The New Clarion

The Democrats are intent on passing their health care reform even if it kills them. There is currently some question as to whether or not Nancy Pelosi has the votes to pass the Senate bill in the House. But the Dems have figured out a postmodern solution to this problem: pass the bill without a vote.

…it looks like House Democrats won’t have to vote directly on a Senate bill they really don’t like. The speaker hasn’t made a final decision, but she told her rank-and-file during the meeting that the plan now is to craft a rule that would “deem” the Senate bill passed once they approve the package of fixes.

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Gus Van Horn considers the question of why liberals hate Sarah Palin so much. I’ve noticed in my personal relations with liberals, especially women, that they do have an intense negative emotional reaction to Palin. The Alaskan Governor really bugs them. Gus takes a guess at the reason:

My first stab would be that they see her as typical of “little” people who need their help — except that she is uppity.

I think that is part of it. The left believes in two classes: the rulers and the ruled. Although few will admit it in America, the longing for a stratified class society in which everyone knows his place has always been important to anti-capitalists. This is why capitalism’s first enemies in England were conservatives who longed for a return to the feudal order. Sarah Palin, with her soccer mom demeanor and her guns, is clearly meant to be among the ruled. There’s nothing more offensive to the ruling elite than a commoner who rises above her station.

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A few more thoughts on the Coffee Party USA, to follow up on my last post.

Remember during the Bush presidency when dissent was the highest form of patriotism? We didn’t hear much from the left about “cooperation” when it came to the Patriot Act or the war in Iraq. And when Congress stopped Bush’s Social Security reform cold, there were no complaints about “obstructionism.”

The idea of forming a movement around “cooperation” is a gimmick to help the Democrats succeed with their socialist agenda, particularly health care reform.

The Tea Party, at least what’s best about it, is founded on timeless principles: limited government, individual rights. I have held these principles for 33 years, since I first read Atlas Shrugged.

The left has gimmicks that hide their true agenda; the free market right has immutable principles.

It had to happen. The left has reacted to the Tea Party movement with its own version, the Coffee Party USA. Their statement of principles, if that’s what they are, is remarkably vague. The movement’s main point is that they are for “cooperation,” whereas the Tea Party movement is about “obstructionism.”

This is not a political platform. Its thinly disguised purpose is to hector and shame Republicans into letting the Democrats in Washington, D.C. do what they want. The Dems are not getting things done fast enough for the left, so it’s time to pressure the Republicans to get out of the way. I guarantee that if the Republicans won back the presidency, Senate and House , and if they began to dismantle big government — I know, this is a fantasy — these same people would be shrieking for the Democrats to stop the right. You would hear everywhere, “They stopped the Democrats, now the Democrats must stop them!” The dream of “cooperation” would be conveniently forgotten.

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Here is a portrait of a leftist character assassin.

And The New York Times is trying to smear the Tea Party movement by linking it to the militia movement of the ’90s.

Robert Tracinski comments on the Times’ smear job in TIA Daily:

The real story here is not about the Tea Party movement; it’s about the left. The ruling political clique in Washington has suffered a catastrophic loss of moral legitimacy—just at the point when they have been seeking a rapid and far-reaching expansion of their power over our lives. This has led a significant portion of the public to conclude that the real essence of the left’s agenda is a lust for power and control. And so a whole series of ideological groups—from Bilderberg conspiracy theorists to students of Ayn Rand and the Federalist Papers—have risen up in response to this dangerous vacuum of moral legitimacy.

And so the left has to seize on the existence of one of these groups, the racists and conspiracy theorists, in order to deny the existence of the real intellectual alternative: the Ayn-Rand-Federalist-Papers wing of the Tea Party phenomenon.

UPDATE: Revision.

This is astonishing:

Atlanta Progressive News has parted ways with long-serving senior staff writer Jonathan Springston. Apparently, Springston’s affinity for fact-based reporting clashed with Cardinale’s vision.

And, no, that’s not sarcasm.

In an e-mail statement, editor Matthew Cardinale says Springston was asked to leave APN last week “because he held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News.”

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Free market supporters love to use the hypocrisy argument against statists. It’s been around a long time. To name a few examples of actions that are called hypocrisy:

• The health care of Senators and Congressmen is better than what Americans would get in the plans of those politicians.
• Al Gore’s house leaves a huge carbon footprint. Political leaders from around the world flew carbon-spewing jets to Copenhagen.
• Nancy Pelosi’s relatives flew military jets instead of commercial airlines.
• A Canadian politician goes to America for his heart surgery.

