Big Brother Bait

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'The US Must Force Open Foreign Markets Or Protect Its Own'

So says Peter Morici of The University of Maryland here:

[G]lobal competition, communications technologies and essentially unchecked immigration have hammered down wages and winnowed opportunities in once decent paying occupations—for example, ordinary line work in manufacturing, middle management and sales, and writing for a daily newspaper.

Sending more Americans to college is not the answer—degrees in the liberal arts are simply not as valuable today as 25 years ago, and many students are not suited to engineering and other technical disciplines. The workforce is well overstocked with business school graduates. The problem is not too few educated Americans but too few good jobs for most of them to do. ...

Heavier taxes on the wealthy to redistribute income won’t help. ...

[T]he United States can’t always dictate the terms of competition and continue to stand idle without more effective responses than bailouts for General Motors, subsidies for Solyndra and Social Security tax holidays, all paid by borrowing from China.

The United States must force open foreign markets or protect its own, or it will perish.

Spoken like a realist about human nature. 

We need more of that.

Red State's Erick Erickson Says Romney Will Be The Republican Nominee

Because Perry blew it on immigration and Newt and Cain blew it with women.

There are many money lines in the post, here.

Oh, and Romney will lose to Obama, and conservatism dies.

And that means now we should rethink . . . John Huntsman (!).

Doesn't that mean conservatism is already dead?

The real conservative in the race is Cain, who likes $400 wine and a national sales tax. Therefore the argument is social, that is, with the women, who gave us their opposites: Prohibition and The Income Tax. Real conservatives like Phyliss Schlafly support Cain's ideas to unleash American business.

What we need is more women like Phyliss Schlafly, and fewer like Ann Coulter.  

'The Capitolist Pigs and There Damn Banks'

Seen at occupywallst.org here in reply to communist Lloyd J. Hart's posting of Marxist demands:

"I hope these demands get met. I would love to get a check mailed to me every month or week or whatever and not have to work like a slave for it! That would be [       ] sweet as hell. [    ] the capitolist pigs and there DAMN banks. I propose $2000 a month for ALL people in this country including the UNDOCUMENTED CITIZENS. We will take the money from teh DIRTY BANKS and give it to those of us that are DESERVING!" (italics added)

Corect spelin is so bourgeois to teh internet left.

Why the organizers leave that stuff up there even one day after the right has savaged it, I'll never know:

Wait, I do know. They sympathize with it.

Rep. Maxine Waters Gets A Little Upset With Uncle Tom Obama

For saying this, as reported here:

“[T]ake off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on. We’ve got work to do, CBC.”

Video of Maxine here:

"I don't know who he was talking to because we're certainly not complaining," Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) said on CBS' "Early Show" in response to President Obama telling blacks to stop complaining.

"I found that language a bit curious because the president spoke to the Hispanic Caucus, and certainly they're pushing him on immigration... he certainly didn't tell them to stop complaining," she said. "And he would never say that to the gay and lesbian community, who really pushed him on Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Rush Limbaugh Slams Obama's 'Peace is Hard,' Forgets Bush's 2004 'Hard Work' Remarks

"We don't elect presidents expecting them to tell us how damn hard the job is." 

-- Rush Limbaugh, Thursday, September 22, 2011, reacting to Obama's comments to the UN that Mideast peace is hard.

I guess Rush doesn't remember these lines from George W. Bush from the first 2004 presidential debate with Senator John Kerry:

"In Iraq, no doubt about it, it's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard.

"I understand the serious consequences of committing our troops into harm's way. It's the hardest decision a president makes.

"There's a lot of good people working hard.

"I work with Director Mueller of the FBI; comes in my office when I'm in Washington every morning, talking about how to protect us. There's a lot of really good people working hard to do so. It's hard work.

