This is prompted by a discussion I had with Vassar and others yesterday.  Some of it will be familiar to those of you who’ve read my stuff over the years.  So, I’m sporting another excerpt from “Red on Blue.”  Have a taste and let me have your comments and criticism.

When you take office, somebody who gave or raised money for you is going to tell you that you need to keep the government running smoothly, so you can’t do anything too drastic.  The person who told you that is some sort of lobbyist or player that you think is your friend, or at least your contributor.  That advice is for their benefit, not yours!

After allowing yourself a moment to shed a tear for the lost hopes, dreams, girlfriends, boats, and houses, fire everyone in the government that you have a colorable legal right to fire, and maybe a few more just to show that you can - you, the courts, or God can sort it out later.  Do it within ten seconds of your hand coming off the Bible.  You got that earlier advice because that lobbyist or player had a relationship with those people that he does not want to lose.  That is not your relationship, and you might want to question your relationship with the person who gave you that advice.

The very hardest thing you could do is to stop government from running.  You could fire every politically appointed director, commissioner, or whatever, and nobody would know the difference; the government would just keep on doing what it does.  Behind every one of those political appointees that someone wants you to keep is a career bureaucrat that actually does all the work.  You only need a political appointee in the places that you want to make a change of direction.  The rest of government can just run itself, and it will do so indefinitely.

A few of the political appointees from the prior administration will have supported you.  Keep them - at least for a while, but it’s a lot like marrying a woman that was screwing around on her husband when she hooked up with you – are you sure what she’s doing tonight?  Some of the appointees are relatively apolitical subject matter experts; fire them all and hire back any that are any good - after they kiss the ring.  Let the rest of them lose their houses.  Political appointments are not career jobs, and anyone who bought a half-million dollar house based on their earnings from a political job deserves what happens to them.  The Democrats will bleat and wail.  The day you fire them, they will have starving babies and mommies with cancer on the 6 pm news, but these days the news cycle is 24 hours or less, and everyone will get over it.

The only exception to the “fire them all at once” rule is the potential poster children.  If there are some appointee level employees that behaved badly enough, keep them on and fire them for cause; prosecute them if the situation warrants it.  Even if they resign on their own accord, hunt them down and prosecute them.  Generally, the way to get rid of the prior administration’s appointees is to demand their resignation upon your assumption of office.  You just tell them you are going to do things differently and they don’t fit into your plans.  Generally, the rule is “any reason, no reason, but not an illegal reason.”  The distinguishing characteristics of true appointees are that they are not selected competitively and cannot appeal dismissal; they are as close to “at will” or “serve at the pleasure” employees as you get in government.  But they are not that “at will;” in most states, if you state a cause, you had better be able to prove it has a basis in fact.  If you can identify a truly corrupt one, don’t honor him or her by just demanding the resignation; fire him for cause and make smoke and noise doing it.  By corrupt, I mean true lying and stealing that Joe Sixpack can identify with, not esoteric policy stuff or bureaucratic rule breaking.  If you really have the evidence, hope he sues you for wrongful discharge.  This is all just to make a statement and to improve the morale and productivity of the survivors.

Republicans have never been willing to do the necessary housecleaning, unlike Democrats.  You can be certain that if the Democrats return to power in your government, anyone who even might have thought like a Republican, even merit system employees merely following orders, will be out on their ear.  They do it every time, they do it ruthlessly, and nobody ever says a word since Democrats are good people.  Republican reluctance is based both on the perception that mass firing would be disruptive and an unwillingness to take the bad press.  This conventional wisdom is wrong on both counts.  The government will run just fine without appointees for a while.  As to the bad press, you do not have a choice; you are going to get bad press whether you keep some of them or fire them all, so get your money’s worth.  It is like coming home late; once you are late enough for your wife to be mad, she’s not going to be much madder a couple hours later and making up might even be better.

You need a good lawyer for taking out the trash.  In states where the Attorney General is elected, AG stands for Almost Governor, and he or she is not necessarily your friend.  If the AG is appointed, you are probably safe with her advice.  If you’re not sure, get a good lawyer, one who actually knows employment law, in your kitchen cabinet.  Many states that have had long time Democrat dominance have lots and lots of jobs that look like political appointees but are not.  There is a line of U. S. Supreme Court law, interestingly mostly out of Chicago, that says that if the employee is not in a policy making position, they do not serve at the pleasure no matter what your state law may say.  Make sure that your reach does not exceed your grasp because the lawsuits can be expensive and embarrassing when you fire some clerk because the job was ostensibly appointed – Democrats can get away with things that you cannot.  The trick here is to put the job under the merit system, assuming you have one, and if the person does not meet the qualifications for the merit system job, they hit the street.  Sell it as reform; you are reducing the number of appointees.  It will take your first year to sort all this out, but the process will not make the headlines after the first one or two.

After you find that good lawyer, you need some people to help you run this thing you just took over.  You’re going to have one Helluva time finding them.  It does not matter whether you are the President or a Governor looking to appoint a Cabinet, a Commissioner or Secretary looking for directors or department heads, or a director or section chief just looking for good help, you are going to have a very hard time finding good people to run or work in a government agency.  First, the money stinks, so you are not likely to be able to recruit from the business world.  Second, most of the ideas that make you successful in business doom you to failure in government.  Third, you cannot recruit from academia because they are almost all lefties who hate you, besides, they can’t do anything anyway – those who can, do; those who can’t teach.  This old saw is especially true in Law, Political Science, and Public Administration.  And fourth, there is a Helluva lot of scrutiny of people in high places, especially of Republicans.  Most of us reaching this level of power are Boomers and we have pasts – an affair here, a joint or a line there, a DWI somewhere.  You can hire those people, but they have to give it up on the spot; no “I didn’t inhale” or “I didn’t have sex with that woman” for Republicans.  The correct Republican answer if you’re asked if you ever smoked dope – and you did - is, “Hell yes and I’m disgusted by somebody who was such a hypocrite that he pretended to inhale.”  You just cannot do that sort of thing anymore and you can bet nobody is going to fish your car and dead secretary out of a river and pretend it didn’t happen.  You have to be straight up about it all – just don’t go around volunteering information.  You will get some grief for 24 hours and then it will be old news.  If you try to evade or dissemble, it will go on forever.   If your appointee has a past, he or she had better be totally honest about it and totally straight now or life will be Hell.

Republican success in legislative bodies in recent times gives a new executive some former legislators and legislative staffers to draw on, but you and they will learn quickly enough that being a member of the legislative branch is not much of a training ground for the executive branch.  You are left with those of your true friends who will take a government job, a few people with legislative experience, and the bureaucracy itself.  You will not have much of a bench, but you cannot afford any slackers or failures; bench them and play short – any failure will be yours, not theirs.

You should worry most about your friends.  I use friends here in the word’s political sense.  I am not talking about the person you grew up with and who knows your deepest thoughts – though I could be.  I’m talking about all the friends you acquired on your way up the political ladder.  With the Republican ascendancy of the ‘90s and early ‘00s, there are lots and lots of born-again Republicans around just ever so eager to write a check, put up a sign, or host a fundraiser.  Those people you met campaigning, at the Chamber, or at Rotary don’t know much about government except that it dispenses lots of money, and you could be their ticket to have it dispense some of that money to their business or friends.  One of my Democrat bosses headed the agency that bought all the State’s computers and went straight from the State to one of the largest computer companies in the world, Ethics Act be damned.  He was a Democrat, Democrats are good people, good people do not do bad things, and therefore, he didn’t do a bad thing.  It is OK for them to do things like that.  You can’t.  If you or your friends even look like you might make a single dime off something you want to do, you can’t do it.  Business as usual for Democrats is graft and corruption for Republicans.  They will hang you from the masthead of every paper in the state.  James Carville had it right when he said, “you spend the election f**king your enemies and the transition f**king your friends.”  Mostly, you are better off without friends.

A special category of friends is lawyers.  You will find lawyers who have gravitated to the Party or to you personally.  The first question you should ask is, “why aren’t they making so much money in private practice that they wouldn’t be interested in government work?”  If you have satisfied yourself with the answer to that question, then you must look at what lawyers are all about.  Any halfway good lawyer can find an argument for anything and a justification for everything.  That skill is what they paid all that money to learn how to do.  Little things like ethics and morality are only a part, often only a minor part, of their analysis.  The other way that lawyers get you in trouble is that they always think they are right.  A lawyer has to believe he can win.  That is his job, wresting a verdict from a jury.  That is all OK when they are out practicing law, but when you involve them in policy, it has real risks.  A lawyer turned political manager will ride his policy decisions right over the nearest cliff, oblivious to the fact that the cliff was perfectly obvious to real people.  Republican leaning lawyers are a source of talent for you, but you had best watch them like a hawk.  Governor Murkowski learned that the hard way with his longtime associate and Attorney General – the fallout from that little “indiscretion” continued to bedevil for his whole term.[1]  Attorneys just don’t think like real people, and that can get you in real trouble.

Republican legislators have done the Party and the nation a great disservice by being so frugal.  To show how lean and mean they are, they have very small staffs and employ few consultants, and then they don’t pay any of them worth a damn.  First, this puts them at the mercy of the executive branch, which has subject matter experts coming out its ears.  Second, it gives them no place to put friends from the executive branch when those friends get in trouble with Democrats.  And third, it means that most of a legislative staffer’s experience is constituent service, not nuts and bolts government.  None of these are good things.  But Republican legislative staffers do give you a cohort of loyal talent to draw on, though they, like you, won’t know where the light switches and rest rooms are.

If you follow my advice and fire everyone in political appointments from the prior administration, there are going to be what looks like a whole bunch of jobs vacant and some supporters who want jobs.  Today’s typical Republican supporter and voter are so antigovernment that they believe, with some justification, that any damned fool can run any government agency better than it is being run.  That may be true at the policy level in a Blue or near-Blue state, and it is certainly true even down into the bureaucracy in a doughnut city or one of the big longtime union and Democrat dominated cities.  The Party and your supporters are going to give you Hell, but you cannot put people in jobs who don’t know the job – you’re better off leaving it vacant and letting the ‘crats just keep on keeping on.  A lot of the positions are unnecessary sinecures for Democrats anyway, so eliminate them.  Every campaign lives or dies by the people who do the political grunt work, but licking stamps, putting up signs, working the phones, or raising a little money really does not qualify someone to run a major agency, no matter how much the people who do that sort of work might think it does.  Just look at what happened to President Bush for putting the former counsel of a horse breeding association in charge of FEMA.  I’m sure his connections and his Republican credentials were impeccable, but he damn well didn’t have the qualifications and experience to run a major federal agency.  FEMA and the Katrina response probably would have looked just as bad no matter who was running it, but the questionable appointment just made the Director and the President into a spectacularly good target.  There are jobs you can put the 22 year old son of a major supporter in, but they shouldn’t be responsible for anything.  There are plenty of “positions” in government to hire the people you just have to hire into, just make sure these people understand that they don’t have a job other than looking good and that you’ll fire them if they cause the slightest upset.  Tell them to think of it as a job shadowing opportunity.  And tell them not to even think of telling the ‘crats what to do.  If they have a problem with what the ‘crats are doing, they tell you or your appointee above them and let somebody competent deal with it.

