European Marxists Assess America’s Marxist Enemies, The Tea Party Folks

Soeren Kern wrote the following article at Pajamas Media:

“In the run-up to the American midterm elections, European newspapers and magazines as well as radio and television programs have been chock full with sensational reporting, disparaging editorials, and derogatory commentary about America, American voters, and the American political system.

European news media have been especially obsessed with the Tea Party phenomenon, evidently worried that a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” might be replicated on European soil and thus upset the big government/high taxes status quo of European politics. (In fact, European Tea Party movements have already emerged in several European countries, as have popular uprisings against multiculturalism and runaway Muslim immigration.)

Rather than commend the Tea Party movement as a refreshing and enviable display of American political energy, European media elites have launched an all-out propaganda assault on the movement and its supporters. The main tactic has been to seek to discredit Tea Party sympathizers as poor, uneducated, unsophisticated, bigoted, and right-wing, i.e., the exact opposite of ideal European citizens and their elite masters.

Over the past several weeks, for example, European media have used the following adjectives to describe Tea Party supporters: ill-informed, wacky, dangerous, incoherent, lacking in manners, intimidating, anarchic, buffoons, charlatans, irrational, jackanapes, confused, inclined to committing malapropisms, extreme, perverse, fruitcakes, nutters, nutcases, nutbags, wingnuts, frightening, mad, bad, juvenile scaremongerers, pandering to the lowest common denominator, easily influenced, prone to artificially-created righteous anger, cartoonishly evil, religious extremists, sociopathic, weird, climate vampires, stupid, ignorant, gullible, angry, poor, drooling imbeciles, poorly-educated, unwilling to think critically, little capacity for logical thought, making ignorance heroic, Nazis, ill-educated, driven by propaganda, idiotic, morons, incompetent, sucking the life out of the world’s ecosystems, Taliban, rednecks, backwoods, end-of-the-world culters, absurd, bigoted, duped, intolerant, ugly, toxic, grumpy, losers, utterly beyond comprehension, bad spellers, ridiculous, insentient, smug, gaffe-prone, of dubious integrity, dimwitted, populist fanatics, dangerously eccentric, and a traveling circus of fools.

What follows is a brief selection of some European media coverage on the American Tea Party movement:

In Britain, the left-wing Guardian has been obsessed with the Tea Party movement all year, but the newspaper recently has ratcheted-up its verbal attacks to levels that betray a mixture of contempt and paranoia. For example, a typical story titled “The Tea Party: On the Road with America’s Right-Wing Radicals” is laced with sarcasm, ridicule, and mockery. “These are ordinary folk from the American heartland on a mission that will take them into the heart of enemy territory – Washington D.C. America’s Tea Party is on the move. … Never much thought about politics or even much cared. Now they’re riled up and fully signed up to the Tea Party. … Tea Party activists approach the constitution the same fundamentalist way they approach the Bible: literally. The words are sacred and must be taken at face value. They should not be reinterpreted for modern times. … The Tea Party is obsessed with myths about America’s past. The Founding Fathers are revered as gods, the constitution is sacrosanct, America was uniquely established to be the land of the free.”

Another article titled “The GOP’s Coming Tea Party Hangover” mocks the “inherent weirdness” of several Tea Party candidates: “[A] candidate who views global warming as a ‘hoax,’ equates homosexuality with addiction, suggests that an alleged rape victim was suffering from ‘buyer’s remorse,’ and does not believe in the separation of church and state. … [A] global-warming sceptic whose other idiosyncrasies include apparent approval of armed action against the government, and a desire to dismantle Medicare, social security and public education.”

An opinion piece titled “Tea Partiers Keep Low Profile Shock!” asks: “Could it be that Republican handlers don’t trust their gaffe-prone candidates not to screw up?” The article reads: “Over the past week or so, many Tea Partiers have been forced to conduct one, and in rare cases two, debates with their opponents. The effects have ranged from the embarrassing to the downright farcical. … But apart from those rare moments, the political consensus in Washington is this: Tea Party candidates themselves are ducking. They are avoiding conducting campaign stops; they have noticeably reduced or even pulled out of debates with their opponents at the last minute; they don’t publicize events they are conducting until the very last minute — so the other side doesn’t get a chance to put a camera in the audience. … The reason is simple. Tea Party political handlers have little if any trust in their candidates not to screw up public appearances.”

