Pause a moment to remember them…
Connecticut School Shooting
Just absolutely horrific:
Twenty-seven people are dead, including at least 18 children, after a gunman opened fire at an elementary school in Newtown, CBS News reported.
Officials say the gunman, who apparently had two guns, was also killed. It happened around 9:40 a.m. Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary School..
Web chatter indicates there might have been a second gunman. We’ll have to see. Please pray for the families.
UPDATE:
A Prayer To The Holy Innocents
Holy Innocents, you died before you were old enough to know what life means, pray for all children who die young that God may gather them into His loving arms.
Holy Innocents, you were killed because one man was filled with hatred, pray for those who hate that God may touch their hearts and fill them with love.
Holy Innocents, you experienced a violent death, pray for all who are affected by violence that they may find peace and love.
Holy Innocents, your parents grieved for you with deep and lasting sorrow, pray for all parents who have lost young children that God may wrap a warm blanket of comfort around them.
Holy Innocents, those around you certainly felt helpless to prevent your deaths, pray for all who feel helpless in their circumstances that they may cling to God for courage and hope.
Holy Innocents, you who are now in Heaven, pray for all of us that one day we may join you there to bask in God’s love forever.
Amen.
UPDATE II: Predictably, some are trying to make a political case right away – probably in service to someone’s idea of never letting a crisis go to waste. Seriously, people, start to think a bit. First off, guns can’t be banned without a constitutional amendment, which would never in a million years be enacted…and if the government tried to go ahead and ban them, anyway, you’re just not going to get them out of the approximately 200 million Americans who have them. Secondly, can you lay off for just a day or two? At least until the bodies get cold? A gigantic, unimaginable tragedy has just occurred and the 2014 mid-terms are nearly two years away…whatever points you think you’re scoring right now, they are at best just a waste of time.
UPDATE III:
The human heart has depths from which schemes of unheard-of ferocity sometimes emerge, capable of destroying in a moment the normal daily life of a people. But faith comes to our aid at these times when words seem to fail. Christ’s word is the only one that can give a response to the questions which trouble our spirit. Even if the forces of darkness appear to prevail, those who believe in God know that evil and death do not have the final say. Christian hope is based on this truth; at this time our prayerful trust draws strength from it. —Blessed John Paul II
A Nation At War
The reelection of Barack Obama by a thin popular margin, albeit a wide electoral margin, underscores a nation divided and unfortunately I don’t see much common ground anymore. The GOP controls the House, the Democrats control the Senate and WH, but the GOP governs 29 states, and controls the legislatures in 27 of those states, so each party have fairly strong battle positions, and the battle has commenced, starting with Michigan. There the GOP legislature passed a right to work which has the unions apoplectic and threatening, and engaging in actual violence. This comes on the heels of a hotly contested battle in WI earlier this year where GOP Governor Scott Walker successfully defeated a union uprising over collective bargaining. Arguably public unions have done more harm than good, of course many liberals including the entire MSNBC network and Mr. Obama will contest that assertion, but if anyone wants to really see the results of public unions they need look no further than Detroit, MI, and San Bernardino, CA, where 71% of the city’s budget goes towards public union pay and pensions which led the city to filing bankruptcy earlier this year. In Detroit, it’s reported that nearly 35% of the population receive food stamps and astonishingly nearly 46% aren’t even the work force, and this is an indictment on both parties. While the MI is traditionally a blue state having voted for Democrat Presidents since 1992, they recently voted in a Republican Governor, who helped initiate the right to work bill, and Republican Legislature and have been governed by a Republican 10 out of the last 16 years. So it seems that regardless of the party, public unions have successfully negotiated more than their fair share of their respective states treasuries for quite some time now, and the results are not good. Compounding this problem is the fact that union officials and their membership seem oblivious to this fact, and are evidently unyielding, so the battle will go on and Mr. Obama is apparently willing to allow it rather than demonstrate leadership which come as no surprise.
If we are to ever right our countries financial ship, public unions will have to play a huge role, and as evidenced by WI and now MI, and the subsequent reaction from the WH, they have no intention of being responsible. The liberal media is also firmly in their corner, and the union leadership is prepared to “draw blood”, so this will be a very interesting four years and as far as I am concerned – I am up for the battle. These next four years could be Civil War II, that is unless Mr. Obama decides to lead. However, I am not holding out any hope on that.
UPDATE: How did I miss this?
