Tag Archives: conservatism

Trump Liquefaction

by Annie | Leave a comment

liquefaction
noun. [lik-wuh-fak-shuh n]

  1. the act or process of liquefying or making liquid.
  2. the state of being liquefied.

Geology: The process by which sediment that is very wet starts to behave like a liquid. Liquefaction occurs because of the increased pore pressure and reduced effective stress between solid particles generated by the presence of liquid. It is often caused by severe shaking, especially that associated with earthquakes.

I first learned of liquefaction by having an example of it quite literally shaken into me. Though I was “safely” on the bedrock of North Beach when the Great Quake of 1989 struck, the bruised cloud of the fires that burned in the Marina District of San Francisco were visible from my window. Why did the Marina burn? Well, turns out the Marina District of San Francisco, like the Back Bay of Boston, are landfill. Just… sand. Lots of it. Manufactured land that is there not by the Grace of God but by the hand of man. We built it. To make extra room. Which is all fine and good until there’s an earthquake. Then all that cemented over sand acts like, well, sand. And gives way.

The cement roads in North Beach looks just like the cement roads in the Marina. You can’t tell just by looking at them that beneath the former is bedrock and the latter is sand.

Until something destructive happens.

In the political arena, that’s Trump. We’ve found out the hard way who’s bedrock and who’s sand. I opined on this the other day, but Did They Ever Believe? says it better.

Enjoy.

Townhall.com 4/21/2016
Did They Ever Believe? by Derek Hunter

To hear TV personalities and pundits who’ve espoused conservative values and policies for years abandon them for an egomaniac incapable of the most basic discussion of policy makes you wonder if they ever meant it.

Is the desire for relevance so strong that principle can be cast aside? Or did they ever hold those principles in the first place?

Are they so beholden to ratings and money they’re willing to betray all they’ve presented themselves as for access?

Either they’ve been lying all along, they’re lying now, or they never had any idea what conservatism is about.

Trade wars, government intervention in the economy, ordering businesses around about how to operate, health care mandates, whining about rules, etc., etc., … Republicans have espoused all of them in the past. But that doesn’t make them conservative.

Truth can’t be situational. Principle is not dependent upon circumstance. Yet these “leaders” swept aside reality in Colorado, which held a caucus on May 1, and embraced the “voterless victory” lie. To do anything else would risk their access to Trump, who won’t return to interviewers who ask real questions and call him out on his non-answers.

Did they fall for a bumper sticker? Is it all that simple? Are they that open to suggestions written on hats? Do they follow people home to ask them about their grandchildren because they read it on the back of a minivan?

“Make America Great Again” reads well, as long as you don’t ask the only follow-up question that matters: How? Does citing poll numbers wipe the section of the brain containing the fact Social Security and Medicare have 100+ trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities and Donald Trump said straight out he doesn’t want to reform them at all?

These pundits and hosts have become unwatchable. They’ve betrayed all they’ve done to this point. So much so, you have to wonder if they were this awful all along. Did they pull the greatest hoax in history?

Like the “GOP establishment” they decry, they’ve been selling one thing but became something else when the chips were down. After years of demanding accountability from squishy Republicans in Congress, they’ve become John Boehner.

They plead neutrality, but they embarrassingly badger other candidates to justify playing by the rules because Daddy Trumpbucks whines about a “rigged system.” If the system is so corrupt, and he’s winning, what’s that say about him?

The throne-sniffing media “conservatives” know not to bother with difficult questions on complex issues. Substantive discussions with Trump are like throwing a newborn into the deep end of a pool. So they don’t happen, no matter how many times they interview him.

When not kissing Donald’s ring, these establishment media types can be heard sucking up to his children. It is embarrassing.

No, they couldn’t have switched on everything overnight. They must’ve been playing a role. Conservatism sells, especially on radio and in cable news. So you just have to say a few buzzwords, go “rah-rah” for this or that cause, feign outrage at all the right times, and boom – job security.

When that security is threatened by the most powerfully addictive drug America has seen since Heisenberg’s blue meth – a celebrity – a course adjustment becomes easier if your highest principle always has been yourself.

We’ve been duped by a marketing gimmick akin to “Batman vs. Superman,” which left us thirsty, holding cases of “New Coke.” These weathervanes of the right are the father who went out for a pack of smokes and never came back.

