[No, we won't be doing that - NS]

Whacked from so many gigs in States he can’t remember the names of, Barack Obama’s
running low on original material.

Then again, Teddy Roosevelt is a tough act to follow.

Nowadays, Obama infers Lincolnesque-style passion into his empty, collective agenda. Or,
the other day in Osawatomie, Kansas, Obama retreaded the modus operandi and static from Roosevelt’s New Nationalism speech; one given 101 years ago in Osawatomie that laid the foundation for TR’s unsuccessful 1912 run to retake the White House.

Stumping in Osawatomie, Obama modernized the 20th century icon, contrasting TR’s call for social justice by a powerful federal government regulating the economy. Obama will be remembered for believing in an even stronger ‑- as TR penned, “National Government.” Up until Obama, it was TR who prided himself in taking great license with executive power.

Comparing the political divide in America, Obama said TR was labeled a Marxian for many of the same political proposals he too has put forward. If Obama is taking cues from TR’s ghost, maybe he prepped for Osawatomie by reading historian George E. Mowrys, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement, calling TR’s speech there, “the most radical speech ever given by an ex-President.”

The “collective amnesia” Obama spoke of in Osawatomie, reminding Kansans this is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; one he bears no culpability for, is for many, the collective amnesia so many Americans threw caution to the wind in voting for someone so skilled in the artful guise of sanguinity.

Kansans though, are not so easily led. The state hasn’t gone Democrat in a presidential race since 1964. Being a non-battleground state, they won’t likely go blue when the unemployment rate there sits at 6.7% compared to the national average of 8.6.

Channeling the raw verve of TR can’t shroud Obama’s abysmal record of failed initiatives, appointing czars with no accountability to the American people, super committees created to flop, and, as so definitively put by Allen West, “a progressive mantra of equal achievement.”

The Cheshire Cat is out of the bag. Even adopting TR’s, “Believe you can and you’re halfway there,” as a 2012 campaign slogan wouldn’t be enough to veil Obama’s stark inadequacies.

It might at the very least, break the long fall down the Rabbit Hole of hope and change.

http://youtu.be/6AsBDZScs6c

For much of the last three years, I, like so many others who were so despondent after the election of 2008, assumed that the election of 2012 was finally going to provide the American people with a real choice of philosophies.

On the one side you have President Obama and the progressive / fascist utopia. (Fascist in the economic sense – where private property remains, but government dictates its usage – rather than the Nazi anti-Semitic / nationalist sense.) This utopia is where government plays the role of caretaker of the nation, where government tells citizens what they can and can’t do with their property, what they must buy and where they must invest, where unions have the power to coerce both government officials and private corporations that pay their members salaries.

On the other side the Tea Party was going to make sure that for the first time in 30 years a conservative nominee would be the standard-bearer of the Republican Party. The platform would include radically smaller government, less intrusive government, and lower taxes coupled with a less complicated tax code – maybe even the Fair Tax – and a strict adherence to the 10th Amendment. Life was indeed going to be good again and prosperity would soon come roaring back.

Given the failure of everything progressive, from welfare to education to the USSR to practically the entire European continent, Americans would finally be given the choice between continuing down that well trod path to failure and a going down that forgotten path of economic liberty that was the foundation of American prosperity since the revolution.

Somehow, somewhere along the road leading to that fateful, Solomanic fork in the road, something went wrong. Not on the left. No, President Obama has indeed been as progressive as most of us feared, and in some cases far worse. Actually, the problem is on the right. Where many of us were hoping that the standard-bearer of the GOP would be a clean, if not perfect, conservative, increasingly it looks as if the nominee is going to be someone other than that.

In the one corner we have Mitt Romney who to this day refuses to renounce Romneycare, the Massachusetts disaster that spawned Obamacare. He also was an early supporter of cap and trade, was gullible on global warming, opposes a flat tax or the Fair Tax and shares an unhealthy affinity with Barack Obama for class warfare.

In the other corner we have Newt Gingrich, the guy who sat on a couch with Nancy Pelosi and told us to pressure our leaders to combat climate change. Although he finally admitted that was one of the stupidest things he ever did, there are other candidates for that title. He trashed Paul Ryan’s less than radical tax plan as “conservative social engineering”, supported the individual mandate in healthcare and now wants to harness local boards to determine which illegal immigrants should be allowed to pursue a “Path to legality”. I have to wonder how effective that might be in sanctuary cities around the country like San Francisco, Austin and Denver. As if all of that were not enough, after taking almost $2 million from Fannie & Freddie and praising their work and the GSE model itself, he now wants us to believe that the only thing he did for the money was tell them their businesses were going to fail. Really?

