The liberty papers found an interesting Obama document. It seems that it is not those poor misunderstood adherents of the Religion of Peace that are a problem. It is any American who disagrees with the Obama agenda. Michael Malkin confirms the document is real, not a parody.
Veterans are also terrorists, no doubt it comes of persecuting those poor adherents of the Religion of Peace.
The New York Times almost gets it right:
Obama’s Ersatz Capitalism
What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a “partnership” in which one partner robs the other.
Close but no banana.
It is crony capitalism, which at its more socialist extreme is fascism, the corporate state, where business and the citizen are subjugated to the state, to the benefit of the rulers and favored businessmen. Not just any business is going to get is losses socialized and its gains privatized. Obama is coming down like a ton of bricks on certain businesses, but not, however, other businesses.
Good thing we did not elect McCain – then fascism would have had bipartisan support.
And talking of fascism, here is something where fascism is plainer to see.
Under current USA nuclear regulations, you cannot launch any new nuclear projects unless the waste is going to go to a federally approved repository, and Obama has announced there is not going to be a federally approved repository. Hence no new nuclear projects. Obama has also announced that carbon emissions are going to be reduced sometime soon, though not yet. If less carbon, then less coal and oil. If no new nukes, and less coal and oil, then less energy usage. Less energy usage, lower standard of living.
One of the several government actions that so greatly prolonged the great depression was Smoot Hawley. The Becker Posner blog reports that the democrats want do do FDR all over again – meaning do the great depression all over again.
You win elections from the base, not the center. Obama appealed to the Democrat base, the Democrat wing of the Democrat party, and the lunatic wing of the Democrat of the Democrat party, Just as Reagan appealed to the Republican party base. McCain tried to appeal to the wobbly Democrat wing of the Democrat pary – mainly by spitting on the Republican party base. McCain followed in the path of Bush by trying to outbid Obama by promising to give away more goodies, but when Obama promised to give away goodies he could credibly sound as if he believed that handing out goodies enriched and ennobled the recipients, whereas McCain sounded like he was handing out goodies after the fashion of a community organizer giving drunks a bottle of whisky to register to vote – if you got your goodies from Obama, it made you noble and superior and proved you deserved them, if you got you goodies from McCain, it made you mooching scum. Why would anyone vote for McCain?
Do you want to reduce your carbon footprint
Or do you want to drill here now.
This republican advertisement is so funny and so true, that I stole it.
Or if not Cthulhu, Obama.
When I started writing this, McCain had the the most violently anticapitalist program of any presidential candidate, his cap and trade policy.
Obama, having started out at lunatic left in the primaries, is heading rightwards at high speed, and his “cap and trade” policy had become a mere pigovian carbon tax, making him considerably less anti capitalist than McCain.
McCain, finding himself outflanked, quietly dropped his cap and trade program altogether, bringing him to the right of Obama again, forcing me to rewrite.
The primaries produced two presidential candidates, one alarmingly anti capitalist and left wing, the other alarmingly anti capitalist, even more left wing, and anti american on top of it. I found it hard to believe that ordinary Americans would vote for either one of them.
It looks like they came to the same conclusion, because they both proceeded to head rightwards at high speeds.
But why vote for the lesser evil? Vote Cthulhu
Bryan Caplan has bet $300 that Europe, and every state of Europe, will survive to 2020. I don’t make these kind of bets, because outcomes tend to be ill defined. What constitutes surviving? But I expect that around 2040, people will look back to around 2020, and say that some substantial portion of Europe, fell back then.
The nation state derives its cohesion from the nation, and the nation is not a patch of land but a people, united by something – perhaps an ideology of governance, economics, and law, but more commonly race and culture, or religion, or some such.
Nation means, still today means, a mutually supporting group of people, not a territory – a people united by culture, or by language dialect, or by race, or by ideology, or religion, or some such. Jews are a nation, Israel a nation state, Kurds are a nation, but Kurdistan is not (yet) a nation state. Iraq is a state, but evidently not yet a nation.
If a state is united by race or religion, the nation state has a disturbing tendency to commit mass murder. Even before the rise of the nation state, even back in the days when nations seldom corresponded to states, the nation was an important and vital part of Europe’s history, leading to lots of disturbingly efficient slaughter – and not just the easy slaughter of disarmed obedient sheeple that we saw so much of during the twentieth century, but the highly successful mass slaughter of armed and united peoples.
Thus a nation state inherently derives its cohesion, its strength, its military prowess from what is now called ethnocentrism, or racism, or bigotry, or ignorant superstition or capitalism/imperialism/exploitation etc.
The transnational progressives are attempting to use the power of the state to suppress that which gives the state cohesion, sawing off the branch on which they stand.
And because they have in substantial part succeeded, Europe suffers from extraordinary military weakness. Europe could not defeat the Serbs, could not defeat the Taliban. The British could not hold the most crucial oil port in the world against Sadr’s forces.
Hence the inclination on the right to predict the collapse of the EU or some of its component states. The prediction seems absurd. The states of Europe have police, tanks, bombers and an immense budget, whereas the various threats to their existence are tiny and have nothing much – but the threats have internal cohesion, and the states of Europe do not.