From Galt’s Gulch:

This is a true story. It happened exactly as described.

It was around noon on election day, November 6, 2012. I was sitting in McDonalds. A group of old retired men were enthusiastically talking about the election. …

A couple was waiting in line. They were a typical, mid-forties, white, middle class couple. They were listening to the old guys discussing the election and the state of the union in general.

One of the retired guys said something negative about “Obama-Care” and the middle-class white guy in line turned to him suddenly and said, “Oh yeah, well I’ll have you know that if it wasn’t for Obama’s healthcare plan, I wouldn’t have any health insurance right now.”

This silenced the old guys. He continued, appearing to speak to the room in general, “Obama made it possible for me to cut the cost of my insurance by over 80%, so I voted for him again.”

The entire room was silent. Nobody said a word. Before I knew what I was doing, I heard myself addressing him.

“You actually sound like you’re proud of that”, I said.

“You’re damn right I am,” he replied indignantly.

“In other words, you’re proud of the fact that instead of paying for your health insurance yourself, you and Obama have ganged up on ME and have forced me, at the point of a gun, to pay for part of your health insurance. You’re actually PROUD of the fact that you are mooching off of me and all those people working behind the counter in McDonald’s… that you’re part of a gang that is using the power of the government to FORCE us to pay for your healthcare. Instead of feeling ashamed… instead of bowing your head and cowering in front of all the people you are depending on to pay for your healthcare insurance… instead of meekly thanking them for the sacrifices they are being forced to make in order to benefit YOU… instead, you stand there claiming that you’re PROUD! What do you have to be PROUD of? Are you proud of the fact that you’re unable or unwilling to take care of yourself? Are you proud of the fact that you’re stealing part of their wages for your own personal greed? No… shame is what you should feel. Disgrace… embarassment… and gratitude… along with a strong dose of remorse… because YOU can’t or won’t take care of yourself and so you joined a mob of others who can’t or won’t take care of themselves… and together you’ve figured out how to force US to take care of you. Shame on you.”

Nobody said a word. The guy was stunned and his wife stood there mortified. The room was absolutely silent for a moment, then one of the retired guys started clapping… and within a few seconds, he was joined by another… then by someone across the restaurant… and pretty soon it sounded like the entire restaurant was applauding.

I had delivered my little sermon while still seated at my table. I remained seated and looked down at my meal… angry at myself for having lost my temper and butting in rather than minding my own damn business.

Within a minute or so, the room quieted down again and everyone went about their business, pretending nothing had happenned.

Then I heard the guy quietly say to the McDonald’s counter person, “Can I change my order… I’d like that, to-go please.”

Life in America gets more like living in an Ayn Rand novel every day.

Drive, Holly, drive!

A six-months-pregnant woman in Mesa, Arizona chased her husband around a shopping center parking lot with her SUV, and finally ran the miscreant over leaving him in critical condition for failing to vote for Mitt Romney. The lady blamed the incumbent for her family’s economic distress.

ABC15.com:

Police said there were no indications that Holly was impaired by alcohol or drugs during the incident.

Hat tip to Rico.

Petitions are underway on the White House web-site requesting that Louisiana and Texas each be allowed peacefully to secede.

If they succeed, I’ll certainly move there.

Deo vindice.

———————

Update:

I clearly won’t need to move.

Examiner:

As of 12:46 am, Sunday, signatures obtained by Louisiana, 7,358; Texas, 3,771; Florida, 636; Georgia, 475; Alabama, 834; North Carolina, 792; Kentucky, 467; Mississippi, 475; Indiana, 449; North Dakota, 162; Montana, 440; Colorado, 324; Oregon, 328; New Jersey, 301 and New York, 169. Many more States are expected to follow.

It was only eleven last time. Hurry up, Virginia!

