Questions

Things to ask liberals in a debate

Abolish the Internal Revenue Service

The commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, Douglas Shulman, said recently on C-Span’s Newsmakers program that he uses a tax preparer on his returns. “I've used one for years,” said Shulman. “I find it convenient. I find the tax code complex so I use a preparer.”

Rational people might find this amusing and even maddening. But this is par for the course. This is why we need a new tax code and need to abolish the Internal Revenue Service entirely, which can be done easily.

The tax code is a monster. It is now more than 60,000 pages and 9 million words. It did not even exist 100 years ago. Nobody can understand it, not even the commissioner of the IRS. So why should every American be subject to it?

They should not. We need genuine tax simplification like a National Sales Tax (NST), also called the Fair Tax.

But Democrats will fight NST every step of the way because they like to use the IRS to harass the citizenry, harm political opponents, instill fear of the government, and employ tens of thousands of bureaucrats.

The current tax system is like a door with 10 locks, with the government controlling all the keys. Conservatives want to use NST to open the door to total tax simplification. But Democrats fear simplification because they lose their power through the IRS and because they know it will actually work and will show them for who they are.

This current system costs huge amounts of time and money just for tax preparation itself. According to the Heritage Foundation in 2007, based on figures from The Tax Foundation, “All taxpayers, not just small businesses, face rising compliance costs. Americans spent billions of hours and an estimated $279 billion filling out their federal income taxes last year alone.”

$279 billion! Not in taxes but just to pay the preparers, accountants and lawyers. In other words, it costs you more and more money just to pay more and more in taxes. Imagine what $279 billion could do to spur economic growth if it were directed toward investment in new businesses rather than to lawyers and accountants.

Said The Tax Foundation:

'The full cost a tax system is more than the amount of tax paid. It also includes the cost of tax planning and paperwork. Economists call these "tax compliance" costs, and the IRS estimates Americans spend 6.6 billion hours per year filling out tax forms—including 1.6 billion hours on the 1040 form alone. In 2002 Americans spent roughly $194 billion dollars on tax compliance. That amounts to 20 cents of compliance cost for every dollar collected by the tax system.'

So not only is so-called tax compliance a monetary cost, but a huge expense in wasted time and productivity, and months of anxiety for millions of Americans. Then the same Democrats who have entrenched this awful system talk about how America needs more jobs and more growth for all the poor people. Which we easily could have if we were not wasting all that time and money just to prepare our tax returns.

The National Sales Tax is so simple that Democrats literally fear it. Because it would free Americans from the tyranny of the current tax code which liberals now use to fund tens of millions of lazy, idle poor people and underworked, overpaid government workers, most of whom vote Democrat.

NST would be a federal sales tax on every product and service, like a state sales tax. NST must be implemented across the board, no exceptions, no government tinkering with every detail, no waivers. Everybody would pay tax on every product and service. It would work like this:

A) The Internal Revenue Service would be abolished, along with its $11 billion annual budget. This would help reduce our budget deficit.

B) No more payments would need to be made to the nonexistent IRS and the tax code would be scrapped. No more April 15 deadline. No more forms to fill out, no 1040, 1099 etc. All federal taxes would be collected through the NST. In other words, you would pay a part of your federal tax automatically every time you made a purchase.

C) The $279 billion annual savings for tax preparation would be a huge boost to the economy.

D) All goods and services would be treated equally. Let’s say that the tax rate was set hypothetically at 8%. That means that a can of soup would be taxed 8%. Car repair would be taxed 8%. Yachts would be taxed 8%. Roofing shingles would be taxed 8%. Paper towels would be taxed 8%. Bread would be taxed 8%. Computers would be taxed 8%. And on and on. No exceptions. Because the moment you start to make exceptions for this and that, it becomes a spoils system like the current tax code.

E) Therefore all people who pay for goods and services - which is everybody - would pay the taxes. What could be simpler. Another advantage is that people could not evade their taxes. They would be forced to pay with every purchase. This in itself would be a huge bonanza for the government. Poor people won’t pay that much in NST taxes because they don’t spend much money anyway.

It is truly time to scrap the current tax system as part of the Clean Sweep that is going to remove Obama and the Democrats from office in the next few years.

Abolish the Internal Revenue Service!

The New Vocal Majority

Richard Nixon, who was president of the United States from January 1969 to August 1974, coined the term “the Silent Majority” to describe tens of millions of Americans who simply worked hard every day and who did not take the time to protest loudly or to get involved in politics except to vote on election day.

He coined the phrase at a time when thousands of young students – whom Nixon knew to be a vocal minority that was being magnified by the media - were taking to the streets in protests over the Vietnam war and who were taking drugs, engaging in promiscuous sex, listening to demonic rock music and changing the face of America with a new brand of radical political thought.

Nixon claimed that the Silent Majority supported his presidency while the media and the university elite hated and marginalized the Silent Majority and Nixon himself. Then his landslide re-election in 1972 over uber-liberal George McGovern proved Nixon right. This further enraged the elites.

So the media continued to portray the Silent Majority as a bunch of hayseeds and rubes who had no idea what was right for the nation. According to the media template, the Silent Majority was made up of unsophisticated, uneducated, middle-class and working-class drones who had no business trying to influence the direction of our nation that  was being largely controlled by liberal socialism from Hollywood and New York – through the media – and from Washington – through the political process.

Nixon was right on the money. The Silent Majority was an accurate description of honest people who generally lived in the suburbs, small towns and in rural areas all over the nation, who carried their own freight, who paid their taxes, who were self-reliant, and who expected or wanted little or nothing from the government except to be left alone.

Ultimately Nixon was way ahead of his time. Way, way ahead. Or perhaps more accurately, he was timeless. He would feel totally vindicated today. Because he was talking about people like the newly vocal Tea Party movement who have decided that enough is enough, that they are overtaxed, that their government is failing them and is wasting their hard-earned money, and is harming their futures and their children’s futures through corruption and greed.

The emergence of the Silent Majority appears to be a cyclical phenomenon. It reared up in the 1980s too. Conservative Ronald Reagan was elected in a landslide over Jimmy Carter and re-elected in 1984 by a huge margin by bringing out not only millions of Silent Majority conservatives, but also so-called Reagan Democrats along with a new force – the Moral Majority, a conservative/evangelical fusion movement led by Jerry Falwell that had, until that time, been politically muted. Until then many working-class and middle-class people of both parties long had held somewhat conservative or strongly conservative economic and religious views. But many had continued to vote  Democrat because their parents had. They then decided in the 1980s that the Democrat party had abandoned them.

Alas Reagan was Reagan and they saw in him, both as a person and as a leader, new reasons to think fresh about the conservative ethos. They gravitated to conservatism for being strong on national defense at a time of continuing Soviet threat, and for focusing on economic growth after Carter policies had led to stagflation. They saw conservatism putting its essential faith in God and in a moral goodness that the Democrat party treated like a visitor from outer space.

Today Nixon’s Silent Majority along with Reagan’s Democrats and Falwell's Moral Majority have coalesced with other new groups to become an even bigger force - the New Vocal Majority. And this time it is different. The New Vocal Majority is much more intense and outspoken because the stakes are greater than ever. And its very existence is built  not around support for one single figure, but opposition to three –  Obama, Reid and Pelosi.

Today’s  New Vocal Majority will never make the mistake of being lulled into complacency again. Decades of fiscal abuse and national security neglect by the Democrats has caused millions of American to band together not only to to create the Tea Party movement, but all sorts of other anti-big-government, anti-tax, pro-property, pro-gun and pro-Constitution movements. These people are fed up and are speaking out against the waste, fraud and abuse that is causing the economy to slide into stasis and unemployment, and moral decay that is causing myriad social crises.

