Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Romney's Unfavorables Now As Bad As Newt's!
So National Journal, here:
Just 31 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Romney, the poll shows. Almost half, 49 percent, have an unfavorable opinion, and 21 percent said they have no opinion. Romney now holds virtually the same favorable and unfavorable ratings as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose numbers have also dropped over the past month -- suggesting that the ugly, protracted fight for the Republican presidential nomination is dragging down its two most prominent participants.
'Compassionate' Elites Plunder The Middle Class To Help The Poor
They don't call them levelers for nothing.
Seen here, in which a single parent of three making $3,625 can end up with more disposable income than a similar person making $30,000, or one making $14,500 ends up with more than one making $60,000:
Ann Coulter Furious Over Newt Attacking Media. It Must Be Working.
Doing her best for her man, Romney, here.
Monday, January 23, 2012
If The Republicans Were Smart, They'd Follow The Rahm Emanuel Strategy
They were liars, mostly. Some were dupes. And their public face was the "Blue Dogs" who helped the Democrats take over the House in 2006. It bled votes from the Republicans and brought them into the party, while their elected representatives dutifully voted for almost everything the Democrat left under Pelosi and Reid and Obama put forward after 2008, although not without occasional difficulty, especially in the case of ObamaCare.
That's why this analysis from one "Ben Shapiro" here is totally wrong (a troll?) and rather sad to see this late in the game because it misses the Emanuel strategy entirely:
John Kerry was a flip-flopper, a wishy-washy liberal who made liberals squeamish. So they responded by moving to the left, bringing in Nancy Pelosi to run the House and the anti-Kerry, Howard Dean, to run the Democratic National Committee. The result was a Democratic victory in 2006 in the House, and the victory of the most far-left candidate in American history, Barack Obama, in 2008.
The Emanuel strategy recognized what polls tell us even today, nearly a decade on: the American people are not Democrat or Republican predominantly, but conservative in their self-understanding, however ill-defined that may be. Liberalism as a category still comes in last, as Politico reports here:
Conservatives continue to make up the largest segment of political views in the country, outnumbering liberals nearly two-to-one, according to a new poll Thursday.
The Gallup survey found that 40 percent of Americans consider themselves conservative; 35 percent consider themselves moderate; and 21 percent see themselves as liberal. The figures did not change from 2010.
These simple facts explain why Newt Gingrich is doing so well on chewing gum and chicken wire against one of the richest Republicans to run for office in decades.
Republicans, if they want to win, should embrace this. People like Tim Pawlenty, Bill Bennett, and Ann Coulter should get with the program and stop supporting an unelectable guy whom Republicans rightly discarded in 2008 for JOHN S. McCAIN, of all people.
Gingrich's chief appeal is his ability to go mano a mano with the media, which are an unpaid arm of the Obama campaign, C-student shills who deserve a real education for once.
Gingrich will give it to them.
We might not get real conservatism, but no one can say with a straight face that we'll get that from Mitt Romney. We're trying to fill the Bully Pulpit here. It's the most important lectureship without tenure in the history of mankind. Newt never got tenure in academe, and I can't think of a better person to fill this chair at this time than Newt.
Feint right, Republicans. You've done it before, you can do it again.
We know you don't mean it.
Feint right, Republicans. You've done it before, you can do it again.
We know you don't mean it.
Ann Coulter's Favorite Governor Picks New Jersey's First Gay Justice
Philly eyeball news has the story here:
If confirmed, Bruce A. Harris would become New Jersey’s first openly gay justice.
Chris Christie gets a twofer: Bruce Harris is black.
German Americans Continue As USA's Largest Self-Reported Ancestral Group
German Americans are citizens of the United States of German ancestry and comprise about 51 million people, or 17% of the U.S. population, the country's largest self-reported ancestral group. California, Texas and Pennsylvania have the largest numbers of German origin, although upper Midwestern states, including Ohio, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, have the highest proportion of German Americans at over one-third.
Supremes Rule Unanimously Against Warrantless GPS Use By Police
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects.
