My Beauty Best Teacher

As a conservative teacher, I plead guilty to the worst sort of offense for a public school teacher- thoughtcrimes. I am guilty of thoughtcrimes- I am a conservative teacher even though I do not push or encourage my conservative views and values in my classroom, even though I make conscious efforts to articulate all sides of every debate and situation, even though I play devil's advocate and am critical of all politicians and views at one time or another, and even though I seek primarily to inspire critical thinking.

You see, it is not my actions which threaten liberals and leftists and Democrats- it is my very existence and the fact that I do not quietly acquiescence to their thuggish attempts to convince me to think differently.

In his novel 1984, George Orwell described a thoughtcrime as an illegal type of thought. Liberals and leftists hate and fear me, because while in the classroom I may be a model teacher and may be inspiring and motivating students, in private I am the author of this blog where I state my thoughts and opinions on a range of subjects in a conservative manner, and for that they feel I must be silenced, fired, and perhaps worse.

Increasingly as our nation descends into a totalitarian fascist state, people like me are a threat to the government. Some people might be conservatives or libertarians or Republicans, but they're usually not teachers, and if they are they have been successfully revealed as thus and thus marginalized and silenced already. What really bothers the government and the fascist thugs who run it is that I'm still hidden in the system, unexposed, unsilenced and unmarginalized, and still teaching. I'm still teaching young children the skills of how to think critically. I'm still exposing students to tough questions and hard facts, and them giving them the skills to grapple with them- without telling them what to think about those facts or without answering the questions for them as a liberal leftist teacher would do. I'm still employed, even though I am a conservative and a teacher.

Some teachers inspire a few students to be conservative by accident or just absently are a conservative and a teacher- but I've thought about this beforehand and put forethought into it, showing that I have a plan to teach students how to think and to give them a wealth of information to think on, and I have done all of this knowingly and purposefully- and that's a crime worse than actually pushing my views or indoctrinating students. I'm not just a conservative and a teacher- I am A Conservative Teacher, and that's a threat to liberals and leftists and makes me guilty of thought crimes of the worst sort.

In many ways, thought crime is an even more serious offense than committing an actual crime, and that is why I have inspired such hate and attacks from my comments and blog posts, more so than others who simply are conservatives. Our outward actions and character stem from our inner world, and my inner world is conservative, and thus it does not matter to liberals and leftists what my outer world of teaching is like and how professional I am in that environment- they know and I know they know that I am a conservative teacher.

Many out there, including President Obama and the modern day Democratic Party that has been infiltrated and taken over by liberal fascists, believe that you can practice one thing all you want, but you must think and believe only what the fascist government tells you to believe. And I don't, and that is why I am a threat that they need to silence, intimidate, and threaten.

The good news is that I have for years been lying about who I am- using friends for radio interviews, having family members post my comments and blog posts from their locations, and even mixing up personal details. Since I started this blog in 2008, I've moved three times and worked in two school districts on either edge of town, gotten married, had a dozen kids, and even taken up urban farming! Because I am still unknown, I remain a threat. I'm nearing retirement age though and just need to hold on for a couple more years. And you wolves, although you may circle me, I am a friend of liberty and a patriot, and you will not terrorize me into thinking differently. Two plus two does equal four.

Today on the Ed Schultz show Ed was interviewing some expert, and the two liberal Democrats agreed with one another that the problem with our current political system was not the fact that our national government is exceeding its limited powers and spending too much money, but rather the problem with our current political system is that our national government is not efficiently and effectively systematically looting the wealth from productive members of our society and giving that wealth to those who are politically favored.

Is this what modern day liberalism is? Is this what the modern day Democratic Party has become? Is this the goal of President Obama and the new-Democrats in Congress? Is this what their policies and laws and orders are attempting to achieve?

Oh, I know that Schultz and the expert (I didn't catch his name) don't 'represent' the Democratic Party any more than Rush or Sean do the Republican Party. But even still, it is a sign of what I am fighting against and what I am pushing back against, and it is distressing to hear that these people support what President Obama and the Pelosi-led Democrats in Congress are trying to do- they are pushing for the United States government to put in place laws and policies that more efficiently and effectively loot the wealth from those people who have earned it in order to transfer that wealth to those people whom it favors.

That's tyranny and corruption and despotism, boys and girls, plain and simple, and I mean to fight it, just like my forefathers did before me. Although the Republican Party is not perfect- far from it- it is the only party in our system that serves as a means of blocking the attempts by Democrats and liberals of turning me into a slave of the state- voting Republican in the upcoming elections is the only real way today of making it so that my labor and time and effort and energies are my own and serve my purposes and that the fruits of my labor and the product of my time and effort and the wealth that my energies produce are not taken from me to be given to someone else.

Let's dress up this pig here and put some lipstick on it- the election of 2012 is a going to be a key one, an election that will determine the future of our nation, and it is not simply enough for President Obama and the Democrats to lose- no, the Democrats must suffer historic losses such that they learn that the purpose of the United States government is not to systematically loot the wealth of others in order to give it to those who did not earn it, but rather the purpose of the United States government is to protect my life, liberty, and property so that I may achieve the fullest of my God-given abilities.

This two party system has run its course, and the modern day Democratic Party must be destroyed, to be replaced by a Tea Party dominated conservative party that will battle for offices and power with a moderate Republican Party. No longer can our nation tolerate people on the radio who advocate for higher taxes so that older people can live comfortably on wealth they did not earn; no longer can our nation tolerate politicians who advocate for more land regulations and environmental policies so that property ownership becomes more costly; no longer can our nation support people who want corporations and businesses to pay so that they can collect money in the form of unemployment insurance and welfare even when they did not pay for these things; and no longer can the debate be about how tyrannical and despotic the government should be but rather why we should allow people who dodge taxes to create our very tax policies.

Liberals and the party that they have seized control of might believe and argue that the United States government should systematically loot those who have property and transfer it to others- but I don't, and I ask you to support me in 2012 by rejecting Democrats up and down the ballot by voting Republican.

We all have them. But many of us run from controversy. But there are times when people who are leaders are doing the wrong thing. They are hurting people. They are saying things that are untrue. 


