A recent post reminded me there are innumerable individuals that constantly advocate higher taxes as inevitable and necessary. Many are very wealthy, and a few notables taking this position are Warren Buffett, and just about every Democrat politician.

Usually the left treats public advocacy of higher taxes as the ne plus ultra evidence of “leadership”.

However, they are missing a golden opportunity to provide both “leadership” and “revenues” to allow the government to do any or all of the following:

1. Reduce the Public Debt
2. Provide Critical Infrastructure Investment
3. Fund Education Initiatives
4. Promote Public Health
5. Meet Basic Human Needs

Yes, higher tax advocate-I’m calling on you to act now, because the need is so great.This is a wonderful opportunity to show those misers on the right how much you believe in higher taxes. You can make a “prelevy personal assessment”.

The best part is it is so simple. Simply write a check made payable to the United States Treasury, and mail it to the following address:

Gifts to the United States
U.S. Department of the Treasury
Credit Accounting Branch
3700 East-West Highway, Room 622D
Hyattsville, MD 20782

More information can be found at the following URL:

http://www.fms.treas.gov/faq/moretopics_gifts.html

We’ll be waiting for appropriately redacted images of canceled checks to be posted on the web to show how you’ve to provided “leadership”. Just remember, the bigger the gift, the more credit you get. We’ll be looking for amounts in the seven-figure and greater range. Are you up to this challenge?

It will be sometime before the demands of our life make the Tucson murders fade into the background of life, to join Columbine, Jonestown, September 11 and a myriad of other senseless slaughters as distant memories in the endless parade of such travesties.  

I know from the experience of losing a young and presumably healthy sibling suddenly (although not to any “man-caused” disaster, but a “hemorrage of unknown etiology”) four years and seven months ago today, that time does not heal all wounds, they fade only enough to become bearable. Notice, I don’t use the word “tragedy”, it is not appropriate-tragedies are unavoidable and outside human control-travesties are neither. No murder is a tragedy. Not these, not the 55 million that have been committed in the name of “choice”. 

Anybody with the slightest humanity cannot be left cold and empty by mass murder, especially those committed with premeditation and in “cold blood”.  Those emotions do not justify letting down our guard.

Unfortunately, experience tells us, there will be other events just like this one. Experience also tells us that there is a great danger here, which politicians will attempt to capitalize on them. Rahm Emmanuel might have become the great exhibitionist of political opportunism with his comment about not letting a good crisis go to waste-but it’s hardly an original thought. This is instinct among the political class, especially the left and at the highest offices, an occupational requirement. Am I suddenly to believe that the political class isn’t going to try to utilize this as a “crisis”?  Some of the left, specifically Mark Penn were anticipating (hoping for?) such an event, specifically to provide Obama with the chance to “re-connect”. I will not forget and I will continue to remind others of this ghoulishness.   

Indeed, the left’s grave-robbing instincts were on display almost immediately. Within hours the left’s attack dogs, notably Paul Krugman started to spin a narrative that right-wing political speech pulled the trigger, not a killer. As we speak, the enemies of the second amendment are dusting of their dream bills and that chattering classes will be in their echo chambers conjuring up close-ended questions to advance the leftist agenda

While most people are praising Mr. Obama’s speech, I’m not and will not, because I see the opportunistic continuation of the narrative of inflammatory rhetoric continued. (Full disclosure: I read the speech, I didn’t want to risk nausea at night by watching it)

Though denying political rhetoric played any explicit role, he nonetheless continued the line that we need to tone it down as fitting tribute for the victims. A more fitting tribute would be to urge people to treat Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto with disdain and disregard, but I’m not holding my breath on that one. Living citizens are to be stifled, not dead misanthropes, especially the ones that are prophets for the secular left.

Worse, a man whose political rhetoric includes such “civil” phrases as “hostage takers”, “bring a gun”, “whose ass to kick”, “punish your enemies”, “I won” and “get in their face” et al, has no moral authority to lecture anybody else on the civility of their speech.  Mr. Obama needs to look in a mirror, not into a crowd. Moreover, for him to continually accept applause at a memorial without graciously refusing it as inappropriate for an event that should be solemn and sober shows him at his worst, not his best.

