Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Fast and Furious cover-up shifts into second gear

August 31, 2011
Thomas Lifson

Decoding the recent bureaucratic moves at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, it looks a lot as if people are being given incentives to keep their mouths shut, and stick with the party line that higher-ups in the Department of Justice knew nothing about the program supplying drug gangs in Mexico with American firearms.

Patrick Richardson of Pajamas Media analyzes the news yesterday that Acting Director Kenneth Melson is being shuffled off to become a senior advisor on forensic science in the DOJ's Office of Legal Programs. They might  just as well rename the post Director of collecting salary and benefits while taking responsibility for nothing.
The move is suspect at best, given that Melson gave secret testimony about who knew what and when within DOJ, and included Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer.
ATF Special Agent Vince Cefalu, one of the original whistleblowers on the case, believes it's motivated by a "cover your ass" attitude on the part of Holder. Cefalu notes Melson is a "lab rat" and believes he should never have been put in charge of ATF in the first place:
I think everything we said all along has been proven to be true. It's no secret that they're cleaning house.
Cefalu thinks Holder asked Melson what job he wanted in return for his silence:
 You don't think they gave him that for his stellar performance at ATF, do you?
Melson reportedly watched some of the straw purchases in Arizona live via webcam in his office.
I take this as a sign of deep worry.  If nothing else, the crew at DoJ is going to try to delay disclosure of documents and records that might contain Eric Holder's fingerprints until after the election.

American Thinker

The Only Thing Keeping Obama in Office

August 31, 2011

There was Fareed Zakaria on his program GPS last weekend banging on about the superiority of the British parliamentary system over America's presidential one.  Good luck with that excuse.  There's such a delicious irony in the CNN/Newsweek commentator's suggestion that it's hard not to snicker.

Under a parliamentary system, Barack Obama would have been ousted as prime minister when the Republicans took back the House of Representatives in November 2010.  At a minimum, a Prime Minister Obama today would be in the process of being defenestrated by his own parliamentary party as part of a repositioning of the Dems for the 2012 election.  Faced with Mr. Obama's dismal poll ratings, Hillary and the president's fellow Democrats in Congress would be rising up to "do him down," as the Brits say.

(Maybe she still will.  Senator Eugene McCarthy didn't even announce that he was challenging President Lyndon Baines Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination until November 30, 1967.  Four months later, LBJ withdrew from the race.).

A British prime minister is head of government because he's been elected to that post by his own party's MPs, not by the voters.  Thus, the brutal fact is that a prime minister can at any time be given the bum's rush from 10 Downing Street by a revolt in his own ranks.  In the last 21 years, two British prime ministers have been ousted by a rival via exactly that route.

The first was the UK's greatest conservative post-war leader, Margaret Thatcher, in 1990 -- after eleven years in office.  It happened again in 1997 to the man who ousted her, John Major.  Far behind in the polls, virtually certain of defeat at the next required election, both PMs were forced out by their own parliamentary colleagues. 

That's how it works under the Westminster system, which Fareed Zakaria likes.

The Founding Fathers didn't like the Westminster system.  And the informed choice they made has served us well in times of national crisis.

That cunning old bird, Benjamin Franklin, knew Westminster well.  He'd been a lobbyist in London for almost 20 years when the Revolution broke out in 1775.  Dr. Franklin (his honorary doctorates came from St. Andrews and Oxford) worked Parliament on behalf of, among other clients, the colonies of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.  He knew well the pervasive corruption, patronage, and confused governance of Georgian England.

Later, after helping write the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Franklin served as the first U.S. minister to France.  There, he learned to speak French and saw l'ancien régime in action.  Ben Franklin brought that life experience to the Constitutional Convention in 1787.  He and the other Founders rejected kings and parliaments.  They designed instead a presidential system.

Absent impeachment, which requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate for conviction, a president cannot be removed until his term expires.  Thus, an American president can, like Mr. Obama, remain in office even though his public support has collapsed.  This is not some design defect: it is the intended result from the Founders.

This stability has been painted as a weakness of the American system.  Walter Bagehot, most notably, urged this point in The English Constitution.  I believe American history proves the contrary -- especially when one factors in the inherent instability of a parliamentary system where there are more than two major political parties represented.

It was our presidential system which enabled Abraham Lincoln to remain in office as a war president after 1863.  That enabled the North to crush the South's rebellion and save the Union.  More recently, it probably enabled another war president, George W. Bush, to remain in office after 2006 and win the Iraq War.

Either way, only the design of the Founding Fathers is keeping President Barack Obama in office right now. 

 Does that mean that Mr. Obama should simply resign, for the good of the country and the Democratic Party?  Well, Roger L. Simon, over at pajamasmedia.com, made  exactly that argument in a post on August 5.  
Roger Simon's point has only improved with time.  During possibly the most famous presidential vacation since Teddy Roosevelt went bear-hunting in Mississippi in 1902, Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal and Jim Geraghty in nationalreviewonline.com (among others) both speculated that the President might "do an LBJ."  The danger to America's national security of a broken president's continuing in office for another year and a half -- something I commented on -- is the exact reason Richard Nixon gave for resigning in 1974.

Of course, the Nixon precedent didn't deter Bill Clinton from staying in office after he was impeached in 1998.

But the real argument in favor of what would be only the second presidential resignation in history is economic, not political.  What the American people need right now is a change in the animal spirits of the economic marketplace.  The best stimulus which could be given to the U.S. economy before November 2012 would be the voluntary departure of Barack Obama as our president -- and the rollback or defunding by Congress of virtually everything the Executive Branch has done since taking office.

An announcement à la LBJ by Mr. Obama that he's not going to seek a second term wouldn't be enough to break the Capital Strike.

The other objection to Fareed Zakaria's suggestion is that parliamentary government is, when it works well, one-party rule.  That's a "tell."

Democrats always seem to like one-party rule, as long as they're the one party doing the ruling.  When in the White House, Democrats argue for centralizing all power in the presidency.  But once a Republican gets in, Democrats change their tune and talk about the dangers of an imperial presidency.

Presidential scholar and JFK advisor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. practically gave himself whiplash doing that.

With the shift from President Bush to President Obama, this shift happened once again.  Now, with the Archangel Barack's approval rating in the 30s, we're hearing the familiar refrain that it's the American form of government which needs to be changed, not the head of that government.

In short, Fareed Zakaria's plaint strikes me as just special pleading.  The problem is not our form of government, but the occupant of the White House.  That's fixable.

We don't need another leftist rationale for why Barack Obama shouldn't be blamed for the current state of affairs.  It didn't work for Jimmy Carter -- the last time, be it remembered, the American people were criticized for their "narcissism" -- and it won't work for this president.  The American people don't believe it.

And, whether under a presidential system or a parliamentary system, American voters are going to get the last word.  Most of us can't wait.

Until then, I'm content with the Founders' choice.

American Thinker

Diary from the Days of Madness


Someday we’ll all look back at this and laugh. Or cry. These are the dark days for small business and would-be entrepreneurs, who need only to open the newspaper, click on their iPad, or flick on the TV to see another attack on anyone who would have the temerity to start a business and produce something with their own ingenuity, drive, and hard work.