And then there is the bureaucracy.  I am not talking about the appointee level.  Remember, you fired all of them as soon as your hand came off the Bible.  The upper level of the merit system bureaucracy – the people who didn’t get their jobs at a cocktail party – is mostly competent and mostly apolitical.  They are relatively affluent and secure and most are pretty conservative – some of them might have even voted for you.  Fundamentally, they don’t care for or about you.  My attitude always was that I knew every political type was going to make me happy at least once; I was going to a going away party.  High level but non-political bureaucrats do their jobs like those British officers built the bridge over the River Kwai; they have a job to do, and they don’t think much about why or for whom they are doing it.  But fundamentally, if a right-thinking person comes along and reminds them of who they are, they will blow up the bridge if asked. 

This is your greatest asset.  The government will keep on keeping on.  The roads will be maintained, the laws will be enforced, the welfare checks will go out, and the paychecks will cash no matter what you do.  Make it clear to them that they are free to do their jobs even if their boss just got fired.  Odds are they didn’t like the boss much anyway; most government agencies run in spite of political managers, not because of them.  A few of the merit system supervisors and managers might have political ambitions and act on them.  If they do, squash them like bugs.  You won’t have to do it but once or twice, and the rest will get the message.  Some of them are dangerous in another way; working for administration after administration at a near-policy level has made them completely cynical and amoral; they will do anything if asked without the slightest thought for whether it should be done, so make sure you have someone loyal to you over every function and keeping an eye on them.  If your personnel system allows for it give the top-level employees the money the political appointee would have been making; “acting” is the common term for it.  That way, you don’t have to appoint anyone, the work gets done, and someone is going to be appreciative of a better paycheck.

After you take out the trash, you will not have much political level management around.  Your true friends and loyalists will give you enough people to put someone in charge of the big subdivisions – usually styled departments – in the government and a pool of people to put in charge of some of the operating subdivisions of the government where you have a need for immediate change of direction.  For now, that is all you can expect.  Now you have to make a government that a Republican can actually run.

Rearranging the Furniture

Most state and local governments roughly emulate the departmental structure of the federal government.  Stop right here and think a moment about who built the federal government’s structure and why.  The modern federal government was built by Democrats to serve Democrat constituencies.  The Environmental Protection Agency was a Nixon era concession to a Democrat Congress and serves the Greenies.  No Greenie is ever going to support a Republican.  The Department of Education was Carter’s gift to the National Extortion Association.  No teacher is ever going to support a Republican.  Hell, usually half or more of the delegates to a Democrat convention are National Extortion Association members.  The Department of Labor exists to keep Davis – Bacon wages high, workers on Workers’ Comp rather than the unions’ health insurance trusts, and to funnel grant money to training non-profits headed by former union officers.  The Department of Health and Human Services exists … well don’t get me started on DHHS.  Suffice it to say that the employees and clients of a social services agency are not a likely Republican constituency.   Knock out some walls and rearrange the furniture of your government.

To the degree that your government is comprised of elected heads of functional units, you are stuck with them until you can get the necessary statutory or constitutional changes.  If you have the votes, go after those changes immediately.  Remember, you just won an election and even those who hate fear.  Use your executive authority to reorganize everything within your authority, and maybe a few things that aren’t – a good expensive appeal to the Supreme Court might get you some lawyer support.  Do it all with Executive Orders or your government’s equivalent; you do not have time for legislation.  At this time, speed is your friend and their enemy.  You cannot give the Democrats and the bureaucracy time to even breathe much less coalesce in opposition to you.  The best time to kick them is when they are down.

Every government does pretty much the same things: it has to regulate itself; control its assets and revenues; arrest and incarcerate bad guys; operate and maintain the roads, airports, and ports; promote and regulate labor, commerce, and natural resources/agriculture; educate the kiddies; and provide for those who can’t or won’t provide for themselves.  While the economies and structures of governments vary, those groups pretty well encompass all the things that a government does.  Use your executive authority to organize around these functional groups.  You have a good chance of finding competent, loyal heads for six or eight groups, but never will you find the fifteen or twenty or more, in some states many more, that some governments require under Democrat structures.

In Alaska our logical functional groups were: General Government comprising our departments of Revenue, Administration, Commerce, Labor, and Education; Public Protection comprising our departments of Public Safety, Corrections, and Military and Veterans’ Affairs; Resources comprising Environmental Conservation, Natural Resources, and Fish and Game, and our two biggies: Transportation and Public Facilities and Health and Social Services are each independent units.  Your government will be different depending on what is important to your area and constituencies, but you get the idea.

We were not able in the Murkowski administration to reorganize the whole government this way; the lobbyists won that one, but we did organize all our human resources administration this way to prototype it.  The internal opposition was significant but the reorganization has been successful in the main, though its future is uncertain in the Palin/Parnell administration.  Governor Palin kept the reorganized system in place, but the assault continues.  It certainly saved us money and helped ensure that employees were actually qualified for the job to which they were appointed and paid appropriately.   Under the old system, fifteen different departments were paying employees fifteen different ways for the same work – almost always wrong and almost always too much.  We had tremendous competence problems with people who were once under department authority and are now under central authority and supervised by people who know something.  When the departments bitched about mistakes, we just told them we didn’t give them lobotomies when we brought them over.  Your objective should be to absolutely control the money, the people, and the procurement.  Even if you are forced to deal with an elected head of a functional group, if you control his money, hiring, and buying, you control him.  If he’s not a friend of yours, he is not going to like the feeling.

Every government entity needs money, people, and stuff.  Move the control of the money, people, and stuff to the highest organizational level where there still is commonality.  If your government has central administration – finance, personnel, and procurement - under the chief executive or in its own department under an appointed head, this is fairly easy to do.  Just sharpen your pencil, redraw the organization charts, rewrite the delegations, and give some orders.  If your government has these functions under an elected head, e.g., an elected secretary of state, it is much more problematic, especially if you are not friends.  I have never had to deal with it, since most Western states have powerful central governments.  But even with an elected administrative head, you are the governor or mayor and he isn’t; use some muscle.

Most governments do everything in at least triplicate.  There is a governor or mayor’s budget office, and each department has a budget office, and each division of the department has a budget office, and so on for accounting, people, and procurement.  None of the subordinate ones add value, but each of them is dedicated to hiding what it is doing from all the levels above it.  Move it as close to the top and to someone loyal to you as you can.  Only where there is a truly unique function should it be allowed any independent control of money, people, or stuff.  And then audit everything it does.  I’m not being paranoid; I just know government.  Well yes, I am paranoid; the question is, am I paranoid enough?

Now you have an idea of what to do, then there’s the doing of it.  First, you do not need a damned consensus; you got one when you or your boss got elected.  As soon as you say anything about reorganization, somebody is going to tell you that you’ve got to get a bunch of ‘crats together and get “buy in” from them.  ‘Crats are amazingly clear-headed when they have a gun to their heads, and I’ve almost never seen one make a bad decision when given all the relevant information.  Tell them that their world is going to be a certain way tomorrow and the only choice they have is whether to be in it or not.  You will have your “buy in.”

Governor Murkowski wholeheartedly adopted two reorganization initiatives early on; human resources centralization and information technology centralization.  We called it “integration,” since centralization had acquired a hot button political connotation in the Hickel administration.   Planning for the HR integration was done by a select, loyal few by dark of night.  The players, including a bunch of Knowles’ holdover directors, were brought into the Governor’s Conference Room, told how it was going to be, and told they were on the program or out of the game.  That reorganization is now ancient history; there’s still a certain amount of backbiting, but no one would dare openly oppose it.  On the other hand, a holdover director convinced the powers that be that they needed a consultant to “facilitate” a “consensus” amongst all the “stakeholders” and “customers” in the IT integration.  They are still talking about IT integration and, if there is any change at all, IT is even more decentralized today than when we took office. 

Take note of the buzzwords I used in the two preceding paragraphs.  If anyone around you uses the words “buy in,” “consensus,” “stakeholders,”  “facilitator,” or “customers” in any discussion about your administration’s policies or organizational structure, threaten to fire him.  If he does it again, fire him.  Those words and the concepts of government that underlie them are designed by Democrats and academics to prevent change and further the agendae of the elites.  The primary product that the Democrats use to keep their behinds is the big chairs is talking about how to do things better.  “Examining our processes” is a buzz phrase synonym for talking that you should add to the list of words above.  You have to actually produce a product, and that is not done by talking.  You’ll be called an autocrat or worse.  Just make sure it is the right people calling you that.

Comrade Obama was put up by whatever shadowy financiers and rainmakers put him up to NOT be Bill Clinton.  Bill and Hill became good little communists smoking dope in Ivy League dorm rooms back in the ’60s.  It’s been largely forgotten but Bill’s got just as many questionable associates as Barry from his youthful political indiscretions.  He’s still got a trip to the old Soviet Bloc that he can’t explain and he was really, really cozy with lots of ChiComs, but he was a charmin’ devil that most of the women thought they could “change,” so he got away with it.

Hillary the Harridan, the Lady McBeth of Little Rock, wrote her thesis on Saul Alinsky.  You think she’s not a good little communist?  Why can’t we remember that the original Clintonista Agenda was pretty much as radical as Comrade Obama’s except the unions weren’t as big a piece of it.  When the Harridan failed to get HillaryCare and the Republicans took back the Congress for the first time since ‘54, Bill decided that discretion was the better part of valor, put the Harridan in a closet, and made nice with the Right.

Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton was the Democrat nominee precisely because it is the expectations of his makers and string pullers that he WILL NOT do that.  Just like we had a bunch of stupid DC insiders and network talking heads blathering on His election about how He was going to govern to the center, we now have the same people who are famous for being famous, including some FOX ones that should be smarter, blathering about how the VA, NJ, and MA defeats are going to turn Comrade Obama right.  No, they’re going to turn him mean.  He may hold off on outright mean until after the ‘10 election, but his job and his mission in life is to “transform” American into the neutered, socialist country that His makers desire.

In some ways we’re in a more frightful place now than we were on Monday.  OK, so they go all bipartisan and offer to compromise.  We’ve got plenty of stupid Republicans who’ll want to be nice and go along with all that.  So, the fury subsides.  Even Brown becomes a rainmaker and a concilliatory figure that “brings them together” - don’t rule it out, the guy has a politician’s ego and has spent waaaay too much time with McShame.  So, peace and love breaks out all over.  With a little help from the Ministry of Information, the MSM, the Administration convinces the ignorant middle that things are on the mend and before long Happy Days Will Be Here Again.  The Ds hold their majorities and unleash Hell in ‘11.  If they can pass Card Check and Cap and Trade in ‘11, American will no longer be a democracy in any meaningful sense in ‘12 and the permanent Democrat rule has been established.

I know I’m paranoid, I just wonder if I’m paranoid enough, and so far, I’ve been pretty much right about what this lot was going to do.

My wife is in Anchorage tending to closing up my youngest stepson’s apartment, servicing and storing his car, and the miscellany of stopping one kind of life and starting another.  He did three years of active duty as an Army infantryman and has been out for about a year.  I can’t say I’m real proud of how he’s acquitted himself in civilian life but he’s kept a job and paid his own bills, including the very expensive DUI he managed to get.  Also can’t say that both of us haven’t thought from time to time that he might be better off back in the Army.

Couple of weeks before Christmas, the notice comes here, he hadn’t been much on those changes of address forms, that he’s been called back up to active duty for a stint in Iraq.  He spent Christmas and New Years with us and his brother came up from Seattle too.  They spent the holidays in a fin d’sicle orgy of dissipation but that’s what young guys do when they have a chance and then it was back up to Anchorage to get his stuff in order so he could report to Ft. Benning yesterday.  His mother couldn’t stand it so she went up to “help” him and see him off.  I had a nice long phone call with him before he caught the plane Saturday afternoon.  I’ve also had several very emotional conversations with my wife since she saw him last at Security at AIA.

Now here’s the irony and the part I really don’t like about this.  He’s a grown man and a well trained, well-equipped, and hopefully well-led American soldier.  He’s at least as safe carrying a SAW in Afghanistan or Iraq as he would be working on a fishing boat, oil rig, or construction site in Alaska.  I worry about him but not really a lot more than you worry about any young man who really hasn’t settled down to a house and a good woman.  But, his life and my and my wife’s lives are being disrupted and his put at risk so that he can go to Iraq to make sure that they can have a free and fair election in March.  I’m pretty much OK with American soldiers giving the people of Iraq that opportunity.  What I want to know is if my son’s Commander in Chief is going to allow the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to have a free and fair election tomorrow, and I have exactly zero confidence that He will.

Vasser’s diary on “Thinking the Unthinkable” got me thinking.  Several have posted about the various labels we can apply to our enemies and which they apply to themselves.  Liberal is a word they long applied to themselves to avoid the stigma that was attached to “progressive,” which was merely code for communist by the ’30s, and they certainly couldn’t use socialist or communist and get elected.  Rush and others successfully demonized Liberal and now they’re trying progressive again because they, rightly I think, believe that nobody remembers its former communist connotation.  Anyway, I don’t have a good marketable label for them, but I’ve dealt with them enough in their union and political operative form to be able to describe and analyze them.  The following is a chapter from the book I’m working on aimed at Republican candidates for public offices and appointments:

Something that has passed with little notice is the characterization of states as Red or Blue.  We Republicans have accepted it and I use it because it is accepted, but we should understand its meaning since that explains so much about the opposition.  In war gaming, the Blue Force is the friendly force; the Red Force is the opposition force – the enemy.  I do not know who first did it, I saw it first in USA Today, but immediately after President Bush’s election in 2000, the media branded Republicans as the Red Force, the enemy, and we have accepted that branding.  What were we thinking?  The Democrats and their allies view their way of governing as the established way and we are the enemy, the opposition force to their version of truth, beauty, and the American Way of Life.  Most Republicans just see themselves as regular people trying to govern as regular people would want to be governed, harking back to old-fashioned Edmond Burke inspired notions of government by the consent of the governed.  The Democrats aren’t much on the consent of the unenlightened masses.

It is not coincidental that the geographic base of the current Democrat Party, the Blue States, is the same area that has afflicted this country with “ism” after “ism” and “reform” after “reform” since the earliest days of the country[1].  We Republicans are usually astounded by the hypocrisy these people routinely exhibit, but if you consider the history, it is easily explained; huge fortunes were made in the Northeast in the rum and slaves triangle trade – no slave ship ever flew a Confederate flag, in smuggling goods past the British, in whaling, in financing and shipping slave-produced cotton, in the slave-based “golden round” Alaska sea otter trade[2], in bilking shareholders, travelers, and shippers in the railroad era, and in smuggling liquor during Prohibition.  The people who made that money then sent junior to Hahvud or Yale, and he hasn’t looked back in his quest to make the world a better place - he has time to do it since neither he nor anyone he knows has done any meaningful work in generations.

The latter day puritans have moved the “shining city on a hill[3]” from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C. and replaced the Christian God with a post-modern ideology of socialism, secularism, and relativism, but they still believe that anyone who doesn’t believe in the perfectibility of man – as they define perfect - is a sinner who should be writhing in the hands of an angry God.  They’ve changed gods, but they are still just as rigid, narrow, and judgmental as they were when they were burning witches[4].

I have worked for and with many appointees and office holders, both Republicans and Democrats.  Most of the Republicans have been nice bumblers and most Democrats have been ruthlessly driven partisan jerks (there’s another more descriptive word, but I’m seeking a wide audience).  Ironically, most of the Republicans have been characterized as uncaring, partisan, and mean-spirited and most of the Democrats have been viewed as “nice.”  The Democrats prattle endlessly about caring and sharing, but the only thing I have ever seen them much care about is power and the only thing they share is other people’s money or wives and daughters.

The part that most Republicans I have ever dealt with just cannot grasp is how nasty and blatantly hypocritical these people are.  If you come out of business, you have to at least superficially get along with people you do not like; if for no other reason than the customer is always right and the money is always green.  Even when you are not dealing with customers, you are dealing with someone you might need to do business with, so you do not make enemies unnecessarily.  Most Republican office-seekers or holders are not ideologues; they form their beliefs on practical knowledge of what people think and what people want.  Democrats and their running dogs in unions, academia, media, and entertainment do not think that way.  They have their belief structure and view and measure everything and everyone from that belief structure; and they never talk to anyone who doesn’t share that belief structure.  Democrats go to Democrat restaurants and bars, Democrat plays, Democrat movies, and Democrat social events – it never occurs to them that anyone goes anywhere else.  If you do not go where they go, do what they do, watch and listen to what they do – think NPR and Michael Moore, and think like they do, you are not human; they deny your existence – terming most of America “fly-over country” comes straight from their heart.  It is the same mindset that justified exterminating the Jews, but if you said they thought like the Nazis, you’d be the one from whom the media was demanding an apology.

The typical Democrat political operative or union leader is not especially difficult to deal with.  Their views are Marxist – whether they know it or not, but their thought processes are logical and thus predictable.  Since they are logical, they can be practical and even hardcore Marxism countenances compromise with the opposition when it is to one’s advantage.  The “college radical” and academic opposition is another matter all together.  While you weren’t looking acadaemia repealed logic and declared that truth was dead.  The German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche and his blathering about will, creativity, and supermen should have been left moldering in the rubble of the Third Reich, but he and his progeny are alive and well in a university near you and probably in your kids’ brains as well.  Old Nietzsche himself is too difficult, dated and tainted by Nazism – think Triumph of the Will - to be wholeheartedly embraced, but his disciple Foucault is the darling of the Academe and the Left; he’s French, Gay, and dead from AIDS, what more could you want?  The second stringers, Derrida and Rorty, complete the post-modernist philosophical pantheon, and Rorty is from the University of Virginia for Christ’s sake!

I would not sentence anyone to actually reading postmodernist drivel; if you are at all rational, it just doesn’t make any sense anyway[5].  But, the essence of it is that these people deny rationality; there is no Truth, there is just what is true for me, right for me.  This is where all the celebration of diversity and “it’s not wrong, it’s just different” crap comes from.  What makes these people difficult politically is that they view reality totally differently from we sane people; we are astounded by their willingness to lie and do not deal well with being constantly lied about – think “Bush Lied, People Died.”  But they are not lying.  You and I can lie if we know the truth and choose to say something different.  These people deny that there is truth in any absolute, objective sense; there is only that which they believe to be true, a license to say and do whatever they want.  Nobody has learned to deal with this yet and it is the reason that President Bush’s numbers were in the thirties or lower near the end of his term.  Foucault and his ilk say that the only role of the intellectual is to criticize and foment change; they never have to pose a solution, they just say what you’re doing is wrong.  Sound familiar?

I think I have a pretty good handle on dealing with the standard Marxist Democrat; nobody has come up with a good way to deal with the postmodern nihilists.  Right now we Republicans can win because thankfully not everyone went to the university and many of us that did didn’t buy it.  The calculus gets more and more grim, though, when we think that we now have two or more generations who’ve been brought up on, “it’s not wrong, it’s just different.”  On this one, the only thing we have going for us is demographics: liberals have a much lower birth rate than conservatives.  That said, Hispanics have a higher birth rate than either.

David Horowitz in How to Beat the Democrats discusses the fundamental difference in approach between Republican and Democrat politicians, and any Republican office holder or seeker should study his work.  Republicans approach government as a management problem and they seek rational solutions.  Democrats just want to keep their butts in the big chairs and their constituencies intact.  The minimum winning coalition has been a fixture in political thought for over three decades; you need fifty percent plus one and getting more than one takes one too many promises.[6]  The old version of the minimum winning coalition was basing your coalition on solving the problems of the constituencies in that coalition.  In the Clinton Era, the Democrats metastasized the old formula and based their coalitions on not solving the problems; they just talked about them endlessly and felt their pain.  I defy you to find a thing that Clinton actually did in eight years in office other than wag his weenie and his finger.  It is a smart way to keep your behind in the big chair.  If you ever actually solved a problem, you would lose the constituency associated with it and your butt would no longer be in the big chair.  Republicans on the other hand keep trying to solve problems.

