Republican Gov. John Kasich Pulls An Obama, Suspends Ohio Medicaid Law That Displeases Him

No doubt that will please Ann Coulter, who loves it when governors act like dictators.

The Wall Street Journal reports, here:

Mr. Kasich simply decided to cut out Ohio's elected representatives and expand Medicaid by himself. This week he appealed to an obscure seven-member state panel called the Controlling Board, which oversees certain state capital expenditures and can receive or make grants. Because the feds are paying for 100% of new enrollees for the next three years, Mr. Kasich asked the panel to approve $2.56 billion in federal funding, and then he'll lift eligibility levels via executive fiat. It's a gambit worthy of President Obama, who also asserts unilateral powers to suspend laws that displease him and bypass Congress. The Controlling Board, which Mr. Kasich and his allies in the GOP leadership stacked with pro-expansion appointees, approved the request 5-2 on Monday. Mr. Kasich's action is all the more flagrant considering the state legislature did not merely refuse to appropriate or authorize spending the federal money. The GOP majority passed a budget with specific language prohibiting the Governor from expanding Medicaid without its consent. Mr. Kasich used a line-item veto to remove that provision, but he's still violating the spirit of the law.

To Us Obama's A Dictator, To Liberals An "Executive-Power Extremist"

You won't find the traditional words "king", "tyrant", "usurper" or "dictator" in Conor Friedersdorf's Atlantic column, "Obama Acts Like He Doesn't Know He's An Executive-Power Extremist", here, because, before dictatorship disarms the population, it has to disarm the language first.

And it has:

The grammer is priceless. Who "put more and more war-making power in the hands of the president"? In Obama's telling, "a decade" put the executive power there. ... We know that Obama is an executive-power extremist in his actions. ...  [I]s he fooling himself, because he likes to think of himself as [a] more prudent and moderate man than he is? Can he not bear the truth that he's a Cheneyite extremist?

There it lies, limp as a dick. 

Obama's Jeffersonian Hero, Ho Chi Minh, Was A Mass Murderer

The pro-Hanoi Vietcong began a guerrilla campaign in the late 1950s to overthrow Diem's government. In the North, the communist government launched a land reform program, and executed between 50,000 and 172,000 people in campaigns against wealthy farmers and landowners, amid broader purges. In 1960 and 1962, the Soviet Union and North Vietnam signed treaties providing for further Soviet military support. In the South, Diem went about crushing political and religious opposition, imprisoning or executing tens of thousands.

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The 44th president conveniently forgot Vietnamese history and slandered ours by linking a founder of our democracy, Thomas Jefferson, to the mass murderer Ho Chi Minh. [Vietnamese President Truong Tan] Sang had brought Obama a copy of a letter sent to President Truman from Ho in which the communist dictator spoke hopefully of cooperation with America. Obama, stopping short of yet another apology, mused about what might have been, and noted "we discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson."

Forbes Contributor John Goodman Uses "Reactionary" Like A Marxist

John Goodman, here:

"[T]he topic du jour on the left these days is inequality. By inequality they mean inequality of income. And they want government to do something about it. ... [W]hy are intellectuals on the left so obsessed with money inequality instead of the inequality of life’s blessings that people value much more? Certainly in their own lives they don’t act as though money is the most important value. They’re all writers and professors when they could have earned a lot more by getting a law degree or an MBA. I believe the answer is that they are reactionaries. They’re living in the past."

Well, when else would the topic du jour be du jour if not "these days", hm? And if advocates of classical liberalism like Goodman aren't reactionaries by his own definition, I don't know who is:

"Throughout the entire 20th century, what did the left consider its intellectual rival? Classical liberalism. That was the political philosophy of our founding fathers. It was classical liberalism that eliminated slavery from the civilized world, gave us women’s suffrage, and extended economic and political freedom to people all over the globe. The contrast between these two worldviews could not be more stark. The classical liberals believed the state should be the servant of free men. The 20th century left believed that men should serve the state. The results are in. The 20th century was the century of economic instability, depression and war. The 19th century was the century of price stability, economic growth and relative international peace. The 20th century was the century of dictatorship and genocide on an unimaginable scale ― with 125 million people killed by their own governments! The 19th century was a century of liberation and increasing personal freedom."

