It’s a wonderful world, isn’t it? Such rich diversity of experience, experiences that are universal and yet unique in the eyes of each individual at the time he experiences them. In our own country alone, at any given moment, somewhere there will be someone enjoying the most delectable meal ever; someone feeling the intense pleasure of creating something truly new with their own hands and imagination; someone having an orgasm; someone mourning the untimely death of a loved one taken too soon; someone seeing their toddler take his first steps; someone beaming with love and pride as they say “I do” to the preacher while holding the hand of their soulmate; someone being served with divorce papers or an IRS audit notice; someone laughing over an after-work beer with good friends; someone experiencing the bitterness and frustration of closing the doors of a failed business enterprise for the very last time; someone worrying about how they’re going to pay the bills, or being elated over an unexpected bonus; in short, experiencing the highs, the lows, and the in-betweens that make up the lavish tapestry of an ordinary human life.

Likewise, somewhere, as reliable and predictable as yesterday’s sunrise, you can be sure that there’s a gang of liberal-fascists and their union-goon Imperial Stormtroopers doing their utmost to thwart the will of the people, undermine representative democracy, and overturn election results they don’t like by violence and intimidation. It’s just another inevitable part of the human experience. Or, perhaps, quasi-human.

Wisconsin State Senator Glenn Grothman is chased and trapped by hecklers outside of the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis. on Mar. 1, 2011. Thousands of protestors had gathered as Gov. Scott Walker delivered his budget address to the state legislature, capping off two weeks of continuous protests and demonstrations against provisions which would strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights.

Stunning, even for them. Surrounded by an angry mob, screaming in his face and preventing him from entering the Capitol as a duly-elected representative of the people, to do the job he was elected to do. For that heinous offense against the Imperium, liberals rise up as one to demand that he be punished appropriately.

Completely, illimitably disgusting, to anyone with even a tenuous grasp of and belief in the American system of government. Just watch the vid yourself, then come back here and try to tell me it ain’t.

This has gone far, far beyond legitimate protest, folks. it’s time for Walker to summon the National Guard to restore order and take the Capitol back from these savages. Rob notes something else:

When Democrats had to walk past tea party protesters around the time they were cramming Obamacare through Congress the media went nuts, reporting endlessly about how the protesters were trying to intimidate the lawmakers, etc.

So where’s the outrage about the union protesters blocking this legislator from getting into the capitol? Don’t expect it to happen, because there’s a double standard.

Damned if THAT ain’t the understatement of the century. Maybe the Wisconsin GOP legislators ought to ask about borrowing Princess Nancy’s big honkin’ gavel for a little stroll through the Leftist baboons infesting the grounds and see what ensues. Although if it was me, I’d be thinking more along the lines of tear gas, fire hoses, Kevlar, and live ammunition myself.

At 84 years old. I couldn’t do it now…and I ain’t 84. Once a sniper, always a sniper, I guess. Good stuff.

(Via Insty)

Update! And then at the exact opposite end of the spectrum of honorable manhood (and sanity), we have this:

This is simultaneously sad and hilarious. Some dude who works for a Noodles, Inc. restaurant wants to unionize he and his fellow workers so they can overthrow the “dictatorship.” The fun part is at about 3:34, when he describes the “dictatorship”: Workers are told what to cook, and how to cook it, and they’re told when to show up for work.

That “dictatorship” is otherwise known as a JOB, which is something this idiot isn’t likely to have for very long.

Not to worry; he’ll get everything necessary for his continued parasitic existence for “free” from the government. Then nobody will have to suffer the “oppression” of having to work for a living, and everything will be just peachy.

How the hell a society goes from producing men like the subject of the first part of this post to cranking out useless, whining pussies like this little leech ought to be the subject of the most intensive study we’re capable of, so as to figure out how to prevent it from ever, ever happening again.

And here’s but one of the many reasons why. It never fails to amuse me to see people just going bug-fuck nuts over some poll or other, as if it meant a damned thing. I don’t pay them any heed at all, beyond whatever entertainment value they may provide. You shouldn’t either.

It ain’t paranoia if they’re really out to get you. And it ain’t crazy conspiracy-theorizing if the conspiracy truly does exist. And it does.

INSIDERS: They really do have quite a training program, don’t they?
LLOYD: Oh sure. To understand NEA — to understand the union — read Saul Alinsky. If you read “Rules for Radicals,” (Saul Alinsky’s bible of radical organizations) you will understand NEA more profoundly than reading anything else. Because the whole organization was modeled on that kind of behavior which was really begun when NEA used Saul Alinsky as a consultant to train their own staff. That’s a very important thing to understand. You cannot possibly understand NEA without understanding Saul Alinsky. If you want to understand NEA, go to the library and get “Rules for Radicals,” by Saul Alinsky. Then you will understand the NEA.

Lots more chilling stuff at the link. The insidious and ruinous Leftist influence on our government, our country, and our culture didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t happen by accident, either. The more you learn about these people, the creepier they are. And if you think it’s too harsh or uncivil to put posts about them in the Our Enemies category, you have a lot to learn about them.

I mean, a LOT.

(Via Michelle and NEA Exposed)

Doug Powers fires a salvo at a useless lemon that not only obliterates the target, but its entire surrounding area as well.