Other Guardian headlines include: “Tea Party Climate Change Deniers Funded by BP and Other Major Polluters,” “US Veteran Who Killed Unarmed Iraqis Wins Tea Party Support,” “America’s Toughest Sheriff Rallies Tea Party Troops Against Illegal Immigrants,” “Guns, Palin and Washington (George, not DC): A Few of the Tea Party’s Favourite Things,” “Why Tea Parties are Perfect for a Disgruntled, and White, Middle Class,” “The Tea Party Movement: Deluded and Inspired by Billionaires,” “US Midterms: Change without Hope,,” and “Report Links Tea Party Movement to White Supremacist Groups.”

In Austria, the center-left Der Standard published a story titled “In Despair Over Democracy,” which asserts that democracy often leads to economically destructive decision-making: “If Obama made a mistake, it was that he should have spent even more and increased the deficit further — even if it is already at ten percent of GDP. But politically, that was simply impossible. … Any halfway-intelligent citizen should realize that the populist resistance of Tea Party leaders Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, as well as the opposition of a great majority of Democrats to Obama, is nonsensical in terms of economic policy. … The majority of Americans will probably vote against their own interests and those of their country in November. Unfortunately, that’s not unusual.”

In Germany, the left-wing magazine Der Spiegel, in a front-page cover titled “The Desperate United States: A Country Loses Its Optimism,” writes: “Good night, America: Americans dreamed a dream that made her the nation of dreams of advancement and wealth for all. Now the United States must realize how fragile its system is, and how bitter the reality — the superpower cannot find a way out of crisis and threatens the global economy.”

Another Spiegel article titled “Poverty in America: It Has Never Been So Bad,” writes: “American society is falling apart. Millions of citizens have lost their jobs and are sinking into poverty. Among them many middle class families. … They have no prospect of receiving help: country and society have left them in the lurch. … Although Wall Street is once again chasing new profits, for much of the nation, the myth of advancement, home ownership and self-made wealth is shattered. The middle class, America’s backbone is crumbling—its ‘American Dream’ is over.”

A Spiegel essay titled “Right-Wing Revolutionaries: Tea Party Movement Mirrors a Deeply Divided America,” writes: “In 2008 alone, the first year of the recession, an additional 2.5 million people fell below the poverty line. Tent cities populated by the homeless are growing outside of major cities. People are camping out in the yards of their foreclosed houses, while long lines form in front of soup kitchens. In 2008, almost 50 million Americans didn’t have enough to eat at some point in the year, an increase of more than a third over the previous year. … For the first time since the global economic crisis more than 80 years ago, questions are being raised about America’s success model, the principle that this country without a welfare state has always been more successful than Europe. It has made the United States the world’s strongest economic power. The country has never had to pay attention to its poor and to the people who had lost their jobs, but now the poor can no longer be ignored. What’s at stake is nothing less than the future of the U.S., a country with white, Protestant roots that knows that non-whites will most likely constitute the majority by the middle of the century.”

The left-wing magazine Stern, in a story titled “Obama’s America: Painful Standstill,” writes: “Americans are greeting the end of the American dream with frustration and anger, anxiety and panic. Millions of Americans are beginning to realize what they wanted to ignore for so long: the great stagnation. America is in steep decline, the country urgently needs a comprehensive economic and social modernization, to be fit for the 21st Century.”

The influential Die Welt, in a story titled “Nightmare Opponent,” asserts that “Christine O’Donnell is even more simplistic than Sarah Palin — but the Democrats are afraid of her.” The front-page story is accompanied by an unflattering photo of O’Donnell with the caption: “A typical American.”

