We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A brief summary of Walter Russell Mead's view of the world. He links to a Fukayama essay, The Two Europes. One quote on the topic of political clientilism:
Clientelism occurs when political parties use public resources, and particularly government offices, as a means of rewarding political supporters. Politicians provide not programmatic public policies, but individual benefits like a job in the post office, an intervention on behalf of a relative in trouble with the government, or sometimes an outright payment of money or goods.
In my view, clientelism should be distinguished from corruption proper because of the relationship of reciprocity that exists between politicians and voters. There is a real degree of accountability in a clientelistic system: the politician has to give something back to supporters if he or she is to stay in power, even if that is a purely private benefit.
Gwynnie emails me that he saw a pair of these this morning.
A colorful, not uncommon finch-like, sparrow-sized bird often seen in the Eastern US during migration - which is right now. During breeding season, the male is dramatically-pigmented but, depending on the light, they can appear black.
Here’s a question I would like to ask François Hollande (I’d like to ask it of Barack Obama, too): just where does he think money comes from? I sometimes wonder if socialists suffer under a species of arrested development. Some credulous children believe that the stork brings babies. So it is that socialists tend to believe that money comes from “the rich.” Need some dough for your social program? Simple, take it from “the rich” (however you define that elastic category) and give it to someone else via a government bureaucracy you have set up.
But what happens when the rich cease to be rich? What then?
Certainly, the steep austerity policies have in Portugal, Spain and Greece only produced bigger deficits as tax revenues have fallen. But what really matters is that Europeans more and more are coming to see the E.U. and the policies it enforces as counter to their interests and harmful.
As economic freedom declines, EU member states are becoming less and less competitive on the world stage, while emerging economies from Asia to South America are gaining ground. Decades of big government policies have now brought several European economies to their knees. Soaring taxes, spiraling unemployment, mountains of red tape, stifling labour regulations, and ruinous levels of public spending needed to fund vast and unsustainable welfare states and entitlement programmes have created a perfect storm of economic malaise. And France is a potent symbol of that decline, with huge levels of public debt, now standing at more than 80 percent of GDP, government spending at 55 percent of GDP, and a tax burden equivalent to 42 percent of total domestic income.
In addition, Western Europe’s problems have been exacerbated by the relentless centralisation of political and economic power in Brussels, which has added layers of suffocating regulations for businesses operating within the EU, as well as onerous regulations on financial institutions, while the single currency has made it increasingly difficult for national leaders to address their own countries’ economic woes.
Any power that government has to do something you like will invariably be used for something you abhor. Today’s decision interpreting the Commerce Clause to justify snatching home-grown medical marijuana from patients in California becomes the justification for tomorrow’s federal mandate to buy health insurance. Reduce the scope of government, and we reduce the culture war, while promoting true tolerance of divergent viewpoints.
TGR: What should the role of the Federal Reserve be?
DS: To get out of the way and not act like it is the central monetary planner of a $15 trillion economy. It cannot and should not be done.
The Fed is destroying the capital market by pegging and manipulating the price of money and debt capital. Interest rates signal nothing anymore because they are zero. The yield curve signals nothing anymore because it is totally manipulated by the Fed. The very idea of “Operation Twist” is an abomination.
We now live in a country where sixty percent of the households get more from the federal government than they put in. We now live in a country where the Democratic Party has gone a long way towards fulfilling its long-term dream of turning citizens into clients of the state.
If the Federalist Papers are ignored or given inadequate attention in today's colleges, the Anti-Federalist Papers are consigned to the memory hole as a challenge to prevailing liberal thought.
It would be difficult to overstate the significance of The Federalist for understanding the principles of American government and the challenges that liberal democracies confront early in the second decade of the 21st century. Yet despite the lip service they pay to liberal education, our leading universities can't be bothered to require students to study The Federalist—or, worse, they oppose such requirements on moral, political or pedagogical grounds. Small wonder it took so long for progressives to realize that arguments about the constitutionality of ObamaCare are indeed serious.
For the full answer, if Berkowitz offers one, you'd have to be a paid subscriber to the Wall Street Journal. A lawyer before becoming a columnist, Jennifer Rubin offers explanations, "The first has to do with the transformation of law schools from intellectual institutions to professional trade schools. Especially with the astronomically high tuition at most law schools, the emphasis, by necessity, is on preparing students for the practice of the law....Second, law schools have given way to the notion that the Constitution is whatever the Supreme Court says it is." She concludes:
The reason in large part is the defect in legal and collegiate education, and the mindset behind the indifference to seminal documents that reveal the ingenious and enduring structure of our Constitution.
