Man of the Year: Ron Paul

Pretty soon, Time magazine (is it still in print?) will be naming its “Person of the Year,” formerly, in pre-P.C. language times, Man of the Year. They almost always get it wrong.

No doubt this year it’ll be Obama. But, as we’re now seeing even more clearly with his cabinet appointments, he’s just another Establishment hack who does what the Establishment tells him.

The real Man of the Year is Ron Paul, for reminding the country — and the world — about the importance of freedom. Everybody talks about freedom, but every other candidate this year, Donkey or Elephant, wanted much more government and much less freedom.

Only Ron Paul wanted to dissolve most of the central government and return American to the limited-government roots of our Founding Fathers.

Young people, especially, responded to his message, and flocked to his campaign. Unfortunately, the GOP Establishment stuck us with old, crazy, bipartisan, loser John McCain. I still wrote in Ron Paul’s name in the November election.

Paul also was the only candidate who warned that the Iraq War was bankrupting the country, and that the inflation and debt used to pay for the war would bring economic ruin. Like Cassandra, he was right, but nobody listened to him. The economic crash began in earnest in mid-September, just as John McCain was enjoying his only bounce to the top of the polls, after he appointed Palin his V.P. nominee.

After that, McCain crashed and burned.

Now we’re stuck with Obama, whose immersion in the corrupt Chicago political machine only now is being examined by the MSNM (MainStream Neocon Media).

Ron Paul would have saved us.

Instead, we’re just going to suffer badly.

Porkbarrel Porkbarrel Porkbarrel

Obama is big on his new make-work program, which supposedly will create $2.5 million jobs. It reality, it will only divert productive private resources to politically favored government waste. But yet…

Obama said a key component of any economic stimulus package would be spending on infrastructure projects, such as fixing roads or bridges, which could help ease the budgetary headaches now being experienced by state and local governments.

At the same time, the Chicago Democrat warned that the selection of which locally based projects to support would be based on need and not political back-scratching.

That would be a first for a Chicago politician.

Of course, the real reason for this spending is to support projects in Democratic districts to help Democrats win in elections in 2010 and 2012. As Steve Sailer points out:

A lot of state and local governments will need bailing out, most notably California, to prevent massive layoffs of civil servants. I expect to see, in the spirit of bipartisanship upon which Obama campaigned, a summit meeting between President Obama and Governor Schwarzenegger in which Obama hands tens of billions to California to meet payroll and even hire some more paper pushers and social workers. That’s what Obama’s entire career has been devoted to: taking money from productive people and hiring people like himself to collect paychecks while failing to solve social problems. That’s his base.

And unlike Republican presidents — such as Bush — who almost always sell out their base, Obama won’t sell out his. Instead, they’ll get the porkbarrel, the gravy, the apple pie, and the cooking sherry.

Under Obama, his Democratic base is going to think every day is Thanksgiving.

And it’s taxpayers who are going to get their heads chopped off.

Joke about GM

A friend came up with this joke:

General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner is on a plane and meets a classmate who’s become a preacher. He tells Wagoner that GM is on the rocks because it lacks Christian management. The preacher said he opens the Bible, stabs his finger onto a verse at random, and God tells him what to do. He prayed and found a verse that talked about bread, so his church invested in wheat futures and made millions. Then prayer led to a verse about smiting enemies, and they reinvested in defense-related mutual funds and tripled their investment. And so on.

Wagoner said he prayed and tried the same thing.

“And what did the Lord tell you?” asked the preacher.

Wagoner said, “It read, ‘Chapter 11‘.”

Bushes and Clintons finally out of power after 28 dismal years

One good thing about this election is that, for the first time since 1980, a Bush or Clinton won’t be at the levers of national power. The two families have done enough damage to America and should be forever banished from corridors of government.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan made the biggest mistake of his career by choosing as his running mate George H.W. Bush, a “moderate.” Bush proceeded to lace the Reagan administration with his cronies, especially longtime Texas buddy, lawyer and  banker James A. Baker III.

