One Election Away from Losing Our Freedom
Posted: 20 Feb 2014 12:14 PM PST
Putin's little fingers in the Ukraine, Cuban agents in Venezuela and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt all remind us how uniquely vulnerable democracy is to totalitarianism. In the United States, cities aren't burning and streets aren't filling up with bloodied bodies, but the government of phone and pen also shows us that we are always one election away from losing our freedom.
When a political system becomes polarized between the forces of freedom and the forces of totalitarianism, then the forces of freedom have to win every single election. Meanwhile the totalitarians only have to win one election and then spend the rest of time reconstructing civic institutions, mobilizing thugs and making it structurally impossible for the other side to compete.
Even if the other side occasionally wins elections, the totalitarian process continues chugging along because the totalitarian side follows no rules while holding its opponents to above and beyond the letter of the law. The law constrains the ability of the law-abiding party to undo the work of the totalitarian party, but not the ability of the totalitarian party to pursue its agenda and undo the work of its opponents.
When one side is on a long march through the institutions while the other seeks consensus, the long marchers will win.
READ THE REST HERE: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2014/02/one-election-away-from-losing-our.html
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THE TOP SECRETS OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION
THE FIVE:
In a survey 29% of the American People did not know that Joe Biden is the vice president of the United States.
Now you can better understand why we are where we are and why, in the words of former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld "It's going to be a long, hard slog." What we have here, in the words of another defense official, Greg Guttfeld of FOX News, is "the triumph of liberal education" (and that one election Sultan Knish speaks about above.)
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The American Public's Indifference to Foreign Affairs
By George Friedman
Last week, several events took place that were important to their respective regions and potentially to the world. Russian government officials suggested turning Ukraine into a federation, following weeks of renewed demonstrations in Kiev. The Venezuelan government was confronted with violent and fatal demonstrations. Kazakhstan experienced a financial crisis that could have destabilized the economies of Central Asia. Russia and Egypt inked a significant arms deal. Right-wing groups in Europe continued their political gains.
Any of these events had the potential to affect the United States. At different times, lesser events have transfixed Americans. This week, Americans seemed to be indifferent to all of them. This may be part of a cycle that shapes American interest in public affairs. The decision to raise the debt ceiling, which in the last cycle gripped public attention, seemed to elicit a shrug. Read more »
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Obama’s Foreign Policy: Enemy Action
It’s often hard to determine whether a series of bad policies results from stupidity or malicious intent. Occam’s razor suggests that the former is the more likely explanation, as conspiracies assume a high degree of intelligence, complex organization, and secrecy among a large number of people, qualities that usually are much less frequent than the simple stupidity, disorganization, and inability to keep a secret more typical of our species. Yet surveying the nearly 6 years of Obama’s disastrous foreign policy blunders, I’m starting to lean towards Goldfinger’s Chicago mob-wisdom: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, it’s enemy action.”
READ THIS IMPORTANT ARTICLE HERE:
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israelnationalnews.com, 2/19/2014
Minister Hits Out"We've seen difficult things befall the Jewish people [over the years]," Ariel noted. "We saw the expulsion from Gush Katif and the Sinai desert and even after all that, there is still cause for concern. We have clarified again and again that it [another withdrawal] is unacceptable to us, it's immoral, and therefore it will not happen again."
Ariel added that US Secretary of State John Kerry is making "severe mistakes" in the peace process thus far.
"If we look 270 degrees around Israel, we can see how everything the Americans touch escapes from their hands," he noted. "Thus we have Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and more. Everything is one giant failure and it is worth it for the Americans to stop and think about what they have done. Let them think about it and correct it."
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/177642#.UwT4qFwo42w
On a more positive note, Ariel shared good news: that building in Judea and Samaria has increased dramatically over the past year. Four to five times more buildings were built in the region over 2013 than in 2012, according to the minister. (AGB: Having stopped building years ago on DISPUTED, not occupied land because of Obama's pressure achieved NOTHING with the Palestinians, so Israel is making up big time for lost time. An absolutely logical move.)
IT IS THE JEW'S LAND AND THEY ARE NOT LEAVING! THEY ARE COMING.
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The photo is a video capture from a security camera located in the North Corridor leading to the Senate floor in the US Capitol Building .
If you do, you could come up missing.
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The Revolt Against the Masses’ reveals liberalism’s elitist roots
Ever wonder why liberals insist they are fighting for the middle class but look down on working people?
Ever wonder why progressives talk endlessly about diversity yet can’t tolerate the slightest dissent from their orthodoxy?
Ever wonder why Barack Obama seems more suited for a European coffee shop than the Oval Office?
