If Liberals Acted Upon Their Convictions

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Then stories like this would be true:

Johnstown, PA (GlossyNews) – Local and state police scoured the hills outside rural Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after reports of three animal rights activists going missing after attempting to protest the wearing of leather at a large motorcycle gang rally this weekend. Two others, previously reported missing, were discovered by fast food workers “duct taped inside fast food restaurant dumpsters,” according to police officials.

“Something just went wrong,” said a still visibly shaken organizer of the protest. “Something just went horribly, horribly, wrong.”The organizer said a group of concerned animal rights activists, “growing tired of throwing fake blood and shouting profanities at older women wearing leather or fur coats,” decided to protest the annual motorcycle club event “in a hope to show them our outrage at their wanton use of leather in their clothing and motor bike seats.” “In fact,” said the organizer, “motorcycle gangs are one of the biggest abusers of wearing leather, and we decided it was high time that we let them know that we disagree with them using it, ergo, they should stop.”

According to witnesses, protesters arrived at the event in a vintage 1960′s era Volkswagen van and began to pelt the gang members with balloons filled with red colored water, simulating blood, and shouting “you’re murderers” to passersby. This, evidently, is when the brouhaha began.

“They peed on me!!!” charged one activist. “They grabbed me, said I looked like I was French, started calling me ‘La Trene’ and duct taped me to a tree so they could pee on me all day!”

Still others claimed they were forced to eat hamburgers and hot dogs under duress. Those who resisted were allegedly held down while several bikers “farted on their heads.”…

 

So That ______?

Leo Pusateri63 Comments

I just figured out the insidiousness connected with what passes for policymaking in Washington D.C. and elsewhere:

There aren’t enough”so thats” 

A long time ago I had a wise supervisor (in education, of all things) who said, “For everything you do in your job, as well as for every change you make in your procedure, you need to have a “so that” attached to it. In other words, I do this, so that________.” If you don’t have a good “so that,” then you have no good reason to keep on doing what you’re doing, or for implementing the change you’ve been contemplating. 

Prime example: “We will raise taxes on the wealthy so that_____.”

So that what? So that we can decrease the deficit? 

By all accounts, the tax hike currently being contemplated by the Democrats will produce enough extra income to run the government for a grand total of EIGHT MORE DAYS. And that is a liberal estimate. With the concomitant economic slowdown, more like FOUR extra days. 

So raising taxes so that to decrease the deficit doesn’t wash. 

So tell me, my Democrat friends- what is the “so that” connected to this grand scheme??

Our Liberal Future: a Vision

Mark Noonan45 Comments

Here’s what life will be like for, say, me in 2041:

I’ll have died at the age of 77 of an easily treatable disease which I could not get care for because the National Health Service didn’t have sufficient resources to treat me before the disease went too far.

I’ll have been living from the age of 67 forward in a one-room, government-supplied retirement home which I was forced in to because given the way the economy developed I was never able to secure enough wealth to replace the home I lost in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.

My 401k had been destroyed years previously.  First by a government program to start taxing it, secondly by the massive inflation which was necessary to get our annual deficit to become 15% of GDP. 

While I officially retired at the age of 67 and started to collect my Social Security (worth about 50% less than it is today because during that bout of inflation the government kept insisting, in spite of rising food and fuel prices, that inflation was non-existent and thus SS payments remained constant in dollar amounts while going down in actual value), I actually quit work at the age of 60 because I found out that by a varied combination of government benefits, I could actually get more income by sitting on my duff than by working 40 hours a week.  At that point, it stopped bothering me so much that a cheeseburger costs $12 because Uncle Sam was picking up the tab.  Until, that is, they banned the purchase of cheeseburgers in the interests of cutting National Health Service costs.

I did get some exercise from the age of about 57 on because the government mandates on fuel efficiency priced me out of automobile ownership.  This resulted in a great deal of walking on my part as the inefficient bus system provided by government didn’t get me to where I needed to be when I needed to be there.  I moved out of the suburbs and in to the city center because at least there were stores closer to home:  on the other hand, I had to pay higher prices for the basics because government policy was to forbid “big box” stores in the area because they provided “unfair” competition to the small shops.

