The fact that there does not appear to be a single Republican leader who is capable or ready to challenge the assertion that “only government” can put our sputtering economy back on track shows we need a rebirth of the Republican Party. And that this rebirth must come from the grass roots.
Tag: Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day
In 1975, when liberalism was on the march around the world, Reagan called for the rebirth of the GOP as a party “raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people.” A few months later, he declared that “I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism” — that is, the belief in small government.
Reagan’s stated beliefs made him the object of ridicule among those who considered themselves intellectuals, but he stuck to his guns. And then, in 1980, when the failures of Big Government were evident to all Americans, the people turned for leadership to the presidential candidate who had been right all along.
Over the last eight years, President Bush sought to tame Big Government and turn it to conservative ends. The administration experimented with the belief — as expressed by Huckabee, Gerson and Kristol — that Republicans and conservatives would do better by rejecting small-government conservatism and accepting Big Government. For generations, Democrats had bribed people to vote for them with one Big Government program after another, so Republicans did the same (No Child Left Behind, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, endless deficits and, finally, the bailouts). The results of the experiment are now in: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Harry Reid, President-elect Barack Obama.
Quote of the Day
Indeed, Toyota claims losses for the first time in 70 years—though how Toyota’s management was able to keep sales up in 1945, when Gen. Curtis LeMay’s B-29s were conducting their nightly visits, escapes me.
Bush may believe he has sinned against free-market principles, but he is following the path of his great free-market predecessor. Ronald Reagan, too, was not prepared to see Japan take down the U.S. auto industry, or steel industry, or computer chip industry, or Harley-Davidson.
Believing Japan was dumping to destroy U.S. companies, Reagan put patriotism before ideology and imposed quotas on Japanese imports. He, too, was castigated by the same commentariat that is berating Bush.
Vice President Cheney, too, has endorsed the bailout of Detroit. Of the senators who voted to pull the plug on General Motors, Cheney is said to have remarked, “It’s Herbert Hoover time” up there in the GOP caucus.
[….]
Like Prohibition in Hoover’s phrase, globalism is “an experiment, noble in purpose, that has failed.”
Quote of the Day
Neoconservatism, he announced, was a victim of its success. It no longer represented anything unique because the GOP had so thoroughly assimilated its doctrines. In 2004, a variety of commentators scrambled to pronounce a fresh obituary for neoconservatism. The disastrous course of the Iraq War, Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím said, showed that the neoconservative dream had expired in the sands of Araby.
Quote of the Day
In recent years, this question of ownership has insinuated itself into my mind, and I can’t dislodge it. If my home (automobile, income) is really mine, why must I pay strangers to continue to live in it, use it, retain it? Is it MINE, or not?
Not only must I pay to keep what is presumably mine, but the strangers who demand the tribute have a greater claim upon “my” property than I do. Over the years, I’ve needed to have several repairs made to a shifting foundation, have had to replace the roof shingles, re-pave the driveway, install a sump pump, etc. If, because of unexpected expenses, I had been unable to pay the property tax bill, would the collector have understood when I told him I’d have to give him a pass this time around? Of course not. His claim upon my money (say, should that be “my” money?) outweighs my own.
But I digress. Back to the “bubble.” We have lived in this house for forty-two years. We started construction in the late summer, or early fall, of 1965, and moved in on January 20, 1966, just one week before my son was born. Now for the epiphany: while I was musing over the tax bill, it suddenly dawned on me that, over the years, we’ve paid the local rulers more than the house cost. Much more, in fact. It’s incredible, when you think about it. The local authorities did nothing to facilitate our purchase of the land, the building of the house, or its subsequent maintenance; that all came out of my pocket. Yet, over the years, they’ve collected more from me than I paid the developer for the land and the building. And, needless to say, it’s not ending here – I’ll be paying them until I die or sell the house.