Let’s see…taxpayer money is being dumped into a car that the public can’t afford and/or doesn’t want. Demand for the expensive product is to be created by high gas prices combined with goading the public into buying one by scaring them with a mythical crisis pushed by an enviro-hypocrite who goes around in a private jet telling everybody the oceans are going to rise and flood the same coastlines where he recently invested millions in a seaside mansion. In a nutshell, the theme park impresarios who proposed “Six Flags Over Chernobyl” had a more solid business plan.

The Volt is in part the brainchild of politicians who expect everyone to believe that we need to spend money to keep from going bankrupt, so was the “economic sense” of the thing ever really in question?

They say it’s called the “Volt” because “Massively Expensive Union Bailout” wouldn’t fit on the hood. If the batteries continue to perform poorly in cold weather, don’t look for the Volt to be scrapped, but rather for several billion taxpayer dollars to be spent on a “Winning the Future” extension cord program.

Man, that smack hurt from all the way over here. The only problem is, the people who really ought to be smarting the most from a stinging blast like that are too stupid and/or obstinate to even know they’re in the crosshairs — our Pretend pResident foremost among ‘em.

Yes, I said “crosshairs.” Stop crying already, you’re embarrassing me.

Is, literally, what it’s ALL about:

There is something that almost amounts to a twisted idealism in the Democrats’ crusade. They are fighting, not just to preserve their special privileges, but to preserve a social ideal. Or rather, they are fighting to maintain the illusion that their ideal system is benevolent and sustainable.

Unionized public-sector employment is the distilled essence of the left’s moral ideal. No one has to worry about making a profit. Generous health-care and retirement benefits are provided to everyone by the government. Comfortable pay is mandated by legislative fiat. The work rules are militantly egalitarian: pay, promotion, and job security are almost totally independent of actual job performance. And because everyone works for the government, they never have to worry that their employer will go out of business.

In short, public employment is an idealized socialist economy in miniature, including its political aspect: the grateful recipients of government largesse provide money and organizational support to re-elect the politicians who shower them with all of these benefits.

The current crisis exposes more than just the financial unsustainability of these programs. It exposes their moral unsustainability. It exposes the fact that the generosity of these welfare-state enclaves can only be sustained by forcing everyone else to perform forced labor to pay for the benefits of a privileged few.

This is why the left is treating any attempt to fundamentally reform the public workers’ paradise as an existential crisis. This is why they are reacting with the most extreme measures short of outright insurrection. When Democratic lawmakers flee the state in order to deprive their legislatures of the quorum necessary to vote, they are declaring that they would rather have no legislature than allow voting on any bill that would break the power of the unions.

The Democrats are fleeing from a lot more than their jobs as state legislators. They are fleeing from the cold, hard reality of the financial and moral unsustainability of their ideal.

It’s never worked, and it never will. But that won’t stop the “reality”-based community from mulishly insisting that we go right on trying, and that this time, they’ll finally get it “right.” Whatever that means.

Pursuant to my statement yesterday that boneheads like Eleanor Clift are unshakably convinced that liberals’ divine right to rule us all flows from their incredible intelligence and our stupidity, I’d like to propose that they all be required to answer a single tough question correctly before ever opening their yaps again to lecture us on how dazzlingly bright they are. The question should represent a knowledge of history and civics commensurate with their demonstrated grasp of these important subjects. A wrong answer to the question would permanently disqualify the brilliant Progressivist from ever holding public office. Hell, we could even make it easy on ‘em and make it multiple choice.

Something like this, say: When George Washington defeated British general Robert E Lee at Waterloo in 1939 to end the Second Vietnam War, did he immediately return to his ancestral home in Portland, Oregon before negotiating the Louisiana Purchase with Libya, thereby making his Universal Declaration of Human Rights the supreme law of the land? Or did he compose his famous 9th Symphony (commonly known as the Unfinished Requiem) first?

Then, after watching them drool on their desks for a few minutes and removing their pencils from their nostrils for them, we could ask them about something they’re more likely to actually understand, along the lines of, say, “Are the lights on in this room?” But I dunno; by making it too easy for them, we’d only be harming ourselves, I guess.

Where do union goons draw the line when it comes to protecting their turf? Over your dead body, that’s where.

Meet Eddie York. He was a workingman whose story will never scroll across Obama’s teleprompter. A nonunion contractor who operated heavy equipment, York was shot to death during a strike called by the United Mine Workers 17 years ago. Workmates who tried to come to his rescue were beaten in an ensuing melee. The head of the UMW spearheading the wave of strikes at that time? Richard Trumka. Responding to concerns about violence, he shrugged to the Virginian-Pilot in September 1993: “I’m saying if you strike a match and you put your finger in it, you’re likely to get burned.” Incendiary rhetoric, anyone?

A federal jury convicted one of Trumka’s UMW captains on conspiracy and weapons charges in York’s death. According to the Washington, D.C.-based National Legal and Policy Center, which tracks Big Labor abuse, Trumka’s legal team quickly settled a $27 million wrongful death suit filed by York’s widow just days after a judge admitted evidence in the criminal trial. An investigative report by Reader’s Digest disclosed that Trumka “did not publicly discipline or reprimand a single striker present when York was killed. In fact, all eight were helped out financially by the local.”

In Illinois, Trumka told UMW members to “kick the s**t out of every last” worker who crossed his picket lines, according to the Nashville (Ill.) News. And as the National Right to Work Foundation (pdf), the leading anti-forced unionism organization in the country, pointed out, other UMW coalfield strikes resulted in what one judge determined were “violent activities … organized, orchestrated and encouraged by the leadership of this union.”

