Lack of money may not be the only reason they’re doomed.
Richard Miniter, in Forbes, notes that we have no choice, we are going to have to stop increasing the beast’s rations. But that is a real problem for democrats, whose entire raison d’etre is the delivery of more federal money in return for support.
The Democratic Party, as we have known it for the past 70 years, is now in its last days.
Yes, the House Republicans may raise the debt ceiling for a mix of spending cuts and revenue raisers. Yes, Barack Obama may win the 2012 presidential contest. Yes, bureaucrats and judges will continue to impose new and costly regulations on the economy.
But it doesn’t matter. The long-term trends are almost all bad news for the left wing of the party.
This week’s fight over raising the federal debt limit exposes a key weakness in the warfare-welfare state that has bestowed power onto the Democratic Party: Without an ever-growing share of the economy, it dies. Every vital element of the Democrats’ coalition — unions, government workers, government contractors, “entitlement” consumers — requires constant increases in payments, grants and consulting contracts. Without those payments, they don’t sign checks to re-elect Democrats.
Daniel Greenfield has an excellent, must-read editorial on the real meaning of the raising-the-debt-ceiling debate and “social justice” as a form of addiction.
The debt ceiling debate is less about spending than it is about the purpose of government. Under the impact of an economic recession, the train of the Great Society is approaching the edge of the New Frontier. Both sides are still trying to work out a New Deal, but another cuts and spending formula is not the solution. What we need is a serious and earnest discussion about why we are compulsively spending money.
A cocaine addict who runs out of money doesn’t have a spending problem, he has a drug problem. Telling him to cut back on how much money he spends on cocaine, or to shop around for cheaper cocaine isn’t the solution. It’s not about how much he’s spending, but about why. The problem isn’t in the math, it’s in the mindset.
Our cocaine is social justice. Like most junkies who are willing to sell anything and everything to keep the supply coming, Obama’s position in the budget debate is take everything—especially the military, but leave the social justice and the big government that administers it on the table. And also like most junkies, he has an endless supply of self-righteous speeches denouncing the people who just want him to stop.
In the rush of words, he postures, conflates compromise with confrontation, threatens and urges everyone to work together. There is no consistent message, only egotistical aggression and defensive need. Strip away the verbiage and you come away with a chorus of, “Mine, My Way, Mine”.
With all addictions, it is important to look for the root cause. The psychological weakness that allows the chemical rush to take over and become the defining principle of life. In this case it is a basic split over the purpose of government.
Brigadier General Thomas Jackson was still wearing his blue uniform.
The cannonade of Fort Sumter occurred way back on April 12th. There have occurred a few minor battles in remote locations, but so far the War for Southern Independence or the War to Preserve the Union, depending upon how you look at it, has not amounted to very much. But 150 years ago today the first great battle of the war took place.
I expect they had nicer weather for it that day.
As far back as May, the military high commands of both the Union and the Confederacy had envisioned a climactic battle occurring with a Union advance from Washington to come to grips with Confederate forces along the banks of Bull Run near the railroad junction of Manassas and the Warrenton Pike.
The commanders, for the Union, Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell, for the Confederacy, Gen. Pierre Gustave Toussaint Beauregard, were both classmates of the West Point Class of 1838. Perhaps therefore it was not surprising that both commanders proposed essentially the same strategy.
Both generals intended to flank the opposing army on the left, roll up its lines, and thereby defeat it. Both generals failed to reckon with the difficulty of achieving complex military evolutions with inexperienced troops and staffs. Had both initiated their attacks at exactly the same time, spectators might have seen the two armies engage and begin to revolve, one around the other, like dancers.
As it happened, McDowell initiated his advance a little earlier, but the Confederacy was to be more favored by fate.
At 9 AM, the tardy Beauregard received a dispatch from a signal officer, reporting that he saw “a body of [Union] troops crossing Bull Run two miles above the Stone Bridge.” He observed both infantry and artillery.
