Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes

Good Morning,

The flu season has hit and according to the latest news, it’s earlier than expected and it’s a pretty bad season already. Our house apparently wanted to jump on the ‘earlier than expected’ bandwagon, so coughing, fever, aches and pains, actually allowed for even more time spent scouring the news this weekend.

Jumping right in – some of you may have noticed your insurance premiums have gone up; some have yet to go up but they will. Astoundingly, the increases are double digit increases – in spite of the ‘affordable care act’. You know it’s insane when the NYTimes takes note of it.

• H.J. Res 15 is the latest mindbloggling piece of legislation to hit the halls of DC. This gem seeks to repeal the 22 Amendment, thus removing the limitation of the number of terms an individual may serve as President. Rep. Jose Serrano (D-NY15) is the brainchild of this atrocity.

• The GOP has their eyes on Jeb Bush for 2016; Sen. Rand Paul is contemplating his own run for the presidency; Obama will nominate Brennan as CIA Chief; and Hilary Clinton miraculously goes back to work today.

• The Supreme Court Returns Today With Gay Marriage, Affirmative Action, and Voting Rights in View.

• Our collective exercise in austerity appears to be over. Americans are adding to their credit card balances again, and experts warn more of us are likely to get in over our heads this year. The lack of broad-based improvement remains a cause for concern… slow job growth, continued uncertainty and falling consumer confidence could signal rising delinquencies in the year ahead. The expiring payroll tax cut also means that the average household will have about $1,000 less in take-home income this year. How is it that DC doesn’t have this information?

• An investigation into where welfare recipients are using their Electronic Benefit Transfer cards has revealed that some are withdrawing taxpayer money from EBT-friendly ATMs at strip clubs and liquor stores. The only people that are ‘shocked’ by this story are the journalists.

• Zero Hedge reports this morning that our government is using terrorism against us. The define terrorism as ‘the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes. The American government has also been using violence and threats to intimidate and coerce the American public for political purposes. For example, the U.S. government is doing the following things to terrorize the American public into docility and compliance:

Labeling peaceful protest as terrorism

Using homeland security laws to crush dissent

Spying on all Americans

Threatening to indefinitely detain American citizens without cause and without any due process

You can read the rest of that here: http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-01-06/us-government-using-terrorism-against-american-people
When you sit and read for hours you can only come to one conclusion: Washington has gotten so caught up in itself that it daily sets off a chain reaction of fear and their results systematically slow America’s recovery and hurt the most those most needing help.

Victor Davis Hanson wrote:

The New Poverty Is the Old Middle Class

We have redefined poverty itself through government entitlements, modes of mass production and consumerism, and technological breakthroughs. The poor man is not hungry; more likely he suffers from obesity, now endemic among the less affluent. He is not deprived of a big-screen TV, a Kia, warm water, or an air conditioner. (My dad got our first color television during my first year in college in 1972, a small 19 inch portable; I bought my first new car at 39, and quit changing  my own oil at 44.)

In classical terms, today’s poor man is poor not in relative global terms (e.g. compared to a Russian, Bolivian, or Yemeni), but in the sense that there are those in America who have more things and choices than does he: a BMW instead of a Hyundai, ribeye instead of ground beef, Pellegrino rather than regular Coke, Tuscany in the summer rather than Anaheim at Disneyland, and L.L. Bean tasteful footwear rather than Payless shoes. I was in Manhattan not long ago, and noticed that my cheap, discount-store sportcoat and Target tie did not raise eyebrows among the wealthy people I spoke to, suggesting that the veneer of aristocracy is now within all our reach. When I returned to Selma, I noted that those ahead of me at Super Wal-Mart were clothed no differently than was I. Their EBD cards bought about the same foods.

Put all the above developments together, and an alignment of the planets is favoring America as never before — as long as we do not do something stupid to nullify what fate, our ancestors, and our own ingenuity have given us. But unfortunately that is precisely what is now happening.

The New Hubris

These are the most foreboding times in my 59 years. The reelection of Barack Obama has released a surge of rare honesty among the Left about its intentions, coupled with a sense of triumphalism that the country is now on board for still greater redistributionist change.

There is no historical appreciation among the new progressive technocracy that central state planning, whether the toxic communist brand or supposedly benevolent socialism, has only left millions of corpses in its wake, or abject poverty and misery. Add up the Soviet Union and Mao’s China and the sum is 80 million murdered or starved to death. Add up North Korea, Cuba, and the former Eastern Europe, and the tally is egalitarian poverty and hopelessness. The EU sacrificed democratic institutions for coerced utopianism and still failed, leaving its Mediterranean shore bankrupt and despondent.

Nor is there much philosophical worry that giving people massive subsidies destroys individualism, the work ethic, and the personal sense of accomplishment. There is rarely worry expressed that a profligate nation that borrows from others abroad and those not born has no moral compass. There is scant political appreciation that the materialist Marxist argument — that justice is found only through making sure that everyone has the same slice of stuff from the zero-sum pie — was supposed to end up on the ash heap of history.

