The New Clarion

It’s that time of year again when I put together my list of a dozen or so headlines I would like to see in the New Year 2012. I normally do this on New Years Eve day. But Obama and both political parties have left so much to be desired that yesterday I could have had several dozen items. Now, reduced to an essential dozen I like to count at night instead of sheep, here is the list:

1. Obama loses election
2. Republicans take Senate and add to House
3. ObamaCare repealed
4. Dodd/Frank repealed
5. Sarbanes/Oxley repealed
6. Departments of Education and Energy to be phased out/privatized
7. Fannie Mae,  Freddie Mac and TSA to be privatized
8. Community Re-investment Act repealed
9. Federal Reserve mandate to provide full employment repealed
10. All bureaucracies to be examined for initiating force thus violating rights
11. Eric Holder under investigation for crime of aiding and abetting public enemies (drug cartels) by arming them against american citizens
12. George Soros under investigation for ties to election fraud activities. 
13. (Bonus headlines)

•  NYT and WAPO losing more readers
• MSNBC bought by conservative publisher and revamped or shut down due to lack of viewers
• Well that’s it for this year’s hopeful headlines. You can add yours in the comments of course.

The “Occupiers” are shamefully ignorant. Ignorant of the other 99%: the 99% of corporations that do nothing wrong.

And another point of their ignorance is: what is the distinguishing attribute of the 1% who aren’t innocent? That 1% isn’t the biggest 1%. It isn’t the richest. It’s the group that are in bed with the government; that use government power rather than free market acumen to gain their wealth.

This, then, leads to the third question they are blind to: who is ultimately to blame for this? When a man with a gun and a man with money make a deal, who is wearing the pants?

And, then, one last question I’d like to highlight, that goes unasked by OWS: Who put that man with the gun in power? They won’t ask this because it is them. THEY put a government in power that meddles in the free market. They got exactly what they asked for; they’re just ignorant of the implications of what they’d asked for. And now they’re screaming for more. MORE! MORE OF THE SAME!

At the website of the Western Representation PAC I found this rather rational post titled ‘Life After the Debt Ceiling Debate.’ I think they’re right in that we can’t expect much more than what we’re getting from the handful of conservatives in the House. I left the following in their comments: (more…)

Unbelievable:

Embroiled by legal battles for more than 25 years, two U.S. Navy ships are finally headed to the scrap heap without ever having sailed and despite the fact that they’re almost completely finished.

According to Hampton Roads, the USNS Bejamin Isherwood and the USNS Henry Eckford were commissioned in 1985 at the Pennsylvania Shipbuilding Co. to carry fuel to the Navy’s fleet around the globe.

When the company defaulted on its Navy contract in 1989 the 660-foot ships were sent to Florida for completion, but cost disputes terminated that contract in 1993.

Since then, the vessels have sat 95 and 84 percent complete at the mouth of the James River as part of the mothballed ghost fleet.

Do you think any private shipping company would let two ships sit around almost complete for 18 years? This is a good example of the difference between bureaucracy in the public sector and profit-seeking companies in the private sector. And the statists want to turn every aspect of our lives over to bureaucrats — from health care to carbon dioxide emissions to the stock market to the banks to car companies to workplace rules to how much fat we can eat to where we can smoke a cigarette (until cigarettes are banned altogether).

Imagine a train rolling down a track. (No, this has nothing to do with the Atlas Shrugged movie opening on April 15th.)

Now imagine a middle aged man who drives his Cadillac Escalade around the railroad crossing arm with its blinking red lights and parks on the train track. The train’s whistle screams at the man to drive off the track. The laws of physics won’t let the train stop in time. There’s no arguing with F=MA.

The man has time to drive off the track, but he does not. If there were something wrong with his SUV, he could jump out and run away, but he does not.

What do you conclude about the man in the Escalade? He wants to die. In a dramatic, violent and irresponsible manner, the man is committing suicide.