There are of course others in the race and they too are imperfect, but at least with Perry and Bachman you know they are true conservatives mostly dedicated to a smaller government. Unfortunately for the two of them, their campaigns barely register a pulse when it comes to the polls.

At the end of the day one has to ask, what happened to the Tea Party revolution? How is it possible that the two men leading the race for the 2012 GOP nomination are big government, crony capitalist chameleons who are far less inclined to upend the Washington applecart than work with the people driving it? Why are not the leading GOP candidates shouting from the rafters that they will radically slash government spending and regulation, that they will champion a flat tax and that they will impose a strict adherence to the Constitution, particularly the 10th Amendment?

Despite the best efforts of the media and the Democrats to paint the Tea Partiers as racist rubes and the Occupy Wall Streeters as noble sophisticates put upon by the evil capitalist system, the American people recognize the truth. The fact that the PR field is so heavily tilted towards OWS, yet citizens still have a more favorable view of the Tea Party, tells you everything the GOP needs to know about the coming election. If they would simply run a candidate who proudly articulates basic conservative principles, the next election would result in the country being freed from the tightening progressive noose around its neck. Without such a candidate, with just another standard-bearer Americans can’t distinguish from the big government GOP they’ve come to know, Barack Obama may indeed triumph.

With Gingrich and Romney sitting in the pole positions, I find myself pulling for a brokered convention that results in an opening for someone other than Frick and Frack to take the nomination. Someone like Sarah Palin, or even the forgetful but conservative Rick Perry. Sure that’s an unlikely scenario, but at this point the traditional route has brought us two paper tiger conservatives leading the pack. The Tea Partiers and the country deserve an opportunity to make a clear choice between progressivism and conservatism. Let’s hope that somehow the GOP can figure out how to give that to them. Otherwise it may be another four years of hoping for change.

Austerity is a government policy of deficit-cutting; lower spending and a reduction in the amount of benefits and/or public services provided, while sometimes coupled with increases in taxes (but not necessary).

Can we all agree on this definition? If so, let’s look at progressive Richard Eskow’s counter “austerity” plan:

Say what you will about Rep. Ryan’s budget proposal, it’s a vision. (…) It may not be a good vision, but it’s a vision.

Read More →

In some respects liberals and progressives have it easy. All they have to do is look around and they can find problems for government to solve. Kids are too fat? Let’s get the government to decide how restaurants market their offering. Somebody walked away with a bad haircut? Impose government testing and licensing for barbers. Crime getting out of control? Let’s ban all guns. Someone loses their job? Let’s give them three years of unemployment checks. And just in case there were not enough real problems, liberals try and use government to solve problems that don’t even exist: global warming, disappearing polar bears and widespread discrimination of minorities.

For liberals the country is a boundless universe of problems just waiting for government solutions. The problem with that of course is that the supply of problems is literally endless. Most men are imperfect humans, and until they find a way to fix that, problems will always exist.

It is the ease with which liberals can point to problems and proffer ostensibly reasonable solutions that make it so difficult for conservatives to make headway, particularly with a population that is focused on things like American Idol, Facebook or Xbox. Of course those simplistic solutions often turn out to be anything but simple and more often than not resemble nothing like a solution. As an example, one of the driving forces of the economic malaise we find ourselves in today was the result liberal regulations forcing banks to give mortgages to people who should probably not have had them. Those regulations were government solutions to the “problem” of banks not making enough loans to minorities.

In a world where problems lay below every surface, around every corner and just in plain sight, it’s sometimes difficult to engage voters with a message that we don’t need more government regulation. When a kid is dead in the street of a gunshot wound or a family has lost its health insurance it can be challenging to carry on a rational conversation on the big picture politics of regulation vs. freedom.

Every now and then however a situation comes to light that so starkly discredits the liberal philosophy that even the least engaged citizen almost takes notice. Just such a situation is taking place in California, and it has nothing to do with the state slowly committing economic suicide via untenable regulations and confiscatory tax rates.