And then there’s the inflation factor. As the dollar has withered over the years, the “value” of the house has increased to seven or eight times the amount paid for it. I’ve always marveled that a building that gradually deteriorates becomes more valuable as it does so. My income, over my working years, did not increase sufficiently to match the decline of the dollar, especially with Medicare forcing me to work for less with each passing year. But for the true, actual, owners of the house, it didn’t matter; their tax rate was based upon the inflated value of the house, so that as the dollars became more worthless, they collected more of them.
What a sweet scheme! No wonder those windbags in the state house, or city hall, never stop referring to home ownership (sic!) as the fulfillment of the American Dream! For them, it’s a sweet dream indeed; for us, it can be a bad dream, if not a nightmare. For every house built within their jurisdiction, they will, eventually, collect more than the contractor, the developer, the architect, etc., from that house, and without significant expense on their part, or liability for flaws or defects. And should some defiant home “owner” challenge them and refuse to pay, they’ll simply take his house away from him, and sell it to someone who will. To cap the climax, I suspect that when the municipality borrows money, it uses “my” home as collateral.
A housing bubble? Of course. Every building that’s constructed means a perpetual flow of income to the local authorities. It may look to you like a house, but to them it’s a cash cow. And you’re getting milked, no bull!
Quote of the Day
In today’s world, America faces nationalistic trade rivals who manipulate currencies, employ nontariff barriers, subsidize their manufacturers, rebate value-added taxes on exports to us and impose value-added taxes on imports from us, all to capture our markets and kill our great companies. And we have a Republican Party blissfully ignorant that we live in a world of us or them. It doesn’t even know who “us” is.
We need a new team on the field and a new coach who believes with Vince Lombardi that “winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”
The Automotive Bailouts: The Other Side of the Story
I have been sitting here, trying to keep out of this. But I have sat and looked at the Republican and Neo–Conservative Spin on this Story and I’m sick of it. 😡
So, I am giving you, the other side of the story, from the horses mouth; without commentary from me.
I did not ask that you agree, I simply ask that you listen and hear this man out. Now I am almost sure, that the Blogs, that I have linked to, will remove my trackback, like the Neo-Con Fascists that they are. I mean, it is all about controlling the message with those guys. 🙄
Here we go:
Part 1:
Part 2:
Media Q & A:
Media Q & A Part 2:
Media Q & A Part 3:
There you have it. The other side of the story. You decide.
(Source UAW.ORG)
Quote of the Day
The fundamental problem of the incoming Obama Administration is that
their thinking is based on the very 2007 assumption that the
fundamental problem of scarcity was solved so now all we have to do is
redistribute wealth and reorganize society in a more SWPL fashion.
Instead, it turns out the Bush Boom was a Bush Bubble and we actually
have much bigger problems than the conventional wisdom of 2007 assumed.
Powered by ScribeFire.
Quote of the Day – Pearl Harbor
A short comment is no place to settle the controversies that have raged ever since the attack about what Roosevelt and his chief subordinates knew in advance, but one thing has been known for a long time: however “dastardly” the attack might have been, it was anything but “unprovoked.” Indeed, even admirers and defenders of Roosevelt, such as Robert B. Stinnett and George Victor, have documented provocations aplenty. (See the former’s Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor and the latter’s The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable.) On December 8, the same day that Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan, former president Herbert Hoover wrote a private letter in which he remarked, “You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bitten.”
On the basis of facts accumulated over the past seven decades and available to anyone who cares to examine them, we are justified in saying that Hoover’s characterization of the war’s provocation was entirely accurate – both with regard to the Japanese imperial government as “rattlesnakes” and with regard to the U.S. government’s “putting pins in.” Indeed, we now have a much firmer basis for that characterization than Hoover could have had on December 8, 1941. Countless lies have been told, massive cover-ups have been staged, propaganda has flowed like a river, yet in this one regard, at least, the truth has undeniably been brought out.