I found as I entered my 50’s that food was harder to obtain – the price kept rising and there kept being less of it.  Various agricultural policies were taking more farm land out of production while various taxes were making the production and consumption of things like beef out of the question.  I was given Supplementary Food Insurance which allowed me to buy whole grain bread, government cheese and all the potatoes I could eat.

I got a boost to my health as I gave up cigarette smoking when the banned it outdoors, where I did most of my smoking.  Also, even buying generic smokes at the Indian reservation was running me $80 a carton.  On the other hand, I found out that ‘Capulco Gold Lights were an admirable substitute, though they did make things a bit hazy; on the plus side, I was permitted to fire up a joint even indoors at work!

It is where we’re heading, people, if things go well.  In other words, if the government manages to avoid complete fiscal collapse, this is how it will be.  Unless you are already quite rich or you manage to get juiced in with a high level, government job, this is what life will be like.  We can still avoid this, but only if we crush the left in 2014 and 2016.  If they win in both those years, then get ready for your government-rationed health care, food and housing…as people eke out a miserable, impoverished existence while liberals (living in guarded enclaves) endlessly tell us how great they are making things for us.

 

The Texas Education Miracle

Mark Noonan87 Comments

From The American Interest:

The Department of Education has just released its first state-by-state comparison of education statistics, and the report has a few surprises. Texas performed extremely well, tying five other states for the third-best graduation rate in the country, at 86 percent.
And Texas isn’t the only high-performing red state: Indiana, Nebraska, North Dakota and Tennessee all place within the top ten as well. Meanwhile, New York, Rhode Island, and California, all of which take a traditional, high-spending, blue model approach to education, are closer to the middle of the pack , with graduation rates in the mid-70s.
This is convincing evidence against the popular notion that we can fix the public education system if only we are willing to spend more money. Not only does Texas do a better job of graduating its students than its blue state competition; it does so at a fraction of the cost per student.

More and more of that and then go out and explain to the American people – especially poor and middle class Americans who live in areas which usually vote Democrat – that we have a better plan and that their current education problems are the deliberate and malicious result of Democrat education policies. Pull no punches – tell them (again and again and again) that liberal Democrats want lousy education because badly educated kids become government dependents.  Don’t let them off the hook by saying nonsensical, idiotic statements like “all of us want excellent education for our kids” because Democrats – by their actions – prove they don’t want it.  They want bloated education budgets.  Well paid union workers.  Graft and kickbacks.  But not education.  We bring this to the American people and we’ll start to do the main thing needed:  prove that we are on their side while Democrats are not.

Fight the long fight and never give the left an inch.  That is the path not just to victory, but a reformed America.

A (Temporarily) Lost Debate

Mark Noonan52 Comments

We certainly haven’t convinced a majority of our fellow Americans on this basic issue:

…Sixty percent in this ABC News/Washington Post poll support raising taxes on incomes more than $250,000 a year, long a popular option overall, but also a divisive one: While 73 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of independents are in favor, far fewer Republicans, 39 percent, agree…

…Sixty-seven percent in this poll…oppose another suggestion, raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67.  And on this idea, strong opposition surpasses strong support by more than 3-1, 49 to 14 percent…

So, at the end of the day, a solid majority are in favor of raising taxes on “the rich” while an even more solid majority are opposed to the basic, common-sense idea of raising the age of Medicare eligibility in order to preserve the Medicare system.  People are in favor of something which won’t help and opposed to something which would.  Whatever else we did in 2012, we utterly failed to make a dent on the issue of fiscal reform of the United States government.

