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.

It also goes to multiculturalism and feminism, two collectivist pillars of the New Left. The left has its “narrative” — its explanation of our culture — in which the right wing is a bunch of greedy white guys who keep the people in a constant state of fear, and so make them vote against their interests (their interests being socialism, although leftists never say it that plainly). The Republican noise machine drowns out reason and stymies noble Democrats who just want to save the planet and help the little guy.

Leftists care so much! If only they could cut through the clamor of the right-wing noise machine so that Americans could see that the Democrats just want to save the planet and help the little guy.

Part of the feminist narrative is that women have their own logic that ennobles them, and makes them different from white males. Instead of greedy capitalists, women are collectivists who care about people. This is a variation on The Feminine Mystique, which the early feminists opposed.

Part of the Democrat narrative (and electoral strategy) is that they are not the party of greedy white male corporate types. In the pressure group logic of the welfare state, Democrats say that they fight for the interests of women and minorities.

The left has a lot invested in the multiculturalist/feminist narrative that Democrats represent women. So when this gun-toting Republican woman comes along, she represents a huge threat. If the Dems lose women as a voting bloc, it’s over: they’ll never win another election. Thus, Sarah Palin must be mocked, scorned, hated and marginalized.

The message from the elite that liking Palin is not cool got out fast and has not changed. In a nation in which people are “socialized” according to John Dewey’s educational theory in public school — that is, in a nation of conformists — it’s important to be cool.

I should note that I’m not a fan of Sarah Palin. The more I learn about her, the less impressed I am. I think she is an ordinary religious conservative with little understanding of economics. Sometimes she gets it right, other times not. If she were not a woman, I doubt she would push the left’s emotional buttons the way she does.

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.

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.

This movement is typical of the New Left, in that it cannot be honest about what it wants. If these people were honest, and capable of thinking in principles, they would say they want socialism. Of course, they can’t say that because it would make the Democrats a party of, I would guess, 15-20% of the population. Honesty on the left means electoral suicide.

When I listen to the Coffee Partiers in their videos, I’m struck by their economic ignorance when they make the rare specific point. One woman argues that socialized medicine — no, of course she doesn’t call it that, but calls it something like, “health care like they have in France” — is cheaper than the slightly freer system we currently have. These people seriously need to read Ayn Rand, Henry Hazlitt, Fredric Bastiat, and then if they got that far, they could go on to Mises. But if they were of the disposition to read these authors, and possessed of the motivation and discipline to study them at length, they wouldn’t be in the Coffee Party movement in the first place.

The woman in the first video (the one standing in the snow with a coffee cup) says at one point that Tea Partiers are motivated by fear of changing demographics. In other words, they are racists. The Tea Party movement has nothing to do with race — it’s about less government and more freedom. But I must admit that it is too bad the anti-immigration Congressman Tom Tancredo had a prominent speech at a recent Tea Party convention, as that makes it seem as if fear of brown people is important to the movement.

The woman in the snow also brings up the old distortion of anarchism — although again, she doesn’t use the word. (Do they consciously conspire to be vague and undefined, or does it just come naturally to these people?) She makes it seem as if Tea Partiers want no government, when most of them want Constitutional government. To leftists, if you think Obama should not be running General Motors, then you’re a wild-eyed, bomb-throwing anarchist.

This movement is based on such uninspiring ideas that it will be interesting to see how long it lasts and how big it grows.

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.

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.”

This is from APN’s Frequently Asked Questions:

“Progressive news is news that brings us closer to universal health care, living wages, affordable housing, peace, a healthy environment, and voting systems we can trust.

We provide news of concern to working families, and therefore, our writing is geared toward a specific audience. Fortunately, our audience–working families–comprises a majority of people in the United States who are largely ignored by corporate media sources.

We believe there is no such thing as objective news. Typically, mainstream media presents itself as objective but is actually skewed towards promoting the corporate agenda of the ultra-wealthy.

APN, on the other hand, does not pretend to be objective. We believe that our news coverage is fair and that our progressive principles are fair. We aim when possible to give voice to all sides, but aim to provide something different than what is already provided by corporate sources.”

