refusing to use American power would be having that man use American power…it would be like giving a machine gun to a drunk.  We’ll have to rebuild all this after Obama is gone – pray it doesn’t take another world war to do it.

The Necessity of TEA Party and RINO Unity

Mark Noonan125 Comments

Churchill once said that if Hitler had invaded hell, he would have made at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.  That was to put it a bit extreme, of course, but Churchill was trying to point out the gravity of the situation.  There wasn’t anything more important for him – and his country – at that time then fighting off Hitler and in service of that goal, he was willing to put up with quite a lot he didn’t actually like.  While we, as a people, are not at death grips with a threat as imminent as that, we are confronted today with an existential threat to our nation – namely, an extreme leftist Democrat party under Barack Obama determined to “fundamentally transform” America.  And its not like they are willing to use truth and rational argument, nor are they in any sense concerned about the legality of their actions.  They are determined to have their way – convinced, of course, that eventually we’ll all love the result.  The trouble is that a republic cannot survive long if the people in charge of it cease to obey the laws – that is what ultimately killed the Roman republic; political leaders determined to have their way simply ignored the law and did what they wished…bribing the people to acceptance with bread and circuses (sound familiar?).  Obama is no dictator – but what he is doing is ensuring that we’ll eventually get one, if we don’t stop this course of action.  And doing that takes winning political victories in 2014 and 2016.

As long time readers know, I am not at all a fan of the GOP establishment.  I do consider them too tight with the corrupt, Big Government/Big Corporation crony-capitalist elite.  But here’s the thing:  there are strong indicators that ObamaCare is causing an implosion of support for liberal Democrats all across the nation.  The political landscape has a very definite 2010ish feel about it.  But here’s the thing – if we go about demanding absolute political purity then we will blow this opportunity.  We must, of course, elect the most conservative candidate possible – but some times that will wind up being someone who is of a RINOish bent.  Now is not the time for political purity, but for all patriots to rally to the defense of their nation.  If we don’t win over 2014 and 2016, then the story of our nation is probably told.  If we don’t stop the rot – what Obama calls the “fundamental transformation” of this nation – then we will eventually go financially and morally bankrupt and, probably, break up in to a series of small republics, easy prey to the rising powers in the world.

Given that Obama and any possible Democrat successor to him will continue to just break the law as necessary in order to advance their leftwing ideology, it fundamentally doesn’t matter who we put in to office, as long as they will at least obey the laws.  This is the crucial moment – this is where we decide, finally, whether the notion of popular government is rational or absurd.  We went through this once before in the Civil War and determined that a people can govern themselves against an attempt to break up the nation – now we need to find out if people can govern themselves against an attempt by the government to break the laws.

As this is the case, it is not time to be hammering on Boehner, McConnell or other GOP leaders.  Go ahead and be mad about the recent approval of  the debt limit hike – that plus $5 will get you a cup of coffee…and, in the long run, a government which will do whatever the whim of the President is at the moment.  The GOP leaders see that the political landscape is favorable to the Republican party as long as we don’t give the Democrats a way out of the ObamaCare box.  ObamaCare, my friends, is the failure of liberalism writ large.  Usually these Big Government boondoggles take decades to reach total failure, and so people get used to them and the only proposals made about them are to tinker at the edges.  But ObamaCare is such a manifest failure in the lives of real people, right now, that it can’t be excused or explained away…and Obama is walking right in to a trap by refusing to countenance any legislative modifications to the law – the tinkering around the edges which would give at least an appearance of success.  Obama has always been arrogant and stupid but he managed to weave his way through because the MSM simply lied to protect him and, additionally, the American people were more than willing to give our first black President all sorts of leeway (the overwhelming majority really wanted him to be a success…not for his sake, but for the sake of the nation).  ObamaCare will crush the Democrats this fall and in 2016 – and will crush the liberal ideal that government can solve problems – provided we allow it to happen.  Give the Democrats something else to talk about (anything else…right now, they’d love to have a Select Committee on Benghazi created…anything to get the subject off of the failure of liberalism as personified in ObamaCare) and they will be able to get out of the box and perhaps stave off electoral disaster.

To be sure, to secure the full victory we need, the GOP will have to run good campaigns in 2014 and 2016.  This will not fall in to our laps – and the Democrats will break every law necessary and cheat like mad in order to deny us victory.  This is still a massive, political battle.  We do need to come forth with a series of policy proposals – but our most important thing to do, especially in 2014, is just to keep hammering on ObamaCare.  It is deeply unpopular.  It isn’t working.  It passed with almost no GOP votes (I believe there was one GOPer in an extremely blue district in Louisiana who voted for it in 2010).  It is the Democrats’ failure through and through – and absent major, legislative modification (which Obama won’t go for), it simply will not get better all through 2014, and looks to just get worse in 2015 and 2016.  Added to this increasing anxiety about the state or the world, an economy still bottomed out from the 2009 recession and increasing fear and hatred generated by Democrat hate-mongers, and we’ve got the ingredients for a major electoral shift.  Unless we blow it.  Unless, that is, we decide that being politically pure and in the political minority is better than compromising as necessary and securing political power.  And don’t forget that we have our con artists – not nearly as many as the Democrats, but there are players out there on our side who simply want to generate attention and donations for themselves and who don’t give a damn about the country…they will play the siren song of political purity, in order to aggrandize themselves.

