DISILLUSIONMENT WITH THE GOP

Bidinotto has a point: One excerpt: "Not a damned thing distinguishes the Republicans from the Democrats anymore...not a damned thing. "No Child Left Behind" in essence, and unconstitutionally, federalized education. The GOP-engineered federal prescription drug subsidy program for seniors was another huge and costly step toward total socialized medicine. The Administration's response to recent natural disasters -- here and abroad -- establishes the premise of federalizing all local emergencies globally, and reducing the U.S. military into becoming the logistics wing of the International Red Cross".

The Anchoress has got pretty disillusioned with the GOP too: "If your plan was to make people so disgusted with your cowardice, your disorganization and your political tone-deafness that they either stop contributing to the RNC, or they decide to just sit out the next election (because what's the point), or they decide to vote out every stinking one of you in the next elections, because you freaking well deserve ouster for literally doing nothing constructive and squandering your majority.well.you have succeeded spectacularly! Beyond your wildest imaginings, I am sure. I can't think of a single reason to vote to re-elect a any one of you".

The Plantation Right: "I write editorials for a conservative editorial page. After my newspaper editorialized that U.S. House Republicans should replace Majority Leader Tom DeLay with someone more concerned with ideology than partisanship, we were deluged with letters from angry Republicans. Almost all of the letters made the same argument: No real conservative would oppose Tom DeLay because of all the good he has done the GOP. Of course, 'Republican' and 'conservative' are not synonyms. Until more conservatives make clear that they understand this distinction, they are in for continued abuse from the Republican leadership."

The House of Reps backdown over drilling for oil in less than 1% of Alaska really got to me but there is an informative comment here on just how it happened.

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Brookes News Update

Why Al Gore could have been America's last gasp? : In Al Gore we did not see the triumph of American liberalism but of nihilism springing from the corpse of liberalism
Are Liberal Party blue bloods sinking the Government's workplace reforms?: Looks like the Hugh Morgan, Michael Kroger and John Calvert-Jones' axis has contributed significantly to the Government's labour market reform stuff up. But what can one expect from the 'Blueblood Society'
Business Council of Australia's quack cure for recessions: The Business Council of Australia has demonstrated a shocking ignorance of economic history and the real nature of the so-called boom-bust cycle
Who hates America in the Arab and Muslim world, and why: Arab journalist tells all on Anti-Americanism and hate in the Arab world. This is something that most Western journalists would never dream of doing
Black group calls on Democrats to stop using racial slurs against black Republicans: Racist Democrats vilify black Republican candidate
Why government was never the source of money: According to a popular view, which originated from Plato and Aristotle, people accept money because of government decree. Not so
Hollywood can't even spell "Israel": Palestinians are perpetrating on their own people with a fervour that increases in savagery each day, because they can't get over the fence and kill Jews so easily
What should we expect from Bernanke now that he is the Fed's chairman?: Why Bernanke'a policy of stabilizing prices will generate a boom-bust situation

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ELSEWHERE

A mindless bigot speaks. Brian Leiter calls Texans mindless bigots because they prefer a traditional definition of marriage. But since he gives no reasoning for his assertion, who is the mindless bigot? Both Keith Burgess-Jackson and Right Reason have given the poisonous old bigot more attention than he deserves -- and I guess I am too.

Blunt talk from a senior Australian conservative: "Federal Treasurer Peter Costello has again urged Islamic extremists to leave Australia, saying there is no point in living in a country with a system of government they oppose. "There are some things Australia stands for, has always stood for, always will stand for, which will never change," he told A Current Affair. "We will never be an Islamic state. We will never observe Sharia law ... We will always be a democracy. "To people who say `well, we've come to this country and we would like to turn it into something it isn't, I say you must understand that will never occur". Mr Costello said rather than try to change Australia, they should leave it".

An interesting research finding: "This paper empirically analyzes the question whether government involvement in the economy is conducive or detrimental to life satisfaction in a cross-section of 74 countries. This provides a test of a longstanding dispute between standard neoclassical economic theory, which predicts that government plays an unambiguously positive role for individuals' quality of life, and public choice theory, that was developed to understand why governments often choose excessive involvement and regulation, thereby harming voters' quality of life. Our results show that life satisfaction decreases with higher government spending. This negative impact of the government is stronger in countries with a leftwing median voter. It is alleviated by government effectiveness - but only in countries where the state sector is already small."

The authoritarian Left at work again: "Massachusetts politicians last week rose to new heights of holier-than-thou arrogance. House members on Thursday-just three days after the 80-page bill was introduced-voted overwhelmingly to tax businesses that do not provide health insurance for their employees, and to require all residents who can afford it to buy health insurance... No doubt, buying health insurance is a good idea. But so is buying a car with a five-star safety rating, brushing after meals and not running with scissors. And yet government lets people decide whether to do these things... If the state can order people to buy health insurance, then where does that authority stop? Why can't it order people to exercise a half-hour a day, quit smoking, and floss regularly?"

Various people have mentioned it but in case you have not seen it, the disastrous way French "unfair dismissal" laws have made Muslims almost unemployable in France is summarized here

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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