Beauregard was caught unprepared, but as Douglas Southall Freeman observes, in “Lee’s Lieutenants:”
[T]he threat of a Federal turning movement far above the Stone Bridge had been met by the convergence of four small columns [those of Evans, Bee, Hampton, and Jackson]. Each had moved swiftly and to precisely the right point, but none had acted on specific orders or with the full knowledge of the Generals at field headquarters.”
When Beauregard hurried to the front, and arrived atop “an eminence from which was visible a wide range of smoke-covered landscape,’
In front was a long, curving Federal front, ablaze at intervals with musketry fire and artillery. To the right and North… on an adjoining ridge, a short, thin line of Confederate infantry was in action. ... To the left… admirably placed behind the crest of the hill, was a waiting Confederate Brigade. Some of its men were lying down; others were in ranks. Near the center of this perfectly aligned Brigade, six field guns were barking viciously at the enemy. In the rear of these troops and streaming backward over the shoulder of the ridge to the North, were broken units that had evidently been in the fight.”
As his men, routed and in panic, fled toward safety and the rear, the desperate Brig. Gen. Barnard Bee attempting to stop their flight, placed himself in their path, and pointed with his sword toward that “perfectly aligned” Brigade. “There,” he cried, “stands Jackson, like a stone wall. Rally behind the Virginians.”
Faced with the approaching victorious Union infantry, Jackson commanded his Brigade to reserve its fire until they approached within 50 yards, then to fire and charge with the bayonet. “And when you charge,” Jackson instructed, “yell like Furies.”
The approaching Northern infantry ranks were shattered by well-aimed fire, and then the strange cry of Southern foxhunters broke from 1700 throats.
Jackson later reported with satisfaction that his Brigade “met the thus far victorious enemy and turned the fortunes of the day.” The Union Army broke into a disorganized mob, abandoning weapons and supplies, and fleeing back to Washington.
Despite the high temperatures, there are being conducted commemorative ceremonies and reenactments today. Washington Post
I’m not persuaded that the fantasy ending of “Scent of a Woman” (1992), in which one rip-roaring speech by a colorful old veteran suffices to cause a preparatory school dean and disciplinary committee to reverse course and do the right thing, is the best possible cinematic illustration of the point Eric Lutzuk might have chosen. I have met some deans and college disciplinary committees and I can tell you that all the eloquence of Daniel Webster or Demosthenes and all the sound reasoning and philosophy of the entire Western canon would have had precisely zero impact on any of the results of their deliberations.
Pardon the digression, but there is a pertinent scene in Joseph Heller’s great novel Catch-22 . The idealistic Clevinger is incorrectly accused of some default and is scheduled to appear before a military disciplinary tribunal. The cynical Yossarian warns him that he is completely screwed. Clevinger insists that he is perfectly safe because he is innocent. (I’m paraphrasing, rather than quoting.) “You don’t understand.” Yossarian warns him. “Those guys hate Jews.” “But I’m not Jewish. Clevinger protests. “That will make no difference.” Yossarian assures him. That is what deans and disciplinary committees are like.
Anyway… Mr. Lutzuk’s article makes an interesting and valuable point about the motivation of conservatives which liberals characteristically find impossible to understand.
In the climactic speech delivered by Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, Pacino does an excellent job of articulating why Kant rejected the pursuit of self interest as an ethical position. In the speech Pacino clearly disavows the pursuit of self interest as being properly ethical. Charlie (the young student who Pacino is representing in the school court ) has forfeited entry to an ivy league university, and has potentially ruined his prospects of climbing the American social ladder by choosing to not “snitch” on his classmates who he witnessed perpetrating a prank on the Dean. The over-arching point of Pacino’s fiery speech is that by punishing Charlie for his silence and rewarding Mr. Willis (Philip Seymour Hoffman) for “snitching”, the school is encouraging students to adopt an ethical stance concerned with acting out of self interest. ...
The American Liberal “left” can learn a lot from Pacino’s speech as it might explain why they are failing to rally grassroots populist support amongst a lot of poor Americans who would directly benefit from Democrat initiatives…. [T]he American Midwest, now a hot bed for right wing Christian, tea party type republican populist support, used to be the center for radical leftist movements in the United States.
