The Fringe Loves Squatters, Hates The Constitution

It was apparently a good weekend to get your fringe on. First, the birthers were back. Trump promised to build a giant placebo to keep out all the Mexicans. And Jay Carney used photoshop to make it look like he owns more books than he does AND he collects Soviet propaganda. See! See people! If only the MSM would tell the TROOTH about these things! Then the public would be with us openly instead of secretly! And those aren’t even the BIG story! The BIG story was how fascist Obamaholderreid wants to strip reel ‘merikan Al Bundy of his property rights. But we faced 'em down!

//sarc off

Most of the land in the West belongs to the federal government. At one point, the feds were giving it away to anyone who would take it in the hopes that people would move from the East to the West. Later, when the West was more established, the feds stopped giving away public land, but they agreed to allow people like ranchers to graze their cattle on public land for a small grazing fee. Ditto miners and oil drillers and others. Indeed, this land is administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which is charged with maintaining and administering public lands for the benefit of the public. This includes allowing private use of the land when that fits the BLM’s mission.

This is where the Bundy family comes into the picture. Somewhere in the late 1800s, the Bundy’s moved to Nevada and built a ranch. They took advantage of the fed’s policy of opening public lands and let their cattle graze on public lands near their ranch.

To hear the fringe tell it, the Bundy family was given the right to use this land forever until the evil BLM decided to save some turtle. At that point, the BLM ruthlessly tried to throw the Bundy's off the land they've been using since before Jesus was a child and have a forever right to use. When the saintly Bundy's resisted, the BLM appeared out of the blue with shock troops, tasered Bundy's helpless son, and would have made the whole family disappear into black helicopters if not for a couple of reel patriots like the nut jobs at InfoWars exposing the TROOTH.

Um... no... not even close.

Somewhere along the way, the BLM was told by the EPA that some rare turtle in Nevada needs protection. At that point in the 1990s, the BLM had no legal choice but to do what they could to protect that turtle. The BLM responded by limiting grazing rights for everyone in those areas to 150 head of cattle per permit. This included the Bundy’s. The Bundy’s, however, ignored this change by BLM in the grazing policy. Moreover, they stopped paying the renewal fee for the grazing permits.

Now, let me be clear because this is where the lunatics stop listening. The Bundy’s have NO right to graze on public land - no matter how long they've been doing it. They are entitled to do so only so long as the BLM has that land open for grazing. Moreover, they need to follow any terms and conditions or limits BLM places on that grazing; the Bundy’s can’t claim more rights than BLM is willing to grant. Nor can the Bundy’s claim what is called adverse possession because (1) you can’t do that to the government, (2) they don’t otherwise meet the requirements either, i.e. their possession was not adverse and they didn’t hold themselves out as owners. So the Bundy’s can’t claim the land is theirs, they can’t claim some sort of right to graze, they can’t claim more rights to graze than BLM grants them by permit, and they didn’t even pay the permit to get those. They are essentially grass thieves... or squatters.

The Bundy’s kept right on grazing, however, so the BLM went to court. On issue after issue, injunction after injunction, appeal after appeal, the Bundy’s lost. They lost every single legal battle for more than 20 years. Eventually, Bundy gave up on the court’s giving him what he wanted and he tried a different approach: he claimed that he does not recognize the existence of the Federal Government: “I don’t recognize the United States Government as even existing.” He then claimed to be armed and threatened anyone who tried to interfere with his cattle grazing.

BLM went to court and got another order to have the Bundy cattle removed. Bundy appealed and lost again. Bundy then removed his cattle. Only, they didn't stay away. For the next eleven years, Bundy snuck his cattle onto the land, sometimes mixing them with others and even leaving them unbranded in an attempt to keep investigators from knowing whose cattle they were. The BLM investigated however, and by June 2011, the BLM issued another cease and desist order.

Bundy then told BLM he would round up their cattle as ordered. He lied. Rather than round up his cattle, he began to build improvements on the land to make it easier to feed and water his cattle – something that has never been allowed. BLM contacted the Clark County Sheriff, who tried to broker a deal. At that point, Bundy threatened a “range war” if anyone tried to remove his cattle. BLM went back to court and got an order allowing them to remove the cattle.

That is where we are now, only with a couple hundred yahoos out there trying to menace the BLM agents as well. As an aside, these fringers are claiming Harry Reid's son is behind this because he wants to claim the land for a CHINESE!!! solar company. They heard this from pathological liar Alex Jones. The trouble is that it's false. The land Reid wants to use is miles away and this issue arose 10 years before Reid got into politics.

So here is who this patriot of patriots is. He is:

1. A man with no legal right to use the land he claims as his property. He is a squatter who is claiming property rights he doesn't have.
2. A man who litigated for more than 20 years and lost every single time... all affirmed on appeal, and when he lost he suddenly started claiming that the Federal Government doesn’t exist.
3. A man who failed to pay the grazing fees that would have let him continue with fewer cattle.
4. A man who has lied and failed to keep “his word” on several instances.
5. A man who has used threats of violence to try to keep the government from legally evicting him, and who then whines about BLM showing up with armed agents.

This Bundy guy is the exact opposite of everything conservatives hold dear. We believe in property rights, yet this guy is a squatter claiming entitlement to property he does not own and has no rights over. We believe in rule of law, which means an equal application of the law to all. The BLM has more than bent over backwards to give that here. Not only have they spent almost 30 years in court trying to get this resolved (winning at every step), but they have patiently tried to resolve this when they could have legally evicted Bundy at any point. Heck, they've even offered to give him rights to which he's not entitled to settle this. Conservatives cannot claim to support rule of law and then argue that the law cannot apply in this instance. Conservatives also stand for law and order and Bundy is violating that. Bundy has refused repeated valid court orders, he's failed to pay to keep his permits, and he's threatened violence if anyone tries to implement the law. That flies in the face of conservatism. Bundy is also a liar and a sneak, which I would hope are not conservative traits. Finally, note that Bundy doesn't claim some right under the constitution, instead he claims the federal government isn't a legal organization. That's about as far away from conservatism as you can get.

There are times the Federal Government is abusive and needs to be stopped. But latching onto "heroes" like this only discredits our side. Yet, here the far right embraces this nutjob as a hero.

This is what I've been warning people about with the fringe. These people are not conservatives -- they are militia types, tax dodgers, racists, anarchists, and they have worked their way onto the conservative side at the moment because they see an opportunity to warp conservatism to their cause. They do not believe in rule of law or property rights or even limited government, they believe in the abolition of the federal government, separatism and anarchy. They only hide behind terms like "rule of law" and "property rights" to trick people like you into thinking their goals are legitimate. Don't fall for it.

** By the way, the Feds have backed off for the moment and the fringe is crowing about the feds being cowards, because that's how they think. The truth is that this is effective law enforcement. The smart play is to wait for the militia types to go home and then grab Bundy when you can do it without shooting a hundred people. That's also the exact opposite way a supposed totalitarian regime would handle things.

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Adventures in Retconning

Liberals, as you know, are sneaky. Never ones to admit failure, they often react to the inconvenient facts of the present by resorting to the past, coloring it their way to prove that history and the world are on their side. And they can be bald-faced liars about it, too.

Leftists have been bad about covering up the facts for a long time. If you want a good example of how they edit history, look no further than good ol' Karl Marx. His greatest hits are famous not only as a call to arms for the working class but for playing fast and loose with the facts. Consider Das Kapital, a multi-volume book so dense and confusing probably none of his followers ever read it. Probably you can guess the tone: Capitalism is evil and oppressive, it forces the working class to toil in miserable conditions, the government is complicit in this because it is run by and for capitalists, etc.

Now, being a self-styled "scientific socialist," Marx probably backed these claims up with lots of anecdotes and statistics that showed just how bad the working man had it, right? Well, not so much. In fact, practically the entire book was devoted to Marx outlining his theories of labor and capital and so on, and his predictions that one day the proletariat would rise up and destroy capitalism. As for evidence of oppression, he supplied practically none, vaguely referring the reader to an earlier book by his partner-in-crime, Friedrich Engels.

