Senate is Broken: Congress in 2011 Passed 80 Bills, Fewest Since 1947

Considering what gets passed, why is this a bad thing?

The Washington Times reports here:

The Times‘ analysis suggested that the Senate is an increasingly broken chamber. All five of the worst performances on record were in the past decade. Four of those were when Democrats were in control and Republicans were in the minority.

In the House, the record was decidedly mixed. Of the worst five years, two were in the 1950s, two were in the 1980s and one was in the past decade.

Maybe the Senate is such a mess because it views itself as a more powerful version of the House, with which it is in constant competition as an institution and over which it lords itself at every opportunity, the Senate healthcare bill of 2010, now known as ObamaCare, being the most recent prime example. Had more Democrats in the House opposed this bill in March 2010, fewer of them had lost their seats in the historic Republican sweep in November.

Arguably the Senate is more powerful, for two reasons.

One, because of popular election of Senators, which puts them in direct competition in the same electoral sphere as representatives, contrary to the original intention of the constitution. And two, the fact that the tenure of a Senator is three times longer than a representative's. The lowly two-year man is ever on guard of losing the next election, while a Senator watches him come and go, mindful of the inattention of the voters over so long a period as half a decade.

The Senators' interests should primarily be to protect the interests of the States they represent, especially the States' independence from the federal government. But they are not. Instead they seek at every turn to usurp the representative function of the members of the House, where bills should originate. Is it any wonder the States have no representation in Washington, the legislatures of which must rely on leagues of Attorneys General to file suits in federal courts to protect themselves from encroachments of federal power?

The remedy for all that starts with a much bigger House, which means repealing The Reapportionment Act of 1929.

With the will of the people once adequately represented for a change, Senators might eventually be persuaded to meddle less at pain of repeal of the 17th Amendment. Already the most expensive races in the country, the dilution of the cost of running for office at the representative level with 10,267 districts instead of 435 might occasion an unwelcome shift of focus back upon the excess and corruption evident in running for the Senate, the mean expenditure for which in 2008 was nearly $6 million, six times what it currently costs the typical representative to run.

Representatives will not need to spend $1 million buying TV and radio ads to reach 30,000 constituents instead of 700,000 now, but Senators will still have to in order to reach the millions of their constituents. They will stand out in those media in a way which they haven't been accustomed to in the past and the spotlight will be on them as never before.

And as we all know, sunlight is a marvelous disinfectant.

The Working Class Does Not Exist In The Economic Structure Of A Single Nation

rich tub-thumper

Oswald Spengler:

"[T]he uneducated and half-educated middle class believed in this picture and does so to this day. The word "worker" has been surrounded by a halo since 1848, without consideration of its meaning and the limits of its application. And the "working class," which does not exist in the economic structure of a single nation - for what have miners, sailors, tailors' apprentices, metalworkers, waiters, bank officials, ploughmen, and scavengers in common with one another? - becomes a political reality, an attacking party, which has split all "white" nations into two armies, of which the one has to feed, and to give its blood for a host of party agents, tub-thumpers, newspaper-writers, and "people's representatives," who pursue their own private aims. That is the purpose for which it exists. The contrast between Capitalism and Socialism - words for which, all this time, literature has searched in vain for a definition, for catchwords are not to be defined - is not derived from any reality, but is purely a built-up challenge. Marx introduced these terms into the English engineering industry, he did not draw them from it; and even so he could only do it by ignoring the existence of all the people engaged in agriculture, commerce, traffic, and administration. This picture of the time had so little to do with the world of reality and its inhabitants that, in theory, the South even became separated from the North: the boundary lay somewhere about the line Lyon-Milan. In the Latin South, where one needs little to live on and does little work, where there is no coal and therefore no industrialism, where thought and feeling are racially different, there developed anarchist and syndicalist tendencies whose wish-picture was the dissolution of the great national organisms into systemless, small self-sufficing groups, Bedouin- like swarms occupied in doing nothing. But in the North, where hard winters mean harder work and make such work not only possible but essential, where from time immemorial the battle has been against hunger and cold combined, there arose out of the Germanic will-to-power, and its urge to large-scale organization, systems of authoritarian Communism which aim at a proletarian dictatorship over the whole world. And, simply because in the nineteenth century the coalfields of these northern lands had attracted an assemblage of people and of national wealth of a hitherto unheard-of order of magnitude, a very different impetus was given to demagogy both within them and outwards from their boundaries. The high wages of English, German, and American factory-workers triumphed, precisely because they were anything but "starvation rates," over the low wages of the land-workers in the South, and only because of this "capitalistic" superiority of party means did Marxism triumph over the theories of Fourier and Proudhon. The peasantry had already ceased to exist for all of them. As a weapon in the class war it had small value, not merely because it was not available on the pavements at any and every moment, but also because its traditions of property and labour were contrary to the views of theory. It was therefore ignored by the catchwords of the Communist program. Bourgeoisie and proletarian - that is the picture one can take in, and the simpler one is, the less one notices how much there is left outside this scheme."

