Ice Rinks, Schools and Gangs: Liberals don't really want to fix problems...

As Donald Trump seeks to throw a wrench in the works of how government works... or more often, doesn't, we should be prepared to listen to Democrats and liberals wail at every move.  Just look at the cries that welcomed the nomination of a climate change skeptic to run the borg known as the EPA.  Remember, Trump's the guy who, after NYC wasted $13 million over two years failing to renovate Wollman Rink, went in and accomplished the task in 4 months for $2.25 million...

The reality is, Democrats and liberals rarely want government to actually improve things or solve problems... Sure, they say they say they want to improve schools, create more jobs, and reduce crime, but, they don’t really. And how do we know this? Because of the policies they advocate.

One place where this is obvious is in education. Liberals constantly advocate for an increase in education budgets, but there is a zero correlation between that spending and better performance. The United States spends more per pupil on education than any country in the developed world other than Switzerland, yet somehow American students rank in the twenties or thirties when compared to that same group.

And this is not new… Between 1970 and 2006 the per student cost of a K-12 education in the United States tripled while test scores remained flat. For the left, improving education means spending more money, not improving the actual education of students. That increase of money involves not only teacher’s and teacher salaries as they would have us think, but more ominously, administrators and non classroom personnel.  Between 1950 and 2009 the number of students in the United States increased by 96% and the number of teachers increased by 386% while the number of administrators increased by 702%! And there’s more! In 21 states across the country, there are actually more non-classroom personnel in schools than there are teachers! In Texas, over the last 20 years while the student population grew by 37% the non-classroom staff grew four times as fast, surging by 172%.

All of this increase in spending and personnel might be reasonable if students were learning more and scoring better on tests, but they're not, particularly in the biggest urban school districts where most of the money is spent. And of course it’s the big cities where liberals have a virtual stranglehold on education… But then calls for education spending isn’t about education, it’s about government jobs, union dues, and ultimately Democrat campaign contributions.

Another example of liberals not really being interested in the welfare of the people they claim to support can be seen in California where immigration advocates are seeking to have the state destroy CalGang, a database compiled over years that contains the names and information on 150,000 suspected gang members across the state - or at least put it in some inaccessible lockbox.

Why would liberals want this database destroyed? So that Donald Trump can’t access it. Still, why?Because a state auditor observed last year that approximately 13% of the database represented names that were “inappropriately included”. That includes names that should never have been added in the first place, names that should have been taken off for being “inaccurate”, or youths whose parents were not properly notified prior to their being added. In addition the database might be sexist and racist because it’s 93% male and disproportionately minority as 64.9% of its database is Hispanic and 20.5% black.

Activists don’t want Donald Trump to be able to access the information so that hen't can fulfill his campaign promise of deporting illegal aliens who have committed crimes.

Now think about that… this database of gang members, which even by the auditor’s account, is at least 87% accurate, should be “blocked from federal access” because of the possibility someone wrongly included might get deported. Nevermind that being a suspected gang member isn’t sufficient to get someone thrown out of the country. They still need to be here illegally. Nevermind that police agencies across the state are constantly reviewing the database and removing names that are not supposed to be there or no longer supposed to be included. In liberalese, if it’s not 100% perfect then it can’t be used... and even if it were, we can imagine they'd find another rationale for blocking access.

So in a world where gangs are responsible for 80% of all crime and 50% of violent crime, liberals want to mask the membership in gangs of approximately 150,000 Californians so that a president who promised to deport criminal illegal aliens can’t do so because of the possibility that 20,000 of those names maybe shouldn't have been included.  Of course that makes sense in a state where there were 1,861 murders last year... and probably half of those were committed by gangs and gang members.

So here’s the thing… rather than concern themselves with the families of the approximately 1,000 people murdered by gang members in California in 2015, liberal activists would prefer to keep the imperfect database out of the hands of Donald Trump because of the slight chance he might deport someone whose inclusion in the database was possibly erroneous! Liberals would rather protect illegal alien criminals than protect the victims of their crime... most of whom are the same Hispanics they are seeking to "protect" in the first place!  But there's not nearly as much fundraising to be had from advocating for murder victims' families as there is for leading demonstrations against government "injustice" against innocent undocumented workers who went through hell to come to America so they could make a better life for themselves only to be unjustly threatened with deportation by a racist president.  

As the next four years unfold and liberals seek to thwart Donald Trump -  the hero of Wollman Rink - at every juncture, keep in mind that their goal is never really achieving the outcomes they claim to advocate, whether it’s better education, lowering crime or virtually anything else. If it was they would abandon liberal sophistry and start advocating policies that actually work. But as those rarely increase their power, their bank accounts and ultimately their control, so don’t count on it.

Calling BS on Bootlickers Hannity, Gallagher et. al Because I Don't Slobber at the Altar of Donald Trump

NOTE: Previously I suggested Dennis Prager as part of this group. I actually meant Mike Gallagher. From what I have heard, Prager is decidedly anti-Clinton and not a Trump apologist. My apologies... 

Carl von Clausewitz famously said “War is the continuation of politics by other means”. He is of course right. But it’s also true that politics is war by other means.