Engels' book did have lots of juicy tidbits on miserable working conditions, long hours, child labor, and so on, but the problem was, it was horribly out of date. The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, repeatedly described cases of bad sanitation and poor factory oversight that had come from the beginning of the century, but which were treated in the book as current events. Even more seriously, it omits any mention that the British government, as well as many of the largest and most advanced industrial operations, had been working to improve labor conditions and denouncing shoddy practices since at least the 1830s, well before anyone had heard of Marx and Engels, and that many of the most heinous stories cited came from the most pre-capitalist enterprises (like blacksmithing). And Marx's Das Kapital was another twenty years out of date; nor was he any better about accurately presenting sources or fairly evaluating those he criticized.

The truth about industrialization is that, while it certainly had some drawbacks, there were from the very beginning (the late 18th century onward) a number of people (wealthy landowners, capitalist factory owners, high-placed government officials tied to both these groups) who were very concerned about the condition of the working class and sought to protect it from abuse and make working conditions as palatable as possible. It's also true that capitalism would, over many decades, greatly improve the position of most people in the Western world, rich and poor. But that would have been inconvenient for Marx and Engels to admit, even if they had been more rigorous and honest.

It's the same story for other leftists' versions of history. In the 20th century, pro-Communist intellectuals claimed the Soviet Union had been working fine until American hostility messed it up; others claimed that white imperialists had had a policy of wiping out non-white populations wherever possible; etc etc. Just the other day I saw where someone was claiming U.S. soldiers in Vietnam regularly carried out atrocities, My Lai-style, and backed it up with nothing more than John Kerry's histrionic testimony to Congress in the '70s. Just remember: If someone's account of history seems to fit too neatly into the Left's version of reality, you probably want to be skeptical.

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The Great Depression, Revisited

Some weeks ago, I spelled out why the much-maligned "supply side" economics are in fact very beneficial to--well, most people, as evidenced by the booms of the '20s, '80s, and so on. Of course, the obvious liberal comeback would be "yeah, but after the Roaring Twenties, there was a Great Depression!"

The implication, of course, being that conservative economic policies may cause a short-term boom, but in the end they always screw you over, because greed and overspeculation cause market crashes and so on and so on. Sounds plausible enough on the surface, I guess, but only because people don't spend a lot of time picking it apart. Several good writer-historians--Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man, for one, Burton Folsom's New Deal or Raw Deal?, for another--have done a good job in recent years of condensing the economics and fiscal issues involved, however, and the events of the 1920s and '30s are much easier to understand now.

So with that in mind, let's take a look at the beginnings of the Great Depression, by exploding some popular myths associated with it. For example:

1. The Wall Street crash caused the Depression.

Well, it certainly didn't help anything, but in the immediate aftermath of 1929's "Black Tuesday," no one seemed to regard the crash as a big deal. Neither the government, nor the media, nor the business leaders, all of whom regarded it as a momentary fluke irrelevant to the national economy. Maybe a lot of wealth had been lost on paper, in stock certificates and the like, but contrary to what liberals later claimed, that was not the only kind of wealth being generated in the '20s. Consumer goods and utilities had expanded drastically during the decade, and even after the crash, every economic indicator suggested that as remote parts of the country were electrified, introduced to cars, etc., this ongoing wealth-production would inevitably drive stocks back up. Which might well have happened within a year or so, except....

2. Herbert Hoover was a "rugged individualism" laissez-faire guy.

....the POTUS just couldn't stay out of things. (Sound familiar?) It's true, Hoover was a self-made man who made his wealth in the private sector, he did believe in the necessity of individual action and self-reliance, and as a public official, he consistently argued that the central government was constitutionally prevented from taking a direct hand in the economy. But he had also built a reputation as "The Great Engineer," and was always consumed with the need to do something, and to be seen doing it. His first reaction to the Wall Street crash and subsequent downturn was to decide that runaway inflation was the problem (he wasn't the only one) and to combat it by having the Fed drastically reduce the money supply. Plus, he undertook what may have been the first major "stimulus" program, increasing spending on public buildings by over $400 million, persuaded major businesses not to cut wages, and even suggested, as early as December 1929, the need for public health management and regulation of the electric industry. So, definitely not a "do-nothing" executive. Which leads me into....

3. The Republican Party opposed doing anything to help the country.

(Okay, I could have wrapped this into the last one but I wanted three headings.) Oh yes, the GOP did want to take action to protect the country--and that was the trouble. One key aspect of the Republicans until the mid-20th century was their commitment to a protective tariff to bolster home industries, a position dating back to their formation in the industrialist North. Hoover and his Republican Congress were no exceptions, and their tendency was strengthened by demands from farmers and businessmen alike that they be protected from foreign competition right now. The result was the God-awful Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. Native and foreign observers predicted that the tax would prove disastrous, and it did. The international economy was completely broken up; many countries, seeing their American markets ruined, retaliated by raising their own tariffs on U.S. exports, or boycotting them altogether. The cost to our productivity was probably incalculable, but certainly it ran into the billions. Not for the last time, trying to control events from Washington proved disastrous. And the same could be said of Hoover's other attempts--restricting the money supply and preventing businesses from cutting wages played well initially, but they also took away the market's flexibility and did more harm in the long run. Again.

----

Long story short--no one denies that there would have been a nasty recession for the U.S. to go through no matter what. But there was no reason, at the beginning, for it to have been any more than that. We'd had lots of economic "panics" before, and they lasted only a year or two with little long-term damage. What made things worse was the intervention by the Hoover administration, or at least the ways in which it intervened. Sinking your own country's economy is bad enough, sinking the international economy--now that's quite an accomplishment. At any rate, I think we can put to bed this idea that the boom of the '20s somehow caused the Depression, and that a government refusal to respond made it awful.

Unfortunately, voters and elites alike drew exactly the wrong conclusions from the 1929-32 period, deciding things were now so bad because government hadn't done enough. That's how we got FDR and the brand-spanking New Deal. Exactly how and why that failed, I'll get to later. To be continued....

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Debunking A Few Arguments

I like to think of our audience as a cut above. Indeed, it makes me happy that you all like to understand what is really going on rather than just running with the mob. So in light of that, let me offer a few more tidbits to add to your knowledge of politics and government. In particular, let me debunk a couple arguments you see used a lot these days. Before we begin, however, let me point out that this is not a defense of the Rubio bill, though I will discuss that because that is the context in which these arguments are arising at the moment. My point is to help you understand why some common arguments made against many bills are nonsense.

● “It’s a 1,000 pages long!”: You hear this a lot these days. It first gained prominence with Obamacare and now it’s being used with the Rubio bill: “It’s a 1,000 pages long!” and “Why do they need a bill that long?!” Arg.

Bills are long because they need to be to get the job done because everything Congress doesn’t explain in the bill is left up to the President to decide. Take the Rubio bill. We could whack off large parts of it by just writing, "Secure the border." But does that mean anything? No. That doesn’t tell the executive which border, how to do it, or what we mean by secure -- and don’t think this is just "lawyer games" with me trying to find ambiguity in things "common sense should tell us everybody knows."

Seriously, you tell me: what does "secure" mean? Does it mean no one can cross without permission? Does it mean anyone who does cross will be rounded up? Within how many days? What do we do with them when we catch them? Lock them up or send them home? How? Where do you send them if you don't know where they came from? What agency will do all of this? What money will they have to do it? What happens if you grab an American by mistake? Do the people you grab have a right of appeal? Under what legal standard? Where do they appeal or can they just pick a court? Do they need to be convicted before we send them home? That's a lot of questions. At least we know what "the border" means though, right? Or do we. Does the border include Canada? What about US military bases overseas? What about foreign embassies here? Do we make exceptions for defectors? What is a defector? What about those who are already beyond the border when they go illegal -- like those who overstay a visa -- how do they fit into the idea of "the border"? Now that we mention it, what does overstay mean exactly? And how do we know they've overstayed? Is there a system somewhere? Who runs it? Who follows up to make sure people are gone?

Every one of those questions requires that written direction be added to the bill. If you don't do that, you run the risk that the courts will invalidate the law for not giving the executive adequate guidance on how to implement the law -- this is because the executive implements the law, but cannot make the law. If too much is left to the executive, then courts will strike it down as allowing the president to make the law. Moreover, even if it isn't struck down, do you really want Obama answering all those questions himself? Do you see now why these things are as long as they are? Claiming that the law should be short and easy makes for a great soundbite appeal to "common sense," but is really only evidence that the person doesn't understand how government (AND THE CONSTITUTION) works.