Indeed this time it is different. Because the backdrop is like none before since the 1930s and we have no wiggle room left. Our very economic survival is at stake and millions are frightened.

Yet the elite media have the same disdain for today’s New Vocal Majority that it had 40 years ago for the Silent Majority. Only problem is that the snobs in New York and Hollywood and Washington don’t have the same media monopoly on the public discourse as they did in the 1960s. And they cannot stop the New Vocal Majority from speaking out. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and Grover Norquist and many, many others are going to push this new majority through the roof in the coming November elections, while the Democrats and their media allies are battening down the hatches for a huge electoral drubbing.

It only took one arm of this new movement - the Tea Parties - less than three months to activate after Obama was inaugurated and went on an unprecedented national spending spree. On April 15, 2009, members of the Tea Party movement took to the streets in a show of force that is growing by the month. Less than one year into its existence, Tea Partiers have held a national convention that garnered wide media notice. This is an organized movement that is much more akin to the Moral Majority of the 1980s than to the Silent Majority of the 1960s which was made up of millions of unconnected citizens joining to form an electoral web without even communicating with one another.

Since the first 2009 Tea Party, Obama’s big-spending Democrats have lost an astonishing percentage of the federal, state and local elections, and the New Vocal Majority is just getting started. The mid-term elections coming up in November are expected to throw many, many Democrats out of office in favor of fiscal conservatives who have been attacked by the media since the days of Nixon. No, the Silent Majority is silent no longer.  Nor intimidated in any way. They even are running for office this time, and winning.

Indeed the Tea Party movement and the New Vocal Majority are exactly what our Founding Fathers envisioned would be a healthy development for a thriving constitutional republic. The Founders warned that electoral democracy could lead to an entrenched political class – like congressmen elected over and over for decades – and a greedy, rapacious entitled class that could manipulate elections to funnel money its way.

The New Vocal Majority always has opposed both of those classes, embracing liberty for all instead as an infinitely more priceless goal than the fleeting entitlements of any one era.

During the American Revolution, the war had only about 30% support among the American people. In places like New York City, that support was even lower. Forty years ago, the elite New York media slammed the Silent Majority and today they have nothing at all good to say about the Tea Party movement and the New Vocal Majority. Only problem for the elites, however, is that even in once-liberal places like Massachusetts, the new majority is speaking loud and clear and winning elections handily. And it is frightening the Democrats and their media friends more than ever before in our history.   

Joseph Stack Meets Ryan Sorba

Samantha Bell, the daughter of Joseph Robert Stack, the man who flew his airplane into the Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas, first called her father a hero, although she later retraced the statement. But she did say, "His last actions, the suicide, the catastrophe that caused injuries and death, that was wrong. But if nobody comes out and speaks up on behalf of injustice, then nothing will ever be accomplished."

So is Stack a hero?

Well, no, because he did cause fire, destruction and death and that is not how those of us opposed to a big and oppressive government wish to strike back. And Stack killed himself in the process, and conservatives do not believe in suicidal behavior. We condemn suicide in terrorist bombings as alien to our pro-life way of thinking, and we condemn it here in the actions of people like Stack.

No, conservatives will strike back through the ballot box and through peaceful means, because conservatives are peaceful people and we don’t resort to the kinds of tactics employed by Stack or by, say, William Ayers, Barack Obama’s Chicago friend and neighbor who in the 1970s detonated bombs at the Pentagon, New York police headquarters and a military recruitment center.

Ayers was never prosecuted for those crimes, but escaped on technicalities. He since has said that he “didn’t do enough” to destroy his targets.

Oh, really? And to think that the media have covered for Obama’s association with this guy even though - or because - Ayers is a violent pro-communist intellectual who is living freely among us despite the fact that he despises our way of living and our freedoms. Under a Soviet-style system, Ayers would have been taken out into the woods and shot.

Then of course the same media who cover up for Ayers/Obama roundly condemn Stack’s action against the IRS when Stack at least had the courage to go down with his proverbial ship, going out in a blaze of glory as a martyr for his cause. And rest assured, Stack will be quietly hailed by millions as a folk hero for striking back in a way that they never could. Indeed his daughter may be admired for saying, "But if nobody comes out and speaks up on behalf of injustice, then nothing will ever be accomplished."

Fact is, millions of American have suffered in silence at the bullying and intimidation tactics of the zealous IRS and its expropriation - some say theft - of earned wealth from decent, hard-working people. Throughout  history, tax collectors have been among the most hated figures in any society. Americans often have felt powerless about the IRS and so Joseph Stack represents their ultimate revenge fantasies.

And who is Ryan Sorba?

He is the speaker at the 2010  Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC who spoke out forcefully against the conference’s inclusion of a group called GOPride, which is a gay organization of alleged conservatives.

Does Sorba really represent the passion of conservatives against homosexuality as Stack spoke to the anger of conservatives at the IRS? And was Sorba secretly being cheered by the majority of conservatives for having the audacity to stand up to the politically-correct, leftist, pro-homosexual establishment? Will Sorba now become a lightning rod for gay rage? Or a torch-bearer for those opposed to the creeping legitimization of homosexuality?

Probably all of the above.

The cases of Stack and Sorba are intertwined. Because each represents a point of view that could be tied to the conservative right – anti-IRS and anti-homosexual. And both of these belief systems are well founded, according to those who hold them.

Because the Internal Revenue Service indeed is an arrogant, threatening and aggressive presence in our government that literally has ruined countless good lives through legal harassment including, apparently, Joseph Stack's. Anyone who knows a person who has been targeted by IRS knows how much power this agency has to disrupt good people’s lives, and even to destroy them.

And what about conservatives’ heartfelt convictions that homosexuality is not only wrong, but utterly immoral? That sodomy is depraved? Does not Sorba represent that firm and unequivocal stand? Why must the Ancient Media always portray conservative beliefs as wrong even when they are invested in the deeply-held foundations of Western Christianity, which is the basis for our freedoms?

For those of us who have witnessed the devastation of AIDS in our own families, our opposition to homosexuality is personal. Because within the conservative movement, the opposition to homosexuality comes from a recognition not only of its immorality, but of the essentially destructive nature of that behavior. Democrats do not see that. Or refuse to acknowledge it. The liberal media in America are engaged in a major cover-up about the health crisis among gays while promoting their lives as, well, gay...

Conservatives also see as wrong the taking of our wealth by elected officials. Democrats do not. Because Democrats benefit from it, just as they benefit from the empowerment of homosexuals who have been involved in funding the Democrat party and fighting for far-left liberal causes. Since most gays have no children, they have much more disposable income to give to political causes, and they do so generously. They have never allied themselves with conservatism. So why should conservatives suddenly seek to accept them as CPAC seemed willing and Sorba not?

Are not these homosexual groups potentially a Fifth Column, a way to infiltrate not just the Republican party, but the conservative movement itself and to soften it up the way that so-called ‘progressivism’ has sought to  infiltrate the Republican party and make it just another group of Democrats?

Indeed that seems to be true. Ryan Sorba is right in broaching the issue

The Ancient Media – New York Times, CBS, CNN, LA Times etc. – are doing everything they can to slander Sorba as a homophobic example of right-wing prejudice, and to tie Stack to the anti-government rhetoric of the Tea Party movement.

Are these charges valid?

Well, if you want to substitute prejudice for principle, yes. Many of us conservatives admit that we oppose the homosexual lifestyle just as we oppose the capricious nature of the IRS to take our wealth away according to a 60,000 page government document called the tax code.

Conservatives see widespread homosexuality and the growing power of the Internal Revenue Service as being two parallel forces created by the Democrat party and unleashed on America against our best instincts and interests. Millions of Americans see their children indoctrinated into pro-homosexual propaganda in the schools and their neighbors punished for speaking out against homosexuality, while their friends and families are subjected to legal persecution – and prosecution - by a renegade IRS.