Doing the right thing is often not popular. In fact, Mark Twain said,

"In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.- Notebook, 1904"

It is a struggle when there are issues requiring that people take sides. In fact, in most cases, I think it is best to keep a focus on the main thing. In your school, the main thing should be the students and helping them become successful in life both academically, physically, and emotionally. It shouldn't be who is the principal. Unless that person is doing great harm to the main thing... then it is time to do something.


I stay away from people who are always negative and hate anyone in leadership. These negative people don't stand for anything but stand against everything. You rarely hear what this person believes because if he/she made a statement, the person would have to defend it. They spend their time tearing everything down. These demolition doo-dah's are always singing a song of negativity, hatred, and unkindness. I don't have much use for them. It is a dangerous tune that is often in many blogs, 

"Everybody here hates me. No one understands me. No one appreciates me." 

Guess what? Every teacher at your school feels that way. The best way to feel appreciated is to start meting out some appreciation of other people. Life isn't all about you. It should be about your students.


But when I see people I know and have known for a very long time suddenly speak out against someone or something, I listen. When I see longtime supporters of an organization get the attention of others that a great wrong is happening, I take a second look. You should too.


So, as I ponder situations and things, I started writing in the tub on my ipad. I couldn't stop and didn't until the water had gone frigid and the family was hollering at me from the den to watch our new favorite TV show (Terranova.) I thought I'd take today and share you these unrelated kernels of thoughts that came to me from the hot water of life. If you like them, I'll start sharing other ones.


These quotes are all mine.

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We like to blame victims for their shame. Because if we can convince ourselves that they were the reason for their fate, we can also convince ourselves that we shall never share it. 

The backstabber unleashes a silent, hidden poison that flows back through the miles into his own coffin. 

Unforgiveness is the sewage of the soul. 

Liars emit confusion like a mating bird emit pheromones. Both are looking for someone to sc:%#.

The manipulator silently rips from his hands the very thing he wishes to possess. 

I believe I will look back upon my earthly meanderings and realize that my brightest moments ignited during my darkest journeys. For heroism is not born amidst comfort and ease but pain and tragedy. There is no heroism where there is no trial and heroes are made by the height of their ascent. Climb a hill and you are a human. Climb a mountain and you are brave. Wake up in hell and ascend to glory and you are epic. 

The thing is that when we have a paper cut we whine. How are we ever going to do anything great when we run at the first sign of controversy? We want to be great but we don't want to pay the price. We'd rather be comfortable on a cushion than called to climb a mountain.  

When I teetered upon the ledge of the abyss between safety and suffering is when I found the most solid foothold. For in that precarious moment I was steadied by the Precious Master.  

When the world has schizophrenia and you manage to hold onto your last wit and do the sane thing, history will call you wise. Wisdom is never judged accurately by peers but by posterity.  

 

 We idolize patriots and heroes for their willingness to give up an anonymous life of comfort for a life of torment. Hated by their peers and hunted by their prey, these men only had their praises sung after their ears were deaf with decay. We romanticize their lives, which were, most likely, as close to hell as most humans can be and live to tell about it. Authors are lonely, actors find it hard to find genuine friends, and politicians give up their privacy but patriots and martyrs give up everything. 

 It is easy to romanticize a person living in a hut on a hill 100 years a go when you're sitting in a warm bathtub with a full stomach reading your Ipad worried if you'll drop it in the tub. 

Photo Credits: Big Stock

One news story that slipped beneath the radar last year was the fact that General Motors Corporation died last year, after 103 years of building quality automobiles. For most of the last century, General Motors Corporation was the world's largest corporation, but at the end of its life, government authorities circumvented the usual bankruptcy process and broke off 'old GM' from 'new GM'.  'New GM', or General Motors Company, was taken over by the government and the unions and given $50 billion dollars, while 'old GM' was put into bankruptcy and the million plus investors who had given their hard earned money to the company lost everything. 'Old GM' spent its final years shutting down dealerships, divesting itself of properties, and attempting to salvage whatever it could from its assets, but with its final death this December it will leave many bills forever unpaid and many properties languishing in weeds and ruin.

The truth of the matter is that the auto bailout, which is celebrated by many in the United States as a success, was anything but- the bailout orchestrated by Congress and the President ruined investors, shook the faith in many more about the future of true capitalism, ruined all those who were still owed money by GM, ruined the communities that now have the abandoned factories and dealerships and buildings in them, and left a mass of wreckage behind. Many bondholders, who took their life savings and invested it in General Motors, lost everything, even though they should have been the first to receive payment in the event of a bankruptcy.

General Motors Company may have survived, and with it thousands of jobs and the ability to make cars in the United States, but the deal it made- accepting taxpayer money and union control and government support- was the kind of deal typical to tyrannies and corporatist states, not a nation built on individual responsibility, freedom to make mistakes, and property protection through long-established bankruptcy laws.

And so 2011 draws to a close, with the death of what used to be America's largest company, and the continued faltering of the American economy, and soon, if drastic changes are not made, America itself. One can only hope that in 2012 the politicians who did this to our country- President Obama, Democrats in Congress, and big-government RINO Republicans in Congress- will be held accountable and thrown out on the streets and will be ruined, to join those companies and individuals who they ruined through their bad policy decisions over the past several years.

RIP General Motors Corporation, and RIP American capitalism.

A couple weeks ago I read an interesting article in the Telegraph- in it, longtime journalist Janet Daley suggests that the best thing that the British government can do to improve the economy and make people more wealthy and happy and free is to work really hard and be very productive in DOING LESS. The truth of the matter is that politicians have to have real guts and strength to simply say 'no, I will not spend taxpayer money trying to control people and the market,' but that may be exactly the kind of strength and guts we need today- politicians who promise to do more of less. From her article A daring idea to fix the economy: try doing less:

...the myth of government activism – the idea that intervention by the state is the answer to every economic and social problem – had been definitively routed. Apparently not: Mr Osborne and, we must assume, his boss still seem to believe that any unacceptable national situation must require direct action from them.