"And now we're fighting them now. And it's hard work. I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is. But it's necessary work. And I'm optimistic. See, I think you can be realistic and optimistic at the same time. I'm optimistic we'll achieve -- I know we won't achieve if we send mixed signals. I know we're not going to achieve our objective if we send mixed signals to our troops, our friends, the Iraqi citizens. We've got a plan in place. The plan says there will be elections in January, and there will be. The plan says we'll train Iraqi soldiers so they can do the hard work, and we are. And it's not only just America, but NATO is now helping, Jordan's helping train police, UAE is helping train police. We've allocated $7 billion over the next months for reconstruction efforts. And we're making progress there. And our alliance is strong. And as I just told you, there's going to be a summit of the Arab nations. Japan will be hosting a summit. We're making progress. It is hard work. It is hard work to go from a tyranny to a democracy. It's hard work to go from a place where people get their hands cut off, or executed, to a place where people are free. But it's necessary work. And a free Iraq is going to make this world a more peaceful place.

"You know, every life is precious. Every life matters. You know, my hardest -- the hardest part of the job is to know that I committed the troops in harm's way and then do the best I can to provide comfort for the loved ones who lost a son or a daughter or a husband or wife. You know, I think about Missy Johnson. She's a fantastic lady I met in Charlotte, North Carolina. She and her son Bryan, they came to see me. Her husband PJ got killed. He'd been in Afghanistan, went to Iraq. You know, it's hard work to try to love her as best as I can, knowing full well that the decision I made caused her loved one to be in harm's way.

"There are 100,000 troops trained, police, guard, special units, border patrol. There's going to be 125,000 trained by the end of this year. Yes, we're getting the job done. It's hard work. Everybody knows it's hard work, because there's a determined enemy that's trying to defeat us.

"I understand how hard it is to commit troops. Never wanted to commit troops. When I was running -- when we had the debate in 2000, never dreamt I'd be doing that.

"We've done a lot of hard work together over the last three and a half years. We've been challenged, and we've risen to those challenges. We've climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it's a valley of peace."

Wasn't George W. Bush re-elected shortly after these debate remarks?

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, Clinton Retread, Pushes For Bank Immunity Deal

Robert Scheer for The Nation:

It is a sellout deal that, in return for a pittance of compensation by banks to ripped-off mortgage holders, would grant the banks blanket immunity from any prosecution. That is intended to short-circuit investigations by a score of aggressive state officials, inquiries that offer the public a last best hope to get to the bottom of the housing scandal that has cost U.S. homeowners $6.6 trillion in home equity in the past five years and left 14.6 million Americans owing more than their homes are worth. ...

Donovan has good reason not to want an exploration of the origins of the housing meltdown: He has been a big-time player in the housing racket for decades. Back in the Clinton administration, when government-supported housing became a fig leaf for bundling suspect mortgages into what turned out to be toxic securities, Donovan was a deputy assistant secretary at HUD and acting Federal Housing Administration commissioner. He was up to his eyeballs in this business when the Clinton administration pushed through legislation banning any regulation of the market in derivatives based on home mortgages.

Armed with his insider connections, Donovan then went to work for the Prudential conglomerate (no surprise there), working deals with the same government housing agencies that he had helped run. As The New York Times reported in 2008 after President Barack Obama picked him to be secretary of HUD, “Mr. Donovan was a managing director at Prudential Mortgage Capital Co., in charge of its portfolio of investments in affordable housing loans, including Fannie Mae and the Federal Housing Administration debt.”

Read the whole thing here.

Obama Admits It Again: He's Tempted By Tyranny, and Disrespects Limits

"The idea of doing things on my own is very tempting, I promise you, not just on immigration reform." (quoted here yesterday)

Here's The New York Times in March: Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China.

And, of course, at the age of nine being prime minister of Indonesia already looked pretty good, according to this in April: His mother's ambition was clearly not lost on the future US president. When his Indonesian stepfather asked him once what he wanted to be when he grew up, he was probably expecting him to say an airline pilot or an athlete. "'Oh, prime minister', Barry answered,'" wrote Ms Scott.