Y’know, there’s a reason why these thugs are almost universally known as “union goons,”and have been for a very long time.

Still think passive non-violence is the correct way for Tea-Party punching bags to deal with these vile fascists? Because sooner or later, we’ll all be in their crosshairs — and they’ve proved time and again that they will stop at nothing, not even murder, to advance their agenda. Too, in times like these, anyone relying on the cops to protect not only themselves personally but the rule of law itself probably shouldn’t be all that sanguine and complacent when it comes to their personal security and self-defense. As the old gun-rights-advocate saying goes, cops ain’t bodyguards. In this case, you have to wonder if they’re even on the side of law and order at all.

Yeah, I know it all sounds harsh. Unfortunately, reality and the truth can be like that sometimes. Not saying I have all the answers here, not by a long shot. But I also can’t say I think standing helplessly by while the goon squads escalate things until they finally end up killing one or more of us is any longer the way to go. And deep down, though we may — do — lament it and what it will mean for the nation, we all know it’s going to happen. The only other alternative I can see is to back down and let them continue dismantling the country, and that ain’t no solution either.

Given a choice, I’d much rather see them bleed than us, frankly. It’d be great if all this could be resolved peaceably and civilly, but given what they’ve already shown us of their warped conception of “civil,” I’d regretfully say the chances of that are somewhere south of “none” at this point. What we’ve arrived at here — what the obstinate Left has pushed us to — is an unbridgeable chasm. They can’t back down; we shouldn’t, if we care at all about the American way of life and self-governance. That doesn’t leave us much wiggle room.

We’d best take our blibbering Veep’s advice and gird our loins here.

They really don’t know anything about how it’s supposed to work, do they?

Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift on Friday amazingly asked, “Since when does Scott Walker represent ‘the people’?”

Umm…since he took office after being elected by them, dumbass? Noel Sheppard breaks it off in the liberal twit:

Maybe someone should have told Eleanor that Walker won in 2010 by roughly the same margin Barack Obama did in 2008, as she certainly thinks the current White House resident represents “the people”.

More importantly, as is clearly evident in Clift’s protestations, Democrats elected with union money represent the people. Republicans supported by individuals don’t.

Yeah, but see, Walker isn’t a liberal, and so can’t possibly represent Duh Peepul. Not correctly, anyway.

And people who “think” like this unswervingly believe they have some sort of divinely-ordained right to run our lives, based on the clear fact that they’re so much “smarter” than everybody else.

A symptom of the larger liberal dementia:

Generations hence, when the river of time has worn this presidency’s importance to a small, smooth pebble in the stream of history, people will still marvel that its defining trait was a mania for high-speed rail projects. This disorder illuminates the progressive mind.

Remarkably widespread derision has greeted the Obama administration’s damn-the-arithmetic-full-speed-ahead proposal to spend $53 billion more (after the $8 billion in stimulus money and $2.4 billion in enticements to 23 states) in the next six years pursuant to the president’s loopy goal of giving “80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail.” “Access” and “high-speed” to be defined later.

Criticism of this optional and irrational spending—meaning: borrowing —during a deficit crisis has been withering. Only an administration blinkered by ideology would persist.

…Kasich and Walker, who were elected promising to stop the nonsense, asked Washington for permission to use the high-speed-rail money for more pressing transportation needs than a train running along Interstate 71 between Cleveland and Cincinnati, or a train parallel to Interstate 94 between Milwaukee and Madison. Washington, disdaining the decisions of Ohio and Wisconsin voters, replied that it will find states that will waste the money.

California will. Although prostrate from its own profligacy, it will sink tens of billions of its own taxpayers’ money in the 616-mile San Francisco–to–San Diego line. Supposedly 39 million people will eagerly pay much more than an airfare in order to travel slower. Between 2008 and 2009, the projected cost increased from $33 billion to $42.6 billion.

Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute notes that high-speed rail connects big-city downtowns, where only 7 percent of Americans work and 1 percent live. “The average intercity auto trip today uses less energy per passenger mile than the average Amtrak train.” And high speed (rail) will not displace enough cars to measurably reduce congestion. The Washington Post says China’s fast trains are priced beyond ordinary workers’ budgets, and that France, like Japan, has only one profitable line.

So why is America’s “win the future” administration so fixated on railroads, a technology that was the future two centuries ago? Because progressivism’s aim is the modification of (other people’s) behavior.

As always with Progressivists, in the end, it’s all about the coercion. There’s only one proper response: NUTS!

Figuring it all out:

Republicans interpreted their overwhelming victories as a mandate to change the course of the states. Specifically, they set about undoing decades of laws put in place by Democrats to favor labor unions over taxpayers.

Instead of staying on the field to defend their positions, Democratic lawmakers in both states fled to neighboring Illinois, where they hope to win with their absence what they couldn’t at the ballot box — namely, the right to control policymaking.

The lawmakers in exile call this a defense of democracy. In truth, it’s a step toward anarchy. If it catches on as a practice, it will officially end government by, of and for the people.

It’s part of a disturbing trend by Democrats to embrace a by-any-means-necessary approach to governing. We saw it during passage of Obamacare, when the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate blew up the rules to block a filibuster. In Massachusetts, Democrats used after-the-fact law changes in a failed attempt to keep a Republican from succeeding Ted Kennedy.

