God rest his soul:
Retired Army Gen. Alexander Haig, who held influential positions in the United States military and in politics and who as White House chief of staff shepherded Richard M. Nixon toward peacefully resigning the presidency, died today at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore of complications from an infection. He was 85.
A patriot with a checkered career – as can be expected from a man hired by Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan for various jobs.
And the continual fun of 2010 goes on – From Real Clear Politics:
SurveyUSA is out with job approval ratings for President Obama and Senate Democrats in a trio of West Coast states: Washington, Oregon, and California. One Democratic Senator from each state is standing for reelection this November, and the numbers demonstrate the kind of political headwind they’re facing this year.
Washington State Senator Patty Murray appears to be the most vulnerable of the bunch, with an upside-down approval rating of 43/50. Recent polling shows Murray losing narrowly to Republican Dino Rossi…
…Barbara Boxer is also showing serious signs of weakness. SurveyUSA pegs her job approval at just 47%, with 43% disapproving…
…Lastly, Ron Wyden of Oregon looks to be the most secure of the bunch, though his job approval rating is right at 50%. The other day Sean pointed out that the most recent Rasmussen poll shows him with a 14-point lead over law professor Jim Huffman but added that it was, “surprising to see Wyden below 50% against an absolute no-name.”…
It is entirely up in the air, this election of 2010. The only thing we can say with any certainty is that if you’re in office, it might not be pretty for you. Other than that, its going to go in ways probably very unexpected by the so-called experts in politics. A political revolution is like that – the old rules don’t apply.
Regardless of the particular outcomes of the various races, the most important thing, to me, is that the people are ready to take their government back…
The news:
Greg Sargent reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that he would support holding a reconciliation vote on a public option.
Said Reid spokesman Rodell Mollineau in a written statement (emphasis Sargent’s):
Senator Reid has always and continues to support the public option as a way to drive down costs and create competition. That is why he included the measure in his original health care proposal.
If a decision is made to use reconciliation to advance health care, Senator Reid will work with the White House, the House, and members of his caucus in an effort to craft a public option that can overcome procedural obstacles and secure enough votes.
But Sargent also relays the doubts of Senate leadership aides, who say they aren’t sure if the Senate parliamentarian will allow the passage of a public option via reconciliation.
There are several possibilities here:
1. Democrats are convinced that things will turn their way by November (figuring on an improving economy, etc) and thus will be able to get away with whatever the heck they want right now.
2. Democrats are just blind to the sea-change which has occurred in American politics.
3. Reid, et al are just giving some eyewash to the leftist base – keeping them quiet and on-side while, in the end, not doing anything to further anger the American people (so, pretend you are pushing health care until your spin-meisters can talk the leftwing rank-and-file in to genuinely believing that it was the mean, old GOP who failed on health care, not the Democrats with their massive Congressional majority).
We’ll just have to see how this plays out. My view is that the change in American politics is not related to the economy – in other words, that even if things hadn’t got as bad as they are and even if they improve between now and November, it won’t fundamentally alter the situation. Unemployment below 9% might rescue a few Democrats on the margins, but the determination to take America back from the corrupt and the Statists is based upon dismay over the way things are done, rather than any particular situation of the moment.
Time will tell, as in all these things…
UPDATE, McConnell on the issue:
Using reconciliation would be an acknowledgment that there is bipartisan opposition to their bill, another in a series of backroom deals, and the clearest signal yet that they’ve decided to completely ignore the American people.
We are ever the authors of our own destruction. We have been given clear, easy instructions on what to do, but we refuse the office and out of sheer perversity, set ourselvs on the path to destruction. This all stems, of course, out of our fallen nature – because we rebelled against God, we became out of sync with what we were supposed to be. It isn’t even so much, now, that we consciously rebel (though some do precisely that) but that we are internally incapable of sustained good behavior. Only a few people, by constant discipline, have trained themselves to be mostly in accordance with the truth – with God’s will in our lives. And even they will be first to say how often they still fall short.
it is because of this innate ability to fail that we must always be on guard against great power being concentrated in the hands of a few, or one. As an individual, the most spectacular failure imaginable would still, at worst, only bring down a few immediate neighbors with me. Enlarge the power I have, and you thus enlarge the scope of failure, should I not measure up. Its the difference between a man benig a fool and ruining a company employing 500 people, and another man foolishly destroying another company employing 500,000. At bottom, the larger the organization, the less actual power it should have.
Wise men have long known this. Our Founders, especially, were clear eyed about the nature of humanity. The system they built is deliberately designed to prevent things from happening – and our error this past century or so has been our efforts to get around the restrictions built in to the system. We are greatly impatient. We don’t want to go through all that tedius effort of garnering a Constitutional majority to enact a new law. So we consign powers to things like the Federal Reserve, to regulatory agencies, to the Supreme Court – if they’ll just give us a short cut to whatever we want, we’ll be fine with it. The trouble is the power we have allowed to these organization is still wielded by regular people. In other words, we’re being ruled by people just as likely to screw up on any given day as the rest of us.
