It's Yuge!

The campaign is over and the election has been won--nearly.  I write this the day before the Electoral College meets to finalize the results of the 2016 election of our next President.  Yes, it will be Donald Trump, a fact that is both a heartening victory and an enormous relief.  I sincerely doubt there will be more than a small handful of Electors who defect from their sworn obligation to vote for Donald Trump as the 45th President of our Republic; it would be their own political suicide as who would ever again trust them in any office.  Certainly not on the flimsy accusations and innuendo proferred without proof by the Progressivists.

I started out being open minded about Trump--I grew to maturity in New York City and was well aware of Trump long before he took to the national stage in The Apprentice.   He was glamorous, larger-than-life, brash, egotistical and yet undeniably effective in the field of building and real estate. I remember my beautiful late wife's quip to a visitor who saw from our apartment windows one of his towers rising.  "Oh, that's Donald Trump's latest erection."

I remember vividly the appalling debacle of the Wollman skating rink in Central Park that lay unused and un-repaired for six long years under a moribund (Democrat) city government until Trump fixed it in six months and under budget.  The Radio City rink is a small and expensive skating venue. Wollman was where everyday New Yorkers and their families skated.

So I started out skeptical but interested.  Uncontrolled immigration had me worried sick; an endless supply of new, cheap workers for business and the next several generations of Democrat voters in the

making is what I feared. Neither Democrat nor establishment Republican wanted it stopped.  The nattering classes at the myriad Conservative think tanks and idea magazines were utterly deaf to any nay saying about it (except Kevin Williamson at NRO who famously wished the white middle-class would die).  The end of America as a productive colossus and home to a thriving middle class was a vision that haunted me.


Democrats tout themselves as the party of the poor. They are correct.  Poor people are desperate, frightened and open to becoming addicted to government largess. Does it surprise anyone then that Democrats pursue policies that shackle job production at home and then champion the mass importation of poor from abroad?  They want as many Americans as they can to be poor and needy because they stand ready with other people's open wallets to fill those needs.

My hesitation to be a full-throated supporter of Trump early on was that I was unsure of his motives. I went into this election cycle with only two absolutes, both negative.  No to Marco Rubio, in return
for his Gang of Eight betrayal; and "Hell No" to Jeb! Bush, for his stance on immigration, but also because I detest the idea that politics in America become the preserve of a few elite families.  There is a word for government that becomes the hereditary occupation of a few families and it's "aristocracy." (That same logic applies to Hillary as well, but she had other and more copious negatives.)  Besides, the Bush family have supplied Republicans chiefly with disappointment in their last two times at bat. We owe them NOTHING.  And despite the Texas patina, they are really still Connecticut Yankee liberal Republicans and elitists in outlook.  I doubt they are on speaking terms with any individual with a net worth of less than $10 million except for servants.  Not exactly the best stewards of middle class American hopes.

I thought Trump's run might be simply a publicity stunt or an ego trip.  But there he was, articulating policies I found myself nodding in agreement with; echoing the doubts I've had this last decade about the future of this country I love.  The more I listened, the more convinced I was.  And he was attracting more and more people to his message; pragmatically, he might just have a shot.  He worked at it, tirelessly.

Rick Wilson accidentally reveals his favorite hobby.

And he took fearful hits from the Democrats, from their co-conspirators in the media and from what I called the Karl Rove Wing of the Republican Party, what has since been dubbed the "donor class." Those are the "right" enemies for someone who wants to revitalize America.  He took them, shrugged them off and kept going.  That impressed me.  This was no ego trip; no one works this hard for simple thrills.  When he began to lose real money from cancelled contracts because of his stated positions and still kept going, I was convinced.  Money and success obviously mean a lot to his view of himself; to give those up so willingly meant there was something else that was driving him.


So I began to defend him on Twitter and in the comment sections of articles.  When we went into primary season, he did well in Iowa, but Ted Cruz had staked out that heavily-religious state and worked it extremely well.  But Trump didn't do badly either.  The catfight between Cruz and Trump started getting really rough and so it was in the venues I mentioned.  The attacks and counter-punches were harsh and brutal, I won't rekindle those fires herein.  I gave as good as I got; maybe a little better.