Grumpy economist John Cochrane explains:

The sound and fury will be over big fights on taxes and spending. They will look like replays of the last four years and not end up accomplishing much. The big changes to our economy will be the metastatic expansion of regulation, let by ACA, Dodd-Frank, and EPA. There will be no change on our long run problems: entitlements, deficits or fundamental reform of our chaotic tax system. 4 more years, $4 trillion more debt.

Why? I think this follows inevitably from the situation: normal (AFU). Nothing has changed. The President is a Democrat, now lame duck. The congress is Republican. The Senate is asleep. Congressional Republicans think the President is a socialist. The President thinks Congressional Republicans are neanderthals. The President cannot compromise on the centerpieces of his campaign.

Result: we certainly are not going to see big legislation. Anything new will happen by executive order or by regulation. …

[T]he unfolding of regulation will be the big story. It is news to most Americans, but the ACA and Dodd-Frank are not regulations written in law. They are mostly authorization to write regulations. They are full of “the secretary shall write rules governing xyz” with a timetable. Most of that timetable starts today, November 7 2012. You don’t have to think the administration is a bunch of willy nilly regulators to foresee a metastatic expansion of regulation. You just have to look at the time-table of regulations already legally mandated and pending.

I fished around a little on the net. The EPA has regulations under development that by its own estimates will cost hundreds of billions of dollars a year. I’m all for clean air, but there is a question of just how clean and at how much cost. …

Dodd Frank. For number of rules that a law commands be written this takes the cake. If you want to scare your libertarian kids on Halloween, just read from the Fed’s admirably transparent regulatory reform website. …

[H]undreds of billions of dollars are at stake, and the involved industries, their lawyers and lobbyists, are furiously “helping” to write all these rules.

This is the real news. It’s baked in. Any new regulatory agendas come on top of this. And it will remake the American economy in the next four years.

Read the whole thing.

Twitchy has a bunch of tweets summarized by this one: 45 companies announce layoff’s in the past 48 hours! This is what the people wanted! The people have spoken!

H/t to Theo.

It starts by admitting that the above guy won, but it has a killer ending.

Hat tip to Will Wilson.

Dan Greenfield delivers the home truth about exactly why they won and we lost.

Romney outlasted the primaries because he was the most electable. Two blue state politicians, as bland and inoffensive as possible, ran on the economy, not on war or social issues, and managed to convince many Democrats that they could fix the economy. He got a white turnout to match that of Ronald Reagan and crowded rallies. And none of it was enough.

Romney had an excellent machine. But Obama had the bigger machine that was more than a collection of SuperPACs. It was the urban political machine, with its suburban tentacles, fed by taxpayer money and integrated into every budget. The time when it could be beaten the old way may be passing.

The people who came out to worship Obama stayed home. Romney’s rallies drew big crowds. But when all was said and done, the lines of people who feed off the political machine were there, and the handlers of the machine cast their multiple votes and carried off their manifold frauds because their own private economy depended on it.

Every time people ask me why the left has such a grip on this country, my answer is because they worked for it. It’s the answer that most people don’t want to hear, but it’s true. The left has been planning this for a while. They have been playing the long game, building the infrastructure and indoctrinating generations. And to beat them, we will have to do the same thing.

The right is 40 years behind the left and it remains a disorganized collection of potentials seeking a compass point. The “right” that got behind Mitt Romney consists of millionaires who want fewer regulations and easier imports from China, of social conservatives who are mainly ignored, except when voter turnout becomes an issue, libertarians who want more freedoms, and the non-ideological small business middle class and the struggling working class sensing their country and way of life slipping away from them. …

The Republican establishment had its shot, twice. It put up moderate non-objectionable candidates. And it lost. It has no policies, beyond keeping the system going, and it has no ideas and no agenda, besides winning. It is a decadent political class fused with an even more decadent pundit class that views elections like these as a game, not as a life-and-death matter. It makes up lies and tells them to its base and hopes that the base will then forgive and forget being lied to and used one more time.