Obama trashed bankruptcy law to move the United Auto Workers ahead of General Motors’ and Chrysler’s secured creditors. And his regulatory agencies are bypassing Congress to enact policies he knows the elected representatives would never approve.

The strategy exposes the arrogant liberal conviction that they are justified in imposing their will on the people, because only they know what’s best for America.

Now you’re getting it. Hell, they’ve only been saying it since the dawn of Progressivism, a century ago.

(Via Insty)

Jonah links to a Corner post of his from last year, and it’s worth the look back:

Anyway, what really interests me is the question of what the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War really was, if it wasn’t the existence of nukes.

Some might say the military-industrial complex or the national-security state. But not me. To me, the most obvious dangerous legacy of the Cold War would have to be the damage the Soviets did to the world. I don’t mean the millions they murdered; those dead do not threaten us now, even if they should haunt us.

I mean the relentless distortion of the truth, the psychological violence they visited on the West and the World via their useful idiots and their agents. I’m thinking not merely of the intellectual corruption of the American Left (which even folks like Richard Rorty had to concede), but the corruption of reformers and their movements around the globe. Soviet propaganda still contaminates, while nuclear fallout does not. Lies about America, the West, and the nature of democratic capitalism live on throughout the third world and in radioactive pockets on American campuses.

The Soviet effort to foster wars of national liberation, to poison the minds of the “Bandung Generation,” to deracinate cultures from their own indigenous building blocks of democracy, to destroy non-Marxist competitors interested in reform, to create evil and despotic regimes that are seen as “authentic” because they represent the “true will” of their subjugated and beaten down peoples: these seem to me to amount to the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War.

Yep, I’d have to agree. And part of what’s dangerous and disturbing about this legacy is that the millions of dead Jonah mentions don’t haunt the Left as they should; they don’t care any more now than they did then.

As if the diseased legacy of the original Progressive movement wasn’t bad enough all by itself.

Update! See what I mean?

‘If one thinker left a major indelible mark on the 20th century,’ Hobsbawm remarks, ‘it was [Marx].’ Seventy years after Marx’s death, for better or for worse, one third of humanity lived under political regimes inspired by his thought. Well over 20 per cent still do. Socialism has been described as the greatest reform movement in human history.

Sick. Just sick. Pejman reminds this douchebag of the inconvenient truths he leaves out:

Note the “for better or for worse” bit, as though there can really be any debate that Marxism’s impact–with all of the poverty, environmental damage, intellectual and artistic atrophy, loss of freedom, and massive human rights abuses and butchery brought about by Marxism and its natural consequences–might not have been “for worse.”

The mind reels. Even if we accept the absurd and convenient argument that socialism was only “most necessary where it was least possible,” such an observation would be sufficient to show the intellectually bankrupt nature of Marxism and socialism. Of course, Eagleton offers us this “argument” as a way of excusing Marxism for its unerring capacity to bring poverty and misery wherever it is instituted. Marxism failed, you see, because it was only tried “in socially devastated, politically benighted, economically backward regions of the globe where no Marxist thinker before Stalin had ever dreamed that it could take root.” Really? Does Eagleton mean that it wasn’t tried in Europe–either through elections, or through outright Soviet imposition–where Marxist thinkers (including Marx himself) fervently hoped and firmly believed that it could and would take root?

Equally absurd is Eagleton’s and Hobsbawm’s dismissal of “the idea that Marxism leads inevitably to such monstrosities.” It’s not an idea. It’s plain historical fact.

And such murderous repression having been repeated in every nation ever to march down the road to socialist Hell, the blockhead historical revisionism of misty-eyed liberal saps notwithstanding, it’s a feature, not a bug.

Plenty more here, and I couldn’t agree more with Pej’s title. Read it all.

Hanson provides some:

So what I remember most was our constant rationalization of our lot. In self-righteous fashion we reminded everyone that we were paid only for nine months’ work and that teaching was an art, a noble profession, not a mere job.

We talked of stress and the wear and tear of trying to teach those who not merely were not prepared, but seemed almost deliberately to resist instruction. Yet, again, teaching had different hazards from the ones encountered on the farm, where turning on an electrical pump if you had a foot in a watered furrow could spell electrocution, or catching a leg between a tractor fender and a tire tread meant it was lost.

Out in the fields, wear and tear did not result from rude deans and abusive colleagues, but arose from rather provocative characters who were willing to resort to fists, knives, or guns if one complained about how poorly they had tied down a load of fruit pallets, or how they had botched pruning a peach tree, or wired a pump wrongly. At school I had to navigate away from a vengeful colleague who tried to sabotage my classics program; on the farm I was once almost run over by the speeding Buick of a drug-soaked and armed disgruntled worker whom I had caught stealing tools from the barn. The one arena was stressful, the other life-threatening.

My purpose in relating the divide is not to suggest that the brutality of farming bears much resemblance to the private-sector office or that a university professorship is at all comparable to the much more arduous duties of an inner-city middle- or high-school teacher. But all that said, I think that we forget how fortunate teachers are in the 21st century, in terms of compensation, hours spent at work, and the general absence of physical danger, at least in comparison to the lineman, the garbage collector, or the interstate trucker. I have met hundreds of teachers who have had only one steady job: teaching. I have seldom met a land-leveler, company field man, or tractor mechanic who had not worked at a half-dozen jobs over his career — and rarely by choice.