You can probably think of more examples. None of these is actually hypocrisy. The politicians involved all believe they are in a special class to which the rules do not apply. It’s not hypocrisy, it’s the prerogative of power.

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People are on to Obama. They know he’s a liar. The Washington Times:

While Mr. Obama was bashing lobbyists during his State of the Union, his administration already had planned private briefings with powerful K Street lobbyists for the very next day. According to The Hill newspaper, the Obama Treasury Department invited lobbyists to “a series of conference calls with senior Obama administration officials to discuss key aspects of the State of the Union address.”

Senator Inhofe:

“I was thinking back during the first State of the Union Address by Bill Clinton and I thought, ‘This guy can say things that aren’t true with greater conviction than anyone I’ve ever seen.’ I honestly think that Obama is better.”

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It gets harder as I age to force myself to watch SOTU’s or the Oscars. The presidential speeches have degenerated in our benighted age from their original constitutional purpose to a laundry list of ways the president intends to buy votes from special interests with the money I make. Why would I want to be reminded that I’m a part-time slave to a bunch of pretentious fools in Washington, D.C.? And Hollywood’s big night is a celebration of mediocrity in an art form I care less about every year. Given the choice of spending $20 on mindless spectacle and popcorn or staying home with a good book, the latter wins every time. I can make popcorn at home.

Reading around the internet, however, it looked like there might be enough in the speech for a blog post. So I watched the State of the Union speech on YouTube. The whole goddamn thing. Obama likes to talk about sacrifice. I sat through 69 minutes of his lies; that’s sacrifice enough.

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During the Bush years I tried to balance my blogging with attacks on both the Democrats and Republicans. I don’t want to be a Republican water boy like Limbaugh or Hewitt. As bad as the left is, the right certainly deserves its share of blame for the mess we are in.

I still strive for balance, but now I fail. Nowadays I’m Johnny One Note, ever pounding on the left. The Dems have all the power and make all the news.

What do Republicans do these days but sit back and let the Democrats immolate themselves on their power-lust? The converse of the Spider-Man line is with no power comes no responsibility. And no blame. Republicans are in the ideal position now; they don’t have to do anything, and even when they propose something, the media are too busy reporting on their god in the White House to notice.

Someday the Republicans will regain power, and then they will do stupid things that piss me off, and you readers of New Clarion will be the first to know about it. I promise.

We now return you to our scheduled programming.

Democrats are trying to figure out what has gone wrong, why they’re losing voters, and what they can do about it. They’re doing what passes for soul-searching on the left — that is, making excuses and demonizing the right.

Kevin Drum, writing before the Massachusetts election, said the “noise machine” of the right  is winning the battle of the narrative. Whenever leftists complain about the right-wing noise machine, it means the truth is getting out and it is persuading people. The term is like their earlier term, McCarthyism: both are meant to deflect criticism of the left by demonizing the enemy.

David Plouffe offers a strategy for how Democrats can mitigate an electoral disaster this November. Plouffe spins, as you would expect from a campaign manager.

Everything I have read from the left is BS. I’ll tell you what has happened and what the Democrats should do about it.

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1. Democrats are all shook up. For a year the Democrats have acted in the most partisan manner possible, passing without Republican input huge bills in the middle of the night that no one reads, and that the people do not want. It’s been the greatest display of arrogance and contempt for the governed that anyone has seen in America. The election of a Republican to the Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy was a much needed act of justice. A slap in the face, a wake-up call, a canary in a coal mine — choose your metaphor.

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There’s so much bad news coming out of Washington, D.C. that it’s hard to keep up. Now they’re coming for your 401k account:

Jan. 8 (Bloomberg) — The Obama administration is weighing how the government can encourage workers to turn their savings into guaranteed income streams following a collapse in retiree accounts when the stock market plunged.

The U.S. Treasury and Labor Departments will ask for public comment as soon as next week on ways to promote the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams, according to Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis C. Borzi and Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Iwry, who are spearheading the effort.

It sounds innocent, doesn’t it? They care so much about us that they want to make sure our 401k accounts don’t lose money. How nice that we have the state to protect our retirement.