APN’s policy explains the predominant trend in journalism today, but they are more up front about it. This is the reason the mainstream media has such a liberal bias (although APN believes they are “corporate media” that think they’re objective). This is why the MSM ignored questions about Obama’s past. It’s an excellent example of how modern philosophy is spreading through our culture,  working its way from universities to newspapers.

How long can a culture that no longer has confidence in objective reality remain free? I would imagine the answer is “Not long.”

• 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.

In socialism there  are two classes: the rulers and the ruled. The rulers, a small elite, were called nomenklatura in the USSR. The rest of the people functioned as the elite’s slaves.

Robert Tracinski explained the phenomenon at TIA Daily:

The left is Platonist at its root. It does not begin by observing the actual requirements of human life or the means by which much of the world has risen from mass poverty to opulent wealth in the past two centuries. Instead, it begins with a whole series of moral and philosophical preconceptions—that self-interest is evil, that money-making is corrupt, that achievement in the material world is morally suspect, that the independent individual is dangerous—and then tries to bend the real world to fit these preconceptions.

Or to put it in more philosophical terms, instead of starting with observation and moving up to concepts, the method of Aristotle, the left starts with concepts and projects them onto the world, the method of Plato.

In keeping with this approach, the left is also Platonist in its attitude toward the minds of others. Like Plato’s philosopher-kings, the leftists like to imagine themselves as endowed with a superior mental faculty which entitles them to look down on the fact-bound reasoning of the unenlightened masses.

Fundamentally, there is no hypocrisy. The rules they dictate to the masses were never intended to apply to the rulers. They’re special people, motivated by altruism and uncorrupted by greed like the rest of us blinded by capitalism.

Taken to its logical end, the rulers are above the rule of law. In socialism there is no rule of law, only the rule of men. The rulers dictate to the ruled, and they call whatever whims of rule they establish law.

The only hypocrisy involved is that because of America’s tradition of liberty, the rulers must pretend they are “public servants.” They must pretend they serve the constitution, which they regard as a meaningless document. This pretense is convenient because it mollifies those who are ruled and keeps them from rebelling against the ruling class.

Instead of calling it hypocrisy, I think it would be better to point out that our rulers’ actions are perfectly moral by their premises. They get to live by their own special rules. That’s the way statism works, and that’s the way it will be until we restore freedom in America. If you put it this way instead of using the hypocrisy argument — as if the norm were that politicians were humble “public servants,” a bunch of Mr. Smiths gone to Washington — then you stand a better chance of educating the people. A man won’t lose his chains until he sees them.

UPDATE: Slight revision for clarity.

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.”

No question Obama is the better liar. Bill Clinton, con artist that he was, had some shred of decency in his soul that showed shame when he lied. Obama, who has lived in the far leftist bubble his entire life, has no trace of shame when he lies. He projects self-righteous condescension when he speaks. He believes he is, as an altruist-collectivist, morally superior to the rest of us. Remember his fantasies about doctors performing needless operations because they’ve been corrupted by greed? That’s what he thinks capitalism does to everyone except the philosopher-kings of the left. He believes he has a moral right to lie to Americans for their own good.

Moreover, postmodern philosophy tells Obama that there is no objective reality, there are only “narratives” informed by tribal differences. Obama believes his narrative is moral because he is not motivated by greed.

As good a liar as Obama is, he is not getting away with his lies because most Americans have a better understanding of reality than Obama. For those Americans who are not sure, there are plenty of sound thinkers on talk radio and the internet explaining how Obama is wrong. Leftists tell themselves they are being drowned out by the “right-wing noise machine,” but really it’s just the truth getting out. In a country with free speech, a statist cannot get away with so many outrageous lies.

I’m beginning to think Obama’s presidency is dead. It died on February 27, 2009, the day of the first Tea Parties, which came after Rick Santelli’s February 19 call for protests on CNBC. On that day Independents and Republicans joined to protest the big government policies of Obama-Reid-Pelosi. The Democrat Party leaders responded with smears.

Obama lost the American people. When the Democrats, in their astonishing arrogance, called the protesters racists, KKK, evil-mongers, a mob, and so on, they lost them forever. People don’t vote for a politician after he insults them.