Also, as an aside, these bills aren't nearly as long as you are told. When Congress puts out a bill, it uses 25 lines per page and heavy indenting. The result is that you get a little over 100 words per page on average, as compared to 250 words per page on a word processor or in a Harry Potter novel. So that 1,000 pages is really only 400, and much of it is repetitive. What matters is not the word count, but what the words say, and people trying to scare you with the page count are basically conceding they don't know how to scare you with the substance of the bill.

● “It’s Incomprehensible!”: When you read a law, a lot of it will look like gibberish to the untrained eye, but it's not. The US Code is a lot like a computer program. When you add a new law, you typically make minor tweaks to other existing laws and you often define the terms in your new law by referencing existing laws because all of the nation's laws need to harmonize. If each law stood alone within the code, the already-enormous code would be many times larger and full of fluff, and the chance of a contradiction would rise significantly. Referencing existing laws reduces those problems. That's why laws often look like logic puzzles. But these things are easy to understand if you take the time to look up the references to other laws. Unfortunately, the people making this claim are more interested in feigning ignorance than making legitimate arguments -- like Eric Cantor who criticized the Rubio bill and then said this weekend that he hadn't read it because "It's a 1,000 pages long!!" That statement tells us exactly what we need to know about Cantor.

● “It’s Got Waivers!”: One of the early criticisms of the Rubio bill (and Obamacare) was that it included a lot of waivers and exemptions. The critics latched onto this as proof that the whole thing was a shell game. That's not true, however. In fact, despite initially screaming about 400+ waivers, the critics ultimately were only able to point to one that raised some concern. But why have waivers at all? Three reasons:

1. When a law allows no exceptions, the courts will often find it unconstitutional because it denies those targeted by the law due process under the 5th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. Those Amendments guarantee people the right to challenge government action that applies to them and which violates their rights. The exceptions and waivers are often made to ensure that the requirements of the Constitution are not ignored, i.e. to preserve rights, because failing to do that would lead to the invalidation of the entire law. For example, suppose it would violate the Constitution to deport someone who is 9 months pregnant and might lose the child on the journey. If there is no waiver or exception excluding such people from deportation, the court would strike down the entire deportation provision... or maybe even the entire law.

2. Moreover, if the new law conflicts with existing laws in some way, the court may strike down the new law depending on various factors. Once again, waivers and exceptions prevent this.

3. Waivers are needed to make the system work. Suppose the law says you need to complete the fence by June 1. If you're 99% finished on May 30, then you need a waiver to be able to finish the fence. Otherwise, the law would expire, work would stop, and the whole thing would need to start over. Waivers and exemptions are ways to make rigid requirements less rigid so you can account for changes you encounter along the way.

This is why the fact of the inclusion of waivers and exceptions is meaningless. What matters is what the waivers realistically allow, not that they exist.

● Just Follow The Constitution: People who say this typically have no idea what the Constitution provides or how it works. The Constitution divides power between the federal government, the state governments, and the people. It talks about the procedures of government. It rarely delves into the substance of government. And when it does, it invariably gives more power than people want to admit. The Commerce Clause, for example, gives the Congress the power to regulate anything that affects interstate commerce. That is an incredibly broad power and saying, "follow the constitution" is not a meaningful restriction. Immigration is the same. In fact, consider immigration.

Congress’s power to regulate immigration comes entirely from this sentence in Article I, Section 8: Congress shall have the power “To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” That's it. So tell me, if someone says, “We should just follow the Constitution,” what exactly does that mean? Under this provision, Congress can pass anything it wants regarding immigration provided it is "uniform." And before you say, “that means everyone needs to be treated the same,” actually it doesn’t mean that at all. Uniform in this case means as between the states. In other words, one set of rules that will apply in all states; it says nothing about how we treat people who are here as citizens, visitors or illegals. Most other issues work the same way. The Constitution is rarely informative, except to the extent it tells us which part of the government has been granted the unlimited power to act this time.

Anyway, the point here is not about immigration or Obamacare, it's about legislation generally. The arguments above are false soundbites designed to make something sound like it is evil or obvious. The truth, however, is that these arguments are nothing more than misdirection. So when people pound the table saying these things, challenge them: ask them what the substantive problem really is... odds are they can't tell you.

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The End of Executive Order Government

Over the past several years, it’s been fashionable to claim that Obama would run the government as a dictator and would simply do whatever he wanted by Executive Order. This has typically been promoted by the self-described “constitutionalists” in our midsts. Naturally, no such thing is possible under our Constitution, as the last few weeks have proven once again.

● Appointment Time: As far as I can tell, the only constituency Obama cares about at all is labor unions, and labor unions care about the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The NLRB is a five member board that hears claims of unfair labor practices. Labor hopes to use the NLRB’s rulings to forcibly unionize companies like Boeing, who have relocated to right to work states where labor unions are all but extinct.

The problem for labor has been that the NLRB hasn’t had enough members to issue decisions. Between January 1, 2008 and continuing through March 27, 2010, the board only had two members. That’s not enough to issue decisions legally, but they did it anyway. Those two members issued nearly 600 decisions. Sadly for them, in June of 2010, the Supreme Court came along and wiped out all of those decisions in New Process Steel v. NLRB, which held that the Board must have at least three members to issue valid decisions.

Whoops.

Since the Republicans weren’t willing to allow Obama to appoint anyone new to the NLRB, Obama took matters into his own hands and appointed three new members in January 2012, claiming they were “recess appointments.” So the Dictator got away with it, right?

Well, no. In January of this year, the DC Court of Appeals ruled that Obama could not do that. They ruled that recess appointments could only be made when a genuine recess happened, not just when Congress took a quick break. Basically, they defined “recess” as the end of the Congressional term. That’s undone everything Obama tried.

Meanwhile...

● I Declare Thee Legal: When the immigration debate first drifted into freak-out mode, our “constitutionalist” friends screamed that “Obama’s going to make them all legal with an Executive Order!!” Said Glenn Beck, “The Fedrechauns are here for me gold!!” Oops, sorry, wrong quote. Anyway, once again, reality has caught up. See, Obama has no power to change immigration LAW in the Unidos Estados... the President has no power to change any LAW. In fact, that’s a good word for scholars like Mark Levin to learn: LAW.

LAW = Congress, not President.

To put it simply, a president may not make laws or decide how to spend money. The president has only the power to spend what Congress tells him and to issue regulations in accordance with the laws Congress passes. But those regulations (1) must be consistent with the law, and (2) may not exceed the authority granted to the president under the law. Basically, a President can only do what Congress tells him to do. Simple enough.

So what happened vis-à-vis the immigration issue? Obama tried to force the states to give illegal aliens drivers licenses by issuing an Executive Order. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer immediately issued her own executive order refusing to follow Obama’s order. She got sued on the basis that her order conflicted with “federal law.” This month, a Federal District Court agreed with Brewer because the court noted that Obama can’t create immigration law. Thus, he cannot impose such a requirement on Arizona.

(As an aside, Brewer may eventually lose this case on other grounds because Arizona already allows some illegal aliens to get licenses, but that’s a different issue.)

So what is the point? Well, this. Don’t believe all the loony theories about what secret things Obama is planning to do... they can’t be done. Our system works just like they told you it does in civics class when you were a kid. Obama cannot run the government by executive fiat. He may issue such orders from time to time, but they will be struck down by the courts and his efforts undone. He can’t create a private army. He can’t ban ammunition or guns. He can’t declare gay marriage the law. He can’t legalize all the illegals. He can’t spend money in any way Congress doesn’t allow. He can’t just appoint whomever he wants either. He needs to follow the same rules every other President has followed... whether he or Alex Jones like it or not.

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The Great White South

Will there ever be a day when Southerners and/or Republicans are no longer tarred as inveterate racists? Well, maybe, if they start endorsing gay marriage and high taxes and hippie communes, but certainly not until then. It's too good a weapon for liberals to discard, and they seem to have some superficial evidence on their side. Emphasis on "superficial."

Of course, I don't have to tell you how political dialogue goes where the GOP and its Southern base are concerned. Southerners are backward bigots who still have Klan hoods in their closets and keep looking for a chance to keep the black man down; the Republican Party depends on them, so it must be like that, too. Now, occasionally a few people on our side will get smart and point out that the GOP is the party of Lincoln and 19th-century abolitionists, and in fact was more supportive of the Civil Rights Act in the '60s than the Democrats were. That rarely fazes any liberal worth their salt, though. They come right back with what is often called "The Southern Strategy."