That's not to say Trump didn't give me the occasional cringe with some of the things he said; he did.  I didn't agree with more than a few of his utterances.  But I'm from Queens like Donald; I get what he was doing maybe better than some others:  he was fighting a maneuver war.  He knew the media would be in the tank for Hillary and that they would want to hang some all-defining label on his policies and on him.  Hang it and then dismiss him, calling in left-wing yet putatively "objective" professional talking heads, clandestine Hillary allies, to "analyze" and then belittle the labels they had assigned him.  That's what has worked against establishment types like Romney and McCain and would really work on the Millennials coming of age for the first time who had been raised in the fact-free zone of modern education under the Obama regime's Education Department.  Labels define how they see others.  But Trump wouldn't co-operate.  You had to tune him in each day to find out what he was saying.  And in doing that, and using Twitter more than any other Republican would ever think to do, he talked right over the heads of the media and directly to America; and the media were so stunned they unwittingly helped him do it.

The rallies astonished and emboldened me.  He would address overflowing crowds of thousands
talking off the top of his head for 90 minutes, actively getting people on his side with the chants and even using hecklers to his advantage.  Openly belittling the enemy amongst them:  the media.  No teleprompter, no focus grouped scripts; when Hillary did that she came out with the phrase that may have knocked more undecideds into the Trump camp than anything:  "Basket of Deplorables" became the war cry of the forgotten electorate.


Well, they remember us now.  

(more later)

Where HAVE you Been?!?

I know I haven't been around in the last few . . .well. . .four years.  I was way off dealing with life issues, many of them owing to The National Mistake that now inhabits the White House.  But I haz returned and I have big plans for this here blog.

I haven't spent the time absent without benefit:  I have been reading, reading, reading; history and philosophy and politics and yes . . . even more economics.

I'll be redesigning the blog, although it will still be largely a black background with white text.  And redesigning . . . well, having someone design . . .a new logo for the site.  And I will be adding music and perhaps a weekly call in show to the site--but I promise you it won't be like the blog talk radio shows you may be used to.


Meanwhile, I leave you with this for the nonce.

How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Twelve.
One to screw it in.
One to excoriate men for creating the need for illumination,
One to blame men for inventing such a faulty means of illumination,
One to suggest the whole "screwing” bit to be too "rape-like",
One to deconstruct the light bulb itself as being phallic,
One to blame men for not changing the bulb,
One to blame men for trying to change the bulb instead of letting a woman do it,
One to blame men for creating a society that discourages women from changing light bulbs,
One to blame men for creating a society where women change too many light bulbs,
One to advocate that light bulb changers should have wage parity with electricians,
One to alert the media that women are now "out-lightbulbing" men,
One to just sit there taking pictures for her blog for photo-evidence that men are unnecessary.

A REPLY TO MY CONGRESSMAN, FRESHMAN RICHARD NUGENT

After a long break, I'm back!  Mwah!

----------------------------- 

At a recent Town Hall meeting, I submitted a written question about energy policy and Sheriff Rick's office wrote me a reply regarding HR 49 - American Energy Independence and Price Reduction Act.  The bill was introduced by Rep. Don Young (R-AK) and will deal with topics such as drilling for oil and gas in ANWR.

The one aspect I am not crazy about is provisions for revenue to be set aside into an alternative energy trust fund, and I set forth my reasons in my reply below. 

(Interested readers can find the text of the Bill here.) 

------------------------------ 

Dear Sheriff Rick,

Thank you for your letter to me of August 26 regarding energy policy and HR 49.  On the whole, I am pleased that Republican members of the House (at least) are taking our future energy needs seriously.  The one thing that you mentioned that I oppose is the provision to establish the ANWR Alternative Energy Trust Fund.

Government subsidies to private concerns are not based on sound policy, on science and engineering or on economics.  They are based on politics, pure and simple.  Creating a government-run fund to finance alternative energy is just a misuse of badly needed revenues that will, inevitably (and make no mistake about the certainty of it), be used to provide funding to the favored recipients of whichever legislator has the most political pull in Washington or to whichever President is in power.  I'm all in favor of using whatever sources of energy may be reasonably used, but they must make economic and engineering sense on their own, not with the US government's wallet appended.  As a graduate student of economics, I learned the old canard known as the "infant industries" argument that has been used in history to justify ruinous tariffs and ridiculous subsidies and bailouts (Chrysler even tried a variety of this when it sought loan guarantees in the 1980s).  Just recently, Solyndra LLC went bankrupt after having received a $535 million dollar loan guarantee and a billion dollars in private equity largely based on that guarantee.  Not coincidentally, George Kaiser, the principal Solyndra investor, was a large contributor and a bundler for Barack Obama (See this article.)   Solyndra was not the only bankrupt alternative energy company in the news this month;, there was also Evergreen Solar ($43 million from the state of  Massachusetts) as well as SpectraWatt (here).