Frankly, I’m tired of listening to guys like Sean Hannity, Dennis Prager, Herman Cain and others suggest that I’m not a real conservative or that I must be a closet Hillary supporter or something of that ilk because I do not support Donald Trump for president. (Which probably explains why I listen to a LOT more sports talk radio these days…) These paragons of conservatism gripe “Why aren’t they focusing their attention on Hillary?” or “Why haven’t you been focusing this much energy on President Obama?” Well, the fact is, since my first blogposts seven years ago: Racism: America’s Original Sin  and The Gift of Freedom, I have done little else than write about the perils of the cancer of liberalism, tried to highlight the irrefutable fact that free markets, individual freedom and limited government are the keys to prosperity, and argue that our Constitution is the greatest document in human history.

Now I don’t harbor the conceit that Hannity, Cain or any of the others are actually talking about me specifically. They don’t know me and I’ve no idea if they’ve ever even read my blog. But there are no doubt more than a few conservatives who have spent years listening to the talking heads on “conservative radio” opining that if we only had a real conservative carrying the banner for the GOP then we’d have a chance to save the nation, who are now stunned to watch as those same talking heads have swooned like teenage girls as they fawn over Donald Trump. And now they lecture us that we’re somehow traitors to the conservative cause because we don’t become sycophants too?

The reality is, standing for conservative principals applies whether a candidate is in the Democrat or the Republican Party. Principals don’t bend just because the liberal candidate is on your side of the isle. That’s why I supported Christine O’Donnell over RINO Mike Castle. Sure, she may have been a flawed candidate, but she was an actual conservative rather than being part of the squish GOP establishment that has proven itself to be all about power and privilege – its own – as opposed to standing for limited government and actually trying to stop Barack Obama.

So today we find ourselves subjected to tirades that the #nevertrump movement – of which I’m not a member – and conservatives who are trying to figure out how to push an illiberal liberal from the perch the media anointed him with – via $2 billion in fawning coverage – atop the GOP are somehow not true conservatives at all but are really Hillary supporters. Somehow if we still fight, even if it’s only for the flicker of hope that somehow Trump will implode or the convention will somehow figure out how to nominate someone else, we are somehow turncoats who were never believers in the first place.

That is, frankly, bullshit. It’s not that we don’t have disdain for fascist Barack Obama’s extra constitutional progressive policies. It’s not that we don’t despair at the thought of a vain liberal, crony capitalist opportunist sitting in the White House. We do. But the point is, we don’t want a vain liberal, crony capitalist opportunist running for president under the banner of the party that claims to represent conservatism and limited government. While I agree that a President Hillary Clinton – or Bernie Sanders or Pocahontas Warren – would be a disaster for freedom and prosperity that doesn’t mean that I have to support Donald Trump as the savior. The reality is, Donald Trump is every bit as much a big government crony capitalist as Clinton is. Well, maybe he’s a bit less of one, but at least Clinton only whined about the “vast right wing conspiracy” where as Trump has actually suggested that Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post as a tax dodge with the implicit threat that once in office he will use the mechanisms of government to punish Bezos and Amazon. Maybe he’s right about Bezos, but his threat, along with a similar approach to dealing with Ford and Carrier certainly suggests that a President Trump won’t be much of a free market and limited government guy.

Which brings us back to the point… conservatives are conservatives because they are (generally) conservative and believe in things like limited government, individual freedom and free markets. Conservative does not equal Republican, particularly when the Republican banner is being carried by a guy who is anathema to all of those things. That does not mean that I won’t vote for or even argue for Trump against Clinton in the general. I may do both, albeit reluctantly, but we’re not there yet. Strange things can happen… I remember shaking hands with Gary Hart in Florida a few months before he shot himself in the political head when he invited reporters to follow him, and they did.

Until Donald Trump is absolutely the only real option for keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House, he will not get my support and I will continue to do what I can to highlight the fact that he is no conservative savior, no conservative and no savior at all. He is a petty, spiteful, manipulative crony capitalist narcissist who would continue Barack Obama’s assault on the Constitution. Maybe it will be all for naught and maybe I’ll end up pulling the lever for him in the general as a nod to the reality that the other crony capitalist in the race would be even worse, but don’t accuse me of being a closet liberal because I don’t rejoice that bootlickers like Hannity et al have turned the party of Abraham Lincoln into the party of Bozo the Clown.

Liberals Shouldn't Be Shocked By Donald Trump's Success In The GOP Race... He's Their Creation

Donald Trump’s call to curtail immigration of Muslims until the government can "figure out what's going on” is probably a bit unworkable. If it’s someone’s goal to kill you, you shouldn’t be surprised that they are willing to lie about it beforehand. How are we supposed to know who’s a Muslim in the first place? Are they still a Muslim if they say they found Jesus just six months before? Two weeks? On the way to the airport?

Trying to limit Muslims coming into the country by asking them is simply unworkable. And doing a background check on every single person from a Muslim majority nation would be impossible. In addition, there are lots of Muslims living in India and Germany as well.

Regardless of his specific plan’s viability, Trump is very much on to something. His lead in the GOP race has only increased since he made his comment. (Indeed, just as it did after he made his comments about Mexicans.) And of course the left is going nuts about that…

But they shouldn’t, because, at least in the political arena, Donald Trump’s success is 100% due to their actions. Americans… or at least a lot of them… are simply tired of the first response to a terrorist attack being an admonition against blaming Islam, accusations of Islamaphobia or chastisement for the targeting of Muslims for hate crimes. They are simply tired of the default reaction being “What did we do to make them hate us so much?” They are simply tired of the media and Democrats contorting themselves into pretzels each time such an incident occurs in order to find a way to blame white, Christian, Tea Party types. The reality is, a significant majority of terrorist attacks around the world and the country are perpetrated by Muslims, and even data from Barack Obama’s politicized FBI show that the vast majority of hate crimes are against Jews,not Muslims. Despite the efforts of the left and the media, Americans recognize these facts. (Don't be fooled by the left's attempt to tip the scales by equating violence by common criminals and psychotic killers with terrorism. That's no more true than their suggestion that the greatest danger to black men is police rather than other black men.) America in 2015 finally has the correct answer to the left’s constant insinuation of that famous Chico Marx line: "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" Americans have decided to believe their own eyes and Trump is benefiting from that new focus.