What are we to make of a political party that does nothing to stop the coming fiscal crisis in America?

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It is amusing to see someone get excited about an IRS refund. He dances around and shouts, “I got $2,000! Partyyyyyy!!!”

Hey, you really screwed the government, huh?

Shmuck. The IRS loves to “give” you that money. Every refund represents a happy sheep.

It’s the First Law of Parasites: Don’t kill the host. That refund check is emotional fuel that keeps the producer working while the government bleeds him drop after drop, month after month…

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Downsizinggovernment.org stunned this blogger with how much useless government can be cut — while Congress is haggling over less than 1%. Let’s see how much I can find to cut in less than an hour. This is, of course, an exercise in fantasy; somehow politicians don’t think like you and me.

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There is one line in Obama’s speech on Monday justifying military action in Libya that stands out, amongst a lot of illogic and contradictions, as the real reason:

…I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.

The prospect of emotionally wrenching pictures of suffering was too much for the President. Obama is not worried about logical arguments, but the emotionalist thinkers who look at pictures out of context and ask, “Why didn’t we do something?”

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Some have wondered what the Obama Doctrine is. I believe Bryan Preston at Pajamas Tatler has found it. Obama made this statement in El Salvador:

And that’s why building this international coalition has been so important because it means that the United States is not bearing all the cost. It means that we have confidence that we are not going in alone, and it is our military that is being volunteered by others to carry out missions that are important not only to us, but are important internationally. And we will accomplish that in a relatively short period of time.

(Emphasis Preston’s)

The Obama Doctrine restated in plain spoken clarity (which politicians never come near) is: America will not assert its national self-interest, but if other countries want to volunteer us to sacrifice for the rest of the world, we will be glad to serve.

(HT: Contentions)

Barry Rubin argues that Obama is bringing disaster to the Middle East and US interests.

Michael Hurd explains Charlie Sheen.

Evan Sayet looks at how leftists portray themselves in movies and TV. I think the explanation is that the left accepts the mind-body dichotomy, which is as old as Plato. The moral ideal is altruism, they believe, but in the reality of the flawed world we live in, everyone is petty and selfish. Comics like Larry David understand that there is more comedy in cynicism than in the left’s moral ideal.

If you like Classic Rock, Gary Moore gets quite a tone on “Red House.”

Spending cuts in perspective.

This piece in the New York Times about pharmaceutical companies is depressing. Government intervention is destroying the drug industry. And it will only get worse:

The new law also contains a major threat to drug industry profits in a little-known section that would allow centralized price-setting. Beginning in 2015, an independent board appointed by the president could lower prices across the board in Medicare unless Congress acted each year to overrule it. Medicare pays more than 20 percent of the nation’s retail drug bills.

Peter Wehner looks at two recent statements of leftist economic principles from Michael Moore and Robert Reich that are remarkably honest and revealing.

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This is incredible. Colonel Daffy has decided, according to this report in Time, that if he goes down, he’s taking Libya with him.

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After the shooting in Tucson, the MSM speculated without evidence that the shooter was motivated by the extremist rhetoric of the right. So now that the media have called for a new tone of civility, everyone is nice and polite, right? Not quite:

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Spike Lee said, “the United States of America is the most violent country in the history of civilization.”

Actually, the opposite is true. If the USA is not the least violent country in history, then it’s one of them. This country was founded on the principle of individual rights, which is the means of shielding people from violence from the state. The history of the world before America is the history of unchecked violence from church and state wreaked upon anyone who got in their way.

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The argument from the left that harsh political rhetoric led to the violence in Arizona has been so roundly rebuked that I expect the MSM to drop it and move on to their next campaign. Charles Krauthammer wrote a good piece disposing of this dishonest nonsense.

