Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Real must-see TV: Energy independence
Monday, October 6th, 2008
If you want to know why we need to reduce our dependence on all oil (not just imports), watch these videoo. If you want to know how to do it, watch these videos. If you want to see through the phony plans of McBama, OCain, T. Boone Pickens, Al Gore, and everyone else who is trying to get rich, elected, or both, watch these videos.
The first video is on the C-SPAN site here. It features Anne Korin of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, who suggests that the way to achieve energy independence is to make ourselves independent of all sources of oil. How? By depriving it of its strategic value. Ms. Korin has a compelling story and a detailed plan for getting us where she believes we need to go. The video is a bit over an hour long with Q&A. The talk itself is about a half-hour of very useful and relevant information but the Q&A is just as informative.
The second video, filmed by alternativeenergy.com is on YouTube here; it is a short (about nine minutes) summary of Ms. Korin’s views.
After you’ve seen one (or both) of the videos, read the related OpEd piece that was published in the Washington Post.
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The Republicans’ Jimmy Carter
Monday, September 29th, 2008
George W. Bush is on the verge of limping out of the White House as ignominiously as Jimmy Carter did – reviled, mocked, and bewildered. If his catastrophic 700 billion dollar giveaway gets through Congress, “W” – along with his liberal allies in Congress – will forever be remembered as the President who sold out America.
There’s no need to go over all the bad ideas rolled into this monumental transfer of public wealth to private coffers. Plenty of commentators have turned over the rocks to expose the dirty little creatures scurrying around beneath. I want to focus on Bush’s betrayal of his constituency and his country.
The Great Betrayer of Conservatism
For all his empty talk about the free market, Bush is revealing himself to be a statist who wants to manage the economy for the benefit of the wealthy. It is ironic that real conservatives are often falsely accused of promoting the American plutocracy, but it is Bush, the phony “compassionate conservative”, who is actually trying to deliver the goods. Unlike real conservatives, Bush likes the upside of free markets, but lacks the courage and conviction to accept the downside.
The premise of deregulation is that the market will be a better watchdog over financial institutions than government bureaucrats. The market has spoken. Fanny and Freddy, WaMu and Wachovia, AIG and Lehmann have been disastrously mismanaged and the market has put an end to their follies. But Bush can’t bear to let the market act when it rightly punishes incompetence. To him and his ilk, the”free” in “free market” means only the freedom to succeed; it does not include the freedom to fail. Bush wants to sacrifice America to protect members of his class from failure.
(Of course, the Pelosis and Reids of the world – along with plenty of compliant Republicans – bear much of the blame by encouraging radical organizations like Acorn to push banks into making loans that no sane underwriter would allow.)
The Great Betrayer of America
At a time when left-wing radicals like Al Franken and moveon.org are making an all-out push to oust Republicans from government once and for all (as if they presented an ideological threat to their socialist dreams), Bush is trying to hand them their favorite weapon – class hatred.
In order to seize power, the radical left requires a deep-seated belief that life in America is a zero-sum game. If the rich grow richer, the poor must become poorer. Their entire political life depends on the notion that the only way “working families” can succeed is for the government to take money away from the “rich” and give it to the people who really “deserve” it – people who vote for them.
Liberals will never admit that it is capital – not government – that creates jobs, credit, and opportunities. They will never admit that the whole pie can grow and everyone’s own little slice with it. And they are committed to keeping America ignorant of those simple facts.
Bush has created a new and powerful “Main Street v. Wall Street” class war. He seems determined to prove to the American people that (a) wealthy financiers need to be protected from financial loss, and (b) only government spending can “solve” the problem. This war plays directly into the hands of liberals on both sides of the aisle (especially in the Senate) who hate democracy and hate the limits the Constitution places on their power.
Is there any hope? Not much. Even if sanity prevails and the bailout is somehow averted, Bush will turn over the White House to either McBama or OCain. The Republicans and Democrats will continue to look after their own interests. A return to such archaic ideas as liberty and fiscal sanity would require the American voters to do something they haven’t done in decades. Voters would have to look beyond their own sense of entitlement and the “journalists” who pander to it, and make some tough, responsible decisions.
That seems unlikely. Sadly, John Kennedy’s stirring admonition to ask what we can do for our country has become just another sound bite to be ignored along with the Republican and Democrat candidates’ empty promises.
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Time to vote third-party!
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
I’ve always bought into the idea that a vote for a third-party candidate was a wasted vote. No more. I’ve become convinced that a vote for a Republican or Democrat – at least at the national level – is a wasted vote. Why? Because neither party can be trusted to do what is right for America.