We can win this.  We can stop the rot.  We can, over the next two decades, reform our nation back in to something resembling what the Founders intended…but our first step is to get the Democrats out of power.  If they have power, they will stop us from doing anything – they must lose it all; House, Senate, White House.  Eye on the prize, good people.

More Indicators To Point Out the Failures of Progressivism

tiredoflibbs96 Comments

State Fiscal Condition: Ranking the 50 States

New research from Sarah Arnett examines states’ abilities to meet their financial obligations in the face of state budget challenges that have far outlasted the Great Recession. Fiscal simulations by the Government Accountability Office suggest that despite recent gains in tax revenues and pension assets, the long-term outlook for states’ fiscal condition is negative (GAO 2013). These simulations predict that states will have yearly difficulties balancing revenues and expenditures due, in part, to rising health care costs and the cost of funding state and local pensions.

Arnett uses four different indices to analyze state solvency using each state’s fiscal year 2012 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report data. She then weights these four indices to create the State Fiscal Condition Index below.

Cash Solvency

A state’s cash solvency takes into account the cash the state can easily access to pay its bills in the near term, reflecting the state government’s liquidity. The map below indicates that most states have enough cash on hand to meet their short-term obligations.

Budget Solvency

A state’s budget solvency is its ability to create enough revenue to cover its expenditures over a fiscal year. Budget solvency varies greatly across states. As the map below shows, in fiscal year 2012-13 states had an operating ratio below 1, indicating a budget deficit.

Long-Run Solvency

Long-run solvency measures a state’s ability to use incoming revenue to cover all its expenditures, including long-term obligations such as guaranteed pension benefits and infrastructure maintenance. Long-run solvency is less sensitive to economic trends than the other measures examined here.

Service-Level Solvency

Service-level solvency is the most difficult to measure because it reflects whether state governments have the resources to provide their residents with an adequate level of services. A state’s service-level solvency is measured using taxes and revenue per capita, along with expenditures per capita.

State Fiscal Condition Index

Using the four solvency indices above, Arnett creates an overall State Fiscal Condition Index. She improves on past research about fiscal metrics by weighting each solvency indicator based on the timeframe in which it will affect state residents. Although the ranking is a snapshot in time, the states at the bottom are there due to years of poor financial management decisions, bad economic conditions, or a combination of the two. New Jersey and Connecticut face similar problems: tax revenues that have not kept up with expenditures, use of budget practices that only appeared to balance their annual budgets, and significant debt levels as a result of decades of using bonds without being able to pay for them (State Budget Crisis Task Force 2012). In addition, both states have underfunded their pension systems, resulting in billions in unfunded liabilities.

 ——-
The above says it all.  Progressivism has and always will be an utter failure.  Taxing the hell out of the “rich” (a definition that keeps changing with each successive Progressive pResident) will not work as shown above and in NORWAY where they, like the Dakotas, drill for oil and exploit their natural resources.  Norway has plenty of revenue to provide for their social programs.  For some reasons, the proggies here refuse to do the same but would rather punish corporations and the rich.  They are punishing those that will provide jobs, create wealth and provide opportunities for the middle class to succeed.
Proggies never learn….. They just keep repeating “it will be different this(next) time.”.

It Appears that History Will Pause in 2014

Mark Noonan22 Comments

Our liberals feel that they are on the side of history – that things always go their way in the long term and that the United States is certain to eventually be a social democratic nation.  Perhaps, but it does seem there are some bumps on the way:

The Democratic Party’s biggest super PAC, recently retooled as an early pro-Hillary Clinton effort, will sit out the midterm elections this year.

A spokesman with the group, Priorities USA Action, confirmed to BuzzFeed on Wednesday night that it would not be involved in House or Senate campaigns.

“House Majority PAC and Majority PAC are doing everything right and making a real difference. We fully support their efforts,” said the spokesman, Peter Kauffmann, referring to the main groups supporting Democratic congressional candidates.

