AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

@Foxfyre,

Foxfyre wrote:

Speaking of ever increased powers of the Federal government:

Quote:
August 28, 2009 12:34 AM PDT
Bill would give president emergency control of Internet

you clipped just a tiny bit early

Quote:
When Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April

1 Reply

@Foxfyre,

Foxfyre wrote:

The first order of business for anybody intent on dictatorial powers is to have total power to control the message.

Are you really that whacked?

1 Reply

@ehBeth,

ehBeth wrote:

Foxfyre wrote:

Speaking of ever increased powers of the Federal government:

Quote:
August 28, 2009 12:34 AM PDT
Bill would give president emergency control of Internet

you clipped just a tiny bit early

Quote:
When Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April

I don't care who introduced the bill ehBeth. I am as critical of a Republican who pushes unacceptably intrusive government as much as I am critical of a Democrat. More so even because a Republican is expected to know better.

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http://www.fickleknitter.com/links/images/3779415360_5a8c360251.jpg

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@OCCOM BILL,

OCCOM BILL wrote:

Foxfyre wrote:
The first order of business for anybody intent on dictatorial powers is to have total power to control the message.

Are you really that whacked?

Okay Mr. Brilliant. YOU tell us what the first order of business has historically been when government has presumed more power than it was intended to have?

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@OCCOM BILL,

0 Replies

@Foxfyre,

crickets

0 Replies

@Cycloptichorn,

I wrote: The general welfare of the United States has and is being achieved by securing the rights of its people.

you said: "In your opinion; however, this isn't written down anywhere, and carries no force of law at all."

~~~~ !????! ~~~~
~~~~ (O|O) ~~~~
.~~~~ ( O ) ~~~~.
... Not written down!
........ anywhere?

From the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

From the Preamble of the Constitution of the USA: "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Emergency room medical care at my hospital for those who cannot afford to pay for it themselves, is paid for by me only when I obtain medical care from my hospital. I prefer paying for that medical care that way, rather than pay taxes to the feds for it.

Enough people--including me--do contribute to medical care charities. Even more would if government would stay the hell out of it!

The fed's current Medicare and Medicaid programs are forecast to create big deficits within the coming decade. The price of medical care would be far less if the feds were not involved, and the tort laws were revised to limit medical tort suits to proven irresponsible medical care.

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@ican711nm,

I think the national psyche is following the same trends we are Ican. Now if we could just persuade the government to give a damn about what the people want from government:

Quote:

America's Best Days
70% Prefer Government That Provides Fewer Services With Lower Taxes
Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Seventy percent (70%) of likely voters now favor a government that offers fewer services and imposes lower taxes over one that provides more services with higher taxes, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

That’s up five points over the past month and is the highest level measured in nearly three years.

Just 19% would prefer a government that provides more services in exchange for higher taxes, down five points from July and the lowest level in over two years. This marks the first time the percentage of voters who prefer this type of government has fallen below 20%.

Most Republicans (88%) and voters not affiliated with either major party (78%) like a government with lower taxes and fewer services, and 48% of Democrats agree. However, one-in-three Democrats (34%) prefer more government services and higher taxes.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/america_s_best_days

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@Foxfyre,

I'll take a stab at it: consolidating power in a single branch of government, politicizing apolitical government agencies, stacking the courts, loyalty oaths, setting up a propaganda network, using it to focus the populace on a foreign boogey man so that they will be convinced that all of these measures are necessary for their own safety, and then tying any political opponents you might still have to that boogey man, no matter how absurd the connection.

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@FreeDuck,

Gee, that sounds awfully familiar...

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@FreeDuck,

FreeDuck wrote:

I'll take a stab at it: consolidating power in a single branch of government, politicizing apolitical government agencies, stacking the courts, loyalty oaths, setting up a propaganda network, using it to focus the populace on a foreign boogey man so that they will be convinced that all of these measures are necessary for their own safety, and then tying any political opponents you might still have to that boogey man, no matter how absurd the connection.