Consider this: Based on their relative solvency, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG should be bailing out the U. S. government, not the other way around. Uncle Sam is so broke and so in debt to China that it’s folly to pretend he has the assets to save even the neighbor kid’s lemonade stand from financial ruin. And there’s no point in partisan finger-pointing. The Elephants and Jackasses have all sold us out with equal fervor.
Yesterday I briefly watched Sen. Chris Dodd blather about how, amid the feds’ .7 trillion dollar give-away, the “taxpayers will be covered”. Covered with what, he didn’t say, but he didn’t need to. When it hits the fan, the politicians and their rich buddies who created the problems in the first place will be well under cover. (See Ron Paul’s email about this vast giveaway.)
The argument from hysteria (the politicians’ favorite way of clouding any issue) is that there will be terrible economic consequences if a handful of private financial instutions are allowed to collapse. What the politicians never tell us, however, is how much more terrible the consequences will be when our government collapses from the weight of its own spiraling debt. I – along with most of Congress – may be long gone by then, but my children or grandchildren are going to live in a debt-ridden country with a third-world economy because we took the easy way out and voted for Republicans and Democrats.
I’m voting for Libertian candidate Bob Barr and I’d encourage you to do the same. But if you want to vote for the Green candidate or the PETA candidate or dust off Ross Perot or write in dear old dead Pat Paulsen, it doesn’t matter to me. Just do it! My guy won’t win and neither will yours. No matter what happens, we’ll be saddled with McBama or OCain and it won’t matter much which one it is.
But if enough of us vote for someone who is neither Democrat nor Republican, we might put a little fear into the self-serving fat cats inside the beltway who have had their way at our expense for way too long.
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Obama/Biden: Sounds familiar….
Sunday, August 24th, 2008
Obama picked Joe Biden, launching a day-long media love-fest. Joe’s first assignment will be to travel to England in search of speeches he and Barry can use. Maybe Al Gore will teach Joe to use the Internet he invented so Joe can do his reasearch with a small carbon footprint.
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Politics: Are liberals liberal?
Monday, November 7th, 2005
America was founded upon the principles of classical liberalism. A 1994 essay on the LockeSmith Institute website, “The Rise, Decline, and Reemergence of Classical Liberalism“, provides a summary of the essentials of classical liberalism. These are:
- an ethical emphasis on the individual as a rights-bearer prior to the existence of any state, community, or society,
- the support of the right of property carried to its economic conclusion, a free-market system,
- the desire for a limited constitutional government to protect individuals’ rights from others and from its own expansion, and
- the universal (global and ahistorical) applicability of these above convictions.
Liberals then …
The expression of these essentials – with their focus on indivudual freedom and rights – can be found in the Declaration of Independence (emphasis added):
We hold these truths to be self-evident,
- that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
- that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,
- and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
… and “liberals” now
But the mis-named modern “liberal” (hereafter mod-lib to distinguish from the real thing) has no use for a limited government that derives its powers “from the consent of the governed”. Indeed, the goal of the mod-lib is to grow (and control) a strong central government that imposes its will on the governed and enforces an elitist vision of a pseudo-egalitarian society.
The phony equality that is the backbone of this ideal society is best illustrated by mod-libs’ attitudes toward public schools. Mod-libs treasure public schools. They reach for greater and more centralized control of both curriculum and funding of public shools. They fight every effort to assist parents who want to get their kids out of public schools and send them to private schools. They lobby and vote for ever increasing appropriations for the grand social experiments that so often overwhelm the simple goal of educating students. (The fact that some of the appropriations find their way to one of their most reliable constituencies, the teachers’ unions, is an agreeable side effect.)
Yes, mod-libs love public schools. They do all they can for them – except send their own kids there. You will find few children of Presidents, Senators, or Congressmen in Washington public schools.
In reality, the “egalitarian” vision of the mod-libs is a two-tier society, one where the wealthy elite enjoy the blessings of freedom while the vast majority endure the curse of egalitarianism. It is no surprise that two of the wealthiest men in the Senate are prototypical mod-libs – Teddy Kennedy and John Kerry – or that the largest single contributor to mod-lib causes is billionnaire George Soros. And why not? These are men who have the money to buy themselves and their familiies out of the oppressive egalitarianism they want to impose on the rest of us.
Ironically, the genuine liberals who wrote the Declaration of Independence and helped to write the Constitution thought that the greatest danger of democracy was majority tyranny. The objective – freedom – could hardly be achieved if the majority routinely trampled the rights of minorities who could not muster the votes to preserve their own freedoms.