Most Americans believe in Freedom of Religion. It’s been part of our heritage for two centuries. It’s written in black and white in our Constitution. But that doesn’t mean that everything is acceptable however as a religion that demands human sacrifice would not be tolerated. That said, the reality is, for many Muslims that is exactly what Islam does, as can be seen by the deaths of 14 Americans enjoying a Christmas party in San Bernadino, 13 American soldiers working on Ft. Hood, or thousands of Americans simply working to support their families on 9/11. Americans recognize that in a world of 1.5 billion Muslims, hundreds of millions of them support the basic tenants of radical Islam such as Sharia law and the death penalty for leaving Islam, and many of those millions are motivated to destroy the United States and the west in their pursuit of a caliphate. Indeed, even here in the United States half of America’s two million Muslims would choose to live under Sharia law if given a chance and a quarter believe violence is an appropriate response to drawing a Mohammed cartoon as well as in pursuit of global jihad.

Despite these vast numbers of Muslims both home and abroad who seek to obliterate our freedoms and use violence to accomplish that task, liberals continue to proffer the notion that Islam is the “religion of peace”. Americans know better, and Donald Trump’s popularity is a manifestation of that reality.

Liberals of all sorts have condemned Trump for his “unconstitutional” proposal, as have most members of the GOP. But the reality is, there’s nothing unconstitutional about it. No one who is not an American citizen has any “right” to come to the United States, whether they are a Muslim coming from Saudi Arabia or a Mexican swimming across the Rio Grande. As much as liberals might hate it, as a sovereign nation the United States has every right to decide who it will allow into its doors. That’s not a politically correct thing to say, but it’s true nonetheless. Donald Trump is merely pointing that out, and more and more Americans are listening.

Happiness doesn't come from equality of outcomes... Nor does prosperity

For years we’ve been hearing stories of schools scrapping dodge-ball, sports leagues eliminating scoring and schools passing students despite their lack of academic achievement. The reason, we’re told, is to protect the self esteem of students who might otherwise be harmed by coming up on the short end of a competitive stick.

Of course none of this is a surprise to anyone who has watched as liberals have transformed the United States economy from a dynamic prosperity creating machine to a middling debt addict where the middle class finds itself on its knees as the government takes care of those at the top and the bottom of the economic spectrum.

Tangentially… I occasionally play the lottery. If the jackpot posted on the sign on the road from downtown flashes over $200 million I’ll consider plunking down a dollar or two for a ticket. Of course I’ve never won but I find it entertaining to wonder for a brief moment what I might do with my windfall.

At the same time I’ve often wondered, if I actually did win the lottery, would I really be happy? Sure, I’d no doubt have lots of fun spending my millions, but would I really be happy? I’m not so sure. That might sound strange, but the history of many lottery winners seems to indicate that lottery money doesn’t bring happiness.

Here’s how these two tangential things are related. Happiness can’t be given to someone. Nor can self esteem. Yes, someone can give you money, and it can ameliorate some problems, but that doesn’t buy happiness. In a similar way, a parent or a school can tell a child they are wonderful, that grades or scores don’t matter… but the kids know better.

Happiness doesn’t come from having, it comes from earning. That’s the fundamental problem liberals don’t understand, whether it’s telling kids there are no winners or losers in sports, or the government giving people money and food stamps and phones and housing vouchers. Liberals focus on outcomes rather than opportunities. They seek a de jure egalitarian society rather than one governed by effort and innovation. It’s not enough for everyone to have the same chance at success based on some test or competition. No, the resulting output, whether it’s bank loans, jobs or college acceptance letters, has to reflect the hue and composition of the larger population or the test is by definition racist or sexist or some other ist. (While such a framework is supposed to apply in boardrooms and law enforcement, for some reason it never seems to apply in the NBA or the NFL…)

Liberals think that if they somehow make everyone equal, everyone will be happy. Once again they’re wrong. The Soviet Union and modern North Korea might be the best examples of “egalitarian” societies in modern history. And in both cases the people were indeed equal… but that equality was / is an equality of poverty, of desperation, of despair.

Just as there’s a difference between “equality” of outcomes and equality of opportunity, there’s a fundamental difference between earning something and being given it. Compare the way tenants of housing projects take care of their homes with the care shown by those who pay mortgages, or compare the level of pride expressed by a kid at winning a bronze medal to that of a kid being issued a participation medal. It’s natural to value something more when it’s earned, rather than when it’s given. Hard work doesn’t guarantee happiness, but it can instill pride, a sense of accomplishment and a sense of having done something of value, all things which are important elements of happiness.

It’s no coincidence then that as the government has become more generous in its gifts to citizens and its regulatory framework – intended to “protect” citizens from the verities of the marketplace – has become a leviathan akin to a straitjacket, the economic dynamo that was once the United States has become has become a lumbering husk of an economy that is kept alive via stratospheric levels of debt? The result is a workforce participation rate at levels not seen since the 1970’s, skyrocketing welfare rolls all while the percentage of people actually paying income taxes has fallen off a cliff.