Most American historians, of course, no longer bother to deny this truth. They simply take it in stride, presuming that the Japanese attack, by giving Roosevelt the public support he needed to bring the United States into the war against Germany through the “back door,” was a good thing for this country and for the world at large. Indeed, some actually shower the president with approbation for his mendacious maneuvering to wrench the American people away from their unsophisticated devotion to “isolationism.” In no small part, Roosevelt’s unrelenting dishonesty with the American people (Stanford University historian David M. Kennedy tactfully refers to the president’s “frequently cagey misrepresentations”) in 1940 and 1941 – plain enough if one reads nothing more than his pre-Pearl Harbor correspondence with Winston Churchill – is counted among his principal qualifications for “greatness” and for his (to my mind, incomprehensible) status as an American demigod.
I have noticed, however, that in polls of historians or lay persons to determine which presidents were “great,” the dead never have a vote. Lucky for Roosevelt.
Quote of the Day
Likewise, the paper “billionaires” of 1999—whose IPOs had yielded them options worth more than several African countries—were never anything like that rich. Their shares, which were “worth” $30 billion or something, were impossible to sell. The moment these 30-year-old hucksters started trying to unload the stocks, their value would plummet—based as it was on nothing. No profits, meager earnings, nothing more than the fantasy that a “greater fool” would come along to pay hundreds of millions for shares in a company that sold Hindu devotional mousepads made from recycled condoms. In the end, we ran out of fools.
So as I use my quarterly 401(k) statement to clean up after the beagles, I console myself with the thought that the annual gains of 25% which they earned throughout the 90s never really existed. They were promises of consumption, based not on previous savings, but the hope of future loans. Faery, insubstantial creatures of light and air, which vanished with the first ray of the dawn. The beagles, at least, are real.
Quote of the Day
As someone from McCarthy’s home state, let me just say that while McCarthy was not wrong in saying there were Communists in government warning us about this, his scattershot, reckless approach made it easy for the powers that be to destroy him and make a characiture out of him. I also don’t think Gabler’s wrong in saying that a style of politics sprung forth from McCarthy (although one could say it predates all the way back to Nxon’s first campaign for Congress in 1946. ) but he should know that when elities operate in backrooms and make policies that could kill young American boys and now girls in battle and some of those people in the room are agents for a foreign power trying to get the U.S. to fight their battles for them, then why should it be so suprising that a populist figure from outside the establishment comes along to turnover the furnitiure inside the Clubhouse and say all little emperors and empresses wear no clothes. McCarthy and McCarthyism was never a vacumn to one’s self. It reflected people’s concerns over the conduct of U.S. foreign policy and the tendency for elities to shut out the voices of many of the country’s citizens when that policy is being made. McCarthy may well have been on the wrong side of history, but he was not afraid to, as he put it “call a spade a spade.”
Quote of the Day
Wounded and enraged by the atrocities of 9-11, America lashed out, first at Afghanistan and the al-Qaida source of the conspiracy, then at Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks. Thus did the Bush administration disunite its nation and forfeit its mandate.
For India to lash out at a Pakistan that was not complicit in the Mumbai crimes against humanity, but harbors elements within that are guilty and are celebrating, would be as great a mistake.
India and Pakistan both have a vital interest in no new war.
But a new war is exactly what the terrorists killed for and died for.
Should it come, they win — and enter history as revolutionary terrorists alongside Princip and the perpetrators of 9-11.
Quote of the Day
A family man in America’s condition, awash in debt, spending more than he makes, would cut back consumption, find a second job and get out of debt. Or declare bankruptcy, accept the shame and humiliation, change his wastrel ways and start anew.
Is it different for a nation?
Yet we seem to believe we can borrow and spend our way out of a swamp of unpayable debt into which borrowing and spending have plunged us.
We are headed either for default on our debts and bankruptcy as a nation, or something less honorable: a quiet cheapening of the debts we have incurred by inflating and destroying the dollar, robbing our creditors of what we owe them and robbing our own people of the value of what they have earned. And so it has come to this.
What would the Founding Fathers think of us now?
Quote of the Day
This is America today—a country that is losing its ability to manufacture things but has to continue to pander to rich Arabs and the Chinese Communists for money just to survive. In addition to our jobs, savings and investments, it looks like our sovereignty and national pride are being sacrificed as part of this process.