If Donald Trump doesn’t reach 1,237 delegates before Cleveland, count on these mic’d up megaphones to maintain their silence as Donald’s goon squads make good on their promise to threaten and harass delegates to get their way.

Be it by stalking them in their rooms or preventing them from even getting to the convention, this subject will remain a blow-off topic in their sessions with The Donald. They’ll mention it, and he’ll say those people have no connection with the campaign. Since Trump’s company is private, and he won’t release his tax returns despite not actually being under IRS audit (another no-go topic for interviews), we’ll never know if they’re getting money from him or how much.

We’ll be left to wonder why these people are so devoted to a man they’re willing to work tirelessly for him for free.

Then again, that’s what these “titans” of conservative media have been doing, so maybe it’s not so farfetched.

In the end it doesn’t much matter if they ever believed. It’s clear they don’t now, and now is all there is. Well, now and tomorrow. After November, the tomorrows for these soothsayers of victory will run as dry. Their audiences will wonder how “the man who was going beat Hillary” lost. To paraphrase the mythical Pauline Kael quote, they won’t know how Trump lost … everyone they listened to said he was the only one who could win.

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The Charleston Shooting & Tea Party America

by Annie | Leave a comment

This… x 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

I could not have explained my feelings on the Charleston shooting, or why I am Tea Party, any better than this TownHall article (below the line). I agree with every single syllable of it. It is as pure a distillation, with absolutely sparkling clarity, on what I think and why I think it, as I have ever seen.

And while, by virtue of choosing it as his opening sentence, Mr. Hawkins clearly meant for us to pay special attention to it and what flows from it, the sentence, in isolation, really deserves to be marinated in our own quiet contemplation all by itself:  “The mass murder of nine innocent black Americans attending a Bible study in a Charleston church by a drug-addled, racist, terrorist thug was as close to universally condemned as anything can be in a country like America.” 

What he’s saying here, if you take the time to really let it sink in, is that, in a country where something like 20% of the population thinks Elvis is still alive, 99% of us condemn the actions of the shooter in Charleston!  (Sure doesn’t sound like a country with “pervasive” “structural” racism, hm?  Remember the OJ verdict?  How black America cheered and white America sat slack-jawed?  I don’t see white America cheering the Charleston shooter, do you? I’m just throwing it out there as an example of what a truly racist nation might do in the wake of Charleston.  Whites would cheer, right?)

And what about the 1%?  Well, unless you re-engineer human DNA into something barely resembling a terrestrial homo-sapien, there will… wait for it… always be racists among us!  That’s why the the constant, reflexive hectoring from Obama et.al. is so offensive to so many of us.  “We” (America) doesn’t “need to have a conversation on race.”  We need to recognize that we are human, that evil exists, and because of both stubborn facts, there is no amount of big government that will ever produce a progressive utopia where these things never happen.  So whaddaya say we ascribe the same level of caution to white America and the hideous incident in Charleston, that we do to shootings preceded by “Allah Akbar”, hm, Mr. President?  (“This is not the true face of Islam.”) Well, Charleston is not the true face of white America.  So stop shaking your finger at us Mr. President and start lifting us up, and embracing the good and generous heart of this great nation.

And thank you, Mr. Hawkins for the brilliant article below!

 

An Open Letter To Black Americans About The Mass Murder In Charleston

6/20/2015 12:01:00 AM – John Hawkins
The mass murder of nine innocent black Americans attending a Bible study in a Charleston church by a drug-addled, racist, terrorist thug was as close to universally condemned as anything can be in a country like America. Expressions of sorrow over what happened and loathing for the killer are everywhere. Moreover, the shooter was quickly apprehended and the governor of South Carolina has already called for the death penalty. Hopefully, she’ll get her wish.

Supposedly, the shooter had the same lunatic dream as Charles Manson did back in 1969: he was hoping to start a race war.

That won’t work any better today than it did back in the sixties.

However, what this evil piece of human debris did manage to do is sow a little more hatred and division between Americans. There are already enough people doing that.

We always have ghouls who gleefully try to exploit every tragedy for their own political ends and there are more of them than ever before. They’re trying to tie this into their campaigns against police, trying to whip up voter registration, trying to convince black Americans that white people in general and conservative whites in particular hate their guts.

It would be nice to just shrug that off, but it has become so easy for people to talk past each other in today’s social-media-driven environment where every molehill is blown up and repeated and intensified until it’s made to look like a mountain. So, I want to try to cut through the clutter.

