All over this land
The all-out effort to force Wisconsin to back down on public sector unions will eventually fail because there isn’t enough money to pay for a leftist victory. The Washington Post conveyed the stark message of National Governor’s Association: the states are broke. Between the budget cuts Congress is proposing and demands by the public sector unions, the state budgets are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Don’t the unions know that? They probably do. What the unions are probably aiming for is something more subtle: control over the process of any reductions to their entitlements so that they still stay in charge.
The depth of the financial crisis facing the states is illustrated by the fact that the most of Wisconsin’s budget deficit is driven by Medicaid shortfalls. Like many other states, Wisconsin is trapped in a perpetual budget crisis caused by an expansion in the program’s beneficiaries coupled with a lack of money to serve them. Wisconsin is in fact seeking a waiver from HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius to tighten Medicaid requirements, something that will no longer be possible once Obamacare is fully implemented. The unions are only part of the problem. What’s driving the crisis is that it probably the only part of the problem that Walker can get at.
But even if Walker wins, it will not solve the basic problem. A blog at the Loyola Law School summarizes the situation. The states are being bankrupted from above as well. The Medicaid program is going bankrupt and providers are leaving the system, leaving those it is supposed to care for high and dry. And when Obamacare kicks in, what isn’t taken by the unions will be swallowed up in the entitlement programs. The system is going to process the taxpayer so thoroughly, they’ll even get to can the squeal.
The only problem, from the liberal point of view, is that the global economy is bad. But it will get better and they want to be in charge when it does. Even the Democrats understand the that cuts have to be accepted for now, yet would prefer to deal with the problem — insofar as they actually deal with the problem — by leaving it in the hands of the boys. The Washington Post explains:
In contrast to Wisconsin’s Republican governor, who has targeted public-worker unions as the chief villain of his state’s budget-cutting drama, Democratic governors who face similar challenges have tried to avoid confrontation by quietly cutting deals with labor leaders.
California Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed largely sparing schools and prisons from deep cuts as he tries to close the state’s $25 billion deficit, and powerful unions representing teachers and corrections officers that spent millions to help elect Brown are backing his plan.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has angered public-sector unions by calling for deep reductions in benefits, has worked closely with some labor officials on proposed cutbacks and is promising more dialogue in the coming days.
Since the soak the taxpayer business is bad right now, the strategy appears to be to talk the boys into taking voluntary reductions in their take until things get better. Walker is being unreasonable about things and therefore needs to be brought into line. Behind the Peter Yarrow 1960s nostalgia performances in Wisconsin is an older refrain: nice capitol you have there, it would be too bad if something happened to it. AFL-CIO Chief Richard Trumka said it best. Raising taxes will create jobs.
“We need to create jobs. The best way to do that is through infrastructure development.” … Trumka didn’t say specifically how much he would raise the gas tax, but mentioned he’s shown the President a $256 billion plan to improve infrastructure. If every billion spent on infrastructure creates 35,000 jobs, as he claims, this package would create close to 9 million jobs over the next five years.
And Trumka is perfectly right. It will create jobs for the boys. He didn’t necessarily promise net jobs. Somebody else’s jobs are somebody else’s problem.
This land is your land, this land is my land
But the foxes cannot be left in charge of the henhouse; not for any length of time, anyway, because they can’t help themselves. Eventually they’ll take a little over, and a little more and still more … It’s a pity Walker can’t use the old movie line, “the only way we can break the mob is to stop letting them get away with murder.” People don’t talk that way any more. It’s hurtful.
If the unions “win” in Madison it will be a pyrrhic triumph. The system is being bled at both ends, and the Democrats are wrong: the “recovery” is not coming. And that means that the unions and Big Government types are digging their own political graves. The music may play a little longer, but not forever. Consequences can be delayed, but they can never be denied. “The mill of the gods grinds slowly, but they grind exceeding small.”
Below, Ann Althouse learns that what rights you think you have are not necessarily the same rights the public sector unions think you have. So, pay them more.
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How long will it take the governors to break the power that the public sector unions have over the democratic party? Or will that doom the democrats to “generations in the electoral wilderness” ??
There’s probably readers here that have some expertise in these fields, so I’m wondering:
What is the FED governments response going to be when California comes for the money? What options do they have?
Of course, the first option is to give them nothing and let them sink or swim on their own. I think the economic realities of refusing to bail out Cali will trump the negative political problems. I just don’t see the FEDS allowing this state to go belly up, while knowing the possibility of triggering worldwide chaos if they do.
What options do we have to keep them afloat but force them into taking responsibility to right their ship and cease to be a burden to the rest of the country? Is there a way for the FEDS to loan or give Cali money, and take the State into a quasi-receivership? I don’t think this has ever been done, and have no idea what would be invovlved or even if it is lawful under the Constitution.
I’d appreciate any thoughts.
Wisconsin circa 2011 is just Bleeding Kansas 1859. Is it to be free state, where the government works for the people or a slave state, where the people exist to serve the government? The clock is ticking. The emotions are being fed. And we know what happened in 1860 when one group refused to accept the results of a ‘democratic’ vote that November to preserve their unsustainable institutions.
Wretchard,
The system is going to process the taxpayer so thoroughly, they’ll even get to can the squeal.
The system is what it is about. It isn’t about money. On some level it is about more than crude power, that is it is about more than the power to get anything done. Most of us think like people who passed High School Physics and know that energy is defined as the capacity to do work. Work is defined as an observable physical activity. They do not believe in that. This explains why their Energy policy is designed to drain the capacity to actually get any work perfomed from the system.
These people are Communists, real Communists because they believe in something. For True Believers it is about real Power, the power to mold minds. We do not understand, they really believe this stuff. They think that magic will happen and they will change what people are, they will rule the human heart and they will become Gods.
Thulsa Doom: I wish to speak to you now. Where is the Eye of the Serpent? Rexor says that you gave to a girl, probably for a mere night’s pleasure, hmm? What a loss. People have no grasp of what they do. You broke into my house, stole my property, murdered my servants, and my PETS! And that is what grieves me the most! You killed my snake. Thorgrim is beside himself with grief! He raised that snake from the time it was born.
Conan: You killed my mother! You killed my father, you killed my people! You took my father’s sword… ah
[Rexor twists his arm]
Thulsa Doom: Ah. It must have been when I was younger. There was a time, boy, when I searched for steel, when steel meant more to me than gold or jewels.
Conan: The riddle… of steel.
Thulsa Doom: Yes! You know what it is, don’t you boy? Shall I tell you? It’s the least I can do. Steel isn’t strong, boy, flesh is stronger! Look around you. There, on the rocks; a beautiful girl. Come to me, my child…
Thulsa Doom: [coaxes the girl to jump to her death]
Thulsa Doom: That is strength, boy! That is power! What is steel compared to the hand that wields it? Look at the strength in your body, the desire in your heart, I gave you this! Such a waste. Contemplate this on the tree of woe. Crucify him!
In the 90′s when the economy was roaring along and the Clinton Admin announced that it had “beaten the business cycle” unions struck not for more pay but to increase union power.
The UAW struck to stop the Big 3 from paying their people so much overtime. Instead they wanted to hire more workers. So, the union essentially directed strikes designed to decrease the pay of the workers and increase the union dues coming in.
The UPS union struck to stop the use of part time workers. Once again, more union members and more union dues was the real objective.
Everyone knows what happened to the big 3 as a result of having all those ultimately unneeded workers. And the result of the UPS strike is that Fed Ex got into the ground shipping business big time – and while UPS workers calculated how long it would be before they made up their lost wages, Fed Ex celebrated their windfall profits by giving their workers a bonus.
Dtmack #2: Florida has decided that the $2B in High Speed Rail money is not a good deal because of what goes with it. Calif and NY stepped right up to take it. So that is your answer right there. If Obama can’t bail out Calif and NY he will ship them billion$ more in “Stimulus” money, which won’t bail them out but will make sure that the Boys are taken care of.
The paradigm of the last era is collapsing. In a rich country growing richer it was a small task to get the public to accept slightly higher taxes so hard working teachers and police could enjoy the wages as every other middle class family or skilled worker. In a bankrupt country full of people who have lost or seen their friends and relatives lose their jobs and pensions while suffering through endless stories of incompetent teachers and worthless police yet another heavy tax increase is a much tougher sell.
The unions are doomed. Either they quietly get consigned to the dumpster of history by the electoral process or violently if the whole rotten structure of American governance proves too far gone to save.
Despite the ugly mob scenes from Wisconsin I have hope. I never thought I’d see the day when anyone in actual elected office would propose yanking collective bargaining rights from these leeches, let alone have the votes to do it.