Or maybe they don’t believe that at all. Perhaps they just lack the political courage to admit that, in our present crisis, the best thing that the Government can do is to get out of the business of running (or subsidising, or initiating, or incentivising) things altogether – not just in the interests of saving money, but because the effects of such interference are counter-productive. What the economy is suffering from is not an insufficiency of overweening, fussy, bureaucratic initiatives that inevitably unleash an avalanche of unintended consequences, but a lack of cash in the hands of people who might spend it in ways that would actually create wealth and stimulate (in the proper sense of the word) economic growth.

If ever there was a time for radical proposals by a governing party, this is it. Rather than the imitative, mealy-mouthed shuffling of dollops of money from one departmental scheme to another, in what will inevitably look like panic in the face of rising youth unemployment and disappointing growth figures, what we need is a display of real insight and nerve...

...There is an urgent need now to rethink the whole relationship between government and populace while there is still the possibility of discussion. In Britain, Europe and America, the questions are remarkably similar. Can a free-market economy support an infinitely growing state? We will have to choose, quite soon, between liberty and the “security” of a society in which government controls the levers of economic life. Washington politicians are getting a terrible drubbing for failing to resolve their implacable differences over the size of the state (to the extent that they are unable to agree a federal budget). The US national debate may seem rough and ready to European ears – but at least they are engaging in the real argument.

She is right- the argument has been joined, and today via memeorandum I read in the Wall Street Journal an article that echo's the very ideas of Ms. Daley. From former Florida Governor Jeb Bush's article Capitalism and the Right to Rise:

...Increasingly, we have let our elected officials abridge our own economic freedoms through the annual passage of thousands of laws and their associated regulations. We see human tragedy and we demand a regulation to prevent it. We see a criminal fraud and we demand more laws. We see an industry dying and we demand it be saved. Each time, we demand "Do something . . . anything."

As Florida's governor for eight years, I was asked to "do something" almost every day. Many times I resisted through vetoes but many times I succumbed. And I wasn't alone. Mayors, county chairs, governors and presidents never think their laws will harm the free market. But cumulatively, they do, and we have now imperiled the right to rise....

....We either can go down the road we are on, a road where the individual is allowed to succeed only so much before being punished with ruinous taxation, where commerce ignores government action at its own peril, and where the state decides how a massive share of the economy's resources should be spent.

Or we can return to the road we once knew and which has served us well: a road where individuals acting freely and with little restraint are able to pursue fortune and prosperity as they see fit, a road where the government's role is not to shape the marketplace but to help prepare its citizens to prosper from it.

In short, we must choose between the straight line promised by the statists and the jagged line of economic freedom. The straight line of gradual and controlled growth is what the statists promise but can never deliver. The jagged line offers no guarantees but has a powerful record of delivering the most prosperity and the most opportunity to the most people. We cannot possibly know in advance what freedom promises for 312 million individuals. But unless we are willing to explore the jagged line of freedom, we will be stuck with the straight line. And the straight line, it turns out, is a flat line.

What Governor Bush is talking about is the same kind of thing that I personally observed during my time as a policy adviser in the state's capital. I remember distinctly one time when a young Republican 'conservative' staffer came in to work one day, upset that the car that she had recently bought turned out to have been a bad purchase. She set about writing a law that would force the state to regulate and control all sellers of automobiles in the state and then tried to convince legislators to sponsor this piece of legislation- she wanted the state to immediately do something, to step in and spend lots of money and time and effort controlling thousands of people's individual decisions just to protect several people from their own stupidity. She proposal was met with great hostility towards me, and I countered her proposal by suggesting that rather than the state doing something about used car dealers, it instead loosen regulations and fees and taxes on all car dealers, making the market more free, so that more fools like her could be separated from their money, as the hand of God in its infinite wisdom is wont to do. I wasn't joking though.

The real courage and intelligent thing to do to create a more vibrant, free market by cutting back government regulations and fees and enabling people to be people, in all their glorious faults and warts, because only by doing so can we also unleash the amazing potential for great and good things that humans contain in them. The safe, stately downward path of state control is not the path for me and is not the path that successful, free, and prosperous people- no, we choose the jagged and uneven and unpredictable path that is the path of less government regulation, taxes, fees, and supervision- that is the only true path for better protection and encouragement of life, liberty, and property.

One of the cornerstones of modern-day conservatism is the belief that America's energy resources can and should be responsibly exploited. This means that the United States should allow private companies to drill for oil, mine coal, build nuclear power plants, tap into natural gas reserves, get shale oil, and utilize whatever other energy resources that these companies wish to use, provided that they respect the property rights of others.

Oh, I know what liberals and left-wingers will say- the horror of pollution! But the faults of energy development do not lie with the companies themselves, but rather with the government for not establishing clear and defined property rights- for example, rather than having the government act as police to safeguard public water, the water rights should be more clearly defined and if companies destroy or harm the property (the water) of others, they should be forced to pay in a court, much as if they destroyed other private property. The faults with 'pollution' then lie not in the companies for breaking ever expanding government rules and regulations over ever expanding public lands, but for the government for not putting in place limited and clear rules regarding private property rights and then divesting itself of public lands by selling these lands off to private entities that can then do a better job of protecting. Like most problems in our society, the solution is less government, not more.

With the main liberal concern out of the way, our nation would be free to exploit and use its vast resources- enough oil for 30 years, enough natural gas for 575 years, enough coal for 500 years, etc. With oil, gas, and coal be utilized to its fullest extent, our nation will have cheap and plentiful energy, enabling it to develop some of the most amazingly energy intensive industries there are- 'renewable resources'. The horse needs to go before the cart here- we  need to have cheap and plentiful energy in order to build the energy intensive operations and industries like building solar panels, developing batteries, building geothermal plants, etc. A wealthy, productive society thriving on cheap energy can afford to become environmentally friendly, as opposed to a cheap, declining society that the liberals and Democrats appear to be pushing us towards with their anti-energy policies.

In a free market, one in which the government is not subsidizing any of the industries (and this includes cutting subsidies for oil and gas and coal), the most efficient energy resources will be developed in an environment that encourages private property ownership and protection. American can be great again, if it moves away from the liberal model of public ownership of lands and public protection of the environment with restrictive regulations and rules and taxes on energy production combined with subsidies for 'favored' industries and campaign donors. It can be great again if it moves towards a more conservative model of private ownership of lands and private protection through impartial courts of the environment, with few restrictions and regulations and subsidies on energy production, encouraging the most efficient producers and users of energy in a free market.

