5 months or so to Election Day 2020 - A prophecy

What will happen between now and then?

The Democrat Party Deep State, along with the "NeverTrump" GOPee quislings, are going to:

1) Inflame civil unrest
2) Stoke racial tension and violence
3) Commit mail-in and non-citizen ballot fraud
4) Increase technological censorship of patriots 5) Extend the pandemic panic, when it is utterly unwaranted given the damage it will do to must of us 6) Hurt economy with #5 above 7) Stage fake "White Supremacist" terror events 9) Weaponize their media further than they already have.

Primary elections: What we owe Donald Trump....

I want to address what we, as patriotic, Constitution-loving Americans, owe Donald Trump today.

Because we actually owe him a great debt.

Due in large part to Donald Trump, the grassroots effort that began with tea parties in the streets of America a few years ago has grown and morphed into a massive movement that has the potential of shifting our nation. Trump has personified and embodied an underground current of discontent with the Establishment -- a distrust of government that spans party lines.

So here's what we owe Donald Trump today....

We owe Donald Trump our thanks for giving a voice to a massive Outsider movement, slaying the dragon of political correctness, elevating the importance of several core issues, and taking down the "chosen" Establishment candidates.

So we owe Donald Trump our thanks. Mr. Trump, take a bow.

But here's what we do not owe Mr. Trump...

We *do not* owe Donald Trump our votes.

If you're like me and millions of patriotic conservatives in our land, you've been struggling with two sentiments. You know from the facts that Trump is not a conservative. After all, he has more consistently supported Democratic candidates over his lifetime than Republicans. Until very recently, Trump was far to the Left of distrusted GOP RINOs like Mitt Romney on core issues like immigration and healthcare, to name just two.

And let's be honest about Mr. Trump's deportment. He's a hard-driving, verbal killer -- a brash and at times vulgar candidate who has turned this campaign into a reality TV show.

Yet something inside of you has been telling you that Trump just feels right. Finally, someone with the internal fortitude to stand up to the bully of Big Government!

And you're right. We've been maligned by the Left and betrayed by the GOP Establishment. Trump just feels like the right guy to stick it to the system! But let's be honest and acknowledge that Trump is not, nor has he ever been, a limited government conservative.

So here's my advice: understand what you owe Donald Trump today. You owe him your thanks. But not your vote. Be thankful for Trump because his candidacy and his impact on this presidential race has done something truly amazing...

Trump has created real space and a real opportunity for a real conservative to win.

And who is that candidate?

Ted Cruz.

Rush Limbaugh called Cruz "the closest living thing to Ronald Reagan we're ever going to have in our lifetimes. I don't know what more I can say about Ted Cruz."

Cruz's record and his rhetoric back up Rush's statement. Perhaps most importantly, Ted Cruz is the best qualified among the three GOP leaders to actually nominate to the Supreme Court originalists who will interpret and not re-write the Constitution.

So, yes, we owe a great debt of thanks to Donald Trump. He is the first public figure to represent on a truly national platform the growing grassroots Anti-Establishment movement which may well be the last, best hope for our nation.

So, as you go to the polls, give a hearty "thanks" to Donald Trump.

But vote for the strongest conservative in the field: Ted Cruz.

The Frogman's Prophecies

A great blog post from "The Dissident Frogman", a French expat, now in America, about what we have done to ourselves in this most recent election:

Now that a slight majority of American voters have caught the French, I will share visions of the times ahead with those who are still immune to this ghastly Western Occidental disease, and with the infected themselves.

Hear ye, hear ye, Great American Tribe: thou hast lost thy ways and hast forged thyself chains of iron. Hear the Revelations of the prophet Frogman, he who wandered through the barren wasteland of Europa under a wooden yoke and witnessed the terrible plight and dreadful blight that will now descend upon thee:

TO THE GLOATERS crowing over the comments sections of every conservative and Republican websites: burn through every gallons of that sweet euphoria as quickly and fully as you can, for it will very soon become stale and leave only the putrid taste of rot in your mouth. I know you, for I’ve seen your peers and walk among them in the Land of the Frenchmen. Tomorrow, the effects of your plebiscite will pierce through the exhilaration of your victory, and they will crush you as much as they afflict those you mock today.

Just as they did in France, the policies you champion will affect everyone’s standards of living, directly and indirectly. If you are wealthy today, your wealth will dwindle tomorrow. If you are already poor or believe yourself so, you will never rise and prosper.

Soon, just as the French did, you will realize that you’ve elected yourself servants of an unaccountable oligarchy courted by a small intelligentsia to which you will never belong, from which you will never profit and of which you can never get rid. Then, you will join the legions of what the French call les déçus de la Gauche, or "the Left’s disappointed"—Indeed, even in Left wing France, the Left never fails to disappoint its followers for it is made of and thrives on fallacy and deceit.

Just as the French, when you realize that the effects of the political model you tout today cascade and accumulate to the point where you have effectively handed that oligarchy a permanent majority that begins to feed on its pawns—you—it will be too late and your loss will be complete.

Understand this: I am not a US citizen nor a resident in the USA, so this is not the bitter retort of a sore looser. This is a prophecy from a foreigner who has seen your future because he lives in it: you, my friend, who laugh today will cry twice as much tomorrow.

TO THE VARIOUS BRANCHES OF LIBERTARIANISM, whether followers of the cranky Dr. Ron "The Bane of the Fed" or hipsters swapping commodity traders’ jokes on Zero Hedge as they wink-wink-nod-nod "wait for the Titanic to sink". You who decided against opposing the Eurobama Project rather than banking on the Romney & Ryan ticket who, despite all its shortcomings (whether real, perceived or invented) would nevertheless have been far more receptive to most Libertarian ideals and would have been easier to steer in the directions you favor than the Chicago Machinist will ever be, here is an enigma:

Have you ever heard about the French Libertarian Party?

Me neither. True, there’s a couple of pretenders to the title, but they are merely social clubs, where every now and then attendants get a tingling in the pants by quoting good old Ludwig Von Mises and Claude Frédéric Bastiat between connoisseurs. Their true distinctive feature when compared to the other French is that they won’t even bother entertaining any delusion of grandeur or relevance—they know they have no place in the French political process, and no chance to ever gain one.

So hear this, Friends of Gary the Third Party and other Principled Abstentionists: by choosing ideological purity over strategic thinking, you’ve effectively hedged your own political future in the one competing force that is most capable of propelling you into irrelevance and oblivion—as we say in France: Bravo!

Just as in France, once a majority of the US population—no matter how slim—has tasted the poisonous fruits of the State, they will demand the keys to the cornucopia and regard with disdain, scorn or hostility any soul brave or foolish enough to call it unsustainable and propose to lock the larder. The fact that you are right will not matter at all. Just as they do in France, the people will ask for more and tout de suite, never realizing or willing to acknowledge that they are effectively cannibalizing themselves and their offspring—as we’ve been saying in France for quite a while: Après moi le Déluge!

Thank in no small part to you, Obama now has more time to multiply the locusts, thus depleting your future ranks. You shall keep fancying yourselves as The Smart Ones, when compared to those Neanderthaloid Conservatives and Liberal Zombies, until one of you wonders aloud why the lights went off in the Libertarian cave, and hears only the echo in answer.

Understand this: I am not a US citizen nor a resident in the USA, so this is not the bitter retort of a sore looser. This is a prophecy from a foreigner who has seen your future because he lives in it: you, my friend, who didn’t oppose Obama today will be politically extinct tomorrow.

TO THE REPUBLICANS, INDEPENDENTS AND, YES, DEMOCRATS—after all, between Lot and his family, even in Sodom there were a few righteous—who saw that great Evil roaming the land, pledged to do anything in their power to stop him but ultimately couldn’t muster a big enough army.

Some of you believe that shifting demographics have now relegated the American Right to a permanent minority status, and that to regain the initiative, you must disown the "Right-wing nut jobs" and "move to the center". That notion would be stupid and self-defeating enough at face value, even if it wasn’t echoed by a slew of Left wing pundits, who smelled the blood and see your doubts as a unique opportunity to demolish you further.

For the results of such a ‘strategic’ move, one needs only to turn, once again, to France.

Look at the French Right. See it? Look harder, as it is now very difficult to distinguish from the Left. Back in 1981, when the French elected their first officially Socialist president in a long time, and the French Right went on a losing streak, collapsing at the polls under what was then dubbed la vague rose ("the pink wave". Rose in French meaning both the color pink and the rose flower, emblem of the French Socialists) they figured, quite cynically, that they had to give the voters whatever they demanded—and moved left. They are now only nominatively Right wing, yet are consistently chided and scorned by the French press as right-wingers, ultra conservative and free market fundamentalists.

In other words, the French "Right" is now always wrong, and only has herself to blame.

