Category Archives: Elections

Democracy And The Immigration Political Steamroller

Constitution, Democracy, Elections, Federalism, Government, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, States' Rights

The essence of democracy is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “general will,” a “national purpose” that must be implemented by an all-powerful state. “Democratic voting is done, not only to select officials but also to determine the functions and goals and powers of the government,” writes legal scholar (and friend) James Ostrowski. “The guiding principle of republics is that they exercise narrow powers delegated to them by the people, who themselves, as individuals, possess such powers.”

James Madison was not a democrat. He denounced popular rule as “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” Democracy, he observed, must be confined to a “small spot” (like Athens). Madison and the other founders attempted to forestall democracy by devising a republic, the hallmark of which was the preservation of individual liberty. To that end, they restricted the federal government to a handful of enumerated powers.

Decentralization, devolution of authority, and the restrictions on government imposed by a Bill of Rights were to ensure that few issues were left to the adjudication of a national majority.

When you consider every bit of legislation written by our democratically elected despotic lawmakers—the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (S.744),” for example—contemplate the words of Benjamin Barber:

It is hard to find in all the daily activities of bureaucratic administration, judicial legislation, executive leadership, and paltry policy-making anything that resembles citizen engagement in the creation of civic communities and in the forging of public ends. Politics has become what politicians do; what citizens do (when they do anything) is to vote for politicians.

And where, pray tell, in the immigration tyranny is the Tenth-Amendment Center? Its scholars used to advocate for the right of the residents of the states to determine how they lived their lives. Unless I am doing him a disservice—in which case I apologize profusely—the last time Michael Boldin applied the Tenth Amendment creatively to the political steamroller that is immigration was when he distinguished between immigration and naturalization in 18th century nomenclature, back in … April 28, 2010.

Has the Tenth Amendment Center fallen to the Beltway bigwigs of the Cato Institute?

Join the conversation on my Facebook page.

The Rise of The Cr-ppy Chris Christie

Ann Coulter, Celebrity, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Free Markets, IMMIGRATION, Morality, Pop-Culture, Private Property, Republicans

“The Rise of The Cr-ppy Chris Christie” is the current column, now on WND. Here is an excerpt:

“Chris Christie’s problem is not his weight, but his character. New Jersey’s popular Republican governor is the consummate backstabbing, slimy, opportunistic politician, who, for good measure, also preaches and practices the dirigiste economics of an Obama (and a “W”).

Gov. Christie is in the news a lot lately, which is just the way he likes it—and the way he has planned it. To say that Mr. Christie hungers for the plum post of US president is a redundancy on par with, “Is the Pope Catholic?”

The governor is no boob, but he knows how to handle boobs, a requirement of public office. And one crucial question Booboos Americanus asks himself when electing a president is whether he’d like to knock back a Guinness with the candidate. A doughnut is as good as a beer.

So on the “Late Night Show” went Christie for a cameo. There he squeezed into a studio seat too small for his girth and humored the hubris sitting opposite him, while scarfing down a doughnut.

Befitting a nation that considers wisdom and intellect as liabilities—cretin celebrities will carry the day in the 2016 presidential run, as they do today. Visibility on late night TV is a requirement of the highest office.

Launched by the Queen of Kitsch, day-time talker Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama has normalized the cultural carnival that sees a president cavorting with dummies like Dave Letterman and the ladies of “The View.” He now sits at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where Chris Christie would dearly like to plunk his keister.

Like his predecessor, the next president will need the imprimatur of entertainers with canonical status. “The road to the White House goes through this chair,” a semi-serious David Letterman warned Republican presidential pick Mitt Romney. Romney had flouted the Letterman commandment. Where is he today? On the ash-heap of history.

Another chrysalis within which the American presidency takes shape is the liberal media. And it loves Chris Christie, holding him up as a paragon of the rudderless Republican the GOP ought to be running.

This wasn’t always the case…”

Read the complete column, “The Rise of The Cr-ppy Chris Christie,” now on WND.

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UPDATED: Republicans Find Religion On … Evolution

Democrats, Elections, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Race, Republicans, Welfare

“Republicans Find Religion On … Evolution” is the current column, now on RT. Here’s and excerpt:

“On the heels of Barack Obama’s Las Vegas run-on ramble on the necessity of immigration ‘reform,’ this week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) announced that he too had “evolved” overnight on the issue. ‘I’m … open-minded enough to say that it is an issue that we do need to evolve on,’ the senator vaporized.

Paul is a Johnny-come-lately to his party’s devolution on immigration. The country was still surveying the debris left by the “D-Bomb” (where “D” stands for demographics), dropped on Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012—when, one-by-one, key Republicans began to defect, pledging their commitment to an ‘overhaul of the immigration system’; to ‘reform’; to ‘a comprehensive solution’; to ‘fixing a broken system,’ all well-recognized euphemisms for amnesty.

