If someone wants to destroy his own life, the state has no business stopping him. This intervention by police and their use of tasers to take an old man down is outrageous. What’s next, people being arrested because they don’t go in for their yearly check-up?

Now, when I write “fighting back,” what do you think this means? Does it mean assembling air-tight philosophical, political and economic arguments grounded in empirical facts? Or does it mean name calling and smearing the other side?

Yes, you guessed it. Josh Marshall explains it for you:

The institutional Republican party has fully (though with some notable and honorable exceptions) hoisted its sail to xenophobia and religious hatred. And as Halperin notes, at least for motivating their own voters, it’s simply good politics. This is not something anybody happened into.

Well, there you go. Those creeps on the right are appealing to xenophobia and religious hatred because that works with the stupid American people. Marshall’s argument is classic leftist thought: forget any subtleties of the issue, just cut to what is important — how the immoral GOP manipulates the American masses with their lies.

Eugene Robinson argues along the same lines:

Lies, distortions, jingoism, xenophobia — another day, another campaign issue that Republicans can use to bash President Obama and the Democrats. First it was illegal immigration. Now it’s the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” which is not at all what its opponents claim.

As for Obama’s Friday statement, which invigorated the left on the Ground Zero Mosque — at least until the President flip-flopped on Saturday and then explained that he did not flip-flop — James Taranto recaps.

Peter Kirsanow gets to an important point:

President Obama’s statements regarding the proposed Ground Zero mosque are the latest in a series of indicators that we are at a very peculiar pass: We have a president who doesn’t get America. For the first time in history we have a president whose default setting is in opposition to the general sensibilities of the American people. His behavior too frequently suggests that he’s playing a cosmic joke on Americans’ essential decency, considered patriotism, and belief in American exceptionalism.

Obama is in opposition to what Ayn Rand called the American sense of life. This sense of life is the legacy of America’s 18th and 19th century freedom and culture of individualism.

I think Obama’s response is interesting for two reasons. First, it demonstrates better than anything in the last nine years why we are losing the war against totalitarian Islam. In the months following 9/11 I was gloomy. I realized that we did not have the will to win this war, and we would not find the will to fight until things went much worse for us. We lost what we had in WWII. The rise of the New Left had disarmed America, and the primary ideology disarming us is multiculturalism. When all cultures are equal, by what right do we use force to defend Western Civilization?

No, it was clear to me that the left had set us on a course of national and cultural suicide.

In 2008 we elected the worst possible man to lead America: a man of the left, whose soul is one with the New Leftist ideologies. Obama’s speech on Friday at the iftar dinner with Muslim ambassadors was steeped in multiculturalism:

In my inaugural address I said that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and every culture, drawn from every end of this Earth. And that diversity can bring difficult debates. This is not unique to our time. Past eras have seen controversies about the construction of synagogues or Catholic churches. But time and again, the American people have demonstrated that we can work through these issues, and stay true to our core values, and emerge stronger for it. So it must be — and will be — today.

In a free nation that protects individual rights, none of this is very important. The controversies between various religions are barely noticed because every individual is equal before the law.

But when a nation throws out individual rights and embraces collectivism — the only thing Obama understands — then groups are of primary importance, for governance becomes a matter of pressure group warfare. A controversy such as the Ground Zero Mosque turns into this group against that group.

Obama’s biggest evasion is that the issue is not first about religion, but politics and war. Islam, in addition to being a religion, is a political ideology — a totalitarian ideology that is waging war as it attempts to conquer the world. The Ground Zero Mosque would be a symbol of Islam’s victory in a battle in its war for world domination. Religion and multiculturalism are used to obscure the essential issue and weaken America in its fight against this totalitarian enemy.

The second interesting thing about Obama’s response is that it does oppose the 68% majority of Americans who want the mosque built somewhere else. The majority of Americans are right. Still. They understand that this is about war, not religious rights, and they are still willing to stand up for our national self-defense. They have not entirely let go of their individualist sense of life that Ayn Rand wrote about almost 40 years ago. This is the only good news here, and the American sense of life, tattered and torn as it may be, remains our only hope.