Sure, liberals admit, the Democratic Party was the party of white racist Southerners until the 1960s. But then LBJ signed all the civil rights legislation, blacks began voting Democrat lock, stock, and barrel; and those white cross-burners became very disillusioned: at which point certain Republicans, especially Nixon and his circle, seized an opportunity by opposing further civil rights to gain Southern votes, making the GOP the racist, knuckle-dragging, red-state party it is today and the Democrats the enlightened knights of progress. It's a very neatly tied-up story, you gotta admit; one that absolves Democrats of any racial guilt. It also perpetuates North-South stereotypes where race relations are concerned, which never hurts.

Basically, the only way to refute this story is to suggest that white Southerners were starting to change their position on the GOP, and perhaps civil rights as well. And one of the best-kept secrets in the political conversation is that, as a matter of fact, they were.

You have to take a careful look at the changing electoral map to see what was going on here. As multiple historians have shown, the famous "Solid South" electoral bloc was already breaking down by mid-century, especially in the Upper South states like Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, less so in the Deep South. This alone would call the Left's claims into question, for if GOP success was linked to racism alone, one would expect just the opposite. Overall, among the states of the "Old Confederacy," Republican candidates were getting around 25 percent of the vote in the '44 and '48 presidential elections, itself a dramatic rise from results in the '20s and '30s (and keep in mind, this came at the end of the reign of FDR, who was famous for tossing lots of federal money South-wards and not lifting many fingers to improve race relations). During the Eisenhower era, Ike was breaking off Virginia, Texas, even Louisiana, despite his party's noticeable lack of an anti-civil rights stance. And lest one think this was a function of presidential personality, the GOP was making similar inroads in congressional seats--again, especially in the less-racist Upper South.

What gives? It turns out that, demographically, the growing Republican support was coming especially from urban and suburban areas, middle- and upper-middle-class voters, and younger generations--the people who made up the "New South." And party strategists at the time recognized this, telling Nixon and candidates all down the line their best shot was to appeal to the "youthful middle-class," downplaying racial issues as much as possible. This is the exact opposite of what the liberal P.C. version of history would have us believe.

Also, this raises the question of just how racist Southerners were in the '50s and '60s. It would be stupid to suggest that race issues during the period were overblown, but neither should we assume that anti-black racism was uniform. Plenty of evidence exists that already by the '50s, many Southerners, especially younger ones, were changing their minds on segregation, with church organizations in particular, including the Presbyterians and Southern Baptists, coming out against it. And it would be many of these same people--young, religious, upwardly mobile--who would begin building a Southern GOP and the subsequent New Right/Religious Right. I wouldn't go so far as to say that racial equality in the South would have happened without federal legislation, but we shouldn't just assume Jim Crow would have otherwise persisted into the twenty-first century, either. Things were already changing.

This is not to imply that the Republican Party was entirely free of racial prejudice, before, during, or after the Civil Rights Era. Many party members and politicians were quite happy to strike unsavory deals with racist/segregationist Southerners. But the stereotyping of these two groups the Left indulges in rests on the narrative that Southern whites haven't changed in their racism, simply jumped ship from the Dems to the GOP, and the latter became racist as a result. Like most stories liberals spin, it just ain't so.

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Liberal Education: A House of Cards

I've said before that left-wing ideology and truth in academia have not mixed well. That's hardly surprising. What does continue to surprise me, even now, is how often their interpretations of the past are based on ramshackle beliefs that are easily refutable with even a little research. Scholars should know better.

Earlier this week, an article appeared at NRO about how historians interpret the Haymarket Square riot--or rather, how they fail to interpret it. For those of you who snoozed through that particular part of your U.S. History course (because labor relations are boring), the Haymarket Square riot was an outbreak of violence in 1886 Chicago where several policemen breaking up an anarchist rally were killed by a bomb and subsequent gunfire. You can read about it in more detail here; I won't totally swipe the story. Point is, historians, especially but not only those of a leftist persuasion, have generally adopted the line that there was no evidence tying the anarchists to the policemen's deaths; that the four men eventually hanged for it were wrongly convicted and martyrs to the cause of workers' rights; and so on. For decades, this has been one of the big events for Labor and the Left in America.

That began to change a few years ago, however, when a labor historian in Ohio (one who voted twice for Obama, incidentally) began researching some discrepancies in the various accounts of the Haymarket Square incident. This led to a full-scale reconstruction of events, leading him to the conclusion that not only were the anarchist protestors--like OWS, generally described as "peaceful"--armed and shooting at police officers, but that the bomb was almost certainly made by one of the men convicted. Practically everything historians have relied on in touting the conventional view of events comes from propaganda put out by defense attorneys during the trial. In most professions, this is known as "not doing your research."

When the prof's research was released to his peers, other historians were skeptical but fair-minded and professional in their response denounced him to high heaven for besmirching those "humane, gentle, kindly souls." No, really, a professor said that, adding that anyone who accepted these findings would have "the sickly sweet repugnance of blood on our lips." Seriously. Another snarked that "Perhaps Romney will put the book on his reading list" (I refer you to the previous paragraph). There has been a slow, grudging acceptance of the Haymarket research, but it's facing an uphill battle.

This is hardly the only example of the consensus among historians, of beliefs nearly every scholar takes for granted, being flat wrong. Take the Australian aborigines. The common assumption about European settlement of Australia is that, much like our settlement of the American West, it involved a lot of unprovoked violence and even genocide against the natives. There is some truth to this, but it is now clear that large portions of the tale aren't based in reality. An infamous frontier massacre of aborigines in the '20s, for instance, was taken as fact despite the absence of any eyewitnesses, any human remains, and the fact that those allegedly killed turned up alive and well years later. In another case, a statistic on white settlers killed by natives was portrayed by a later historian to mean the number of natives killed by whites. That is, a record of 10,000 settlers killed by aborigines in Queensland was "re-interpreted" to state that settlers had killed 10,000 aborigines. Forget not doing your research, these are just pernicious lies.

What's the deal? One more sensible scholar, reviewing cases of distortion like these, blames the influence of postmodernism, namely its claim that all truth is relative (a self-refuting claim, I might add); that the historian is incapable of writing outside his political and cultural biases and thus cannot be objective. Therefore, the theory goes, more enlightened academics ought to use their position to write histories "empowering the powerless," attacking the system, blah blah blah. No more, he adds, can a historian simply strive for a factual account of the past:

This has become the most corrupting influence of all. It has turned the traditional role of the historian, to stand outside his contemporary society in order to seek the truth about the past, on its head. It has allowed historians to write from an overtly partisan position. It has led them to make things up and to justify this to themselves on the grounds that it is all for a good cause.

It's this lack of emphasis on knowing the facts about history, this placing of "power relations" and whatever theory happens to be popular at the time before accuracy, which results in these cases of willful ignorance and incoherent, crumbling ideas about the past among liberal academics. And it's not getting better. I know of fellow grad students who are unaware of who was President during the Trail of Tears; because hey, they're all rich white guys, right? Oy vey.

As Ronald Reagan said, "It's not that liberals don't know anything, it's that they know so much that isn't so."*

*If I got that quote wrong, don't tell me. I don't want to look bad.

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Baby, It’s Cold Outside

Global Warming is failing. Yep. Just as Marxism slammed into human nature without a helmet and got decapitated, Global Warming Enthusiasts are finding that reality can be harder to manipulate than they hoped. And it’s been a bad year or two for them. Observe:

You’d kind of have to be an idiot not to realize that the biggest determinant of the temperature on our planet would be the sun. That is not only the primary source of warmth on our planet. . . it’s the only source. Moreover, we know that the sun does not put out a constant heat. This means that any model that fails to address the effects of the sun on our temperatures is worthless. Yet, the global warming models used by the enthusiasts all ignore the effect of the sun.

This point has been brought home by a leaked report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the lead propagandists for the Enthusiasts' ideology. This report admits (buried in Chapter 11) that the sun is more important than previously acknowledged:

“Results do suggest the possibility of a much larger impact of solar variations on the stratosphere than previously thought, and some studies have suggested that this may lead to significant regional impacts on climate.”

Translation: “yeah, the sun could be causing a lot more warming that we thought it was. Curse you sun!!”

But here’s the kicker. Despite this admission, the models upon with the IPCC report relies in concluding that warming is a a man-made problem do not take the sun into account. How in the world can you legitimately exclude something from your analysis which you admit could be a much larger cause of your problem than you realize? This is nonsense. This is theology, not science.

