I’ve been watching this whole Herman Cain/Rick Perry/Mitt Romney/Anonymous Donks fracas over the past few days on my cellphone and I have something to say finally.

First of all, I’ve been watching it on my cellphone (Samsung Galaxy S, Android over Verizon, nice phone, works great, cheap) because my power has been out since last Saturday.  It was finally restored 20 minutes ago and I can tell you that there’s nothing like electricity to make you happier after six days of crapping in plastic bags and heating noodle water up 6 ounces at a time and running extension cords all over the place while schlepping a generator hither and yon all week long trying to get at least *some* productive work done.  In the meantime everyone else has been bothering themselves silly with all this incredibly unproductive and even destructive work.

But I’ve been watching it over the past six days (well, it seems that long) and I have to tell you all:  none of you have anything serious to complain about.  You ain’t suffering.  Get your heads straightened out.  It’s pretty obvious to me that this is a hatchet job hit piece attempt at destroying Herman Cain and driving irreconcilable wedges into the Republicans and Conservatives in this election cycle.  The truth will come out and it should, but everyone needs to calm the heck down.  There’s nothing you all have gone through in the past six days that even remotely compares to balancing freezing the pipes and freezing to death at night with dying of carbon monoxide poisoning and knowing that you can’t shower and have to wake up tomorrow and go wipe your butt in the woods.

Now that the power is back on here I have a lot more to say about the whole Cain sex harassment thing but seriously folks if you can’t read between the lines here and realize what a truly enormous distraction this is, designed to make Republicans and Conservatives hate each other’s guts right when they need some solidarity, there’s nothing that can help you.  First it was Perry’s “Niggerhead Rock” and now it’s Cain’s blahblahblah alleged sex harassment woes.  It’s all really scary.  It’s designed to make you think it’s really scary.

It’s a bunch of crap in my opinion.  Watch this shiny object.

So get your heads on straight and be thankful you didn’t get 10 inches of snow the day before Halloween and had to spend the last week showering out of a tupperware container with ice cubes floating in it.  Then take a few deep breaths, calm down and quit banging away at each other long enough to realize that Rahm Emanuel is sitting back in his office in Chicago laughing his ballerina arse off.

Get on the backs of our candidates for good reasons, not the stupid reasons – and stop the circular firing party.  That is my advice after crapping in a plastic bag all week long.  Believe me, if I can do that, you can find the courage to keep your powder dry and not be led around by the nose into saying things and thinking things and wishing things you’ll regret.  Whatever the truth is, we can handle it, and it’s not that bad.

Over and out until tomorrow and yours very truly:  Me.

Ladies and gentlemen of Redstate, this is going to be my last post [scratch that, I have the feeling this is just getting started] on this debt ceiling/cap/balance subject.  I only have a few words to say and I hope that any lack of eloquence on my part doesn’t reflect negatively on the importance of the matter we have before us at this moment.

It’s time to support the Good Guys.

The Good Guys in this fight are the people who are pressing hard, and continue to press hard, against very long odds, for a Cut/Cap/Balance solution to the country’s fiscal woes.   They are the ones who are looking honestly at the exponential growth in our national debt, the completely heedless nature of which has become so otherworldly that it’s barely recognizable any longer.  We’re pushing up against the boundary of 100% of our GDP in debt, if we haven’t already gone over it, depending on whose estimates you listen to.

Earlier this afternoon the Washington Post had an article trying to draw a parallel between this situation and that of 1990, when the US Debt was barely 5% of its GDP, about $492 billion dollars and approximately $850 billion today.  The small errors in these numbers aren’t significant.  You can read their article here:

“Read their lips: For the origins of today’s deficit fight, look to 1990″

The author there is remembering the debt in 1990 at $492 billion dollars or $850 billion in “today’s dollars.”

Through a long and tortured series of inside-the-beltway reminiscences, he somehow manages to convince himself that the people who are calling for real limits on debts that are more than 1,500 percent higher than that  – right now – are the wrongheaded people.  Our debt currently stands at something like 15 trillion dollars.  It’s such an enormous amount of money that I really don’t think the entire rest of the world even understands it, and I don’t know whether we understand it ourselves.  We hear things like 150 billion Euros for Greece and don’t realize that’s about that’s only about $215 billion dollars.    That’s about 1/60th of our national debt.  If the latest Greek bailout is 1 minute of agonizing pain on a clock, our national debt is AN HOUR.  Does anyone in the world except the Chinese understand a Trillion Dollars?   The limits just keep rising out of sight – but our ability to pay those debts, as everyone knows in the past couple of years, is nowhere near as robust.  Go take a look at middle America.

What has happened since 1990 is that the situation has gotten between 15-20 times worse.  And all of that money, all of that debt that is owed, is on the backs of our children.  I’d say that’s a pretty damn good reason to be “intransigent” about it.

[Update:  Let's say our national debt is $15 trillion dollars.  That's a stack of dollar bills that would reach almost FOUR TIMES THE AVERAGE DISTANCE TO THE MOON.  If we had a way of piling it up, gluing it together and climbing it, we could climb all the way to the moon and back, TWICE on the pile of our national debt.]

I get scared too when the President of the United States, his Treasury Secretary, and half of the MSM, and Al Franken, get up and proclaim that without increasing that limit, we’re calling for a catastrophe.   Unstable people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz who base their existence on spending ever increasing sums of other people’s money and who are also utterly debased in their thinking try to stand up and throw stones.  It may be that we’ve reached a point of reckoning, but that’s hardly a catastrophe: it’s healthy that we call a halt to it.  It’s even more important that we realize people like Erick and the Club for Growth and Heritage are the people – probably the last of the honest people – who are sounding the alarm and calling on us all to do something about it.  Don’t be scared.  Be honest!

Please help me get behind their efforts and continue to support them.  This is going to be a difficult series of days.  Keep your cool, everyone, but do what I did three days ago:  shake it off and keep demanding what you know is right.  I had a bout of the “fear fever” but I came to my senses about it.

Our country deserves better.  It doesn’t deserve to be spent into oblivion by people who are so irresponsible they cannot even recognize more than an order of magnitude of difference in the scale of the problems we face.  And all of that more-than-an-order-of-magnitude difference has happened in just over 20 years, the time it takes for a generation to “grow up.”