But the poster child for bad energy subsidies has to be ethanol.  Ethanol, which many in the green movement now descry as causing more harm than good, takes something like three gallons of fossil fuel (for the farm equipment, for the trucks to move it, for the energy to distill it, etc.) to make just four gallons of ethanol.  It also raises food prices, since corn is a primary animal feed and this artificially raises the price of corn.  (This year's "Arab Spring" uprisings may have been as much about hunger from rising food prices than about any latent yearning for better government.)  But no one seems to be able to stop it because there are too many people making too much money from it, the news media has fallen in love with the idea as a solution to the mythical menace of anthropogenic climate change, and the lobby even hired former General Wesley Clark as a spokesman for themselves.  And there are plenty of Republicans from farm states who will stand up in the well of Congress and argue for the subsidies.

The TEA Party movement was based, in part, upon the realization by everyday Americans that the US Government has become captured by the fantastical myths and emotion-based belief systems of the Left and that we just can't afford it anymore.  We must be cold-eyed realists about the direction of this country if we are to save this Republic we love.  Realistically, oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power are going to be the major sources of energy for this nation for the foreseeable future.  If alternative energy has a future, freely-determined market forces will be the driver of any new technological development.  American ingenuity is legendary and the idea that government subsidies are needed to spur technological innovation is ridiculous.  How many subsidies did Silicon Valley need to produce their technological revolution?  Businessmen are pragmatists; if they see the government ready to underwrite the risk of new technology, they'll be only  to happy to lobby fiercely for their share of the taxpayer's money.  Let's shut that window firmly once and for all.

Thanks for writing, I enjoyed your presentation at the Knights of Columbus in Spring Hill, and thanks for keeping the faith.




---------------------------

UPDATE

I had to add this, it's just hysterically funny!  We need more ads like this!

Roger Williams for Congress - The Donkey Whisperer 

An Open Letter To The Speaker.

to the Honorable John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, 112^th Congress.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, and through you, all the Republicans of the House who heard the call of Americans like me and stood firm on starting the process of cutting the atrocious level of Federal spending.  This was not an easy thing for you and for them, as you were all vilified by the Democrats and their pets in the media, the blogoshere, academia, the Leftist think tanks, and the Twittering ninnies throughout the nation.

 Schumer's lips hardly move as Reid talks

I know the numbers are not large compared to the size of the gargantuan Federal budget, but to take a phrase away from the Progressives, "it's a good beginning."  You changed the terms of the debate.  Whereas for too long the difference between Democrats and Republicans has been "Spend Huge Amounts vs. Spend Somewhat Less," you and all the Republicans that supported you in the House and Senate have reversed the direction of spending altogether.  And you got Reid to agree to debate Obamacare in the Senate, something he hated to contemplate as it will force Democrats to stand and declare again their support for this hateful program and opposed to the message the November 2010  election clearly heralded, thereby marking themselves indelibly for recall in November 2012.

I know that there are two more major fiscal battles coming this year, and I am with you, as are many Americans who also do not want to see us become a second-rate world power in debt-peonage to China and the oil emirates.  We are at a moment in history that is nothing less than a tipping point in our fate as a nation and I for one want the America of my earliest years back.  And I want it back better than it was.

This is a battle against a trend that has been ongoing since FDR and the New Deal, a trend not just in spending, but in the ideology of spending, in the nature of our government and a citizen’s relationship to that government.   Thanks to a thoroughly-corrupted educational system, children are not even taught about the nature of our federal republic and so are utterly disarmed in the debate about the future of our nation.  I hope this is the beginning of the road back, away from that sewage field called "Progressivism."

I'm 54 years old and I am in this fight for the long-term.  I may not live to see the end, but I'm here while I still have breath to argue and strength to write, help organize, speak out and do whatever is needed to restore my country to her unique promise and destiny.

Thank you and God bless you all. 

Now get some sleep, you'll need it.

Very truly yours,

Kevin - The Ikonoklast

--------------------------------------------------

High-Speed Rail anyone?

