Occupy Wall Street, Democrats, the Obama administration, Davos, the Communist Party, and various and sundry fans of government have recently gotten on yet another predictable kick about replacing capitalism with some form of highly regulated central planning. When people are free to buy what they want and make what they want, they say, the marketplace goes wild, dogs and cats start living together, the poles melt, glaciers topple into the sea, polar bears float away, banks collapse, hedge funds steal grand-pappy’s Teamsters’ Union pension, and generally a whole boat-load of bad things happen. As an alternative to all of this chaos with people trying to maximize their own happiness, they claim, maybe just maybe we should have the government step in and regulate the amount of happiness that everyone is allowed to have, including controlling manufacturing so that everyone can get exactly as much stuff as they need in order to be happy, no more and no less.

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It’s always dangerous to overthink. But right now I’m cogitating on the GOP primary contests and how to characterize the people who support each of the candidates, and wondering if I have thought enough.

Who are the candidates and their supporters?

Mitt Romney: His supporters are the country club Republicans and the people who base their support on who they think will win. As other candidates drop out his momentum appears to increase, and this momentum draws more and more casual supporters who don’t really care whom they support as long as the guy they support ends up winning.

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Just 23% say the US Government has the consent of the governed. This result of a new Rasmussen Poll is startling in its simplicity. It simply states that in the opinion of the people, their representatives have not been representing them but doing something else. How else could the American people have come to the conclusion that their own government rules in their name but contrary to their wishes or desires?

Charts illuminate numbers like this in a way the numbers alone cannot.

Rasmussen has differentiated its political poll results between mainstream Americans and the Political Class for a while. The difference is that Americans trust the people more than they trust the self-appointed rulers of the people, while the Political Class trusts the rulers more than the people. So it’s no surprise that the Political Class disagrees with the above result.

The data leads one to the conclusion there is widespread dissatisfaction with Congress’s performance. Despite this widespread dissatisfaction, the Political Class, comprising the DC establishment, East and West coast elites, the media, legal and higher education professions, continues to support this profoundly non-representative Congress. The Tea Party is in the lead of efforts to replace Congress with representatives who take their duty to represent their constituents seriously. But there is an underlying pessimism in the country concerning this course of action. Most Americans believe the system is rigged to prevent the people from replacing bad members of Congress.

The greatest danger is that the American people may begin to believe that their votes don’t matter, never will matter, that the government is an occupying, enemy force, and that their only recourse is violence. Violent revolutions almost never increase the freedom of the people. Usually they result in dictatorial rule. The US did it once and it’s not likely to work again.

The Precinct Project holds as its goal the mobilization of Conservatives who want to restore accountability and Constitutional governance to the United States, and send home all those public servants who believe their job is to rule over us and ours is to obey and give them everything we own. We need to overcome despair, which will weaken us, and become energized by our knowledge that we are not alone. We, the conservatives, outnumber those who support every terrible thing the government has been doing for the last hundred years by a factor of 3 to 1. Our problem really is messaging, and winning the political battles. Most important of those is winning.

Conservatives, you need to join up with the Precinct Project and united with other Conservatives to take over the Republican Party from those members of the Political Class who still occupy the top spots. The GOP must be cleansed, and then it can become a force for good and the renewal of the American Constitutional promise of 1789.

This diary was originally posted at Unified Patriots.

We are in the first, heady days of the Obama 2012 Campaign. Let’s see what is going on. What will Obama run against? He will run, naturally on Hoax and Chains, just as he did last time. But this time instead of running against George W. Bush, he will run against John McCain, or at least his foreign policy as embodied in the foreign policy of Barack Obama. This makes 2012 the Obama v. Obama campaign season.

Barack Obama's 2012 Anti-Bad-Obama Poster

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The other night I watched The Social Network. At the beginning of the movie Mark Zuckerberg sat down in his Harvard dorm room and in a drunken coding binge wrote a web application that asked users to compare female faces for who was hotter. Then the application ranked the results. Zuckerberg sat back and watched as it went viral so quickly that it brought the Harvard network to near collapse. This was the genesis of his success. Zuckerberg had the insight that it was the viral appeal of this program being passed on from guy to guy that he would harness for Facebook. So he created Facebook, and most likely you and your extended family and your friends and coworkers all have accounts on Facebook. It’s addictive. That’s the viral appeal.