“This is just the first round of a battle that’s going to divide this state. We’re going to have a civil war,” – Jimmy Hoffa
Moral Decay Plus Welfare Equals…
This – from the Daily Mail:
While many families are worrying about how to afford Christmas this year, one jobless single mother has revealed she receives so much in benefits she has £2,000 to spend on designer gifts, clothes and partying.
Mother-of-two Leanna Broderick plans to buy 20 presents for each of her children, including Burberry and Ralph Lauren outfits, iPads and gold jewellery.
The 20-year-old, who has never worked, claims nearly £15,500 a year in state handouts…
Whatever you do, don’t you dare get mad at the girl. She’s just doing what she’s been told to do.
She was told it was ok to have sex before marriage, then she was told it was ok to be on welfare…and then the welfare system pays her more than entry-level work and, presto, you’ve got a “welfare queen”. If you get mad at her then you are just being absurd: this is the system of incentives provided and she has reacted to them in a perfectly reasonable manner.
And, of course, this does happen here in the United States as well – there are millions here who have no incentive to work because welfare benefits, of various types, are either equal to or greater than what can be earned by entry-level work…and even if you have a circumstance where the welfare is slightly less than a 40 hour a week, minimum wage job, not having to go to work beats going to work if its only a matter of 10-15% total income difference.
Yes, of course it is a disgrace – it is better than a lot of welfare situations where mom is a drug addict or some such (at least she does seem to be treating the kids well), but its still a horrid destruction of a human being, and apt to be repeated in the next generation by her daughters who will likely live by their mother’s example…and may not be so lucky on the drug-addiction issue. We have, in some areas, several generations of people who live like this – who don’t work, never have worked and don’t even know what working is like. And as liberal policies go their natural course, more and more people are hooked on welfare of one sort of another and yet more and more people develope a disconnect between work and reward.
There is a way to cure this, but it would take some guts and some willingness to genuinely reform the economy.
The guts part of it is this:
Total welfare benefits – from whatever source – for a physically fit person under retirement age must never exceed 80% of the value of a full time, minimum wage job. They can be up to 100% of a minimum wage job if the welfare recipient is married and both persons have resided at the same address for 365 consecutive days or longer. No additional benefits may be provided for children born while receiving welfare benefits. That will take guts because to propose it is to immediately get howls of “racist!” and “hater!” and other such nonsense thrown at you.
The reform the economy part goes like this:
If we are to restrict welfare benefits like that, then we’d better buckets of entry-level jobs for these people to start working at – and that means manufacturing, farming and mining jobs, so we’d better restructure our economy for production rather than consumption and that will require much smaller government, a hard currency and a high cost for personal debt.
Or, we can just keep going as we are until we reach that tipping point where too many hands are in the till and the whole thing collapses. That is, at most, four or five years from now. So we’d better choose wisely…
The Liberals Have Really Stepped in it This Time…
Judge finds NC ‘Choose Life’ plates unconstitutional
myfox8.com
RALEIGH, N.C. – A federal judge has ruled it is unconstitutional for North Carolina to issue pro-life license plates unless…
Here is the takeaway line…
“This is a great victory for the free speech rights of all North Carolinians, regardless of their point of view on reproductive freedom,” said Chris Brook, legal director of the ACLU-NCLF.
Brook said the government cannot create an avenue to express one side of a political issue while denying an equal opportunity to citizens with an opposing view.”
This is quite interesting… and at once damning to all the government-sanctioned intellectual monopolies held by the Left.
Given the Federal Court’s decision, for instance,
Should the taxpayers support Darwinism exclusively being taught in schools, while at the same time denying equal opportunity and access for those who espouse Intelligent Design theory?”
Given the Federal Court’s decision, why should the taxpayers be forced to support Planned Parenthood, and at the same time not be forced to support Pro-Life organizations?
In their zeal to utilize the courts to push their agenda, it appears that ‘progressives’ have really stuck it to themselves this time.
We Conservatives Are So Stupid
At least, that is the allegation of a new “study” – from Pajamas Media:
…The results of a 4 year study show that Americans who obtain their news from Fox News channel have an average IQ of 80, which represents a 20 point deficit when compared to the U.S. national average of 100. IQ, or intelligence quotient, is the international standard of assessing intelligence.
Researchers at The Intelligence Institute, a conservative non-profit group, tested 5,000 people using a series of tests that measure everything from cognitive aptitude to common sense and found that people who identified themselves as Fox News viewers and ‘conservative’ had, on average, significantly lower intelligent quotients. Fox Viewers represented 2,650 members of the test group…
The study, itself, is bogus – as is the allegation that it came from some sort of conservative group (you can read the linked article to see just how laughably fake the whole “study” actually is). But, fake as it is, that is the way liberals view us – we’re conservatives because we’re just too stupid to be smart liberals.