What have we done?

I just have a simple question.

One of the things Geithner has done during the past couple of weeks while mentioning “coffers” is to insinuate that the United States Government can’t be “guaranteed” to have enough money to fund next month’s issuance of Social Security checks.

Does that money really exist there?  If not, where did that money go?

If Geithner and Obama’s threat not to pay the benefits is to be taken seriously, the first question everyone should be asking is:  “What happened to all that money?  I thought it would be there no matter what?”  Unless I’m reading these two guys wrong, they’re saying it just doesn’t even exist!

Just a short post:

We keep hearing about all these lemonade stands around the country being shut down by bureaucrats in municipalities because the kids haven’t obtained the requisite permitting.  It’s a shame, because running a lemonade stand in the summertime is something that children have traditionally done to introduce themselves to entrepreneurship and running a business – they’re being held back by the red tape.

I have an idea:  some enterprising person should establish Lemonade For America, LLC.   Its purpose would be to help youngsters in municipalities across the country obtain the permits they need to do business at a reduced cost.  To help them navigate the paperwork and fast-track their lemonade stand, it should take less than two weeks from application to approval.  LFA doesn’t make the lemonade and it doesn’t distribute the lemonade, but it works as a kind of clearing house that gets everyone’s documentation straight and works with local governments to lower the barrier to entry for these most local of all local businesses.

Let’s say, for example, that for a $25 fee, Lemonade for America would contact your local government and help you obtain the required permit, or a special permit that is strictly for these kinds of lemonade stands.  Local governments would still make money, the kids could still have their lemonade stands without running afoul of anything, and with enough buy-in across the country it would be a bonafide way for young entrepreneurs to break into the summer lemonade stand business without worrying about being shut down by rule-bound municipalities. 

I see the biggest problem in being drawing up the legal documentation and getting local municipalities to participate in the Lemonade for America initiative.  But if just a few hundred local governments accepted the framework, it could be legitimized and let the kids run their lemonade stands in the summertime without fear of being slapped with a fine or shut down.  

In my vision of it, Lemonade for America would be a nonprofit corporation that just sets a few clear standards and works with local governments to get special licenses for lemonade stands approved.   The focus would be on a very, very low up-front fee and enough expert advice and municipal participation to make it painless for your local entrepreneurs to get started with minimal cost, but still satisfy the regulatory requirements of townships and boroughs across the country. 

I see the application process being something simple that parents can be involved with their children in doing – one page, a notarized signature from a parent or guardian on the agreement, and a stamp from the local jurisdiction.  Follow that up with a Lemonade for America Facebook page, a Lemonade for America Newsletter, and some annual meetups.  Simple and low cost and in good faith from end to end - easy and inexpensive to do, and it clears away the patchwork jumble of red tape across the county and gets the kids doing what they want to do – run a bonafide microbusiness that they won’t have to worry will get shut down because of abstruse over-regulation.

Then we could get these sad stories of kids having lemonade stands shut down by the cops in the middle of the summer out of the news and make them a thing of the past.

“Lemonade for America – The Kids Make the Lemonade, We Make It Easy.”

The kids keep the profits from their venture.  They buy the lemons, they set the prices, etc.  All LFA does is help them get through the red tape.

What do you think?

For most people in the United States, the past three years have been the toughest of their lives for a couple of generations.  There are a few people who remember the Carter years, when neighbors in suburbs across America were siphoning gasoline from each other’s tanks in the middle of the night in order to avoid the gas-rationing lines in the morning and still get to work.  If anything, this situation today is more dire and even more challenging.  I’d like to offer my thoughts – based on hard-learned experience – so that people here at Redstate can understand how to cope with another year, living in the Obama Economy.

LEARN TO EAT DIRT

It’s all around you when you walk outside and it’s even underneath the sidewalks in most of our major cities and townships.  Fortunately, for most of us there isn’t any need to pry up large sidewalk tablets to get at the rich, life-sustaining loam underneath.  For most people in America, dirt is available almost everywhere with a variety of rich mineral compositions depending on where you buy it or scoop it from.  Oftentimes, construction companies who are presently out of work will have the best dirt still encrusted on the teeth of their large, industrial digging equipment.  You can sneak up in the dead of night, break it off by the pound and literally walk home with it and eat it – and nobody will ever say anything.  Think about setting up a dirt co-op in your local neighborhood:  the idea is to pool the best varieties of edible dirt from as many places as possible and present it so that it appeals.  If you have a gallon or two of runoff water or cat piss, you can pour that on top of the dirt to make it even more delicious.

FIND A NEW JOB

If you don’t already work for the government, I know – it’s sad, and your job prospects just suck.  Your chances of finding a new job at almost any age are really terrible right now.  You practically have to wait until someone dies or drives their car off a cliff before an opportunity even opens up, and then there are another 800 people who have already submitted their credentials ahead of yours.  It’s almost as much trouble as getting a job as a Ph.D. in Computer Science was back in the late 1990s.   But don’t let that deter you:  this is no time to lose hope!  Smart people can always come up with new and novel answers in difficult circumstances.  For example, many people have found they can’t pay their rent, and they’re getting thrown out of their residences.  Keep an eye out for them, because there are lots of them nowadays and this is your opportunity!  This is your time to step up, because they’re going to have a lot of things they’re just going to have to throw away and be hauled off by waste management corporations.  Do not neglect this trove of potentially new products to sell.  A little dumpster diving in a few days can easily net you a few hundred cast-off pieces of stuff that can be repackaged using some old food wrap and sold again as new.  With a little ingenuity, you’re not a dumpster-diver, you’re a Product Consultant!   Moreover, a lot of the things that people throw away can be successfully sent back to the companies that manufactured them as “defects” – and you can receive a whole new product to sell in the mail. 