As Chief of Staff in Reagan’s first administration, Baker thwarted Reagan’s conservative initiatives time and time again. This led to the call, among us young conservatives of the day, to “Let Reagan be Reagan.”

In 1988, Bush won his election as Reagan’s successor. Whereupon he quickly reneged on his solemn pledge of the campaign, “Read my lips: No new taxes!” The tax increases crashed the economy and we got the Clintons.

You probably remember the depressing Clinton years. And we’re still suffering through the remaining disastrous days of Bush the Less.

28 years of Bush-Clinton-Bush assaults on America. No wonder the country’s economy is collapsing and soon we’ll be No. 2 to China.

Obama will be a disaster. But at least he’ll be a new kind of disaster.

Rush Limbaugh caused Obama win, McCain loss

I listened to Rush Limbaugh this morning for a few minutes. He was talking about “rebuilding” the conservative movement based on small-government principles.

Right. Except that he’s the main reason the movement, and the GOP, have embraced big-government the past 8 years. He all along has supported Bush’s big-government wars, which had to be paid for by bribing congressmen with ever-higher domestic spending. It’s called “guns and butter,” and if it lasts too long — in this case, more than 7 years now since 9/11 — it leads to bankruptcy and political defeat.

Rush could have stopped the wars cold. He didn’t, and still supports them.

Second, Rush is directly responsible for his foolish “Operation Chaos” during the Democratic primaries. Remember that? As Obama was inching toward victory over Hillary in the primaires, Rush urged Republicans to switch parties and vote for Hillary. Rush’s reasoning was that the two Democrats would rip one another to shreds, helping McCain.

But as I noted at the time, back on April 21, 2008:

Operation Chaos is about as well conceived as Bush’s Operation Iraqi Freedom. That is, it’s a disaster.

Operation Chaos means Obama remains in the limelight longer. He’s also challenged by his fellow Democrats longer, forcing him to improve his campaign.

Rush pointed out that, in the last debate, Obama was testy and didn’t like being grilled. What do you think he corrects that problem pronto? If the nomination were already his, there would have been no debate until the fall against McCain, when Obama’s problem would have been in a much bigger spotlight.

It also doesn’t make sense to have Republicans vote Democratic, many for the first time in their lives. By the time the November election comes around, many of these voters will have lost their jobs, seen their homes foreclosed, and had their pickups repossessed after paying $4 gas. Having once voted Democratic, they’ll be primed to do it again. Life is made up of habits.

Sure, Obama’s economic “recovery” program is a socialist disaster that would make matters worse. But if you’re kicked out on the curb and your wife and kids aren’t eating, you’re willing to take a whirl of the big Wheel of Democracy Fortune.

Operation Chaos? Would you believe it’s more like like Operation KAOS, after the bumbling enemy agency in “Get Smart,” and Limbaugh playing the role of Siegfried?

How’s that for prescience? As Operation Chaos dragged on, it also kept McCain out of the spotlight for about another 2 months. So the real show, Obama vs. McCain, began two months late. Yet at the end, just these past few weeks, McCain was catching up to Obama, and with another few weeks — precious weeks Rush’s Operation Chaos denied him — McCain might have won.

For that “strategy,” Rush just signed a $400 million contract. Hey, I’m for people making a lot of money. But shouldn’t there be some excellence shown?

Looks like it’s an Obama blowout…

As I’ve been predicting since the economy blew up 2 months ago, Obama is winning big.

More soon…

Decision 2008: I’ll be live blogging tonight

Before President Obama imposes Prohibition again, I’ll be gathering with some friends at a local bar at around 8 pm PST, 11 pm on the East Coast, to drink as we jeer the election’s unfolding insanity. So click back to my blog then.

Meanwhile, click this YouTube to see where America is headed…

Is McCain’s health getting worse?

John McCain’s doctors have given him a clean bill of health, including his condition after several melanoma operations.