The Democrats thought they could intimidate people away from the protests by demonizing the movement. They didn’t realize they were talking only to their base, and now that is all the support that remains.

This does not mean they will give up. When you believe morality is on your side, you don’t give up. They will try everything to pass their socialist agenda. With the help of their media, some of their lies will will succeed. It will be interesting to see, as failure mounts upon failure, what fresh hells desperation inspires on the left.

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.

If your mind wandered during this speech, you could always look at Joe Biden, sitting behind Obama, to see how you should be reacting. When Obama was serious, Biden put on a frowny face; in lighter moments Biden grinned like a jackass. How nice of Joe to serve as a kind of human cartoon of what we should think. After two centuries someone finally found something useful for vice-presidents to do.

Others have examined the lies. Alex Epstein summed the speech up in one sentence:

We need to rise above fear, hesitation, and partisan politics–to give the government all the power it needs to solve all our problems.

I think Obama was saying in this speech “I am not Bill Clinton.” He’s not a moderate, not a triangulator; he won’t run to the middle after an electoral disaster. He is an ideologue who believes his collectivist agenda is moral and he is not backing off an inch. If you listened to the speech out of focus, as William F. Buckley, Jr.’s son must have done, you might have admired Obama’s integrity and purpose. Obama posed as a reasonable man of common sense who can laugh off difficulties, a man who just wants to get things done to help Americans.

You have to think in principle. You have to remember that Obama wants to expand state power over the individual. His is the path to dictatorship. If you can’t keep that in mind when he talks, then you’re doomed to be a welfare statist and to wonder why those unreasonable people on the right hate him so much. They must be racists!

Everything in this speech was designed to bamboozle people so that Obama-Reid-Pelosi can forge on with their socialist program, despite the fact that most Americans don’t want it. In a remarkably partisan speech, in which he attacked the Bush presidency and the Supreme Court, he also attacked partisanship. In a speech full of lies he attacked cynicism. He knows his ideological comrades in the media will publicize the noble, if hollow, statements, and ignore the partisan lies. A concrete-bound mentality, a pragmatist, would have no idea what to make of this speech.

If you think in principle, you understand that when Obama says “I don’t quit,” he means, “I don’t care what the people want, I will force socialism on them for their own good.” That is the meaning of Obama’s resolve. He has courage to stick to his values, yes. But what values this man has! He has the courage to run your life for you even if you’re too stupid to appreciate it.

We discovered in 2009 that many Americans can think in principle. They see that Obama is destroying our liberty. They have rocked Obama’s party in three elections in the last year, and they’re not done yet. After the Massachusetts election Obama made an odd statement that I interpret as another shot at Bill Clinton:

“I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” he told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer.

The captain will go down with his ship. If he does it will be because enough Americans were not bamboozled by Obama’s rhetoric. Those who can think in principle and understand individual rights — the Tea Party Movement — would be the reason Obama failed, and that would make them the most important political movement since the civil rights era.

UPDATE: If you think I was tough on Obama’s speech, check out the reaction over at PJTV.

Andrew Wilson looks at Obama’s economic ignorance. It makes me wonder what Mises would have made of this speech. He’d probably have yawned and said, “I’ve heard it all before in Germany in the 1920’s and 30’s.”

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.

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.

When the trio of Obama, Reid and Pelosi found themselves in power together, the New Left was finally, after more than 40 years of struggle,  in control of the executive and legislative branches. Their time had come, and the Democrat base wanted four decades of frustration rectified NOW. They tried to pass their agenda of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” into a European-style socialist state.

It was a domestic shock and awe. The Democrats worked in a fury. They worked in arrogant, partisan disdain of the Republicans. They passed a $787 billion stimulus bill full of pork for various Democrats that did nothing to create jobs, but only made the economy worse. They took over two automobile manufacturers and told financial sector CEO’s how much in bonuses they could make. The House and Senate passed huge health care bills that would raise insurance costs, weaken medicare benefits and get the state involved in who would live and die. They lied about all of the above.

