The Party of Free Stuff

“Here is something I don’t understand: liberals are often revealed as vile, vulgar hatemongers–not all of them, of course, but far too many–yet they never seem to pay a penalty at the polls. Why is that?”
– John Hinderaker “Why Aren’t More People Repelled by the Left?“, Power Line.

“You’re not going to sell swing voters on far-left liberalism by telling them their kids don’t really belong to them, but tell them that they have a right “at all times” to things they need and you’re golden.”
–Allahpundit, “New MSNBC promo: You have the right to health care, education, housing, and food at all times“, hotair.com

Ask a stupid question. Student load debt is over a trillion, the teachers union is stuck in the past and liberals are attacking adoption and wiretapping their foes.

Vote Democrat, it’s easier than getting a job.

For decades the left has sold itself as the party of free stuff[tm]. Soak the rich to pay for stuff. College, welfare, gov’ment cheese, bennies out the wazoo and you are entitled to it. It’s your right. And if someone objects that racist!!1!!11!

The reality is that the country is broke. Employers can’t keep up with the new healthcare mandate, they are fleeing California and the blue states, Detroit is in shambles and the press is in the tank for liberal politicians.

The answer from our liberal overlords is more taxes and more spending of course. Never mind that we’re taxed to the hilt. The attacks will increase, the press will spin and spin, making dissent into a hate crime.

And the country will drown in red ink.

But hey, you’re “entitled” to free stuff.

Love and Truth in 2013

In the book 1984, the Ministry of Truth was the propaganda arm of the evil regime, the Ministry of Love was the KGB analog.

Social Class in 1984

“Colorado Democrats are prepared to launch an all-out war on guns with legislation that includes bans on “high capacity” magazines, requirements for universal background checks, fees for existing background checks, and allowing victims of gun violence to sue firearm manufacturers for the misuse of weapons.”–Breitbart.com

“DONALD SENSING: Why is DHS buying billions of rounds of ammunition?”
–Insty.

Keep this in mind, SWAT teams are growing across the country. the Department of Education has one. SWAT officers who nearly killed a man over his wife’s student loan fraud.

And now in California, a fired cop and “military” vet (really a reservist) is on a killing spree. The man is a leftist nutjob. But you won’t hear it from the media.

The left, the oh-so “we hate guns” left loves, loves, loves this guy.

“Apparently, when the suspected mass-murderer is a Piers Morgan fan, his crimes win a Piers Morgan exemption.

You know, the idea of bringing politics into a tragedy used to sicken me. But ever since Arizona, Obama’s mercenary media have helped me to see the light. “
–Piers Morgan: L.A. Murder Spree Has ‘Nothing To Do With Politics’ :Breitbart

“So far, though, it’s just the Obama administration pursuing the rather laughable claim that S&P’s ratings would have made any difference to Citi and BofA on their own products. Combine that up with the fact that this is the only ratings agency that the DoJ has pursued after the financial collapse in 2008, and it’s the most significant one that downgraded US credit while Obama has been President, and the actual raison d’être seems pretty clear.”
–DoJ lawsuit against S&P even sillier than first thought by Ed Morrissey, HotAir.COm

This worries me. We’ve seen the left call their opponents “UN-american”, “insurrectionists”, “violent”, “racist” and use vulgar slang and mockery to lesser us and silence dissent.

Now it seems that they want to use real violence. R.S. McCain points out that terrorists do get to be heroes given the passage of time. The left loves underdogs and views all the world through that Marxist Lens(tm). If, somehow, you can claim some “-ism” and pin it on your victims, you are not a domestic terrorist, you’re a hero.

Down the media memory hole went the Tea Part links to Gabby Giffords shooter. So too went the history of Bill Ayers. Vietnam is a repressive police state, but don’t tell the hippies that. The USSR has fan as well.

The mask is off, the fangs are out. The left hates everyone who is not like them. If you’re the 1% who profited from the bailouts, make Hollywood movies, part of the media or a government worker you are a saint. Even if you’re done vile deeds. We’ve seen that you don’t even have to have done anything real, just conform to the lefty narrative.

Go against the grain, make waves, speak truth to power or just step out of line?

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
–O’Brian, 1984

New GOP, old ideas?

After the beating the GOP took in November, PJ media offered some advice for the party leadership.

Here are two of their ideas and my comment on them:

4) Investigate the possibility of reducing American forces in Germany: While NATO served an honorable and crucial role in winning the Cold War, the chances of another war in Central Europe are currently very low. Drawing down American troops to a “trip-wire” force could save up to $20 billion [3].