Via Powerlineblog's post AMERICA’S VAST ENERGY RESOURCES I read this quote from the Institute for Energy Research. IER describes the problem (and the opportunity) bluntly:

Access to affordable, abundant energy is, fundamentally, a means of freedom. But for those seeking to create a crisis that provides an opportunity to direct the way we live, work and act, affordable, reliable, abundant, domestic energy is a threat. In a very real sense, the more energy we have, the less power they will have. Energy abundance ends the justification for central energy decision-making.

As it turns out, many of the problems of energy scarcity and rising costs in the United States have been caused by the government itself. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a report that outlined many of the policy and regulatory constraints that impact domestic energy production. While the report focused on natural gas specifically, many of the laws and procedures also represent roadblocks to any form of safe and responsible energy production. The list of energy barriers included the following policies, all of which can limit access to U.S. resources, increase delays related to exploration and production, and/or increase costs of development:

(John from Powerlineblog)The list of statutes and other legal impediments that follows is three pages long. Only liberal politicians stand between the American people and development of our vast energy resources.

In spite of being a conservative libertarian Republican who wants to drastically reduce government spending, I've always had a soft spot for NASA- I know, everyone has 'their agency' or 'their sacred cow of spending', and that's why the budget is never cut, but in this case, and NASA is mine, so it does need to have its funding cut and do more with less and all that, but I still think is my favorite agency. And even though it's budget is only about $18 billion/year (out of $3456 billion/year total US spending), it is still able to deliver some amazing results.

From BBC News:

NASA is about to launch its latest Mars rover, nicknamed Curiosity, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. At nearly a tonne, the six-wheeled vehicle dwarfs all previous robots sent to the surface of the planet. The machine carries a suite of sophisticated instruments and tools, including a hammer drill and a laser, to find out whether Mars is, or ever has been, suitable for life....

Lift-off is just the start for what Nasa hopes will be a multi-year campaign at the Red Planet.... The rover is equipped with a plutonium battery and so should have ample power to keep rolling for more than a decade. It is likely the mechanisms on MSL will wear out long before its energy supply.... MSL will use its suite of 10 instruments to study the local rock, soil and atmosphere....

This mission looks very cool, and a description of it doesn't do it justice. Check out an animated video for this mission- it should make you feel very proud to be an American to imagine that in spite of our economic downturn, we can still do things like this (at the relatively bargain cost of $2.5 billion, or 1/1382th of the budget for 2010):

I've written about NASA before- check out my posts Obama's New NASA Policy- Yet More Broken Promises and Lies or Obama too Busy to Appoint Public Officials- but mostly check out my post Nuclear Power and Manned Space Flight: Victims of Democrat's Progress Backwards? where I wrote (in part- read the whole post):

Today I watched the movie Apollo 13 for perhaps that hundredth time. As I watched that wonderful movie, I grew a little emotional, but it wasn't because of the drama of the movie- it was because I am upset and angry and sad that America has abandoned manned spaceflight in my lifetime, and seems to be abandoning the larger future too, a future where man would harness the power of an atom splitting and travel among the stars, a future of dreams and inspiration. America instead is collapsing on the weight of promises made to generations past, ruled over by elitist politicians who seek only to control us, and everyday our nation moves farther away from living a prosperous life in the stars in freedom and liberty, however preposterous or unlikely that future may have been.

The current leadership of our nation speaks of 'progress,' but they are abandoning nuclear power and manned spaceflight in favor of providing healthcare insurance to people who are encouraged not to purchase it and spending money they don't have to support railroads and electric motor carriages and windmills. The future that Obama, Democrats, liberals, and Republicans that go along with them is not a future full of cheap safe energy and man roaming freely in the stars- it is a future with man going backward, remembering that once, long ago, before I was born and before my students were born, man built generators that were powered by the atom splitting and man walked on the moon.

Man once walked on the moon! Nuclear power plants were once built! Say it- and then realize that these are events of the past- that the new normal and likely new future of America and the world is a long, slow slide backwards into tyranny, injustice, and confiscation of property by elites. Oh, I know it is 'nice' to give out healthcare to anyone who asks and that we all want teachers to be paid a million bucks and that no job should be insecure and that energy should be provided from dancing on the suns rays or blowing gently on flowers, but that is not reality! The reality is that the future is slipping away, and much like the greatness of Rome was the standard for centuries or the might of Britain was to be envied for generations, ours is a time that is slipping away, slipping away based on the policies pushed for by Democrats like Obama, Granholm, Stabenow, Levin, Rogers, and others. Modern day liberalism has failed to move man into the future- rather, man has been moved backwards through its policies of standing in the way of human liberty and freedom, by embracing the killing of life and babies, and by stealing other peoples property....

Obama and the Democrats may be intent on making America average and poor- but at least NASA continues to dazzle us with great work like this Curiosity program!

Here are some great NASA products to buy! When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions (Limited Edition), Nasa: The Complete Illustrated History, From the Earth to the Moon - The Signature Edition, The Space Shuttle: Celebrating Thirty Years of NASA's First Space Plane, or America in Space: Nasa's First Fifty Years.

Conservatives and liberals, libertarians and progressives, I have bad news for you- most of the American people are moderates and independent voters and want a candidate who is moderate and independent. Oh, I know you guys all want a purist, someone who is ideologically consistent and always agrees with your every viewpoint- but the truth of the matter is that the American people elect the party that they feel is the most moderate. Of course, this is all subjective, as the American people might view a party as 'moderate' when in reality it is very extreme, but at a certain point in politics perception becomes reality, and so it is important to be perceived as voters as being a moderate and independent party.

And the Democrats of today are not moderates or independent. Via RealClearPolitics comes this article called Moderate House Dems a Vanishing Breed:

Two issues plague Democrats when it comes to congressmen representing swing districts: The moderates don’t get heard in Washington, and centrist districts are rapidly becoming extinct because of the way congressional lines are being drawn....

....Not all of Main Street is on one side or the other, said former congresswoman Kathy Dalhkemper, a Democrat who represented northwestern Pennsylvania until being defeated last year in the wave of moderate-Democrat losses to Republicans. “The Democratic Party is not really the ‘big tent’ it claims to be,” she said of the small space available to represent centrist districts.