And don’t forget, this isn’t the first bit of evidence that they are fudging the science and ignoring evidence that blows apart their theories. The biggest example was of course Climategate (and Climategate 2) where they were caught manipulating data and using political pressure to smear opponents. But there’s more. Consider these things we’ve seen from Warming Enthusiasts:

● Climategate exposed the manipulation of data to generate a warming trend where none existed. Specifically, they excluded a warming period in the Middle Ages and they only used certain data to make sure that the present period showed abnormal warming.

● The famous “hockey stick” which shows the supposed warming (the one highlighted by High Priest al Gore) was debunked. It uses a fake formula which will take any sequence of numbers and spit out a hockey stick type result.

● The IPCC relied upon data from flawed weather stations which wrongly created warming.

● The IPCC wrongly used summer data for winter months to generate warming.

● The IPCC claim that global warming will hurt biodiversity was shown to have no basis -- not to mention that the world’s species are at least one million years old and thus have all been through hundreds of climate cycles.

● The IPCC had to retract a completely unsupported statement that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.

● The IPCC had to retract unsubstantiated statements about threats to the Amazon rainforests.

● In January 2011, IPCC scientist Osvaldo Canziani was listed as an advisor on a report that overstated warming by 1000%, and which was published unfixed even after this error was pointed out to the study’s authors.

● In January 2010, the IPCC had to retract the part of its report which claimed that Global Warming would cause sea level rises equal to 2.3 meters per century, with 2.7 feet happening this century. This report was retracted because of “mistakes in time intervals and inaccurately applied statistics.” It also turns out this report was based on data collected in a part of Hong Kong that is sinking.

Incidentally, in May of that year, a paleogeophysics/geodynamics professor from Stockholm University in Sweden issued a report that observations from around the world showed NO rising sea levels in the last 40 years. How did Enthusiasts respond? A year later, the University of Colorado’s Sea Level Research Group simply added 0.3 millimeters a year to their sea level figures to create rising sea levels where none exist.

● In June 2011, experts from Finland and the United States were shocked. . . shocked to learn that rising carbon dioxide levels caused forest density to increase: “Global warming, blamed by the U.N. panel of climate experts mainly on human use of fossil fuels, might itself be improving growth conditions for trees in some regions.” That’s right, trees are getting fatter. And the consequence of this is. . . well. . . um. . . it’s “offsetting climate change.” In other words, it’s keeping global warming from happening.

So let me sum this up...... there was supposed to be warming, but there wasn’t... the seas were supposed to rise, but they didn’t... the sun is an “unknown factor” in warming that is much more significant that the models expect but we don’t want to know how much... trees absorb carbon in much greater amounts than we expected. And all of this is based on data that either doesn’t exist or which has been manipulated to exclude contrary data or which is the result of bad collection techniques or which is the result of the fraudulent use of statistics. Nice work, boys.

Now there’s undeniable evidence that the warming ain’t happening. In a truly embarrassing admission, the British agency responsible for pimping Global Warming, the Met Office, admitted on Christmas Eve (to try to bury the story) that there has been no warming for 17 years now, even though all the models predicted significant warming for that period – they attribute this to solar activity, natural variability, and the movement of the oceans.... all things any competent model needs to account for. Anyway, what makes this a particularly humiliating admission is that during this same period, Enthusiasts were claiming that warming was actually accelerating.

Moreover, in 2008-2010, global temperatures dropped sharply enough to cancel out the entire supposed net rise in the 20th century. This is important because global warming theory relies on cumulative increases. Thus, their whole theory has fallen apart. . . again. Enthusiasts tried to blame this on the "unexpected" solar cycle -- an eleven year pattern that has repeated itself consistently throughout history and seems to coincide with scaremongering about new global ice ages or new global warming. Enthusiasts also complained that the oceans reacted in an "unexpected" manner by doing what they've always done rather than changing as the climate models suggested. And then the dirty trees have done the "unexpected" by doing what they've always done and refusing to conform to the models. Are you seeing a pattern? It seems that every time the Earth does what it's always done, it's "unexpected."

The jig seems to be up for the Enthusiasts. When cap and trade failed in the US, that signaled the death of their movement. Obama lost interest and the Democrats haven’t picked it up. Obama then went to Copenhagen with the idea of securing a fake agreement to agree which would get the environmentalists of his back and even that blew up in his face when China, Brazil, India, and South Africa met behind his back and agreed to do nothing to change anything. At this point, there are some stragglers. The UK, for example, remains brainwashed, though I’m reading lots of reports about the huge cost and consequence of trying to reduce their carbon emissions which may make them think twice. Australia’s Labor Government seems intent on imposing a carbon tax. But that’s about it. Everyone else seems to be ready to move on.

It’s never wise to predict the death of a religion, but I think the Cult of Warming’s days are numbered.

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Conservatives versus The Media

Let’s hit this straight up: the media is not all powerful. I know that much of the conservative world is convinced that the media has some voodoo power over the electorate which is the only reason Obama won and why we have such a bad image, but it’s just not true. The truth is WE are causing our own problems. Here’s why.

● The Public Is Not Brainwashed.

Let’s start with something that should be obvious, but apparently isn’t. The media has NO power to brainwash the public. If the media had such power, the election results would have been a lot different. Of the 310,000,000 Americans, there are 208,000,000 eligible voters. Obama got only 60 million votes. That’s only 28% of all eligible voters (19% of all Americans). If the media really had power to brainwash people, WAY MORE than 28% of eligible voters would have turned out to support Obama.

Likewise, Obama lost 9 million votes between 2008 and 2012... 13% of his total. How can that be explained if the media has this magical power to make the public do as they wish?

Also, if the media had this power, why are people in certain states immune to their manipulation? And why does the media mysteriously lose this power on issues like guns? The “the media brainwashed people” argument has no merit and conservatives should stop hiding behind it.

The truth is, the public did not “buy” Obama, nor did people do what the media wanted. The public stayed home. The public stayed home because it saw no reason to vote for either side. In fact, the biggest winner on election night was None of the Above at 44%. Obama and Romney were a distant second and third at 28% and 27%. That’s on us. We need to focus on why we couldn’t get more than 27% of eligible voters to support us. We need to look at ourselves. Observe...

● Why Our Image Stinks: We Do It To Ourselves.

Ok, so if the media can’t brainwash the public, then why does the public believe that conservatives are extremists? The answer is simple: that’s what WE tell them. In the entire universe of political movements, conservatives are the only ones (except maybe anarchists) who disdain the moderate label. Everyone else, from the Nazis to the Commies to the Democrats, claims to be moderates who speak for the forgotten man in the middle. They do this because the goal of politics is to win a majority of the electorate, so it’s important to tell the public that you and they are the same.

Not conservatives. Conservatives have developed a bizarre mentality where they compete with each other to prove how extreme they are. Conservatives brag about being “genuine” conservatives, they use the word “moderate” as a slur, and they equate moderates with traitors. Because of this mentality, our candidates routinely proclaim their purity and try to attack their primary opponents as being secret moderates. This implies (and is sometimes explicitly stated) that being a moderate is something we disdain, which translates into a message of “we are extremists.”

Make no mistake, the media could not sell the public on the idea that conservatives are extremists if we weren’t busy selling the image ourselves.

● Why Don’t We Get Credit For Things We Do: Because We’re Nasty.

But wait, you say, even when conservatives act like moderates, we never get the credit! Isn’t that the media’s doing? Well, no. The problem is that while conservatives sometimes do “moderate/liberal” things, they do them kicking and screaming and lobbing insults. No one is going to give you credit in that type of circumstance.

Take the upcoming immigration reform effort. It will pass with Republican votes. As it does, talk radio, pundits, various grandstanding politicians, and bloggers will scream racist sentiments at the top of their lungs and whine about how these dirty Mexicans will forever destroy America and how any Republican who votes for it is a dangerous RINO who needs to be driven out of the party. These same conservatives will wonder a year later why conservatives got no credit from Hispanics for passing the bill.

Think about it this way. Suppose you want to post an article about your ugly, stupid kid at the blog. You nag the crap out of me to post it because you’re an a*hole who won’t shut the f*ck up and doesn’t realize nobody cares about your lame kid. I finally have enough of you and decide that I’ll let you talk about your dumba*s spawn. So I post the article with this disclaimer: “Here’s an article about some retarded kid you won’t care about, but ___ won’t leave me alone, so I’m only doing this to get them off my back.” How happy are you going to be with me? And are you going to give me any credit for posting your article?