Read the News and Weep

That is not conspiracy talk, but simply a distillation of what I read today. On the last day of the year when I am writing this, I offer you just three sample op-eds.

A journalist, Donald Kaul, in the Des Moines Register offers us a three-step, presto! plan to stop school shootings:

Repeal the Second Amendment, the part about guns anyway. It’s badly written, confusing and more trouble than it’s worth. … Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. Hey! We did it to the Communist Party, and the NRA has led to the deaths of more of us than American Commies ever did. …Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control.

Note the new ease with which the liberal mind calls for trashing the Constitution, outlawing those whom they don’t like (reminiscent of “punish our enemies”?), and killing those politicians with whom they don’t agree (we are back to Bush Derangement Syndrome, when novels, movies, and op-eds dreamed of the president’s assassination.)

What would be the Register’s reaction should a conservative opponent of abortion dare write, “Repeal the First Amendment; ban Planned Parenthood as a terrorist organization; and drag Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi from a truck”? If an idiot were to write that trash, I doubt the Washington Times or Wall Street Journal would print such sick calls for overturning the Constitution and committing violence against public officials.

Ah Yes, Still More Redistribution

Turning to a column in The New Republic, John Judis, in honest fashion, more or less puts all the progressive cards on the table in a column titled “Obama’s Tax Hikes Won’t Be Nearly Big Enough” — a candor about what the vast $5 trillion deficits of Obama’s first term were all about in the first place.

Here is the summation quote: “But to fund these programs, governments will have to extract a share of income from those who are able to afford them and use the revenues to make the services available for everyone.”

Note that Judas was not talking about the projected new taxes in the fiscal cliff talks, but something far greater to come. He understands well that the “gorge the beast” philosophy that resulted in these astronomical debts will require enormous new sources of revenue, funds “to extract” from “those who are able to afford them” in order to “make services available for everyone.”

That is about as neat a definition of coerced socialism as one can find. Implicit in Judas’s formulation is that only a very well-educated (and well-compensated) technocratic class will possess the wisdom, the proper schooling, and the morality to adjudicate who are to be the extracted ones and who the new “everyone.”

The Constitution — Who the Hell Needs It?

The third item in my year-end reading was the most disturbing. A law professor (could it be otherwise?) named Louis Michael Seidman enlightens us with “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution” — yet another vision of what the now triumphant liberal mind envisions for us all:

As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

Did Madison force Obama to borrow a half-billion dollars to fund Solyndra and its multimillionaire con artists?

Note Seidman’s use of “evil,” which tips his hand that our great moralist is on an ethical crusade to change the lives of lesser folk, who had the misfortune of growing up in America — a place so much less prosperous, fair, and secure than, say, Russia, China, the Middle East, Africa, South America, Spain, Greece, Italy, or Japan and Germany (in the earlier 20^th century history) . When I lived in Greece, traveled to Libya, and went into Mexico, I forgot to sigh, “My God, these utopias are possible for us too, if we just junked that evil Constitution.”

White Guys Did It

The non-archaic, un-idiosyncratic, and anti-downright evil Professor Seidman presses his argument against his inferiors who wrote the “evil” document: “Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.”

Ah yes, old white male Madison, who lacked the insight, character, and morality of our new liberal technocrats in our successful law schools, such as, well, Mr. Seidman himself:

As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is. Imagine that after careful study a government official —  say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress  –  reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

I suppose human nature changes every decade or so, so why shouldn’t constitutions as well?

I can see Seidman’s vision now: Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi decides that semi-automatic handguns, not cheap Hollywood violence or sick video games, empower the insane to kill, and, presto, their “considered judgment” and favored “particular course of action” trump the archaic and evil wisdom of “white propertied men.”  But if we wish to avoid the baleful influence of white guys, can Seidman point to indigenous Aztec texts for liberal guidance, or perhaps the contemporary constitution of liberated Zimbabwe, or the sagacity of the Chinese court system?

The Law Is What We Say It Is

Note the fox-in-the-henhouse notion that a constitutional law professor essentially hates the Constitution he is supposed to teach, sort of like Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warning the Egyptians not to follow our own constitutional example, when South Africa has offered so much more to humanity than did Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, and others: “I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the constitution of South Africa.”  Ginsburg obviously vacations in Johannesburg, goes to Cape Town for her medical treatment, and has a vacation home and bank account in the scenic South African countryside.

Seidman looks fondly on Roosevelt’s war against the Constitution (especially the notion that law is essentially what an elected president who has proper “aspirations” says it is):

In his Constitution Day speech in 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt professed devotion to the document, but as a statement of aspirations rather than obligations. This reading no doubt contributed to his willingness to extend federal power beyond anything the framers imagined, and to threaten the Supreme Court when it stood in the way of his New Deal legislation.