I am not going to lecture you on what Republicans and conservatives should or shouldn’t do—if you want patronizing political advice, ask any of the other 60 millions+ French, they’ll happily oblige—but in light of the rapid destruction of the French Right, I’ll just state the obvious: what you need to change isn’t your principles, it’s the narrative.

Some of you believe that societal collapse or civil war are coming soon hereafter, and advocate stocking supplies and ammunitions for the conflict they see ahead.

Truly, there isn’t such things as too much food and weapons, and yes, collapse and conflict could come to America. Yet it is not written.

The various flavors of Social Democrats who run Europe (into the ground, admittedly), and share so many features and aspirations with Obama have learned the mistakes of the less subtle autocrats who preceded them. If France can teach you one thing, it’s that Obama will never bleed you dry or push you beyond the threshold of revolt, only to the nearest edge of it: you are now more likely to bleed from a thousand cuts over a thousand years than to get a quick, if violent, resolution to the relentless assaults against your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness—snarky Libertarians who opted to let Obama squat in the Oval Office unopposed on the deluded notion that "it doesn’t matter" and will bring the fall of Leviathan sooner, may want to take notice.

Even the French have not yet managed to completely plunder and ruin their comparatively much weaker economy, and the good Lord knows they’ve been trying for the best of the last 80 years or so.

Just like in France, the rates of taxes, duties and fees unleashed upon the good folks of the US of A will not only augment, they will also metastasize over an incredibly varied and ever expanding range of products and services, in addition to your income and profits. You will suffocate under an unrelenting onslaught of new regulations, red tape and audits by a growing army of government agencies and bureaucrats all tasked with the mission of controlling that nothing passes through their nets, and punishing you ruthlessly for anything that does.

And still: you will live through it, and you will live well enough—for a given value of "well"—to never really have a legally and morally unquestionable motive to rise up in arms and go full scale de oppresso liber on the tyrant. This will not be, as many of you imagine when they think about France, North Korea only with more cheese, wine and broads who don’t shave their armpits. Instead, you will find yourself in a multi-generations limbo of "too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards"—as, ironically, a Libertarian once said.

Just like in France, this will turn you into a depressed, cynical and pessimistic people, until they finally manage to kill your spirit whole, and nearly everybody is on the dole.

That’s when they’ve won. They do not need to kill you, they just have to break you.

Understand this: I am not a US citizen nor a resident in the USA, so this is not the bitter augury of a sore looser. This is a prophecy from a foreigner who has seen one of your possible futures while living in it.

Yet you, my friend, are all that’s needed to change that destiny.

If, as some say, this is all about demographics, then look at demographics and rejoice: no matter the color of your collar, you are the the productive class, the entrepreneurial class, the creative class—quite literally, the working class—the likes and numbers of which France has never seen. You are guided by family morals and work ethics that are long gone in France, assuming they’ve ever existed here. And you are living under the cover of the most formidable declaration and system of self-governance, one that simply never existed in France.

Thus the only future I can predict is the one where you go French and surrender. You, and only you can turn this debacle around and me into a false prophet.

Sadly, some among you seem to have all but given up. Reading through your reactions in the comments at PJ Media, Breitbart, Hotair and others, I see cries that "the Republic is dead", and even claims—shocking claims, for this Americanophile—to burn the flag because "it doesn’t mean anything anymore".

Old Glory doesn’t mean anything, simply because you woke up last Wednesday to a measly 4 millions popular votes difference? A battle of nearly 121 million voters finds you outnumbered by four and hear, hear: the Republic is dead and the war is lost?

Try and tell that to those Americans who found themselves outnumbered and outgunned by far more disadvantageous enemy ratios, whether in a forest in the Ardennes, a hill in Korea, a valley in Vietnam or a mountain in Afghanistan. Try and tell them you’re considering giving up and burning the flag in despair.

Even though I am just a French, I am quite certain I can predict their reaction.

Once again, you don’t need a lecture from this Frenchman, but it seems to me that some of you, in the emotion of that unexpected electoral defeat, forgot this simple fact: America is always outnumbered.

This unique nation, founded not on feudal or religious fault lines but on a radical philosophy of individual freedom isn’t the norm in this world: it is an anomaly. If you needed a quick and simple reminder on the basis for American exceptionalism, there you go.

America is always outnumbered and, until the rest of the world sees the guiding light and builds shining cities on America’s model—if that day ever comes—America will always be outnumbered.

Yet it doesn’t matter: America’s strength isn’t in numbers, it’s in her soul.

Hear this final prophecy America: only one man can kill the Republic, and it isn’t Barack Obama. The one man who will kill your Republic is the one man who will last give up and renounce it.

Don’t you dare be that man.

 

It's not 1980 anymore

Many patriots are left asking, "How could this happen? Surely people remember the Jimmuh Cartur disasters? How could another liberal fool get elected twice?"

However, the sad truth is that the American electorate has changed. Some of this is merely a new generation, or maybe two, coming of age without memory of The wretchedly liberal late 1970's. As one comment I ran across on Yahoo! News put it: "Dude, I wasn't even *born* when Jimmy Carter was president...."

For months, conservatives have been likening the conditions of the 2012 presidential race to that which saw the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The American Spectator's own Jeffrey Lord proclaimed that President Obama could be beaten handily“because the past four years really have been Jimmy Carter's second term.”

Victor Davis Hanson of National Review Online put it this way: "What does 1980 tell us about 2012? Barack Obama, like Carter, can run neither on his dismal four-year stewardship of the economy nor on his collapsing Middle East policy."

Hanson went on to write: "The winner probably won't be decided by old video clips, gaffes, or even campaign money, but by turnout and the October debates --depending on whether incumbent Obama comes across as a petulant Carter and challenger Romney appears an upbeat Reagan. As in 1980, voters want a better president -- but they first have to be assured he's on the ballot."

This goes even more so for California. I remember joking on a chat board, Yelp.com, that the Jerry Brown for Governor campaign theme song should be "You're No Good" by Linda Rondstadt, and again, a good many younger readers did not understand what I was getting at.

Well, Obama did come across as petulant in the debates while Romney was upbeat. And yet it wasn't enough. At the end of the day, despite Obama's dismal economic record and an ineffectual Middle East policy, his well-oiled organization turned out his vote and Romney could not. Romney could not break through in key states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan nor could he put Ohio and Florida back in the Republican column.

And yet Obama didn't win on turnout alone. He won because America has changed. We're not in 1980 anymore.
(...)
At the dawn of the '80s, a critical mass of the American population knew what life was like in the Great Depression and WWII, understood the evils of Soviet communism and did not take kindly to American diplomats being held hostage. But when we have an education establishment that is skeptical of the use of American power and weans high school students on Howard Zinn's communist A People's History of the United States, should it come as a surprise that many shrug when an American ambassador is murdered? Still, Romney had not one but two chances to expose the folly of the Obama Administration's insistence the attacks in Benghazi were a result of a YouTube video, not a terrorist attack and twice he failed to do so.

In 1980, Americans would not tolerate rising unemployment. In 2012, not only is high unemployment accepted as a fact of life but receiving food stamps is encouraged. There was also no concept of gay marriage in 1980. In 2012, Obama endorsed gay marriage (albeit sooner than he wanted to on account of the loose lips of Joe Biden). Nor was it conceivable in 1980 that a sitting Commander-in-Chief's re-election campaign could have put out a commercial featuring a woman likening support for the President to the loss of her virginity. Thirty-two years ago, being wealthy and successful was considered something to aspire to and be proud of. Today, it is a source of bitterness, envy, resentment and, in some quarters, the very epitome of evil.

In the final analysis, it must also be remembered that a significant segment of the electorate was emotionally vested in Barack Obama in a way it never was with Carter -- and I'm not just talking about the mainstream media. Obama received a near unanimous vote from African-Americans and a substantial majority of Hispanics as well as people under 30 (especially women). That doesn't necessarily mean we've entered the permanent Democratic majority which Ruy Teixeira and John Judis wrote of a decade ago. It is certainly possible that America could again elect a conservative Republican President. But conservatives must recognize that the American electorate has changed and that 1980 has come and gone, never to return.
 

Moreover, demographics have changed. And NO, Hispandering with an amnesty or phony "comprehensive immigration reform", or a "DREAM" (sic) Act, won't change the voting trends. People with a favorable view of big government will vote for the Democrats, even the full blown Commierats. Victor Davis Hanson proves:

As far as the grand bargain, the Dream Act, comprehensive immigration reform, or whatever the rubric of the day that a clueless Republican establishment employs: just imagine the opposite to learn the truth. If the Republicans were to agree to amnesty for, say, two million who were brought here as children and are in school or in the military, do you really think the “Latino community” in response would celebrate and then also agree to deport those who did not qualify? Or do you imagine the deal would at least result in deportation for those entirely on public assistance or with a criminal record? Did the Reagan-era Simpson-Mazzoli Act amnesty lead to 1) an end to calls for amnesty, 2) closing the border, 3) a surge in Latino support for Republicans, or 4) none of the above?

