Category Archives: Democrats

When Obeying Law Becomes a Political Bargaining Chip

Nothing in the GOP budget proposal are the Democrats willing to accept, except for “one minor change sought by Republicans: setting new procedures to verify the incomes of some people receiving government subsidies for health-insurance costs.” (WSJ)

John Hayward at RedState.com puts this “concession” in context:

One of the “concessions” Democrats are supposedly offering to Republicans is a pledge to obey the parts of ObamaCare that require income verification for those who receive welfare subsidies through the tax code – a requirement they would otherwise feel free to ignore.
… it’s increasingly clear that the powerful feel no compulsion to obey the law. … We’re only talking about a shutdown because the Ruling Class freely disobeys the laws – and they are laws – requiring Congress to prepare a budget for the federal government. The President and his party are fighting to protect ObamaCare, which they never tire of reminding us is the “settled law of the land,” as if that’s supposed to quash all dissent… but they ignore portions of that law as they please. …In return, Democrats demand the repeal of sequestration, the only remaining shred of a law called the Budget Control Act of 2011.
…Many of President Obama’s Shutdown Theater antics have involved violations of the law. …But even as the aristocracy luxuriates in the highest level of power – the ability to not only pass laws, but ignore them – demands for compliance and obedience from the rest of us grow more strident. …

No doubt, the U.S. is mired in moral decay. A question for RedState.com: Where were you lot when Bush was flouting The Law?

Debt-Addled America

Debt, Democrats, Economy, Government, Republicans

“Like father, like son” goes a saying about the similarities between the behavior of a child and his parents. In the case of the nation, infantile America mirrors its squandering government with respect to debt carried.

Is there any wonder the American people, happliy gulled by the moron media, disapprove of Republicans for entertaining the idea of not raising the debt ceiling?

“American companies and consumers are embracing [debt], running up record amounts in 2013,” reports CNBC.

Total household debt, according to the Fed’s flow of funds report, is at $13 trillion, nearly back to its pre-crisis level in 2007 and a shade below government debt of $15 trillion. … The debt deluge doesn’t end there, either, with lots of loans being taken out as well by companies. U.S. loan volume alone totaled $1.53 trillion through the first three quarters, a gaudy 25 percent higher than the same period in 2012. …
…Consumer credit, for instance, surged past the $3 trillion mark in the second quarter of 2013 and continues on an upward trajectory, according to the most recent numbers from the Federal Reserve.
At $3.04 trillion, the total is up 22 percent over the past three years. Student loans are up a whopping 61 percent.

Warns financier Peter Schiff:

The belief that deficits add to the economy, and that debt can be dealt with in an imaginary future (that never seems to arrive) is the foundation upon which the President can chastise the Republicans as irresponsible suicide bombers. Using this logic, he can argue (with a straight face) that borrowing is the equivalent of paying. That the President can make this delusional argument is not so surprising (no lie too great for the typical politician to attempt). What is alarming is that the media and the public have swallowed it so willingly. As they call for limitless increases in borrowing, Democrats have offered no plan to reduce the current debt and they are unwilling to negotiate with Republicans on that topic. Yet somehow they have been perceived as the party of fiscal responsibility. …
… According to modern economists, an elimination of deficit spending will immediately cause a dollar for dollar decrease in GDP. For example, if the government stopped sending food stamp payments to poor people, then grocery stores would lose business, employees would be laid off, and the economy would contract. But this one dimensional view fails to appreciate that the purchasing power of the food stamps had to come from somewhere. The government can’t create something from nothing. Taxation transfers purchasing power from people living in the present to other people living in the present. In contrast, borrowing transfers purchasing power from people living in the future to people living in the present. The good news for politicians is that future people don’t vote in current elections (and current voters don’t seem to appreciate the cost to their future selves of current policy).

UPDATE II: Common-Core Curriculum: ‘Fascism With A Smile’ (‘Soft Despotism’)

Democrats, Education, Regulation, The State

The centralization of education has allowed public “intellectuals” and “experts” to mold and manacle young minds. Start a conversation with almost anyone on the street. Provided he speaks English, you’ll hear within a whisker the same opinions repeated on capitalism (plain evil or a necessary evil), the environment (near destruction) and racism (rife). This uniformity of opinion is almost scarier than its uninformed nature.

(From “NEEDED: A LEAVE THE CHILDREN BEHIND ACT!”)