I also sent this to Rep. Rick Nugent, my Congressman and Senator Marco Rubio.  I did not bother sending it to Senator Bill "ASTRO BOY" Nelson; why bother, it would do no damn good.

 

Mid-Week Rants and Election Woes

"Give us what we want & we'll go away!"

I don't know when it was that my country went from a nation where most people believed  in working hard and doing for themselves, in supporting their nation against all foreign threats and  believing in the basic decency of one's fellow citizens to a nation where that is considered a sign of unhealthy extremism.  "Extremism" itself is an interesting expression.   It implies that there is some undefined benefit in being balanced equally between two polar opposites.  Conceivably, it is a modern expression of the ancient Greek axiom of "moderation in all things,"  truly I don't know. 

But it's modern use has been to pull the country steadily to the Left during my lifetime.  And it was going on before I was born, too.   Listening to my favorite cabal leader, Schumer the Tumor, in a verbal ping-pong match with Matt Lauer, you begin to worry whether the great mass of Americans will fall for this cynical spinning or not.   For The Tumor to claim that a $33 billion cut in spending is a reasonable compromise from the $100 billion figure that the Republicans initially wanted is pathetic.  Even the $100 billion number was a token gesture measured against total spending, but a behemoth such as our government doesn't turn on a dime; it was enough to get it started in the right direction.  $33 billion will be treated as a rounding error by the Democrats  in our government's inexorable spending climb.

What has happened in America is that with each small victory of the Progressives, the baseline for normal has been pulled steadier and steadier to the left.  But the Progressives never stop.  Take Schumer's favorite hatred, private ownership of firearms.  In the course of my life, whenever legal firearm ownership has been restricted a little further, someone like Chuck pops up after the smoke clears and expresses the opinion that "it's a good first start."  No matter how far we've already come, "It's a good first start,"  relentlessly tugging that baseline to the left, redefining what the center is by shifting the mean.  Ronald Reagan famously remarked that "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The party left me."

Schumer's eyes glow with satisfaction and malice and hate at the thought of the shutdown being blamed on the Republicans and that segment of the electorate he despises most of all:  The Tea Party.  They are anathema to Schumer, a real grass-roots movement not afraid to challenge the growth of the Progressive state Schumer wants for all of us.  THAT to Chuckie is the most un-American of things, to rebel against your duly-elected (from NYC) civil masters, to question their guidance and thwart their will.  He and the toady media have done their best to gin up hatred for this movement of average Americans practicing simple adversarial politics in a supposedly democratic system.  And they've been helped by the union bosses, angered at having their banquet of taxpayer-funded dues disturbed and threatened.  

"If you won't contribute . . . ."

Schumer, as I have said before, is a major mover and shaker within the policy-making side of the Donkey party.   Inside it, he is considered a shrewd calculator and strategist and a true believer in the Progressive vision.   In public view, he has limited utility and he knows it.  His face and voice and expressions are so marked by the twisted hatred in his soul for what we all think of as traditional America that they only bring him out in the light of day when they are desperate, and the Donks are.   All you need to know about what Schumer thinks of middle-America you get from his ideological offspring, Anthony Wiener, who is Chuck Schumer without an inner monologue.  But now, he's in his element.   If the Donks feel the average American has blamed the shut-down on the Pubbies, he will smile and sink back down into the swampy waters he is most at home in, his eyes and nostrils above the surface, waiting in ambush like the crocodile he is.

Mr Obama, of course, has tried to keep his skirts as far away from the mud of actually governing as possible.  Incredibly, while the country teeters back and forth, he junkets around the globe.  I hope GE appreciates all the business he is getting for them that they won't pay taxes on (OK, but I HAD to get that in).  Seriously, that's what you have a VP for, although given Biden's verbal gaffes, sending him on a diplomatic trip might end with the European Union declaring war on us.  But Mr Obama apparently enjoys all the trappings of holding the most powerful executive office in the world.  Except for that messy, annoying bit about actually governing.

All clear, Captain Obama!

I shouldn't be surprised at the depth of ignorance, intolerance and sheer irrational hatred coming from the Left, but I am sometimes taken aback by it.  Spend any time in the Twittershpere and you will see some of the most hateful messages being posted.  I'm not dismissing the occasional ignorant remark on the part of the right-wing crowd, but the Left is an order of magnitude worse in sheer vitriol and emotionally-laden fantasy.  America is on a downward slide into bankruptcy and there is no one big enough to bail US out.  No, not China; China has 1.3 billion people and a billion of them still live in near poverty and increasingly resent it.  China needs every resource it can muster to fund it's own development.  Don't look to the IMF, we're their principal contributor.  And yet for the first time in a generation a political movement seeks to turn the ship away from the iceberg and half the passengers have joined with the crew to keep us bow on to destruction.