Does a conservative message of lower taxes, less government, and fewer regulations really appeal to Latinos en masse, who define La Familia values as something that includes a big and paternalistic government, along the Spanish/European model? 

(...) 

So family values are defined somewhat differently from the Republican silk-stocking view that Latinos are natural Republicans — if only (fill in the blanks). Again, I would like the Democrats to introduce the Dream Act, and then watch whether closed borders, E-Verify, and deportation of criminals were part of the deal. That is not to say one should not talk in softer tones and be magnanimous; but one is fooling oneself if one believes a cheap Dream Act endorsement would mean anything.
(...)
The truth is that the present system of illegal immigration is quite logical and thrives because too many are invested in it, well aside from corporate employers. California is a permanently blue state. Latino leaders, many of whom can no longer speak Spanish, represent a vast underclass of illegal aliens whose numbers warp all statistics on Latino achievement and become a permanent argument for set-asides, more government help, higher taxes (think: who just voted for California’s higher taxes?), affirmative action, and changing demography. Why simply give that up, and join a party of the melting-pot, up-by-the bootstraps, self-reliant, shrink-the-government types? To go to Parlier or Orange Cove is to drive through a maze of federal/state clinics and government facilities, many eponymously named by those who secured the government funding for them. No, I am sorry: I don’t see a natural Hispanic constituency for what Mitt Romney was trying to offer.

VDH concludes that once again, the Demunist Commiecrats played their class warfare card and the Republicans did not effectively respond:

I also confess that stupid ads like Lena Dunham’s sex-equals-voting-for-Obama ad and stupider ones like the African-American garbage collector, who said Romney never talked to him at the curb, worked. 

I sense the same misinformation about the “wealthy” and the “job creators:” Just think the opposite and the truth emerges. Most in the top brackets voted for Obama; eight out of the ten wealthiest counties did at least. Many of the people I know in Silicon Valley, who this year passed on the signs and bumper stickers, nonetheless voted for Obama. The fact is that the Democratic Party, to generalize, is largely now the subsidized lower classes who pay no federal income tax and receive a growing array of federal largess coupled with, on the other end, a technocratic blue-state elite making over $200,000 annually. If taxes go up under Obama, at least theirs will, too. Another truth: the Republican Party is basically made up of a shrinking middle class and upper middle class, flanked on both ends by Democrats who, for various reasons, on one end, either do not appreciate their success or, on the other, hate them for their hoity-toity, un-PC tastes and culture. Yet how strange that the two ends of the Democratic coalition have so little to do with each other — a partnership based on cynical opportunism on both sides. All that is missing are the Roman tribunes, or perhaps the wealthy demagogi.

What Lost the Election?

Marco Rubio would not have won the Latino vote this year. A ticket of Condoleezza Rice and Herman Cain would not have won the black vote. Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley would not have won the Asian vote. Obama, in brilliant fashion, marketed himself as the above-the-fray great healer and our post-racial future, while his surrogates waged the most vicious race-, class-, and gender- divisive campaign in history. More likely, what lost the race for Romney — a decent and strong candidate — was instead the failure of the white working classes to turn out to vote en masse.

Why so? I was in Michigan, near the Ohio border, for all of September, and each night was stunned by the variations in the class warfare ads, mostly brilliant and effective in painting Romney as your kill-Detroit, wet-suited, jet-ski-setting, multi-home employer — a veritable John Kerry, John Edwards, or Ted Kennedy — and “us” as a disabled, homeless, starving, and out-of-work collective victim as a result. Millions, who did not prefer Obama, just stayed home and thought that they would pass on voting for the guy who had too much money and gave them their pink slips. In 2004 they saw Kerry as the wet-suited wind surfer; in 2012 it was Romney.

Election Post-Mortem: The cracks in the dam

Well. There it is. A slight majority of Americans, a sizeable one in electoral terms, believe massive unemployment, massive debt, government health care, and not a single thought of how to address the coming cataclysm of entitlements is OK with them. We are whistling past the graveyard...

Meanwhile, here in California Governor Moonbeam effectively extorted taxpayers with the schools gambit with Proposition 30, while a $60 billion and counting choo-choo that no one will ride will continue to be studied, if not built.

Almost unnoticed, Proposition 39, a phony "closing of tax loopholes for out of state businesses", passed. These "loopholes" *don't* really exist (of course out of state businesses don't pay California income taxes on their operations, because they are not located in California!). All of which really means out of state businesses *won't* locate here. And what revenue that Proposition 39 *does* raise will go to more failed "green energy", which somehow does not include hydroelectric dams, the one proven source of such energy. Expect blackouts and utility rate hikes in our future.

From Gregory Bradford on Facebook:

Well, It's official folks. The country I loved as a free and right state has ceased to exist except on paper.

The progression as I see it is as follows:

- In the mid 90s America was tolerant of allowing a President to sully the office of the Presidency and well, quite frankly let him get away with probably staining the carpets in the Oval Office.

This tolerance was a major crack in the dam and foretold of things to come.

- 2000-2008 saw a supposedly Conservative Presidency *still* spend money on a trajectory like we had never seen previously. The spending was tolerated by practically all.

Water was flowing through the cracks in the damn at this point in time.

- 2000-2008 also saw a distinct rise in partisanship. Both sides of the isle participated.

(And while I don't agree with probably a majority of the policies of those years Presidency I do feel President Bush was a fairly honest and sincere man. His activities after the Presidency have reiterated that for me.)

The partisanship was effectively water starting to breach the top of the dam.

- 2008-2012 saw the passage of Obamacare and the installation of a Congress in 2010 that did not one single solitary concrete thing to abate the problems facing the country (i.e. talk is cheap Darrel Issa).

This was water flowing unabated over the dam.

- 2011-2012 saw the Supreme Court uphold Obamacare.

Big junks of the dam are being washed away at this point in time.

- November 2012 we just witnessed the American people re-elect a President that has a record as stellar as it is.

The dam is gone.

America is no longer the land of free. You now live in a socialist country.

It is simple. There are now enough people who are willing to take what is yours and give it someone else. And you have no way of stopping it. Last night proved that point.

So, you may as well get used to the new golden rule.

"Do unto others as much as you can conceivably get away with."

This is even more true in California, where the Dems now have a 2/3 supermajority in the Legislature, and can now impose tax hikes on a whim. While not all of them are Commiecrats, the leadership is, and they will bully the "Blue Dogs" into line.

And Jeff Goldstein on Protein Wisdom is always spot-on:

Looks like the Mayans were right, after all.

Sadly, there is no going back now. At least, not by way of elections. The masses here are content to run out the debt clock, get theirs, and say fuck it to the next few generations, who will bear the burden of what will be an inevitable collapse. So there’s really no going back, period.

{Given the Senate, the Congress will be no help}. McCaskill — whose family raked in stimulus money; Sherrod Brown, the Senate’s most leftwing Senator; a fake Indian; and a rubber stamp for Obama in Donnelly, a former Obaman DNC chair running as a “moderate” in VA, all winners. So the Presidential election doesn't even matter.

The mainstream press once again bought Obama the election. Which will buy him 4 years of an imperial presidency with nothing to stop him.

End of country.

Time to maybe start a new one, I think. Because I’ll be goddamned if my family is going to work to pay for other people’s shit; and I most certainly won’t live in a post-Constitutional police state — at least, not without putting up whatever resistance I can. 

Robert Stacy McCain is also spot-on:

The American people -- or, at the very least, a sufficient plurality of them -- decided that they want another four years of clumsy policy failures and vengeful "progressivism," as Democrats nowadays describe their agenda for wrecking what remains of our constitutional republic. Even before the unmitigated political disaster of November 6, 2012, a date that will live in infamy, the prospects of salvaging the United States were not particularly hopeful. Now, however, we are permanently and irretrievably screwed.

Let's not mince words, eh? It was one thing, obviously, for the electorate to choose Barack Obama in 2008, when Bush-era "brand damage" was still a fresh irritant in the wounds of a war-weary nation. Four years ago, Obama was untested and enshrouded in the glowing mantle of Hope. No intelligent person could possibly believe that "Lightworker" crap anymore, but then again, it's been a long time since any intelligent person believed anything a Democrat said. The cretins and dimwits have become an effective governing majority, and the question for conservatives at this point is perhaps not, "What does it mean?" but rather, "Why should we bother ourselves resisting it any longer?"
(...)
What is left to hope for? That the American people will soon regret their choice? That another four years of economic stagnation and escalating debt will cure them of their insane appetite for charismatic liberals? If four years of endless failure have not rid them of this madness, the disease may well be terminal. Perhaps others will still see some cause for hope, and in another few weeks my friends may persuade me to see it, too. But today I will hear no such talk, and I doubt I'll be in a better mood tomorrow. At the moment, I am convinced America is doomed beyond all hope of redemption, and any talk of the future fills me with dread and horror.