5) Consolidate and eliminate departments: There is also precedent for this. In the 1950s and the 1990s, programs that were duplicative were combined to save money (both decades saw balanced budgets). One possible department to consolidate would be the Department of Energy (whose budget was $27 billion last year [4]). Many of this department’s functions can be handled by other cabinet agencies. For example, regulation of oil and gas drilling can be done by the Environmental Protection Agency. Grants in the alternative energy field can be processed by the Commerce Department. Drilling permits can be handled by the Department of the Interior. And so on.
…
8) Make sure your members speak the language of the national interest: The 2012 CNN exit poll showed that Democrats were 38% of the voters, Republicans 32%, and independents 29%. So, any policy that comes across as appealing only to the Republican base isn’t likely to rally the nation as a whole. The good thing about “reform” themes is that they cross party lines, and especially appeal to independents.

9) National Guard/FEMA upgrade: The nation has repeatedly been hit by natural (hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.) and man-made (9/11) disasters over the last generation. More extensive training for the National Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency would seem to be a wise investment.

Why are US forces still in Europe? And don’t say it’s because of the middle east. Pull our forces out of Europe and leave a skeleton force to keep bases in Germany maintained. PATRIOT missiles, tankers and support units could be left in Germany. Navy ships, an infantry brigade and other units could rotate out on an as needed basis. Move the dependents home would save a vast amount of money. Make Germany a one year unaccompanied tour for most service members. Consolidate all the commands into one Joint Service Command and retire all the field grades who just sit in an office and drink coffee.

The National Guard needs to stop being the red-headed stepchild of the DoD. Upgrade their equipment and training. As the Active Duty force draws down, offer incentives to servicemembers to join the Guard. Newer vehicles and aircraft would help the Guard because they have a state mission AND are the strategic reserve of the DoD. No Rachel Maddow, they are not the unit at sit in the armory until a disaster strikes. If we’re going to use them, treat them well.

The education department should go back under Health and Human Services.  The Department of Homeland Security should either go away or be reformed after a long hard look at how it does business.  The silly “firewall” between departments could get the once over.  The FBI and CIA should share data on terrorists.

The Democrats have set themselves up as the party of “free stuff”.  We need to point out that under all their horseshit there is no pony.  Hold the “reality based” community to reality.  Point out that California and Detroit are disasters.

We need to show off the GOP governors and the states they are running. Show that our glasses are clean before we point out the turds in the liberals punchbowl.

Here and now

Two youtube videos to chew on:

Yes some NYT editorial from a law professor states the “reasons” to give up on the constitution and overthrow the law of the land.

When the law and public opinion don’t go their way, this is the left, (╯°□°)╯︵,,.┻━┻._.,

Bill Whittle states the obvious:

┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ) Now the article is over, let me put it back up.

Chew on this: 2013

Some tasty links:

• “Working Americans have just experienced a pay cut they didn’t expect — the cut resulting from the expiration of the reduction in the payroll tax rate.” Powerline
• Leslie Eastman finds that liberals don’t like the new tax hikes. Legal Insurrection.com
• Life in the USSR circa 1989. Daily Mail
• “Trillion Dollar Coin.” HotAir.com

the left fails economics forever. I guess they want us to live in a third world country with hyper inflation.
The left always has some excuse, the rich, low taxes or some defense. Given that the left controls two branches of government, the branch that spends money and the branch that collects it, they have no excuse. So out comes the crazy solutions: more taxes, a platinum coin, soon pension funds may be at risk.

The left promised the moon: free stuff and a free ride. I have to wonder, they played to people’s greed to get into office. When the budget reckoning comes, will they play to the rage? Programs will have to be cut, may will be canceled to fix the budget. Entitlement fraud happens despite the left playing the race card, accusing people of racism when the welfare rolls have to be fixed. So the right, the tea party, ordinary Americans, thinking, will become the enemy. The economy and the country will be fixed until the next generation will fall for the okeydoke.

Well played lefties, well played.

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
— “The Gods of the Copybook Headings“, Rudyard Kipling

Sandy Hook

On December 14, 2012, a gunman killed 20 children and 6 adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the Sandy Hook village of Newtown, Connecticut before committing suicide. It was the second-deadliest mass shooting in United States history, after the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre.[8]
–
Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Wikipedia

Some psyho woke up hating the world. He took many innocent lives before he turned the gun on himself. Michelle Malkin has a column up, with links on how to help.

Pray for the families, the survivors, the town, and the children.

And you, lefties, you need to SHUT UP.

Why is it that you want to take away the freedoms of those who have nothing to do with this? Nothing at all.