As America’s big-government “leaders” take us down the tubes, here’s what the future will record for the last couple days:

Big Government

Re-assigning an ATF Director Is Not Enough: Those Behind ‘Fast and Furious’ Must Be Prosecuted


News broke yesterday that punishment had been meted out for “Fast and Furious.” Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson had been re-assigned and U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke had resigned. There was no mention of pending criminal prosecution or jail time. Rather, we were politely informed that Melson would be moved to a new position at the DOJ in Washington DC while Burke would “return to private life.”


Hmmm. Let’s think about this: Over 150 Mexican law enforcement officials have been killed as a result of Fast and Furious. As have nearly 1,000 Mexican civilians, at least one U.S. Border Agent (God bless the family of Brian Terry), and who knows how many other humans on both sides of the border who have yet to be accounted for. And there are still over 1,000 weapons on the loose, although we are starting to find them more and more at crime scenes in America.

And all that happens in response to this is that an Acting Director gets re-assigned and a U.S. Attorney returns to private life?

Think about it: “Straw purchasers” went into gun stores to buy weapons they had pre-determined to pass on to criminals, and now those criminals have used the weapons against Mexicans and Americans alike. It has put us all at risk, and especially those living near the border in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

No wonder Congressman Paul Gosar of the House Oversight Committee contends that “we (Americans) were the known collateral damage” in this whole plan.


Yet we’re supposed to sit back and say, “Wow, that Eric Holder sure is tough on crime. Just look honey, he re-assigned Melson as a result of all this.”

No, no, no. It’s an insult to our intelligence and our love of country for Holder & Co. to think they can shift a few people around and we’ll forget the literal death and carnage that has been caused.

They tried this once already, when they re-assigned “two A.T.F. Phoenix division supervisors, William Newell and William McMahon…to positions in Washington” a few weeks ago. But that didn’t assuage any one’s anger over this outrageous operation then, and giving Melson a desk job in DC won’t do it now.

Moreover, U.S. Attorney Burke, who says he’s stepping down to re-enter private life, is the very one who denied “victim of crime” status to Brian Terry’s family earlier this month. What a cowardly human he must be: upon resigning he claimed “responsibility” for the “mistakes” associated with Fast and Furious, yet he denies Terry’s family the right to be recognized as victims of those very mistakes.

But as disgusting as these things are, we must remind ourselves that both Melson and Burke are just the tip of the iceberg. This goes much higher in the administration. And thankfully, Congressman Issa has made it clear he’s ratcheting up the investigation at this point, instead of slowing it down.

Big Government

William Shakespeare Responds to the CBC Declaration of War Against The Tea Party

 
During the past few weeks we have been covering the cross-country trip of Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) who have been been using job fairs as an excuse to incite hatred against the grass roots Tea Party movement. Among the more famous incidents were Maxine Waters telling the Tea Party to go to hell,  Frederica Wilson declaring the Tea Party as the enemy, and CBC Whip Andre’ Carson’s statement that the Tea Party programs are the efforts of Jim Crow who would like to see Black American’s “hanging from a tree.”


These charges are very serious and very false.  Rather than try to address these CBC charges myself, I have decided to ask someone much more talented in the language arts to answer the Congressional Black Caucus.

 I’ve channeled the Bard himself, William Shakespeare to answer the CBC’s  reprehensible, divisive rhetoric. This morning I went to a medium-rare and spoke to the spirit of the Bard of Avon, below is what he told me to write:
To call me names if it will feed nothing else,
it will feed my resolve. The CBC hath disgraced me, and
hindered me with their mistruths; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my policy, scorned my constitution, thwarted my
honest dialogue, cooled my supporters, heated mine
enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a tea party patriot.

Hath not a patriot eyes? hath not a patriot hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a CBC Democrat is?

If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
expose you for what you are? If we are like you in the rest,
we will resemble you in that.
If a tea party patriot wrong a Democrat,
what is his humility? Lies.
If a Democrat
wrong a tea party patriot,
what should his sufferance be by
the Democratic example?
Why, TRUTH. The villainy you teach us,
we will execute the opposite, and will expose you
for what you are,  frauds
who bully American voters like us lest we remind the public
you have no entitlement to your position
Nay we hold the power and you sit at our whim and will
Remember November, the Second of November remember:

Did not the Tea Party wave rise for the budget’s sake?
What progressive was sent home, that did lose,
And not for the economy? What, shall one of us
That struck the biggest progressive congress in all of history,
But for Taxing and Spending, shall we now
Contaminate our cause with base rhetoric,
And sell the mighty space of our constitutional movement
For so much trash talk as may be grasped thus?
I had rather be a dog, and bay the moon,
Than such a
n American

You have done that you should be sorry for.
There is no terror, CBC, in your charges
For we are armed so strong in honesty
That they pass by me as the idle wind,
Which I respect not.
We did ask of you
Not to spend sums of gold, which you denied us,
For we will raise no more money till the budget cut.
By heaven, I had rather coin my heart
And drop my blood for drachmas than to wring
From the hard hands of any American their limited cash
To pay for your fiduciary indiscretion.

We did sent
To you to pay our bills FIRST,
Which you denied us and called us racist.
Was that done like Americans? Should we have answered
the Congressional Black Caucus so?
When Tea Party Patriots grow so covetous of power
To use such rascal venom in political debate
Be ready, gods, with all your thunderbolts.
Dash them to pieces!

Big Government

The New York Times: Circling the Drain


Academics have, for centuries, looked far back in time as they argued and speculated about why the Roman Empire fell, but we now have an opportunity to observe in real time the accelerating decay of that imperial gatekeeper of liberal conventional wisdom, the New York Times.

A pair of op-eds from August 27th illustrate this sad phenomena as its writers invent a new stage in the Kübler-Ross grief scale inserted somewhere between “denial”, “anger” and eventual “acceptance”: “delusion.”



The first op-ed is by congressman and civil rights legend John Lewis, whose work in the Sixties makes it awkward to have to point out that he is entirely full of it, having morphed from an anti-establishment hero into just another establishment hack.  Sadly, he seems totally oblivious to his sad transformation over the last five decades even as he keeps milking his past in order to block any kind of critical look at the nonsense he is peddling in the 21st Century.

His op-ed is entitled “A Poll Tax by Another Name,” which is a problem because what he is whining about – mostly laws that require voters to prove that they are who they say they are – is neither literally nor figuratively a “poll tax.”

Poll taxes are, well, taxes charged voters for the privilege of voting.  Voter ID laws, in contrast, are requirements that people identify themselves before voting.  Nope, not the same.  Not even close.
“Despite decades of progress, this year’s Republican-backed wave of voting restrictions has demonstrated that the fundamental right to vote is still subject to partisan manipulation. The most common new requirement, that citizens obtain and display unexpired government-issued photo identification before entering the voting booth, was advanced in 35 states and passed by Republican legislatures in Alabama, Minnesota, Missouri and nine other states — despite the fact that as many as 25 percent of African-Americans lack acceptable identification.”
Those GOP bastards, forcing people to prove they are who they say they are before voting in an election!  It’s almost a Robert Byrdian level of racism!

