The election is over, we see the contours of what lies ahead for the next four years.

4est_4est_Gump

Run Forrest! RUN!
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Ripples from the Election
Victor Davis Hanson, NRO
December 11, 2012

Now that the election is over, we are starting to see the contours of what lies ahead for the next four years. Here are some likely consequences from the Obama victory.

1. Barack Obama is not very interested in tax reform, deficit reduction, or curbing annual spending. He believes in big government, and the bigger the better. His tenure is not so much a repudiation of Reaganism as it is of Clintonism, and the whole notion of keeping the annual growth of federal spending at or below 2 percent, balancing the budget, and declaring the era of big government over. Going off the cliff would give Obama the extra revenues from across-the-board tax hikes on the 53 percent that can fund further expansions for the 47 percent in federalized health care, food stamps, unemployment, and disability insurance and in block grants to bankrupt cities, states, and pension funds. Gorging the beast always demands more revenue; and more revenue will always come from those who must “pay their fair share.” That is also a good thing in itself given the innately unfair compensation of the marketplace, which must be rectified by an intelligent, always-growing government, run by humane technocrats rather than grasping Wall Street speculators. In other words, why should we expect serious discussions on the deficit? When so many have so much less than so few, we have hardly begun the necessary “redistributive change.” That is facilitated, not retarded, by large deficits and the need for much higher taxes on the fat cats who did not build their own wealth.

2. One could make the argument that Barack Obama was the first president since Jimmy Carter to put daylight between Israel and the United States — both rhetorically and materially on issues such as settlements, the Netanyahu government, and disputes with the Palestinians. Yet Obama still received over 60 percent of the Jewish-American vote. That anomaly might suggest a number of things. For all practical purposes, the supposed Israeli lobby is now analogous to the fading Greek lobby — with similarly diminishing clout in foreign policy.

If Obama can still count on a strong majority of the self-identified Jewish vote, then he has established that U.S. policy toward Israel is largely freed from domestic political concerns. Diehard support for Israel now no longer rests with the American Jewish community, though it may come from evangelical Christians and from Americans in general who prefer to support consensual governments in their wars against authoritarians. Obama correctly saw that, more than six decades after the creation of Israel, and a century after the great Jewish immigrations from Eastern Europe, many of today’s American Jews are assimilated and intermarried, not all that familiar with Israeli issues, or simply no more aware of being Jewish than I am of being Swedish. That may be a good thing for the melting pot of America, but it is most certainly a different thing as far as U.S. support for Israel is concerned — as we return to a pre-1967 relationship with a Jewish state that is increasingly on its own.

3. The traditional conservative antidote to Obamaism has fallen short. That is, the arguments of principled conservatives about the perils of big government, redistributionist economics, and diminutions in personal freedom seem for a majority of Americans to be outweighed by the attraction of government subsidies and entitlements. If there is going to be a check on Barack Obama’s redistributionist agenda, it will probably have to come from upper-middle-class independent voters and blue-state residents. Such Obama supporters may soon notice that the new federal and state tax rates, the envisioned end to traditional deductions such as those for blue-state high taxes and for mortgage interest, and means testing for most government services are aimed precisely at themselves. When the Palo Alto resident grasps that his total income- and payroll-tax burden will be well over 50 percent, his tax deduction for the mortgage interest on his million-dollar-plus, 1,000-square-foot home will be eliminated, and his $250,000 salary still gets him counted as “rich” even after huge taxes and mortgage costs, we may see change — perhaps not in terms of the number of large swings in actual votes, but in the nature of campaign donations, political commentary, and campaign organization. Blue-state elites do not yet believe the voracious Obama tax monster is coming for them, but it is — as they will see.

4. Barack Obama has successfully conducted a number of wars of hyphenated-Americans against the regressive establishment. When the Obama campaign asked supporters to check off which “constituency groups” they identified with but did not include “whites” or “men” among the options, or when the Reverend Joseph Lowery, who gave the 2009 inaugural benediction, can declare without pushback that white people are going to Hell, or when one totals up the Obama administration’s vocabulary of racial polarization (e.g., “nation of cowards,” “my people,” “punish our enemies,” “put y’all back in chains”) and collates the invective with that of the Black Caucus and the likes of MSNBC, then we are headed for a backlash analogous to that of the 1970s among the white working class. In the new racialist landscape, is it any surprise that Jamie Foxx can joke about killing white people, or that Chris Rock can call the Fourth of July “white people’s independence day,” or that Samuel L. Jackson can brag of voting along strictly racial lines, or that Morgan Freeman can equate opposition to Obama with racism, even as he reminds us that Obama is only half black?