The problem with our side in these discussions is that we continue to accept the redefinition of the categories foisted upon us by a victorious left. It was the Marxists who successfully made "reactionary" into a dirty word, despite attempts like Paul Elmer More's in the early 20th century to steal that weapon from the Marxist arsenal aimed against us. What the continued use of the term "reactionary" in the perjorative sense by the right shows is that the right, for all its vindication by experience, evinces a shared world view with the left which is mistaken, and because it is mistaken is impotent in face of the challenges facing the West.

The hostile pose of the present toward the past means it can never really accept anything from it, and perhaps more to the point can and will therefore be deceived by the promise of the future. As long as people believe that human nature can be changed for the better, that its progress is inevitable, and that arrangements to check it are no longer necessary, they will no doubt face as they have before a future brotherhood of man as fraught with fratricide as any past we have ever experienced. Worldviews are not imposed from above, they spring from the inner conception of the self, and unfortunately for us, the prevailing inner conception remains servile, not free. If we cannot throw off this illusion of the present, we are doomed to be ruled by others instead of by ourselves.

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"Look over the whole creation, and you shall see, that the bond or cement, that holds together all the parts of this great and glorious fabrick, is gratitude."

-- Robert South

What's Worse? Frequent Financial Panics Over Quickly, Or A Long Great Depression?

Unfortunately, you won't read about the Federal Reserve's role in the run-up to the Great Depression from Roger Lowenstein's discussion of the creation of the Fed beginning on this date 100 years ago, here in The New York Times:

One of the plan’s most strident critics, Representative Charles A. Lindbergh Sr., the father of the aviator, predicted that the Federal Reserve Act would establish “the most gigantic trust on earth,” and that the Fed would become an economic dictator or, as he put it, an “invisible government by the money power.”

Savers know the dictator. Executive Order 6102 in April 1933 made them hand over their gold at $20.67 for an ounce only to learn in May the price per ounce was "raised" to $35. Savers now experience the same trick in a different form because they earn nothing for a lifetime of trouble due to ZIRP. It is not a coincidence that Lowenstein just leaves out the fact that one of the world's most gigantic busts occurred not 17 years after the creation of the Federal Reserve, just as it is not a coincidence that the current bust occurred not 10 years after Gramm-Leach-Bliley undid the banking reform of Glass-Steagall which had to be passed to fix what was wrong with Federal Reserve banking.

Particularly insidious is Lowenstein's use of the terms Fed "framers" and Fed "originalism" in discussing the Federal Reserve's origins, which had nothing to do with the framers of the constitution or the originalism which seeks to recover their lost ideas, ideas which were already long lost in 1913. Apparently those ideas still need to be killed.

Methinks the liberal doth protest too much of "ghosts".

Obama The Marxist Thinks The Middle Class Is His Greatest And Most Dangerous Enemy

"The most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat."

"The greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution."

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Impose a dearth of ammo for their guns, mediocritize their healthcare, impoverish them with unemployment, make them servile with food stamps and disability payments, destroy their incentive to save with artificially low interest rates, spy on them with cameras, wire taps, drones and email intercepts, make it too expensive to travel, or too humiliating, dumb them down with inadequate public school educations, reduce them to the level of the gutter in their speech and morals through ridicule of all standards of public discourse and thinking, and destroy all traditional conceptions in institutions from the Boy Scouts to the US military. Politicize everything, but threaten the wrong politics with the power of the State. Anesthetize with drugs. Make them hate the rich so they stop trying to be so. Meanwhile, party, and spend their money like it's never been spent before.

Obama Is Eliminating The Middle Class, But Do You Know Why?

Based on how thorough-going are Obama's attacks on the middle class, I'd say it's all intentional, something the professor would not dare say if he wants to keep his career, so I'll say it for him since I don't have a career to save.

Summarized from an op-ed by Peter Morici, University of Maryland, here:

His immigration policy swells the ranks of visa-holders in skill-short areas like engineering as well as the ranks of semi-skilled immigrant workers, frustrating the middle-class aspirations of the working poor born in this country.

His massive expansion of student loans permits universities to jack up tuition . . . Students are graduating encumbered by massive debt and too few marketable skills. Broke and unemployed, they are not marrying and starting families—that shrinks the middle class. 

Despite the availability of loans, skyrocketing tuition mandates ever greater family contributions to finance college. This puts higher education further out of reach for many working class families, and fewer low income children are pursuing post-secondary education than in the past—that shrinks the middle class too.