I think of myself as a typical white Tea Party conservative. I’m pro-cop, tough on crime, anti-Affirmative Action and I can’t stand Obama. In fact, if you put pretty much any black liberal (or for that matter, any liberal) and me in a room, we probably wouldn’t agree on ANYTHING political.

There are liberals who will tell you all day long that people like me are racist, that we hate black Americans and we secretly send “dog whistles” to each other about it all day long. If you believe them, you’d think people like me don’t care about black Americans at best and want to see them suffer at worst.

Now, here’s the truth about me and people like me.

I support the policies I do because I think they’re good for all Americans, including black Americans.

I think tough policing benefits black Americans more than anyone because they’re most likely to be the victims of crime. I think Affirmative Action undercuts the accomplishments of deserving black Americans by making people wonder if they earned their achievements. I think Obama has been a disaster not just for America as a whole, but for black Americans in particular. Given the fact that liberal policies have been failing black Americans for fifty years, I think I can make a good case for what I’m saying.

Of course, if you look at it a different way, I understand that, but since I can give you a coherent, intellectual explanation for why I think the way I do, you should at least give me the benefit of the doubt when I tell you I don’t hate you.

The words “racism” and “bigotry” get tossed around so quickly and easily these days that they’ve lost a lot of their meaning. So, rather than talking about those words, let me just say this: I don’t think anyone is inferior because of his skin color. I think black Americans are just capable as white Americans. In fact, I think people should be judged by merit and the content of their character, not skin color. People are just people.

So, we may disagree. In fact, if you’re a black Democrat, we probably disagree on a lot of things. But, I want you to know that people like me don’t hate you. We may oppose you and we may support policies you don’t like, but it’s not out of hatred. It’s because we love our country and because we want as many Americans as possible to be successful and have good lives. Disagree with us all day long, but no matter what anyone tells you, we don’t hate you.

==end==

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WONDERFUL Mini-History on the "Roaring Twenties" & the Tax CUTS that made it Possible

by Annie | Leave a comment

Here’s a FASCINATING Treatise on the Early Roots of Federal Taxation.  It’s a MUST Read & a MUST Share!  Thanks to the author for posting it.
I can’t believe I’m going here, but let me tell you a little about Presidents Harding and Coolidge.
Andrew Mellon — he was the Timothy Geithner without the TurboTax scandal — did a study in 1921 on why the wealthier classes had paid less and less in taxes as the government raised the rates on them over and over again. Mellon found that higher taxes actually drove the money underground.
Let’s put it in today’s context…Oprah Winfrey and her mansion in Montecito, California — because California has one of the highest progressive tax rates on people making over $1 million a year, she actually monitors the number of days she stays there, in order to avoid being considered a “full-time resident” and thus avoid paying the full punishment in taxes.
Here’s another example: In 1969, Ireland introduced a tax-exempt status for artists. When they decided, in 2006, to put a cap on that tax break — 250,000 euros — Bono, another one of these celebrities who champion progressive politicians, promptly moved U2’s business operations to the Netherlands.
That’s how the money goes “underground,” just like Mellon found in the 1920s; the uber-rich look to save money any way they can. And as long as it’s legal, I don’t blame them. But it drives me nuts when I see people like Oprah campaigning for the guy who wants more taxes and then she doesn’t want to pay the taxes.
I mean, who do you think he’s talking about when he says “the wealthiest one percent?” Come on, Oprah! Do your patriotic duty, like Vice President Biden says.
How about Michael Moore? I thought the rich don’t pay their fair share? So why did he apply for and receive a tax credit from the state of Michigan of all places for shooting his latest film there? Michael, why are you so greedy?
Soaking the rich doesn’t work; they move their money as California and New Jersey are finding out. They leave the state. New Jersey in four years has lost $70 billion in wealth.
They leave!
In the 1920s, Mellon found that “the rich” tended to invest abroad rather than build new factories and mills in the United States and pay the 73 percent tax on the income from those investments. That’s right, 73 percent.
It didn’t start that way, though. When progressive Woodrow Wilson introduced the “progressive income tax” in 1913, the 16th Amendment had to be passed because income taxes were unconstitutional. How did these reformers manage to get it passed? They said taxes would be extremely low. Many would pay no taxes at all.

The richest of the rich only paid seven percent, while the average American paid one percent. Of course, it didn’t last. By the end of Wilson’s term the lowest bracket bumped up to four percent and the highest at 73 percent.

