Maggie's Farm

Among other national races I am keeping track of in my blue area of the country, I have been particularly interested in those of Dan Debicella in Fairfield Co., CT and Sean Bielat's vs. Barney Frank.

Dan: Wharton, Harvard, McKinsey, entrepreneur, State Senate leader.

Sean: Georgetown, Harvard, Wharton, Maj. USMC, McKinsey, entrepreneur.

We are fortunate that such talented and experienced people are willing to serve us. What moves them, when politics is so often a harbor for losers?

I found it interesting how their resumes overlapped. McKinsey is like a finishing school for the shiny resume, the energetic and the bright, isn't it?

These guys grew up in the "working class" with no "privileges," and applied their talents to the fullest. Good for them.

What's required to revive America is major structural overhaul. This is a task of historic proportions - not unlike the simplification of law by Justinian in ancient Rome. Our founding fathers never imagined that democracy would become a one-way ratchet - always adding laws but never repealing them. Nor did they intend law to be a form of central planning. The Constitution sets forth our governing goals and principles in only 16 pages.

From the Redneck Tree-Hugger: "Barack Obama has awakened a sleeping nation."

This is a Maggie's sort of fellow. h/t, reader.

A review of a new book of his letters. One quote:

One journal entry tells us that he turned down a job at the University of Chicago lest Saul Bellow and the sociologist Edward Shils—both of whom taught there—discover that he was not as smart as they thought he was.

I love that humility from a politician. Readers know that I do not view poltics as a career: I like to view it as a temporary public service for care of country. However, I do understand that these people want jobs with good benefits. Who doesn't enjoy freebies with a job without heavy lifting?

He's rich and plays in politics because his father-in-law owns the Empire State Building, and presumably supports his life style. Video at Ace. What a weenie putz.

Linda has created jobs, built a large business, and knows how the world works.

You don't approve of wrestling entertainment? Then what job-creating, profitable biz could any candidate have been in that you would approve of?

How different is wrestling from MSM news? We need more entrepreneurs in government, and fewer professional politicians who know nothing except government. Government is a parasite. Blumenthal has been on the government teat all of his life - and I assume, the teat of his in-laws. It's all ego for him because he has never done anything real in his life.

Send this smarmy, slippery, phony jerk back to his poolside in Greenwich. He'll be just fine, like his dear buddy Spitzer (they are called "the twins") in New York who I think also lives off family real estate in NYC when he isn't busy with hookers.

At Reason, 14 ways to dismantle a monstrous government, one program at a time.

Don't hold your breath. 

Not yet, anyway. He seems to imagine that somebody thinks Obamacare can work. Of course it cannot. It is not meant to work.

It's meant to fail, and is doing so already. The greedy insurance companies will be blamed, and the Feds will step in...as long as the Lefties are in control.

Here's how it should have gone down:

"What? You're asking me why after I paid my maid three times the minimum wage, checked her paperwork, paid taxes on her - and she turns out to have defrauded me - I'm the bad guy? Next question."

Defrauded - and betrayed. Unfaithful servant indeed.

What did Meg do wrong? She should not have hired a Hispanic.

From Heather McDonald's Windy City Silence - The truth behind the city’s youth-crime spree remains unspoken:

The studied silence in Chicago about the massive reality that underlies that city’s youth-violence epidemic—black family breakdown—is so complete as to border on perverse.

From VDH's From the Unbelievable to the Passé:

Statism versus free markets is about as easy to understand as the difference between Singapore and Greece, and yet here we go again. This weird suicidal statist impulse seems for Obama to trump almost every other consideration: he may well destroy the Democratic Party for a decade just when it was recovering; he has so terrified private enterprise that trillions of dollars in capital are simply sitting out his first two years, waiting for the end of his congressional majorities, and hence his agenda to implode.

All this goes on as Obama sees the EU running away from precisely what he wishes to implement, while at home a high-tax, high-entitlement, redistributive economy like California has managed to destroy the most richly endowed human and natural landscape — agriculture, tourism, high-tech, oil and gas, Hollywood, Napa Valley, Silicon Valley — in the nation. And yet here we continue down into the abyss.

In just three months, on January 1, 2011, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves.

On January 1, 2011, here’s what happens... (read it to the end, so you see all three waves)...

It must be some failure of multicultural education in the West when we imagine that other people in the world want what we want. Things like peace, material well-being, freedom, etc.

Bruce Thornton notes The West fails to imagine that its adversaries might have different values. One quote:

Munich in particular illustrates the dangers of projecting one’s own motives or goods onto an aggressor. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain failed to imagine that Hitler and the Germans, fired by revanchist passions and the lust for recovering lost prestige and power, were eager for conflict and had spent most of the interwar period preparing for it. Worse yet, this ignorance of true motives puts one at a disadvantage when dealing with an aggressor, who can conceal his aims under the pretext of diplomatic negotiation (as Hitler did), thus buying time and misdirecting his adversary by the duplicitous endorsement of ideals he knows are important to the West.