Albert Shanker

It isn't even possible to discuss political differences with most on the other side.  Public education has been in the hands of the Left since the mid-Twentieth century, and the top levels of the teachers unions are utterly controlled by Progressive true believers.  It filters down, not always in a doctrinaire way, but in a subtle manner, what subjects you emphasize, which get short shrift.  And many of the damn teachers are products of that educations system, so we have a second, third and fourth generation of people teaching our children about our Republic who don't have the slightest idea what they are talking about.  They don't teach limited government.  They don't tell students the differences between a direct democracy and a federal republic, because I don't think they know.  They are certainly not inclined.  When you are teaching history from Howard Zinn's bloody book there is no reason to wonder why.

So you get slogans in return for arguments.  Political discourse has become one long barrage of imprecations against corporations and wealth, tirades against Judeo-Christian religious principles, vague and not-so-vague suggestions of corruption.  A great consuming terror that if a government program disappears or changes, chaos and destruction will follow.  People shout about rights being denied who have no conception of what the word even connotes.  Self-evident inconsistencies go unreported by a largely compliant media.  No, by an advocacy media.

Most of all, they don't understand that one of the most precious principles we have is the rule of law.  But the rule of law is only as good as the men who uphold  it.  To the Donks, there is no other consideration except winning elections.  There just isn't, and anything done to win that election is justified in the name of  . . . righteousness.   Absentee ballots that magically appear that somehow carry votes for only the major contested election, ignoring all other contests.  The sneering contempt in the act shocking in it's smug confidence.  A parade of last minute voter registrations.   The rank-and-file Donkeys bray and catcall and cheer, like it's got no more significance than a baseball game.

But it does.  For if the Donks prevail with Kloppenburg and the recall of Republican state senators in Wisconsin, reverse everything that Governor Walker has tried to do to stop the downward spiral of his state, the booby prize they will get will be layoffs and bankruptcy, and that will happen whether there's a Pubbie, a Donk or a Martian in the Governor's mansion.    

And ya know, I don't think the Koch brothers will be one bit worse off. 

Timing is everything

My Mommy says . . . .

I must be psychic.  I posted a blog entry that dealt with my buddy, my old NYC pal Charles "Fauntleroy" Schumer;  leading Donkey strategist, guiding light, bomb thrower and Momma's Boy. One of the things I mentioned was that he perpetually throws around the sobriquet "extreme right-wing" whenever he speaks about even the mildest, most centrist political opponent, and the next day he gets caught on tape pretty much agreeing with me.   He's been doing it for decades.  He has NEVER in his entire life held an honest job; although a Harvard trained lawyer, a member of the Bar, he has never practiced law.  This is a guy who got a perfect 1600 SAT score, went to Harvard as an undergraduate and then on to the Law School. He's extremely bright, he ran for the New York State Assembly right out of college and won at age 23, and he has never, not ever, lost an election.  He has been in Washington since 1981, and for you Donkeys that means thirty years.  

Hence, Schumer  the Tumor, the persistent cancer that continues to grow on the American body politic.  He won't go away folks; Chuckie can't DO anything else.  Like Quaddafi, like Saddam, like Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe--there is no AFTER for The Tumor, no Plan B, no Part II.  Truthfully, he doesn't much want to go away.  If he wanted to be a Governor of New York, he would have run already.  But Schumer knows his perfect place:  making laws at the national level.  Telling YOU, people who live in disparate parts of the US, how to live, what to eat, how many and what sort of firearms you can own.  

He's the quintessential  effete, urban Progressive.  He hears the call, he knows what he must do.   And . . . he knows he has to fool most of you into accepting what he wants.  He's been a champion on Obamacare, he's switched sides three times on the financial crisis, he's big in consumer product regulation.  And of course, the Senate Judiciary Committee, where that "right-wing extremist" Molotov cocktail gets used frequently.  After all, when you are gutting the Constitution in the Legislature you cannot afford to have some judge with an unhealthy affection for that ancient document scuttle your plans.