Many of us had hoped that the phenomenal rate of intermarriage and assimilation had made the old racial rubrics anachronistic, if not irrelevant, but Obama has managed in brilliant fashion to resurrect them in terms of minority groups’ having grievances against the assumed white majority that does all sorts of awful things, from arresting children on their way to purchase ice cream to stereotyping people solely on the basis of race.

It was almost surreal to watch the pre–November 6 media and political commentariat daily allege racism and attempts to prevent minorities from voting, only to witness their post–November 6 jubilation that Obama’s reelection had given America a reprieve and proven the power of the Other to express itself at the ballot box. When asking a would-be voter to show his a driver’s license is declared tantamount to voter intimidation, while 59 Philadelphia precincts collectively reporting a margin of 19,605 to 0 against Romney is merely proof of the president’s popularity in minority communities, then we have a growing divide that will not be assuaged by cheap “no more red state/blue state” rhetoric from those who help to foster it.

5. In the new climate of “fat cats,” “corporate jet owners,” “pay your fair share,” “you didn’t build that,” and “1 percent,” the more Americans have, the more they are envious of those who have more. One might have thought that the technological revolution, in combination with the welfare state, had redefined poverty altogether in ways that the fossilized entitlement bureaucracy could hardly grasp. Certainly, a Kia, an iPhone, and a big-screen TV do not disqualify one from the menu of American entitlements. That today’s earner or recipient of $35,000 in wages or entitlements has better appurtenances — in terms of computer power, phone, and car — than the $250,000 earner of 30 years ago means little. The point is not that the modern iPhone gives the poor man access to more knowledge than the entire RAND Corporation had 50 years ago, but that the contemporary RAND Corporation has more access than what an iPhone can provide, leaving its owner in relative terms still poor. That today’s Kia is better in many ways than yesterday’s Mercedes matters little — it is still not today’s Lexus. One of the great lessons in the age of Obama is that wealth and poverty will always remain relative. Happiness is now defined not as having the basics I need, but as ensuring that someone else does not have more. Obama has successfully appealed to the oldest and basest of human emotions — envy and jealousy, masked with the notion of enforced fairness — and for now they trump even the human desire to be free.
 
Economic Micawberism
Charles C. W. Cooke, NRO
December 11, 2012

‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness,” declared Wilkins Micawber in Dickens’s David Copperfield. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” This simple adage was one that the character had come to understand well, for, having hoped fruitlessly that “something will turn up,” he was sent to prison for defaulting on his debts. Experientia docet, and all that.

Micawber’s words are as true now as they were in 1850. But they are not, perhaps, quite as popular. In our age we are more likely to find those who would, like Thomas Paine, assert that we can change the world simply by willing it to be different. Question is, which man’s view is correct? This, it seems, is rather an important inquiry, especially as we continue to hurtle into uncharted indebtedness.

For a group that enjoys assuring the gnostics and rubes on the political right that it is a “reality-based community,” America’s progressives sure as hell tend to side with Paine. They are exceedingly vexed by American businesses’ making it known that there are consequences to the passage of new laws. To take at face value the assortment of counter-complaints would be to conclude both that complying with the Obamacare legislation is voluntary and that balance sheets are subject for their integrity to the spirit of good intentions and not to the logic of mathematics.

This, for instance, is how ThinkProgress reacted to one among the slew of announcements that rained down after Barack Obama’s reelection: “Darden Restaurants, Inc. — owner of Red Lobster and Olive Garden — is battling back negative press attention in light of its October announcement that the company will use Obamacare as a reason to shift to part-time employees.”

Note the language: Darden “will use Obamacare as a reason to shift to part-time employees.” Hold up one moment. Darden will use Obamacare? How so? Obamacare is not a voluntary system or an optional extra, but a law with which the businesses of these United States must comply, on pain of fines or worse. Is it not a touch fairer to say that Obamacare will use Darden?