Whenever you pose a solution to a problem somebody is going to be unhappy with your solution and the Democrats are going to have a better idea.  If your Republican idea has broad public support, the Democrats will adopt your idea but will say they can do it better and attack you for how you do it.   If you are having trouble believing this, just look at how they voted for the war in Iraq and then attacked everything President Bush did thereafter.  In the Democrat response to Bush’s 2005 State of the Union address, they actually used the line; “We can do it better,” over and over.  You’d best believe that they can keep up the debate on how to do it better until the next election.  You will look around and realize that you have just spent a term doing nothing but talking about doing something better, all the while enduring their relentless ad hominem attacks – checked your poll numbers lately?  The bureaucrats are always ready to help the Democrats because they have endless ideas about how your idea will not work – it’s too simplistic usually – and how they and the Democrats can do it better.  I might be willing to write bad checks for Ann Coulter, but she’s wrong; you don’t talk to liberals.  You ignore them or you screw them.  If you buy into that doing it better process, you are about to become a failed footnote.

If you got fifty percent plus one or work for someone who did, you have a mandate.  You don’t have to give a damn about what the opposition thinks until the next election cycle.  This fact eludes most Republicans.  Republicans are terrified of being labeled partisan and mean-spirited, and most Republicans got to where they are politically by being nice guys or girls.  That “hail fellow well met” that served you so well in the Legislature, Chamber, or the Rotary will just get you screwed in the executive branch.  If you just have to be a “nice guy,” you need a chief of staff or other deputy depending on where in the structure you are who is a real SOB.  Give her a mandate to keep things running and adopt a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude about how she does it.  Democrats are masters of this; the office holder is always Mr. Nice Guy, but behind the scenes are operatives who are anything but nice.  This built-in disingenuousness is hard for most Republicans, and there really are not a lot of skillful operatives around, so I do not recommend it unless you have your own Karl Rove.  Democrats and their running dogs do not believe that any government other than theirs is legitimate so as soon as you are in office, the Democrats, the press, and the elites will start telling you about how you need to “reach out” to them.  The reason they want you to reach out is that you are still too far away for them to bite you!

Americans are rich and lazy.  Even poor Americans are rich and lazy compared to the rest of the world.  Oh, we have our hard-driving entrepreneurs and our magnificent military, but the res publica of America is not going to do anything that it does not absolutely have to do.  If you just won political office, you own them.  The ideologues will stay with their old alliances, but the rest of them will come to the fundraiser to retire your campaign debts.  You can ignore the ideologues, and so long as you look like you’re winning, the rest of them will whore for you.

I started this book writing like I was a pretty nice guy.  It was a bait and switch, I’m not.  I am abrasive, confrontational, ruthless, and have been a very successful Republican political appointee.  That said, I am not a comfortable Republican.  The Republican Party still has way too much used car salesman karma for me, and there are altogether too many “Republican” wannabe office holders who make me want to count my fingers after I shake hands with them.  I am an ideological conservative, maybe a conservative ideologue, and I am the kind of conservative that the Lefties find scariest, since I am a conservative who isn’t a Christian.  Though I was raised in Baptist confinement, I simply have never found Faith.  My conservatism is practical and philosophical; the only faith I profess is in markets, knowledge and republican democracy, in about that order.  I guess that makes me a secularist of a different sort.  Those of you coming from Faith will find more than a hint of amorality in my views – I didn’t make the governmental world, I’ve just learned how to live in it.  That is your warning, so if you need to stop reading because you need to base things on Faith, this is the place.

The Romans had it right: Metuant dum Oderant – they may hate so long as they fear.  Our Founding Fathers wanted to emulate the Roman Republic; we Republicans now contend for the purple of the American Empire.  If you will govern, you will be judged by the quality of your enemies.  It is OK to be hated, so long as it is the right people who hate you.  If you are a Republican, the Democrats, the press, the elites, the academy, the unions, and the bureaucracy must hate and fear you.  If they do not, you are doing something wrong.

From here on out, this book is going to be negative, partisan, and sometimes mean-spirited.  In places it is sarcastic and cynical, but I’ve learned to expect the worst and then be pleasantly surprised when I don’t get it – it is better that way than the other way.  I also generalize and stereotype some occupations and groups; I know it isn’t fair to every member of the group, but you don’t have time to find out which ones are the exceptions.  Stereotypes are evolved by a social group for a purpose: they keep the group safe so it does not get hurt while it figures out the individual(s) that may be an exception.  I’ll say it out front, most of government works nominally well most of the time, but the thing that it handles worst is change.  Your election will be a dramatic change.  The things that are working OK and that you do not try to change will not hurt you, so there’s no reason to talk about them.  This is about the things that must change and the things that can hurt you as you try to effect that change.  This work is not much about policy, that part is up to you and varies from place to place and year to year.  On policy, you know who and what you are, or want to be, or you would not be reading this.  Also, this is not is legal advice; I’m not a lawyer, so get yourself one.  This is a bureaucrat’s experience and bureaucrats live in a world of applying and interpreting laws, but have your attorney reconcile these ideas with your local law.

So, way back in February when the news was all about Aah-nold getting a grip on those CA state employee unions and furloughing employees to save money I wrote this: http://www.redstate.com/achance/2009/02/07/californias-forced-time-off-plan/

Today, I read in the McClatchey rag, Anchorage’s California based newspaper, this: http://www.adn.com/nation/story/1075115.html

I missed it a bit because I’m not real up on CA’s wierd public labor laws and they got it from a judge rather than an arbitrator. Now, CA already didn’t get whatever work the 50K employees might have done and now they have to pay them. I suspect at least some of them have all sorts of penalty pay provisions in their agreements to make sure they get paid for the inconvenience of not getting paid right to begin with as well.

And some of you wonder why I sometimes have a bad disposition; I dealt with people like this for 30 years!

“Sarah From Alaska: The Sudden Rise and Brutal Education of a New Conservative Superstar” is a new book about former Governor Palin and the VP Campaign.  The writers are two reporters who covered her extensively during the campaign and then came back to Alaska for further research.  I haven’t read it yet, but I know all the people quoted in the linked Juneau Empire article and I respect their opinions.  It also has the ring of truth from my own observations.  Here’s the article: http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/112309/sta_528072912.shtml#mdw-comments

Pat Forgey is a local reporter for the Empire and I’d consider him pretty objective.  You’ll note that the quotes closely conform with much that I’ve said about She Who Was Once Governor.  Maybe hearing it from somebody else will cause less hysteria than hearing it from me.  So, to avoid having another thread shut down, I’ll leave this diary too short and let the linked article speak for itself.

Those of you who know my stuff know that I have long advocated that Republicans boycott the axes of evil from Boston to DC and from Seattle to San Diego.  Nobody in any of those places is ever going to support a Republican and every thing you say and do gets filtered through a hostile left wing media.  Republicans should make news in the places where they can get votes and from which they serve.  If the WaPo, NYT, LAT, and the “big three” TV networks want to cover Republicans, their reporters need to learn to think of a Holiday Inn as a luxury hotel.

Sarah Palin is going to Chicago and NYC for some specific TV appearances but beyond that, her book tour is strictly through flyover country; in other words, the places where people vote for Republicans.  The Anchorage Daily Worker’s, er, News’ story is here: http://www.adn.com/palin/story/1000006.html

It’s well known that I am no great fan of Sarah Palin as Governor of Alaska, but she has demonstrated a keen sense of the issues and style of political action that resonates with our core constituencies.  This book and speaking tour will allow her to speak directly to the base without having to modulate her message for a hostile audience or have it filtered by a hostile media.  All of that is a good thing!

Now I’m from the generation that most of you think destroyed America.  I was educated by the National Defense Education Act and did Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll in the ’60s.  I left college as a dope-smoking, FM radio listening, liberal Democrat.  Then I met Life.

But no matter what many of you think of people of my generation, I pretty much did it right.  After a period of youthful adventure and excess, I got married, settled down, raised a kid, and made payments; every American’s duty.  I did what I was ’sposed to do for 17 years.  Though I was no angel and lived on the road a lot, I always came home and her cut always came off the top.  But, women of the ’60s being as they are, she needed “more space,” a euphemism for body parts unknown, so she took off and left me as a single father of a teenaged daughter.  Life gets real tough with that kind of unrelenting responsibility.

So, I was single, had a nice house, nice car, and a good income; ‘course I did have that kid.  For a while if they weren’t under 25 and didn’t have a belly I could bounce a quarter on, I wasn’t interested, but then I figured out that I did kinda miss talking to them, and I started dating “older” women.  That means, you’re dating her past; boyfriends and husbands, kids usually, and a whole lot of attitude, but they do know what goes where and why.  And that’s when I learned a vital lesson.  Women often run from marriages or relationships and seek “comfort” where they can find it.  That isn’t as sexist as it sounds; women need a reason, men usually just need a place.  And, I entered the world of separated and divorced women.  Not coincidentally, the single largest demographic that supported Comrade Obama.

Now I gotta’ admit, a recently separated or divorced woman is a lot of fun.  She’s either looking to make up for everything she thinks she was missing or she’s trying to rub her ex-to-be’s nose in what she’s doing.  Either way it’s fun so long as you don’t think about it too much.

So, America had a fairly long period of responsible adulthood from Reagan through Bush I.  It had a fling on the side with that dashing and charming Slick Willie; you could just hear all of them saying, “I can change him; he wouldn’t cheat on me.”  But then they came back to dull, responsible life with GWB for awhile.  But after eight years, they needed “more space.”  This adulthood crap with all of its limitations and responsibility just sucks!  And there was all this adventure and hope and change out there just waiting if you only just soaped up that ring and got out there.  And so they did; ring in the pocket, marriage vows forgotten; time to have a little “change.”

And what us old guys who’d been through this understood was you had to be really, really careful with somebody looking for a little “change.’  So, America went out and got a little “change,” and maybe has just discovered that it ain’t much different and maybe is worse.  What you always had to worry about when you’d just been that “change” was she’d get herself a whole bunch of guilty conscience and go home to ex-to-be and confess all.  That’s when he and his friends Smith and Wesson came looking for YOU.

The cuckholded husband and his friends just went out looking for Comrade Obama tonight.  A lot of people didn’t like the hard, narrow path of personal responsibilty and the difficult duty of seeing our way through a war in a barbarous land.  They thought all they had to do was go out and get themselves a little “change.”  It has one Helluva price.