The President has jacked up taxes on families earning more than $250,000. Unfortunately, most businesses in America are either proprietorships or pass through corporations that pay those higher individual, as opposed to corporate, tax rates, raising the cost of investing and expanding businesses—that spells fewer jobs for the middle class and those that aspire to its ranks.

Unable to push through Congress limits on CO2 emissions, President Obama has used executive orders and the EPA to impose limits by fiat. Unfortunately, those raise manufacturing costs, China has no such limits, and all this encourages business to outsource in China—again fewer jobs for the middle class and aspiring middle class.

Free trade agreements that permit trading partners to undervalue their currencies, subsidize exports and artificially under price their products on U.S. store shelves, health care mandates that raise the price of insuring employees instead of controlling costs, unnecessarily cumbersome regulations to run factories, mindless limits on developing U.S. oil reserves, and exporting abundant natural gas to countries that shut out U.S. products with high tariffs all encourage outsourcing, not just in manufacturing but for many supporting services too—yet again, fewer jobs for middle class Americans.

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“The lower middle-class,” in Marx’s words, “has no special class interests. Its liberation does not entail a break with the system of private property. Being unfitted for an independent part in the class struggle, it considers every decisive class struggle a blow at the community. The conditions of his own personal freedom, which do not entail a departure from the system of private property, are, in the eyes of the member of the lower middle-class, those under which the whole of society can be saved.”

And this is the very reason why the lower middle-class masses are the most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They represent a very strong section of society. Their special interests are absolutely incompatible with the economic disturbances which are the inevitable accompaniment of transitional periods.

The disturbance of credit cuts the ground from under their feet. They begin shouting for order, for the strengthening of credit, in such a way that every concession to them leads in effect to a complete restoration of the old order. ...

[Marx] wished to separate the Labour movement from all lower middle class elements, because the lower middle class attitude — attachment to the idea of private property, more or less open striving to uphold credit, terror of every fundamental social disturbance — is in practice the greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution.

-- Bela Kun, Pravda, May 4, 1918 (Marxists Internet Archive, here)

Barack Obama: The Social-Democratic Philistine Who Embraces The State . . .

"WE GOT YOUR MONEY!"

. . . and fears the people.

Barack Obama, disappointment to true believers everywhere, here at Ohio State University, May 5, 2013:

"Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny [is] always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted."

Friedrich Engels, March 18, 1891, here:

"And people think they have taken quite an extraordinary bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat . . . cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap. Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat."

Pittsburgh Tribune Review Agrees Obama Is Essentially A Fascist

According to an editorial in Saturday's Pittsburgh Tribune Review, here, agreeing with John Mackey the CEO of Whole Foods, Obama is essentially a fascist. The editorial approvingly quotes this definition of fascism by libertarian Sheldon Richman:

“As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. For those with the hubris to think they, not free markets, could better serve society, ‘fascism‘ (or as we prefer, 'fascistic economics') was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone (classic) liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism.”

Just when you thought there's been no progress defining for the public who and what is Obama, a businessman and a newspaper provide some:

"The general parallels to Obamanomics are glaring. Throw in the specifics of ObamaCare — then consider forays into national industrial policy and state protection of organized labor cartels — and the parallels are blinding", the editorial says.

Not that America's odd mixture of socialism and capitalism is something new.

It was Herbert Hoover, as far as I know, who was the first liberal to identify the American phenomenon of a mixed economics. Hoover located it in the blended strongman presidency of FDR, which was based more on Roosevelt's admiration for Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler as leaders than it was on substantive convictions about the dismal science. The alphabet soup of government which we take for granted today is the direct descendant of Roosevelt's impulse to try something, try anything, until it worked. Well, they're still trying.

Under Roosevelt, perfectly good food was deliberately destroyed by government to keep it from reaching the market in order to support prices in a deflationary economy even as people went hungry all across the country. Today we deliberately devote half the corn crop to produce an expensive, politically correct fuel boosting the cost of food animals while the number of people on food stamps is at an all time high and consumer demand has fallen like a rock. In the immortal words of Curly, if at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking until you do succeed.

But Hoover the loser was on to something, even if calling the man who beat him an un-American dictator lover was beyond the pale for some people. History eventually proved Hoover right when FDR broke with American tradition dating from the founding by running for a third term, and then a fourth. It took until 1951 for the American people to wake up and put a stop to that, with the ratification of the 22nd Amendment. Some dictators are assassinated, others just end up in the circular file. In many ways, Roosevelt simply out-Hoovered Hoover's own liberalism. People forget that FDR ran on what amounted to a repudiation of Republican liberal economic interventionism in the economy, and promptly ramped it up beyond anyone's imagination after he was elected.

