Republicans Suck, Part I
Been reading “The Battle” by Arthur C. Brooks over the past couple days. The subtitle sums up the theme of the book: “How the Fight Between FREE ENTERPRISE and BIG GOVERNMENT Will Shape America’s Future.”
He divides America into two basic political groups. There the 70 percent for which politics really aren’t that big a deal, and the 30 percent for whom politics is almost religion. The divide is also along cultural lines, hence the culture war as described in the book between those who believe in limited government, individualism and free enterprise, and the collectivists, socialists, liberals, statists or whatever else you’d like to call people who look to government and government control of all aspects of life as the best way to ensure human happiness.
Anyway, Brooks points out how the current depression was caused and is owned, lock, stock and barrell by Democrats and liberals. It was bad policy, bad housing policy going back more than three decades that created the housing collapse that led to the financial system collapse and the current prolonged and long-lasting depression.
But, he also notes that Republicans had a very big hand in creating the mess we’re in right now:
It was a Republican administration that began the huge Wall Street and Detroit bailout. This raised expectations about future levels of spending that the incoming administration was able to fulfill. And for years before the crisis, Republicans weakened the culture of free enterprise, just like Democrats. During those years, the GOP talked about free enterprise while simultaneously growing the government with borrowed money and increasing the percentage of citizens with no income tax liability. These politicians spent billions of tax dollars on special interests with every bit as much gusto as the most shameless statists on the left.
Look at social spending at the federal level — always a target of Republicans running for office. From 2001 to 2008, when the GOP occupied the White House and during part of which they also controlled both houses of Congress, these expenditures rose. Even after adjusting for inflation, for example, the Department of Education grew by 54 percent.
It doesn’t stop there. Consider new entitlements such as Medicare Part D, the program to give prescription drugs to seniors, cooked up in a bipartisan process in 2003. The Medicare Modernization Act became the largest medical entitlement program in history… But it was enacted under a Republican government and created a climate of spending that made today’s future-sapping expenditures somehow seem acceptable.
Under the Republicans, Americans became aware of infamous “earmarks.” … President Bush signed spending bills containing more than 55,000 earmarks.
And then there’s good old-fashioned government pork and outright corruption with public money. Think of Alaska’s Ted Stevens, the seven-term Republican senator responsible for the infamous “bridge to nowhere.”
Republicans, who once counted spending discipline as a core value, have been responsible as Democrats for the growth of government in recent years.
I remember in 1994 (I think) when Republicans won control of Congress after decades of Democrat rule. They all came to Washington vowing to cut government and eliminate at least one government agency. Two agencies ripe for picking were (and are) the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
If ever conservatives get serious about defunding the left, those two agencies need to go. But, back in the early ’90s all the brand new GOP chairman of various oversight committees, particularly the HUD and Education committees, realized that without the agencies, they no longer had their committee grandstands upon which to pontificate.
Same thing with all the talk back then of privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two secondary market leaches that are bleeding the U.S. Treasury dry. It was known for years that those two government-sponsored political cash cows were huge risks to the treasury. But, when the subcommittee chairman overseeing the two mortgage giants realized that privatizing took them out of his control, and possible dried up all the political contributions he and his colleagues got from them, the issue went away.
So now we have a bunch of Republicans hoping to capitalize on the mess the Democrats have made of the economy. They’ll talk conservative and free markets until after the election and then rejoin the Democrats in pursuing the same reckless spending, albeit at a slower pace.
I don’t trust Republicans, and no conservative should.
When You’re Holding a Hammer…
…everything looks like a nail.
Not much into country music, but this video over at Ace of Spades is pretty good:
What’s amazing is the guy who co-wrote the song got fired from his teaching job after some parents complained and the school administration caved.
Which brings up, once again, the need to completely, totally and ruthlessly purge liberals of any stripe from the ranks of government jobs, boards and elected positions. They just have to go.
As Ace says:
This is how it is going to have to be: First of all, all of the school board members here have to be run against, and run hard against, and ejected from office. And then the principal needs to be fired, and every administrator along the way.
Second: Conservatives must begin, immediately, to get liberals fired from their jobs for any political expression. Any. Political. Expression.
We have tried to reason to them that this fascism is unfair. They don’t care, they don’t get it. All they see is the upside of fascism, the “good” side, the happy side, the I-get-to-coerce-my-opponents-and-hold-them-in-terror side.
They haven’t been held in terror themselves, worried that any stray comment they make may cause them to lose their livelihood (in the worst recession since the depression, no less). They do not “behave” as conservatives are forced to stay in line because they haven’t experienced the terror of of a hostile political bloc which has seized control of all the apparatuses of government.
They must be made to be afraid. And when a certain number of them have experienced the bad side of fascism, perhaps then they will be amenable to reason.
But they won’t be until then. It’s time to start using their despicable tactics against them. Not out of vengeance — but as a teachable moment.
Fire them all.
Who’s the New Guy?
Heh.
The New Extremists
Ouch!