Let’s hope that’s a sign for the day when the math makes it impossible to pretend that medicare and other “entitlements” are viable, and someone has to step up and tell the public loudly and unequivocally that the party is over and the music has stopped but forever.
The states are broke and cannot afford to continue the public sector union Democrat Party mutual graft scheme that has existed since the 60′s. As if that isn’t bad enough, the cost of oil is going through the roof. Now, if this was still the evil Bushitler regime, we would all be aware of that from reading the papers. The reason would be that Bush and his “oil buddies” would be ratcheting up the price and lining their pockets and the media would be shouting every penny a barrel increase. But since this is the caring and sharing Obama admin, you have to actually go to the gas station to see the cost increase. Under Democrat rule, the rising cost of oil just reflects its true environmental cost. No oil executives are enriched in the making of this film. No hospitals, schools, old people or homeless shelters are impacted by the rising cost of heating oil with the tyranny of nice in charge. So its all good.
Actually, the good part is that after years of being abused, shaken down and called racist and selfish whether we comply or not, it appears that at least 51% of us are finally figuring this out.
Here’s a great article on this situation:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/02/27/public_unions__the_socialist_utopia_109046.html
It isn’t simply that the AWOL Democrats are fighting to retain the public service unionts because “the government employees’ unions are a mechanism for siphoning taxpayer dollars into the campaigns of Democratic politicians”. The public unions, whose income comes from the taxpayers, are the largest contributor to Democratic campaigns.
But, there’s another issue about these public service unions:
“No one has to worry about making a profit. Generous health-care and retirement benefits are provided to everyone by the government. Comfortable pay is mandated by legislative fiat. The work rules are militantly egalitarian: pay, promotion, and job security are almost totally independent of actual job performance. And because everyone works for the government, they never have to worry that their employer will go out of business.”
So, the ‘work’ of this sector is unaccountable; you don’t compete to get the goodwill (and money) of the consumer; it’s mandated – you must pay for their services, whether you use them or not, whether they are adequate or not, whether they are productive or not.
“The current crisis exposes more than just the financial unsustainability of these programs. It exposes their moral unsustainability. It exposes the fact that the generosity of these welfare-state enclaves can only be sustained by forcing everyone else to perform forced labor to pay for the benefits of a privileged few.”
And that’s a key point. These public service unions are not about ‘worker’s rights’. They actually enslave a large proportion of genuine workers in the private sector, who must pay and pay and pay for the well-being and lifestyle of an Elite Set of Privileged Workers.
Public service unions are not about worker’s rights; they are massive Corporations focused on only one agenda: Money. They want as much in dues as they can grab from the taxpayer – and they use this money to corrupt the political process by their buy-out of the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party is clinging to this elitism and exploitation of the taxpayer.
What we are seeing is an uprising among government clerks and associated special interest groups. To keep their vassals loyal while they grabbed power, the Statist Lords of the Ruling Class made promises of future benefits — high promises coming due in a period of low dough.
As they aggressively took control of vast swaths of the economy, the statist sowed the road ahead with Improvised Exploding Expenditure Devices. These devices promised to pay huge dividends to various groups while hiding the true future cost from the wider society — costs which explode years later. These devices are concealed along the road ahead, waiting to go off, and are often cleverly camouflaged — as investments, as civilization saving regulation, or life sustaining programs. But as the expenditures explode, it is the entire nation that is on the critical list.
A good example of an Improvised Exploding Expenditure Device (IEED) “going kaboom” is the subprime mortgage mess. The political class said that for the cost of a few billions Washington DC could make a McMansion available to every family and the McMansions will only grow in value, making their “owners” (who never got in the position of actually owning the structures) financially secure. When the house flipping flopped, prices took a tumble and the true cost of the program was trillions, not billions.
The same folks who brought us the subprime mortgage debacle designed Obamacare. The Health Care reform plan has many hidden costs that will explode in the future. But the goal is to create many dependents on government before the IEEDs go off. Indeed, if the exploding IEEDs cause the masses to seek shelter from the rein of blood under the umbrella of the ruling class, then the device has done double duty. In fact, the IEEDs are thus provided with human shields, since defusing them — or so we are told — will hurt women and children first (before helping everyone including women and especially children — who will pay for all this stuff).
To implant these IEEDs they have to be disguised as something benign that offer society great benefits at a reasonable cost. Selling this “line” requires the cooperation of journalists, pundits, analyst, politicians, lobbyists and billionaires. In these relationships, the significant other brings something of significance to the others: jobs, money, influence, bureaucratic favors, propaganda outlets and so on. Usually, these folks are in bed together before they start making out and when they have sex it is the entire nation that gets screwed.
The insurgent clerks want to keep these IEEDs from being defused. Often these IEEDs benefit them directly, but they also provide power and prestige. And if you want to show your power, sometimes you just have to make an example — or many.
The left has not come to grips with the fact that the battlespace has changed. They have had to bus in out of State people to Wisconsin of all places and despite the support of the MSM lying like rugs, the majority of the voters in Wisconsin and most importantly the majority of the “swing” voters are supporting the Republicans that they elected. As has been pointed out on Instapundit the unions don’t seem to realize that cameras are everywhere. Also there are starting to be arrests nation wide on violent demonstrators of the left. See: Chris Christi’s popularity in New Jersey has increased since he got elected despite the public sector union opposition. The mantra more and more is, “What are you bitching about, at least you have a job!” The education “bubble” is busting at all levels, from kindergarten to the doctorate level. The news media bubble is deflating, lazy union reporters are losing jobs and are starting to grow fearful, the more they lie though the quicker they fall.
There is an interesting issue about the sustainability (or otherwise) of the Democrat coalition. Greenies, Bureaucrats, and Blue Collar workers — ar at least, would-be Blue Collar workers.
If the economy had continued to grow at the rates of half a century ago, there would be enough money to fund the pensions and the rest of it. But the Greenies have led the Democrats to hire millions of Bureacrats to enforce excessive regulations. The Bureaucrats not only produce nothing, they stop Blue Collar workers from getting jobs and produce something (while paying taxes).
If the Republicans had half a brain, they would be driving wedges into this splintered Democrat coalition as fast as they could. If ….
“But the foxes cannot be left in charge of the henhouse”
That’s because foxes don’t lay eggs.
“That’s because foxes don’t lay eggs.”
But they do make a nice fur coat…
Some animals are most useful alive, some are most useful dead. I think gov’t unions are the latter.
Its really all about cookies. Imagine that all things desirable; money, health, energy, peace, ideal climate, etc. are all contained in a long row of cookie jars.
When you were a small child so far as you knew, the cookie jar held an endless supply of cookies. If you couldn’t have one it was because someone was keeping them from you. That is the way liberals see the world.
So insurance companies, big oil, Israel, Republicans etc are the problem. Wisconsin could pay its bills, Israel could make peace, energy could be risk and cost free if we could only force the jar masters to quit hoarding.
This works because if you whine loudly enough, or get your friends in the unions or international community to whine loudly with you the problem will sometimes get solved. The actual doers keep doing things because that is what doers do. The whiner feels that they accomplished something because there are now more cookies in the jar.
We needed an engineer, a problem solver instead we elected a community organizer, eg a blamer in chief.
No one, I mean no one, even Public School teachers can claim the Public Schools nation wide are working well and doing a good job of educating children. The high school drop out rates nation wide, and the FACT that other countries (India comes to mind) are producing more hard science graduates than US colleges are proof that the current system does not work. I think the decline in education started with Lyndon Johnson and has accelerated since.
The Federal Government with all of it’s mandates has failed to improve education. Bush’s ” No Child left behind.” was and is an immense waste of money. If anyone can tell of any program from the Federal Dept. of Education that has worked as promised, on time and on budget I will kiss your dog on youtube
No one seem willing to do the honest thing and eliminate the Federal Dept. of Education, and make Public School systems compete for their money through a voucher system. Let the States set their own requirements and goals and let schools compete for the tax dollars.
I don’t care about respecting the student or the little devils “self esteem”. They should be in school to learn how to think and facts, not Politically Correct crap.
We tend to conflate the different groups that cause the problem. Every movement is a coalition and that goes for for the Right and the Left. Both have fringe groups.
On the Right there are Libertarians, Social Conservatives, NeoCons, and Corporate Traditionalists or Country Club Republicans.