It’s not done, by any stretch of the imagination. Right now, Christie is patting himself on the back and drawing up a list of advisers for a 2016 run. And a dozen equally loathsome personalities are doing the same thing. And they may even get their way. But that doesn’t really matter. This is a long game and to win it, we have to think long term.

Moderation does not win elections. If you think it does, go look at the smirking face of Barack Obama. And then imagine him running for office back when Bill Ayers was building bombs. America’s new rulers were once considered far more extreme and unpopular than the Tea Party. Embracing radical and unpopular ideas is not a losing strategy. It is a short term losing strategy and a long term winning strategy so long as your ideas can be used to build a movement capable of turning those ideas into an organizing force.

A must-read article.

A line of blue counties stretches across the usually red-voting South which parallels curiously enough an ancient sea coast from 100 million years ago. Why?

Dr. M. explains:

Hale County in west central Alabama and Bamberg County in southern South Carolina are 450 miles apart. Both counties have a population of 16,000 of which around 60% are African American. The median households and per capita incomes are well below their respective state’s median, in Hale nearly $10,000 less. Both were named after confederate officers–Stephen Fowler Hale and Francis Marion Bamberg. And although Hale’s county seat is the self-proclaimed Catfish Capitol, pulling catfish out of the Edisto River in Bamberg County is a favorite past time. These two counties share another unique feature. Amidst a blanket of Republican red both Hale and Bamberg voted primarily Democratic in the 2000, 2004, and again in the 2008 presidential elections. Indeed, Hale and Bamberg belong to a belt of counties cutting through the deep south–Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina–that have voted over 50% Democratic in recent presidential elections. Why? A 100 million year old coastline.

During the Cretaceous, 139-65 million years ago, shallow seas covered much of the southern United States. These tropical waters were productive–giving rise to tiny marine plankton with carbonate skeletons which overtime accumulated into massive chalk formations. The chalk, both alkaline and porous, lead to fertile and well-drained soils in a band, mirroring that ancient coastline and stretching across the now much drier South. This arc of rich and dark soils in Alabama has long been known as the Black Belt. But many, including Booker T. Washington, coopted the term to refer to the entire Southern band. Washington wrote in his 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, “The term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the color of the soil. The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil…”

Cretaceous rock units (139-65 million years old) are shown in shades of green. Older rock units are in gray, younger ones in yellow. From Geology and Election 2000.

Over time this rich soil produced an amazingly productive agricultural region, especially for cotton. In 1859 alone a harvest of over 4,000 cotton bales was not uncommon within the belt. And yet, just tens of miles north or south this harvest was rare. Of course this level of cotton production required extensive labor.

As Washington notes further in his autobiography, “The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers. Later and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense—that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white.”

Readers can compare 2012 results using individual state maps at Politico.

James Delingpole offers some consolatory theories to those of us in the colonies drinking to forget.

[numbering omitted]

The price of your gold will soar. (Though remember not to reveal its location to the Feds. Otherwise they may well confiscate it, as happened under FDR).

Whoever replaces him after his second terms is going to be really, really good. Not just because the list of candidates is so strong – Paul Ryan, Allen West, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul….. – but because the relief will be so great.

America will finally have demonstrated to the world that Obama’s electoral success wasn’t just about race. It was about stupidity too.

The GOP will be forced to get its act together. Its best scientific minds will ensure that no freak storms interfere with their next run at the presidency; its strategists will finally work out that they need to get some of those groovy kids like the Obama campaign has – you know, ones that really understand the interweb thingy, and can do cool stuff like send targeted fundraising messages to sympathisers on their iPhones.

It will be much easier to empathise with the pain of Greece, Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of Congo – because that’s where your economy is headed.

No need for any tedious debates about who was the worst president in US history. After his second term, Obama is going to make Jimmy Carter look like Ronald Reagan.

And we control the House and can now impeach Obama for the cover up of Benghazi.