Schumer is pretty hawkish on defense, but you have to appreciate  the delicacy of that position.  First, he's from New York City, Brooklyn to be specific.  He still lives there with his family.  As a fellow City boy, I cannot adequately convey the utter shock, horror and outrage that natives felt when those murderous animals flew planes full of human beings into buildings full of human beings.  Schumer was married at Windows on the World, a great restaurant at the apex of the North Tower of The World Trade Center.  My wife took me there to celebrate my MBA, but I worked across the street for Bankers Trust for years and it was my favorite place to take visitors for the panoramic views of New York and the harbor. [BT got eaten by Deutsche Bank and my building was itself later a casualty of the WTC collapse, declared uninhabitable and finally succumbing to fire some years after]  I went to a small, all-male Jesuit high school in Chelsea.  Xavier is coming up on it's second century and 25 alums were listed as casualties of 9/11.  If my life had zigged instead of zagged, I could have been up there watching a passenger jet speed headlong into my desk.

The second thing you have to understand about Schumer on defense is Israel.  Schumer is Jewish, much of his original and current core constituency are Jewish.  Support for Israel is the sine qua non of  politics in NYC and for a Jewish politician, well it comes with the briss.  Support for our staunchest ally in the Middle East is something I can enthusiastically get behind, I've been to Israel, it's a wonderful country.   I have no doubt his position is sincere, he gets a little heated when talking about it.  In speaking of Palestinian Arabs in Gaza, he told an audience that "Palestinian people still don't believe in the Jewish state, in a two-state solution, they don't believe in the Torah, in David . . . . you have to force them to say Israel is here to stay."  So much of his support for the War on Terror is informed by those two points.  

And being meddlsome with laws is just in his nature.

This is Schumer's niche in life, he's happy doing what he does.  Well, "happy" may be too extravagant a term as Chuck Schumer usually looks so sour it's as if he were weaned onto solid food by sucking lemons and never quite recovered from the experience.  Chuck Schumer smiling is a terrifying sight to behold, the kind of expression a prison warden attending  a state execution might give the condemned as he whispers "this is gonna hurt."   He's the Democratic Policy Committee Chairman and he is at the apex of his power in Washington; if you doubt for a second that he is one of the leading figures championing the aggressive stance of the Donks in confronting the drive to reduce federal spending, then I have some wonderful beachfront property in Japan that I can get for you at a bargain.

I'm a Payload Specialist

I started this series of posts about Bill Nelson, the Senior (and next ex-) Senator from Florida and let me reiterate the connection:  ASTRO BOY and Donks like him are important for men like Schumer to shove their Progressivist world view down your unsuspecting maws.  They provide cover.  I caught Nelson on C-Span the other night speaking in the Senate.  I managed to stay awake.  That men's-store-mannequin spouted every Donkey platitude about who they are protecting and who the real villains in America are, how the everything is going to be wonderful.  

For example, he whined on about oil companies not paying royalties to the US for oil from leased Federal lands.  Well---Bill---if memory serves, you had a 60-seat majority in Congress, a majority in the House and a President in the White House for two damn years.  Why didn't YOU do something about it?

Nelson also trotted out the now-standard Donkey diatribe against corporations that don't pay taxes.   YAWN.  Ditto for this one too, Bill, where where you and your fellow Donks?   On a junket paid for by GE, maybe, one of the biggest tax avoiders of all but also former owner of a few lovely broadcast networks that just happen to support the Democrats in almost everything they do?  

Is there anyone out there who doesn't understand that whatever taxes a corporation has to pay it passes along to it's customers in the form of higher prices.  I guess there are.  No, competitive pricing won't help you; taxes are imposed across all competitors so they will ALL raise their prices.  Or some will go out of business and you will have fewer choices and, oh yes, the survivors will raise prices because they can!  

But that's the dirty little secret::  The Donks in Congress and the White House KNOW all this, so when they rail on about raising taxes on corporations and the great unwashed cheers and thrusts fists in the sky, they are really setting themselves up to be the ultimate taxpayer.  The Donks in Congress have just wiped off their fingerprints. 

Yes, I do moisturize . . . .

Folks in Florida, remember what Nelson says.  Remember in whatever state you live the next time you are tempted to vote for that nice person with the Jackass button on their suit lapel.  The 2010 elections knocked off a lot of the moderate Donks, leaving the screedy shrill ones like Maw Pelosi in place.  But for all intents and purposes there are NO moderate Democrats in Congress anymore.  They cannot vote that way with the hard lefties in all the senior positions.  