Thuggery
The congresswoman in the following clip comes across as pompous, self-important and condescending as an elementary school principal addressing an auditorium of unruly first graders.
However, note the thug roaming the room trying to intimidate the unruly citizens who actually came to speak to the congresswoman. Also, note how she wants to hide from the public by stopping any video taping of the event.
What a moron.
From Gateway Pundit:
Somebody should have gotten on the thugs face and told him to sit the fuck down.
Asshole.
Defund the Left
Also on Powerline Blog: Target department store apologized for donating money to a group that supports a Republican candidate in Minnesota. The contributions were critized by a group of homo activists because the candidate opposes gay marriage.
From the Star-Tribune:
Unable to extinguish a firestorm of protest among some of its customers and gay rights supporters, Target Corp. on Thursday took the unusual step of apologizing for making a political donation.
CEO Gregg Steinhafel sent a message to company leaders saying he was “genuinely sorry” that the donation had disappointed some. The message was posted on the company’s Intranet, making it available to all employees.
Minneapolis-based Target had tried for days to emphasize that the $150,000 donation to MN Forward, a pro-business group backing Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, was based solely on a tax and jobs platform. But because of Emmer’s stance against gay marriage, many perceived the donation as flying in the face of Target’s longstanding commitment to workplace equality.
Background here.
We need to fight as hard to defund the left as they fight against our organizations.
Coming…Quarter Century of Bad Decisions
The smart guys at Powerline Blog neatly sum up the disastrous impact of the Republican’s capitulation on Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination.
To get a sense of what it means, think of the three big constitutional decisions rendered by district courts in the past week or two. They are: (1) Judge Bolton’s grant of a preliminary injunction blocking key portions of Arizona’s immigration enforcement law, (2) Judge Hudson’s ruling permitting the Commonwealth of Virginia to proceed with its lawsuit challenging the portion of Obamacare that requires individuals to purchase insurance, and (3) Judge Walker’s outrageous ruling that California’s Proposition 8, which bans gay marriage, is unconstitutional.
If these matters reach the Supreme Court, as seems likely, I have no doubt that Kagan will side with those who challenge the Arizona immigration law and Proposition 8, and with the government in the case of Virginia’s challenge to Obama care. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg — probably less than one year’s worth of bad jurisprudence. Kagan is only 50 years old, so we can expect at least 25 years of the same sort of leftist assault on our traditional freedoms and the rights of our states.
The only way Kagan’s confirmation doesn’t become a disaster is if we are able to elect Republicans presidents pretty consistently during the next 22 years or so, starting in 2012, and thus can keep Kagan busy writing dissents.
The trouble is there’s no guarantee that the Republicans: 1. will have a presidential candidate and then president who will nominate a high caliber conservative justice; 2. that the Republicans in the Senate will fight sufficiently hard enough to keep the Democrats from blocking and/or filibustering that nomination; 3. that the usual RINO turncoats won’t join the Dems in scuttling a strong conservative nominee.
I’m getting to the point where I despise the Republicans as much as I hate the Democrats.
Another Reason to Vote Both Parties Out
Democrats have to go. That’s obvious.
But this illustrates why the Republicans have to go too.
Elena Kagan Confirmed…
The usual suspects on the GOP side of the aisle joined the Democrats to put this highly unqualified, leftist ideologue on the nation’s top court.
Five Republicans Yes votes: Collins (Maine), Snowe (Maine), Gregg (N.H), Lugar (Ind.), Graham (S.C.).
We’ve come to expect this from these clowns, but the rest of the Republicans in the Senate were not better. Simply voting no is not enough. A filibuster until the end of time, or until The Obama withdrew Kagan’s name was the proper course of action.
The Stupid Party.
Your Opinion, Votes & Voice Doesn’t Count
Increasingly, we’re being told by the mandarins running this county that our opinions and votes don’t matter.
Case in point are two recent court cases. Yesterday, a judge in California vetoed the will of 7 million Californians in deciding that a state constitutional amendment limiting marriage to men and women. The other case involved an Arizona judge putting that state’s anti-illiegal immigration law on hold.
On top of that, you have the White House Press Secretary basically telling the 70 percent or more of Missouri voters who reject ObamaCare to shut the hell up.
From the Heritage Institute:
This Tuesday voters in Missouri, by a 40-point margin, approved a ballot measure rejecting the individual mandate at the core of President Barack Obama’s health care law. Asked what the vote meant to the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs said: “Nothing.” Yesterday in San Francisco, federal judge Vaughn Walker gave the exact same weight to a California ballot measure that affirmed marriage as an institution between one man and one woman. Specifically Judge Walker overturned the California Marriage Protection Act after concluding, as a matter of fact, that the majority of Californians who voted to protect marriage were bigots who had no rational basis to define marriage on their own terms. Here are just some of the “facts” Judge Walker found:
•Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians.
•The campaign to pass Proposition 8 relied on stereotypes to show that same-sex relationships are inferior to opposite-sex relationships.
•The Proposition 8 campaign relied on fears that children exposed to the concept of same-sex marriage may become gay or lesbian.