At the end of the day, liberals claim they seek widespread prosperity and happiness. In reality however, whether it’s a participation trophy or a nanny state that “protects” the citizenry from virtually anything, they accomplish neither. From kids ill equipped to handle failure in life to millions of Americans who have simply stopped bothering to look for work, to the tens of millions who are on government assistance, liberals talk a game of prosperity but never actually realize it. Sadly, they're not the only ones paying the price for their failures. The entire country is.

But at least we can take solace in the fact that their self esteem won’t be hurt because success isn’t measured by actual results, but only by intentions…

Memento: The story of liberals who can't seem to learn from reality...

If you’ve never seen the movie Memento, I would highly recommend it… The main character, Leonard, is suffering from anterograde amnesia – the inability to create new memories – the result of a violent attack. Unable to create new memories, Leonard uses tattoos and notes to help him find the person he believes is responsible for the last thing he does remember, his wife’s murder. Throughout the movie we see Leonard writing himself notes and getting new tattoos to help him take the next step in his pursuit of the culprit. By the end of the movie Leonard finds and kills “John G” the man he believes is responsible for his wife’s murder. Or at least he thinks he has, and something we discover he’s apparently done before. At the end of the movie the viewer discovers that despite Leonard’s “system” there really is no correlation between his actions and reality. Even those memories he can recall are suspect. In a nutshell, Leonard is lost in a world where reality simply doesn’t exist. Friends and foes are interchangeable and he knows what he knows only because he reads it in his own handwriting. Actions have no consequences because lessons are never learned.

One has to wonder, is to exist in such a world really living? Think about all of the things you know, from when you first learned the fact that a hissing radiator is probably hot to the realization that not everything everyone tells you is true, most of us never stop learning. It’s how we grow, it’s how we discover what works in the world – and what doesn’t – in the pursuit of solving problems, finding pleasure and virtually everything in between. Without learning we don’t grow and are destined to face an endless cycle of reliving the same exact problems day after day.

Such is the world that liberals have created for themselves… and increasingly have imprisoned the rest of us in. They seem to be unable to make new memories. They seem to be stuck in a universe where reality is disconnected from what actually goes on in the world and they believe what they believe only because they read it in their own handwriting… or in this case the typed letters of the New York Times or the spoken word on MSNBC. Reality simply doesn’t intrude on their universe.

From the trope that throwing money is the solution to America’s education mess to the mantra that more government regulation is the solution to all problems, liberals never seem to learn. One can only look at the performance of American schools and know that money and performance do not move in tandem. What liberals don’t learn is what actually works and what doesn’t. The examples are legion. From the fact that tax cuts actually spur economic growth to the folly that massive government spending can spur an economy to the notion that “You can keep your health insurance”, liberals fail to look at what is going on right in front of them. Or maybe fail to look is the wrong characterization… maybe fail to recognize is more accurate. It’s like when you look at one of those optical illusions with the old lady and the young girl. Depending on what you focus on, you see something different. Liberals look at the economic juggernaut of Ronald Reagan and focus on his tax cuts “for the rich” yet somehow fail to see that 15 million private sector jobs were created under his watch and GDP was booming. That’s 15 million families with a paycheck rather than depending on the government for support and hundreds of billions of dollars in American’s pockets. Conversely they laud Barack Obama because of his concern for the poor and minorities while his policies have resulted in record levels of poverty and massive numbers of people simply leaving the workforce because they can’t find jobs, with minorities hit the hardest.

One has to wonder how is it that liberals consistently fail to learn from the stark failures that are in front of them and have been recurring for decades. Whether it’s the collapse of urban America under generations of Democrat rule to the inverse relationship between government regulation and economic growth, one has to wonder if, perhaps there is not some widespread mental problem there. One can certainly choose to support economic policies that put “fairness” above economic growth, but to proffer the notion that higher taxes, increased government spending and more regulation is good for the economic well being of the nation is to simply ignore the history of the last 40 years. To have watched as government regulation of the housing industry brought the meltdown of the economy and then somehow choose to double down on that very regulation suggests that a portion of America’s liberal’s brains have simply atrophied to the point where they simply no longer process the learning of new material. They find themselves stuck reading the same notes they wrote to themselves decades ago such as “fairness”, “more government regulation”, “higher taxes” and of course the ubiquitous target of everything liberal: “the evil capitalists”. Like Leonard in Mememto, who blindly follows his notes and ends up killing an uncounted number of John Gs, liberals in America follow their notes (or teleprompters) and kill jobs, opportunity, prosperity and perhaps eventually the American Dream itself. One can only hope that at some point they misplace the notes and forget where they’ve put them.

How Conservatives can win in a world of "Low Information Voters"

How did Barack Obama win reelection despite 8 million fewer people working and a doubling of gas prices since he took office? Despite a flatlining GDP, $6 trillion in new debt, and the disastrous Benghazi? How is it possible that given his abject failure voters could give Barack Obama a second term? Easy… Republicans hate everyone.

This point was crystallized this week when Mary Katherine Ham got into a dustup with Juan Williams over the issue of gun control. Ham made the cogent point that Chicago, with some of the strongest gun control laws in the country is anything but a “promise land” of tranquility. Williams responded with the absurd notion that because Virginia has much weaker gun regulations than DC, the lives of people who live in DC are somehow less valuable.