To be sure, we are politically stupid – that I grant. The reason for this is that we don’t live and breath politics: we don’t hold it as the be-all and end-all of existence as liberals do. Only a liberal, for instance, could have thought up political correctness, which is nothing more than a demand that whatever is politically fashionable at the moment among the elite become obligatory among everyone. You can only think up something like that if you hold that what is political trumps what is personal. But while political correctness is idiotic, in practical, living terms it is highly effective in purely political terms: it allows you to control the debate by either insisting that everyone affirm some particular view or, more often, condemn some idea…with what is being condemned always being something that is traditionally held by the broad majority of the American people. We’re stupid in the sense that we let them get away with it.
But in terms of actual living, I wouldn’t trust a liberal with a burnt out match. These are people, after all, who think you can craft a national health care system for a nation of more than 300 million people, spread across four time zones and having places as completely different in demographics, economics and philosophy as, say, San Francisco, California and Birmingham, Alabama. They also think that incurring debt creates economic growth and that spending is more important than saving (we might get some liberal denials on that, but the whole of liberal, Keynesian economics is based upon the laughable fallacy that spending is better than saving).
Preening themselves on their credentials, secure in well-paid Big Government and/or Big Corporation jobs, liberals look out upon us and see a great, unwashed mass of ignorant bigots, bitterly clinging to guns and the Bible…meanwhile, their Great and Glorious Leader presides over a bankrupt nation and their solution is to raise taxes on “the rich” which will pay for 8 days of spending…brilliant!
UPDATE: 76% favor cutting spending across the board. In a very real sense, we’ve won the argument…we’ve just failed to craft a plan which gets us back in to the White House with full control of Congress. We figure that out over the next four years and we’ll be unstoppable.
In My Opinion
America not only has an economy problem, we have an economic educational problem that compounds the issue and our ability to resolve it. Most of our younger generation have been victims of educational malpractice as a result of liberalism and political correctness that infiltrated our educational system going back a few decades, and it will take a concerted effort, and a few more decades to overcome it. The curricula emphasis on diversity and political correctness took the place of history and economics and has produced a generation of ill informed, over emotional people with a distorted understanding of our Constitution and capitalism. One of our resident liberal teachers here has said on many occasion that the Constitution is racist and misogynistic, and even a liberal Supreme Court justice has said that if she were beginning a new country, she would not look towards the US Constitution as a foundational document, preferring instead to look towards other countries philosophy of governance. Unbelievable as that is, it’s true. The US Constitution is inarguably the greatest governing document ever written, and needs to be taught as such. The US Constitution is responsible for this country becoming the most powerful economy in the world, offering the most civil rights and liberties than any other country hands down.
Re: economics, too many people are financially illiterate as to capitalism, the private sector, and the role of government. Let me begin by simply saying that wealth is not a zero sum game, capitalism is the best economic platform hands down as “a rising tide lifts all boats” (think: JFK), and the role of government is simply that of a referee. Free markets are the foundation of the capitalist platform, and the Federal Governments role is to see that the rules are abided by, and the Federal Government has failed at this core responsibility so to think that they can perform any other function properly defies common sense. There should have been investigations, indictments, prosecutions and convictions stemming from the 2008 housing crash, but those investigations would have revealed some very uncomfortable truths for some very well politically connected people so the fact that those investigations never took place, should be disturbing to us all. The fact is, that more people can be lifted from poverty and the lower class via a healthy private sector, than any government program could ever accomplish, and the more money that the government extracts from the private sector, the less ability that private sector has to turn that money, creating wealth, jobs and ….. wait for it …… tax revenue. It’s all about the turns and any retailer, wholesaler and manufacturer can attest to that. The more you turn your inventory, the more income is produced, the more profit is produced, the more jobs are produced, which exposes more dollars to taxation. It’s better to tax a dollar that is turned 5x at 20%, than it is to tax that same dollar turned 1x at 40%, and any liberal that desires more revenue to the federal government needs to understand this basic economic fact. Sadly, this is not taught often enough in our primary and secondary educational levels.
As a country we owe our children an honest education, and there are certainly people who do take advantage of our capitalist system, as the very nature of the system can invite corruption, but if our federal government was more focused on it’s proper role, those instances would be few. Our children need to understand how the blend of our Constitution and our capitalist economy has created the most powerful, free country in the world unequaled by any other. As it is now, the misunderstanding of those two foundational components of our country has resulted in our current slide into malaise and mediocrity.
