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 Ignorant Statement Of The Day Comes From Jeff Immelt, Chairman Of GE

The ignorant statement of the day comes from Jeff Immelt, chairman of GE, here:

"The one thing that actually works, state run communism a bit– may not be your cup of tea, but their [Chinese] government works."

Communism is nothing if not "state-run", as in, run by the Communist Party. As it stands, the statement is meaningless.

Actually China's Communist Party practices a form of state capitalism, just like we do, which in the good old days was called fascism. And it only works until it doesn't, at the price of human repression, which goes unreported in the west. You know, like how many abortions were performed this week in Peoria or Shanghai. Still, I don't see a lot of people flocking to China. I see Chinese who have gotten rich trying to get out.

And whereas we build things that actually get used, using fiat currency, China builds things using fiat currency which don't get used, including massive numbers of buildings and highways. Of course, the grandmothers of Bolshevism in our country do the same thing as the Chinese. They build massive numbers of churches which are for the most part vacant all week.

You say socialism, I say national socialism, but let's call the whole thing off.

If You're Unemployed, Just Remember . . .

. . . you're expendable, just like an abortion.

TAC Analysis Of Montana Senate Race Never Mentions Libertarian Spoiler

Michael Tracey for The American Conservative here spends zero time contemplating how the Libertarian Party candidate easily spoiled the race for the Republican by bleeding off his votes, thus electing the Democrat to the US Senate in Montana.

Criticizing libertarianism at TAC evidently conflicts with the program.

Obama's Popular Vote Total Reaches 50.93%

They keep working on that tax increase mandate!

Memo To Jim DeMint And Heritage Foundation: Limited Government, Conservative v. Libertarian

Memo To Senator Jim DeMint and The Heritage Foundation:

Conservatives and libertarians DO NOT share the same understanding of limited government.

Libertarians believe in limited government in order to be free to do anything they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody.

Conservatives believe in limited government as the larger, necessary and inevitable political expression of the moral limitations they place on themselves as individuals who respect the laws of Nature and of Nature's God, transgressions against which hurt others and especially the individual whether he recognizes it or not.

Limited government can only exist where there is self-limitation pre-existing. It cannot be voted into existence.

It begins with the personal moral experience of a conversion taught variously in human experience, but well-expressed by the ancient Greek maxim "Nothing too much". We know it more vaguely in our time, for example, as conservation and good stewardship of resources as opposed to relentless consumption and production, or as savings and thrift in economics as opposed to repeatedly rehypothicated credit and debt, or as abstinence outside of marriage and fidelity within it, or in law as a scale of punishment of infractions against these appropriate to their severity.

Libertarians can know these things only because conservatives have told them, otherwise they do not have it in them, deluded as they are that the possibilities in life are infinite. Libertarianism is thus an infantile idea from which one should grow up. 

How To Distinguish Between A Libertarian And A Conservative

The libertarian is the pot-smoking fudge-packer and the conservative would be the guy running away from him as fast as he can.

I Don't Call Sen. Jim DeMint "Demented" For Nothing

Here he is in all his confused glory:

"I think the new debate in the Republican Party needs to be between conservatives and libertarians. We have a common foundation of individual liberty and constitutionally limited government, and we can rationally debate some of the things we disagree on. I don’t think the government should impose my morals or anyone else’s on someone else, but at the same time I don’t want the government purging morals and religious values from our society. We can find a balance there. It really gets back to decentralization. The tolerance is going to come from decentralization and letting people make their own decisions, but we have to be able to put up with societal stigma of things we don’t like."

No, we don't have a common foundation.

Libertarians believe in freedom as license. Conservatives believe in ordered liberty, that there cannot be true freedom unless we respect the transcendent moral order. In recent times libertarians were easily allied with Democrats on social issues, and finally gave up on that and moved rightward on economic concerns. In doing so they demonstrated their unprincipled shape-shifting for what it is, and that Republicans have been too stupid to reject them. For example, I can't recall a single prominent Republican or so-called conservative descrying the many Republican victories spoiled by libertarians in either of the recent elections in 2010 and 2012. What is more we have idiot conservatives like Sarah Palin telling us we must make room for libertarians in the Republican Party while the Libertarian Party itself is encouraged by the races it has spoiled for Republicans by electing Democrats. This from the woman who vigorously supported John McCain and TARP.