2012: The make or break year???

In a 2008 radio interview, Barack Obama said:

" ... the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties."

And there you have it. There is a reason I call many of that political party Demunists, or Commiecrats.

No, Barack, it was NOT an oversight that the Founding Fathers never addressed the issue of the government taking your assets and giving them to who they deemed "deserving". Perhaps it's just an indication that George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison were cold, calloused individuals who enjoyed watching people suffer. That is what they teach in Multicommunist Ethnic Brainwash Studies 101 nowadays.
In the same interview, future President Obama went on to say that the Constitution:

 "[says] what the Federal government can't do to you, but doesn't say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn't shifted ... and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was ... um ... because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change."

Excuse me? Do on your behalf? Those stupid Founding Fathers again. They didn't even think to put in the Constitution what the government must do on your behalf (which are code words for what it can do to you). What were those mentally challenged Old White fuddy-duddy guys thinking?

And what a tragedy it was that the civil rights movement didn't put together the coalition of powers that could bring about "redistributive change." Forget the fact that the Constitution never mentions the redistribution of anything. After all, as with man-made global warming, the debate is over: We all know that redistribution of wealth is the only moral way to operate a country, right? If we are caught alluding to the Constitution, Queen Nancy Pelosi herself simply laughs us off with, "Are you serious?"

America will go through a fundamental change in 2012 - guaranteed. Either the gains of Obama and his minions will not be reversed, which means we are that much closer to having our nation fundamentally transformed into a Euro-weenie welfare state, then, following the Europeans, a bankrupt state.....
Or those in the Republican Party who still believe in freedom (and sadly, they do not seem to be anywhere near an overwhelming majority) will do whatever it takes to overthrow the "czars" and policies of the Obamunist oligarchy that now rules over us.

If the Republicans, after winning back the House and Senate - or even coming close - continue to act like RINOs / Republicrats / Demopublicans and ignore the Constitution, it will be a sad time indeed.

Having said this, the only way that a "fundamentally transformed America" can be avoided is if:
1. Free elections without significant vote fraud are held in 2010.
2. Conservative Republicans sweep into power.
3. Said conservative Republicans immediately began to repeal ALL unconstitutional legislation - including ALL federal government involvement in health care, ALL forms of federal government welfare, ALL federal government involvement in education ... and so on.

State and local matters like education and public health belong back in state and local hands.

In short, get rid of ALL Federal government functions other than providing a legal system for arbitrating national disputes, protecting the lives and property of American citizens, and providing for a national defense.

And we must spend enormous amounts of time and energy educating the anesthetized, sports-crazy, entertainment-crazy, vacation-crazy masses about the wonders of the free market. We must expain to them why liberty is the most valuable commodity they can ever possess. We must have enough love in our hearts to help them understand that liberty, not government handouts, gives them the best opportunity to achieve economic freedom.

California: A Warning From History

Tom McClintock bluntly tells it like it is. Congressman Tom McClintock delivered the following speech to the Council for National Policy. Excerpts below:

I want to welcome this groundbreaking scientific expedition to the savage lands of the Left Coast. You are here in California to answer an important theoretical question and now you have your answer.

Yes, this is what Barack Obama’s second term would look like.

Study it. Fear it. And then go home and make sure that it never happens to the rest of the country.
(...)
Mark that well, because if we lose this struggle for the future of our country, you too someday will live in a California – only without the nice climate. 

Bad policies. Bad process. Bad politics. Those are the three acts in a Greek tragedy that tell the tale of how, in the span of a single generation, the most prosperous and golden state in the nation became an economic basket case.
(...)
One thing – and one thing only – changed (over the last decades): public policy. The political Left gradually gained dominance over California’s government and has imposed a disastrous agenda of radical and retrograde policies that have destroyed the quality of life that Californians once took for granted.
(...)
I submit to you that no conceivable act of God could wreak such devastation. Only acts of government can do that. And they have.

We conservatives espouse principles of individual liberty, free markets, constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, the protection of natural rights – not out of some slavish devotion to ideology, but because all human experience has shown these principles to be the most certain means to achieve a prosperous and happy society. If you want to see the opposite of that – come to California.

James Madison said the trickiest question the Constitutional convention confronted was how to oblige a government to control itself. History records not a single example of a nation that spent, borrowed and taxed its way to prosperity; but it offers us many, many examples of nations that spent and borrowed and taxed their way to economic ruin and bankruptcy. And history is screaming this warning at us: that nations that bankrupt themselves aren’t around very long, because before you can provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty – you have to be able to pay for it.

California may not have invented deficit spending but we certainly refined it into a science. Before the crash of 2008, when California was taking in more money than ever in its history, it was already running a nine billion dollar deficit, under a Republican governor elected on the pledge to “cut up the credit cards.”

Here, Tom points out how Ah-nold and a good many RINO Republicans did their part in ruining this once great state.

Federal spending increased 26 percent in the last three years literally consuming and squandering the wealth of the nation at the worst possible time. Yet consider this: from July of 2005 to July of 2008, California increased its spending by 31 percent, under a Republican governor elected on the pledge to “stop the crazy deficit spending”. You can see how well that’s worked for us.

If stimulus spending, massive deficits and burgeoning government bureaucracies were the path to economic prosperity, California should be leading the nation from the top rather than from the bottom. After we lost the nation’s triple-A credit rating this summer specifically because of chronic deficit spending, it should surprise no one that California suffers the lowest bond rating in the nation for precisely the same reason.

Our regulatory burdens are also years ahead of the rest of the nation – we’ve had our own version of "Cap and Trade" on the books for five years now, and even though the bulk of these restrictions yet to take effect, investors make decisions every day anticipating their impact.

This has already proven utterly devastating to energy generation, cargo and passenger transportation, cement production, construction, wine making, agriculture and manufacturing. When he signed this legislation, Gov. Schwarzenegger promised that this would produce a cornucopia of new "green" jobs.

How’s that working out? Up until the autumn of 2006, California’s unemployment rate tracked fairly steadily with the national unemployment numbers. But beginning in that quarter, California’s unemployment rate moved steadily beyond the national numbers. Today it stands at 12.1 percent – three full points above the national rate. You can’t blame the national economy for that – you have to find something specific to California that occurred in the autumn of 2006 to explain this divergence. I submit that the only significant event in that period was the signing of AB 32.

And I should note that although we’ve devastated California’s once recession-proof economy with these ridiculous regulations, the Earth stubbornly continues to warm and cool as it has for billions of years.
(...)
California (once) had embarked on an aggressive program of hydroelectric and nuclear power construction that promised an era of clean, cheap and abundant electricity. But beginning with the first “small is beautiful” administration of Jerry Brown, these programs were abandoned in favor of “green energy.” We now have the most stringent renewable energy requirements in the nation.

Which helps explain why California is the home to such stunning green energy success stories as Solyndra. We have among the highest electricity prices in the continental United States. We have the lowest per-capita electricity consumption in the nation as well. And every day, our government spends part of our sky-high electricity bills to lecture us to conserve more.

We completed our last major dam in 1979. Last year, environmentalists diverted 200 billion gallons of water from central valley agriculture for the enjoyment and amusement of the Delta Smelt – a three-inch long minnow that has become the environmental left’s pet cause. This single action destroyed thousands of jobs and laid waste to a half million acres of the most fertile farmland in America. It is no coincidence that four of the ten metropolitan areas suffering the highest unemployment rate in the country are all in California’s Central Valley.

Meanwhile, up north on the Klamath River, California has found a new partnership with the Obama administration as they proceed to tear down four perfectly good hydroelectric dams capable of producing 155 megawatts of the cleanest and cheapest electricity on the planet — enough to power 155,000 homes. This is due, we are told, to the decline of the salmon population. The Iron Gate Fish Hatchery on the Klamath produces 5 million salmon smolts each year – 17,000 of which return as fully-grown adults to spawn – but they don’t include them in the population count. To add insult to insanity, when the Iron Gate Dam is destroyed, we will lose the Iron Gate Fish Hatchery.

We have the most aggressive mass transit program in the country – although we have not added significant capacity to our highway system in a generation. Californians consistently pay among the highest taxes per gallon of gasoline in the country and yet make among the lowest per capita expenditures on our roads. And what a surprise: we also have among the highest congestion rates in the country.

We have the largest population of illegal aliens in the country, consuming somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 billion in direct state expenditures. A few years ago, the Los Angeles County Sheriff reported that fully 25 percent of the jail inmates were illegal aliens. For years, California has provided in-state tuition for illegal aliens at the expense of California taxpayers – and with the signing of the California Dream Act four days ago, they will also have access to taxpayer-financed grants. Meanwhile, CSU (The California State University system) has increased tuition 22 percent in just two years.