In using Darden, Obamacare will impose upon that company an opportunity cost that will almost certainly be paid by its employees — in the currency of their prospects for full-time employment. It is spectacularly irrelevant if businesses such as Darden are receiving “negative press attention” for reacting to the new economic conditions. Reality cares not what voters think of it; you can’t shame a company into rejecting the laws of economics, and if you shame and coerce it into acting against its own survival, then it will die.

However, this inconvenient truth doesn’t tally well with the modern way of things, by which one’s intentions are all that are deemed to matter. Don’t ask Joe Biden how much he gives to charity; instead, ask him what he believes the world should look like. Don’t think about how many times you’ve given your weekend to the local soup kitchen; in lieu, look at how many people have clicked “Like” on its Facebook page. How many retweets does a sentiment receive? Three million? It must be true, then.

Why is Darden even concerned, ThinkProgress’s Annie-Rose Strasser asks? Instead it, and other restaurant chains such as Papa John’s, Denny’s, and Applebee’s, should be thrilled. “Obamacare will, over time, decrease health care costs,” she explains. “It will also likely lead to more satisfied workers, competitive hiring, and higher rate of employee retention.” You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, Strasser suggests.

No, America’s businesses might retort. But you can stop making omelets.
 
AJ ruminates on the election

notcomfort.jpg
 
Education Has Been Battered by Bad Faith
Bruce Deitrick Price
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/education_has_been_battered_by_bad_faith.html
December 11, 2012

The easiest way to understand the field of education is to consider a legal concept: bad faith. It's been around for thousands of years; in Latin, the phrase was mala fides. Any time there's a split between what is claimed and what is fact, you've got bad faith.


Lawyers, judges, and juries must wrestle with the subtleties of bad faith. Philosophers find it a fertile field. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about what it means, existentially, to act in good faith: "[h]uman reality is what it is not, and it is not what it is." I'd say that Sartre acted in bad faith, as he virtually guarantees that no one will understand what he means.


Education is not so murky. This is a field clearly disfigured by counterintuitive failure crying out for explanation and cure. Why are our statistics and test scores so low, why do we have roughly 50 million functional illiterates, why must we import most of our scientists and engineers, and why do we have so many people at the college level who know very little? These are inexplicable mysteries until you factor in bad faith. Then everything makes sense.


Think of young teachers, fresh from ed school, teaching their first year of classes. These teachers have embraced the theories and methods taught to them. No matter how bad these approaches might be, the young teachers believe in them and are therefore acting in good faith.


But what about the professors at the ed schools? They're probably in their forties or fifties. They've been watching dismal results come back from the public schools for decades. They know (or should know) that many popular fads are disasters. Most of these professors have heard of better ideas used in private schools, homeschooling, or other countries. But they keep promoting the same bad ideas in the schools, with a reckless disregard of the damage caused.


Reading, the quintessential skill, provides a well-documented, open-and-shut case of bad faith lasting 80 years.

If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience.
Noam Chomsky

"I am a radical, Leftist, small "c" Communist.... Maybe I am the last Communist willing to admit it.... The ethics of Communism still appeal to me."
William Ayers
Mild-mannered Professor of Education and former Terrorist
 
Looks like the tribe is on the warpath again...

RobDownSouth
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tmercury14
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When they get their way, they just keep getting madder (see article #2).

I bitched about Bush for six years, and through all that time the Republicans on this board never trashed me the way the Democrats do now that "their guy" is "in charge."

They were angry when Bush was President, but they seem even more angry now that Obama is President.

Maybe it's just disappointment.

Maybe, it's who they really are and have been all along.
A_J, the Wiser

Maybe because it never works out according to their day-dreams...

"We know that the moment of greatest danger to a society is when it comes near realizing its most cherished dreams."
Eric Hoffer

"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."
Ayn Rand

"Empires always end, not because another military power comes along, but for economic reasons."
Ron Paul
 
Yeah we just had an election of the most pro-union president ever yet right to worl laws get passed in Michigan of all places and several states have told the Feds they aren't interested in setting up Obama care exchanges. :rolleyes::D

I guess we can refer to Obama as the Great Mala Fides President.