Wait, I should show more respect for this Democrat icon.  After all, Byrd was a kleagle.

Let’s leave aside the dubious notion that a quarter of all black adults lack a photo ID – which would mean, among other things, that a quarter of them can’t drive.  Or cash checks.  Or fly on an airliner.  Or get a job, not that this would be a big issue in the miserable Obama economy.

Let’s also leave aside the even more dubious (not to mention patronizing and utterly obnoxious) idea implied by Lewis that these citizens lack the basic competence to obtain such ID.  It’s interesting that hardcore conservatives have a significantly higher opinion of African-Americans’ ability to function than those liberals who loudly claim their leadership, but it isn’t surprising.  Liberalism is an ideology based upon low expectations.


Also left unsaid is why we should be concerned that someone of any race who can’t fulfill the basic function of obtaining a photo ID isn’t voting.  If voting isn’t important enough to you to spur you to make the effort to go get an ID, you probably shouldn’t be voting in the first place.

Lewis (like the rest of the liberal establishment) can’t seem to find any evidence of voting fraud – and the Times staff made no effort to help him.  For both their benefit, let me point out that there’s this thing called “Google,” but you can save yourself the trouble and just review Michelle Malkin’s overview of some recent voter fraud cases.

Instead of confronting the issue, Lewis pooh-poohs the necessity of such laws, dismissing the idea of voter fraud with such insights as “in Kansas, there were far more reports of U.F.O. sightings than allegations of voter fraud in the past decade.”

Yeah, we can all agree that rural Republican states are not hotbeds of voter fraud.  The problem is urban Democratic areas like Chicago, Milwaukee and so forth – places Lewis’s deeply dishonest screed ignores – where voter fraud in support of liberal candidates is endemic.

At the heart of this is one sordid fact.  Lewis and the Democrats – and the Times – are not concerned that voter ID laws won’t work to prevent voter fraud; the liberals are terrified that they will.

Oh, and you can almost see Lewis’s Times editor’s face contort into a rictus of horror at Lewis’s observation that in Texas, a concealed weapons permit is considered valid voting ID while a student ID is not.  Well, kind of by definition, a person getting a CCW has undergone a background check more rigorous than one required for getting a passport or a driver’s license – though when the Constitution mentions the right to bear arms there doesn’t seem to be a footnote saying that the Second Amendment only applies when some bureaucrat signs off on it.

On the contrary, I bought a lot of beer with the fake student ID my pal, who worked in the UC San Diego office where they made them, got me.  Thanks for the hazy, intermittent memories, suckers!
Times regular Charles Blow’s op-ed is similarly reality-challenged.  It’s called “Falling Forward,” and it makes you wonder if Blow has been in a cave for the last three years.  Actually, he kind of has – the walls of willful ignorance surrounding the liberal world of the Times are more impenetrable than yards of granite when it comes to keeping out facts that undercut the liberal narrative.

Blow is outraged by what he claims is a huge increase in unintended pregnancies, and he has identified a cause.

Republicans are limiting access to abortions.

Well, you gotta give him that – killing their babies would solve the problem of unintended pregnancies.  But then, so would these women deciding to limit their mating to men they are actually married to instead of every random dude who comes along with a bottle of booze and a smile.

Oh, wait, that’s judgmental.  We can’t have that.  See, “[w]e have to remove the stigma and judgment around sex.”  That’s the real problem – people feel so judged and stigmatized for having sex that they, well, have sex with everyone in sight.  Wait, did I read that right?

Now, savor the magic of Blow’s prose – prose that got through the vaunted Times editorial process:
“This is what we’re saying: actions have consequences. If you didn’t want a child, you shouldn’t have had sex. You must be punished by becoming a parent even if you know that you are not willing or able to be one.
This is insane.
Even if you follow a primitive religious concept of punishment for sex, as many on the right seem to do, you must at some point acknowledge that it is the child, not the parent, who will be punished most by our current policies that increasingly advocate for “unborn children” but fall silent for those outside the womb.
This is not how a rational society operates.
Wait, so let’s see if we can puzzle this out.  Someone who breeds out of wedlock is “punished by becoming a parent?”  Apparently, Blow does not know the difference between a “punishment” and a “consequence.”  I guess someone who drops out of high school is being “punished” by not getting a diploma, and someone who doesn’t show up for work is “punished” by not getting paid.

This is a great illustration of how liberals seem to believe that bad things that stem from stupid behavior aren’t easily anticipated consequences of poor decisions but are, instead, the result of some malevolent conspiracy by evil conservatives to cause misery to innocent losers for reasons that are not readily apparent.

Oh, and not thinking like Blow is “insane.”  Doesn’t someone at the Times own a dictionary?

Moreover, people who think you probably shouldn’t kill an unborn child because he is inconvenient practice a “primitive” religion – you know, like Christianity and Orthodox Judaism.  And, remarkably, it is the child who is “punished” by not being aborted.  But we’re the ones who aren’t “rational.”

And, wackiest of all, Blow states that “Now is when we need government to step up and be smart” – like that’s ever happened.  If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results, than liberals like Blow and the Times staff are certifiable.

And so, the once mighty New York Times keeps spinning around the bowl.  Around and around it goes, and when it finally darts through the figurative drain, there won’t be any argument about what finally flushed it away.  Nonsense like these superficial, silly op-eds will be Exhibit A.

Big Journalism

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

A Palin Presidential Run is the Ultimate Debunker

August 30 2011 
By:



Celebrity-hungry, fame-seeker, and money-minded. This is the description the media and the establishment typically use to portray Governor Palin.

Here’s a question for the media: How can one explain the actions of someone whose only focus is self, self, and self, but opted to sell a private plane handed to her as part of the package of being Governor? How does the money-hungry image match with a Governor who chose to forgo the taxpayer funded private chef with the result that she would continue to do her own cooking?

How can a Governor who supposedly dreams of dollars fight special interests, powerful oil companies, and corrupted individuals with the knowledge that doing so will ensure they won’t contribute a dime to her campaign or include her in back-room shady dealings as per their usual customs with the previous Governor Frank Murkowski and most politicians? After all, the power they’ve amassed was largely thanks to their constant efforts in keeping the political machine properly oiled.

Why would a Governor out to promote and benefit oneself lead the most transparent administration in world history?

Why would someone who has dollar signs reflected in her eyes refuse to accept a pay raise of $25,000 recommended by an Alaskan state commission? Which money-minded individual has ever left a six figure position without an equivalent or greater monetary job in the waiting? There was no way Palin could’ve known that she’d sell millions of copies of the books she hadn’t yet written at the time and which were later proclaimed by all that they would sit and gather dust in the basement of bookstores. Certainly no-one could have foretold that this supposedly brainless woman would produce a documentary watched by millions, become a sought-after speaker, and a Fox News contributor.

Besides, many politicians including Perry have authored books and gone on book tours, or embarked in other private endeavors to earn additional money while continuing to officially serve the people and receiving their weekly taxpayer-funded check. If Palin were truly greedy she could have thus similarly continued being governor and receiving her paycheck while raking it in from her books and other endeavors.