25% of GDP is Fake

Because 25 percent of GDP is government spending.

Think about it.

Richard Viguerie Smokes Mitt Romney As Anti-Capitalist On His Own TARP Petard

Here:

To Mitt Romney, venture capitalist, the average worker is an expendable line on a spreadsheet -- until that worker’s tax dollars were needed to bailout financiers who promoted the leveraged buyouts and packaged the exotic financial instruments that led to the financial meltdown of 2008.

Who is more anti-capitalist? Is it Romney’s opponents, who question whether or not a form of capitalism that allows a handful of rich people to avoid moral hazard, manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and then walk off with the money by getting a bailout from the taxpayers?

Or, are the real anti-capitalists Mitt Romney and his establishment friends in the Washington/Wall Street Axis who hypocritically enjoy having the option of firing "the little guy" and stripping the factory on Main Street on the way up -- but then use their insider power and influence to demand those same little taxpayers bail them out on the way down?

And the person chiefly responsible for misleading the troops on this issue is Rush Limbaugh, who has flip-flopped on the bank bailout issue in spectacular fashion and fed Gingrich to the wolves.

Mormons in Congress as of January 2011

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah

Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah

Sen. Tom Udall, D-New Mexico

Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah

Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona

Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nevada

Rep. Wally Herger, R-California

Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho

Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah

Rep. Buck McKeon, R-California

Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho

"Say I Was A Drum Major For Plagiarism"

For the controversy over the inscription on the MLK statue, see The Washington Post here:

“I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness,” the monument says. What an odd choice for a quote, I thought, when I visited in August before its scheduled dedication. It sounded almost . . . conceited. And it was past tense, as though King was speaking from the grave. It didn’t sound like King at all.

I went looking for the context, read the whole speech and found there was a reason it didn’t sound like him. “If you want to say I was a drum major, say I was . . . ” is how King began his statement. As many have since pointed out, the “if” and the “you” entirely change the meaning. To King, being a self-aggrandizing drum major was not a good thing; if you wanted to call him that, he said, at least say it was in the service of good causes.

Why such concern over an inaccurate inscription on a monument to a plagiarist? Wouldn't it be more fitting to leave it as it is?

From the Wikipedia entry here:

King's doctoral dissertation at Boston University, titled A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, included large sections from a dissertation written by another student (Jack Boozer) three years earlier at Boston University.

As Clayborne Carson, director of the King Papers Project at Stanford University, has written, "instances of textual appropriation can be seen in his earliest extant writings as well as his dissertation. The pattern is also noticeable in his speeches and sermons throughout his career."

Boston University, where King got his Ph.D. in systematic theology, conducted an investigation that found he plagiarized major portions of his doctoral thesis from various other authors who wrote about the topic.

'There Is No Contradiction Between Economic Liberalism and Socialism'

Spengler:

'Labour-Socialism in every form, on the other hand, is, as I have already shown, definitely English in origin. It arose, about 1840, simultaneously with the victory of the joint-stock company and the rootless "financial" form of capital. Both were the expression of Free Trade Manchesterism: this "white" Bolshevism is capitalism from below, wage-capitalism, just as speculative finance-capital in respect of its method is Socialism from above, from the stock exchange. Both grew out of the same intellectual root: thinking in money, trading in money on the pavements of the world's capitals, whether as wage-levels or profits on exchange rates makes no odds. There is no contradiction between economic Liberalism and Socialism. The Labour market is the stock exchange of the organized proletariat. The trade unions are trusts for forcing up wages on the lines followed by oil, steel, and bank trusts of the Anglo-American type, whose finance-Socialism penetrates, dominates, sucks, and controls them to the point of systematic expropriation. The devastating dispossessing effect of bundles of shares and bonds, the separation of mere "credit" from the responsible directive work of the entrepreneur, who no longer knows to whom his work actually belongs, has not received anything like adequate consideration. Productive economy is in the last resort nothing but the will-less object of stock-exchange manoeuvres. It was only the rise of the share system to domination that enabled the stock exchange (formerly a mere aid to economy) to assume the decisive control of economic life. Finance-Socialists and trust magnates like Morgan and Kreuger correspond absolutely to the mass-leaders of Labour parties and the Russian economic commissars: dealer-natures with the same parvenu tastes. From both sides, today as in the days of the Gracchi, the conservative forces of the State - army, property, peasant, and manager - are being attacked.'

