From Bruce McQuain at his QandO blog:

It is the point the liberal left in this country still doesn’t understand. The looters have finally been noticed by looted and the looted aren’t at all happy.

No. Not at all happy. The traditional punishment for looters is to be shot on sight. Maybe they'll acquire a clue or two before it comes to that. I fear for my country.

McQuain continues:

The “lumpen electorate” has finally had enough. They want to keep what they earn. They want less government. But that’s an anathema to politicians who have built whole lives and careers on providing more government. It’s like an addiction – they can’t stop what they’re doing or how they’re doing it.

And, unfortunately, even though the masses seem unhappy with the size and cost of government, they too are addicted to a certain level of government. They too have an addiction to break.

The question, of course, as far as libertarians are concerned, is how these two addictions can be addressed and overcome so that government’s size and cost can be scaled back to a proper and legitimate size? And where are the leaders to do this?

Until they emerge – and there is nothing to say they will – this cycle of unrest which sees the swapping out of political parties will continue. But you have to believe that at some point, the disenchantment with the current political regime (and both parties make up that regime) will come to a flash point. What that flash point will entail – the range of possibilities is vast – is anyone’s guess.

The way out is simple: those people who are pushing for all of this government expansion must stop pushing, before the people who are being pushed begin to seriously push back. And I really, really mean the word "seriously." This has the potential to go way beyond "politics as usual." Our country--a large segment of it, anyway--is starting to red-line. Somebody has to step in and provide some sanity. But the only person on the national stage who's both in a position to do so, and might be inclined to do so, God help us, is Sarah Palin.

I'm a fan of Sarah Palin--awkward speech patterns and all--but I don't want the future of the Republic resting on her--or on anyone.

So, for now at least, we can still disagree peacefully with those we politically oppose. I intend to do that, by attending Freedom Fest 2009 in Kansas City Saturday, September 5th.

UNITED WE STAND

Freedom Fest 2009

Date: Saturday, September 5, 2009

Time: 10:00 am to 2:00 pm

Location: Theis Park Intersection of Oak and 47th Street, KC,MO. (Across from the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, 1 Block East of the Country Club Plaza)

Combining leading voices of entrepenurship, faith, race relations and entertainment with great food and drink. You’ll hear author and radio host of the Big Black Lie, Kevin Jackson--frequent guest contributor on the Fox News Network; Director of Health Policy Studies for the CATO Institute, Michael Cannon: Host of the Christian Politician, Apostle Claver, and music from Outlaw Jim and The Whiskey Benders also featuring Melanie Owen, Angelo Mino and Beverly Gossage.

Stand up for yourself, be seen, be heard. While you still can.

No Thugs Allowed.

UPDATE: "lumpen proletariat" is a phrase first used--or at least popularized--by Karl Marx. I did not know that.

Who? No, not Obama--at least I don't think Obama is a Truther. It's Van Jones, Obama's "czar" for "green" issues.

Marxist.

Truther (somebody who believes that George W. Bush ordered the 9/11 attack.)

He's the guy Glenn Beck has been going nuclear over for the past few weeks. Why is this crazy person in the White House as a trusted adviser to the President?

42% Say People Randomly Selected From Phone Book Better Than Current Congress - Rasmussen.

Google wants to assimilate (digitize) millions of books. Amazon thinks that idea is fantastically bad.

Reuters article:

Amazon, which scans books after getting permission from the copyright holder, said that the court should reject a settlement between Google and the Authors Guild because the deal would change copyright law by allowing Google to digitize books even if the copyright holder cannot be found, often called "orphan works."

"The proposed settlement usurps the role of Congress in legislating solutions to the complex issues raised by the interplay between new technologies and the nation's copyright laws," Amazon said in its filing, which was dated Tuesday.

So, exit question: Is Google the Borg?

To the only people possibly gullible enough to still believe his line of bull.

The children.

UPDATE: Oh, good Lord. Obama is so incompetent that he doesn't realize that school in three of the biggest cities in the US--New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago--isn't even in session on September 8th.

The preservation of the Republic may hang on the fundamental incompetence of Barack Hussein Obama. This guy has his finger on the trigger of the nuclear arsenal of the United States, not to mention the minions of the IRS, and he's completely, totally out of his depth.