Conservatives certainly would not be so adamantly opposed to homosexuality had it remained restrained, just as conservatives are always willing to pay taxes that are reasonable. But once these forces are unleashed on the public in a confrontational and aggressive manner, people like Joseph Stack and Ryan Sorba grab our attention and focus us on those issues that have simply become too overbearing to ignore.

So will conservatives accept the media slander directed at Sorba and Stack?

Sure. Why not. It is what many of us stand for. The only difference from the past is that we are no longer afraid to strike back, now happily pointing out the repressive nature of of the IRS and the statistically dangerous lives being led by homosexuals because we know the real facts.

Perhaps we should have an open debate on prime-time TV about both issues, like we wanted to debate Gore on so-called ‘global warming’ but he would never show. And then we will see how many people agree in spirit with what Joseph Stack did, or what Ryan Sorba said. And you will be surprised at the result.

Running the Trains on Time

Imagine you run a railroad and you have a schedule under which passengers obviously need to arrive on time to catch the train.

Then imagine that one day a passenger is late and, just as the train is departing the station, he signals to the conductor to stop the train and open the doors for him. The conductor asks the engineer to stop the train and then opens the doors and allows the passenger to board. The doors are shut and the train then proceeds.

The next day, the same passenger is late again, the conductor asks the engineer to stop the train again, opens the doors again, allows the passenger to board the train again, then closes the doors and allows the train to proceed.

And the third day, the same passenger is late again, the train is stopped again etc. And just as the train is pulling out on the third day, yet another passenger shows up late and asks the conductor to stop the train and open the doors. The conductor obliges.

Well, imagine this goes on and on with dozens or hundreds of passengers over the entire railroad until the whole system is thrown completely off schedule for tens of thousands of punctual commuters.  Seeing the crisis, the railroad company decides that no passengers will be allowed to board the train late and that the original schedule will be adhered to, which is common sense.

But then a lawyer comes along and says that that is unfair, that late passengers should not be discriminated against. He sues the railroad and a judge orders that all late passengers must be accommodated, and soon late passengers are making the entire system useless because every train is late. Thus the majority of riders suffers because a small minority cannot arrive on time for the train.

This is precisely what is happening all over America in every aspect of life. We are disrupting the lives of the majority in order to accommodate the minority. It is called ‘socialism’. And slowly it is plunging our society into chaos.

For instance, millions of idle poor people today live easy lives with all their needs accommodated – food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education etc., while the productive, taxpaying citizens are forced to work longer and longer hours to pay more and more in taxes to support the idle poor.

In the meantime, of course, those productive citizens never would think of asking the government for anything. It is not in their character, just like disciplined people would arrive on time to take the train, and would never expect the train to stop for them every time they were late.

And since most people (the majority) recognize what is required to create a durable economy and culture – for instance, that the trains run on a schedule and that you must arrive on time for your train – you will undermine the entire culture when you undermine the will of the majority for the whim of the minority.

Just look around the world today, where many nations are controlled by the minority. In communist nations, small groups of people take over entire countries and run them according to their whims. The majority then suffers, even when the majority knows exactly what is wrong. But it has no power. Just talk to anyone who has fled a communist nation and you will understand. They all say the same thing: That communism treats the majority like they are stupid children.

Under socialism, in heavily-taxed nations like Japan and France, small groups of people in political power, in the government bureaucracy, in the universities, and in the labor unions, have enough influence to control the entire national discourse through the media and thus the ballot box. And then when the corrosive influence of that minority is challenged because the nation is failing, that minority may go on strike to disrupt the whole nation, or it starts to riot in the streets, as has happened in Greece recently.

These strikes and violent actions are cultivated and nurtured by the same minority – communists, socialists and leftists – who control so many societies in the world today. And these actions are a trademark of the minority left. Because they must use disruption, violence and intimidation in order to keep the minority in power against the will of the majority, which we in America call "We the People..."

The railroad analogy works well. Because minority thinkers believe that the society should be built around their lesser abilities (they cannot get to the train on time, they awoke late etc.)

Just compare our American presidents. Conservative Ronald Reagan was said to have been super-punctual for White House events like news conferences and speeches. Ditto George W. Bush. Bill Clinton, however, was notoriously late and kept everyone waiting. Because Clinton is an arrogant leftist and an intellectual elitist who never cares about the majority, who thinks that his needs are paramount. This is the same as the chronically late train passenger who is a certain type of person who thinks only of himself, and that showing up late should not be any hindrance to his getting to work.

Leftists use every tactic in the book to have power. This is why the courts of America are so crucial to lefty power – because, for instance, the entire railroad can be ordered to accommodate the late-passenger minority through the courts, while the majority suffers because one judge says they must. So a minority – one judge and a handful of late passengers - controls the lives of tens of thousands of on-time passengers, also known as the majority.

Fortunately, there are enough sensible people to prevent this from happening in many aspects of life in America. But this type of minority rule is spreading incrementally throughout our society in many ways that we do not even recognize. For instance, transvestites need to be given sex-change operations at the expense of the taxpayer because a judge says so. Or Christmas decorations are banned because one single person complains. Or an economic development project is shut down because one environmentalist raises an objection.

This is why communist nations always spiral down into destitution. Because the minority - with the least ambition and discipline but the most power and a completely arrogant attitude - takes over the society and makes it subservient to their needs, ignoring the needs of the prudent, punctual majority.

That is why Americans need to take back our nation in the interest of the majority. We must stop feeding the listless bureaucracy and the overpaid intellectuals, and stop fearing the idle poor with their belligerent attitude when their welfare check is late. This anger and belligerence is an attitude cultivated by the minority left in order to control the society through emotion. And when that does not work, disruption, intimidation and violence are sure to follow. To which the majority must say - and now in fact is saying - "Enough is enough!"

Pothead Politics

A recent program about marijuana on the National Geographic channel said that a whopping 60% of the population of rural Mendocino County, California is somehow engaged in growing pot, everyone from  the grower to the fertilizer supplier.

This seems hard to believe until you realize that Mendocino is the Hippie Haven of the 1960s, just north of San Francisco on the Pacific coast. It is ultra-left liberal. And so you understand.

The program then went on to profile some good people moving away from Mendocino because the marijuana trade is everywhere and they did not want their kids exposed to it. Then the program showed storefront marijuana shops all over California selling pot ostensibly for “medicinal” purposes, which is a sham. Pot is simply being slowly legalized. And it reported that in places like Mendocino that a certain amount of pot is legally allowed to be grown per person, i.e., incremental legalization.

In other words California is leading the way to introducing to our nation yet another damaging leftist agenda item that we would not have imagined just 25 years ago – legal marijuana.

The potheads have all their arguments for legalization - that our jails are full of small-time pot users; that pot is better than alcohol; that marijuana is just harmless fun; that the Mendocino economy would collapse without the income from marijuana; that the state of California, and ultimately the federal government, can raise billions if marijuana is further legitimized, legalized and taxed.

All of these arguments are bogus. The same can be said about lots of bad things. And then when you start to look at the history of marijuana, you see that this whole agenda is  just more, well, smoke and mirrors.

This train started rolling in the 1960s. And anyone who grew up in the 1960s knows that millions of spoiled brats of the Baby Boom generation lived an easy, degenerate life because their parents had fought World War II, established peace and prosperity, and then handed their children the world on a silver platter.

One of the Mendocino potheads profiled was nothing more than an aging 1960s ‘hippie’. And we know that the ‘hippies’ still today are looking to make a quick buck, just like they always did. Because if you grew up  back then you remember many of these slackers running rip-off dope operations, making as much money as possible on their illicit deeds. They loved sex and drugs and money, but said they were anti-materialist. This is one of the Big Lies of the 1960s. Quite the opposite. It was a time of complete youthful self-indulgence in every way - sensually and financially.