Dead Since 1936, Oswald Spengler Remarkably Described Our Own Time

'It must be stated again and again that this society . . . is sick, sick in its instincts and therefore in its mind. It offers no defence. It takes pleasure in its own vilification and disintegration. From the middle of the eighteenth century it has broken up more and more into Liberal and Conservative circles - the latter representing merely the opposition set up in desperate self-defence against the former. On the one side there is a small number of people who, possessed of the true political instinct, see what is going on and whither it is leading and exert themselves to prevent, moderate, or divert accordingly; people of the kind who formed Scipio's circle in Rome (and whose outlook inspired Polybius' historical work), and, again, Burke, Pitt, Wellington, and Disraeli in England, Metternich, Hegel, and Bismarck in Germany, and Tocqueville in France. They sought to defend the conserving forces of the old Culture - State, monarchy, army, consciousness of standing, property, peasantry - even in cases where they had reason to object, and are therefore cried down as "reactionary." This word, which the Liberals invented, is thrown back at them now by their Marxian pupils, in that they try to prevent the logical outcome of their actions: such is our reputed progress. On the other side stands almost everything that has the urban intelligence or, if not, at least looks up to it as the badge of superiority in the conditions of today and in terms of the power of the future - the future that is already the past.

'At this point journalism becomes the dominant expression of the time. It is the critical esprit of the eighteenth century diluted and lightened for intellectual mediocrity - and let us not forget that age means to part, to dissect, to disintegrate. Drama, poetry, philosophy, even science and history are turned into leading articles and feuilletons written with an unashamed bias against everything that is conservative and has formerly inspired respect. "Party" becomes the Liberal substitute for rank and State; revolution, in the form of periodic mass elections fought by all available means of money, brains, and even - after the Gracchan method - physical violence, is exalted into a constitutional process; government, as the meaning and duty of State existence, is either opposed and derided or degraded to the level of a party business. But the blindness and cowardice of Liberalism goes further still. Tolerance is extended to the destructive forces of the city dregs, not demanded by them. In Western Europe Russian Nihilists and Spanish anarchists are gushed over in "good" society with revolting sentimentality and passed on from one fashionable hostess to another. In Paris and London, above all in Switzerland, both they and their undermining activities are carefully protected. The Liberal press rings with maledictions of the prisons in which the martyrs of liberty languish, and not a word is dropped in favour of the countless defenders of the State, down to the simple soldier and policeman, who are blown into the air, crippled by bullet-wounds, or slaughtered in the exercise of their duty.