An announcement from Palin that she’s running for president is the ultimate debunker of the celebrity-seeking money-craving myth. If she has left the public service in order to make a fortune off her name, as the Palin-haters claim, then why would she once again run for public office after seeing such stunning success in the private sector? After the TLC documentary Hollywood has jumped to have Palin join their world where she’d have the opportunity to make tens of millions, become a true celebrity, and have the media fawning and falling all over her. Choosing to face a tough campaign, more media scrutiny, and then serve the country in these difficult times for a paltry $400,000 comparative to making millions with a Hollywood career simply doesn’t match the image of Palin as portrayed by the media.

The only answer that can thus properly explain the incongruity of the facts vs. the fabrication is the hypocrisy and hatred from the left, media, and establishment. They simply choose to ignore facts that don’t match their lies. While the correct course of action for the media, left, and establishment would be to quit making things up they will in all probability not change their current agenda and continue to invent fabrications and distort the facts.

Sarah Palin has understandably mainly focused the last few years exposing Obama’s terrible policies and his lack of leadership, and hasn’t spent much time on her own experience and qualities except when refuting the media or when relevant to the national discussion. During the campaign, the Palin team will have the opportunity to debunk these and all other ridiculous lies regarding her and her record that are circulating on the internet and believed by many.

The biggest challenge likely awaiting Palin and her campaign staff may be the educating of voters as to who the real Palin and the real Obama are, and that the true solutions to get the economy moving once again were actually implemented successfully in Alaska during her governorship. Unfortunately, since a large percentage of voters tune into elections with barely half an ear it’ll be necessary to shrink her resume to bite-size portions — not empty slogans, but short enough so that it will stick in  the minds of millions who vote based on emotion rather than logic and brains. Needless to say, every Palin message released will also be spread via O4P, C4P, and her millions of supporters thereby increasing the number of recipients and amplifying its effectiveness.

The battle between truth and falsehood is about to begin. Let the truth prevail!

Conservatives 4 Palin

What Liberals Fear More Than Obama Losing

August 30, 2011
By Geoffrey P. Hunt

The left are now wringing their hands fearing their agenda is overripe, blaming everyone else for their own spoiled pickling.  While Obama's sinking prospects for re-election are disquieting, the real source of liberals' despair is their sudden, unexpected realization that the progressive agenda is dead in its tracks and will likely be in full retreat after 2012. 

Obama is finished, but the demise of their identity politician is neither the main event nor surprising.  He was a lame duck after he returned from Copenhagen empty handed in September 2009, expecting the mere presence of his electro-magnetic glow would secure the 2016 summer Olympics for Chicago. 

He cannot claim a single success.  His resume is a bibliography of failure.  His signature achievement, the dubious namesake ObamaCare,  was designed by someone else.  Its central feature, the individual insurance mandate,  is destined to be overturned by the Supreme Court.

We will have our fill of post mortems, ad nauseam, about how The One broke their hearts; his considerable skills, now considered overrated,  were just no match for the enormity of the clean- up needed after Bush's mess; a victim of his opponents' entrenched racism.

Obama was only a convenient vessel, a mere tool. But enough about Obama; even the Congressional Black Caucus is ready to Move On.

The end of the Progressive Era, eclipsing Obama, has come from two places -- one fiscal and pragmatic, the other ideological and visceral.  First, the debt crisis and persistent economic woes have made it clear that the progressive agenda is unaffordable and unsustainable.  The money pumps in the forms of more borrowing and taxes cannot possibly keep up with the tons of green water spending coming aboard.

 "Short-handed" by Lionel Smythe, National Maritime Museum, UK



Second, beyond the limited government ideology now gaining real traction, Americans without an ideology are finding that central planning madness from Washington is making their lives worse, not better.

The tipping point provoking the libs' worst nightmare was contained in Rick Perry's speech announcing his candidacy to be the Republican nominee for president.  Perry proclaimed his mission was not to make government more accountable, effective, or efficient -- that's standard issue bromide from populist reformers.  

No, Perry was bold enough, and as his critics will assert reckless, to suggest government should be irrelevant -- his words "as inconsequential to your lives as possible."  This may be the most radical anti-government posture since Calvin Coolidge, leaning on the likes of Lord Acton:
There are many things the government can't do, many good purposes it must renounce.  It must leave them to the enterprise of others.  It cannot feed the people.  It cannot enrich the people.  It cannot teach the people.
The liberal press are frightened out of their wits.  Whether Perry is an authentic purebred limited government advocate may be debatable.  No matter, he's close enough.

Perry's credibility as a governor, his disdain for Washington, his unapologetic and outspoken defense of conservative principles, his jobs and business climate record, all despite occasional lapses and rhetorical excesses -- in short his popularity and substance overcoming his defects -- make him the candidate the Dems fear most.  Perry is more ruthless, pragmatic, and plain spoken than any of his rivals.

MSM's Jeff Greenfield nearly soiled his pants describing Perry's brand of extremist limited government:
It is a formulation of a brand of current conservative thinking that breaks radically with two centuries of American history. There is no mission - other than defense against foreign foes - that is the proper task of Washington...
To argue that there is nothing of moment that Washington should be doing marks a version of that argument that is nothing short of astonishing.

Read all of it here.  Greenfield seems to believe whatever the federal government does is equally momentous -- fighting wars, ending slavery, enabling westward expansion beyond the Alleghenies, and mandating rules on low flow toilets and energy saving light bulbs.  Greenfield commits the increasingly commonplace liberal fallacy of conflating real with surreal.  How absurd to suggest that by rejecting job killing global warming taxes and denouncing EPA regulations crippling business expansion and economic growth, Perry would also have opposed the Homestead Act and desegregation.

It doesn't require a PhD in economics or history to sort out the origins of the progressives' inevitable downfall.   
During the past 60 years we've rung up deficits in 51 of them.  Democrats controlled both the US House and Senate in 38 of those years.  The Democrats, increasingly  dominated by the ideology of redistributive economics, welfare state largesse, and central planning elitism,  have simply engorged themselves without restraint, spending us into oblivion. 

Spend, spend , spend some more...of someone else's money. Then threaten to take more of it while libeling those who protest financing this bottomless pit.

The liberal vision of the ideal state is fat, sloppy and lazy.   Why exert yourself if someone else will buy you food stamps and school lunches?   Why bother learning to read, write, do simple algebra, or acquire any employable skills when you'll get free health care and subsidized housing?   Why eat right and keep fit when obesity and diabetes is a protected disability?

Americans are finally fed up with the Democrats' value system:  no personal accountability; moral equivalence; belief that success is derived from exploiting everybody else; everybody else is a hapless victim; we are all racists and xenophobes, consigned to endless acts of contrition where reparations and open borders would be the only relief.

Here's a story of a public school janitor describing the obscene waste in his school's cafeteria.  An apt metaphor for the trillions of social program spending since LBJ's Great Society:  taxpayer dollars shoveled onto a compost pile with nothing to show for it.  Far from a bed of roses, instead fostering a culture of depravity, dependency, and entitlement.   The writer of this piece wonders out loud what many of us think in private.  Is poverty real with such bounty?   Certainly poverty of spirit is real.  We are an impoverished nation when it comes to intellectual honesty, denying that self- reliance and sweat equity, not government handouts, enabled American exceptionalism.

