Sunday, February 28, 2010

It all started with a bumper sticker …

The Name Game.  Liberal, liberal fee-fi-iberal.  Conservative, conservative moo-oink-ervative.  Lets get real.  Republican?  Democrat?  Liberal? Conservative?  Those terms have become irrelevant.  They have been stripped of all meaning by history and a press that is quick to cast the fog of war on politicians they don’t like.

Many, many years ago, I remember a bumper sticker that said “I’m not anti-abortion, I’m PRO-LIFE”.  This set off a revolution over political naming rights.  Who has the right to determine what a person is called politically?  Pro-Life has such a  … well, positive, sound to it.  Of course, so as not to be considered “anti-life”, abortions rights people decided to describe themselves as “pro-choice”.

Republicans haven’t always been conservatives, and conservatives haven't always been American in their ideals.  A conservative is one who believes that the established order should be maintained and protected, while a liberal wants to change the established order (usually  in the name of reforming it).

By those definitions, the American Patriots fighting for independence were liberals, and the loyalists were conservative.  The Confederates, fighting for states rights and against federal intervention in property laws were conservatives and the abolitionists were liberals.

I think that one of the weaknesses of political discourse today is a lack of absolute terminology.  Mark Levin in his book Liberty and Tyranny prefers the term “statist” to describe the main body of the current Democratic party.  A statist is one who believes in “giving a centralized government control over economic planning and policy” (dictionary.com definition of statism).

I am anti-statist.  I believe that the best thing government can do is get off our backs and let the American People be free and prosperous again.  This is something you will unlikely get with Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives in the United States today.

Friday, February 12, 2010

What conservatives need to win …

This will be short and sweet in honor of Valentine’s Day.  If conservatives really want to win this November, they need something.  They need specificity.  The democrats won by whining and complaining.  The American people, now that they are seeing specifics of the democrats ideas and plans, they don’t like it.

So, for the republicans to win… for conservatives to take the government back, they need to put forth to the people a unified, SPECIFIC plan and message, much like the Contract with America from 1994.  Call it the American Plan for Prosperity or something.  Here is my wish list for the plan:

  • Include in it a simplified tax code with three brackets (starting at $18,000.00 and eliminate the EIC at the same time) and close the current loopholes the tax code is riddled with. 
  • Include in it a tax subsidy for homeowners who add solar and wind electrical generation systems to their homes if those systems feed power back to the grid.
  • Include in it a cap on punitive damages in medical malpractice cases at the amount of the $500,000.00 or the ten-year average of the doctor’s annual salary, whichever is more.
  • Include in it a ten-year plan of spending and construction to retrofit all existing federal buildings with green technology.
  • Include in it a portability law which allows workers to take their health insurance with them when they change jobs, and allow people to purchase insurance across state lines.

By providing a simple, straightforward plan, with specific, measurable goals, we can take our country back from the democrats who seem hell-bent on destroying it.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Meghan McCain: Defiantly hot, but do we want her? NOT!

Meghan McCain is many things.  In the days after the campaign, she was put up as the face of a newer, younger, hipper Republican Party.  Sure, she's mattressable, but beyond that, does she have anything to offer a conservative like me?  Let's see, she hates the teabag movement. She favors gay rights (I am not anti-gay-rights, I m pro-civil rights, no one group deserves special rights).  She can't tell the difference between original sources (Rham Emanuel saying liberals were "retarded") and secondary reporting (Rush Limbaugh quoting Emanuel).  She is basically an empty-headed socialite who is, like Paris Hilton, famous only for being famous.  She has nothing in her resume that makes me believe in her as an individual.

I believe that she is a Republican only because of her family, and once John passes on, she will probably switch parties.  To that I say, fine.  Go Ahead Meghan.  Stop pretending and go be a Democrat.  Trust me, you will fit right in since I doubt your professed belief in conservative fiscal principles is very genuine.  You will fit in with all the other showy socialites.  Meanwhile, those of us who stand on principles will be rid of your poisonous influence.  And after the sad day that your father does leave this world, you will, thankfully, fade into the obscurity from which you came.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Environmentalism as religion.

Sadly, we lost a great mind several years ago when Michael Chrichton left us.  Aside from great books like Jurassic ParkCongo and Sphere … aside from ER, the greatest medical drama ever to grace our TV sets … he gave us something most interesting.  He gave us the theory of Environmentalism as a religion.