'The concept of the proletariat, created of deliberate intention by Socialist theoreticians, has been accepted by the middle classes. Actually it has nothing to do with the thousand branches of strict and skilled labour - from fishing to book-printing, from tree-felling to engine-driving - and is scorned and felt as a disgrace by industrious, trained workers. It was intended solely to secure the amalgamation of these workers with the city mob for the purpose of overthrowing the social order. But Liberalism centred political thought upon it by employing it as though it were an established concept. Under the name Naturalism there arose a pitiable school of literature and painting which exalted filth to aesthetic charm, and vulgar feeling and thinking to a binding world-view. "People" no longer meant the community of the whole nation, but that section of the city masses which set up in opposition to this community. The proletarian appeared as the hero on the stage of the progressive bourgeoisie, and with him the prostitute, the shirker, the agitator, the criminal. From this time onward it has been "modern" and superior to see the world from below, from the perspective of a bar-parlour or a street of ill repute. The cult of the proletarian arose during that period, and in the Liberal circles of Western Europe, not in 1918 in Russia. A fatal notion of things, half false and half stupid, began to pervade educated and semi-educated minds: "the worker" becomes the real person, the real nation, the meaning and aim of history, politics, public care. The fact that all men work, and moreover that others - the inventor, the engineer, and organizer - do more, and more important, work is forgotten. No one any longer dares to bring forward the class or quality of his achievement as a gauge of its value. Only work measured in hours now counts as labour. And the "worker," with all this, is the poor unfortunate one, disinherited, starving, exploited. The words "care" and "distress" are applied to him alone. No one has a thought left for the countryman's less fertile strips of land, his bad harvests, his losses by hail and frost, his anxiety over the sale of his produce; or for the wretched existence of poor craftsmen in strongly industrialized areas, the tragedies of small tradesmen, fishermen on the high seas, inventors, doctors, who have to struggle amid alarms and dangers for each bite of daily bread and go down in their thousands unheeded. "The worker" alone receives sympathy. He alone is supported, cared for, insured. What is more, he is made the saint, the idol, of the age. The world revolves round him. He is the focus of the economic system and the nurseling of politics. Everybody's existence hinges on him; the majority of the nation are there to serve him. The dull lump of a peasant, the lazy official, the swindling tradesman, are legitimate targets for mirth, not to mention judges, officers, and heads of businesses, who are the popular objects of ill-natured jest; but no one would dare to pour the same scorn on "the working man." All the rest are idlers, egoists; he is the one exception. The whole middle class swings the censer before this phantom. No matter what one's own achievements in life may be, one must fall on one's knees before him. His being stands above all criticism. It was the middle classes who successfully "put over" this notion of him, and the very business-like "representatives of the people" continue to sponge upon this legend. They dinned it into the wage-earners until they believed it; until they felt themselves to be really ill-treated and wretched, until they lost all sense of proportion with regard to their output and their importance. Liberalism vis-à-vis the demagogic trend is the form of suicide adopted by our sick society. With this perspective it gives itself up. The merciless, embittered class war that is waged against it finds it prepared to capitulate politically, after having helped spiritually in the forging of the enemy weapons. Only the Conservative element - weak as it was in the nineteenth century - can, and in the future will, hinder the coming of this end. ...


'The manual worker is merely a means to the private ends of professional revolutionaries. He is to fight for the satisfaction of their hatred of the conservative forces and their thirst for power. If only workers were to be recognized as representatives of the workers, the benches of the Left would be very empty in all parliaments. Among the originators of their theoretical programs and leaders of revolutionary campaigns there is not one who actually worked for years in a factory.'

We Despise Mitt Romney To The Very Core Of Our Being

“I don’t know a single Tea Party person who does not despise Mitt Romney to the very core of their being.”

-- Karen Martin, Spartanburg South Carolina Tea Party, quoted here

Sarah Palin Follows Rush, Tries To Change The Subject to Jobs from Looting

Newt has tried to appear to take a principled stand in the war on Romney and today's Republicans don't seem to want to join him there, which just shows what a throwback Newt is and what co-dependents Republicans have become in their job-servitude.

Republicans are in thrall to the concept of The Job as much as Germany was to The Worker in the 1920s. Sarah Palin's remarks asking for full disclosure of job creation data and of Mitt's tax returns strike me as pure posturing and ass-covering in the face of Mitt's impending coronation. What was it, five colleges she attended to get a four year degree?

While Newt's gotten older the Republican Party has continued to move so far away from its old moral positions that it now considers Newt to be talking the values of the enemy. Rush Limbaugh is a case in point, who constantly derides Newt for using the language of the left, when Rush can't make up his mind from day to day whether the bank bailouts were necessary, superfluous or deceitful. A convert like Augustine of Hippo couldn't possibly have something important to contribute, could he?

The truth is Romney's capitalism is parasitic, not entrepreneurial, because it incessantly demands gains in productivity which go to the owners and investors at the expense of the workers. Please. Save. My. Crummy. Job.

No one aged 50 or more who has lost a position on a mere technicality after twenty or more years of service, and they are legion, is sympathetic to this argument. What work at year 5, 10, 14 or 18 was superior to the work at year 20, but for the fact that salary and benefits at that point represented a juicy cost savings going directly to the almighty bottom line? The young who lose their jobs are too inexperienced and too frequently abused to know any other reality than job-hopping in the world created by the corporate raider. Such lives do not produce traditional, stable families, nor committed, law-abiding communities and reliable tax bases. The business left is now in full-throated holler for simplifying taxes, removing tax deductions, and, the real point, a more mobile worker, one who doesn't own a house and who can be moved here and there at will without having to sell first.

Pat Buchanan, who twenty years ago this month made life very difficult for one President George Herbert Walker Bush in the New Hampshire primary, had a change of heart about what was really happening to American workers as he made the rounds during the campaign. It made him realize that something had begun to change in the relationship between worker and employer which went to the heart of patriotism. Today we see the full expression of businesses' loyalty, and it's not to justice, only to the letter of the law, skilfully crafted by its bought and paid for politician. 