But the blended system in America surely began much earlier. We could dial it back probably all the way to Lincoln himself, which would be fitting if only because the current occupant of The White House who practices fascism goes to such great pains to style himself after him, the president who chose to make the principle of national union over sovereign States the new definition of America. That fact of working a revolution, of remaking the country, should trouble everyone who has an ounce of independence left flowing through his veins, which is what troubles so many people who hear Obama speak of transforming the country. For half of us, one such revolution was enough.

This year we might do well to reflect on a later example, however, seeing that it is the anniversary of the abolition of private banking 100 years ago. It's strangely coincidental. The Federal Reserve Act was signed into law in 1913 by a fanatical progressive Presbyterian named Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat who hated the encumbrances placed upon government by the constitutional order and wanted to forge a new world where nations disarmed, lived in peace and cooperated toward a common goal, with the US not at its then natural place, at the head. The Federal Reserve Act was passed in thoroughly partisan fashion by Democrats who had swept to power in the election of 1912 and rammed it through the Congress without Republican support. Their dollar then is now worth 4 cents.

If Woodrow Wilson doesn't yet remind you of Obama and ObamaCare, maybe its because after 100 years of the pernicious effects of American style fascism, you're just too poor to pay attention.

Obama's Gangster Government Of, By And For The Banks

Matt Taibbi provides a pretty thorough look at the recent history of the bailout alliance between the federal government and the big banks for Rolling Stone, here, from which this excerpt:

All of this – the willingness to call dying banks healthy, the sham stress tests, the failure to enforce bonus rules, the seeming indifference to public disclosure, not to mention the shocking­ lack of criminal investigations into fraud committed by bailout recipients before the crash – comprised the largest and most valuable bailout of all. Brick by brick, statement by reassuring statement, bailout officials have spent years building the government's great Implicit Guarantee to the biggest companies on Wall Street: We will be there for you, always, no matter how much you screw up. We will lie for you and let you get away with just about anything. We will make this ongoing bailout a pervasive and permanent part of the financial system. And most important of all, we will publicly commit to this policy, being so obvious about it that the markets will be able to put an exact price tag on the value of our preferential treatment.

But Taibbi goes pretty easy on Obama's role in all of this, who has profited handsomely from it with reelection, focusing instead mostly on underlings like Geithner and Summers. Taibbi seems to hate only the big bankers for their profiteering, not the administration responsible for the continuing massive bailouts. He never connects Obama's admiration for dictatorship in China with our gangster government's stick up of the American people, and even gives Obama credit for some success with HAMP. It's as if the imperial president is merely an accessory to the crime, which Taibbi calls right up front "one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people."

By the way, Taibbi endorsed Elizabeth Talking Bull for president.

Rules For Radical Republicans: Bush Tax Cuts Edition

Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

The enemy knows the Congress is a coequal branch of the government. The problem is the Republicans and the Speaker of the House do not. You actually have more power even than that. You have 30 Republican governors. Start using them.

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people.

"New revenues from the rich" is the enemy's idea, not Republicans'.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.

Bush is ancient history. Time to make your own and repudiate the past. Pass something in the House which goes farther than Bush ever dreamed, and send it to the Senate to enrage the enemy.

Rule 4: Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

The enemy is funding gold-plated union jobs and pensions for federal and state workers at the expense of middle class Americans in the private sector who enjoy neither. It's time you reminded the middle class about that.

Rule 5: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

Use surrogates saying: Moochelle. Crony capitalist. Ideologue. Bolshevik. Dictator. Muslim sympathizer. Race baiter. Panetta flies cross country too much at taxpayer expense. The vice president thinks FDR talked to a television camera.

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

Republicans can campaign, too. Go frequently to friendly territory and bring 2016 hopefuls with you.

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag.

The idea of compromise became a drag a long time ago. Stop waiting for it. Go on the offensive instead.

Rule 8: Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period.

The enemy is trying to combine everything into one event, "the fiscal cliff", which tells you they perceive they are at a disadvantage. They are. You need to keep the events separate and do things piecemeal. Raising the debt ceiling should come later, crossing the tax rates fiscal cliff should come first. Fight for spending cuts later with the debt ceiling, not now. Sequestration already gave you some spending cuts, which you should embrace.

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself.