CONSIDER A NEW LINE OF WORK

Most people in America have spent their adolescent and adult lives aspiring to achieve some form of excellence in a chosen field.  In a lot of cases, they’ve spent a lot of money in an attempt to accumulate the credentials and work experience they’d need to continue to advance their careers.  All of that is out the window right now.  Not only are they saddled with debt from the futile attempt to break into an already crowded field, at this point so many of those fields are folding up that what was previously fertile soil for their hopes and imaginations are just piles of sand stretching to the parched horizon as far as the eye can see.   That’s compounded by the fact that let’s face it, America has what so many economists and talking heads are calling a “structural unemployment problem.”  That means that no matter what field you want to go into, there won’t be any new jobs in it.  This is the time to consider a new line of work.   For example, if you had thought it was time to be an industrial engineer, this might just be the time to start digging ditches.   If you wanted to be an architect and use your talents manipulating space and materials in order to create new and innovative living environments, I’d cut that out right now and consider understanding the mechanics of switchblade knives instead.  Doctors and Lawyers who have graduated in the past three years will have to cut back on their expectations for the future:  instead of working in an esteemed hospital or clinic or high-salary partnership, it might be best to consider things like Street Medicine and Street Law.  Highly skilled astronaut candidates and nuclear engineers should start thinking about doing new things like painting in Trompe L’Oeil  and hanging out at the local pharmacy, packing bags.

LEARN SKILLS THAT MATTER 

For almost 100 years the Boy Scouts of America and the US Army have published manuals that can teach you how to tie knots, fell trees, cook food, boil water, find directions using the nighttime sky, erect basic survival structures and learn to live off the land.  It turns out that all that old wisdom has become new again – and you will need to use it.  Forget about bartering for your intellectual credentials in a developed and highly variegated workplace of skillsets – you’re going to need to understand how to start a fire with a few pieces of wood and a flint.  Before time runs out, learn how to protect yourself from the basics of airborne and waterborne diseases.   Learning how to kill and dress an animal isn’t something you should shy away from:  Even Dutch Restaurant in New York offers a Rabbit Pot Pie as one of their “comfort” dishes – you’ll just need to learn how to prepare it for yourself, which is suprisingly easy.

LEARN TO LAUGH

Listen, for 50 years America has had nothing but people telling themselves that everything was going to keep getting better, forever.  Regardless of which party you belonged to, the mainstay of American philosophy for the last century has been that tomorrow, everything would be better than today.  We’re finding out that it isn’t so.  It’s true for a handful of people given the way our government works, but for most of us it is not true any longer.  So all of it was, in a sense, a dirty joke.  That’s OK, you just need to learn to LAUGH!  When America has spent itself into oblivion and the rest of the world’s investors take off for other parts of the world, everyone is going to know just how bad a joke it was, but the most important thing you’ll need to keep your sanity is to keep laughing, even at all the bad jokes. 

MORE TO COME TOMORROW….

A lot of Senators are in China today.  They include Harry reid, Dick Durbin, Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, Frank Lautenberg, Jeff Merkley, Michael Bennet, Richard Shelby, Mike Enzi and Johnny Isakson.

Nobody knows what they’re doing over there.

This afternoon, however, half-page ads have been running on the Washington Post’s website about Chinese workers allegedly exposed to n-Hexane at Apple iPad manufacturing plants there.  They are essentially demanding greater worker’s compensation for their injuries.  Clicking the link takes you to a Washington Post blog on China.

http://chinawatch.washingtonpost.com/2011/03/harsh-reality-behind-apple-scandal.php

My guess is that a great deal of what the Senators are talking about in China, described above as “the world’s factory” is the extension of the right to sue American companies and extract worker compensation claims against them for products sold in America.  China is going to be dictating to the United States the terms under which it manufactures our goods for us.  It only makes sense.  They own us!

Tonight there’s a new WSJ poll splashing all over the Drudge Report talking about how Donald Trump is second only to Mitt Romney in popularity among Republican primary voters.  A couple of days ago, The Donald was reported to be doing very well in New Hampshire, also. 

I’m not surprised Mitt Romney is the front runner right now.  I knew that he would be.  Large segments of Americans don’t want another George W. Bush traditional Republican.  You can beat your head against a wall about that for a long time to come, but that’s what my people say.  And my guess is that he’s going to be the Republican nominee in the end.  What’s more surprising, though, is that Donald Trump is gaining so much ground, so quickly.

How can this be?  I myself am surprised at that, a little, so I’ve tried to think of an answer as to why?

While everyone’s heads are also spinning trying to answer that question, I can give a few guideposts:  the fact is that Donald Trump is doing a better job when he’s in front of the camera articulating a message against Barack Obama’s second term in office.  He doesn’t pull punches, and he just speaks very plainly.  He’s doing an especially good job telling Americans what they want to hear about China, and in terms of the economy he’s pumping out red meat through a firehose.  I expect that firehose to turn into a whole Company pretty soon. 

But here’s the big lesson, and this is why Trump is rising:  In terms of our recent national politics, he’s someone everyone knows but is also a completely fresh face, and when he did reveal himself as a Republican it attracted DROVES of attention.   He’s a chimeric figure.  He is the middle ground between Barack Obama (who nobody knew) and John McCain (who everybody knew).  America also doesn’t want a traditional Republican Conservative and it also doesn’t want another Obama.  Donald Trump has gauged the national mood precisely.  Obama looks more and more like a train wreck every day, he’s obviously beholden and ineffective, and Americans are looking for something…comfortably radical.

Like a casino.  And if anyone really examines it, what is a casino?  It is the most controlled environment on Earth that human beings willingly subject themselves while thinking they are “leaving things to chance.”  Casinos are zoos for human beings like no other in the world.  Everything is monitored.  The outcome of the games in terms of odds are rigorously predetermined and regulated.   Not a single person walks in or out of one without being seen by security cameras.  And yet people go to them believing … they’re having FUN!  Donald Trump knows the backstory of human zoos very well.   He is especially well-suited to make people feel like they’re taking a new chance.

I have a very strange feeling that Donald Trump is a lot closer to what a lot of Republicans want than they’re willing to admit:  he’s a guy who runs casinos, and he’s made his entire fortune off of games of chance (all of which are bound by strict mathematical rules in favor of the House).  He’s also not a busybody in terms of mores:  nobody who rents a room at a casino hotel wants anyone to think about what they do while they’re there.  And he’s an international businessman:  just keeping that empire alive and growing ensures that he sees what the real costs are to building or doing anything in America. 