Wonder no more. Fred Siegel’s new book explains all you need to know about liberalism, a political philosophy that, despite good intentions, careened off track after World War I and hasn’t found its way back yet.
Siegel traces the movement from the era of Woodrow Wilson to our own, stopping along the way for details the way a travel writer samples local food. Wells, for example, is best remembered for science-fiction books like “The Time Machine,” but Siegel blames him for laying out “two central tropes of liberalism: a sense of superiority and a claim on the future.”
Croly, a founder of the New Republic magazine, held the average American in contempt and wanted a government led by enlightened experts. Mission accomplished.
Siegel, of St. Francis College and the Manhattan Institute, has a keen eye for hypocrisy. He twins liberalism’s hunger for “moral deregulation” with its appetite for overregulating everything else. He captures the religious fervor by labeling its leaders a “clerisy.”
The ultimate payoff is his depiction of Obama as the incarnation of the philosophy’s disdain for conventional life, including the president’s penchant for “authoritarian liberalism.” In that America, rights are given and taken by government experts.
READ THE REST HERE:
http://nypost.com/2014/02/15/the-revolt-against-the-masses-reveals-liberalisms-elitist-roots/
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Michael BarroneThe snobs at the heart of liberalism
The roots of American liberalism are not compassion, but snobbery. That’s the thesis of Fred Siegel’s revealing new book, “The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.”
He depicts the Progressives as Protestant reformers, determined to professionalize institutions and tame the immigrant and industrial masses. Progressive projects included women’s suffrage and prohibition of alcohol.
But the many pro-German Progressives were appalled when Woodrow Wilson led America into World War I and by Wilson’s brutal suppression of civil liberties. And progressivism was repudiated in the landslide election of Warren Harding in 1920, at which point disenchanted liberal thinkers turned their ire against middle-class Americans who, in the Roaring ’20s, were happily buying automobiles, refrigerators, radios and tickets to the movies.
This contempt for ordinary Americans mostly persisted in changing political environments. During the Great Depression, many liberals became Communists, proclaiming themselves tribunes of a virtuous oppressed proletariat that would have an enlightened rule. For a moment, idealization of the working man, but not the middle-class striver, came into vogue.
But in the postwar years, what Siegel calls “the political and cultural snobbery” of liberals returned. He recounts the derision of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and economist John Kenneth Galbraith — Cambridge neighbors after the war — for Harry Truman, the onetime haberdasher and member of veterans’ groups and service clubs.
Liberals since the 1920s have claimed to be guided by the laws of science. But often it was crackpot science, like the eugenics movement that sought forced sterilizations. Other social-science theories proved unreliable in practice. Predictions that the world would run out of food and resources turned out to be wrong. In the 1970s, people were told global cooling was inevitable. Now it’s global warming.
READ THE REST HERE: http://nypost.com/2014/02/18/the-snobs-at-the-heart-of-liberalism/
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TOP SECRETS OF WALL STREET
Don’t cry for Wall Street
Published: February 18, 2014 | 4:11am
-- but there’s absolutely no sign these guys have learned their lesson.
Turn back the clock a bit first to the 1990s, when Mack, Blankfein and Dimon met their first love: President Bill Clinton. A limousine liberal’s dream, he professed a “moderation” on social issues while he let the banks get away with just about anything they wanted, included killing Glass-Steagall — a smart law that kept risk-taking in the trading markets from infecting government-insured customer deposits.
After Glass-Steagall finally died, they all made gobs of money, so much that by 2007 they felt confident enough in their ability to mold regulatory policy that they began embracing the Democratic Party’s two presidential frontrunners.
For a time, Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton split the Wall Street honcho vote. Mack came out first for Hillary, explaining how he liked her embrace of universal health care — the same formula now slamming the economy and the public.
Blankfein moved into the Hillary corner as well, while his No. 2 at Goldman, Gary Cohn, joined Blackrock’s Larry Fink and others to support Obama. And when Obama wrested the nomination from Clinton, the Wall Street stampede to the former community organizer shifted into high gear.
http://nypost.com/2014/02/18/dont-cry-for-wall-street/
The Inequality of Access
Posted: 15 Feb 2014 08:51 PM PST
A day after Bill de Blasio's Tale of Two Cities address in which the wealthy Park Slope resident once again made inequality his focus, the radical pol intervened to spring one of his biggest supporters from prison. The New York Post, a tabloid that unlike the Daily News is much less enamored with the lefty dreamboat of the moment, responded with a cover page reading, "A Jail of Two Cities."
Aside from being the commonplace corruption that one ought to expect from a politician trying to ban horses in Central Park because a wealthy real estate magnate wants to seize their stables, the Jail of Two Cities also reveals the fallacy of government wars against inequality.