•The genetic relationship between a parent and a child is not related to a child’s adjustment outcomes.
•Children do not need to be raised by a male parent and a female parent to be well-adjusted.
How did Judge Walker arrive at these “facts”? By agreeing with everything the same-sex marriage proponents’ “experts” said while ruling that the traditional marriage witness was “unreliable” and “provided no credible evidence to support any of the claimed adverse effects proponents promised to demonstrate.” In so doing, Walker not only ignored the views of millions of Californians, but by basing his decision on the 14th Amendment, he also ignored the factual determinations of every single popular vote that has been held on the issue in the past two decades. According to Judge Walker’s reasoning every single one of these Americans is a bigot whose opinion on marriage has no place under Judge Walker’s Constitution.
More often than not, the decisions to cancel the will of the electorate is not based on the Constitution, law, reason, tradition or science, but merely the opinions, largely ill-formed, of judges and lawyers.
Why bother with elections at all? Why bother with Congress and state legislatures when a small group of appointed members of the judiciary or some bureaucracy can arbitrarily oppose the will of the majority for no other reason than their own personal opinion on any given topic?
The proper corrective to all of this begins at the ballot box, starting this November, but continuing in two years. The next step is to aggressively defund the left, labor unions, bureaucrats, community groups and all the other big-government moochers.
Finally, a clean sweep of the federal judiciary is in order. We need to remove judges like the two in California and Arizona. Congress needs to enact legislation stripping the court’s authority over matters best left to the states. (And yes, Congress has the constitutional authority to limit the court’s perview.)
Why the News Is Broken
Missouri voters overwhelming (73% to 27%) reject ObamaCare in a state-wide referendum yesterday. Yet, the moron reporter and editors for KMOV St. Louis Channel 4 interviewed two voters coming out of the polls who supported government-run health care.
Incredibly, when three quarters of the people who entered that polling place voted against ObamaCare, the station couldn’t find a single person to interview.
This is partisan political advocacy masquerading as journalism and pure incompetence. Regardless of your political leanings, commonsense should compel a reporter to find at least one voice in opposition to the agenda to at least give the appearance of objectivity.
When the nightly news doesn’t even come close to portraying reality, why bother watching?
A No Vote on Kagan, Please
Republicans must vote against and even filibuster the vote on Elena Kagan for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., outlines the many excellent reasons why Kagan is unqualified for the job:
However, I have little confidence in senate Republicans to do the right thing.
We’ll see.
Happy Birthday Mr. President
Today’s allegedly The Obama’s birthday, although no one’s ever seen official proof.
From Yahoo News:
When President Obama celebrates his 49th birthday Wednesday, he won’t be surrounded by his wife and daughters, who are on summer vacation. He’ll spend the night in Chicago, where on Thursday he’ll mark the occasion with “friends” — the kind who are willing to part with $30,000 or so for the chance to see the president presented with a birthday cake.
As Rush said yesterday:
Tomorrow is Obama’s birthday, not that we’ve seen any proof of that… What? We haven’t seen any proof of that! They tell us August 4th is the birthday; we haven’t seen any proof of that! Sorry. It is what it is.
Who Needs Experience?
Hell, we’ve got a president who had zero experience at anything, but running for election. And look how well that’s worked out.
So who cares if The Obama’s Supreme Court nominee has zero experience too?
From FoxNews:
Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has never been a judge, she’s never ruled on a case and she’s never written an opinion. But that doesn’t mean she’s President Obama’s Harriet Miers.
For the president’s supporters, lack of courtroom experience is no problem for a Supreme Court justice.
“President Obama said he wanted someone on the high court who understood the impact of the law on average Americans, and I believe the depth and breadth of Ms. Kagan’s experience will allow her that perspective,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Monday in a statement echoed by several Democrats.
‘Don’t Retreat, Reload’
“You don’t need an office. You don’t need a title. And, you don’t need a TelePrompter to make a difference.” — Sarah Palin.
Boo hoo
Oh darn, Radley Balko has quit the Tea Party. What will we do? Oh, what will we do?
Dear Tea Partiers,
Ask Joe Arpaio to be your keynote speaker, and you’ve lost me.
He’s a power-mad thug with a badge, the walking, mouth-breathing antithesis of the phrase “limited government.”
Yes, this is but one state chapter in your movement. So distance yourself from them.
It’s one thing to have a few idiots and nutjobs show up at your rallies.
It’s quite another to invite one to speak.
Yours,
Radley Balko
The good sheriff from Maricopa County, Ariz., happens one of the few elected officials in the U.S., who not only cares about illegal immigration, but has actually done something about it.
For that he’s earned the everlasting ire of libertarian Balko. A tea party group in Arizona invited a popular Arizona politician, Arpaio, who shares their views to speak at their rally. And now
The Agitator dismisses the entire Tea Party, which has done more to promote and popularize libertarian, small government ideas in the past year than the entire libertarian movement has done in the past — umm — ever.
Talk about a crank.
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