A tipping point in the demographic shift in the US population had returned Barack Obama to power for a second term. A moratorium on mass immigration, buttressed by strong secessionist and states’ rights movements, might just help delay another such bomb from detonating . But the Republicans were having none of it.

House Speaker John Boehner was soon leading the party of turncoats to the promised (la-la) land, pledging that ‘a comprehensive approach’ was ‘long overdue.’ ‘I’m confident,’ Boehner promised, ‘that the president, myself [and] others can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all.’

In short succession, our wily pitch men were joined by Republican media mouths who had also ‘evolved’ overnight. Thus, in a career-clinching bid—presumably, to continue playing a part in national politics—Sean Hannity, an influential Fox-News personality, declared that he too had found religion on immigration and now supported a ‘pathway to citizenship.’

Another mantra mouthed by brother-believer Charles Krauthammer and echoed by Sen. Paul was that, ‘The GOP needs to do a better job of reaching out to Hispanic voters.’ Yes, ‘Inside each Latin American immigrant there’s a Republican waiting to get out,’ mocked Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Mockery for this pie-in-the-sky is warranted. However dispiriting, the reason 71 percent of Hispanic voters broke for Obama is not because Republicans are mean to them—John McCain and George Bush demonstrated that they would wrestle a crocodile for any Hispanic convert, legal, illegal and criminal. This identity group’s political preference is because 60 percent of them live in or near poverty and ‘fully 57 percent use at least one welfare program.’

In his irrational ramble, the president waxed about legalizing the ’11 million undocumented immigrants [residing] in America,’ while at the same time praising the contribution made by their kind to the founding of great ‘businesses like Google and Yahoo.’

Fantasies about the future founders of companies like Google and Yahoo, aside—their highly educated corporeal founders are from Russia (Sergey Brin) and Taiwan (Jerry Yang). …”

Read the complete column, “Republicans Find Religion On … Evolution,” now on RT.

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UPDATE: More of a reality check from Pat Buchanan:

Hispanics are not small-government people. They believe in and benefit disproportionately from Big Government.
Some 53 percent of Hispanic children are born out of wedlock, and 52 percent of Hispanic families are headed by single women.
Big Government provides their kids with Head Start before school, free K-through-12 schooling, Pell Grants and student loans for college, and two or three free meals a day at school for the kids.
Big Government provides food stamps, welfare for mom and earned income tax credit checks should she work. Big Government subsidizes her housing and provides free health care for the family through Medicaid.
A Pew Hispanic poll found that by 3-to-1, Hispanics would favor a big government with more services to a small government with fewer services.
Why would these folks vote for a Republican Party that promises to downsize the Big Government upon which they depend for sustenance, security and survival? Why would they vote for a party that is going to cut capital gains, income and inheritance taxes they don’t pay?

UPDATED: No Country For Old, White Men

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Critique, Democrats, Elections, Feminism, Media, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Pop-Culture, Republicans, The West, The Zeitgeist, War, Welfare

“No Country For Old, White Men” is the current column, now on WND. Here’s an excerpt:

“…Romney was booed when he wooed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Enough to provoke the ire of blacks, Latinos, ladies of all hues, the halt and the lame was the mere hint that the too-white-to-like Romney would slow down the gravy train. Lickspittle Republicans were as eager as the Democratic representatives of these identity groups to lambaste Mr. Romney for being too attractive, too macho, too white, too Christian, and too rich.

No one could have failed to notice that Mitt Romney resembles the “Mad Man” played by Jon Hamm, in the eponymous AMC series. Both men are tall, dark and handsome, with the kind of picture-perfect, quintessential American good looks. Both hide their feelings and are spare with their emotions. When they show their softer side–it actually means something. Each is dutiful and dependable.

Such qualities, once considered desirable in a man, now offend the dominatrixes who run the nation’s newsrooms.

“He’s a very private man; and that’s a liability.” “How can you get me to vote for him, if I don’t like him?” “He needs to humanize himself.” And, “Can he [even] be humanized?” demanded one CNN ghoul by the name of Gloria Borger on the eve of Halloween. Mitt Romney was inhuman: That, very plainly, was the premise of this harridan’s rhetorical question.

“Ann Romney’s job, and she’s been pushing for this in the campaign, is to kind of humanize him,” noodled the banal Ms. Borger over and over again, for the campaign’s duration.

This was the menstrually inspired miasma that emanated from TV studios countrywide.

Thus did Mitt Romney come to embody elements in Aristotle’s definition of a tragic figure: …”

The complete column is “No Country For Old, White Men,” now on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATE: VIA JACK KERWICK:

You are absolutely correct for noting the unmistakable racial subtext of this election and people’s reaction to Romney. … MR and his wife are straight out of 1950’s America, the Dark Ages when blacks, women, and homosexuals were oppressed, the days before the Enlightened ’60’s. Romney is ‘Father Knows Best,’ Ward Cleaver. Obama, in contrast, is the symbol of the new, multicultural America.