The MEC's presser and what, hopefully, its impact on these ridiculous negotiations will be

Most important thing in this lengthy post at Hot Air, at least so far (it keeps getting updated): a Tweet from an insider who says "House leadership is livid at his speech and may blow the whole thing up."

The LITD position on this whole thing is the position Charles Krauthammer put forth at the beginning of December: Pubs need to walk away from the whole thing.  Grover Norquist also said as much: make sure their fingerprints aren't on whatever happens.

It may hurt McConnell's image, or Boehner's image or clout for a deal to fall through at this late hour, but any deal would gravely hurt the cause of freedom, and that is far more important.

If we're not the party of people getting to keep what is theirs, we have no raison d'être.

The MEC made it about as clear as he could that his overall objective is to break the Republican party's back.  His remarks that "Just two months ago they were adamant that no tax increases be part of any deal, and now..." and "If they think that further tax increases aren't going to continue to be part of our ongoing efforts to bring down the deficit . . ." damn well ought to be a deal-breaker.

It's going to be a long, grinding New Years Eve.

The latest evidence that the MEC holds the country he presides over in utter disdain

Have you heard about the State Department advisory group headed by former SecDef William Perry?  I hadn't either, but I'll pay more attention now.  It is recommending that the MEC regime and Russia work out a plan to reduce their respective nuclear arsenals without bothering to craft an actual treaty and present it to Congress for ratification.

I guess this kind of development is to be expected, given that we now live in a climate in which someone who has taught constitutional law at Georgetown for forty years can get New York Times op-ed space in which to say it's time to jettison that document, which, in his view, has outlived its usefulness and constrains us in an age of unforeseen complexity.

I don't continue to fight because I'm brimming with confidence about freedom's prospects.  I continue to fight because I couldn't live with myself if I didn't.

Just some "sloppiness," doncha know

That's how the MEC characterizes the Sept. 11 debacle in Benghazi that left 4 Americans dead.

Why we call the MSM the propaganda arm of the Freedom-Hater regime

David Gregory - he of the 30-round-AR-15-magazine-used-as-a-prop recent fame - snags a Meet the Press interview with the Most Equal Comrade this morning and asks him - seriously - "Is this your Lincoln moment?"

I liked what a commenter at some site I was visiting a little while ago said:  "David, is this your Monica moment?"

The limit to Mitch McConnell's ability to stand by his principles

Word has it that a critical mass of Senate Pubs are willing to cut a deal that agrees to a hiked tax rate for those with incomes over $500,000 and - you guessed it - has no spending cuts beyond the sequestration.
So it's the the old "Here are my testicles on a silver platter" point at which Washington Pubs inevitably find themselves when locked into one of these recurring taxing-and-spending crises with their FHer counterparts.

It is so very late in the day.

The embodiment of the poison coarsing through Western civilization's veins

Wasn't sure I had anything to say about the controversy - make that controversies - Piers Morgan has been generating lately, but then I ran into Peter Wehner's piece on Morgan's interview with Rick Warren and this delightful video clip from his interview with the singularly magnificent Ted Nugent.

This guy makes Larry King look like he's in the same league with Edmund Burke.

Not even on the same planet

Just about any specific public-policy, cultural, or economic issue one discusses with a general array of one's acquaintances these days quickly turns into a microcosm of the general chasm between the two Americas that very tensely co-inhabit this physical continent.

Bookworm had this once again brought home to her in some Christmas-season conversations about gun policy.  She lives in Marin County, so most of those with whom she was conversing were FHers, and things quickly devolved into shouting matches.  Her post about it is lengthy, but most informative and enlightening.

One thing that makes the FHer takeover of America so chilling is that these people know in the cores of their beings that their worldview is built on intellectual and moral quicksand.  Their denial of that makes them all the more determined to extinguish any opposition to it.

The Most Equal Comrade cuts short his golf game to return to the capital

His mission is obvious: to once and for all drive a stake through the heart of the Republican party and leave conservatives without a political home.

Well, the report said nobody in particular was really responsible

The four State Department officials whom the MSM insinuated to have been dismissed from State in the wake of the report on Benghazi are just moving to other desks.

A once-great civilization now untethered from reality

No one in the major capitals of the West - not Britain, not France, not Greece, not Italy, not the United States - is even trying to make the appearance of addressing the actual situation we each and all face.  Certainly, there's a lot of talk about taxes, spending, borrowing and such.  But we will not be returning to a path of advancement and growth and those stirring up the sound and fury signifying nothing know it.

Why the Pubs deserve the "stupid party" label

Making someone who, according to Tagg Romney "wanted to be president less than anyone I've ever met in my life," the presidential nominee in a year in which America's survival as the beacon of human freedom was at stake was not a real swift move.

The regime's propaganda arm goes full tilt in attempting to distort you understanding of some simple truths

Michael Walsh at PJ Media on this morning's Reuters story about the surge in gun-show sales of certain types of rifles that it calls "assault weapons."

The Most Equal Comrade's arrogance knows no bounds

New information about the contempt with which he has treated Boehner all week.  Told him he'd offer nothing in exchange for Boehner's offer of $800 billion in new revenue.  "I get that for free."  Said if the cliff plunge becomes a reality, he'd use his inaugural and State-of-the-Union addresses to blame Pubs.

The SOB is as narcissistic as ever, too.

FHers can no longer blame the Pubs for the 2008 economic meltdown

A new study confirms that the Community Reinvestment Act caused the banking-industry crisis.

It comes to this

Robert Costa at NRO provides a visceral - indeed, cinematic - account of the post-vote scene in the House basement last night, where the Pub caucus gathered to hear Speaker Boehner's post-mortem.  The Speaker's short, sad, moment in front of the group.  Various members standing up to exhort or shame their fellows.  Small clusters within the caucus heading out for nearby watering holes to get a handle on what had just happened.

Is it a defeat for Republicans?  In a certain sense, yes - the sense that will be the main point of MSM coverage of it.  The Beltway and the MSM, you see, set great store by image.  The Pubs now look like they can't muster cohesion.

Me, I think it's great.  Flat-out fabulous.  You see, my interest is in principle, and principle won a great victory here.  No stinking deal that has been cobbled together in the last few weeks has a damn thing to do with the actual problem that brings us to this juncture in the first place, namely, a federal government so broke and in debt it endangers our national security and culture.

And Plan B was an abandonment of principle too far.  First, Boehner was willing to "close loopholes." Then it was putting off debt-ceiling discussions.  With this latest non-starter it was stepping into the realm of actual rate hikes.

I'm proud of those who resisted persuasion.  Let's get an entire Congress full of such types.

You never compromise with Democrats.  Certainly not where tax policy is concerned.

Never.

Did I say never?

And now that John Boehner has been shown to have squish where a solid core should be, perhaps we can realistically look forward to his being replaced.

Proceed with extreme caution; no coherence for the next 50 miles

Great Daniel Henninger column in the WSJ today on the theme of societal guard rails, and how we probably don't have them anymore.

In it, he excerpts his own column from nineteen years ago on the same subject.  In that piece, he had pinpointed August 1968 as a moment when the likelihood that guard rails would disappear made a quantum increase.  He was, of course, referring to the yippie riots in Chicago's Grant Park, outside the Democratic National Convention.

My own frame of reference can lend a constructive perspective to the significance of that historical moment.  I was thirteen years old at the time, the son of a small-manufacturing-business entrepreneur and a homemaker.  It was a middle-class household, with lifestyle parameters ranging from the Presbyterian Church to pre-dinner martinis, to expectations of Boy Scout membership to season tickets to the touring-Broadway-show series at the Indiana University auditorium.  And in the midst of this was this highly impressionable adolescent holed up in his bedroom with the most subversive rock and roll records of the day, who was getting a taste via his peers of radical literature and exotic social theory.

