City, I remind you that history does not repeat, but it sure rhymes.
We're not going to have Soviet troops marching down main street. ( Not until the 2nd amendment is staked, decapitated and the ashes scattered... )
We DO, already, have out of control bureaucracies asking people for their "papers". Seemingly as a psych conditioning program to make sure the proletariat stay in line. See also your local airport, the rampant theft of personal property by TSA agents, ( how very Russian! ) the utter lack of due process now legal.
Not even George Washington, who they would have made King if he let them, has claimed the power to kill or imprison in secret, indefinitely, without trial, lawyers or even notification of family as has this President.
Of course, his opponent in this last election, Mitt, has stated that he'd never abuse such power, and is sure Barack wouldn't either...
Great comfort there, eh?
It's also clear from Congressional records that it was the President, BHO, who insisted that the New Normal be free from pesky rights or Constitutional restrictions.
While I'm not looking forward to Greece style riots as State Govs cut the public employee pensions and bennies, they seem to be coming. The obvious answer from the Prez is to punch another $trillion$ stim bill to keep the state Union Employees afloat, just a year longer.
Also something to watch for these next few months are the UN treaty basically banning private ownership of weapons, which the lame duck Senate was feared to be approving in violation of the Constitution and the will of the people, but now with the increase in D's may not happen until january.
Perhaps with Big Sis as AG she'll finally be able to crack down on her most feared enemies of the state, those pesky Vets and Constitution Lovers.
Wish I was paranoid on this matter, but the public comments and documents stating explicitly the views of the Dept of Homeland Security are clear. ( and in this case, it IS Bush's fault. DON'T give power to an admin you like unless you want it in the hands of the next one you might not. )
We're not going to have Soviet troops marching down main street. Nope, probablynot, but they don't have to invade like 1980's hollywood... Maybe just a group of say,...20-100 could take over a larger area for quite some time before anyone knows whats going on. Like a Mumbia/Iran hostage incident but in multiple cites across the usa... simultaniously or maybe during a disaster where people are most vunerable. Whatever happens... it will probably happen very quick.
Maybe just an armed cadre of 'advisors' say 2500 or so.... Korea was started this way as was Vietnam Create the chaos, subvert the status quo, instill 'advisors', put them in a fired on situation - get a few dead; escalate, mobilize, deploy, militarize,
It rhymes enough to smell it clearly down wind. The first step in the Soviet is to sack the opposition - by removal, discredit, or assassination... Washington will see a similar pruning of those not loyal to the O The purges come next - when you are not 'democratic' or 'tolerant' enough watch and enjoy
Stalin killed more Soviet citizens, than did Hitler in their military campaign; and if you think it is a good idea for total control from the center of industry, food, transportation, water, communication, and 'civil response' go read abit about Xolodomor out of Ukraine.
Xdigitalx, wouldn't it be easier to not occupy/invade us at all? Just issue orders to your comrades in power. Our Flexibility has been transmitted to Vladimir. I'm sure Vladimir has transmitted his desires back.
BTW, being paranoid about the government turning on you is currently officially grounds to arrest and detain you, according to the head of DHS.
Just something to chew on. Not sure of the origin of this. Got it in an email today.
quote:
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo – for the incumbent President and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And fewer people voted. As I write, with almost all the votes counted, President Obama has won fewer votes than John McCain won in 2008, and more than ten million off his own 2008 total.
But as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle.
Romney lost because he didn’t get enough votes to win.
That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost because the conservative virtues – the traditional American virtues – of liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness – no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate. The notion of the “Reagan Democrat” is one cliché that should be permanently retired.
Ronald Reagan himself could not win an election in today’s America.
The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to compete against free stuff. Every businessman knows this; that is why the “loss leader” or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool. Obama’s America is one in which free stuff is given away: the adults among the 47,000,000 on food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they did, by the tens of millions; those who – courtesy of Obama – receive two full years of unemployment benefits (which, of course, both disincentivizes looking for work and also motivates people to work off the books while collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote; so too those who anticipate “free” health care, who expect the government to pay their mortgages, who look for the government to give them jobs. The lure of free stuff is irresistible.
Imagine two restaurants side by side. One sells its customers fine cuisine at a reasonable price, and the other offers a free buffet, all-you-can-eat as long as supplies last. Few – including me – could resist the attraction of the free food. Now imagine that the second restaurant stays in business because the first restaurant is forced to provide it with the food for the free buffet, and we have the current economy, until, at least, the first restaurant decides to go out of business. (Then, the government takes over the provision of free food to its patrons.)
The defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation (by the amoral Obama team) of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in which “47% of the people” start off against him because they pay no taxes and just receive money – “free stuff” – from the government. Almost half of the population has no skin in the game – they don’t care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs, nor do they care that the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from their children and from the Chinese. They just want the free stuff that comes their way at someone else’s expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very little margin for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the future.
It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning against such overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence, the people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for a President who will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay for it.
That engenders the second reason why Romney lost: the inescapable conclusion that the electorate is dumb – ignorant, and uninformed. Indeed, it does not pay to be an informed voter, because most other voters – the clear majority – are unintelligent and easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. That is the indelicate way of saying that too many people vote with their hearts and not their heads. That is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting taxes for the rich. Obama could get away with saying that “Romney wants the rich to play by a different set of rules” – without ever defining what those different rules were; with saying that the “rich should pay their fair share” – without ever defining what a “fair share” is; with saying that Romney wants the poor, elderly and sick to “fend for themselves” – without even acknowledging that all these government programs are going bankrupt, their current insolvency only papered over by deficit spending. Obama could get away with it because he knew he was talking to dunces waving signs and squealing at any sight of him.
During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson: “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!” Stevenson called back: “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!” Truer words were never spoken.
Similarly, Obama (or his surrogates) could hint to blacks that a Romney victory would lead them back into chains and proclaim to women that their abortions and birth control would be taken away. He could appeal to Hispanics that Romney would have them all arrested and shipped to Mexico (even if they came from Cuba or Honduras), and unabashedly state that he will not enforce the current immigration laws. He could espouse the furtherance of the incestuous relationship between governments and unions – in which politicians ply the unions with public money, in exchange for which the unions provide the politicians with votes, in exchange for which the politicians provide more money and the unions provide more votes, etc., even though the money is gone. He could do and say all these things because he knew his voters were dolts.
One might reasonably object that not every Obama supporter could be unintelligent. But they must then rationally explain how the Obama agenda can be paid for, aside from racking up multi-trillion dollar deficits. “Taxing the rich” does not yield even 10% of what is required – so what is the answer, i.e., an intelligent answer?
Obama also knows that the electorate has changed – that whites will soon be a minority in America (they’re already a minority in California) and that the new immigrants to the US are primarily from the Third World and do not share the traditional American values that attracted immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a different world, and a different America. Obama is part of that different America, knows it, and knows how to tap into it. That is why he won.
Obama also proved again that negative advertising works, invective sells, and harsh personal attacks succeed. That Romney never engaged in such diatribes points to his essential goodness as a person; his “negative ads” were simple facts, never personal abuse – facts about high unemployment, lower take-home pay, a loss of American power and prestige abroad, a lack of leadership, etc. As a politician, though, Romney failed because he did not embrace the devil’s bargain of making unsustainable promises, and by talking as the adult and not the adolescent. Obama has spent the last six years campaigning; even his governance has been focused on payoffs to his favored interest groups. The permanent campaign also won again, to the detriment of American life.
It turned out that it was not possible for Romney and Ryan – people of substance, depth and ideas – to compete with the shallow populism and platitudes of their opponents. Obama mastered the politics of envy – of class warfare – never reaching out to Americans as such but to individual groups, and cobbling together a winning majority from these minority groups. Conservative ideas failed to take root and states that seemed winnable, and amenable to traditional American values, have simply disappeared from the map. If an Obama could not be defeated – with his record and his vision of America, in which free stuff seduces voters – it is hard to envision any change in the future. The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to a European-socialist economy – those very economies that are collapsing today in Europe – is paved.
A second cliché that should be retired is that America is a center-right country. It clearly is not. It is a divided country with peculiar voting patterns, and an appetite for free stuff. Studies will invariably show that Republicans in Congress received more total votes than Democrats in Congress, but that means little. The House of Representatives is not truly representative of the country. That people would vote for a Republican Congressmen or Senator and then Obama for President would tend to reinforce point two above: the empty-headedness of the electorate. Americans revile Congress but love their individual Congressmen. Go figure.
The mass media’s complicity in Obama’s re-election cannot be denied. One example suffices. In 2004, CBS News forged a letter in order to imply that President Bush did not fulfill his Air National Guard service during the Vietnam War, all to impugn Bush and impair his re-election prospects. In 2012, President Obama insisted – famously – during the second debate that he had stated all along that the Arab attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was “terror” (a lie that Romney fumbled and failed to exploit). Yet, CBS News sat on a tape of an interview with Obama in which Obama specifically avoided and rejected the claim of terrorism – on the day after the attack – clinging to the canard about the video. (This snippet of a “60 Minutes” interview was not revealed - until two days ago!) In effect, CBS News fabricated evidence in order to harm a Republican president, and suppressed evidence in order to help a Democratic president. Simply shameful, as was the media’s disregard of any scandal or story that could have jeopardized the Obama re-election.