Yes, you could make a case that the Sudetenland was part of Greater Germany - Austria too - but that's not what it was about.

Thornton's piece is mainly about militant Islam. In the West, we often prefer to be in denial of the evil intentions of others. I'm sure there is a psychological explanation for that. To me, it just seems like a pleasant Edenic fantasy.

We have no "insurgency" in the US now. What I think we have is a reaction to governmental overreach - an overreach which, as I posted yesterday, will only with time ratchet ever upwards until it breaks.

What did the guy say? "Tighten the bolt until it breaks, then back off a little."

Being a Constitutional Conservative is a depressing role.

From Protein's One Party Washington? No-Party Insurgency:

The American government has become a gigantic regulatory juggernaut. It decides the fate of individuals, businesses, whole industries, and entire regions.  A few lines in a statute, or a paragraph in one of the many administrative codes that enmesh our productive lives, can mean wealth or ruin. This is a huge, unchecked, and increasingly unaccountable power. Where there is such power, as our Founders knew, it will be abused.  Picking better people won’t solve the problem, because where such power exists, it will corrupt the people who have access to it.  This is a political law almost as universal as those of Newton and Maxwell in the realm of physical phenomena. A regulatory state this powerful will necessarily be corrupting, venal, and suffocating.

OK, sure. But people voted for that stuff. What can anybody undo? Even Ronaldus Magnus could not take on the ridiculous and useless federal Dept. of Education. Megan McArdle mulls over government coercion, and exposes the straw man of Somalia. A quote:

Unfortunately, I don't have a Grand New Theory with which to replace it; I think of "society" as a chaotic system, within which government, like corporations, are necessary evils that will only ever imperfectly perform the idealized roles to which we would like to assign them.  As such, I can't generate any neat sound-bytes like "Taxation is theft!" or "Why don't you just move to Somalia, huh?"

Nobody is advocating nihilism. I do have a grand theory, from Thomas Jefferson: "That government which governs least, governs best." A light hand. The Constitution remains a good idea, and it worked pretty well for a long time. We had a country of self-reliant, strong men and women and kids who took nothing for granted except that their lives were in their own hands, and God's.

Stanley Fish urges opponents to engage the Tea Partiers on the merits, instead of name-calling. He is right.

And Matt Taibbi snarkily notes the Medicare Tennessee Tea Partiers in their government-paid scooters. I think that Medicare should have been means-tested, but that fight is long gone. The Liberal youngsters are going to pay my medical bills in a few years - if they can find a job. The joke is on them because, the way things are going, I have far more assets than they will ever have. Too bad it's not a joke.

It's been going on for many years, at least since Teddy Roosevelt: While the Left claims to want bipartisanship and compromise, the incremental clicks of the ratchet only go in one direction: toward European-style social democracy.

That's what William F. Buckley Jr. meant by "A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'"

The fatal flaw of democratic systems, of course, is that people figure out they can vote themselves things. The US wasn't planned that way, but it's become that way. Progressives call it Progress.

From Driscoll's Springtime for Algore: A Romantic Pilgrimage to Germany’s ‘Eco–Anschluss’:

...what is it about self-styled intellectuals, “liberals,” leftists, “progressives” who loathe America and think that real progress exists in some far off land, preferably with top-down centralized state-run planning? During the first two decades of the 20th century, American men had built the first mechanized airplane and were spreading electricity throughout the nation, the first big radio networks were going up, skyscrapers were rising ever higher, affordable mass-produced automobiles were rolling off assembly lines, and nascent television technology was being created, all via private enterprise. But instead, the intellectuals of the period look to totalitarian nightmare states thousands of miles away such as the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s Italy, and want to cut and paste their ideas into the American firmament.

What is it about them? I believe I know what it is. Some folks think they are smart enough to run the world. Like Deval Patrick who regrets freedom, they want to be Philosopher-Kings. Trouble is, the mere fact of wanting that role is a sign of lack of wisdom. In my view, humility is the sign of wisdom, and hubris a sign of emotional immaturity.

As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.

Henry David Thoreau

At American Thinker, Hoven's The Government Tapeworm:

Government is an organism that tries to maximize its energy intake. It is, in effect, like all other organisms.

Read it. It's about the Romer-Laffer Curve, and how greedy governments can enslave you - almost to the point that you give up, but not quite. A successful work camp never works its inmates to death...unless they are too old or sick to be productive to the State.

Photo is a human tapeworm. They can be up to 35' long, and lay millions of eggs daily. They can be an effective aid to slow and manageable weight loss.

The College Board keeps selling college:

“For reasons that are not entirely clear, more people are questioning whether it’s necessary to go to college.”