President Harding decided to listen to Mellon. And from 1921 to 1926, Congress worked to reduce the top tax rates. Eventually they got to top rates down to 25 percent. The result: Tax revenues from the wealthiest taxpayers tripled. The national debt dropped from $24 billion to $18 billion.
President Calvin Coolidge assumed the presidency in 1923 after Harding suddenly died and continued with the smaller government, lower tax strategy. He talked about not building up the weak by pulling down the strong; not being in a hurry to legislate and cutting the size of government. 
These policies, along with fostering the mentality of self-reliance (the opposite of what progressives had been preaching the previous 20 years) and the opposite of what they preach now, by saying “too big to fail” or you can’t make it without government safety nets.
What followed was arguably one of the most prosperous eight years this country has ever seen. You’ve probably heard of a little term called “The Roaring Twenties,” right? The progressive history books have done their best to hide the fact that a lot of it had to do with Mellon’s tax policies, including the tax cuts for the wealthy.
Progressives don’t want you to know this. They’ll say the tax cuts and small government caused the Great Depression. No, I’m going to go out on a limb here and use common sense: The same things that caused the problems of today were the root of the problem in 1929: greed; the Federal Reserve; government making every single mistake. The president before the crash was a Republican, but a progressive Republican…
Let me get back to what happened when they cut taxes in 1921:
Automobile production was up 191 percent for the decade and while the elites bemoaned those wealthy fat cats and their automobiles, their appetite for driving created jobs. The demand for auto-related products skyrocketed: metal; lumber; steel; cotton; leather; paint; rubber; glass and of course, gasoline. Companies had to be created to meet the demand. This is real job creation. People had to be hired. Roads were being built. State highway construction spending increased tenfold between 1918 and 1930; did they fire all the cops and teachers?
In 1920 there were only 5,800 passengers who had flown on a plane. By 1930 it was 70 times that amount.
RCA brought us the radio and along with it, advertising. Now you could hear Babe Ruth hitting home runs all anywhere in the country.
Thomas Edison brought us movies in the 1880s, but in the 1920s the true modern-era motion picture arrived with Cecil B. Demille and “The Ten Commandments.”
A whistling Mickey Mouse was introduced to America by Walt Disney in 1928; the first cartoon with synchronized sound.
Conveniences like telephones became less exclusive and more commonplace in the ’20s. More Americans had irons, vacuums, washing machines and refrigerators. And all of these new products meant there was a demand for something else: energy. America needed huge power plants.
Does all of this innovation and growth seem to anyone else, like lasting job creation? Assuming the Fed and the government don’t come in and screw everything up. And unlike the temporary jobs or the low-paying census jobs our government creates, per capita income had incre
ased 37 percent from 1921 and 1929. People saved and invested like never before, gaining access to things for the first time such as life insurance.
It was America’s coming-out party. And all of this success, all of the innovation, all of the prosperity without punishing the rich, without big government, absolutely baffled progressives. Especially the fact that everyone benefited; from the bottom up.
Evidence? Leon Trotsky, a Marxist revolutionary in the Soviet Union with Lenin, later lived in New York City in 1917. He fought all his life for Marxism to help the working class. Here’s what he said about New York: “We rented an apartment in a workers district… and that apartment, at $18 a month, was equipped with all sorts of conveniences that we Europeans were quite unused to: Electric lights, gas cooking range, bath, telephone, automatic service elevator, and even a chute for the garbage.”
What would Mr. Communism himself have said about New York a decade later? This was the conditions for the working class under evil, evil capitalism.
I can tell you what the intellectuals and the progressives said. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that Americans had engaged in “the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.”
What do you think “The Great Gatsby” was all about? How materialistic and evil the average American had become? No. Did you read your own book?
The fact that the middle class was closing in on the upper class because the policies of smaller government — decreasing government spending and cutting taxes on the wealthy — were working didn’t sit well with progressives.
And we are at the same place in history today.
We have a clear choice: Do we listen to the elites and The New York Times who warns of the dangers of cutting spending and lowering taxes? Or do we listen to our gut and common sense? The things that work in our own home. If the boss is having trouble keeping the doors open, you don’t ask for a raise. If you are in debt, you stop spending.
We need to set the country back on the course of personal responsibility and innovation because that leads to prosperity and a better life for all of its citizens.
Thanks to the author.

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