I think our failure on taxes is that our absolute opposition to all tax increases has painted us in to a corner where Democrats (aided by the by-lined Democrats in the MSM) can label us as extreme.  To be sure, opposing tax increases has been, is and will remain a key GOP principal because we know that you can never feed the Big Government beast enough.  No matter how much money you give to it, it will be blown through and more demanded.  We’d have a $6 trillion a year budget if we hadn’t held the line on taxes all these years.  But one must not allow rigidity to overcome good sense – we should have seen four or more years ago that as long as there are people with more money than they know what to do with the Democrats would be able to successfully campaign on an “make the rich pay their fair share” slogan.  That most of these super-rich are liberals and that Democrat tax proposals will hit the super-rich lightly, if at all, is irrelevant: we handed them an issue and ideological rigidity against tax increases prevented us from a counter-offensive which can preserve low marginal rates (vital, as we know, for economic growth).  This is the genesis of my “wealth tax” proposal – a tax aimed at the very richest and not at productive capital, but at money just squirreled away in tax shelters of various types.  Had we come out with a wealth tax for the 2012 campaign it would have been us attacking Democrats and deflecting their attack on us – at worst, it would have been a wash and it may have worked out to our credit…and we’d be in a much stronger position right now to fight for lower marginal rates to be maintained.

Our failure on entitlement reform stems from the failure on taxes – as a party which has been successfully painted as defending low taxes for the rich, any and all reasonable reforms of entitlements can be (and have been) cast by the Democrats as a callous disregard for the poor and middle class by a party which is only interested in defending low taxes for the rich.  Yes, I know this isn’t true, at all – but it is how we’ve been painted and it is something we must change if we are to succeed.  Remember, Obama won’t be President forever – eventually we will be back in power.  When we get there if we haven’t convinced a majority of Americans to back us on entitlement reform then there’s no point in winning.  If we don’t reform entitlements then even if we some how manage to avoid fiscal collapse in the next five years or so then we are still absolutely stuck with the fact that entitlements will soon eat up almost all government revenues.  That is unsustainable.  But we can’t offer ourselves as reformers of entitlements until the people trust us as defenders of the poor and the middle class.  That we already are (no greater enemy of the poor and middle class than a tax hiking, entitlement expanding liberal who pretends there is no crisis), but the people don’t know it – don’t understand it; don’t buy it.

To get the people firmly on our side we have to be seen as firmly on their side.  To be sure, it is almost certain that things will just get worse and worse as Obama’s 2nd term unfolds.  Nothing which was wrong in 2008 has been fixed and nothing will be fixed as long as Obama is President – he’s apparently unaware of the problems or just doesn’t care about them.  Whatever the case, the problems won’t be solved.  But it won’t be enough for us to just be “not the Democrats”…we have to be seen as something which will change the course from the Democrats and in a manner which is easily understood as helping the poor and middle class.  This, in turn, requires a ruthless turning away from big business, from those who have, and a relentless pointing out of the plight of the poor and the middle class and a relentless education of the same that it is the Democrats who have, on purpose, done all this to them.  My “wealth tax” proposal is one method.  Another is to go gangbusters, once again, for school choice.  Yet another is to point out that Uncle Sam can use Medicare money to help people take care of their old folks rather than shoving them off – at twice the cost – to sub-standard nursing homes (and telling oldsters and their kids that we’re going to keep them at home will resonate as more and more people get old).  On and on like that – show them that we are not for the rich, that we are for the poor and the middle class…that we will get them better results without taking anything away (do not campaign against “free stuff” – in time, with rational economic policies, less and less free stuff will be needed until we reach a tipping point where only a tiny minority is getting free stuff…but if you go out there and complain about the free stuff then all you do is automatically alienate everyone who is getting free stuff…including those who would rather not but just don’t see any other way: really, we have to stop being the Stupid Party and learn how to play a long game).

Its either become the party of the people, or perish. Our choice.  We’ll see what we decide.

Teach The Principles

Cluster103 Comments

The contortions that many conservatives and GOPers have gone through over the last couple of weeks trying to make sense of the election has been amusing, frustrating, and a little disconcerting. I get the sense that some seem to believe that it was simply a function of the base not showing up, or that Romney was weak candidate, and/or that the 47% comment did us in, and that we need to stop denigrating the American voting public, which was George Will’s comment. Some of this I can agree with, but if denigrating the American voting public was the reason for our loss, then how did that same tactic result in Obama’s win? I find Will’s comment to be completely off base and simply a pandering comment to make sure he is invited to the next cocktail party.

