Editorial Cartoon from 1934, Still True Today

But what has the Chicago Tribune, and ever other major newspaper, since come to?

The other plan of action they had was to infiltrate and slowly take control of the newspapers. Thank goodness for blogging.

Independence Day?

Mark Steyn points out how we are losing ours, as the Obamunists push us toward becoming another banana republic:
....in America "Independence" seemed as much a statement about the character of a people as a designation of jurisdictional status. The first Americans were British subjects who had outgrown a British king as benign and enlightened as any ruler on the planet. They demanded "independence" not from foreign rulers of another ethnicity but from their own compatriots with whom they had a disagreement about the nature of government. Long before the Revolutionary War, small New England townships governed themselves to a degree no old England towns did. "Independence" is not about the replacement of a king in London with a president in Washington but about the republican virtues of a self-reliant citizenry free to exploit its own potential.

Please, no snickering. The self-reliant citizen? In the damning formulation of contemporary American vernacular, he's history — as in over and done with, fuhgeddabouttim. What's left of that founding vision on this less than Glorious Fourth of July 2011 in the Brokest Nation in History? "You go talk to your constituents," President Obama taunted Republicans on Wednesday, "and ask them, are they willing to compromise their kids' safety so that some corporate-jet owner continues to get a tax break?"

In the Republic of Brokistan, that's the choice, is it? Give me safe kids or give me corporate jets! No corporate aviation without safe kiddification! In his bizarre press conference on Wednesday, Obama made no fewer than six references to corporate-jet owners. Just for the record, the tax break for corporate jets was part of the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" — i.e., the stimulus. The Obama stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Democratic-party stimulus that every single Republican House member and all but three Republican senators voted against. The Obama–Corporate Jet stimulus that some guy called Obama ostentatiously signed into law in Denver after jetting in to host an "economic forum."

Charles Krauthammer did the math. If you eliminate the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Corporate Jet Tax Break, you would save so much dough that, after 5,000 years, you would have clawed back enough money to cover one year of Obama's debt. Five thousand years is the year 7011. Boy, our kids'll really be safe by then. I see some leftie at MSNBC has just been suspended for characterizing the president's performance on Wednesday as that of a demotic synonym for the male reproductive organ. So I shall be more circumspect and say only that even being a hollow unprincipled demagogue requires a certain lightness of touch Obama can't seem to find.

Speaking of corporate jets, did the president fly commercial to Denver? Oh, but that's different! He's in "public service." A couple of weeks before he flew Air Force One to Denver, he flew Air Force One to Williamsburg, Va. From the White House (well, via Andrews Air Force Base). That's 150 miles, a 30-minute flight. He took a 747, a wide-bodied jet designed to carry 500 people to the other side of the planet, for a puddle-jump across the Potomac.

Oh, but it was for another "economic forum." This time with House Democrats — the ones who voted for the Obama Corporate Jet Tax Break. "Economic forums" are what we have instead of an economy these days.....And the least the beneficiary of such decadence could do is not condescendingly lecture those who pay for their own transportation. America's debt is an existential crisis, and playing shell games with shriveled peas of demonizable irrelevancies only advertises your contempt for the citizenry.
(...)
What else isn't "the same for everyone"? A lot of things, these days. The president has a point about "tax breaks." We have too many. And on the scale of the present tax code that's a dagger at the heart of one of the most basic principles of free societies — equality before the law. But, of course, the president is not opposed to exemptions and exceptions and special privileges on principle: After all, he's issued — what is it now? — over a thousand "waivers" for his own Obamacare law. If you knew who to call in Washington, maybe you got one. If you didn't, tough.

But that's the point. Big Government on America's unprecedented money-no-object scale will always be profoundly wasteful, stupid, and arbitrary (as in those waivers). But it's not republican in any sense the Founders would recognize. If (like Obama) you're a lifetime member of the government class, you can survive it. For the rest, it ought to be a source of shame to today's Americans that this will be the first generation in U.S. history to bequeath its children the certainty of poorer, meaner lives — if not a broader decay into a fetid swamp divided between a well-connected Latin American–style elite enjoying their waivers and a vast downwardly mobile morass.