I’ve noticed a few of you on your cell phones no doubt checking to be sure that your return reservations are confirmed.

But I need to remind you that the Obama administration is pursuing exactly the same policies nationally – and so far with the same results. When you step off the plane back in your home state, just remember that all your plane trip will buy you is a couple of years if we lose the fight in 2012.

The second act of this morality tale is how bad process accommodated and amplified bad policy.

The Left loves to throw the term “dysfunctional” at our governing institutions. In the last week, the Democratic governor of North Carolina seriously opined that we ought to postpone congressional elections so that congressmen would “do the right thing.” Peter Orzag this week wrote of wanting to shift even more decision-making from our elected representatives to elitist boards appointed by our betters.

We have reached this point not because of a failure of our republican institutions, but because of a failure to respect those institutions.

Again, California is a pioneer, but the rest of the country is fast catching up. In the 1960’s, California’s legislature was respected throughout the country as the model for others to follow. It was professional, it respected process, and it worked. It did a few things, but it did them exceedingly well. It left local schools, local governments and local revenues in local hands. But beginning in the 1970’s this began to break down.

The humility that kept Sacramento from sticking its nose into the business of local governments gave way to the hubris that the state knew better what was important to local communities than those communities themselves. The appalling breakdown of federalist principles at the national level now geometrically compounds this problem.

But at the core of this breakdown was the abandonment of our basic republican structure of government – and it began right here.

Our parliamentary institutions have evolved over centuries to distill diverse viewpoints to a common direction within constitutional boundaries. When this process is applied, it works extremely well.

For a quarter of a century, I watched as these brilliant checks and balances that had produced reasonably punctual and reasonably balanced budgets for over a century, and nurtured the most prosperous economy in the nation, were gradually abandoned in the name of liberal efficiency.

Slowly, inexorably, decision-making that had been done broadly and independently by the two houses of the legislature — involving the active participation of every elected representative — was usurped by an extra-constitutional abomination called the “Big Five.”

See if any of this sounds familiar: The “Big Five” is essentially a super-committee that meets behind closed doors outside the scrutiny of the public, sidelining the legislature, short-circuiting the independent judgment of the two houses, and then in the eleventh hour drops its decision into the laps of the legislature for a take-it–or-leave it vote that cannot even be amended.

Czars, anyone?

I know I don’t have to connect the dots for anybody here. Ladies and gentlemen, it does not work. California’s plague of chronically late and chronically unbalanced budgets coincides quite clearly with the disintegration of the legislative process and the replacement of parliamentary institutions with handpicked super-committees.

Which brings me to the third act of this Greek Tragedy – bad politics.

Last November, while the rest of the country was celebrating historic Republican gains (including a shift of 63 U.S. House Seats, six U.S. Senate Seats, 680 state legislative seats, 19 state legislatures and six governors), the statewide Republican ticket in California – despite massively outspending the Democrats in the best Republican year since 1938 – lost every statewide race and even lost ground in the state legislature.

Republicans nationally now hold more state legislative seats than in any year since 1928. In California, they hold fewer than at any time since 1978! 

That is not because the voting population of California has lost its collective mind and it is not because the state is divinely ordained to be run by morons.

I would like to *believe* this, Tom, but unfortunately too many eco-weenie fools, too many atomized souls without extended family and local community who now seek government as their new authority figure, and too many illegal aliens might mean that we are doomed, Tom.

It happened because Dick Armey is right: “When we act like us we win, and when we act like them we lose.”

Republicans lost the 2006 and 2008 elections not because voters abandoned Republican principles, but because they looked at the Republicans and concluded that the Republicans had abandoned Republican principles.

Although this is undeniably true as well.

During the Bush years, Republicans had increased federal spending at twice the rate of Bill Clinton; they left our borders wide open; they approved the biggest increase in entitlement spending since the Great Society and that turned record budget surpluses into record deficits to launch this brave new era of stimulus spending.

Thanks, Karl Rove!

I last visited with the CNP in Washington in May of 2009. What a depressing meeting that was! Obama enjoyed 66 percent public approval. The week before, a conference of self-appointed Republican leaders had concluded that “we had to put the Reagan era behind us” and we had to be “mindful and respectful that the other side has something and that we have nothing and you can’t beat something with nothing.” (I won’t mention names, but his initials were Jeb Bush.)

Thank God House Republicans didn’t take that approach.

In the aftermath of that debacle, House Republican leaders resolved to restore traditional Republican principles as the policy and political focus of the party and they achieved something no one at the time thought possible: they united House Republicans as a determined voice of opposition to the Left and they rallied the American people.

Republicans rediscovered why we were Republicans, and Republican leaders rediscovered Reagan’s advice to paint our positions in bold colors and not hide them in pale pastels.

The result was one of the most dramatic watershed elections in American history.

California Republicans did exactly the opposite, and ended up replaying the disaster of 2008 while the rest of the country was enjoying one of the greatest Republican landslides ever recorded.

In California, the Democrats attacked Republicans for imposing the biggest state tax increase in American history. The Democrats attacked Republicans for obstructing pension reform to protect the prison guards union. These attacks had the unfortunate element of being true.

Meanwhile, the (California) Republican ticket attacked Arizona’s immigration law. (RINO) Republicans attacked the Proposition that would have stopped AB 32 – California’s version of Cap and Trade.

The sad truth is that (in California) we were more like the Democrats than the Democrats.

A few days after the election, a Republican leader whose mission in life has been to redefine the Republican Party in the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger said he just couldn’t explain the results.

I can. We didn’t need to redefine our principles. We needed to return to them. House Republicans did. California Republicans did not. Any questions?

Great parties are built upon great principles and they are judged by their devotion to those principles. Since its inception, the central principle of the Republican Party can be summed up in a single word, Freedom.

The closer we have hewn to that principle, the better we have done. The farther we have strayed from that principle, the worse we have done.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln warned the nation that two incompatible and irreconcilable philosophies, freedom and slavery, competed for our future and reminded us that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” “I do not believe the house will fall,” he said, “but I do believe that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

Today two incompatible and irreconcilable philosophies — freedom and socialism — compete for our nation’s future and the stage is set for one of the greatest debates in the history of the American Republic.

We are winning that debate. But we have to stand firm.

What has happened to California and now is threatening our country is the inevitable consequence of bad policy, bad process and bad politics – and the good news is, that’s all within our power as a people to change.

I believe that if Californians rediscover these self-evident truths, Jerry Brown will be to California what Barack Obama has been to the rest of the country – a giant wake-up call. And if Americans rally behind these truths, together, we will write the next great chapter of the American Republic: that just when it looked like America would fade into history as just another failed socialist state, this generation of Americans rediscovered, revived and restored those uniquely American principles of individual liberty and constitutionally limited government, rallied under a bold banner held high by the traditional party of freedom, and from that moment America began her next great era of expansion, prosperity and influence.

But what happens when a sizeable percentage of Californians, out of either ideology brainwashing or opportunism (yes, illegal alien coddling Wall Street Journal cheap labor greedheads, that means *you*) can never, ever, rediscover these self-evident truths?

Truth Still Hurts: At Least 70 Avowed Socialists In Democrat Party

Never mind Barack Obama and his commie pals. Congress has been crawling with communists for years....

In October 2009, the "Democratic Socialists of America" released in its newsletter a list of 70 members of the U.S. Congress who are members of the organization. And it is a Who's Who of Commiecrat Creeps:

Co-Chairs:
Raúl M. Grijalva (AZ-07)
Lynn Woolsey (CA-06)

Vice Chairs:
Mazie Hirono (HI-02)
Dennis Kucinich (OH-10)
Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX-18)
Diane Watson (CA-33)