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The astonishing election in Massachusetts of a Republican to the Senate seat long held by Edward Kennedy is the fruit of the ideological clarity that John Lewis wrote about. After one year of Obama-Reid-Pelosi attempting to ram socialism down America’s throat in the middle of the night, voters are frightened and angry. Even voters in liberal land.

I’m happy to see Americans rebel against big government, and I want more. Let 1,000 tea parties bloom, and make Keith Olbermann’s head explode. (Can a vacuum explode?) Aside from the excitement of a growing movement of people centered around the idea of less government, I’m still wary. Judging from some of their comments, it looks like the political leaders in Washington, D.C. have not changed.

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If a nation loses the integrity of its elections, then it loses its freedom. Without clean elections, voters have no voice. Those who count the votes can put who they want in power, regardless of what the voters want. We see what a joke elections are in dictatorships, where those in power win landslides. Everyone knows those elections are rigged.

Given the importance of clean elections, you’d think Americans of all parties would be zealous in protecting the integrity of the process. Well, not the totalitarian left.

Listen to this brief audio clip of Ed Schultz.

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In a free country reporters ask politicians tough questions, to which the politicians either answer or ignore. Preferably, they give an honest answer, as that is what the people deserve from their representatives. Disagreements of opinion are answered with more opinion; reason is answered with reason, and peace reigns throughout the land.

Well, not anymore — at least not on the totalitarian left. When a reporter asks a tough question, the left thinks he deserves this:

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Tucker Carlson’s new internet publication The Daily Caller is worth a click. It has a good piece on Brandon Darby, a man who stopped radical leftists who were planning to use force at the Republican National Convention in 2008. He is now reviled on the left:

Darby has learned that if you disrupt a terrorist attack on Americans by Islamic fundamentalists as Dutch tourist Jasper Schuringa did on Christmas Day, you’re a hero, but disrupt a terrorist attack on Americans by left-wing fundamentalists and you might as well be a terrorist yourself.

This is because among many on the left — even some moderate liberals — there is a presumption of good intentions by terrorists who claim to pursue social justice ideals. “My left-wing crazies are better than your right-wing crazies,” progressive talk radio host Thom Hartmann said in an interview last year. “Our left-wing crazies are incited to violence because they’re trying to create a better world.”

These “left-wing crazies” had firebombs that could have killed people or inflicted terribly painful injuries, but it’s okay “because they’re trying to create a better world.” The better world they’re fighting for is a collectivist dictatorship. Force is fine to the totalitarian left because the end justifies the means.

We should thank Brandon Darby for his courage in standing up to the militant left. Hollywood won’t make a movie about him as they are for the radicals who were arrested. Mr. Darby is an American hero.

Walter Williams gives us some remarkable facts in his latest column, “Global Warming Is A Religion.”

Over long periods of time, there is absolutely no close relationship between C02 levels and temperature. Humans contribute approximately 3.4 percent of annual C02 levels compared to 96.6 percent by nature. There was an explosion of life forms 550 million years ago (Cambrian Period) when CO2 levels were 18 times higher than today. During the Jurassic Period, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, CO2 levels were as much as nine times higher than today. Contrary to what educators are brainwashing our children with, polar bear numbers increased dramatically from around 5,000 in 1950 to as many as 25,000 today, higher than any time in the 20th century.

Are his facts right? If so, then the whole push to pass wide-sweeping laws restricting CO2 production is based on bad science, to put it kindly.

John Bolton has written a good piece looking at Obama’s next three years in foreign policy. As Bolton explains, Obama has been concerned so far with issues left over from the Bush years, such as Afghanistan. He hasn’t even got to the policies he wants to enact.

And what does he want to do? It’s an all-out leftist agenda: disarmament, global warming treaty and binding America to international law. What makes this particularly worrisome is that a president has more power in foreign affairs than he does domestically. There are ways for a president to enact his will without worrying about Senate filibusters and angry town hall protests.

Whatever damage Obama does in the next three years, it is imperative we make him a one-term president in 2012. I don’t know if America’s security would survive two terms of this man.

ARC has put up audio files of a speech by Ayn Rand from 1972 called “A Nation’s Unity,” with the Q&A session. If you have two hours this weekend, give it a listen. The speech is a brilliant analysis of how pressure group politics destroy a nation’s unity and freedom.

The speech is especially relevant today because the Democrats’ health care bill that no one wants is being passed by buying off various pressure groups. AARP gets this, Nebraska gets that, insurance companies get the other thing… at whose expense? As Bastiat put it, “The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”

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