We're coming up on Christmas, and it has me recalling the presents under the trees of the late 1960s and early 70s, LPs by figures whose entire orientation was, to use a 21st-century phrase, the fundamental transformation of America.  And that was the musical foundation I brought with me as I learned to play guitar,  joined musical ensembles, and got a taste of professional musical activity.

A long-playing vinyl phonograph record, for any readers who may not be old enough to be familiar with that delivery system, came shrink-wrapped, and, in the upper left-hand corner of the 12"x12" carboard cover, the logo of the corporation that had signed the artist in question to a contract and had manufactured and distributed the product in the consumer's hands.

These corporations, at this point, generally still had pre-countercultural-revolution-type American capitalists as CEOs, board members, and upper-management personnel.  Their marketing departments, though, were wising up to the shifting cultural winds and hiring hipsters to craft their appeal to the demographic that was clearly buying most of the nation's records.   The 1968 advertising slogan for the Columbia label, for instance, was "The man can't bust our music."

So there were adolescent consumers like me, as well as somewhat (but not all that much) older employees of these record companies, who could use the infrastructure of the recording industry to subvert the very culture that had spawned it.  We could do so because there was an even more solid and pervasive infrastructure behind it, namely, the whole edifice of what was at that time "normal" American life: clear gender roles, church attendance, dress codes in schools, television variety shows, acceptance of the fact that US foreign policy necessitated a projection of power, family vacations, robust civic organizations, settled neighborhoods.  That whole web of factors made for an America so great and prosperous that it could absorb the jabs of a counterculture that still depended for its viability on "establishment" institutions.

Up to a point.  As we boomers grew older ("matured," perhaps, or perhaps not) and moved into such realms as law, journalism, education, and, more to the immediate point, the recording industry and the arts and entertainment generally, we cut the bonds which had tethered all that to that "establishment" foundation.

Which gets us back to Mr. Henninger's guard rails.  I recall a point Diana West makes in her indispensible 2007 book The Death of the Grown-Up about U2 lead singer Bono accepting a Grammy at some point in the 1990s and telling the audience to "keep f---ing up the system," and how both he and his fans missed the irony that they were now the system.

There truly are no guard rails now - no behavioral guard rails that would have stigmatized a clearly troubled Connecticut boy sufficiently to prevent his playing violent video games and spewing rhetoric about being the devil on social media, and no fiscal-sense guard rails that would have the current debate  in Washington be about the actual problem facing the country instead of anything having to with increasing taxes.

You don't have to even attempt to make sense in post-America.  You can spout utter babble about your sexual identity, about personal or governmental solvency, about "inclusion" for jihadists, about windmill farms versus oil drilling, and, if you do it to a sufficiently rocking beat, you can become a celebrity, perhaps even a dictator.

The official gummint take on Benghazi: It just kind of happened

The report of the Accountability Review Board finds that the lead-up to the Sept 11 attack and the attack itself were a major cluster-you-know-what.  But it concludes that nobody's accountable.

Nothing to see here.  Move on.

Robert Bork, RIP

A great jurist and the kind of mind that is an American treasure, that sees the nexus of legal theory, culture and the national soul.

The fact that he never served on the Supreme Court is one of the burdens Ted Kennedy is bearing wherever he is spending eternity.

The Speaker's cave of the day

Now it's the damn debt ceiling.

And, again, the MEC gave it a big thumbs down because it still mentions entitlement reform.

I know I've been posting a lot about this, the most tedious of our current front-burner issues in America, but it has the widest set of implications of any of them.  One can't help but parse Boehner's possible motives for this destructive course of action.  Is it more desperation, or more cluelessness?

Then there's the frustration we who love freedom and American greatness feel.  Our hands are tied.  He may or may not keep his Speakership, but that's a ways down the road.  Right now, there's no stopping him if he chooses to continue to be complicit in the obliteration of the Republican party.

What would be required for him to do what is right?

Just how late in the day is it? Well, we've lost the will to recognize enemies

New training manual for US troops headed to Afghanistan says to refrain from criticizing the Taliban, criticizing pedophilia or mentioning "anything about Islam."

"Speakership in jeopardy": let's hope so

I've really tried to see the point of pundits who assure us that Boehner is one of the good gys who is just in an unbelievably tough spot, who has to balance pressures from all sides, who is conducting himself in a "valiant" manner, as Larry Kudlow put it.

But apparently last night he went there: Offering actual tax rate hikes on the most successful Americans.  While the MEC called it "progress," he turned it down because it also involved entitlement reform.

I don't know how one can conclude otherwise than that this guy is in the terminal stages of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.

The better to rule over you with, my pretty

Austin Hill at Townhall asks a pertinent question:  If the ostensible goal is debt and deficit reduction, why is the MEC pushing for more stimulus spending as part of a package to avoid the fiscal cliff?

It's all about draining wealth from the private sector, friends.  There ain't no goal of reducing debt and deficit, not on the MEC's part.

Senator - and soon-to-be-Secretary of State - Global Test was called out for what he is early on

Scott Johnson at Powerline reminisces about being a foolish young lefty in college and hearing Kerry speak.  This would have been 1971, when Global Test was heading up Vietnam Veterans Against the War.  He still had his years of end-running official US policy toward the Sandinistas (a link in the Powerline post to a 2004 NRO article by Jay Nordlinger about this), or accusing the US of torturing Iraqis ahead of him.  But a guy who was sitting near Johnson saw what GT was all about:

One of the students right next to me in the audience stood up to walk out on Kerry’s speech and shouted to Kerry as he approached the steps descending to the first floor of the Hop: “You phony. You’re just in this to promote yourself.” Kerry was only momentarily flustered, bending down to the microphone and asking the guy to stay and talk after he’d already made his way down the steps.

At the time I couldn’t believe the obtuseness of the student; I bought Kerry’s act completely. In retrospect, however, that student may have been the most perceptive person with whom I’ve ever crossed paths.

Because evil is a constant presence in this fallen realm

John Podhoretz at Commentary has about the best take on the Connecticut massacre I've seen so far.  Yes, the shooter was mentally ill.  Still, there was an impulse inside him that existed not due to anything he'd experienced during his developmental years or any biochemical abnormalities.
As Podhoretz says, ensuring the protection of the weak and innocent is the core of the body of values that makes Western civilization distinct.  Some new ban on whole categories of guns will not enhance that protection.

This could be problematic

Chuck Hagel is increasingly being talked about as a possibility for SecDef.  This might prove to be an obstacle:  He sits on the board of a bank that allegedly violates sanctions against doing business with Iran.

The fact that he seems to be cool with Hamas and Hizbollah ought to be creepy enough to disqualify him.

It's amusing, in a grim sort of way . . .

. . . to see FHers concede that their policies and proposals are in fact harmful.  Witness, for example, the spectacle of FHer Senators imploring Harry Reid to hold off on implementing the medical-device tax feature of FHer-care.

Let's be clear; this guy runs an ostensibly private organization, but he's no free-market devotee

Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, is no Jack Welch.  There's his remarks to Charlie Rose about how effective and efficient the Chinese economic model is, and then there's also the crony-capitalist gravy train that the MEC regime steers his way.

Yessir, one great guy to have on a presidential jobs council.

The regime's propaganda arm gets its battle plan

Great IBD editorial on the Dec. 4 White House meeting of the Most Equal Comrade and MSNBC freedom-hatred mouthpieces Maddow, Schultz, O'Donnell and Sharpton.

One of the most blighted states in the nation tries to begin to heal itself and rediscover freedom and prosperity, and all the Most Equal Comrade has to offer in response is radical demagoguery

The MEC visits Michigan and excoriates it for passing a right-to-work law, saying mockingly that it gives workers "the right to work for less money."  Less money than what?