There is a reason why our state capitols are not usually flooded by cash-strapped farmers on tractors ditching their work when the price of wheat crashes. During a power outage, electric-company linemen do not often call in sick. Those who walk nimbly between IEDs in the Hindu Kush or who braved RPGs in Fallujah did not in mediis rebus pause to suggest that they had gotten a raw deal on their far too frequent deployments. Very few corporals and privates ask medics to write false medical excuses.

So, yes, teaching is a noble profession upon which the future of our youth rests. It is not easy, and it is not as lucrative as the law or medicine. No doubt day-traders and the architects of hedge funds can make more in an hour than a sixth-grade social-studies teacher earns in a year, without either the caring or the commensurate work. Yet in comparison to most workers in the private sector, teachers are, in terms of working conditions and compensation, blessed — which is why we are told of Wisconsin that the problem is not really one of renegotiating wages, benefits, and pensions.

Anybody who whines about making 100k a year for teaching ought to try truck driving for 35 (if you’re an OTR guy and don’t mind living full-time in a sleeper cab, taking all your showers and eating all your meals in truck stops, you might see 60k) for a while, and see if they like that any better.

Update! Asshole cop misunderstands a few very basic things:

To the extent the policeman in the video above, while off duty, wished to participate in the political process, that was fine. But the policeman went much further, and suggested to the protesters that he would disobey the Governor. The announcement by the police union members that they would refuse an order from the legislature to evict the protesters from the building also went far beyond mere political speech.

It’s unclear to me what the lines of command are in Wisconsin, and whether the departments in which these policemen work ultimately are under the control of the Governor and/or legislature. Clearly, the Governor does control the National Guard. Regardless, the police union members involved have actively advocated and offered to participate in insurrection against the legal authority in Wisconsin. 

More than anything, this shows the dangers of public sector unions. Those who work for the state occupy a different position than those who work in the private sector because they carry the weight of state authority. When those state workers are in law enforcement, they carry special obligations not to use their positions for political purposes.

When an off-duty policeman wearing police insignia takes a megaphone and announces that he and his fellow police union members will disobey orders, that policeman — at a minimum — has dishonored his pledge to uphold the law.

He appears to have forgotten who he really works for — it ain’t the unions, and it ain’t the bused-in Leftist rabble defiling the Capitol, desecrating war memorials, and defecating on legitimate republican government. It’s the taxpayers. Yes, the same ones who elected Gov Walker to clean up this mess…and who pay both his and the above cop’s salary, and have had enough of involuntarily underwriting the union/Democrat Socialist big-government circle-jerk.

New Civility update! Yet more union-goon violence:

Sacramento’s ABC News 10 reported on the union rally and Tea Party counter rally in Sacramento today. ABC’s online report makes cursory mention of an incident of union violence directed at Tea Party activist Rodney Stanhope: “Police cited one man for battery after he allegedly shoved a tea party supporter.”

I spoke to Stanhope, as he drove to the hospital for x-rays and treatment for the injuries sustained at the rally, and asked him what happened. Mr. Stanhope said that he was with a group of about 150 Tea Party activists across the street from the MoveOn.org-organized union rally. A union man with a bullhorn,Richard Andazola, 28, was yelling across the street at the Tea Party activists, calling them “fascists.”

Then one of the Tea Party activists, also bullhorn equipped, replied, “We pay your salary!”

This enraged Andazola, who, according to Stanhope, rushed the Tea Partiers, chanting “Fascists go home! Fascists go home!” He violently shoved Stanhope twice, the second time apparently striking Stanhope in the throat…

And nobody stepped in to stomp his worthless ass into the ground like he deserved, and he’ll get clean away with his unanswered attack, and it’ll all be forgotten until the next time — at which time the whole process will be repeated, up to and including the supine helplessness of the Tea Partiers. Which, if the fascist union goons keep to their long-established schedule, will be any minute now.

Jeff says some of the same things I was trying to get across the other day here. Only he does it pithier…uhh, more pithily…uhhh…oh, you know what I mean, dammit.

The irony is that we’re sitting on an abundance of oil and natural gas right here in the US, and yet our own government — increasingly run by unelected leftist ideologues appointed to power in regulatory agencies like the EPA — won’t let us get to it, much less use it.

Make no mistake: oil prices are certainly being affected by the unrest in the middle east. But Libya exports only around 2% of the world’s oil. So scapegoating our soaring oil prices on Libya is a convenient progressive fiction. Obama himself told us energy prices would soar under his regime, as he planned to saddle the US with a Soviet-style industrial regulatory schemes. And unable to get them through Congress, he has concluded he can implement them through his regulatory agencies.

King Obama is transformational, you see: he doesn’t have to abide federal law, be it a ruling on ObamaCare coming out of Florida or a ruling on drilling coming out of Lousiana; he can declare on the spot the unconstitutionality of a duly passed, bi-partisan supported law and instruct his Justice Department not to defend the law in court; he can gin up crises, then use those crises to nationalize industry; he can force through a public takeover of health care against the wishes of the American people, and then issue waivers to those who reward his generosity, allowing them to escape the economic destruction of the system he’s forcing into place.