This shift can be explained as a Kantian phenomena. After all the number one criticism amongst the left of the tea party and other populist movements in the US is that they are acting against their own self interest. They are supporting a political party (the Republicans) that explicitly benefits the rich and do little to nothing to help the poor or disenfranchised. Time and time again Democrat political pundits point this out to no avail. All the statics and numbers in the world seem incapable of swaying these people from their support of a party that does nothing to improve their day to day lives or the lives of their children.
What makes the tea party a properly Kantian movement is that they justify their support for the Republican Party by appealing to freedom. This is the twisted strength of the tea party movement, it emphasizes people’s freedom as the highest virtue. It’s overarching message is that common people, working people, are free and capable of making their own decisions. You do not have to listen to the pejorative pandering of left liberal intellectuals from the North East, telling you what is or isn’t in your best interest. You are free to make that decision yourself. That is what America is all about.
Arguments appealing to self interest are practically non-existent on the right (with the exception of the small business owners tax cut argument). Ordinary working people are appealed to based on their autonomy. They are encouraged to demonstrate their autonomy by voting for a party that they feel represents them despite it acting against their self interest. In this way they are strangely enough like Charlie: affirming their own characters against intellectuals who claim they can predict their actions based on their class, race, occupation income etc. The right in the US have tapped into the fundamental Kantian insight that people want to believe and feel they are autonomous beings.
From Paul Ryan’s House Budget Committee, A Brief History of President Obama’s Fiscal Record:
January 20, 2009
President Obama sworn into office
President tells the American people in his Inaugural Address: “Those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”
Debt Held By Public = $6.31 trillion
———————————————————-
February 17, 2009
President Signs into Law the Spending Stimulus
The stimulus adds $821 billion in new spending according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
The White House promises this infusion of spending and borrowing would keep unemployment rate below 8%. As millions of Americans are painfully aware, that promise was broken.
Debt Held by Public = $6.48 trillion
———————————————————-
February 26, 2009
President Issues FY2010 Budget
The President’s budget adds $2.7 trillion in new debt in FY2010 and imposes $1.4 trillion in new taxes.
Debt Held by Public = $6.58 trillion
———————————————————-
March 11, 2009
President Signs FY2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act
The massive spending bill includes 8,696 earmarks at a cost of $11 billion.
The spending bill adds $19 billion in new spending above the baseline – an 8.6% spending increase.
Debt Held by Public = $6.66 trillion
———————————————————-
April 29, 2009
Congressional Democrats Pass FY2010 Budget
The Congressional Democrats’ budget calls for a $2 trillion debt increase in 2010, and another 8.9% increase in non-defense discretionary spending.
The reconciliation process is abused to later pave the way for health care overhaul to be jammed into law.
Of note: this is the last time Congressional Democrats will bother budgeting.
Debt Held by Public = $6.85 trillion
———————————————————-
February 2, 2010
President Issues FY2011 Budget
The President’s budget more than doubles the debt; pushes the FY2011 deficit to a new record of $1.6 trillion; drives spending to a new record of $3.8 trillion in fiscal year 2011; and raises taxes by more than $2 trillion through 2020, under the administration’s own estimates.
Debt Held by Public = $7.85 trillion
———————————————————-
March 23, 2010
President Signs Health-Care Overhaul Into Law
The massive new law adds $1.4 trillion in new spending over the next decade, and over $2.5 trillion once the law is fully implemented.
Despite sluggish economic growth and high unemployment, the law imposes over $500 billion in new tax hikes. CBO Director Elmendorf would later testify that the law would reduce employment by roughly half a percent – a reduction of approximately 800,000 jobs.
Debt Held by Public = $8.18 trillion
———————————————————-
April 15, 2010
Congressional Democrats Decide Not to Do a Budget for FY2011
The 1974 Budget Act requires Congress to pass a budget each year by April 15.
In an unprecedented budget failure, House Democrats not only failed to pass a budget – they opted to not even propose a budget.
Debt Held by Public = $8.39 trillion
———————————————————-
July 21, 2010
President Signs Financial Regulatory Overhaul Into Law
In addition to heightened regulatory uncertainty, the massive new law adds $10.2 billion in new spending.
