GOP Whistling Past the End of America

Ann Coulter

An election almost as important as the presidential election will be held next Tuesday, and conservatives aren't making a big deal of it, just as they didn't make a fuss over the 2008 Minnesota Senate election as Al Franken stole it from under their noses. (Gov. Tim Pawlenty: "Minnesota has a reputation for clean and fair and good elections. We've got 4,100 precincts run by volunteers. They do a good job, and we thank them.")

The public sector unions are trying to oust Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker from office for impinging on their princely, taxpayer-supported lifestyles. If Walker goes down, no governor will ever again suggest that snowplow operators work when it snows. No governor will dare try to deprive public school teachers of their Viagra. Forget about ever firing self-paced, self-evaluated, unnecessary government employees.

Always leading the nation, California has already been bankrupted by the public sector unions. That's the country's future if Walker doesn't win, and it's not going to matter who's in the Oval Office.

Democrats know what's at stake. They're treating this election like the Normandy invasion. Meanwhile, Republicans are sitting back, complacently citing polls that show Walker with a slight lead.

Polls don't register passion. Public employee unions have vast organizing abilities, millions of dollars in union dues at their disposal, and millions of voters who are either union members themselves or relatives of union members. And it's their lifestyles being voted on.

The public sector unions will turn out 99.9 percent of their people. Even if they are only 15 percent of the electorate, that could be enough. Union members will have every distant relative, every neighbor, every person they can drag to the polls, voting to recall Walker next Tuesday.

Ordinary people answering polls may agree with Walker, but they'll have to decide: "Do I really want to get out of bed early and drive to the polls, just so they don't recall the governor?"

News reports blare with the information that the Walker campaign has spent more money than the opposition. This is absurd. Every union member in the country is working to defeat Walker.

Union political operatives aren't volunteers: They're getting salaries from the unions. But those expenditures don't get counted as money spent on a campaign -- a little detail of campaign finance laws Republicans have been screaming about for 20 years.

One measure of the unions' disproportionate passion is how difficult it is to obtain non-union information about the Wisconsin fight. Try running a few Google searches on Scott Walker and the public sector unions, and you'll get 20 pages of union propaganda under names such as "Common Dreams," "All Voices," "United Wisconsin," "Veterans News Now," "Struggles for Justice," "One Wisconsin Now," "Defending Wisconsin" and "Republic Report."

From the hysteria, you wouldn't know Walker's reforms have nothing to do with government employees' salaries. He eliminated collective bargaining only for all other aspects of government employees' contracts. OK, you can have two guys on a snowplow, but you can't have a snowplow watcher.

One of the most egregious union scams Walker dispensed with was the requirement -- won in collective bargaining -- that all school districts purchase health insurance from the same provider. The monopolist insurer was WEA Trust, which happens to be affiliated with the teachers union.

Simply by eliminating this union boondoggle, Walker has already saved individual school districts millions of dollars per year, which could easily rise to hundreds of millions of dollars. (Most districts still get their health insurance from WEA Trust, but the mere threat of competition forced it to lower its price.)

Amazingly, Walker actually had to eliminate "overtime" for snowplow operators who work outside of their 7 a.m.-3:30 p.m. shifts. Isn't the whole idea of snowplowers to have them work when it snows and not during specific, pre-set hours of the day?

The teachers unions wail, "It's all about the kids!" -- and then we find out the Milwaukee teachers union sued the school district because their health insurance didn't cover Viagra. Yes, it's all about the kids.

Fox News has barely mentioned this election, while on MSNBC they're doing non-stop campaigning on behalf of the unions. Apparently, James Madison will be rolling over in his grave if government unions aren't allowed to dictate how many employees are required to move a copy machine.

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Race Matters...To Racists

And Democrats have dishionest arguments galore to support their racial agenda

In February 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder said America is a “nation of cowards” on race because we don’t talk about. So let’s talk about it.

Progressives are up in arms over the prospect of voters being required to show something at the polls they must show regularly to function as a productive member of society – a photo ID. It’s because progressives, particularly progressive Democrats, have a vested interest in preventing as many people as possible, especially minorities, from becoming productive members of society.

