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.

One of the things I did in my sojourn into the Peoples’ Republic of Mexifornia was read books.  One of the books I read was “Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America” by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev.  Everyone here should read this book!  It is dry as dirt academic history based on Vassiliev’s notes from his research in the KGB archives during that brief shining moment in the early ’90s when Russia departed from its historical norm.

Even though I would have considered myself fairly well informed about Comintern, the CPUSA, and the NKVD/KGB’s activities in the US, seeing it all laid out and detailed as in this book is just plain scary.  The book makes it very clear that communist/Soviet penetration of academia, media, and entertainment was very thorough by the mid-Thirties.  As a result, the KGB really didn’t have to spy, it simply had to find and organize the home-grown spies eager to commit treason.

Now this would all just be an interesting history lesson for all us old white guys who like to know what other old or dead white guys did if one accepts the conventional wisdom that it all ended with the defections and suppression of the “McCarthy Era” or, more charitably, with the “fall” of the Soviet Union in the early ’90s.  I don’t accept that.

We now have third generation communist college professors in all fields of academic endeavor.  We have third generation communists in the media and in entertainment.  With the destruction of the FBI and CIA’s counterintelligence capabilities in the aftermath of Vietnam and the Nixon debacle, nobody was watching these people.  With the “fall” of the USSR, most blithely assumed that it had all gone away.  Maybe the KGB or whatever its successor is called really is more interested in industrial espionage today – it always was, actually – but the people who served the KGB so willingly and their progeny are still there and still motivated by the desire to establish a communist state in the US.

Read the book.  Read all the familiar names.  Learn the vocabulary and see how it relates to today’s vocabulary of “progressivism” and “change.”  If it doesn’t simply scare Hell out of you, you don’t understand the situation.

Here’s some excerpts from a presser he did yesterday in Anchorage: http://community.adn.com/adn/node/142631

Unlike some recent Alaska governors, Gov. Parnell is a thoroughly low-key, conservative, in several senses of that word, Republican politician.  There will be no glitz and no flash-bangs in a Parnell Administration; the guy probably has pin stripe PJs.  I did not support him when he ran against Don Young because I thought he was just going along with then-Governor Palin’s opposition to all things Republican.  His half-hearted campaign certainly demonstrated little commitment to getting elected.  That said, I like the guy.

I worked for him in ’97 when he was co-chair of Senate Finance.  I had been engaged by the Finance Committees to draft and carry an extensive revision of Alaska’s Public Employment Relations Act.  The 1972 PERA is public employee bargaining the way unions would have it in their dreams.  It started life as AFL-CIO model legislation and has been very little amended.  It is so valuable to Alaska unions that they would, and have, risk all their political capital to protect it.  Needless to say, union and Democrat opposition was intense and we had a Democrat governor so we had to cover two-thirds to deal with a veto; that was the game, the bill could not move unless we could get chits on the over-ride.  Sen. Parnell and his co-chair and Sen. President, Drew Pearce, got that bill passed by the Senate, something we couldn’t do in the House even though we had a veto-proof Republican majority.  It took guts on Parnell’s part because getting cross-threaded with the unions has serious implications for your future electoral success; they never forget your doing something they don’t like.  He will face some of them in contract negotiations before he comes up for re-election in ’10.

Gov. Parnell is personally a religious social conservative but like most Alaska Republicans, he is unlikely to pursue a socially conservative political agenda.  Alaska is much more libertarian than conservative and the electorate here doesn’t like being told how to live by either the left or the right.  His administration will not allow the liberals to further their social agenda but they’re unlikely to do much beyond the symbolic to all the conservatives to advance their agenda.  On social issues, “leave me alone” is the best position here.

On defense issues, even the Democrats here have to at least talk like they’re pro-military.  Gov. Parnell will be reliably pro-military and pro-strong national defense.