Finally, he’s a lot more popular, like it or not, among a large segment of the younger generation than Tim Pawlenty ever will be.  The only moralism Trump has is the Bottom Line.  He’s not interested in what anyone really does to get there.  It’s a line that’s very much in tune with a lot of young people you meet at casinos throughout America. 

He can win, in fact he very well might win.  I’m putting odds on a Donald Trump Presidency right now at 2/3rds against.  He’s got a very good chance to pull it off.

The only real question I have is not whether Donald Trump is doing this for reasons he thinks will be beneficial to him, because he undoubtedly is.  This publicity is good for him whether he’s going to go all the way through with his candidacy or not.  The question is:  if he did win the Presidency, why would he want it?  He’s going to have to completely repurpose himself for 4 years or more.  He won’t be the master of his own destiny:  he’ll be the servant of circumstance.  That’s the ONLY reason I don’t think his candidacy is serious in the end.

My reading of the Zeitgeist right now is that the winning cohort of the American electorate wants the Librorepulitarian Demopublic.  It wants us to fight back against our enemies but not if it’s too costly.  It dislikes big government and high taxes but it doesn’t want to see its sister Susie get fired from her State job.  It loves all those promised benefits and hates the big Corrupt Fed and the International Bankers, but is anguised about how to pay for them on the one hand or apply for a loan without them on the other.  And right now the only thing that is cutting through the clutter is Donald Trump’s bluster.  It’s hitting the high notes, he’s crackin’ skulls.  The American electorate doesn’t know what it wants.  It’s all up for grabs.

This one is just to make you laugh a little. Kinda like a dirty joke. It’s supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, so laugh, OK?

I don’t normally re-report Politico stories, but this one is really funny. It seems that The People of Chicagoland have decided who is going to be the next mayor. The race is over. The three or four dozen (ok, maybe hundred) people who matter in Chicagoland, that is. The rest of them are going to vote, eventually, but that’s just a formality at this point.

Politico reports that filings released on Thursday indicate Rahm Emanuel’s campaign has amassed $11.7 million in funds from Hollywood big shots, former Treasury secretaries, celebrities, CEOs, etc., which puts him 508% ahead of the second best-funded candidate (Gery Chico) and an astonishing 1460% ahead of the next most popular candidate (Carol Moseley-Braun), according to their article. Even if those two were to fuse themselves together into some kind of hideous Chicago political monster, Emanuel would still have ‘em jackslapped to the tune of about 375%. That’s a big lead, brother.

The Chicago Mercantile exchange cut a check for $200,000, dozens of lawyers from top city law firms, especially Kirkland and Ellis, also gave in the thousands. Local real estate and finance moguls gave $50,000 donations by the handfuls.

So that means he’s gonna lose now, right?

[UPDATE:  As of late yesterday afternoon, the Governor of Hawaii is saying in an interview that he's FOUND IT!  Eureka! Hallelujah! We can all rest easy now, I guess, secure in the knowledge that Barack Hussein Obama is actually, legally and constitutionally, eligible to be the POTUS. 

The Governor is going to "do what we can..." whatever that means.

"It actually exists in the archives, written down," he said.  ... ""We'll do what we can as quickly as we can to make it inevitable that only those who wish the President ill, only the ones with a political agenda, will be the ones doing this kind of thing,"

What does "this kind of thing...." mean?  If he means playing hide-and-seek with the public, I would say that the blame for "this kind of thing" rests squarely on the people in charge of Vital Records in Hawaii.  I, of course, can take no credit for the Governor's new-found ability to search the vital records of his own state to produce and verify the birth records of the child of a personal acquaintance/friend who is now a pretty important person.]

At the beginning of this whole question, I tried hard not to be a ‘birther’.  I don’t know whether I am a ‘birther’ now, but the longer time goes on, and the weirder the prevarications become, the more questions I have about our President’s long-form statement of live birth here in the United States.

The more time that passes, the stranger and more politically intrigued the question becomes.  It should be a simple question that anyone could have resolved in an instant, with reference to a bonafide document, but the more time passes, the more convoluted the story becomes.  And that makes think a couple of things:

1) There is a real long-form statement of Live Birth for Barack Hussein Obama somewhere in Hawaii and nobody has found it yet, despite the Governor of Hawaii’s attempts to search for it.

In #1, what I would do as the President is wait as long as possible to show it, to maximize the impact on the Birther movement.  Keep it building, keep denying it’s a problem so that the voices grow more and more fervent and then !WHAM! hit them with the evidence, knocking all the wind out of their sails.

2) The long-form birth certificate from Hawaii doesn’t exist, but eventually some fascimile of it will be trotted out before the 2012 elections to accomplish much of the same thing as in #1, but with another fraud tacked on top of it.

3) There *is no* long-form birth certificate from Hawaii and no fraudulent document can be produced that will convince anyone.  In which case the President is in really big trouble, Constitutionally speaking.

I just don’t know.  I keep wondering about why the President and anyone else might want to play around with something so simple, so basic, and so seemingly simple to solve and/or refute, but all I see are media manipulations, and those manipulations have actually started me wondering whether there’s something to this idea that Barack Hussein Obama’s live birth certificate in Hawaii really just doesn’t exist. 

If the Governor of Hawaii was telling the truth, he could have produced it two weeks ago, but apparently he’s still searching for it.  Why?  I can’t think of any reason except that he really can’t find it, or he is waiting for the moment of maximum impact to reveal it.

The thing that gets me about it is that I know there are people in this country who could very credibly validate the birth certificate in a responsible and scientific forensic fashion if one were shown to them.  We have experts on every kind of printed document that has ever been produced by humankind here in this country.  If a certificate was produced, and if it was real, it shouldn’t be a problem to verify its authenticity through a number of forensic means.  I would imagine such a task would be duck soup to a real art historian, for example, someone who works with old texts and works of art.  Someone at the Smithsonian surely has the expertise to validate that document, if it exists.  Lay the question to rest and let’s stop the enormous waste of people time and energy on the speculation.  That to me would seem to be something the President would be interested in doing here at this point in America - to positively stop people from wasting any more valuable time on absoultely frivolous things. 

I can’t make a poll here at Redstate, so I’ll just put the options here and let people put their votes in the comments:

“WHEN WILL BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA’S LONG FORM HAWAIIAN CERTIFICATE OF LIVE BIRTH BE SHOWN?”