It’s the same thing in politics. Conservatives don’t get credit for things they do because they do them kicking and screaming and making it clear in no uncertain terms how much they hate doing them and how, if it was up to them, they wouldn’t do them.

● Why Are Scandals Worse For Us: We Mishandle Them.

That brings us to the next issue. Conservatives claim bias in how scandals get portrayed. They claim that nothing the Democrats do sticks to them because the media covers for them, but everything sticks to us. Again, this isn’t accurate. Yes, the media covers for them, but the Democrats are better at separating themselves from their lunatics.

When the Democrats get a lunatic, they immediately dismiss them as not representative of the party. Essentially, they tell the public, “oh, that’s just crazy uncle Joe. He’s harmless.” This works because the Democrats claim the moderate label, and thus, they can put space between themselves and their fringe. Conservatives, on the other hand, do this backwards. First, we all claim to be at the fringe, so there’s no space to be had. Secondly, we attack our own right out of the gates and then try to circle the wagons after we’ve told the public this issue is an outrage. The Democrats don’t do that. They remain flexible until they see how the wind is blowing and then they act accordingly. And contrary to conservative belief, when the Democrats get someone they can’t explain away (e.g. Weiner), they disown them in a heartbeat and they don’t keep trying to prove that they were actually right. We do.

● Why Doesn’t Democratic Hypocrisy Stick: Because We Help Them.

Conservatives complain that Democratic supporters are blind to their hypocrisy. But the problem is actually that we help the Democrats sell their false image. Look at the issue of cronyism. Republicans are seen as cronies because. . . well, they are. So are the Democrats, but they aren’t seen as cronies. What accounts for the difference? For one thing, Republicans brag about helping Big Business, whereas the Democrats lie about hating Big Business. More importantly, however, we help them sell that lie.

Consider Obamacare. Obamacare is nothing more than a power grab on behalf of insurance companies. But no one is telling that to the public. The Democrats certainly won’t say it, and the Republicans won’t say it because they’re working for those same companies. Moreover, conservatives don’t say it because they’re busy mischaracterizing Obamacare as “government run, socialized medicine.” And in screaming that, they reinforce the false sales pitch the Democrats are trying to sell to their own people.

Any liberal who has doubt that the Democrats really are liberals gets constant reinforcement from conservatives that everything the Democrats are doing is “liberal/socialist.” Look at the gun control debate. Obama’s gun control plan is nothing more than a placebo, yet conservatives are screaming that it’s one step away from banning guns. Obama’s environmental agenda is a sop to unions and GE, yet conservatives scream about it being “anti-business” and “wacko environmentalism.” On issue after issue, WE are the Democrats’ best salesmen because WE are pushing the very false image the Democrats need their followers to believe.

Anyway, believe it or not, all of the above is good news. It really is.

The American people did not “buy” Obama. They are not brainwashed by some all-powerful svengali media. And our problems are of our own making: WE poisoned our own brand and WE protect the Democrats from their stupidity with our misdirected hyperbolic rhetoric. That means WE can fix these issues OURSELVES because we are victims of our own stupidity and not of some powerful external conspiracy.

I know it may not seem like it, but that really is a good thing. It means that we are not doomed. It means that we just need to make a few changes and we need to work on winning back those None of the Above voters. And our only enemy is ourselves.

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Overpopulationists: How Did This Not Happen?!

Ah, liberals. They’re such fun to watch. When their theories prove false, they stand there, like idiots who can’t for the life of them understand why NOBODY saw that their theories were garbage (of course, they conveniently ignore all the people who told them their theories were garbage). Yep, the world was blindsided. The overpopulation crowd just ran into this.

Anybody who understands... well, anything... knows that the world is not overpopulated nor will it ever be. The idea of overpopulation was born in the 1970s when chicken-little leftists noticed that it took a lot less time for the world population to go from one billion to two, and less to get to three, and less to get to four, and less to get to five. Here’s a handy chart of DOOOOOM:

123 years.... 2 to 3 billion
33 years...... 3 to 4 billion
14 years...... 4 to 5 billion
12 years...... 5 to 6 billion

At this rate, we’ll be at 100 billion in minutes, right? Well, hardly. If you have even the slightest grasp on demographics or anything else in nature, like how diseases spread, you know that these things peak and then collapse. So it’s inevitable that this will actually stop and reverse itself. But don’t tell that to liberals because they LOVE straight-line projections... one... two... infinity!

Anyway, the academic world has now caught on to the problem. It turns out that it took 13 years to get to 7 billion, i.e. longer than it took to get to 6 billion. This shocked people because it wasn’t supposed to happen, so they began looking for an explanation and, lo and behold, they discovered that birthrates are falling everywhere. They are falling so much that Western Europe is expected to fall from its estimated peak of 460 million to around 350 million by the year 2100. China’s population will fall by half in that time, as will Russia’s. Mexico’s birthrate has crashed from 7.3 births per woman in 1960 to 2.5 today and is still falling. India’s fell from 6 to 2.5. Brazil’s fell from 6.15 to 1.9. And so on.

What happened is this. Birth rates soared when mankind learned to stop the diseases that were killing most of people when they were young. Then capitalism reached every corner of the world and birth rates started to collapse because prosperous people have fewer kids. This trend isn’t stopping either: it’s consistent across countries and cultures. And the people studying this now believe that most of us will still be alive to hear the news that the world population has actually begun shrinking.

Sadly for the left, the premise of so many of their beliefs is this idea that the population will continue to rise forever. That won’t happen now and you can already see them decoupling their ideology from this rotten apple. Indeed, the article mentioning this tried to pretend that the whole population bomb was just one of those US things and not leftist dogma. It actually said,

“This is a counter-intuitive notion in the United States, where we’ve heard often and loudly that world population growth is a perilous and perhaps unavoidable threat to our future.”

Yeah, right. Actually, none of us believed it except dogmatic enviro-leftists.

Anyway, not all liberals are onboard with the newthink yet. The Los Angeles Times is running a seven part series on the horrors of there being seven billion of us and how this trend of growth without end will lead to “bleak living conditions.” Oh well, give them time. Soon all of liberaldom will be safely within the groupthink and they will be preaching the dangers of the population shortage. No doubt they’ll recommend forced breeding, which sounds like a perfect solution for liberals: it’s simple, it’s oppressive, and it’s guaranteed not to work. Ah, liberals.

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I Hate To Break This To You. . .

From the very beginning of this blog, I promised an honest opinion, no matter which side got hurt. And I’ve done my best to deliver it. But I’m getting sick of beating my head against a wall, so this is the last time I will address this issue. Make of this article what you want, ignore it if you want, I don’t care. Here is the point: conservatives are killing conservatism.

I get around a lot, particularly on the net. I’ve gotten to know several hundred people on gaming sites, sports sites, book sites, and any other number of sites. And in recent months, I’ve had long conversations with well over 50 (mostly single) women. The one thing they all had in common was they ALL voted against the Republicans, and I think it’s important for you “high information voters” to understand why.

Let me start with some basic points. First, I realize this is anecdotal and I cannot attribute statistical significance to it.... BUT, the women I spoke to are a true cross-section of American women. They ranged from 16 to 55 and they were geographically diverse. Some were professionals, some worked in stores or hotels, some were nurses, one was a newspaper editor, and some were teachers. Only two were unemployed, and they were basically stay at home mothers. Moreover, the 100% consistency of their views strikes me as extremely meaningful.

In each case, I spent extensive time speaking with these women. I discussed politics with them and delved into their views on various issues. Without exception, I found that they held fundamentally conservative beliefs. They thought they paid too much in taxes. They didn’t like people living on the government. They want to see fiscal sanity and want to see the government spend less. Most were religious. Several were gun owners and only two really opposed guns. None of them believed the government could make their lives better. Yet, they all voted for Obama, and not one of them identified themselves as conservative. To the contrary, they used words like “evil,” “corrupt” and “hateful” when asked to describe conservatives - I cannot overstate the contempt they had for conservatives. And so you know, of this group, only two described themselves a liberal.

So what is the problem? Well, contrary to what certain “high information voters” want to believe, none of them collect benefits from the government, none of these supposed “low information voters” want anything from the government, and none of their votes were bought. Nor are they stupid or uninformed. To the contrary, I found them to be quite bright, very rational and surprisingly well-informed... much better informed than a lot of “high information voters” I know. Yet, they all voted for Obama.