Debt Held by Public = $8.69 trillion
———————————————————-
February 14, 2011
President Issues FY2012 Budget
The President’s budget yet again calls for the doubling of the debt in five years, and tripling the debt in ten years.
The President’s budget spends $47 trillion over the next decade, imposes over $1 trillion in new tax hikes, and fails to address the drivers of the debt.
Debt Held by Public = $9.45 trillion
———————————————————-
April 13, 2011
President Delivers Speech on Deficit Reduction
The President appears to abandon his own budget by offering a ‘framework’ that calls for additional tax increases, defense spending cuts, and Medicare price controls – yet lacks sufficient detail to back-up claims of deficit reduction.
The extreme angle obviously precluded application of Pei Mei’s Five-Point-Palm-Exploding-Heart Technique.
Allison Pearson, in the Telegraph, used a Harry Potter theme to turn the proceedings of the Murdoch hearing into comedy, but she did get off several good lines. I liked the “Galapagos turtle old” bit, and she properly paid tribute to the formidable Wendi Deng.
[O]ur first glimpse of the legendary media mogul was a huge anticlimax. Good grief, could that really be him? He was shockingly old. I mean, Galapagos tortoise old.
Despite the sharp pinstripe suit and fashionably strobing, chunky tie, the octogenarian Murdoch looked less like a master of the universe than one of those Ukrainian pensioners who is dragged from obscurity to testify about a suspected past as a war criminal.
“Nope.” “Nope.” And “nope.” Those were the News Corp chairman’s first three answers to a fusillade of passionately incensed questions from Tom Watson, who knows a great deal more about the News of the World and its reporting practices than its owner seemed to.
Seated at the right hand of the father was James Murdoch, who kept stepping in to speak for his faltering parent. “We were not in full possession of the facts,” explained James.
Never mind the facts, in the opening 10 minutes Murdoch Senior seemed to be scarcely in possession of his faculties. In the interminable and embarrassing silences between question and answer, you wondered whether our star witness, with his head lolling forward, had actually nodded off.
The only sign of the force he once was came when Rupert began to bang out his answers on the pine table in front of him with flattened palms; a defiant, almost contemptuous sound that was perturbingly at odds with the words of regret and contrition coming out of his mouth.
At one point, Wendi Deng, who was seated just behind her husband, leant forward to try to stop him hitting the table. She just couldn’t help herself; Rupert’s unconscious drumbeat of defiance was clearly spoiling the carefully calibrated performance that both men were putting on to reassure their shareholders and save their business.
Wow, Wendi! Trust me, you don’t want to mess with the Chinese-born third Mrs Murdoch. Immaculate in a coral pink jacket and polka dot skirt with killer heels, Wendi is two parts care nurse to three parts Ninja.
With her lovely head cocked alertly and her laser eyes drilling into Rupert’s impertinent interrogators, you could almost read the thoughts running through her mind:
“Ha! In my country, you take the fat Scottish MP man, leave him tied to bamboo in sun for five days, cut out his liver then serve him with soft noodle!” We’ll come back to scary Ninja Wendi in a minute. ...
[Then, comes the pie attack]
There was uproar in the committee room. Louise Mensch was caught mid-question, her mouth forming a horrified O of astonishment when, suddenly, came a flying, vengeful form. Pow! Kaboom! It was Ninja Wendi.
For over two hours, Mrs Murdoch had looked like she was longing to punch someone and here was a chance. Not Tom Watson, sadly, but the next best thing. A fantastic hook to the assailant’s jaw left you in no doubt that the killer Murdoch instinct has not passed to the son, but to the missus.
When one of those pie-throwing commies went after Rupert Murdoch during Parliamentiary hearings on the News of the World phone hacking scandal, his much-younger Chinese wife, Wendi Deng, sprang to the octogenarian’s defense, delivering an excellent palm strike to the face of the attacker. Approving comments and general applause followed from all corners.
Wendi Deng, it turns out, studied at the Yale School of Organization and Management, presumably after leaving the Shaolin Temple.
Pity the fate of the less-than-top-rank right-wing blogger. Not only did the Age of Obama not create booming traffic for us, we’re actually an endangered species, argues John Hawkins.