But my point is not the viral appeal of Facebook. It is that he did the key work on that first project in one night—while he was drunk. He was motivated because he was mad at a girl. So he did something stupid and juvenile about it that got him in trouble. But afterwards he took his insight in a different direction, and coded and architected Facebook. He did it. He did it himself. He found helpers afterwards. But while he was creating something entirely new he worked on his own, he worked hard, and he worked as fast as a man can work.

What has changed? Why couldn’t Rome be built in a day but something like Facebook was close?

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The public labor union bullying of the elected legislature and governor continues in Wisconsin, where Scott Walker stands resolute in his plan to balance the budget not only this year, but also for the future. Gold plated union pensions and contracts negotiated through an incestuously corrupt process threaten to bankrupt the state in the near future, and have created a $137 million deficit this year and a much larger one in the next 2-year budget cycle. Democrats in the legislature ran away from the state senate rather than participate in the democratic process. The protests are also fundamentally anti-democratic, as they seek to overturn the results of a democratic election by bullying the legislature. Republicans in the Wisconsin state senate have upped the ante: introducing fast track Voter ID legislation to prevent some forms of vote fraud and call Democrats’ bluff. It remains to be seen if Democrats rush back to the statehouse in order to protect the right to commit vote fraud in Wisconsin. Democrats traditionally favor the “right” to commit vote fraud as well as the “right” of state workers to conspire with friendly Democratic state officials to negotiate sweetheart union deals in return for kickbacks to reelection funds. When these two cherished Democrat Party values are put up against each other we’ll see which one wins. Obama has already backed off early White House and DNC support of the Wisconsin rabble rousers. The protests are borderline violent, with actual locals supplemented by revolutionary communists and socialists bused in from out of state. The tone of things is most definitely not civil, with union supporters, communists, socialists, and various revolutionary rabble rousers making the most bloodcurdling threats imaginable and comparing every Republican in sight to Adolf Hitler. The public perception of union demands has suffered badly.

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Don’t take this too seriously. It’s just a bit of fun.

William F. Buckley’s Desk…

And Nat Hentoff’s Desk…

And Albert Einstein’s Desk…

And Barack Obama’s Desk…

Have a better caption than the one I put in the title? Let’s have a caption contest in the comments.

X-posted

In the past week many flocks of birds have been dropping dead out of the sky, fish have floated belly up on various rivers, and bumble bees are buzzing off to drop dead too. Some have been blaming Bush, others have been blaming invisible airplanes, anti-missile technology, UFOs, Obamacare, Global Warmening/ Coolening, and Santa Claus’s hypersonic sleigh. But the most amusing reason I’ve heard is that the birds have dropped dead after running into the debt ceiling.

I didn’t know they could fly that high!

So I did a little calculation to see how high birds would have to fly to run into the debt ceiling. My presumption is that the debt ceiling needs to be tall enough to fit a stack of dollar bills under it. A dollar bill is .0043 inches thick when stacked, according to the US Treasury. Here is a table showing how high birds would have to fly to run into a debt ceiling defined thusly.

Once the debt ceiling passed a billion it was 68 miles up, too high for birds to fly. This happened before the turn of the 20th century. The center of the moon is between 225,622 and 252,088 miles away from the center of the earth. So the debt ceiling passed the moon when the national debt got to 4 trillion. This happened some time in the 1990s, while Clinton was in office. Mars is 34 million miles from earth at its closest approach. This would require a debt ceiling at roughly $501 trillion. The US government will go bankrupt well before it approaches that level of debt, in fact it will require drastic and destructive measures if the debt approaches the $16T GDP any closer. So I wonder what the idiots in charge of federal spending are trying to reach. They can’t reach Mars. So what are they trying to reach?