Claude Sandroff sees this book putting the anthropogenic global warming idea in the grave — if people listen to Dr. Spencer, and with MSM serving as the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party, that’s a big if.

At the end of Spencer’s careful analysis, a simple picture emerges. The PDO is a long-lived ocean-to-atmosphere heat transfer process (similar to the better-known El Niño and La Niña) but of much longer duration. Cloud cover decreases significantly during the positive PDO phase, allowing more sunlight to reach the earth’s surface. In the ocean, this extra energy is stored as heat. In its negative phase, the PDO acts in reverse and cools the atmosphere. And all of this occurs in roughly thirty-year cycles. While this mechanism is operating, mankind is dumping a small, vanishing amount of CO₂ into the atmosphere. Big deal.

It’s outrageous that buffoons like Al Gore have led this nation to the brink of Cap and Trade legislation that would devastate the economy in the name of a fantasy.

Pakistan is playing a double game with the US, taking its money and aiding the Taliban. We give $1.5 billion in foreign aid to Pakistan annually. Now, imagine you are President Musharraf. You know you can skim off 5% of this money, $75 million,  put it in a Swiss bank account, and no one will notice. Those who do notice, if they are so unwise as to speak out, you can have assassinated. What do you do? Do you put a little away for yourself or, because you are a noble idealist who wants to help the poor, do you pass it all on to your welfare state bureaucracy, which is so riddled with corruption that much of the money will never reach the poor?

American taxpayers, you suckers, you’re busting your ass from 9 to 5 so that dictators around the world can send their children on gambling vacations to Monaco.

Ever since Obama became a serious presidential candidate in 2008 I’ve written a series of blog posts trying to figure the guy out. He’s a strange bird, both leftist ideologue and Peter Keating-like second hander. He’s a politician beloved by many Americans, especially African-Americans, but he is also so distant and cool that one wonders if he is even paying attention to the daily crisis.

Mark McKinnon sees parallels between Obama and LBJ.

Christopher Hitchens talks about God as he is “battling” cancer. Most disappointing. I had always thought he was a hardcore atheist, but it turns out he’s a squishy agnostic. It looks like Hitchens and Martin Amis in this clip get hung up on epistemology. Since man is not omniscient, there’s a possibility that God exists. Once again, only Objectivists with their doctrine of the arbitrary get it right.

Paul Krugman gives up.

What causes the Great Stagnation? I’m no economist, but I would guess it has something to do with increasing size of government and increasing regulation, which decrease productivity. That and inflation end up keeping the little guy little. I’m certain it is not because the greedy rich refuse to spread the wealth around.

A chill ran up my spine when I read that. Several questions came to mind:

1) What gives the federal government the right to dictate that all health care providers look at an ID?

2) Why would the federal government think this law was needed?

3) Why is it for my protection? If someone gets medical care under my name, that’s the clinic’s problem, not mine, is it not?

Statists of all parties will be thinking as they read this post, “Oh, come on! Don’t be such a paranoid right-wing extremist. They’re just checking ID. Who can object to that?”

Well, for two centuries checking ID was not a problem in medical care. Now for some reason it is mandatory. A doctor should be able to treat whomever he wants without following some goddamn bureaucrat’s order that he check ID.

I take this new regulation as a sign of what is to come with the federal government taking over health care. This new policy, as innocuous as it seems to statists, will have costs — and those costs were not incurred when health care was not controlled by the state.

Worse than the cost, this little dictation is symbolic of the greater dictation in health care we will all suffer. When the state controls medicine, it controls our lives.

100 years ago Americans would not have stood for this ridiculous dictation from Washington, D.C. Today? Hey, they just want to see some ID.

This sign is a little reminder that we are losing our freedom as the state gains power and marches toward the abyss of dictatorship.

