For those of you who made it one of your New Year’s resolutions to support this site with that bit of disposable income you might otherwise spend on Subway meal deals or twelve packs of faddish, extra-hoppy IPAs — and I imagine that numbers in the hundreds of thousands of you — consider this post my gift to you all.

Don’t mention it.

Thursday update: Thanks to all of you who have so far contributed. I’m about half-way to my target. I’ll keep this post up through Sunday, then put it to bed. Hopefully with a hot water bottle and a glass of scotch. And maybe a hooker, if it turns out you people get really generous.

From erstwhile Moby “RyanBacon,” who doesn’t much like that he can’t get back on to comment under his latest identity:

Jeff, I hate to break it to you, but your little circle of sycophants is suffering from some serious PMS. I think you're all beginning to realize that yes, Romney will be your nominee, as soon as he disposes of Santorum and Gingrich. Gosh, that's a funny sentence to write. Did you ever in your wildest dreams imagine that your field would be THIS weak? No Sarah. No Christie. No Pizza Man. All the fire and passion that might have been is gone. Teabaggers? Useful idiots in 2010, now pushed safely back into the basement.

But hey, it will be fun to see your wail and gnash your teeth as you slouch towards the inevitable. The "vain thrashings of the beaten hopefuls," as my best friend recently put it.

I'll be watching you, boy. Poor little Goldstein, boy-child, begging for donations to keep your circle-jerk alive.

I always find it amusing how trolls like “Ryan” — whose entire political philosophy involves taking money from “the rich” and redistributing it to the “needy,” take such evident offense at my fundraisers. Is it the “begging,” do you think? Or is it that, unlike him — who is reduced to trying to claw his way back onto my site under a variety of names and emails just to get attention — I am actually able to cultivate readers who, of their own free will, donate because they find some value in what I do, or in the platform I provide?

Ironically, if I eschewed fundraisers, quit the site altogether, and then sat on my ass collecting a government check, “Ryan” would fight tooth and nail for the government’s right to take your money by force, you all being “the rich” by virtue of holding jobs, and give some of it to me — after first whetting its own beak. No begging involved!

The saddest part being I doubt the double standard’s ever even occurred to him, so consumed is he by envy and a desire for power.

Scratch a prog, find a fascist.

****
Oh, and while I’m here, let me take this opportunity to put in writing my very best Happy Birthday wishes to my boy, who turned 8 today. It seems only yesterday he poppe his li’l cottage cheese-covered head out from my wife’s hoohah and greeted the world. And yet tomorrow, he’ll be hosting his first ever slumber party / Nerf Gun Battle Royale in the evening, after wrestling in the district tournament in the AM.

A father couldn’t have a better son than I have, and I hope one day he sees this little poem, which I wrote especially for today:

Roses are red
violets are blue
Satch loves his Daddy
And his Daddy
wishes he’d keep his goddamned room tidy.
(But he loves Satch, too).

Go, ruling class! Go Team!

Who needs freedom when you can have power?

****
update: Besides, as the Romney campaign lectures, the GOP primaries are “not about picking someone even with your own beliefs and principles. This is about picking a person that can beat Barack Obama, period.”

Just so you know.

But no worries: should we ever really need to be engaged in two separate theaters at once, we can always just ship over all the new union enforcers and have them set up picket lines — or, in a pinch, let them pull, say, the North Korean president into an alley and truncheon him to death with a blackjack.

Problem solved — and with significant savings that can then be used to build bigger and more robust bureaucratic machinery right here at home!

Progress!

Bill Wilson, ALG:

Since Barack Obama assumed office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the total population over age 16 has grown by 5.845 million to 240.5 million, and yet, since then, the civilian labor force has actually shrunk by 349,000 — from about 154.2 million to 153.8 million.

This is a startling contradiction, and it is at the heart of why the unemployment rate is much higher than the 8.5 percent being reported.

The problem is that the measured civilian labor force participation rate has fallen from 65.7 percent to 64 percent since Jan. 2009, reflecting people who have lost hope and simply stopped looking for work. If those people were still counted, the actual civilian labor force would be 4.176 million higher than is reported at about 158 million.