In Luxembourg, the center-left Tageblatt, in an editorial titled “Prepare for ‘Tea Time’ in America,” writes: “They are white, they are male and female and they are conservative. They are mostly populist and constitute a bizarre blend of Christians, right-wing anarchists and disappointed Republicans. Their idol is the fanatic presenter Glenn Beck of the horrid Fox TV network, and their heroine is the hysterical former Republican nominee for vice president, Sarah Palin. … They detest Democrats and loathe President Obama, accusing him of all evils of the world, consider Republicans to be traitors, but before that, had failed to criticize George Bush Jr. … Convinced that the panacea is to turn back the clock by centuries, they dream of the America of the Mayflower, Sir Walter Raleigh (who gave his name to the capital of South Carolina), thrive on open-air events with pom-pom girls where they can feel the red, white and blue, and are convinced that the original sin — treason — was committed in 1912 by a one Woodrow Wilson. … The Tea Party dreams of ‘saving America’ by constraining the White House and the Federal Reserve, cutting taxes, abolishing the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, and promoting free enterprise without any constraints or controls. They seek to abolish unemployment insurance, even if seeking to preserve (at first) public health insurance for seniors — doing otherwise would cost too many votes. Finished, too, would be the ‘socialist’ policies of Obama, the left-wing press, indeed, the left in general, and the oppression of the White minority. … As amazing as it sounds: The Tea Party has considerable campaign funding and has used it against the ‘Kenyan crypto-Muslim,’ read Barack Obama.”

In Spain, the left-wing El País published a story titled “Tea Parties Against Obama” which asserts that the Tea Party is an “extreme right movement linked to the Republican Party. … The Tea Party is a grassroots movement that brings together middle-class white men in a panic who have been hit by the economic crisis and the arrival of a black man to the White House, who the same consider a Marxist a Nazi or a racist against whites.”

Another El País article titled “The Tea Party Takes Control of the American Right,” writes: “The resounding victory of the popular movement known as the Tea Party … definitely puts the extreme right at the helm of American conservatism and opens a difficult period of uncertainty about the fate of the historic Republican Party and American politics in its entirety. … Apart from the impact the rise of the Tea Party is having in the intra-party struggle, as the United States faces one of its gravest political crises ever, how will it affect the governability of the world’s only superpower?”

Elsewhere in El País an “analysis” titled “The New American Conservativism” asserts: “If anyone thinks that Bush / Cheney is the most extreme version of American conservatism, they will soon be proved wrong. The conservative movement that has emerged in recent months in the United States, fueled by the resentment of an impoverished middle class and the ambition of a new post-partisan political class, breaks the mold of traditional Republicanism and evokes a character that is racist, nationalist and fascist fanatical. The only ingredient still missing is violence. … This new conservatism reflects much of the frustration of white men accumulated since women’s liberation, civil rights, and all of the laws for equality that have been subtracting power from this once-dominant sector of society. That white man has not been helped by good contacts, useful friendships and easy money, and that frustration has been swelling in recent decades in a middle class which was the pride of the nation in the fifties, but has been mercilessly beaten by the latest technological revolution and the recent economic crisis. … From a European perspective, this combination of demagoguery, racism, nationalism and xenophobia, hoisted by a hurt and troubled middle class, is a recipe well known and even feared.”

The center-right El Mundo, in an article titled: “Glenn Beck, Consort of Sarah Palin and Scourge of the White House,” asserts: “The United States has rediscovered the wild seasoning at its essence. It’s the umpteenth return of those who see the state as a hunting ground for the idle. Beck serves as the prophet and Sarah Palin, the commander-in-chief. … Beck proclaims the return of a purer America — the one preceding feminism, rock and the sexual revolution. It’s a mythical country, with covered wagons crossing prairies or neon gas station signs that light up when he evokes them on behalf of the middle class. Beck knows how to excite his audience. He knows well the source of its melancholy, its nostalgia for paradise lost. With his own junk, fast-food intellectualism, he has led a renaissance of an extremism that has never gone away.”

In Switzerland, the center-left Le Temps, in an article titled “America’s Cry of Agony,” writes: “Where did the Tea Party movement come from? It is the result of the recession and the tremendous rage that seizes Americans when they think of the behavior of their elites. It is also a consequence of the financial crises, bank rescues and financial excesses that caused millions of people to lose their jobs. Lastly, it is the fear of a loss of American ‘values,’ from the end of its role as a model envied by the whole world, to leading pointless and bloody wars, and a realization that debt and deficits render illusory a dream once thought to be eternal.”