Being an American is not a matter of blood or birth, it’s a matter of faith.

J.E. Dyer observes,

In pairing “faith” and Americanness, Obama made a vague, impressionistic association that tells us much about him; and one of the chief things is that he simply doesn’t think like an American.  Naturally, there are American nationals who posit the kind of association he implies here, but when they do so they are not expressing the quintessentially American idea.  They are speaking theoretically and proposing analyses for further consideration.

This is common in academia, where the link Obama suggests – of Americanness with the concept of “faith” – is implied through an analytical progression:  Americans are religious; they believe strongly in their religions; they believe strongly in their national identity; therefore, their national identification is essentially a sort of religious belief.  It has been a long time since an academic could wander through this syllogistic sequence without implying that it represents irrationality on the part of Americans – and once that premise is sneaked in, the syllogist is off the hook for making his own case rationally.  The whole discussion becomes a sticky goo of impressions and vague associations, so that you can wind up saying “Being American is a matter of faith,” and your auditors can all go off and interpret that however they want.

The “sticky goo of impressions and vague associations” is right on the mark. Obama expects Americans not to think in focus about his words, but to accept the hazy emotional connotations of his words, well, on faith.

In another sense, I think Obama means exactly what he says. He wants Americans to have faith in the state. He wants Americans to turn their lives over to the state the way religious people turn their lives over to the metaphysical fantasy of God. Don’t think, don’t question, just have faith in the philosopher-kings such as Barack Obama. They will run our lives better than we benighted masses motivated by self-interest ever could.

Dyer also observes,

…there is something a bit creepy about saying “being American is a matter of faith” – something that evokes the national-religious aspects of Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, Soviet Stalinism, and Maoism.  It is extremely informative about Obama, and presumably his speechwriting staff, that their ears didn’t catch this off-kilter resonance.  I think Obama thought these words would resonate with traditional Americans.  In the end, that merely reinforces the perception that he knows such Americans only through the rarefied prism of academic interpretations by third parties.

It’s not exaggeration to notice that Obama’s concept of Americanism has more in common with the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century than with the ideas of the Founding Fathers. In the Declaration of Independence are the words,

…let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Thomas Jefferson expected no one to take his words on faith. He laid out the facts supporting the case of independence and expected a candid world to evaluate those facts with reason.

The essence of America is individual rights. Freedom made America great, and restrictions of freedom are now destroying America. Freedom does not depend on anyone’s faith. It depends on respect for the rule of law — from the people and from the politicians they send to Washington, D.C.

From day one of his presidency Obama has done nothing but destroy liberty in America — from the creation of various czars dictating every aspect of our lives to quadrupling the deficit to dictating how much CEO’s can get paid to nationalizing health care to wanting draconian regulations on carbon emissions to bowing to dictators and appeasing our enemies abroad. Of course he wants Americans to stop thinking, to stop judging and to accept the state’s order on faith. If nothing else, it would make his job easier if being an American were a matter of faith.

The argument is complicated and certainly not self-evident. It’s a matter on which good people can disagree. I see in the various comment threads people I respect on both sides.

What would be worse for the rule of law in America, our government violating property rights of those who would build a mosque or giving the enemy in a time of war an enormous morale boost by seeing a mosque built where militant Islam scored its greatest victory?

This strikes me as the kind of argument one finds in a mixed economy. Our government is bad and getting worse. It intervenes now in so many areas that it seldom does anything significant that is limited to the scope envisioned by the writers of the Constitution. Good is packaged with bad, and sorting out what is fundamental or most important can be maddening.

Speaking for no one but myself, I believe the government should prevent the building of the mosque. I will be surprised if it does. A government that can’t bring itself to use the word terrorist is unlikely to do anything so politically incorrect. Our government would rather sacrifice our men on the battlefield than fight the war properly and risk the censure of world opinion. The lives of our soldiers and Marines are less important to the current administration than the preventing the sneers of sophisticated Europeans.