This was an election of big choices, and our side lost. Romney clearly laid out stark differences between his approach and that of Obama’s. Romney was the first candidate that I can remember to courageously put Medicare reform on the table; he was the first candidate to speak to the need of tax reform and put forth a plan, and he was the first candidate to suggest real cuts in the budget, not just a slow down of growth rates. So in my opinion Romney was not weak – he had the right plan, and the American people chose to continue down the irresponsible path we are on. They made that decision based partly on the lies told to them by Obama, the Democrats and the liberal media (think: taxes on the rich and outlawing abortion), but more on their own historical and financial ignorance having been educated in failing schools steeped in liberal philosophy. A philosophy of which blames others for personal failure, and teaches that a large centralized state can, and will, take care of their needs.

We, as conservatives, should certainly plan our attack for 2014 and 2016, by articulating a message that resonates with the growing constituencies of single women and minorities,  but if we are to preserve the ideals of this great nation in the long term, we need to begin a strategy of teaching conservative principles to our children, starting at the elementary levels. It’s much like raising a child as we all have done, and proving to them that conservative philosophy is the most compassionate towards others and offers the most rewarding personal life they will ever know. Those principles include, but not limited to:

1.      Live within your financial means – large debt restricts personal freedom and destroys relationships and lives. Be responsible with your money, and if money is important to you, then pursue education and set goals.

2.      Personal responsibility – bad decisions have consequences and you need to, and will, live with those consequences. Don’t blame others, and don’t repeat your mistakes. Good things happen to those who do their best everyday and make good decisions.

3.      Learn how to fail – no person has ever won all the time. Learning how to fail builds personal strength and character and makes winning that much more rewarding.

4.      Abstinence – abstain from drugs and excessive alcohol use. There has never been one successful alcoholic or drug user, and by engaging in this activity you can assure yourself of future health problems. Abstain from treating your body like an amusement park, whether that be sexually, or by putting ink and bolts into yourself. Treat your mind and body with respect – you only get one.

I am sure other conservative posters here can add to this list, and I hope they do, but these are four principles that I have taught my kids, and all three of them have turned out to be responsible, functioning adults. I desperately want to see this country get back to a shared sense of responsibility for moving our country forward. I look around me anymore and much of what I see is very disheartening – entitlement minded, financially illiterate, selfish, drug addicted, pierced and bolted ignorant masses, more interested in the latest brain dead Jay Z CD, or what the Kardashian’s are doing, and I suspect much of you see the same. The problem is, this is a growing constituency, so if we are to have long-term success, we need to begin building a more solid foundation of responsible, better educated children.

Expanding Middle Class?

Retired Spook15 Comments

There’s an interesting article in the on-line edition of the Washington Post this afternoon. Another in a long line of election post-mortems, but citing a figure that I’ve not seen or heard before:

Romney won voters earning between $50,000 and $100,0000 by 52 percent to 46 percent. That’s less than what Bush got in 2004 (he won that group by 12) but they were 28 percent of the electorate in 2012 and just 18 percent electorate in 2004.

I had to read that a couple time to make sure I was reading it right.  In an economy that virtually everyone admits is the worst recovery from a recession since WW2, the number of people who have moved into the upper middle class has increased by over 55%.  And half as many (percentage-wise) of these upwardly mobile Americans voted for Romney as voted for Bush in 2004.  That made zero sense to me until I thought back to my response to Canadian Observer in the previous thread.  Given that a single mother of 3 making minimum wage has as much disposable income as a married couple with 2 kids making $60,000 a year, that puts a lot more Americans (and Obama voters) in that $50,000 to $100,000 demographic.  There’s probably another explanation, right?

Avoiding the Fiscal Cliff

Retired Spook42 Comments

Well, the agenda media is tripping over itself speculating on how Congress and the President will avoid the fiscal cliff, and what the ramifications are if they do (or don’t).

An on-line AP article today makes some of the most ludicrous statements and assertions I’ve seen in a while, illustrating the fact that they haven’t got a clue as to what’s going to happen — or why.

President Barack Obama and leaders of the lame-duck Congress may be just weeks away from shaking hands on a deal to avert the dreaded “fiscal cliff.” So it’s natural to wonder: If they announce a bipartisan package promising to curb mushrooming federal deficits, will it be real?

Come on, now — this is Washington D.C. where perception is reality, and the MSM is all about creating perception.