[W]hen Barack Obama got into power, you’d have expected that traffic on the Right side of the blogosphere would have surged just as it did on the Left side of the blogosphere in the early Bush years.
That didn’t happen.
Sure, there were a few outliers that took off: Hot Air, Redstate, and the Breitbart empire for example, but most conservative blogs have either grown insignificantly, stayed the same size, or even shrank. Most bloggers on the right side of the blogosphere haven’t increased their traffic significantly in years. Moreover, the right side of the blogosphere as a whole is definitely shrinking in numbers as bloggers that have had trouble getting traction are quitting and fewer and fewer bloggers are starting up new blogs.
The problem is that there are no ecological niches vacant anymore, he contends. Insignificant microbes, to employ NZ Bear’s metaphors, find it harder to evolve. You become a Crunchy Crustacean or even a Flappy Bird, and that’s it. The days of evolving into Higher Beings are over. There is simply too much higher quality competition for almost any blogger to overcome.
The market has also become much more professionalized. When I got started, back in 2001, a lone blogger who did 3-4 posts a day could build an audience. Unless your name is Ann Coulter, you probably couldn’t make that strategy work today.
Instead, most successful blogs today have large staffs, budgets, and usually, the capacity to shoot traffic back and forth with other gigantic websites. Look at Redstate, which is tied into Human Events, Hot Air which connected with Townhall, Instapundit, which is a part of Pajamas Media, Newsbusters which is a subsidiary of the Media Research Center and other monster entities like National Review and all of its blogs, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and the Breitbart media empire. An independent blogger competing with them is like a mom & pop store going toe-to-toe with Wal-Mart. Some do better than others, but over the long haul, the only question is whether you can survive on the slivers of audience they leave behind. ...
Most bloggers are not very good at marketing, not very good at monetizing, there are no sugar daddies giving us cash, and this isn’t the biggest market in the world to begin with. In other words, this is a time-consuming enterprise, but few people are going to make enough money to go full time. How many people can put in 20-30-40-50 hours a week on something that’s not going to ever be their full time job? Can they do it for 5 years? 10 years? 15? 20? This is the plight that 99.9% of serious, independent conservative bloggers face. This has already created a lot of attrition and over the next few years, as people realize that their traffic is more likely to slowly, but surely significantly deteriorate rather than explode, you’re going to see a lot more people give up.
I think there is more than a small amount of truth in what he says. The top ranking bloggers are very, very talented people who are incredibly hard working, and the successful ones now have staffs. Few people and only the most professional are going to make it to the top.
But Ann Althouse is right in offering the response that not every conservative blogger is really trying to play the game professionally. A number of bloggers, like myself and the talented crew who publish at Maggie’s Farm, think of ourselves as “boutique bloggers,” catering to a smaller, but more sophisticated and discriminating, audience. Our blogging activities reflect our own eccentric and individualistic personalities.
I often think of my own blogging as just an alternative high tech way of forwarding links to my friends.
As to future readership growth, who knows? I do find it is much more difficult to get links from the top blogs anymore, but I also long ago quit emailing links to them seeking their attention. I’m looking forward to seeing what the 2012 election is going to do for blog readership myself.
I’m more optimistic. I think, on the prospects of blogging, we can refer to Henry David Thoreau’s estimate of the human condition generally: “There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”
Michael A. Walsh, in the New York Post, identifies the key issue in the current political crisis, something at stake even more important than economic prosperity: the choice for America of freedom versus dependency.
When did it become the primary function of the federal government to send millions of Americans checks?
For this, in essence, is what the debt-ceiling fight is all about—the inexorable and ultimately fatal growth of the welfare state. If you don’t believe it, just look at President Obama’s veiled threat to withhold Grandma’s Social Security benefits if Congress doesn’t let him borrow another $2 trillion or so to get himself safely past the 2012 election.
The feds now borrow 43 cents of every dollar they spend. Under Obama, outlays have soared to nearly a quarter of GDP (the historical average is just under 20 percent)—and once ObamaCare starts to fully kick in around 2014, it will only rise.