Maybe bankruptcy is the whole goal, after all.

The 2-Year tax rate extension negotiated between Obama and some Republican congress-critters looks like it will get through and be passed. But this will not be before Nancy Pelosi’s pork brigade finishes larding it up with a bunch of noxious spending to make it more palatable to her gang in the House and Harry Reid’s gang in the Senate. As per plan, it will also be linked with refundable Tax Credits to continue Obama’s redistributionist ideology, plus patching unemployment benefits for another thirteen months and renewing the Ethanol price supports and global food shortage mandates. This is just being passed now because the Democrats in charge had two years since 2008 to fix the problem but failed to protect Americans from the largest tax increase in American history. There is no reason for Republicans to follow the lead of lazy Democrats. Republicans should set a better example and plan ahead for this important issue before it becomes hair-on-fire urgent in the winter of 2012.

In January 2011, House Republicans should introduce a clean bill to make the Bush tax rates permanent. It should apply to all Americans, even small business owners whom Democrats want to punish with extra taxes. The public is on the Republican side in this. The tax issue is a winner for Republicans, and will be something that Republicans can talk about on every Sunday show and every press interview. Pass a pure, brief version in the House after reading the entire bill aloud and debating it on C-SPAN. There should be no extraneous legislation in it: No unemployment; no refundable tax credits; no money for ACORN or unions. Send it to the Senate and wait.

Until it passes and is signed into law this bill will be the best evidence in the world that Democrats do not want to let people keep their money. It would show that Democrats think the government is better qualified to spend the people’s money than the people are. This is the government we are talking about, the one that borrowed over $3 Trillion in the last two years to finance spending. Now that the government has spent all this money, the government’s pet political party wants to reach into the pocket of every American man, woman, and child and extract $35,000 each for their share of the national debt.

Progressive Democrats like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama are not going to let permanent Bush tax rates pass if they can stop it. They hate the idea of Americans keeping their money. They want to redistribute Americans’ money to the communist rulers of other countries like China and Brazil and to their favored political and racialist groups. But about 50% of Democrats want the tax rates to be permanent for all Americans. This makes it one of the best wedge issues ever. It cuts the Democrats in half. It will never pass with the progressive, socialist Democrats in charge of the party right now. And until it passes, non-socialist, rank-and-file Democrats will keep splitting off from their party in search of a political party that brings some sanity to the discussion.

The socialists in charge of the Democratic Party today will destroy their party before they let it return to the control of people who think like Americans. So Republicans should give them the chance to do just that.

Most likely the bill will not get through Democrats’ fear, urgency, and doubt attacks right away. It will just sit there, waiting, making noise, underlining how Democrats didn’t take care of this when they had the chance. That just makes it better. The longer it sits there like a festering sore the more urgent it gets, and the more apparent it is that Democrats do not want people to keep their own money.They think that no matter what it is, whether to buy food or drive our cars, go to the doctor, buy medicine, clothes, housing, lunch for our kids, or even give money to charity, government bureaucrats do a better job at picking what to spend money on than regular Americans do. Why should Americans have to pursue happiness on their own when the government can just hand it to them? Sure, it’s a little like living in your parents’ house as an adult, under their rules, while putting all your money in the family pot. Your loving parents say it’s worth it because Mom’s such a great cook and you will never want to eat anything she didn’t cook, make any decisions your Dad doesn’t agree with, put away money for your retirement, get married or have kids, because Mom and Dad wouldn’t approve. That’s what it’s like when you don’t have resources of your own. You don’t have choices either. It’s always pizza on Friday night and chicken on Wednesday.

And that’s the bottom line. Democrats do not want Americans to keep their own money or to be free to make their own decisions. Republicans do. Republicans should pass this bill, then pop the popcorn and wait.

The Tea Party Patriots and the Claremont Institute both scheduled shindigs to welcome the Freshman class of Republicans to Washington DC on the same day, at overlapping times. It’s a classic tempest in a teapot. Leaving aside hurt feelings, territoriality and resentments it’s important to make a few points.