We must win the war against totalitarian Islam. To those who think we could never be defeated by a ragtag bunch living in caves, I would note that the Romans thought Rome would stand forever. Alaric and the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 a.d., shattering the confidence of the ancient world. Augustine wrote City of God in response, which you could call the constitution of the dark ages.

I know there is plenty of difference between modern America and ancient Rome. But what impact would the explosion of a nuclear device on Wall Street have on Western Civilization? It’s too depressing to consider for long.

The enemy has not struck us on American soil since 2001, but will it in five years? 10? 20?

In war it is important to convince the enemy that there is no hope of victory. Building a mosque at Ground Zero would  give the enemy hope.

“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

Doesn’t this sound like a leftist attempt to turn children into little collectivists? Selfish individuals, you see, find friends they value. But modern education since Dewey seeks to socialize children. Don’t be “possessive” about friends, just relax and be friends with everyone.

Who know? Maybe American educators will succeed where the Russians failed in creating homo sovieticus.

Devastating our economy and making us economically uncompetitive is a feature, not a bug. The whole “global warming” scam has been about throttling the industrialized world, especially the US, by restricting use of energy. It was never really about saving the world climate, it was always about trying to bring about international equality. You could tell that because the Kyoto accord restricted use of energy by rich nations, but permitted poor ones to increase their use of energy.

It important to remember that the left’s goal is egalitarianism. To make us all equal requires destruction, not prosperity. Obama’s presidency is a radical departure from what we knew before. I think many Americans are afraid to see this truth in all its horror.

(I’m sorry that I have not been blogging much of late. I’ve been acting a lot. I just finished doing Bottom in Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Capulet in Romeo and Juliet and the Ghost and Claudius in Hamlet. Awesome roles! At the moment I’m doing another great role, Shylock in Merchant of Venice. How could I resist playing a guy who wants to cut a pound of flesh from a Christian? [Come on, now -- that was a joke.] I’m busy this summer, but I have not given up blogging, and I expect to get back to it later, especially when we get into election season. Oh, yeah — you know we’ll have plenty to say then.)

We’re not, we’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service. We don’t want people to stop, ah, fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy.

(To make money is to produce wealth. Can one produce too much wealth? Can one be too healthy or too good?)

Obama’s ideal businessman would think something like, “I’ve made enough money, and it’s embarrassing to make more because all the leftist elitists sneer at me, but darn it, I must continue to produce to fulfill my responsibility to grow the economy.”

In Obama’s universe making money is a necessary evil. Americans must submit themselves to this dirty task so that the state will have enough wealth to redistribute. Those who produce wealth are not only used to support the poor, but they are sneered at for producing so much wealth in the first place.

With such a concept of the American way, it’s no wonder Obama is in a hurry to fundamentally transform it.

It will be up to each of you to make sure that the young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women who powered our victory in 2008 stand together once again.

I think it’s more than just electoral demographics that makes Obama think in terms of pressure groups. The Democrats want people to think of themselves as members of multicultural collectives, not as individuals. The message is: if you’re a minority or a woman, the Democrats will take care of you.

Individual rights are not an issue in welfare state politics. Instead society is a war of pressure groups. If you’re not rich, you’d better vote Democrat to get your fair share of the pie.

At whose expense come the gifts doled out by the state?

Today, the health insurance companies, the Wall Street banks, and the special interests who have ruled Washington for too long are already focused on November’s congressional elections.

They see these elections as a chance to put their allies back in power, and undo all that we have accomplished. So this year, I need your help once more.

The rich, the banks, the health insurance companies — it’s the old class envy card that the Democrats have played since the invention of playing cards.

Underneath it all the left depends on a people willing to live as parasites on others, a citizenry that thinks it’s fine for the state to take from Peter to give to Paul. And that’s the dirty secret that all the left’s ideological concepts, and all of Obama’s gaseous rhetoric about hope and change, are built to evade: at root the welfare state appeals to the  worst within us.