No doubt.

Free at Last from Constitutional Chains

In the age of Obama, the constitutional law lecturer who once lamented that the Supreme Court had not gone far enough by failing to take up questions of forced redistribution, Seidman writes:

In the face of this long history of disobedience, it is hard to take seriously the claim by the Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text. Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper.

But I thought it was the Constitution, not the anti-Constitution or egalitarian good will, that separated us from Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Tojo’s Japan, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and most of the miserable places that one sees abroad today, from Cuba to North Korea, which all had and have one thing in common — the embrace of some sort of national, republican, or democratic “socialism” guiding their efforts and plastered about in their sick mottoes.

The progressive mind, given that it is more enlightened and moral, alone can  determine which parts of the “evil” Constitution should be summarily ignored (e.g., the Second Amendment) and which should not be: “This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands. Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.”

Give Real Freedom a Chance

I am sure that history offers all sorts of examples where people without evil documents like our Constitution protected free speech and religious worship — out of “respect.”  Ask Socrates, Jesus, six million Jews, 20 million Russians, or those with eyeglasses during the days of the Khmer Rouge. Apparently, what stops such carnage is not the rule of constitutional law, but good progressive minds who care for others and show respect. I’ll try that rhetoric on the next thief who for the fourth time will steal the copper wire conduit from my pump.

So just dream with Professor Seidman:

The deep-seated fear that such disobedience would unravel our social fabric is mere superstition. As we have seen, the country has successfully survived numerous examples of constitutional infidelity…What has preserved our political stability is not a poetic piece of parchment, but entrenched institutions and habits of thought and, most important, the sense that we are one nation and must work out our differences. No one can predict in detail what our system of government would look like if we freed ourselves from the shackles of constitutional obligation, and I harbor no illusions that any of this will happen soon. But even if we can’t kick our constitutional-law addiction, we can soften the habit… before abandoning our heritage of self-government, we ought to try extricating ourselves from constitutional bondage so that we can give real freedom a chance.

I have seen their future and it is almost here right now. Scary times, indeed.

• Michael Savage is calling for a 3^rd Party – the Nationalist Party. He professes, as we do, that there is no Republican Party. “It’s an appendage of the Democrat machine, as we’ve all just seen. It’s two-card Monte, as we well know. It’s a game being played against the American people. You’ve got the drunk Boehner on the one side, and the quasi-pseudo-crypto Marxist on the other, who is really just enjoying the ride in Hawaii right now, representing his factions.”  Instead, “We need a nationalist party in the United States of America,” said Savage on WABC’s “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” suggesting a party focused on “borders, language and culture.”  “Borders, language, culture has been my motto in radio from the beginning,” Savage explained. “Nationalism is the only thing that can save America, and a new nationalist party that has a very strict firewall that does not permit the radical fringe of racism.”

There is one true reality left….

Washington has a spending problem. A taxing problem. And a debt problem.

While the ‘elite political class’ discusses how ‘we’ can’t be trusted to have guns, or finds that ‘we’ need to be ‘reformed’ or our dollars ‘redistributed’, their own ineptness escapes them. THIS, to them is a reasonable way to address a problem.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/01/06/The-Trillion-Dollar-Coin-and-Other-Bizarre-Currency-Disasters

We won’t be able to do it all.  WE have limited time and therefore WE will have to decide what WE value.  It is time to identify what you value most and focus your efforts there.  

We can wait no longer to save our nation.

Change your party affiliation TODAY.

One final thing before you go – yes, it’s a push to get those still not seeing red seeing red. The ULTIMATE ‘punish our enemies’ courtesy of the GOP. RS reports:

Jim Bridenstine may get a primary challenge. You may not know who he is, but Jim Bridenstine is a brand new member of Congress, a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy Reserves, a fighter pilot from the Iran and Afghan Wars, and a strong fiscal conservative. He should be a hero to any and all Republicans. He’s a genuine bad ass. And on Day 1, he decided not to vote for John Boehner for Speaker. Bridenstine is happy to play on the team, but unhappy to go along to get alone when we are looking at $16 trillion in debt. His office is silent, but friends of his in Congress say the House Republican Leaders already have him on a list of incumbents they may just want to do away with. But he is exactly the type of guy we need in Congress. This presents a problem for House conservatives. There are more and more signs that the GOP Establishment intends 2014 as an election season to seek revenge on conservatives.

http://www.redstate.com/2013/01/07/the-trouble-for-conservatives/

The ‘Grand Old Party’; The ‘Growth, Opportunity, & Prosperity’ for all Party, has become anything but.

We won’t be able to do it all.  WE have limited time and therefore WE will have to decide what WE value.  It is time to identify what you value most and focus your efforts there.

CHANGE YOUR AFFILIATION TODAY.

Lisa