Dalhkemper thinks most Americans are pretty centrist: “More people are swing voters than we realize. Take myself, for example. I don't believe in everything that every Democrat stands for, and I am proud to say that I have voted for Republicans in the past.”...

...More than 50 moderate Democrats were in Congress before the 2010 midterm elections. That number is circling the drain at 22, with more disappearing each day.

Rep. Dennis Cardoza of California, one of the fiscally conservative “blue dog” Democrats, announced his intention to retire last week, citing a lack of politicians in the middle as one of his reasons. He joins 12 other centrists who have said they would retire or seek another office. Fellow blue dogs Mike Ross of Arkansas and Dan Boren of Oklahoma have said they won't be coming back when their terms expire in January 2013.

A moderate Democrat such as Boren represents a district with a large number of white working-class, often Catholic traditional Democrats who outnumber registered Republicans by a wide margin, explained Eldon Eisenach, a Tulsa University political theorist.

...A moderate Democrat is almost always against stringent gun control, is personally against abortion, is skeptical about extending affirmative action beyond anti-discrimination, supports a fairly aggressive foreign policy, wears patriotism on their sleeves, and actually sees periodic conflicts between regulation and job-creation....

....David Wasserman, House analyst for the Cook Political Report, points to this statistic: “There are six conservative Southern Democratic House members remaining. After 2012, it’s possible none of them, who are threatened by redistricting, will be in office.”

And the 19 Democrats who voted against Nancy Pelosi for the House Minority Leader position have very little incentive to stay; they’re a minority within a minority in the House, not to mention members of a minority party in their districts. “So they’re triply marginalized,” said Wasserman.

The moderate Democrat is a disappearing breed, which is a problem for Democrats overall – because, in any given election year, those moderates could be the difference between being in the majority or the minority party.

The Republicans might have have a lot of pressure from the tea party and the media might accuse them of being extreme right-wingers- but their Presidential nominee is likely going to be a moderate like Mitt Romney, their previous Presidential nominee was a liberal John McCain, many Senators and Congressman are pretty moderate, and here in Michigan our Governor is a moderate GOP. That might make many of the Tea Party crowd unhappy and drive conservatives to anger, but by being perceived as less extreme has led the GOP to winning large amounts of political power in our nation, where the Tea Party and conservatives in the party can then push their agenda from a position of strength rather than a position of weakness.

If Democrats had nominated Hillary Clinton in 2008 or the so-called 'Blue Dog' Democrats had had influence or not been wiped out in 2010, then maybe they could have claimed to be the party of moderation and independence- sadly, none of that is true, demonstrating that the Democratic Party of today is a party of extreme left-wing views that has been hijacked by progressives and liberals, and should only represent the citizens of our nation in a few random districts in Congress.

It isn't your parent's Democratic Party any more- for the full reality, read Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.

Originally I was going to put together a post about how the Occupy Wall Street movement has been endorsed by the American Nazi Party. It was news-worthy- the ANP said in a statement that

The fact that its these “lefties” as you call them, who are picking up the ball and running with it – only shows how much more in tune THEY are with the fed up masses of White Workers, than the fossilized, reactionary “right-wing”. WHO holds the WEALTH and POWER in this country – the JUDEO-CAPITALISTS. WHO is therefore the #1 ENEMY who makes all this filth happen – the JUDEO-CAPITALISTS. WHO therefore do WN need to FIGHT? My heart is right there with these people, perhaps someday the “movement” will SHOW the same COURAGE and DEDICATION that these people OUT THERE FIGHTING are SHOWING!

Yeah, so there is that out there, the fact that the fascists in the Nazi party clearly recognize that this movement fits into their goals and agenda. But really this isn't so much what I want to post about today, because when I was doing research for this post, I came across something more stunning, something that I had written about before after Obama's election as President and something that I think is relevant today.

In December 2008, I linked over to a piece at the American Thinker from Bruce Walker called Orwell's Children, and I think we should all take a minute to re-read it today, because it describes this Occupy Wall Street movement very well. Picture the people at these protests and rallies as you read the following (edited for brevity)...

It has been sixty years since George Orwell wrote his chilling dystopian classic, 1984....

...We are drifting into the sort of horrific future he described. Too many of us for comfort or solace have become just like the denizens of Jonestown: Orwell's children -- a new generation of creature enraged into constant militancy against eternal enemies, oblivious to the notion of a Blessed Creator, melded into the consciousness of the party hive, divorced from history, hypnotized by images, inoculated against reason, stripped of family, and existing only to serve the cause...

...There were specific elements necessary for nations with a heritage of freedom to slide into the most absolute and abject slavery. These elements existed in Nazi Germany, they existed in Soviet Russia, and they exist in our free democracies today. What are the characteristics of the Orwellian state?

Start with God. He must go.... A generation of Orwell's Children are growing up without thinking about God at all or thinking that God is a silly idea cherished by sillier old fogies.

Truth must go too. Nazis embraced the "Big Lie." Soviets denied that honesty, per se, mattered. In Orwell's Oceania, the Inner Party members learn to even lie to themselves and to hold utterly contradictory beliefs at the same time. Truth and honesty have little meaning to Orwell's Children in our world. All truth is relative, all honesty a sham.
Language must be brought to heel... Politically correct language is rampant.

Image and symbols replace words... We live in a word of symbols and images. Conservatives succeed in books and talk radio, media that deal in words- but Orwell's Children live in the realm of symbols and images...

..Immutable oppressors are the final nasty element in dystopia. Hitler blamed Jews for everything. Stalin blamed kulaks and his enemies in the party for everything. Subjects of Orwell's Oceania saw Emmanuel Goldstein as the eternal, immutable enemy of the party. Today there is a drearily predictable list of oppressors. Christians, men, white people, the "rich" (whatever that is supposed to mean), America, and Israel are oppressors and nothing can ever change that.

Orwell even told us, by name, the professionals who would lead us into the nightmare of 1984: "sociologists," "teachers," "bureaucrats," "journalists," "professional politicians," "scientists," "trade union organizers," "publicity experts," and "technicians." (The term "community organizer" was unknown to him.) Those who enslave were those who taught students, who created the news, who sat in the halls of government power, and who defined official "truth" (at least truth de jour.)