On the Left are Liberals who want to help people, Thugs who want to take from people, and the Ideologues I spoke of above who want to control people. The Ideologues prosper by convincing the Liberals to ignore the Thugs or mistake them for for being on the Right and to focus on fear and hate of the Right.
spindok,
The history of Engineers in the White House has not been an entirely happy one. I’d add Carter to Hoover in that group, but they may object. Lawyers have proved a mixed bag, as have soldiers or naval officers. Actual writers, scholars (with the exception of Wilson) and farmers may fare better. Only one was a union boss. Source
I fear that the pols in power will rethink the notion that the electorate is taxed enough already and will enact ruinous new taxes to keep the music playing awhile longer.
There is still much to loot if our ruling masters are determined enough.
I think the analysis is wrong.
The Cuddly Statists are siezing the moment. They have never been this close, and if they don’t act now, it could all slip away. They will do everything they can to force a final confrontation.
If they lose, well, they were willing to spend 60 years the last time to undermine the country. They will just go back to square one and start over.
ETAB #8.
Communism isn’t opposed to wealth. It’s only opposed to wealth for people who aren’t members of the ruling clique. The commissars live in luxury.
That’s what communism is really about.
The only problem, from the liberal point of view, is that the global economy is bad. But it will get better …
Then it is good news that – the economy will NOT get better anytime soon, the problems are structural, the jobs in China do not support consumption or recovery in the USA.
We should also note that the Medicaid crisis has been coming for twenty years, it is not an artifact of Obambus and Obambuscare. In fact, one of the main motivators for Obambuscare was this looming disaster which it claimed to address, in some small part. That the claim that it helps is a blatent lie – except for an increase in taxes that “helps” – of course is the joker.
–
On a related note, saw Mitch Daniels on Fox Sunday. A nice guy, probably very good at what he does, sufficient for Indiana but I’m afraid he didn’t strike me as presidential timber. But then, who does?
#19 proreason – I agree; communism isn’t opposed to wealth. For themselves. The problem with communism is that, as an economic system, it has no means to generate wealth. So, it has to take from those who actually do generate it – the private sector – and keep it for their own luxurious lives.
Genuine communism – if there is such a thing – and by that I mean a no-class population – really only exists within the ancient hunting and gathering bands which could never go beyond a population group of about 30 people. That’s because they generated no wealth by their own actions. All they did was use the wealth of the land – existing animals and plants – live off that. Share it all among the 30 people. And move on to another area when they had depleted the ‘wealth’.
In any situation where wealth must be produced by the work of people, communism – as that total redistribution and socialiams as partial redistribution – simply cannot and has never and will never be functional. The imbalance between those who produce and those who are not productive is destroyed in a communist and socialist system, in favor of the non-productive population receiving benefits that the producing sector cannot sustain.
The only system that works to produce enough wealth to enable a population made up of both producers and non-producers of wealth to ‘continue into the future’ – is produce goods/services-and-trade on the market. And that, right there, sets up an inequality of outcome.
So, a moral society has some basic means to sustain those who cannot produce; that is, it sets up family or other situations to look after the children and the elderly. Then, it sets up a safety net to look after those who are disabled or otherwise cannot produce wealth. What it has to do is be very careful not to include those who CHOOSE not to produce. In a socialist society – it is this latter group which has exploded in size.
This latter group can be the welfare scammers, the subsidy scammers – we all know that millions are lost to these groups. But it is also those people who CHOOSE to live an elitist lifestyle off the taxpayer: these are the public service unionistes – the teachers, the civil service – who use their monopoly over govt services to extort a wealth that is unavailable to the average private sector worker. That – is amoral.
“The mill of the gods grinds slowly, but they grind exceeding small.”
Who said that?
Forgotten Man @15 wrote:
‘I think the decline in education started with Lyndon Johnson and has accelerated since.’
I would suggest the decline of American education began with John Dewey, who started ‘progressive’ education.
Whatever the beginning, the result is education failure that is well-known around the world and an object of (mostly) unspoken derision. Not only are American students not so smart, they also carry serious character flaws, borne of the ingratitude that leftist teachers indoctrinate them with.
Best regards, Peter Warner.
Kin@11″If the Republicans had half a brain, they would be driving wedges into this splintered Democrat coalition as fast as they could. If ”
That the Republicans are not exposes how unserious they are. To do what you are asking the Pubs would actually have to have a plan how to fix the economy. They would need to provide an alternative to Obama. They simply do not have one. They have a bunch of slogans. They are afraid of their own shadows and ruffling the feathers of the establishment.
Some people say just give Obama enough rope to hang himself; Take power and then make changes. Except you won’t have a mandate to make the major changes necessary with that strategy. Reagan didn’t do that. He focused on just the major issues, told people what he way going to do and then did it.
“We needed an engineer, a problem solver instead we elected a community organizer, eg a blamer in chief.”
Actually, no. Engineers approach all problems as if they were machines, or systems (virtual machines). The problem here is people, not machines.
Social Engineering is an Oxymoron.
Remember the tool box rule. If your only tool is a hammer, ALL your problems become nails. So when the only tool in your box is organizing, all problems become O-charts.
No, what we need is a MOM. Sombody that can keep the rug rats, curtain climbers, house apes, etc, out of the near empty cookie jars until more cookies are baked.
GO SARA GO.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfmrHTdXgK4&feature=related
See if this works. Now that Google, that fount of evil, has bought Youtube, I worry about western Civilization.
WE love you Sara. You have 14 hours to save America. No pressure babe.
Walt How hard would it be to re-do the Flash Gordon theme into the Sara Palin theme? I know she was using Barracuda, but Heart got bitchy about that.
Send it in and if they take it, you will join L3 on the BC big time list.
Some random responses to various points above.
* On union giving to politicians. I knew it was bad, just not HOW bad. If you go here you can see the top political givers from 1989 to 2010:
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?order=A
Unions are overwhelmingly in the top groups, and give overwhelmingly to Democrats. The big companies on the list tend to split their donations more or less 50/50. The groups that are strongly Republican tend to be small business organizations like the National Auto Dealers Assn.
* Blastfromthepast @16: On the Left are Liberals who want to help people, Thugs who want to take from people, and the Ideologues I spoke of above who want to control people.
I’ve used this quote many times, but it always bears repeating. From James Burnham: The difference between a Liberal and a Communist is that the Communist knows what he’s doing.
* Education began it’s decline with Horace Mann and other “reformers” in the 1840s and onward. Until then, all American education was local and generally limited to people with some money. Mann began to promote the idea of public education. To his credit, he wanted to educate more children. To his detriment, however, was that his real goal was not education but the construction of “good citizens.” Right from it’s very founding, public education has been about ideological shaping, not just teaching kids stuff.
The first state to require children to attend school was Massachusetts in 1852. It all grew from there.
Of course, as “progressive” as Mann was for his time, I have no doubt he would be appalled at what became of his idea, and the abject failure of schools to actually teach anything at all.
BFtP@16:
On the Right there are Libertarians, Social Conservatives, NeoCons, and Corporate Traditionalists or Country Club Republicans.
On the Left are Liberals who want to help people, Thugs who want to take from people, and the Ideologues I spoke of above who want to control people.
A guy I worked for in high school once told me:
Suck in your gut. Stand up straight. Nose to the grindstone. Now try to work that way.
Coalition building ain’t what it used to be. History provides guidance, but the assumption of full omniscience is completely incorrect when applied to USA. Stupid, fat, unaware and parochial as we are, the ‘sleeping dragon’ is still out there. Deny that at your own peril.
Two simple changes would reduce SS/MC entitlements to fixable issues, as opposed to historic cataclysms: (1) retire – lock, stock, and barrel – from the ME and (2) fix the tax code – flat tax and bring corporate foreign earnings back into the country.
The probability of that happening is close to zero. So we have the sturm and drang and general handwringing of whose wings get clipped first.
The only thing I know is that it won’t be Wall St. who so richly deserves a collective marine style buzz cut.
g @ 22: “The mill of the gods grinds slowly, but they grind exceeding small.”
Who said that?
Someone with a slow mill.
OSHA.
Me on the last thread.
…
Stuff I see via Google doesn’t source this where I thought it came from, oh well.
RE: optimal presidential timber: technocract or MOM?
If the tax code can ever be reformed, it must be done under the auspices of a Bill Clinton-like intellect. Same kind of chess required to extricate from ME.
A big part of the despair is that the technocrats like Daniels and Pawlenty don’t market well in fishnet stockings. No sizzle.
The MOM profile belongs at the Chief of staff level – right hand man so to speak.
One troubling thing about Facebook is the dominance of liberal gatekeepers on it. At first I thought this was just how the dust settled for my own annecdotal case. My own network of friends and family just happened to wind up constructing a network dominated by liberal thinking. And the liberals are on there seemingly 24-hours at a time, like in shifts, linking John Stewart, Bill Maher clips, NYT editorials, latest Koch Bros. activities, and talking-point thoughts on whatever was the cause du jour.