This guy makes all decent human beings on the planet want to puke at the merest glimpse of his totalitarian mug.

That wasn't very nice or elevated, was it?  Sorry.  I've had it with this creature and anybody who supports him.  He is so wrong for Western civilization.

Well, at least it was just another ineffective progress-hater conference

The Doha green confab was, as these things always are, a bust.  No big new treaty to replace the shopworn Kyoto document.  Just a general agreement to keep pestering the normal-people world and waste its money.

A little scrutiny reveals . . .

 . . . several instances in the Palestinian art exhibit currently on display in the entrance hall to UN headquarters in NYC of the entire state of Israel being depicted as Palestine.

How's this for reckless and presumptive?

Geithner's proposal to, should no fiscal-clif agreement be reached, take it upon himself to readjust withholding tables for the nation's payroll people.  Um, Secretary Wack-Job, the taxpayers will owe that much more money come the following April 15.

This is low

The MEC regime is intimidating charities into supporting a tx hike on the most successful Americans.

"Nice foundation you got here. Be a shame if it was no longer tax-exempt."

But you have to understand, Madame Managing Director, that would be just fine with the Most Equal Comrade

IMF chief Christine Lagarde says that the looming fiscal cliff threatens the US's global leadership role.

This is what passes for an appropriate technique of persuasion among FHers

On the heels of that Asner-narrated video about rich people, Oil Change International and The Other 98 release a video entitled "Exxon Hates Your Children."

The DeMint move

Jim DeMint's decision to vacate his Senate seat and assume the presidency of the Heritage Foundation triggers a few questions about the political climate and overall culture in post-America.  He really must feel that he can be more effective in the position he will assume next month.  What does that say about the degree to which the Republican party has lost power in Washington?   What new strategies is the think-tank world - particularly Heritage - considering to impact public perceptions?

I must say, he certainly got my attention when he and current Heritage prez Ed Fuelner were on Rush's show today when, in response to Rush's quip about John Boehner not having a hand in any kind of forcing-out of DeMint, the Senator said, with a chuckle, "It might work a little bit the other way, Rush."

The way to expose a FHer proposal to the light of day

Mitch McConnell says, "Well, okay, let's vote on the MEC's proposal as it stands - the debt-ceiling powers, the tax hike on the top 2 percent, the additional stimulus spending."  Reid says "no dice."

Okay, Mr. Speaker, if it's not an ideological purge, what is it?

The Hill is reporting that there was no Pub opposition to Boehner's "here-are-my-testicles-on-a-platter" offer to the Most Equal Comrade.  Except that a few paragraphs into the Hill piece, one finds some reportage about just that.  But, why was there so little that the piece's hadline could read thus?  Because Boehner had removed a slew of pro-fiscal-sanity folks from committee chairmanships.

Mr. Speaker, you don't even attempt to negotiate with Freedom-Haters.  Their real goal is the stamping out of all you hold dear.  Your destruction is their laser focus.

If he feels that his two latest birdbrained moves are not being adequately explained, he'd better get his sorry a-- in front of a microphone pronto

John Boehner is none too effective, shall we say, at dispelling the notion that he suffers from chronic Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.  His two latest moves - sending yet another "compromise"-laden offer to avert the fiscal cliff the White House (which, thankfully, appears to be DOA) and removing pro-fiscal sanity House members Amash, Schweikert, Heulskamp and Jones from their committee assignments - pretty much obliterate the recent perception that he had some spine and some principles.

As I say, if being considered by conservatives and / or the general public as a freedom-cherishing man of conviction is important to him, he'd better access a forum for explaining himself, and yet this afternoon.

Why the H-word Creature is every bit the poisonous being that the MEC is

In a Friday speech to the Saban Forum, she castigates Israel for a lack of "compassion" and "generosity" toward Palestinians.

Says Israel needs to do more to "understand the pain of an oppressed people."

Such Western self-hatred had the immediate effect of emboldening the Jew-haters of the region:  Upon returning from the UN's vote on Palestine, Abbas declares the Jerusalem the eternal capital of the newly  proclaimed Palestinian state.

It's on purpose - today's edition

Median household net worth in America drops to a 43-year low.

The UN is an ideological sewer that ought not to exist - or at least get our tax money - today's edition

The General Assembly votes to upgrade Palestine's status to that of nonmember observer state.

Yasser Arafat is surely looking up from Hell and smiling.

The next bubble to burst: higher education

There is a crisis in the newly nationalized student loan behemoth.  Default rates are at record levels.

So the regime proposes to - you guessed it - bail it out.  With what?  Does this happen regardless of whether we go over the fiscal cliff?

The grim, relentless march of the prosperity haters

That's the sound of jackboots tromping by that you hear.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar shuts down the 100-year-old Drakes Bay Oyster Company.

Today's exhibit of the advanced state of our cultural rot

The media mocking of Angus T. Jones.

Well there is actually another exhibit, discussed in the Brent Bozell column linked above: the advertising industry deliberately seeking out "bad boys" (and girls) to sell products.

Remarkable clarity at week's end

Count LITD in with the range of pundits - from Rush to Krauthammer - that say what absolutely is called for is for Pubs to step completely away from the table.  We're dealing with out-and-out wackos.

Kimberly Strassel at the WSJ distills the utter unseriousness of the FHers:

How to put this tax-and-more-spending offer in perspective? It is far in excess of what the Democrats asked for in last year's debt-limit standoff—when the political configuration in Washington was exactly the same. It is far more than the president's own Democratic Senate has ever been able to pass, even with a filibuster-proof majority. It is far more than the president himself campaigned on this year.

I was none too keen about Boehner's early-November mutterings about "revenue" being "on the table," but at least he put Pubs on record as having tried one last time to arrive at something at least minimally serious:

Within two days of the election, Mr. Boehner had offered an enormous compromise, committing the GOP to provide new tax revenue, through limits on deductions for the wealthy. Mr. Obama campaigned on making "the rich" pay more—and that is exactly what Mr. Boehner agreed to give him.

All that was left for the president to do was accept this peace offering, pair it with necessary spending cuts, and take credit for averting a crisis. Mr. Obama has instead spent the past weeks campaigning for tax-rate hikes. He wants the revenue, but collected only the way he chooses. And on the basis of that ideological insistence alone, the nation is much closer to a crisis. 

So, yeah, the way to proceed is to quit answering the phone when it's a Freedom-Hater calling, and then go on a PR mega-blitz, letting the American people know that the MEC and Harry Reid are holding a gun to America's head because they perceive an opportunity to destroy the Republican party.

Memo to black Americans: refuse to be a human shield for the FHer regime

I haven't done a lot on this blog concerning the racialization of the overall political climate in America, primarily because it all seems so juvenile to me that I hoped it would go away and relieve me of my embarrassment for the left side of the American populace.

But it doesn't go away.  In fact, it reaches new levels of ridiculousness, as demonstrated by its red-herring use in the attempt to get at the reason for Susan Rice's disingenuousness in the Benghazi debacle.  (Adding further irony to this is the fact that Rice wrote for her senior thesis at Stanford a lamentation on the whiteness and Eurocentricity of the way US history is taught in American educational institutions overall.  I dunno; her family seems to have comfortably assimilated into overall American society; her father was a Federal Reserve governor, and her mother was VP of Control Data Processing.  And Rice herself was at Stanford.)

What is needed is a way to get people whose demographic categorization could qualify them for aggrieved-group status to see that the Freedom-Haters engage in identity politics to use them as human shields.  It's very clear that the Benghazi situation is a huge issue that may even involve treasonous activity.   Yet there is no faster way to obscure that elephant in the room than to shift the subject to conjecture about bigotry on the part of people who have never previously been accused of such a thing.