Obama, you see, is our nemesis. He is a totem, the logical manifestation of a warped media, the reification of some crazy — and arrogant — ideas about redistributive politics, the statist economy, and cultural and social life that permeated American life the last forty years. He is the president with a 1,000 faces that we have all seen at work, on TV, throughout American life, and at some point the odds determined that we had to have a rendezvous with him— perhaps a catharsis to teach us the wages of Keynesian debt, of a social policy contrary to human nature with its equality of result doctrines, of an all-powerful, all-growing unaccountable government, of the now hip ambiguity about past American protocols and history. Obama is the exaggeration of all the dubious ideas that arose since the 1960s — brought to fruition on his watch, delivered by mellifluous cadences by an untouchable persona.

In fact, a Barack Obama was long overdue. Had he not appeared out of nowhere in 2008, we would have surely had to invent him.

Victor Davis Hanson

"In the early part of the 20th century our politicians promoted the notion that the tax and monetary systems had to change if we were to involve ourselves in excessive domestic and military spending. That is why Congress gave us the Federal Reserve and the income tax. The majority of Americans and many government officials agreed that sacrificing some liberty was necessary to carry out what some claimed to be “progressive” ideas. They failed to recognized that what they were doing was exactly opposite of what the colonists were seeking when they broke away from the British.

We Need an Intellectual Awakening. Without an intellectual awakening, the turning point will be driven by economic law. A dollar crisis will bring the current out-of-control system to its knees."

Ron Paul

;) ;)
 
Looks like the tribe is on the warpath again...

RobDownSouth
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tmercury14
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When they get their way, they just keep getting madder (see article #2).

They're mad because they had no idea what they wanted to begin with. Ask them to define "hope and change."
 
Looks like the tribe is on the warpath again...

RobDownSouth
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tmercury14
This message is hidden because mercury14 is on your ignore list.

When they get their way, they just keep getting madder (see article #2).

Kraft Rule99, Chief: 99. If all else fails, brag that you have your political opponent on ignore, cutting and pasting the ignore message, because that will prove that you have a superior argument!

Derp Derp Derp.
 
Yeah we just had an election of the most pro-union president ever

Fuck, you really believe that don't you? Of course you also fault Obama for his basis in Black Liberation Theology even though he talks about race about as often as our white presidents did.

ever yet right to worl laws get passed in Michigan of all places and several states have told the Feds they aren't interested in setting up Obama care exchanges. :rolleyes::D

The conservative states refusing to set up their exchanges are idiotic. They bitch about too much federal control of health care and then willfully opt to let the federal government swoop in and run their state's exchange? Give it three years and every last state will be running its own program.
 
They're mad because they had no idea what they wanted to begin with. Ask them to define "hope and change."

Not mad at all, Miles Ben Zonah. What's to be mad about? My presidential candidate got re-elected and you are on your "final warning" here from Laurel for posting personal information!

Life is actually going quite well now.
 
Your first point doesn't deserve an answer.

The second is simple, it's written into the law that the feds have to start the exchanges if the states decline. The reason being costs, nobody knows the costs. That's why the feds aren't doing it either.

That's not true. The Feds were prevented from taking action until the deadline passed for states to decide if they wanted to create the exchanges themselves.
 
Your first point doesn't deserve an answer.

The second is simple, it's written into the law that the feds have to start the exchanges if the states decline. The reason being costs, nobody knows the costs. That's why the feds aren't doing it either.


You think the feds aren't going to set up exchanges for states that decline? Where do you see that?

The cost is small and is purely administrative. Networking insurance providers who are already there onto a website and advertising it a little? Staffing will be minimal.
 
Your first point doesn't deserve an answer.

The second is simple, it's written into the law that the feds have to start the exchanges if the states decline. The reason being costs, nobody knows the costs. That's why the feds aren't doing it either.

And Robert's ruling...


;) ;) ... the states cannot be forced. Let Obama pay for it. Our standard of living goes down again beginning in January thanks to all of the great miracles of savings in the Affordable Health Care Act...
 
And Robert's ruling...


;) ;) ... the states cannot be forced. Let Obama pay for it. Our standard of living goes down again beginning in January thanks to all of the great miracles of savings in the Affordable Health Care Act...

When Americans get better access to health care their standard of living kind of increases.
 
Not a single one has been initiated by the feds...due to the lack of information concerning costs. Even they don't know the costs.

... because the deadline for exchanges to be in place hasn't happened yet. Even the ones that are setting up their own haven't set them up yet.
 
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