Are you frightened yet? I am.

Reference to my previous article, Who wants to be a slavemaster? here's the always-incisive Victor Davis Hanson writing at National Review:

Obama is not a pragmatist, as he insisted, nor even a liberal, as charged.

Rather, he is a statist. The president believes that a select group of affluent, highly educated technocrats — cosmopolitan, noble-minded, and properly progressive — supported by a phalanx of whiz-kids fresh out of blue-chip universities with little or no experience in the marketplace, can direct our lives far better than we can ourselves. By “better” I do not mean in a fashion that, measured by disinterested criteria, makes us necessarily wealthier, happier, more productive, or freer.

Instead, “better” means “fairer,” or more “equal.” We may “make” different amounts of money, but we will end up with more or less similar net incomes. We may know friendly doctors, be aware of the latest procedures, and have the capital to buy blue-chip health insurance, but no matter. Now we will all alike queue up with our government-issued insurance cards to wait our turn at the ubiquitous corner clinic.

None of this equality-of-results thinking is new.

When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable: redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor; stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith; bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.

All of this should be obvious to anyone who's been paying attention to what Obama has actually done rather than just listening to what he says.

What Obama says sounds pretty good, as long as you don't examine it too closely and discover that he really hasn't said anything at all, but he's said it very prettily.

What Obama does marks him as a statist, a re-distributionist.

He's a slave owner-wannabe.

Before you recoil in horror, I would observe that most of the slaves that were brought over to the U.S. from Africa were sold into the trans-Atlantic slave trade by other blacks, or by Arabs, or by other "people of color." So don't even start about how white people are somehow uniquely racist, because that's just bull$hit.

The unspoken assumption is "everyone should have equal access to all health care procedures, regardless of cost."

Really? Why? Do we all have equal access to all food? Housing? Clothes? Cars? Entertainment?

Actually, yes, all Americans in fact do have equal access to all of those things--what we don't have is equal ability to pay for those things. We don't have an equal allocation of resources. The poor and powerless have fewer options than the rich and powerful.

Here's the cold, hard truth: That will NEVER change. There will always be the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless--those who can afford the best of everything, and those who just scrape by--and some few who can't even do that.

Bitter experience has shown the human race that "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need," while maybe an admirable sentiment in the abstract, has in practice over and over throughout history brought out the very, very, very worst in human nature. All the "steal from the rich and give to the poor" sentiment does is change who the "haves" are from those who earn their status, wealth, and power though free enterprise, to those who seize their power through political maneuverings--or through outright violence and war. At its extreme, the philosophy of Marx and Robin Hood is a recipe for oppression, terror, slavery, and the ruthless crushing of the human spirit.

Maybe it's not such an admirable idea at all.

Life isn't fair. It never has been, and it never will be. Efforts to make the outcome of life equal for every person will always fail. It simply is not within the power of the human animal to change the basic nature of economics. It is arrogance to think so, a fatal conceit.

This doesn't mean we should not act to make our fellows' life better. It is a virtue to do so. There are organizations dedicated to feeding the poor, clothing the naked, providing for those in need. They don't use the force of government to get money--people give of their own free will, because there are a great number of relatively well-off people who want to help those less fortunate. We should have more charitable organizations. We should support them better than we do. But the virtue in this is precisely that it is voluntary charity.

There is no virtue in pointing a gun at someone and demanding money. We usually call that armed robbery, unless the person with the gun is from the government. Then we call it "taxes." We tolerate some level of this government gun-pointing as the price for a civil and orderly society. But once you begin expanding the list of things for which the government shakes down its citizens beyond the physical safety and security their persons and property, you begin the slide down the proverbial slippery slope at the bottom of which is serfdom, or in slavery.

That's what you are advocating if you're for a greater government role in health care. You want us to move closer to serfdom, or to outright slavery.

There is no way to argue out of that box. You either think it's OK to force other people to work to pay for other's needs, and/or to force people to directly provide those needs, or you don't. And you're willing to use the guns and courts of government to make your opinion of who should give, and who should get be the final word. The word for this, if you are wondering, is, exactly, "oppression."

