Category Archives: Barack Obama

On Nuking Nonnuclear States

Barack Obama, Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Just War, Republicans, War

HERE’S ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT AMERICAN “CONSERVATISM”: Obama, who seldom does anything good, is “revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons.”

The only country to ever nuke hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians is committing to not repeat that shame. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Not if you’re a fire-breathing GOPier or conservative.

They object to the following policy outline, which seems to me more than reasonable:

“For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack. [Nuke a country for hacking into the state’s computers?! Are these people serious?]
Those threats, Mr. Obama argued, could be deterred with ‘a series of graded options,’ a combination of old and new conventional weapons. ‘I’m going to preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure,’ he said in the interview in the Oval Office.
White House officials said the new strategy would include the option of reconsidering the use of nuclear retaliation against a biological attack, if the development of such weapons reached a level that made the United States vulnerable to a devastating strike.”

Today’s GOP is too dim to double check their lust for blood against what their oracle Ronald Reagan would have preached. This via Andrew Sullivan:

“A Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. And no matter how great the obstacles may seem, we must never stop our efforts to reduce the Weapons of war. We must never stop at all until we see the day when Nuclear arms have been banished from the face of this Earth.”
– Ronald Reagan , 1984, in China.

Updated: Regulator ‘Claims Credit For Nascent Economic Recovery’

Barack Obama, Business, Democrats, Economy, Government, Regulation, The State

Obama can boast of job growth for the month of March—162,000— because, from his standpoint, an accretion of the parasitical sector (government) is as good, if not better, than that of the private, productive economy. Laissez faire capitalists understand that the “U.S. Census Bureau’s addition of 48,000 jobs for its once-in-a-decade head count of the U.S. population” will hit the private sector hard. Barack doesn’t.

Note that none of the modest job gains in other industries, respectively, rivals the gains of one government department, the Census Bureau. And sixteen thousand other IRS thugs will be hired to enforce the healthscare bill.

That rising tide of hiring brought relief to some long-suffering sectors of the economy. Construction added 15,000 jobs, the first increase of any kind in the sector since June 2007. Manufacturing also added 17,000, with 2,500 of that gain coming at auto plants and their parts suppliers.
Retailers added nearly 15,000 jobs and leisure and hospitality accounted for 22,000 more jobs.

What interests me about Obama’s blather is not so much that he has declared that the “country has successfully ‘turned the corner,'” but that in response to criticism of his interventionist policies, he “insists the country cannot return to the more conservative hands-off regulatory philosophy traditionally favored by the GOP.”

The US economy is regulated to the hilt; legislators of both parties have placed it in knots of bondage.

Take banking. “For all the talk about deregulation run amok, banking is one of the more heavily regulated sectors in most Western economies. In the US, for instance, banks have numerous regulators, ranging from the federal Reserve System to the Federal Deposit Insurance Funds to a variety of minor offices and state regulators, all acting in concert. Not only did these regulators fail but they egged on the excesses which later exploded. The more consolidated regulatory approach of the UK didn’t seem to fare much better. We’re counting on the regulators to fix the markets but there is very little talk about how to fix [or rather fire] the regulators. [Tyler Cowen, Times Literary Supplement, February 26, 2010]

Peter Schiff sees a bubble in government brewing. In “The Fed’s Last Hurrah,” he writes:

“While the earlier booms at least provided the illusion of prosperity and some fun while they lasted, the government bubble will cripple the economy and deliver widespread misery to the vast majority of Americans.

Of course, there will be winners in the government bubble, at least for a while. As was the case with the stock and real estate bubbles, plenty of money will be made by the well-connected and parasitic classes. Government employees will continue to enjoy pay raises at our expense, as will anyone benefiting from the new wave of subsidies, such as Wall Street investment bankers, financial speculators, and those working in health care or education.

These gains will come at the expense of the taxpayers who foot the bill and the consumers who face higher prices. As government grows, it deprives the private sector of the resources it needs to survive and grow. The result is a lower overall standard of living. Not only are government jobs less productive than private sector jobs, but bureaucratic interference actually makes the remaining private sector jobs less efficient as well.”