Senate Members:
Bernie Sanders (VT) -- but at least he is honest

House Members:
Neil Abercrombie (HI-01)
Tammy Baldwin (WI-02)
Xavier Becerra (CA-31)
Robert Brady (PA-01)
Corrine Brown (FL-03)
Michael Capuano (MA-08)
André Carson (IN-07)--One of two Farrakhan followers in Congress. False claims of "Tea Party lynchings"
Donna Christensen (Virgin Islands delegate)--not such a big deal, but still there.
Yvette Clarke (NY-11)
William "Lacy" Clay (MO-01)
Emanuel Cleaver (MO-05)
Steve Cohen (TN-09)
John Conyers (MI-14)
Elijah Cummings (MD-07)
Danny Davis (IL-07)
Peter DeFazio (OR-04)
Rosa DeLauro (CT-03)
Donna F. Edwards (MD-04)
Keith Ellison (MN-05)--One of two Farrakhan followers in Congress
Sam Farr (CA-17)
Chaka Fattah (PA-02)
Bob Filner (CA-51)
Barney Frank (MA-04)
Marcia L. Fudge (OH-11)
Alan Grayson (FL-08)
Luis Gutierrez (IL-04)
John Hall (NY-19)
Phil Hare (IL-17)
Maurice Hinchey (NY-22)
Michael Honda (CA-15)
Jesse Jackson, Jr. (IL-02)
Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX-30)
Hank Johnson (GA-04)
Marcy Kaptur (OH-09)
Carolyn Kilpatrick (MI-13)
Barbara Lee (CA-09)
John Lewis (GA-05)
David Loebsack (IA-02)
Ben R. Lujan (NM-3)
Carolyn Maloney (NY-14)
Ed Markey (MA-07)
Jim McDermott (WA-07)
James McGovern (MA-03)
George Miller (CA-07)
Gwen Moore (WI-04)
Jerrold Nadler (NY-08)
Eleanor Holmes-Norton (DC delegate))--not such a big deal, but still there.
John Olver (MA-01)
Ed Pastor (AZ-04)
Donald Payne (NJ-10)
Chellie Pingree (ME-01)
Charles Rangel (NY-15)
Laura Richardson (CA-37)
Lucille Roybal-Allard (CA-34)
Bobby Rush (IL-01)
Linda Sánchez (CA-47)
Jan Schakowsky (IL-09)
José Serrano (NY-16)
Louise Slaughter (NY-28)
Pete Stark (CA-13)--Pro-Illegal Alien Traitor.
Bennie Thompson (MS-02)
John Tierney (MA-06)
Nydia Velazquez (NY-12)
Maxine Waters (CA-35)--Burn LA Burn and Free OJ Simpson
Mel Watt (NC-12)
Henry Waxman (CA-30)
Peter Welch (Vermont)
Robert Wexler (FL-19)

The DSA is a political action committee and bills itself as the heir to the defunct Socialist Party of America. It's chief organizing objective is to work within the Democratic Party as the primary, but not sole, method of achieving public ownership of private property and the means of production.

"Stress our Democratic Party strategy and electoral work," explains an internal organizing document. "The Democratic Party is something the public understands, and association with it takes the edge off. Stressing our Democratic Party work will establish some distance from the radical subculture and help integrate you to the milieu of the young liberals."

But, actually, the number of those sympathetic to the socialist, in fact outright communist, goals of the DSA is substantially higher than 70. There is a close association between the DSA and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. At that time, the caucus website was actually hosted by the DSA. The Progressive Caucus website has since become an official U.S. government website as it remains today.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus website boasts 81 members as well as resource links to numerous pro-communist publications and organizations. Those links include Mother Jones magazine, Moveon.org, OneWorld, The Nation magazine, ACORN and the Institute for Policy Studies.

The DSA makes clear its preference for working within the Democratic Party for the change it seeks. "Many socialists have seen the Democratic Party, since at least the New Deal, as the key political arena in which to consolidate this coalition, because the Democratic Party held the allegiance of our natural allies," the group states in the "Where we stand" section of its website. "Through control of the government by the Democratic Party coalition, led by anti-corporate forces, a progressive program regulating the corporations, redistributing income, fostering economic growth and expanding social programs could be realized."

In addition to a national program of "massive redistribution of income from corporations and the wealthy to wage earners and the poor and the public sector," the DSA also calls for a breaking down the American-style notions of nationalism and national sovereignty.

"A program of global justice can unite opponents of transnational corporations across national boundaries around a common program to transform existing international institutions and invent new global organizations designed to ensure that wages, working conditions, environmental standards and social rights are 'leveled up' worldwide," the group says on its website. "The basis of cooperation for fighting the transnationals must be forged across borders from its inception. Economic nationalism and other forms of chauvinism will doom any expanded anti-corporate agenda."

It also states in the group's mission statement: "A democratic socialist politics for the 21st century must promote an international solidarity dedicated to raising living standards across the globe, rather than 'leveling down' in the name of maximizing profits and economic efficiency. Equality, solidarity, and democracy can only be achieved through international political and social cooperation aimed at ensuring that economic institutions benefit all people. Democratic socialists are dedicated to building truly international social movements – of unionists, environmentalists, feminists, and people of color – that together can elevate global justice over brutalizing global competition."

While the DSA tries to paint distinctions between its brand of socialism and communism, before scrubbing its website following the WND expose 12 years ago, the site included a song list that included:

--"The Internationale," the worldwide anthem of Communism and socialism.
--"Red Revolution" sung to the tune of "Red Robin," with these lyrics: "When the Red Revolution brings its solution along, along, there'll be no more lootin' when we start shootin' that Wall Street throng. ..."
--"Are You Sleeping, Bourgeoisie?" Lyrics included: "Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping? Bourgeoisie, Bourgeoisie. And when the revolution comes, We'll kill you all with knives and guns, Bourgeoisie, Bourgeoisie."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a longtime member of the Progressive Caucus and served on the executive committee. She was not, however, listed last year as a member of the DSA.

Fred Siegel: Who Lost the Middle Class?

The so-called "progressive" leftists did, that's who! They did it to New York first, and California appears to be following.

Forty years from now, politicians, writers, and historians may struggle to understand how America, once the quintessential middle-class society, became as socially stratified as Europe or even Brazil. Should that dark scenario come to pass, they would do well to turn their attention first to New York City and New York State, which have been in the vanguard of middle-class decline.
It was in mid-1960s New York—under the leadership of a Barack Obama precursor, Hollywood-handsome John Lindsay—that the country's first top-bottom political coalition emerged. In 1965, Gotham had more manufacturing jobs than any other city in the country. But the city's political elites used eminent domain to push manufacturing aside in favor of business services; they also expanded social programs to help African-Americans and Puerto Ricans. The service sector proved rough going for the less educated, and the social programs failed. New York City responded by inflating its unionized public-sector workforce to incorporate minority workers.

John Lindsay was more like an Arnold Schwarzenegger precursor, really. The quintessential RINO.

Higher taxes to pay for bigger government joined higher crime to produce a massive exodus of manufacturing and middle-class jobs. Over the last 45 years, New York has led the country in outmigration. A recent study by E. J. McMahon and Robert Scardamalia of the Empire Center for New York State Policy notes that since 1960, New York has lost 7.3 million residents to the rest of the country. For the last 20 years, "New York's net population loss due to domestic migration has been the highest of any state as a percentage of population."
New York City, meanwhile, solidified its standing as the most unequal city in America. Twenty-five percent of New York was middle-class in 1970, according to a Brookings Institution study. By 2008, that figure had dropped to 16 percent, and the numbers have only plunged further since the financial crisis, with virtually all the new jobs in the city's hourglass economy coming at either the high end or the low. Only high-end businesses can succeed in a local economy that has the nation's highest taxes and highest cost of living—and even those businesses, in many cases, weathered the downturn only by living off the Fed's policy of subsidizing banks. Despite the federal largesse, more of the city's new jobs are in the low-wage hospitality and food-services industries than in the financial sector. The middle has lost its political voice in a city dominated by the politically wired wealthy and the public-sector unions that service the poor.
New York is the picture of what the Tea Party fears for the country at large. In the 1970s, liberal mandarins seized the high ground of American institutions in the name of managing social, racial, gender, and environmental justice on behalf of the disadvantaged. Their job, as they saw it, was to "protect" minorities from the "depredations" of middle-class mores. In the wake of the Aquarian age, the U.S. developed the first mass upper class in the history of the world.

What some other commentators have called "bourgeois bohemians" or "limosine liberals".