Of course, many ‘hippies’ ended up losing their minds in a world of pot, acid, hallucinogenic mushrooms, cocaine, opium, rock music and promiscuous sex. And those that did not today certainly would never recommend that their children live the same dissolute lives as they did.

We also know that many of the spoiled druggies of the 1960s turned into spoiled adults. Many of the ‘hippies’ ultimately went on to become the ‘yuppies’ of the 1980s, the Young Urban Professionals who cut their long hair, ran off to law school or business school  then went to New York and other cities to make a huge amount of money in the boom years of Ronald Reagan, kicking and screaming every step of the way that they were not just another generation of rabid materialists.

And today millions of the former lefty ‘hippies’ drive Mercedes and BMWs and other expensive cars and act like they somehow could never have turned out to be the materialist pigs that they are but claim to despise. Because the most materialistic people ever in world history are today's liberal, Democrat East Coast/West Coast ex-hippies, all grown up and living in New York, San Francisco, Seattle etc. and in suburbia with their big houses, big 401Ks, big vacation homes, big bank accounts and fancy cars.

Still there are many ‘hippies’ who never made it to the economic top. They stayed out in the countryside. So they live in places like Mendocino Country and now favor the growing of marijuana for profit.

Question is: Why has Mendocino’s economy become so crippled in the first place? After all, many rural counties in the 1960s and thereafter were flooded with young people, and this was supposed to lead to new ideas and prosperity. Yet many of those places are facing economic crises today.

The reason is this: The ideology of most of these back-to-the-landers was leftist and environmentalist and obstructionist. They have shut down rural economies through decades of restrictions on logging, ranching, mining, quarrying, oil drilling  etc. Rural American economies were being savaged by environmentalism even before the recession. In the 1990s, more than 30,000 logging jobs and many tens of thousand of associated jobs were lost in rural Oregon on account of the phony Spotted Owl controversy. This is being repeated all over rural America.

Here in just one quiet corner of western Massachusetts, 400 well-paying manufacturing jobs in small-town paper mills have been lost in the last few years alone because environmentalists pushed up the price of electricity with ‘green’ policies. In uber-liberal Vermont, the state legislature has voted to shut down the state's biggest electricity supplier, the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

So now other lefties want to revitalize rural economies with… marijuana. This is classic socialism: First you beat the nation into economic submission, then you suggest the easy way out to try and solve the problems you created. Easy money. Easy living. Everything easy, like it was when the 'hippies' were young.

Forget about the hard work of cutting trees or mining coal or working in a mill. Or, heaven forbid, even starting a productive enterprise like a paper mill, making a product, developing a market, hiring people, signing checks etc. That is for someone else. No, today’s 'hippie' holdovers want to sit in their urban/suburban offices collecting their big paychecks, or, on the other extreme, live in some small town, water their pot plants for a few months and then collect a bundle of easy cash when the harvest comes in.

Only thing is that growing marijuana is a degenerate enterprise. And those of us who grew up in the 1960s today see the result of decades of pot smoking. We saw some of our friends destroyed in the 1960s by pot and other drugs. Now one recent survey showed the highest rates of marijuana use among people aged 55 to 65. If you know any of these people, you know that many of them are washed-up losers pining for the past. And many of these potheads are going to develop Alzheimer's disease at very high rates, and will cost us dearly, another hidden cost of the liberal lifestyle.

It is time for Americans to reject pothead politics and to get back to basics so that the 50 million people in rural America can participate in the economic growth that we will have once we get the lefties – whether they be multimillionaire liberals in the cities and suburbs, Democrat government officials, enviro obstructionists, or Mendocino marijuana growers – out of the political way of the law-abiding Americans who simply want to make an honest living the old-fashioned day. By earning it.

Is America Becoming Cynical?

Diogenes was a Greek philosopher (412-323 BC) who was part of a group known as the Cynics. He questioned the materialistic nature of man, praised the simple life and shunned work. He lived in a tub on the streets of Athens. When he witnessed a peasant drinking water from his hands, Diogenes discarded his last possession – a cup. When Alexander the Great stopped by to inquire what he might do for Diogenes, the Cynic was said to have responded, “Please step out of my sunlight.”

As our society has veered into socialism, cynics have attained stature by questioning everything from authority (the police, the military etc.) to the bases for our way of living (capitalism, the family structure, Christianity etc.). And as cynicism becomes an overpowering way of thinking as it has in modern-day America - urging the most negative and small-minded aspects in people - it become corrosive.

Synonyms for cynicism are sarcasm, skepticism, suspicion, disparagement, distrust, pessimism and scorn. Thus cynicism has highly negative connotations. Antonyms are optimism, romanticism or idealism. And today conservatives reject both extremes. We embrace simple realism.

Today cynicism is a tool of the political left. Filmmaker Michael Moore comes to mind. He never sees any positive in America, and questions all of our institutions despite the fact that America has made him very rich. He even said in 2004 that the chance of becoming rich in America are “one in a million”. Moore said:

"I think it’s because we’re still addicted to the Horatio Alger fantasy drug. Despite all the damage and all the evidence to the contrary, the average American still wants to hang on to this belief that maybe, just maybe, he or she (mostly he) just might make it big after all. So don’t attack the rich man, because one day that rich man may be me!

"Listen, friends, you have to face the truth: you are never going to be rich. The chance of that happening is about one in a million."

Yet according to CNN.com in 2005:

Households with a net worth of at least $1 million excluding primary residences rose 8 percent to a record high 8.9 million, according to an annual report by TNS Financial Services, a market research and polling firm.

Thus the real chances of becoming a millionaire are roughly 1 in 31. So Moore is off by a factor of 33,000. Could this be the cynicism and anger of a wealthy and confused man? Perhaps a cynic. Or perhaps Moore does not really consider people to be “rich” unless they have the tens of millions of dollars that he has. 

Why are cynics like Moore so casual with the truth?

It is because of the type of people who become cynical. We all know them well. “Oh, he’s so cynical,” we say. They are weak and angry people. And lying is nothing to them just like Al Gore saying he invented the internet or that ‘global warming’ is killing the planet. It is part of their strategy to seduce the world with rhetoric because they do not have truth on their side.

Moore, like most liberal cynics, sees only the negative even when our problems are a result of a system that he embraces – socialism.

For instance, liberals are very cynical about our current economic woes. But those problems are a result of laws passed by Democrats that forced banks to make trillions of dollars in loans to poor people who would not normally qualify for those loans. Then the government agency Fannie Mae started to buy those loans, taking the risk off the hands of the banks. Then Fannie Mae in 1999 eliminated any criteria for banks making the loans, leading banks to make loans to just about anyone who applied, with the government ultimately taking all the risk. That is why Fannie Mae collapsed.

And since many of our financial institutions have been taken over by liberals, they are the ones who have trashed our economy. Big names like swindler Bernard Madoff, former Fannie Mae chairman Franklin Raines, former Citigroup bigwig Robert Rubin, and former Lehman Brothers chairman Richard Fuld are all committed Democrats. Each contributed mightily to the collapse.

But liberals, including cynic-in-chief Michael Moore, blame everything on Bush and Republicans. We can expect one of Moore’s movies about the financial crisis, which will pin it all on the GOP.

Through his movies, Moore spreads his cynicism. His movie will say that we have a “free market” economy, and thus the blame falls on the Republicans who advocate such. But that is nonsense. We have a highly socialistic economic system, as exemplified by the high taxes, excessive regulations and the very existence – and collapse – of a huge government agency like Fannie Mae.

All the major media promote leftist cynicism as a way to help liberals gain more power. For instance, the American media attacked the Iraq war for years, but now seem loath to admit that we have turned the corner to democracy. Ultimately, however, it was the tenacity of president Bush that, against all odds, brought liberty to 25 million people and will transform the Middle East.