Back before QE2 became reality and was still in debate, Sarah Palin made an important speech. She predicted QE2 would lead to cost-push inflation and higher commodity prices which would hammer the common folks world wide through higher food and fuel prices. I linked it in Facebook.
I was not prepared for what happened, where I got virtually gang-tackled by replies, even from people I didn’t expect, saying just this: “Palin is an idiot.” I asked folks to put aside the messager and consider the message, and got this, “Palin is an idiot.” Only one guy rose above it, and then only briefly. Then, when food riots started in Tunisia and spread across the ME I posted a follow up asking if anybody remembered the argument put forth about how policies at the US Fed were guaranteed to generate hardships for everyday people across the world. Response: “Palin’s an idiot.”
My network includes a wide array of people. It’s mostly family: aunts, uncles, in-laws, an insane number of cousins. Our family background is quite old American, too. We all come from old Appalachian families, and we are only 2 generations away from subsistence farming. Our families have been here since before there was a United States, fought in ever US war since the Barbary Coast, etc.
I got to talking privately to conservative friends and family, who are crickets on my Facebook, and guys at work who aren’t on my Facebook network, and they report the same problem. Opinion is led by the libs on Facebook, who freely say any fool thing they want, and expect and get consent. To voice an opinion contrary is to invite a swarm. So, you post family photos and what kind of amazing pie your wife baked up for dinner last Sunday.
The elders look here to see the pulse of the “young’uns”, the youth can’t wait to turn 13 so they can have their first Facebook page and join the grown-up community.
Several have talked about what large role Facebook has had in the ME unrest, but Facebook is all over this land, too. And the betters, the “cool kids”, are all over it, dominating the space. Such activities are reflexive “consciousness raising” tasks for liberals. They’ll fall into it happily, without prompting or direction, just a SOP from page two of the unwritten but widely ingested handbook.
Despite talk radio, FOX News, and the conservative blogsphere, if there is a majority of people out there who support Gov. Walker, or understand the con game with the public unions, or who worry about the hidden IEEDS (love that analogy!), they are once again the Silent Majority it seems.
They’ve succeeded in molding minds to a large degree. What is going on in Wisconsin is outright, visible, fraud on every level.
Teachers calling in sick – fraud.
Busing in students – fraud.
Busing in astroturf protestors – fraud.
Writing phony doctor’s notes – fraud.
Running away to another state to sieze up the democratic process – fraud.
“Undisclosed locations” – fraud.
Vectoring public stimulus money to the unions (& back to the Dems) – fraud.
Vectoring public money to union managed health programs – fraud.
Police officers ignoring orders and selectively enforcing the law – fraud.
But, you see, you can look it up on Facebook, all that fraud is really “justice”.
Longfellow said it:
Though the mills of God grind slowly;
Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience he stands waiting,
With exactness grinds he all.
Nice job of analysis, Mr. Fernandez. Nobody does it better.
RE: optimal presidential timber: technocract or MOM?
The logical extension of the concept being that the Executive is allowed to possess flaws/deficiencies as long as risk is distributed over the breadth and depth (?) of a viable Congressional body.
Which has not recently been the case.
Obama’s “deficiencies”, as such, do not strike me as being equivalent to the feckless behavior demonstrated by the last decade of Congressional bodies.
Not even Super MOM could handle that, and the danger lies in the possibility that one does, shifting excessive power into one branch of government to compensate for widespread failure in another.
The oxen is slow, but the earth is patient.
It’s a quantum thingy.
The ox does not really move, the ox’s legs just ploddingly push the earth on its axis against the edge of the plow. Of course, as you consider the other vectors of force at work such as wild pigs rooting in the forest in random fashion, each contributing a smaller vector of force that acts to move the earth, it is amazing, to me anyway, that the furrow remains somewhat straight.
Perhaps it is because the patient movement of the ox’s legs and the crazed rooting of the pigs eventually balance out to plow the earth in an orderly fashion, where in this case the earth is a meta-metaphor for existence.
Of course, I didn’t factor in the huge inertia of the earth in the original model which will tend to resist the random forces at work. Maybe the ox is really moving forward, but slowly, and the frenzied activity of the pigs rooting in the muck is all for naught.
#30 cowboy – I wonder if Facebook (not on it) is not a site for discussion, debate – even thought. All it can accept are opinions – and the type of opinion which has no ‘causality’. No evidence, no data, no reasoning. The opinion just exists.
So why would anyone who can think – be on Facebook? It’s the domain of the chattering sophists.
#33 YBR – that’s an interesting analysis – that the deficit risk of the Executive ought to be spread out – over Congress, so that the Executive flaws could do as little harm as possible. [And vice versa of course: a weak Congress would need a strong Executive.]
What we have at the moment is an Executive that is worse than flawed; it is anti-American. And, it has shown a deep disdain for and rejection of Congress. Almost every bill that Obama has put to Congress – he has tried to get them to pass it without doing the work of Congress. That is, without reading the bill, debating, questioning it. Instead, he has asked that His bills be passed based on their Trust-in-Obama. And Congress, when it was run by the Democrats, did just that.
So- a flawed Executive and a flawed Congress. It’s only since the November elections that Congress has been able to stand up to Obama. And – Obama has gone into hiding. He parties. And parties. Then, he appears, briefly, to SPEAK – reading some outline written for him by someone else. And he immediately goes back into hiding. And partying.
Cowboy@30-
Opinion is led by the libs on Facebook, who freely say any fool thing they want, and expect and get consent.
Right on. My Facebook friends follow suit.
They’re signifying. Under public scrutiny, the daily scroll of commentary (the political remarks, not trivial social stuff) reflects the old mandatory ‘community’ gatherings in the USSR, at which correct sentiments were expressed along with self-criticism, and one could not be the first to stop applauding.
Privately, not all of them might be perfect Party members, but publicly, the herd all goes in the same direction and moos in concert.
Thanks Professor, I needed that.
My liberal correspondents are apoplectic with desperate anger, thrashing at this week’s designated villain – Walker, the Kochs, the Tea Party the ultimate enemy always.
Nice to read the sober view from afar. Well, maybe “nice” is not the right word under the circumstance. Maybe we’ll call it the Thucidides view, dispassionate, factual, focused on human folly as the cause of most of humanity’s “bad luck.”
Thanks – T.
Cowboy:30,
I agree with your analysis, for what it is worth. What keeps me somewhat optimistic is that Facebook and other social “opiate of the masses” sites are not representative of what most people think, only what they put out for public consumption. A person can get fired or worse, get severe legal problems in some cases, for what they say on Facebook. So far, they can’t get hassled for how they vote. I think the last election (2010) was a case in point. I don’t think the liberals and Democrats are winning any friends, but they sure are influencing people.
BTW, I suspect the recall petitions in WI are not going to work for the same reason. No one will want to sign their name to a public document.
To his detriment, however, was that his real goal was not education but the construction of “good citizens.” Right from it’s very founding, public education has been about ideological shaping, not just teaching kids stuff.
And the percentage of teachable “stuff” that is completely detached from moral associations would be, what? Good luck teaching pure mathematics for six hours a day to 7-year olds.
Ideology (political orientation) certainly doesn’t need to be rammed down kids’ throats in the classroom, but the view that all of life is politics (“the personal is political”), aka, power relationships, is the Lefty view of human existence to begin with. They apply it to everything, so, no surprise, they would view classrooms full of impressionable kids as great opportunities for political indoctrination.
The problem is that the “stuff” that children need to be taught almost all has moral aspects. Teaching things that will produce “good character” in a child (and in higher grades this will involve science subjects, as questions like “Let’s say we *can* do X, but *should* we?” arise) used to be Goal #1 in many Americans’ education philosophies, and when not #1 ranked high up on the list of desired outcomes.
“Good citizenship” in traditional American terms (thorough knowledge of the Founding Fathers, the founding principles as stated in the Declaration and Constitution, belief in America as a good country worth defending, respect for our military, engagement in the political process and respect for the results of fair elections, etc.) is something conservatives have always believed in and have sought for their children to be taught.