On October 18, 1867, the United States took possession of Russian America.  The rather meager ceremony took place in the Capital of Russian America, Sitka.  Some of the Russian structures of that day still remain and there is still a considerable Russian Orthodox religious presence in the State.  Other than Russian and Russian-derived surnames among the Aleuts and some Southeastern Indians, there is little to show for the Russians’ time here.

The sale to the United States made a virtue of necessity.  The Russians barely held the territory and both the US and Great Britain cast an imperialistic eye on the almost forsaken colony.  The British were encroaching inland from Canada through the good offices of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Americans had developed a very lucrative trade all along the Northwest coast and Alaska as well as significant whaling interests off Alaska’s Northwest Coast.

All the Western mercantilist powers wanted to trade with China for its tea, textiles, and porcelain, but the Westerners had almost nothing the Chinese wanted except specie and trading in specie was anathema in that time.  The one Western product the Chinese had a great interest in was the fur of the Sea Otter, a luxury product of great value in China.  The best source of Sea Otter fur was Russian America, but the Chinese and Russians hated each other and the Chinese would only trade with the Russians at one remote entrepot far up the Amur River.  The Russians barely had the shipping to supply their colony and it was only with the greatest difficulty that they could bring otter fur far up the Amur River.  Enter the Americans.

New England based shipowners, many of them Quakers, developed what came to be known as The Golden Round trade.  They built handy, relatively shallow-draft vessels that could both ply the coastal waters of the Northwest and Alaska and sail the open Pacific, crewed them very lightly, and all the crew worked on shares of the voyage’s profits.  They stocked the ships with trade goods ranging from trinkets to staples and also with rum and guns.  The Tlingit Indians of Southeast Alaska were particularly fond of brass keys but also had a taste for rum and guns.  The Russians came to rely on trading otter fur for staples with the Americans.  The Americans also traded directly with the coastal Indians and Aleuts, much to the chagrin of both the English and the Russians.  Loaded with otter and other fur, the Americans, who enjoyed good relations with the Chinese, sailed across the Pacific to the Chinese ports of their choice, though the trade concentrated on Shanghai, and exchanged fur for tea, textiles, porcelain and other Chinese products.  They then sailed around Asia and Africa to Europe where they sold a portion of their goods and on to the US with the remainder.  Voyages could be as long as four years and the AVERAGE profit from a voyage was 4000%!

Russia had developed a good relationship with the US, even sending a fleet to visit during the Civil War.  The Crimean War was still fresh in the memory and a cash-strapped Tsar fearful of finding the hostile British on his eastern border sold Russian America to the United States for $7.2 million dollars.  In an interesting and little known irony, the British ultimately almost paid for Alaska.   In June of 1865, the British-built Sea Lion renamed as the Confederate States Ship Shenandoah all but destroyed the US whaling fleet off the coast of Northwest Alaska.  The US pursued claims against Great Britain for violation of the British Neutrality Act in what became known as the Alabama Claims, named for the most famous Confederate commerce raider, the CSS Alabama.  The Alabama Claims tribunal, one of the first usages of arbitration to settle international disputes, awarded the US some $15.5million in damages, $6.8 million of which was for the Shenandoah’s work off Alaska.  Even without the contribution of the British, it is said that US commerce recouped the $7.2 million from fur, whaling, and fishing proceeds in the first year of US ownership.

By the late 1800s, the otters were all but extinct but gold had been discovered first in the Yukon Territory of Canada and then in several locations in Alaska.  By the turn of the century, the Treadwell Mine in Douglas, now a suburb of Juneau, was the largest and richest gold mine in the World.  The Treadwell had extensive works under the Gastineau Channel and the mine collapsed in 1917.  It was supplanted by the Alaska-Juneau Mine across the Channel in Juneau which in turn became the largest and richest gold mine in the World until the US removed its labor allocation in 1944 and the mine was closed.  The fixed cost of gold at $35/oz. made the mine uneconomic to re-open post war.  An attempt to re-open the still-rich mine in the 1990s failed due to environmentalist opposition.  For those of you who’ve been to Juneau or recall pictures of it, the mountain behind downtown Juneau has over 700 miles of tunnels in it from the A-J mine’s productive days.

The Territory continued to produce gold and other metals, fur, fish and timber but was largely ignored except as a sinecure for political appointees and their friends in business until WWII and the Cold War.  The Alaska Highway giving the first road link to the Territory was completed in 1942.  Extensive military establishments were placed in Anchorage and Fairbanks as well as on the Aleutian Chain where the Japanese for a time held Kiska and Attu Islands and bombed Dutch Harbor.  The Cold War brought extensive military development in several areas of the Territory and a deadly game of chicken between Soviet and US aircraft and ships became commonplace.

Oil was discovered in significant quantities in Cook Inlet, near Anchorage in the early ’50s.  This potential oil wealth as well as Soviet Bloc pressure on the US about the political status of its colonies and territories gave heart to supporters of Alaska Statehood.  Statehood became a reality in 1959 and this year is the State of Alaska’s 50th Anniversary year.  Oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope in 1968 - and the rest is history.

From Statehood in 1959, Alaska had the standard federal style system of decentralized personnel administration based in the operating departments with a central Personnel agency setting policy and providing some oversight and audit.  The system was governed by statute and regulation and was state of the art in the late 1940s.  Pay was set by legislative enactment except in the ferry system which had collective bargaining.  The government became vastly larger with burgeoning revenue from the North Slope almost concurrently with the State’s adoption of collective bargaining for virtually all of its employees from 1972.  Collectively bargained pay and processes elbowed the old statutory and regulatory system aside for day to day operations but the old system remained in place for non-represented employees and to fill the gaps not covered by collective bargaining.  The system had become desperately creaky and outdated but this isn’t the sort of thing you can get politicians to spend money on in lean times.  The Democrat Knowles Administration took office in ‘94 and under pressure from their union allies gutted the already minimal centralized authority over personel and labor relations.  In typical Democrat fashion, in the name of streamlining they repealed all the rules to make it safe to hire a Democrat into any job regardless of job requirements of qualifications and at any desired rate of pay.  The almost total decentralization made the always powerful politically appointed Administrative Services Directors almost all-powerful regarding hiring and pay of employees, subject only to the limitations of the unions’ influence over the administration.

I and some of my friends in the government endured this travesty and planned to rectify it at the first opportunity.  On taking office in ‘02, we secured Governor Murkowski’s approval to implement a reorganization of all HR/LR functions in accordance with a White Paper on government organization we had done for in secret for the Campaign.  We planned it with a select and trusted few by dark of night and implemented it by bringing in the major players to the Governor’s Conference Room and telling them that this was the way their world was going to look tomorrow and their only choice was whether to be in that world or not.

We completely centralized the HR function under the statutory director of personnel, my primary co-conspirator, and the LR function in a separate division that I headed.  We rescinded all HR/LR authority outside our offices and took all the employees away from the Agencies and put them under our supervision.  It was a struggle particularly in getting competent personnel.  The Agencies had had a collection of fixtures, pets, and not a few playthings, many of which were worse than useless.  Suffice it to say that there was a lot of turnover when these people were placed under supervision that actually knew something about the work.  Some of the women in particular really, really didn’t like being placed under female supervision where their talents would be less appreciated.

There was a constant drumbeat of opposition and backstabbing but my friend and I had the personal horsepower to hold them off and keep the system running.  With a centralized system we were able to stop the private deals and most of the special pay.  Can’t say we stopped the pets and playthings but we moved them to the level where you had to be the pet or plaything of somebody who was powerful enough to make you into what was/is essentially a political appointee to keep you around.  My friend retired in ‘05, but her successor was one of our cohort and was able to keep it mostly together on the Personnel side.  I retired in July ‘06 and the holdovers in the Agencies started dancing for joy.

Enter Sarah Palin and her buddies who’d never run anything larger than a real estate office or the “City” of Wasilla.  Sarah promptly ran off most everyone appointed by Murkowski, who just happened to be pretty much all of the Republicans who knew where the lights switches and restrooms in State offices were.  So, the Departments start their pleas to the Governor about how they aren’t being served and how they’re the “customers,” and of course Palin doesn’t know any better and ain’t much on that detail stuff anyway.

So, it took them until early this year but to make it look legitimate rather than just a power play, they get an appropriation and do a study to “examine the HR/LR processes” and make recommendations for a more “satisfactory” system.  I didn’t go look it up but I’d say it was $100K or so, maybe more.  When I first saw the RFP, I said, “Oh well, this is how they get their HR girls back and start playing politics with unions again.”  So, here is Alaska’s taxpayers dollars at work: http://dop.state.ak.us/iscsi/fileadmin/DirectorsOffice/pdf/StateOfAlaskaHRStructureStudy.pdf

Interestingly, and I suspect not coincidentally, the contractor didn’t bother to talk to me or any of the other people involved in the ‘03 restructuring.

There in all the radiant glory of charts and graphs and captions with circles and arrows is the contractor’s finding that the Administrative Services Directors, almost all of whom are Democrats and most of whom are holdover Democrat appointees are getting their girl down the hall back and the central agency will be ceding day to day authority over personnel and labor relations back to them.  You’d think that the great hope of Republicans around the Nation would understand that Personnel IS Policy and try to keep it under Administration control.  And now, even as much as I hate that government, I’m going to have to get out of my bathrobe and start moving pieces around to stop them from pulling it off.

OK, it’s after midnight ’cause I’ve been writing a brief so I can make some money.  Holocaust is one of those words that has been thrown around until it is now some shapeless, meaningless hunk of something.  There really was a Holocaust or Shoah, the Hebrew term for it.  I’m not an academic historian and I’m working from memory, so save the nitpicking; if you find something to corect, correct it.

At the beginning, the NSDAP, the Nazis, were actually a pretty rational response to hyperinflation, predatory reparations, and communism within Germany.  Unfortunately, like some even here in America today, Hitler and his followers were convinced of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the financial system and thus Germany and the Western World and held that conspiracy responsible for the “knife in the back” of German in the Kaiser’s War.

By the late ’30s the Nazi’s had essentially made Jews into a Weberian “other;” they were non-persons in Germany and essentially had no civil rights.  You could treat a Jew the same way you could treat a dog in the World before PETA came along.  As the war began, the Nazis became more inclusive; Poles, Slavs from Eastern Europe and Western Russia, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled persons, and most anybody the Nazis didn’t like became “others” outside the reach of civil justice.