All this and more shook up the American people. Although both parties have been stumbling towards fascism since the New Deal, people never saw it clearly until 2009, when their eyes were opened by the Democrats’ domestic shock and awe. The Democrats were intent on governing to the left of the American people. The people didn’t like what they saw. A movement among Republicans and Independents call Tea Parties sprung up. During the summer the same rebellious spirit met Democrats at town hall meetings.

How did the Democrats respond to the protests among the voters? With name calling. They called the protesters tea baggers (a term that refers to an off-beat sexual practice I had not heard of before 2009), racists, KKK, evil mongers and likened them to Nazis. Mind you, this did not just come from blowhards on MSNBC, but from the leadership. Statements were made by Pelosi and Reid in a campaign coordinated by the White House. Also mind you, the Democrats were smearing some two-thirds of America. In a country with free elections, calling a majority of voters names like racists and evil mongers is no way to win votes. It seemed as if the Democrats were out of touch with reality or suicidal.

The clash between the Democrats and the American people came to a climax this week in Massachusetts. A Republican was elected to the Senate seat that Edward Kennedy had sat in for 47 years. At the moment the Democrats are in disarray, victims themselves of some shock and awe courtesy of the Massachusetts voters.

The Democrat politicians are frightened. They know that if they continues as they have for the last year and make their health care reform bill into law, many Democrats will go down in November. Their base, however, is advising them to pass the bill. The politicians find themselves caught between their base and the rest of America — damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

Their problems are made worse by Obama’s incompetence. His resume is the least distinguished of any modern president. Even the accomplishments seem strangely hollow: as editor of the Harvard Law Review, he never wrote an article and took no interest in the actual editing; in the Illinois State Senate he voted present over 100 time. He’s gone through life landing prestigious jobs in which he did little — and the same pattern shows up in his first term in the White House. In his first year he gave more speeches and golfed more than any other president. At his core he seems empty and unserious. He doesn’t have any idea what to do.

I see only one way out of the bind they are in: they need a crisis. Both Rahm Emanuel and Hillary Clinton have remarked the usefulness of a crisis. But not the penny ante stuff we’re used to, rather a major, gut wrenching, world changing, once-in-a-century CRISIS. I’m talking hyper-inflation, soaring unemployment, mob violence in the streets and marshal law. At the same time they need World War III to begin. They need the Chinese to invade Taiwan, Muslims to start wars everywhere and the Russians to do something stupid. (And Putin is just the man to do it.) The outbreak of some highly contagious disease would also help.

Under the cover of a crisis, they could skip the hassles of constitutional government and all those annoyances that just get in the way such as filibusters and angry voters. They could get to the collectivist dictatorship they want. They could fundamentally transform America into a land in which all individuals sacrifice to the state in return for cradle-to-grave security. And there would be paradise on earth.

My advice to the Democrats is to manufacture the big crisis. I think they’re up to it. Come on, Barack — create a BIG mess. Otherwise, the Democrats are in for more frustration and backlash from the voters. By 2012 they could find themselves completely out of power again.

It looks like they’ll have to rethink their health care reform. The 2,000-page monstrosities don’t seem to have a chance of passing now. Right now the Democrats are in utter confusion and chaos.

…for the first time in the yearlong push, Democratic aides — and even some members — finally acknowledged privately that the fear of failure was real. And Congress recessed for the weekend without an obvious path forward as rank-and-file Democrats started splintering in different directions.

Democrats struggled all year to maintain a coalition in support of health care reform without any GOP votes. Republican Scott Brown’s improbable win in Massachusetts on Tuesday now looks like it has the potential to end that almost-impossible balancing act.

I have no hopes that they will throw out their goal of nationalizing medicine and suddenly support less government, market oriented plans. The Brown victory has only slowed them down for now; that’s good enough.

2. The Supreme Court voided a key provision in McCain-Feingold’s Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that limits corporate political spending. This is a victory for free speech. Will it lessen the influence of George Soros’s 527’s? We’ll see.

3. Air America has stopped broadcasting and filed for bankruptcy. It’s good news only in that it shows the American people are not interested in the ideas the left is selling. Practically speaking, the end of Air America might not be good news in the long run, as now the left will push harder for the Fairness Doctrine or similar restrictions on broadcasting. It’s not fair that only right-wingers should be able to succeed on the radio!