I don’t know if this story is true, but it strikes me as symbolic of the New Leftist welfare state. We have an altruist government forcing on people what no one seems to want, but the state gives anyway because it makes them feel morally noble. Oh, yes — it also gives them the power to rule our lives, but they are not motivated by greed, so they are certain they can do better with our lives than we can.

The American people did not want ObamaCare. The Democrats gave it to them anyway. Now we get news that four in 10 Tea Partiers are not Republicans, but are Independents or Democrats. In light of this it is astonishing that the Democrats still pursue a strategy of demonizing Tea Partiers as racists, violent extremists — as idiots no respectable American would hang around.

Why must Democrats smear their opponents? Leftists are not stupid people. Many leftist political leaders were educated in Ivy League colleges as Obama was. Surely they could rely more on rational arguments (or pseud0-rational arguments) instead of dismissing the Tea Partiers as KKK, Nazis and so on.

I think we are seeing the power of philosophy in action. The Democrats have lost all confidence in reason. They believe that only force has efficacy in human affairs. Thus when they are confronted with an cultural phenomenon such as the Tea Party movement, which opposes big government and wants a return to Constitutional government, leftists lash out with smears. Politics is important — in Biden’s words, it’s a big f**kin’ deal to the left. One doesn’t fight an important battle with weapons in which one has no confidence. You bring out the big guns.

The New Left is still living the finest hours of its salad days, the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam war protests. On both sides they had morality on their side (in the antiwar protests only because our government was drafting men to die needlessly in an altruistic effort to keep a jungle half a world away free). Its opponents in the civil rights struggle were racists. Ever since then, when leftists see angry faces, they flash back to the ’60s, when they had morality on their side. Morality provides more powerful flashbacks than LSD.

Now we see that even some Democrats are part of the Tea Party movement. The left could be in for a huge shock in the next few elections.

Personally, I know some Democrats who for decades have been predictable. Reagan’s tax cuts were bad (although those Democrats prospered greatly from them). The Republicans are religious nuts who went after Clinton for getting a blow job. George W. Bush was arrogant and his tax cuts created the deficits.

Now I’ve noticed that some of them have changed. For the first time in their lives, they don’t like what the Democrats are doing. They’re worried because we should be out of the recession by now, but Obama’s policies just seem to make things worse. This is a new script for them, and they’re not certain what to think.

These Democrats look back on Clinton with fondness. I must admit, in the ’90s I never thought anyone would make Clinton look good, but both Bush and Obama have done just that.

Clinton wanted to be loved. Obama wants power over your life. Yes, Clinton wanted power too, but the moment the polls wavered a fraction of a point, he triangulated. He was pushed around by the Republicans for eight years (resulting in a balanced budget). Obama doesn’t care about the polls. He doesn’t give a damn if he goes down in flames, so long as he can take the rest of us with him. Clinton made me laugh. Obama scares the crap out of me.

With Democrats questioning Obama, how can their party do anything but lose big? Well, we will see in November. I think our culture is changing quickly because of Obama: radical push causes radical pushback, as if Newton’s laws of thermodynamics applied to society.

I don’t know how it will turn out, but I do believe things will not be the same again.

Let me remind you this [Americans allegedly dying because of lack of universal health care] has been going on for years. We are bringing it to a halt. The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.

Doubtless the closest statist to you will explain that Dingell did not mean “contol the people” in a bad way. His intentions are good. He just wants to help. And to help 300 million people, well, you can’t just let them run around doing what they want. Control. It’s good for you. Bend over and take it.

Then we read this remarkable statement from Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union and a member of Barack Obama’s deficit commission:

We now have a new metric. The president says he wants to judge the new economy whether it increases the number of people in the middle class. Whether we have shared prosperity, not just growth. Which is a fundamental different philosophy then what we’ve seen in this country to date. Now how do we distribute wealth in this country … clearly government has a major opportunity to distribute wealth – from the EITC, from tax policies, from minimum wages, from living wages – the government has a role in distributing wealth and social benefits. We are at historic crossroads … in terms of what our new president is trying to do and a different way we are going to try and evaluate the economy. And so all of sudden we are witnessing the first new American economic plan led by the government, not necessarily by the private sector.