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and debt interest consume—at the moment—nearly half of our $3.8 trillion budget. ...
The debt-ceiling cage match is the culmination of the Democrats’ 75-year-long fight to establish a voting bloc of dependents under the false flags of “compassion” and “social justice.” It’s sapped our strength, created a welfare mentality and, if unchecked, will reduce us to a nation of aging, resentful beggars with eyes cast permanently toward Washington.
The preamble to the Constitution talks about promoting the general welfare, not the welfare state. For the welfare state is incompatible with the rest of the preamble, which concludes: “and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” By definition, dependents are not free.
British newspapers don’t simply all bug people’s phones and publish photographs of naked girls. The Telegraph, for instance, commonly offers slide-shows on interesting subjects, including one on the unconventional and highly imaginative operatic stagings done on a floating stage platform on Lake Constance at the Bregenzer Festpiele.
There are 7000 seats and a Seebühne (a floating stage) on Lake Constance at the Bregenzer Festspiele (Bregenz Festival in Bregenz, Austria). Verdi’s “Un ballo in maschera,” in 1999, was performed on a giant book being read by a skeleton.
Michelangelo?, Crucifixion With The Madonna, St John And Two Mourning Angels, 16th century, currently, Ashmolean Museum
The British Province of the Society of Jesus must be gearing up for a major weekend in Las Vegas. They just sold the oldest intact surviving European book, the Stonyhust Gospel, to the British Library for £9m ($14.3m). Now, they’re getting ready to put up the spout a painting identified by an Italian art historian as a Michelangelo which could conceivably fetch $100m or more at auction.
Campion Hall, one of six Permanent Private Halls (essentially small-scale divinity schools, operated by different religious denominations or religious orders thereof) at Oxford University, owns a painting purchased by a previous master at a Sotheby’s auction in 1930.
It was scientifically-examined using infrared photography by Antonio Forcellino, an art historian who has written several books on Michelangelo (including the just-published The Lost Michelangelos), who found that the painting was based upon a cartoon in hand of Michelangelo himself.
The painting was previously believed to have been executed by Marcello Venusti, a Mannerist painter who sometimes worked from Michelangelo’s designs. But Forcellino was convinced that the painting was really the work of the master’s own hand, and he was able to associate the painting with a close friend of the famous artist, Tommaso Cavalieri, by the presence of 18 seals of the Cavalieri family coat of arms still present on the edge of the panel.
Dmitri offers a characteristically insouciant (some would say, “accident-waiting-to-happen”) Russian approach to playing with seriously dangerous toys.
Gasoline-flavored pork! Yum.
Dmitri has his own blog: FPS Russia, devoted entirely to videos of the man himself playing mostly with the kind of stuff the BATF doesn’t want you to have. Are flamethrowers legal in Russia, do you suppose? Does anybody know what the “FPS” in FPS Russia stands for?
Noemie Emery, in the American Spectator, is a bit too kind, I think, to the creators of the Welfare State, but she correctly identifies the fallacy of promoting wishes into rights. Authentic rights are always take the form “shall not do to you, or shall not stop you.” Legitimate rights are simply negatives commandments to violations of person, property, or liberty. Positive rights are a blank check written on someone else’s account.
The intentions of Democrats are only the best. They want all of the old to have lavish retirements, all of the young to have scholarships, verse-penning cowboys to have festivals funded by government, and everyone to have access to all the best health care, at no cost to himself. In the face of a huge wave of debt swamping all western nations, this is the core of their argument: They want a fair society, and their critics do not; they want to help, and their opponents like to see people suffer; they want a world filled with love and caring, and their opponents want one of callous indifference, in which the helpless must fend for themselves. (“We must reject both extremes, those who say we shouldn’t help the old and the sick and those who say that we should,” quips the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg.) But in fact, everyone thinks that we “should” do this; the problem, in the face of the debt crisis, is finding a way that we can. It is about the “can” part that the left is now in denial: daintily picking its way through canaries six deep on the floor of the coal mine, and conflating a “good” with a “right.
), who found that the painting was based upon a cartoon in hand of Michelangelo himself.