But new evidence might show that his cancer may be more dangerous than thought. At a minimum, he should have a team of objective oncologists inspect him and report their diagnosis to the American people.

The latest report comes in CounterPunch magazine, issue Sept. 16-30, 2008 (not online; subscription here):

On September 20, 2008, CounterPunch was contacted by  a reader in Washington, D.C., reporting conversations pointing to a dramatic, recent worsening in McCain’s medical condition and prognosis.

Though pressed by CounterPunch, the reader insists on remaining anonymous. Over the course of several exchanges with our reader, we can report the following. A senior official in the National Institutes of Health, well known to our reader, has confided to her that in an informal conversation with a doctor in a California hospital the official had learned that there had been a metastasis of McCain’s melanoma, and that this had come to light in a checkup in the past few weeks.

Urged to reconfirm this news and to provide further details, our reader pressed the NIH official for more details and reported back to us on September 26 that she had “asked our NIH contact to verify the details.” The official “decided this was important, and contacted the doctor friend to get what info she could. So here it is. John McCain recently was diagnosed with a melanoma recurrence, with a metastasis to the lymph node, in his latest, most recent cancer checkup, which took place at John Wayne Cancer Institute in California.”

Attempting to confirm this intelligence, CounterPunch contacted four physicians, none of whom want to be identified. Two remarked the subsidence of swelling in McCain’s left jaw in recent months. A UC San Francisco cancer specialist said, “It looked to me like he had something going on in his left jaw for a long time, and then it appeared much less puffy in the last few months. My theory was that he had gotten some radiation therapy. It was way pooched out compared to what it is now. He used to not show his left side on camera. And then he appeared to be going head-on. So my guess was that he had some radiation.”

An East Coast oncologist said of John Wayne Cancer in Santa Monica, California, “That would be the place he’d go because the world’s expert surgeon for melanoma, Donald Morton, is there.” Dr. Morton, while head of surgical oncology at UCLA, developed a technique that minimizes the number of lymph nodes that must be removed during biopsies.

A Los Angeles radiologist put the question of McCain being treated directly to two colleagues at John Wayne. “They said ‘no,’ but I had the strong impression they weren’t being forthright. I’ve known these guys 30 years and I sensed from their tone that they weren’t leveling with me.”

(We do find an online report that McCain was in California for a dermatological checkup on July 28, 2008.)

Same-sex “marriage” — Yes on California’s Prop. 8 — refuting O.C. Register editorial

I always put same-sex “marriage” in irony quotes because it’s an absurdity, a joke. In reality, there is no such thing.

Yet so-called same-sex “marriage” is “legal” here in California, and in Massachusetts and New York. Out here, the foolishness was “legalized” in May by an anti-constitutional edict of the state Supreme Court. Our Nov. 4 ballot includes an initiative, Proposition 8, that would amend the California Constitution to ban the absurdity.

I’ve written about this before. But it’s worth going over the matter again in support of Prop. 8.

As my starting point, I’ll look at yesterday’s editorial opposing Prop. 8 by The Orange County Register, where I worked for 19 years. I agree with them that marriage should be removed from the purview of the government and returned to where it was until the recent centuries, with families and religion.

As they write:

In an ideal world, the state would have little or no role in defining or regulating so intimate a relationship as marriage. However, the state has inserted itself into all too many aspects of our private lives.

Given that about 50% of marriages fail, it’s absurd for government to keep “regulating” marriage.

But it’s also outrageous that the government, this organ of immense coercion, forces on us a redefinition of marriage. What it is doing here isn’t just a legal absurdity, but a full-blown assault on yet another area of our lives, this time something that is the essence of the sanctity and privacy of the family.

The Register maintains:

Legal recognition of same-sex marriage does not require those who have a moral objection to homosexuality or homosexual marriage to recognize or approve of it.

