First, as a joke... UPDATED 4x & BUMPED

[orig post 9.28 1032am]

Just throw it against the wall and see if it sticks.

That is what the liberals progressives communists have done this week with their proposals to modify our democracy.

North Carolina Democrat Governor Beverly Purdue suggested (See Lee Decovnick's AT article):

I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years...

Of course, if there are still problems after those two years, maybe we'll need to make more modifications.

Obama's former Director of Obama's Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, suggests in his The New Republic article, Too Much of a Good Thing - Why We Need Less Democracy:

So what to do? To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.

Complaining about congress, Mr. Orszag? Puhlease. Get in line.

Gov. Purdue and Mr. Orszag are demonstrating the real Democrat Party agenda. AKA, the Communist Manifesto. Destroy America. Redistribute wealth to a new bourgeois. And build a Communist state in its ashes for the new proletariat.

It is a joke today.

It'll be a suggestion tomorrow.

And as the 2012 election rout nears, it'll be a negotiating point.

The only question left: will the Democrats be negotiating from a position of strength, or weakness?

UPDATED Noon

Moonbattery has a post on this subject. Read the comments.

And WeaselZippers. Good comments there too.

UPDATED 5:40pm

Audio at Daily Caller's post. Doesn't sound like she's joking...

UPDATED 7:10pm

The Minuteman

UPDATED 8:32PM and BUMPED

WSJ's James Taranto leads with these stories in his Best of the Web post, Democrats Against Democracy. He mostly quotes others, including Niles Gardiner at The Telegraph, Why Barack Obama Could Be America's Last Big Government President. Could Niles possibly be stating the reasons some Democrats want to suspend elections?

Obama’s declining presidency has become synonymous with the image of big government, from spiralling budget deficits and out of control federal spending to massive taxpayer funded bailouts and increasing regulations on businesses and healthcare.
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The United States is undergoing one of the biggest political revolutions in its post-war history, and perhaps the most important since Ronald Reagan, with an emphatic rejection of the idea that government knows best when it comes to handling key domestic issues, especially relating to the economy. President Obama, whose administration has practically worshipped at the trough of big government, looks spectacularly out of touch with a clear majority of the American people. The highly interventionist liberal experiment of the last two and a half years has been a spectacular failure, with 14 million Americans out of work, sliding consumer confidence, collapsing house prices, and falling stock markets.

This is why Barack Obama could well end up being the last big government president of the United States, a nation that simply cannot afford the lavish excesses of an imperious presidency that drains the pay-checks of hard-working Americans with impunity and reckless abandon.

You can almost hear the English accent....

Beat'in Hippies

We had a company commander who would stop a meeting every time a helicopter flew over our base. Even in mid-sentence. He'd walk to the window, look up with envy in his eyes and mutter, "some people have the coolest jobs." This coming from a Vietnam Special Forces soldier who killed commies 24/7 for sport. The helicopter would pass and we'd go back to work.

We share his feeling as we watch this video of New York police pounding on the protesters-du-jour near Wall Street.



We tried to make out what they were protesting, but all we heard was

blah blah redistribution blah blah stop beating me blah blah.

We'll keep watching it and report back if we hear anything else.

UPDATED 9.29

Now that the video above is burned into our memory, we've been brainstorming possible soundtracks. Maybe something from Woodstock, perhaps?

A view from the other side (MSM) - found at IOTW:



Love the slo-mo analysis at the 4min mark, where you can clearly see the pepper spray come from the grassy knoll.

We're thinking Pink Floyd.

And Rodney King? O'Donnell goes into the Rodney King beating in the 7min mark. Let us share our perspective on Rodney King:

We lived on Foothill Blvd about two miles from the beating.
He took his slow-speed LAPD chase through our neighborhood risking pedestrians, drivers and the officers.
He got his ass beat.
Rodney never led the police through our neighborhood after that.

How come Rodney King learns his lesson, but the hippies don't?

We blame the public schools.

Maybe The Doors?

The Two G's

Girls and Guns!

Photographer Lindsay McCrumb has a picture book coming out Saturday: Chicks With Guns.

Here is one of her pictures:

If that isn't All American, we don't know what is.

Read the Houston Culture Map review.

"Less than 12 months..."

Found at Ann Barnhardt's site:



Alessio Rastani:

In less than 12 months, my prediction is: the savings of millions of people is going to vanish. This is just the beginning.

Ann blames this on affirmative-action-staffed bureaucracies which were created to protect us from these risks. And she predicts:

It's over. There is no coming back from this. The only thing that can happen is a total and complete collapse of EVERYTHING we now know, and humanity starts from scratch. And if you think that this collapse is going to play out without one hell of a big hot war, you are sadly, sadly mistaken.
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As much as you may not want to believe it, what this guy [Alessio Rastani] says is correct. This iteration of human civilization is approaching an end.

