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.

As night follows day . . .

Stocks plunged across the board today.  The Dow closed below 13000 for the first time since August.

As the Senate is confirmed to remain Freedom-Hater and Mitt's path narrows

The principles remain true even if this country has decided to ignore them.

Western civilization is done for.

So very late in the day

Daren Jonescu at The American Thinker captures the essence of what today is all about: It's a referendum on civilization.

I've yet to see a more perfectly distilled explanation of why FHer-care is so poisonous:

Government health care is a perfect microcosm of what real oppression will look like on a daily basis, an important and constantly needed reminder for people still hoping to preserve the idea of freedom in their own country.  Those whose air has at least been perfumed with the (dissipating) vapors of genuine liberty all their lives can easily regard oppression as more foreign and strange than it really is.  The natural tendency among citizens of "the land of the free" to identify tyranny primarily with the nightmare world of Kristallnacht or the Ukrainian forced famine has facilitated the efforts of freedom's enemies to push America onto its current collision course with the more quotidian brutalities of "soft" oppression. 

Or why "compromise" is simply unworkable in our current climate:

Treating leftist authoritarianism as one side of the nation's healthy political debate is by definition a violation of the American founding.  Socialism cannot be put into practice to any degree without violating the Declaration's primary rights and the Constitution's delineations of the role of government.  By allowing leftist policy to metastasize through all branches of the federal government for generations, a large portion of the population -- including, sadly, many who see themselves as conservatives -- have unwittingly forsaken most of what America, as a philosophical idea, stands for.

Or why the current ridicule with which the defense of liberty is treated marks a grim juncture:

If the American majority finally comes to absorb the view, already accepted as policy by the Department of Homeland Security, that "reverence of individual liberty" and "suspicion of centralized federal authority" are indicators of an antisocial threat, then there will literally be nowhere left on Earth where one is allowed to love freedom without ostracism, or worse.  There will be nowhere left on Earth where Jefferson, Madison, or Washington may speak or be spoken of without ridicule.

His metaphor for America's current situation is spot-on:

A man is hanging from a cliff, with only his fingers still gripping solid rock.  The prevailing impetus is all downward, but the man continues to dangle in one place as long as that grip holds out.  If he lets go, however, his fall will be short and decisive. 

Modern civilization is that man.  America is his final, desperate grip.  On November 6, 2012, that man will either be left alone to continue his brave, heartbreaking struggle for another day, or a boot will come down on his fingers.

The entire piece is well worth your time.

EPA bureaucrats: Next year, we'll either live under their ever-more totalitarian rule, or we'll fire them from their worthless jobs

They're planning to ratchet up the war on coal before this year is out whether the regime they serve is defeated or not.

Mitt, have that executive order pen ready right after your inaugural speech.

Why we must take the Senate, too

Heritage Foundation lists 5 ways FHer-care is set to be a detriment to ordinary Americans.

Grateful for their lives

Some Hoosier women who were conceived in rape who support Richard Mourdock for Senator.

I tried to post the video directly by using the "share" button at YouTube, but it was taking forever to load.

Start your Saturday with a smile

Mitt up by by 4 in Pennsylvania per Susquehannah Polling.

Maintaining a solid 51 - 45 lead in Florida per Miami Herald / El Nuevo herald poll of likely voters.

Overflow crowd at Mitt rally in Wisconsin


Up by 5 among independents in Iowa per Gravis Marketing.

LITD cedes the floor to the Las Vegas Journal-Review

File this one under "Couldn't have said it  better myself."  The MEC's foreign policy failures make him utterly unsuited to be Commander in Chief, and his economic policies are a disaster, too.

The further revelations do no make this look any better

The regime did not convene the one group of people who are charged with knowing what resources are  available throughout the government in a moment of terrorism-related crisis.

This is per CBS. Even the MSM must now acknowledge the extent of this fiasco.

The MEC's not messianic, but he sure makes messes

Former Libyan prime minister Mahmoud Jibril says that the way the MEC regime went about facilitating the ouster of Ghaddafi and then basically ending its involvement left a power vacuum that resulted in - well, what we are now witnessing.

Benghazi: Our guys had been extremely concerned for some time

They held an emergency meeting a month before the Set. 11 attack to discuss the al-Qaeda training activity in the city and the vulnerability of the consulate - and send a top-secret cable about it to the State Department.

The overlords were perfectly willing to let these guys be sitting ducks, so as not to disrupt the meme that the MEC had vanquished al-Qaeda.

And then they - that would be the MEC, the H-word Creature, Susan Rice, Jay Carney and Leon Panetta - were perfectly willing to lie to you, to me, and to the dead guys' parents.