1) At the precise moment Barack Hussein Obama decides it will do the most damage to people asking the question, and not before.

2) Whenever anyone finds it in Hawaii.

3) Sometime after Obama is no longer the President after losing the election because of it.

4) Never, because it doesn’t matter to anyone, even if the whole thing is a put-up job.

I keep looking at what’s happening in Camden, NJ and I just can’t believe what I’m seeing there.  Or maybe I do believe it and I knew it was coming, but I can’t believe it was allowed to reach this point.

For those of you who haven’t been following the apocalyptic tale of Camden, you can find a lot of the reports on Drudge.  They just laid off something like half the police force and firefighters there, in a town run by criminals, and the actual totals almost don’t matter.  Half of the city lives below the poverty line, all the manufacturing jobs that used to form the pillars of what Camden was have left for parts South and East, or at least elsewhere, and the violent crime rate is already 5 times the national average.  Before the layoffs.

You’re seriously talking about a place in America – right on the East Coast – where the illegal immigrants currently in the city should be thinking hard about going back to Juarez voluntarily (nobody is going to kick them out, not in Camden) — because it’s safer and the jobs and life expectancy are better there.

It’s fair to say that Camden is a city being lived in by people who cannot afford to leave, lorded over by thugs running drugs, with a political class that is clinging to life by the thinnest of reeds.  It’s a city that was kept on life support by the taxpayers of New Jersey for many years, while everything worthwhile about living there got up and was lost hell and gone.  And now the money has run out – all of New Jersey’s money has run out (the casinos there have sucked wind for the past 3 years) and Camden is facing an implosion and it could be a very violent implosion.

I look at Camden and I don’t see an outlying phenomenon, though.  I see it as becoming much more mainstream for a lot of places in America.  Where would the people in Camden go if it wasn’t for Camden?  Some of them might like to leave, but how?  What will they build there?  Another casino?  What jobs will they get to finance their exodus?  What surrounding town is willing to absorb the blight of Camden and take on the burdens of a failed city within what until recently was called one of the most prosperous states in America?

We’ve got the rot eating away at us right in the middle of some of the most prosperous areas in our country, and nobody seems to know what to do about it.  Our best answers so far seem to be to try and find jobs in casinos (which is what they mean by “hospitality”) or health care.  So…we’re going to be working to lose money to the State or try to maintain people in increasingly poor health, at greater and greater expense.

These things don’t sound to me like a recipe for a society that can rebound from the bust of the housing market bubble.  I really don’t think there’s anything in America left to replace that last one:  you were talking about a massive failure of the market in the realest of the real property – people’s homes.  Everyone who knows seems to say that we won’t see significant unemployment declines for something like 5 years or more, if ever.  How can a city like Camden ever rebound if that’s true?  How can America?  What will happen to all the people there?

Everyone is watching Camden right now in a kind of morbid fascination about how far and quickly the cancer will spread, how many other cities around the country will go the same way, and what the aftermath of it will be, like some kind of necromantic curiosity.    But there are real people there.  Some of them are still alive.  Many of them were victims of circumstance and are good people.  What will happen if the rest of the country goes this way?

Listen, we don’t want any unstable perons influencing millions of people at a time in America.  Because they might be dangerous, to themselves or others.

We don’t seem to have any problems with Oprah Winfrey, though, who admits she ate 30 pounds of macaroni and cheese after having been trounced by “Bride of Chucky” in its opening weekend.

“I ate about 30 lbs. worth,” she tells Morgan. “I’m not kidding, I’m not kidding.”  Wow, that’s a lot of mac and cheese.  Was it Kraft, at least?

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/2011/01/13/2011-01-13_oprah_winfrey_beloved_box_office_failure_made_me_eat_30_pounds_of_mac_and_cheese.html#ixzz1BFKB56At

Winfrey herself is now competing with former jailbird Martha Stewart for cable television viewers, and the last I heard, Oprah is slimming down again to get back into the fight against the Hallmark Channel.  The main reason is that Martha doesn’t mind bringing every gay dude in the nation who knows how to make silk flowers and toasted desserts (like women used to do) on to her program.  It’s a big question whether or not Winfrey will be able to shed her pounds and bring those boys onto her network without real trouble from Steadman.

Winfrey is one of the most influential people in the Universe and let’s face it folks, all she has to do is shed a skin cell with your name on it and you’re doomed.  Forever!  She’s the Chocolate Bulldozer!

But listen:  recently she’s decided that American television is a Vast Wasteland.  This, after having done more to create it than any other single human being on the face of the earth in the past quarter century.

[And I'm just getting started. This is just a little foretaste of what I would tell my Children about what America really IS these days. It's a horrible, dying, fetid, nasty place, full of people who have no common purpose and who actively hate each other. It's a dead Republic.]

Looking back at the past year and the two years before that, this New Year’s I wanted to think what I would tell my children (if I had any) about the Real state of the country they live in, and have to try to grow up in and thrive in. Barack Obama is rumored to be hosting a gala in the halls of Congress called the “State of the Union” message, and I’d just like to preempt him by telling ordinary Americans what things are really like here in America now that he has been the President for two years.

It’s a depressing story, and it’s getting worse, as I’m sure he knows. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Most of the Republicans we’ve just elected to Congress will not do anything substantive to stop the slide once their constitutents really weigh in. John Boehner will keep crying, as he did again today.

If I had a chance to tell my children something, the only thing worth conveying to them would be this: “America cannot stop spending money at the Federal, State and Local levels. All of the people who weren’t courageous enough to be real burnouts during the 1960s are currently running those governments, and they are atoning for their lack of courage, they think, by spending the country into the ground in the name of Social Justice. There is no hope for you and your children, it’s a generational thing. America is finished.”

I would tell them that there is no way they will ever earn enough to pay the tax burden that is going to be slapped on them in a few years time, regardless of what business they’re in, unless it is pure drug dealing. That’s right: the people who are going to be in a position to lead this country in 20 years are the drug dealers, corporate and noncorporate. It’s going to be a collection of drug dealers, pornographers, casino operators and tax collectors running the country by 2020, not engineers and scientists, not laborers and machinists, not doctors and lawyers: it’s going to be the thugs running the place. And people like John Kerry will get along with those thugs, because having a nation that has been converted into a Banana Republic is easy to deal with. He decries “cheap seats” politics but he really enjoys it better than anyone else in Congress.

