Friday, September 04, 2009

Karl's Weekend Reading

Dan Henninger takes a stab at guessing the electorate's target(s) for their rage. Is it 'those f******* D*** libs", the spineless spending Republicans, or dare we say, both? Dan seems to be leaning towards that last - both parties - in his WSJ article The Revolt of the Masses.

What accounts for the global electorate's growing disgust with the political overclass? Try this: No matter the ideological cast of these governments, they all hold in common one policy: the inexorable upward march of national indebtedness. It has arrived at the edge of the cliff.
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Unable to identify who or what has put them in hock to the horizon, national electorates are attempting accountability by voting whole parties out of power. Rasmussen recently found that 57% of voters would throw out Congress en masse if they could. Gerrymandered districts ensure that they can't.


Ya, but.... Remember the PUMA (Party Unity My A**) movement in last year's campaign where the Hillary supporters vowed to revolt? While we're on board with Dan's point, we know we'll vote for the candidates that 'suck less' next year. That means our disgust with the Republican party will not translate into votes against their candidates. You?

Mary Anastasia O'Grady reports there are behind-the-scenes attempts by the State Department to strong-arm Hondurans to restore Zelaya to power. Combined with what we already know - Visa and Aid restrictions - we're just shy of calling Obama a full fledged commie.

The most recent example of the Obama-style Good Neighbor Policy was the announcement last week that visa services for Hondurans are suspended indefinitely, and that some $135 million in bilateral aid might be cut. But these are only the public examples of its hardball tactics. Much nastier stuff is going on behind the scenes, practiced by a presidency that once promised the American people greater transparency and a less interventionist foreign policy.
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By insisting that Mr. Zelaya be returned to power, the U.S. is trying to force Honduras to violate its own constitution.
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When I asked the State Department whether it was employing such dirty tricks a spokeswoman would only say the U.S. has been "encouraging all members of civil society to support the San Jose 'accord'"—which calls for Mr. Zelaya to be restored to power. Perhaps something was lost in the translation but threats to use U.S. power against a small, poor nation hardly qualify as encouragement.


Your government at work.

Keeping with tradition, we're posting Laura Hollis' latest Townhall article, Don't Call Them Progressives. We won't be so presumptuous to say she 'speaks truth to power', but with all of her articles we've linked to we can say with all confidence that Laura Hollis speaks to us!

If liberals want a new moniker, they should be called regressives.
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[Regarding using Sen. Kennedy's death to achieve socialist health care] ...given the 100 million other people who died in the fruitless pursuit of contemporary collectivist dystopias, what’s one more? I’d call this Stalinesque, but even Stalin was more tempered. He reportedly said, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Apparently, today’s regressive does not even view the single death as a tragedy, at least if it is a stepping stone to the greater good.
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What is “progressive” about America is its grounding in individual liberty and human freedom.
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So let’s recap: incensed mobs demanding collective adherence to failed ideologies; the abolition of personal freedom; millions of impoverished individuals dependent upon a handful of self-appointed elites; the confiscation of more and more individual wealth to satisfy the appetite of an insatiable and bankrupt government; the elevation of deeply flawed human leaders to the status of gods, and the willingness to sacrifice other human beings to appease them. You can call these behaviors many things, but “progressive” they are not; one need know only a little history to see the frequency with which they occur.

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