Same with the bandying about of the term "middle class" in the fiscal-cliff battle.  In fact, the middle class is more than the regime's human shield; it is its hostage.  The Most Equal Comrade is holding a gun to middle-class America's head because he has an opportunity to destroy the Republican party.

All of us - "the masses" - are mere fodder for the utterly mad aims of the post-American left.

Beware:  The more they realize we are on to them, the more sinister their methods of fighting back will be.

State-level governance: a crucial front in the twilight struggle for America's soul

Two more states - Michigan and Arizona - give the big-thumbs-down to FHer-care exchanges.

Now, that's what we've been looking for!

Mitch McConnell, speaking on the Senate floor, gives big thumbs-down to any tax rate hike.

Money lines:

We’re insisting on keeping tax rates where they are, first and foremost, to protect jobs and because we don’t think government needs the money in the first place.” 

"Their aim isn’t job creation. They’re interested in wealth destruction.”

The chilling power of the FHer propaganda machine - and the utter failure of Pubs to articulate the case for freedom

We have indeed become a nation of cattle - lining up at the corral chute with blank stares on our faces.

New WaPo / ABC poll shows most Americans want to see tax increases on the most successful among us and don't want entitlement reform even discussed in fiscal-cliff negotiations.  Ass-backwards from what needs to happen if we are to avoid national ruin.

It's a Greece world.

The political is indeed personal

This stinks so bad.  So bad.

One of my alma maters, Butler University - my master's degree in history is from there - has a political science professor who has instructed her students in her class syllabus to purge any American-ness, whiteness, maleness or heterosexuality from the perspectives they take when writing papers or essay answers on exams.

The linked article about this doesn't mention the professor by name, but as soon as I find out, I'll update this post.

I do know that the dean of liberal arts, Jay Howard, is on board with her stance.  Says it challenges the students or some such dog vomit.

I know Howard personally.  For several years he was a sociology professor at IUPUC, where I am an adjunct lecturer.  He was even interim campus chancellor for a time.  I was on good terms with him professionally, but I knew he read my opinion column in the local paper and always sensed that it was a factor in our relations.  I also knew that he leaned left.  (He was involved in local Democrat politics.)  It seems he's now in the catbird seat, able to endorse and empower this kind of poison and happily accelerate the momentum with which our culture decomposes.

Have you thought about it this way?

The $16 trillion figure we hear for the national debt is alarming indeed.  The real picture, though, is far more grim.  That's because the liabilities of Medicare and Social Security aren't included in the government's balance sheet.  Why not?  Maybe because we'd then see that we are actually on the hook for $86.8 trillion.

Whew!  That's a lot of obligation.  How are we gonna climb out from under it?  Well, consider the numbers and see if you can come up with an answer:

When the accrued expenses of the government's entitlement programs are counted, it becomes clear that to collect enough tax revenue just to avoid going deeper into debt would require over $8 trillion in tax collections annually. That is the total of the average annual accrued liabilities of just the two largest entitlement programs, plus the annual cash deficit.

Nothing like that $8 trillion amount is available for the IRS to target. According to the most recent tax data, all individuals filing tax returns in America and earning more than $66,193 per year have a total adjusted gross income of $5.1 trillion. In 2006, when corporate taxable income peaked before the recession, all corporations in the U.S. had total income for tax purposes of $1.6 trillion. That comes to $6.7 trillion available to tax from these individuals and corporations under existing tax laws.

In short, if the government confiscated the entire adjusted gross income of these American taxpayers, plus all of the corporate taxable income in the year before the recession, it wouldn't be nearly enough to fund the over $8 trillion per year in the growth of U.S. liabilities. Some public officials and pundits claim we can dig our way out through tax increases on upper-income earners, or even all taxpayers. In reality, that would amount to bailing out the Pacific Ocean with a teaspoon. Only by addressing these unsustainable spending commitments can the nation's debt and deficit problems be solved.

The tax increase that the MEC and Harry Reid are insisting on has nothing to do with addressing this nation's fiscal crisis.  Nothing.

Didn't clear up anything

Senators McCain, Ayotte and Graham say that their meeting with Susan Rice today didn't enhance their  understanding of why she trotted out the video-protest meme on five talk shows.

Hey, MEC, how's that unclenched fist working out for ya?

Further conclusive proof that Iran is working on a nuclear arsenal - a very powerful nuclear arsenal.

Per AP:

Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, according to a diagram obtained by The Associated Press.

The diagram was leaked by officials from a country critical of Iran's atomic program to bolster their arguments that Iran's nuclear program must be halted before it produces a weapon. The officials provided the diagram only on condition that they and their country not be named.

The International Atomic Energy Agency — the Vienna-based U.N. nuclear watchdog — reported last year that it had obtained diagrams indicating that Iran was calculating the "nuclear explosive yield" of potential weapons. A senior diplomat who is considered neutral on the issue confirmed that the graph obtained by the AP was indeed one of those cited by the IAEA in that report. He spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue.

The IAEA report mentioning the diagrams last year did not give details of what they showed. But the diagram seen by the AP shows a bell curve — with variables of time in micro-seconds, and power and energy both in kilotons — the traditional measurement of the energy output, and hence the destructive power of nuclear weapons. The curve peaks at just above 50 kilotons at around 2 microseconds, reflecting the full force of the weapon being modeled.

The bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima in Japan during World War II, in comparison, had a force of about 15 kilotons. Modern nuclear weapons have yields hundreds of times higher than that.

Now it's up to $2.6 trillion

That's the latest - sixth - upward revision of the cost over ten years to taxpayers of Freedom-Hater-care.

How I would love to know the exact number of Americans who understand what this means, who have been paying even a minimal degree of attention.  It seems to me those who don't - and maybe I don't want to see that percentage laid out in all its horrifying specificity - fall into two categories: those who immerse themselves in circumscribed concerns ranging from the laudible (family, career) to the fluffy (sports, hobbies, pop music), and those who are leftist activists, who do indeed pay enough attention to know that there is still a force out there trying to stop this madness, and react with that "It's-a-done-deal-so-keep-your-hands-off-my-health-care" ignorance that is currently prevailing in our apparently doomed society.

This war gets tougher to wage by the day.  Of course, that's annoying, but it's not a deterrence.

Is it impossible to do what's necessary to save America?

I've been thinking about the noise one is hearing today in the media about an ostensibly growing number of Congressional Pubs who are caving to various degrees on the role of taxation in averting the fiscal cliff.  My thought process is taking the form of a dialogue in my head, as is often the case when I ponder something.  I can picture some kind of east-coast wonk, maybe even someone who is supposed to be one of my people - a Bill Kristol, perhaps - feeling like he is comfortably successful in refuting my insistence on principle - namely, the principle that a person's money is his or hers, not a football in a Capitol Hill scrimmage.  Here's how the snippet went that began when I was washing dishes a few minutes ago.

Me: Any talk about revenue is way, way premature.  Certainly tax rate increases, but even preoccupying ourselves with loopholes.  Save that for a discussion on overall tax reform.  Of course, we know that tax hikes would be ridiculously inadequate for addressing our debt / deficit situation, and they would, no matter what Warren Buffett says, cause economic contraction.  The problem is that if one does indeed get truly serious and put on the table, as Pennsylvania Avenue types like to say, the stuff that most needs to be on the table - moving the big three entitlements toward privatization, letting FHer-care die on the vine for lack of funding, and dismantling whole cabinet-level departments and agencies - one is dismissed as a crank, a wacko.