Priorities USA, which operates under loose campaign finance rules that allow it to raise and spend unlimited sums, put $65 million behind Barack Obama in 2012…

This, as VP Biden would say, is a “big f’ing deal”.  It is an essential surrender on a large part of the Democrat money machine.  They are giving up on 2014 and setting their sights on 2016.  And there is a certain logic in this – with Obama increasingly unpopular and heading for his second mid-term, a wipe out of the Democrats was always possible.  But Democrats have learned something under Obama – as long as you’ve got the White House and one house of Congress, you can do as you please.  Just write all the executive orders you want, refuse to pass a budget and live on continuing resolutions which allow the President to move money around pretty easily to whatever is the cause of the day for Democrats.  Democrats are confident (with reason, it should be said) that they can get Hillary in to the White House…and, given the electoral map of 2016, reasonably confident that even if they lose the Senate in 2014, they can win it back in 2016 (and thus Reid has already signaled his intent to run for -re-election that year).  This is just hard nosed, political reality coming in here.

But it also means the GOP can win big – and that can set the stage for us to win in 2016, as well.  It’ll be an interesting couple years.

The End of the GOP, or a New GOP?

Mark Noonan70 Comments

Interesting:

Four Republican-leaning groups with close ties to the party’s leadership in Congress — Crossroads and its “super PAC” affiliate, the Congressional Leadership Fund, and Young Guns Action — raised a combined $7.7 million in 2013. By contrast, four conservative organizations that have battled Republican candidates deemed too moderate or too yielding on spending issues — FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth Action Fund, the Senate Conservatives Fund, and the Tea Party Patriots — raised a total of $20 million in 2013, according to Federal Election Commission reports filed on Friday.

“This is by far the biggest nonelection year we’ve ever had,” said Matt Hoskins, the executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund. “It shows how committed people are to electing true conservatives and to advancing conservative principles.”

The golden rule of politics is, of course, “whoever has the gold, makes the rules”.  How long can the establishment GOP really retain control of the party when the non-establishment part of it is pulling in more money?

Democrats have been gleeful ever since 2008 over the GOP “civil war” – I haven’t viewed it in those terms.  It believe that what is happening is that the Republican Party is becoming a party of Jacksonians.  This would, no doubt, surprise and amuse that old Whig Lincoln who helped to build the Republican Party, but I don’t think he’s be dismayed by it, either.  We are a long way, after all, from the Republican Party of the 1860’s, just as we are from the Democrat Party of that era.  Things change and ever since FDR routed the Civil War era GOP in 1932, there has been no political party which has broadly expressed the old, Jacksonian principals of limited government.  Both parties have been broadly in favor of government, with just different ideas about just whom is to benefit the most from government largesse – though with both parties tending, in the last 20 years, to favor the rich and the poor over the middle class.

Jackson, it should be recalled, was for States’ rights…but not in an absurd sense, as shown when he smacked down South Carolina over nullification.  Jackson was in favor of free enterprise, but not to the idiotic limit of just allowing the rich to grind the poor.  Jackson’s power emerged out of the State militias rather than out of the traditional financial (in the North) or planter (in the South) Establishments.  Jackson would fight a man to the death to preserve his rights, but then adopt that enemy’s son and raise him as his own – this neatly encapsulates the American ideal.  Our modern Jacksonians – even if they don’t know they are – are also for States’ rights; for free enterprise (but getting more and more disgusted with crony capitalism); and for the right of the individual to live his or her life however they wish.  These are the general political ideals which are fueling the new forces in the GOP – and the forces which now look to take over the whole enterprise.

To be sure, the final part of this battle for the GOP might result in handing the Democrats just one more victory in 2016 – but the bottom line is that the old GOP Establishment will have to knuckle under to the TEA Party (broadly defined), or go over to the Democrats.  I think most will knuckle under – after all, any group which can raise $20 million in an off year is a force to be reckoned with…and a force which is probably going to win it all, in the by and by.

A Primer On The Minimum Wage That Even A Liberal (hopefully) Could Understand

Leo Pusateri28 Comments

A little primer regarding the ‘minimum wage.’

Understand exactly what a hike in the ‘minimum wage’ entails.

A compulsory hike in the minimum wage means that the price of productivity will increase.

This means that the level of what one used to purchase per dollar is less; therefore, one will be required to spend more to get the same amount of productivity.

What a set amount of money bought before the hike in the minimum wage, can no longer be bought for the same amount of money. After the hike, more money must be spent, to get the same level of productivity.

Money, is then, by definition, devalued. When money is devalued, the amount of it required to purchase a given good or service increases.

This increase is called INFLATION.

One of two things MUST happen in order to regain equilibrium between resources spent and goods produced or purchased:

1. Pass along the increased price (inflation) of goods or services to the customer; or

2. Make sure the money you spend on the manufacturing/service end results in more productivity.

Option number one results in inflation in the marketplace (rise in prices to purchase goods or services) passed on to all. This means that the money earned after the minimum wage hike has less purchasing power than the money earned prior to the minimum wage hike. This effectively negates the purchasing power experienced via any raise in pay to the worker as a result of hiking the minimum wage.