These well-to-do, often politically connected professionals—including the increasingly intertwined wealthy of Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley—espoused what might be called gentry liberalism, a creed according to which the middle classes had to be punished for their racism, sexism, and excess consumption.
And they have been punished—with job losses. These losses are the inevitable result of the costs of an ever-expanding, European-style public sector; environmental restrictions on manufacturing, mining, and forestry, which push the higher-paying manufacturing jobs offshore; and illegal immigration, which reduces overall wage levels. At the same time, the decline in the quality of K–12 schools has undermined what was once a ladder of economic ascent. After completing high school today, students are likely to require a raft of remedial courses in college. Then, after college, many middle-class students graduate not with an education but with a credential—and a bag of enormous college loans that paid for the intermittent attention of a highly paid, tenured faculty.
The private-sector middle class's plight has been exacerbated by international competition and technological innovation, which have undermined job security, including for unionized manufacturing workers, who had enjoyed an unprecedented prosperity for about a quarter-century. Median household incomes have grown only marginally since the early 1970s, despite the mass movement of women into the workplace. Many dual-earner families have been caught in the two-income tax trap: on the one hand, they pay for services once performed by the homemaker; on the other, notes economist Todd Zywicki, they're pushed into a higher tax bracket when the wife's salary is added to the husband's.
Adding to the woes of the middle and lower classes is that their families are far less stable than they were a generation ago. The decline of marriage has been driven not only by changing mores but also by a decline in male employment. In 1970, only one of 14 working-age men was out of the workforce. Today, notes Nina Easton, one in five is either "collecting unemployment, in prison, on disability, operating in the underground economy, or getting by on the paychecks of wives or girlfriends or parents." Whites who don't attend college now have out-of-wedlock birthrates approaching those that triggered Daniel Patrick Moynihan's concerns about the black family in 1965. Today, four in ten American babies are born out of wedlock.
During the current downturn, the black and Hispanic middle class has been particularly hard hit. From 2005 to 2009, according to a recent Pew survey, inflation-adjusted wealth fell by 66 percent among Hispanic households and by 53 percent among black households, compared with 16 percent among white households. These families worry with good reason that in the face of continuing high unemployment, they may fall out of the middle class. For the Obama administration and the public-sector unions, the solution to this slide is to force the nearly one in four employers that have contracts with the federal government to pay above-market wages. Here again, New York has been a pacesetter. Recently, public-sector unions and their allies tried to force a developer rebuilding a decayed Bronx armory to follow their wage and hiring guidelines; the deal collapsed, leaving one of the poorest sections of Gotham in the lurch.
There's a major difference, though, between New York and the country as a whole. The New York option—move somewhere else—doesn't apply to private-sector middle-class workers fighting adverse conditions that exist throughout America. So they've exercised the classic democratic right of political action, organizing themselves to compete in elections. The Tea Party is the national voice of the private-sector middle class—despite the demonizations heaped upon it by public-policy elites whose own judgment and competence leave much to be desired.
Middle-class decline should be front and center in 2012, which is shaping up as a firestorm of an election. It's likely to be a bitter contest, in which the polarized class interests of those who identify with the growth of government and those who are being undermined by its expansion face off without the buffer of mutual goodwill. Liberals, unless they change their tune, will blame Tea Party "terrorists" for the tragedy of a fading middle class. They will continue to delude themselves into thinking, as Al Gore said in 2000, that their rivals represent "the powerful" and that they themselves act on behalf of "the people," even though President Obama's policies have poured money into Wall Street and the politically connected "green" businesses that form the upper half of his top-bottom electoral coalition. The question is whether the country will buy this line and, more broadly, whether it will follow the New York model. Should it do so, those future historians will no doubt look at the election of 2012 as the contest in which the middle class staggered past the point of no return.

November 2010: The Spirit of 1994--Only Greater!

At first, I thought to myself that I have to blog more than just a theme of "Defeat the Demunists, Crush the Commiecrats, Vote Tea Party Republican or die!" It couldn't be *that* simple, could it?

But really, this time, it IS that simple. It's even simpler than that. Too many of us have been had. Too many of us, without realizing it, voted in the most Soviet leaning and frankly un-American government in American History. The old school "Boll Weevils" and "Blue Dogs" in the Democrat Party, who used to prudently curb the excesses of the leftist Democrats, are just about extinct. More sectors of the American economy, from auto manufacturing to banking to insurance to medicine, have been nationalized, expropriated, or otherwise commandeered in peacetime than ever before, in just two short years. By contrast, the governmental excesses of the "New Deal" took 12 years and the necessity of a World War to get that severe, and the excesses of that were rolled back.

When I was a student at Berkeley, I used to shudder at the thought of a large enough number of the pseudo-academic "professors" ever getting into positions to make public policy. Well, over the last few years, a large enough number have--and the results are not pleasing. I am reminded of why I chose NOT to go into academia, as one dissenting professor who did sadly but humorously relates.

Domestically, those who decried the deficits spent by the previous administration in eight years, decided to spend several times that amount in eight months. And for what? For a "fiscal stimulus" given the Orwellian name of the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" (ARRA), that spends nearly a trillion dollars, as of now just a bit more than the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts put together, a "Stimulus" that was for the most part nothing more than welfare payments. Here and there we do get another freeway lane.

But I can tell you what happened to much of California's ARRA money: it has kept the state running for the last four months. Until recently, California had no budget agreed upon, meaning that for July, August, September and October, no state monies could be appropriated. Yet the Department of Health Care Services kept on paying out the state's "Medi-CAL" programs, and how much of that went to illegal aliens and their children I wonder, with ARRA federal money. And there are many more California State agencies, bureaus, and departments.

So we have an unsustainable federal program, paying for unsustainable state programs. In decades past, Federal "Fiscal Stimulus" at least built real things, and gave us awesome Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams, Interstate Highways and rockets to the Moon. Today? It gives us environmental impact reports for projects that enviro-weenies will only block, that will realistically serve no one, and will never get built. The proposed "high speed rail" boondoggle is a case in point.

Moreover, this unprecedented spending binge has not worked because it cannot work: government cannot inject dollars into the economy until it has first taken those dollars out of the economy, either by taxation, by currency devaluation/inflation, or by borrowing from the very pool of capital that would otherwise been available to investors in real productive enterprise.

This is NOT stimulus, it is redistribution of wealth from producers to parasites, and it clearly does not create real jobs. It creates a further dependence upon government that cannot be sustained.

Meanwhile, the investors and entrepreneurs, who could get the economy going again, are sitting it out and biding their time. And why shouldn't they? The more the Obama Administration castigates insurers, businesses and doctors, the more it raises taxes on whatever profits they manage to earn, the more those who create wealth are sitting out, neither hiring nor lending. The result is that traditional self-interested profit-makers are locking up trillions of dollars in unspent talent, rather than using it to take risks and either lose money due to new red tape or see much of their profit largely confiscated through higher taxes.

And while the economy rots, the Obamunists want to condone the entry of more illegal aliens, even as entry level job wages plummet and teens find it harder to work than in the past. I was shocked when my teenage nieces told me that entry level jobs, which were there for the asking when I was their age, were not so easy to come by.

Then again, perhaps there is another theme to all of this: "We Need The Spirit of 1994--Only Greater!" After all, the Clinton administration initially went quite Leftist in 1993 and 1994.

But after the Great Political Upchuck of 1994, Bill Clinton realized this wasn't going to work. He sacked the most leftist of his advisers (does anybody remember the radical Ms. Achtenberg, Mr. Cisneros, Ms. Elders, Mr. Reich, Ms. Shalala? All of whom had to leave under clouds of scandal and disgust) and Billy Jeff put in pragmatic types as replacements. In the end, although loathsome to many Conservatives on a personal level, Billy Jeff did a couple of downright Conservative acts: (1) welfare curtailment and reform, and (2) cutting the capital gains tax rates in half, from 28/20% short/long to 15/10%, fueling the investment boom of the mid to late 1990s. The Obamunists have undone the former under ARRA, which extends unemployment and other benefits indefinitely, and the Obamunists are poised to undo the latter next year.

But Bill Clinton wasn't all about Leftist Marxism. Bill Clinton was all about--Bill Clinton.

Unfortunately, in President Obama, I see a much more leftist ideologue. This was best evidenced last summer in Cairo, when President Obama prostrated himself and America before Islam--in light of all that is going on in *that* religion--and falsely claimed certain historical achievements on the part of Islam — all the while outlining Western Civilization's shortcomings.

And he did this sort of thing at home too. Remember the condescending Pennsylvania "bitter clingers" speech, and the psychoanalysis of his own grandmother--who lovingly raised him while his father abandoned him and his bimbo mother went from academic fad to academic fad--accusing Grandma of alleged “typical white person” sort of racism? Remember his mentors such as the "Reverend" Jeremiah Wright, and Weather Underground veteran Bill Ayers?

When I heard the put-America-down rhetoric of Obama and his minions, I thought "Where had I heard that before? Oh my God, it can't be that he really absorbed and believed the Commie leftover pap from cretins like Frantz Fanon or Herbert Marcuse or the still living Communist scumbag Noam Chumpsky???

Evidently, yes. This is the "progressive" (sic) thought of unrealistic political ideals. The failure of the West to achieve the super ideal, despite the otherwise astonishing progress that has been made in the human condition, becomes the warrant for a hatred of Western culture that oozes from "progressive" politics, and that is eager to make the West the arch-villain responsible for global failure and suffering. As Obama and other Leftist cultural elites wallow in this masochistic guilt, the enemies of the West — first communism, and now jihadism — understand that this self-loathing is the sign of cultural decay, the dying spasms of a civilization that no longer has faith in the goodness of its foundational beliefs, and so no longer will fight for itself.

And all this crap, at home and abroad, led to the Tea Party Movement. This movement has taken up with the Republican Party, and in fact has in more than a few primaries purged the "Grand Old Party" of those Republicans who won't fight back hard enough, purged those Republicans who will "go along to get along", purged those who are RINOs (Republicans In Name Only).

We aren't going quietly into a future of decline, appeasement, surrender, and a diminished future.

And we're tired of being called (blank)ist and (blank)ophobic or otherwise smeared for refusing to accept the decay.