Beltway Wonk: Okay, I will not call you a crank, but I will flatly state that it is a cold, hard fact that it is a certainty that those items will not get an airing at any fiscal cliff negotiations.  For one thing, many people of public and private influence honestly, whether mistakenly or correctly, believe such programs, departments and agencies do significant good. Secondly, there are thousands of entrenched career bureaucrats that have a keen self-interest involved.  They will not sit idly by and see the plug pulled on their livelihoods.  Thirdly, yes, unbridled conservatism has been marginalized in Washington.

Me:  But none of these people are idiots.  They know that we know that they have at least glancingly been exposed to the study findings  - CBO, Ernst & Young - showing the futility and indeed the harmfulness of tax increases.

BWW: Yes, they have, which compels them to be all the craftier in sticking to talking points, glossing over inconsistencies in their worldview, and dealing in platitudes whenever possible.

Me: So you're saying it's impossible to do what's necessary to save America.  If that's so, we have indeed passed the tipping point.

Re: the current outbreak of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome among Pub Senators

Saxby Chambliss and Lindsey Graham are either being disingenuous in order to dress up their zeal to be liked inside the Beltway, or they have never seen the CBO numbers on the utter ineffectiveness of a tax hike on "the rich" or Ernst & Young report outlining the economic damage that the tax penalty on which the Most Equal Comrade insists would do.

These paragraphs from Red State's Daniel Horowitz's piece about (my boldface for emphasis) it ought to be trumpeted from every media outlet without relent:

Saxby’s comments are quite instructive for conservatives as we confront a Republican Party that is committed to capitulation.  This imbroglio over the fiscal cliff was never about the budget – spending or revenue.  It is about the fundamental role of government in a Constitutional Republic that inherently restrains the size of government.  As such, even if raising taxes on the rich would be fair (it’s not; they already pay 37% of the income taxes), and even if it would be economically prudent; it is the wrong thing to do.  Any additional revenue would be used to grow the size of government at a time when it needs to be cut in half.  On this core issue, Republicans like Chambliss and Graham side with Democrats.  We side with the Constitution.

That’s why this has never been about Norquist and his tax pledge.  If Democrats would genuinely agree to a deal that would wind down the welfare and entitlement programs and eliminate full departments of the executive branch, conservatives would reluctantly go along with some form of revenue increases.  Raising taxes is unfair and counterintuitive, but if that is what it would take to get Democrats to come onboard with our efforts to shrink government, then it would be a deal worth making.

The Freedom-Haters' new gotcha question

In the just-concluded election cycle it was about pregnancy and rape.  Now it's "How old do you think the Earth is?"

I've never cared much for GQ anyway.  It is the ultimate embodiment of self-congratulatory metrosexualism and shallow materialism.

Shawn Mitchell at Townhall does a good job conjecturing the circumstances under which the question in its Marco Rubio interview was crafted:

 the premeditated bad faith of an upscale publication. The random question is untethered  from public policy, from issues in the US Senate, or measures Rubio might pursue. It arose from a singular goal unrelated to reporting current events: GQ wanted to conjure a killer question, something that might damage a popular potential GOP presidential candidate.  It’s easy to imagine the query came from a group brainstorm over lunch: “Think, people…how can we trip him?!”

I also like the reply Mitchell says he would have given the magazine:

Our best science says the earth is 4.5 billion years old. I don’t have a good reason to question that. I don’t know what a “day” is in the account of Creation. But I do believe in a God of miracles and mysteries. So I’m not going to scratch your inquisitional itch by denouncing anyone’s literal belief in the biblical account.

Does that trouble you? Why? I accept the laws of science and physics, and I admire the people who work to understand and reveal them. If, as a public official, I propose to substitute prayer for research, Bible verses for nuclear codes, or religious rites for rigorous testing, then, you can get concerned. 

But until that point, the faith I hold somewhere in my mind and heart is between me and my God. If you want to force me to sign a loyalty oath denying it, you can go to Hell, figuratively speaking. 

The mosquitos that carry Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

Establishment Pub consultants.  Rush lays into two of the worst, Mike Murphy and Steve Schmitt, with due vehemence.

We conservatives truly do not care what anybody's age,color or gender is, or the population density where they reside.  We care about immutable truths and principles that demonstrate themselves to be true no matter what course society takes.

Society presently seems to be taking a course that will necessitate rediscovering those principles the hard way.  Eventually, when the madness gets egregious enough, people will wake up to the fact that what we have been pointing to is an easier way to go about understanding them.

Didn't we just go through this about 20 months ago?

Egypt in chaos.  Riots in Tahrir Square.  Judges calling the president's power grab unconstitutional.  Egyptian stock market plunging.

Oh, wait.  That's what's occurring right now.

I sure hope the post-American overlords and their propaganda machine will now cool it with that Morsi-is-a-worthy-statesman crud now.

Before we start drooling all over ourselves about a new honest-broker partner in the search for Middle East peace . . .

Morsi unilaterally assumes a slew of new presidential powers.  Protecting the gains from last year's revolution, doncha know.

The H-word Creature, Morsi, and the eleventh-hour Band-Aid

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line on why Hillary Clinton - and whoever else played a role in bringing about this ceasefire - was engaged in an exercise in absurdity.

Apropos Morsi's characterization yesterday, you wanna talk farce . . .

Have you paused to consider what the economic impact of the tax increase the MEC is insisting on would be?

The Most Economic Comrade, as has been noted on this blog, is blackmailing America.  He swears he'll veto any plan for avoiding the Fiscal Cliff that does not involve a tax increase on America's most successful.

How stupid does he think you are?  Surely he knows all you have to do is click your mouse a few times and you have the Heritage Foundation's / Ernst & Young's numbers for the resultant economic damage available for citing.

It would result in the following:

• Unemployment would rise 0.5 percent, which translates to 710,000 fewer jobs...

• Real after-tax wages would fall by 1.8 percent...

• GDP would fall by 1.3 percent...

• Capital stock and investment would drop by 1.4 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively

So you have to ask yourself, how is this rapidly accelerating decline not deliberate?

This is what a ceasefire is to a jihadist regime

Hamas calls the truce a "victory," says Israel "failed in all its goals."  Gaza celebrates by firing guns into the air.

Latest developments in the ongoing jihad

Terrorist bus bombing in Tel Aviv.  21 injured.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri says his organization "blesses" the attack.

2 dead, 2 injured in massive blast near US embassy in Kabul.  The perp was armed with a gun, grenade and vest.

We already know one thing that's gonna get sequestered: Christianity

US District Judge Joe Heaton says that Hobby Lobby can't get out of the HHS mandate that private businesses have to provide insurance coverage for drugs that exterminate embryonic Americans.

His line of reasoning is getting way too much traction in post-American society.  It goes like this: the business in question is not an explicitly religious organization.  Indeed, it exists for a decidedly secular purpose: making money.

This dangerous blurring of the lines between what constitutes an entity comprised of citizens freely associating with each other and the realm of the state's purview is becoming a precedent.  If a person's faith really means anything, he must be free to have it inform his conduct in all areas of his life.

There is no right to health care, but there is a right to worship God in a biblically informed way, which means adhering to those principles in all situations.

That Judge Heaton is not capable of thinking this through to that truth does not speak well for our current juncture.

What the "religion of peace" thinks of puppies and 87-year-old Swedish women

This.http://vinienco.com/2012/11/20/87-year-old-woman-savagely-beaten-saving-puppy-immigrants/

Here's how Egyptian president and Muslim Brotherhood bigwig Morsi characterizes the just-reached ceasefire

Says, "The farce of Israeli aggression against Gaza will end on Tuesday."

Yessir, there's one neutral broker.