Boortz goes on to inform us,

The SEIU (Andy Stern’s unions) is promoting a plan to centralize all retirement plans in the United States. The plan is called “the Retirement USA Initiative” and it would create one government pension plan for all American workers.

There are trillions of dollars in retirement funds currently controlled by individual Americans. It’s the kind of set up we used to take for granted back when America was a free country. This will no longer be tolerated in Barack Obama’s America. We will reorganize this system, and put government in charge of all retirement funds. It’s only fair, right? Besides, individuals pursuing their own self-interest leads to instability.

Once government confiscates your 401k, guess what will happen? The money will instantly be spent, and your retirement plan will become an IOU note held by same people in Washington, D.C. who say there ain’t no rules, we just make ‘em up as we go along.

You think they can’t do this? We’ve just seen they can do pretty much whatever they want. As Obama said, “I won.”

Liberty loses.

‘Repeal and replace’ is likely to be the slogan for the fall elections.

What do they mean by replace? Free market reforms? Getting government out of medicine?

Or do they mean some compromise plan that redistributes wealth to give the uninsured health care insurance?

Remember, the Republicans are the party that just a few months ago thought the way to fight ObamaCare was to stress that Republicans will protect Medicare. Like the Democrats, most Republicans believe there is a right to health care. They are terrified that stating there is no right to health care will lose them votes.

Remember also, this is the party that collapsed during the government shut down of 1995 when the media ran sob stories of government workers not getting paid, and the Democrats called the Republicans mean.

What do you think the media will do if the Republicans try to take away ObamaCare? Can you imagine the nonstop parade of hard luck stories meant to sway the emotions? They will drag out Tiny Tim, who will look at the camera with his big Bambi eyes and ask, “Why do the Republicans want to take away my crutches?”

And the Republicans will sputter and fold.

Fuggedaboutit. It’s still too early. I would love to be wrong, but I suspect the outrage of the Tea Parties will die. If the anger over September 11, 2001 can fade, do you think the American people can stay angry about socialized medicine?

The Republicans need to maintain their will to repeal until we get a Republican president who will not veto their repeal bill. This means 2013 at the soonest. People will likely be used to ObamaCare by then. I could be wrong. We’ll see.

UPDATE: Senator Cornyn has announced that the Republicans won’t try to repeal all of the bill. Two days after the passage of ObamaCare and the Republicans are already wilting as they always do. What a joke.

Did you expect more dignity from the Democrats at what is, by their own statements, an historic event? Instead of Cicero they sound like Al Capone in Cicero, Illinois.

But why shouldn’t they talk like gangsters? They went to the mattresses to seize control of one-sixth of the economy. They now have the power to make offers the American people can’t refuse. It is a big f***kin’ deal.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will be speaking this afternoon about financial reform at the American Enterprise Institute, not exactly a place brimful of folks who give smiles to reforms that involve the government unless it’s reducing its oversight role. Over the weekend, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made some rumblings about the need to do something about firms that are “too big to fail,” calling their existence “pernicious” and an “insidious” barrier to competition. And starting at 5 p.m., Senator Dodd will lead the executive committee of the Senate Banking Committee in the first round of marking up the 1336-page Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010. (Summary here.)

Mises has explained the process of how a mixed economy degenerates into socialism. First the government intervenes in the economy; this intervention creates a crisis, which is blamed on the remaining elements of freedom in the economy; then the government intervenes further, creating new crises until the government is in total control. Thus Meteor Blades, the Daily Kos blogger, blames our recent crisis on deregulation:

…financial reform will not go nearly far enough toward reversing the 30-year deregulatory trend that in no small part brought on the economic crisis that has forced analysts over the past two years to reach back to the 1930s for relevant comparisons. And by not going far enough, the final certainty is that a fresh crisis will appear sooner or later and drag Americans outside the Top 10% through yet another round of economic hell. 