Extermination began with the military officers and intelligencia of Poland and was done enthusiastically by both the Germans and the Soviets.  Jews were just herded into the ghettos early on.  As German conquest continued, anyone who got in their way or who might become a leader simply died of a 9mm brain hemmorhage courtesy of the Gestapo.  That was pretty much equal opportunity.  It didn’t much matter what your belief system or ethnicity was, if you could be a threat, you died.

When the Germans turned east on 22 June 1941, the Holocaust began.  The massive German pincer movements left millions of troops and civilians behind German lines.  The rear eschelon Wehrmacht troops and the einsatzcommando (special action groups) filled in behind the front rank Wehrmacht  units.  Their job was to find and eliminate Jews and political opponents.  At this stage of the war, it was done by rounding them up, making them dig a trench, and machine-gunning them into the trench.  That process took a lot of time and ammunition and was hard on troop morale since the feldgrau didn’t find much honor in machine gunning women and children.  The Germans tried all sorts of stuff.  For a while tractor trailers with the tractor’s exhaust piped into the trailer filled with Jews and other political prisoners was a favored option.  Esterminating the enemies of the Reich was proving to be both a complex and expensive proposition.

But, by ‘42 or so German industry and technology had solved the problem.  It is one of the great ironies of the Second World War that the Wehrmacht often lacked transport for its troops, armor, ammunition, and supplies, but the SS NEVER lacked transport for Jews and other undesirables.  The Germans set up industrial scale extermination centers across occupied Europe.  Auschwitz was only the biggest and most notorious.  These camps were simply death factories.  Most had some industrial component attached to them where German war production was carried on.  Jews, Soviet soldiers, and other undesirables were worked on a 500 - 1000 calorie a day diet until they could work no more and then sent back to the camp for extermination.

Machine-gunning had proven problematic, CO poisoning was time-consuming and expensive, but a powerful industrial insecticide, Zyclon-B, turned out to be just the trick.  Jews and other undesirables could just be herded into the “showers,” dosed with Zyclon-B, and after a suitable interval, hauled to the ovens; the stench of burning flesh hovered over all of the concentration camps day and night.  To save labor, the Germans even recruited from the Jews and other undesirables to do all the dirty work.  The kapos got to live a little longer before their 9mm brain hemorhage or shower came.

There really was nothing special about it.  The Wehrmacht took a town.  The “Special Action Group” came in and took care of the Jews and undesirables; sorta’ like urban renewal.  If you still have some belief in the “good German” read Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.”  Everything the Germans did in the East was properly enacted in the most democratic country that was a combatant in WWII.  The “healthy opinion of the Volk” is the most common justification of German actions in German court decisions of the Nazi era.

I don’t know that anybody really knows the numbers.  It is undisputable that Jews were essentially wiped out in Europe.  The Germans killed millions of Soviet soldiers, gypsies, homosexuals, common criminals, and pretty much anyone else who didn’t fit into their Nietsche-esque view of what the Superman might look like.

Go look it up; the literature is out there so that you can make your own decisions about what happens when technology meets ideology and there are no values to inform that meeting.

Whether it is his flaccid foreign policy, his constant attempts to curry favor by deprecating our Country, or his refusal to actually take a firm position on anything, Comrade Obama is being true to his makers: The Harvard School of Law.  It is ironclad dogma at Hahvud that any policy development or bargaining be based on identification of issues and commonalities rather than on taking firm positions on matters.  Hahvud calls this interest based bargaining and has developed an elaborate vocabulary for it that has crept into both business and government-speak.   There is also an elaborate system of ritual associated with any bargaining process, an understanding of which will explain some of the seemingly silly things this and other administrations do.  I’ll save you the $4 grand or so that Hahvud and MIT will charge you for the four day training on interest based bargaining and give you a crash course on IBB and the vocabulary of bargaining used by Comrade Obama and the elites.

Unlike Comrade Obama and his minions, I’ve actually bargained literally thousands of labor agreements.  I’ve been forced to try to use IBB by administrations that thought it was cool.  I’ve had unions try to coerce me into using it because it is so greatly to the union’s advantage.  I’ve taken Hahvud/MIT’s class and sent my staff and even my boss.  We saw it as a “know your enemy” course, Comrade Obama and his ilk see it as the revealed wisdom.  I will state categorically that IBB is only useful for a union-friendly government or management to work together with the union to make it look like they’re doing something while giving the union whatever it wants despite what the shareholders or taxpayers want.  It is simply a scam but it has penetrated the thinking of practically every business and government in the Country and is informing our foreign policy formulation today, a truly frightening thought.  Whenever you hear someone speak about identifying the stakeholders, identifying interests, identifying shared interests, finding concensus positions, getting buy-in from the stakeholders, and the like, you are listening to someone using the vocabulary of IBB - whether they know it or not.  Even the wildly popular “Getting to Yes” bargaining techniques aimed at business are just a deriviative of IBB, though some of that stuff is actually useful in pure commercial bargaining.

The unenlightened evil that Havud seeks to address is so-called positional bargaining, the kind of bargaining most of us would take for granted.  In positional bargaining whether you’re engaged in nuclear non-proliferation bargaining, collective bargaining, or trying to buy a house each party identifies its position and can take action ranging from complete acceptance of the other party’s position to staunch maintenance of its own position to any point between those extremes.  The watchwords in IBB are that you should never “become positional.”  Think about that for awhile.

Using IBB, parties to negotiations would hire someone familiar with IBB to jointly train each party’s negotiating team in the vocabulary and processes of IBB - that’s guaranteed and expensive work for anybody who’s had the training, and yes, I do have that certificate handy.  After getting to know each other as individuals, an important part of the process, and developing a shared process and vocabulary through training, the parties then separate to assess the interests they seek to serve in the upcoming negotiations.  An IBB’er would never crassly take a position such as “It is the United States’ postion that Iran should not have nuclear weapons” or “The US will guarantee the safety and sovereignty of the State of Israel.”  An IBB’er would say that “It is in the interest of the US and all the nations of the Middle East that there not be a nuclear threat to that region.”  See how that automatically establishes an equivalence between Iran and Israel?  This is, of course, completely in keeping with the “it’s not wrong, it’s just different” thinking of the elites about most anything except conservatives.  In the collective bargaining context as well, IBB establishes an equivalence between the management of the company or government’s desire to protect and enrich the shareholders or taxpayers and the union’s desire to protect and enrich its members.  This is why really stupid and expensive things get done in Blue states where the government and the union view themselves as partners.  Beware anyone who uses the word partner in government!  Then the parties come back together and exchange their views of the interests being served in the negotiations and try to achieve a consensus on shared interests from which they can develop an agreement that reflects those shared interests.  Throw in a dash of fairy dust and some unicorn farts and you can all live happily ever after.

So, when you see and hear Comrade Obama reaching out to talk with adversaries that reasonable people would conclude there is no basis for discussions, you are seeing him naively act on the IBB dogma that there are always some shared interests between parties and the only way to find those shared interests is to never be adversarial or become positional.  Thus, IBB, though cumbersome and expensive, will work where there really are some shared interests and where the parties have correctly identified their interests.  At the most elemental level whether one is dealing with an employer and a union or bargaining between two nations, there would seem to be a shared interest in survival and that both parties would accurately assess a threat to their survival.  However, history is replete with examples of companies and unions having destroyed themselves by sacrificing their future for a present benefit or of nations not accurately assessing that another nation posed an existential threat, see, e.g., “Peace in our time.”  It is a particularly common trait of leftwing elitists to not understand either the thinking or the power of anyone who does not accept their view of things.  I made a very good career out of left wing unions’ inability to accurately assess what the employer might do and deluding themselves about how much power they had to influence employer actions.  It was common enough and so much a part of the leftist dogma that I think it is a general rule in dealing with American leftists that they will not accurately assess their interests.  If I can figure that out, so can the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese, the NorKors, and any one of the entities out there who may not share the US’ interests.

It is one thing when a naive and inexperienced mayor or governor buys in on this stuff and hands the deed to his city or state to a union.  It’s only money and in the next election you toss him out and the next administration tries to get the money back.  It is quite another thing when a hopelessly naive and inexperienced POTUS’ has a worldview that casts his own nation and the most vile regimes in the World as equivalents in terms of interests.  Comrade Obama really does believe that Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons justifies Iran’s seeking nuclear weapons because in his worldview informed by Hahvud, they are at best equivalents and if you believe, as I do, that he is an open Communist, he would at heart believe that Israel is the evil in the Middle East and Iraq is merely struggling against Jewish and Colonialist oppression.  Be afraid!

Promoted from diaries. - Moe Lane

For those who haven’t read my bio, my background is in collective bargaining and employee relations.  I cut my teeth on the union side as an understudy to an old-time liberal Democrat trade unionist.  His mantra was, “Before they do anything, make sure they think about what you’ll do about it.”  After a stint in the private sector, I went to work for the State government representing the employer in dealing with labor unions.  That is actually very common in both public and private sector labor relations since the union side is the best place to get good, hands on training in labor relations practices.

I began working on the employer side at the depth of the depression brought on by the oil price crash of ‘86.  Gov. Cowper (Democrat), elected with great state employee union support, took one look at the revenue and budget projections and announced “All bets are off” to the Democrat constituencies accustomed to having their hooves in the trough.  There ensued a decade of concessionary bargaining and labor strife.  The times broke the back of the old-fashioned independent association that represented the bulk of State employees and the State’s largest unit came to be represented by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).  The old association had acted like a labor union, AFSCME acted like a political party and a whole new education began for me.

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OK, I promised I’d do this.  It’s the middle of the night and I can’t sleep.  Had a bunch of dental work done Friday, I’m allergic to the painkiller the Doc gave me, and he’s been off all weekend and doesn’t work Mondays, so I’m in just the right mood.

You’ve all heard me talk about the “shadow government” that the Democrats have.  This work will attempt to describe it and how we foolishly feed and fund it.  The existence of the shadow government is important because it explains how the Democrats are never out of power even when they’re out of power and how Republicans can never seem to actually get anything done.  And, typical of the stupid party, most of it is our own damn fault.