Based on this analysis, the number of unemployed is actually closer to 17 million instead of the 13 million reported jobless. That is simply astounding.

Instead of 8.5 percent, the effective unemployment rate should be closer to 10.9 percent, and the underemployed closer to 17.4 percent, or 27.3 million. This is what we mean when we say that the unemployment rate is no longer a valid economic indicator.

[...]

To get the economy moving again, the government needs to slash corporate tax rates, which are the highest in the world of advanced economies. It is imperative that the regulatory overkill come to an end. The dollar needs to be strengthened to lower costs and stabilize energy and food costs. The debt needs to be paid down and retired, and the budget balanced. Onerous federal securities laws and state-by-state blue sky laws need to be repealed that make it cost-ineffective for new businesses to raise capital.

In short, it must become competitive to do business here in America again. And that will probably not happen so long as Obama is in office. It is clear the nation needs new leadership that is intent on actually creating jobs and restoring hope, instead of ignoring the despair of Obama’s lost labor force.

Not surprisingly, the ObamaCons are gaming the unemployment numbers, and with the help of a compliant and complicit legacy media, they are creating and normalizing the narrative of a slowly healing economy under Obama’s steady hand — a complete and utter lie being manufactured into a conventional “truth” through a cynical propaganda effort coming from the White House and being perpetuated by an activist mainstream press bent on protecting its progressive champion.

However, as Jim Pethokoukis points out, for ObamaCo to try running a re-election campaign on a carefully constructed mirage is risky:

Those headline economic numbers are terribly misleading, hardly reflecting the devastation most Americans still see every day. An 8.5 percent unemployment rate? Please. If the size of the U.S. labor force was as large as it was when Barack Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be 10.9 percent. But since so many people have gotten discouraged and stopped looking for work– and thus disappeared by government statisticians — the jobless number has been artificially depressed. A better gauge of the jobs picture is the broader U-6 rate, which includes part-timers who would rather have full-time jobs. It stands at a whopping 15.2 percent.

Then there is that 200,000 number. As Goldman Sachs points out:

Part of the strong gain reflected a 42k increase in employment for “couriers and messengers”, which likely reflects temporary employment for holiday gift delivery persons. A similar spike occurred last December and was reversed in the following month, indicating that the payroll statistics are not properly seasonally adjusting for this type of hiring. Taking this into account, December employment growth was still firmer than the preceding two months, but the underlying trend is likely still below 200k.

And even 8.5 percent is way off from where Team Obama said the unemployment rate would be if Congress passed the $800 billion stimulus [...]

[...]

[...] as it is, this may well be the zenith of the Obama recovery, what with Europe weakening and massive policy uncertainty here at home — including massive tax hikes scheduled for 2013.

The “beauty” of Obama’s campaigning strategy is that, if the economy craters, it is not his fault. Bush, Wall Street, selfish millionaires and billionaires, a political conspiracy to thwart him, racism — these are all to blame. If the economy improves, it’s because of him — and his willingness to fight a recalcitrant, politicized congress and take bold steps to get American going again, because, well, “we can’t wait” (unless there’s a tee time available; in which case, what’s another four hours?). If the jobs numbers don’t reach the magic 8% unemployment, even with all the tinkering (Matt McDonald at Hamilton Place Strategies notes that to reach that point, the economy would have to grow at 4.8% and yield 254,000 jobs monthly between now and the run-up to the election, a clip we haven’t seen since 1999), Obama will simply point to the slow decline in rates he’ll be able to massage out of the data and then lie directly and without reservation to the American people.

Because he’s all in — and as the last few days have shown, he has no fidelity to the Constitution, and in fact looks for ways to actively subvert it in order to assure power and control, and the continuation of the leftist project to reduce the role of representative government and build a technocratic Utopia run by a centralized bureaucracy and a permanent power elite.

For the children.

RS McCain asks the question:

Conventional wisdom suggests that the social conservative message that fueled Santorum’s surge in the Iowa caucuses, where evangelical Protestants are an influential constituency, will not go over well in New Hampshire. Yet Santorum appears determined to try to prove the conventional wisdom wrong.