Probably some validity in all of that. But look at this 1964 article from Time Magazine.

DISCLAIMER: I am NOT comparing Obama to Hiter nor the Democrats to the Nazis. I do NOT believe Obama or the Democrats bear any semblance to the Nazi regime and are not capable of what the Nazis were capable.

This is offered strictly in a generic sense as illustration that control of the media is essential for a government that intends to assume more power than the people will consent to in advance. I have highlighted some portions.

Quote:

The Press: Hitler's Paper Yoke
Friday - April 17, 1964
Time Magazine

In 1920 an obscure, brown-shirted band of fanatics who called themselves the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei"Nazis for short"bought their first newspaper. It did not seem much of a buy. The Volkischer Beo-bachter (People's Observer), was a slender Munich biweekly with barely 7,000 subscribers and not a pfennig in the till. Its new publisher, one Adolf Hitler, made it a daily and rang up a blustering new masthead slogan: "Combat Organ of the National Socialist Movement of Germany."

From this tiny seed, sown a full 13 years before Hitler's accession, sprang the most perverted, rapacious and successful propaganda apparatus the world had ever known. By 1936, after just three years in power, the Nazi party owned two-thirds of all German news circulation outright and tightly controlled the rest. Not a line was printed without official approval, not an editor escaped the role of Nazi stooge. How this happened"and, more significantly, how easily it happened"is told in The Captive Press in the Third Reich (Princeton University Press; $6.50), by Oron J. Hale, 61, chairman of the history department of the University of Virginia and an acknowledged authority on the Hitler years.

Pure Publishers. Hale's book suggests that the German press was overripe for a predator like Hitler. There were far too many papers, and far too few good ones. Mostly they were what the Germans called "Kase blatter""cheese wrappers. Harsh laws were passed as early as 1922 to discipline the more scurrilous members of the political press. They were not harshly enforced "but their potential was not lost on the country's budding Fuhrer.

Hitler's press boss was Max Amann, a stupid, brawling dwarf bullock who had been Corporal Hitler's wartime company sergeant. Amann had assembled a press empire of 59 dailies even before the party took power. For the sake of Nazi recognition, scores of nonparty papers agreed to print Nazi propaganda free and to take no ads from Jews. By way of disaster insurance, dozens of German advertisers cynically bought space in official Nazi organs. The German people were partly to blame, for they did not support the few honest papers that warned what Hitler was up to. After daring to call the Nazi election victories of 1932 a TRIUMPH OF FOLLY, the Hannoverscher Kurier lost one-fifth of its circulation in a fortnight.

Once Hitler became Chancellor, Presseleiter Amann peeled off his gloves. In 1933, the entire Social Democratic and Communist press, totaling some 150 papers hostile to Hitler, vanished without trace. That same year, the party passed a law decreeing that editors must "regulate their work in accordance with National Socialism as a philosophy of life." The Amann ordinances, passed two years later, required publishers to trace their own and their wives' racial "purity" back through four generations. Amann outlawed publications that appealed to "confessional groups""an assault on Germany's Catholic press.

Dupe Sheets. Though Amann's measures caused nearly 1,500 newspaper casualties, the German press went docilely to its fate.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,875820,00.html

"The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable." --James Madison

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@Foxfyre,

Wow, Foxfyre, now "70% of likely voters favor a government that offers fewer services and imposes lower taxes over one that provides more services with higher taxes."

Yes, if this trend is sustained, the national psyche is following the same trends we are!

Foxfyre wrote:

Now if we could just persuade the government to give a damn about what the people want from government

I think the Obama government is not persuadable to give a damn "about what the people want from government."
So the options are:
(1) remove it by lawful congressional elections and subsequently by normal lawful congressional actions; or,
(2)remove it by impeachment of Obama by the House and removal of Obama by the Senate.

