The goal of fighting poverty is no longer about meeting physical needs; instead it has been covertly shifted to equalizing incomes, or “spreading the wealth.”
Divorced from actual living conditions, the new government report on “poverty” is merely an advertising tool for expanding the welfare state.No kidding.
Fellow conservatives, please stop obsessing about what other adults might be doing in their bedrooms, so long as it's lawful and consensual and doesn't impinge in some obvious way on you. This obsession is socially uncouth, politically counterproductive and, too often, unwittingly revealing.
Also, if gay people wish to lead conventionally bourgeois lives by getting married, that may be lunacy on their part but it's a credit to our values. Channeling passions that cannot be repressed toward socially productive ends is the genius of the American way. The alternative is the tapped foot and the wide stance.
One big thing that just happened was that the real America trumped the "real America." And it's also the election that lets us ask, finally, "Who cares what's the matter with Kansas?"
For a long time, right-wingers--and some pundits--have peddled the notion that the "real America," all that really counted, was the land of non-urban white people, to which both parties must abase themselves. Meanwhile, the actual electorate was getting racially and ethnically diverse, and increasingly tolerant too. The 2008 Obama coalition wasn't a fluke; it was the country we are becoming.
And sure enough that more diverse and, if you ask me, better nation just won big.
2. Ethnic coalitions are inherently unstable. It used to be a sort of natural law that urban Catholics voted Democratic. Then Reagan won them in huge numbers. And--contra those who are saying that the GOP now has to move left--they didn't win by getting more liberal. Rather, the Democrats got more liberal, on crime and bussing, and the white ethnics who felt victimized by these policies fled. The more ethnic groups you have, the more likely it is that you will eventually find the goals of those ethnic groups in direct conflict. And the Democrats sure do have a lot of groups.
3. We are heading for a showdown between public sector unions and taxpayers. That's going to put Democrats in a very tough spot. Those unions are the backbone of the Democratic political operation. But their pensions are, in many places, simply not payable. Thanks in part to the late 1990s stock market boom, and in part to really scandalously bad accounting standards, politicians made a lot of promises they didn't pay for. Those promises now can't be shed in bankruptcy, and all of the possible deals--which including hiking taxes to "tax revolt" levels, or shafting all the younger public sector workers--are bad for Democrats.Bingo.
I still don’t understand what Obama did during Sandy that was impressive. He walked around a bit and looked concerned, but did he do anything you couldn’t train a collie to do?
I fear that what an English friend just wrote me is true:You just don’t care about being a Great Power any longer. That’s what this is about. The world should start sucking up the China instead now, as Americans have shown they’ve no appetite for world leadership any longer. You’ve had a century in the sun, and now you’ve decided to become Sweden instead of shouldering the burden. The 47% have won and you’re going to slip into social democracy and in 4 years time no-one — Christie, Rubio, Ryan — will be able to do anything about it.
RIP American ExceptionalismThat might be overstating it just a bit but it's close. The thing about the Swedes, however, isn't completely true. They have no interest in leading the world. But at least they actually pay for their own social welfare state. They tax everybody to do it. Here, we put it on a credit card and ask the next generation to pay for it.
Even those who voted for Romney can take heart in one aspect of the 2012 campaign: racism continues its historic retreat in the United States.
In the heat of the campaign, voices were heard saying that a defeat for Obama in 2012 would be a sign of racism in America. We could never buy that. Though we have no illusions that dark forces like racism, anti-Semitism and other kinds of bigotry still linger in the U.S. and in other places around the world, it seemed to us that electing an African American president in the first place was a pretty clear indication that white racism in America continues, thankfully, to wane.
The President’s re-election should be further evidence of deep change in America. While the President did not do as well among whites as among other groups, partisan loyalty and the mixed economic record of his first term account for the fall off in his support. A white president in his shoes would have also faced a tough fight for re-election and would have lost some states that he carried the first time around.No doubt. And this win is a tribute to Barack Obama as a campaigner. Now, it's time for him to govern.
On Wednesday, we woke up to the same old reality, a divided government and overextended fisc whose options are steadily narrowing. The country may start to wonder what the pundits are good for, when it figures out how little help they provided in the voting booth.
Mr. Obama now can be expected to claim a mandate, one whose content he will perhaps share in his memoirs. Judging by his campaign, he expected his victory margin to come from single women frightened that their abortions and contraception would be taken away.
This is a mandate to do what? That is, besides a mandate to keep frightening women about abortion and contraception every time Democrats need to scare up a few votes in close races?
"I am so proud of the country. To reelect this president and overcoming -- not because of the partisanship or even the policies. Here's an African-American guy with an unusual background -- part immigrant background, part African-American background -- with all this assault on him from day one. From Mitch McConnell, from the clowns out there that will never be elected, never will be to anything.
And the way he took it, as someone said, with coolness and charm and dignity and took it and took it and kept moving forward and doing his job. And the American people, and I know we look at these percentage, 40% of white vote. Fine. That's about right among Democrats in the last couple cycles, three cycles or four. Good work for them. Good work for him. A good day for America.
I'm so glad we had that storm last week because I think the storm was one of those things. No, politically I should say. Not in terms of hurting people. The storm brought in possibilities for good politics."Not so glad we had that storm last week...
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Especially in minority communities, they say, the mere presence of a white person who looks and perhaps acts like an election official can have a chilling effect on some voters, particularly if the person seems to be paying close attention to how a voter is processed at the polls.
Anyone who dismisses the fact that such attitudes persist in 2012, they add, is probably not black.They writer of this piece does not immediately identify who "they" are. But "they" - and he - are obviously numbskulls to think that black people are so afraid and intimidated by white people who show up in minority communities to do a job. Anyone who thinks so is probably a white liberal who doesn't know many black people.
I am not blaming Barack Obama for all the country’s ills. He was dealt a very bad hand. But he chose the wrong course. He relies too much on big government and too little on the enterprise of ordinary people. He is operating a historically discredited model.Actually it was the country that was dealt a bad hand and it was Barack Obama we picked to play it. He asked for the job claiming to understand how lousy the hand was. He not only played it badly, he and his Democratic cheerleaders went all in with $820 billion of OUR money. After the flop, Fiscal Reality had the nut flush. Phil Ivey for President.
IT PAYS to know Thaddeus Kirkland - better yet, perhaps, to call him your father-in-law, your pastor or your dad.
Kirkland is a rainmaker in his riverfront city of Chester, and the entrenched state representative from Delaware County has helped steer hundreds of thousands of dollars in state money to organizations close to his family:
* The Baptist church where he preaches.I thought he explained all this quite well at our endorsement meeting. This is just how communities are well served by their hard-working representatives. Why should deserving family members be excluded?
* The arts center where his wife is the president and his son-in-law served as the executive director.
* The annual cultural festival that boosts his political profile and has paid his daughter to sing.
About $800,000 in grants from Harrisburg have gone to those organizations since 1998 as part of a funding process that appears rife with potential conflicts.
We keep hearing that on November 6 we will elect the leader of America. We will pick whom we want to set the course for our nation and inspire us to move forward. Someone who will take on all our problems and set things right. Someone who will write up a nice kill list of people who should be dead.
So where did we get this idiotic idea?
I mean, really, why does everyone believe the president is the leader of our country? What he is, is the head of our government, i.e., he is the leader of the least part of our country. We have two groups in America: the people who work hard and create businesses and jobs and all the things that make our country great, and the screw-ups who get in the way of that. Government is by far the greatest force of the latter. So why do we as citizens think the guy we put in charge of the government and all the bureaucrats — “King Idiot,” basically — is our leader? That’s like saying a pothole is in charge of the road.