In a very provocative speech before the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, he drew a parallel between Judeo-Christian belief and environmentalism.  Consider his explanation:

“There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.” (Read the whole article at http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-environmentalismaseligion.html)

Environmentalism … the religion of choice for 21st century urban atheists.  Scary, huh?

Monday, February 8, 2010

Weapons of Mass Distraction

OK, so this post comes a little early (cutting and pasting the entries I had was all of a ten-minute job).  I just can’t get this out of my head, so I figured I would blog about it.

We just finished our chapter on Political Elections in my class.  I wrapped it up by showing clips from a great movie: Man of the Year.  In this movie, Robin Williams plays a comedian who does a politically-based comedy “news” show on cable (like John Stewart or Stephen Colbert) who decides to run for President.

During the campaign, he speaks about something he calls “weapons of mass distraction.”  These are political “hot button” issues that politicians use to distract the public from other things that would, quite frankly, piss them off.  So, to save themselves the grief of a pissed-off electorate, politicians use these issues as a kind of smoke screen to keep the public away from the issues that are bad for the politician (I hope you understood that explanation).

Anyways, two of the issues he calls “weapons of mass distraction” are flag desecration amendments and same-sex marriage amendments.  However, you can see this far more clearly in the current administration.  Granted, when President Obama entered office on Jan 20, 2009, he inherited an economy that was in a shambles.  However, when it comes to the economy, Presidents often get blamed for things that are not their fault, and they often take credit for things they did not do.  What happened in ‘08 has been referred to as the “perfect financial storm”.  It had all of the ingredients for a major meltdown, but no one was able to connect the dots, and people who did and tried to warn us, well, we called them doomsayers and ignored them.

So, President Obama wins election based, in part, on his ability to link the poor economy to the previous administration.  Once he became President, it became HIS problem though.  Enter the Stimulus Bill.  It spent money we didn’t have on things that would have happened anyways, albeit perhaps more slowly.  He promised us that if the Stimulus Bill passed, unemployment would not go above 8%.  Now we sit at 9.7% (an artificially low number because of how the government counts unemployment, I will probably post about that topic in a later post), and we were as high as 10% before about half a million unemployed persons simply gave up looking for work.

So, what does the President focus his energies on?  Fixing the economy?  No, he focuses instead on healthcare.  Get the people riled up about healthcare, and they won’t notice the continuing degradation of the economy.  And it has worked.  How many people have realized that in the past three weeks, the Dow has lost pretty much all of the gains it has made in the past six months?  Not many.  Why?  We are worried about our insurance plans, whether or not we will lose our family doctors and whether or not we will be able to care for ourselves in the future with the insurance we will have.  All while polls show that the majority of Americans are happy with their health insurance.

Now THAT, is a weapon of mass distraction.

Catching Up: Political Toolbox …

OK, so we often refer to Democrat politicians as "tools" ... people who exist to be used by liberal special interest groups. Well, exactly what tool do you think President Obama is? I hereby nominate him to be a ...
Strap Wrench.
Why a strap wrench? You buy a strap wrench for something, and find out it isn't very good at doing what you bought it to do ... and it is totally useless for anything that has a decent purpose.
What political tool do you nominate President Obama to be?

Catching Up: Americans … The Next Nazis?

So a friend of mine ... marginally conservative, well-meaning Christian ... is a perfect example of what happened in Germany in 1933. He and his wife have jumped on the organic bandwagon. They breathlessly and evangelistically recommend the movie Food, Inc.

Movies like this really frost my cookies. It is listed as a "documentary", but it is something I call "polimentary", or a political documentary. It is chock full of anti-capitalist, anti-business statements. It is a clearly activist film that pushes a leftward agenda.

The movie uses food to re-enforce class warfare divisions: the poor who cannot afford to eat healthy and are stuck going through the drive through, and the well-to do who can afford to buy and cook actual fresh vegetables. It tries to re-enforce class divisions by equating Latinos ("undocumented workers") with African-Americans calling them "slaves" of the food industry. It tries to revitalize the tarnished image of the unions by creating a new crusade for them: lets fix food! The reference that great socialist tome of liberalism gone by: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. The language they use is straight out of the failed assault on Wal-Mart: 'we want our food as cheap as we can get it but don't realize that it comes at a high price' in the toll it takes on the workers while these companies are making 'billions of dollars'. One bright spot was an organic yogurt producer selling to Wal-Mart and how positive a thing that is.