I will tell my children: “I lived through the time of the greatest expansion of electronic technology in the history of human beings. And it was a waste of time. All of the effect of giving people cheap access to technology was designed so that corporations will know what they like, right down to what kinds of sheets they enjoy sleeping on in their beds. And all of the rest of it is a huge time sink. What started off as a way to increase people’s productivity turned out to be a gigantic mutual-masturbation exercise. But because it was the only thing anyone could rely on to keep growing the economy, it was encouraged. It’s useless. Cut the legs off that rabbit for me, please. That’s all America makes now is noise. And nobody listens to it.”

I’ll tell them: “Back when this country was founded, there was almost nobody here except a few rich people and a few poor people, but they were all in the same boat against the Indians and the British. Their ability to crush the savages and expand the country required they rely on each other and a few Frenchmen. Now we’ve grown to the limits of our domain and there are no savages to crush, nothing legal to exploit, the British and the French are whupped, and we have and a ruling caste of people who would prevent us from doing so even if we wanted to, which we do. Let’s make no bones about it: we want to crush and exploit. But we’re being prevented from doing so. China is not, and neither is India. If you really look carefully, you’ll see that the big people in Britain who still want to crush and exploit are all the ones who have homes in Dubai and invest in China and India. They really don’t want to live in Britain, because it takes all their money and makes them suffer through the endless guilt trip, which is why most of them are drunks.”

“Speaking of drunks, there is the whole problem of the Irish. They were doing pretty well up until recently, and then they found out how badly American bankers and investment firms had lied to them. Now they’re all drunks again. That is supposed to be seen in America as some kind of relief.”

“The President’s home state is the most bankrupt of any state in this country. For more than a decade it has listened to people pull the financial strings who shouldn’t have been allowed to piss on the front porch, but they did it. And they’re not dumb people! There is the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, all kinds of brainpower there, but lo and behold — they’re all flat broke and they’ve all screwed themselves! Now what they want to do is build more gambling parlors (always a source of reliable growth and estimable civic mores) and raise taxes and borrow more money to cover the enormous hole they’ve dug. Please, don’t read this, Children. It will tell you exactly what is going to happen to you. You just will not be able to stop.”

This is a short diary but it’s on an important subject and there really isn’t much more to be said than this:

Someone needs to tell John Boehner to grow the heck up and stop crying in front of every camera thrust in front of him, particularly when he’s being interviewed by Lesley Stahl for 60 Minutes. It was OK to see a sniffle here and there in the past, but this is now becoming a pattern in which Boehner just lets loose with the waterworks every time he’s asked to make a comment on something even tangentially emotional.

It’s becoming disturbing.

I don’t have any doubt that he’s a man of deep feelings but it’s getting worse and more acute and more frequent; his inability to keep a lid on it in public is really making me question his emotional stability. Lots of people have deep feelings and it’s a challenge for a lot of people to maintain their composure but they do it – and if they can’t, they find out why and they take steps to bring it under control. Boehner is now coming across as a blubbering, tongue-tied basket case whenever he has to think about something difficult or emotionally challenging. If he keeps crying every time someone asks him a tough question, it might be wise for the Republican caucus to relieve him of his duties and get him some help, because he’s obviously decompensating on a pretty regular basis these days.

America’s in a tough way, Mr. Speaker, and there’s a lot of pain to go around, but we’re not all sitting here with tissues crying all over each other: we’re working to make it better. So pull it together, bro.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2010/12/13/VI2010121301704.html?hpid=artslot

Yup. It’s true. Druidism is now a bonafide religion in Britain, instead of a gathering of eccentric occult whackos.

Hey at least that means the guy I knew from NJIT who couldn’t find enough protection spells in Dungeons & Dragons now has a place he can return home to.

The Druid Network, a group of about 350 Druids, will receive exemptions from taxes on donations after the semi-governmental Charity Commission granted it the same status as mainstream religions such as the Church of England.

It’s all downhill from here, folks. We’re all going to be robed wanderers chanting at stones before it’s over. Boy was Carl Sagan wrong, but maybe Stanley Kubrick was right. Lock and load, folks, Western Civilization has gone back to the robed, mysterious nature-worshippers. The Dark Ages are Back.

Although they are best known as the robed, mysterious people who gather every summer solstice at Stonehenge – which predates the Druids – believers say modern Druidry is chiefly concerned with helping practitioners connect with nature and themselves through rituals, dancing and singing at stone circles and other sites throughout the country they view as sacred.

OK listen everybody. I know that I have a mixed reputation for being a cheerleader here for Conservatives and Republicans – sometimes I’m a squishy squish. Sometimes I contest the official Party Line. I criticise Sarah Palin, I yell and scream and moan sometimes, or just suck my thumb and don’t write anything, or even worse, sometimes I make jokes. I joke about our politics and I do my best to camouflage whether I’m really in support of a Conservative agenda, specifically. Doing that gives a lot of wiggle room to other squishes and half-hearted Republicans in the room, so they can feel like maybe somehow they’re OK too, but it’s a terrible way to run a Party. I know, it’s the Internet and all…people have all kinds of opinions. However, when our country is really in danger of going into the toilet, it’s time to stop playing games and relying on Transactional Analysis to help us ignore the problems.

There is a certain benefit to having undertaken transactional analysis and read that book at a very young age, but there’s a point where all of us need to understand that the world isn’t subsumed by a self-help book that says everything is basically all right. Because it’s not. And right now, there’s a lot more evidence than ever that at least three things are happening:

1) People are waking up to the fact that the United States has an unsustainable fiscal policy.
2) People in the heartland of America are waking up to the fact that they really need to do something about it.
3) People are coming to realize that sitting on their duffs and waiting to be told who to vote for isn’t going to help save this great country of ours before it turns into something nobody wants.