Yet the same cynical media said for years after the first Gulf War in 1991 that “Bush should have gone to Baghdad” referring to president George HW Bush who stopped American action at the Iraq border in expelling Iraqi forces from their invasion of Kuwait. Al Gore even made the same criticism of Bush in a 1992 campaign speech posted on YouTube. They said it to cynically seek to diminish Bush’s big victory in that 37-day war.

In another vein, if you say that America is the freest nation on earth, the cynics call you a zealous flag-waving patriot and their cynical friends sneer at you. If you claim that Christianity is the basis for our freedoms, they dredge up the failings of Christianity, which are minor compared to its triumphs. Always cynics focus on the negative.

But here’s the interesting part: Since cynics are people of emotion, and since cynicism is an emotional response to the world, liberals can swing wildly from complete cynicism all the way over to the other extreme of idealism and romanticism.

How? Consider Michael Moore’s blanket condemnation of our health-care system in his movie called Sicko, and then, at the other extreme, his gushing praise for the failed communist system in Cuba. Or how about the rush by liberal lawyers to pin every horror on Bush, then to go to the other extreme to defend every terrorist detainee at Guantanamo Bay? Or how about the cynics’ bottomless anger at Republicans and capitalism over the economic crisis, but no inquiry whatsoever about Democrats like congressman Barney Frank and US senator Chris Dodd who said that everything was fine at Fannie Mae. Right before it collapsed.

Why does this happen? Simple. Because liberals are emotionally unstable and suffer from high degrees of manic-depressive disorder.

By nature, conservatives do not suffer such extremes of emotion. For instance, even the most ardent free-market advocate knows that there are flaws in the capitalist system. Even the Founding Fathers were not idealistic about capitalism. They knew that free markets would provide the most opportunity for the most people, but also that it would provide the extra wealth needed to help those who could not succeed because there certainly would be those who would not.  There are myriad examples today and throughout history that prove that free markets provide a much higher standard of living than socialist economies.

Still liberals are cynical and angry about our system because it is imperfect. And then, in their manic-depressive swing to the other extreme, they tout utopian ideas like the Communist Manifesto that describe a perfect world. Yet when the principles discussed in the Communist Manifesto are applied in the real world, they end up making people destitute and societies murderous. Just look at China, North Korea and Cuba.

The American media advocate cynicism every day. And it is a very corrosive trend. Americans are becoming more cynical because many millions of people can access MSNBC and NBC or Time magazine or The New York Times, all of which are fountains of leftist cynicism. And this is why America is becoming more socialistic. Liberals use anger and misfortune, like our current economic problems, not to better people’s lives and to think constructively about solutions, but simply to further their own agenda.

Diogenes advocated a simple life and shunned materialism. But if everyone lived in a tub like he did and refused to work, the world would be a pretty grim place. Materialism is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they laid the foundations for a prosperous society. Prosperity and materialism are two different things.

The Founders themselves were not materialistic people. Yet many of the libs who today are cynical about our culture are themselves very rich and very materialistic, including people like Moore or Follywood actor Sean Penn or US senator John Kerry or multi-billionaire Oprah Winfrey. They have millions and billions at their disposal, yet they see our society as corrupt.

Our cynical streak was implanted in the 1960s. After all, what was the message of the left-wing beatniks of 1950s and the ‘hippies’ of the 1960s? They were cynical people who constantly disparaged our families and churches and our society for its materialism. They said that the full-employment economy of the era was a bad thing that killed peoples’ souls, when in fact prosperity is what most humans yearn for. Today, millions of Americans long for all those jobs we had back then.

The ‘hippies’ said, like Diogenes, that they shunned materialism. But that was just talk. After all, they came from wealthy middle class and upper-middle class and rich families, and, being young, had not much need for material things. Yet today, 40 years later, many of the ‘hippies’ have become some of the most grossly materialistic, greedy and wealthy people in the history of mankind. We all know them well. They are called Democrats.

We should be more than aware of the dangers of cynicism. It is an emotional tool of the political left that is infiltrating itself into our society. And if we allow it to fester, we all will be living in a tub with only our opinions to offer the world, and only our thoughts to feed ourselves on.  

Liberals’ Love of Power

In Massachusetts, the voters are registered 36% Democrat, 12% Republican and 52% independent. Yet the state legislature is 90% Democrat.

What does this say?

It says that liberals are people, often in the small minority as they are nationally at 20%, who must, need, want and will go to extraordinary ends to have control over other people’s lives.

Socialism always is numerical minority rule and serves only numerical minority constituencies. For instance, liberals want the entire health-care system to be nationalized to account for a small numerical minority that does not have health insurance. Or they favor a rapacious tax system to subsidize a numerical minority that cannot or will not support itself. Or they favor radical forms of environmentalism which hurt the numerical majority.

This love of power is in the liberals' DNA, while independents, Republicans and conservatives do not necessarily even want that power but generally would like to be left alone by the government, and desire only a small non-intrusive government that leaves citizens free.

If liberals were not so aggressive in the pursuit of power, conservatives would not even feel compelled to run for office in many cases. But becoming part of the government has become necessary to prevent what the Founding Fathers warned against – an encroaching government that wishes to control the lives of the people. And in America today that government means only one thing: Democrat party liberalism and its power-craving adherents.

The Founders were unequivocally conservatives. They believed in God, in small government, in low taxes, in free markets, in individual freedom, in the right to bear arms, in religious freedom. The Constitution was written as a document specifically to restrain government. Period. The Founders wanted real liberty for the common man, which was a unique state of affairs in the world at the time, and even today.

The American revolutionaries were willing to fight and die for their freedom. Yet only 30% of Americans supported the Revolutionary War. And guess where opposition to the Revolution was strongest?

You guessed it… in New York City. Because cities are hotbeds of liberalism, and city dwellers are materialists. And the love of 'things' and the passion for money, elegance, decadence and finery always leads people to marginalize the desire for freedom. Religious leaders have warned against materialism for millennia. The Founders were well aware that the European obsession with materialism and wealth had led Europe into centuries of war, taxation and oppression.

How many elite, left-wing New York City billionaires today have children serving in the military that defends our freedom?

Answer: None.

And where is opposition to conservative sentiment strongest? Where do they favor big-government socialism most?

You guessed it… New York City and others places like San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Hollywood, Philadelphia where the love of material things and money is strongest, and where belief in God and respect for Constitutional freedom is weakest.

It is in the genes of liberals first to congregate in cities where money is concentrated because liberals love only two things - money and power. They then compete with each other in their measures of wealth and intellect. Their college pedigrees are crucial. And they come to see themselves as superior to the rest of us, and so they then want to control our lives with their ideas as if we are all stupid. This is repeated over and over by the Follywood elites and everyone else in the liberal urban media.

Thus even when in the national minority, liberals look around in their cities surrounded by like-minded people and media and assume that they are somehow in the majority. One famous quote reveals this. After the 1972 presidential election, in reference to the loss by super-liberal George McGovern to Republican Richard Nixon, New York film critic Pauline Kael has been quoted as saying: “I can’t believe McGovern lost. Everyone I know voted for him” although she is reported by a fellow critic to actually have said, "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."

Oh, really. Can you spell P-R-E-J-U-D-I-C-E?

And so liberals, having an outsized sense of themselves, decide that they can “solve” every social problem. For instance they believe that the government needs to take over health care in order to ‘solve’ the problem of the minority of uninsured. But once government seeks to “solve” a problem rather than allowing people to solve their own problems, then zero problems will be solved. In fact things will always end up worse. It is historical fact.

Under a government system, fewer people will end up with health care just as the public education system in America has resulted in fewer and fewer people becoming educated. It has been reported that as many as one-third of all students who enter the public schools today either drop out or are never educated in even the basics.