The American people voted for a symbol in 2008. Just not the symbol they thought they were voting for. Because Obama represents not the hope and change he promised, but rather the soft-tyranny that was always at the end of the progressive movement’s playbook.

The irony, she does indeed abound. The conclusion he arrives at is…sobering, at best. And, sadly, correct.

Update! Dang it, screwed up the title, accidentally taking one from a post I ain’t done with yet. Fixed now.

We need one, now more than ever.

Reagan and Earnhardt were polar opposites in terms of style.  Reagan wore the white hat, optimistically championing the virtues of freedom, embracing American exceptionalism, defeating the Soviets without firing a bullet, and comforting the nation after tragedies, such as when the space shuttle Challenger exploded upon takeoff.  Reagan was sunny, graceful, and had a majestic nature about him.

Earnhardt often wore the black hat.  He got under the skin of drivers.  He bumped cars out of the way, forcing himself to the victory lane.  He glared at his enemies—on the racetrack and off of it.  There was no smoothness and grace.  He was curt, to the point, and sometimes in-your-face.

But both men captured the imagination of the common man because, deep down, both were exactly that.

And both played to win, and took no shit off of the anklebiters or anybody else, contrary to the Leftymedia’s recent attempts to guilefully co-opt Reagan. It’s one of the reasons people were so disappointed in Dubya, and so admire Palin. She knows, as Bush should’ve, that attempting to appear above the fray while the yapping attack poodles of the Left nibble away at your feet is no way to do it; when you’re attacked, you bite back as hard as you can. You grab the little dust-mop fuckers and sling ‘em hard enough to break their scrawny necks, leaving them quivering on the sidewalk in a raggedy heap.

It’s also why Mitch Daniel’s sub-moronic statements last week about his-buddies-his-pals-his-colleagues the Fleebaggers were so dismaying. Democrat Socialists have demonstrated over and over again that they’re no conservative’s friend: they’ll be civil only when they think it will get them something; they’ll respect the rule of law and the will of the people only as long as those things can be cynically manipulated in their favor; they’ll “compromise” only when it means they get their way.

Meanwhile, they’ll lie, smear, connive, and swindle their way to socialist utopia, dragging the rest of us with them, willing or no. Pliant dupes like McCain will get their hands bitten off every time they try to reach across the aisle, stunned to see their names mentioned unfavorably in the WaPo and the NYT any time they try to go against the grain; nice go-along-get-along moderate types will be left in confusion as the Almighty State envelops and smothers them. Disingenuous, unreliable, finger-to-the-prevailing wind types like Romney aren’t even worth discussing in this context; they’re worse than no help at all.

We’ll succeed in truly reclaiming America for liberty and Constitutional government only when we have leadership that understands this from deep in their bones, and unequivocally refuses to play their game any longer — and not a moment before. Most of us have been waiting a long, long time for it; we can only hope we find our new Intimidator — a truly tough, no-nonsense, rough-and-tumble type who isn’t afraid to get a little blood on his shoes from kicking the poodles to the curb — before it’s too late.

Saturday Steyn is BACK, baby!

You don’t have to go to Athens to find “public servants” happy to take it out on the public. In Madison, politicized doctors provide fake sick notes for politicized teachers to skip class. In New York’s Christmas snowstorm, Sanitation Department plough drivers are unable to clear the streets, with fatal consequences for some residents. On the other hand, they did manage to clear the snow from outside the Staten Island home of Sanitation Dept head honcho John Doherty, while leaving all surrounding streets pristinely clogged. Three hundred Sanitation Department workers have salaries of over $100,000 per year. In retirement, you get a pension of 66 grand per annum plus excellent health benefits, all inflation proofed.

That’s what “collective bargaining” is about: It enables unions rather than citizens to set the price of government. It is, thus, a direct assault on republican democracy, and it needs to be destroyed. Unlovely as they are, the Greek rioters and the snarling thugs of Madison are the logical end point of the advanced social democratic state: not an oppressed underclass, but a spoiled overclass, rioting in defense of its privileges and insisting on more subsidy, more benefits, more featherbedding, more government.

Big Unions fund Big Government. The union slices off two per cent of the workers’ pay and sluices it to the Democratic Party, which uses it to grow government, which also grows unions, which thereby grows the number of two-per-cent contributions, which thereby grows the Democratic Party, which thereby grows government…Repeat until bankruptcy. Or bailout.

Or counterrevolution.

Two very damned useful tools for Google Chrome users linked here. I’ve tried ‘em, and they both work like a charm.

Heartbreaking:

SEAN got a heartbreaking phone call from his five-year-old daughter on Christmas Day.

He said: “I hadn’t seen her since February and she said, ‘Daddy, I haven’t seen you for ages. When am I going to see you again?’

“Later I got a text from my ex saying my daughter had been nagging her all day and she agreed to let her see me on a certain day.

“I was so excited. But just before the date, my ex cancelled it.”

Sean’s partner left him for another man four years ago. His ex makes it virtually impossible for him to stay in his daughter’s life.

Sean, 37, said: “She told me, ‘You can’t see her any more’ when we split. We are in and out of court. My ex gets legal aid but it’s cost me around £12,000 to £15,000.

“I won a contact order but my ex ignores it. We have been back and forth to Cafcass (the Children And Family Court Advisory And Support Service) who are supposed to mediate between parties but they’ve been virtually useless.