Right now, as Conservatives, Republicans and Tea Partiers (which I haven’t been until now) most of us understand that unless we effect real change in the upcoming elections, we’re headed down a pretty dismal path of increasing government spending, increasing regulation, increasing fealty to “global government” mandates, increasing lack of responsibility in government for the wasting of our tax dollars, a lower standard of living for our children and grandchildren in the future, a lower set of basic living expectations for all Americans, increased illegal immigration, less control over our own country and its expectations and demands, and even more obtuseness when it comes to the forces of government that increasingly run every aspect of our lives. And no matter how “softly” all of the disparate agencies of the gangrenous federal government believe they’re regulating our lives, everyone who isn’t gangrenous knows that they’re just inflating…inflating.

For the past three years, all of us have been hurt deeply by the economy. It could have been avoided. People shouldn’t have borrowed more than they could pay, and the Government and the institutions we formerly trusted that were private institutions shouldn’t have gone along with the Gubment’s plan. The real problem was that there weren’t any real Conservatives guiding the decisionmaking in those institutions – instead they took that enormous risk and decided to creatively repackage it and sell it all around the world. If there had been any Conservatives there, someone would have yelled: “STOP!” and we would not be where we are today. The past is gone. Let’s not make the future gone as well.

It’s time to elect some different leaders, ladies and gentlemen.

We’re facing a difficult and really hard-fought battle with a little over a month left to go. Everyone is going to have to get involved in whatever way they can, and particularly to get out the vote for the most Conservative candidate they can in their district and locality. They also need to be conscious of the fact that if someone loses the popularity contest, they should bow out gracefully and transfer that support to someone else who is at least closer to their ideals than the other candidates would be.

My personal feeling is that we have a good chance to regain the House with a lot of hard-fought battleground seats and have a slim but unlikely chance of retaking the Senate. I’m a pessimist, and deliberately so, because I know that complacency is no substitute, but too often the substitute, for people showing up on election day.

The optimist in me is going to do a couple of things in the next month, though: I’m going to volunteer as much time as I can to candidates who I think deserve to win. I’m going to contact them and try to help them in whatever way I can. I can’t donate a lot of money right now (because I don’t have much to donate) but I know that I and lots of other people I know want to see the momentum that’s been built in the past six months — from all kinds of disparate sources — is focused and brought to bear this November, and it a matter right now of doing what you can, whenever you can. It’s the Zero Dissipation Coalition, the ZDPC. Fight right up until the last moment on election day, folks. It’s time to push our effort to return the Congress back to actual Americans into afterburner.

And do you know what? Those actual Americans include a lot of nonpartisan independents, many of whom are very intelligent and don’t want to be talked down to, they’re not interested in the sound bites, they’re interested in the effect of decisions on their lives first and then on the country as a whole. They’re a little upset, they want their kids to succeed, they want America to do well, and they’re fiercely independent. So don’t disparage them, because they know as well as you and I do in our hearts that where we’re going is not the best place.

This is the first time I’ve said anything like this in my life and it will probably be the last: I would rather *any* of our candidates win than any of theirs. Let’s do everything we can to make it happen.

Today I had to compose a writing sample because I’m applying for a second job, so that I can help my family survive the still-ongoing economic catastrophe that was visited upon us by feckless people in Government followed by feckless people on Wall Street and elsewhere.

I wondered for a few minutes what I was really expected to write when applying for a job in this economy, as an entrepreneur and a small businessperson who has given everything he owned in the world to an attempt to succeed.

Should it be a lament about how people can be so easily fooled by each other, an acerbic little essay about the power of suggestion? Or should it be something more positive, about looking at a landscape strewn with pictures of broken dreams while trying to arrive at some inspirational moral to the story? I decided to write the second one, and I think everyone here at Redstate should try to, also. We’ve got a long way to go, and it begins in November.

You know, this whole thing about this tiny church in Florida has got me thinking.  It’s got lots of other people thinking, too – instead of doing useful, productive work.  There’s no need to recapitualte everything they’re thinking, because you can find it all over the place. 

But what I was thinking was this: burn the right book. And if you wanted to burn a book as an act of protest, to express your First Amendment rights for a cause that really matters, why not instead burn the Federal Budget for Fiscal Year 2011 and its appendix?  The Federal Budget for Fiscal Year 2011 is 186 pages and costs $37.00, or almost 20 cents a page.  The Appendix to the budget is 1424 pages (because it describes what actually goes on in there) and costs $73.00, or just over 5 cents a page.  It’s good to see, I guess, that the government applies a volume discount on the number of pages it prints, particularly when you need the Big Book to understand the Small Book. And really, the most important threat to most people’s livelihoods in this country is the endlessly increasing size of the federal budget.

In fact, burning the Koran will arguably make Americans less safe and sound – even the threat to do so has already made one preacher at a tiny backwoods church and his small congregation less safe, although whether they were really ever “sound” in terms of mind is a big open question.

On the other hand, burning some copies of the Federal Budget might have an entirely beneficial effect, since very few people read them anyway, but everyone pays for them.

My firm belief is that the Second Coming isn’t going to arrive at the behest of isolated Florida preachers, no matter how hard they try. On the other hand, the Federal Budget arrives every single year here in the United States, and look at all the damage it is doing.

Ok this is going to be very short but Sarah Palin is forgetting something when she says things like this, referring to Scott Brown:

“But up here in Alaska, and so many places across the U.S., where we have a pioneering, independent spirit, and we have an expectation that our representatives in D.C. will respect the will of the people and the intelligence of the people — well, up here, we wouldn’t stand for that.”

Uh, Ok. Let’s not talk about the fact that Sarah Palin couldn’t ever be anyone’s Senator here in Massachusetts (nor would she want to be.)  Or that she decided to quit her job as Governor of Alaska to persue what she’s currently doing.  It’s beside the point, even according to her. 

Instead we should remember something else.  If we’re going to talk about judgment, let’s remember whose Vice Presidential candidate pick she was, and how enthusiastically she accepted that job.  Does anyone remember who that guy was?  Because she was willing to be his Vice President, and she wanted it really badly.  And a lot of us held our noses and went along with that, at the time. 

Remember, Sarah?

What I read from this and the past few days’ events is that we’re looking at McCain/Palin again in 2012, along with Romney/Brown.   Redstate’s editors should buy a pallet of Pepto Bismol right now.