Thelma & Louise Cont. – The Enabler Version
I am enjoying this conversation on the direction of the GOP and where we go from here. Many of you know my position and some disagree so let me come at this from a different angle. In my opinion, the GOP is nothing more than an enabler at this point. We are enabling Obama to have someone to blame for his failures, and the liberal media is lapping it up. Everyday we try and save liberals from themselves, is another day that Obama can blame us for “obstructing” his wise and benevolent policies, and that perception will not change anytime soon, so why do we continue to do the same thing expecting different results? That is the definition of insanity.
What I think we should do, is clearly state for the record that we vigorously disagree with the policies prescribed by the Democrats and Obama, but that we do realize that elections have consequences so we will stand aside and allow Obama to implement his policies unchallenged. We all know these policies will fail, in fact they already have, so why are we standing in the way? The people who will be hurt the worst are the people who voted for Obama, so let the pain begin. This is also the only way that we can then clearly lay the blame at the feet of the Democrats and the media won’t even be able to cover for them and that just might help usher in a decade of conservative rule.
Count and Rat Haven have suggested that we simply need to control the message, and that another Reagan is what is needed. I somewhat disagree. While I would love to see another Reagan emerge, I believe our problems are deeper this time around. Our problems are not just the economy as they were with Reagan in 1980, our problem is the demonization of wealth and capitalism that is now ingrained in too many people. It’s the economic illiteracy that we must overcome in addition to selling the virtues of a smaller government, and back in 1980, wealth and success were not seen as the evils as they are today. So it is imperative in my opinion that this younger generation, and the growing minority constituency who all voted for the Obama plan, feel the pain of it first hand.
UPDATE, by Mark Noonan:
Seriously, we have entirely blown it on getting information to people…and Democrats have done the Big Lie better than ever.
Thelma & Louise – Open Thread
Reminiscent of Thelma & Louise’s movie ending flight over the cliff to destruction – that is exactly what I suggest conservatives allow to happen. In fact, going further, I believe that the GOP should rubber stamp everything Obama and the Democrats want to do for the next year, including military spending cuts, and little if no curtailment on entitlement increases. There is no question that the policies prescribed by Obama are doomed to fail, and in fact have so far, and there will be no other way to crystallize that in the minds of voters and the media, but to allow it to happen in full bloom. Every Republican needs to stand center stage and say unequivocally that while they disagree with the Administrations agenda, elections do have consequences and they will not stand in the way of the policies Obama endorses. Then, the GOP needs to remind the voters on a weekly basis, the results of those policies as they relate to unemployment, the debt, interest rates and the cost of living. As Count d’Harcots accurately pointed out to me earlier, the messaging is the main obstacle conservatives need to overcome, and it should become quite difficult for the Democrats to continue to sell their message of compassion, misguided as it is, when the economy is in shambles, poverty is rampant, and unemployment is persistently high, and the American voter is actually living the nightmare and being reminded of it everyday.
So spread your wings everyone and let’s take flight!
A HAT TIP TO DBSCHMIDT AS WELL FOR THIS PLAN TO ALLOW THE IMPLOSION OF LIBERALISM UNIMPEDED.
UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: Just wanted to point out that which ever party can successfully mobilize white, middle class voters in 2014 and beyond will win huge.
Nader: Obama Worse Than Bush
Breitbart has the video of Nader discussing Obama. Nader does have some major blind spots – first off in saying that Obama is failing because he knows the law and yet he violates it. This, to me, is a failure on the part of Nader to understand that people like Obama don’t even know what a law is. But Nader is also pretty upset with Obama on the way Obama has been running the war – essentially calling Obama a worse war criminal than Bush.
First off, I’d like to say that I deprecate the whole concept of “war crime”. There are, of course, laws of war – things which have been held to be right and proper for ages. Such things as not going on a rampage of rape, looting and murder. Things like accepting an honorable surrender and treating the captive decently. But these are things for honorable soldiers with proper morality – when dealing with people who have deliberately set themselves outside of all morality, then it becomes a bit different. The honorable soldier will still refrain from senseless brutality, but he isn’t bound to treat an inhuman adversary as if he were humane. The biggest example of war crimes, of course, were in Nazi Germany – but it was absurd of us to put the captured Nazis on trial as if judging them by our standards in a court would some how make right what was done. How can one exact justice against someone who organized the mass murder of millions? Who deliberately broke the peace simply to grab wealth from others? You can’t – once the millionth person was done to death in a Nazi death camp then no amount of judicial sentence could ever balance the scales of justice. We should, instead of bothering with all that (and especially without putting on the bench Soviet judges which represented a regime just as hideously anti-human as the Nazi regime on trial), just taken out whichever Nazis we felt were most responsible and shot them one, fine morning. It wouldn’t have been a matter of justice – it couldn’t be a matter of justice; it was a matter of disposing of people who had outlawed themselves in the fullest sense of the word (but Mark, you’re a Christian – what about mercy? Indeed, and people with a sense of honor would have tried to discern whom among the captive Nazis should get that mercy…and be let go; by trying to be “legal” about it we ended up hanging someone as trivial as Ribbentrop while letting off someone as crucial to Nazi power and cruelty as Alfried Krupp).
