Via Slashdot:

“Federal CIO Vivek Kundra described some dismaying government inefficiencies in a speech on Thursday at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs in Seattle. It takes 160 days to process benefits for veterans, he said, ‘because the Veteran’s Administration is processing paperwork by passing manila folders from one desk to another.’ Another example bound to make you grind your teeth is why it takes the Patent and Trademark Office 3 years to process a patent. ‘One reason,’ says Kundra, ‘is because the USPTO receives these applications online, prints them out, and then someone manually rekeys the information into an antiquated system.’”  ~slashdot

Democrats failure is actually evidence of the system working exactly as it is supposed to. The founding fathers attempted to construct a system that would thwart tyranny with checks and balances. If they had wanted to create a socialist paradise I suppose they would have done so.

Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude. ~Alexis de Tocqueville

Civil Society

Civil Society is a term used to describe the interactions of free citizens. The collective action of free citizens acting outside of government for the betterment and enrichment of fellow citizens and society. De Tocqueville had it right when he said that, “The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.” This is democracy: power in the hands of people.

Unfortunately, progressives and liberals have an agenda that seeks to effectively crowd out  all interactions that are outside of government. For the life of me I don’t understand why. Government is no different from any other large ‘corporate’ entity. The only thing I can think of is that it is the religion of Marxism which permeates progressive ideology. For the left, voluntary grassroots uprisings are illegitimate unless their ultimate purpose is to unite in collective action through government or to empower government. All else is heresy.

So when the issue of which nations of the world are more charitable the left can only reference how much governments spend. Ignoring the private donations of individual citizens. The definition of charity, of how much one cares about the poor and the sick, can only be accounted for by how much you want government to spend on the problem. This is why conservatives are called heartless and evil by liberals. Why they are accused of wanting to starve children and old people. Of wanting the sick to die… because they oppose government taking over healthcare.

Representative Republic

Democracy is rule by the people. As opposed to rule by a privileged few. Our founding fathers realized that direct democracy was not a stable form of government, but they also viewed a privileged ruling class akin to royalty as an abomination to human liberty. So they tempered pure democracy and created the United States as a representative republic able to retain the rights of the people to rule themselves and still have characteristics of conservative stability.

The problem Democrats and liberals are having is not new. Friedrich A. Hayek describes how progressive economic planning always devolves into the need to force people to comply with the plan.

Planning and Power

IN ORDER to achieve their ends, the planners must create power—power over men wielded by other men—of a magnitude never before known. Their success will depend on the extent to which they achieve such power. Democracy is an obstacle to this suppression of freedom which the centralized direction of economic activity requires. Hence arises the clash between planning- and democracy.

Many socialists have the tragic illusion that by depriving private individuals of the power they possess in an individualist system, and transferring this power to society, they thereby extinguish power.  ~jim.com/hayek.htm

When Lincoln spoke of, “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” he was not endorsing a dictatorship of the proletariat. He was expressing the political idea that the government is the people. That the power of government resides in every citizen. That it should be citizens exercising power over the state not the other way around.

In contrast, the government of Obama sees Americans as subjects to be taken care of and this requires the state to take upon itself more and more power and responsibility that should rightly be left in the hands of individual citizens.

“It’s not that I want to punish your success,” Obama told him. “I want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance for success, too.

Then, Obama explained his trickle-up theory of economics.

“My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”  ~nypost.com

A government that cannot yet enact this kind of sweeping control over entire sectors of the economy and override the decision making rights of millions is not broken. The fact that we are still debating whether or not to socialize healthcare is a sign that something is broken: the commmon sense of way too many politicians.

The good new is that Obama has accomplished something that his wife Michelle had claimed he would as President. He will not allow us to “go back to our lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed…”

“He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”
~Michelle Obama

The T.E.A. (Taxed enough already) Parties are a sign of political awakening. Thank you Barack.

Glen Reynolds has a great piece describing this:

Today American taxpayers in more than 300 locations in all 50 states will hold rallies — dubbed “tea parties” — to protest higher taxes and out-of-control government spending. There is no political party behind these rallies, no grand right-wing conspiracy, not even a 501(c) group like MoveOn.org.