Comment:  No European country has a democracy remotely similar to  ours in the United States.   There state socialism is a well established condition penalizing citizen freedoms.  Political Parties are establishment operated.   A Tea Party movement arising from the population itself  could not occur in Europe.  Established political parties themselves select their candidates  to run for election.   Popular movements have a violent history in Europe.   Throughout the twentieth century the organized Marxists in Europe fought against rival Marxist groups and against the socialist-fascist nationalistic movements in Germany and Italy.   Think jihad terrorists running throughout the streets of the major European cities for over a century, shooting and bombing each other.

Moreover the European press has a history of state control.  Free speech is much restricted.   Add all of these matters with the European affection for fellow Marxist, Barack Hussein Obama, one can better understand the hysterical biases of Europe”s leftwing, so called, “reporters”.

Military Voters Win Court Victory

“A Maryland court rules that a soldier who does not receive his ballot on time has had his constitutional rights violated, and can sue without waiting for the Department of Justice to act.

Congratulations to the Military Voter Protection Project — they have broken new legal ground in protecting military voters.

A Maryland federal court ruled today that it is a violation of a soldier’s constitutional rights to not receive his complete ballot on time. The court ruled that the John Doe officer stationed in Iraq had standing to sue based on deprivations of their constitutional rights.

This is an enormously important decision which will affect the 2012 elections.

This means that military members need not wait on the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., at the Justice Department to sue. It may end the monopoly on DOJ’s oversight of military voting, which is a good thing for everyone in uniform. It means that in 2012, during the presidential election, we won’t have to wait for the DOJ to act. It means that the Eric Holder military voting disaster of 2010 might not happen again.

Individual soldiers and sailors may have recourse to the courts, able to act immediately as they are trained to do in combat zones.

This ruling also shows that private citizens are more effective than their government. DOJ filed no lawsuit in Maryland, but MVP did, and MVP won a victory for military voters from every state.”

The above article,  written by J. Christian Adams, was published at Pajamas Media.

J. Christian Adams is an election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. His website is http://www.electionlawcenter.com.

Dennis Prager: Why I Now Vote Party, Not Individual

“There is an American tradition of voting not for the party, but “for the man.” Unlike Europeans, who are more ideologically driven, Americans have prided themselves in assessing individuals of both parties, and then voting for the more personally impressive candidate. The European parliamentary system of government fosters ideological voting whereas the American political system does to a much lesser degree. With only two parties competing in American elections, each party has had to encompass a much wider spectrum of ideologies.

This is no longer the case. For better or for worse, the notion of voting for the candidate rather than the party is now mostly naive idealism. The Democratic Party is now fully left-wing, and is simply the American version of any European Social Democratic party. It is the party of ever-expanding government. (The Republican Party, in contrast, is — at long last — the party of small government.)

There are two reasons to vote Democrat: either one is a Leftist or one has come to believe the Left’s demonization of its opponents as SIXHIRB (Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist, Bigoted).

Oh, yes, there is a third reason to vote Democrat: More and more Americans are employed by the government, and more and more Americans receive significant material benefits from it. So one does not have to have left-wing values or believe in the demonization of conservatives to vote Democrat. All one has to do is vote according to where one’s livelihood comes from.

Along with the minority groups that it has effectively convinced it alone protects, the Democratic Party has, therefore, created a built-in voting bloc that is formidable.

Why, then, will Republicans do well this year? Because the Democrats went too far left and the country has serious economic problems.

Of course, Republicans cannot and should not depend on economic recessions to win elections. They have to make the case as clearly as possible why America’s success is the result of its most distinguishing trait: limited government. They have to show that the Democratic Party undermines the primary reason for America’s success — limited government, America’s most distinguishing trait. And Republicans need to make clear the connection between Democratic policies and America’s economic problems.

It is probably accurate to say that no country in the world has less government intervention in the lives of its citizens than America does. But Democrats do not like such American distinctiveness. They want America to be like other countries. The president, recall, does not believe in American exceptionalism.

For all these reasons, I admit that I am prepared to vote for a less personally impressive Republican over a more personally impressive Democrat. The Republican will vote for America’s values (E Pluribus Unum, In God We Trust, and Liberty, which by definition means small government). The Democrat, no matter how personally charismatic, will not vote for these values.