Within that phrase “civil and honest public discourse” are the seeds of more speech restrictions, just as “hope and change” was a vacant slogan for government healthcare, czars, and a general concentration of political power. 

Ironically, it wasn’t so long ago, before the former Junior Senator from Illinois was taking vacations to escape the White House, that dissent was considered the highest form of “civil and honest public discourse”. Who can forget the shrieking and shaking Hillary Clinton, proclaiming “I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you’re not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.”  Bravo, and that means if I want to call this President or any President a “jackass” or a “liar”, that’s my right. I’m not going to be bullied like Mr. Wilson. Better Presidents have been called worse.

The left has largely advanced through the imposition of restrictions on speech. Words often give life to inchoate concepts. To be muzzled is to be neutered. Don’t let the natural emotions of the moment allow the left to duct tape our mouths. He may have spoken in the softest tones, but his words “scream for your submission”, as for me, I will not submit. If Obama wants to keep bowing before foreign leaders, he can. I will not bow to him. I want him defeated and no matter how small and insignificant my effort will be, it will be the full measure of what I can offer to that end.

Insurance, Bought and Paid For.. Repeat after me, insurance, bought and paid for.

Mechanical efficiency allowing the “premium” to be just three cents on the dollar.

http://www.archive.org/details/YourSoci1940

Notice the giant safe shortly after 5:00, and the phrase “in trust”.

But the promises of Obamacare are true, right?

Bank Examiners and Christmas have but one connection-in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”.

The newer breed clearly needs any life.

http://www.koco.com/r/26162860/detail.html

http://www.koco.com/news/26174152/detail.html

This doesn’t exactly comport with the normal criticisms of the Federal Reserve, but it might be more compelling.

Since the lawyers at the Fed have apparently realized the First Amendment trumps the curiously malfeasant interpretations of Fed regulations made by a petty tyrant masquerading as a regulator ( and we can assume Ben Bernanke thinks its probably a bad idea to give Ron Paul a little gasoline), we can celebrate the victory, but lament the occurrence of the battle and the presence of such twisted misanthropes in positions of authority.

However, the question remains, will the responsible employee(s) be disciplined? Perhaps sent to a “sensitivity” training-or how about a class on the First Amendment?

We will probably never know for sure, however these examiners given offense to a legally “protected class” or perhaps a religion more favored by the dead tree media, we can assume this that they would have been very publicly sacrificed to the gods of political correctness and no doubt all Federal Reserve employees would have been required to undergo “diversity” training and been subjected to a “no-exceptions” policy.

This illustrates the problem with regulators, first voiced in Latin. Who polices the police?

In other news, the war on Christmas continues..

Let’s work on the other things that make them irate.

Abortion, Pornography…..

When we really get good, we can ban Christmas, Bacon and Wine.

The following quote is from Boston Globe Columnist Jeff Jacoby:

“Our nation has been enriched – not “overrun” – because of birthright citizenship. The 19th-century nativists who feared otherwise were wrong. Their intellectual heirs today are, too.”

If economists Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff ever decide to write a sequel to “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly”, perhaps they should entitle it This Time Is The Same”, and explore simplistic arguments predicated on imagined similarities where things actually ARE different.

The first Chapter could be devoted to the” immigration” debate (although the words immigrant and immigration are debased of meaning when applied to people who knowingly invade another country). As somebody who actually knew 19th century IMMIGRANTS (great grandparents, passed through Ellis Island, legally, were naturalized, sending one son to Europe and the other to Tarawa) these arguments ring hollow.