From Thomas Jefferson’s “yeoman farmer” who would value and defend freedom, to the restraints on power exerted by James Madison’s competing interest groups, to the addition of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, the Framers sought structures that would restrain the raw power of the majority. Little did they guess that it would be the 20th century corruption of their own liberal principles that would impose the very tyranny they feared. How? By circumventing democracy altogether.
Hating democracy
Mod-libs hate democracy. They hate it because democracy allows Americans to directly influence the legislative bodies most accessible to them – state and local governments. These bodies are more directly controlled by voters, more likely to be comprised of “citizen-legislators”, and more reflective of their voters’ will. With Congress long the playground of what George Will refers to as the privileged “political class”, state and local governments are the only legislative institutions that empower ordinary people.
But mod-libs don’t like to share power. In the middle of the last century, they discovered that if they could control the federal judiciary, they could thwart the desires of the American people as expressed through state and local legislatures. Mod-lib judges simply invalidate the will of the people by declaring “unconstitutional” any legislative acts that run counter to the ruling elite’s vision. As long as the Supreme Court agrees with the decision, no reference to actual provisions of the Constitution is required and the people’s voice has been effectively silenced. Do you doubt that mod-libs deliberately circumvent the democratic process? Consider where their victories are won and their will imposed.
Disenfranchising America
Time and time again, the American people, speaking through their state legislatures, have tried to control abortion. Some states wish to outlaw it altogether; others would impose few or no restrictions. But the judicial onslaught begun with Roe v. Wade, which was decided with only passing reference to the Constistituion, has disenfranchised them.
Majorities in many states have tried to require their schools to mention that Darwinian evolution is not a universally accepted, monolithic fact but a fractured and flawed hypothesis. They want their students to know that evolutionary orthodoxy is constantly reviewed and its claims challenged, not only by creationists but by “real” scientists doing “real” science. But Edwards v. Aguillard stripped the American people of any right they thought they might have to insist on scientific honesty in their schools.
Citizens in several states and localities would like to acknowledge the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition on their own legal system. This isn’t such a strange idea – the Framers of the Constitution created a form of government patterned on that of the Presbyterian church of the time. While the Code of Hammurabi, for example, is an interesting legal artifact, it is historical fact that the British and later the American legal systems were heavily influenced by the Ten Commandments. To simply note that fact does nothing to “establish” a religion (as prohibited by the Constitution). But state and local governments are seldom permitted to publicly mention this aspect of their own history.
This prohibition, of course, is the result of mod-lib judges who could find nothing in the Constitution’s establishment clause on which to hang their hats. They turned instead to a private letter from Thomas Jefferson who mentioned in passing something he called the “wall of separation between church and state”. Typically, upon finding a nicely turned phrase to undergird their personal view, such judges ignore the fact that, according to Jefferson, the “wall” existed to protect relgion from government, not the other way around.
One need only look to recent bitter battles over judicial nominees to see evidence of the mod-libs’ fierce defense of their anti-democratic strategy. Democrats can live with Republican legislative victories; mod-libs can accept the presence of conservatives in their midst. What they cannot tolerate is a crack in the legislative hegemony that has been seized by uncontrolled and unaccountable federal judges.
If mod-libs aren’t liberals, what are they?
There is another political system identified with a powerful, overbearing central government dominated by an elite minority – fascism. The ultimate irony is that both the mod-lib and the fascist subordinate the rights of the individual to the power of the state. The only difference is that the fascist forthrightly states that the state is more important than individual citizens, so the subordination of individual rights is properly done for the benefit of the state. The mod-lib claims that the state’s exercise of power is actually for the benefit of the individual, so the state is usurping and exercising the citizens’ rights for their own good! There are two obvious grounds for refuting this specious assertion:
- As we’ve seen, particularly in the case of public schools, the exercise of power by mod-libs is meant to benefit those who exercise it (though there may be collateral benefits for others).
- The state could exercise its power in opposition to the clearly expressed desires of the citizens only if the state were able to know better than the individual what would be best for him or her. Such is the arrogance of mod-libs that they actually believe this is the case.
In The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defined a blackguard (villain) as “a man whose qualities, prepared for display like a box of berries in a market – the fine ones on top – have been opened on the wrong side. An inverted gentleman.” In like manner, we can observe that a fascist – who makes no effort to disguise his interest in power and oppression – is simply an honest mod-lib.
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