At EPJ, the best libertarian site on the WWW, John Whitehead, author of “A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,” warns about the latest federal ploy to “transform and nationalize school curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade”:

… there are several methods for controlling a population. You can intimidate the citizenry into obedience through force, relying on military strength and weaponry such as SWAT team raids, militarized police, and a vast array of lethal and nonlethal weapons. You can manipulate them into marching in lockstep with your dictates through the use of propaganda and carefully timed fear tactics about threats to their safety, whether through the phantom menace of terrorist attacks or shooting sprees by solitary gunmen. Or you can indoctrinate them into compliance from an early age through the schools, discouraging them from thinking for themselves while rewarding them for regurgitating whatever the government, through its so-called educational standards, dictates they should be taught.

Those who founded America believed that an educated citizenry knowledgeable about their rights was the surest means of preserving freedom. If so, then the inverse should also hold true: that the surest way for a government to maintain its power and keep the citizenry in line is by rendering them ignorant of their rights and unable to think for themselves.

When viewed in light of the government’s ongoing attempts to amass power at great cost to Americans—in terms of free speech rights, privacy, due process, etc.—the debate over Common Core State Standards, which would transform and nationalize school curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade, becomes that much more critical.

Essentially, these standards, which were developed through a partnership between big government and corporations, in the absence of any real input from parents or educators with practical, hands-on classroom experience, and are being rolled out in 45 states and the District of Columbia, will create a generation of test-takers capable of little else, molded and shaped by the federal government and its corporate allies into what it considers to be ideal citizens. …

This is an essential read for parents. It also helps explain, for those of us who notice, why most youth are so mindlessly monolithic in thinking. READ IT in its entirety. While you’re at it my latest column is now on EPJ.

UPDATE I: Parent Arrested For Questioning Pedagogues.

John Whitehead:

…46-year-old Robert Small, found himself “pulled out of the meeting, arrested and charged with second-degree assault of a police officer” simply for daring to voice his discontent with the standards during a Q&A session with the superintendent.

Even calling this event a forum is disingenuous, given that attendees were not allowed to stand and ask questions. Instead, attendees were instructed to write their questions on a piece of paper, which the superintendent would then read and members of a panel would answer. In other words, there would be no time or room for debate, just a one-sided discussion. And this is what life in our so-called republic of the United States has been reduced to, a one-sided monologue by government officials who neither care about what “we the people” have to say, nor are they inclined to hear us out, just so long as we pay their taxes and abide by their laws.

“Don’t stand for this. You are sitting here like cattle,” shouted Robert Small to his fellow attendees as he was being dragged out of the “forum” on the Common Core standards. “Is this America?” No, Mr. Small, this is no longer America.

UPDATE II (9/24): SERVANTS OF THE POLITICAL CLASS. Former polster Pat Caddell is able to get to the crux of the arrest and attempted prosecution of a parent for questioning the pedagogues.

“What we saw here is bigger than just this. The people are the slaves to the office-holders: superintendents who won’t take questions, the EPA that goes to Alaska on to conduct a … raid, SWAT converging with guns on a gold-mining operation in a little town; the things that government does now to oppress people; the laws that we have, the NSA, the fear people have of the state spying on them and imposing on them–this is a kind of soft despotism, whereby if you get out of line, we’ll get you. We work for them. Public servants are the masters; we are the servants of the political class.”

Conflict of Interest And Media Corruption

Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Journalism, Media, Morality, Republicans

Conflict of interest equals corruption. It is the modus operandi of major media in America. It is why affiliates of large news organizations see nothing outrageous about producing documentaries and miniseries about Hillary Clinton in the ramp up to the 2016 elections.

What can Republican candidates expect from the media mafiosi in the 2016 Republican primary debates? If past is prologue, Republican candidates will be “deposed” by the Democratic operatives of CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, etc. That’s how Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus put it. So one wonders what took GOP invertebrates so long to stand up to the farce of Democratic special interests (most media) moderating or sponsoring the Republican election debates.

Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus said NBC and CNN must halt their Hillary Clinton programming or the RNC won’t partner with them for the 2016 Republican primary debates.

(LINK)

NBC Entertainment has announced plans to produce a mini-series about Hillary Clinton starring Diane Lane, while CNN has announced plans to produce a feature-length documentary about Clinton that will air in theaters and on the network. Both networks have stressed that their news divisions will have no part in the projects.

(LINK)

Even though this is neither here nor there for liberty, many of us still wanted to see Mitt Romeny get off his knees and quit apologizing to his media inquisitors, who kept berating him for the Good Life he had led.