Productive members of society – and those who aspire to be – don’t need or want government to do for them what they can do for themselves. The socialists, communists, fascists and anarchists – in other words, progressives – obviously don’t have the support to win elections. They must find many votes beyond their core supporters to survive. So they attempt to manipulate minorities.

They play the race card. They attempt to convince them Republicans, particularly conservatives, are racists.

Never mind only a few generations ago, it was Democrats who were lynching black people in the South, turning water cannons on them, toying with the idea of using eugenics to eliminate them and, always, trying to prevent them from voting. Since the party of slavery couldn’t own the bodies of black people anymore, it turned to trying to own their minds.

And votes. In the last 50 years, progressives have become quite interested in minority votes as the popularity of their message has waned. They pushed for a web of government dependence to entangle minorities – direct subsidies of just enough money to encourage complacency, public housing that serves as a staging ground for continuing criminal enterprises, an education system that coddles and babysits but does not, no matter how much money is sunk into it, educate, and, from their leaders, the soul-crushing rhetoric of victimhood and entitlement. Utopia is only an election cycle away – if we can get rid of those damn Republicans.

How else to explain how U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has been in office since 1965? It certainly isn’t because he has helped his district in Detroit. It looks like a nuclear bomb went off … twice. You can tell what it used to be when you drive through, and it’s sad. There is no one in that district not named Conyers whose life is better off since he assumed office, yet he’s re-elected by overwhelming margins every two years. Why?

They vote Democrat because they are told Republicans will only make things worse. Never told – or asked – is how things truly could be worse. But it’s folly to seek logic in irrational thought.

Which brings us back to voter ID laws. Holder told a group of black preachers this week the push in some states to require a government-issued ID to vote constituted an assault on minority voting rights. He seemed unconcerned about protecting the integrity of that right.

Holder claims requiring a photo ID to vote would disenfranchise minorities disproportionately…somehow. MSNBC harps on this point relentlessly, and progressives from Rev. Al Sharpton to U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., equate voter ID laws with a return to Jim Crow. But why? Do these progressives fear their partners in democracy are too stupid to obtain a driver’s license or state-issued photo ID?

The sad part is the rhetoric surrounding this issue figures only to get worse. Get real, progressives. Almost everyone has a photo ID these days. You have to have one to deal with banks, stores, school registrars, property managers, traffic cops and with the HR people where you work. Progressives should be encouraging minorities to get IDs, not concocting excuses so they don’t have to. A few years ago, they demanded illegal aliens have access to drivers’ licenses. Was that Jim Crow? Only if you want to keep those people lashed to the ship of government dependency.

There’s no upward mobility in that plan. You can’t even move across the street. You’re just stuck where you are, where your parents were, where your children will be. But you’ll keep voting for Democrats because there will always be “leaders” who you view as having the job of helping you telling you the alternative is worse.

Democrats know upward mobility is not their friend. Even the prospect of it threatens their power structure. That’s why they don’t want you having a photo ID. It’s crucial to helping you improve your life on your own. And if you can improve your life on your own, you don’t need them or anything they’re selling.

If vote fraud is such an insignificant thing – as progressives falsely claim – then why not root it out completely? Because the party that always seems to ensure the polls in St. Louis stay open just long enough to get right amount of votes to pull out close elections at the 11th hour, or miraculously finds forgotten “lost” votes in car trunks or offices after the number needed to win is known has no interest ensure the integrity of our “sacred” right to vote. They need Mickey Mouse and the offensive line of the Dallas Cowboys on the rolls in every jurisdiction.

Because they want to win. And they’re willing to do anything to win. They will cheat the process they hold so dear. They will oppress the people they claim to champion. They will spend $10 trillion on the war on poverty and make not a dent in the poverty rate. Because it’s not the defeat of poverty they seek. It’s political power. Their ideas won’t win elections, so their bought votes must.

A progressive will look at someone, assess the amount of pigment in their skin and determine how that person should think and vote. Hell hath no fury like that of progressives when someone of color who dares stray from their pigmentally assigned expectations. Just ask Clarence Thomas.

That’s because what progressives want is power – government power, their power – and they have no problem using race baiting to steer votes their way.