Every “discussion” about guns ends with the left calling for a police state. No guns, no freedom to disagree. Every discussion with the left seems to end with less freedom and the rest of us being labeled as racist/sexist/evil.

I chose to remember the victims and move on.

Via the New York Times:

No, we are not Europe

“Sweden has the population of North Carolina, no real linguistic or religious diversity, no experience of chattel slavery or mass immigration (and the children of recent immigrants in Sweden, incidentally, tend to have much higher poverty rates than the native-born), and a culture of Lutheran thrift and prudence that endures even though Lutheranism itself is on life support. America is and always has been a country of much greater diversity and wider cultural extremes, “
–Can We Be Sweden?, Ross Douthat, New York Times.com. Via Insty

“Bush didn’t create the conditions that led to the crash; he inherited them from Bill Clinton, and a large cast of thousands all played their own parts. Republican policies had no role in the crash; and the Democrats’ policies would have had no role, either.”
– “Another place where Republicans keep failing”, Noemie Emery, Washingtonexaminer.com

Most of the US Federal Budget goes to that govm’ent cheese.

Even Sweden or Europe can’t afford to be the European Welfare state:

“But while austerity tears at the funeral industry — and some say the social fabric of the country — it has been a boon for science. Donating a body has become such a popular alternative to the cost of a funeral that some medical schools complain they do not have enough refrigerators to store all of them…”
–Economic Crisis Leaves Hard-Hit Spaniards Scrimping on Funerals, NYT.com

“According to Swedish Statistics, unemployment in May 2011 was 7.9% in the general population and 25.9% amongst 15-25 year olds.”–Wikipeida

U.S. unemployment is at 7.9 percent. What does it all mean?

It means that while some might blame the Cold War, Iraq War, the DoD, Regan, the Bush Presidents, it’s the quest for a socialist state and the welfare state that’s got this country in the shape it’s in. Both parties got Uncle Sam in the housing business. The result was good money was sent to bad loans. We knew this was coming: articles, teevee shows, talking heads talking about the end of cheap money.

We did nothing. George W. Bush tried, but the Congress stopped him.

It would be nice to give a house to everyone. It would be nice to have a guaranteed income. One of my college buddies liked to rant that “in Europe, you were guaranteed an income of $20K a year no matter what.” I wish I could see him now.

The US floated Europe during the Cold War. While American GI’s stood guard, Europeans partied, or in Sweden’s case, stayed neutral. Communism fell, pulling the rug out from under the socialist lie. We were promised a “peace dividend”, that went away with the conflict of the 90′s and 9/11.

But still the advocates of govm’ent cheeze pressed on. From LBJ and his War on Poverty to the Community Reinvestment Act of the Clinton-Era, politicians promised something for nothing. And in times of crisis the cry of “Free stuff!” gets louder. Our economic problems will only get worse as more people and special interests ask for more government money. With money comes power and with power comes attempts at control.

Sadly government control and government money distort the economy. High taxes drain the economy, backing loans mean more bad loans get made. Government steps in to “regulate” things and now we have the mess we are in. Government expanding to meet the needs of an expanding government.

Instapudit says that the answer is no, we can’t be Sweden. We can’t be France in the 70′s, Europe in the 90′s or Japan in the 80′s. No matter how much liberals try to turn the USA into Europe 2.0. All of those economies were founded on lies (and helped by American military and economic might). Some have recovered, others are spiraling downward.

We need to look to an American solution. If people want Sweden, they should move to Sweden.

“Son, all these bad things don’t happen to you because you have bad luck; they happen to you because you’re a dumbass. “

This pic got the dumbass fired

“”She’s devastated,” Stone’s father told the Boston Herald. And her future might be, too.”
– Gawker

” In case you somehow missed the story, Lindsey is the woman who managed to exercise her right to free speech in a manner so incredibly offensive that people across the nation took to social media demanding she be fired from her job. If your love of civil liberties has you feeling sorry for her, you might want to hold back on defending her here.”
– Hotair

This post’s title is a quote from Red Foreman of That 70′ show. He was supposed to be a straw man, the cold dad in contrast to “free spirit” kids of the show. However the Jerkass had a point.

This wasn’t a lapse, she was an adult. Arlington National Cemetery is a war grave. What liberal sites like Gawker forget is that her right to be a dumbass ends where the grave begins. Of course liberals believe that we have a right to act like children (see Fluke, Sandra). This woman is a child in an adult’s body. She worked for an assisted living facility that cares for veterans.

She would be in charge of medication, she was supposed to care for people who can’t care for themselves.

