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.
Is it any wonder, then, that the pragmatic and commonsense Americans, along with those whose consciences and religious freedoms were constantly violated, revolted at last? Is it any wonder that when an elite few invent a world without any relationship to reality, the rest of unconverted society refuses to accommodate itself to their confabulist insanities? Is it any wonder that honest Americans saw, as did the late theologian John Webster, that “The lie can be kept intact only if anything which threatens to expose it is destroyed?” Is it any wonder that the mere mortals among us have seen that the progressive gods are mad, and that their insistence that we retrofit our existence and all of society to accommodate their insane demands was a potentially fatal assault on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
Think
federal policy matters? Here’s why conservatives have a
once-in-a-lifetime legislative opportunity at the state level - See
more at:
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/11/think-federal-policy-matters-conservatives-have-a-once-in-a-lifetime-legislative-opportunity#sthash.WffBKmgm.dpuf
Calling modern Progressives “the Left” turns history on its head. Progressives are the champions of privilege and advocate what amounts to the return of active and passive citizenship. They and their attendants will be the active citizens while the rest of us, including whoever happens to wander in from who knows where, will be the passive citizens. The only difference is the 18th century aristocrats were honest about what they wanted. The modern aristocrat prefers to lie about his intentions.
I am sorry that I forget which commentator observed that US voters have now elected the fourth Republican Hitler in his or her adult life. The Hitlers keep coming, yet somehow we muddle along.
Matt Yglesias may be too young to relax about the latest American Hitler. Reading this, definitely.
I am certain about two things only: There is no new Hitler, and the Federal government will expand.
Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.
The Left’s trivialization of the charge of racism only made it easier for Trump to win. Previous GOP candidates lived in dread fear of the media’s PC mau-mauing. Trump didn’t and ended up getting a higher percentage of the Black and Hispanic vote than Romney. While Hillary wrote off half the country as a basket of deplorables, Trump turned up in inner cities. Obama and other Hillary surrogates mocked him for his “Make America Great Again” slogan, but next to the “God damn America”-style multiculturalism of the Left, Trump’s simple nationalism looked less scary than sane.
I received a bit of pushback yesterday from my post on wars but I am not changing my view yet. Looking for fights is neither Conservative nor patriotic. Bellicosity is just foolish and weak.
Look at it this way: From Russia's standpoint, NATO (ie mainly the US) seems like a threat. a threat in their backyard. I feel NATO is an obsolete remnant of the Cold War. Leave it. There is no Soviet Union. The Ukraine, historically part of Russia, is of no national interest for the US. Major powers want their spheres of influence and power, and tend to be a little paranoid and bullying. Russia and China included. Yes, it all seems stupid in the modern world where economics rule. However, those are not America's issues. They do not wish to invade the US, for heaven's sake.
Except for Israel, the Middle East is a God-forsaken s-hole. Despite 9-11, I refuse to be intimidated by those backward lunatics. This is their extended Dark Ages, and nobody can pull them out of that. Bush's and Hillary's wars and interventions were wrong, in retrospect. In the ME, whatever you do is wrong. What could be more obvious? Nuke ISIS, but there will be another one popping up a week later. Evil perseveres.
Life sucks for many people on the planet, but we can't fix that. We are not God and we often make well-intentioned mistakes. We must count our blessings.
Contrary views welcome, as always. No Thought Police here but personal insults are not arguments and good manners are always appreciated.
Where do all of these spineless candy-ass university administrators come from? Are they as immature and babyish as the students, or are they just afraid of the Stalinist Thought Police? This is refreshing:
Depending on how you define it, "American interests" deserving of military force or threats thereof can be construed to involve everywhere on earth. However, we have just elected a guy with far less warlike or quasi-imperialist tendencies than the John Boltons, the Bushies, the Neocons, and Hillary. That's good. Governments often look for enemies for their own purposes.