I say this because I remember my great grandmother, who died in her mid-90′s in the early 1980′s, having emigrated in her youth from what would be the epicenter of World War I. Decades after naturalizing, in her eighties and nineties, she still carefully retained municipal tax records from as early as the 1920′s in a trunk with other documents to maintain a record of worthy citizenship. It was the result of an attitude where LEGAL entry was the “path to citizenship” and that citizenship was valuable because it came dearly. That was just one of a myriad of ways she used to demonstrate allegiance to, and compliance with the laws of her new country. Its a jolting memory when I see hordes of illegals marching in the streets and threatening violence and given a forum by the Lamestream Media.

So yes, them and folks like them, who came to make it on their own merits, did enrich the country. There was no welfare state, and my great-grandfather fed his children with the wages gained working long hours in a filthy black pit called an anthracite coal mine. He and others of his ethnicity suffered innumerable insults and abuses, often at the hands of other ethnic groups, who themselves were abused immigrants in preceding decades.

His English was poor, but then again so were the pieces of the 3 or 4 other languages other than his own he picked up working merchant ships while saving enough money to pay for the transportation of his young wife to a new home an ocean away, hopeful that she wouldn’t be sent back based on the caprice of some petty tyrant working in Ellis Island).  He preserved and survived, if not prospered.

Today, we have people who slip in the cover of night en masse and immediately “enrich” the nation by becoming wards of the state, marching in the streets, and insisting that parts of this country are really the property of a foreign nation that is so wonderful they were compelled to leave it.

Then there’s an even more insidious threat, the one where the “immigrant” is really a warrior to a foreign cause, and who is the vanguard of subjugation and enslavement, who wants to use freedom of religion only until it can be eliminated.

Those people that came here decades ago weren’t seeking rights with responsibilities, support without effort, or acclimation to their ways.

Some LEGAL immigrants, I work with (generally well-educated Indians with IT backgrounds-I hope stay, even though some won’t). Why? They work hard, are intelligent, amiable and engaging, and seem to harbor no hostility towards the country that will either provide them with either an opportunity to develop a career in what is increasingly a project-based industry with global labor procurement or a new home. They aren’t insisting we become Hindus or that driver licensing examinations be issued in their language. Their skin is brown, their customs different and nobody cares because they understand they are here, we aren’t there. There’s also a small contingent of (other) Asians, same deal minus the brown skin.  In fact, I would prefer their company over some preachy academic and media types, I’m sure.

The problem is, the world changed. There was no Islamofascism or welfare state one hundred plus years ago.  If you think a borderless nation can survive, try reviewing the history of the first Americans, who had no concept of borders and no means of enforcing them with restricted entry.  The Fourteenth Amendment was enacted to protect the rights of former slaves, and they have all passed on. Although I think politicians (especially McCain and his useless boy blunder, Graham) are posturing, given the near impossibility of obtaining the supermajorities needed, there’s nothing wrong with considering the repeal of birthright citizenship.  All legal enactments need periodic reconsideration, especially given the annoying tendencies of courts to deface them with wordplay. It’s wise to consider whether the protections of one century create perils in another. If you think repealing amendments a terrible idea, well then there’s the conundrum of bring back prohibition.

Access controls are as much a useful method for protecting as the integrity of political entity as it is for a business. (Of course, we know newspaper types don’t know how to run a business). To diminish everybody who wants to minimize the risks of unlawful entry as ignorant dolts from the nineteenth century shows ignorance, not enlightenment.

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hy is Barack Obama failing at everything except passing legislation designed top enhance federal power-and that in large part because of substantial legislative majorities?

Is it really just the effects of his inexperience or is it a something else? Beyond the fact that appointing a commission is a proxy for proper action for a politicians who campaigned on omnicompetence and is now stymied by his own limitations, initial inaction and improper response-the appointment of partisans to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling provides valuable insight into Obama’s obsession with academic credentials, and those of a certain type.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-national-commission-bp-deepwater-horizon-oil-spill-and-offshore-dri

Its particularly instructive to examine to examine Obama’s appointments to his Commission, since after all, Obama not only created the Commission with  Executive Order 13543-he specified the qualifications of its appointees. Section 2 (a) provides that “The Commission shall be composed of not more than 7 members who shall be appointed by the President. The members shall be drawn from among distinguished individuals, and may include those with experience in or representing the scientific, engineering, and environmental communities, the oil and gas industry, or any other area determined by the President to be of value to the Commission in carrying out its duties.” In short, after providing for people with relevant knowledge, he reserved the right to appoint individuals by executive fiat.