The Summary shows a bill written entirely in the statist spirit. Its mission:

Create a Sound Economic Foundation to Grow Jobs, Protect Consumers, Rein in Wall Street, End Too Big to Fail, Prevent Another Financial Crisis

“Rein in Wall Street”? What does Wall Street do but produce wealth and make money? Won’t reining it in mean less wealth, less profit, less money?

Look what the Summary touts as some of the “HIGHLIGHTS OF THE NEW BILL.”

Consumer Protections with Authority and Independence: Creates a new independent watchdog, housed at the Federal Reserve, with the authority to ensure American consumers get the clear, accurate information they need to shop for mortgages, credit cards, and other financial products, and protect them from hidden fees, abusive terms, and deceptive practices.

I don’t trust bureaucrats to determine “hidden fees, abusive terms, and deceptive practices.” I believe the market and the courts stop these bad things more efficiently than regulations that will hold businessmen guilty until proven innocent, create huge costs that will be passed on to the consumer, and create shortages of “mortgages, credit cards, and other financial products.” This highlight will make the economy worse.

Ends Too Big to Fail: Ends the possibility that taxpayers will be asked to write a check to bail out financial firms that threaten the economy by: creating a safe way to liquidate failed financial firms; imposing tough new capital and leverage requirements that make it undesirable to get too big; updating the Fed’s authority to allow system-wide support but no longer prop up individual firms; and establishing rigorous standards and supervision to protect the economy and American consumers, investors and businesses.

There is a much easier way to end “the possibility that taxpayers will be asked to write a check to bail out financial firms.” Get the government out of the business of bailing out financial firms! And the government wants to “make it undesirable to get too big”? Corporations become big because it’s efficient; that’s where the money is. If the government now decides to stop businesses from getting too big, it will destroy an unimaginable amount of wealth. This highlight will make the economy worse.

Advanced Warning System: Creates a council to identify and address systemic risks posed by large, complex companies, products, and activities before they threaten the stability of the economy.

This highlight shows the underlying premise of this whole bill. Statists think that people left alone with too much freedom to pursue their self-interest end up destabilizing the economy. The opposite is true. The economy is destabilized by government intervention that creates a misallocation of capital. The prime destabilizer is the Federal Reserve, the very entity to which this bill will give more power.

This bill will be a tremendous blow to an already weak economy. We desperately need to repeal Sarbanes-Oxley and dismantle regulations that violate individual rights and hamper the economy. The state has its hobnail boot on Wall Street’s throat; with this bill it grinds the boot more firmly into that throat. Someday the windpipe will be crushed and the victim will be dead. Doubtless, at the funeral Obama will orate in sonorous tones that the deceased killed himself by being too greedy.

Socialized medicine is here to stay. The Republicans will not repeal this legislation. I write this first because they never have significantly rolled back the welfare state. The programs of the New Deal and the Great Society are all still here with us; they created the mess we’re in today. Nobody talks about repealing them.

Second, if you listened to the final speeches of Republican John Boehner and Democrat Nancy Pelosi before the vote, it was obvious who would win, and it was obvious that socialized medicine is here to stay.

John Boehner gave an impassioned speech, during which the Speaker warned him to remember the dignity of the House, I guess because Boehner repeated the word hell. He argued against dubious procedure, Democrat lies and the awful practical results this bill will bring. All of these are good points, but they don’t get at the essential argument against socialized medicine.

Nancy Pelosi argued that health care is a right. She went straight to the altruist morality of our culture, and she won the argument.

John Boehner did not argue that health care is not a right. Without moral certainty, the Republicans will never roll back socialized medicine.

We can’t even begin to know how this bill will worsen our lives. It turns doctors into creatures of the state. Rationing will have to happen, as it always does in socialism. Taxes will rise. 16,000 new IRS agents will be hired to audit Americans, taking us closer to a police state.