Option Number Two results in fewer workers doing more work per hour for the increased pay they get. Instead of seven people on a shift, to keep the same productivity without passing increased costs to the consumer, there may be only five people required to do the work that seven people once did. This effectively results in a reduction in the present work force at worst, or in preventing the company from hiring additional workers after attrition, at best.

This, of course, results in higher unemployment and/or lower labor participation rates, as there are now fewer jobs to be had.

In other words, contrary to all the magical thinking going on in the White House and in the war rooms of the DNC, and yes, among the democrat party faithful, there are no sustainable benefits to a *compulsory* increase in the minimum wage.

Conservatives Know Liberals; Liberals Don’t Know Conservatives

Mark Noonan89 Comments

From Volokh Conspiracy:

…One other point that I find really interesting and important about Haidt’s work is his findings on the ability of different groups to empathize across these ideological divides. So in his book (p. 287) Haidt reports on the following experiment: after determining whether someone is liberal or conservative, he then has each person answer the standard battery of questions as if he were the opposite ideology. So, he would ask a liberal to answer the questions as if he were a “typical conservative” and vice-versa. What he finds is quite striking: “The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’ The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.” In other words, moderates and conservatives can understand the liberal worldview and liberals are unable to relate to the conservative worldview, especially when it comes to questions of care and fairness.

In short, Haidt’s research suggests that many liberals really do believe that conservatives are heartless bastards–or as a friend of mine once remarked, “Conservatives think that liberals are good people with bad ideas, whereas liberals think conservatives are bad people”–and very liberal people think that especially strongly. Haidt suggests that there is some truth to this…

We see this all the time.  First off, anyone who is right of center in any meaningful sense can usually with 100% accuracy determine what a liberal will think on any issue before the liberal is queried.  This is why we don’t need to tune in to CNN, read the New York Times editorial page or watch the President’s State of the Union Address.  We already know what they are going to say. There is never a surprise in a liberal.

Secondly, we know that liberals will not know what we think about any particular issue, even after they have asked us.  Whatever we say will just go through the liberal’s mental filter and come out as us saying whatever the liberal believed we should have said, given that we are conservative.  The most recent example of this absurdity is the way liberals treated Huckabee’s recent comments  –  whatever one wishes to think about them, all Huckabee said as that liberals treat women as if they are unable to control their libidos and need Uncle Sugar to take care of them.  Once that went through the liberal filter, it came out in liberal thinking that Huckabee thinks that women cannot control their libidos and need Uncle Sugar to take care of them.  I can assure one and all that if Huckabee is still prominent 20 years from now, liberals will be condemning him for having once upon a time said that women cannot control their libidos.

If you read the whole article linked from Volokh, you’ll see that it starts out describing how people originally come to their views – that we tend to take up views which meet our predispositions and then tend to concentrate on evidence which confirms us, rejecting that which denies our view.  This is probably true to a certain extent.  I can see why I was open to the conservative argument when I first started paying attention to politics in the late 1970’s – Carter’s liberalism was such a clear failure that I’d have had to be an idiot to think that liberalism had the answers.  Any particular liberal out there can provide us with reasons why liberal twaddle appealed to them at the start.  But I think there is this difference – when you start entering in to conservative thought, you’ll find a variety of views right from the get-go.  Unlike the mindlessness of liberalism, conservatism has dissidents.

And because we have dissidents, we are forced to argue and when you argue (if you are to be at all successful) you have to get in to the mindset of your opponent.  You have to accord their point of view some respect and assume that they want the same good end as you, even if their means of doing so are different (and perhaps incorrect).  Liberals don’t have dissidents – the powers that be of liberalism decree that this or that is the only acceptable view and everyone must conform to it – and everyone who doesn’t is slandered as a hate-filled bigot.   Naturally, all of us would urge liberals to try and understand our views, but that won’t really be successful – a liberal who enters in to the worldview of a conservative in order to understand it would very swiftly cease to be a liberal.  Not saying that they’d go out and become TEA Party activists the next day, but they’d cease to be liberal because they’d cease to automatically accept whatever the liberal powers-that-be decree…and thus they would be ostracized by fellow liberals, and most people cannot tolerate ostracism (not for nothing did the ancient Greeks give you a choice between drinking hemlock and going in to exile; some choose hemlock as the preferable option).

What all this means is don’t expect liberals to be kind or merciful: they can’t be and remain liberals.  To remain liberals they must remain ignorant of and fearful about us.  Just keep that in mind as we battle it out.

Three More Years!

Mark Noonan174 Comments

Yep, just three more years before Obama is gone.  Out the door.  No longer matters.  Can’t screw up things any more – at least, not in a way that we’ll have to care about.

And, Barry, it isn’t racism which is making us dislike you – its the whole incompetent fool thing which is getting us down.