Toys in "Happy Meals"

When did 3 out of 5 of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors become such WEENIES?
I expect this in SF and/or Berkeley, but Santa Clara County always was a safe enough distance away. Maybe not anymore.
Whenever anyone on the Left cries something about "keep your laws off my body" - just remember that it is the Left that is continuously telling us how to live our lives, what we can eat, what we can drive, etc. And now, what kind of promotional toys a fast food chain can pass out. This micromanagement of our lives is a loss of liberty - many, many small losses add up to a significant loss of our freedoms.

Oh but this is for the good of kids, who aren't adults, they say? Fine. If we're going to regulate what kids can see about sugary cereals and plastic toys in fast food because it might be bad for them, how about we regulate what they see in schools about sex and their bodies?
--No more teaching them that sodomy or other gay sex is perfectly normal, and safe as can be as long as you use a condom.
--No more enabling them to have abortions without their parents' consent.

But will the Left do that? I thought so, or not.

What the McDonald's Corporation should tell these liberal local governments.

Republicans Beware: The Health Care "Fix" is really a Cover-Up

Now that this bloated, bankrupting, health care debacle has passed the House and will likely become law in the next several days, the statists who supported it are now laying the rhetorical groundwork to convince Republicans to come on board. The Democrats need cover. They are well aware that they've jumped over a political cliff and they are anxious to make sure they don't have to face gravity alone. (Politics is one of the few venues where suicide isn't fatal if you can convince others to fall on their swords, too. They know that the people aren't ready to throw everyone out at once.)

Their tactic will be pretty straightforward, "The bill passed and you crazy libertarians, and conservatives, and defenders of the Constitution, and proponents of fiscal sanity, and others we characterized as "extremists" didn't like it, so help us make it better." To wit: this is the time to Fix It. I'm warning Republicans: Don't fall for the gimmick, don't go back to the pre-Tea Party, Beltway mindset that "doing The People's work" means passing legislation, even if it's bad. The People's don't want more government and the best work to be done is opposing more government. The legislators who opposed the extraordinarily unpopular bill that just passed must understand that popular opposition to this bill isn't simply because of all of the undeniable corruption involved in its passage. That provided some sound bites, but the opposition goes far deeper than that. The bill is fundamentally flawed because there simply is no way to make health care more affordable by giving more control over health care to the most fiscally irresponsible player ever to enter the field, the U.S. government. Miraculously, people saw through the statist baloney and understood that a government takeover was a bad idea. That takeover is the essence of the bill that passed and it can't be fixed by rearranging the pork used to tempt Democrat holdouts. Any attempt to recast the fundamental problem with the bill as simply embarrassing pork or some other form of mere political excess is a betrayal of that understanding and the many tens of millions of voters who got it. To define the problems of this bill in the typical Beltway terms of this or that political misstep is to really misunderstand the popular opposition that it spawned. And, such opposition will drive the 2010/2012 elections if the GOP doesn't fumble the ball.

So, don't go along with the Fix It bill. In fact, don't even use that terminology. The upcoming legislation to "correct" things like the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, etc. isn't a Fix It, it's a Cover-Up. The GOP message on this should be: We didn't commit the crime and we won't take part in the cover-up. Let those who passed this corrupt pig stand alone in putting lipstick on it. You Dems passed the bill without any Republican support and the bill you passed is an abomination, both in process and in substance. We warned you and the American people warned you and you arrogantly defied that warning. Don't ask us to give you cover so that you can pretend you didn't vote for a corrupt bill. You did. We gave you better options and you ignored them. The bill that passed is entirely yours. You will be judged on that bill in November, not on some other bill.

Meanwhile, if the changes the Dems are proposing are such obvious improvements, then the coalition that passed the original legislation should have no trouble getting "the fix" passed. (Though it begs the question of why the original bill was so bad if a better version was politically viable...) Maybe the tricks used to get the original through will help get the cover-up through. Of course, using pay offs and arm twisting to cover up pay offs and arm twisting may not be such a great idea, but one expects the corrupt to stick to their strengths. Whatever approach taken to pass the cover-up, the GOP would be downright stupid to lend legitimacy to it.