As nonsensical as William’s argument (if you can call it that) was, its demonizing of Virginians as not valuing the lives of DC residents was not unusual. That is exactly how Barack Obama won reelection and how we’ve gotten ourselves into this quagmire of a bloated mommy state with trillions of dollars flowing to the “needy” and tens of thousands of pages of regulations seeking to “protect” citizens. Conservatives and the GOP have been participating in different conversations than liberals for decades. While conservatives seek to engage in conversations about finding solutions for problems, liberals ignore them and steam ahead building their progressive utopia, regardless of the impact on the actual problems themselves.

The conversation between Ham and Williams provides a clear demonstration of the tactic. Data clearly show that jurisdictions with the most restrictive gun laws not only don’t show lower rates of gun violence, but typically have more gun violence. The conclusion that one might draw from this is that fewer gun laws mean more saved lives. You can disagree with the conclusion or argue about a lack of causation or you can suggest some other alternative explanation for the data. But that’s rarely what liberals do. Instead they suggest that if you’re against more gun laws you don’t want to protect children.

The same construct holds true for virtually every issue in politics:

• You oppose Barack Obama you’re a racist.
• You oppose increasing spending on education you don’t’ care about children.
• You oppose wind farms and electric cars you don’t care about the environment.
• You want borders enforced you hate Hispanics.
• You want lower taxes you hate poor people.
• You don’t support gay marriage you’re a homophobe.
• You want Obamacare repealed you’re a greedy SOB who doesn’t care about children with cancer or the elderly needing medicines.
• If you oppose increasing the minimum wage you don’t care about the poor.

And the list goes on. This is the liberal modus operandi: Demagoguery. Rather than engage in thoughtful discussions on the goals and efficacy of government regulations, they seek to demonize their opponents and in the process marginalize then sideline them.

Mitt Romney was just the latest causality of this Democratic pseudo defamation machine… He’s rich and wants lower taxes, therefore he hates poor people. Nevermind he created thousands of entry level jobs that gave poor people an income.

Before him Rudy Giuliani was called racist because of his crackdown on crime in New York City. Nevermind that he saved the lives of thousands of young black men by making the streets safer for everyone.

Ronald Reagan was constantly pilloried for everything from wanting to starve children to being a war monger. Nevermind he created a staggering level of economic growth that provided incomes to parents of millions of children, and that he won the Cold War.

The worst part of this liberal tactic is that it’s almost impossible to refute. Data rarely works to sway the argument. You saw that in William’s rejoinder to Ham. He had no interest in engaging on the facts. You also see it in the painting of the Tea Party movement as racist. Andrew Breitbart offered $100,000 for proof of the claim that Tea Partiers had spit on black members of congress. Despite thousands of phone cameras rolling nobody came forward. Nonetheless the meme of Tea Party racism continues, even in the face of explicit proof to the opposite. Once the left makes an assertion and the sycophants in the media get hold of it, it’s almost impossible to reverse.

Liberals have been seeking to delegitimize conservatives for half a century. Unfortunately it’s been a largely successful strategy, as can be seen by the growth of government regulation and spending under both Democrat and GOP administrations. As such, liberals have no intention of abandoning it any time soon.

Given that playing field, in order to achieve success conservatives are going to have to face those falsehoods head on. At the most basic level they must make the point, repeatedly, that their policies of limited government and fiscal restraint seek to help all Americans, not just particular groups. More importantly however, conservatives must be willing to go toe to toe with Democrats who seek to delegitimize them as haters of one sort or another. They must be willing to stand up and state clearly “I reject the basic premise of your argument” and clearly articulate that opposition to Democrat’s nanny state policies does not suggest that they hate anybody. Rather, by reducing government entanglement in our lives, conservative policies seek to help everyone and anyone succeed.

In a universe of “low information voters” the only recipe for success is for conservatives to stay laser focused on the idea that limited government helps drive prosperity, which helps everyone. Period. That’s it. There's nothing else.  In a cacophony of issues we must narrow the focus to the only ones that count: freedom and prosperity, because once they're gone, nothing else matters.  Conservatives must learn to compellingly deflect the “hate” label and focus attention on how freedom drives prosperity and prosperity makes everything else possible. By explicitly refuting those “hate” labels they can narrow the spectrum of discussion to the consequences of government policies. They should be under no illusion that doing so will change the votes of dyed in the wool liberals. It may however catch the attention of a sufficient number of those "low information voters" to sway the next two elections red and save the country from our impending Greece like collapse.

Life imitates art... Liberals see the world as they imagine it is, not how it actually is

I’ve always been a fan of Van Gogh’s paintings. I similarly like Renoir, and Seurat. Although I like some of Picasso’s early work, most of it I find a bit odd. My favorite artist however is William Adolphe Bouguereau, a 19th century French artist whose works are the polar opposite of the impressionists, literally.

From the 1870s his realistic portrayal of the human form was increasingly seen as passé in an art world increasingly captivated by Impressionism – a style which influenced both Van Gogh and Seurat. By the early 20th century Bouguereau’s work had completely fallen out of favor among cultured art devotees, – i.e. everyone except those uncivilized Americans.

Impressionist art was less precise than that of Bouguereau and most artists who came before him. It began a march that has brought us a century of modern art that is often anything but precise… Think Jackson Pollack or Christo.

A challenge of art is that what the artist is trying to convey (if anything) is often up for debate. Take any three people and ask them what is the artist’s intent behind one of Alexander Calder’s mobiles and you’ll no doubt get three completely different ideas.

Such lack of clarity works well in the subjective world of art. Not so much in the not so subjective world of politics and government. It is perhaps no surprise then that the rise of modern liberalism has evolved over a similar timeline and path as modern art.