And while the department of parks and recreation in your local community can screw up your city by boneheaded action, a mis-step by the Federal Reserve will mess up the entire nation. Heck, the entire world, given the importance of the United States in the global economy.
Think about where we’ve come from and where we are. Back in the 1960′s, the United States was supreme in all respects. We made more things. Grew more things, Farmed more things. We were the envy of the world – we were sending a man to the Moon. Now, in 2010, its extraordinarily difficult to even find so much as a pair of shoes made in the USA. Our mines have been moved to Chile. Our farms are in Mexico. Our factories are in China – and the United States government just decided that gonig back to the Moon is too expensive. This is the result of assigning ever more power to fewer and fewer people.
Who consulted with the people before making a decision to, say, cut off the farmers of California from the water needed to grow crops? Did you vote on that? When did we, in our deliberations as citizens, decide that we’d go decades without building an oil refinery, or a nuclear power plant? When was the vote taken which decided that the United States would become the world’s largest debtor? Indebted to China for some trillion dollars? The answer, of course, is that we never did – various elites, behind closed doors and in consultation only with those who could most financially profit from the moves, decided what would happen. And it came about this way because we did not insist that we, the people, rule this nation.
One can pick many land marks upon the road to atrophy of our democratic republic. The so-called “progressive era” of the early 20th century struck many blows at the Founders system. FDR, of course, gleefully over-rode all manner of protections for the people. But to me, the final straw, was when the Supreme Court issueed the Roe decision, legalizing abortion in all 50 States, local laws and US Constitution notwithstanding. Regardless of how one feels about abortion – pro-choice or pro-life or just not sure – it should horrify everyone in love with liberty to think that 9 judges got to decide that issue. There should have been an uprising – and it should have been led by the pro-choice people, outraged that any judge, anywhere, would usurp the rights of the people to decide such a difficult issue. But, of course, that was not the case – in fact, the pro-choice people, with that impatience noted above, led the fight to have the judges usurp the rights of the people – they wanted to be less free (though they didn’t think of it that way) because freedom was (and is) difficult and allowed for all manner of local differences (another thing which annoys those with a zeal for change – they hate the fact that a law might hold in one area, but not in another).
While that was the watershed, it was also just one in a series of dimunations of the power of the people. The whole thrust of politics over the past 100 years has been to remove power from the small and local and assign to the large and national. Some how or another, the idea developed that if we could just get things done and have “experts” lead the way, we could get things all set in no time at all. The end result of this has been the near collapse of our civilization and the near destruction of the ability of the Aermican economy to produce wealth. In the phrase of the radicals of old – though they really had no conception of what the words meant – we need “power to the people”. We need, that is, to return power to the people – to the individual, the family, the community, the states…and take most of it away from the federal government.
But not only in government, but in economics, as well. Big business is, in its own way, just as bad as big government. A huge, bureaucratic corporation can cause massive dislocation when it makes a mistake – such as what we’ve seen in instituitons like Lehman Brothers, GM and AIG. It isn’t so much about breaking up the behmoths – people have a right to invest in such firms, if they wish – but in resetting the economy so that small and mid-sized corporations are encouraged. In order to be in control of our destiny, we must reserve the most power down to the lowest level. It must be us in our families, churches, community groups and local governments who call most of the tune. If this means some localities will get it horribly wrong, then that is ok – better one town to blow it than the whole nation. Additionally, diffused power provides a series of political experiments…with everyone working on it and thinking about it, the best solutions will come up and can be copied by others.
The road back is the road to the destruction of such monstrosities as, say, the Department of Commerce. Commerce will get along just fine without Uncle Sam’s tutelage. So will Energy. The times comes, my fellow Americans, when we’ll have to courageously face up to the fact that it is we, in our communites, who can best judge the needs of our locality…and thus things like the EPA will disappear, education will become the province of parents, health care will be done by doctors and the work of America will be done in America, not overseas. We do that and freedom will bloom, again.
UPDATE: Sorry, everyone, didn’t know I had set comments to “off”. Have at it.
Joe Biden recently said that a another 9-11-type attack was unlikely.
Well, yesterday’s incident in Austin where nut-job Joseph Stack flew into a building targeting the IRS proves just how wrong Biden was.
If one desperate man can do such a thing, even posting up hi s suicide note online prior to his actions, are we supposed to believe that Islamic extremists, more dedicated to attacking America and in much larger numbers can’t pull enough another attack if we let our guard down?
Biden’s attitude is what the terrorists need to succeed. Our complacency paves the way for vulnerability.