Libertarians are not natural allies of conservatives, but they are of Republicans just as they are of Democrats, because the Republican Party has been liberalized beyond recognition. That a so-called conservative like Jim DeMint is friendly toward libertarianism tells you all you need to know about the state of conservatism in America. Conservatism in America is really and truly dead.

One of the favorite ideas of libertarians illustrates my point. The idea comes by analogy from Adam Smith's invisible hand at work in economics, namely, that the electorate always gets it right (Jude Wanniski). Is there a Republican who voted for Romney saying any such thing anywhere in the country now that Obama is re-elected? I doubt it. But that is the position of John Tamny and his ilk at Forbes Magazine. John Tamny, by the way, would like you to be a completely rootless person, with no house, no wife, no children, paying no property taxes for good schools and contributing no commitment to church and community but owning just two bags and a passport so that his beloved capitalist boss can send you wherever and whenever he needs you.

Good government, as the Scriptures teach, is a terror to bad behavior, not to good. That means there are moral absolutes, against which all libertarians do chafe, now more, now less, starting with "It is not good that the man should be alone."

To Demented Jim there are no such absolutes. He's a moral relativist who doesn't have the courage of his own moral convictions. "My morals" he says, as if they belong only to him and didn't come from the Author of Life. St. Paul, I remind you, ridiculed the Corinthian Christians for such an attitude, saying "What do you have that you did not receive?" Our faults are as ancient as the way of escape.

The Heritage Foundation had become reprehensible enough for having embraced Reagan liberalism, which contributed materially to what became the tyranny of the ObamaCare mandates. Now Heritage is to be headed up by the confused conservative DeMint, if he really isn't just a stealth libertarian. Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know about Heritage, that it remains to this day so intellectually confused about the meaning of conservatism that it welcomes a libertarian sleeper?

Conservatives should revolt against Heritage's choice of Sen. Jim DeMint, but don't count on it. I reckon there are only 500,000 of us in the whole country, and that's being generous. In the end, Sen. DeMint and Heritage will come to nothing, and the Republicans too if they are not careful.

"SAVE YOURSELVES FROM THIS CROOKED GENERATION!"

Food Stamps In September Hit New Record 47.7 Million Americans

Hm. There's that number "47" again.

Data here.

Libertarian Republican Sen. Rand Paul Recommends Going Galt On Fiscal Cliff

Gee, what a shock, a libertarian recommending "strategic withdrawal" on new taxes. Does anyone think libertarians really believe in any principles at all?

It's the one principle they do believe in which is at work here: freedom, a license to do anything.

They are no less culpable, and no less liberal, than the liberal Republicans they attack for raising taxes.

Senator Rand Paul, here:

"Why don't we let the Democrats pass whatever they want? If they are the party of higher taxes, all the Republicans vote present and let the Democrats raise taxes as high as they want to raise them, let Democrats in the Senate raise taxes, let the president sign it and then make them own the tax increase. And when the economy stalls, when the economy sputters, when people lose their jobs, they know which party to blame, the party of high taxes. Let's don't be the party of just almost as high taxes."

It's a kind of paraprosdokian like "We had to destroy the village in order to save it": We have to raise taxes in order to cut taxes.

Do House Republicans, who would have to surrender their majority and vote "present" on a Democrat tax bill, really want to be remembered for crashing the economy even more to make a political point? Haven't enough of us lost our jobs already? Hasn't the economy already sputtered for too many years?

If libertarians had their way, we'd all be smoking the dope that makes Senator Paul think this way.

How about just doing the right thing for its own sake and continuing to be the party of no new taxes in the face of economic stagnation, and let the chips fall where they may?

The Enemy Of My Enemy Is My Friend, Illustrated

Everything Hitler, including Mein Kampf, is big in India:

Hitler’s popularity in India is not the result of anti-Semitism, says Navras Jaat Aafreedi, a professor of social sciences at Gautam Buddha University in New Delhi. He says it stems from a dearth of European history classes in schools. To the extent that German history is taught, he says, it’s in the context of “the view that had Hitler not weakened the British Empire by the Second World War, the British would have never voluntarily left India.” 

Read all about it, here.

The Sign Read: "Pants 50% Off!"

But it was more like 75% off.

Why Did We Get Obama In 2008? Because A Republican Bailed.

Why did we get Obama in 2008?

Because a good conservative bailed in 2006.