Just because countries like pathetic Russia or growing but still adolescent China want to play geopolitics does not make them enemies or even adversaries. America today has no credible enemies but, as always there are plenty of bad actors and nasty talkers in the world. There always are and always will be.
The world is not America's sandbox. In my view, Europe can take care of itself. NATO is obsolete. If China wants to be a tough guy in south Asia, it's fine with me. It's not critical to the US. The middle east will be a mess for another 100 years unless the Ottoman Empire is restored. Of course America should be militarily competent - Always Be Prepared.
Trump does have a chance to do some of this if it is the priority.
For all the awfulness associated with Trump, his election stemmed from a disinclination among Americans to accept their place in the new technocratic order. Trump is best praised for some of the enemies he has made—movie stars and hierarchs of the environmental left, the racial grievance industry, the high-tech oligarchs, the bureaucracy and a university system that serves largely as a giant re-education camp. Not surprisingly, those enemies are having a collective fit about his victory.
All this about the popular vote is nonsense. Clearly, if the rule of the game were popular vote instead of electoral college, national election campaigns would be planned entirely differently.
As it is now, candidates must appeal to broad sectors of the country and to a broad geography instead of just to the largest urban areas. The electoral college, like the Senate, gives some importance to states with differing interests or without large urban centers. That was part of the deal. Our republic was designed with many systems to prevent majorities from overpowering the rest.
The fact is that everything you liberals wanted to do, except rebuild America’s bathrooms to suit a more transgendered sensibility, is done -- and it probably could have been done without all the intellectual terrorism inspired by Karl and Fritz and Max and Ted and Herb, scaring the pants off the victims and silencing the bourgeoisie. So you can take your street armies and your racist BLMs and La Razas and your segregated dorms, your “Studies” degrees, your “mostly peaceful protests,” and demobilize the activists and tell them to go get a job.
... a deeper dive suggests that actually, in the end, she (Clinton) does stand for something, and that's government intervention in every single problem that exists, anywhere. It may not seem like policy played a role in this election, but I suspect in the end that's like saying that water plays no role in fish behavior. It was always in the background.
Clinton's campaign pushed out several policy memos and briefs, and what they all had in common is that they called for federal involvement in every single solution, with very few exceptions. She is known for being an interventionist in foreign policy, supporting military action in Syria and Libya and elsewhere. If she thought any particular outcome was a good idea, she wanted to a federal law to make it happen or a government subsidy or grant to push it along.
The idea that government, especially federal government, is supposed to solve our problems is a sickness. In America as I see it, government's first job is to do no harm. Its second job is to get out of the way so people can solve their own problems.
The pretensions of the imperial presidency are going to haunt Democrats for the immediate future, but they’ll quickly rediscover their belief in limits on the executive. While they’re rediscovering old virtues, they might take a moment to lament Senator Harry Reid’s weakening of the filibuster, an ancient protection of minority interests in the less democratic house of our national legislature. They might also lament Senator Reid’s attempt to gut the First Amendment in order to permit the federal government — which in January will be under the management of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and — incredibly enough — President Donald Trump — to regulate political speech, deciding who can speak, about what and when, and on what terms. Perhaps they’ll thank those wicked “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court for saving basic political-speech rights. If they are smart, they will rediscover federalism, too, and the peacemaking potential of a school of thought that says in a diverse nation of 320 million souls, there is no reason that life in rural Idaho must be lived in exactly the same way as it is in Brooklyn or Santa Monica. As Charles C. W. Cooke pointed out, the same people who until ten minutes ago denounced federalism — which they mischaracterize as the doctrine of “states’ rights” — as an instrument for the suppression of African Americans are now embracing secession, which, in the American context at least, has a little bit of its own racial baggage.
Business loves open borders. It keeps labor abundant and cheap. An immigrant from Mexico will work cheap, but that guy will get food stamps, housing, medical care - all sorts of benefits by which the taxpayer is essentially subsidizing their low wages. So low wages are not really cheap except for the employer. Dems love open borders - they believe it means more Dem voters. Do open borders take American jobs? Of course, regardless of the arguments of both lib and conservative pundits. They either take jobs, or they take government assistance.Many Repubs want more open borders for the supposed economic benefit. Trump wants immigration policies that work for American employees.