The situation to which I’m referring involves the conspiracy amongst environmentalists, the state and the federal governments to turn what is possibly the most fertile land on the planet into a desert wasteland, and take with it tens of thousands of jobs. I’m talking of course about the San Joaquin Valley. The Valley, which occupies much of the center of California from approximately Bakersfield in the south to Sacramento in the north, is the breadbasket of the United States, having in some years produced more than 25% of all the food consumed in the country. It produces everything from grapes to broccoli to tomatoes to rice to pistachios to milk and cream. It’s also a major producer of non food items such as hay and cotton.

In 2008, the Valley, already suffering the effects of a years long drought, was dealt a body blow by the government. That December the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a “biological opinion” that imposed draconian water reductions on many farms in the San Joaquin Valley. Why? Because California is running out of water? No. Because there’s too much food and they wanted to reduce the supply? Plausible by government standards, but no. No, the government decided to cut off 100% of the water supply (later reduced slightly) of much of the Valley to protect a two inch fish called the delta smelt. The decision was the result of a 2006 lawsuit brought by the environmental group National Resources Defense Council. And the diverted water, is it being sent to other farmers someplace else? No. Is it being held in a giant reservoir for later use? No. It’s being dumped into the San Francisco Bay.

The predictable result of all of this is that not only is a wide swath of some of the most arable land on the planet turning into a dustbowl, but tens of thousands of farm workers are now unemployed and standing in food lines. On the state level, although the Governator claimed that were the decision up to him he would turn the water back on, when he had the opportunity to ask the federal government to review the decision he chose not to.

Not that it had to be this way. The government had much leeway in how it might have approached the “problem” of the delta smelt. Given all of the possible routes the bureaucrats might have taken, they chose the most heavy handed avenue possible and the result has been predictably bad. And it’s not even a matter of depraved indifference. This was a case of regulators actively seeking to advance the environmentalist agenda at the expense of jobs, families and communities. If there were any doubts about that the perniciousness of the government’s actions U.S. District Judge Oliver Wagner put them to rest on the 15th of last month, stating in his decision that the U.S. F&WS had acted in an “arbitrary, capricious and unlawful” when issuing their “biological opinion”.

Rarely are the ruinous consequences of progressive / liberal policies as rapid and stark as they are in the dying fields of the San Joaquin Valley. Nonetheless, ruinous they usually are. Be they banking regulations seeking to bring about social change, gun laws seeking to diminish crime or regulations seeking to guarantee every American health insurance coverage, progressives look at the troubled world as a place that must be fixed by government intervention.

Unfortunately, in addition to being pernicious and totalitarian, progressives are also immune to objective evidence of their failures. It doesn’t matter that the outcomes from their policies are usually the exact opposite of their stated objectives or cause irreparable harm to the unwashed masses who actually have to live with them. The only thing that is important is growing government control so that citizens can finally be saved from themselves and the negative consequences of their unenlightened choices.

“with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor”

There were some poor, many “middle” class and a few that were filthy rich. John Hancock was likely the richest man in America at the start of the revolution. Samuel Adams was generally broke. Everyone risked all.

Total War is not only defined by what you are willing to destroy in your quest for victory but what you are willing to lose.

“The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already dead.  The sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function: without mercy, without compassion, without remorse.  All war depends upon it.” Ron Speirs, Band of Brothers

You may lose your job, you may lose your fortune, and you may lose your friends. You may not get invited to appear on Fox or MSNBC. Your children are being taught in the schools to revile what you believe; you may lose them to the culture. If we continue down the road we are on, civil war will come to America, and you may even lose your life. All liberty depends upon men who are willing to risk everything. It has always been so.

I do not advocate civil war but I do recognize the inevitable result of tyranny. Psychology has laws as immutable as gravity or economics; people will only take so much.  Mass psychology is practiced by those in power in the same way the FED practices monetary policy. Statism bubbles are blown up and the pressure/anger is relieved by “conservative” victories when the statists recognize the pent-up anger has reached critical mass. Of course the conservative victories never quite undue the frameworks laid and successes made in the prior advance. As the recent stock and real estate bubbles resulted in economic devastation due to miscalculations of the FED, it is inevitable that the statists will miscalculate the anger generated by their actions. It may be this time. To use FED jargon, their models would predict a brief interlude of control by “conservatives” would be a relief valve on the pent-up anger and thereby safely deflate the bubble. What is going to happen when the Republicans retake the congress this fall and then fail to dismantle Obamacare, Cap and Trade, etc.? Are real Americans going to quietly sit through more shameless duplicity on the part of the Republican Establishment?