This is my response to the liberal media, which have portrayed virtually every popular conservative in my lifetime as a mediocrity at best, a dummy at worst. In not one case — from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin — was the media’s depiction accurate. To give but one example, George W. Bush can probably run rings around Vice President Joseph Biden in his understanding and knowledge of history and of the world.

But even if the media’s depictions were accurate, it wouldn’t matter to me. I will take common sense and values over intellect any day and in any election. Left-wing intellectuals have abysmal track records when it comes to confronting great evil in the world. Their willingness to fight tyrants and despots is one of consistent and abject moral failure.

Take the left’s favorite Republican to depict as a dummy, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

This country would be in considerably better shape if Palin were either vice president or president. Palin would have confronted Iran rather than place her faith in negotiations and the United Nations. She would not have sought to impose a peace on Israel (as if peace can ever be imposed by outsiders on any countries, let alone upon those in which one of the parties seeks to annihilate the other). She would not have bought into Keynesian economics and spent nearly a trillion dollars largely to keep overpaid and overcompensated government workers voting Democrat. She would not have expanded the number of government agencies and “czars” to the point that this country may well be governed for the next two years not by congressional laws but by unelected and unaccountable federal agencies. She would not have declared a date by which America will leave Afghanistan and thereby ensured that fewer and fewer Afghans fight alongside America. She would not have signed a 2,000-page bill about anything, let alone health care. She would have expanded oil drilling in America so that we can actually begin the long journey to energy independence, not the imaginary journey to windmills and solar panels. She would never have considered taxing energy, the engine of our economy, on the increasingly absurd claims that human carbon dioxide emissions will bring the planet to ruin.

So, it is time for us Americans to realize that the old days of choosing the better candidate are gone. The Democrats have, at least in this way, achieved their goal of rendering us more European — we will have to vote by party.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that in almost no case is the choice between a more impressive Democrat and a less impressive Republican. The quality of most Republican candidates this election is the highest in post-war American history, Republican or Democrat. But even if it weren’t, a Republican mediocrity would get my vote. My first concern is America’s greatness, not the candidate’s.”

(Dennis Prager’s columns can be found at Townhall.com.)

New York Times: House Democrats Spent More on TV Ads Than GOP

Allahpundit at HotAir is happy and writes the following:

“How could it be more perfect? They’ve spent the past month accusing the GOP in ways explicit and implicit of having bought the House via shadowy Rove-ian groups fueled by secret money from dirty, dirty foreigners. And meanwhile, in the most important advertising medium of all, they’ve actually outspent Republicans by almost $25 million. Even their painfully pathetic fifth-string GOTV pitch — Republican fatcats shelling out big money — is a fraud. Perfection.

Actually, I guess having Pelosi on the witness stand mumbling about a stolen container of strawberries would make it a little more perfect. But short of that — perfection.

The most recent numbers available, through Friday, showed that Democratic candidates and their allies spent $142 million on television advertising across all House races in the general election, compared with $119 million by Republican candidates and their backers. In the Senate, Republican candidates and their allies outspent Democrats, $159 million to $120 million…

The Democratic advantage on television spending in House races was something of a revelation, given all the attention that has been garnered this year by the staggering expenditures by Republican-oriented independent groups after a Supreme Court ruling in January that lifted restrictions on corporate political spending.

But it appears that the Republican-leaning groups were able to make a significant impact in many House races by leveling the playing field for underfinanced Republican challengers, who in previous elections might have had little chance against Democratic incumbents…

The overall Democratic spending advantage on television in the House holds true not only for all races, but also when just the 105 races that the group classifies as competitive are considered. Democrats have so far outspent Republicans on television in 68 of those 105 contests. In all House races, Republican-leaning outside groups spent $38 million on television, compared with $13 million by Democratic-oriented groups. But Democratic candidates outspent Republican ones, $97 million to $49 million. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee also outspent the national Republican Congressional Committee, $30 million to $26 million.

I’m really curious now to see what the excuse will be tomorrow night. Presumably it was going to be “outside money!” but the Times just went and knifed them in the back on that. What are they left with now? Pelosi’s not actually going to get up in front of the podium and talk about “messaging.” Is she?”