So who’s behind the Tax Day tea parties? Ordinary folks who are using the power of the Internet to organize. For a number of years, techno-geeks have been organizing “flash crowds” — groups of people, coordinated by text or cellphone, who converge on a particular location and then do something silly, like the pillow fights that popped up in 50 cities earlier this month. This is part of a general phenomenon dubbed “Smart Mobs” by Howard Rheingold, author of a book by the same title, in which modern communications and social-networking technologies allow quick coordination among large numbers of people who don’t know each other. ~online.wsj.com

Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism.

Because the free market has failed? What– failed to reward blatant liberal bias? Failed to reward shoddy reporting and a failure to check facts? Failed to keep afloat journalists who skew their stories so routinely that the new objectiveness is in fact liberalism. The reason for these failures is that journalism = liberalism. There is no objectivity.

…We begin with the notion that journalism is a public good, that it has broad social benefits far beyond that between buyer and seller. Like all public goods, we need the resources to get it produced. This is the role of the state and public policy. It will require a subsidy and should be regarded as similar to the education system or the military in that regard. Only a nihilist would consider it sufficient to rely on profit-seeking commercial interests or philanthropy to educate our youth or defend the nation from attack. With the collapse of the commercial news system, the same logic applies. Just as there came a moment when policy-makers recognized the necessity of investing tax dollars to create a public education system to teach our children, so a moment has arrived at which we must recognize the need to invest tax dollars to create and maintain news gathering, reporting and writing with the purpose of informing all our citizens.

So, if we can accept the need for government intervention to save American journalism, what form should it take? In the near term, we need to think about an immediate journalism economic stimulus, to be revisited after three years, and we need to think big. Let’s eliminate postal rates for periodicals that garner less than 20 percent of their revenues from advertising. This keeps alive all sorts of magazines and journals of opinion that are being devastated by distribution costs. It is these publications that often do investigative, cutting-edge, politically provocative journalism.

What to do about newspapers? Let’s give all Americans an annual tax credit for the first $200 they spend on daily newspapers. The newspapers would have to publish at least five times per week and maintain a substantial “news hole,” say at least twenty-four broad pages each day, with less than 50 percent advertising. In effect, this means the government will pay for every citizen who so desires to get a free daily newspaper subscription, but the taxpayer gets to pick the newspaper–this is an indirect subsidy, because the government does not control who gets the money. This will buy time for our old media newsrooms–and for us citizens–to develop a plan to establish journalism in the digital era. We could see this evolving into a system to provide tax credits for online subscriptions as well.  ~thenation.com

Couple this with the fairness doctrine and what do you have? State-run and approved media.

Outlining his strategy in organizing Alinksy writes:

“There’s another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families – more than seventy million people – whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don’t encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let’s not let it happen by default.”^[2]

Alinsky codified and wrote a clear set of rules^[3] for community organizing. His rules for radicals are now used as key tactics to learn in the training of new community organizers.  ~Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals

We have elected a man whose political education is Saul Alinsky. A man who has stated explicitly that his mission, his purpose, his destiny, is to “fundamentally transform America”. Now we know that the man who is our current President is in fact a radical socialist bent on destroying capitalism and the American way of life and replacing it with something that resembles animal farm. We are f*ucked.

What we are watching at this moment is the exactly what Alinsky prescribed: preparing the American people to accept anything in liue of the absolute poverty that the “change agent” wants. We will be slaves, wards of the state, serfs working toward a glorious future of togetherness and hope that never comes and only exists in the propaganda of our dear leader’s proclamations and directives.

More…

The Obama-Alinsky Connection August 26, 2008, Rush Limbaugh
Planned Impoverishment? – The Virginian

Tell me that this isn’t total liberal bias and sycophancy for the great dear leader:

We Are All Socialists Now

Why Nationalization isn’t un-American

Yes, the outright socialist propaganda has begun! Get ready for the publishing of the Obama Five year plans next. Oh wait, that’s the stimulus bill aint it?