The greatest fear of the Democrats is a debt ceiling fueled government shutdown over spending cuts, but it wasn't the end of the world under Bill Clinton, and it won't be the end of the world if it happens in 2013. You actually won that in 2011. Do it again, except bigger, to satisfy the ratings agencies. Besides, it's red meat for the base.

Rule 10: Maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

No more appearances with the enemy, especially on the golf course. You are third in line for the presidency. Start acting like it. Visit Afghanistan to encourage the troops.

Rule 11: If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.

The place you need to get to is the same place you were at two times when the president extended the Bush tax rates, so you should know the way. An uncompromising new insistence on tax reform and much lower tax rates might get you there. It changes the subject and focuses the argument on relieving the taxpayers. The president upped the ante. You need to see him and raise him. Aim for the moon, and you might get into orbit.

Rule 12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

You might not get the radical tax reform, about which you must be deadly serious, but settling for making the Bush tax cuts permanent is a constructive alternative.

Rule 13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.

Focus your attention on answering the partisanship of individuals in the pundit class. Don't fire Tea Party men. Enlist them in attacking the enemy. They are good at it, and they will repay you with support later.

The Rats Are Jumping Ship

"Tea Party favorite" Senator Demented Jim is resigning his Senate seat early to head up the Heritage Foundation, whose spawn was RomneyCare, and, you know, ObamaCare, and which has otherwise utterly failed to stop the leftward drift of the country.

The reason, of course, is that Heritage is the standard bearer of Reaganism, which is really a form of liberalism. As such it has furthered the leftward drift of the country as it made Republicanism home for Reagan Democrats who fled the radicalism of the Democrat Party and in their turn liberalized the Republican Party, driving out the conservatives in the process and making the Republican Party safe for the Bush family.

Meanwhile at FreedomWorks Dick Armey has controversially bailed out with a boat load of cash donated to help elect conservatives, which didn't go so well in November. After co-opting the Tea Party, the Republicans have now raped it.

It's interesting how the public face of both organizations has been the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program from noon to 3 daily, where Rush runs paid ads for them. Today, in fact, Rush had Sen. DeMint and Ed Feulner on the show to interview them about the move, no doubt to help preempt the narrative that DeMint is bailing out because of the increasingly hostile environment for conservatism in the Senate, led by squishes like Sen. Mitch McConnell. And right afterwards we got a nice little plug for FreedomWorks.

The glaring problem for the so-called conservatism of the Republican Party is that it is still trying to preserve the excrescences of the progressivism of the early 20th century when what it should be doing is challenging the originalist credentials of figures like Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln. The latter did more to ruin the original constitution than any president before or since, which is why no thinking conservative can call himself a Republican.

The only people in the country who used to have the habit of mind necessary for overthrowing foreign accretions to the original faith were Protestants, but any examination of them today demonstrates few instances of the virtues which characterized their forebears, unless the followers of Westboro Baptist Church be accepted. The capitulation of Christianity in America generally to the gay mafia tells you all you need to know about the intimate (can I say that?) connection between contemporary theology and liberalism.

Just ask yourself when was the last time the Heritage Foundation or FreedomWorks got upset that Obama has presided over the sweeping away of the Hyde Amendment, the single bullwark in law erected by conservatism against the radical advances of a dictatorial, blood-thirsty, liberalism? Communion, anyone?

Or did they ever object? None of us can remember.

Joel Kotkin Urges Republicans To Join The Class War

"It’s time for Republicans to break with the traditions of Goldwater, Reagan, and, particularly, Bush and shift to something more akin to the party’s roots in the mid-19th century. This party needs less preaching and libertarian manifestos that essentially defend plutocracy. Instead it’s time to embrace class warfare on today’s gentry, and embrace the aspirations of today’s middle-class. Honest Abe in 2016?"

Egging on the Republicans to embrace Marxist class categories and methods and pretending that's not an appeal to ideology, Joel Kotkin here thinks Republicans could win again if only they gave stuff to the yeoman class and took away stuff from the clerisy. You know, like his hero Pres. Abraham Lincoln did when he signed the Homestead Act in 1862, which gave away 160 acres out west to anyone who would improve the land, and when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which took away the property of slaveholders without compensation. Like all good dictators, Lincoln made notions of property and its value even more arbitrary than they had been before.

It is little appreciated how the Homestead Act basically destroyed the flexibility of the federal revenue system, causing the federal government to rely increasingly on tariffs and also excises which up until The War Between The States had fluctuated up and down as revenues from federal land sales did the same.