Comment:  I am not so certain the Left’s money hasn’t paid America’s Marxist some dividends.  Let’s wait until the ballots are counted.   Some of us are not used to conservative political victories.

Michael Lind’s Salon Assessment of Socialist Party Troubles

Occasionally, but not often, voices from the leftwing are civil and thoughtful…..unadorned with Obama duplicity or outright vulgarities and lies.  To the world of the religious Left, such those at Salon,  Marxist  ends justifies the Marxist means.   America must be made equal.

Not all socialist voices are   strident and intolerant.  Conservatives interested in strengthening America’s democracy must be aware of the left’s good as well as its potential for terror-filled bad.

Michael Lind writes the following article at Salon, “Why center-left parties are collapsing.”

“The setbacks Democrats are poised to suffer in the midterm election have to be viewed in a trans-Atlantic context. The backlash against Barack Obama and the contemporary Democratic Party is part of a global wave of popular disapproval of social democratic parties that abandoned their traditional working-class constituents in order to woo bankers and professionals.

Parties or coalitions of the left hang on to control in Norway, Spain and Austria. But every major country in Europe — Britain, France, Germany and Italy — is now ruled by the center-right. From the Baltic to the Mediterranean, social democratic parties are crumbling.

For most of the 20th century, Sweden’s ruling Social Democrats were the model for center-left parties elsewhere. In September’s election, the Swedish Social Democrats received only 30.9 percent of the vote, their worst showing since 1914. Earlier in 2009, Germany’s Social Democratic Party suffered its worst electoral defeat since World War II, winning only 23 percent of the vote. In Sweden, Germany and elsewhere, Social Democrats are losing voters to populist parties of the right, Greens and hard-left parties.

It would be a mistake to believe that the voters, in rejecting social democrats, are rejecting the middle-class welfare state that social democratic parties built in the 20th century. On the contrary, center-right parties like David Cameron’s Conservatives and the ruling Moderate party in Sweden have been forced to limit their libertarianism in order to win office.

The truth is that voters have not turned against the old-fashioned social democracy of the mid-20th century. In Europe as in the U.S., universal social insurance programs for the middle class, as opposed to means-tested welfare programs for the poor, remain popular among voters on the right as well as the left. Voters in Europe are not voting against public pensions and universal healthcare. Instead, they are tossing out a more recent generation of social democrats who went too far in their embrace of markets.

The greatest assault on traditional social democracy in the last generation has come from “Third Way” leaders of center-left parties like Tony Blair, and their continental European counterparts. Like the Clinton Democrats, these “modernizing” social democrats embraced free markets with a convert’s zeal, celebrating globalization and deregulating finance, while seeking to privatize or dismantle parts of the older welfare state. The politicians of the Third Way were far more libertarian than the voters in their own parties and their actions helped to make possible the global economic crisis.

Having given up traditional social democratic economics for a watered-down version of libertarian conservatism, the Third Way social democrats in Europe, like the Clinton and Obama Democrats in the U.S., sought to replace the traditional bread-and-butter concerns of working-class voters with idealistic campaigns about multiculturalism, climate change and obesity that appealed to more affluent, college-educated voters.

The immigration issue is particularly damaging to the center-left, because it illustrates the growing divide between the populist working class and the professional-class elites who control the machinery of center-left parties. The conflicts associated with Muslim immigration in Europe are different from those associated with Latino immigration in the U.S., but on both sides of the Atlantic parties of the center-left have treated any concern about the effects of high immigration on wages, the welfare state, or national cultural community as deplorable racism. While the mainstream conservative parties of Europe officially denounce far-right nativist parties like the Sweden Democrats, the Dutch Freedom Party and the French National Front, they have moved to the right to co-opt the issue. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy was catapulted to the presidency after he called Muslim rioters “scum” and supervised a crackdown in his previous post as interior minister. Angela Merkel, the conservative chancellor of Germany, recently declared that multiculturalism in Germany had “utterly failed,” and Horst Seehofer, leader of a conservative Bavarian party allied with the ruling Christian Democrats, declared: “Multikulti is dead.”