Trump wants tough international trade. Business wants free trade. Why? Often, imports are cheaper (whether labor or products). However, at the point of sale, such imports are not cheap. They are whatever the market will bear, of course. The benefit to the consumer is greatly overestimated. Generally speaking, Dems, Repubs, and business like free trade. Trump wants tough trade deals and tariffs if they can help American workers.
Leftist pundits (which is almost redundant) always write that, sorrowfully, but only when their team loses. Of course the country is divided: It's a big country and there are only two teams. I happen to feel that division and disputation is mostly good and healthy.
A good Repub plan would be to turn it into something entirely different. For starters, an interstate marketplace with all sorts of medical insurances offered.
It became easy to say that a “crude” Trump and a “crooked” Clinton polluted the 2016 campaign. The real culprits were a corrupt Washington elite, who were as biased as they were incompetent — and clueless about how disliked they were by the very America they held in such contempt.
True the Dems became the party of banks, big corporations, lesbians, and feminists and abandoned appeals to the rural areas, the shopkeeprs, etc. - but they are wrong about Trump's appeal, which is heavily to the old Dem base. Lefties keep bringing up Trump as authoritarian, when he is just Populist even to the point of complaining about Amazon. Of course, old-fashioned populism no longer works in a world of multinational corporations and relatively free trade. If you somehow broke up Amazon, for example, Mr. Ma in China would buy the pieces and keep running it.
Whoever takes over what’s left of the Democratic Party is going to have to find a way to appeal to a broader cross section of the country. It may still be true that in the long term, Republicans can’t win with their demographics, but we found out Tuesday that the long term is still pretty far away. Democrats have to win more white voters. They have to do so in a way that doesn’t erode the anti-racist or anti-sexist planks of the modern party, which are non-negotiable. If only there were a model for this.
He is so very wrong about this. "Trump has been in the public eye for at least thirty years. He was never accused of racism until he opposed a Democrat."
I thought Hillary had it wrapped up months ago. I have been wrong about many things before, but I spoke about this with too much certainty and I burst Mrs. BD's balloon - but she never entirely lost confidence that Trump would win.
A friend in Calif. was so confident of Hillary that he promised his Trumpist wife that if Trump won, he'd quit ceegars. Now that was confidence. Mind you, he is a Trump voter too, but in Calif. what does it matter? I feel terrible for him now.
Trump's humble brief speech last night was good. He noted that he had somehow caught onto a movement that few realized was there. This is a revolt against the Elites, against Wall St., global corporations, crony capitalists, Davos, central bankers, academic totalitarians, political correctness, Jonathan Grubers, massive powerful and out of touch bureaucracies, careerist politicians, climate loonies, political dynasties, George Soros, the "intellectual-yet-idiots", and moonbats in general. It's about time. Let's be grateful that Pence is in there - he knows the world that Trump is getting into far better than Donald does.
Two things of note: Trump spent half of what Clinton spent. So much for money and politics. Second, this is the first time in a long while when Repubs will have had the White House and both houses of Congress. I guarantee they will disappoint you. Be bold and wise, you government people.
How did I vote? I voted for Melania because she is cute, and an immigrant. Here are a few fascinating reactions:
This wasn’t an election. It was a revolution. It’s midnight in America. The day before fifty million Americans got up and stood in front of the great iron wheel that had been grinding them down. They stood there even though the media told them it was useless. They took their stand even while all the chattering classes laughed and taunted them.
The Obama era ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. With a national consensus that maybe he didn't really matter so much after all. And those to whom he mattered the most were his enemies determined to undo everything he did.
Image stolen from 
FTC 
Why Is
The True Story of Hacksaw Ridge and Desmond Doss:
Photo via 