Category Archives: Elections

Happy Meal Time for US Students

Debt, Democracy, Economy, Education, Elections, Republicans, Socialism, Welfare

“Happy Meal Time for US Students” is my new column. Here is an excerpt:

“Barack Obama has promised America’s miseducated Millenials to keep the student-loan bubble from bursting. Campaigning in Iowa, the president vowed to keep college affordable, because, like every other welfare and warfare program, it “is at the heart of who we are.”

Interest rates for Federal Stafford Loans are set to double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, on July 1. You just know how bad things are when a socialized financial market like student loans attempts to correct itself. Nevertheless, if the glut of miseducation is to be curbed, higher interest rates are healthy.

Why the president’s promise? The Twenty-Sixth Amendment, smuggled into the Constitution by statute, artificially swelled the ranks of Democratic voters by millions of eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds. While they don’t work for a living, youngsters get to vote for dibs on the livelihood of those who do.

It’s Happy Meal time for the nation’s students….”

Read the complete column, “Happy Meal Time for US Students.”

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We Need Hillary Like a Hole in the Head

Elections, Hillary Clinton

In reply to CNN’s Jack Cafferty’s assumption that “there is so much interest in a 2016 Hillary Clinton run,” one of Cafferty’s follower offered in all seriousness that the “wicked witch of the east” was desperately needed in order to restore the country to the Clinton years of peace and prosperity.

PEACE?

Bill Clinton strafed the Serbs.

In a fit of “estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids,” Hillary and two sisters in the Obama administration launched that humanitarian “war of the womb” that left Libya in shambles.

My guess is that so long as an American politician is killing far-away people from high above, without incurring too many American losses, he or she will be thought of as a peace maker by the likes of Cafferty’s follower and too many of her countrymen.

UPDATED: BHO’s Tactical Slip Of The Tongue

Barack Obama, Elections, Ethics, Etiquette, Foreign Policy, Russia

Mitt Romney, and everyone Republican, “seized on Obama’s comments to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, in which Obama suggested greater ‘flexibility’ on negotiations regarding missile defense after the election.”

Romney launched into a scary cold-war diatribe against Russia, to which Russian President Dmitry Medvedev retorted with reference to reason and history (no wonder the Fox News report refrained from quoting Medvedev’s one-two punch):

Medvedev advised the White House hopefuls, including Romney, to “rely on reason, use their heads,” adding, “that’s not harmful for a presidential candidate.” He further said, “It’s 2012, not the mid-1970s, and whatever party he belongs to, he must take the existing realities into account.”

[ABC]

Obama is right to suggest that the US should reconsider its policy of “getting into Russia’s space and getting into Russia’s face.”

Where Obama went wrong is in carelessly revealing the Knavish connivance he shares with just about every politicians.

Republican hysteria notwithstanding, Obama’s slip of the tongue was a tactical error, no more.

UPDATE: Nicki, many would say there’s a critical-mass of evidence that the US government and its various democratic proxies do indeed meddle on the level you suggest. See “The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt.”

UPDATED: No Surprise: Left-Libertarianism Prevails Among The Young

Affirmative Action, Education, Elections, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Private Property, States' Rights

I’ve long since contended that establishment-endorsed libertarianism, touted on the Fox News and Business channels, is a left-libertarianism. Like neoconservatism, this “Libertarianism Lite” equates liberty with abstract propositions that—against all evidence, historic and other— purport to work when applied to every individual, Afghani, Israeli and Iraqi, provided he or she gets the proper (invariably American) instruction.

A libertarianism that refuses to recognize “Liberty’s Civilizational Dimension,” sadly, prevails among the young (leftism is, after all, second nature to youth).

Writes VDARE’s James Kirkpatrick:

Students for Liberty, forthrightly supports exterminating the American identity. It defends capitalism precisely on the grounds that it undermines conservatism and traditional values. Its campus coordinators enthusiastically champion the usual “civil rights” causes and are particularly obsessed with championing gay groups. They invite immigrants like Reason Magazine columnist Shikha Dalmia (email her) to punish us for letting her come here by lecturing their mostly white audiences on why their ideology requires more immigrants.
Needless to say, Students For Liberty avoids Politically Incorrect causes that may technically fall under the cause of “liberty.” A column posted on its website about an affirmative action bake sale by the College Republicans says the real root of racism is “statism.” [Don’t Just Bake, Strike the Root!, by James Padilioni, Jr., September 27, 2011] There’s even a defense of critical race theory, and needless to say, no mention of official multiculturalism and its reliance on state support. [The Law Perverted: A Libertarian Approach to Black History Month, February 1, 2012 by James Padilioni, Jr.]
Movements that supposedly champion the radical libertarian economist Murray Rothbard might want to look at what he actually said on the subject.

Note that, as a paleolibertarian, I do not give a tinker’s toss about gay marriage. It is NOT a libertarian issue (other than to stress that “whatever is not specified as a power of the federal government and is not prohibited to the states, is reserved to the states or the people“). However, it is incongruous to profess libertarianism, while supporting affirmative action, anti-private property Civil-Rights laws, and public education extended to all trespassers—these are policies that violate private property, which is the cornerstone of libertarianism.

MORE.

UPDATED: In reply to HBK on Facebook: The stand most libertarians take is that libertarianism is neither Right not Left; we are all supposed to uphold the non-aggression axiom (although left-libertarians, aka the Beltway think-tank type, were more likely to evince full-throated enthusiasm for Bush’s war than the Rightists; I came out against that war on Set. 19, 2002, and never again heard from Neal Boortz, who used to link to my stuff prior). There is something to the eschewing of Left and Right, but in my opinion, it is, for the most, a cop-out. Beltway lefties were also quite hostile to Ron Paul at the inception. Since the nation’s memory is non-existent, they now love him—talking about him gets them on TV.