Almost two years ago, just after Obama won the 2008 Presidential election, I posted a short blurb here at Redstate referencing an article written by someone who I think is among the brightest bulbs in the marquee – Philip Greenspun of MIT.  I’d like to briefly reprise that article here. With the benefit of almost two years of hindsight, it stands as one of the most clear-headed descriptions of the problems America is currently facing. Imagine, someone actually attempting to treat the moribund economy as a problem to be solved instead of a disaster to be pushed down the road, onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.

It’s also a prescriptive essay, but precious few of the prescriptions have been followed by our current government.  I think it’s time they were. 

Here is the essay:  “Economy Recovery Plan For The United States”

When I read it back in 2008, I understood two things right away. The first was that Greenspun had accurately described the situation, as well as the steps we needed to take to ameliorate it and turn it around. The second was that he published it just after Obama was elected because he had a hunch that none of those steps would be taken. As a result, the essay stands as one of the most prescient observations on the American economy I’ve read in my lifetime. I invite you all to read it again now, while thinking about it in the context of the decisions made at the Federal level in the past two years.

With the midterm elections coming up, I don’t think there’s a more important time or a more important subject. If the United States doesn’t begin to heed this advice – and there is no sign that anyone in the Obama Administration is capable of doing so – the future of America for the next ten years does indeed Look Like Michigan.

Respectfully submitted for your review and comment.

Hello everyone.

I’d just like to post a follow-up to my previous entry on Massachusetts (actually Deval Patrick’s) one-gun-a-month legislation with emanating penumbras, H.4102, and how it turned out – for this legislative session, at least.

Here in the Commonwealth we’ve become sadly accustomed — and we even expect it of each other at times — not to boast when we manage to prevent a violation of our rights and a further increase in anti-gun incrementalism which ultimately aims to make the 2nd Amendment not worth the paper it is printed on, at least as far as Massachusetts is concerned. Prior to the cases before the Supreme Court this year, the Patrick Administration submitted H.4102 as a kind of prophylactic against those cases. He crafted the bill back in June (or perhaps even earlier) of 2009, so that it would arrive in advance of any SC decisions. It took a long time to wend its way through the Legislature here, but it almost made it to the floor, at the end of the session this year, when controversial bills of this kind are commonly pushed out.

If it had passed the Legislature it would have meant a one-gun-per-month restriction on firearms purchases here in MA and it *also* would have created an entirely new class of crime, punishable by a 10 year prison sentence, based on a misdemeanor. And that’s just part of it. You can read the text at GOAL.

I am happy to report that H.4102 never made it out of the MA House Ways and Means Committee and died in committee before it could reach the State House floor, thanks to the efforts of GOAL MA and many others. I’m also unhappy to report it, in a way, because I shouldn’t have to report it. It was a terrible law, and the fact that it made it all the way to the Ways and Means Committee is actually pretty shameful. Legislation of this kind should never have been proposed or considered seriously, but it was, and we here in MA did successfully stop it from becoming law, at least in this session of the MA legislature.

Please take a few moments to read about the bill at GOAL MA, and while you’re there, have a good careful look at the results of the anti-gun legislation in this state since 1998.

I want to remind everyone here at Redstate that your 2nd Amendment rights have not been settled by the decisions in Heller and McDonald. In many ways, those decisions have just created a series of new paths for legislation, and I can tell you as a resident of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that those avenues are constantly being explored. They will be driven down if it is politically expedient, and not just here in MA. The most important thing, rather than ballyhooing this victory from one end of the world to the other, is to help make sure that people realize that those two Supreme Court decisions do not represent an end state – they are, in fact, a beginning for anti-gun, anti-2nd Amendment groups across this country. I also want to emphasize how well-prepared the gun grabbers are to conduct these kinds of legislative campaigns – Patrick started working on that bill well over a year ago, and I can tell you that as surely as the sun rises in the East, if there had been even a ghost of a wisp of a chance it could be passed this year, it would have been. Heads up.

I know that here in MA we have a lot of very good and wise people who were persuaded that Patrick’s law was wrongheaded, but it might not always be so. Next year there will be more laws proposed, that’s a given. In the meantime, I’d like to thank anyone and everyone who responded to my call here and did so responsibly. Where I live, the most important things that we have in terms of preserving our rights are evidence and dialogue, not blustery, in-your-face tactics.

GOAL MA is a model organization for other states in the Northeast where there are similar concerns. I really hope more people in the surrounding states (particularly Maryland, but also New York) will consult with them, because they’re professional, thoughtful, situationally aware, and very well-prepared. This most recent result is a testament to that.

I have been watching the Al Gore Massage Therapist story with all the restraint that I could muster and certainly more restraint than it deserved. Now that the Portland Police have decided that Al Gore is once again free and clear to hire massage therapists in their fair city, I think he should do something radically different, and start getting into Turkish massage while mixing in a few other massage traditions in the Middle East.

Tony Curtis, Kaiser Wilhelm and Florence Nightingale are all said to have been cleaned at the baths near the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent. I’ll bet they don’t even have to pay health insurance for their practitioners. It’s a place of tradition that’s been unaffected by all the harrowing details and pesky loose ends of modernity, and Gore should fly a few people in and choose #5.

Mr. Gore should know that this BBC report is merely a foretaste of real Turkish Massage and other kinds of steam room treatment in the Middle East. There are other techniques he might be interested in that involve being smacked all around the room like a big sweaty rag doll, pummeled against the hot stone walls until one doesn’t even know what village or clan they started from, having all sorts of muscles not just deeply massaged but stretched and extended to almost unbelievable extents – certainly the participant will find them unbelievable. He’s obviously a dilettante, not so much a connoisseur of these kinds of holistic treatments, but I think he should try them, instead of dabbling in the shallow pools of Portland.

We’ve all watched Al Gore over the past several years and seen all of his transformations, from Beta-Male Geek Striver who Invented the Internet to bearded, jilted depressive, to corpulent messianic prophet of Doom and Salvation, cable and internet televisiomedia entrepreneur, Board member, and now postmodern political divorcee, and frankly I think he’s getting the wrong massages from people in the wrong places at the wrong times. Nobody goes to Portland for massage therapy. He should take a trip to Turkey and get himself all kneaded up, stretched out, smacked around, spindled, folded and mutilated, drenched and steamed and patted down until he’s happy again.