The hunger for power evidently began early. But its possession now apparently does not satisfy. What's especially disturbing is the frustration Obama keeps expressing with the limits we place on presidential power in America. He's frequently seen bowing to foreign leaders. Why not to the constitution?

Nothing in it prevented FDR from seeking a third term, and then a fourth, except respect for the long tradition of the unwritten rule of laying down power voluntarily after two terms, going back to the example of George Washington. The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1951, was the people's response to the lack of self-control FDR showed by his actions.

Obama would do well to consider that more seriously, and these words from our Declaration of Independence:

A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Why Obama Revealed His Certificate of Live Birth This Week

Because he wanted to divert attention from a different, unavoidable, embarrassing revelation.

What revelation is that?

The revelation disclosed here as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request.

Namely, that the narrative Obama has been telling about the first two years of his life is a lie. His mother and father never lived together with Barack Jr. as a family. She went to Washington State. Obama Sr. stayed in Hawaii and left for Harvard before the future president turned one, not when he was two. The marriage itself might be in question.

Everyone is consumed by the release of the Certificate of Live Birth, but not with the truth behind it.

Obama is skillfully playing this out, no doubt on the advice of counsel, to divert, dissemble and distract.

See the discussion here.  

National Popular Vote Virus Spreads to Vermont

The whole point of writing the constitution to allocate two senators each to the States was to reassure the smaller ones by population that the larger ones would not be able to exert unfair advantage over them in the nation's Legislative branch, and to get them thereby to join the union.

Another way of stating this principle is that population was meant to be reflected in the composition of the US House, but deflected in the Senate. The latter was originally designed to be a creature of the States, not of the people. That is why State Legislatures elected US Senators until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913, the same year that gave us the Federal Reserve and the income tax. Bad things always seem to happen in threes.

Today it is reported here that the senate of the only State of the union which has a Socialist for a US Senator, Vermont, has decided to advance the NPV measure, which should not be confused with the acronym for the Human Papilloma Virus. The National Popular Vote initiative, already passed in 6 States and DC, seeks to deny the will of the voters in a State by allocating its electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, not necessarily to the winner of that State.

In the same way that the 17th Amendment sought to weaken the power of the State governments, the National Popular Vote initiative would make it even more irrelevant. What is more, the scheme really represents a rival electoral college which seeks to make the president, like US Senators, a creature directly of the people, in this case of the whole people, and a simple majority of the whole people at that.

If you thought the States have not mattered much in recent years, under the NPV they will mean even less than they already do. Large urban population centers, Democrat bastions, will increasingly replace States not just as campaign stops, but as constituencies. And it is they to whom presidents will become increasingly responsive, at the expense of State capitals.

The States are not dead yet, as people who live in the 26 which have successfully challenged Obamacare in court will tell you. But it is a sign of their weakened sense of themselves that so many are staking everything on their appeals in the courts instead of passing counter legislation and forcing the Federals to sue them. Arizona is a striking exception in this regard in the immigration area, and should be imitated more widely and more often, which prospect the recent and deep Republican resurgence in the States may portend.

When pestilences like the National Popular Vote initiative stop getting traction in the Legislatures, we'll have more reason to be sanguine about the future of the Republic. 

    

Treasure Trove of British Archives Undermines "Lincoln Freed the Slaves" Myth

The Washington Times has the details:

Newly released documents show that to a greater degree than historians had previously known, President Lincoln laid the groundwork to ship freed slaves overseas to help prevent racial strife in the US.

Just after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Lincoln authorized plans to pursue a freedmen’s settlement in present-day Belize and another in Guyana, both colonial possessions of Great Britain at the time, said Phillip W. Magness, one of the researchers who uncovered the new documents.

Historians have debated how seriously Lincoln took colonization efforts, but Mr. Magness said the story he uncovered, to be published next week in a book, “Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement,” shows the president didn’t just flirt with the idea, as historians had previously known, but that he personally pursued it for some time. ...

"What we know now is he did continue the effort for at least a year after the proclamation was signed.”