Hillary Clinton, Resolution 16/18, national sovereignty and your basic right to freedom of speech

You need to read up on the "Istanbul Process."  The H-word Creature and the head of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation held a summit in July 2011 to commit the US to a partnership supporting a UN  resolution that would make UN member countries pass laws circumscribing freedom of expression.

Now, we're sending State Department personnel to an OIC gathering that will further refine the degree of that circumscribing.

How to begin to counter the commercialization of holidays

Remarking on the commercialization of holidays is a bit tricky for an opinion writer.  Avoiding the lapse into banality requires some discernment.  The observation that ours is an overwhelmingly materialistic culture is not exactly original.
In fact, that it gets made so perennially attests to the fact that it remains unresolved.  In fact, the insinuation of the term "Black Friday" into our seasonal lexicon, and the metastasizing of that day into the evening of Thanksgiving marks the confirmation of its ridiculousness.
As we can see by what's happened to our culture in the last forty years, when regard for the family unit shifts even modestly from veneration to neglect, civic association and community soon follow as fading institutions.  Technology does its part to assist.  Since smartphones have become an extension of the human anatomy, we barely occupy the same physical space anymore.
Consider this use of the term "dead time":

Bill Tancer, the general manager of global retail for Experian, sees it as a confluence of sophisticated retailing and consumer boredom, thanks to the swelling population of cyber-deal surfers on Thanksgiving. He’s been following for the past decade a growing group of restless consumers who turn to the Internet for entertainment and holiday shopping on the holiday. From 2003 to 2011, the No. 1 online shopping day has been Thanksgiving, according to his findings. Last year was the first that the so-called Cyber Monday, the Monday after the holiday, eclipsed Thanksgiving Day in online sales.

It makes sense then for retailers to just open the doors. They wouldn’t if we didn’t walk through them. . . 

“I don’t know if it’s stealing our time from us, since consumers have shown a strong interest in searching for those deals and making purchases on Thanksgiving,” he says. “There’s a lot of dead time while that turkey is in the oven. It’s a good time to shop.” 

Dead  time.  So much for leaning back on the couch, taking in the aromas wafting from the kitchen, catching up with cousins and nephews, watching parades on television, or perhaps reflecting on the depth of one's gratitude.

Libertarians, of course, take a "leave-those-consumers-alone" approach.  Their rabid scouring of deals and sales harms neither your person nor property, so it's none of your business.

And that stance, of course, abets the leftist mocking of the conservative struggle to preserve that which made western civilization uniquely great.  The taunt is that our championing of pure economic freedom runs smack dab, like a cruise ship into an iceberg, into our cherishing of traditions steeped in God and family.

Which gets us back to the point that cannot be hammered home enough:  We can't dispense with any of the three pillars of our worldview.  A free-market economy, a foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature, and, most relevant here, an understanding that Western civilization uniquely blesses humankind precisely because of its Judeo-Christian foundation, are each and all essential.

From the John Adams quote ""Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other," to the modern-day work of the Acton Institute and the Ethics and Public Policy Center, this little flame of truth has kept flickering, no matter how stiff the winds of obscuration or dark the night of distraction.

The first step in countering the Black-Friday-ization of our society is to choose not to participate - indeed, to choose to gather dear ones in your home and sufficiently entice them to remain there in conscious fellowship with your joy - and your cooking.  Beyond that, it's having this arrow in your polemical quiver: The point of the truly conservative worldview is to keep meaning front and center in our moment-to-moment existence.

Thank God for the Iron Dome

The jihadists' rockets are flying over Tel Aviv and Jerusalem now.

Andrew McCarthy at NRO says that that the worldwide Islamist movement in all its forms now feels emboldened on a new level to lay waste to Western civilization.

Kicking it up a notch

Iran is ready to "sharply" boost uranium enrichment.

Your sinister, lying overlords

Petraeus testifies to the House committee this morning that his agency did indeed know that the Benghazi attack was jihadist terrorism as soon as it occurred, but that that acknowledgement was taken out of the talking points before the CIA said anything publicly.

What is is with this bureaucrat-ese term "talking points"?  Why can't government officials just speak the f------ truth?

Didn't take him long to choose sides

Egyptian president Morsi proclaims Israel the aggressor in its current conflict with Hamas and intends to travel to Gaza tomorrow.

The latest idea that is so bad one wonders if it's some kind of joke from a regime that offers nothing but

Neo-neocon reminds us of the Vietnam-era reasons why the floating of John Kerry's name as possible second-term SecDef is wacky in the extreme.

She could have included the 1985 trip he and Iowa Senator Tom Harkin took to Nicaragua to meet with Sandinista comandante Daniel Ortega, and how Kerry came back and told the Washington Post "They just want peace."

Or his remark in one of the 2004 presidential debates in which he said the US ought to have to "pass a global test" to defend its interests.

It's on purpose - today's edition

Per the Census Bureau, 16 percent of Americans now live in poverty.

We're next

Europe is officially in a recession again.

The regime is cool with letting us see the fruits of planned decline, now that the election is over

Per the Department of Labor, jobless claims have risen by 78,000 - yes, you read that right - in the week since the overlords secured their tyranny.  Pennsylvania and Ohio hardest hit.

Blackmailing the nation that just elected him to a second term

The MEC's presser yesterday removed any doubt what his hill to die on is: tax increases on the most successful Americans.  Never mind that the $66 billion raised over ten years by such a confiscation would be dwarfed by the kinds of deficits - over $1 trillion a year - we've been running since the MEC became our overlord.

What's going on here is cultural at its root.  The idea is to reinforce the meme that most Americans want to see "the wealthy" taxed more.  It's raw class warfare.  The only reason for doing it that is of any use to anybody is the gratification that the Freedom-Haters can gin up among the indoctrinated for seeing those more successful get it stuck to them.  It is one of the Left's most effective tools in its great societal leveling enterprise.

It will also cause small business to pull in their horns even more than they are currently doing.  In short, it doesn't avert the fiscal cliff.  It merely aggrandizes the Most Equal Comrade, and there is probably nothing in the world more important to him.

In case you wondered if Israel was going to answer those Hamas rocket attacks . . .

They're answering big-time.  Zapping facilities where the Iran-supplied missiles are stored.  Zapping Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabri in his car.

Stay safe, House of David, and make their rubble bounce.

The enemy's opening salvo in the latest battle of this war

The MEC's opening position in fiscal-cliff negotiations with the House is $1.6 trillion in new taxes over the next ten years.  Memo to John Boehner: time to go into go-to-Hell mode.

The secession movement - the LITD take

It's growing, you might even say exploding.  While it's obviously not going to lead to a mass splintering of the United States in the next six months, it's hardly an easily dismissed frivolity.  Why hasn't something like this ever followed a presidential election before?  The sense that the nature of this country has been irreversibly altered is pervasive.  Those of us who love freedom and who cherished American greatness do not intend to suck it up and move on.  Who knows what forms of resistance this might morph into?  LITD certainly doesn't care to venture a guess, but since the alternative is surrender and submission, you can be sure that other expression of our seriousness will manifest themselves as the second term of the most frightening figure in our nation's history unfolds.

The reason Petraeus testified that Benghazi was about a video

Charles Krauthammer goes there.  The ugly truth is that the general was counting on the regime to protect his image, legacy, career and marriage, but, you see, his usefulness quotient went way down about ten after eleven on the night of November 6.

Another one down the chute.

It's not a serious conference, it's a sewer of freedom-hatred

The guest list for the regime's fiscal cliff summit reads like - well, like a list you'd expect from our overlords.

Here's a hurl-inducing nitey-nite

US budget deficit got 22 percent worse in October.

A lot of useful information has been coming down the pike since the election

Along with Iran firing on our drone and the Petraeus mess, Ohio food stamp recipients are just now getting notices that their monthly gravy ladlings will be $50 less come January.