The Tea Party Patriots event begins with brunch and goes 11:30AM to 3:30PM. The Claremont event runs from 12:30PM to 3:30PM. Both events have a hard stop so currently serving Republicans can get over to Congress to oppose the Socialist Democrats as the Red Queen Pelosi commences her revenge plan to ram more spectacularly bad legislation [preposition] America’s [body part] starting at 4:00PM in the lame duck session.

First, after Republicans won a historic victory on November 2, 2010, it’s critical for those Congressmen and women who actually get to vote during the Lame Duck session to come out of the gate strategically smart enough and united enough to defeat the Socialist Democrats and their destructive agenda. Most freshmen are not in the Lame Duck congress, but have a few months to get their feet on the ground.

Second, I’m sure that newly elected Senators and Representatives who owe their victory to Tea Party voters and donors are thankful to the Tea Parties for their assistance. It would only be polite to show up at the Tea Party event and shake some hands.

Third, the Tea Party event is more likely to emphasize the principles and values that unite We the People with our Republican public servants than the Claremont event, which will be full of lobbyists looking for “friends” to help them get favorable tax treatment and earmarks. If our newly elected Representatives and Senators don’t already share our Tea Party principles and values, they aren’t going to learn them at one Tea Party event. So it won’t be the end of the world if they attend Claremont’s event. Actually, as EE notes, Claremont is one of the most conservative organizations that exists anywhere. Freshmen will make valuable alliances at either or both events.

Fourth, We the People will respect our public servants according to what they do in Congress, not according to whose shindigs they attend.

Fifth, We the People are watching what the 112th Congress does on the job. If they remember what the phone lines and fax machines were like during the Obamacare cramdown, that’s what it will be like from now on.

I will finish up with a note to the 112th Congress.

Technorati Tags: Government, Conservatism, Republican, Tea Party

Judge Andrew Napolitano gave a terrific speech at RightOnline 2010. After a few funny anecdotes about his judicial career he began by quoting the movie version of St. Thomas More in his defense against charges of treason.

Some men think the earth is round, others think it flat. It is a matter capable of question. But if it is flat, will the King’s command make it round? And if it is round, will the King’s command flatten it?

Of course the King cannot decree the shape of the earth, any more than the President can declare things to be evil that are good, or things to be good that are evil. Sure, the President or Congress can pass unjust laws but this is a violation of the Constitution, and as Napolitano pointed out: The states created the Federal Government and gave it its power, and they can take that power back. Napolitano approaches the end of the speech with another telling anecdote, this time about the incompetence of government.

• Medicare: broke.
• Medicaid: broke.
• Social Security: broke.
• Amtrak: broke.
• The Post Office: broke.

You’ll know this one. It didn’t happen too far from here. When the Mustang Ranch was taken over by the Federal Government for failure to pay its taxes, they drove it into the ground. So… the government can’t supply hookers and booze to truckers in the desert and they want to run health care

The government proves it has the reverse Midas touch. Everything it touches falls apart and turns to dust. Only a government with employees similar to those Obama put in charge of GM and Chrysler, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, could lose money with a bar and legal house of prostitution in the middle of a desert.

Watch it all, peeps.

Judge Andrew Napolitano at RightOnline 2010 from AFPhq on Vimeo.

I just came back from the best fireworks display I’ve ever seen. I wish you could have been there with me. We went to the beach right by the yacht club where the locals dock their 15, 20, and 30 foot boats, with a view of the bridge on one side and the Gulf on the other. Straight ahead of us was an island painted orange, with all the official, big, professional fireworks set up on it. On each side of us, behind us, and every fifty feet or so down the beach for another couple of miles, were families with their own fireworks. Each of these families was busily lighting fireworks and sending them up into the night while the “official” display went on. It was like the difference between being in the audience at a great concert and being on the stage.