Michael Medved, with whom I often disagree, made an interesting observation on his show, that these smears are aimed at recapturing women voters to the Democrat side. They have not been appealing to strictly logical thinkers among either sex, but hoping to establish a vague emotional connection linking murderous violence to the right. Those who are swayed by feelings without subjecting them to reason will be fooled — but then, those people will always fall victim to demagoguery.

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Yaron Brook often makes an interesting point in his appearances on Front Page with Allen Barton: people don’t learn from experience. Not when it comes to something big and fundamental like statism. Leftists can see their schemes fail over and over, but their confidence in socialism will not be shaken. The members of the “reality-based community” stick to their whims even when reality slaps them in the face. (See James Taggart in Atlas Shrugged.)

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The reaction to the tax deal announced last week has been all over the map. Pundits and politicians on both sides love it and hate it. There is anger on both sides — one Democrat Congressman even said “F**k the president” — and the only person who seems bored by it is President Obama, who could not be bothered to hang around a press conference held with Bill Clinton. He departed to attend a party with his wife, leaving the unfortunate impression that the former president is more engaged than the current specimen. Bookworm summarizes the range of reactions well.

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The election is tomorrow and so far the Democrats are staying with their anti-business philosophy. I was hoping they would change their attitude from about three weeks or so ago. At that time I received in the mail campaign promotion material from the Michigan Democratic state central committee. It was headlined “The main street agenda” and featured the pictures of Democratic candidates for Governor, Lieut. gov, sec of state and Atty gen. The bottom of the flyer contained a partial picture of New York stock exchange overlaid with the words “not a Wall Street CEO.”

I’m disappointed to see the Democrats continuing to cash in on the false notion that the people on Wall Street are the enemies of the people on main street. This ad represents all that is wrong with Michigan (and national) politics. Readers are presumably supposed to be relieved that these Democrats are anti-wall street. It is blatantly anti-business in tone. And yet it is only businesses that can create productive jobs. Government cannot create jobs. All government has to offer is force and the threat of it. And for decades government has used this power to chase businesses out of Michigan.

It’s time to get government out of the way and let business do what it does best: create prosperity. We’ll have to see if the new republicans are up to the task. The Democrats sure aren’t.

I took a look at the new Republican Pledge to America and I don’t like it at all. In the first paragraph of the introduction is this sentence: “America is the belief that any man or woman can – given economic, political, and religious liberty – advance themselves, their families, and the common good.” Right off the bat is the influence of collectivism-common good. Since only individuals exist, and since the good of individuals is the only good to exist, anytime the common good is said to be in addition to the good of individuals, it means that the good of some individuals can (and will be) sacrificed to other individuals. This is not a founding principle of our nation. (more…)

I spend a lot of time attacking conservatism on this blog, and for good reason; conservatives claim to be the defenders of America against the Left, and this claim is ultimately untenable and fraudulent for many reasons.  It is, however, very plausible for various reasons, primarily the conservatives’ professed opposition to the Left, and to the consequent migration of pro-Americans to the side they have been led to believe is theirs — and so exposing conservatisms’ anti-American essence is much more urgent.

What often gets lost in all this, largely due to the utter implausibility thereof,  is that the Left in America also makes these claims on occasion.  Since their followers have been almost completely weaned away from the knowledge of what Americanism actually is, it is usually not necessary for them to do so.  Such efforts are without exception laughably weak, plainly meant for internal consumption as a means for modern “liberals” to reassure themselves and each other that they are still, somehow, “liberals” in the grand American meaning of the term.  That these efforts are so fleeting illustrates how insubstantial are the last remaining links of the modern American Left to its victim, the hollowed-out shell of what was once liberalism.

I offer as a case in point, the following article by Michael Lind, which attempts to deflect the ever-accurate charge that American “liberalism” has been on an anti-American road since FDR by the incredibly thin means of attacking the charge as “Straussian”.  Below is the fisking I posted in his comments. Passages in italics are Lind’s, and items in [] are corrections I added here that are not in the original comment, with the exception of the “[citation needed]” references to Wikipedia.

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