Category Archives: Government

Diplomatic Immunity From The Dangers Of Occupation

Barack Obama, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Government, Individual Rights, Islam, Just War, Terrorism, War

Our government’s only legitimate function is to protect American lives, one by precious one. Yet under “W,” ordinary Americans were regularly beheaded in the theaters of war Genghis Bush launched. None of their representatives stateside bargained for their lives or staged showy Congressional hearings to probe their forsaken security.

“President Bush sat bone idle, never lifting a bloodstained finger to haggle for his countrymen.”

The helpless faces in televised pleas of Americans such as Private First Class Keith Maupin, Paul Johnson, Nick Berg, and American engineers Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong; the depraved indifference of my countrymen to their plight—these haunted me throughout 2003-2004, documented in columns such as “AFTER THEIR HEADS ROLL, AMERICA’S DEAD REMAIN FACELESS.”

Now, Republicans are attempting to saddle a war president by any other name—Barack Obama—with the blame for the “resurgence” of terrorism in America’s occupied territories, when the same anger was evinced by the occupied under Bush, and it will persist under future Republican leaders.

One voice of sanity on foreign policy is “departing Congressman” Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. Kucinich, who will be sorely missed, made a cameo today during the “House Hearing on Attack on U.S. Consulate in Libya,” where he asked about al-Qaida’s presence in Libya. Lt. Col. Andrew Wood said: ‘Their presence grows everyday. They are certainly more established than we are.'”

More from Kucinich via Reason:

Departing Congressman Dennis Kucinich said at today’s hearing on security failures in Benghazi that rather than engaging in partisanship Congress ought to look at its role in failing to curb American interventionism as what led to the terrorist attack in Benghazi on 9/11, saying extremists exist and are more powerful in Libya because the U.S. “spurred a civil war” there, “absent constitutional authority, might I add.”
Kucinich blamed “decades of intervention” on the rise of extremists in the region and asked why no lessons from Iraq were drawn on Libya.
“Interventions do not make us safer,” Kucinich said, “they are themselves a threat to America,” before asking how much more Al-Qaeda there is in Libya now than before the U.S. intervention (the only answer he got was that they have a bigger presence in Libya than the U.S. does.” He also asked how many surface-to-air missiles were still missing since the U.S. intervention. Between 10 and 20,000, according to one of the witnesses.

UPDATED: Conservatives And The Diversity Dross (NASCAR Drive for Diversity)

Affirmative Action, Conservatism, Founding Fathers, Government, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism, Paleolibertarianism, The West

The next news item is unremarkable. “The U.S. government,” reports Fox News, “paid a Chicago consultant hundreds of thousands of dollars to put on diversity training workshops that, according to one watchdog, included an exercise in which employees were told to chant ‘our forefathers were illegal immigrants.'”

What do you expect from “the U.S. government”? It’s a criminal gang out to erase every vestige of a history that might rekindle in a pliant people the quest for freedom. The government, and its excrescences, does these things reflexively rather than as a matter of collusion and conspiracy. Like a big amorphous amoeba—a simple, single-celled organism—government will instinctively act to preserve its own integrity.

The people to condemn in his story are the “Conservative group Judicial Watch.” While we are grateful to JW for uncovering the bestialities of bureaucrats—in the substance of their complaint, they are almost as complicit as government. They complains that,

“Instead of being diversity-oriented or tolerance-oriented, it’s more about adopting a mindset,” said Lisette Garcia, a senior investigator with the group.

Garcia of Judicial Watch is quite fine with the government conducting mind-control workshops on taxpayers dime, so long as these indoctrination sessions transmit true “diversity and tolerance,” as promised.

What kind of a conservatism is this? The watch dogs are worse than the dogs in power (my apologies to dogs). At least the people who dreamed up the “diversity intelligence advantage course” know what they are after. What do Garcia and her friends want?

A truly conservative watch dog would, first, object to the unconstitutional appropriation of taxpayer funds. Second, they would reject the diversity doxology. Americans should not relinquish their birthright for a mess of pottage.

Were Lisette Garcia of Judicial Watch a true conservative she’d take the opportunity to mention that “Thomas Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.”

The settlers spilt their own blood “in acquiring lands for their settlement,” he wrote with pride in A Summary View of the Rights of British America. “For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.” Thus they were “entitled to govern those lands and themselves.”

UPDATE (10/7): NASCAR DRIVE FOR DIVERSITY. Another “initiative” conservatives doubtless would endorse:

Drive for Diversity is the industry’s leading development program for minority and female drivers and crew members. The Drive for Diversity program currently supports drivers in two of NASCAR’s developmental series – the NASCAR K&N Pro Series and the NASCAR Whelen All-American Series. The Drive for Diversity Initiative also supports crew member candidates through a year-long pit crew training program. Crew members have gone on to compete in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series and the NASCAR Nationwide Series.
The Drive for Diversity program has been successful in creating meaningful opportunities for minority and female competitors. The program helps to further diversify NASCAR’s participant and audience base. The program has seen continuous growth since its inception in 2004.