What happened is that progressives’ definition of “good citizenship” parted ways with conservatives’ definition of same. At some point public schools ceased, en masse, to teach “American citizenship” and instead began to fill kids’ heads with the glorious virtues of “world citizenship.” Back when I lived in Los Angeles in the 1990s, I found out that LAUSD “celebrated” Flag Day by having kids bring in flags from their country of origin (and, no doubt, preparing essays and speeches and all manner of other presentations on the topic of Why It’s So Great To Be Not American). International-themed days have their place (I’m thinking of the Scouts, which focus on food, music, games & clothing from other countries), just NOT on a day explicitly named after and dedicated to something American. Turning Flag Day into an international day was a brazen Eff You by the progs in LAUSD. But guess what? They got away with it. (AFAIK)
Yes, it was the progressives who turned the public education of children into a political football. Because that is what Lefties do. Everything in life, including breathing (part of your carbon footprint!!) is a political act. And when every human action is a political action, every thought a political thought, then that pretty much begs for a massive, totalitarian government regulating everything under the sun. How conveeeeenient for the Lefties.
The difficult task for conservatives is to untangle the Gordian knot in which progressives have bound up education. For conservatives who still want education to be one of those aspects of child-rearing that builds character, that inculcates moral principles, how do we separate the moral from the political? Especially when the government, thanks to progressives, is dedicated to nannying and bullying us grown-ups 24/7? How do we (re)create a non-political classroom for the kids when PTA and school board meetings routinely devolve into scream-fests over creationism and sex ed?
No wonder homeschooling is growing so fast in popularity. I kind of think of homeschooling parents as having taken the path of Alexander …. why bother struggling endlessly with the Gordian knot, and why not just cut right through it instead?
“Teaching kids stuff” was never that simple to begin with. But the progs have made it exponentially more difficult and, in certain schools, downright impossible: an unholy, unconscionable and unworkable mess.
YBR 27,
Coalition building ain’t what it used to be. … retire – lock, stock, and barrel – from the ME
The Left has always operated in terms of United Fronts and coalitions. It is in their vocabulary. The Right not so much so. We need a coalition, even more we are better for working with those we partially disagree with. The Ideologue True believers on the Left think they know everything and can order the universe to meet their desires. If we believe in anything it is that no one has all the answers and that the “wisdom of crowds” must be allowed to work. Libertarians bring many good ideas and practical answers to the table about fostering creativity, but so do the NeoCons regarding responding to threats, Social Conservatives regarding stable social structures, and Traditional Republicans about a profitable business climate.
Be very careful about chopping off groups because their core issue does not fit neatly into your vision. Decent conservatives from the Libertarian and Social Conservative camps work painfully and visibly to find a modus operendi regarding issues like homosexuality on which they fundamentally disagree. They have to do this with the Left pouring gasoline on that fire at every opportunity to split the coalition. Do not do the Left’s work.
The world is full of people, Libertarians, Vegans, Christians, Muslims, Marxists, who say “Everything would be perfect if only everybody was just like me.” That is what we don’t need.
The Flat/Fair Tax does not seem at first glance to gore any oxen that are key to our collective interests. It may yet have legs.
Woodrow Wilson wrote a book on “Congressional Government.” Maybe he forgot to read it.
Insufficiently Sensitive:36,
I see you said much the same as I, just more succinctly. Probably a trait I such attempt to emulate.
Cheers, sir.
dtmack, #2 : Nobody answered your question, so I will. But I’m not an expert. The FED probably won’t bail out California because the Republicans control FED purse strings. All money bills must originate in the House. The FED Executive branch are the same folks who run California, the Democrats. The FED has screwed up their debt and deficit problems as bad or worse than California has. They are in no moral or fiscal position to direct California’s recovery.
…When a sovereign power has debt so great it cannot be repaid, politically or practically, it only has two choices. Either you do the one, or you do them both. Monetize the debt : that means inflate your currency and make your money worth less. Mr. Bernanke was and is doing that with QE2. About a trillion dollars worth, but he says he’ll do more if he thinks he should.
…The other choice is to renounce the debt. Tell the folks you owe that you will not pay them, or will only pay them some of what you owe. This is not rare, it’s common, though it’s only been done here by States and the FED rarely. Roosevelt did it in 1933 when the Gold Clause was renounced.
…Until the criminal conspiracy known as the Democrat party loses power in California, and Washington, there is no hope of repairing our economies.
E@35: #33 YBR – that’s an interesting analysis
Yes, it’s called separation of power. Not mine of course.
The level of hatred directed at the person occupying one branch of government is not constructive, and uncomfortably reminiscent of the equally indigestible Bush Derangement Syndrome.
The danger inherent in the laser-like focus on one person is the threat to the stability of balance of power.
#43 YBR – hmm. I’m not sure I agree with your suggestion that to hate, for example, Obama is comparable to the BDS. The point of the BDS is that it was unfounded in empirical or logical reasoning. It was purely emotional; if you asked for reasons – all you could get was: ‘He went to war in Iraq for oil’ – a manifestly ignorant comment. That was it. I won’t get into the ‘he killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq; or the ‘he refused to help with Katrina’…etc. None of these stood up to factual analysis.
My total disdain for Obama is, I think, founded on the facticity of his words and actions.
BFtP@40: Be very careful about chopping off groups because their core issue does not fit neatly into your vision. Decent conservatives from the Libertarian and Social Conservative camps work painfully and visibly to find a modus operendi regarding issues like homosexuality on which they fundamentally disagree.
Whoa there pardner. Katy bar the door!
Who’s “we” Kimosabe or “your”?
And who let in the homosexuals?
Slow down and take it easy.
The Pubs don’t do coalition building. Was my only point. If I wanted to be attitudinal, I might add that it’s funny to watch them try, but I remain heartened to be informed that legitimate efforts are underway. About time they put down their gold clubs. (I didn’t say that!)
“Your vision” is “their problem” not mine.
E@44: My total disdain for Obama is, I think, founded on the facticity of his words and actions.
Factual is not accurate, as we were reminded not too long ago.
Commenter derek a few threads ago, had a very good description of the defeat of unions here in British Columbia in the 1980′s and how it spread to other parts of Canada. Eventually, to get elected, politicians had to promise to be rude to unions and had to promise to cut spending. Because of our 1867 law which created and defined the Canadian Federation, Canadian Provinces are far more autonomous than American States. It therefore made sense for our union/government spending battles to begin at the Provincial level and then spread to the Federal level.
I am sure that the U.S. States will win their battles and will then put pressure on the U.S. Federal government to do the same. Because of weakened States Rights the U.S. States have only restricted or partial power over many of these issues, so they can solve their piece of the puzzle but cannot touch the Federal pieces of the puzzle.
In the end, the unions will lose and they will be diminished. In the end, the U.S. Federal government will fall in line behind the electorate to cut spending and to revive economic development. It took Canada ten to fifteen years to right the ship and we continue to endure recurring leftist hiccups. If Obama is ousted in 2012 the U.S. could be wading through manure until 2022-2027.
The progressive collectivists will never go away. See this link about ethical oil where the EU criticizes oil from the Alberta oilsands because ‘we have 20 more grams of carbon dioxide per megajoule of oil than Libya does.’ Or see this map at small dead animals which essentially claims that people should be placed in parks within ecosystems instead of parks being placed in human communities.
As the old radio show used to say, the world today ‘is about as comfortable as a sword swallower with the hiccups.’
BDS was so over-the-top, it has to have been a deliberate MSM conspiracy to glorify the ‘hope’ of ‘change’ –ANY change, just to get some relief from BDS. That this is voluntary sadism perpetrated on the citizen/victims, is implicit and so well indoctrined it’s become like the weather, like water to a fish.
It’s the ‘rule or ruin’ strategy –which is quite real –look at the harsher pronouncements coming out of the current protests. “We teach your children” carries a premise, and it can’t be that ”if we didn’t, no one would” because that’s too easily seen through.
It has to be, ”unless we do it, no one else will be allowed to, on pain of chaos”.
In fact that word, ‘chaos’ has been used quite a bit –”without a contract, the classroom will be chaos”.
Really? Why?
I ask my liberals friends, what is worse: The Tea Party or the The Taliban?
Since the Taliban are not American, what do you think they will answer?
I interpret the words on the protest banner, “We teach your children”, as a threat akin to, “Your children are ours”, or “We know where you live.” We’re dealing with union thugs here.
Unions are a racket, and they always have been, in every form public or private. Contrary to the assertion that they once were necessary, they never were necessary. All of the good things attributed to them such as better working conditions, higher pay, shorter workdays and workweeks, etc. would have fallen out with or without unions. A vanishingly small amount of good comes with unions, and always that “good” has been reserved for a select few and remains highly suspect. A union is a natural born extortion racket, and union tactics always, from the first day, are the same as the Goodfella’s.