4. Jon Stewart makes fun of Keith Olbermann. MSNBC has officially become a national joke.

UPDATE: Don Surber has more good news.

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.

As Dale Franks writes,

There literally isn’t enough money in the world to float the T-notes the Treasury must issue in order to prop up our unsustainable spending path.  There are, however, about $3.6 trillion in funds just sitting in 401(k) accounts.  If the government can urge–or force–you to convert your 401(k) into T-note funded annuities, the Treasury can continue to issue those notes to float the government’s deficit.  Essentially, you’ll be converting your retirement funds into an IOU from the government…just like your social security account has already done.

This will allow the Treasury to keep borrowing money–from your retirement–in order to keep issuing more debt that they may or may not be able to pay back to you.

The altruist-collectivists in power just cannot stand that there is $3.6 trillion out there being controlled and consumed by individuals for their own selfish interest. They want that money. They want total power over every person from cradle to grave. They want you dependent on government for your retirement money.

They expect, as they always do, that Americans will fail to think in principle — not a bad bet. They hope people will fail to see this change to annuities, a complicated financial matter, as the first step toward government control of all retirement funds.

Those who speak out against this plan will be smeared as fringe nutjobs and probably motivated by racism, since Obama is black. But speak out we must because this plan is just the thin edge of the wedge.

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.

From the left:

The president, making his first public comments after a Republican candidate on Tuesday won the special election to fill Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat, said he understands that some Americans view his administration as a bunch of “technocrats up here … making decisions.”

But he said the main reason for this was not his policies but rather his communications strategy.

“What I haven’t always been successful at doing is breaking through the noise and speaking directly to the American people in a way that during the campaign you could do,” he said.

Oh, no — not the communication gambit. Leftist politicians always say this. They called Ronald Reagan “the Great Communicator,” the implication being that he had some mysterious power to fill the proletariat with false consciousness and make them act against their interests.

Obama is exactly wrong. The Democrats’ radical agenda has brought ideological clarity. Americans understand perfectly what Obama-Reid-Pelosi want, and they don’t like it. What he really means is, We must find a better way to fool the masses.

No, nothing has changed on the left, and that figures: being a leftist means never having to say you’re sorry. They never, ever learn; they never, ever change.

But how about the right? Are the Republicans still the dazed and confused party? I’m not reassured by this:

McConnell said Republicans want to work with Democrats in passing legislation for the rest of the year.

“We would like to be partners in the process,” he said. “We’re prepared to meet them in the middle.”

Yes, I know Senator McConnell does not want to be seen as just “obstructionist,” but meeting the Democrats in the middle is what Republicans always do, and it’s always bad. Instead of full socialization of medicine, the Republicans will settle for going halfway. Instead of a lethal dose of poison, they’ll drink just enough to get sick.

You can’t meet socialists in the middle. That’s what has brought us to the terrible state we are now in. That’s why the state has done nothing but grow for last 100 years.

I believe the American people do not want the Republicans to compromise in nationalizing health care. I think they want the Republicans to just say no. The Democrats’ health care reform is so bad that doing nothing is by far the better course.

Judging from the comments above from the two party leaders, we’re in for a dense fog of lies from the Democrats; nothing new. And we’re in for bumbling idiocy from the Republicans as they stumble around in search of some compromise they can show the mainstream media so they won’t be scorned at the next cocktail party in Georgetown. We need more protests, more rebellion, more anger — the ruling elite still do not get it.

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.

“I’d cheat to keep these bastards out.”

There you have it. Because Republicans are bastards, Schultz thinks it’s fine to undermine an election. The altruist-collectivist morality of the left excuses all crimes, no matter how damaging to our freedom.

Judging from the chicanery of ACORN and what we’ve seen from Democrats going back the Kennedy-Nixon contest in 1960, it’s a safe bet that Ed Schultz is not alone in his thinking.

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

The reporter was John McCormack of the Weekly Standard; the politician was Martha Coakley, Democrat candidate for Senate in Massachusetts. The man in the glasses is apparently a political operative sent to help a Coakley campaign in panic because Republican Scott Brown is rising in the polls.