Quote of the Day
Conservatives were called racist for opposing immigration policies pushed by the Bush administration, other Big-Government Republicans and Democrats. The wrong immigration policy, under which people here unlawfully would receive benefits at taxpayer expense, would also allow them to steal jobs from low-income Americans, and would be a slap in the face to immigrants who came to America legally through a long and sometimes expensive process.
Conservatism is a threat to liberalism because bigotry is counterproductive to conservatives, but is a cornerstone of liberalism. Economic conservatism values the productivity, work, intelligence, integrity, motivation and other virtues of the individual. Religious conservatism is based in the fundamental premise that we are all born of equal value in the eyes of God.
Liberals who evade the merits of policy arguments by resorting to calling white conservatives “racists” or African-American conservatives “Uncle Toms” don’t merely demonstrate their own ignorance, they cheapen the cause against real racism.
Sunday Afternoon Snort Worthy Quote
Responding to Sophia A. Nelson’s lament about how the Republican Party has not sucked up Pandered to the African-American race. Oliver Willis quips, “They don’t want your black ass!”
Just about made Coffee shoot right out of my nose! 😆
Thanks Oliver, I needed the laugh. 😀
Quote of the Day
Bill Richardson, who had served in Clinton’s cabinet and later became governor of New Mexico, kindly stopped to speak to our delegation at the [2000] Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. He commented favorably to us: “What do Hispanics want? Fully funded government programs!”
Quote of the Day
After an election loss, recriminations are inevitable. Everyone believes they know what went wrong and who is to blame for it. Conservatives in the Republican Party are blaming the corruption and apostasies of senators like Ted Stevens (R-AK) for the party’s tarnished image, while more elite conservative opinion-makers like Kathleen Parker and David Brooks are arguing that the party must head left, and specifically jettison social conservatives, to appeal to a broader base of the electorate.
Most of these arguments are not credible. For instance, the latter group cites poll evidence showing that such-and-such demographic groups, who had voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004, all of a sudden switched to supporting Obama and other Democrats. That is a true observation, but it does not necessarily follow that the GOP should act more Democratic to appeal to these groups. The problem is that all demographic groups favored the Democrats more this year than they did last election. The GOP lost ground among men, women, all educational and income levels, minorities, and age groups. There is no group here that can be targeted for a specific appeal, no Rovian strategy that will woo a particular demographic. The GOP simply lost.
Quote of the Day
Who killed the U.S. auto industry?
To hear the media tell it, arrogant corporate chiefs failed to foresee the demand for small, fuel-efficient cars and made gas-guzzling road-hog SUV’s no one wanted, while the clever, far-sighted Japanese, Germans, and Koreans prepared and built for the future.
I dissent. What killed Detroit was Washington, the government of the United States, politicians, journalists, and muckrakers who have long harbored a deep animus against the manufacturing class that ran the smokestack industries that won World War II.
For once in my life. I am in 100% agreement with a Republican. Click the link to see who it is.
Quote of the Day
It’s hard to know whether it was the real John McCain who lost or whether the person Barack Obama defeated was a fake, created to motivate the narrow slice of the electorate mistakenly thought to be the Republican “base” (see Palin, “country first”, Joe the Plumber).
Obama might have won in any case, but the McCain campaign was an amateur affair, unable to settle on a consistent presentation of the candidate’s message or identity. At times (e.g., the proposal to cancel a debate, put the campaign on hold, and race theatrically back to Washington), he appeared foolish.
McCain started the campaign as an admired and independent-minded combination of war hero and experienced legislator, weighed down by the unpopularity of his party and the president. By the time the campaign was over, it was not George Bush but McCain himself who had been rejected.