People have said that public unions are different than private ones for a number of special reasons. Take all of those arguments about protecting the taxpayer and replace the word “taxpayer” with “shareholder” or “bondholder”, and you’ll find the same arguments against public unions apply against private unions. In either case, the name of the game is muscling in on somebody else’s money, and deeming that process a right or a protection.
Unions have become vehicles to further themselves and to further leftist agendas. Pin them down on their motives and you’ll hear a lot about protecting the little guy and about the “Public Good”. But they don’t protect the little guy, this is easily demonstrable. They protect union guys at the express expense of the little guy.
As for “Public Good”, realize you’re dealing with people who deny the existence of “good”, whether the individual before you can recognize it or not. The philosophical underpinnings of leftism rest on a materialism in which nothing is good and nothing is evil. Things just are. What matters is only what you make of them.
To the traditional mindset any act has intrinsic moral properties. To call in sick when you were not sick, for example, is always a bad thing to do. It is intrinsically dishonest, a lie, therefore bad. To the leftists, that lie furthers the cause, it sticks it to The Man, it hinges on poetry born of the Revolutionary Spirit. It is using things for the collective benefit of the Left, so, you do it.
Bad, Good, Evil? Such thinking is for pigeons.
@Gordon 22, Josh 28, Gordon 31
“The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind small”
Actually, it was Sextus Empiricus, in ‘Against the Dogmatists’ who wrote it long before the American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The Post WWII social system continues to erode (unions, currencies, political alliances, post-colonial nations all eroding). In 20 years what wiil be left of it? And who will be around to pick up the pieces?
#50 cowboy – well said. Many thanks.
The Post WWII social system continues to erode (unions, currencies, political alliances, post-colonial nations). In 20 years what wiil be left of it? And who will be around to pick up the pieces?
The right answer is to look in the mirror and say, “I will”. A lot more worn down perhaps, maybe much the worse for wear, but if there’s 20 years more in the old gray mare, then “I will”.
What thugs have over many ordinary people is a highly developed and primitive survival instinct. They’re going to grab the last girl, drink the last glass of whiskey, gnaw the final scrap off the carcass. They don’t think about happens next. That’s why they’re bankrupting the system. But they think about playing the angles now. Now is what counts. The Big Tent doesn’t make sense in the long term. It only counts for now.
One advantage of this mental attitude is that it removes all hesitation. The “gimme” mindset lets you get in there unabashedly and snatch away your mouthful to bolt down quick as you can to get another.
They feel no shame as such. The only shame that really counts in that world is the shame of not getting yours.
In the Althouse video above, what differentiates Ann and her companion from her interlocutors isn’t logic, it’s attitude. These guys are out there to put a boot in your face because it makes them feel good. They like being mean. They like seeing you slink away bleating impotently, mumbling about what’s right and what’s logical. That’s all to the good but unfortunately you don’t have a chance of beating them unless you get up in the morning hating — perhaps not them — just hating to lose.
So don’t lose. Because if life is worth living then you don’t want to close your eyes with those mugs laughing in your face.
So you look yourself in the mirror and say “I will be around to dance a fandango over the institutional grave of these thugs. And when I die my last words will still be yippee kai-yay MF.
The CSM reports that Walker is not backing down and neither are the unions.
That’s why this fight is so interesting. For a long time the liberals have acted as if losing were not an option. And for the same amount of time conservatives have acted as if it were always an option. That was the asymmetry. The marvel is not that the unions are working all the angles, but that they are actually being resisted in manner suggesting something fundamental was at stake.
In politics 101, you’d learn that republicans only had to wait in line, to get to the top nomination slots. So, you got a really bad selection process; with the one good one, Ronald Reagan, coming in when the parties thought Jimmy Carter would get a second term.
Now? You’ve seen stars rise! Didn’t happen on election day! THEN, just like Nancy Pelosi did, running to victory on the back of Blue Dogs. (Who then LOST!) … The republican MEDIOCRITY went to a victory dance. Out of nowhere, “turd blossom, the boy wonder,” Karl Rove,got to go on TV a lot! Both Mitch McConnell and the overtanned Boehner took leadership seats in Congress.
BUT WHAT HAPPENED NEXT IS FASCINATING! Out of nowhere! Scott Walker becomes an overnight sensation! Look at the possible list of candidates for 2012, now, and what do you see?
I see the guys in Congress SWEATING! I see, some people retiring. And, Russ Feingold, who didn’t LOST HIS SEAT! Unlike Tom Daschle he doesn’t seem to be having a “soft lobbyist landing” at all!
And, the Internet GROWS! Sites with site meters begin to notice they’re getting traction!
The world is turning upside down. Not just here, either. But in the Mideast.
About half of humanity makes its decisions based on emotion. You see this expressed in films such as Star Wars wherein the budding Jedi is told to fight blind. Such is the nature of fantasy. It’s entirely counter-factual.
The Left / Liberalism is riven with touchy-feely emoters. They are ten-a-penny in Hollywood, naturally.
Facebook is a Maslowian platform of the first magnitude. It addresses the Love/Belonging niche perfectly. And for many, Facebook works on Esteem. ( particularly respect by others )
It is critical to understand, then, what their emotional state is while ‘Facing:’ they’re seeking affirmations, period.
Then some dirty fellow like Cowboy shows up and whips out brutal facts and logic — total buzzkill !
Cowboy has to understand that those folks are being ‘Face’ists.’
They ride the train of events just ahead of the Dining Car — the tail end of the train. At no time does the touchy-feely crowd drive events unless it’s a riot. They are led around by agitprop and that existence is all that they are capable of absorbing. Hence it is a complete waste of your time to persuade them on anything at any time. Better you should teach calculus to your dog. ( BTW, this crowd will normally be innumerate to a shocking degree. It’s all part of their persona. And by innumerate I mean that they are maxxed out at fourth grade arithmetic. )
It’s this anti-math rage that under pins their emotional state when ‘standing against the system.’
——-
Until the exposition is established all of this budget talk is scaffolded on emotion. Walker is making a mistake by not zeroing in on the details using the Internet as his pulpit.
The Union deal should be spreadsheeted — it’s public policy — with footnotes elaborating when necessary. It should be updated and made a permanent web record.
Particular highlights: which household members are covered under a teacher’s health plan. Does it provide coverage for college age students living at home? I suspect so.
What are the co-pays? I’ll bet they’re trivial to nil.
What are the averaged benefits as expensed? I’ll bet the numbers astound.
When can full retirement occur? I’ll bet it’s at 55, ten years earlier than industry.
The Web is the only way that Walker can break the myth making MSM.
The Left / Liberalism is riven with touchy-feely emoters.
When the whole thing in Wisconsin started, I was listening to a radio news report. They interviewed a teacher who said, “Why does Scott Walker hate me?”
I found it interesting that out of what was probably a much lengthier quote from the teacher that this was THE quote that the newsies glommed onto and aired.
But the fact that she said it at all … a grown-up should be embarrassed to be exposed to the world as that immature. Note the a priori assumption in the question –not *whether* Gov. Walker hates her (or even knows/about her, period, or would single her out even if he did) but *why* he hates her.
This is the emotional solipsism of a four-year-old. “It’s all about ME.” And that, friends, is the thinking level of this woman who has other people’s children in her charge for hours and hours a day.
****************
Until the exposition is established all of this budget talk is scaffolded on emotion. Walker is making a mistake by not zeroing in on the details using the Internet as his pulpit.
Wisci-leaks, anyone?
@wretchard 53
I don’t know wretchard. There is much to your insistent individualism … like a well-crafted Hemingway tale of “the old man and the state” … but there’s something missing as well. A few threads ago some wise soul mentioned Unamuno, who was as much of a rugged individualist as anyone, but who remained able to recognize his responsibilities to his country, his fellow men, and to God. He saw that among both Socialists and Fascists these traditional ties had been lost or attenuated. A tragic sense of life yields perspective on the manner of our life and our death, providing a way forward which is neither desperate nor naive, neither simply pragmatic nor blindly ideological. Perhaps this is why some conservatives, such as Bill Buckley, did allow for the option of loss, while fighting wholeheartedly to win.
The union bosses do not care how big a pay-cut the membership has to take what they care about is how big a dues cut they may have to take. If money is the mother’s milk of politics those dues are the Carnation of politics. By including the yearly re-certification in the bill Walker has guaranteed perpetual war. I do not believe those fleebagger senators will come back and I think the Dems in Washington where this was all organized are dying for a government shutdown thinking it will be a repeat of what happened back in the ’90′s. But the problem is they are fighting the last war not realizing technology has changed the ground they are battling on.