There are elements of justice for sale, farmers telling the stories of being ruined by the evil corporation, Monsanto. Over and over, corporations are vilified in this film, and then the discussions are ended with a external shot of a factory with the notation that the company refused to be interviewed for this film. Why would a company want to be interviewed for a movie that is a hatchet job against you. Do banks hand out guns with every account? Of course not! That gun may be turned around and used to be rob the bank. Why would you willfully participate in your own lynching?

The movie also goes into the "control" over the legal system that these food companies have. They talk about "veggie libel" laws and "cheeseburger" laws. It talks about lawsuits brought by Monsanto against small farmers who knowingly or unknowingly violate their patents.

As the movie progresses, it embraces the environmentalist agenda, talking about how industrial food is part of destroying the planet.

What does this have to do with Nazis, you may ask? Do you think people elected Hitler based on the promise to slaughter the Jews? Of course not, he was elected because of his promises to rebuild the economy and improve the lives of the German people. Does any of this sound familiar? Liberals do not run for office promising to change our lives, but to improve our lives. They promise to protect us. The theme of protection shows up in the movie when they talk about a child dying from E.Coli poisoning.

This is liberal fascism. They will protect us. The government will take care f us, and the only politicians who care are of course, liberals ... or so the liberals want us to believe.

A movie full of human tragedy caused by heartless corporations, one that works towards what I believe is the modern liberal goal. The modern liberal goal is not so much to change people's minds, as it is to get the conservatives and conservative-leaning people to not oppose their actions.

Hitler didn't need people to vote to kill Jews, he just needed the people to not oppose him while he did it. Wake up conservatives!

8^) Jim

Catching Up: Obama’s Victory is Our Fault, Conservatives!

We don't like to hear it, we don't want it to be true, but the fact is that Conservatives have been setting the stage for a President Obama since the 1970's. How, you may ask? By our virtual abandonment of public education.

Back in the 70's, when liberals realized that the way to win the future was to get the kids while they were at school, they rushed into public education like crazed teenagers at a concert. And, while they grew more numerous and powerful in the educational establishment, conservatives established an alternative educational system through church-run schools and "Christian Academies" to provide a safe place for conservatives to educate their children.

The 80's vintage report on the failure of schools to turn out a literate population further solidified the belief in conservatives that the public education system was beyond redemption and more and more students (children of conservatives) left the public school system, and conservative teachers left a system that was now considered to be the den of secular humanism and took pay cuts to teach at these schools that held to good Christian values. Meanwhile, values is stricken from the curriculum of public schools, and there is no one within the system to stand up for traditional moral values.

This trend continued and the children who were abandoned by conservatives, educated by a public system that focuses on social justice and equality of result, voted en masse for President Obama. He energized the youth of America, whose education left them susceptible to his charisma, but unable to properly evaluate his statements and promises.

In short, because conservatives left public education, we didn't so much as stop teaching children, as we have stopped teaching them to be Americans. I see this every day. I am a high school civics teacher, and I am a conservative. I actually have students who ask to switch to my class because they want a conservative opinion. They need us, they want us. Are we willing to answer their call?

"What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty & Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?" (James Madison)

8^) Jim

In this crazy life, who has time to blog?

OK, so it has been a MAJORLY long time since I have posted anything.  It isn’t that I haven’t had thoughts, but I have so many outlets for my thoughts (school, colleagues, friends) that I often purge things from my mind before I get a chance to write about it.  As such, I end up sometimes forgetting this blog.  Then today, something really profound hit me.

I have a friend.  She is one of those distant, once in a lifetime friends who bring your whole world into focus.  Not a romantic kind of friend (though it could have been once), but the kind of friendship that helps you define who you are and that keeps you from taking yourself too seriously.

My friend is in a rough patch in her life.  No job, very little money, but she manages to get by.  She has a blog that she writes in almost daily (sometimes more than once a day) and she has established herself as a semi-professional blogger.  I enjoy reading her blog and keeping up on the goings on in her life.  Her blog is about life in general (her life in particular) and I am often amazed at her positive outlook on life.

It has been said we rarely tell the people who are most important in our lives exactly what they mean to us.  Reading her blog has inspired me to make sure I write more in this blog.  I am going to cross-post between this blog and TCUNation, since both blogs cover the same topic but reach different audiences.

So in the interests of catching up, tonight I will cross post the current contents of the two blogs, and then, starting tomorrow, even if it is a minor observance, I am going to try like the dickens to post something every day.  Heck, maybe I will even theme the days and make little daily icons like she has.  In the mean time, check out her blog here.