As you can see by our other posts, we are not ones to take a 'sky is falling' position on anything.

Our theme that Democrats in general and Obama specifically have communist inspirations has remained consistent. The mood and focus of our posts have remained consistent. Our readers' view of Ushanka.us has changed as the Democrats and our Dear Leader have steered this country hard left.

In short, our theme was meant as a joke, not a prediction.

Go to Ann's site and the sites she references, and critically analyze the facts for yourself. Maybe all will be well.

Perry

Found at SaysUncle:



Every GOP commercial for the next 14 months MUST include quotes from our Dear Leader.

It's going to be a great year (politics, not employment, economy or America's standing in the world). Buy stock in Orville Redenbacher, cause we'll be buying it by the truck load!

No Jobs For You!

AP:

The number of people applying for unemployment benefits fell last week, though the decline isn't enough to signal improvement in the job market.

Weekly applications dropped by 9,000 to a seasonally adjusted 423,000, the Labor Department said Thursday.

The four-week average, a less volatile figure, rose slightly for the fifth straight week to 421,000.

Give AP credit. Where everyone else sees shit, they see fertilizer.

Just more "unexpectedly" newspeak.

Our Dear Leader will be in our home town of Cincinnati today. He'll be inspecting a bridge, and will determine the only solution is $1.5T in new taxes on those who would reverse this unemployment trend if given some opportunity for growth

We've come a long way since Bill Clinton's "Bridge to the Future" rhetoric.

Nathan Hale

Hung 235 years ago today.

U/T: Publius at Big Government

Just Asking...

But did our Dear Leader think he saw his dead Mom out in the audience?

Our maybe he saw Frank Marshall Davis...

The Shootout

Ladies and Germs, Mr. Steve Lee:



Someday, we'll be able to educate socially re-engineer this violent American Australian fascination with guns. Someday.

Steve Lee's Best: I'll Give Up My Gun

The European Project

If you are an American and standing outside the bathroom, what are you inside the bathroom?

A European.

Europe has suffered many comments here on Ushanka.us. If WSJ's Bret Stephen's predictions today are true, we will opine at Europe's expense until our last breath.

Bret's Opinion article today: What Comes After 'Europe'?

He outlines three stages of post-war Europe: Hard Facts, Convenient Fictions, and Fraud, and predicts how the next 50 years will play out.

In short, the 'Hard Fact' phase was immediately after the war where the hard decisions were made by brave and strong men. (Lord Ismay is pictured above.) Setting up economies to build their respective countries into self-sustaining successes.

Bret doesn't note this in his article, but this stage was only 'European' in the sense that a bunch of neighboring countries each acted on their own behalf. They did this out of a shared history of suffering, but in the end each decided how their democracies and economies would be structured. In our simplistic view of European affairs, the moment these countries started sharing currencies, political affairs and defenses, the disaster was only a matter of time. Sovereignty must be primary in all affairs.

The 'Convenient Fictions' phase was a superior view of Europe in areas of diplomacy and productivity. Basically, all of Europe adopted France's snotty self-love in this phase and, as a result, took their eye off the ball. Bret:

All this did wonders, for a while, to mask European failures and puff up European pride. But there is always a danger in substituting grandiosity for achievement, mistaking pronouncements for facts, or, more generally, believing in your own nonsense.

The 'Fraud' phase is the acceptance of Greece into the Union when their self-created demise was evident and other overt deceptions. Bret assessment and predictions:

What is now happening in Europe isn't so much a crisis as it is an exposure: a Madoff-type event rather than a Lehman one. The shock is that it's a shock. Greece was never going to be bailed out and will, sooner or later, default. The banks holding Greek debt will, sooner or later, be recapitalized. The recapitalization will be borne by German taxpayers, and it will bring them—sooner rather than later—to the outer limit of their forbearance. The Chinese will not ride to the rescue: They know not to throw good money after bad.

And then Italy will go Greek. Europe's crisis will lap on U.S. shores, and America's economic woes will lap on Europe's—a two-way tsunami.

America will survive this because America is a state.
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The riots of Athens will become those of Milan, Madrid and Marseilles. Parties of the fringe will gain greater sway. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued. Countries will choose decay over reform. It's a long, likely parade of horribles.

Watching the events in Europe anger us. We are angered that the solutions are known, yet decades of pain - caused by leftist policies - must be felt by all before the solutions are accepted by... leftist politicians.

How many people must suffer economic stagnation and missed opportunities before people with zero history of success adopt proven strategies?

Bret suggests it will take 50 years before Europe is replaced by a collection of neighboring, sovereign states. That's good news, except for the current and next 1-2 generations.