One of the more irritating aspects of this campaign was its limited focus, odd in light of the billions of dollars spent. Only a few states were contested, a strategy that Romney adopted, and that clearly failed. The Democrat begins any race with a substantial advantage. The liberal states – like the bankrupt California and Illinois – and other states with large concentrations of minority voters as well as an extensive welfare apparatus, like New York, New Jersey and others – give any Democratic candidate an almost insurmountable edge in electoral votes. In New Jersey, for example, it literally does not pay for a conservative to vote. It is not worth the fuel expended driving to the polls. As some economists have pointed generally, and it resonates here even more, the odds are greater that a voter will be killed in a traffic accident on his way to the polls than that his vote will make a difference in the election. It is an irrational act. That most states are uncompetitive means that people are not amenable to new ideas, or new thinking, or even having an open mind. If that does not change, and it is hard to see how it can change, then the die is cast. America is not what it was, and will never be again.
For Jews, mostly assimilated anyway and staunch Democrats, the results demonstrate again that liberalism is their Torah. Almost 70% voted for a president widely perceived by Israelis and most committed Jews as hostile to Israel. They voted to secure Obama’s future at America’s expense and at Israel’s expense – in effect, preferring Obama to Netanyahu by a wide margin. A dangerous time is ahead. Under present circumstances, it is inconceivable that the US will take any aggressive action against Iran and will more likely thwart any Israeli initiative. That Obama’s top aide Valerie Jarrett (i.e., Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett) spent last week in Teheran is not a good sign. The US will preach the importance of negotiations up until the production of the first Iranian nuclear weapon – and then state that the world must learn to live with this new reality. As Obama has committed himself to abolishing America’s nuclear arsenal, it is more likely that that unfortunate circumstance will occur than that he will succeed in obstructing Iran’s plans.
Obama’s victory could weaken Netanyahu’s re-election prospects, because Israelis live with an unreasonable – and somewhat pathetic – fear of American opinion and realize that Obama despises Netanyahu. A Likud defeat – or a diminution of its margin of victory – is more probable now than yesterday. That would not be the worst thing. Netanyahu, in fact, has never distinguished himself by having a strong political or moral backbone, and would be the first to cave to the American pressure to surrender more territory to the enemy and acquiesce to a second (or third, if you count Jordan) Palestinian state. A new US Secretary of State named John Kerry, for example would not augur well. Netanyahu remains the best of markedly poor alternatives. Thus, the likeliest outcome of the upcoming Israeli elections is a center-left government that will force itself to make more concessions and weaken Israel – an Oslo III.
. The most powerful empires in history all crumbled – from the Greeks and the Romans to the British and the Soviets. None of the collapses were easily foreseen, and yet they were predictable in retrospect.
The American empire began to decline in 2007, and the deterioration has been exacerbated in the last five years. This election only hastens that decline. Society is permeated with sloth, greed, envy and materialistic excess. It has lost its moorings and its moral foundations. The takers outnumber the givers, and that will only increase in years to come. Across the world, America under Bush was feared but not respected. Under Obama, America is neither feared nor respected. Radical Islam has had a banner four years under Obama, and its prospects for future growth look excellent. The “Occupy” riots across this country in the last two years were mere dress rehearsals for what lies ahead – years of unrest sparked by the increasing discontent of the unsuccessful who want to seize the fruits and the bounty of the successful, and do not appreciate the slow pace of redistribution.
If this election proves one thing, it is that the Old America is gone. And, sad for the world, it is not coming back.
It's just thoughts typed out. I felt there were some points worth taking into consideration. It's not like it's carved into stone like the 15 commandments.
Look who's back. I was wondering when you were going to come out and play again. Did you ask Romney for a refund of all your donations? Looks like the majority of voters don't agree with you.
I don't mean any harm Ferris, just a good time. I hope you didn't take anything to heart. Like I said before, if it wasn't for Paul Ryan, mitt would have got my vote. That being said, I'm not worried about the future. The mess we are in will take time to clear
To be fair Xb9er, the total vote count was something like 61 million (50.5%)for Obama and 58 million (48%)for Romney. This hardly puts Fb1 (& me) in the lunatic fringe category. I will submit that the 50,000 people who voted for Roseanne Barr are kooks.
...I'm not worried about the future. The mess we are in will take time to clear
I'm not worried about MY future; I'm worried about my kids' future, and my grandchildrens' future. I'm worried about the near- and long-term future of our Republic.
With all due respect: How, exactly, are we going to "clear" the mess we're presently in?