It is, then, impossible for us to commit a war crime against the Islamists we fight against – these are people who will murder a Christian for nothing (and rape his daughter and burn his church, in to the bargain). These are people who will strap a bomb on a kid and send him off to commit mass murder in a shopping mall. These are people who have outlawed themselves from human society. The only reason to take them prisoner, at all, is to obtain information from them. Outside of that, how is justice served if we were to, say, give a man a 20 year sentence because he organized a campaign of suicide bombings in Afghanistan? So, when Nader says we are committing war crimes when we drone-attack a jihadist, I disagree with the notion – even when, at times, such attacks end up killing the innocent. It isn’t our fault that our enemies deliberately hide among non-combatants for the sole purpose of ensuring that innocent people are killed so they can score propaganda points against us. We still have to fight these people – though a bit of wisdom at this point would lead us to withdraw completely or steel ourselves to going after the ultimate sources of the trouble: the money-bags in the oil States and the government of Iran. Be that as it may, we are at this point fighting them, and it not only isn’t a crime to do so, it is impossible for it to ever be a crime.
Nader reflects a certain, hard-left disappointment with Obama – a feeling, correct in a lot of ways, that Obama has not been what he promised to be. Schooled his whole life to believe that the left is in favor of peace, prosperity and freedom, someone like Nader just doesn’t know what to do with an Obama who doesn’t make peace, doesn’t create prosperity and is clearly uninterested in individual freedom for average folks. Part of this comes from a failure to understand that the left has an inherent problem in getting to any of these desired results. Nader, honest as he is, simply does not understand that a large government setting out to, for instance, create prosperity is in an impossible situation: the thing can’t be done. Even the most benevolent government, grown large, can only get in the way. But, still, you can see his point: clearly Obama is not carrying out the programs and policies which leftists believe will bring peace, prosperity and freedom.
It still astounds me that Obama managed to win a second term: the only people actually benefiting from Obama policies are those who are getting a rake-off via government contracts and grants. For 90% of Americans, Obama’s Administration has been a net loss. I can see why dyed-in-the-wool Democrats voted for Obama, but they only make up about 35% of the electorate (at best) and Obama got over 50% of the vote…which means a very large number of people who aren’t just mindlessly Democrat and/or personally profiting off of Obama voted to re-elect this man who has not a single policy success to his name. The fact that Nader – and some other hard left people – are taking Obama to task just makes it more remarkable that we’ve got Obama for four more years.
Nader is right about this: Obama is far worse than Bush. Far worse than anyone we’ve ever had in the White House. I’d welcome back a combination Carter and Nixon and figure we’re coming out ahead of the game, right about now. The combination of dishonesty, insensitivity, lack of patriotism, old-school Chicago graft and a general sense that Obama is happy to see us decline at times makes me sick at heart for our country. I can only imagine how much worse it must be for a true blue leftist: here was a man (and a black man!) who had dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s of true-blue leftism and yet he manages to get elected…and then he goes about messing up so badly that when he is replaced, the whole concept of leftism will be in disgrace for a generation. Just as after Carter left office no one would call themselves a “liberal” for more than a decade, so it will be after Obama leaves…people will be ashamed to be thought of as being in any way like Obama. And for someone like Nader, that is tragic because his whole life has been a sincere (if muddleheaded) quest for a leftist settlement in the United States.
It is to be hoped that there will be an awakening from this – as I hope my fellow conservatives will awaken to the fact that Big Corporation is a bane, so I hope that honest leftists like Nader will awaken to the fact that Big Government is also a bane…and a worse bane than Big Corporation. You can, if you want, be a leftist and be against government – the only fundamental change is to understand that whatever social changes you want will have to be done via education and at the local level, not by the heavy club of government because such clubs are always eventually wielded by someone like Obama.
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