Orwell's Children live among us now, not in tiny numbers in weird Marxist cults like Jim Jones' People Temple, but as leaders of Congress, as the establishment of academia, as the producers of news and entertainment, as the administrators of public schools, as the "experts" in a thousand myriad and odd fields of putative "expertise." They infatuate our bored children with the only reality and the only diversion that many can find. They wait for the rest of us to grow older and to die....

Education, science, technological gadgetry, good medical care - all of this can not stop us from sliding into a massive Jonestown, a realized Oceania, a place marked by Dante's grim caution "Abandon hope, all you who enter here." We are all anchored in belief, but it is what we believe that matters. We can believe in the lies of Big Brother, which change each day with the needs of the party or we can believe in the truth of a living God. We can become the children of Orwell or the special creatures of God. Everything -- our nation, our world, our families, our communities -- flows from that choice.

Go back and look at the Occupy Wall Street movement with this lens- listen to the interviews from these people, look at the signs they hold up, and have conversations with them. They are inarticulate slogan-shouting, God-hating, lying children who endlessly talk about 'oppressors' that need to be overthrown by empowering an all powerful government to take property from those who they do not like, attack and kill those who they hate (like Jews), and control all of our choices through regulations and taxes. The people who go to these Occupy Wall Street rallies and support them and talk favorably of them are Orwell's Children, and are the enemies of the protection of life, liberty, and property, and deserve nothing but the full and complete opposition of all true patriots.

Jennifer Granholm, the Democratic former Governor of Michigan, is exactly right- the United States can learn a lot of lessons from Michigan's government- lessons on what not to do.

Before the Obama years, many looked back at the Bush years and talked about how bad 4% GDP growth and 6% unemployment were, but to be honest, those numbers were never that good in Michigan, which suffered under a single state recession for much of the 2000's and had low GDP growth rates, high unemployment, and bad numbers on everything else. For many years, the people of this great state were told that the reason why Michigan was doing so poorly was George W. Bush's fault- but from 2009 to 2011 Bush was gone and yet Michigan still led the nation in all of the wrong numbers. The reason why Michigan did poorly as a state from 2003 to 2011 was because during this time our state had a progressive Democrat as Governor who put in place the same policies at the state level that have failed so miserably at the national level as well.

Governor Granholm believed that the government should take money from those who are successful and then use that money to pick and choose winners and losers in the marketplace. Her administration decided that what made a company or an industry a 'winner' was not whether or not it was profitable, whether it provided a good that was valued by society highly (as determined by private investment), or whether it was a stable and sound investment. No, under Democratic officials and Granholm, the decision to use the power of government to anoint an industry a 'winner' was made based on political decisions of whether or not that industry or company donated to the Democratic Party, the decision was made based on whether or not the industry or business was deemed 'cool' and 'hip', and whether not the business or industry provided a good or service that the ruling powers liked, whether it was 'green products' or movies.

Using the power of the government to transfer wealth from savers and producers and successful people to those who are spenders and wasters and unsuccessful has a decided effect on an economy, whether at the state level or the national level- it leads to less economic success, more waste, more inefficiency, less jobs, less tax revenue, and a thoroughly lessened society on almost every level. When property is taken and corrupt decisions are made in the government, a state and a nation are not successful.

Michigan showed the entire nation what would happen if those same policies were enacted at the national level- it was a lesson of what not to do. And yet, in spite of this, much like our national leaders that continue to press on in the face of failure, those who inflicted this awful economy on us have no apologies and hold true to their course. President Barack Obama, much like Jennifer Granholm, will not change in any substantive manner and will not alter his policies if he wins a second term.

Jennifer Granholm is coming out with a new book, "A Governor's Story: The Fight for Jobs and America's Economic Future," and in it she gives our great nation of how not to run a state or government or anything at all.

As is typical in a government which inserts itself into the marketplace and plays political games with citizens, the book talks about all of the political gamesmanship and behind-the-scenes deal-making and continual crisis that marked the Granholm years in Michigan. The book argues that government involvement — tax payer money given away in the name of green jobs and pork programs — is essential to economic growth, in spite of the track record that that philosophy has had whenever and wherever it has been tried. They attempt to argue that because another government has (the Obama administration) has awarded tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer money borrowed on credit from China as loans to various industries in Michigan over the last couple of years, this is some sort of an indication of success for their method.

Granholm says "Smart and active government is really what's needed"- as if a small elite class of unconnected politicians working in a capital will be smarter than the thousands of decisions that free citizens make every day in a free market, and as if a more active government will not crowd out investment and decisions freely made by businessman and force them into making unwise and bad investments.

"If you place no bets, you will lose every time," she said, suggesting that the government should use its extreme lack of information about the market and rely on its lack of personal investment in the situation to gamble away taxpayer money at every political or 'cool' industry or company that comes along. Oh, a couple of those bets will win- even a Democrat finds his way out of a recession every now and then- but on the whole, taxpayers will take it on the chin many more times than not, and Granholm and her cronies will walk away with pensions, paychecks, a nice university position, and a new book.

United States, be prepared- Michigan has shown the nation the way, and don't ever forget- Granholm won a second term of office after her disastrous first term saw her destroy Michigan's economy and ruin many lives.

Detroit News provided quotes and source information.

As we learn more about the financial meltdown of 2008, it becomes increasingly apparent that one of the main causes for this economic disaster was government policy that forced banks to extend loans to those people who were unable to pay those back. Government agents put pressure on banks and government banking institutions like Freddie/Franny to give loans to people who under normal circumstances would be unable to pay back these loans and who were especially unable to protect themselves from the exposure to risk that these loans entailed. Misguided government policies ambushed innocent people who believed the dream that politicians peddled and banks were coerced into following, and in 2008 the house of cards came crashing down and peoples lives were ruined. It was not the failure of the markets, the lack of government policy on the issue, evil rich people, George W Bush, or the Republicans who were the minority party in Congress at the time- it was government policy that put pressure on banks that led to the collapse in 2008.

And the lesson apparently was not learned by the Democrats.