I don't think there is a true clear answer. This is a young government; its possible it might fail and we start all over. On the other hand we might save it, but its going to be from baby steps. The people have spoken who they think is going to do the best job at getting us back towards prosperity. I do know one thing, Romney couldn't have fixed it in four years either. Ryan would have screwed up things that are currently working just fine (personal opinion).
Romney and Ryan are both Patriots, IMO. Both of them repeatedly expressed their reverence and respect to the Founders, Constitution and Bill of Rights in the run-up to the election. I don't think there's ANY conservative, me or them included, that thought they could "fix" America in four years.
They could certainly undo a lot of damage in that time, however, and even more so in eight; see "Reagan."
0&B, on the other hand, do NOT respect and revere our Founders, Constitution and Bill of Rights. That's not opinion, it's fact.
They will NOT "fix" America. The damage they've done in four years is, in all likelihood, irreparable.
And now, they've stolen another four years with which to continue our destruction as a constitutional Republic.
Baby steps? Electing R&R would have been a baby step, but a very POSITIVE one.
With the current administration, we're taking GIANT LEAPS towards statism, or socialism, or whatever it turns out ultimately to be.
You weren't around when Reagan was pres, were you? Pity. He was our last great president. A true Patriot.
How do you feel about Fast & Furious? How do you feel about Benghazi-gate? How would you feel if it was our buddy Stingaroo that our pres left to die in Benghazi that night?
We are past the tipping point, this was the last meaningful election * Takers (all of whom absolutely deserve it) * Pigmentation based grievance groups looking for "Revenge" (his word, not mine) * Government Employees Now total more than 50% of the population. * Crony capitalists, tho few in number are more than happy to finance the effort. * Very special interest groups (sodomy, animal rights, Gaia worship) provide foot-soldiers
It's over, accept it, there is no reason for any of them to change their position on anything.
No let us figure what we do while waiting for the collapse
I have faith in the people. Another four years, and changes will come.
Senate goes GOP and Congress stays GOP in 2014.
This is not the end of the world. The wheels of change moves slowly and things will right itself over time. Keep in mind, it is not the politicians that makes the wheels turn, it is you and I.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch. Republicans must concentrate on fiscal responsibility. Focus!
Republicans must concentrate on fiscal responsibility. Focus!
I've said for a long time that we have one party that is trying to make us bankrupt on Tuesday, and one party trying to make us bankrupt on Thursday. As a nation, we just voted for Tuesday.
PJTV -- Afterburner with Bill Whittle: Cannibals Published on Nov 12, 2012 by Pajamasmedia
In his first Afterburner since the election, Bill Whittle weighs in. Now that Barack Obama has been reelected president, ObamaCare is certain to remain unchanged. Bill thinks this is the first step towards massive tax increases, socialized health care, and a citizenry more dependent on the federal government than ever. So although the foreseeable future of our great country may seem grim, hear why Bill thinks patriots must continue to fight the good fight for the duration.
>>> That the government won't bend to your particular personal religiuos beliefs is not religious persecution.
Forcing me to tangibly support that which blatantly violates my deeply held religious convictions, convictions that are well-founded in longstanding Judeo-Christian doctrine is in blatant cold hard fact understood as the State imposing itself into my religion and through threat of force mandating that I violate my religion.
Just what exactly do you imagine would constitute the State prohibiting the free exercise of my religion? Only manger scenes and copies of the Ten Commandments are guilty of that?
I agree, no meat subsidies. No subsidies for anything not vital to national security. I'll sign your petition.
No subsidies for contraception, abortion, or homosexual behavior either!
Will you sign my petition?
Either we have the rule of law or we have tyranny.
Well, after spending more time trying to conform to the new regulations, one thing sticks out for me. The only procedure listed in ObamaCare is abortion (I could be wrong, there's still miles of this crap to go through) is now fully covered by medicaid now. Congratulations! Whether you're for it, or against it, you're now paying for it. So much more to go through, I can see why a lot of Mom&Pops are throwing in the towel. I have no idea how Ann's business is going to stay afloat. Me? I'm not sure I can either, but I don't employ anyone other than myself, Ann's company employ 65, no wait that's 49... I'm losing my faith in the future.
Blake, I would think it in your best interest to aid those who depend on the government for everything to not reproduce.
I can understand the moral objection to abortion, but long term contraceptive implants should, perhaps, be free to all who are on public assistance. The jealousy of their freedom to make whoopie without fear of "being punished by a pregnancy" ( as Obama puts it, re: his little girls ) is more than offset in the reduction in us being punished by their pregnancy. ( in aid to unwed, underage, under educated, teen moms )