For a long time we have been more like Mussolini’s Italy than Jefferson’s America. Tonight we took another leap down the road to serfdom. The America we once knew — a safe and happy place full of “can do spirit” and productive individualists — is now dead. With fear and loathing we look toward the new America.

There ain’t no rules here, we’re trying to accomplish something….All this talk about rules…. When the deal goes down… we make ‘em up as we go along.

Drew M. reacts:

“A government of laws and not of men”-Stuff John Adams actually wrote.

…

234 years is a good run by any standard. Now, as with all things, it comes to an end.

Or as Jennifer Rubin puts it,

This is the talk of tyranny.

When you’re trying to accomplish something, the rules don’t matter — or to put it another way, the end justifies the means. In practice it means that the whims of those in power are law.

Would the Democrats and their media allies be fine with the Republicans deeming Obamacare repealed without any regard to rules of procedure? Somehow I doubt it.

…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.

The idea comes from House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter.

Each bill that comes before the House for a vote on final passage must be given a rule that determines things like whether the minority would be able to offer amendments to it from the floor.

In the Slaughter Solution, the rule would declare that the House “deems” the Senate version of Obamacare to have been passed by the House. House members would still have to vote on whether to accept the rule, but they would then be able to say they only voted for a rule, not for the bill itself.

Not reading a bill is old news. Now the House can pass a bill without even voting on it! Robert Tracinski notes,

The purpose of this, as I understand it, is to change the chronology—in weird sort of “I am my own grandpa” kind of way: the bill will be passed only when Congress passes a revision to the bill that they haven’t passed yet.

Well, voting is so 18th century, like Newtonian physics. Our postmodern House has advanced to quantum physics. Like Shroedinger’s Cat, a bill might or might not be dead, depending on how the Democrat leadership deems it.

This postmodern logic fits with Nancy Pelosi’s reasoning on why we need this bill:

“But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”

We must pass the bill so we can find out what is in it. Pass the bill so we can read it! Who needs the new “Alice In Wonderland” movie when we’ve got the 111th Congress?

We’re talking about nationalizing one-sixth of the economy here.  The health care reform bill is probably the most important bill since the 1960′s, and the Democrats want to pass it with an unprecedented parliamentary trick.

Allapundit writes,

…for probably the first time in U.S. history, the president will be signing into law a bill that never received its own vote on the House floor. The “what if a Republican did it?” meme is overused, but clear your mind and try to imagine the media reaction if the Frist/Hastert Congress tried something like this for, oh, say, social security reform. If ever you’re tempted to agree with idiots on the left who think the press is balanced, let that thought experiment be your corrective.

All this Rube Goldberg process comes because the Democrats do not want any compromise with the hated Republicans.

For the past two months, the White House and Democrats in Congress have been weaving ever-more complicated legislative webs all with the express intent of avoiding at all costs any need to negotiate with the now slightly enlarged Senate minority. In effect, what Democratic leaders want to do is — at the very end of the legislative process — switch from regular order to a reconciliation process in order to avoid having to deal seriously with any elected Republicans.

There must be statist Republicans who want socialized medicine, and would work with the Democrats if they were given a chance. The Democrats might not get everything they want, but they would forge a compromise that would take us a long way down the road to serfdom. That’s how it has worked in the past, but this is not good enough for the leftists in power today. For all the talk about “cooperation” from Coffee Party USA, the Democrats’ problem with health care reform has been caused by their own unwillingness to cooperate. Maybe we should thank them for being so principled — otherwise, some godawful law would have passed by now.

Why are the Democrats going so far to pass their health care reform? Mark Steyn argues,

…the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative”).

The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

And,

…government health care is not about health care, it’s about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.

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.

UPDATE: Instapundit:

2300 SHOW UP FOR ST. LOUIS TEA PARTY, only 30 show up for St. Louis “Coffee Party.” And that 30 includes the “tea party infiltrators.”