Politicians on the left no longer look to objective facts to define the world around them. Rather, they look at the world as they would like it to be and interpret it accordingly. How else could one explain the lunacy that pervades the Democrat party today?

Data clearly show that stricter gun laws lead to more crime but that is of no consequence. President Obama and the rest of the progressives who want to pass gun laws that will magically make the world a safer place... as if there were no knives, swords, cars or anything else that might ever be used as a weapon.

Maybe they forgot about Prohibition? It doesn’t take much looking to see the negative consequences of that. Not only did it not work, but it created a paradise for gangsters to grow rich and powerful. Fast forward 80 years and while smoking is not illegal, per se, many states are trying to tax it out of existence… while simultaneously padding the tattered state coffers at the same time. Surprise… it’s not quite working out the way they had planned. High cigarette locales are seeing their sin tax base actually decline as as much as 60% of the cigarettes sold in their states are illegal. Indeed, even in the face of such failure Chicago is planning on doubling down on its bad bet.

Then there are government schools. Could there be a more crystal clear example of government failure on the planet than public schools? Yet somehow the union backed Democrats continue to fight vouchers and school reform despite the physical and intellectual carnage government schools have wrought on American children.

Of course the most important example of the liberal failing to see exactly what is in front of them is on economics. In 2009, just as Canada was beginning to look at free markets to fix its state controlled healthcare sector Nancy Pelosi was crafting ObamaCare to strangle the American people. Over the last four years, just as Greece, Spain and Italy collapse under the weight of their social programs and confiscatory tax rates, the Obama administration has sought to expand government welfare, increase taxes on those who create wealth and further strangle the economy with regulation.

At some point one has to wonder what exactly liberals are looking at that would cause them to make such illogical choices. It makes you think of a doctor who studies medicine with anatomy books illustrated by Picasso. Do you really want that guy operating on you?

Government is not like art. In art, the artist can paint what he wants, the way he wants. He can imbue it with hidden messages, explicit messages or no messages at all. The beauty of art is that anyone can interpret it any way they want and in doing so they don’t impact anyone else’s ability to enjoy it. With government on the other hand, the realities of life are quite different. Regardless of the author of a bill’s limited intentions, its passage almost always presages a reinterpretation and expansion once it becomes law. Do you imagine when the 16th Amendment was passed Americans expected tax rates to quickly rise to 90%? Do you think when the Civil Rights Acts were passed in the 1960s the writers expected white and Hispanic firefighters to lose promotions because no black firefighters did well on the promotion tests? Do you think when Nixon created the EPA he planned on the agency eventually seeking to regulate milk spills, rainwater and lightbulbs? No, no and no!

None of that matters to liberals however, and that’s the problem with government: Government regulations are rarely limited to benign interpretation or precise application. They have real world consequences, most of which are unintended, and most of those are negative. And the rest of us are stuck with them because they rarely get repealed and almost always grow more restrictive.

Taking a page from the Impressionists, at some point the citizens who drive prosperity in the United States will stop operating in the world of realism – i.e. high taxes and oppressive regulations – and opt to do something altogether different. Maybe they will work a bit less or be satisfied with 40 employees rather than adding a few more. That might sound benign right now, but just as Impressionism began an evolution that led to everything from Robert Mapplethorpe to Willem de Kooning to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, government regulations have a way of morphing the world in ways that were unimaginable (to liberals) when they were passed. When America is left with only the dependants and bureaucrats, the wealth and job creators either dead or long gone to places like Switzerland or Australia, the legacy of liberal failure will be complete.

As President Obama begins the second leg of his quest to “fundamentally transform America” we should keep that in mind. Thankfully the Constitution limits his time in office to 8 years, unfortunately the shackles of liberal government he leaves us with will likely last far longer and morph into things even he didn’t imagine. The reality of that hell is one that even Monet would have a hard time blurring.

Democrats falsely claim conservatives are racists. Let's pretend it's true... So what?

From the moment that Barack Obama threw his hat into the ring for President, Democrats have been accusing those who disagree with him of being racists. They are of course being disingenuous, pernicious and at the end of the day, most importantly, wrong.

But what if they weren’t? Let’s say somehow the entire universe of conservatives was made up of racists… so what? Does it change the veracity of their stated disagreements with President Obama? If it were in fact the case that conservatives hate him because he is black does that mean that their well thought out, reasonable and clearly articulated reasons for opposing him are somehow less valid? No, of course it doesn’t.

This issue makes me think of hate crimes. I’ve never been a supporter of hate crime legislation. Not because I like crimes or hate, but because it's the act that makes something a crime, not the real or imagined hate. If someone beats up someone else because of their race or sexual orientation or religion, they should be prosecuted for assault, period. Is a victim any less injured or dead because the perpetrator assaulted them for their money instead of their – fill in the blank characteristic? No, obviously not. That’s ridiculous. The criminal justice system should deal with the crime and not worry about trying to look into the soul of the criminal.

In the same way, politics should focus on people’s words and actions and not try and look into the souls of the various participants. Why? Because that is all we can really know about a person. As George Bush discovered with Vladimir Putin, it’s impossible to look into someone’s soul and know what is going on in there. Along those same lines, when Steve Jobs died I wrote that it was possible that he was selfish son of a bitch, but I’d never know. What I do know however is that his words and actions did a great deal of good for hundreds of millions of people around the world. It didn’t matter if Jobs thought PC users were mental dwarves when compared to the Mensa like intelligence demonstrated by those who use Macs. He opened up iTunes to everyone and changed the world of music. It’s what he did that changed the world not what was going on in his soul. But of course race plus politics is something altogether different.