During an afternoon appearance at a gathering of college students in Manchester, Santorum was challenged on his opposition to same-sex marriage, which the New Hampshire legislature approved in June 2009. Instead of brushing off the question, Santorum engaged in what the liberal blog Think Progress called a “Socratic dialogue” with his student questioner. “So, are we saying that everyone should have the right to marry?” Santorum asked. “So, anyone can marry anybody else.… So, anybody can marry several people?”

His implicit comparison of homosexuality to polygamy was, of course, offensive to liberal sensibilities, and an annoyance to many Republicans who nowadays view social issues as a distraction or political hindrance that prevents their party from appealing to independent voters. However, Santorum seemed confident to the point of boldness Thursday, and there were good reasons for his confidence. Since his unexpectedly strong showing in Iowa, his campaign says, he’s been raising money at the blistering pace of $1 million a day. And Santorum’s refusal to trim his sails in regard to his conservative stances on social issues may be much wiser than the conventional wisdom.

[...]

Polls are lagging indicators for a suddenly surging campaign like Santorum’s, but the latest New Hampshire poll — commissioned by the Washington Times — showed him breaking into double digits for the first time. He is still a distant fifth in the Real Clear Politics average of New Hampshire polls, and it is too early to tell if Santorum can replicate his feat in Iowa, where his vote total on caucus night exceeded the final Des Moines Register poll by a full 10 percentage points. And his campaign is seeing signs of a similar surge here.

“We feel the excitement’s building out there,” Santorum’s campaign manager Mike Biundo said Thursday afternoon. “The crowds are getting bigger. More reporters are covering us. It feels pretty good.”

Biundo is a veteran New Hampshire operative and, while pundits have frequently asserted that Santorum had no organization outside Iowa, in fact he has made more campaign appearances here than any other candidate except Huntsman. While it’s nearly impossible to imagine that Santorum could fare as well here as he did in Iowa, he may once again exceed expectations, lending weight to the perception that he is the conservative with genuine momentum going into the South Carolina showdown.

Thoughts of political strategy, however, may have nothing to do with Santorum’s insistence on standing firmly on his social conservative stances. A devout Catholic father of seven, Santorum can’t be accused of “pandering,” when he is simply stating his own firm beliefs. And contrary to the conventional wisdom, his message appeared to win him admirers in the Tea Party crowd at Windham High. As they left the auditorium Thursday night, many of them were carrying home the candidate’s yard signs emblazoned with his campaign slogan, “Join the Fight.”

As several commenters here have pointed out, New Hampshire — though it is traditionally a kind of Rockefeller Republican stronghold — may nevertheless contain just the kind of Reagan Democrats who, as Tea Partiers voting in an open primary, could join with social conservatives (and some movement conservatives) to provide Santorum with a suprisingly strong showing.

One of Santorum’s great strengths, it seems to me, is that he is willing to stand and answer questions — to defend his positions and, importantly, to make clear what those positions actually are. That is, he tells you what he believes and is willing to tell you why he believes it, and his arguments appear genuine, which I suspect wins over grudging respect and new admirers from those who realize that, under a conservative stewardship, the presidency won’t be an monarchy, and so there is really no reason to fear Santorum’s religiosity: the US will not drift into a theocracy under a constitutionalist, and in fact, it has moved in the direction of a secularist dictatorship under progressive statism precisely because the statist agenda has been to remove religious competition and replace God with the State.

You don’t have to agree with Santorum on every issue; and he wouldn’t expect you to, as he’s made clear in interviews. But as with Newt Gingrich, whose earlier surge was fueled by a concentration on substance, Santorum’s willingness to stand and explain himself and his thinking is a proving to be refreshing to voters used to canned and polished responses from slick technocrats and seasoned perpetual candidates; and in that regard, I think Santorum has picked up some of the Not Newt votes from those who like Newt’s message but not Newt himself, in addition to a lot of the Not Romney votes.

Time will tell. But I think there’s a chance Santorum surprises and picks up some more momentum going into SC.

