It’s been awhile since VDH hit the ball out of the park like he does here. He really gets the nature of this Bourbon-esque monarchy that team Obama sees in the mirror. Well they had lots of mirrors at Versailles, as well.

United States of America does not possess the Guillotine. We have only impeachment and removal from office.

… Pity…T

Consider: The 120,000 troops in “the surge is not working” Iraq are now complaining of ennui —while the White House is paralyzed over whether to send more troops to the new escalating front in Afghanistan. How odd the present perceptions: Bush’s bad optional war became good in the public mind, and Obama’s necessary good war became bad…

The Russian gambit failed…

Sorta, Kinda, Maybe Diplomacy

…Guantanamo really will close on March 1, 2010; Iran must comply this time by June 1, 2010; all combat brigades will be out by March 2008, 2009, 2010; health care must pass by August, September, October, November…

Oil is climbing back over $80 a barrel…

They got greater bailouts, higher unemployment, larger deficits, and Chicago politics…

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• Laura Ingraham on ‘This Week:’ ‘I Might Not be Invited Back, George;’ Calls Out Charlie Gibson over ACORN Awareness (mediabistro.com)
• Politicized intelligence — will the Democrats investigate the real thing? (powerlineblog.com)
• Charles Krauthammer: In Afghanistan, the generals have spoken. But will Obama listen? (network.nationalpost.com)
• Little Hope, Less Change (navitor.blogspot.com)
• U.S. Chamber vs. Obama (blogs.wsj.com)
• Strassel: The Chicago Way (online.wsj.com)

The Cash for Clunkers program’s sudden financial insolvency is a valuable object lesson as the country gears up to consider nationalizing 17% of it’s economy under President Obama’s national health care plan. The initial one billion dollars allocated for the program was designed to boost car sales from Mid July to Labor Day, a period when retail sales slow down across the board. Thus, the plan was crafted to inspire car sales now and free up inventory dollars as the new model year approaches.

Continue reading…

Real time, real information is entering the debate over the Obama Administration’s health care plans. However, the problem with real time streaming information is the diminished ability to distinguish between reality and falsehood. Some political operatives fan sparks into flame for the purpose of watching the fire, and they reside in both the left and the right. These political thugs have their own reasons for creating social unrest, modeled after the Saul Alinsky school of political thought. They believe that chaos and crisis is one of the most favorable environments to push forward radical, transformational policies.

Others are willing to endure the sparks in the political and media firestorms in order to uncover the truth of a matter. Their approach may create sparks, but these patriots’ goals are to discover accurate, truthful information from which the American people can make informed decisions.

For this reason, I appreciate Newt Gingrich, and his well informed political analysis. Those who firebomb Newt usually do so because he accurate, shining the light on back room political hacks and their deals often struck out of sight from the American people. Newt also has demonstrated the ability to apply political theory and forecast the outcome of a given flight path.

Newt has done it again with a recent article at HumanEvents.com. The health care debate has been stirred into a frenzy around the topic of rationed health care. A core question is whether or not seniors will receive the same quality care in the final years of their lives as they received in their youth. Words like “euthanasia” and “death panels” have been lobbed like grenades into the public forum. While the comments reflect the feelings of those behind them, the consequences of these verbal explosions are not helpful to the discussion. What is helpful is finding sources which can tell us what a US single payer, government plan will look like. Enter again Newt Gingrich.

Check out his article describing Britain’s national health care, and the decisions which the Britain’s national health board make regarding the monetary value of a human life. How much are you worth?

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=33100

Timothy Burns

Light the Fire

Obamunism - it’s a thought provoking title. Yet do the majority of America’s citizens assent to this characaturization of our new president?  After all, he was elected on a groundswell of American populism (and maybe Acorn voter fraud, but who’s really keeping track).  Until recently, His poll numbers continue to reinforce his self-assumed deification, and the liberal media unquestioningly toes the party line.   With support like this, who wants to challenge the Chicago thuggery politics which have come to the White House with him?

If only we could get an outside point of view – someone who could comment on recent political evolutions in America who doesn’t have Democrat or Republican prejudice.

In april of this year, Pravda, the state run media outlet in Russia printed the following.

“It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.”

Read the full story here: http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/107459-american_capitalism-0#

This commentary comes from the Russian state run political news machine. I would suggest that this group knows communisism and marxism when they see it.

Stand up Americans.