The newly discovered evidence will give greater credence to the argument that Lincoln crucified the country in the Civil War over his crusade for an extra-constitutional Sovereign Union of states, in the middle of which, when things were going badly in 1863, Lincoln the demagogue hit upon slavery as a new way to salvage support for the war of Northern aggression.

Read the whole story here.

George Bush: Mushy-Headed Liberal

George W. Bush has been beating his little isolationism, protectionism and nativism drum for years now, but it seems like conservatives such as Laura Ingraham are finally looking at it in the right way. She's even suggesting that if we knew in 2000 what we know today about George and his family (people should be free to marry anyone they love), maybe conservatives wouldn't have supported W back in the day.

I know I didn't. I admit it. I was one of the few, the proud, the (top!) 500,000 Americans who voted for Pat Buchanan in 2000. And I've still got the lawn sign to prove it! In 2004 I had to be drawn kicking and screaming to vote for Bush. The alternative was too horrible to contemplate (a man who won't stop for stop signs while behind the wheel of his Jeep is a dangerous man, willing to break any law), as it was also too horrible to contemplate in 2008, as events prove everyday.

Bush's continuing antagonism against, for example, advocates of border security doesn't surprise me, and Laura is right to perceive that his sort of Republican poses a threat to the policy initiatives championed by Tea Partyers and conservatives. Her show this morning is devoting considerable time to Bush's remarks at Southern Methodist University on January 24th.

But Bush was making similar remarks already in November 2010 in Britain as part of his book tour, and Pat Buchanan eviscerated him way back in March 2008 for the very same kind of loose and silly talk:

In smearing as nativists, protectionists and isolationists those who wish to stop the invasion, halt the export of factories and jobs to Asia, and stop the unnecessary wars, Bush is attacking the last true conservatives in his party.

Which is understandable. For after the judges and tax cuts, what is there about Bush that is conservative? His foreign policy is Wilsonian. His trade policy is pure FDR. His spending is LBJ all the way. His amnesty for illegals is Teddy Kennedy's policy.

The truth is George Bush hasn't changed, and has never been a conservative. Ever true to his self-described role as The Decider, he once boasted that he would be the one who decided what is Republican and what isn't:

"That conservative movement stuff is over. I've redefined the Republican party."

Even liberals have recognized Bush as one of their own. So Richard Cohen in The Washington Post in 2007, after cataloguing Bush's liberal intentions in No Child Left Behind, in affirmative action hires in his administration, and even in the Iraq war, he adds:

You only have to listen to Bush talk about the virtues of immigration -- another liberal sentiment -- or his frequent mention of the "soft bigotry of low expectations" to appreciate that the president is a sentimental softie, what was once dismissively called a "mushy-headed liberal."

Cohen leaves out Bush's greatest liberal achievement: Drugs for Seniors, the single largest expansion of federal government to that time since Lyndon Johnson. He leaves it out because that's what really drives liberals crazy, how George Bush out-liberaled the liberals, and co-opted them for eight years.

That's why they really hated him.

To the Left, Enforcing the Law is Right Wing Extremism

As in this from Conor Williams for The Washington Post:

Yet [the ex-governor's] views are hardly moderate at all: [Tim] Pawlenty has advocated fining or jailing business owners who employ undocumented immigrants. He's even suggested amending the Constitution to repeal birthright citizenship.

This approach to immigration policy could be disastrous for a region already suffering from economic hardship. The Midwest needs more immigrants - not fewer.

What the Midwest needs is fewer coastal pricks telling fly-over country what's what, and a vigorous emigration policy for liberals, from wherever they hail, including the Michigan governor's residence.

President of the United States? "Punish Our Enemies"?

No, by his own admission, he views some of us as his personal enemies, and intends us harm:

"We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us."

He views his supporters similarly, not as fellow Americans, but as his personal friends whom he'll reward with benefits extracted by force of taxation from the rest of us. How many tax cheats were there again in the White House? 41? 42?!