Who's gonna make your Twinkie?

Hostess Brands is closing bakeries in Seattle, St. Louis and Cincinnati. 

One time when it would have been a delight to have been mistaken

It is with no pleasure that LITD acknowledges that it was exactly right about something crucial to the prospects for America and the West.

Mitt Romney was another awful Republican presdential candidate.  If one goes back through the archives here, a softening of tone about the man and an increase in the tone of hope and confidence is discernible.  Did I, in my heart, know it amounted to whistling past the graveyard?

The candidate who asserted that climate change was real and that human activity was a cause, the man who said he would allow automatic increases in the minimum wage, the man who said that the Most Equal Comrade was "a good guy" who was just "in over his head" was yet another terminal case of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome - like John McCain, like both Bushes, like Bob Dole.  Like Richard "We're-all-Keynsians-now" Nixon.

There are many in our party who say it's time to get over the obsession with Dutch, but a glaringly front-and-center question still hasn't been answered:  How did the only real conservative president we've ever had win two landslides when the cultural and political landscape were already nearly as debased as they are now?  The left hated him with at least as much vehemence as it has ginned up for subsequent presidential - and vice presidential - candidates.  Cultural rot was well underway by the 1980s.  His presidency coincided with the rise to stardom of Michale Jackson, Prince and Madonna - three of the most narcissistic, indeed, solipsistic, artistically derivative, aesthetically perverted figures American popular culture has ever produced.  Reagan had a worldwide Communist empire breathing down his neck.  Shortly after his first election, the economy went sharply from bad to worse for several months.

It's not rocket science.  He stood for clarity.  He had the three pillars of conservativism - free-market economics, a foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature, and an understanding that Western civilization, with its Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman foundation, was a unique blessing to humankind - firmly in his mind.

Maybe the cultural climate now is such that it really would be impossible to do well in primaries let alone a general election if one spoke plain truths about taxes, government bloat and the actual definition of the term "family."  Maybe proposing elimination of the capital-gains tax and the income tax, proposing elimination of the Departments of Education, Energy, Health and Human Services and Agriculture would be universally derided as crackpot.  Maybe pointing out that maleness and femaleness are fundamentally different ways of being human (indeed, of being a member of any species) would get the same reaction as the ramblings of a psychotic with voices in his head.

But I don't think so.  There are still plenty of us who understand all of the above to be true and right.  We have been driven underground, but we're in touch with each other.  I'm meeting one for coffee tomorrow morning, and a couple for wine tomorrow evening.

The value I place on clarity has taken a quantum leap recently.  As with so many medicines, it's a little bitter going down, but it begins to alleviate the symptoms of civilizational death every time it's administered.

Bill Kristol, the ultimate Beltway Bubble pseudo-rightie

The Weekly Standard editor is in the advanced stages of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, going on record as saying Congressional Pubs ought to acquiesce in the matter of higher taxes on the most successful Americans.  He's willing to portray it as a scenario in which House Pubs are cornered and that their only way toward any wiggle room is compromise on avoiding the fiscal cliff.

What the hell do we need somebody like this for?

Just too smelly

Nice Deb offers a roundup of links to various observations on the timing of the Petraeus resignation.  So many angles, so many considerations.

One big question: Will the sex angle and its attendant juiciness - according to the NYT, she was an exemplary family woman who doted over her kids and made candlelight dinner for the whole tribe most nights, but according to other sources pretty much stalked the general and threw herself at him - bring more focus to the Benghazi scandal or obscure it?

25 of 'em

That's how many rockets Gaza terrorists have fired into Israel today.

Another nugget of information that would have been useful for the public to have before the election

Food stamp usage surges to highest level in a one-year period ever.

The poisoned collective mind of the post-American masses

Twitter is full of attacks on companies that are instituting or considering hiring freezes or cuts in workers' hours on the assumption that such moves are out of spite rather than economic necessity.  That's because those so tweeting don't know their asses from hot rocks.  They have no concept of rational economic behavior.  All they see is an endless gravy train.

The odds that it's all still a coincidence are shrinking

Really, I've been trying to refrain from ascribing any tinfoil-hat implications to the timing of Petreaus's announcement of his affair, what with his Congressional testimony about Benghazi scheduled for next Thursday that now ain't gonna happen (until he gets subpoenaed) , but now, on the heels of that comes the sudden and without-fanfare resignation of Lt. General Mark Herling, commander of US Army Europe, who oversaw our bases in Sicily.

I'm picking up an odor.

The enemy ratchets up the war on normal-people energy a notch

Interior Department announces that it is closing off 1.6 million acres of federal land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming to oil shale extraction.

The kind of prayer that will become all too frequent

Read the from-the-soul-and-gut prayer of the CEO of Murray Energy before he announces to 54 employees of the company's American Coal subsidiary.

We have chosen decline.  We have chose n madness.  Millions of good people will suffer the impact of what we have chosen.

The face of our enemy

Newsweek only has a few more print editions to go, s oI suppose that's why it sinks to new depths of shamelessness in that time frame, as evidenced by the cover of the current issue.

This war ain't over, Freedom-Haters.  Your current victory is far from final.  You had better watch your back.  We live on, and we fight on.

Taxation and the fiscal cliff: the lines are drawn

There's nothing surprising about this, but it does revive one's warrior spirit. The Most Equal Comrade says once again that a tax increase on the few remaining successful Americans has to be part of any deal to avert the fiscal cliff that he signs.
And Boehner and McConnell are on record in post-election statements as being adamant that that ain't gonna happen.
So, as I said the other day, we go over the fiscal clif in either scenario.  Pub leaders on the Hill adhere to their principles no matter what kind of dog vomit is hurled at them and the Freedom-Haters quit even talking about any avoidance measures.  Pub leaders get weak knees and acquiesce to this class-envy grandstanding gesture, small-business owners say, "Well, there's no uncertainty now, but now we know we're in for a confiscation-fest.  The hell with it.  We'll shrink our operations rather than expand them."
So the blackmail is on.  No, not "game of chicken."  That term has the implication of moral equivalence  to it.  This is about tyranny vs. freedom, as everything that happens in Washington and whatever we are to call this post-American country will be for the foreseeable future.

Portrait of an emboldened America-destroyer

Harry Reid says he has a mandate to raise taxes.

Yet more layoff announcements

Vestas Wind Systems (This one is another green outfit subsidized with your tax dollars)

Harper Collins (nearly 200 "family-sustaining" jobs)

Hawker Beechcraft (about 410 jobs)

Convenient timing if you're a Freedom-Hater

Iran fired at a US drone - on November 1.

It's on purpose - today's edition

MacDonald's sales drop for the first time in a decade.

Another essential-reading, says-it-all column

George Weigel today at NRO.

The American culture war has been markedly intensified, as those who booed God, celebrated an unfettered abortion license, canonized Sandra Fluke, and sacramentalized sodomy at the Democratic National Convention will have been emboldened to advance the cause of lifestyle libertinism through coercive state power, thus deepening the danger of what a noted Bavarian theologian calls the “dictatorship of relativism.”

And:

 a recovery of American greatness — cultural, political, economic, diplomatic, and military greatness — was not the driving theme of the Romney campaign. Not knowing Mitt Romney personally, I can’t say whether this obviously decent and successful man simply lacked the understanding necessary to make the case for true American renewal, as distinct from the faux hope-and-change mantra that had seduced so many in 2008. But whatever Romney’s personal inclinations, many Republican campaign managers and consultants always seemed afraid of scaring the horses. Obama would be beaten, they insisted, on grounds of competence, not by a campaign that called the country to recognize that it need not settle for mediocrity, a campaign that summoned America to new heights of achievement.