Once upon a time labor unions were the cash cow and manpower pool for the Democrats.  They still are, maybe even moreso, but now they’re far from the only one.   Part of the rise of the shadow government comes from tax laws and part from mostly Republican initiatives to privatize government services.  For most Republicans a non-profit corporation is an oxymoron, for a Democrat it is the holy grail.  If instead of just stealing the money Randy Cunningham had set up some nice non-profits to do defense related contract work, hired a good government accountant, and then ear-marked a few billion to the non-profits - his share skillfully raked off by the accountant and put in a safe numbered account - he’d now be a multi-millionaire senator instead of a convicted felon.  Republicans generally have a small town Chamber of Commerce view of life and they are all over having the private sector do stuff rather than government.  Well, where government is just another competitor, the privatization initiative is probably right, but there are lots of things that government does because nobody else was willing to do it.  From the Reagan days forward, the Republicans won the battle of privatization and many, many government functions and programs have gone to the “private” sector.  The Democrats, however, won the war of privatization because they became the “private” sector to which the work has gone.  The Democrats have a vast network of for profit and non-profit companies that live almost entirely off state and federal government funding and do work almost exclusively for the government and Democrat constituencies.

All sorts of companies in your state are simply Democrat fronts.  Your state government’s departments of Health, Social Services, Education, Labor, Environmental Quality, and Natural Resources/Agriculture in large measure are simply money laundries that funnel state and federal taxpayer money to Democrat constituencies and ultimately to the Democrat Party itself.  There is little that we on the Right can do to stop direct federal appropriations or contracts and grants to the Democrat front groups.  There is much that we in the Red States can do to stop or control the federal funding that comes to the state and is distributed by the states’ appropriation processes.

All eyes these days are turned to ACORN; they’re the biggest and the worst.  But your state and city has all sorts of “community action programs” and housing assistance programs and legal resources programs.  Your state government is giving contracts to all sorts companies to do weatherization of low income houses or energy audits.  Your state’s department of labor is funnelling money to all sorts of job training programs - all run by retired union business agents - that never train anyone much, never place anyone in a job, and often only have paper “students.”   Your state’s evironmental quality department is funnelling all sorts of money to “companies” to study snail darters and rabid rats.  The education department funds all sorts of before school, after school, ESL, juvenile delinquent, and on, and on programs.   It’s also putting up all sorts of money to teach teachers this year’s new indoctrination scheme fresh from the Ed Schools.  And in doing that, it is funding the remote campi of most state universities.  If they didn’t have teachers, most remote campi wouldn’t exist.  And, to make it better, most teacher salary schemes are set up so that if the teachers take this year’s underwater basket weaving classes, they get paid more.  And I focussed on the social services sort of stuff that most Republicans so dislike, but the real cash cow in recent years has been GWB’s creation, the Department of Homeland Security.  DHS has been the personification of money for nothing and chicks for free; if you couldn’t get it funded anywhere else, go to DHS.   Folks, there ain’t no Republicans doing much of this stuff.  This is the way the Democrats give their staffers and officeholders jobs when they’re out of power.  This is the way that the Democrats fund themselves when they’re out of power because every one of these outfits knows that an “appropriate” share of its revenue had best find its way back to the Party or that revenue stream will dry up.  I could keep going with a litany of abuses and usurpations that result from federal funding, but I want to finish without throwing up on my keyboard.

So, what to do?  I think she was grandstanding and doesn’t really have a clue about how federal funding impacts states, but Sarah Palin was right in wanting to resist federal stimulus money because of the “strings” attached to it.  Unless you’re in Mississippi, federal money is a small percentage of your state’s operating budget.  (Don’t start on Alaska pork; most federal spending in Alaska is on stuff that the Fed owns or federal functions that are located in Alaska.)  Even though most states run most things with their own revenue, they routinely forfeit their sovereignty to the US in order to get federal funding to supplement their revenue.  That crazy-assed politically correct curriculum at your school was developed in DC and is the price of the five or ten percent of your school funding that comes from the Fed.  Those insane child protection regs that your Kid Nazi department’s lebian social workers enforce against responsible parents weren’t enacted by your legislature, they were the price of the federal funding for your Department of Health and So-called Services.  Those insane OSHA regs being enforced against the non-union employers in your state aren’t anything your legislature enacted, they’re regs or often only unenforceable guidelines that your state agreed to to get US DOL money.  I chose my words carefully, if you ever see an OSHA inspector on a union job, hire a skywriter.

So, what do we do?  Nothing in the Blue states, but if we do something about some of this stuff in the Red states, the businesses will move out of the Blues states; that’s a good Republican incentive.  The most obvious thing to do is refuse the money but that would require a suicide pact by all the Red state’s elected and appointed officials.  You all saw what happened to Sanford and Palin’s refusals; their legislatures took care of it at the first opportunity.  Maybe one day we stop the federal government’s overtaxation and redistribution scheme, but that day ain’t today.  Today’s solution is right out of Saul Alinsky; make them follow the rules.

Republican governments hate overhead, so administrative positions are always the first to go in a Republican government.  This is simply stupid.  The bean counters and auditors are what keep your government honest but the typical Republican governor or mayor gets rid of them first.  That both gives the Democrats a free rein because nobody’s watching them and lets some of your avaricious Republican friends steal so you can have some front page time with the paper that hates you most.

If you’re a Republican governor or attorney general, your mission should be the misery of any entity in your state that receives federal funds.  There isn’t a union or non-profit in America that can live by the rules if someone is looking over their shoulder.  Give me a staff of ten good auditors and program SMEs, and I’ll put anybody in America recieving public funds in Jail; the rules are so obtuse that nobody can follow them if anyone wants to go all Alinsky on them.

If we ever get the federal government back, we can see if we have the guts to cut off the federal appropriations altogether.  It is to the eternal discredit of GWB and the Republican “leadership” in Congress that they NEVER DID A THING about any of this.  Then we can take it to our states and cities that have NEVER DONE A THING about any of this.  Anybody ready to man up?

It’s the title of a Neil Sedaka song from a long, long time ago; before most of you were even a gleam in someone’s eyes.  I’m not a Buchanan fan, but Pat Buchanan has a piece out that bears some attention.  It’s titled, “Is America Coming Apart?”   You can read it here if you want: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=109478 I submit that America isn’t coming apart; it is apart.  We have what, I think, Seward described as an irrepressible conflict in this Country, a conflict every bit as irrepressible as the one that America experienced in 1860.  Except that this irrepressible conflict is hardly defined by geography as the previous one more or less was.  This conflict is defined in our minds.

I can generally say that I have nothing in common with California or New York and even less with Massachuesetts, but there are people in those states with whom I have much in common.  Likewise, the people of those states may well view Alaska as the breeding ground of troglodytes and the home of their bete noir, Sarah Palin, but there are plenty of people here who would fit right in in Berzerkley or The Village.

I don’t know how this plays out.  If Comrade Obama called on the governors of the several states to provide for him the troops to suppress the rebellion in the Red States, the question would be clear, though the answers might not be.  But he’s not going to do that; we aren’t a nation half slave and half free with those boundaries clearly set by state lines.  We are a people who are half willing to be enslaved and half not.  We can see geographic patterns but they’re generalizations.  Everyone here knows Kowalski; he lives in Taxachusetts!  I could very happily not be associated with Taxachusettes any longer, but I like Kowalski.  You can repeat that over and over and over.

I’m thinking of this on this solemn day; the day that Comrade Obama obviously thinks was payback for AmeriKKKa’s sins against the World.  I don’t want to be associated with that man.  All my life I’d have thought that if I ever awakened to find a practicing communist as President of the United States, I’d be standing or lying in the rubble and dying of radiation poisoning.  I don’t want to be associated with any person ignorant enough to have supported him.  I especially do not want to be associated with people who openly and knowingly accept and support his goals and objectives.

This boils down to people like me are going to suppress people like Comrade Obama and his supporters or they are going to suppress us.  A divided house cannot stand.

Marxist, socialist, communist, Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyite are all being thrown around fast and loose and often wrongly.  So, let us get our communists sorted out.  I only know the broad strokes and bright colors about the old time, hard line communists of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.  In that era you have the inheritors of Marx and Hegel and lots of talk of dialectic materialism and the like.  Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin all are of that ilk.  Trotsky and Stalin parted company over Stalin’s “bureaucratization” of communism.  Stalin set the pattern for the authoritarian communist state by harnessing the apparatus of the state to the Party.  He and Hitler were cut from the same cloth in this regard.  Trotsky was more the free-wheeling revolution for the sake of revolution type.  Cuba and North Korea are today’s inheritors of the Stalinist mold.   Mao was some of both; the enduring revolution and the Stalinist bureaucratic state.  Trotsky with a dash of Mao was more the model for today’s home grown communists in the US.

Obama and HRC, and most of their minions and handlers/backers are the incarnation of the Saul Alinsky model of stealth radicals.  Alinsky was more of the Trotskyite and was once aligned with the Socialist Workers Party, the Trotskyite wing of American communism.  Alinsky was not, however, a doctrinaire Soviet-style communist.  Alinsky took a lot from the Italian communist thinker, Gramsci, and turned to organizing institutions and recruiting “clean and articulate” young disciples who could “pass,” to use an old Black term, in business, education, media, and government and could get to positions of power as stealth communists.  It is no accident that Hillary Clinton wrote her thesis on Alinsky; she’s a prime example of the Alinsky model stealth communist.  She and Slick Willie would have been just as crazy left as Comrade Obama is if they hadn’t overplayed their hand leading to the Republican takeover in ‘94, which act thwarted the Revolution for the remainder of Clinton’s terms, leaving him nothing much to do but play with interns.

Only the fact that the MSM are fellow travellers allowed Comrade Obama to reach power; he has too much of a record as a radical, too many radical associations, and has said too much, particularly in his first book, to be a true stealth communist as Alinsky envisioned one.  But, we on the right could not yell loud enough for a deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid voting public to hear what kind of person they were poised to elect.  And that idiot McCain was too interested in being liked by his “friends” in DC.  So, we have a practicing communist as President and he is surrounded by practicing communists, some more stealthy than others, and some not stealthy enough, e.g., Van Jones.  Shuffling HRC off to State is a Stalinist touch, sort of a kinder, gentler version of the axe that Stalin had put in Trotsky’s head.

Taking a lesson from WJC’s failure, communists are good at learning from their failures, Comrade Obama would, I’m sure, liked to finesse things a lot more, but he has lost control of things to the unions’ greed for power and to the Democrat crazies in the House.  Hopefully, he won’t be able to rein them in and they will so disgust even the stupid members of the res publica that we can wrest one body away from them in ‘10.  If we don’t, welcome to the Peoples’ Republic of America.