If only we had Republican candidates today who could effectively tap this well of misery in order to alleviate it instead of merely to get elected. Democrats are better at this, which is why their future looks bright, and ours looks dim.

Senator Jim DeMint is NOT a Conservative

If he were, he'd be doing everything he can to repeal the 17th Amendment.

Raising money to elect so-called conservatives is raising money to perpetuate the status quo post. Originalism isn't just for the Supremes.

He's a phony.

The TARP Elephant Still in the Republican Living Room

BUSH:

"I've abandoned free market principles to save the free market system."

-- December 16, 2008 (video here)

Bob Rodriguez Says 2012 Will Be Languid Economically

Here:

"I’m looking for GDP growth at about 1%, probably even lower at times. It’s going to be a very languid year economically, and the stock market will face profitability issues along with governmental issues."

Mighty Dullness Crowned

"In a dull stream, which moving slow,

You hardly see the current flow;

When a small breeze obstructs the course,

It whirls about for want of force,

And in its narrow circle gathers

Nothing but chaff, and straws, and feathers:

The current of a female mind stops thus,

and turns with ev'ry wind;

Thus whirling round, together draws

Fools, fops, and rakes, for chaff and straws."

-- Swift

"No Economic Recovery Until We Deal With Housing"

They think we're turning Japanese.

So say the boys at Institutional Risk Analytics, here.

Read it.

They are right.

(video here)

If Romney Still Has To "Come Up With A Rationale For November" He's Already Finished

So Michael Walsh here:

[T]o call corporate restructuring “jobs creation” won’t fly. Romney is going to have to come up with a far more persuasive, positive rationale for his candidacy if he hopes to beat Barack Obama in November.

What we are witnessing with this weak field of Republicans is a Republican Party "redefined" and ruined by George W. Bush himself, as Matt Latimer famously told us, because for eight years it consisted in and ended in a gross repudiation of the American idea, of capitalism, and failed utterly.

None of the candidates has the courage nor the conviction to say so. And because of that, they have nothing to say to us.

Which makes the moment incredibly awkward, because Obama has nothing to say to us either.

"There is no conservative movement."

If Newt really were smart, he'd attack that.

Stunning Video of the Dead Voting in New Hampshire Yesterday

Video and story here.

ID is not required to get a ballot in New Hampshire, just the way Democrats want it.

Romney Likens Bain to Obama Bail Out of Auto Cos.: Rush Livid Romney Makes Newt's Point!

So Rush is left today simply trying to change the subject to what Romney SHOULD have said, because Newt not only can't be right, he MUSTN'T be right, now that he's guilty of "anti-capitalism" according to Rush.

The story and video of Romney on CBS this morning are here:

“In the general election I’ll be pointing out that the president took the reins at General Motors and Chrysler – closed factories, closed dealerships laid off thousands and thousands of workers – he did it to try to save the business." ...

“We also had the occasion to do things that are tough to try and save a business." ...

Where is Sarah Palin and that crony capitalism talk from Sept. 3, 2011 when you need it? Is she going to leave Newt to hang out to dry and defend Ron Paul who now defends Romney, or ante up and call Romney (and Obama) nuts and Newt right?




"In a dull stream, which moving slow,
You hardly see the current flow;
When a small breeze obstructs the course,
It whirls about for want of force,
And in its narrow circle gathers
Nothing but chaff, and straws, and feathers:
The current of a female mind stops thus,
and turns with ev'ry wind;
Thus whirling round, together draws
Fools, fops, and rakes, for chaff and straws."

-- Swift

Non-Party Members Can Interfere in Primaries Except in a Handful of States

Eeny Meeny Miny Moe 4 Lap Dogs In A Row

Anybody But Romney, But Who?

Jeffrey Lord successfully locates Romney squarely in the progressive wing of the Republican Party for The American Spectator here, but doesn't really explain how the supposedly dying wing of the party keeps getting its people nominated for president.

Not only that, Republican progressives dominate in the Senate, which can only mean one thing: Republican progressives owe their electoral success not to Republicans but more broadly to Democrats and independents who interfere in their primaries and occasionally vote for them in the general. The relatively small size and influence of the Tea Party in the US House underscores this point, despite its role in giving the House back to the GOP in 2010. Narrower constituencies elect representatives.  

The way forward is for the Tea Party to narrow them further still.

Which is another way of saying the Tea Party needs to work for greater representation for the individual American's interests. What better way than by insisting on the originalist interpretation of the very idea of representation? The Tea Party should be demanding an end to a fixed House delegation of 435 members, a Republican fast-one pulled on the country back in the 1920s at the height of the progressives' influence. The Tea Party should call for expanding the House to its original constitutional proportions of one representative to every 30,000 of population.