Obama levitation meditation

CARACAS, Venezuela – As President Hugo Chavez intensifies his anti-Israel campaign, some Venezuelans have taken action, threatening Jews in the street and vandalizing the largest synagogue in Caracas — where they stole a database of names and addresses.

Now many in Venezuela’s Jewish community fear the worst is yet to come.

Chavez has personally taken care not to criticize Israelis or Jews while accusing Israel’s government of genocide against the Palestinians. He vehemently denies inciting religious intolerance, let alone violence.

But Venezuela’s Jewish leaders, the Organization of American States and the U.S. State Department say Chavez’s harsh criticism has inspired a growing list of hate crimes, including a Jan. 30 invasion of Caracas’ largest synagogue.

About 15 people overpowered two security guards at the Tiferet Israel Synagogue, shattering religious objects and spray-painting “Jews, get out” on the walls. Most worrisome, according to Elias Farache, president of the Venezuelan-Israelite Association, was their theft of a computer database containing many names and addresses of Jews in Venezuela.  ~news.yahoo.com

Socialist dictator Hugo Chavez shakes his fist

Incredibly, this is one instance in which the Nazi epithet actually applies. When you could actually say that someone is acting and advocating a Hitlerian agenda. Do you think that the long stream of leftist celebrities and democrat politicians who have taken a pilgrimage to shake hands with the socialist dictator will cry out at the downright similarities to Hitler and the German fascist agenda? No?

One week before the invasion, a Chavista columnist named Emilio Silva posted a call to action on Aporrea, a pro-government Web site, describing Jews as “squalid” — a term Chavez often uses to describe his opponents as weak — and exhorting Venezuelans to confront them as anti-government conspirators.

“Publicly challenge every Jew that you find in the street, shopping center or park,” he wrote, “shouting slogans in favor of Palestine and against that abortion: Israel.”

Silva called for protests at the synagogue, a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, seizures of Jewish-owned property, the closure of Jewish schools and a nationwide effort “to denounce publicly, with names and last names the members of powerful Jewish groups present in Venezuela.”  ~news.yahoo.com

Sure sounds like Goebbels to me.

This is nothing less than theft and fraud against the American people.

The Democrat’s Job Creation” Bill Offers Taxpayer-Funded Bonanza for Organization Reportedly Under Federal Investigation

Washington, Jan 23 – The House Democrats’ trillion dollar spending bill, approved on January 21 by the Appropriations Committee and headed to the House floor next week for a vote, could open billions of taxpayer dollars to left-wing groups like the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). ACORN has been accused of perpetrating voter registration fraud numerous times in the last several elections; is reportedly under federal investigation; and played a key role in the irresponsible schemes that caused a financial meltdown that has cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars since last fall.

~gatewaypundit

The real truth is that many on the Republican right just read everything I write through an anti-gay prism, because their homophobia – benign or not-so-benign, conscious or unconscious – is so overwhelming it occludes any genuine assessment of a person’s thoughts outside this fact.  ~andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com

Do I give a f*ck if Andrew Sullivan is gay? (The answer is no for those who are unable to read my meaning.) Andrew Sullivan is not a conservative because he’s taken every liberal position on every issue of the last few years. He’s a liberal because he cheers when liberals win and boos when conservatives win. He maligns conservatives and then says that he supports some token issue (in principle but not in practice) that might be construed as conservative under some strained definition. This is why Sullivan is a liberal.

Andrew Sullivan is a closet liberal who has been outed. It’s no use denying it, honey, we all know what you are.

Besides isn’t conservatism degenerate? For a man who claims to be conservative, he doesn’t like conservatism very much does he?

The country is in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, which isn’t stopping rich donors and the government from spending $170 million, or more, on the inauguration of Barack Obama. ~abcnews.go.com

Mentioning the Great Depression is a great touch, I thought. But $170 million dollars?!?! “…or more!”

This is why I say we are off to a poor start. One which will continue to make us all poorer in the years to come. This is the first indication that Obama will be the worst President ever.