Hey there, everyone – heading to Reno for a few days. Blogging by me might be a bit spotty, so have at it with this open thread and I’ll try to have something up later today.
Which is news to the IAEA, but not to everyone with any sense at all:
A draft report from the International Atomic Energy Agency warns that Iran may currently be working on secret nuclear warhead. This is the strongest language the IAEA has yet used to describe Iran’s nuclear weapons program:
“The information available to the agency is extensive, … broadly consistent and credible in terms of the technical detail, the time frame in which the activities were conducted and the people and organizations involved,” the report said.
“Altogether this raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”
Give the fact that Iran has no need to have nuclear power, at all, the only possible reason for it is weapons. And if you’re going to build nukes, you need a way to deliver them to the target. Other than smuggling a bomb, a missile or a bomber is the only way.
And so…
Or, torture, as some would have it – Mike Potemra makes some trenchant remarks about it:
The question has been raised, Was it appropriate for a Catholic TV network to provide a platform for a torture advocate? In my view, the answer is yes. Marc Thiessen, who appeared on Raymond Arroyo’s TV show The World Over, defends the practices of the past decade because he believes that these practices are necessary to defend innocent lives…
…Irealize I run the risk of being accused of special pleading in this defense of Marc (and of EWTN), so I should probably point out that I disagree with him on the underlying issue. I think torture is a great evil, and that the resort to it in the past decade is a black spot on America’s record. But I am not in a stone-throwing mood against people like Marc, because I realize that the accusation that someone is not living to up to his or her religious creed is one of the lowest and least helpful arguments imaginable. For heaven’s sake, I — in religious matters — am now a rather liberal high-church Episcopalian, and I find even that pronouncedly lenient ethic hard to live up to…
…So the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak: I accuse myself. I have been dismayed by how rapidly the resort to torture has been undertaken in recent years, in response to much lesser threats than the one in my hypothetical. (Two or three incompetent pantybombers in a decade doth not a Hitler make.) But I recognize that my difference from Marc and the others on his side of this discussion is one of degree, not of kind. And there are other reasons to ask people for generosity of spirit – notably because we may have need of it ourselves…
To me, its just doesn’t rise to the level of immorality when we compel terrorists to divulge information. Terrorists, in my view, simply do not have a right to remain silent – they must tell us what they know. Physical coercion should be used sparingly, but if that is what it takes to get them to talk, then that is what a proper understanding of morality requires in such situations.
What we have in terrorists are non-State actors who yet pose a threat to not just an individual or group of individuals, but to a whole people. This is different in kind from a bank robber who is a risk to all banks or even a murderer who is a threat to a particular person at a given time. The terrorists, if allowed the time and resources, would not just rob a bank – or even 10,000 banks. They would not just commit a murder – or even 10,000 murders. They will kill every last one of us, if they can. There is no limit to the amount of damage they may do – and unlike chasing down a murderer, once we’ve caught one of them we have only barely – and temporarily – diminished the threat.
In order to effectively combat the terrorist threat we must, as far as possible, learn what they know and what their plans are. There are many means of doing this, but the most effective way is to draw the information out of those best informed: the terrorists, themselves. When we capture a terrorist, it is a golden opportunity to gain a distinct advantage over the threat – and we must take full advantage of it, even if the captive proves reluctant to come clean. And do keep in mind that the more information we gather from one terrorist will not only save the lives of our own, but of the terrorist’s own, too. Thwarted terrorist plans means, also, a smaller number of dead terrorists, in the long run.
It is a dereliction of duty – an act of immorality – for someone who can obtain information about this threat to refuse to do so on the imagined grounds that everyone, all the time and everywhere, may not be coerced in to giving information. Some people might ask, “where do you draw the line?”. Meaning, of course, that if we allow one terrorist to be waterboarded, then we are presumptively defenseless against the claim that we must rip out the fingernails of someone who refuses to spill the beans about his neighbors tax return. To such arguments I answer: are you stupid?
I’m not. I can draw the line right where human decency requires it. I want information out of these terrorists – I don’t want so much as a hair on their heads harmed, if it can be in any way avoided. I don’t need to boil a terrorist in oil – in fact, doing so is counter-productive because a boiled terrorist cannot provide me the information I require. I want the terrorist to talk – and talk truthfully, as far as can be determined. Most of the time more regular interrogation methods will work – some times, however, it takes a bit more.
For us Christians, the greatest commandment is to love God with all our might, and love our neighbors as ourselves. Would I be loving my neighbor if I allowed my neighbor – in this case, a captive terrorist – to with hold information which may lead to the deaths of thousands? In my view, I’m not loving anyone – I’m guilty of cowardice, if I do such a thing.