The GPS device helped authorities link Washington, D.C., nightclub owner Antoine Jones to a suburban house used to stash money and drugs. He was sentenced to life in prison before the appeals court overturned the conviction.
NOW WE NEED A SIMILAR RULING ON . . .
SPY DRONES
SCANNERS
AND SATELLITES.
SPY DRONES
SCANNERS
AND SATELLITES.
President Obama: Murder Your Baby . . . Fulfill Your Dreams
A sick man, for a sick society, quoted here:
“And as we remember this historic anniversary, we must also continue our efforts to ensure that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.”
As a state lawmaker in Illinois, he voted four times against legislation to protect the life of a baby that survived a botched abortion. He voted against such legislation at the state level in 2001, 2002 and 2003.
TSA Interferes With Senator's Travel to Washington, DC
ABC News actually gets the story right, here:
The U.S. Constitution actually protects federal lawmakers from detention while they’re on the way to the Capital [sic].
“The Senators and Representatives…shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same….” according to Article I, Section 6.
The Senate is back in session today at 2 p.m., with votes scheduled at 4:30 p.m.
Forty-eight States . . . Fifty-eight States . . . Whatever
"It is just wonderful to be back in Oregon, and over the last 15 months we've traveled to every corner of the United States. I've now been in fifty ... seven states? I think one left to go. One left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to, even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it."
-- Barack Obama, May 9, 2008 (video here)
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Liberal George Bush Dramatically Expanded Food Stamps, But Obama Out-Liberaled Him
From an excellent summary of the food stamp facts since 1969 in The Wall Street Journal, here:
George W. Bush expanded food stamp eligibility with the egregious 2002 farm bill by adjusting deductions and income tests and encouraging states to find more participants. The Pelosi Congress then rebranded the program in the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of June 2008 to emphasize nutrition rather than the stigma of receiving handouts. As a result and also thanks to the recession in 2008, food stamp participation rose by 10.9 million across the Bush Presidency.
But Mr. Obama is now outstripping that dubious achievement, and in only three years rather than eight. The 2009 stimulus bill increased maximum benefits and authorized more money for states to administer the program. Some 11.2 million more people have joined the rolls from 2009 through 2011, including 4.4 million last year during what was ostensibly an economic recovery.
46.2 million Americans get food stamps according to the latest data here. Fewer than 5 million received them in 1969.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
John Hawkins' Mistake: 'A Republican president IS the conservative movement'
In an otherwise sterling clarion call to stop Mitt Romney, John Hawkins of Right Wing News here displays what is fundamentally wrong with America's current conception of itself as a nation:
"A Republican president IS the conservative movement."
If that's true, then why are we bothering electing representatives and Senators? Why not simply go for dictatorship? One almost wonders if this is some weird transposition of a conception of religious vicariousness to politics: one man dying for the nation and all that.
No. America led by a single (blended strong) man instead of the founders' America of a nation governed through intimate representation is what the last 100 years have been all about. Since 1913 this country has had 435 representatives in the US House when by today it should have grown to 10,267.
Presidents are elected by electors after all, not by the people. I would rather have 10,367 electors next autumn than today's measly, rich, corrupt 535, precisely because a president would have to persuade a lot more of them, not just before inauguration day, but for the entire four years of his term in office thereafter.
As things stand, however, a president ignores the Congress once he gets elected. Obama has done so spectacularly, even when his own party controlled the House. And make no mistake about it, the less represented you are, the happier is Washington DC, the better to stick it to you, my dear.
An adequately sized Congress is the people, not the president, otherwise America is finished, so-called conservative president or no. Representation, not the presidency, was the most significant issue debated in the ratification debates.
That's why Congress is held in record low esteem today: IT DOES NOT REPRESENT US.
2.5 Million Homes Lost to Foreclosure. How About At Least Another 4.5 Million?
Laurie Goodman is back in the news on housing, here:
All told, Goodman warns that more than 10 million of the nation's 55 million mortgage holders could default by 2018. ...