Or the Post Office ends up offering poorer and poorer service to the point that millions of people simply stop using it. Because government bureaucracies never change with the times, but stagnate through pure inertia.

At the same time, it has been reported that 98% of all households in America have telephones and electric power from the private grid. Yet according to liberal spin, this never could happen because capitalism is only for the rich.

Government's failure is built into the nature of Bureaucratic Man. Always has been, always will be. He is utterly fallible when seeking to care for others' needs because Bureaucratic Man, crucial to government control, ultimately helps himself first, then foremost and finally, only.

Liberals seek to “solve” every social problem through words and thoughts, in the universities, in think tanks, or by writing endless columns in the New York Times or holding countless meetings and conferences to talk things over.

And they become immersed and consumed by their ideas. Because liberals love to hear themselves talk. This is part of their love of power. Because then their words and images are repeated through media. Because they think they know everything since they went to places like Harvard. Even when they are wrong and cause destruction. That is why communist dictators like Castro talk for hours at a time – because he is obsessed with his own thoughts and words as his country descends into misery.

Just look at Bill Clinton or, worse, Obama. They are obsessed with being in the limelight, talking, speaking, holding news conferences, appearing on stage, making remarks, statements etc. For Clinton, being president was everything. He is a classic narcissist progressive. Yet George Washington served only reluctantly as president. George W. Bush once said that if had not been elected president, that it would not have been a big blow to his life. Ronald Reagan was similarly-minded.

 Obama was obsessed with being president and now is the most overexposed president in history. Talk, talk, talk… hundreds of news conferences, announcements, speeches. Then he thinks that the American people don’t understand his health-care plan after he has talked about it relentlessly. Which is false and absolutely incredible. They understand it perfectly well. Because Obama's endless chatter is a perfect mirror reflection of the plan itself - words, words, words, more than 2,000 pages of words. And the majority of Americans are terrified of all that government intrusion.

For decades now, liberals have been reaching out of the cities to like-minded thinkers all over the nation to join in their crusade to control the lives of everyone through a big, overwhelming government structure. And they use every tactic from vicious peer pressure to appeals to the vanity of a well-educated electorate.

The wealthy suburbs are increasingly Democrat, while today, even rural America, long a bastion of conservative individualism and God-ly Christianity, is being infiltrated by leftist thinking. City dwellers now often move to small towns or out into the countryside and imprint their ideas there. They  become vocal in their towns' governance or in the media because they think they are so smart.

Through the media like cable and satellite TV and the internet and rock music and other arms of the decadent culture, urban thinking can permeate small-town and rural America where once it never did. People in the wheat fields of Kansas now can be propagandized by CNN just like an apartment-dweller in New York City can.

We must beware of the psychological state of liberals and their endless desire for power and their tools for attaining it. It is precisely what the Founders warned us against. It indeed is the problem that man has faced throughout time.

Karl Rove Speaks Out

(Karl Rove, who is called “the architect” of George W. Bush’s two presidential election victories, and who served as senior adviser to the president during Bush’s tenure in the White House from January 2001 to January 2009, has written a new book called Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight  (HarperCollins). Below are excerpts from Rove’s book-tour interview with Rush Limbaugh on March 9, with my comments after each excerpt.)

Rove told Limbaugh about the repeated Democrat claims that Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: “I spent an entire chapter in which I make the point that Democrats who said before the Iraq war resolution vote that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, after looking at the same intelligence that President Bush was looking at, and that President Clinton had looked at when he was in office, they came to the same conclusion as Bush, and yet later had the temerity to say Bush lied and I think -- and I make the point in the book, chapter 21 -- that this was a deliberate and cynical and hypocritical ploy by the Democrats launched on July 15th of 2003, by Ted Kennedy who made a speech, he was then echoed later in the day by Tom Daschle, on the 16th John Kerry and John Edwards both raise the issue, and Jane Harman, who is normally a sane individual, joins in, chimes in, saying Bush misled on intelligence.  And I go person by person and talk about how Democrats echoed the president's charge that Saddam had WMD, in some cases went far beyond what George Bush was willing to say, and yet later found themselves, for politics, trying to say that Bush lied….

"Well, and, look, even at the time of the debate in 2002, (Al Gore) makes a speech out in California saying, quote:  ‘Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.  We know Saddam has stored away secret supplies of biological weapons and chemical weapons throughout his country,’ end quote…  A hundred and ten Democrats vote for the war resolution.  Sixty-seven of them stand up on the floor of the House or Senate and say, ‘Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.’  Among them were Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, Bob Graham, you know, Senator Rockefeller, Congresswoman Harman, and for these people then to stand up, you know, Robert Byrd, Barbara Boxer, Dick Gephardt, Henry Waxman, Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid, for these people now to stand up and say, ‘Bush lied,’ is the height of cynicism and hypocrisy. "

Comment: This needs to be repeated over and over. History will sort it out. There was a widespread national and international consensus that Hussein had those weapons. The Democrats conveniently reduced that to a dangerous two-word falsehood that ‘Bush lied’ which was aimed at the uneducated and radical audiences that Democrats always appeal to.

Rove speaking about the public perception of Bush:  "I've had this experience a lot in the last year and a half as he's (Bush has) gone out on the speaking tour and I've run into people who said, "Oh, gosh. I saw your old boss (Bush)," … "and boy, I was blown away. Where was that guy during the last eight years?" And, look, President Bush has a fluency and a familiarity with the issues in a winning manner and an extraordinary recall, and we ill-served him by not putting him out in ways and places where that would shine like it does naturally.  As you know he's got a winning personal manner about him, and he remembers every name and every detail, and enjoys being around people, and yet there's just something about the way that we allowed him to be put on television or put in front of the public that too often made him look stilted and restrained and, you know, not as effective as he could be."

Comment: Bush was trashed by the media. Yet there is absolutely no critical analysis of the real Obama like there was every day about Bush. If there were, Obama's veneer would be stripped away and he would be exposed as angry, superficial, radical, insecure and not genuinely smart, but only politically crafty.

Rove speaking about the bogus media story that he (Rove) was about to be indicted in the Valerie Plame case:  “It didn't happen, but on October 20th of 2005 my lawyer (Bob Luskin of Patton Boggs) met with (special prosecutor Patrick) Fitzgerald at his office in Chicago and finally, after sort of circling around with it, Fitzgerald laid onto the table the issue that he was concerned about -- which boggles my mind what it was, it was so minor and so out on the fringes of all of this, it was unbelievable -- and when my lawyer gave him the answer to the question that he had, literally Fitzgerald says, ‘You've rocked my world,’ and literally a day or two later lets my attorney know that no action would be taken at that point”.

Comment: America must understand that there are two narratives that usually are at odds; the left-wing media narrative and then the truth.

Rove talking about Obama: “You know, (the Obama administration has) been episodically partisan but what gets me about this one is that the president of the United States is so tone deaf and so intent upon conducting himself in a manner in which he basically is disrespecting his political opposition.  He's not taking them into account.  President Obama has made three fundamental mistakes.  The first one is that he ran as a centrist and he's governing as an extreme liberal or a social Democrat.  The second is that he went to great pains to paint himself as an advocate of postpartisanship or bipartisanship and he made no attempt to do so.  I was shocked.  Last March 5th he held a meeting at the White House with Republicans and Democrats to kick off a discussion of health care.  His next bipartisan meeting at the White House was February 25th of this year.  When John Boehner said that he had not had a substantive meeting at the White House on any subject for months and had not heard from the White House chief of staff in months, it was shocking to me, 'cause it basically said: Obama is outsourcing the writing of legislation and the legislative process to two of the most hyper-partisans in Washington, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.” 