Dreadnaughts and trenches and mustard gas won WWI but by WWII you needed aircraft carriers, bombers, and tanks. There is not a three network monopoly any more. Nobody (and I mean literally nobody) read Time or Newsweek or other once powerfull opinion leaders and that is aside from the fact that the political issues themselves have changed.
The American middle class right now is scared, probably more scared than they have been at any time since the great depression. They feel it all slipping away. American power, wealth, leadership, and freedom. That latter is the thing so often tendentiously referred to by the term American Exceptionalism. The rules never fully applied to us, and the Left believed this as much as the Right because freedom seemed impossible to take away from a people so self-sufficient as Americans.
However the world changes and the self-supporting independent agrarian America, always with a frontier at its back door is no more. As late as the 1920′s half of al Americans still ived on farms and so when that great depression came while people were seriosly reduced in circumstances most still had access to kitchen gardens, tools, and maybe a milk cow or some chickens. In todays world the loss of a job usually means pretty much total dependence on a government handout within weeks or months for the average family. I am 60 years old the classic boomer and while I have certainly seen ups and downs in the economy and my own personal circumstances I have never seen a situation where I was not sure there was some job out there somewhere for anyone who wanted one. I am not sure that is true today in large parts of this country and I am not sure most middle class Americans believe it will be true again in an America running huge deficits and facing brutal wage competition from globalization.
For some the answer is to hunker down in the safe harbor of a government job and for others it is to hope for policies that can bring back the jobs. So far the Obama administration is utterly failing on the jobs front and thatis exasperating the blood sport called politics and politicizing virtually everything in the country. I believe it is going to get worse, much worse before it gets better. People are losing faith not just in this government but government in general and state legislators running away to another state to avoid difficult votes is not helping.
15. Forgotten Man: I have only one disagreement to your comment, No Child Left Behind was enacted under Bush but the legislation was written and pushed by Ted Kennedy, IIRC. It was impotent regardless.
53. wretchard: IMO, they are not thugs but hyenas. They can only drive off lions through tediousness. Now if the lions ran down a token hyena and broke its neck every time they showed up, the hyenas would keep their distance. We need to start snapping necks. Figuratively, of course.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MXZCecet-s
“The world is turning upside down. Not just here, either. But in the Mideast.”
55. Carol.Herman
George said:
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
George Orwell”
“the future” is Red China:
http://media.thestar.topscms.com/images/d7/26/99919b9a473bad9add09a3adb090.jpeg
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/51447000/jpg/_51447217_011387348-1.jpg
Touchy-feely:
“Canadian kidnapped by Taliban ‘a sweet person with good intentions’”
TU THANH HA”
[...]
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/canadian-kidnapped-by-taliban-a-sweet-person-with-good-intentions/article1922635/
What is the FED governments response going to be when California comes for the money? What options do they have?…Cali will trump the negative political problems. I just don’t see the FEDS allowing this state to go belly up, while knowing the possibility of triggering worldwide chaos if they do.
Been there, done that, hocked the T-Shirt to pay the bus fare back home. 2008 and the banks – TARP et al – was sold as bailing out a bunch of irresponsible knuckleheads because it would “trigger world wide chaos” if we let them fail.
We’ve got chaos anyway, and just saw a bunch of freeloaders make off with more money.
The “we can’t let them fail” message won’t work again. There was serious opposition to raising the National debt limit. People are done with business as usual, done with buying flailing incompetents a little time to make a soft landing. My reading of the National Mood is that the American public thinks it’s time for some smoking craters. My home state will make a nice big one. Pour encourage les outres, if nothing else. Or don’t throw good money after bad if you’d rather. One way or another, I don’t think any pol who tries to say we have to bail CA out will survive the next election.
maz2…
Your boy is a clone of T.E. Lawrence of Arabia… dead nuts.
Sadly, not as brilliant, not as lucky.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTJ
If they don’t murder him they will be astounded as to his intellect.
He’s very bright — and yet seeking ‘the way.’
I suspect that this aspect has fascinated the Taliban. He genuinely seeks the truth and enlightenment.
After enough time, I suspect that he has learned their language and puzzles them with queries the like of Socrates.
The dogmatists are not pleased.
Weirdly, he may end up being a T.E. Lawrence kind of fellow. His absolute lack of institutional support is a blessing to him. As a ‘lost’ seeker of truth willing to travel ever far he appeals to the core of any true believer.
His challenge is: “Please make me believe, I come naked and alone. Heal me.”
No cleric can refuse such a man. He comes off as Diogenes of Sinope.
Cowboy@30: I hear what you’re saying but I’m playing the Grumpy Old Man card with facebook.
Just because there’s a knock at the door; just because the phone rings; just because there’s tweeting in the air and just because people are flaunting their faces in a book; I don’t feel obliged to be party to any of these interruptions or exhibitionist flauntings.
Tweet-land and everywhere-face are driven by a desire to follow the madding crowd. That’s why they influence so many people so strongly. I’d rather communicate with the people I want to when I choose to, instead of “net-web-friending” with a bunch of apparent air-heads.
Grump.
Question regarding the “optics” of the Pro-GovUnion protests. Who on the other side thinks that a bunch of fat, ugly middle aged women wearing garrishly colored T-Shirts makes for a good protest? The USA Today story on the WI protests has a covershot of some – I don’t know a better word for them – old battleaxes in bright orange T-Shirts. Three things struck me about this picture:
1) Central Casting could not have delived better matches for “lazy, slovenly, and unpleasant”
2) The T-shirts are hideous. Day-glo orange formless sacks slopped over fat old women for the sake of sloganeering. These people have no class.
3) The uniformity of the T-shirts. The constant uniformity of the T-Shirts. They always have their rabble dressed alike, and it’s always crappy T-shirts. The old Nazi Brownshirts dressed alike too, and it invites comparisions, except the Nazis may not have had any sense of morality but at least they had a sense of style. These modern goons don’t even have that.
The Revolution Was
by Garet Garrett
There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.
There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, “Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don’t watch out.” These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within the form, when “one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state.”
Worse outwitted were those who kept trying to make sense of the New Deal from the point of view of all that was implicit in the American scheme, charging it therefore with contradiction, fallacy, economic ignorance, and general incompetence to govern.
But it could not be so embarrassed and all that line was wasted, because, in the first place, it never intended to make that kind of sense, and secondly, it took off from nothing that was implicit in the American scheme. It took off from a revolutionary base. The design was European. Regarded from the point of view of revolutionary technic it made perfect sense. Its meaning was revolutionary and it had no other. For what it meant to do it was from the beginning consistent in principle, resourceful, intelligent, masterly in workmanship, and it made not one mistake.
The test came in the first one hundred days.
No matter how carefully a revolution may have been planned there is bound to be a crucial time. That comes when the actual seizure of power is taking place. In this case certain steps were necessary. They were difficult and daring steps. But more than that, they had to be taken in a certain sequence, with forethought and precision of timing. One out of place might have been fatal. What happened was that one followed another in exactly the right order, not one out of time or out of place.
Having passed this crisis, the New Deal went on from one problem to another, taking them in the proper order, according to revolutionary technic; and if the handling of one was inconsistent with the handling of another, even to the point of nullity, that was blunder in reverse. The effect was to keep people excited about one thing at a time, and divided, while steadily through all the uproar of outrage and confusion a certain end, held constantly in view, was pursued by main intention.
The end held constantly in view was power.
In a revolutionary situation mistakes and failures are not what they seem. They are scaffolding. Error is not repealed. It is compounded by a longer law, by more decrees and regulations, by further extensions of the administrative hand. As deLawd said in The Green Pastures, that when you have passed a miracle you have to pass another one to take care of it, so it was with the New Deal. Every miracle it passed, whether it went right or wrong, had one result. Executive power over the social and economic life of the nation was increased. Draw a curve to represent the rise of executive power and look there for the mistakes. You will not find them. The curve is consistent.
At the end of the first year, in his annual message to the Congress, January 4, 1934, President Roosevelt said: “It is to the eternal credit of the American people that this tremendous readjustment of our national life is being accomplished peacefully.”
Peacefully if possible — of course.
But the revolutionary historian will go much further. Writing at some distance in time he will be much less impressed by the fact that it was peacefully accomplished than by the marvelous technic of bringing it to pass not only within the form but within the word, so that people were all the while fixed in the delusion that they were talking about the same things because they were using the same words. Opposite and violently hostile ideas were represented by the same word signs. This was the American people’s first experience with dialectic according to Marx and Lenin.