This latest in response to my post detailing how the left will try to smear Santorum. From Sam Seder, who writes:

we'd like to invite you to call into the Hipster douche's show any time you'd like- we're live 11:30 AMET M-F and take calls generally after 12:10 at 646-257-3920... you can "Ask why, for instance, no one has asked Santorum to respond to this bit of truncated video. Or what the full context of his statement was, such that the video was edited the way it was."

or even... "get just as mean and nasty in response to vulgar attacks and baseless insinuations as the lefties who aim them at us."

--
The Majority Report
with Sam Seder
Live M-F 11:30 ET

http://majority.fm

Ring of Fire Radio
With Sam Seder, Mike Papantonio and Bobby Kennedy Jr.
Weekends
http://www.ringoffireradio.com

To which I offered a counter invite:

And you have a standing invite to post a response on my site. All it takes is a valid email address, an internet connection, a keyboard, some digits, and the time it likely took you to pull on the sweater vest and the designer specs you are almost certainly sporting as you read this.

Regards,
Jeff

Here’s the thing: if I called in, what I’d ask say is something along the lines of, “Come now. Do you really believe Rick Santorum is a racist? Or that the majority of conservatives really do hate them the darkies — save the ones who are useful to us as minstrels and Uncle Toms? I mean, did you express the same OUTRAGE after liberals in the media immediately jumped to race when Newt Gingrich spoke of the food stamp President — even though Gingrich didn’t specify a particular race?

“And while we’re on the subject of identity politics gotcha games, do you equate a failure to support legislation legalizing same sex marriage with homophobia? And if so, are you willing to say so to the blacks you are so concerned to protect from Rick Santorum’s racisty racism?

“Similarly, are blacks — who voted 97% for Obama — simply smarter than whites for having done so at such a clip, or do you think there might be something else at play?”

And really, where would that get us?

Besides bored, stinking of Marc Jacobs cologne, and covered in third-rate smarm?

Take away their cynicism, their opportunism, and their contempt for a Constitution designed to thwart their dictatorial designs (ah, if only we could be like China, right, Obama? Right, Tom Friedman? Right, Andy Stern?), all that would remain of the progressive ruling class is a pile of fat wallets and a floor full of power suits. And likely a few hairpieces.

That certain Bushies — whose boss had his own appointments thwarted by the same procedure the Senate was now using to block Obama’s appointments — have come out and suggested that Obama is within his constitutional rights to circumvent advice and consent, suggests either that they don’t understand the Constitution, or that they, too, can look ahead and see the kinds of possibilities such a power grab would mean once a Republican president took office.

Either way, bold!

This is the same Reid who relied on the constitutionality of non-recess procedural rules to block Bush appointments, back when he needed to assert their constitutionality to get done what he wanted to get done.

Constitutionality that shifts depending on the party in power, or that shifts depending upon the current context, deconstructs the very idea of a foundational, grounding document around which the rule of law derives its power.

If the law can be changed depending on the circumstances, it isn’t a law. It’s an impotent placeholder intended to give the appearance of a rule of law.

Andrew McCarthy, NRO:

In 2007, Reid kept the senate in pro forma session in order to block President Bush from making recess appointments — particularly, the eminently qualified Steve Bradbury’s appointment to head DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. “I had to keep the Senate in pro forma session to block the Bradbury appointment,” Reid recounted in 2008. “That necessarily meant no recess appointments could be made.

The Senate has similarly been holding pro forma sessions over the current holiday recess to keep the session technically ongoing, thus blocking — or at least they thought they were blocking — Obama, just as Bush was blocked. But Obama ignored the move, reasoning that such brief sessions (held roughly every three days and lasting only seconds) should not count. Despite the position he took during the Bush years, Reid today said, “I support President Obama’s decision.” His rationale, if you can call it that, is that while he was just trying to block recess appointments, Republicans are blocking such appointments for the specific purpose of re-legislating the Dodd-Frank law.

The theory of separation of powers is that the respective branches have a powerful incentive to protect their turf and will therefore police each other’s encroachments. Apparently … not so much. In any event, since the president is in the hardball business, he can only be stopped (or at least discouraged) if Congress uses its constitutional tools in kind. It is worth remembering that the government cannot function if the House declines to raise and spend money, and Obama cannot get anyone appointed from here on out unless the Senate, once it is in session, can muster 60 votes. So my question is: are Republicans just going to grouse about this, or are they actually going to do something about it?