Obama and top lawmakers could produce an agreement that takes a serious bite out of the government’s growing $16 trillion pile of debt and puts it on a true downward trajectory.

On what planet could (or would) they do that?  Certainly not this one.  Even during the Clinton administration when the budget was supposedly “balanced”, the debt never went down year on year.  If they taxed the top 2% at 100%, they couldn’t even erase the current deficit, much less “take a serious bite” out of the debt.

Or they might reach an accord heading off massive tax increases and spending cuts that begin to bite in January — that’s the fiscal cliff — while appearing to be getting tough on deficits through painful savings deferred until years from now, when their successors might revoke or dilute them.

Now that sounds more like what we’re accustomed to from our political class.

Historically, Congress and presidents have proven themselves capable of either.

Not recently.  Since 1961 the debt has done nothing but increase.  In all fairness, the biggest jumps came during the administrations of Ronald Reagan ($2 trillion) and George W. Bush ($5 trillion).  But Obama has already exceeded Bush’s total and is likely to exceed that combined $7 trillion well before the midpoint of his second term.

Passing a framework next month that sets deficit-cutting targets for each of the next 10 years would be seen as a sign of seriousness. But look for specifics. An agreement will have a greater chance of actually reducing deficits if it details how the savings would be divided between revenue increases and cuts in federal programs, averting future fights among lawmakers over that question.

Say what?  Can anyone read that and not laugh?

Better yet would be including a fast-track process for passing next year’s tax and spending bills if they meet the savings targets so they can whisk through Congress without the possibility of a Senate filibuster, in which 41 of the 100 senators could kill a measure they dislike.

Is that the same Senate that hasn’t passed a budget in 3-1/2 years?

Raising money from higher rates, closing loopholes or a combination of the two would create real revenue for the government.

As opposed to what? Fake revenue?

The problem is many tax deductions and credits , such as for home mortgages and the value of employer-provided health insurance, are so popular that enacting them into law over objections from the public and lobbyists would be extremely difficult.

D’ya think?

With the price tags of tax and spending laws typically measured over a decade, delaying the implementation date can distort the projected impact of a change on people and the government’s debt.

But it does give the perception that they’re doing something.

Even more questionable are assumptions that overhauling tax laws will boost economic activity and thus produce large new revenues for the government. Many Republicans and ideologically conservative economists contend that’s the case, but most economists say there is no sound way to estimate how much revenue can be generated from strengthening the economy by revamping the tax system. Many believe the amount is modest.

Well then, we are just fluked!

Savings that come from weeding out waste, fraud and abuse, which sounds good but are difficult to find, or rely on one-time sales of federal assets should be treated with suspicion.

Of course — there’s no waste, fraud or abuse in the federal budget.

Deep cuts that take effect in the future, say after Obama leaves office in 2017, might be better than imposing them now and hurting an already weak economy by reducing spending.

Now were talkin’

How Old is the World?

Mark Noonan190 Comments

Turns out, they don’t just ask that of GOPers whom the Democrats have commanded the MSM to destroy – seems that our President was once upon a time asked the question.  From Instapundit:

Q: Senator, if one of your daughters asked you—and maybe they already have—“Daddy, did god really create the world in 6 days?,” what would you say?

A: What I’ve said to them is that I believe that God created the universe and that the six days in the Bible may not be six days as we understand it … it may not be 24-hour days, and that’s what I believe. I know there’s always a debate between those who read the Bible literally and those who don’t, and I think it’s a legitimate debate within the Christian community of which I’m a part. My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent Earth on which we live—that is essentially true, that is fundamentally true. Now, whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible: That, I don’t presume to know.

Which is actually a pretty good answer – a bit better than Rubio’s which also wasn’t too bad.  Of course, we don’t know if President Obama has “evolved” on this issue or decided it was above his paygrade.  We’ll need a follow up question – which I’m sure the MSMers will ask at his next press conference in 2015 or so.