There are way, way too many stories like Sean’s here in our country too: of vindictive, evil women — yes, I said it, and it’s perfectly correct — using children as weapons to take some sort of sick “revenge” on the kids’ fathers. Chances are every one of you knows of at least one such story personally. And if you, as one of these abused men, are forced to rely on the Almighty State to secure your rights as a father, well, frankly, odds are overwhelming that you’re well and truly screwed.

It ain’t right. It just ain’t right.

(Via Insty)

Hey, anybody remember when TV and movie comedy was actually funny?

Q. True or False, a pea can last as long as 5,000 years.
A. George Gobel: Boy, it sure seems that way sometimes.

Q. You’ve been having trouble going to sleep. Are you probably a man or a woman?
A. Don Knotts: That’s what’s been keeping me awake.

Q. Which of your five senses tends to diminish as you get older?
A. Charley Weaver: My sense of decency.

Q. Charley, you’ve just decided to grow strawberries. Are you going to get any during the first year?
A. Charley Weaver: Of course not, I’m too busy growing strawberries.

Q. It is the most abused and neglected part of your body, what is it?
A. Paul Lynde: Mine may be abused, but it certainly isn’t neglected.

Q. Back in the old days, when Great Grandpa put horseradish on his head, what was he trying to do?
A. George Gobel: Get it in his mouth.

Q. Who stays pregnant for a longer period of time, your wife or your elephant?
A. Paul Lynde: Who told you about my elephant?

Good stuff, all of it. And not a fart joke, a bong joke, a kick in the nuts, or a drunk teenager puking to be found.

Spitting on American soldiers — if only figuratively this time. “I’m just horrified that you would treat a memorial this way, really. Seriously. And I don’t understand why you’re not troubled by it.” Then you don’t really understand the Left, Ann. As Dave in Texas says: “Enjoy how it works out boys. Thanks for the soft underbelly.”

This is what they are. This is what they do. Worst of all:

Meade and I confront them, and we’re told we’re the first people who’ve had a problem with it. I try to explain how that attempted defense of the behavior is only going to make it look worse. It means that of all these crowds of people in the Capitol, no one else has noticed or cared enough to say anything.

Truly nauseating. But then again, maybe any decent Americans who happened by were cowed by the likelihood of sustaining yet another union-sponsored beating if they said anything.

Which, by my reckoning, sort of disqualifies them as decent Americans, frankly.

We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn.

A lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill are terrified of a government shutdown. Look at what happened in 1995, they say, when Newt Gingrich forced a showdown with Bill Clinton and got his clock cleaned. It was a disaster the party can’t afford to repeat.

But another view is emerging in Republican circles. Perhaps GOP strategists have learned the wrong lesson from 1995. Maybe this time, while Republicans shouldn’t seek a shutdown, they shouldn’t fear one, either. For five reasons:

One, if shutting down the government in 1995 was such a catastrophe, how come the GOP not only kept control of the House in the 1996 elections but remained the majority party in the House for a decade to come? The voter revenge predicted at the time did not happen.

Two, even if the ’95 shutdown hurt the GOP — and there’s no doubt the party suffered wounds inflicted not only by Clinton but also by themselves — today’s voters are in a different mood. “We have fiscal crises at the federal, state, and local level, and voters understand that,” says Bill Paxon, a former Republican lawmaker and veteran of the shutdown. “Back in ’95, we were whistling into the wind — we were trying to preach fiscal discipline when voters were saying, ‘Hey, there’s not a problem.’ ”

Read the rest of York’s reasons, and then read this, which I meant to mention when it was first posted but didn’t manage to get to somehow.

If the GOPcong is smart (I know, I know) it will give the Dems what they want and engineer a shutdown – one that keeps the Social Security and Medicare checks coming, but closes the IRS and the hordes of worthless agencies busy trying to rule and regulate even the tiniest aspects of our daily lives.

After about two weeks of folks noticing the the world hadn’t ended when the Department of Education, the Labor Department, the FDA, or the BAFTA went on extended leave of absense, the Dems would be screaming to turn the state back on. The GOP should refuse, and I suspect that if they did so, they’d find most of the voters – the taxpaying ones, at least – cheering them on.

They won’t do it quite that way, of course; the Ogabe junta and our rulers in the permanent bureaucracy will do everything they can to make the shutdown as painful as possible, and the Ministry of Propaganda will see to it that every least whine from Americans inconvenienced while on vacation because the park was closed will get the broadest and most sympathetic possible airing.

But as York mentions, this ain’t 1995. It may not be as big as it ought to be quite yet, but we do indeed have a much bigger megaphone now for getting the truth out than we did then. And the unavoidable fact that liberals will lie any way they can about us should never, ever stop us from telling the truth about them, and from doing the right and necessary thing. It’s the worst, most damaging thing we can do to them, and to judge from their near-constant screeching hysteria these days, they know it.

Shut the damnable monstrosity down. As Bill says, let the people see for themselves just what kind of effect all those “nonessential” government employees have on them — beyond hoovering up enormous amounts of their money and un-Constitutionally micromanaging their existences, that is. Letting voters see the more deleterious of those effects removed for a while may just end up being a bigger disaster for the statists than having them witness the less-than-dire impact of giving all the goldbricks, paper-shufflers, rent-seekers, and layabouts some time off from snootering and hectoring us.

Thank God we “professionalized” airport security, eh?

