In a time when debt-based federal stimulus money rains down around us out of control, these 3 measures are entirely rational.
GOP Agenda - A Pledge To America
I don’t think there’s enough lipstick in Washington to make this pig look good. It doesn’t mention death taxes, it uses weasel words about border security, it says they’ll put us on a path to balancing the budget without actually calling for a balanced budget, and they promise to give us 3 days to digest and respond to their thousand page bills.
It looks dressed up to appeal to constitutional fundamentalists without actually saying much to hold the GOP to. And this morph of the Declaration of Independence from a document stating the foundation for our right to change our system of government, to a justification for making policy changes within our existing government, is just repugnant.
Matthew Broderick played a hacker kid in the movie War Games who dialed into a government computer named WOPR, and triggered a global thermonuclear war game simulation with it. In the movie, WOPR was located at the NORAD complex inside Cheyenne Mountain and it controlled our nuclear arsenal. No one at NORAD realized there was a simulation going on and the military mobilized as if the threat was real. The plot brings the world to the brink of nuclear war as the game between the hacker and the machine plays out. Things eventually resolve and at the end the WOPR computer concludes the moral of the story–in a suitably robotic voice, “The only way to win is not to play the game.”
There you have the answer to Saul Alinsky and his Rules For Radicals.
msnbc.com news services
updated 9/18/2010 10:15:40 PM ETWASHINGTON — President Barack Obama came out swinging against Republicans in a fiery campaign-season speech to black lawmakers Saturday night, urging them to “guard the change” he was delivering with the kind of organizing that propelled the civil rights movement.
“I need everybody here to go back to your neighborhoods, and your workplaces, to your churches, and barbershops, and beauty shops. Tell them we have more work to do. Tell them we can’t wait to organize. Tell them that the time for action is now,” Obama said in his remarks.
Members of “the other side,” Obama said, “want to take us backward. We want to move America forward. In fact, they’re betting that you’ll come down with a case of amnesia. That you’ll forget about what their agenda did to this country when they were in charge. Remember, these are the folks who spent almost a decade driving the economy into a ditch. And now they’re asking for the keys back.”
“What made the civil rights movement possible were foot soldiers like so many of you, sitting down at lunch counters and standing up for freedom. What made it possible for me to be here today are Americans throughout our history making our union more equal, making our union more just, making our union more perfect,” Obama said. “That’s what we need again.”
The effort began Monday with a White House reception for black college officials. It included speeches by the president on Wednesday to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and by first lady Michelle Obama to a black caucus legislative conference that same day.
The president told the Hispanic group he is committed to an immigration overhaul, even though it has stalled in Congress. He blamed GOP opposition and said Hispanic voters should keep that in mind.
“You have every right to keep the heat on me and keep the heat on the Democrats,” he said. “But don’t forget who is standing with you, and who is standing against you. … Your voice can make the difference.”
Looking at this latest push from Obama, it’s obvious he’s dealing race cards, class envy cards, illegal immigration cards, culture cards, xenophobia cards, and probably a handful of others–pretty much red meat for everyone, whether you are for or against his hope and change.
If you’re for Obama’s change, he means to inspire you to action. But even more importantly, if you’re against Obama’s change he means to inspire you to reaction. It is in the reaction of the majority that his real power to control events lies.
Without conservative reaction to Obama’s racism, victimization and division, all he has is an echo chamber within the minority. The real play, the big fish he’s trying to reel in, is the resonance from the majority, because their reaction makes the playing field on which to continue the game.
The main goal of community organizing is to provide a continuing provocation to the majority to get them to react irrationally, emotionally, to lose control, and to thereby become subject to manipulation.
Conservatives need to stop reacting to all of the dividing philosophies promulgated by the Left. The basket full of plainly harmful and emotionally supercharged red-meat ideas that the left uses to cause division in America all deserve to be ignored. There’s nothing new there, nothing to be learned, nothing to be gained, and conservatives know this on an intellectual level.
Conservatives need to stop allowing themselves to be jerked around by their emotions. The left will carry on as they will. No one can reasonably expect to change members of a brainwashed cult. Conservatives should take themselves off the playing field and out of that game and allow the left’s ideas, such as they are, to just resonate among themselves.
If conservatives disempower the left’s harmful ideas by ceasing to react to them, I expect their politics of division will lose relevance and gradually die out. And one day we’ll be able to put Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals into the ground where they belong with him.