Yes, it does. It’s in the tax forms the government forces me to fill out.  It’s pushed on us incessantly by politicians, the media, and the powerful entertainment industry. If I ever get married, I’ll have to go to the government to fill out the forms that no longer say “groom,” in my case, but “Partner A” or “Partner B.” Let me emphasize: Under current law, I have no choice. I am forced to subscribe to this absurdity.

The Reg says:

It does not require ministers who have doctrinal or moral objections to perform or bless such marriages.

But will public officials who object to this absurdity be allowed to avoid implementing it? No.

Brainwashing children

The Reg:

And it does not require schools to teach that there is “no difference” between man-woman and same-sex marriages.

Yes it does. Just a year ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — who opposes Prop. 8 — signed into law SB777, which changes Section 200 of the California Education Code to read:

200. It is the policy of the State of California to afford all persons in public schools, regardless of their disability, gender, nationality, race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic that is contained in the definition of hate crimes set forth in Section 422.55 of the Penal Code, equal rights and opportunities in the educational institutions of the state. The purpose of this chapter is to prohibit acts that are contrary to that policy and to provide remedies therefor. [Bold face added.]

With same-sex “marriage” now “legal,” that means, according to SB777, that teaching there is a difference between man-woman marriage and same-sex “marriage” is a hate crime.

The Register’s 2000 position

Despite my calls for them to do so, The Register still hasn’t explained to its readers why they changed their position on this issue from 2000, when they (and I) supported a similar initiative, Prop. 22.

As they put it in 2000:

The ultimate question in Prop. 22 is whether the definition of what constitutes a marriage should remain as it always has been, or whether the door can be opened to same-sex marriages – and by extension to any other sort of arrangements that people might devise.

Fast-forward to 2008, and this is the reasoning behind the new position — basically, it’s the opposite of the 2000 position:

Proponents of Prop. 8 argue that it simply restores “what human history has understood it [marriage]to be.” But marriage has not been a static institution. At one time wives were treated as chattel and had no property rights of their own. Interracial marriage was once banned in California, but that law was overturned as recently as 1948 on similar equal-protection grounds.

This is wrong  historically. Whatever marriage was in the past, it always involved persons of the opposite sex. It might have been one man and 50 women, or even incest as among the royal family in ancient Egypt. But, until our recent times of absurdity, it always was between one sex and the other, never between those of the same sex.

It certainly was wrong, for example, for California law to ban interracial marriage. But such marriages, whether banned or legal, always involved a man and a woman.

Let’s go further.  The Register writes, “But marriage has not been a static institution.” So does that mean the next step could be approving incestuous marriages? Where does the “dynamic” redefinition of legal marriage end? Will marriage be redefined, as the Register itself warned in 2000, to mean “any other sort of arrangements that people might devise”?

The Register writes:

As our understanding of equal protection has evolved and expanded and as an increasing number of same-sex couples have expressed a desire to make lifelong commitments to one another – incidentally, promoting societal stability and reducing promiscuity – it has become clear that equal protection should be extended to same-sex couples.

A different view comes from Justin Raimondo, an “out” homosexual, libertarian, and editor of Antiwar.com, one of my favorite Web sites. He writes in opposition to same-sex “marriage” being imposed by the government:

Which brings us to the central argument against gay marriage, which is that it is based on a heterosexual model of sexual and emotional relationships, one that just doesn’t fit the gay lifestyle. The whole idea of getting gays hitched is derivative of the central error of egalitarianism, the counterintuitive conception of human beings as being “equal” and, therefore, interchangeable—and therefore one-size-fits-all. Egalitarianism isn’t really a political ideology: it’s a religion, one quite capable of withstanding a sustained assault of clear evidence to the contrary….

With gay marriage comes the inevitable gay divorce—and, believe you me, it’s going to be ugly. If gay activists think that marriage is going to somehow legitimize homosexuality in the eyes of Middle America, then they have yet to imagine the new hit “reality tv” show, “Gay Divorce Court,” which will make the heterosexual version seem like a Sunday School picnic. Indeed, I predict that, given the nature of the male animal, the gay male divorce rate will soon outstrip the rate of new gay male marriages. Gay marriage—in the gay male community, that is—is prone to self-abolition….