It’s just one of many examples of how the left really believes only in force.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Miss Rand’s speech was delivered during the McGovern-Nixon presidential race. It’s quite fascinating to hear how the Democrats have not changed since 1972. From the beginning the New Left was a totalitarian movement. I was stunned to hear that at one point in the campaign McGovern proposed that everything Americans made over $12,000 be confiscated by the state. He quickly backed away from the idea, as it must have gone  over like a lead balloon. Excuse me, Senator McGovern? We’d like to introduce you to reality. Before the reaction of the voters, this idiot actually thought it was a good idea to steal everything over $12,000 in income per American.

So what’s the difference between a Democrat and a communist? The Democrats would let you keep $12,000 in 1972 dollars, whereas the communists would take it all.

It makes you realize how good it was that from 1972-2008 we elected only two Democrat presidents, both of whom were fairly weak presidents. Now, however, the Obama-Reid-Pelosi era has brought the New Left into power. Now the White House Christmas tree has ornaments with Chairman Mao’s face on them. The Obama White House can think of no better way to celebrate Christmas than by hanging pictures of the greatest collectivist mass murderer in history.

One great irony of Obama is that he campaigned as a unifier, but has governed as the most partisan and divisive president in memory. Our nation’s unity will suffer greatly under this little man’s governance; Ayn Rand explains why.

UPDATE: Irony is the wrong word in that last paragraph. It’s not irony that Obama promised to be a unifier but turned out a divider; it’s just a lie.

How does driving a Honda Civic save the planet? Does driving a car with good gas mileage make that much of a difference in any respect? Does it pollute that much less than a gas guzzler? Does it emit that much less CO2? Does it put off the day we will supposedly run out of gas that much? And if the driver drives more because of the money he saves on gas, doesn’t that offset any small benefits that might come with better mileage?

Moreover, what does it mean to save the planet? The planet is an inanimate object. It will continue to orbit the sun regardless of what kind of cars we drive on it.

Let’s imagine one of the environmentalists’ fantasies is true, and we are running out of oil. If we continued to drive gas guzzlers, then we would wake up one day to the horrible news that the oil is all gone. Civilization would suffer around the globe. People would be forced to walk or ride a bicycle. Manufacturing and production would decline. Millions would die.

We would have exactly the world the environmentalists want! Less production and fewer humans is their ideal, isn’t it? The end of oil would be the best thing that could happen by their standards.

If the environmentalists really believed oil was so scarce that it was about to disappear, they would campaign for people to use as much gas as possible. They would want people to drive the biggest cars possible. The more gas we consumed, the quicker we would get to ecological nirvana. Instead, they want people driving as little as possible, and they want everyone driving the shoe boxes we drive these days instead of the land yachts we used to drive.

Environmentalists want us to conserve gasoline for the same reason they want us recycling scraps of garbage. “Saving the planet” has nothing to do with the planet; it’s about sacrifice. It’s about getting people to renounce values — to live lives more deprived than they would live if they pursued their own selfish happiness. 

Environmentalism is fundamentally an altruist ideology. Environmentalists hate the individual pursuing his happiness, producing wealth and consuming it as he does in a capitalist system. Anti-capitalists have always hated the selfishness of capitalism.

Capitalism depends on exploiting the world we live in. The ecology movement attacks capitalism at its root, by claiming that production and consumption are bad for “the environment.” By whose standards? By those who do not want man reshaping the world for his selfish happiness. Good and bad can only apply to humans. The planet has no consciousness, and cannot care what kind of cars we drive. Environmentalism comes down to what some people want. They want it because of their altruist-collectivist-statist premises.

The state can force people to live deprived lives — it does so now and it will do so even more in the future. However, the surest way to defeat capitalism is to persuade people to renounce values voluntarily. Get people to think that morality lies in sacrifice, and the war is over. The anti-capitalists win.

The war is not entirely over yet, but the New Left has been waging its ideological war for about 50 years now. Public school students are taught for 12 years to equate material sacrifice with morality. Environmentalism is everywhere in our culture. To some it serves as a religion. There’s a lot of work to do in this war. First we need to spread a rational philosophy. We need to fight bad philosophy with good philosophy. I hope it’s not too late.