The president was quoted here, in case you were wondering, last October.

So . . . to us that makes him what? Surely not a president like any we've ever known. And traffic cop with a radar gun doesn't quite capture it, either, does it?

The word "tyrant"does come to mind, but I repeat myself.

In India after the November 2 debacle for his party, he remained unchastened and needed all 750 rooms at the Taj Mahal, at your expense.

A transformed country, after all, requires a transformed executive. A little election wasn't going to change that.

Gabrielle Giffords' Democrats Promoted Libertarian as True Conservative to Divide Vote on her Right

The following excerpts come from the website of the Libertarian Party candidate, Steve Stoltz, whom the Democrat Party (yes you read that right) promoted in its literature as the true conservative running against the Democrat incumbent Gabrielle Giffords, shot in Tucson on Saturday, to bleed off votes on the right from the Republican challenger Jesse Kelly:

As a Libertarian, I am socially liberal, compassionate and humanitarian, but I am also fiscally conservative and principled.

The United States should have sound money that is backed by gold not the “monopoly money” of a fiat currency that is essentially counterfeited by the printing presses of the Federal Reserve which causes massive inflation.

As a Libertarian I believe that everyone owns their own body and can do ANYTHING they want with it, so long as they do not infringe upon someone else’s life/health, liberty or property (the 4rth amendment of the constitution says that people have a right to be secure in their person).

Government has no authority over the nature of a person’s consensual sexual relationships - even if they desire to engage in promiscuity and immorality.

The government has no right to tell a person what food they can eat, has no right to restrict their access to vitamin and mineral supplements, has no right to prevent a person from taking experimental drugs or getting medical treatments they feel will cure them of disease.

It is ironic that laws limit access to drugs, while the FDA has permitted poisonous/toxic substance like aspartame to be introduced into beverages.

Drugs like marijuana should be legalized, with increasing amounts of regulation and taxation applied to the more addictive drugs.

Society should lift prohibitions, but should regulate drugs the way alcohol currently is.

Lifting some drug prohibition could have a positive impact on national security.

Marriage is a legal contract protecting the rights of two individuals who decide that they want to live together and share property.

The state’s sole role is to enforce the property rights of the union, without placing stipulations on the nature of the union, whether it is between heterosexuals or homosexuals.    

The equal protection clause of the 14th amendment says that every US citizen shall enjoy the equal protection of the law.

Since no group should be given special treatment relative to over another, the military’s current policy of “Don’t ask don’t tell” is un-Constitutional, and should simply be reduced to “Don’t ask”.

The military should not expel a member who has already proven they can do the job merely because that person has identified himself/herself as homosexual.

I believe the government must respect the 2nd amendment, and place absolutely no restrictions on gun rights.

Although I am totally opposed to violence, I find it amazing that those who would place restrictions over a private citizen’s access to guns also seem to place blind faith in the integrity of the police, merely because they are agents of government.

Social security ... The system should be restructured so that younger persons invest in a privately held account, the way the government originally sold it.

I do not believe that it is moral for a wealthy person to hoard their wealth without trying to use it to help people.

[I]t doesn’t make sense for the government to document illegal aliens.

I do not believe that illegal aliens who give birth in the United States should instantly be granted citizenship (i.e. “anchor babies”).

I don’t believe illegal aliens should enjoy special access to entitlements relative to US citizens.

[W]hile it might be unfair for the children of illegal aliens who don’t pay property tax to receive a free education in US school systems, they nonetheless fall under the same category as the children of US citizens who receive a free education because their parents rent and don’t pay property tax.

The illegal alien problem is a multi-faceted social problem that can’t be solved merely by erecting a fence.     

Female reproductive rights/abortion – I am pro-choice.    

The focus of the military should be primarily to defend the nation’s borders against invasion.

As a Libertarian, I believe that in order for anything to be regarded as a crime, there must be a victim.  Civil fines for traffic violations that do not result in an accident or property damage or personal injury, and merely raise money for the state represent victimless crimes.