Comment: We conservatives have warned about this phenomenon over and over, for years now, the difference between the campaign promises of a leftist like Obama, and reality.

Rove said about Obama personally:   “We actually shared common friends, so when he (Obama) got elected to the Senate whenever he'd come to the White House we'd sort of hang around and talk to each other and chitchat about our mutual friends.  And look, he's got a lot of personal charm, he's very bright, he's incredibly intelligent.  He also doesn't think he needs to apply himself.  In these White House meetings when the president would go around the table, Senator Obama would be probably the least useful comment in the room, generally something along the lines of, ‘I'm honored to be here, I've listened with interest to what my colleagues have said, it's an important issue, and I'm going to take what I learned here today home and think about it a lot.’  I mean that was basically, you know, he'd dress it up as he can, but he was one of the least impressive legislators I saw there."

Comment: Again, this is what conservatives have been saying about people like Obama for a long time now. He is all gloss and narcissism and self absorption, like Clinton and Gore and Edwards and Kennedy and the rest of them. It's good to hear this blunt talk from somebody like Rove.

Rove commenting on Obama’s view of Rove: “…in 2007, an aide of mine came in and said, "Do you know that you're in Barack Obama's book?"  I said, ‘Really, Audacity of Hope, I'm in there?’  He said, ‘Yeah, saying quote: “We are a Christian nation,”’ end quote, and he (Obama) has it in quotes with my name attached to it.  Now, look I've never said any such thing.  It's one thing to say we're based on the Judeo-Christian ethic or draw from the Judeo-Christian ethic, that we have enshrined the free expression of religion, that we have no state establishment of a state church, but you can't say we're a Christian nation 'cause that leaves out the Jews and the Buddhist and the Sikhs and the nonbelievers, all of whom under our Constitution are as good an American as anybody else.  So, you know, but he easily said that about me, and I confronted him about it.  And he had no good explanation of why he would attribute to me something that I didn't say.  He then went on in his book to accuse me of being a 1960s radical.  And as I say in my book, isn't that rich?  I don't remember trying to bomb a government office building…”

Comment: This is simply unbelievable. But then again, we know that Obama is a partisan radical hothead who will say anything that fits his political template.

Nancy’s Art School

Did you hear what Democrat House speaker Nancy Pelosi said in advocating passage of a national health-care plan? She said: “Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance…”

Isn’t this just amazing? Our nation is in a severe financial crisis, there is no end in sight, everything is pointing in the wrong direction yet she is concerned that you might not be able to launch your career as an artist unless you have some sort of national guarantee about covering your health-care costs.

This is classic socialism, that somehow we must endlessly nurture an arts culture that considers itself more important than anything else like, say, energy production or economic growth. This is literally the way today’s today's artists view themselves. And we know why Pelosi is using this example - because contemporary artists are A) 95% left-wing socialists; and B) are an integral part of the narcissist and dependent Handout Culture that believes that it simply must have access to endless piles of money and free health care.

Just look at the average artist or arts organization today. They are completely helpless. Their entire existence is based not on “creating” any wealth, but on “getting” wealth. They launch endless appeals for money because they have no means of supporting themselves.

And this certainly has been the case throughout history - symphonies and museums and artists have always needed patrons. But in the last 30 years in particular, as much of art has degenerated into a corrupt form of popular culture, many artists and arts organizations have become so wealthy and greedy that they simply have come to expect more and more. Since the Regan economic boom, many well-known artists have been getting richer and richer making worse and worse art.

These artists have built up such a veneer of superiority and self-righteousness that they have convinced people like Pelosi that they are utterly deserving of every last dollar and every last pixel and paragraph of media adulation.

Yet anyone who is involved in the arts today knows one thing, that there are far too many artists in America, that many in the arts today participate in, and profit from a cheap, decadent, ugly, postmodernist form of anti-culture, that the arts have in many cases become nothing more than a quest for easy money and lifestyle, that millions of baby-boom households have at least one painter, sculptor, poet, novelist etc. making paintings, sculptures and poems that once actually could be sold but, finally, that the bottom has fallen out because many of the exorbitant sales and gallery contracts and college professorships and laudatory publications have dried up in the recession and may never come back.

For the last 30 years, however, it has been “art, art everywhere” with more nonsensical and redundant galleries, museums, exhibits, studios, schools, arts organizations, art camps, magazines, art gulags (whole buildings full of artists) etc. devoted to lesser and lesser expressions of art.

Fact is, however, that our nation would be much better off with many fewer artists, but each pursuing a higher form of art. In other words, quality not quantity, where the historical underpinnings of art are respected - discipline, history, beauty, standards, talent, craft and finally, yes, morality.

That would be too much to ask for many in today's arts, however. Because the leftists who now control the arts have intentionally dumbed down and undermined art just as they have ruined many of our schools, courts, churches, media and public discourse with their bottomless injections of leftist opinion and ideology. And far too many millions of artists already have been nurtured and financed by government grants, scholarships, public education funds, taxpayer-funded museums and exhibition spaces, left-wing media adulation, rich leftist collectors etc.

You might think that Pelosi understands this. But then again, she is from San Francisco, a place that never has faced up to its own dismal history with the so-called Free Expression generation at censorship citadels like the University of California at Berkeley where only one form of expression ultimately has been tolerated.

Remember the 1960s and Haight-Ashbury, the San Francisco ‘hippie’ neighborhood that was synonymous with Free Expression?

When the ‘hippies’ congregated there in the summer of 1967, everything was great. For two months. For one summer. Yet two years later, Haight-Ashbury was a boarded up dump full of homeless drug addicts. Because the Free Expression culture could not support itself and ultimately ate its own flesh. Because nothing is free.

Yet today San Fran Nan is talking about cultivating another artistic renaissance based on more and more government funding.  “Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance…”.

Yeah, right… This means that Citizen A pays even more in taxes so that Citizen B can make art that Citizen A may actually despise.

It ain’t gonna work, Nan. Not any more. Because most of those attracted to the contemporary arts are the same type of people as the ‘hippies’ of Haight-Ashbury in 1967 – materialistic, narcissistic, needy, arrogant, narrow-minded and helpless. Only problem is that today the money no longer is there to support them.  No, the good old days are over. The cash is gone.

But the Democrats will go to any length to get their agenda passed. And it means not only disregarding the will of the people but also reaching for rationalizations that are simply beyond the pale like this one: "Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance…”

Just amazing, isn't it?

What Do the Two Parties Stand For?

In a debate on the Senate floor, very liberal Democrat US senator Tom Harkin of Iowa said, “If Republicans are so sure passing health care reform will doom the Democrats in November, why not help them pass it?”

Do you understand how toxic this statement is? And what it reveals?

Harkin actually was suggesting that Republicans should actually help the Democrats to pass health care simply because Republicans know it will hurt Democrats politically.

And this, America, is the way that Democrats see all of politics, as geared only toward power and not toward what a legislator might actually consider to be in the best interests of the nation or his/her constituents.

Because Harkin is saying that Republicans should have no conscience about health-care policy, but should only make a political calculation about how to treat it as a charged political issue.

This is abhorrent. But then again this is the Democrat party we are talking about, you know, the party that “cares” about everyone when in fact it is interested only in political power as revealed in Harkin’s statement.

Speaking of hyper politics, have you heard about the Slaughter Rule?

That is a rule that was possibly going to be used in the House of Representatives and is named for a congresswoman named Louise Slaughter. It would have allowed the House to vote on a rule – not a bill, but a rule - that deemed that the House had passed the Senate health-care bill!

Yes, you are hearing that right. They were going to vote on a RULE that simply stated that the Senate bill was passed, and thus the Senate version of the health-care bill would have been deemed “passed” by the House without the House even formally voting on it.