From Townhall's Bob Beauprez comes this stunning mind-blowing information:

The Department of Justice is executing a "Witch Hunt" against banks. Through the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, Attorney General Eric Holder is forcing banks to "relax their mortgage underwriting standards and approve loans for minorities with poor credit as part of a new crackdown on alleged discrimination," according to a published report by Investor's Business Daily after reviewing court documents.

The DOJ has already extorted $20 million for weak and poor credit loans from banks that "settled out of court rather than battle the federal government and risk being branded racist." The DOJ admits another 60 banks are already under "investigation." Holder's demanding the banks sign "non-disclosure" settlement agreements barring them from talking while allowing the DOJ to operate behind a curtain of secrecy.

The settlements already extracted from banks force them to make "prime-rate mortgages to low income blacks and Hispanics" with credit problems, even if they are living on welfare. According to IBD, the DOJ has ordered banks to advertise that minorities cannot be turned down for a loan "because they receive public aid, such as unemployment benefits, welfare payments or food stamps." No job; no problem!

In other words, the DOJ is forcing banks to make loans to people that they know don't qualify for them and likely won't be able to afford to repay them, which is precisely the kind of failed public policy that precipitated the financial collapse and recession in 2008.

Can you believe it? Obama took an economy that was going through a usual recession, killed the recovery, set us up for a double-dip recession, and is now working on creating another epic economic collapse!

Read the whole analysis- it'll really scare you!

For more on the background of the Great Recession and how Obama plans to recreate it with his policies, check out The Great American Bank Robbery: The Unauthorized Report About What Really Caused the Great Recession or A Decade of Delusions: From Speculative Contagion to the Great Recession.

Via Ace of Spades I saw this story that ran in the Wall Street Journal called Is Obama Smart?

Before you read it, I want to point out for the record that I am not hugely interested in how smart our politicians really are, since I vote mainly based on which politician better realizes that governments are instituted among men  only for the purposes of better protecting my life, liberty, and property than I could do so myself in a true anarchy. If I had a chance of a genius who hated liberty and wanted to redistribute wealth or an idiot who loved liberty and wanted to let me keep the fruits of my labor, I'd choose the idiot. In fact, I'd prefer an idiot tyrant over a genius tyrant to- I imagine they'd be less successful than a genius in pushing for regulations and rules and fees and taxes which control me and seize my wealth.

That being said, by looking at whether Obama is smart we can learn two important things; first, what does it truly mean to be smart; and second, whether his supposed intelligence just another example of bizarro world where smart is dumb and dumb is smart.

...I just think the president isn't very bright.

Socrates taught that wisdom begins in the recognition of how little we know. Mr. Obama is perpetually intent on telling us how much he knows. Aristotle wrote that the type of intelligence most needed in politics is prudence, which in turn requires experience. Mr. Obama came to office with no experience. Plutarch warned that flattery "makes itself an obstacle and pestilence to great houses and great affairs." Today's White House, more so than any in memory, is stuffed with flatterers.

Much is made of the president's rhetorical gifts. This is the sort of thing that can be credited only by people who think that a command of English syntax is a mark of great intellectual distinction. Can anyone recall a memorable phrase from one of Mr. Obama's big speeches that didn't amount to cliché? As for the small speeches, such as the one we were kept waiting 50 minutes for yesterday, we get Triple-A bromides about America remaining a "Triple-A country." Which, when it comes to long-term sovereign debt, is precisely what we no longer are under Mr. Obama.

Then there is Mr. Obama as political tactician. He makes predictions that prove false. He makes promises he cannot honor. He raises expectations he cannot meet. He reneges on commitments made in private. He surrenders positions staked in public. He is absent from issues in which he has a duty to be involved. He is overbearing when he ought to be absent. At the height of the financial panic of 1907, Teddy Roosevelt, who had done much to bring the panic about by inveighing against big business, at least had the good sense to stick to his bear hunt and let J.P. Morgan sort things out. Not so this president, who puts a new twist on an old put-down: Every time he opens his mouth, he subtracts from the sum total of financial capital.

Then there's his habit of never trimming his sails, much less tacking to the prevailing wind. When Bill Clinton got hammered on health care, he reverted to centrist course and passed welfare reform. When it looked like the Iraq war was going to be lost, George Bush fired Don Rumsfeld and ordered the surge.

Mr. Obama, by contrast, appears to consider himself immune from error. Perhaps this explains why he has now doubled down on Heckuva Job Geithner. It also explains his insulting and politically inept habit of suggesting—whether the issue is health care, or Arab-Israeli peace, or change we can believe in at some point in God's good time—that the fault always lies in the failure of his audiences to listen attentively. It doesn't. In politics, a failure of communication is always the fault of the communicator...

There is more, all of it good, all of it pointing out that Obama is not a smart guy. That's okay though- although he lacks experience, doesn't know his or government's limitations, and has surrounded himself with yes-men, the fact that he isn't smart is not why he is one the worst Presidents in the history of our nation. He's a bad President because he erodes the quality of life, encourages abortion of babies, puts in place policies that result in people dying, removes choices and freedom from people, acts in a tyrannical manner, and uses the power of government to unjustly take property from people so that he can give it to others. He's a bad President not because he isn't smart, but because he is a tyrant.

No offense to those candidates who had previously announced that they were running for the United States Senate seat that is up in 2012, but since none of those candidates really got me too excited or had a big enough name, I was playing around in my mind with running myself for that Senate seat. The 2012 election is going to be more about the President than it is who will be Senator, and although Debbie Stabenow (who currently ineptly fills the office) is a good fundraiser she is good at little else and is able to be beaten if someone lays some solid body blows on her record and character- and I could do those things. I don't have very much money and have few connections to people who do, but once you're a candidate, those things appear, and then it's just about hammering away at the weak candidate that Stabenow is. Oakland County Water Resources Commissioner John McCulloch, activist Peter Konetchy, and former judge Randy Hekman are the only candidates currently running against her, and I've got as good as a shot as any of them, so I was playing around with it in my mind. Now, thankfully, I don't have to.