So given the stated qualifications of membership, what criteria did Obama use to appoint the members of the commission? How did he apportion the skills among the various categories he specified?

The panel is co-chaired by former Democratic Senator Bob Graham and former Environmental Protection Agency chief William Reilly. Graham and Reilly, the co-chairs have law Harvard degrees, and there’s two other members with law degrees on the committee.  Francis Umler, a Democrat politician is a University chancellor graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison and Terry Garcia’s degree is from The George Washington University. Frances G. Beinecke, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council has an M.S. from Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Don Boesch received a PhD from the College of William & Mary.

There’s only one engineer on the panel, Cherry A. Murray, a Harvard Dean, and her engineering expertise isn’t in petroleum engineering or fluid dynamics. Even if you think the possession of higher degree academic credentials is essential, what stands out is that from all of the fields that might be considered relevant to the objectives of the commission, oceanography, marine biology, fluid dynamics, petroleum or mechanical engineering, economics-Obama appointed four people with JD’s-LAWYERS. Three are connected to Harvard.

Of course, Obama wanted “distinguished” individuals with experience in “… any other area determined by the President to be of value to the Commission in carrying out its duties.”  Those duties include determining the cause of the incident-which we can assume was the result of a physical or mechanical issue or condition (which may not ever be known, because there was significant damage from the initial explosion). It’s pretty clear that Obama provided for reasonably relevant expertise and then ignored his own criteria-the chief determinant of sufficient distinction to serve on this commission was Presidential judgment, and possession of a JD or a connection to Harvard.

One could assume that as a Harvard lawyer himself, with a tendency to deepen a recent frequent habit of reserving government executive positions for lawyers, Obama is just exhibiting professional cronyism. Or is his staffing decisions just the easily seen exhibition of a man expecting to buttress an already formed opinion while having the veneer of support.

The answer might be found in a distinction made by the ancient Greeks, whose thoughts we one expected to be found de rigueur in the curricula of the elite schools such as Columbia and Harvard, both of which granted degrees to the forty-forth President.

Although the exact meanings of the words Epistêmê and technê may elude our modern understanding, the can be roughly defined as follows: Epistêmê is to know, technê is to know HOW. These Greek words are the roots of epistemic and technical.

A brief discussion can be found here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/episteme-techne/

The former is focused on pure inquiry for its own purpose, with abstractions and distinctions, words and concepts; the latter on is focused on the knowledge required to accomplish an end; the practical and concrete. Philosophy (love of wisdom) is the ultimate example of episteme; the curricula of vocational schools are almost pure technê.

Obama, more than any other President since Woodrow Wilson is a man of the academy. By this, I don’t assert that he’s blessed with other-worldly intellect that the fawning legions of two years ago attributed to him. -I mean he’s intellectually immature, capable only of thinking within the confines the academy’s statist, collectivist and secularist shibboleths. Emotionally, he’s stuck at 22-a newly minted undergraduate eager to correct the errors of the generation that preceded him.

Throughout Obama’s presidency, he has shown absolute indifference to the value of technê , experience, bordering on contempt. He’s going to rearrange everything. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is the poster child for Obama’s obsession with the Epistêmê of the modern academic canon -without ANY judicial experience, he nominates her for the Supreme Court; ironically repeating a key error of the predecessor he takes great pains to express contempt for at every opportunity. Sure she shares his views on the world, but can she function as a judge? That would be good to know, before she is actually confirmed and appointed to the court once famously observed as infallible because its final, not final because its infallible.