If you believe that, I disagree vehemently with you.

Don't even try to pretend you have the moral high ground here. You don't. You want serfdom. You want slavery.

And YOU want to be the master, don't you?

This is why a lot of people, myself included, think that the vast majority of the American news media is totally "in the tank" for leftist/Democrat causes--Bernard Goldberg:

Mary Mapes knew before she put the story on the air that George W. Bush, the alleged slacker, had in fact volunteered to go to Vietnam.

Who says? The outside panel CBS brought into to get to the bottom of the so-called “Rathergate” mess says.

. . .

Mapes had information prior to the airing of the September 8 [2004] Segment that President Bush, while in the TexANG [Texas Air National Guard] did volunteer for service in Vietnam but was turned down in favor of more experienced pilots. For example, a flight instructor who served in the TexANG with Lieutenant Bush advised Mapes in 1999 that Lieutenant Bush “did want to go to Vietnam but others went first.” Similarly, several others advised Mapes in 1999, and again in 2004 before September 8, that Lieutenant Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam but did not have enough flight hours to qualify.

This information, despite the fact that it has been available since the CBS report came out four years ago, has remained a secret to almost everybody both in and out of the media — one lonely fact in a 234- page report loaded with thousands of facts, and overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the documents.

Here's a simple question for those who think there's no such thing as media bias, or if there is, the media leans to the right:

Why, if Mapes knew that Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam, did CBS News insist on the reporting angle that he had joined the Texas Air National Guard to avoid going to Vietnam?

I would assert that any reasonable person would look at that one fact and say "CBS News was trying to slant--BIAS--the story to make Bush look bad." Furthermore, given that incidents of such slanted reporting are almost countlessly common at this point, any reasonable person would then take anything that the "traditional" or "mainstream" media say with an enormous grain of salt.

Fortunately, I am now taking eight salt tablets daily as a supplement to my doctor-prescribed weight loss plan, so I should now be able to believe anything that the media tell me. You, however, might want to Question yourself some Authority--as in media authority.

Ted Kennedy is dead. So is Noreen, the mother of one of my very best friends.

I sit here, and the question pops--unbidden and very unwanted--into my mind: which one of the two had more impact on my life? Ted Kennedy, through all of the policies he fought for, and the legislation he passed through the years, or the person who gave birth to a dear friend?

That I can even consider the question troubles me greatly. It should be a no-brainer--of course Noreen, through her daughter, has had an enormous impact on my life--all positive, by the way--daughter and husband are really among my dearest friends. Kennedy's legacy--for me, anyway--consists primarily of taking more money away from me on an annual basis and giving it to other people. What could I have done with the money Ted took from me? Would I be better off? Would others?

I guess they say "it's only money."

I feel more than a bit gulity that my mind turns to the political at a time like this.

God bless Ted, and Noreen, too. May you have the rest you both have earned.

We're supposed to believe that there are 45 million people in the U.S. who don't have health insurance through no fault of their own. That's the reason why it's a "crisis," right?

Not so fast.

Here are the facts, via the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute (both reporting data from the Census Bureau:

12 million people without health insurance are eligible for Medicaid and/or the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) but haven't enrolled. Whose fault is that? Should you pay for their irresponsibility?

10 million people without health insurance are foreigners in the U.S. 4.4 million of those are here legally, and 5.6 million are here illegally. Should you pay for their irresponsibility?

19.6 million people without health insurance have incomes higher than 250% of the poverty level--$55,125 for a family of four. Should you pay for their poor household budgeting skills?

Is this a real crisis? Is this a panic attack on the part of the Democrats? Or is it a naked power grab to seize control of one sixth of the American economy?

Here's one thing we could do to "fix" health care--from Cato:

The current system excludes the value of employer-provided insurance from a worker's taxable income. However, workers purchasing health insurance on their own must do so with after-tax dollars. This provides a significant tilt toward employer-provided insurance. Workers should receive a standard deduction, a tax credit, or, better still, large Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) for the purchase of health insurance, regardless of whether they receive it through their job or purchase it on their own.

We can then look at those people who may need some kind of subsidy to better afford insurance.