Light the Fires

Tim

As I watched Obama stumble, dissemble, and ramble through his prime time “State Media apparatchik public event” er, press conference, a powerful though came to mind. OK, two thoughts: The 1st, of course, was the mental image of the Brezhnev era military parades featuring the Soviet Elite atop the Kremlin walls waving to the “adoring” masses. Ah yes, the power of a prescient double entendre!

The 2nd:  Obama’s poll numbers are falling faster than Jimmy Carter’s. The Democrats, the ones who still eat meat, are in open rebellion, rightly fearing an impending 1994 redux. This guy is a liar, like Bill Clinton was. Obama, though, unlike Mr. Lewinsky, is an ideologue. Obama has neither the political skills nor the inclinations of W.C. Clinton to sway with the prevailing political winds and but survival above ideology. He has, along with the most left-wing congress since 1917, shoved his progressive, fascistic agenda against the collective will of the American people, who have seen this scam before.

His presidency, to quote a real US president, is like “an Evil Empire, whose last pages are even now being written.”

The Obama presidency is over. God bless America.

What we’re seeing is the people speaking through their politicians. Obama and many Democrats assumed that the financial crisis would predispose most Americans to favor a larger and much more expensive government than we ever have had before.

A plausible hope for change, perhaps, but polling shows it hasn’t happened. The prospect of huge federal deficits extending out as far as the eye can see is not appealing to most voters. The prospect of having the health care sector of the economy designed by the people who gave us the $787 billion stimulus package is even less appetizing.

But we should not cynically underrate the importance of a strong argument, which may prevail despite the transcendent aura of a new president. Some of the Blue Dogs’ concerns may be parochial (rural health care), but they make a strong case, buttressed by ( CBO’s) expert testimony, that Congress should not rush to transform the health care sector at huge cost and with little cost-cutting effect. And the Polis letter signers’ concern about the negative macroeconomic effects of higher taxation of high earners can find support in the writings of Democratic, as well as Republican, economists.

What will this Thursday bring? We’ll wait and see what comes from the buzzing on Capitol Hill. In the meantime, as I read the text of the Blue Dogs’ and Polis’ letters, I suddenly heard the voice of the late Jack Kemp proclaiming at the 1984 Republican National Convention that if you subsidize something, you get more of it and that if you tax something, you get less of it.
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• Obama’s Sinking Approval Ratings Are Even Worse Than They Look (usnews.com)
• Obama may have to wait for health care passage (ctv.ca)
• David Brooks: “Liberal Suicide March.” (althouse.blogspot.com)

These are the “Four Legs” upon which the pedestal of our liberties have stood these nearly 250 years. The rule of law is a concept dating all the way back to the edicts of the Roman Emperors, but enshrined in our modern world by English common law, informed and enlightened by natural law, and codified starting with the Magna Carta in 1215.

The Constitution of the United States of America is the ultimate expression and synthesis of these four principles. It has indeed allowed for the sustenance of the greatest, most powerful, and freest nation in the history of this earth.

But what would happen if none cared any longer?

A good friend of mine opined today that Obama’s health care proposals, among others, are fascist, and blatantly unconstitutional. Understanding fascism is complicated, but a lack understanding the Constitution and our system of checks and balances is intellectual laziness, which I postulate is why we find ourselves in the situation of peril that exists today.

Constitution? Who the hell even cares that it exists anymore – certainly NOT when democrats are in power… Hell I wouldn’t be surprised to see it “suspended” – after all, Woodrow Wilson did so! FDR did so! Fascistic is exactly right: Jonah Goldberg (in “Liberal Fascism“) explains, and I have added here that:

Actually, the notion that fascism/Nazism and communism are polar opposites stems from the deeper truth that they are in fact kindred spirits. – Richard Pipes: “ Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism”. Both ideologies are reactionary in the sense that they try to recreate tribal (or feudal!) impulses. Communists champion class, Nazi’s race, Fascists the nation. All these ideologies, totalitarian impulses in the extreme, attract the same types of people!

AND they are all of the same in another respect – they are all forms of IDENTITY politics. Get the rich, affirmative action, “save the planet” – all pseudonyms for fascistic, socialistic, Nazi, communist, totalitarian, Orwellian control.

We are in deep trouble, and can only hope our founders were wiser even than we thought until now…T

The operational meaning of the word “fascism” for most liberals who invoke it is usually “shut up.” It’s meant to bludgeon conservatives into silence. But many on the left also genuinely believe that there is something fascistic in the DNA of contemporary conservatism, as if Republican Party conventions would get their rightful treatment only if they were worshipfully filmed by Leni Riefenstahl.