If she had been paying any attention, she would know that the reasons are very clear. Many of the young people drawn into college are academically weak and disengaged; they learn little or nothing in their college years; they accumulate loads of debt; they end up working in jobs that almost any high-school student could easily learn to do. Furthermore, as we increase the percentage of people in the labor force who have college credentials, that ratchets up credential inflation, making it harder for those who don’t have college credentials to find good employment.

Via Insty:

People who choose to work with their hands are looked down upon by the chattering classes. It used to be that getting into college was hard. Now it’s just expensive. Getting into a post-college profession was even harder. People were impressed if someone went to college. And even more so if they went on to become a lawyer or doctor.

Walter Russell Mead's 6 Tips About What Really Matters in College

Many British University Grads Working in Call Centers

For-profit education under assault by the government. New rules that do not apply to the old-fashioned schools.

From Re-thinking Education at Rebel:

Everything testifies to the great benefit of charter schools, private schools and home schooling, so why do we continue to provide education in such an antiquated method? Again, it doesn’t serve the teacher’s union to break the kids out into smaller and smaller schools and classes where information can not be controlled and might even become contradictory to earlier “government” teachings. What government employee would benefit from a revolution in education delivery? None.

I guess we don't have to worry about that baloney. I was hoping a good one would hit up here, so I could have an excuse for a day or two off work to catch up on my chores. We know how to deal with bad weather.

Globalistical warmening fails again. Funny how negative results never make headlines or get attention. Even important negative findings in science have trouble getting published in scientific journals. There must be a fallacy term for that, but I'm not sure what it is. If a good hurricane hit land this year, the Al Gore folks would be all over it.

What am I smoking? A Griffin corona. Nice. No, actually, it's not a corona. It's bigger than that. Tasty, whatever the Griffin is that I bought from my local upscale cigar store Indian.

My NYC pal, who happens to be a "private wealth" money manager, and I had an interesting a conversation this week.

I commented to him that it seemed to me that, the more money people had, the more they worried about money. (I also told him about some doubtless BS study that said that peoples' general life happiness doesn't improve much after an income of $75,000. - assuming the life they constructed is not totally dysfunctional.)

He told me that he had thought about this too, and that his observation about my point was that wealthier people did tend to worry more about their money the more money they have - up to the point of $17 million in the bank.

At 17 million, he said, for some psychological reason, prosperous people generally stop worrying unless they are highly neurotic - or if they try to live as if they had $100 million.

He also said, however, that "Everybody is neurotic about money. The hard part of my job is the Psychiatry, because it's not rocket science to determine a good bond price and it's not rocket science to preserve capital."

Got off the phone with a friend who lives in NYC. "Every time f-ing Obama comes to town, it's a mess. They shut down midtown, you couldn't get a cab. After my meeting, I had to walk, tried to go into the Waldorf to take a leak and have a cocktail, but they had State Dept. Security cops with scanners at the door. Wouldn't let me in. Pain in the ass."

Says I, "New York is probably the only place so jaded that, when the President visits, all people do is bitch about the inconvenience."

Of course, all the cops etc were also there to protect Ahmadinejad. As has been asked, how come he doesn't get arrested when he's here?

Entitlements promised by politicians, but never paid for. Do we all live in a dream world? Pie in the sky? From Biggs' Why Does Government Grow and Grow and Grow? (h/t, Insty) a quote:

As I noted in a recent National Review column on why Social Security reform has proved so difficult, shifting from a pay-as-you-go program to a funded system entails significant “transition costs,” which are borne by the very citizens who would decide to make the change. Since today’s Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits are paid from today’s taxes, if we decide to pre-fund these programs then the current generation must pay twice: first for current beneficiaries, and second for their own benefits. Put simply, to shift from an unfunded program to a funded program, someone must contribute extra funds. When the defining characteristic of domestic policy has been for voters to shift their own cost burdens to future generations, it is highly optimistic to expect current voters to accept a double burden. The expected result is to kick the can down the road, such that deficits grow and future taxpayers become even worse off. My own take: it was the transition costs associated with Social Security personal accounts, more than the risk of investing Social Security taxes in stocks, that doomed President Bush’s 2005 reform drive to failure.

Read the whole thing, because it is the best explanation I have seen. I do understand that pols seem to want to keep their big shot jobs in DC, but, in the process, China will ending up owning us.

By the way, I would like my lifetime net Social Security contributions as a lump sum, please, at age 65. That's all I ask for. You can even ignore inflation, so it's been my free long-term loan to you, Uncle Sam. It is my account, right? Just hand it over, and I won't give you any more trouble. I'll use it to pay off my mortgage, and live happily ever after...

Soft tyranny, manliness, Western Civ, the Leftism of the campuses, etc. Video interview with Harvard's Harvey Mansfield thanks to Powerline.

It's a long interview, and well-worth every minute. I am now a confirmed Mansfield fan.

It's time for the absurd Barney Frank to retire, but the real point is that Bielat is one heck of a good candidate.

Here's his website.