As I’ve discussed before, no governor of Alaska is a conservative of the sort that most of you would recognize; Alaska is a socialist state with pretty much a command economy if a governor wants to exercise that command.  He can be expected to hold the line on government spending and growth but not take the axe to anything except as dictated by available revenue.  Economic life in Alaska is dictated by a simple formula: Revenue = Price X Production.  Production is declining and Alaska needs some new field development, something that will be opposed and obstructed by Comrade Obama and his Environazi friends at every step.  He has said he will go forward with the AGIA natural gas line, but he doesn’t have the personal involvement with it that Gov. Palin did, so he won’t ride it down.  Somebody is going to start saying out loud that the thing ain’t happening and Sarah Palin’s resume is no longer Sean Parnell’s problem.  He’s a former Conoco-Phillips employee and lobbyist, so he will be sensitive to Industry concerns about Palin’s windfall profits tax on the oil industry.

And finally, since he has never posed himself as a reformer and maverick, he will have much better relations with the Legislature, the Republican Party, and the many experienced Republicans around the State that have been effectively excluded from government during the Palin Administration because of their association with Gov. Murkowski and the Party establishment.  Since she had to be the un-Murkowski, Gov. Palin got rid of most of the appointees from the Murkowski Administration and replaced very few of them with experienced Republicans.  That left her administration the province of holdover Democrats, congenital ‘crats, and a few Wasilla neophytes.

So, it should be a peaceful and uneventful year and a half and continued Republican control of Alaska after the ’10 and ’12 elections.  By twelve we should be able to repair our party, get strong majorities again in both bodies, and get ready to retire the Boy Senator in ’14.

Now this doesn’t mean much to those of you down in the 30s and 40s, that’s degrees of lattitude, but for those of us in the 50s and 60s, June 21st or so means something.  The summer soltice brings me 18 hours and change of Sun above the horizon daylight, and it never really gets dark overnight, such as night is; as I write this at 2:30 AM, it isn’t really dark outside, I couldn’t read the paper, but I wouldn’t stumble over things.

For a few days on either side of the solstice, the Earth sorta’ wobbles and the days are about the same length.  After that, at the high lattitudes, the days begin to get shorter precipitously; by August we’ll be losing more than six minutes of daylight every day, almost an hour every week.  In the three months from the solstice on or about June 21st to the eqinox on or about September 21st, we go from over 18 hours of daylight to 12 hours of daylight.  From the Fall equinox to the Winter solstice, we go from twelve hours of daylight to about six.  And in a land of mountains and valleys, you don’t see that low Sun for much of that six hours.  Because of the surrounding terrain, in December I see the Sun, if it is sunny, from about noon to about two PM, max.

Probably most of you weren’t really interested in a solar geometry lesson on a political blog, but as some of you might have noticed, I’ve almost sworn off politics.  We lost and we lost in the worst way and to the worst sort of person and party; we may well never get America back after Comrade Obama’s regime.  But life goes on.  I live in a Red State and until they come and nationalize the oil, we’ll live pretty well and even though the US has a huge presence here, the State is just too big and daunting for a bunch of wimps from DC to really govern, but there is a fin d’siecle air to things.

As a longtime bureaucrat, “Since the house is burning, I’ll keep warm” was a good motto.  The house is burning, but gas is still relatively cheap and the fish are biting.  I burned a hundred gallons of Tesoro’s finest yesterday and today and caught a few of the wily and elusive King Salmon.  I’m burning some of AmeriGas’s propane to smoke those fish so I’ll have good smoked fish and salmon dip for football games and NASCAR races this fall and next winter.  Damn, I must have an awful carbon footprint; guess they’ll eventually be coming for me over that.

But, untill then, I’m going to do what I do.  People like us, living the way we do, are the ultimate affront to the urban castrati and their ugly prunefaced, sexless women.  Go burn some gas, catch a fish, or kill a deer, make a baby,  or something.  Do something you’re not supposed to do in Comrade Obama’s world.  And remember; the Sun also rises.