Until it was too late few understood one like Julius C. Smith, of the American Bar Association, saying: “Is there any labor leader, any businessman, any lawyer or any other citizen of America so blind that he cannot see that this country is drifting at an accelerated pace into administrative absolutism similar to that which prevailed in the governments of antiquity, the governments of the Middle Ages, and in the great totalitarian governments of today? Make no mistake about it. Even as Mussolini and Hitler rose to absolute power under the forms of law… so may administrative absolutism be fastened upon this country within the Constitution and within the forms of law.”
For a significant illustration of what has happened to words — of the double meaning that inhabits them — put in contrast what the New Deal means when it speaks of preserving the American system of free private enterprise and what American business means when it speaks of defending it. To the New Deal these words — the American system of free private enterprise — stand for a conquered province. To the businessman the same words stand for a world that is in danger and may have to be defended.
The New Deal is right.
Business is wrong.
You do not defend a world that is already lost. When was it lost? That you cannot say precisely. It is a point for the revolutionary historian to ponder. We know only that it was surrendered peacefully, without a struggle, almost unawares. There was no day, no hour, no celebration of the event — and yet definitely, the ultimate power of initiative did pass from the hands of private enterprise to government.
There it is and there it will remain until, if ever, it shall be reconquered. Certainly government will never surrenders without a struggle.
To the revolutionary mind the American vista must have been almost as incredible as Genghis Khan’s first view of China — so rich, so soft, so unaware. No politically adult people could ever have been so Little conscious of revolution. There was here no revolutionary tradition, as in Europe, but in place of it the strongest tradition of subject government that had ever been evolved — that is, government subject to the will of the people, not its people but the people. Why should anyone fear government?
In the na’ive American mind the word revolution had never grown up. The meaning of it had not changed since horse-and-buggy days, when Oliver Wendell Holmes said: “Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.” It called up scenes from Carlyle and Victor Hugo, or it meant killing the Czar with a bomb, as he may have deserved for oppressing his people. Definitely, it meant the overthrow of government by force; and nothing like that could happen here. We had passed a law against it.
(( read more at http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/garrett1.html ))
Pawlenty’s studies showed a negative correlation between Govt Spending and job Growth.
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Hewitt Interviews Pawlenty
About this talk
What does it take for state government to properly regulate business without creating undue barriers to entrepreneurism and job creation? Tim Pawlenty identifies several key drivers that businesses of all sizes regard as very important. Will states step up to the challenge?
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Tim Pawlenty
Just completing in January 2011 his second term as the 39th governor of Minnesota, Governor Pawlenty has brought increased accountability to state government, held the line on taxes, improved K-12 education standards and made Minnesota a leader in energy reform.
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66. westerncanadian:
I remain Friendless and Faceless!
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Tim Pawlenty: Not another typical Ivy League Elitist
Hard to picture Obama (or GW Bush, for that matter) in the scene described below.
…also worked a produce counter for eight years!
“we’ve just got to do this”
well, I grew up in a meatpacking town, and my dad, for a lot of his life, was a truck driver, although later on, we thought we had hit the jackpot when he became a dispatcher. But we didn’t have a lot of money, and so he took some side jobs now and again. And one of them was a weekend where we went out and untangled meat hooks. Now these are the hooks that sides of beef would be hung on as they slid down an overhead rail system to the cutting tables of these huge meatpacking and slaughterhouses, which were the cornerstone, economically, of my hometown. And they get thrown in a bin afterwards, and my dad and I were hired to go on to untangle them. But they sat out in 90 degree heat, so they had beef sinew and fat on them, and they’d sit out and rot, basically. And you had to stick your head in these big bins, go in there, untangle the hooks, and then hang them up so they could go through a power washer. But you could imagine if you’ve got beef sinew sitting in 90 degree or 100 degree summer head, un-air conditioned, you get flies, you get meat rotting, and we went in and it was ugly. And at one point, I tossed my cookies, and I looked up at my dad, and he just said you know, we’ve just got to do this. And we powered through it, but it was a good lesson in life. It wasn’t fun that afternoon, but it kind of summarizes there’s tough stuff that we’ve got to do that the nation may be facing, you may be facing in your personal life. But you’ve just got to put your head down, and you’ve got to plow ahead. And sometimes, you’ve just got to do it. And that was one of those cases.
How Twitter Enforces Policy…Sorta
“Some of you might know that I’ve spent most of my online time on Twitter, which I believe to be a wonderful service run by lefties who have no idea what they’re doing.
That said, it holds a special place in my heart, which is why it’s maddening to have this debate about what “spam” is or isn’t, what “aggressive” is, and whether or not posted rules mean anything if you’re a conservative on Twitter.
Here is the thread of the conversation I’m having with Ginger, one of Twitter’s spam control people.
Those of you on Twitter, am I out of line here? Reply me @radioblogger…unless, of course, they permanently suspend me. if that happens, join http://www.hughniverse.com where the rules aren’t so weird.”
– Duane Patterson
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67. JMH
You’ve described Trumka Porn!
This what the fight is about:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2011/02/wisconsin-teachers-mafia-follow-money.html
66. westerncanadian
You ask them a question:
“You still Twitting?”
#57. BW:
There is ugliness on the right too:
The left likes pain free utopias (why should anyone suffer?). The right likes painful ones (how else can you learn?). A middle way would be nice.
About half of humanity makes its decisions based on emotion. You see this expressed in films such as Star Wars wherein the budding Jedi is told to fight blind. Such is the nature of fantasy. It’s entirely counter-factual.
I dunno. I can sense things before they happen and if they are “bad” I have plenty of time to avoid them. The first mate came home one night after a walk through DePaul University in Chicago and said “I passed a spot with very evil vibes.” I said Hmmmm. Two days later there was a report of a murder at that spot (about 8 hours after she passed it). When the furor had died down we went back to it. Still bad vibes. But we knew why.
Never underestimate the power of the force. We have ancient talents we prefer to pretend we don’t have. They are not “scientific” after all.
Hokey religions may be a match for a M1911. If you get the information far enough in advance.
BTW I’m that most rational of people. I’m an EE who does a fair amount of programming.
53. wretchard
For 40+ years I have been the champion of the lost cause of all lost causes – ending drug prohibition.
The end is in sight.
What was my attitude? “Today I’m going to do something.” Every day.
” there isn’t enough money to pay for a leftist victory.”
Alas, yes there is. The USSR managed to run on phony economics for 75 years; Wisconsin hasn’t even started. If the unions win in Wisconsin, the EU (or someone) will prop them as its members states subsidized the USSR and now subsidize the Palestinians, until all Wisconsin is ruined.
39. bogie wheel,
The problem with public schools as indoctrination centers is that some one else got control of the wheel. The fault with all such schemes is central control. Once that is installed you have created a battle ground.
I’m still waiting for the right to get on vouchers – hard. Nope. It is all “If we were in control all things will be better because we are moral and they are not.”
The common denominator between the right and the left: “If we were in control…” A mugs game. I can see the left not getting it. But the right too? Control will be their downfall. As well.
So why would anyone who can think – be on Facebook? It’s the domain of the chattering sophists.
To reach the chattering sophists. Eventually you wear them down.
My gang exchanges links suitable for blogging. If I need a topic I give Facebook a check.
74/M.Simon
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/seeing_in_the_dark/
hykgoml,
Interesting article, proof that nuggets can be found in unlikely places. Seed is Left wing agit-prop outfit. They have an article accusing “the right wing” of killing a scientist who believed in Anthropogenic Global Warning by causing him stress. They tie in nicely with the Economist, PBS etc. It would be nice to know where their money comes from. Oddly enough Harper-Collins (News Corp.) published their book.
BFtP @ 80
If discrete tidbits of information can be thought of as individual strands of near invisible cat hair floating softly in the swirls and eddies, then the echoing halls that constitute what passes for my memory are wallpapered with wool sweaters.
That’s right, I rely wholly on the effects of static cling.
As a consequence, I knew such studies (and there are more than one now)existed.I need only find the end of the thread.
In much the same way that I take a small and petty pleasure from continuing to use you tube to make points antithetical to the goals of Google, they derive a similar pleasure in tracking what I post and eliminating what they consider the most egregious (effective)links that would disparage their champions and their goals.
It often forces them to dispense with one of their own having first served the purpose I intended. Not that it generates any qualms on their part as I’ve long considered that in order for one to be accepted into the left elite, a demonstrated inherent ability to swing a boat oar from a standing position,(in high heels),from the centre of a lifeboat during a force 8 gale is crucial.
The womens’ test is essentially the same.
Sloth, is of course, the most likely alternative explanation for its use.
hykgoml,,
Ditto
If you want to channel Hedley Lamarr I’ll raise a flag for Taggert.
Now where’s your froggy?