Race has been an issue swirling around Barack Obama since he first declared his candidacy and then continued once he became President. There was the whole Jeremiah Wright deal and Obama’s spending two decades in his church but somehow inexplicably never hearing a single racist comment. There was his knee jerk reaction that the Cambridge police department "acted stupidly" without knowing the facts of the case. There was his attorney general dropping voter intimidation charges against the demonstrably guilty New Black Panther Party. And just last month the President revived African-Americans for Obama. Can one imagine the outrage if Mitt Romney created a Whites for Romney organization?

To the degree that race is an issue for President Obama, it’s either been because he is making it so or because his party is using it as a red herring to deflect criticism of their agenda. The most obvious example of the latter was during the ObamaCare debate when the Democrats famously accused protesters of using racial epithets and spitting on black congressmen. The late Andrew Breitbart did a good job of dispensing with those charges.

That brings us to the basic element of liberal politics. Their default position towards anyone who opposes Barack Obama and the Democratic Party’s socialist agenda is to accuse them of being racist and that is supposed to be the end of the conversation. In that kind of an environment a conservative simply cannot win – how do you disprove something for which the mere accusation itself is seemingly enough to prove guilt? You can’t. My suggestion therefore is to take a different tack altogether: Don’t try. Rather, I suggest playing the hypothetical card. Instead of trying to disprove the undisprovable, instead suggest: “Ok, let’s pretend I am what you have painted me to be, and let’s assume that’s not going to change… now let’s talk about the issues.”

Now of course many of the good and principled liberals will demure to discuss the issues because they feel it’s inappropriate to discuss politics with racists other than to demonstrate their own non-racist bona fides. In that case you might then suggest to them that if their leader can advocate sitting down and talking with people who want to wipe the United States off the face of the planet they might deign to talk with people who simply want to discuss things like the tax code, the EPA and healthcare.

Don’t hold your breath however. Apparently liberals / Democrats believe that if one is racist (or more accurately, is labeled racist by them) then you are simply not qualified to have a voice in the political arena and your issues need not be addressed. That’s quite a leap for a party whose Senate leader for a decade was a man who had been an Exalted Cyclops of the KKK and filibustered to block the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Conservatives need not acquiesce to the liberal’s attempt to stifle public discourse. By calling their bluff and taking the non sequitur of racism off the table, conservatives have the opportunity to expose the liberal agenda for what it is, nothing but a recipe for disaster of a cleptocratic nanny state. In doing so and by discussing the facts rather than letting Democrats malign the messengers of the messages they fear, perhaps we can once again allow the American people to focus on the real issues facing the country rather than parrying with shadows of a Democrat created illusion with no basis in reality.

How Paul Ryan is like the slavery loving Founding Fathers…

It’s not uncommon to hear liberals ridicule conservatives for wanting a Constitutional government by suggesting that they are seeking to return to a time when blacks were considered 3/5 of a person and that the Constitution is somehow permanently damaged because it did not outlaw slavery. (At the time of the Constitution’s ratification in 1789 slavery was still legal in the British and French Empires – although not in England and France themselves – Spain, Denmark & Norway as well as most of the Middle East, Africa and Asia.)

This liberal narrative suggests that the Founding Fathers had the opportunity to outlaw slavery and simply chose not to do so because they didn’t see blacks as fully human. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. While a majority may have been skeptical of suggestions of equality between races, there were a number of eloquent anti-slavery members of the Constitutional Convention, including one of the most influential, Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania who called slavery: A “nefarious institution, the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed” as well as Virginian George Mason who said: “Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant.... I hold it essential ... that the general government should have the power to prevent the increase of slavery.”

At the end of the day, the liberal notion that the 3/5 Compromise was a mistake is simply wrong. Outlawing slavery or counting slaves as whole persons was never an option.

The 3/5 Compromise was itself the result of another compromise, the Connecticut Compromise, which gave us a Senate with equal representation and a House with proportionate representation. This arrangement provided smaller states like Rhode Island and Delaware with the confidence that they were not going to be steamrolled by the bigger and more populous states like Virginia and Pennsylvania.

It is that proportional representation that begat the 3/5 Compromise. The Constitution apportions taxes and representation by population. As such, there was a dichotomy of opinion on slaves. Northerners wanted slaves counted whole for taxes and not at all for representation. Southerners wanted slaves counted whole for representation purposes, but not for taxes. (Note: Race was not the issue: Free blacks were counted as whole persons…)

The result was the 3/5 Compromise: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

The 3/5 Compromise resulted in southern states having a disproportionate representation in the House for the next 70 years. Had slaves been counted as whole persons that imbalance and the Southern power would have been even greater than it was, a situation the North would never have accepted. As difficult as it might be for 21st century liberals to understand, the choice was never between a Constitution that outlawed slavery and one that counted slaves as 3/5 of a free man for representation and taxation purposes, but rather the choice was between a Constitution with a 3/5 Compromise and one that could not gain ratification.

The demonstration of this comes from the words of none other than Gouverneur Morris himself. In noting that the Constitution was to be willingly entered into he said: “But as the Compact was to be voluntary, it is in vain for the Eastern States to insist on what the Southern States will never agree to.” And to see exactly where the Southern states stood on the issue there is North Carolina’s William Davie who said of the representation of slaves: “(He) Was sure North Carolina would never confederate on any terms that did not rate them at least as 3/5. If the Eastern States meant therefore to exclude them altogether the business (Writing of the Constitution) was at an end.