The only thing that should matter to the conservative-minded person is merit. But like progressives, conservatives buy into the construct upon which social tinkering is based, both in private and public settings (corporations love this stuff). That of built-in bias. Conservatives agree that patriarchal society is innately hostile to “minorities and females,” and that therefore, these special interests need a helping hand.

We Are ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’ As The Beltway’s Bitches

Debt, Government, Politics, Taxation, The State, Welfare

Better late than never. The Beltway press discovers and reveals that wealth in the D.C. hood comes from, as I put it in 2010, the graft flowing into Rome from the ‘provinces.’ FoxNews.com quotes Tim Carney, columnist for the Washington Examiner, explaining why D.C. prospers as the rest of the country buckles under its weight.

“Sometimes I think that D.C. is the vortex and there’s a giant sucking sound of American wealth and jobs coming in here. It’s not free trade, it’s not commerce … it’s government. The taxpayers are the ones who are paying to build up this region.”

The American Community Survey released last Thursday found seven of the nations top 10 wealthiest counties now surround Washington, D.C. They include Loudoun County, Va., ranked No. 1, with a median household income over $119,000 dollars a year. Fairfax County, Va., was second with $105,000 and Arlington County, Va., third with just over $100,000 a year in median household income.

From “Our Overlords Who Art in D.C.,” December 17, 2010:

“All life in Washington today derives ultimately from the capitals’ own version of Rome’s annona — the continuous infusion not of grain and olive oil but of tax revenue and borrowed money. Instead of ships and barges there are banks, 10,000 of them designated for this purpose, which funnel the nations’ tax payments to the city. This ‘never-ending flow of revenue creates a broad level of affluence that has no real counterpart anywhere in America.” Says Murphy: “Washington simply doesn’t look like the rest of America.” But its residents “fail to view this as bizarre.”
America’s annona was facilitated by the Sixteenth Amendment. With its passage, in 1913, Murphy admits begrudgingly, “A Rubicon was crossed, giving Washington the unimpeded power to levy an income tax and therefore spend ever larger amounts of money.” As in Rome, D.C. grubbiness coexists with “rhetoric of high-mindedness about the duties and burdens of leadership.”
Thanks to the graft flowing into the Beltway, the average income in and around Washington D.C. is $85,189 compared to $49,777 for the hinterland, where unemployment rates are almost double. The rest of the country exists to serve its masters in modern Rome.

Alas, “Statism Starts With YOU!” The fatter the feds the happier Americans seem to be:

As for America’s fondness for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — which combined, account for close to half of the federal government’s budget — …only 7 percent of the country will consider slashing the first two welfare programs. And a mere eleven percent of those living in the “Land of the Free” are prepared to pare down Medicaid.
Keep the government out of my Medicare! For a while — and in all seriousness — Dick Morris even promoted a similar slogan on Fox News. It was this Republican hack’s ploy to alert seniors to the dangers to Medicare from Obamacare. The sink-hole of debt into which this country has slid, because of state spending, scares its citizens. But not sufficiently to seriously motivate them to dent “defense” spending. Just a fifth will entertain trimming the estimated $1 trillion which the United States blows on defending to the death borders not its own.

Unless the people of the “provinces”—you out there—are willing to do something drastic, like repeal the American annona, we will all have to learn to live forever after as the Beltway’s bitches.

The Road To Ruin

Barack Obama, Economy, Government, Intelligence, The State

“This Thursday night I’ll offer you what I believe is a better path forward,” Obama said today in Urbandale, Iowa, where the president began his “Road to Charlotte” tour. “A path that grows this economy, creates more good jobs, strengthens the middle class, and the good news is you get to choose which path we take.”

CNN failed to provide the full quote, which I watched. BHO went on to tout all the government workers he was responsible for hiring, thereby conflating the growth of government with job creation.

Au contraire.

This is yet more evidence that the man is as thick as a brick.

In a paper entitled “The Scope of Government and The Wealth of Nations,” economists James Gwartney, Randall Holcombe, and Robert Lawson demonstrate that “government growth as a share of GDP coincides with a decline in GDP growth. Governments in high-income developed economies have now been steadily accreting for decades. The decline in prosperity or in real growth rates in these nations has been concomitant: As government share of the GDP rises, so has GDP in the OECD nations been declining.”

“A 10 percent increase in government expenditure as a share of GDP results in a 1 percent point reduction in GDP growth.”

An increase in the number of jobs for federal employees invariably comes at the cost of real, sustainable, consumer-driven jobs in the private economy.

Obama’s trick is that the private jobs never created cannot be counted.

This US president is seriously dumb.