As you know, I think both are required. I think campaigning for (1) is required to lawfully accomplish (2). I think this, because I am convinced that Obama and his supporters will take whatever approach--lawful or unlawful--to accomplish their objectives. Time is of the essence! I do not think we have even a year to postpone campaigning for Obama's impeachment and removal in order to save our constitutional government from being replaced by a dictatorship.

Yes, I'm heavily influenced by what I observed the nazis doing to gain power in Germany while I was growing up in the USA. I hope I am wrong, but my gut tells me I am not wrong! My gut tells me wishful thinking like we in the USA did prior to WWII is wrong! We still have some time to carefully observe Obama's and his supporter's actions before we must decide to promote both options, (1) and (2).

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@Foxfyre,

it's fair to say that right about now, there's a whole slew of republicans in La Canada / Flintridge who wish they'd gone ahead and paid the extra couple of bucks in taxes instead of letting things get so tight that we've had to cut shifts and operation days in the fire departments. the bright shining city on the hill is in danger of going up in flames.

and i can see the smoke and flames from my house.

hey... i guess that makes me qualified to be fire chief.

http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2009-08/48931507.jpg

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-0826-morris-fire-pictures,0,2039975.photogallery

1 Reply

@Foxfyre,

Seriously Foxfyre, I just have a really difficult time understanding how anyone could have lived through the last eight years and now suddenly awaken to the tyranny that is supposedly at our doorstep. It's amazing. It's as if the country was going about its business in perfect balance of power, fiscal responsibility and individual liberty until we elected this president. And now after just 8 months in power he has somehow single-handedly put us on the road to communist dictatorship. If you take a deep breath and zoom out you'll see that things have gotten a bit hysterical, and that the people pushing this message are not appealing to our better natures.

1 Reply

@FreeDuck,

I think you're looking at it through partisan blinders. You didn't see eight years of pure hatred, vitriol, ridicule, insults, accusations, innuendo, conspiracy theories, suggestions of improper favors, payoffs, coercion, and patronage and really ugly adjectives and metaphors heaped upon the administration of the previous eight years? If you didn't see those of us who were shouting from the rooftops that the war was being mismanaged, there was no fiscal accountability, we didn't want new entitlement programs, and we didn't want increased government spending, then you had extra large blinders on.

And now we are complaining about a government and administration that presumes to be even more sweeping and intrusive and controlling and, yes, dangerous to our Constitution and American way of life. Perhaps they are even more emboldened because the previous administration got away with so much.

I do try not to call the President or anybody else hateful names or make ridiculous accusations. But if those who see the red flags don't points them out, it could be too late by the time the kool-ade drinkers finally catch on. The fact that you loathed and despised President Bush does not give this administration license for a free ride void of criticism.

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D.C. Mayor in School of Self-Interest?
By Edward Hudgins

August 28, 2009 -- Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty seemed silent and secretive about acting in the self-interest of his own children. Asked at a press conference about where his kids were attending school this academic year, he answered, in essence, "None of your business." Why this sensitivity?

Good school, bad school

One of Fenty's sons started school this year at Lafayette Elementary, a public-read government-school in D.C. But the neighborhood school to which kids at Fenty's residential address would normally be assigned is West Elementary.

Lafayette is in one of the best parts of the city. It gets a 10 out of 10 rating from Greatschools.net and is ranked the second best school in town by PSK12.com. It is 71 percent white.

West is in a not-as-nice neighborhood. Greatschools gives it a 7 out of 10, still not too bad, and it is ranked the tenth best in D.C. by PSK12. It is 71 percent black.

So how did Fenty's son get into Lafayette? There is a difficult competitive procedure by which D.C. parents might get their kids into better schools outside their neighborhoods if slots are available, but there's no indication that this is what Fenty did. Top education officials also can allow kids to go to non-neighborhood schools in special cases but there is no obvious reason why Fenty's kids deserve special treatment.

School's rank reeks

So why won't Fenty discuss his son's school and why does anyone care where he sends his kids in any case?