Remember what all those who did not buck the Progressives said when there was time to do something about it.   Remember and think for yourselves.

Now, now, I know best!

My memory works just fine.  I remember what has happened in the world during my life and what I thought about it at the time.  I need no one to help me remember history through the prism of political spin.  I remember who promised what, who tried to call attention to problems, who shouted them down and why.  And I'll tell you that the problems we are facing TODAY have been brewing for years, that there were plenty of warnings, that many of the Donks in power now were around then and screaming against solutions.

And here's a little video that does a GREAT job explaining it for those that are numerically impaired.

More On Nelson

[For the first part of this story, go here] 

I know some readers are going to think I am am picking on Bill Nelson far in excess of what he himself deserves.  He's a good guy, he's a family man, he rode on the Space Shuttle, he's personable.  He's the man every guy strives to be and every woman wants to marry.  A leader, a lawyer, a legislator.  From his campaign website:

From time to time, Bill gets asked where he gets the energy and determination to stand up and keep fighting. He says it comes from being an optimist and believing things will get better for all people. It's an optimism that comes from faith, from family and from his belief in individual responsibility. It's why Bill Nelson is optimistic for the future of Florida and our nation.

That's just so beautiful!  It's so hopeful, so positive.  It belies anything a person who observes him and thinks clearly and for himself would deduce from Nelson's conduct in office; but Geez, don't you just wish it were true!

See, this has always been my problem with the Donkeys; and it's their secret weapon; one of their most powerful.  Individually, the Donks can sometimes come off as salt-of-the-Earth, fairly conservative people in their personal outlook, demeanor and lifestyle.  They go to Church, they may hunt or fish, they read to the vision-impaired and they show up at Habitat for Humanity.  They never miss a State Fair, and make sure the press knows what soup kitchen they'll be working in next Thanksgiving.  They fit into their communities, they have to to get elected.  The problems start when they get to Washington.

Get lost, bitch, I'm on the phone.

For most of my life, the Donks have been moving farther and farther to the left.  Self-important Senator from New York, Charles Schumer  (The Tumor), is a leading strategist behind many of the DNC's policy and publicity initiatives [not to mention my personal choice for Biggest Momma's Boy in Congress] and regularly trots out the "extreme right-wing" label, no matter how mildly centrist the object of his vituperation, more so even than Van Jones uses "racist."   Neither label has any particular meaning except to rouse somnolent Donks who wait to hear the right boogey words which impell them into action.  Think of them as Manchurian Constituents, ready to board buses and shout slogans and carry signs thrust into their hands when they hear certain phrases that have been programmed into their small brains.

So you vote for the mainstream guy, but you get the rabid Equine.  He's the beard the Party wears to gain a majority.  You vote for Bill Nelson, you get Schumer the Tumor.  You vote for Bill Nelson, you get Harry Reid.  You vote Nelson, you get Barbara Mikulski.  You get Dick Durbin. You get Barbara Boxer.  When he gains enough seniority, you'll get Al Franken, too.

This is the Howard Dean Donkey Party.  It isn't going to change.  Well, it will, but the days of the more centrist Democratic Leadership Council are long gone.  It's getting more and more left-wing. For those of us who watched the Democratic Primaries in 2008, there were tell-tale clues.  The Eastern hard left Donks were chafing under the more Centrist Clintons and their pet DNC chairman, Terry McAuliffe.  But the Clintons brought in the donations as no one else in the party at the time could, so the Clintons called the tune and the rest of the party capered about obediantly.  That doesn't mean they liked it.

Dean is another story.  Dean can, through a TV screen, palpably radiate  his insane hatred for Republicans and by extension, for the American traditionalism and values they represent. You could cook a Cornish game hen in the radiance of Dean's venomous tirades when he unleashes them.

Weiner goes on the attack.

[And speaking of  politicians that go rabid from time to time, every Pubbie's favorite Democrat-to HATE-Anthony Weiner.  Would it surprise you to learn that Weiner learned from the Master, the aforementioned Chuck Schumer?  Weiner was an aide to Schumer when The Tumor was in the House, trying to have gun dealers in Wyoming regulated as though they were selling to recently-escaped convicts in Rego Park or drug merchants along Woodhaven Boulevard. After serving on the City Council in New York, Weiner ran for Schumer's House seat in 1999 as The Tumor was trading up to bring his own special brand of poison into the World's Greatest Deliberative Body.  Weiner has never gotten less than 59% of  the vote in 5 elections, so that's why the little putz is always so smug.  I come from Queens, Jackson Heights specifically; I know the area Weiner represents.  Gilbert Gottfried could get elected there, bad taste jokes and all.]