Actually. . . only two voted for Obama, the rest voted against the Republicans. (And for those of you thinking “those damn Republicans,” you should know that not a single one of these women distinguished between conservatives and Republicans... it’s all the same to them.)

So why do they hate Republicans? Here is what they ALL told me... without exception:

● The Republicans want to raise my taxes to help the rich.
● The Republicans have no plan to help me get a better job.
● The Republicans hate gays and I have gay friends.

(They also listed the “obsession with abortion” and lots of examples of racism, but those weren’t 100% consistent... maybe 70%.)

Now, I know that a lot of you “high information voters” are asking, but what about Fast and Furious? Clearly, these morons didn’t know about that, right? Actually, they did and they didn’t care. They didn’t see how one stupid ATF operation that may or may not have been known by someone in the Justice Department meant much to their lives. What about Benghazi? They knew that too. And again, they didn’t care. They didn’t see how that affected their lives either. Ditto on all the other dozens of minor “scandals” that you “high information voters” seem to think are so vital.

The truth is that these women, to a one, know the things you think they don’t, but they don’t care. They are concerned with how they will keep their jobs, how they will get better jobs, how they can afford a house and kids, and how they can pay off massive student loan debts. You “high information voters” haven’t offered them anything on how you’re going to make that happen.

And before you say they’re wrong, ask yourself if they really are. What have the Republicans and talk radio been jerking themselves off over for the past three months? They want to protect the rich from a 3% tax hike. To stop that, they threatened to cause taxes to go up for working Americans everywhere. Is it really irrational to see this as Republicans looking to raise taxes on the middle class to help the rich?

And what about the conservative plan on jobs? Oh, that’s right, there isn’t one except to grouse about those lazy people on unemployment. Student loans? Just grousing about how not everyone should go to college. Fixing the devastated housing market? Grousing about those damn minorities who never should have been given loans. Fixing our out-of-control health care system? Repeal Obamacare and something something to make big insurers richer. Who’s being more rational here... the “low information voters” who see this as a platform of crap or the “high information voters” who can’t see a problem with this?

So what about the charge of “hate”? The big thing here was the gay issue. The Republicans send the signal loudly and clearly that they hate gays. Every single one of these women picked up on that and repeated it. Now you may not want to believe that, but that is how conservatives are coming across. And when 100% of a random sample of 50 people says the same thing, you can pretty much be sure something is going on.

This is why the Republicans lost this election and why they will keep losing elections in the future. It has nothing to do with “low information voters,” it has nothing to do with voters “wanting goodies”... it has everything to do with “high information voters” not being able to see how nasty they come across or how their “policies” offer nothing to people who only want to make their lives better. These women see us as a party that hates people -- gays, minority homeowners, Hispanics, single women, the poor, the unemployed -- and a party that holds the middle class hostage to save the rich from a minor tax hike. And honestly, they make a solid case for that.

And before you blame the MSM for spinning conservatives, you can forget that. What these women complained about came directly from the mouths of conservatives. For years now, conservatives have competed like lemmings to prove they are more extreme than the other guy. Uniquely in the world of politics, conservatives despise the word “moderate” and use it as a slur. Every one of our candidates swore to a series of pledges and constitutional amendments so far beyond the pale to ordinary Americans that it makes conservatism seem like a cult... and they reveled in their purity and accused others of heresy. The MSM doesn’t need to spin that to make us sound extreme, we embrace the idiotic label.

Look, you people are smart. I know that. I’ve seen tremendous insight from each of you over the past several years. So use that insight and think about what I’ve said. There is a problem here whether conservatives want to believe it or not, and trying to dismiss these people as “low information voters” is both asinine and wrong. Not only does it not help to name-call people you want to win over, but frankly, these women are right and you are wrong. They are not stupid, they are not uninformed, they are not irrational. To the contrary, they are thinking much more clearly, and much more conservatively, than the self-described “high information voters” who are trying to mock them. These women are not the problem, these women highlight the problem, which is that “high information voters” have made conservatism unpalatable. I suspect each of these women would happily have voted for the conservatism of Ronald Reagan, but they’ll NEVER vote for the “conservatism” of today’s “high information voters.”

Anyway, this is the last time I’m going to talk about this because honestly I’m sick of saying it. But if conservatism means anything to you... I urge you to think about this.

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FDR: Foolishness Done Repeatedly

Last month, I noted some recent examples of liberal policy failing over, and over, and over again. For those on the Left, however, suggesting that those policies are the problem is ludicrous, because of course state intervention and regulation work! Just look at the Golden Age of Liberalism, FDR's New Deal! Hmmm. Let's do that, shall we?

Now I don't want to bash too much on our 32nd President. He did lead us through World War II, partly by projecting a constant image of strength and determination, and I've got a lot of respect for him for that. And it must be said that he didn't intend to create the massive welfare state we know and loathe today--Social Security, for instance, was never meant to become so extensive. Yet, if we take a good hard look at the data, one cannot conclude that his domestic leadership did anything to save the nation, or even to keep things from getting worse.

There's more to the failure of the New Deal, it should be noted, than simply that the Depression continued to go on well after 1933. Even your average liberal professor will admit that. What they won't do is discuss the reasons for it.

For one thing, FDR's policies failed to strengthen the economy in one of the most elemental ways: they did not provide the stability and consistency necessary for a market to operate. I doubt I'm surprising anyone here with this, but investment, production, and the exchange of goods tend to work best when the rules are constant and known to all. The New Deal not only did not bring or maintain such stability, it went in the opposite direction. As just one example of how this happened, consider the incoming president's approach to the monetary system. One of the first things Roosevelt did in 1933 was to issue an executive order (an illegal executive order, but I digress) confiscating all privately held gold in the country. Once this had been accomplished, the government set the price of gold for sale on the world market, and then continuously raised the price to increase revenue.

This was bad enough, of course, but what made it much worse was the fact that these increases occurred without reason or rhyme, as gold prices were set according to what the POTUS, by common consent an intellectual lightweight, thought they should be. One nearly unbelievable example of how this could work came when FDR informed his Treasury Secretary that he had decided to raise the price by 21 cents--because 7 is a lucky number and 7 times 3 is 21. Not only did this open the door to rapid inflation, it played havoc with banking and the rest of the finance sector. As one writer noted,

One effect [of this rise in gold prices] was that private borrowing and lending, except from day to day, practically ceased. With the value of the dollar being posted daily at the Treasury like a lottery number, who would lend money for six months or a year, with no way of even guessing what a dollar would be worth when it came back paid?

No wonder that the stock market did not fully recover until the 1950s, that the GDP did not reach 1929 levels until the early 1940s, or that unemployment remained in double digits until World War II.

Not that a more academically accomplished President might have done any better. The supposed wonder boys of FDR's administration, the so-called "Brain Trust," were just as capable of making a bad situation terrible. For example, you may remember from history class the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), which mainly distinguished itself by paying farmers to destroy their crops and livestock in the midst of starvation. The theory behind this waste was that by limiting the supply of produce, demand and therefore price would be driven up. This interference accomplished less than nothing, at least from the standpoint of the farmers themselves. A review of farm prices in 1939--after six years of market interference by the nation's "best and brightest"--revealed that prices for nearly all agricultural products, whether corn, cotton, wheat, or pork, were still only one-half to two-thirds of what they had been a decade before. The AAA failed to help farmers, and it made the misery of non-farmers worse, as the destruction of crops had such an effect that, by 1935, economists were predicting the U.S. would have to become a net importer of wheat for the first time ever.

But hey, at least the government did something for the little guy, right? Didn't those wonderful liberal civil servants make sure the poor were protected from the rich? Well, not exactly. What no one likes to admit about New Deal regulation is that it was created by and for the wealthy. The NRA (not that NRA--the National Recovery Administration), the key business regulatory agency created by the New Deal, came up with its codes the best way the Brain Trust knew how: the leaders of the largest businesses were brought in to write and/or review them. In other words, Big Business wrote the regulations that only businesses with sufficient money could easily comply with. Anyone see where this is going?

The resulting situation was one not unlike the medieval guild system, one where a tailor could be sent to jail for pressing a suit of clothes for five cents less than the NRA codes allowed (no, seriously, that happened). Small businesses across the country went under, which was just as the corporations friendly to the government had planned. And to save space, I'll avoid going into detail about how unions and businesses alike played the regs to exclude minority employment where they could, as did many Southern farmers to drive off black tenants.