When government is big, then true inequality is not of wealth, but of political access. Money can buy you access, or as the recently released Orlando Findlayter discovered, so can being an activist who bets on the right horse-hating politician. The rich can write a check, but the poor can vote early and often. Access isn't about money; it's about becoming useful to those in power.
There are two cities and two countries in America; the land of the politically connected who are part of a network that can score anything from millions in cash to open door prisons and the land of the politically unconnected who don't understand why the government won't leave them alone. It won't leave them alone because in a corrupt system, being left alone is a special political favor.
Government should not be concerned with the inequality of income, which isn't in its purview, but with the inequality of access, which is. It's not the job of government to even out how much money everyone makes, but it is its job to ensure that everyone has equal access to government.
In a city or a country run by income inequality campaigners like Barack Obama or Bill de Blasio, the inequality of wealth takes a back seat to the inequality of access. Pledges of income equality put the equalizers in charge of moving huge amounts of money around and determining who gets to wet his beak and who doesn't.
The Inequality of Access
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-inequality-of-access.html
IN OTHER WORDS, THE LIBERAL VISION IS TO CREATE THE PERFECT USELESS MAN.
The MEANS to be gainfully employed (making a living in other words) is secondary to a system wherein government gives one the option of working for a living or voting for a living. As the liberal can either blame others for whatever his own shortcomings happen to be, or learn to hate what he will never become early on via his liberal education and the envy and resentment of success, none of which teaches him how to think but only what to think. Listen to the Pacifica stations on FM, MSNBC, and other liberal outlets to get the point of liberalism's utter hypocrisy and ignorance as they speak in conspirational tones about how unfair life is and that it's either George Bush's or the Jews' Fault that this winter the planetary ice cover grew 60% in a single year, and in the summer the sun will likely warm the planet. Imagine that!
THE POLITICS OF BAD FAITH
Ever since the French Revolution, radical “equality” and conservative “liberty” have opposed each other as the defining agendas of Left and Right. For radicals, freedom is the power to redefine human destiny and has invariably meant, the surrender of individual autonomy to the radical project, to collective truth and the “progressive” idea. For conservatives, in contrast, liberty is relief for the individual from collective power. It is secured by “negative rights,” by limits to government. Liberty is made possible by the civilizing bonds of social order, and restraints on the coercive power of civil authority.The conservative goal is democratic, but it is also circumspect and modest (and so, deeply unsatisfying to the radical soul). Better to live with some injustices than, by seeking perfect justice, create a world with none. This is the political caution that has been etched in blood on the historical ledger of the last 200 years. It is the lesson the Left (and lately Libertarians), refuse to learn. It is this refusal that makes both of these radicals the dangerous reactionaries of the post-modern world.
This very denial of history however, also creates the political mask that allows leftists (and libertarians) to appear as social reformers (and "patriots.") Refusing to acknowledge any connection to the destructive consequences of their radical faith, these two ideologies have been able to hijack the vocabulary of political discourse, to appropriate the terms “democratic” and “progressive,” and now even “liberal” and “market” ("conservative" and "patriot" for the libertarians), and to frame its agendas in the misleading imagery of “social justice.” The Left and Libertarian fly under permanently false colors. They are neither liberal nor progressive (not patriots nor conservatives), and the justice they all promise is achievable only through political infiltration of people of faith, ongoing re-education and indoctrination in the centers of learning and media, naive isolating of the United States, and totalitarian terror.
Despite the Left’s surface adjustment to historical realities in the post-Communist era, the character of its project remains stubbornly the same. This project (and of the Libertarians, the DARK SIDE of whom Ayn Rand warned against), as before, is antithetic to the American paradigm and the stoic realism in which its liberties are grounded. The opposition is so fundamental that even those left-wing revisionists who have accepted a part of the democratic achievement, and call themselves “democratic socialists” (and those of the "Libertarian" faith), reveal a profound and dedicated hostility to the American founding and its political truths.
– David Horowitz, The Politics of Bad Faith (AGB's comment on Libertarians - Two Sides of the Same Coin)
Union official blames Remington Arms expansion in Alabama on NY SAFE Act
A union official said Saturday the Remington Arms Co.'s decision to open a manufacturing plant in Alabama does not bode well for Ilion, and he's blaming New York's SAFE Act restrictions on assault weapons. Just hours after officials with Remington Outdoor Co. announced it would locate a new gun manufacturing facility in Huntsville, a New York lawmaker is pointing to his state's stringent firearm laws as a reason the business isn't coming there. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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"In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend." --Alexander Hamilton
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