I can think of no quicker, more sane and just way to wrest control of government away from the political parties as presently configured and return it to the people where it belongs.

We need 10,267 members in the US House.

And surely you know what that means? Instead of dividing 538 or so electoral votes to win the presidency, he or she would be fighting for a majority of 10,367 electoral votes. The growing and wildly disproportionate and unconstitutional electoral influence of the Senate since the 20s would thus be ended at a stroke because their 100 electoral votes would be up against 10,267 others, not just 438.

And so would be ended the Senate's ability and power to cram down our throats odious nostrums like Obamacare, gays in the military, START and any number of other progressive, enlightened ideas rejected by the vast majority of Americans. 

Tim Carney Draws Blood and Larry Kudlow Proves it By Losing His Cool

Kudlow didn't like being exposed for a hypocrite, and beat up on the young guy (video here) just to show who's in charge, but the point still stands:

Republicans shill for high finance and free trade at the expense of Main Street and American manufacturing workers. Protestations that government must not pick winners and losers to the contrary, it's high time in this country that American business and American government started picking America to win instead of some libertarian notion of the bottom line, which is poison to our communities.

Tim Carney speaks up against it here, noting how Rick Santorum's populism has rankled Kudlow.

A Brief History of Third Parties' Performance in Presidential Elections

2008  2.0 million votes  1.5 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes

2004  1.2 million votes  1.0 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes

2000  3.9 million votes  3.7 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes  Nader

1996  9.7 million votes  10  percent of the vote  0 electoral votes  Perot

1992  20  million votes  20  percent of the vote  0 electoral votes  Perot

1988  0.9 million votes  1.0 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes  Paul

1984  0.6 million votes  0.7 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes

1980  7.1 million votes  8.2 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes  Anderson

1976  1.6 million votes  1.9 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes  McCarthy

1972  1.4 million votes  1.8 percent of the vote  1 electoral vote    Hospers

1968  10  million votes  14  percent of the vote  46 electoral votes Wallace

1964  0.3 million votes  0.5 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes

1960  0.5 million votes  0.7 percent of the vote  15 electoral votes  unpledged Democratic

1956  0.4 million votes  0.7 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes

1952  0.3 million votes  0.5 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes

1948  2.6 million votes  5.4 percent of the vote  39 electoral votes Thurmond

I'm cool with that

                 

Social Spending on 'The Worker' Ruined Germany Before 1933, Not War Reparations

So Oswald Spengler:

"For this part of the political wage also - insurance of every kind against fate, the building of workers' dwellings (no one thinks of demanding these for farm labourers), the construction of playgrounds, convalescent homes, libraries, and the special terms for food, railway journeys, and amusements - is all paid for directly or indirectly by taxation of "the rest" for the working man. This in fact is an essential part of the political wage, and it receives very little thought. At the same time the national wealth of which we are given the amount in figures is an economic fiction. It is calculated - as "capital" - from the yield of economic undertakings or from the market prices of interest-bearing shares, and it falls with these when the value of the working factories is threatened by the burden of high wages. A factory that is thus made to close down is, however, of no more value except for the scrap-heap. Under the dictatorship of the trade unions, Germany's economic system had in the four years 1925-29 to meet an extra load of 18,225,000,000 marks annually in respect of increased wages, taxes, and grants for social purposes. This means one-third of the national income spent one-sidedly. One year later the sum had grown to far beyond twenty milliard marks. What are two milliards for reparations compared with this? It endangered the financial position of the Reich and the currency. Its drag on the economic system was not even taken into account when the effects of wage-Bolshevism were in question. It was the expropriation of the whole economic system in the interests of one class."

What Republicans and Karl Marx Have in Common Today: Free Trade

"Generally speaking, the protectionist system today is conservative, whereas the Free Trade system has a destructive effect. It destroys the former nationalities and renders the contrast between proletariat and bourgeoisie more acute. In a word, the Free Trade system is precipitating the social revolution. And only in this revolutionary sense do I vote for Free Trade."