The left has been practicing a form of almost bloodless Total War against basic liberty for more than 100 years. They have been willing personally to lose all in order to accomplish their progressive goals. Why would they fight so sacrificially in support of tyranny? I don’t know either but that is why they are called useful idiots. How many Democrats are not seeking re-election in 2010 already? But they voted for ObamaCare anyway. Winning is all that matters. Total War.

We’re whipped. I saw a comedian once refer to it as chicken-whipped in order to maintain a family friendly show.

In fact, we are so badly chicken-whipped that many on the right faithfully and righteously support many of the goals of the progressives for fear of being labeled naïve or uncaring.

As long as that is the case; we will stay whup’d.

Who is for destroying Social Security?

Who wants to scrap the DEA and all federal drug laws?

Who wants to eradicate the FDA? The Federal Reserve?

The EPA and the Dept of Education?

The NRLB and AMTRAK?

No more Medicare or Medicaid at the federal level?

Seat belt laws?

Can we not get out of the UN? Must we fund this dictators club?

These are all things that were pushed through by the progressives at the expense of liberty.

I can’t get on an airplane or open a bank account without going through a virtual strip search (soon to be an actual virtual strip search). But in spite of all of the ridiculous nonsense it was ordinary Americans that stopped the EunuchBomber. It was ordinary people that stopped Richard Reid (and hopefully soon that other treacherous Reid, “Harry”). It would have been ordinary Americans that stopped 9/11 had they not been disarmed by a wayward government.

The IRS and Income Tax are both thoroughly evil and absolutely incompatible with liberty. Yet there are too many on the right who think it is only fair for the wealthy to be taxed this way. The self-made wealthy are punished for success while drunken trust fund babies take the floor to rail against them. We are all forced annually to testify against ourselves in plain contravention of the dreaded 5th.

Too many on the right still believe anyone invoking the 5th is guilty. Refusing to answer the question is prima facie evidence of guilt, right? Only guilty people have something to hide, right? The truth is that only fools believe such tripe.

If we are going to win a Total War all of the things the left have implemented must be destroyed. As soon as you decide that your favorite unconstitutional progressive program should be preserved then Total War is not being practiced, and the left wins another one of its two steps forward one step back battles.

We will see this shortly when the Republicans retake congress in the upcoming elections. Watch as they attempt to FIX ObamaCare instead of eradicating it entirely. We occasionally see some similarly moronic legislation to force the IRS to play “nice”. The Republican Establishment’s focus on making things work well, instead of standing on principle and asking if it should be allowed to exist, is as responsible for the state we are in as anything the left has done.

The answer is not easy but it is simple;

(Thanks EPU and nessa) Carthago Delenda Est, leave no stone standing upon another, plow the streets and salt the earth so that nothing can grow there again.

We must DESTROY every element of progressivism or like the noxious weed it is, it will grow back. We must accept with humility when our current or former positions are helpful to the enemy and destructive of liberty. And then change.

The men who founded this country did risk everything. Whether poor or rich they all knew death, prison or poverty was the price of failure. In fact many suffered all these things in spite of victory.

But not us. Unfortunately Samuel Adams perfectly described the Right of today when he said;

“If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you (Mitch). May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”—Samuel Adams

As long as unemployment is low and the dollar is strong nobody gets worked up.

Somebody recently asked a bunch of British veterans of WWI and WWII if, given the state of British society today, it was worth it. Most said no. They wouldn’t do it again.

Is there any doubt we would get the same response from Washington, the Adams’s, Jefferson or Paine were they to see the depths we have plumbed in the name of civility, profitability and providing for the general welfare?

There is nothing wrong with civility or profit until they are gained at the price of principle.

We do not live our principles.

How many would vote not guilty as a juror when the defendant is clearly guilty but you think the law is bad or unconstitutional? How could any juror ever vote to convict a person for violating a law the juror was unaware of before the trial? Ignorance of the law is no excuse we are told. Tens of thousands of pages of law, hundreds of thousands of pages of legally binding case law and bureaucratic regulation and we are responsible for every word? Are we to be bound by these millions of words while they refuse to be bound by the 7600 words of the US Constitution?

How many contribute to Wal-Mart profits even though it supports the healthcare trash being pushed and has people on staff specifically to teach its employees how to access the welfare state?

Who will buy a GM car if the deal is better than what Ford or Toyota offer?

Who takes their kids to Disney World or Disney movies?

What’s in our wallets? How many of us have credit cards drawn on banks that took bailouts?

Where are our PRINCIPLES?

Total War means TOTAL WAR.

Or does it?