The themes for such a campaign were not difficult to imagine; they could have been built around a recasting of FDR’s four freedoms. Freedom of religion: No government bureaucrat in Washington is going to tell your religious community how to conduct its affairs. Freedom from fear: A Romney administration will not tolerate the burning of American embassies and the torture and murder of our diplomats by the thugs of al-Qaeda and their jihadist allies. Freedom for excellence and accomplishment: Unshackling American ingenuity from the restraints of government interference will unleash new wealth-creating and wealth-distributing energies, even as that liberation empowers the poor to lead lives of self-responsibility through honest and dignified work. And freedom from unpayable debt: Your children and grandchildren must not be buried beneath a sludge pile of extravagance sluicing out of a national capital (and an administration) addicted to throwing oceans of money at problems. 

Would it have worked? Who knows? But the issues would have been sharpened; the fake issues (“war on women,” “tax breaks for the rich,” etc.) might have been marginalized; and a lot more energy — real political energy, not just energies bent on denying Obama a second term — might have been unleashed. 

As night follows day - today's edition

Twitchy has a very long list of tweets from small business owners who are laying off people because FHer-care is now a done deal.


Boeing announces massive defense-contract-related layoffs.


Michelle Malkin's column about these and even more instances.

It's interesting.  Last Friday I attended an economic-outlook breakfast sponsored by our local Chamber of Commerce.  It was a panel discussion of four professors from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.  Each one looked at a particular level of the economic scene.  One focused on the global scope, one on financial markets, one on the statewide (Indiana) level, and one on the city's outlook.  While certain aspects of their assessments varied from one another, the common theme that was reiterated throughout the hour was the atmosphere of uncertainty brought on by the looming fiscal cliff.

It seems that now that the picture is clearer, we see how the nation's ostensible engine of prosperity is responding.

Let's look at what we've become before we think we know what to do about it

The other day, I quoted at length from a piece by Daren Jonescu at The American Thinker.  He has another essential one up today.  And, again, do read the entire thing, but here are some money paragraphs that warrant their own further dissemination:

America is not a center-right country, whatever that means.  It is -- notwithstanding its still-sane minority (which includes almost everyone reading this) -- a socialist-leaning nation that lags behind the rest of the progressive world only due to a slight residual guilt complex regarding all that old Constitution stuff.  The events of the past couple of days suggest that even that little bugaboo has now been largely overcome by the majority, for whom most inhibitions about accepting their chains -- and chaining their neighbors -- are now gone.

And:

"Mitt Romney was only the nominee because of a thin primary field."  Phooey.  He was the nominee because the entire GOP establishment threw everything it had at all the other candidates, in order to guarantee that it would get the candidate most likely to succumb to their advice and direction.  As of September 2012, Romney was the only candidate left in the primary field whom no one had ever described as a conservative, let alone a constitutionalist.  That, in short, is why he was the nominee.

(3) "Republicans need a candidate who can appeal to moderates."  See point 1 above.  Appealing to moderates means apologizing to voters for not being quite as forward-looking as Barack Obama.  It is to set oneself up as the inferior choice.  It is to presume that the moderates are with the Democrat candidate by default, and must be peeled off by stealth.

And:

This election was the last chance to spare America the final degradation of ceasing to be a constitutional republic altogether.  That battle has now been lost.  The things most needed now are clarity and forthrightness.  The danger most imminent now is that, having forsaken the principles of liberty, the nation will simply forget that those principles ever existed.

That, my friends, is the America of November 2012.

Unless we fully grasp what's going on, our steps forward will be inadequate

As you no doubt assume, I've been thinking about where to start in on assessing all that has occurred this week, and its various levels of impact.
I'll say something here, knowing it can easily be taken out of context and used to bite me in the tail end.    The risk is worth it, though, because it needs to be said, and much constructive elaboration can actually ensue.  It is that much so-called analysis from the same old wonky white guys (and one white gal of note, Ann Coulter) still fails to grasp the level of cultural sickness that has made for the America of November 2012.  There are, of course, the spectacularly wrong prognosticators, ranging from Michael Barone to Dick Morris to Rush Limbaugh, who now, with one more gaze into their crystal balls, draw the brilliantly original conclusion that conservatives are now outnumbered.   But I'm also a little frustrated even with the likes of Victor Davis Hanson.  All he has to say is that the election left the landscape in Washington much as it was.  Not a word about an emboldened FHer base, executive fiat, the thug machine surrounding the MEC, or the spot, that is to say situation amounting to blackmail, in which the Pub-dominated House, finds itself.  Or the consequences - that is, the inevitability of the fiscal cliff.  (If Pubs resist tax increases during the lame-duck session, FHers have all the ammunition they need to blame them for said cliff; if they acquiesce, we go over the cliff anyway.)

What I've pasted below is a reader comment underneath the unsigned editorial at NRO today, in which that magazine's editors do what they can to get the biggest-possible-picture take on what Tuesday's electoral rout means.  The reader, who calls himself WisdomVision, does a far better job of explaining our current juncture than the editors.  In fact, better than any pundit's observation I've yet seen.

So many bad, bad things, it is hard to begin to sort them out. Our beloved country has made a tragic error. The resilience and character of the American people is not what it once was. The majority of our countrymen prefer regulation and easy subsidy now. The phrase, "Greatest Generation" seems quaint and antique now; the phrase, "Wisdom of the Founders" seems oddly racist.

When the GOP thinks about attracting unmarried women in the future, it should remember that this group is growing extremely fast. And the reason it is growing so fast is because so many young women are rejecting marriage. A pastor I know in a large California parish told me he has not seen one case, in 8 years, of a young couple coming to the church and saying, "We're in love and we want to get married." It's all half-brothers and shacking up and serial live-ins and ruined children. The GOP will never be able to match the democrats when it comes to freebies for unmarried women, or for anyone else. And our efforts to emphasize "traditional family values" (another sincere effort, now translated as hate speech by most of America) have utterly failed.

When the young woman asked the candidates what they would do to correct the fact that women are paid 72 cents on the dollar of what men make, both candidates accepted her premise. Both knew it was a lie, one of those statistical "facts" that drive sane people crazy. But both knew they were in a promising contest, and no liberal is ever going to lose a promising contest with anyone. And so I wish the GOP luck bringing these voters into our fold.

The American people heard about the HHS mandate and yawned. They know nothing about the (again, hear the quaintness) phrase, "religious liberty," but they know everything about Dancing with the Stars. The once-mighty coalitions of Catholics, evangelicals, Mormons, and mainline Protestant churches made tiny sounds, inaudible really, like mice with asthma. Soon gay marriage will be guaranteed by US law, and Catholic churches who do not agree to preside over ceremonies where men marry men will be closed. The church is going to pay a price, then, for their timidity in fighting religious oppression in 2012. I wish my fellow conservatives all the luck in the world on this matter as well.

Conservatives, properly, worry about the high percentage of Americans that pay no income taxes. I wish them luck in attracting voters from the millions of citizens who pay no income taxes today, by making the argument they really should pay something. I would also encourage them to look at the numbers of people paying no taxes overall, but also by ethnic group. They are going to find out the people who voted against them in the highest concentrations Tuesday, have the highest rates of paying no income tax, and also the highest rates of government subsidy. Educate this group, my fellow Reaganites, on voting Republican, because they will show you the virtue of adding you to the rolls of taxpayers, and removing you from the roles of subsidy. Good luck on this quest my friends.

We are entering a period of steep national decline. The incredible virtues that made America what it was are fading away and can never be recovered. Virtually every conservative hero since the Revolution has warned this day would come if we continued doing bad things, but strangely, now that it is here, even National Review cannot recognize it.