So Anderson and Martin, here, who emphasize the substitutability of tariff and land sales revenues:


"Coinciding with the rapid increase in land grants to homesteaders, railroads, and the states after 1862, the federal revenue derived from land sales fell rapidly as a proportion of total receipts. Further, the general decline in tariff rates that had occurred until the Civil War was reversed, and tariff rates began to rise rapidly. Import duty rates, which had reached their lowest level in the century in 1857, increased sharply during the Civil War and remained high for the remainder of the century (Baack and Ray 1983, p. 73). Tariffs continued to be the single most important source of federal revenue after the war ended."

So in an important sense, Lincoln and the Republicans are to blame not just for the development of Our Enemy, The State, they are also to blame for setting the untenable conditions to fund it as it henceforth and inevitably grew large. In the end, the price of Union and black emancipation would be universal bondage to Leviathan with the coming of the Income Tax in 1913.

Kotkin completely misses the significance of what's going on on the right. Conservatives in America are rediscovering the meaning of the constitution, and how people like Lincoln ruined it. Mitt Romney with his incessant talk of American supremacy in the world simply reminded them too much of him.

Kotkin's correct about one thing, though, that the socialism of Obama is misunderstood. But Kotkin doesn't call it the fascism that it is, because Kotkin himself actually advocates it himself, only that it's the good kind which helps grow the middle class.

From the comments section, Kotkin says as much:

"i am an old-style democrat who favors using government when necessary to create an ever-larger property owning class. neither party today has this as its main focus. instead both are neo-feudalist as I will explain in the coming months."

Old style democrat? You know, the FDR kind, which admired and imitated the strong men of Europe, who eventually plunged the world into a war far bloodier than, but no less reminiscent of, Lincoln's.

Conservatives want to get rid of the imperial presidency, not just get one friendly to its interests.

Joel Kotkin's "New Geography" isn't old enough.

Imported British "Conservative" Condescends To Instruct Us About Communism

John Derbyshire

Here:

"But Barack Obama was never about the downtrodden masses. If he associated with revolutionaries such as Bill Ayers, it was only to feed off them and advance himself. Once he’d advanced, they went under the proverbial bus, as did the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Barack Obama has always been about Barack Obama. ...

"To be a real communist is to make a serious commitment to a cause. Communism is a hard dogma, completely at odds with the soft-handed girlish narcissism of a late-20th-century American leftist such as Obama, who has never risked, fought, struggled, or suffered."

Well, by this standard most businessmen, and most people who work with and for them, aren't real Americans either because the only thing they're committed to is the advancement of number 1. Nor are they real capitalists, but fascists, ever seeking preferments in law to protect their fiefdoms. Nor are they real Christians, eschewing renunciation of the world and service to the poor.

Serious commitment to anything hardly exists anywhere at any time for very long. There are only degrees of commitment, the few outstanding examples of which momentarily intrude upon our attention, as when devotees of a 7th century bandit religion would just as soon blow them- and ourselves to smithereens as live another day.

Just because Obama is a hypocritical communist fellow-traveler doesn't invalidate classifying him as one. After all, Obama also claims to be a Christian but believes things about the unborn and human sexuality which many a Catholic bishop would say destine him for hell, but people still say he is a Christian. Obama's lavish expenditures on his own presidency, which mark him out as a tyrant according to Aristotle ("the good of one man only"), stand alongside his belief in redistribution of income, in spreading the wealth around, in the same way that his friendship with and fundraising among the rich coexists with his sustained inveighing against them because in his opinion they do not pay their fair share in taxes.

The real problem with calling Obama a communist isn't that it isn't true but that the term doesn't exhaust the possibilities. What is instructive about Obama is that he is a blend of enthusiasms and idealisms, a character Herbert Hoover would have recognized as in the mould of FDR who admired the strong men of Europe, who were at once fascist, Nazi and communist. Obama may be a dilettante communist, but you'll still get an alphabet soup of statist experiments at his dinner table. 

But, of course, communist purists would demur at this point, Stalin having been an "aberration". Yet we still call Stalin a communist dictator and his rule a communist dictatorship even though Stalin's partnership with capitalism and people like Henry Ford arguably aligned Stalinism more with fascism than with communism.