"Ja think I'm a cowboy!"

When Mr Obama came along, and showed he had a talent for putting money together and for putting a highly-effective grassroots coalition in play and using the Internet as well, out went the centrists.  I knew Mrs Clinton's was done in January 2008, when Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama. Ted's signature issue throughout his career had been health care, which is also strongly associated with Hillary and wasn't with Obama at that time.  Maybe Ted never forgave her for screwing it up so badly during the Clinton years, which she undoubtedly did, leaving the Republicans in charge of both the Senate and the House during most of the final years of his life.  Kerry-the-Sailor-Man had already endorsed Mr Obama.  Others followed suit.  Maybe the entire caucus resented her for Bill Clinton's turn to "Triangulation" as an act of self-preservation, saving his own Presidency by essentially abandoning the Congressional Democrats.  The Donks had won big in the 2006 mid-term elections, a sign that the country  was turning away from the political center.  Hillary was toast, and the Donkeys were in full gallop Leftward for the general election.  The Donks had had their fill after sixteen years of Clintons.

The leftward lurch of the US continued through the 2008 elections, helped along by the economic downturn,  mortgage banking implosion, TAPR and Detroit bailouts and calls for subsidies for many industries as long as the subject was on the table.  When Republicans start tossing around collectivist cures to economic and societal woes, they are going to lose out to the party that always prefers socialist solutions.

The Donkeys do have a critical weakness that victory in politics brings out. The Party leadership and their camp followers in the media, in academia, in the blogosphere and in the left-leaning nonprofits are horrifyingly, excruciatingly, condescendingly elitist. Not in the Old Money sense of the word, but a self-appointed elitism based on acceptance of the model and forms of Progressivism. They are just smarter than anyone else. University trained, good grades in all the "right" subjects, a solid career in public service or it's close private analog. Aware of the tragedies and foibles of their unenlightened fellow humans, they hear a call the unworthy are deaf to, a sublime summons to organize mankind for the sake of mankind.  Even if it's against the will of mankind.  So for the greater good of mankind it is necessary to hoodwink mankind.  They know they are worthy, they are special, they are better because they hear that call and others do not.

So generally speaking, the Donks begin to steamroller their visions.  Whether the Bill Nelson's of the party are truly with them ideologically or not doesn't matter.  They had better toe the line, to vote as the party demands.  Having a political party at the national level at all means you are going to have to accept compromise as a fact of life and vote en masse when your leadership makes a case for it; that's life in politics.  But when the Leftist Donkeys take the bit in their teeth that dynamic changes, and the more moderate Democrats become true party "backbenchers,"  with radicalized, redistributionist reformers out to remake this "zero-sum" world.  And the Republicans become, well "What Republicans?"

The rank and file Donks and the rest of the public would probably rebel if the full extent of the corrective surgery were revealed.  So they obfuscate, they generalize, they retreat behind carefully crafted phrases that seem to fall from the lips of every Donk caught out where a reporter can question them, simulatenously and verbatim; bromides that reveal nothing except the inner goodness of the speaker and his Party.

They went too far post 2008.  No jobs materialized from that orgy of pork and debt known as The Stimulus Package.  Businesses surprisingly (to anyone who did not study the 1930s and New Deal), un-patriotically, did not expand and hire more employees in the wake of new taxes and new regulations being tweeted and emailed from Speaker Pelosi high above Planet Earth in her US Government Gulfstream.

And then The Horror began.   A self-organizing group of people aghast at the extent of government growth being promulgated started to show up at what the Donks thought were going to be routine dog-and-pony Town Hall meetings about the health care proposals and ask unplanted questions.

Moreover, they demanded answers and just would not be shut-up, put off or put down.  And the more the elitists tried to dismiss them, the more they came back and with greater intensity.  The elites made the mistake of writing it off to racism, or fear of the unknown, or religious intoxication, anything but what it really was.  A spontaneous, grassroots rebellion against everything the Progressives hold dear, everything the leadership of the Democrat Party has become in the last several decades.

And anyone who kicks Arlen (Scottish Law) McSpecter  around earns a warm spot in my heart.

More to come . . . .