The liberal legacy soon to visit America has been displayed writ large in the London rioting.  The consequences of the welfare state combined with illiteracy and a moral vacuum were predicted nearly 50 years ago by Daniel Patrick Moynihan's infamous "Report", The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. Moynihan focused his attention on urban black society, the fatal breakdown of the family unit, and was vilified by the left for doing so. Moynihan's insights should not confined to the black community. His observations would equally apply to Britain today and throughout much of post-modern America.

Today's black unemployment rate ranges from 20-40% depending on who's counting and where. What have the trillions devoted to our welfare state achieved for them? More illiteracy, more broken single parent families, more crime, more dependency, more rage. And now, we're bankrupt. What next?

What's next is not more of the same. The welfare, entitlement and central planning state is a perpetual resource sink paying no dividends.  Flush Obama and turn out the lights on the Progressive Century.  The party is over.

American Thinker

For Business, It’s 1920 All Over Again


American political fortunes have long been tied directly to the economy… so you would think that politicians would do a better job understanding how to improve the economy.  We know consumer demand is down – because consumers don’t have the money or home equity they used to have.  That alone is keeping the economy down.  Businesses, however, are said to have money but they are not spending or investing it. 

Why? Because for them it’s the early 1920’s all over again.


Our so-called brilliant, Nobel Prize-winning President, for months, has exhorted American businesses to hire employees and invest – as if wishing for an economic recovery would make it so.  Recently, however, Democrat and mega-businessman Steve Wynn told the country – and Obama, if he was listening – why cash rich business is not hiring and investing.  According to Wynn, “this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime . . . those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President . . .”

President Calvin Coolidge used to say, “The chief business of the American people is business.”  Even so, business doesn’t invest just for fun – they invest for profit – and they don’t invest if they think the risk of not making an acceptable profit is too high.  I wrote “acceptable” because business weighs the fact that even if they make money, it will be taxed.  As such, a business must decide not only if it will be able to make a profit, but will the profit be so much that it would be worth the trouble/risk after taking taxes into consideration. 

Keep in mind business knows that it carries all of the downside risk and that government will take a good portion of any upside.  If at some point the risk gets too high, business investment and spending is stalled.

Today, Steve Wynn, and much of American business, believes that the risk of not making a decent profit is too high for several reasons.  For instance, business doesn’t see sufficient consumer demand – so they don’t stock their shelves or expand production as they otherwise might.  Regulations and the threat of more regulations are so high that they hold back money to pay for future costs.  Taxes and the threat of higher taxes are also high – and that too causes business to hold back spending in order to pay those future taxes.  As a result, business investment and spending is stalled.


All of which brings us to the early 1920’s.  Back then government created unacceptable risk because it was taking too much of the upside.  Democrats under Woodrow Wilson instituted the income tax in 1913 with a top rate of 7%.  Just over 3 years later it was 77%.  In other words, the federal government was telling Capitalists, “You risk the downside and, if you are lucky enough to make money, on that last, top dollar, we will take 77%.”  Not surprisingly, by 1918, we were in a deep recession because of a reduction in war spending and the high tax rates.  By the early 1920’s, poor consumer demand and high tax rates caused investors to believe that there was too much risk for them to spend or invest very much.

So what did they do with their money?  They parked huge amounts of it in tax-free, risk free, government bonds.  Incredibly, rather than risk their money, the rich were being paid tax-free interest by the government. 

Also not surprisingly, government revenues lagged because business transactions and profits had been greatly reduced by the high tax rates.

Treasury Secretary and Republican Andrew Mellon saw all of that.  It confirmed what he knew; namely that the “history of taxation shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid. The high rates inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business.”

Mellon and his President, Calvin Coolidge, wanted the rich and business to take risks again.  To get them to do that, Mellon knew that the risks had to be reduced enough to jump start investment – and like a boulder at rest, Mellon knew it would take a big push to get the investment ball rolling.  To do that, they had government lower income tax rates to 25%.

With that, the rich and business decided that, while it wasn’t normally worth taking risks during a recession with those high tax rates, the new rate was sufficiently low enough to take a risk. They believed that they had the opportunity to keep a sufficient amount of the profits they might make.  Sure enough, they took risks, they invested and the Roaring 20’s ensued. The subsequent surge in risk-taking created the greatest period of innovation in American history and federal government revenues jumped over 60% because profits soared.

Today, the risk is too high for American business and the rich.  They have withdrawn their productive capital from the market place. Government spending, as the failed stimulus bill proves, only increases risk because it is temporary and leads to demands for higher taxes.

The only thing government can do is to truly change today’s psychology of risk.  The ONLY way to do that is to lower the costs of regulations and the rate of taxes – not temporarily and not just a little – but as far as the eye can see and substantially.  They must do it enough to convince business to take risks again – just like Coolidge and Mellon did in the early 1920’s.

Big Government

Patent Reform Act Threatens ‘Engine’ of Prosperity


Editor’s Note: Paul R. Hollrah is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a contributing editor for Family Security Matters and a number of online publications, including mine, BobMcCarty.com

Today, I published a piece by Paul that deserves widespread attention.  For that reason, I share it below.


In early February 1997, I received a telephone call from a longtime friend in Washington. He was calling to say that we were being recruited for a very important assignment, an assignment related to national security.

He explained that, in 1996, the Clinton administration agreed to give the People’s Republic of China a complete set of magnetic tapes from the U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office computers, containing every iota of American technology registered with the patent office in the previous 160 years. With the information from those tapes on their computers, the Chinese would know exactly how to make everything we make. But more importantly, by tracking the long-term development of every conceivable kind of technology and extrapolating the path of development into the future, the Chinese could “leap-frog” our own technological development.
 
No American president could possibly think it was a good idea to do such a thing – unless, of course, he owed a debt of gratitude to the Chinese and he was more concerned about that than he was about the future prosperity of the American people. The American people would never have known how many factories were being built in remote provinces of China, employing workers who were happy to work for two or three dollars a day. When the proposed technology transfer was inadvertently reported in a Commerce Department newsletter, the offer was withdrawn.

But what was potentially more damaging to the United States was contained in a Memorandum of Understanding with the Japanese government, signed by Commerce Secretary Ron Brown an agreement to introduce legislation in the U.S, Congress that would destroy the U.S. patent system, as we know it. The vehicles for that treachery, already introduced in Congress, were H.400 and S.507, the House and Senate versions of the Omnibus Patent Reform Act of 1997.


Because the legislation was so thoroughly “wired” on both sides of the aisle, our employers were seeking a small team of experienced government relations professionals who’d been in the political arena long enough that many of their longtime friends had risen to become influential members of Congress. They were looking for lobbyists who were on a first-name basis with members of Congress…. men whose reputations in the political world were such that they could ask members of Congress to take certain actions, on faith alone, and expect those requests to be honored.

What made the task so difficult was the fact that the legislation was supported, not only by the president and vice president of the United States, but by the Peoples Republic of China, the Japanese government, the Indonesian Lippo Group, and 80 or 90 of America’s largest multinational corporations all but assuring the neutrality of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.