September 3, 1949; ten years after Germany invaded Poland, a little less than four years after the war ended, the same year the hydrogen bomb was invented.  The H-bomb and I had a good run together.  I came into the World dirt poor but I didn’t know it for a long time.  In rural Georgia in those days heritage and social status meant a lot more than material wealth.  Those with ostentatous wealth got it after The War from the cotton lands they bought from widows and from the timber boom of the ’90s; being able to rattle off what company and regiment in General Lee’s Army your grandfather or great-grandfather served in meant a whole lot more for your social status.  That all changed when the Yankees came again.

Rural Georgia of the 1950s was differentiated from rural Georgia of the 1850s by gasoline and electricity and nobody had much of either.  I saw some pretty good arguments between my mother and father over whether it was necessary for the single 30 watt light bulb in the living room to be on.  The only really ugly fight I ever remember them having was over the fact that my father simply could not comprehend how she could have managed to spend $12 for her weekly trip to the grocery store.  Generally, if we didn’t grow it or kill it, we didn’t have it, and the grocery store was for stuff like sugar, coffee, tea, flour, and meal, though we often had our own meal ground.  Doc and Betty, a mule and a horse, did the heavy work until we finally got a tractor in ‘54 - a Farmall Cub.  My grandfather did most of the farming and my dad helped but also worked for wages at Rosenberg’s department store in town.  Old Martin, who lived across the branch in Price’s Quarter, did most of the handyman work and after my grandfather was probably my greatest youthful influence.  Blacks did NOT come in through the front door or eat with whites except in the fields in those days so in an irony not lost on me even in my youth, Old Martin always came in through the back door and ate dinner - that’s the meal in the middle of the day - in the fairly fancy dining room while we ate at the kitchen table.  Like the medieval world described in Manchester’s “A World Lit Only By Fire,” thus it was and thus it shall ever be; Southern farming life was eternal and unchanging - or so they thought.

In some ways it was an idyllic world; nothing changed, everyone knew everyone, people lived alright as we understood alright to be.  If you didn’t know any better, it was good.  We were cultured and well-educated; I knew which fork to use.  My great grandfather was a teacher.  My grandfather and father had some college.  My grandmother was also a teacher.  She could speak, read, and write Latin and read Greek.  She always told me that if I couldn’t do that, I’d always be a barbarian; she was right.  She could rattle off long passages of Caesar’s Gallic Wars in Latin or whole Acts of Shakespears plays.  The skill that has served me best professionally is my ability to memorize and I attribute it to her constantly demanding it of me and to the Sunday School ritual of always having to recite a Bible verse at the beginning.  “Jesus Wept” was my best friend!  That said, they and thus I were abysmally ignorant of the World.  I don’t mean we didn’t know what was going on.  My earliest memory of anything political - one of my earliest memories of anything - was sitting with my grandfather and father listening to, I think, the Republican convention on the old tube-type radio.  Looking back, it must have been in ‘52 because my grandfather died in ‘54.  I don’t remember anything about it except the doing of it; just my grandfather, my father, and me sitting in the kitchen in the dark - no need to waste electricity - and the reason it is memorable is they included me.

By the time I started grade school, what passed for leadership in The South was doing everything it could to get Southerners off the north end of southbound mules.  In my little town, we started to get “plants.”  Now plants that don’t grow out of the ground were pretty much a foreign concept in the rural South, as was being anywhere other than school, church or court at a particular time.  Getting a Geogia farm boy to actually show up at eight o’clock every day and do what somebody not related to him told him to do was a major cultural transition.  And that’s when we began to see it.  The Yankee plant managers demanded their modern houses.  They drove new cars and their wives had station wagons.  And somewhere in there, ‘58 I think, we got a TV, then it all changed.

Nobody I knew lived like Beaver and Wally or David and Mary Stone.  Fast forward through it all; Kennedy’s assassination, the Civil Rights Movement, the Riots, the long, hot summers, the Klan, the Freedom Riders, Having a Dream, and MLK’s assassination, the war in Viet Nam.  The World I started grade school in in 1955 had ceased to exist by the time I heard “Pomp and Circumstance” in 1967.  By the time the Principal thrust that piece of paper in my drunken hand, I didn’t believe a single word coming from parent, pulpit, lectern, or stump.  When I got to college, I was a marxist professor’s dream; I’d believe anything that was contrary to what I’d been brought up to believe.  So, by the early ’70s I was the archtypal long-haired, dope-smoking, FM Radio-listening liberal Democrat.  Then I got mugged.

Atlanta in the early ’70s taught me all I needed to know about liberal policies.  I sold out and packed Wife 1.0, kid, and dog into a Toyota LandCruiser and struck out for Alaska.  I had no airspeed or altitude, but I did have ideas.  I’ve sold suits, cleaned floors, drove trucks, and most anything else I could find to make money.  What I liked most about Alaska was that nobody asked what your daddy did and if they asked where you went to school, they didn’t follow up with a question about what fraternity you belonged to. Hell, I was barely willing to admit to belonging to the human race; belong to a fraternity?

Anyway, I’ve led a charmed life, lived the American dream.  I have a God-given right to be working for the minimum wage in the lawnmower factory in Swainsboro, Georgia; that’s what any of my teachers and civic leaders would have told me I could look forward to - and they were proud of their accomplishment of making that possible, there was always farming.

In those sixty years that also parallel the Pax Americana, I’ve never been hurt badly except by my own doing, I’ve never been sick since childhood, I’ve never really wanted for anything that I actually needed.  As someone said, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor; rich is better.”  But in this Country, even poor as most of us understand it ain’t bad.  I know the worst off I’ve ever been is scrounging the sofa cushions for cigarette money.  And now, I’ve even given up the cigarettes after forty years of Winstons and Marlboros; probably too late, but at least I did it.

So, to sum this up; generations of my forebears dug up the dirt to make my life possible.  My life has been beyond the wildest imaginings of my forebears.  Their efforts and sacrifices made a life of money, power, and relative luxury possible for me.  And to bring this back to a political theme, ain’t nobody taking that away from me unless they’re prepared to pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

The National Extortion, er, Education, Association is a, perhaps the, bulwark of the Democrat Party.  As many as a third or even more of the delegates at a Democrat National Convention are NEA members most years.  It is fair to say that most here and most having conservative/Republican views do not share the worldview of the NEA and at most tolerate sending our children to government schools for lack of a better option.

Now, Comrade Obama wants to make it official that our characterization of public schools as indoctrination camps is, indeed, a correct characterization with his “appearance” in the schools on September 8th.  The Ministry of Information, the NEA, and various groups of fellow travellers are all circulating all the ways to make this a “teachable moment” for America’s children.

Well I don’t want that man to teach America’s children anything.  I don’t want America’s mostly communist, even if they don’t know it, teachers to teach America’s children anything about that man.  I don’t want America’s children to have to listen to the lying siren songs of Comrade Obama, the Democrat Party, and the NEA.  Of course, September 8th will practically be a National Holiday in the Blue States and no business will be done in the schools except the adoration of the Dear Leader, Comrade Obama.

I propose an alternative in the Red States, the ones that have Republican governors anyway.  Most, maybe all, governors have the authority to declare a state holiday.  Holiday doesn’t have its old meaning of a Holy Day - unless you’re a Democrat, but a governor’s declaration of a holiday generally causes all legal and governmental business to cease on that day.  So, rather than subject the children of the Red States to a day of indoctrination at the hands of the NEA and Comrade Obama, I propose that we give them a day at home with their family and friends.

Most labor agreements and state and local personnel statutes contemplate a gubernatorially declared holiday.  They also usually have some pretty hefty holiday pay if the employees have to actually work on a declared holiday.  So, if the Red State governors declare the 8th to be a holiday, those school districts that remain in session that day will incur some fairly serious costs for holiday pay.  The school boards and school administrations can answer to the taxpayers for that, a good thing in itself.

So, a week is a very short time to put something like this together and our Republican governors are, in the main, little if any more courageous than our Republican CongressCritters, but at least this will give us something to talk about and a way to pull the tiger’s tail.  Comrade Obama really shouldn’t be trying to teach our children and the NEA and the other fellow travellers shouldn’t be colluding with him in doing so.  Shutting down the schools in the Red States on that day seems appropriate.

Those words come down to us from FDR’s ‘37 Inaugural Address: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”  In those days America was in the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy.  The South had been abandoned after 1876 except for its potential to be exploited.  Appalachia was the poster child, followed closely by the Dust Bowl of the Great Plains.  One third of a Nation, more or less, really was not participating in the American industrial economy.  Through successive Democrat - and Republican - administrations from FDR to Nixon, the goal of American domestic policy was to do something about the plight of both Black and White rural farm labor.  I know about it first hand because my family owned one of those sorry-assed farms that wouldn’t even support us and from which we tried to support several other Black and White families.  In one of the few intelligent things my hide-bound rural Southern parents ever did, they quit farming in ‘62 and subdivided those worn out cotton fields so that Yankee plant managers could have houses better than we had.

Fast forward fifty years.  We still have one third of a Nation that isn’t really participating in the American economy.  They’re on welfare, they’re on extended unemployment benefits, they’re on farm subsidies, they’re livin’ the life in prison - yeah most of them like it, they’re working for the government - and, yes, I made a career of it, so I know exactly what most government employees do.

So, Jaded’s piece got me thinking along these lines.  We’ve spent trillions of Other Peoples’ Money (OPM) trying to lift that “one third of a nation.”  Maybe we should just stop lifting.  If you couldn’t have a flat screen, a cell phone, and a pimped out ride on welfare, maybe you’d do something to get that stuff on your own.  This has to start at how we define those who society has some obligation to help and though I’m not a Christian, I take a Biblical view of that; I’ll willingly help the widows, orphans, and the lame, blind, and halt.  The rest need to fend for themselves.  And, I feel absolutely no guilt that I live better than someone else; I worked for it.  That encapsulates the most insiduous thing the Left and the Poverty Pimps have done.  They have convinced that third of a nation that I live better than they because I was either born with advantage or cheated and stole from them.  Hey, ain’t no poor person ever given me a job and no poor person has ever had anything that I wanted to cheat them out of or steal from them.  That third of a nation needs to get off the dole and go to work.  Comrade Obama wants to keep them from having to work for a lttle while longer, but American really isn’t rich enough for that.  If you confiscate all the wealth from those of us who actually work and produce, there isn’t enough left to give the parasites their flat screens, cell phones, and pimped rides.