In his brilliant new book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg (a colleague of mine) demonstrates how the opposite is the case, that fascism was a movement of the left and that liberal heroes like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were products of what Goldberg calls “the fascist moment” in America early in the 20th century. How we think of the ideological spectrum — socialism to the left, fascism to the right — should be forever changed.

Benito Mussolini was a socialist and earned the title “Il Duce” as the leader of the socialists in Italy. When he founded the fascist party, its program called for implementing a minimum wage, expropriating property from landowners, repealing titles of nobility, creating state-run secular schools and imposing a progressive tax rate. Mussolini took socialism and turned it in a more populist and militaristic direction, but remained a modernizing, secular man of the left.

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The argument has been frustrating.

We have the Colin Powell types demanding we draw and quarter the Rush Limbaugh’s and abandon conservatism. It’s just not fashionable, you see! We should just manage big government better than the democrooks.

Then there are the purists. Preferably start a new party, but at the very least, kick all the RINO’s and McCain’s to the curb! The republicans are worse than the democrats and must all lose, so that we can then win.

I’ve always thought both of these schools of thought were self defeating, for yes, we need to stand for limited government and constitutional jurisprudence, but there will never be enough of us to form a lasting majority. We must get better at teaching, explaining, and finding thoughtful, principled candidates, as well as finding some answer to the leftist, statist media monopoly that feeds the cancer of socialism that has befallen us. Reagan is the prototype. Idealistic, educated, dedicated to a purpose, not to a career, and yet appealing to centrists and democrats because he could explain conservatism in simple ways that people are instinctively drawn to and can’t ignore.

Mr. Barone has hit on a perfect message to which we can only hope the GOP is listening!…T

“So I think Republicans today should be less interested in moving toward the center and more interested in running against the center. Here I mean a different “center” — not a midpoint on an opinion spectrum, but rather the centralized government institutions being created and strengthened every day. This is a center that is taking over functions fulfilled in a decentralized way by private individuals, firms and markets.

…To govern is to choose, as John F. Kennedy said, and those in charge of these new centralized institutions are making choices that inevitably favor some and hurt others. Unsurprisingly, the politically well connected tend to get the favors. Banks forced to take government money are now blocked from paying it back and in the meantime must direct funds where the government wants them to go…when government gets this intertwined with the private sector, when it makes decisions not based on neutral economic criteria but by what is at best guesswork about the allocation and valuation of vast amounts of capital, bailout favoritism and crony capitalism are inevitable.

…It’s arguably good policy as well as good politics to run against this over-powerful center. Bailout favoritism and crony capitalism not only misallocate economic resources, they also sap faith in the fairness of our institutions. After World War II, Democrats wanted to retain wartime high taxes, pro-union labor laws, and wage and price controls — all manipulatable for political benefit by political insiders. Republicans ran in 1946 on the theme of “Had enough?” and won big enough majorities to lower taxes, revise labor laws and abolish controls.

The 1946 Republicans didn’t move to the center. They ran against the power of the center and permanently redefined where the center of the political spectrum was. That’s a path today’s Republicans might want to consider.
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Two thoughts stuck me full force like a shot of espresso at 7AM while reading this piece – the 1st being the feeling of slowly having the wool pulled collectively over our eyes…and this one:

“Socialists believe in government ownership of the means of production. Fascists believed in government control of privately owned businesses, which is much more the style of this government. That way, politicians can intervene whenever they feel like it and then, when their interventions turn out badly, summon executives from the private sector before Congress and denounce them on nationwide television.”

…T

…Barack Obama seems determined to repeat every disastrous mistake of the 1930s, at home and abroad. He has already repeated Herbert Hoover’s policy of raising taxes on high income earners, FDR’s policy of trying to micro-manage the economy and Neville Chamberlain’s policy of seeking dialogues with hostile nations while downplaying the dangers they represent…

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• How about if we get a second opinion before committing to Geithner’s Goldman Sachs solution? (iflizwerequeen.com)
• New G.M. Chief Doesn’t Rule Out Bankruptcy (nytimes.com)
• GM’s Rick Wagoner Gone, but Carmaker’s Problems Remain (abcnews.go.com)
• Diplomatic Memo: Parsing the G-20’s $1 Trillion Pledge – So Far, Only on Paper (nytimes.com)