On the day we arrived in Washington, April 12, 1997, we tuned in to C-Span just in time to see the House of Representatives pass H.400 on a voice vote. Not one member of the House of Representatives demanded a roll call vote on a bill that would severely emasculate a core function of the federal government.

When we were finally able to obtain a copy of S.507, we read it very carefully and we were horrified. Never in all of our years as lobbyists had we ever read a worse piece of legislation. If we had ever wondered what it was that the Chinese received in return for the millions of dollars they poured into the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign in 1996, there was no longer any doubt:

• They proposed that the Department of Commerce relinquish control of the U.S. Patent Office and that the patent office become a wholly-owned corporate subsidiary of the federal government.

They proposed that the patent office be controlled by a six-member advisory board made up of individuals drawn from the private sector, all with vested interests in patent office decisions… i.e., institutionalized conflict of interest.

They proposed that the patent office be authorized to accept gifts of cash, or anything else of value, without limit, from any and all sources, including individuals, corporations, foreign businessmen, and foreign governments, including those with patents pending.

They proposed that the patent office be authorized to borrow money and to create debt, without congressional approval, and to retire debt by increasing patent fees… in effect, giving the patent office the power to levy taxes. Under the U.S. Constitution, only the Congress has the power to levy taxes.

They proposed to repeal that portion of U.S. patent law which required that all technical details of every patent application be held in strict confidence by the patent office until the inventor was given patent protection. Instead, the patent office would be required to make public all technical details of every new patent application just eighteen months after the inventor filed for a patent – on average, two and one-half years before inventors received patent protection.

They proposed the creation of a system of “patent reexaminations,” wherein any individual or corporation, for a $2,000 filing fee, could cause an existing patent to be reexamined. Under this provision, inventors would be prohibited from using, licensing, or exploiting their patents in any way while their patents were under reexamination. And while reexaminations could take years to complete, the clock would continue to run on an inventor’s seventeen-year patent term. Of course, if the inventor was able to successfully defend his patent, those who wished to steal his technology would have others standing in line to file for additional reexaminations. Rather than face bankruptcy through fighting endless reexaminations, most inventors would gladly sell their rights to their intellectual property for pennies on the dollar.

Clearly, the latter two provisions were included in order to attract the support of America’s largest multinational corporations. If ever there was an invitation to corruption, the Clinton-Gore Omnibus Patent Reform Act of 1997 was it. The bills had no redeeming value whatsoever, and there was nothing in either bill for the American people. But when we saw who was supporting the bills we could understand their motivation.

We were up against the most powerful coalition of political and moneyed interests in the world, and the bill they were supporting was potentially more damaging to the nation’s economy and to intellectual property rights than anything the nation had previously experienced. Our “mission impossible,” if we chose to accept it, was to see to it that neither of the bills would ever reach Bill Clinton’s desk.

Our initial strategy was to find just one senator who’d be willing to stand up and oppose S.507, even to the point of staging a filibuster. Unfortunately, what we found was that no member of the senate, other than Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the Senate sponsor, had focused sufficiently on the bill to know what it was all about. Then, on Tuesday May 20, we learned that Hatch had set a “markup” session in the Judiciary Committee for the morning of Thursday, May 22.

We’d been able to learn from friendly sources in the Senate that Hatch had arranged for S.507 to be reported out of his the Judiciary Committee by “unanimous consent,” meaning that, under Senate rules, the bill could then be passed on the floor of the Senate by “unanimous consent” – without debate. The railroad was well-oiled.

On Wednesday, May 21, my associate and I placed a call to our friend, Gov. Don Sundquist (R-Tenn.). After a brief explanation of what we were up against, we asked the governor to call Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and ask him to object when the bill was called up in committee.

The following day, as Senator Hatch took his seat in the cavernous Judiciary Committee hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, he was confident that he would pass S.507 out of his committee by unanimous consent. But that was not to be. When Senator Hatch called for the vote on S.507, Senator Thompson rose from his chair, pounded his fist on the table, and shouted, “NO, BY GOD, SENATOR. I OBJECT!”

In that instant, the most damaging piece of legislation in recent memory came to a screeching halt. There would be no “unanimous consent” in the Senate committee, and there would be no “unanimous consent” on the floor of the Senate. S.507 had suddenly become just another Senate bill – subject to all the political give-and-take of the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”

I tell this story now because those who wish to destroy the U.S. patent system, the constitutional wealth-generator that has been the “engine” of our prosperity since the first days of our republic (whoever “they” are), have waged a never-ending attack on the system since the day we defeated them in 1997. This year is no different. When the Senate returns from its August recess, the members will be asked to end a filibuster against passage of H.R. 1249, the Smith-Leahy Patent Reform Act of 2011. It is essentially the same bill that we defeated in 1997 and it deserves the same fate.

If we care about preserving our standard of living for future generations, we should all call our senators and demand that they vote “no” on the motion to invoke cloture.

Big Government

Obama NLRB Eliminates Secret Ballot Elections-Making Card Check Forced Unionism a Reality


Outgoing NLRB Chair Wilma Liebman and the of the Obama Appointed NLRB Board members, Craig Becker & Mark Pearce, voted to eliminate secret ballot election protections.  Now, when employers make secrets deals with a union bosses agreeing to recognize a union without allowing his employees a secret ballot vote;  employees no longer have the right to force an NLRB secret ballot election and allow workers to decide if they want the union or not.

Unable to pass EFCA, Card Check Forced Unionism,  through a Democrat-controlled congress, Obama is paying off Big Labor through his handpicked NLRB Board.  He is doing all this at the expense of worker freedoms and worker paychecks. And, the NLRB Decision is applied retroactively to bar even elections that have already been held but not counted.


Employees can now be forced to pay for an undisclosed arrangement between employers and labor union bosses without having the right to put it to a secret ballot election.


This is particular heinous in non-Right To Work states where employees are forced to pay union dues and fees regardless of the fact that they did not want the union.  The NLRB’s actions again prove why the National Right To Work  Act needs to be passed.   Then, every American will have the freedom to withhold his paycheck from union bosses if they choose.

Big Government

How Obama lost his presidency in August 2009

By Andrew Breitbart |  
Tuesday, August 30, 2011


President Barack Obama speaks about Hurricane Irene in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington on Sunday, Aug. 28, 2011.


When the history of Barack Obama's one-term presidency is written, August 2009 will be remembered as the turning point.

It was then that thousands of ordinary citizens began to rise up against a health care bill being forced through Congress. And it was then that the Obama administration declared war, through its union proxies, against the American people.

Obama had been elected to fix the economy. But Democrats had planned for years to use the first year of the next "progressive" presidency to push universal health care, according to the plan written in federal prison by convicted fraudster and Democrat strategist Robert Creamer. That plan declared: "To win we must not just generate understanding, but emotion — fear, revulsion, anger, disgust."

The Democrats followed that plan to the letter and vowed to pass ObamaCare — then known as H.R. 3200 — before that summer's end. But when they dispatched members of Congress to town hall meetings to sell Obama's policy, they met unprecedented outrage — not just protests, but the simple, searing questions of their constituents: "Why should we pay for abortions?" "Does the legislation cover illegal immigrants?" "Have you even read the bill?"