As Mark Levin noted, we are in the midst of a Constitutional Crisis. Yet we have hamstrung ourselves by giving leftist ideologues the controlling power over the Senate and, by way of the President, the Justice Department.

Which raises the question: what does a citizen do to protect his liberties if impeachment is off the table, save finding standing and bringing suit against the governmental agencies themselves? Because as Boehner and McConnell have shown repeatedly, they don’t have the political will to fight back.

…I offer this counter.

Secular social engineering — that is, replacing God with the State, then making the State your God — is really no different in kind from the cries of “theocracy” that often ring out even among certain conservatives, save that overt expressions of those religions that believe in a higher metaphysical power than man (or his aggregation) have been carefully and methodologically removed from public discourse, while overt expressions of those religions that grant man power over man have been celebrated and raised to a level of moral authority that is entirely at odds with our Declaration and Constitution.

This is the essence of the Progressive gambit.

But then, at least liberal fascism doesn’t have those silly little Jesus fishes. Because honestly, how tacky, am I right?

In his speech at Shaker Heights High School, Obama proved — as Dennis Green might say — that he is who we though he was. In fact, Obama — under the guise of Champion to the Middle Class (he’s looking out for you!) — has essentially said that separation of powers, checks and balances, and, in effect, the Legislative branch itself, are mere nuisances that need to be circumvented, and that the President has the power to ignore the Constitution and Congress when the Legislative body refuses to do as he says.

That is, he has stated — now quite directly and clearly — that the Constitution is but a show piece, a ceremonial document to which the Chief Executive pretends to defer only until its constraints prevent him from acting in a way he wants to act, at which point, it is the “obligation” of the President to seize complete and total control of the reins of power, denying advice and consent powers to the Senate, denying the jurisdiction of the majority holders of the House to allow for an extended Senate recess, denying the legislature its role in passing laws (Obama has decided he will execute only those parts of the omnibus budget bill he himself signed that he likes, and the rest he will not; just as he has directed his Justice Department not to defend DOMA, even though it passed Congress and was signed into law by President Clinton), denying states the jurisdiction to protect their borders or enforce their voting laws, denying the people themselves the franchise by setting up commissions and bureaucratic agencies explicitly beyond the reach of the electorate and beyond the oversight of Congress; and doing so all in your name, claiming a popular mandate that doesn’t exist to justify the very behaviors that are laying the groundwork for a permanent tyranny.

One of the problems we in the US have is that we haven’t really seen tyranny up close, so we seem to think of it in cartoonish ways — a dictator in his camouflage fatigues and a Radar O’Reilly cap speaking from a balcony while the masses, ringed by a military protectorate, gather below and clap like trained seals — and as a result, we can’t believe it is actually happening here, now, in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

But it is. And Obama is telling you so. Harry Reid is telling you so. The activist progressive media is telling you so.

And what’s worse, I truly believe that at least some of the GOP, seeing the possibilities for such heretofore unprecedented usages of power, are content to wait their turn, to win elections and gain control of the kind of mammoth centralized government the Founders and Framers feared most, one that reinforces the institution of a permanent political class that will eventually be almost entirely beyond the reach of the people it ostensibly represents.

Obama is laying the groundwork for the dissolution of the Constitution. He is saying as much. So again I ask, is it okay, finally, to speak aloud precisely what it is this Marxist ideologue is doing? Or are we again to retreat to Wikipedia to challenge the nuanced historical accuracies of calling Obama a liberal fascist, or a Marxist, or a socialist, and so on — despite what we know about his mentors, his education, and his prior roles in community organizing and local government?

Listen to Obama claim the high ground, even as he is usurping full control over what is supposed to be a constitutional republic. Then listen to Mark Levin’s impassioned rebuke to Obama here.

And here.

Crazy-eyed extremist kook Michele Bachmann was right: we are at a perilous crossroads here. And this may be the last election we get to stave off the soft socialism that is everywhere being implemented in this country.

Once it takes root, the only way to remove it will be through the kinds of actions that no longer can be solved by men and women in power suits lunching collegially in Georgetown.