We were surrounded by fireworks. Sparklers, screaming roman candles, bottle rockets, combination fireworks that released little army men that drifted down on little parachutes, loud fireworks that pulsed white light like a strobe, showers of sparks, big bangers, little bangers, whizzing flying things that sounded like a blender gone berserk and looked like the bat signal, bigger rockets, huge rockets, crackling crawfish, fountains of sparks, and various firecrackers and smoke bombs. And not a single person got his hand blown off or his eye burned out. I didn’t even hear a single “ouch” (unlike earlier in the day when one of those little tank firecrackers singed the tip of my finger). There were probably about 2000 or 3000 people on this beach setting off fireworks.

The official fireworks were bigger, admittedly. But they were about a third or half a mile out from the beach, and there were so many more munitions going off behind and to either side of us that the main show paled in comparison to the people’s show. The people, who bought fireworks on their own, without municipal support for their purchases, who set them off using their military training or common sense for safety measures, who set them off for their own selfish reasons instead of a government’s solemn dedication to whatever a government is dedicated to, the people had a better fireworks display than the government did.

This is why the fireworks display that I saw tonight was the best fireworks display I’ve ever seen. Not only were the fireworks better. The people, acting in freedom and using their own intelligence, demonstrated something we all know to be true but sometimes forget. Individuals, doing things for their own reasons, always do a better job than government, no matter how much money government expropriates.

According to long established tradition in the English common law, and as explained by the eminent Blackstone, the three rights in the Declaration of Independence are as follows.

Life is the right to live, intact with one’s limbs, eyes, and organs. Any physical damage that cripples or removes a limb, or eyes, or kills one violates this right. This definition was important because according to the common law people had the right to defend themselves with lethal force if they were under threat of losing life or limb.

Liberty is the right to move about freely. Any false imprisonment, clapping into slavery, or kidnapping violates this right. Once again, under the common law people had the right to defend themselves with lethal force if they are under threat of losing their liberty.

Property is the right to keep the fruits of one’s own labor, including items that are improved from their natural state, and to transfer the rights to this property to others as one wishes. If people become wealthy through their hard work, they can trade for the things they like, buy and sell items, and pass property on to charities or family as they wish. This is also known as the Right to the Pursuit of Happiness, because if happiness is brought nearer by a life without hardships, and hard work and the accumulation of property leads to a life without undue hardships, then they are one and the same. Certainly people cannot be happy if they are forced to constantly struggle in abject poverty for food, a bed, and a roof over their head.

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Canadians are so polite it’s just amazing. For example, the other day Ann Coulter received a letter from a mind-reading provost at the University of Ottawa warning her to watch her mouth or she might be arrested and thrown in the hoosegow. The interesting part went like this.

Canadian law puts reasonable limits on the freedom of expression. For example, promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges. Outside of the criminal realm, Canadian defamation laws also limit freedom of expression and may differ somewhat from those to which you are accustomed. I therefore ask you, while you are a guest on our campus, to weigh your words with respect and civility in mind.

There is a strong tradition in Canada, including at this university, of restraint, respect and consideration in expressing even provocative and controversial opinions and urge you to respect that Canadian tradition while on our campus. Hopefully, you will understand and agree that what may, at first glance, seem like unnecessary restrictions to freedom of expression do, in fact, lead not only to a more civilized discussion, but to a more meaningful, reasoned and intelligent one as well.

Ann Coulter responded with musings about how she would file a Hate Speech complaint, including in a letter to the Ottawa Citizen:

The provost simply believes and is publicizing his belief that conservatives are more likely to commit hate crimes in their speeches. Not only does this promote hatred against conservatives, but it promotes violence against conservatives. [link]

And the sequel to this was extremely amusing, if you are amused by irony. Tonight, according to Drudge, a mob of 2,000 angry, hateful students and members of communist parties, carrying rocks and sticks with which to attack and commit violence upon Ms. Coulter, assembled outside the building in which she was to speak. Some got into the building and pulled a fire alarm, while others shouted hatefully outside the building in protest of Ms. Coulter’s “hate speech.” Blogs called for Coulter to be hurt. Members of Parliament were banned from going, while a Member denounced her on the floor of Parliament. The threats were bloodcurdling enough that the police were persuaded to shut down Coulter’s speech before she was able to give it.