Some of the opposition was organized by Tea Party groups that had sprung up in the wake of President Obama's massive stimulus in February 2009. But much of it was spontaneous. Then-House Speaker (now Minority Leader) Nancy Pelosi called the protests "un-American" and falsely accused Tea Party members of carrying swastikas. That made the public even more indignant.

By early August, President Obama realized he was losing public support. So he turned to the "community organizing" techniques of his Chicago days. On Aug. 6, 2009, Jim Messina, then-White House Deputy Chief of Staff (now managing Obama's re-election campaign), told Democrats to "punch back twice as hard." The same day, John Sweeney, then-president of the AFL-CIO, issued a memo telling union members to show up at the town hall "battleground."

That very evening, union thugs at a town hall meeting in Tampa assaulted a man who opposed ObamaCare, ripping the shirt off his back. And that same night in St. Louis, Ken Gladney allegedly was beaten up outside a town hall meeting as he tried to distribute Gadsden ("Don't Tread On Me") flags by union thugs yelling, "What kind of nigger are you?" The next day, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius thanked SEIU members for their efforts at town halls.

It didn't stop there. On Aug. 31, left-wing organizers outside a town hall meeting in suburban Chicago instructed activists to block residents' questions. The Gladney attack was a small part of a much larger campaign of intimidation, directed from the White House. The acquittals in the Gladney case cannot erase what happened, even though the high-flying lawyers brought in by the SEIU outmatched the rookie prosecutor. But the verdict has been seized upon by the left-wing propagandists at Media Matters, which received a hefty donation from the SEIU after the Gladney attack and which set about trying to destroy Gladney's credibility.

Local graduate student Adam Shriver has been a willing accomplice in Media Matters' revisionism. In an Aug. 25 oped column in the Post-Dispatch, he accuses me of 'smearing" unions — yet in this case and others, Shriver focuses obsessively on shreds that favor his ideological patrons, knowing and caring little about the facts as a whole.

Recently, when professors at the University of Missouri were caught indoctrinating their students in violent tactics in labor disputes, Shriver tried to dismiss the evidence by focusing on edits in a highlight reel created by an independent blogger. He refuses to join calls for the university to release video or transcripts of the course as a whole, thereby assisting the administration's cover-up. Both private and public unions continue to use those thuggish tactics — most recently in the Verizon strike, where union members staged a mock funeral outside an executive's home, and even put a little girl in front of a truck to scare replacement workers.

Ken Gladney was an innocent victim, singled out by thugs specifically because they thought he was a black conservative, for whom the Janeane Garolafos of the left reserve special contempt. Those who accuse the Tea Party of being "terrorists," and who blamed Sarah Palin for the Tucson massacre, have yet to be held accountable for the violence they unleashed in August 2009. They "won" the Gladney case, but they are losing the nation, thanks to the extraordinary courage of ordinary people who will not be silenced.

Andrew Breitbart is founder of bigjournalism.com.

Monday, August 29, 2011

America's One Child Policy

Sunday, August 28, 2011
By Daniel Greenfield

Vice President Joe Biden, Commissar of the Cracked Head Club, visited China and voiced his understanding of China's One Child Policy. The part that he understood was the forced abortions and the eugenics of baby girls. The part that he didn't understand was how the Chinese government expects one breadwinner to support four retirees. But as usual Biden had it backward.


 
 
The Chinese government isn't worried about how retirees will be supported, because they have no investment in them. They'll receive whatever social benefits are doled out, and that's it. China's brutal pragmatism and lack of democracy makes rationing health care and anything else easy. Massive rallies and protests happen all the time in the People's Republic, unreported by the media, and are ignored by the authorities. Tienanmen Square showed the limits of popular protest in creating political change. It's a lesson that neither the leadership nor the people have forgotten.

Biden should have really been asking his question in Washington D.C. While America has no official one child policy, it has promoted a shift from family savings and support, to a government supervised safety net. Taxes have gone up, the single income family has become rarer and birth rates have dropped. Marriage and children have become more expensive, the former has dropped at a staggering rate among lower income families, and the latter has gone up leading to large numbers of single parents.

The modern state has all for intents and purposes tried to replace the family, providing an expensive cradle to grave social support network. A network that favors those most who work the least.

The government replaces fathers, mothers and children. Children are cared for by the government. So are their elderly parents. The utility of having children diminishes. And the entire system is funded by higher taxes and economic gimmicks that decrease jobs and diminish buying power which lowers the number of self-supporting families, and lowers birth rates in general and especially among the productive working class who usually provide the biological base for population expansion.

Boosting tax revenues means rewarding spenders over savers, which leads to a consumeristic society that drives even more people into the social welfare system. And even those who stay out of it and try to save, are operating in a system whose monetary policy and programs are set against them. The short term tax revenue gains and monetary policy gimmicks lead to much larger problem as again they create more dependency as everyone is forced into relying on the government social safety net.

Birth rate is the engine behind the social safety net. If the birth rate falls, then even when practiced with the best intentions, the whole system becomes a massive Ponzi scheme. But how do you keep the birth rate high when taxes are high, higher education has become mandatory and a consumer society teaches people to reward themselves now, instead of deferring instant gratification until later?

And without a high birth rate, a major revenue gap opens up. If solvent long term funds were used to prepare for the gap, then the day of disaster could be delayed. But the same political elite that created the problem is also guilty of uncontrollably spending all those funds, and then holding out their hand for more.

In Europe, one answer has been more government subsidies for children. A typical statist solution that tries to use the unacknowledged source of the problem to create incentives to bypass its consequences. While subsidies can marginally increase birth rates, they do not address the real problem.

Taking away people's money and then paying them to go shopping in order to stimulate the economy is common enough in the United States. And it never works. You can't restore a healthy economy with subsidies and you can't restore a healthy birth rate with some social benefits. It's not just about the money, it's also about the culture that was created by those policies. A post-family culture.

So the other Western solution is to import immigrants from a different culture with high birth rates. Europe has all but destroyed itself with that approach, and America is speedily following along. Sure, the total birth rate numbers look good, and no one is supposed to care how many European countries are set to be Muslim by 2100.

But the economics of it still don't work because social utilization goes up drastically to pay for all those extra children, many of whom will never work legally, others who will take far more out of the economy than they will ever put back in. The cost of trying and then imprisoning a single criminal for a year is staggering. Those rapes, murders and drug deals don't just have a human cost-- they have a shocking economic toll. And throw in a major riot like in London and the economic damage adds up to the loss of entire major cities.

And there we are back again to Europe set for a Muslim majority, and America set for a Hispanic majority, and both are going completely bankrupt anyway.

Chinese leaders could have pointed all this out to Biden, but they find it easier to let our civilizations collapse in their own time, while the Century of China gets underway. China may never make it, its own economy is parasitically interlinked with ours and its centrally planned economics and social unrest will probably take it down before 2050. This would be nothing new for China which has gone down this way before. And dynasty or party, it has never really learned from its mistakes.

And Europe arguably has never learned from the mistakes of the Roman Empire, instead again overreaching its conquests, outsourcing its defense, showing weakness at the worst possible time, opening cities to barbarians and engaging in absolute folly in a crisis have been repeated. And the United States is following along.