Therefore the question today might be, were slaves and their progeny better off as part of a union that included abolitionists as part of the government and polity who were actively seeking to abolish the practice or would they have been better off as part of a country or countries where slavery was an accepted basic element of the culture and where there was no significant dissent? In addition one might ask the question of whether anyone on the continent would have been better off had the 13 colonies not ratified the Constitution and the continent split into a mosaic of nations resembling Europe and it’s perpetual wars?

To bring this full circle, whether looking back at history or ahead into the future, liberals rarely let the reality of life get in the way of their theories on how the world works. Once again they are proffering a false narrative, only this time they are discussing the future of the country. Paul Ryan has taken the first step in recognizing the unsustainability of America’s entitlement programs as they are currently configured and has laid out a viable solution for addressing the problem. Democrats on the other hand believe that the programs are just fine and the problem is simply that the rich are not paying their fair share in taxes.

Like their take on the 3/5 Compromise, liberals once again have the wrong narrative. The choice facing America’s mushrooming entitlement costs is not between increasing taxes on the rich and throwing grandma off a cliff, but rather it’s between fixing the programs and not fixing them, in which case the federal government would finally implode under the weight of its unsustainable promises.

The difference of course is that while we can’t impact history, the actions taken today can impact what happens tomorrow. Liberals could learn much from the Founding Fathers in terms of examining the real choices at hand when it comes to choosing which path to follow. It may not be as much fun as peddling simple minded populist solutions, but it sets a foundation for real progress.

$50 light bulbs! Unfortunately for you, the green in Green Energy is your dollars…

One has to ask the question about Greens, do they even live on this planet they are trying to save? They often seem to be living in a completely different universe if not just a different planet.

The most recent example of this is the LED light bulb, the latest answer to Congress’s 2007 energy efficiency mandate – which was regrettably signed by George Bush. Last week a story emerged that the 100 watt LED light bulbs slated to replace 100 year old inefficient incandescent bulbs will cost upwards of $50 apiece! That’s right, $50 for a light bulb…

Fifty dollars vs. the one dollar it costs for a typical incandescent bulb. It’s a bit hefty, but then they are more efficient. The question is however, are they 50 times much more efficient? Ah, no. Two years ago Carnegie Mellon compared the energy lifecycle of LED lights vs. those of compact fluorescents as well as incandescent bulbs. (The energy lifecycle includes not only the energy a bulb will burn over the course of its life, but the energy and materials used to manufacture it in the first place.)

The numbers were unambiguous… LED lights were far more efficient. If the energy lifecycle cost of an LED is $1, the cost of producing the same amount of light from a compact fluorescent bulb would be $1.14 and a whopping $5.36 from a traditional incandescent. (Compact fluorescents are those curly bulbs that have their own significant problems.)

So it’s true that green LED light bulbs are more efficient than traditional bulbs. Five times more efficient, which makes your soul feel warm and fuzzy. Unfortunately, your wallet, not so much. That warm and fuzzy feeling of a five times more efficient bulb will cost you fifty times more money to experience.

Of course that is just the latest in a long string of Green initiatives where your wallet plays no role in the choices you are forced to make. Ethanol is perhaps the most blatant example. Not only does it make gasoline more expensive, make your car less efficient, but it turns out that it’s also damaging your engine. As a bonus, it also has the effect of increasing food prices while doing nothing for the environment. Then there’s wind and solar energy, neither of which is even remotely close to being competitive with fossil fuels. Not only are they not competitive with traditional fuels, but at the same time they are unreliable and are not exactly inconspicuous in their footprints. How about those clean energy electric cars that cost twice as much as a similar gas fueled model and go a quarter the distance without needing a recharge? Greenies are so busy basking in the adulation received for not emitting any earth destroying gases that they forget that the electricity fueling their cars comes from coal plants which are far dirtier than gasoline powered internal combustion engines. They also conveniently forget the environmental concerns created from the manufacture of all of those batteries.

As if all of this was not bad enough, Green Jobs are expensive, highly inefficient and kill off twice their numbers in regular jobs.

Greenies inhabit s universe where cost is never a factor. Why? Because they don’t have to. They don’t have to make a coherent argument for their position and give consumers the choice of acting on those rational arguments. No, instead of the rough and tumble world based on the competition of ideas and science, they simply propagate junk science as real and then harness the police powers of government to advance their agenda.

This would be bad enough if it were just about light bulbs, gasoline and CO2, but it’s not. It’s about your fundamental choice of how to live your life. In the most simple sense, forcing Americans to pay $50 for a LED – or even $25 for a CFL – rather than the $1 they could pay for a traditional light literally takes $49 out of their pockets that they can no longer spend on anything else, from buying Twinkies to donating to the Red Cross to buying a share of the latest Internet startup.

Life is about choices and it is through the experience of making choices and living with them that individuals and societies learn about the connection between actions and consequences and by implication the responsibilities that come from choices.

Liberals of course don’t have to learn about consequences or responsibilities because they know what’s best for everyone. Even when their policies fail, both on an objective measure as well as achieving their announced goals, it doesn’t matter because they never have to face the consequences. Unfortunately it’s the rest of the population who are trying to figure out how far they can go on vacation with $4.00 a gallon gasoline who end up paying for the good fortune of living on the planet liberals are trying to save. And that doesn’t even count the taxes paid so the federal government could spend billions of dollars subsidizing electric cars, ethanol, as well as the wind and solar industries…