And yet she can’t keep her idiocy to herself, she had to share it with the world.

Dumbass.

Doubling down on stupid: the “cost” of defense part II

Oh Time magazine, you show how stuck in the 1960′s old media is:

The accumulating damage wrought by the permanent war economy started to accelerate in the 1970s, and by 1980, the cancer metastasized: militarization and managerialization began to openly thrive at the expense of the traditional high-wage manufacturing sector, in effect, siphoning off money flows via a combination of government handouts and favorable tax treatment that in effect rewarded both the looting of the tax base and the draining of competitiveness and ingenuity from the civilian manufacturing sector (via the increased defense subsidy, leveraged buyouts, offshoring of jobs, emphasizing short-term focus to pump stock prices, etc.)
…
If you want to learn more about the important but little examined subject of defense dependency, and by extension, learn more about why America is becoming a third world nation, the best introduction is Melman’s* elegantly argued 11-page prologue to Profits Without Production, aptly titled ”How the Yankees Lost Their Know-how.”

Chuck Spinney uses Time’s battleland blog to give cover for the failure of the Democrat’s current wet dream welfare state. The truth as provided by Robert J. Samuelson of the Washington Post (?):

The welfare state’s great contradiction — the reason its politics are so messy — is that what seems good for the individual is not, when multiplied by thousands or millions of cases, always good for society. Politicians appeal to individuals who vote, but in doing so may shortchange the nation. Most obviously: The welfare state’s costs may depress economic growth.

The need is not to dismantle the welfare state but to modernize it gradually, preserving its virtues, minimizing its vices and not doing it abruptly so as to derail the recovery. But first we need to admit it exists.

I take back some of my vitriol I had for WaPo.

It wasn’t the Regan buildup that somewho screwed the US economy. It was guys like Mike Milken, the short sighted labor unions and bad decisions by rock star CEO’s that put American industry on it’s rocky course. Between labor unions asking for the moon, a finance sector looking for a quick buck and CEO’s more concerned about their golden parachute it’s a wonder that Japan didn’t take over the world:

Actually, the Japanese hypergrowth of the ’80s was built on a system of buddy-buddy relationships between various corporations and the government. At the time, this system appeared to be a triumph of modern corporatism and state-directed capitalism, but nowadays, we just call it “crony capitalism”. Predictably, this created an unsustainable economy based on *ahem* loose credit, selling below profit, and toxic loans. At its peak, property values became massively overinflated, to the point where prime real-estate in Tokyo could sell for more than the entire GDP of smaller countries. Once the bubble popped, the economy stagnated, and Japan entered a “lost decade” (or two). Banks became zombie banks, the central bank got its hands stuck in a liquidity trap, and Japanese twenty-somethings faced a fate worse than death: while their fathers had enjoyed lifetime employment at one company, they moved from temp job to temp job, failing to build much in the way of careers. In short, they weren’t half as inhuman as the mythos.

Wow, TvTropes beats liberal bullshit again!

Here is the take away via John Nolte at Breitbart.com:

Naturally, this won’t end with Obama leaving office in 2016. For the media will then write the first draft of history with a flood of books proclaiming Obama’s greatness — regardless of the actual results. And if this first draft of history is based on what we’ve seen throughout his presidency, Obama will be graded on a curve so steep it will require a guard rail.

So, no, Libya will never be properly investigated. Furthermore, no matter how bad the economy gets, Obama will always be credited for saving us from “Bush’s Depression.”

Yeah so the DoD will be gutted, America won’t be able to save South Korea, Taiwan, Israel or the next country old media wants us to save (*cough like Bosnia cough*).

But people will be able to buy Iphones with their EBT. That’s…um…yeah…

The real war on science

“Remember: People still sell snake oil. They just put pictures of leaves on the bottle now.“
—Cracked, “8 Health Foods That Are Bad For Your Health”

The left loves to shout that it loves science. While it’s true that many college students are lefties, the progressive left HATES science. Starting in the 1960′s, opposition to the Vietnam war, the new Environmental movement and the subversive activities of the Marxist left converged into the “Progressive” movement we now know today.

• MMR vaccine controversy
• Homeopathy, quite popular with the left.
• watch this Star Trek: Deep Space Nine review or this review of the ninth Star Trek film.
• The Outer Limits (1995) and the X-files, both middle fingers to science.
• From TVtropes: All Natural Snake Oil, Science is bad and Science is Wrong
• The works of James Cameron.

The end results is a mistaken believe/worship of anything “natural” and seeing science, the military and “corporations” as the same thing. What does that get the rest of us? Reason.tv has the answer: