President Obama would like to remind you that 2014 is an election year

While we’re all gearing up to cheerfully ring in the new year tonight, President Obama has already launched the 2014 campaign season and asked for money.

This email hit his supporters’ email inboxes this morning:

Friend –

When the sun comes up tomorrow, it’ll be an election year.

That’s an opportunity to finish everything we set out to do. But it also means we’ll have to go to work protecting the progress we’ve made.

So when I say that tonight’s deadline is important, it’s not an overstatement.

Chip in $10 or more right now, if you can:

https://my.democrats.org/Deadline-2013

Happy New Year, and let’s resolve right now to make 2014 count.

Barack

Ten New Year's Resolutions For You, Mr. President

By George Leef
Dear President Obama,
Face it — 2013 was terrible for you. If it were a baseball game, you’re like the starter who is getting shelled, alternating between wild pitches and ones that get belted out of the park – and yet you keep throwing the same old stuff. That won’t work.
I suggest some major changes, and this would be a good time to make them as New Year’s Resolutions. Half are to stop doing things that are bad habits, and half are ideas for new behaviors. Ready?
First, stop saying nasty things about other Americans who happen to disagree with you. Throughout your presidency, you have repeatedly impugned the motives of your opponents, for example insinuating that anyone who disagrees with your gun control ideas must be in favor of letting dangerous people have access to guns. And the rhetoric of your associates often goes far into uncivil territory. You should ask them to stop, say, comparing Republicans to terrorists.
Second, stop making empty, windy speeches. If you have anything new to say, by all means say it, but spare the nation those speeches that merely regurgitate statist tropes we’ve heard over and over. Of course, many of those speeches are aimed at the faithful at party fundraising events, but you should stop spending your time on those.

The Year Washington Fled Reality

'Message discipline' can win elections but is not a healthy way to run a country.

By Senator Tom Coburn
The past year may go down not only as the least productive ever in Washington but as one of the worst for the republic.
In both the executive branch and Congress, Americans witnessed an unwinding of the country's founding principles and of their government's most basic responsibilities. The rule of law gave way to the rule of rulers. And the rule of reality—in which politicians are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan liked to say—gave way to some politicians' belief that they were entitled to both their own opinions and their own facts. It's no wonder the institutions of government barely function.
...The culture that Mr. Obama campaigned against, the old kind of politics, teaches politicians that repetition and "message discipline"—never straying from using the same slogans and talking points—can create reality, regardless of the facts. Message discipline works if the goal is to win an election or achieve a short-term political goal. But saying that something is true doesn't make it so. When a misleading message ultimately clashes with reality, the result is dissonance and conflict. In a republic, deception is destructive. Without truth there can be no trust. Without trust there can be no consent. And without consent we invite paralysis, if not chaos.
Taking unilateral, extralegal action—like delaying the employer mandate for a year when Mr. Obama realized the trouble it would cause for businesses—is part of a pattern for this administration. Immigration and border-security laws that might displease certain constituencies if enforced? Ignore the laws. Unhappy that a deep-water drilling moratorium was struck down in court? Reimpose it anyway. Internal Revenue Service agents using the power of the state to harass political enemies? Deny and then stonewall. Unhappy with the pace of Senate confirmations for nominees? Ignore the Constitution and appoint people anyway and claim that the Senate is not in session.
The Obama administration hardly has a monopoly on contributing to Washington's dysfunction. Congress more than earned its 6% national approval rating, a historic low.
Congress's most significant action this year was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's decision to undo 200 years of precedent that requires a supermajority to change Senate rules. To speed the approval of executive appointments and judicial nominations, Sen. Reid resorted to raw political power, forcing a vote (52-48) that allows the Senate majority to change the rules whenever it wants. In a republic, if majorities can change laws or rules however they please, you're on the road to life with no rules and no laws.
The supermajority safeguard that prevented senators from destroying the institution in which they serve is now largely gone. Gone also are members of the majority who understood the need to protect minority rights. There are no more Robert Byrds to quote Cicero, who said, "In a republic this rule ought to be observed: that the majority should not have the predominant power."
Instead, we have a majority leader who has appointed himself a Rules Committee of one. Referring to the right of the minority to offer changes to bills under consideration, Mr. Reid said: "The amendment days are over." Like President Obama, Mr. Reid is great at message discipline but weak on the rule of law and reality. His narrative about Republican obstruction of appointees is a diversion from his own war against minority rights. Even before his wrecking of the supermajority tradition, Mr. Reid had already used Senate rules to cut off debate and prevent the minority from offering amendments 78 times—more than all other Senate majority leaders combined.

...If Congress wants to get serious, and be taken seriously, it can start by doing its job. It can debate and pass individual appropriations bills—a task that Congress has not completed in eight years. And perhaps Congress can cut some of the stupidity in government spending. The House deserves some credit for trying—it passed four appropriations bills—but the Senate deserves none. Mr. Reid did not pass a single appropriations bill in 2013, thus shielding vulnerable members of his party from having to make tough votes.
How the nation's leaders perform in Washington is a reflection of the country, and culture, they represent. Moral relativism and postmodern disregard of truth has been promoted by academia for decades; sometimes it seems that the best students of that thinking can be found in Washington. We live in a time when laws and rules are defined however the holders of power decree, and "messaging" is paramount, regardless how far the message is from reality.
The coming year presents an opportunity to Americans who hope for better. Despite Washington's dysfunction, "We the People" still call the shots and can demand a course correction. In 2014, here's a message worth considering: If you don't like the rulers you have, you don't have to keep them.

A New Year and Old Problems

By Thomas Sowell

...What ObamaCare has done, thanks to Chief Justice Roberts' Supreme Court decision, is reduce us all from free citizens to cowed subjects, whom the federal government can order around in our own personal lives, in defiance of the 10th Amendment and all the other protections of our freedom in the Constitution of the United States.
ObamaCare is more than a medical problem, though there are predictable medical problems -- and even catastrophes -- that will unfold in the course of 2014 and beyond. Our betters have now been empowered to run our lives, with whatever combination of arrogance and incompetence they may have, or however much they lie.
The challenges ahead are much clearer than what our responses will be. Perhaps the most hopeful sign is that increasing numbers of people seem to have finally -- after nearly five long years -- begun to see Barack Obama for what he is, rather than for what he seemed to be, when judged by his image and rhetoric.
...The question then is: What can be done about it? Nothing can be done about Obama himself. He has three more years in office and, as he pointed out to the Russians, he will no longer have to face the American voters.
ObamaCare, however, has no such immunity. It is always hard to repeal an elaborate program after it has gone into effect. But Prohibition was repealed, even though it was a Constitutional Amendment that required super-majorities in both houses of Congress and super-majorities of state legislatures to repeal.
In our two-party system, everything depends on whether the Republicans step up to the plate and act like responsible adults who understand that ObamaCare represents a historic crossroads that will determine what kind of people we are going to be, for this generation and generations yet unborn -- citizens or subjects.

Good Ol’ Boy, Inc.

Reality shows about gold miners, ax men, and ice-road truckers are a far cry from the Kardashians.

By Victor Davis Hanson
...There are lots of theories why watching these good ol’ boys at work has caught on. The zoo hypothesis suggests that American suburbanites are amused by exotic creatures that they rarely see at the mall or biking about the trails in Spandex — in perhaps the same way as Petronius wrote for his literate audience about smelly soldiers and crafty innkeepers. The miners and cutters certainly don’t act like the Prius crowd in Menlo Park or the wine-tasters in Napa Valley.
Instead, just as grizzly bears and Bengal tigers are a big draw at the zoo, so too white-boy reality shows allow us to get close to these perhaps-endangered species. And as long as they do not stick their paws and snouts too far out between the bars to mouth off about gays, minorities, or feminists, there is a quaint appeal in — safely — watching these men cuss, and occasionally fight, while sawing and drilling in the wild. Why go on safari to their usual haunts in Alaska, Louisiana, or Wyoming, where bad things are said to happen to outsiders, when A&E can bring the perpetrator class, slightly sanitized, into your living room? A metrosexual can enjoy Duck Dynasty or Ax Men without necessarily being fond of the political wing inhabited by Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee.\Aside from the idea of glimpsing rare species in their natural habitat, a second theory suggests that viewers are smugly satisfied that they are not like these uncouth white boys, who are certainly worse spoken, more emotional, less mature, and more intolerant than the viewership. For all the MSNBC talk of “white privilege,” these reality shows remind Americans of a non-minority underclass (fabricated though it is for TV) that is a bit worse off than the Latina newscaster who trills her Rs each evening on the news.
...So good-ol’-boy reality offers glimpses, premodern though they may be, of unrestrained freedom. In our upside-down world, the eighth-grade teacher understands that one wrong word, an ill-timed joke, a casual pat on the shoulder can end a career, pronto — while his punk student with the gang-banging parent who shouts profanity at him are mostly exempt from worry. The boss at the DMV accepts the fact that the whiff of a sexual-harassment suit, the rumor of an impending racial-discrimination allegation, the suggestion of inhospitality to the handicapped are more terrifying than the rowdy 16-year-old who pulls in to take his driving test in a monster truck. In our dreams it is better to be an ax man, where it’s Mother Nature, not the local diversity czar, who is after you.
The crabmen and lumberjacks don’t seem to worry about what they say or whom they offend — to the degree that such screw-it attitudes can be hinted about on politically correct camera. They are not fellow subjects who live among us in our kingdom of lies, in which you both dare not confess to profiling and dare not walk in a particular Philadelphia neighborhood. In contrast, these mythic men of the wild act as if they do not care about second-hand smoke or the right zip code. They apparently buy fast food, and their kids can watch bad TV — in a world where Mayor Bloomberg and Michelle Obama do not exist. There are no neurotic college-prep kindergartens with long waiting lists outside the trailer park in northern Alaska.
That freedom from our thought police and the Pajama Boy scolds and the social aspirations of the yuppie mesmerize the viewer — all the more so in that it usually entails giving up the good life as defined by the normal upper-middle-class cursus honorum.

The Trillion-Plus Heist

By Sylvia Bokor
Government produces nothing. It creates no wealth. Yet the District of Columbia is ranked as the richest area in the nation.
Politicians and bureaucrats shriek that business people are "greedy." But facts show differently. Imagine voting yourself a raise and millions of dollars in allowances. Imagine 5-figure bonuses. Lifetime pensions to which you contribute only 1.3%. Imagine opening 3 or 4 offices around the state for which you pay not a dime.
Politicians and bureaucrats are diseased with avarice -- and complain with self-righteous indignation when CEOs arrive in private jets for a White House meeting.
D.C. is the richest area in the nation not only because an annual salary of $174,000 is paid to congressional members, 261 of whom are millionaires, not only because most of the appointed cabinet secretaries are multimillionaires, but also because federal employees are paid salaries over three times what the average taxpayer earns.
The source of all that money is taxes levied on production.
Business people -- both employers and employees alike -- produce all of the services and products that provide our as well as politicians and bureaucrats' comfort, health, safety and pleasure. Business people create the nation's prosperity. They are the nation's wealth -- and are regulated by those that produce no economic values whatsoever.
...

Recap:

Executive -- 6,546,673 employees; salaries ..... $ 549,126,870,330.
Legislative -- 12,835 employees; salaries ....... 5,250,599,780.
Judicial -- 1,324 employees; salaries ....... 199,418,700.
Agencies -- 5,298,867 employees; salaries ....... 569,886,700,000.
Total = 11,859,699 employees; salaries .... $ 1,124,463,588,810.

The consequences of these stupefyingly large numbers are far more devastating than can be seen directly. To grasp the extent of that destruction, consider the level of prosperity that employers and employees achieve today despite regulations, taxes, permits, fines, and wasted time on government paperwork.
Because of government confiscation of producers' time and money, gone are the businesses that would have been started with that income. Never to be recouped is the time that would have been spent on innovations, inventions, discoveries and products that would have been made. Never to be retrieved is the prosperity that would have inevitably raised the standard of living, elevated the destitute and eventually wiped out poverty.
The money that politicians and bureaucrats have looted has gone and continues to go into the pockets of the nonproductive. Vying with one another to ingratiate themselves with the most politically influential, politicians and bureaucrats toss around their loot to raise the height of the soapbox before which others rush to kneel. None of that money creates wealth. It stops dead, going no farther.
...The individual business person's right to life and property is being brazenly violated. Today's politicians and bureaucrats are the self-appointed plutocrats of this nation. And they have forced business people -- employers and employees alike -- to be their feudal serfs by means of how much of their income earners are allowed to keep.
When Obama or some other Retrograde (AKA "Progressive") complains about the growing "gap between the rich and the poor" they expect one to understand that the "gap" referred to is between the productive rich and the non-productive poor.
But knowing something about the mammoth amounts of money that bureaucrats and politicians routinely rip off from taxpayers paints a different picture. The actual gap is between the nonproductive rich -- politicians and bureaucrats -- on the one hand and on the other the productive of our nation that are the victims of over a trillion dollar heist.

Red versus Blue States: A Divide Worth Having

By J Robert Smith...Stated another way, progressives, through the federal courts, principally, and legislatively, began the process nearly a century ago of breaching constitutional limits that thwarted ambitious politicians and factions from crimping liberties and imposing themselves through government. Politicians and parties today are better able to manipulate the system and impose themselves because constitutional constraints have loosened; that loosening has occurred in states, too.
...But Balz's Post article hints that liberals are uneasy with the growing red-blue divide among states -- and not for the "good government, let's split our differences" trope Balz offers, but because "experiments in democracy" might lead to choices that the left would prefer not be made: either the overturn of liberal dominance in blue states or the continued - if not accelerated -- drain of productive citizens and enterprises from liberal states. (See Joel Kotkin's article, "Blue States Double-down on Suicide Strategy" at Forbes.)
Without overdoing the comparison, liberals may be discovering that they have a dilemma similar to that of the old communist regimes: the ambitious don't often stay where liberty is constricted or outright denied (though crony capitalism and big government have their adherents among the ambitious, for they see the potential to profit from either or both).
...The Obama presidency has been largely an attempt by the left to reenergize and reassert national government at the expense of true federalism. President Obama is the "anti-Reagan." The left wants leftism regnant in every state and locality and is using a bolder national government to impose itself.
But the left's error may be in thinking that conservative Americans will eventually go quietly into the good night, permitting the left to work its will. Big fights loom if the left continues to try to ram its agendas down the throats of red state Americans (ObamaCare is a first critical battle). There's now a long history of leftism in America. The right's rejection of leftism is grounded in the left's demonstrated failures and in cultural and societal constructs that conservative Americans view as wrong-headed and deficient. The lines have been drawn and set.

Yellen, Keynes and Copernicus say the Debasement of Money Overthrows the Social Order

By Ralph Benko
...These policies in slow motion are, in the opinion of this columnist, at the root of the very political, social, and cultural dysphoria — uneasiness or generalized dissatisfaction — predicted by Keynes:

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become ‘profiteers,’ who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
An almost identical point was made almost four centuries before Keynes by iconic savant and polymath Nicolas Copernicus.
Copernicus commenced a study composed for the Prussian and Polish governments around 1525, On the Minting of Money, with these words:

ALTHOUGH THERE ARE COUNTLESS MALADIES that are forever causing the decline of kingdoms, princedoms, and republics, the following four (in my judgment) are the most serious: civil discord, a high death rate, sterility of the soil, and the debasement of coinage. The first three are so obvious that everybody recognizes the damage they cause; but the fourth one, which has to do with money, is noticed by only a few very thoughtful people, since it does not operate all at once and at a single blow, but gradually overthrows governments, and in a hidden, insidious way.

