Coming Soon to a White House Near You: Lame Duck Dynasty

[Busybody]

 

[kbate]

Wanted to mark this thread so when Democrats have 61 Senate Seats and win the house back in 2014 and we see the "true liberal agenda", I can remember it.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Where's the beard?

 

[Busybody]

Wanted to mark this thread so when Democrats have 61 Senate Seats and win the house back in 2014 and we see the "true liberal agenda", I can remember it.

if that happens

please close the last wind (de)generated lite bulb

and get the fork out

ITS DONE!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The Great Surrender
Daren Jonescu, American Thinker
April 22, 2013

Those who have been forcibly divested of their natural liberty by tyrants must be pitied. They have been coerced into accepting lies of security and state beneficence as paltry compensation for the loss of their birthright of a life worthy of human beings. And yet such wretchedness of external conditions, though destroying a man's practical life, does not destroy the man. More wretched than this is the spiritual self-destruction of one who would freely sell himself into tyranny in exchange for that very same subhuman compensation.

Western politics has fallen under the domination of progressive authoritarianism. The press, once perceived as a safeguard against government corruption and overreach, has become an almost monolithic mouthpiece and apologist for oppression. Art, long modernity's bastion of moral questioning and humane doubt in the face of materialist reductionism, has finally reduced itself to dogmatic nihilism, collectivist amorality, and court jesterism in the service of power.

These nightmarish degradations are often cited as causes of our decay, as though they were abstract realities controlling civilization's fate as the laws of physics control the fall of a stone. The most nightmarish fact of all, however, is that these conditions were not imposed upon us by force. The modern West's demise was chosen. Generations of men walked into this of their own volition. They voted for it. They purchased it. They chose to believe in it, defying the evidence of their own eyes and common sense. They willingly surrendered themselves to slavishness and its diminished moral horizon.

For thousands of years, men fought for a breath of freedom while struggling against the shifting currents of irrational governance imposed by brute force. Modernity promised a reasonable way out of all that, producing the theory and practical conditions of political liberty, elevating the individual human being above all coercive power, and hence allowing men, to a greater degree than ever before, to choose their own social conditions, and to project their choices into the future with some measure of solidity. But modern men, given that choice, have -- gradually but consciously -- forsaken all of it to return to the conditions from which men strained to extricate themselves for millennia: fleeting flames of hope capriciously snuffed out in sudden storms of power lust.

Is it time to ask whether we flatter ourselves when we imagine that Western modernity will be remembered by future men as the age of Shakespeare, Mozart, the Industrial Revolution, rationalism, science, and political liberty? As things now stand, it is difficult to see how Time's dust storm will not settle to reveal this epoch as that of man's ultimate shame: the moment when men walked freely into hell, merely for the sake of a little rest from the trials of living as men. Modernity may be on the verge of obliterating its own great promise and achievement, and revealing itself at last as The Age of the Great Surrender.

 

[Busybody]

please close the last wind (de)generated lite bulb

!

yet another......seemingly endless......brilliant lines....coined by Anquan Jihad

 

[unregistered]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

No Fisker for Your Garage
PETER HANNAFORD, American Spectator
4.22.13

Today the bill come’s due for another Obama green elephant.

If that spare $103,000 has been burning a hole in your pocket waiting for delivery of a svelte new Fisker Karma, you’ll have to find something else to spend it on, for it looks as if there aren’t going to be any more of these plug-in hybrid electrics of which President Obama has been so fond.

At least there won’t be any unless Fisker can find $20 million by today with which to pay its overdue federal loan, as well a find a lot more to fire up production again. Fisker Automotive ceased production last July after turning out 2,500 automobiles, from a contract plant in Finland.

Earlier this month it laid off three-fourths of the work force at its plant in Anaheim, California, which had yet to build an automobile.

Fisker is the latest in a list of bad bets the Obama Administration has made in trying to become the venture capitalist for “clean energy” in order to replace fossil fuels. Solyndra, a maker of solar panels, was the first conspicuous failure, going out of business owing the government half-a-billion dollars. A123 Systems, a Massachusetts company that was to be Fisker’s primary battery supplier, then filed for bankruptcy and has since been purchased by a Chinese company.

Founded in 2007 by Henrik Fisker, a designer of sports car, Fisker was always in need of money. By mid-2009 it had arranged for a $529 million line of credit at the Department of Energy. Mr. Obama had designated Stephen Chu, his Secretary of Energy, as venture-capitalist-in-chief. Mr. Chu’s qualifications consisted of his career as an academic physicist.

With much fanfare, Fisker held an announcement ceremony in late October 2009 that it would pay $20 million for a former General Motors plant in Wilmington, Delaware and invest another $18 million in retooling it. The ubiquitous and ever-cheerful Joe Biden was on hand to laud the good news. Between the DOE money and $21 million from the State of Delaware it looked as if state and federal taxpayers were going into the luxury car-building business for which there was no known market. Nevertheless, Fisker confidently predicted it would be producing 15,000 cars a year.

It tried, to no avail, to get two Chinese automobile companies to make big investments in the new operation.

By December 2010, the DOE knew that Fisker wasn’t meeting various milestone payments on its loan. In the 20 months between the Delaware ceremony and June 2011, when the feds froze funds, Fisker had drawn another $193 million from its government line of credit. Fisker’s minders were either asleep at the switch or turning the other cheek. Once funds were frozen, Fisker hired a company in Finland to produce cars. So much for job growth in the United States!

With meager production stopped and most of its work force dismissed, Fisker then hired a major law firm to help it find new investors or file for bankruptcy. The witching hour will come today when a $20 million payment is due on the federal loan. If Fisker can’t pay, it’s bankruptcy for the Karma. In that case, since most of Fisker’s equipment and property is pledged as collateral on the federal loan, Uncle Sam — or, more to the point, Uncle Barack — will once again be presiding over a fire sale of used goods.