Namely, conservative Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald from Illinois, who chose not to run for re-election in order to spend more time with his needy son in his formative years, according to statements he made on Tom Roeser's "Political Shoot-Out" radio program at the time on WLS, Chicago. I know. I was there. I listened in front of my fire.

One wonders, then, why he ran for the Senate in the first place.

In addition to that, Peter Fitzgerald was a real conservative in a state full of Republicans who were not. He famously rubbed them the wrong way. But I honestly don't know what he expected.

At any rate his voluntary departure after one term helped open the way for another Illinois State Senator like he had been, one Barack Obama, to run for the Senate seat in 2006, a seat by the way which Senator Carol Mostly Wrong had once held.

And the rest is history.

Now, Senator Jim DeMint from South Carolina is bailing out to head up the Heritage Foundation, having brought a few so-called conservative people into the Senate.

South Carolina was the state which quoted a Tea Party member as saying during the Republican primary election that she loathed Mitt Romney to the core of her being. The state ended up going big for Speaker Newt Gingrich. So I rather doubt we'll get a similarly dramatic turn in Senate representation, but it still is upsetting that conservatives bail just when we need them the most.

Since DeMint seems happy with the idea that a Republican governor will appoint his successor, isn't that an argument for doing it all the time?

Repeal the 17th Amendment.

Gasoline Prices Up 129% After Four Years Of Obama

You deserve it!

The Gold To Oil Ratio Moves Much Higher To 19.85

Oil is on sale relative to gold. The latter has recovered its legs a little bit recently.

ObamaCare Will Separate The Wheat From The Chaff

If this story in the Washington Post is correct and big successful firms in large numbers continue to provide insurance under ObamaCare as before, despite the costs, expect the less competitive, smaller firms who are at comparative disadvantage to suffer the most and possibly disappear as they drop coverage because they must to survive.

Unemployment In November Said To Decline To 7.7%

Down from 7.9% in October.

The report is here:

"Hurricane Sandy made landfall on the Northeast coast on October 29th, causing severe damage in some states. Nevertheless, our survey response rates in the affected states were within normal ranges. Our analysis suggests that Hurricane Sandy did not substantively impact the national employment and unemployment estimates for November. BLS will release the regional and state estimates on December 21st. For additional information on how severe weather affects employment and unemployment data, see Question 8 in the Frequently Asked Questions section of this release."

The reported employment growth average for 2012 fell from 157,000 per month in last month's report to 151,000 in this month's report, putting 2012 through November behind 2011's average of 153,000 new jobs created per month.

The participation rate in the labor force declined 0.3 in the raw data, 0.2 in the seasonally adjusted data, probably the biggest reason for the headline number to decline.

Translation: as more people aren't looking for work, they don't count! Meanwhile job creation looks like it declined quite significantly in just one month if the average for the year dropped 6,000 per month in just 30 days, which means November must have been pretty bad to have had that large of an effect.

There's somethin' funny goin' on here, Lucy.

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.

Glenn Beck Is Bat-Shit Crazy

I never listen to the guy, but I just happened to turn on the radio and there he is, right now, saying

"The constitution is divinely inspired."

Unlike certain lines of the New Testament which claim divine inspiration for "Scripture", the constitution notably doesn't for itself, and provides for its own amendment.

The founders were too wise to claim infallibility for what they did. Too bad Glenn Beck is in thrall to a fanaticism which keeps him from seeing that.

His microphone deceives the simple, who are many.

CNBC Shills For Obama, Ignores Big Spike In Jobless Claims

CNBC obviously wants nothing to stand in the way of Obama and the Democrats solving the fiscal cliff by raising taxes on everybody.

It's amazing how the commie sympathizers blatantly rewrite the headlines in denial of reality.

Initial claims for unemployment spiked up to nearly 500,000 in the latest report, and CNBC says claims fall, focusing only on "seasonally adjusted" numbers from the Dept. of Labor.

Claims in the "not seasonally adjusted" category spiked up nearly 140,000 in the last week, and over the last four weeks have averaged 435,000, far in excess of a number in the low 300,000s consistent with an environment of job creation.

Since CNBC says the "temporary spike caused by Superstorm Sandy has faded" that can only mean the spike up which they ignore had a different cause.

Elections have consequences, and higher taxes and ObamaCare are going to cause more joblessness, as the last four weeks suggest.