I won't say *all* Democrat candidates are treasonous commie leftovers at this time, but to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, "I believe nine out of every ten are, and I will inquire closely in the case of the tenth. The nuttiest Bible-Thumper Republican is much better than the average Democrat."

Perhaps one day the "Boll Weevils" and "Blue Dogs" will make a comeback, but for now, they are nearly extinct.

OK, on to the candidates and propositions.

GOVERNOR: Meg Whitman

There is a theme song for Jerry Brown. Or, on a more sinister note, there is another one...

Meg wasn't my primary choice, but the dishonest smears against her, by that political whore Gloria Allred (how aptly named), have made me a fan.

Moreover, do we really want to return to Jerry Brown's "era-of-limits" - "small-is-beautiful" - "don't build things and people won't come", new-age nonsense? Do we really want criminal coddling judges like Rose Bird and Cruz Reynoso appointed again? Have we forgotten what that was like?

And I laugh at claims like "Meg is trying to buy the election." Boo hoo hoo. The only worse thing than buying an election is acting like it's an entitled birthright for a formerly young punk but now elderly member of an elite political family.

LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR: Abel Maldonado

I have to laugh at Gavin Newsom's sleazy attacks against Abel Maldonado on the Tax Increasing issue. Yes, RINO Abel did sign onto a tax increase as part of a budget deal. However, for Gavin Newsom to make an issue out of that--is the cast iron pot calling the copper tea kettle a little burnt at the bottom.

And Gavin Newsom? Mr. Sanctuary City for the murderers? This smarmy clown? For real?

SECRETARY OF STATE: Damon Dunn

Four words: Photo Identification for voting. Damon Dunn supports, Debra Bowen opposes. Voter fraud anyone?

As for the boo-hoo-hoo nonsense about "minority voters being disenfranchised", Damon Dunn, who is African American and grew up modestly, might have something to say about that.

CONTROLLER: Tony Strickland

His opponent, John Chiang, tried to pretend he was above the Governor during the budget battle. Sorry, but the office of Controller isn't.

TREASURER: Mimi Walters

Good lord, is that corrupt fossil Bill Lockyer still shambling through the Capitol halls? Is he still pushing his shakedown lawsuits of automakers and gun manufacturing businesses? Since he is no longer Attorney General, no, thank goodness. But he is still as anti-self defense, and hence anti-freedom, as ever. And he has played "Musical Chairs" with state executive offices for too long.

ATTORNEY GENERAL: Steve Cooley

From a "Sanctuary City" for those who go on to murder, to an unwillingness to push the death penalty on the scum who deserve it, his opponent, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, is a Bolshevik Bimbo in a city infamous for Bolshevik Bimbos like Boxer and Pelosi.

INSURANCE COMMISSIONER: Mike Villines

And again, the Democrat Iron Pot calls the Republican copper tea kettle a little burnt at the bottom! Assemblyman Mike Villines, like Abel Maldonado, did go wobbly and sign off on a tax increase as part of a budget deal. For this, sleazy Democrat Assemblyman Dave Jones, who never met a tax increase he didn't like, is trying to make hay. Please California don't fall for this.

US SENATOR: Carly Fiorina

I don't care if her tenure at Hewlett Packard was not so hot, *anyone* would be better than the (bleep bleep) Barbara Boxer. I will refrain from cursing, but she really makes the blood boil. And who can forget this clip?

What is really nauseating is listening to Boxer harp about how at HP Fiorina "exported" jobs. And Ma'am Boxer really doesn't get that her taxation and her mandates and her lawsuits and her business bashing drove the jobs out, does she? Wow.

India progressed only when it adopted free markets. People do not outsource 1-800 numbers to socialist "paradises", like Hugo Chavez's bandito Venezuela. The sad truth is, thanks to Barbara Boxer and her ilk, it is now better to do business in India than it is here.

Cheap labor, you say? Which begs the question of who drove up the cost of labor? Who did that? Boxer did. Taxation is a big part of the cost of labor.

When Boxer and her ilk have made business into something to be excessively taxed for their welfare state, they should not expect the businessmen and women to remain here. They should not expect them to stay in America and lose their money for the purpose of becoming the fodder of National Health Care. They should not expect them to produce, when production of goods and services is punished with ever higher statist demands. Do not ask, "Who is exporting the jobs?", Ma'am--You are.

JUDGES: CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT:

My criteria here is how they voted to uphold or overturn Proposition 22 of 2000, which defined marriage by statute as only between a man and a woman, and how they voted on Proposition 8, which had to Amend the California Constitution after Judicial Piracy overturned Proposition 22.

I DON'T CARE if you think "Gay Marriage" is a good idea; there is NOTHING in the Constitution about it. The ultimate legal status of homosexual relationships (and yes, such relationships do merit some legal status) should be decided by the people, or by their elected representatives in the Legislature. I want The Rule Of Law, not The Rule Of The Anus. I want a representative republic, not judicial tyranny.

Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye: YES

She wasn't there during the Gay Marriage brouhaha, but she would have voted to stop judicial tyranny. She was appointed to the Municipal Court by Deukmejian, the Superior Court by Pete Wilson and the Appellate Court by Schwarzenegger. She is opposed by the "Green" (Watermelon) Party, which means she must be good.

Ming W. Chin: YES

In the 4-3 decision on Proposition 22, he was one of the three trying to stop judicial tyranny. Likewise for Proposition 8, where fortunately he was in the majority.

Carlos R. Moreno: NO!!!

He is one of the judges who struck down Prop 22 and voted to do the same to Prop 8. He voted against the right to self defense, and against Prop 21 of 2000, which had tougher penalties on gang related crime.

JUDGES: LOCAL AND REGIONAL:

This is a helpful site you can use, and this is another one. I do not always agree with them, they make the perfect the enemy of the good (see their votes on Ming Chin and Tani Cantil-Sakauye), but they are helpful.

SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION: Larry Aceves

Two words: Charter Schools. Groups of concerned parents form a public school for their children's particular needs. My ex-wife taught at one that focused on English immersion for Slavic immigrants. They work well and bring about better results. Larry Aceves supports them, Tom Torlakson, a teachers union stooge, blocks them.

STATE PROPOSITIONS: This post is getting really long, and those will come next time.

Voter Fraud? Will the Demunists Cheat November 2nd?

Michelle Malkin worries, and not without reason.

Socialist Health Care: The Left on a suicide mission?

Why are the Demunists still pushing this wretched "health care" bill, even when it is clear that the consequences are *not* well thought out ("We have to pass this bill to find out what is in it..."), the American public clearly does not like what they see so far, and corporate donations are falling off?

(Contrary to Left belief, the corporations make peace offerings to whomsoever is in power, and in fact have donated heavily to Obama, and not only because many of them are in bed with Obama on certain "green energy" and "stimulus" programs.)

The answer is that the Left understands that this issue is for all the proverbial marbles. If some of them have to fall on their swords politically to push The Big Agenda, no big loss, they will be back in the massively expanded bureaucracy if not in office:

Why let "health" "care" "reform" stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?

Because it's worth it. Big time. I've been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally "conservative" parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let's not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a "conservative").

The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic. Less than three months ago, they were stunned at the way the Democrats managed to get 60 senators to vote for the health bill. Then Scott Brown took them back down to 59, and Republicans were again stunned to find the Dems talking about ramming this thing into law through the parliamentary device of "reconciliation." And, when polls showed an ever larger number of Americans ever more opposed to Obamacare (by margins approaching three-to-one), Republicans were further stunned to discover that, in order to advance "reconciliation," Democrat reconsiglieres had apparently been offering (illegally) various cosy Big Government sinecures to swing-state congressmen in order to induce them to climb into the cockpit for the kamikaze raid to push the bill through. The Democrats understand that politics is not just about Tuesday evenings every other November, but about everything else, too.
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Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily "compassionate conservative" statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect "conservatives," as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha'penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.

Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it's so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.

OK, then what? You'll roll it back – like you've rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you've undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel'n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:

"Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?"

Indeed. Look at it from the Dems' point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That's a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.

I've been bandying comparisons with Britain and France, but that hardly begins to convey the scale of it. Obamacare represents the government annexation of "one-sixth of the U.S. economy" – i.e., the equivalent of the entire British or French economy, or the entire Indian economy twice over. Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary "comprehensive" health care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out.

This "reform" is not about health care, and certainly not about "controlling costs." As with Medicare, it "controls" costs by declining to acknowledge them, or pay them. Dr. William Schreiber of North Syracuse, N.Y., told CNN that he sees 120 patients per week – about 30 percent on Medicare, 65 private on private insurance plans whose payments take into account the Medicare reimbursement rates, and about 5 percent who do it the old-fashioned way and write a check. He calculates that, under Obamacare, for every $5 he now makes, he'll get $2 in the future. Which suggests now would be a good time to retrain as a realtor or accountant, or the night clerk at the convenience store.
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Because government health care is not about health care, it's about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.