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Warren’s ploy is not that much more egregious than the thousands of Caucasians with Hispanic surnames who pass as minorities in American universities. White Chileans, Argentines, and Mexicans come to American colleges and are transformed into “Chicanos,” a category that has little reality outside a college campus. Hiring Basques or Spaniards counts as increasing “diversity,” even though they have nothing culturally in common with the mestizo or Indian children of farm-workers. So too with African or Caribbean blacks, who are hired not because they bring the unique perspective of their homelands to their intellectual work or teaching, but because they count as “black,” and thus are assumed to have some mystical connection with American black students and their cultural identity, which owes much more to American culture and history than to African.
Of course, socio-economic differences among American minorities are also ignored in the rush to promote diversity. A Mexican-American dentist’s or schoolteacher’s daughter who never cut a grape or washed a dish supposedly has some special insight into poor or working-class Mexicans. A light-skinned black son of college-educated parents who grew up in the suburbs gets to campus and suddenly has a rapport with the “brothers” and their experiences. An upper class Chinese is thought to be better able to relate to anyone designated by the meaningless category “Asian-American,” which obscures the fundamental differences and histories of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Thais, Laos, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Hmong. The social capital that comes from education and wealth and that is used to define “white-skin privilege” suddenly has no value when it comes to the equally privileged ethnic “other.”
...is the party he belongs to. The Dem Party is as far Left as it has ever been, and with that comes irresponsibility, vote-buying, and deception (ie "by all means necessary").
If I believed that socialism were a good thing for American freedom, I'm sure I would overlook his flaws and be just focused on the larger goals, as the MSM and other O supporters do. After all, politics ain't beanbag.
Lying, deception, and skirting the rules have now become commonplace for O and the Dems. However, we must understand that they believe that this is justified "for the greater good." It would not matter what skin tone O had, it would be the same (altho I suspect being half-African may multiply the sycophancy of the media).
As I discussed with a friend last night at dinner, Obama is not the problem. He's just the figurehead du jour and, it seems, not an ineffective one as figureheads go. So it really doesn't matter that the O is a slick con-artist who would fit right in with Newman and Redford in The Sting.
The condescension inherent in this vision is apparent in every step of Julia’s pilgrimage toward a community-gardening retirement. But in an increasingly atomized society, where communities and families are weaker than ever before, such a vision may have more appeal — to both genders — than many of the conservatives mocking the slide show might like to believe.
... liberalism does not work, contrary as it is to human nature. I wish I could just say that about every thirty years or so, forgetful Americans take an allergy shot of it, suffer the reaction, and then get another three decades of Carter/Obama immunity. But instead statist redistribution and intrusion are an insidious process, no longer specific just to Democrats, but bound up in the growing affluence and leisure of the West—both serving its various needs of alleviating guilt to the masses, subsidizing half the nation, and providing much envied power and lucre to a highly educated and technocratic elite who have little talent for acquiring either in the private sector. That it is not sustainable does not mean that it will not cause havoc as it totters and collapses. Look at Russia and Eastern Europe circa 1989, or the present-day EU, or Greece proper, or California or Illinois today.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius pens an optimistic description of "Our Plentiful Future." According to analysts he cites, the US could reduce its energy imports to 22% by 2020 due to our natural-gas boom, and reduce our dependence on the unstable Middle East even more due to Canadian supplies. In turn, this will decrease the cost of manufacturing at home, a high percentage of companies which have outsourced to China bringing several million jobs home.
What Ignatius fails to mention is that with regulatory interference and increased taxes, the Obama administration is doing everything it can get away with to puncture these possibilities. Leaving out that important blockage, Ignatius is engaging in the happy talk that comes from an Obama supporter.
15:1 "I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower.
15:2 He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.
15:3 You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you.
15:4 Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.
15:5 I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.
15:6 Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.
15:7 If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.
15:8 My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.
Gwynnie emails me that he saw a pair of these this morning.
Maurice Sendak: Author of ‘Where the Wild Things Are’
Megan Draper's Choice
is the party he belongs to. The Dem Party is as far Left as it has ever been, and with that comes irresponsibility, vote-buying, and deception (ie "by all means necessary"). 
Image from 
John 15:1-8
TigerHawk