Over time the terms lose their adequacy, primarily because they are invented by human beings who will do nothing if not disappoint, eventually. There's a word for that, but like "communist" the word "sinner", to quote our British instructor, is just not "ironic enough for our very ironic age".

Blame Utopianism On Christians Like Joshua D. Hawley

Blame utopianism on Christians like Joshua D. Hawley.

He's an example of a contemporary who understands full well the implications of the broad expanse of Christian teaching as understood from "Scripture", namely an ideological view of reality wholly in keeping with secularized ideologies like Marxism. The key similarity is the denial of reality and the assertion of an alternate one.

Christians of a prior age in America were not "enthusiasts" like this guy who, ominously, clerked for John Roberts (all italics are the author's own):

Isn’t immanentizing the eschaton precisely what Christians citizens should be doing? ... The New Testament teaches that this long-looked-for kingdom has dawned now, in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Christ has become king and, as Scripture says, presently rules over the world and over earthly government. That last point is central. Scripture teaches that political government is mandated by God for his service and is one means by which the enthroned Christ carries out his rule.

Ongoing suffering, death and injustice mean nothing to such people. Those things are inconvenient truths incapable of penetrating the ideological mind. To call it the fanatical mind in a political age is to short-change it because so many no longer have such religious understanding. For religious ideologues unjust government must be endured or ignored, but always obeyed.

People who think such things would never oppose kings like George III, let alone totalitarian dictators, with force of arms. Europe would still be in the grip of Hitlers and Stalins, and so might we, had American Christians had such scruples in 1776 and 1941, or British Christians in 1939.

There is no such thing as immanentizing the eschaton, only instantiating the fall. If it were otherwise, there would be no such thing as a Christian cemetary.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Blown Prediction Of Doomsday Award Goes To Republican TARP Author Sen. Judd Gregg

The blown prediction of doomsday award for 2012 goes to former Senator Judd Gregg, Republican author of TARP, who opined in July (here) that September was likely to be a month where we might again come close to total economic collapse.

Oh well. There's always Octember. After which comes Novonder.

As we all know:

MINISTER OF PROPAGANDA to DICTATOR HAILSTONE:

"Yah, you were gonna Blitz-Kreeg Great Mitten by the middle of August!"

FIELD MARSHAL HERRING to DICTATOR HAILSTONE:

"Then you said, Septober, then Octember, it's now in the middle of Novonder, and we ain't there yet!" -- The Three Stooges, "I'll Never Heil Again" (1941, here)

TARP averted nothing. And now nothing has averted nothing.

Aren't you glad he was in charge?

The Line of the Day Award Goes to "Hope Needs More Time"

The line of the day award goes to the ever-incisive Steve Huntley for The Chicago Sun Times, here:

Hope needs more time. That was President Barack Obama’s message in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night. But a country that was forced to live on hope for four years and rewarded with dreary unemployment, falling middle class income and depressed home values may not be ready for another dose of lofty national goals based on nothing more than oratory.

Hope is the very stuff of ideology, whether political or religious.

Religious ideology makes life tolerable by offering faux rewards in the forms of community, sacraments and liturgy with hope of eternal life deferred to the next one. Forgiveness in the here and now goes with all that, a sort of foretaste of the salvation to come. Or it offers assurances of the imminent in-breaking of the kingdom of God with the second coming of Christ, a recrudescent hope which litters the historical landscape since the time of Jesus. Such assurances are often accompanied by religious experiences of being "born again", or of so-called miracles, which require new exempla over time to validate the ideology as the second coming fails to materialize and the experience flattens. Certain Jews say year upon year "Next year, in Jerusalem." Muslims await the last imam, fourteen centuries after Muhammad.

But political ideology promises, promises and promises, with not much to show for it even in democracy, which promptly turns it out when it is still healthy enough to do so. The American record in this regard is mixed. Woodrow Wilson was not turned out. A terrible, costly and demoralizing war was the consequence. FDR was not turned out. Another terrible, costly and demoralizing war was the consequence. But LBJ was turned out, in the throes of a period when first principles were readdressed selfishly under what was decided was an existential threat to the next generation. Say what you will about the '60s generation, war in America stopped being involuntary. 

Ideologues sometimes become dictators, in which case they just go on promising. FDR did this but in the extenuating circumstances of global war, flaunting the long-standing American tradition that presidents serve but two terms. A free people finally came to its senses and put a stop to that with the 22nd Amendment, but not until after the fact.