Peering at the world through the spyglass of history, it would seem as if every people are repeating their old errors again. The State of Israel looks a lot like the latter days of its kingdoms, placing its faith in an untrustworthy power, Egypt and Rome, and allowing itself to be led to disaster by internal division and treason. The Muslim world is aching to revive the Caliphate with the same end results, cultural decay and collapse.

It's astounding that no one has learned anything in thousands of years except how to make a better smartphone. We can put people on the moon and make dinner in five minutes, but we can't stop destroying ourselves in cycle after cycle of history while finding creative ways to justify our suicides.

 
 
America doesn't need a One Child Policy, but it has one anyway that punishes childbirth among productive populations and rewards it among unproductive populations. That leads to a division of lower income populations into a working class and a welfare class. With the working class supporting the welfare class. Marriage is down among both classes. It's too expensive for the working class and too unnecessary for the welfare class. Why bother getting married when the local aid office is already your husband, wife and parents combined? The more children you have, the more the government takes care of you.

If China's One Child Policy is a moral horror, the Western One Child Policy is an economic and social horror that has already destroyed major European and American cities. And it's just getting started.

The left's fear and loathing of Western self-perpetuation translates into shrill agitation for population control. Which means more tax penalized one child or no child families in the West alongside ten child Bangladeshi families living off social welfare since tax penalties can't be expected to apply to people who don't pay taxes.

The countries worried about population growth have too little of it, and the countries that aren't worried about it have too much of it. Globalists dream of some UN administered worldwide population scheme, but if no major country was willing to turn over its nuclear weapons to the UN, how likely is it that they'll turn over their babies?

Ted Turner has praised China's One Child policy and suggested that tax penalties could be used to dissuade large families, along with Cap and Trade for babies to allow those families or countries who don't have children to sell their childbearing rights to more fertile people and places.

Turner's plan would allow Europe to sell its child credits to Africa, but how would Africa afford it? China would have an entirely new export in baby credits, but the main countries buying it wouldn't be able to pay for it either. There's something ghoulish about such talk of trading unborn babies between the continents, aborted Western and Chinese babies being sold as credits to create new babies in countries subsidized by Western aid.

But we're trading enough live babies already. There is a booming trade in Chinese and African babies being adopted by Western couples. As with other Western industries, the manufacturing is outsourced to China, while the Western consumer overpays for a product that seems convenient in the short term, but is highly injurious to him and his society in the long term.

The consequences of using the Third World as a baby manufacturing factory, through immigration or adoption, are the end of the First World. You can outsource your energy production to countries that hate you and finance a wave of global terrorism. You can outsource your manufacturing and industry to countries that hate you and lose much of your economy and gain a powerful new enemy. But when you outsource your population replacement to peoples that hate you-- then you're gone.

A country can survive anything but its own self-inflicted genocide. And low birth rates combined with population replacement amount to that. Suicidal genocide by a civilization that no longer thinks there's any reason to go on.

The West has subsidized population booms in the Third World with its medicine and its aid. Now it's subsidizing its own population replacement by them. Uncle Sam, John Bull and Madam Liberty are sitting in a skyscraper somewhere with pistols to their heads, cheerfully making plans for their farewell parties. The parties will have a very diverse invitation list. And the evening will end with the suicide of the cultures that contributed so much to the world in the last 500 years.

But the fecklessness of Western liberals and liberalized conservatives may stem their self-inflicted suicide. Before the populations are wiped out, the economies will be.

America and Europe are coming up against the impossibility of maintaining their governments and their economies at the same time. They will have to choose one or the other, and whichever choice they make will leave their countries much less attractive to immigrants.

Either the end of the social safety net or the end of economic growth will significantly reduce rates of immigration and even lead to the exit of some immigrants. It's already happening in America just on the current unemployment rates alone. A complete economic collapse would dramatically reverse the number of opportunistic immigrants who come for profits, rather than for freedoms. But this isn't any kind of solution, it's more like a suicide realizing that he can't hang himself and jump into the water at the same time. He'll have to choose one or the other.

But drowning a dog to kill the fleas on it is no answer. Even if you reduce the number of fleas, the dog is still dead. And it's not clear if the dog can be revived again. The Russian people have never recovered from the damage done to them by Communism. Neither have their birth rates. America isn't as badly off-- but many European countries may have passed the point of return. The easiest way to tell may be to see which countries have an active political movement dedicated to national survival and which don't.

 
 
The 2012 election looks set to come down to a contest between a candidate who favors open borders and economic growth-- and a candidate who favors open borders and big government. Lucky us. We'll get to choose between a man who still wants us to have hope and faith in being able to hang ourselves and jump in the lake at the same time-- and a man who believes the future lies in jumping into the Rio Grande and lowering taxes. As they say north of the border, Dios Bendice a Estados Undisos Mexicanos.

Not that it matters. The fleas aren't killing the dog, they're feeding off its self-inflicted wounds. And the wounds are economic and cultural. Japan kept out immigrants, but its low birth rate and falling marriage rate, under the shadow of a big government maintained recession puts it in the same club as the rest of the First World  It may avoid filling its cities with Third Worlders doing manual labor and low level crime, and instead replace them with robots, but it's still on the path to extinction.

Meanwhile back in China, the Commissar of the Cracked Head Club, was explaining to his hosts who were trying to stifle their laughter, how unsustainable their system is.

"Poor dumb bastard," they think, "doesn't he understand that this is what drives our competitiveness. That Chinese parents push their child even harder to succeed when he is their sole source of support?

But how could Biden understand, what government control, estate taxes and the death of the family have robbed America of? Chinese families may have only one child, or two, but they still think in the long term. That child is their future. But Biden's own party is barely capable of thinking two weeks ahead. His opposition is hardly much better. Show me a Republican with a long term plan for the country, and I'll show you an unelectable candidate. Show me a Republican with short term solutions that ignore long term problems-- and I'll call him, Mr. President.

Having children is about thinking of the future. Cultures that stop thinking of the future, that cannot imagine the world going on after they die, find innovative ways to commit suicidal genocide. The left is right that having children is not selfless, it's long term selfishness. It's our willful desire to keep our blood and our people around on the planet long after we're gone.

Long term selfishness like that built this country. It built a lot of countries. It raised industries out of the ground and covered the continent with people. But when a culture loses its sense of long term selfishness, what replaces it is a short attention span and instant gratification. And as the economic reasons for having children vanish, and so does the structure of the family, the reasons for having children diminish. The biological need is replaced by housepets and casual sex.

China's competitiveness is personal, but it transcends the personal. Its leaders are venal, greedy and amoral-- but they also think of the future. American competitiveness is personal. It doesn't look to the future. Our companies are satisfied with making short term gains. Our politicians look for short term successes. Our culture seeks only to lock in the benefits of the present, while China sacrifices the present for the future. It does so in brutal and ugly ways, but you don't have to fight a duel nicely to win. You just have to play to win.

Children are the staying power of a nation. They are its long term projection into the future. When a nation does not think of the future, then it has no children and when a nation has no children, then it has no future.

Sultan Knish