Whose speech stirred up violence and hatred again? Was it Coulter’s or the provost’s?

Technorati Tags: Canada, Ann Coulter, Censorship, Culture War, Education, Political Oppression, Hate Speech

Pelosi’s gang have the greatest claims for this bill. They can promise the world, since nobody has yet seen the bill. It might as well be the chupacabra, because it’s just as easy to see. I also suspect the bill’s a killer, just like the NHS and the X-Files version of the chupacabra.

Can anybody tell me if I missed anything?

Supposedly this bill is totally awesome and we are idiotic chumps because it…

1. Reduces the deficit;
   It nearly breaks even by paying for 6 years of benefits with 10 years of increased taxes. And it only ends up 800 billion in the red after ten years. In the second ten years that means it will be 40% over budget. How exactly is that reducing the deficit? By the way, I plan to pay my full year’s taxes next year on only 6 months of my income. The IRS understands and agrees with Congress’s math, right?

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The Captain’s Journal, The Media, the New Media, and U. S. Intelligence

• Takeaway: DoD Intelligence is finally recognizing the usefulness of open source intelligence and accurate history as practiced by bloggers sitting in basements, and as compared with the relative uselessness of politicized intelligence coming from the official US intelligence community.

Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz, Why Alternative Power is and will Remain Useless

• Quote: There exists no alternative energy source, no combination of alternative energy sources, and no system of combinations of alternative energy sources that can fully replace a single, coal fired electric plant built with 1930s era technology.

Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz, Does the President actually understand the Concept of Insurance?

• Quote: Liability insurance pays for the damage that you might do to the property and lives of others. Comprehensive pays to repair the damage to your own car. The law requires that you protect the rights of others, it doesn’t require that pay for your own car in any particular way. Everybody knows this.
• Takeaway: Everybody except Obama.

Gateway Pundit, Upward Bound is Down… Radical Sexual Indoctrination of Kids is In

• Upward Bound, which has a 95% rate of rehabilitating at-risk youth and getting them to graduate from four-year colleges, is being cut. Funding to teach fisting in schools is being increased.
• Takeaway: Jennings and GLSEN want homosexual, bisexual and transgender themes taught in every subject at every grade, all the way down to the kindergarten level, maybe even preschool.

Gateway Pundit, 12th Imam Appears, gets arrested by Iranian Regime

• On Friday during the local Friday sermon, in the southern Iranian city of Bandar Abbass, a young man presented himself as the Mahdi and claimed to have been sent by God to bring enlightenment and blessings to people. Soon after this however he was arrested by agents of the revolutionary guards.

Belmont Club, Masters of the Unvierse

• Are interstellar aliens likely to be peacemongering progressives, or somewhat more ruthless?

Robert LeFevre at Mises.org, The Birth of a Man

• Takeaway: What is needed is a Declaration of Individual Independence

Liz Blaine at Newsreal, How to Beat Leftists and Astroturfers

• While lurking the web I ran across a set of videos that fall into the “must view” category for conservatives this year. Recorded during Conservative New Media’s workshop the videos focus on tactics used by leftists and astroturfers during the 2008 primaries and election, and methods to defeat them.

Technorati Tags: Roundup, Interesting Articles

Courtney Cook wrote an infuriating essay for Salon that exposed the contempt she held for her marital oath and her first husband, a soldier deployed in an overseas combat theatre when she left him.

You’d be surprised how easy it is to leave a soldier on deployment. You can do it with a letter. (He can’t argue with you. He doesn’t have a phone.) If you lay the groundwork early, saying to the soldier before he leaves, “This will be the end of us, we might as well admit it,” it’s that much easier. The letter won’t even come as a shock.