The D.C. government schools are notoriously bad; the American Legislative Exchange Council ranked them dead last when compared to the fifty states, yet they are ranked first in expenditures per pupil. Talk about a terrible return for your tax dollar! What a striking refutation of the "more money will solve the problem" philosophy!

Mayor Fenty took control of this worst-in-the-nation system and wants to make it better. But he still supports the status-quo government model. For example, in early 2009 his fellow Democrats in the U.S. Congress wanted to eliminate a program that granted a small number of low-income parents vouchers with which they could send their children to better schools. Fenty supported continuation of the program for parents who already had vouchers but sided with those who would eliminate all future vouchers.

As a show of support for D.C. schools, Fenty had pledged to keep his own kids in that system. At least he's more consistent than President Obama who opposes parental choice of schools for their children while sending his own kids to a pricy private school rather than to a D.C. government one. Still, Fenty opens himself up to the charge of hypocrisy. Did he use his political influence to get his kids into a better school while generally supporting a system that assigns kids to particular schools-good or bad-whether or not their parents want their kids in those schools, all the while opposing expanded parental choice via vouchers?

Morality school

Fenty would not be in this awkward position if he'd embrace a morality of rational self-interest. Among its premises:

1) Parents are morally right to want the best for their children, including the best education.

2) It is the moral responsibility of parents-not their neighbors or governments-to provide for their children.

3) Therefore parents should have the freedom to use their own resources to serve the interests of their children.

But government schools fly in the face of this morality. They transfer resources, in the form of taxes, from parents (as well as from most other citizens, whether they have kids in school or not) to government bureaucrats who determine where their children must go to schools and how those resources will be spent. Parents have no say in the matter. If parents want to send their children to better, non-government schools, they must pay out of their own pockets on top of the tax dollars they were forced to turn over to the government for inferior services that they don't want.

So how could Fenty run a school system based on rational self-interest? As a first step, he could allow all parents to send their children to any school they want, with their tax dollars allocated to the schools of the parents' choice. But you say, if most of the D.C. schools are so bad, wouldn't all parents want to send their children to the Lafayettes, which simply wouldn't have room, while abandoning the majority of low-performing schools?

Yes! And that's why the second step should be to get the government out of the business of running schools altogether. Privatize them all. Let them compete. Let the owners of the newly-privatized Lafayette buy out the bad schools, fire the incompetent teachers and administrators, and compete for parents' dollars the way every grocery and consumer electronics store competes for their customers.

The parents of D.C., who have suffered so long with inferior schools, deserve nothing less than what's in their self-interest: freedom of choice and control of their own money. That's the lesson that all should learn!
----
Hudgins is director of advocacy and a senior scholar at The Atlas Society.

1 Reply

@DontTreadOnMe,

DTOM please repeat after me:

Firefighters, police forces, and other necessary functions are appropriate in the social contract we agree to as members of our communities, counties, and states. And yes, it is appropriate to pay taxes to fund such mutually beneficial and shared services and they are appropriately paid to and administered by the communities, counties, and states.

It is Federal taxes targeted for programs that should not be the prerogative of the Federal government and any monies that are targeted for individuals or special interest groups rather than programs that benefit everybody and contribute to the general welfare--general meaning everybody--that we object to.

I bet if you focused really really hard you might be able to discern the difference between these two forms of taxes.

If you are serious that you can see smoke from your house though, I do hope you'll stay alert and be ready to move out of harm's way.

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@ican711nm,

Objectivist bullshit. A continual exercise in excusing one's own greed.

Cycloptichorn

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@Cycloptichorn,

Deny deny deny. Divert, obfusicate, accuse, blame, change the subject, use ad hominem or direct insults often, and then deny some more. Ask endless question after question but avoid answering questions as much as possible. Don't articulate a reasoned rebuttal or back up your opinion with any serious history or credible sources. Insult. Blame. Divert. Deny. Deny. Deny.

I will say that you have the Daily Kos play book down pat.

1 Reply

AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

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