Silverman interviews Maes 9_17_10.mp4
With all of the loose ends in the continuing Dan Maes’ narrative, with the absence of any pro-forma policies that Maes might intend for Colorado, with the absence of any credentials that might lead one to a governor’s office, Maes leaves me with the clear impression that he continually invents and reinvents himself from whole cloth, minute by minute. He is the narrative and the narrative is all there is.
Let’s break this turkey down:
This article reeks of election year politics. It’s main value appears to be as an indicator of a linkage between John Dunn and Jim Whistler. Mr. Whistler circulated an email a couple weeks ago that grew out of a freedom of information request he had made for the 2009 county audit report. He then cherry-picked a couple pages out of the 50 page document and forwarded those pages with his own suggestions of county financial impropriety. A friend routed the email to me. I asked Mr. Whistler to release the entire audit report so that I could make an informed analysis of his charges. He refused to release the entire report.
Those are the facts as I see them. Draw your own conclusions.
Decision: Olsen & Harrington v. Tancredo, Miller, ACP & CO Secretary of State
Excerpt:
D. Plaintiffs’ First Amendment Argument Does Not Alter The Court’s Conclusions
Plaintiffs seem to contend that the Court’s construction of the statutory framework somehow implicates Plaintiffs’ rights under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. They point to Storer v. Brown, 415 U.S. 724 (1974), Colo. Libertarian Party v. Sec’y of State of Colo., 817 P.2d 998 (Colo. 1991), and Riddle v. Daley, 2010 WL 2593927 (D. Colo. June 23, 2010) and Curry et al v. Buescher, slip. op. 10-1265 (10th Cir. August 31, 2010). First, Plaintiffs do not explicitly assert a constitutional claim in their Second Amended Petition. Second, the law is clear that a court “should not decide a constitutional issue unless the necessity for such decision is clear and inescapable.” People v. Lybarger, 700 P.2d 910, 915 (Colo. 1985). Third, the associational, speech and ballot access rights at issue, if any, belong to ACP, Mr. Tancredo and Ms. Miller. Fourth, the facts of the cases on which Plaintiffs rely are distinguishable. They involve independent candidates seeking direct access by petition to a general election ballot. Such candidates are not similarly situated to candidates selected through the processes available to major and minor political parties. Finally, Plaintiffs seem to invoke these cases to make a policy argument about what they perceive as the political instability that would result from allowing someone such as Mr. Tancredo late entry into a race. It is not appropriate, however, for this Court to decide public policy. For all these reasons, Plaintiffs’ constitutional argument is not ripe for the Court’s consideration.
The GOP sponsors of this lawsuit consider Tancredo’s candidacy in the governor’s race an infringement of their 1st Am. right to free speech because Tancredo’s candidacy creates political instability for them. A more clear nanny-state predisposition could hardly be conceived. The Colorado Republican Party should be voted into obscurity for prosecuting such an offensive view.
“Why not a 9/10 movement?’ asks Ed Quillen.
Because:
Quillen’s Pollyanna lament is a nice bit of nostalgia, and it’s completely unhelpful, like much of what comes out of his brand of politics. If the left really wanted things to be as they were on 9/10, they would fight the long war and its Islamic philosophy as if they meant to end it. They would stop enabling it in America.
RE:
Quillen: Confessions of a 9/10 American
By Ed Quillen
The Denver Post
Posted: 09/12/2010 01:00:00 AM MDTAs memorable dates go, Sept. 12 is not high on the list. (more…)
The man who knows nothing about business and wealth creation would guarantee a job, an education, health care, a home, and a comfortable retirement to everyone. The man above who produces nothing would use the power of the state to guarantee the appropriation of wealth from producers to consumers. No one calls it Communism or Socialism, however, “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” and Obama’s policy stated recently in Cleveland have a distinction without a difference.
Who is going to provide all of the outcomes that Obama effortlessly promises? Who will provision the beneficiaries? Not the government. The government doesn’t create any of those things. The government is just an intermediary that consumes some overhead to manage the transfer of all this guaranteed value from one group of citizens to another. Wealth producers fund Obama’s guarantees–his wealth transfers–to consumers, and they also fund the government overhead that operates the transfer system.
Obama and Congress are free riders in this system. They get paid by wealth producers, and they keep their jobs by buying off the goodwill of government beneficiaries who receive the guaranteed outcomes they promise.