Even if voter fraud were as rare as progressives claim, the real fraud is when they tell large chunks of the population their destiny is determined by their skin tone. A photo ID won’t set anyone free, but it is a passport to a society that values work, rewards diligence and offers an upward path. Progressives can’t have that because those who choose that path are significantly less likely to vote progressive.

SOURCE

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Obama and the TV Networks Ignore America's Number One Issue

The government says the economy is weakening yet again and unemployment claims are rising, but President Obama is going about business as usual.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that weekly applications for unemployment benefits jumped by 10,000 last week to nearly 400,000.

And the Commerce Department said the economy grew at a snail's pace 1.9 percent in the first three months of the year -- slower than the government's earlier estimate.

Despite all those glowing, exaggerated stories on the network nightly news shows that the Obama economy was taking off, Commerce officials discovered a grimmer and more negative reality in their latest numbers. Consumers were spending less than was once thought, the U.S. trade deficit shot up, and businesses aren't restocking as much because of unsold inventories.

With Election Day a little more than five months away, the Gallup Poll continues to find the weakening Obama economy and high unemployment levels remain far and away the overriding issue for most Americans. No other issue comes close.

The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll confirms that finding, with more than half of the voters calling the economy and jobs the "single most important issue" before the country.

But Obama continues to campaign merrily about the country as if this 800 pound gorilla of an issue didn't exist. He doesn't talk about it. He doesn't complain about it. He doesn't bemoan it. He isn't seen doing anything about it, except to blame the previous administration.

The Democratic leadership up on Capitol Hill, which controls the U.S. Senate, is similarly mute on the issue of jobs and the economy, praying things will get better on their own before November.

It is going to take more than prayer to get this economy up and running again, it's going to take aggressive, pro-job, pro-investment policies. But the so-called "party of the working class" hasn't a clue about what it takes to create economic growth and spur risk-taking private investment.

As for Obama, it isn't as if he's been busy doing more important work. There he was this week handing out gold medals to nearly a dozen of his biggest supporters, while insulting Poland with a stupid remark about "Polish death camps," when they were Nazi death camps.

On other days he is bashing Republican Mitt Romney for investing in companies to help get new businesses off the ground, despite Romney's high job creation success rate.

But even Obama, as much as he avoids the harsh daily truth of his feeble economy, can't escape the grim reality of the unemployment rates across the country -- from California (10.9 percent) to Rhode Island (11.2 percent).

The politically devastating evidence of millions of Americans who can't find full time work was on the front page of the Washington Post this week. He couldn't have missed the story.

Beneath a blunt headline that read, "Prime-age workers still lost in the recession's undertow," economics reporter Peter Whoriskey reports that the number of Americans "in their prime-working years" (between ages of 25 and 54) who have jobs was "smaller than it was at any time in the 23 years before the recession..."

The shrinking share of these workers now stands at 75.7 percent. Before the recession hit, it was at 80 percent.

This disturbing figure, more than any other, Whoriskey writes, "captures more of the ongoing turbulence in the job market. It reflects 'missing workers' who have stopped looking for work and aren't included in the unemployment rate."

When he talks about the unemployment rate coming down, Obama never talks about these long discouraged, jobless workers who are never added to the monthly unemployment rate. But Whoriskey says "huge numbers are on the sidelines."

"What it shows is that we are still near the bottom of a very big hole that opened in the recession," says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a far-left think tank. She estimates the number of missing workers at about 4 million.

The immensity of this economic issue is hard to hide, though the White House, the president, the Democrats in Congress are doing their best to distract voters with other issues that are of little if any concern to most Americans.

About 83 percent of the voters polled by the Post in mid-May said the Obama economy was "poor" or "not so good," reflecting higher negative ratings than in the entire decade preceding the recession.

But the Obama administration is getting a lot of help from the network news programs who have gone to great lengths to bury this story for as long as possible.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is intensifying his focus on the economy and jobs, knowing these are the issues that will decide this election.

Obama may not want to talk about his failed record on these two issues, but he's going to be held accountable for them at the ballot box in the end.

SOURCE

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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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" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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