To avoid the "moral hazard" of rewarding foolish borrowers, Goodman recommends that lenders swap immediate principal reductions for shares of any gains on the mortgaged house when it is sold.
To avoid the "moral hazard" of rewarding foolish borrowers, Goodman recommends that lenders swap immediate principal reductions for shares of any gains on the mortgaged house when it is sold.
In 2010 she was talking 11-12 million defaults, so the new, only slightly lower, estimate shows that in the intervening two years she has corrected her predictive range by at most 16 percent.
Spengler on the Christian Origins of Communism
From The Hour of Decision, 1933:
"But since the end of the World War the church - in Germany above all, where, being an ancient power of rigid traditions, it had to pay heavily in prestige with its own adherents by descending to street level - has sunk to class wars and association with Marxism. There is in Germany a Catholic Bolshevism which is more dangerous than the anti-Christian because it hides behind the mask of a religion.
"Now, all Communist systems in the West are in fact derived from Christian theological thought: More's Utopia, the Sun State of the Dominica Campanella, the doctrines of Luther's disciples Karlstadt and Thomas Münzer, and Fichte's State Socialism. What Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen, Marx, and hundreds of others dreamed and wrote on the ideals of the future reaches back, quite without their knowledge and much against their intention, to priestly-moral indignation and Schoolmen concepts, which had their secret part in economic reasoning and in public opinion on social questions. How much of Thomas Aquinas' law of nature and conception of State is still to be found in Adam Smith and therefore - with the opposite sign - in the Communist Manifesto! Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism. All abstract brooding over economic concepts that are remote from any economic experience must, if courageously and honestly followed out, lead in one way or another to reasoned conclusions against State and property, and only lack of vision saves these materialist Schoolmen from seeing that at the end of their chain of thought stands the beginning once more: effective Communism is authoritative bureaucracy. To put through the ideal requires dictatorship, reign of terror, armed force, the inequality of a system of masters and slaves, men in command and men in obedience - in short: Moscow.
"But there are two sorts of Communist. The one, the credulous type, obsessed by doctrine or feminine sentimentality, remote from and hostile to the world, condemns the wealth of the wicked who prosper and also, at times, the poverty of the good who do not prosper. This lands him either in vague Utopias or throws him back upon asceticism, the monastic life, Bohemia, or vagabondism, which proclaims the futility of all economic effort. But the other, the "worldly" type with the realist political outlook, hopes through its followers to destroy society, either from envy or revenge, because of the low place assigned in it to their personality and talents, or, alternatively, to carry away the masses by some program or other for the satisfaction of his own will-to-power. But this, too, likes to hide itself under the cloak of some religion.
"Marxism is indeed a religion, not in the sense of its founder, but in that which his revolutionary following has imparted to it. Like any church it has its saints, apostles, martyrs, fathers, bible and mission. Like any church it has dogmas, heresy-tribunals, an orthodoxy and a scholasticism, and, above all, a popular moral - or rather two, for believers and unbelievers. And does it make any difference that its doctrine is materialistic through and through? Are those priests who agitate on economic questions any less so?"
Culture Cannot Be Had For Money
"But because culture, the tradition of enjoyment which knows how to make much out of little, is lacking and cannot be had for money, jealousy of this kind of superiority torments all vulgar-minded people."
-- Oswald Spengler
The Tea Party vs. The Vulgar Mob
Oswald Spengler, 1933:
For the Age has itself become vulgar, and most people have no idea to what extent they are themselves tainted. The bad manners of all parliaments, the general tendency to connive at a rather shady business transaction if it promises to bring in money without work, jazz and Negro dances as the spiritual outlet in all circles of society, women painted like prostitutes, the efforts of writers to win popularity by ridiculing in their novels and plays the correctness of well-bred people, and the bad taste shown even by the nobility and old princely families in throwing off every kind of social restraint and time-honoured custom: all of these go to prove that it is now the vulgar mob that gives the tone.
Monday, January 16, 2012
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