An undercover TSA agent was able to get through security at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport with a handgun during testing of the enhanced-imaging body scanners, according to a high-ranking, inside source at the Transportation Security Administration.

The source said the undercover agent carried a pistol in her undergarments when she put the body scanners to the test. The officer successfully made it through the airport’s body scanners every time she tried, the source said.

TSA officials said they were quickly acting to close the security gap revealed by the failed tests, by issuing new regulations that will require all passengers to remove all articles of clothing before entering any airport terminal. Passengers must remain completely unclothed throughout the duration of their flight and disembarkation, being allowed to dress themselves only upon exiting their final-destination terminal.

The new, stricter rules, which a TSA spokesperson acknowledged might create a “slight inconvenience that may make some passengers uncomfortable,” will go into effect immediately. The spokesperson also added, “Muslims will, of course, be exempted, due to their admittedly superior culture’s wise and just emphasis on body modesty.”

And the bleating sheep responded, “If even one life is saved…”

I may have made some of that up, by the way. But I wouldn’t want to place any bets against it happening just the same.

(Via Dan Mitchell)

Scott asks a silly question:

Why are welfare state liberals like our president and his congressional allies perpetually seeking to appropriate the income and manage the lives of productive citizens? Why can’t they tell us when they will have taken all that it is right to take, so we can relax, secure in the enjoyment of our property?

The question answers itself: they see no limits on their “right to take,” it isn’t your property, and you will never be secure in the enjoyment of it. Therefore, we must never relax, if we intend someday to be free again.

Update! They lie. They’re scum. They must be exposed, and ultimately, stopped.

His Majesty: hell, no.

Amid all of this, the Obama administration treats America’s domestic-petroleum supply like the Smithsonian’s Hope Diamond: something to be observed and admired, but not touched.

“The Bureau of Land Management has created a lot of uncertainty related to onshore leases,” says the American Petroleum Institute’s Erik Milito. “They have added redundant steps in the land-use-study process. They are adding layers that delay opportunities for oil and gas development on federal land.”

The picture at sea is no better.

“The administration has at least 40 exploration plans and 40 development plans that have not been acted upon,” Milito adds. “We understand that dozens of oil-spill-response plans require action as well. This is in addition to the environmental assessments that must now be completed for the exploration plans. They cannot approve permits to allow drilling to commence until they address those items.”

“In addition, this may be the first year since 1964 where we will not have a lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico,” Milito continues. “A recently announced supplemental environmental-impact report for the Gulf may not be ready until 2012.  Holding these lease sales is critical to our economic and energy security because they provide the opportunity for long-term investments in American jobs and energy sources.” 

Short-term delays can cause long-term stasis. A Wood Mackenzie studycommissioned by the API found that a one-year delay in granting permits could render “sub-economic” 13 out of 25 deepwater oil and gas fields. Those 13 fields represent 2.7 billion barrels in potential oil reserves (which would satisfy about five months of U.S. demand) and 540,000 barrels of daily output. Such a loss would slash Gulf of Mexico production by 27 percent.

President Obama can bow before windmills, and Vice President Biden can cheerlead for a shiny, new, national train set. But none of that changes the fact that — like it or not — America relies heavily on oil today, for jobs, commerce, and our very existence. As bad luck would have it, oil comes mainly from an area that is as stable as a prison riot. “Precarious” barely describes America’s predicament.

And as bad judgment would have it, we have an America-hating Marxist squatting in the Oval Office who thinks he can cure the nation’s energy ills by waving a Green magic wand around — or, more precisely, who considers adherence to his radical Watermelon-extremist ideals way more important than meeting the nation’s pressingly real energy needs.

As long as King Ogabe remains on his DC throne, we’ll not only have to eat cake; we’ll have to find a way to use it to fuel our cars, too.

Once again, McCarthy is right on the money:

There is a simple, compelling case that public-sector unionization should never have been permitted in the first place, that FDR’s predictions that such a system would be rife with corruption have been realized in spades, and that the arrangement has the country on the fast-track to bankruptcy. Moreover, despite the rate and pace at which public-sector unions have lined their pockets over the past quarter century, the quality the public gets from its “servants” decreases in direct proportion to the public unions’ ever-inflating sense of entitlement.

The case was forcefully made just yesterday by Jonah here and by Peter Ferrara at Pajamas. And they demonstrated that proponents can advance the case while illustrating that they are not anti-union, that we appreciate the contributions to a decent society that private sector unions have undeniably made. This is not a pro-corporate fat-cat argument; it’s a pro-us argument.

The public-sector employees work for us — they are not beaten down by “the man,” “the system,” or whatever bogeyman the lefties are using today. The only “collective bargaining” they should be permitted is the regular legislative process that everyone else who wants something from the public purse needs to go through. And I can tell you from personal experience, having worked in the public sector for over two decades — and having felt honored to represent the public in court despite making a lot less money than I could have made as a private attorney — that the real public servants understand this. The people driving this train, and driving us into bankruptcy, are left-wing activists whose power hinges on maintaining this perverse system in which unions effectively sit on both sides of the negotiations, passing piles of public money over and under the table.

Governor Walker is a very persuasive fellow and he has a soapbox he will probably never have again thanks to the dreadful behavior of the opposition. This is not a time to go for incremental improvements. This is a moment when the game is there for the taking.

It certainly is, and Walker would seem to be just the man to do it. If not now, when?