The very phrase “gay marriage” is an oxymoron. Homosexuality, after all, is really all about the avoidance of marriage – and the responsibility of raising a family. It is the embrace of sensuality for its own sake, as an instrument of pure pleasure rather than procreation. Do gay guys really want to give up what is most attractive – to males, at any rate – about their recreational activities, the tremendous sense of freedom it implies?

Today’s gay activists are embarked on what is truly a futile mission, to make homosexuality seem “natural.”

Libertarians vs. same-sex “marriage”

Raimondo also is pertinent on why libertarians ought to oppose the government forcing us to accept legal same-sex “marriage”:

A true libertarian position on gay marriage is very simple: libertarians seek to prevent the incursion of the State into private affairs. This means that any libertarian worthy of the name must oppose “legalizing” the very real marriages that do exist in the gay community, albeit not in a form most “straights” would find either familiar or acceptable.

The State, after all, has already made a strenuous and largely successful effort to regulate and intervene in the natural life of families, as well as the relations between women and men—the advent of gay marriage would mean extending the reach of the State over the private lives of individuals. Surely no libertarian could agree to such a thing, and would certainly do everything to oppose it.

Yet all sorts of alleged “libertarians” and fellow travelers simply assume that support for gay marriage—and, indeed, for the homosexual lifestyle—is a central principle of libertarianism. It simply isn’t so.

Conclusion

The Register and I agree that we should get government out of our lives, especially marriages, as much as possible. Then it does not follow that the government should be allowed to redefine marriage, on the whim of four state Supreme Court barrators, into something it never has been and — in a metaphysical sense — never can be.

The 4-3 decision also means that one vote decided the matter. That means just one person was the deciding factor in imposing this tyranny — over language, morals, and family — over 37 million Californians. This is the very definition of totalitarianism.

The tyrannical California Supreme Court needs to be rebuked over its statist attempt to redefine something that should not even be in its purview: marriage.

Vote Yes on Prop. 8.

Crooks bailing out crooks: You get the $700,000,000,000.00 tab

The bailout of Wall Street is the biggest heist in history. It’s robbing Main Street to bankroll Wall Street. Here’s all you need to know, from Bloomberg:

Paulson Plan Aimed at Helping `Poorly Run’ Banks, Allison Says
By David Mildenberg

Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) — U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson‘s proposed $700 billion bank rescue aims to help “poorly run” companies and the primary beneficiaries would be Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, said BB&T Corp. Chief Executive Officer John Allison in a critique of the plan.

Paulson used to be the head honcho at Goldman Sachs. So he’s bailing out his old firm and his buddies on Wall Street. You get the bill for $700,000,000,000.00.

Paulson is a crook, pure and simple, who should be impeached, removed from office, put on trial, convicted, and jailed. So should all those also involved in the greatest ripoff ever: President Bush, VP Cheney, Speaker Pelosi, Senate boss Reid, every representative and senator who votes for the bailout, and the Wall Street criminals who will profit.

On of the main crooks cooking up the bailout is Rep. Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Two decades ago a male paramour of his was running a prostitution ring from Frank’s Washington, D.C. apartment. Anyone who supports this bailout also is a Barney Frank prostitute.

As I write, it’s not clear whether Obama and McCain will support the Bush-Paulson-Frank bailout, but they’re leaning in that direction. If so, then both should quit the race and become streetwalkers for Frank.

This whole bailout robbery has one positive aspect: It shows us that America no longer is a democracy, but a plutocracy, with the whole show being run of Wall Street, by Wall Street, for Wall Street.

They make all the profits. If they goof up and lose money, then you, Joe and Jane Taxpayer, get stuck with the immense bill.

Heads Wall Street wins, tails you lose.