The proper answer is, of course, “as old as it is, I suppose” because no one really knows.  You see, the main trouble with pre-historic events is that they are, well, pre-historic.  What happened wasn’t written down in contemporary documents and so we can’t review the material and come to a conclusion about what happened.  We can make some surmises from what we can analyze in the here and now, but we can’t know how it all came about.  One of the troubles we have in studying the distant past is that there is so little evidence for us to go on – and so, all too often, the scientists studying it grasp on to whatever scrap of evidence they can find and run entirely too far with it (this is especially true of paleontologists and their tiny collection of bones).  So much of what happened in the past has entirely vanished – there are a lot of wild guesses about what our primitive ancestors did, for instance, but I find no real profit in looking in to the matter – we’ll never really know.  I’m just grateful that, apparently quite early on, one of them figured out how to make beer.

The fundamental problem with evolution as it is expressed these days it not in the concept that a positive thing called an ape slowly turned in to a positive thing called a man – that is something which no theology can have the slightest problem with.  The error comes in when a proponent of evolution insists that it was all blind, random chance – first off, the chances of it happening are so vastly small as to be nearly zero:  it is a greater miracle that we exist by blind chance than the miracle that we exist because the Word called us in to existence.  Secondly, if it was all blind chance then everything is merely the result of a prior cause; there is no free will and thus no actual thought…including the thought that we evolved.  You see, if all results are merely the blind working out of forces beyond anyone’s control (as they must be if there is no Creator) then there is no validity to the thought that we evolved by blind chance:  the random atoms in your brain just happened to be worked in to a position where your mind spits out the “it all evolved blindly” thought; but a slight alternation in the atoms a billion years ago and you’d have spit out the thought that we all grew out of a rock in the garden – and neither thought is worth commenting on because each are equally meaningless.   The thoroughgoing evolutionist cuts his own intellectual throat.

To me it is just plain as a pikestaff that God created the universe and ordered it towards a certain end.  I really don’t grasp how anyone can think differently – one thing happening can be ascribed to random chance but the tens of billions of things which must have happened to result in my typing on a computer in 2012 makes me highly suspicious that there is an Author to the play I am acting in.  I don’t know if this Author spoke everything in to existence in 6 days or if he decided to go about it through 6 billion years – and to me the whole debate is rather academic.  At the end of it all we are, indeed, here and have to do the things we must do.  The only thing which irks me in this debate is the insistence upon some that in our public life we subscribe to an asinine theory saying that there can be no God in the process of life.  That is just to shut down a massive area of intellectual inquiry – it is a closing of the mind and made doubly irritating because the people who are shutting their minds say they are doing it in the name of openness.

Thoughts on the “Black Friday Strike”

Mark Noonan89 Comments

A lot of people are getting fed up with the way America’s retailers are forever pushing back the start of “black Friday” – that Friday after Thanksgiving which represents the largest retail sales day of the year.  Starting some years ago, retailers started opening up earlier and earlier on Friday morning, offering “door buster” deals for those people willing to get there at the crack of dawn.  Trouble is, each retailer tried to out-do the other – and now we have a lot of major retailers who are planning on opening on Thanksgiving Day, itself.

I’m not quite sure where this bright idea came from – given that I work in corporate America, my guess is a second-level corporate exec managed to produce some numbers which alleged that opening up an hour earlier you can grab some tiny percentage more of consumer’s disposable income – income which might be spent at other retailers if everyone opened up at the same time.  I highly doubt that this opening up earlier and earlier actually increases sales – more than likely it just spreads the sales out over a longer period of time.  At any rate, the corporate execs who thought it up are, likely, the  products of business schools who are rising to the top not based on skill or ability but simply on the fact that when they first were inserted in to junior management post-college they were befriended by someone a step higher on the corporate ladder and just rose along with them year by year (with only those entirely screwing up along the way losing their place on the ladder).  Essentially, they are just “managers” who don’t actually know what it is their troops do for a living (anyone who has worked long in corporate America is continually astounded by how executive decisions bear little connection to reality – but before any of you liberals out there consider this an indictment of the private sector, I point out that the level of senior obtuseness is vastly higher in government); most importantly, the corporate executives who are commanding their troops to give up their holiday for the sake of a 0.01% increase in gross sales won’t be there while the troops are at work – for the most part, they’ll be home with their families, enjoying Thanksgiving.

Continue reading →