Quote of the Day
To gain any understanding of Churchill, we must go beyond the heroic images propagated for over half a century. The conventional picture of Churchill, especially of his role in World War II, was first of all the work of Churchill himself, through the distorted histories he composed and rushed into print as soon as the war was over. In more recent decades, the Churchill legend has been adopted by an internationalist establishment for which it furnishes the perfect symbol and an inexhaustible vein of high-toned blather. Churchill has become, in Christopher Hitchens’s phrase, a “totem” of the American establishment, not only the scions of the New Deal, but the neo-conservative apparatus as well – politicians like Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle, corporate “knights” and other denizens of the Reagan and Bush Cabinets, the editors and writers of the Wall Street Journal, and a legion of “conservative” columnists led by William Safire and William Buckley. Churchill was, as Hitchens writes, “the human bridge across which the transition was made” between a noninterventionist and a globalist America. In the next century, it is not impossible that his bulldog likeness will feature in the logo of the New World Order.
Quotes of the Day
The U.S. dollar, tied to gold, was to become the world’s reserve currency. The pound, the franc and other currencies were to be tied to the dollar at fixed rates of exchange. An International Monetary Fund was established to lend to nations with balance of payments problems. An International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) was created to provide loans for rebuilding war-torn Europe.
America provided most of the financing for the new institutions and assumed the lion’s share of control. Though the most famous economist of the age, J.M. Keynes, led the British delegation, his ideas — for a new world central bank and new world currency — were brushed aside by Harry White and the Americans.
The Bretton Woods system endured until Richard Nixon. With his country hemorrhaging gold in 1971, Nixon slammed the gold window shut, cut the dollar loose and let it float against other currencies.
Nixon’s was an act of necessity. The Europeans, with more dollars than they needed or wanted, were coming to cash them in and clean out Fort Knox.
To suggest that Europeans possess anything like the hegemonic power of America in 1944 is delusion.
……
I now officially pronounce the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party as dead as its namesake, the late Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York, who assumed room temperature nearly 30 years ago.
This is a good thing – a very hopeful, even promising, eventuality for a potential rebirth of the Republican Party as a party of ideas.
It had to happen. As the first Republican president told us, “A house divided cannot stand.” Neither can a party – at least not when it is divided the way the Rockefeller Republicans divided the GOP.
But, why do I proclaim the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party dead?
Because, John McCain was the personification of that wing – at least in the last 10 years.
He got the nomination. He did it his way, as Frank Sinatra would say. And he got beat by a guy three years out of the Illinois Legislature, a radical with tempestuous associations, no executive experience, little experience with elective office of any kind and little professional experience of any kind.
McCain got his butt kicked. He not only lost his bid for the White House, but he also lost many Republican seats once thought safe in Congress.
McCain may still be the titular head of his party as the presidential nominee, but his influence on its future will be considerably diminished as a result of his utter failure. McCain is not considered even a remote possibility for another bid at the big prize.
He’s done, finished, over, completed.
Snort Worthy Quote of the Day
“Faggots” hating on “niggers”. What’s next?
No word on how naggots and figgers feel about all this.
*snort*
Quote of the Day
Ultimately, however, the Beltway Republicans are losing Middle America because they are ideologically incapable of addressing two great concerns: economic insecurity and the perception that we are losing the America that we grew up in.
Economic insecurity is traceable to NAFTA-GATT globalization, under which it makes economic sense for U.S. companies to close factories here, build plants in China and export back to the United States. Manufacturing now accounts for less than 10 percent of all U.S. jobs.
Social insecurity is traceable to mass immigration, legal and illegal, which has brought in scores of millions who are altering the character of communities and competing with U.S. workers by offering their services for far less pay.
These are the twin causes of death of the Reagan coalition, and as long as the Republican Party is hooked on K Street cash, it will not address either, and thus pass, blissfully addicted, from this earth. – Patrick J. Buchanan
Quote of the Day…
Sad but true.
Thomas DiLorenzo via LewRockwell.com Blog – All Hail the Neocons!
As of next week they will have totally destroyed the Republican Party. Good work, boys! All those “Churchill Award Winners” and “Lincoln Fellows” really did a job on the ole GOP.
Let’s hope these parasites next attach themselves to the Democratic Party, which is where most of them came from in the first place.
Something tells me. It is going to be a LONG four to eight years.