I can’t help that some of my brothers and sisters make bad decisions – all I can do is react to the results of those decisions, and do my best to limit the overall damage. A man who is determined to fly a plane in to one of our buildings is someone who had gone severely wrong – the least worry we have is that it might require waterboarding to get him to talk. Our larger worry is how to change things so that it is less likely for a man to make such a choice – but part of that making change requires that any captives talk and tell us everything they know.
More trouble in Democrat-land:
Longtime Democratic strategist Pat Caddell on Wednesday blasted the Obama White House for creating “a world in which there is no dissent,” following his banishment from Colorado Democrat Andrew Romanoff’s campaign for Senate.
Caddell, in a phone interview with The Daily Caller, doubled down on the comments he made in November that he said public sector employee unions in Colorado used as leverage to get him tossed from the Romanoff campaign.
“What I said about Andy Stern and the SEIU? Sure, they’re thugs,” said Caddell, a former adviser to President Jimmy Carter, who until Monday* had an informal advising role with the primary challenger to incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet.
Caddell said he does not fault Romanoff, a former state House speaker, for cutting ties with him after his remarks from November — in which he called the Service Employee Union International (SEIU) “thugs” and said the goal of the environmental movement is to “deconstruct capitalism” — were made public.
But Caddell said the comments were pushed into the public spotlight by the state chapters of the SEIU and the AFL-CIO, who called on the Romanoff campaign to get rid of him or risk losing any chance of getting labor’s endorsement.
They really are starting to eat their own. The Unions demand no dissent. The pro-abortion fanatics demand no dissent. On and on it goes – only slaves to the powerful are permitted in the Democrat party, it would seem.
I think it really comes down to the fact that they think they really won in a positive sense in 2008 – that they won because people wanted liberal Democrats, as opposed to not wanting President Bush and the GOP (and now, of course, more and more people long for the Bush Administration). Democrats had a really solid chance of gaining a lot of power for a long time – but they would have had to govern from the center. This seems an impossible task.
Why is that? Because the Democrats allowed kook leftists to hijack the party. Once Michael Moore was invited to the party any chance of reasonableness or compromise became impossible – when you honor a liar because his lies make you feel good about your absurd hatred of someone, then you are very far gone.
Can they come back to the center? There is still a window of opportunity – but its small and closing fast. As things are heading right now, even an improved economy won’t help the Democrats in November (especially given that any “improvement” will be smoke and mirrors having no discernible effect on the day to day lives of non-government Americans). Only a complete shift away from the left will do the trick…and now we hear that Obamacare might be forced through via reconciliation; not the thing you’d be hearing if Democrats were awake to their peril.
When “tax the rich” meets reality:
More than $70 billion in wealth left New Jersey between 2004 and 2008 as affluent residents moved elsewhere, according to a report released Wednesday that marks a swift reversal of fortune for a state once considered the nation’s wealthiest.
Conducted by the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College, the report found wealthy households in New Jersey were leaving for other states — mainly Florida, Pennsylvania and New York — at a faster rate than they were being replaced.
“The wealth is not being replaced,” said John Havens, who directed the study. “It’s above and beyond the general trend that is affecting the rest of the northeast.”
This was not always the case. The study – the first on interstate wealth migration in the country — noted the state actually saw an influx of $98 billion in the five years preceding 2004. The exodus of wealth, then, local experts and economists concluded, was a reaction to a series of changes in the state’s tax structure — including increases in the income, sales, property and “millionaire” taxes.
The real rich will always find a way around taxes – they’ll either lobby the government to grant loopholes, or they’ll hide their money overseas. Meanwhile, those who are prosperous and yet find themselves to be “the rich” as liberals go ever lower on the income scale for tax increases, just move to jurisdictions with lower tax burdens. While my State of Nevada is quite in the economic dumps right now, we still benefit from a huge amount of wealth which decamped from California as that State went on a tax and spending spree (Arizona, Utah and Oregon have also benefited from California’s economic suicide).
Taxes there must be, but taxes should never be implemented to make things “fair” or to redistribute wealth – such taxes actually end up hurting the poor the worst as opportunities for advancement dry up as money hides from the tax man. Taxes should always be geared towards a combination of revenue maximization coupled with encouragement of wealth creation – they should be simple, non-burdensome and everyone who earns a penny or has any wealth at all should pay something, even if its quite small (no true citizen can be excused from the burden of government unless physically incapable of earning money).
As liberalism has worked in practical effects, it has become a “soak the poor” scam – the rich are fine, the middle class is burdened and the poor “progressively” have their chances of advancement curtailed. We can’t make the law philanthropic – a desire to help has to come from within, not from the tax code, or any other legal code. Tax for the necessities of government, and leave the rest to the generosity and good sense of the people. Trying to do otherwise just makes a mess – as we can now see with blinding clarity in New Jersey.