And if you have children with that soldier? You can handle all that with a letter, too. He’ll write it — because he cares about the kids, because he wants to work with you to do what’s best for them even though you’re leaving him — and you’ll give it to them. Here again, you will avoid a nasty confrontation. Who will they cry to? You? You’re just the teary-eyed bearer of the letter. Him? The one who’s sweating it out in the desert?

There will be no moving truck, no boxes, no house torn asunder. The soldier is peeing in a bucket as you pack. He doesn’t care who gets the couch.

Now she has married a blue-eyed marxist war protester and had a marxist baby with him, while her ex-husband married again and had a baby with the new wife.

Nessa already wrote a beautiful response to this article. If you click through and read Ms. Cook’s diary you will know the cheater’s story, the spoiled brat’s story, the oath breaker’s story. Nessa tells the story with statistics and history. Cassy Fiano at HotAir explores the process by which this spoiled brat of a woman went astray. This diary isn’t about those things. This essay is about what oath breakers like Courtney Cook do to their husbands, men who are risking their lives to protect their families and country. And this essay is about the alternative.

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The Free Dictionary defines ‘tolerance‘ as follows.

tol·er·ance

1. The capacity for or the practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others.

That’s what tolerance used to mean, before Orwellian progressives performed their cunning linguistic tricks on it. Now the class-obsessed left has divided tolerance into two classes: partisan (good) and repressive (bad). The dirty secret is that both their meanings are identical and neither one is real tolerance.

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All over the US, especially in big cities but it happens in small towns too, people apparently rise up out of certain graveyards to vote every four years. This has has probably always happened, but this is 2010 and we don’t have to allow vote fraud to continue into the 21st century.

If you are allowed to vote, then your vote should be counted. If your vote is not counted, then it’s just as if you were stopped from voting. If a person gets to vote twice, that is the same exact thing as taking away someone else’s vote. If a person votes a dozen times at a dozen precincts, a dozen people have their votes stolen from them. One of them could have been you! There is nothing funny or innocent about vote fraud. No matter how rare it is, each time it happens it takes away a person’s Constitutionally granted power to vote. And each time it happens, the frustration over vote fraud convinces another person that voting is useless. If too many Americans come to believe their votes don’t count because of fraud, then the possibility of revolution by other means becomes very real. Those are the stakes. Those are the reasons why preventing vote fraud is important.

There is a non-partisan Voter ID Petition going on in Mississippi. Currently Mississippi state law prohibits poll workers from asking for or checking a photo ID to make sure that every voter is who she says she is. Coupled with the inability of cities and towns to clear the voter rolls of people who die, this leaves a wide-open field for fraudulent voting. The only way fraudulent voters get caught is if they come back to the same precinct to vote under a second name and one of the poll workers or watchers remembers them and calls them on it. The current petition is to put a question on the 2010 general election ballot that lets the people of Mississippi decide if they want to require Voter ID to prevent vote fraud.

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To the tune of Winter Wonderland

Shift bells ring, are you listening,
In the streets, blood is glistening.
Revolution in sight,
We’re toiling tonight.
Progressing to the workers’ motherland.

Gone away is our history,
Here to stay is equal misery.
We sing labor’s song,
As we go along,
Progressing to the workers’ motherland.

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
Then pretend that he is Chairman Mao.
He’ll say: Are you orphans?
We’ll say: No man,
But we can do the job,
Just show us how.

Later on, we’ll conspire,
As we dream by the fire
To face unafraid,
The plans that we’ve made,
Progressing to the workers’ motherland.

In the meadow we can build a gulag,
And pretend that it’s full of the rich.
We’ll starve teabaggers right there in the gulag,
Until the mass graves fill up the new ditch.

When it snows, ain’t it thrilling,
Tracking down bourgeois and killing?
We’ll murder and slay, the Soviet way,
Progressing to the workers’ motherland.

Everybody sing along with the progressive lyrics!

Updated: Replaced “Josef Stalin” in the second line of the third stanza with “Chairman Mao” for better poetic meter. Adjusted rhyme in fourth line to fit.

Xposted at

Technorati Tags: Satire, Lyrics, Music, Socialism, Progressivism, Christmas