During the recent British electoral campaign, David Cameron’s Tories criticized non-EU immigration, a code word for Muslim immigration. Meanwhile, New Labour prime minister Gordon Brown harmed his chances for reelection in what the tabloids called “bigotgate.” Gordon Brown’s demise was accelerated by a similar gaffe during the recent British election campaign. After a 65-year-old widow named Gillian Duffy asked him about “all those eastern Europeans coming in,” an open microphone caught Brown telling an aide that “she was just a sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be Labour.” Brown’s dismissive attitude was strikingly similar to that of then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008. In the infamous leaked speech to a group of rich donors in San Francisco, Obama attributed the preference of white working-class voters for Hillary Clinton in terms of their alleged pathology: “It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration.” It is hardly surprising that working-class voters in Europe and America should reject center-left politicians who treat them as annoying yokels whom they must humor on the way to their coronations.

In general the parallels between the U.S. and Europe are striking. In the U.S., as in Europe, the right is divided between a pro-business right promoting policies of austerity and a populist, nativist right energized by opposition to immigration and multiculturalism, particularly where Muslims are involved. In the U.S., as in Europe, the upper-middle-class activists and intellectuals of the center-left devote far less energy to traditional social democratic issues like social insurance and the minimum wage than to non-economic causes like renewable energy, mass transit, the new urbanism, gay marriage, identity politics and promotion of amnesty for illegal immigrants. On both continents, conservatism is becoming more downscale while progressives are increasingly upmarket.”

• Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of “The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution.”

Tom Sowell Quotes A Treasury Secretary: “We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work.”

Toms Sowell writes deja vu ‘all over again’…..regarding government spending and high unemployment:

“Guess who said the following: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Was it Sarah Palin? Rush Limbaugh? Karl Rove?

Not even close. It was Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt and one of FDR’s closest advisers. He added, “after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . And an enormous debt to boot!”

This is just one of the remarkable and eye-opening facts in a must-read book titled “New Deal or Raw Deal?” by Professor Burton W. Folsom, Jr., of Hillsdale College.

Ordinarily, what happened in the 1930s might be something to be left for historians to be concerned about. But the very same kinds of policies that were tried– and failed– during the 1930s are being carried out in Washington today, with the advocates of such policies often invoking FDR’s New Deal as a model.

Franklin D. Roosevelt blamed the country’s woes on the problems he inherited from his predecessor, much as Barack Obama does today. But unemployment was 20 percent in the spring of 1939, six long years after Herbert Hoover had left the White House.

Whole generations have been “educated” to believe that the Roosevelt administration is what got this country out of the Great Depression. History text books by famous scholars like Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., of Harvard and Henry Steele Commager of Columbia have enshrined FDR as a historic savior of this country, and lesser lights in the media and elsewhere have perpetuated the legend.

Although Professor Schlesinger admitted that he had little interest in economics, that did not stop him from making sweeping statements about what a great economic achievement the New Deal was.

Professors Commager and Morris of Columbia likewise declared: “The character of the Republican ascendancy of the twenties had been pervasively negative; the character of the New Deal was overwhelmingly positive.” Anyone unfamiliar with the history of that era might never suspect from such statements that the 1920s were a decade of unprecedented prosperity and the 1930s were a decade of the deepest and longest-lasting depression in American history. But facts have taken a back seat to rhetoric.

In more recent years, there have been both academic studies and popular books debunking some of the myths about the New Deal. Nevertheless, Professor Folsom’s book “New Deal or Raw Deal?” breaks new ground. Although written by an academic scholar and based on years of documented research, it is as readable as a newspaper– and a lot more informative than most.

There are few historic events whose legends are more grossly different from the reality than the New Deal administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. And there are few men whose image has been more radically different from the man himself.

Some of the most devastating things that were said about FDR were not said by his political enemies but by people who worked closely with him for years– Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau being just one. Morgenthau saw not only the utter failure of Roosevelt’s policies, but also the failure of Roosevelt himself, who didn’t even know enough economics to realize how little he knew.

Far from pulling the country out of the Great Depression by following Keynesian policies, FDR created policies that prolonged the depression until it was more than twice as long as any other depression in American history. Moreover, Roosevelt’s ad hoc improvisations followed nothing as coherent as Keynesian economics. To the extent that FDR followed the ideas of any economist, it was an obscure economist at the University of Wisconsin, who was disdained by other economists and who was regarded with contempt by John Maynard Keynes.