In contemplating Obama’s obsession with the academy, its not hard to imagine young Mr. Obama-abandoned by his parents, disconnected from his grandparents by their lack of melanin, coming into the University environment that self-servingly strokes the egos of “young skulls full of mush” in order to continue enduring mid-terms and papers and depleting savings or accumulating debt. But for an emotionally needy and isolated student like Obama-he was clay to be molded, fired and filled by the professorial potters. Like many kids in elite colleges, he would be unable to question the reassuring certitudes he was being taught. Obama was that curious collision of need and capacity which works to create the legions of leftist monsters that inhabit government.

When he spoke of restoring science to “its rightful place”, it’s not hard to imagine that he really meant to make it a cudgel in the hands of the intellectual aristocracy to dispose of restraints created by consciences informed by religion and tradition, in the quest to remake the world. No doubt, he was just echoing the dismissive prejudices of the Piled Higher and Deeper crowd, even though he himself chose non-scientific degrees as his majors.

Most people move on at some point and leave at least part of the college zeitgeist as some transitional excess, to be reflected on with the same self-reflection one affords keg parties. It begins when the isolation from family and employment ends. Employment (without tenure), marriage and children are daily reminders of how little we really know. Personalities and viewpoints expand beyond the university doctrines. Not so for Obama-the closest thing he’s had to a real job was that of college professor-never has he had a job he hated, a payroll to meet or any of a thousand common indignities that force maturation. For over thirty years, his academic credentials were everything to him, including his ascent to the most powerful office in the world.

So it is, his worldview is limited to Epistêmê. It’s what he knows and it’s the totality of his comfort zone. Unfortunately, what we need now is KNOW HOW and Obama can’t seem to embrace that. His quip about kicking “a**” was a racit admission of his inability to fix the problem.  The model for this problem should be Apollo 13-there’s a problem that needs to be fixed, quickly- not explained. Somehow he can’t see that-but as the old adage goes-if your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail.

There is an alternative possibility of course, that this is too good a crisis not to let go to waste-Obama doesn’t mind the hit to his credibility because in the fullest measure mendacity, he knows crises cause a cry for action, and this is an opportunity to impose an all-encompassing green agenda.

We either have a President who’s terribly limited by his own academic chauvinism or one whose a calculating deviant who’ll lay waste to lives and the environment. I’m not sure which is worse.

Apparently, Mitch McConnell aspires to be the new Bob Michel-the man who sheepishly conceded the idea of permanent minority for his party, election after election, while maintaining his hold on the title “leader”.

Clearly, McConnell doesn’t understand job one for the Senate Minority Leader is becoming Senate Majority leader. According to Rollcall.com,

http://www.rollcall.com/issues/55_147/news/47308-1.html?mostread=1

McConnell won’t campaign against Harry Reid. The article indicates the two have something of a “covenant not to compete” in order to restore “decorum” to the Senate. Unfortunately, shaking hands with Reid on restoring decorum, is like partnering with BP on maintaining clean oceans.

The usual suspects seem willing to forgive McConnell’s efforts at winning the Neville Chamberlain award and the key reasoning is contained in this anonymously cited bit of drivel: “But at the end of the day, the Senate has to run,..”. “To do that, the two leaders need to have a relationship.” Really? Did the Senate need top pass Obamacare? That’s not running, its dysfunction. The Senate was supposed to be the brakes on the ill-advised, rushed and unconstitutional. Shepherding that one piece of legislation alone should make the Reid the top priority in an all-out effort to retake the Senate.

Its up to the voters of Kentucky to determine if he represents if he represents their interests,and they seem satisfied up until now. However, party leadership involves more.  As a registered Republican, I expect a little more brass where it counts, and a little less concern for the opponent’s contrived sensibilities, especially one who shows rapaciousness, not reciprocation.

It’s time for the pusillanimous caucus to quit freebasing saltpeter.  Fraternizing with the opposition isn’t collegiality, it’s dereliction of duty. This is the equivalent of a boxer unilaterally failing to punch at an opponent’s head. If McConnell doesn’t have a taste for punching, he needs to give up electoral pugilism.

Attempting to justify restraint based on some imagined comity isn’t leadership, it is cause for removal. Either hit Reid hard or get out of the ring.