...Madame Yellen? Whether one follows Keynes or Copernicus … it is time to return to the principle of meticulous monetary integrity — as exemplified by the classical gold standard — to restore legitimacy both to to the social order and to government.

Marc Lamont Hill: Romney Grandson Photo Was Exploitative To Begin With

By Caleb Howe

Marc Lamont Hill: “Some would say maybe that it’s an exploitative picture that they’re exploiting the kid by hauling out this black person …”
[crosstalk]
“They were pointing out the fact that the picture itself was sort of a spectacle and they were sort of making fun of the Republican party. I don’t think they were making fun of the baby. If they were I’d be right on your side. This was a light moment making fun of Mitt Romney”

Clear? This was just good old-fashioned, harmless, light, fun-poking based on the self-evidently silly and mockable notion of Mitt Romney exploiting a black child to make up for being so white. Isn’t that fun and light-hearted and tra la la?
Please note the New Rule in Hill’s comments. Taking a family photo with a member of your family is exploiting that family member. Using that photo to make fun of republicans as racists is not exploitative at all, it’s just clean harmless horsing around. Why any second now Hill is going to snap a towel at Mitt in the locker room and oh, how we’ll laugh. Good times.
Not for nothing here, but in order for it to be exploitative, wouldn’t it need to have some degree of visibility? This photo wasn’t exactly plastered on posters in Times Square. It was, in fact, sort of difficult to find online.
Hill goes on later in the segment to say, in response to host Lemon’s comments that the panel was using a baby to score points, that “you could argue that [the Romneys] were using a baby to bring attention to their political progressivism.” So again, it’s really Mitt Romney who is at fault for his son adopting the kid. Because he only did it to get off the hook for being so super white and republican!
Now what do people on the left call a black person who ends up in a photo or on a stage or on TV among white conservatives? I can’t recall. What’s that word? Oh now I remember. Token.
Like the original panel participants, Marc Lamont Hill is taking it as a given that the adoption of the child was some sort of ploy on the part of the Romneys to make up for .. well, for being the Romneys. That takign a family photo with the child is by its very nature an exploitation of the child.
Finally, if it weren’t clear enough at this point, Lamont Hill says it is fine when Bill de Blasio brings his adopted black son into photo ops because in his case, its not exploitative. You know, because democrat.

A deep sickness on race on MSNBC and CNN

By Thomas Lifson

"Everybody loves a baby picture," Harris-Perry said, "and this was one that really, a lot of people had emotions about this baby picture this year. This is the Romney family. And, of course, there on Governor Romney's knee is his adopted grandson, who is an African-American, adopted African-American child, Kieran Romney."
As Harris-Perry made the introduction, panelist Pia Glenn sang "One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just isn't the same," a tune whose original lyrics read "one of these things doesn't belong."
"And that little baby, front and center, would be the one," she added.

"Doesn't belong"? She is actually telling a small child that he doesn't belong with his parents? This is monstrous of itself. But it gets worse:

Comedian Dean Obeidallah chimed in by reducing the baby to a token. "I think this picture is great," he said. "It really sums up the diversity of the Republican party, the RNC. At the convention, they find the one black person."

So the premise here is that Mitt Romney somehow persuaded his child to adopt a black baby so as to provide political cover for the GOP? The kind of person who make such an assumption is the kind of person so alienated from human feelings as to contemplate such a thing -- treating an adoption as a political maneuver, not as an act of love, an opportunity to nurture a future generation. In this view, babies are mere political objects.

Planned Parenthood app tells kids ’12 or under’: masturbate as much as possible

By Eric Owens
Planned Parenthood, a group founded on the premise of limiting the number of little kids in the world, just can’t stop advising little kids about the joys of sex and, especially, masturbation—lots and lots of masturbation.
The birth-control organization, founded by racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger, is a self-proclaimed authority on “fingering” and that burning, eternal question: “Are you still a virgin if you’ve used a dildo?”
Planned Parenthood is also attempting to appeal to young teenagers as well as children 12 years of age and younger with “Apps for Teens” available on cell phones.