President Roosevelt’s strong suit was politics, not economics. He played the political game both cleverly and ruthlessly, including using both the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service to harass and intimidate his critics and opponents.

It is not a pretty story. But we need to understand it if we want to avoid the ugly consequences of very similar policies today.”

This article was found at realclearpolitics.

Obamacare “Will Further Depress The Nation’s Employment Picture.”

Even CBO Is Skeptical of ObamaCare

Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Douglas Elmendorf recently spoke at the University of Southern California about the economic impact of ObamaCare.  He predicts that ObamaCare will further depress the nation’s employment picture, says the Heritage Foundation.

CBO’s analysis of ObamaCare predicts that it will reduce the amount of labor being used in the economy by roughly half a percent.  

• Elmendorf states that this impact will be small, but in reality the impact is small only in relative terms.
• For instance, a half-percent loss in jobs in the American economy today would translate into about 750,000 additional Americans losing work.

The reason for the job loss is twofold, says Heritage.

• First, ObamaCare raises costs on businesses with additional mandates and taxes, which will negatively impact hiring.
• Second, ObamaCare increases the social safety net with a massive Medicaid expansion and generous subsidies to purchase insurance — this increases implicit marginal tax rates and discourages work.

Elmendorf’s recent remarks focus on the impact ObamaCare will have on lowering the amount of unnecessary spending on health care.  The answer appears to be it won’t have much of an effect, as CBO projects that health care spending will be at least 25 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2035, up from 17 percent today.

In his recent remarks, Elmendorf goes beyond the 10-year purview of the CBO’s budget “score” time frame to look at the long-range impact of ObamaCare on health care spending.  He expresses doubt that the new health care law can drive efficiency improvements and reduce wasteful spending.

Source: Even CBO Is Skeptical of ObamaCare,” Heritage Foundation, October 26th, 2010.

For Heritage text:

http://blog.heritage.org/?p=45618

For Elmendorf remarks:

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/119xx/doc11945/USC10-22-10.pdf

For more on Health Issues:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index

Good Morning, America…..Will It Be Bigger Government to Run Your Life?

…….or will you vote to accept the responsibility to strengthen the citizen’s role in managing his or her life and the lives of your children?

Will we, as Americans, return to the dignity of adulthood or continue our Marxist ride down the slide to the perpetual helplessness childhood?   Who will be responsible for your tomorrow?…..the president Obamas, Nancy Pelosis and Harry Reids to make your decisions for you, or will you accept the good and the bad of  your own choices  in your own life?

Consider fellow American Shelby Steele’s conversion to conservatism!

 ”What drew me to conservatism years ago was the fact that it gave discipline a slightly higher status than virtue.  This  meant it could not be subverted by passing notions of the good.  It could be above moral vanity.  And so it made no special promises to me as a minority.  It neglected me in every way except  as a human being who wanted freedom.  Until my encounter with conservatism, I had only known the  racial determinism of segregation on the one hand and of white liberalism on the other;   two varieties of white supremacy in which I could only be dependent and inferior.

The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society.  And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism;  human rather than racial dignity.”

We are all made MINORITIES in today’s world if we do not agree on an America which strengthens its citizens to remain free and retain the mind, soul and body, of one who is free!

Will you or a government buraucrat decide your future?   your health care?  your diet?   where you live?   what you should learn and not learn?   what clothes and furniture you should buy?  what light bulbs should light your rooms or regulate the amount of water or heat you consume?   IN ORDER TO MAKE CERTAIN YOU ARE AS EQUAL AS THE PERSON LIVING IN THE ROOMS NEXT TO YOU! 

Big Government owning citizen lives is not new in the human experience.  It is each citizen’s responsibility to know its result.   It is the responsibility of each citizen to make sure our children know the result when Big Government owns citizen lives.

Adult human beings who live in a truly free democratic society have responsibilities to maintain that society.  Knowledgeable voting is the first step to maintaining the dignity and honor of being a free citizen.

Vote today for your conservative candidates.  Help them become better citizens, too, by knowing America’s issues.