In other times and other places dictators install themselves permanently, as was the case with one Robert Mugabe. Barack Obama has made no secret of his admiration of such like, openly expressing his dissatisfaction with the constraints placed on him by our form of government at the same time he voices his admiration for the lack of such constraints in places such as China. Are Americans wrong to be disquieted by this?

Hope needs more time. But for what, exactly?    

The Congress Fails To Represent The People, Say 90 Percent Of Americans

Congressional approval in August is down to 10 percent, according to Gallup, here, tying the all-time low.

No wonder. How could one person effectively speak for an average constituency of over 700,000 Americans? Do you know your Congressman? Does he know you?

It wasn't meant to be this way.

The fiercest disagreements over the Constitution's ratification were over whether a Congressman would be able to speak for 30,000 Americans, or 15,000 as the anti-federalists wanted. The advocates of 30,000 won, but the line in the Constitution was inartfully written, looking backward to that debate more than forward to the consequence:

"The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand . . .."

And so census followed census, and the Congress grew in size as the population did, decade upon decade, following the principle of one per thirty thousand.

Americans today don't realize how the Congress of the United States offended against this arrangement not until the 1920s. It was a naked power grab, fixing the number of representatives at the then current 435.

The Constitution had said nothing, they eagerly pointed out in those days, about one for more than thirty thousand, only that, say, one for 15,000 was too many. The scientific inspectors of language didn't care about the intent and the custom, only about the new opportunity. Dispensing with the census, however, which was the basis for apportioning representation, was a bridge too far.

But the example had consequences. Not long after FDR in his admiration of foreign dictators overturned another custom laid down in the founding era by the father of the country, George Washington, by running for a third term. There was nothing to prevent it. If one branch of government could grasp for more power, so could another. The imperial designs of the presidency have been with us ever since. 

The best way to fix the Congress isn't to elect a new one of a different political party. It's to dilute the power it has concentrated into its few hands by flooding the place with the roughly 10,267 representatives the constitution calls for. This should be done by constitutional amendment, after the same manner in which the 22nd explicitly enshrined Washington's example into law in 1951, restricting the president to two terms.

The Constitution isn't perfect. If it were it wouldn't be amendable. Strict constructionism is fine as far as it goes, until it runs up against the need for explicit construction.

We used to complain to the British that we had taxation without representation.

Now we have representation without representation.

It's time we changed that.

Backward, countrymen, to the future!

Romney Is A Total Hypocrite On Hard-Money: To Him TARP Preserved The Dollar's Value!

Hard-money conservatives like Larry Kudlow who think Gov. Mitt Romney is actually serious about maintaining the value of the dollar ought to remember that Romney argued in October 2011 that the TARP bailout was designed to keep the currency worth something:

According to Governor Romney, the $700 billion Wall Street rescue package "was designed to keep not just a collapse of individual banking institutions, but to keep the entire currency of the country worth something."

Noting could be further from the truth and Romney knows it.

TARP was not sold as a program to prop-up the dollar; it was sold as a means of keeping credit markets liquid, to keep banks lending to business, so businesses would keep people employed.

Not surprisingly, from that perspective TARP has been a spectacular failure -- because as soon as Congress granted then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson a blank check for $700 billion (along with near-dictatorial powers over the American financial services industry and de facto control over the U.S. economy), something changed.

Suddenly, instead of being a program to move illiquid mortgage-backed securities off the books of banks, TARP became a no-strings-attached cash infusion to favored financial institutions and corporations. 

Among the insiders who received the no-strings-attached cash were Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Deutsche Bank AG, Merrill Lynch, Societe Generale, Calyon, Barclays Plc, Rabobank, Danske, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Banco Santander, Morgan Stanley, Wachovia, Bank of America, and Lloyds Banking Group – that’s what Romney and Cain were defending.

If borrowing money to spend on circumventing the failure necessary to the proper operation of free markets props up the value of the dollar, it hasn't worked very well.

Since the (first!) bailout of Chrysler signed into law by Jimmy Carter in January 1980 you now need $2.73 to buy what $1.00 did then.

Way to go Brownie!

a little hurricane humor there

George Orwell on Adolf Hitler

"[T]he situation in Germany, with its seven million unemployed, was obviously favourable for demagogues. But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches. I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. ...

"I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. ...

"Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all 'progressive' thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. ...

"Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarized version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people 'I offer you a good time,' Hitler has said to them 'I offer you struggle, danger and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."

-- from George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf, 1940 (reproduced in full here)