Obama, Congress, and the Executive Branch containing thousands of federal regulators with enforcement powers, have no personal skin in the game. They produce nothing while they wield power, yet the wielding of power actually prolongs and enhances their positions–gets them more power. The reality feedback loop for this system is stacked against producers, it’s disconnected from real cause and effect, it doesn’t respond to real economics, and it cannot produce economic outcomes. Every outcome the government wealth transfer and regulatory system produces is in fact a dislocation from what would occur naturally.
And what would occur naturally, according to Leftist mythology, is a dangerous, racist, hurtful, unjust, mean, nasty, insensitive, polluting, deadly, evil, devastating Republican disaster that must be avoided at any and all cost. Leftist mythology covers a lot to hate, and that’s why they’re so practiced at expressing hatred. You are what you eat.
But the Left thinks this system is just wonderful because they see themselves as saviors from all the squalor that would otherwise exist. Obama and those who uphold his beliefs have no clue about the essential injustice, unworkability, and seriously harmful consequences that their guaranteed outcomes have caused wherever they’ve been previously tried. They zealously believe in a system of thought that prevents them from realizing these truths. Blissfully unaware of the harm their policies cause, with brains washed clean of introspection and critical thought, they think themselves brilliant. The role of savior, the messianic complex, is so captivating to them that it crowds out reality feedback. They never even see their own negative effects.
Our Constitution gave us the tools to prevent this sort of monstrosity from developing. Over two centuries of Supreme Court decisions have largely eviscerated the constitutional protections created by the Founders, and there now exists a very wealthy and self-perpetuating industry of lawyers and courts who are vested in the daily effort to transfer wealth and political empowerment to beneficiaries, and away from producers.
America may have already passed the tipping point where the incentive to produce is so diluted, and the avarice of beneficiaries and their empowering bureaucracy is so ravaging, that the American dream has become a memory.
International groups and the U.S. Military have unanimously counseled against the upcoming performance of burning the Koran on the grounds that it greatly inflames Muslims and thereby poses an increased safety risk to Americans. I agree and this is a more than sufficient reason to avoid burning the Koran.
Perhaps this would also be a good time to put to bed this nonsense about Islam being a religion of peace like Christianity. With the shoe on the other foot, with Bibles on fire in a circle of ululating and shouting Muslims, Christians would quietly stand by and pray for the book burners. But Muslims aren’t Christian and Islam has a ways to go to grow out of its barbarism.
If burning Korans would help them do that, one could say that increasing the risk to Americans abroad from Muslim violence would have a balancing argument, but there doesn’t appear to be anything constructive to be gained from this act. It’s as pointless as burning an American flag or an effigy of Uncle Sam, acts which bring great joy to Islamist fanatics, but just look pathetic to the majority of Americans.
Koran burning over here, American flag burning over there, both pitiful acts performed by and for backward people.
Ask the Tea Party in Colorado. The answer is blowing in the wind and whither the wind goes, so goes the tea party. One day the Constitutionalist fishwrap from the Springs agrees with the Gazette that Maes should get out. The very next day, he’s back. The Constitutionalist loves him again. The whole state voted him off the island, but he won’t go. So what does the tea party do? They love him all over again.
Maes blew in like a fresh spring breeze with all the hope and promise you could want. Here was a successful businessman who had made millions, managed large organizations, had the experience and the stones to stand up to the powers that be. Turns out, all he had was the stones! The rest of it was a fraud, but now he’s their fraud.
Again. Today. Tomorrow? Well, they’ll have to cross that bridge when they come to it.
If tea party history is any guide, expect their sentiments to change. Perhaps when the cold winds start to blow in from the North, they’ll turn chilly about Maes once again. They seem to be a fickle bunch.
When you hang your hat on the mercurial, corruptible, shifting sands of the will of the people, you never know when it will be handed back to you, who will wear it in the interim, or what kind of dirt they’ll leave on it. That’s why the Founders built a country on the rule of law and tried to put as many roadblocks in the way of the will of the people as they could devise.
If you could pry the Elbert County Tea Party lose from it’s Facebook flag-waving-frenzy over the will of the people for a moment, you might let them in on this little secret of our shared history, however, the leader of this ragtag bunch of ersatz revolutionaries, one Mr. Rowland, isn’t into substantive debate, responding to dissent, or defending his ideas.