Update (April 5): FRED REED RIPS apart the US Managerial State. No one on this site buys the line you hear from Mr. Hannity, and other iconic conservatives, that the US BB (before Barack) was a free country:

“Washington is out of control. It does as it likes, without restraint. It spends American money and American lives to fight remote wars for which it cannot provide a plausible reason. It determines what our children will be taught, who we can hire and fire, to whom we can sell our houses, whether we can defend ourselves, even what names we can call each other. The feds read our email and track the web sites we visit, make us hop around barefoot in airports at the command of surly unaccountable rentacops. They search us at random in train stations without even a pretense of probable cause. We have no influence over them, no way of resisting.

… Washington has learned to insulate itself from interference by the population. Huge impenetrable bureaucracies beyond public control make regulations that amount to laws, spending God knows how much money to do God knows what for the benefit of the interest groups that run the government. These bureaucrats cannot be fired and usually cannot be named. Congress, like the bureaucracies, serves not the United States but the big lobbies.” …

Updated: Liberty And The Civil Wrongs Act

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Bush, Liberty, Private Property, Race, Racism, Regulation, Republicans

The excerpt is from my WND.COM column, “Liberty And The Civil Wrongs Act”:

“The Obama administration, like the gang it replaced, has intervened on the side of a mutant strain of affirmative action – a ‘race conscious’ admissions process practiced at the University of Texas at Austin, now being contested by two white plaintiffs. In case the conservative base reverts to its default position – a belief in the superiority of Republican tyranny – I’ll remind it that Bush had helped to legitimize this proxy-for-race admissions process at the University of Michigan Law School.

In what was surely a triumph of Clintonian triangulation tactics, Bush, in a 2003 legal brief, ostensibly challenged racial preferences at Michigan Law, while simultaneously encouraging, instead, the use of racial cue cards in the admissions process. For example, an applicant could hint heavily at having overcome hardship (‘such as having been shot,’ quipped commentator Steve Sailer at the time).

Housebroken conservatives will reach for the smelling salts at what I am about to say next – they do so each time an attempt is made to explore the effects on liberty of one overarching and overreaching bit of legislation. The culprit in these crippling codes for university admissions – and in hiring, firing, renting, and money lending – is the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the ‘most radical law affecting civil rights ever passed by any nation’ …

The complete column is “Liberty And The Civil Wrongs Act.”

Do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

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Update (April 4): I hope I have misunderstood Myron’s anti-South stereotypes. Myron seems to have great faith in the power of legislation to renew communities. Alas, the Civil Rights Act most certainly did not “transform” the South for the better. Someone has swallowed whole “HOLLYWOOD’S HATEFUL HOOEY ABOUT THE SOUTH.” The South of John Randolph of Roanoke and John C. Calhoun was aristocratic, if anything. The War Between the States destroyed a patrician way of life.

I recommend Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by historian David Hackett Fischer.

Meathead America Warming To BOCare

Barack Obama, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Healthcare, IMMIGRATION

A GALLUP poll, taken one day after the H.R.4872 Reconciliation Act of 2010 received a majority of votes in the U.S. House of Representatives, shows that “Americans’ emotional responses to the bill’s passage are more positive than negative — with 50% enthusiastic or pleased versus 42% angry or disappointed.”

Bottom Line, conclude the authors, “Passage of healthcare reform was a clear political victory for President Obama and his allies in Congress. While it also pleases most of his Democratic base nationwide, it is met with greater ambivalence among independents and with considerable antipathy among Republicans.”

IF INDEED A MAJORITY OF Americans are beginning to thaw on Obamacare, what does it say about the changing face of this country? I do not believe that tea partiers will embrace this massive intervention into the economy anytime soon. What I do believe is that freedom-loving, small “r” republicans are in a shrinking minority. Mass immigration and the corrupting values of mass society—namely rampant democracy where property and liberty are forfeit—have rendered patriots aliens in their own country.