-- Karl Marx, 1847

Self-Denial is Hard When Faced with Self-Indulgence

"[The] vulgar luxury of great cities - little work, much money, and still more amusement - exercised a fatal influence upon the hard-working and simple men of the open country. They learnt to know of needs of which their fathers would never have let themselves dream. Self-denial is hard when one has the opposite before one. The flight from the land set in: first the farm-hands and maids went, then the farmers' sons, and in the end whole families who did not know whether or how they could hold the paternal heritage in the face of all this distortion of economic life. It has been the same in all Cultures at that stage. ... The depopulation of the villages began in England in 1840, in Germany in 1880, in the Middle West of the United States in 1920. The peasant is tired of working without wages when the town offers him wages without work. So away he goes - to become a 'proletarian.'"

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, July 1933

Here's to Tony!

Suddenly I'm Big in the Ukraine

Tony Blankley, Burkean Conservative, Succumbs to Stomach Cancer, Aged 63

He had just phoned a good one in on the Acela under the influence of a Bloody Mary at 9 in the morning last November, and famously kept peacocks, sometimes appearing to dress like one by American standards. Of course "American standards" is an oxymoron, but he became one of us still after the war when his parents moved here from England.

He enjoyed himself, as a conservative should, as even the Good Book teaches:

Behold [that] which I have seen: [it is] good and comely [for one] to eat and to drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labour that he taketh under the sun all the days of his life, which God giveth him: for it [is] his portion.


May he rest in peace.

Obituary here.

So Little To Say Today . . .

. . . and so much time to say it in.

And there it is!

Jackie on MLK, Jr.: CBS Reports Her View of Him as a "Phony", ABC? Not so much.

(Updated from Sept. 2011)

Stories here and here.

On Don Wade and Roma on wlsam.com, Diane Sawyer of ABC went out of her way, as have many others on the left as the story has come out, to say that Jackie was simply speaking under the awful spell of J. Edgar Hoover.

Uh huh.

Let's see, Diane Sawyer is married, since 1988, to Mike Nichols, grandson of the communist anarchist Gustav Landauer.


Liberalism in the defence of plagiarism knows no vice.

Unemployment Falls To 8.5 Percent in December, November Revised Up to 8.7 from 8.6

The data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics are reported here.

For 2011 through November the reported rate of unemployment has been revised higher four times and lower four times. As revised, unemployment has averaged 8.99 percent in 2011 through November:

If this were touted as an economic recovery by a George W. Bush administration, everyone would be laughing out loud and the Democrats would be calling for his head.

Obama and the Democrats have been utter failures. They should all resign.

Tea Party Takes To The Skies

Story and video here.

Carmen Tisch Arrested in Tush Attack on Abstract Expressionist Oil Painting

America's finest

Story here.

Sen. John McCain, Who Approved 'A Tale of Two Mitts' Then, Now Endorses Gov. Romney

“It’s with some nostalgia that I return to this place that I love so well. I’m really here for one reason and one reason only and that is to make sure we make Mitt Romney the next president of the United States of America. And New Hampshire, and New Hampshire is the state that will catapult him onto victory in a very short period of time. That’s why I’m here.”

See the video here.

I don't know what's worse, Mitt Romney's flip flops or John McCain's.

Here's a recounting of 61 of the latter's, and that's just through June 2008. In the 2010 Arizona Republican primary, it cost McCain $21 million to convince Arizona's Republicans to vote for him again, flip-flopping even more all the way if that were possible, as recounted here:

Moving sharply to the Right, the senator supported the controversial new immigration law in his home state that opponents said would discriminate against legal residents of Hispanic descent.

The move was in contrast to failed legislation he had drafted in 2006 that would have provided a path to citizenship for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants and had dismissed the effectiveness of building a fence on the US-Mexico border. This year he filmed an advertisement with a border sheriff which delivered a message to the federal government of: “Complete the danged fence.”

In a further bid to please the party’s Right-wingers, who tend to vote in party primaries, the senator also reversed his support for a repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on homosexuals in the military. He then distanced himself from a measure to cap carbon emissions that he had been developing with Sen Joe Lieberman, an independent Democrat.

“What McCain did was recognise he had a real race to run and move to the right,” said Martin Frost, a commentator who was formerly a Democratic congressman in Texas.


Americans have the lowest opinion ever of the US Congress not because of gridlock, partisan bickering, or even its fantastic personal wealth, but because of the utter faithlessness of the men and women who populate it.

And people don't like to be reminded too much how these chameleons represent them all too well.

Alas, we have the government we deserve. 

James Pethokoukis Trots Out His August 2010 Surprise as a January 2012 Surprise

Involving a supposed mass refinancing of GSE-backed mortgages.

Rush Limbaugh fell for it on his show today, but it's a recycled attempt at a story to which there was nothing when it first appeared a year and a half ago, and there's nothing to it now unless . . . Obama makes another very quick recess appointment, and a bunch of lenders agree to take huge hits.