Oh dear, this has gotten too long. So why am I bringing all this up? Because, as we are all painfully aware, the New Deal is in many ways the foundational myth for the modern Left. It is proof for liberals that government intervention in the economy works, that an active government saved the country just when laissez-faire conservatism was about to take it down. And thanks to leftists in the media and academia, this belief has been repeated endlessly, so that whenever small-government advocates try to push back against the welfare state, they are forced to "explain" the success of the New Deal. Well, consider it explained. It wasn't a success.

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The Census Reads Commentarama (Finally)

Remember how Hispanics were going to overwhelm the US and turn us into the Unidos Estados? Remember how I told you that wasn’t going to happen? Perhaps, you recall this brilliant article ==> LINK or this one ==> LINK. Well, other people like the Census and Pew are finally starting to figure this out.

Here’s the deal. Liberals have long believed that Hispanics would become the majority racial/ethnic group in the country. This idea is based on the following faulty reasoning:

1) If you take the number of Hispanics today and compare that to 1980, you get a growth rate.

2) If you project that growth rate into the future, then Hispanics eventually become the majority.

BUT, that “reasoning” is nonsense. For one thing, the growth rate is not constant and won’t rise forever. Like every other rate in the known universe, it rises until it spikes and then it falls. Liberals are wrongly assuming this number will keep growing forever. But guess what? It’s already spiked in the 1990s and it’s been falling ever since.

Moreover, the growth rate consists of two groups – locals and recent immigrants. The locals actually have a birth rate at or below the white birth rate. Yet, the Census people have been applying the whole growth rate to every Hispanic as if the ones here for a while keep having massive numbers of kids. They aren’t. What is happening is that the growth rate is entirely because of illegal immigration. Factor that out and you’re looking at no change. And here’s the thing about immigration: it’s coming to an end. Hispanic immigration is drying up because Mexico is running out of people.

Basically, this theory depends on Mexico sending another 15 million people in the next two decades and then another 18 million after that and then another 20 million after that. But those people don’t exist. Mexico’s birthrate is far below ours and they are running out of young people. Without those young people coming our way, the Hispanic population in the US population will stagnate at around 14%.

So what makes me discuss this again?

Well, the Census is starting to agree with me. First, their new numbers show that the number of illegals dropped to 11.1 million from 12 million. That’s a significant drop. Moreover, the number of new immigrants has dropped significantly. In fact, last year was the first year since 1910 when new Asian immigrants outnumbered new Hispanic immigrants. That’s right, more Asians came to the US last year than Hispanics. And the Census now expects the number of Hispanic immigrants to remain low because, get this, Mexico has run out of young people to send our way. Gee, where have you heard that before?

Anyway, because of this, the Census has gone from predicting that Hispanics will become the largest racial group in 2023 to moving that back to 2042 officially to now saying privately it will be much later than that. . . if ever. Yeah, no duh.

This matters for several reasons. First, it is clear that Asians will likely grow from their 3% of the population to something a good deal larger. This is something we must consider now. According to Pew, Asians are not particularly loyal to either party at this point and their primary concerns are: jobs, education and healthcare. They do prefer government solutions, but that can be faked with the right rhetoric. We need to get in on the ground floor of the Asian boom that will soon be hitting.

Secondly, maybe we can stop talking about building a wall. With more illegal immigrants coming from China than Mexico, it should be obvious that a wall will not solve this problem.

Finally, before talk radio gets a hold of this and tells you to ignore Hispanics and just focus on being hateful, let me point out that this does not mean Republicans can pretend their Hispanic problem doesn’t exist. Like it or not, Hispanics will probably top out somewhere above where they are today, maybe in the 12-16% range. And if we keep losing them by 70%, then we will never win another election. The good news, however, is that this reinforces the fact that Republicans only need to win more Hispanics, not a majority, as would have been the case if they became 50%+ of the population. Fortunately, what appeals to them tends to appeal to other ethnic groups as well.

Thoughts?

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Leftists Exploit Gun Tragedy. . . As Usual

With the Aurora shooting a couples days removed now and emotions cooling, let’s talk rationally about the issue of guns. As usual, the left has hopped on this tragedy in full exploitation mode. They’ve blamed everything from guns to the Tea Party. They are, as always, wrong. Let’s discuss.

As with Gabby Giffords, the left immediately jumped out and pointed their twisted fingers at the Tea Party. This charge was led by ABC News who decided the shooter had to belong to the Tea Party because they found a Tea Party member with a similar name. Naturally, they never bothered to investigate before smearing the Tea Party. Eventually, they were forced to retract this, but not before every other new outlet repeated the slander. Those outlets never withdrew their reports.

Meanwhile, the usual pack of leftist celebrities took to the airwaves to whine that this proves we need gun control. Roger Ebert even whined that this proved that concealed carry laws don’t work because no one in the crowd had a gun. Think about that. In Roger’s mind concealed carry means that someone in every crowd must be carrying a gun even when the theater and law forbid it. What a twisted turd he has become.

In any event, none of this is working. Almost no one on Capitol Hill has called for gun control laws. To the contrary they are running like scared rabbits. Why? Because polls show the public’s support for gun rights at an all-time high. Indeed, an October 2011 Gallup poll found that 73% of Americans would not support gun bans. This was the highest level in 50 years. Incidentally, the same poll showed 68% approval for the evil NRA.

So why doesn’t the public fall for the blathering of the moronic celebrities and professional tragedy exploiters? Easy, it’s common sense.

As I’ve pointed out many times before, gun tragedies are incredibly rare. The United States has 2.5 million deaths annually, but only 12,000 of those are related to guns (0.4% of all deaths) – many of these are shootings by police. This places gun deaths 43rd on the list of causes of death in the United States, well behind diseases, cancers, suicides, diarrhea related deaths, unintentional injuries, measles, falls, drownings, poisonings, fires, asthma and road accidents.

And mass shootings of the type in Aurora are even more rare. For example, in the last 10 years, there have been only seven shooting sprees at schools in the US that resulted in three or more deaths. Moreover, Europe has a comparable mass murder rate, despite its strict gun control laws. Europe saw six such mass murders in the same period, and the European ones had a higher body count. China too has seen a spree of stabbings at schools that have resulted in a vastly higher number of deaths than American shootings. So this problem the celebrity left is whining about simply about doesn’t exist, and people realize that.

Secondly, guns don’t kill people. There are 250 million guns in the United States. If guns “caused” crimes as the left claims, then there would 250 million murders a year. Even if only one in ten people fell under the evil spell of these guns, we would still be dealing with 25 million murders a year. Heck, even one percent means 2.5 million murders. Yet only 12,000 people are killed annually in the United States by guns. That works out to less than 0.004% of guns being used to kill someone. . . 40 out of every million guns in the country. Guns do not cause crime.

We know this from Switzerland too. Everyone in Switzerland is required to own a gun, yet gun crime is virtually nonexistent. It’s so low they don’t even bother keeping official statistics on gun crime. It is, in fact, lower than the gun crime rate in Japan, which absolutely bans guns. Switzerland ranks as the fourth safest country in the world and its violent crime rate is 1/100th that of Britain, where guns are banned.

Moreover, there is strong evidence that guns actually prevent crime. When Britain banned private gun ownership in 1996, crime rates skyrocketed. According to American Enterprise Institute economist John Lott, an examination of information released by the British Home Office showed that the violent crime rate rose 69% following the gun ban (with murders increasing 54%). Interestingly, in the five years prior to the ban, such crimes had been falling consistently.

A county by county examination by Lott of crime rates in the United States, found that right-to-carry states experienced (on average) lower rates of violent crime (27% lower), murder (32% lower), robbery (45% lower) and aggravated assault (20% lower) than states with more restrictive gun laws. Other studies conducted at Vanderbilt University, SUNY Binghamton, Claremont-McKenna College, George Mason University, and the College of William and Mary, have supported Lott’s findings.

So Ebert’s attempt to prove that concealed laws don’t worry through a bad analogy is proven ludicrous by comparison to these statistics.

The truth is the world is full of nuts. And if they want to find a way to kill people, they will find a way. It is better to let decent people arm themselves so they can defend themselves than it is to disarm the very people who would help, leaving everyone at the mercy of the crazies. It’s interesting that our left thinks this way. Why do you supposed they don’t want you being able to defend yourself?

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