This truly is Soviet-style politics, where the legislature makes up any directive it wishes in order to have its way. And along with the Harkin statement and the Democrats’ earlier intention to use a budget reconciliation tactic for a type of bill (health care) for which it was never intended – reconciliation is only for budget matters - it reinforces just recently in three separate instances the Democrats as an autocratic party that will step on the Constitution and do anything for political favor, as they have for decades.

Just look at the presidential election of 1960 which we know was stolen by the Democrats. Shameful... But par for the course.

Democrats are interested in power, not freedom. They will manipulate any political issue for the own ends, no matter the practice, technique or outcome.  Just look at the way that millions of poor people in America are urged to use their vote for only one thing – to elect Democrats and, in turn, to get welfare money for themselves. This is one of the dangers of a free electorate that the Founders warned against… that citizens would use their votes to enrich themselves. But then again this is how Democrats operate.

Conservatives and Republicans, on the other hand, understand what the Founders wanted in a Constitution – true representation of the will of the people. That is why the Founders chose a 'republican' form of government, with elected officials doing the legislative work on behalf of the people.

But to the Democrats, every issue can be manipulated in exactly the way the Founders did not want them to be. Imagine the Founders hearing Harkin talking about Republicans using their vote not as a reflection of the will of the people but as a political club. Imagine the Founders hearing about the Slaughter Rule. They would be utterly incensed. And the kickbacks and bribes surrounding health care? The Founders would be outraged.

So what is the difference between the two parties?

It lies in their name:

Democrats truly represent the concept of ‘democracy’. Many Americans think that our nation is a ‘democracy’ but it is not. A ‘democracy’ is a system under which every citizen could vote on every issue. Imagine every citizen in America taking time and effort to vote on every bill that came before Congress. There would be chaos. And when there is chaos, tyrants can step in and seize power as they often do.

Because while 'democracy' works on a small scale - like a town meeting - it eventually becomes unworkable as the population grows.  Then mayhem and tyranny can ensue, and often has.

An infinitely more stable form of government is what we have in America and it is called a ‘Constitutional republic’ with elected officials fulfilling the will of the people. Note the word ‘republic’ as in the Republican party. Therefore Republicans represent a much more formalized and proper type of government with codified and established rules and regulations governing the process.

For instance, today a candidate must first get a certain number of valid signatures on his nominating petition before even being considered to be included in the election process. This requires a lot of work and it weeds out people who are not serious.

Under a mob-rule type of democratic system, without all the step-by-step procedures we have for electing public officials, anyone could join the campaign at any time, creating chaos and leading to demagoguery, agitation and anarchy.  

Therefore a ‘democracy’ and a ‘republic’ are very different things. And Democrats and Republicans are very different types of people right from the start. So the very names of the parties in fact represent what they really stand for:

Democrats believe in mob rule, abuse of the ballot for financial gain, and power at any cost no matter the Constitutional or legal propriety. Look at the Slaughter Rule or Harkin's statement.

Republicans believe in a representative government based on order and harmony. This indeed is the only way to maintain freedom.

Unintended Consequences of Health Reform

A shocking poll was released recently by the venerable and respected New England Journal of Medicine. Conducted by the Medicus firm, it showed that a huge percentage of doctors believe that the Obama health-care bill is bad for medicine and will induce them to leave their profession.

According to the startling results, 29.2% of the nearly 1,200 doctors surveyed said they would quit the profession or retire early if health reform legislation becomes law. That number jumps to a whopping 45.7% if the “public option” is included.

The survey also showed that a shocking 63% of doctors would not recommend medicine as a career if health-care reform passes while a massive 46.3% of primary-care physicians said that they would either want to leave medicine or that they would be “forced out” by an Obama Care type of system. 

Forget everything else. This is huge. Because the Law of Supply and Demand tells you that if you reduce the supply of doctors – particularly by almost half in some cases, with millions discouraged from pursuing medicine in future decades - that the cost for medical care is going to rise drastically and quality is going to tumble.

Yet the Obama Care bill is supposed to address rising costs, not fuel them. This survey should stop Obama Care in its tracks.

So what are we to make of a piece of government legislation that drives doctors out of a profession that is very costly, challenging and difficult but specifically selected so that they can fulfill a need and a desire to serve their fellow man? In other words, what the hell is going on here?

How about this – that every single time that the government says it is going to "solve" a problem, it always makes the problem worse for the numerical majority of people, while improving the situation for a numerical minority. And that liberals don't care who is hurt or how much disruption their policies cause. Because they are only interested in increasing their power.

Think about it. The Obama Care bill was supposed to lower health costs and reduce the deficit. It will do the opposite. Because government legislation never takes into account what are called "unintended consequences", which always become the most significant factor when big programs are involved.

Who would have thought six months ago that almost half of all doctors – you know, the people who actually provide our health care – would predict that they would be adversely affected by the bill not just procedurally, but that their entire professional careers would be threatened? And where is that "unintended consequence" mentioned in the 2,000 pages of legislation?

It is not.

Think about education. Imagine that education in America was all private, and that we were debating today whether to create a public education system. What would liberals be saying?

They would say that “public education will include everyone, and all students finally will get a shot at a good education.”

And what do we know to be the fact about public education?

That it is an awful system, that only about one-third of all students in the public system reach graduation with enough knowledge and skills to move on and contribute to the world, that tens of millions have been left behind. And that alternative systems like private, religious and charter schools do a much better job at educating kids.

Yet liberals would tell us that the public system is best.

Here is what happened in Washington, DC where the public schools are horrible. The Republicans actually established a federal scholarship program for 1,700 poor kids to attend private, religious and charter schools. Those kids were thriving in those schools. Yet the Democrats, under pressure from their cronies in the teacher unions, killed the scholarships because liberals do not want poor kids seeing a bright future outside of the public system. That would have been an “unintended consequence” of the conservative approach also known as "success". 

Look at the Post Office. Today it is a debt-ridden, sluggish, inefficient, bureaucratic system run under ridiculous government and unions rules. It literally is a joke. People who work for the Post Office are considered laggards and dopes. Private  companies like FedEx do a much better job at much lower cost.

Yet if the mail delivery system were all private today, proponents of a Post Office would be telling us how wonderful the Post Office will be with everyone happy and well served.

How about Social Security? Libs tell us over and over that most Americans are thrilled with Social Security. Yet they do not tell you the actual numbers – that the original debit to each worker’s paycheck in the 1935 legislation was 2% total (employee plus employer) of the first $3,000, but that today it is 12.4% of your whole check!

Yes, 6.2 times the debit. That would be like gasoline costing $20 a gallon.

And don’t believe the liberals who tell you that you only pay 6.2% of your check and that your employer ‘matches’ your contribution and gives the other 6.2%. That is nonsense. The whole 12.4% is accounted for in your wage rate ahead of time. You pay ALL of it.

And today, after  only 70 years of Social Security - the first check was issued in 1940 - after huge spikes in taxes since the system was founded, SS is flat broke. They never told you that Social Security is a huge Madoff Scheme built on money coming in one door and going out the other. And that the number of people collecting has been increasing faster than the huge increases in taxes. That is an "unintended consequence" of changing demographics and increasing lifespans.

So what do the liberals now say to us conservatives about Social Security? They say: “Well, if you’re such a right-winger, then why don’t you just turn in your Social Security card! Try living without it!”

And we conservatives are supposed to say, “Yeah, right. We don’t take money from the government! Here’s my card!”

Which is what the libs want us to say. Which is a trick.

What we really need to say is, “We will turn in our Social Security cards when you give us back all the money that we have been forced to pay into the Social Security system. With interest.”

That always shuts them up. Because it represents the truth.

No, liberals always have a trap set for us with their big-government agenda, and they use manipulative and deceptive language to ensnare us. And they never will tell us the full story including the crucial “unintended consequences”. That would be too painful for them. And too informative for the world to know.