Fat chance, I say.

Aside from the political toxicity of the former (even The New Republic thinks Obama's recent appointment was unconstitutional), I can't imagine how lenders are just going to agree to eat half of the losses associated with rewriting mortgages at today's lower interest rates, especially with the stiffer Basel III bank capital rules now taking effect: "[T]he plan would have an immediate fixed cost to the government of . . . $242 billion with half that cost split equally between the government and lenders." 

Linda Lowell at housingwire.com, among others, knew the story was malarkey way back when here.

For Pethokoukis' August 2010 version, see here. For the January 2012 version, now see here.

Remember the Much-Hyped Japanese Economic Threat to the US of the 1980s?

Nikkei 225 1970-2011

Refresh your memory a little bit here.

Four Week Moving Average of Initial Claims for Unemployment Falls Below 375,000 For First Time Under President Obama

To 373,250. The last time we had a number close to that was July 5, 2008: 373,000.

Break out the party hats!

The numbers are here.

The World's Richest 1 Percent

For the US in 2005, almost 10 percent of its people were among the richest in the world.

For Germany, almost 5 percent.

For France, under 5 percent.

For Italy, over 5 percent.

For Great Britain, 5 percent.

For Canada, over 6 percent.

For Korea, 4 percent.

For Japan, 1.5 percent.

For Brazil, 1 percent.

It Takes An Irritable Mental Gesture To Know One

Occupy Wall Street Doesn't Know How Good They've Got It

Occupy Wall Street doesn't know how good they've got it.

A new study using data up through 2005 puts the world's top 1 percent of earners starting at $34,000 of after tax income per person per year.

The world's median income is just $1,225 per person per year.

Half of the world's one percenters live in the USA, and "even the poorest 5 percent of Americans are better off financially than two thirds of the entire world."

Story here.

Does This Parachute Make My Butt Look Big?

In NDAA America Embraced Authoritarianism With Little More Than A Pause Between Drinks

So says liberal Jonathan Turley.

Read the whole stinging rebuke of Obama and both political parties, and of the American people, here.

You have the evil government you deserve.

"Your Excellency"? "Your Immensity" maybe, but not "Your Excellency".

Story and video here.

Thank Republican Justin Amash for Giving Planned Parenthood $487 Million to Abort 329K

The latest Planned Parenthood annual report is the subject of a news story here:

According to its latest annual report, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) received $487.4 million in tax dollars over a twelve-month period and performed 329,455 abortions.

Of course, these figures are for the fiscal year ended in 2010, but since funding and abortions continue to increase every year Amash's vote to continue funding of Planned Parenthood makes him a conservative only in the sense that he's maintained continuity with the past.

Consistent, unprincipled Libertarianism.

Sarah Palin's Republican Hotel Reserves a Room For Insane Libertarians

Yeah, and it's right across the hall from one marked "GOProud" and another marked "Log Cabin Republicans."

The Libertarians' room is easy to spot. Its sign says "Insane Asylum."

Video here:

"the GOP had better not marginalize Ron Paul and his supporters after tonight"

The Pig and The Communist

Story here and here.

"You are a pig" . . . "And you are a communist"

"Vote For Me and I'll Set You Free" Went The Song on Don and Roma This Morning

On wlsam.com.

Nothing epitomizes better what's wrong with America than that: "Vote for me and I'll set you free!"

People want a savior it seems, especially of the presidential sort. If Christianity has had just one baneful influence on the American psyche, this obsession with presidential politics is it. No wonder the executive is imperial. That's just the way the slaves of God want it.

A more original, more free and noble America would save itself. It would demand broader, deeper and better representation, and would not wring its hands over our corrupt plutocracy.

Instead it would wring their necks.

The truth dies another death as the mobs cry "Give us Barrabbas!" 

'Judicial Supremacy is Eroding America's Democratic Values'

So says Jeff Jacoby for Boston.com, quite correctly even if he does agree with Newt Gingrich in saying so, here: "Judicial supremacy is eroding America’s democratic values. The balance of federal power needs to be restored." In noting that both the executive and legislative branches are servile to the court, however, the question is, Which branch needs to restore the balance? Well, surely not the executive. The branch which needs to re-assert itself is the legislative, and I can think of no better way, than for Americans to have the number of representatives intended by the constitution. Not 435, but 10,267 as of the last census.

Total Public Debt as of 12/29/11 is $15.1 trillion

(source)