Former U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra is expected to jump back into the race against Stabenow as early as today, and he represents exactly the kind of big-name, high-experience, solid candidate that I have been looking and waiting for to get into it against Stabenow. Hoekstra retired this year after serving nine terms in the federal House of Representatives, after his run for Governor was unsuccessful. While in the House, he rose to Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, where he left his mark on key anti-terrorism legislation. Before entering politics, he served as a vice president of marketing at Herman Miller, the office furniture maker headquartered near Grand Rapids. Since leaving Capitol Hill, Hoekstra's worked for Dickstein Shapiro, a top law firm based in Washington, where he has continued to keep in touch with all the issues facing our nation.

Hoekstra is the kind of candidate that we need in the Senate. As I pointed out in my post Graph: Public Debt Over Time, Color-Coded by Party in Power, although the President is important in our nation, having a solid and conservative Congress will go farther to restoring the sanity to our nations finances, so it is good to finally have a solid candidate running for the US Senate against the weak and corrupt Stabenow, who has grown fat on taxpayers for too many years. My post Graph: U.S. Foreclosure Rates, Colored-Coded by Party in Power also indicated that the worse thing for our nation as far as foreclosures go was having a Democratic Congress, and knocking out Stabenow, who represents the farthest extremes of progressives as a Democrat in Congress, and replacing her with Hoekstra, who represents a solid Republican vote, will work to stop the foreclosure crisis that is hammering our nation.

Congressman Pete Hoekstra was honestly my choice for Governor of Michigan last time around- in my post Recommendations for Michigan's Primary Election in 2010 you can read about my struggles with deciding on a candidate, and after much research and analysis I decided that Hoekstra was the best- even better than Rick Snyder, who went on to become Governor. I decided that Hoekstra was a solid candidate, someone who people spoke well of, he had good family values, a solid background in business and government, and he is a good conservative who is friendly to the Tea Party movement (see post Tea Party Express Stop Southeast Michigan: My Report, with Pictures and Video).

And Senator Stabenow is not a good Senator for the people of Michigan. As I wrote in my post 10 Good Reasons Why Senator Stabenow Should Be Re-Elected, the joke was that there was no good reason for her to be re-elected-

She does a poor job advocating for Michigan, she is consistently ranked as one of the weakest politicians in Congress, and according to the National Journal Group she is the most liberal member of the Senate and thus more liberal than any of her constituents in this fine moderate state of Michigan. If she were a run-of-the-mill liberal who did a good job helping constituents and was chair of a powerful committee than I could see her winning re-election, but that describes Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), not her.

Stabmenow is going to be a tough battle in the election, that's for sure. As I wrote in Senator Stabenow at DEC Event Details What a Political Economy Looks Like:

Don’t get me wrong- she is going to be a formidable candidate this election, because her campaign is going to be awash in kickbacks from companies who have benefited from her abilities to distribute favors to politically connected companies, and because unlike the last time she ran, this time she has experience and knowledge on the issues and has passed some legislation.

Whoever the Republicans choose to run against her- whether it is indeed Terri Lynn Land or whether it is Pete Hoekstra- I really hope that they realize that to campaign against Stabenow will require a lot of hard work and determination. She is going to be heavily funded by groups that owe her for all of her hard work redirecting taxpayer money to big businesses that she likes, and she is going to have a strong record to run on of passing policies that look good. It is going to require a lot of educating of voters and connecting with voters to get them to see that her policies are bad for America and bad for Michigan and that she should not be elected to office again.

But I think that Hoekstra is the kind of candidate who can and should defeat her attempt to hold on to her ill-bought seat. He has managed to weather tough and dirty attacks on him before- remember last year when President Barack Obama went into his home district to cut the ribbon of another government-financed battery plant and took the occasion to make a bunch of snide underhanded comments directed at Hoekstra as he stood uncomfortably there? I wrote about it in my post Republican Congressman Visits White House and Insults Democrat President in Front of Friends (which is a joke, because the exact opposite occurred). Hoekstra took in in stride, calmly and dryly moved past it, and didn't lower himself to the levels that the partisan joker who inhabits our White House did. If Hoekstra can navigate situations like that, I have high hopes for him navigating through the negative and mean and bitter and partisan attacks that an incompetent liberal who is out of touch with voters like Stabenow will unleash in her desperate attempt to clutch to power.

So, thank you Congressman Hoekstra, for entering the race for US Senate in 2012, because now I no longer have to think about running for this seat myself. Good luck and you can count on me for anything you need!

Although I'm from the east side of Michigan, I still feel pride in our state when I watch the following video that was produced in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It is a massive city wide lip sync; a single long recording shot of residents singing along with Don McLean's "American Pie" that features the entire cityscape of Grand Rapids put together in amazing technical skill. Roger Ebert called it "the greatest music video ever made."

The motivation for this was Newsweek naming Grand Rapids as a 'dying city'- and that magazine couldn't be more wrong. Although a decade or more ago it might have been, today behind the generous donations of great business leaders, smart policies by politicians, and a good old Midwestern can-do spirit, it is now a city on the rise. From Art Prize to the Griffins to the nearby sand dune beaches of West Michigan, if you are looking for a great city to visit and spend some time in, Grand Rapids is it.

And now this video- it is amazing, down to the last shot of a city that is not dying but is on the rise. It is great- check it out!

Today, along with thousands of others, I attended a Get Motivated seminar at the Palace of Auburn Hills. It was packed, parking was $15, the food was expensive, but the ticket was cheap ($2) and it was worth a day due to the wealth of information, ideas, and motivation that were thrown at you. There were many quality speakers at this event interspersed with sales pitches and people trying to keep the crowd motivated- let me give you a quick recap of some of my thoughts on each of the main speakers-

Modern day Democrats talk often about 'progress'. If you listen to your Democratic Congressman or Senator or President talk, they'll mention how they want to move society forward, advance the ball, create or grow jobs through government spending, or in some way improve humanity by using the power of the state to hammer the backward among us into the future. Liberal blogs support Democrats by arguing and mocking conservatives and Republicans as 'backwards' and falling behind an advancing liberal society.

But the truth of the matter is that the modern day Democratic Party has betrayed the ideal of 'progress' by promoting policies of the past, policies that lock in jobs and classes and innovations and ideas of the past and act as a barrier to human progress.

President Obama demonstrated this lately when he lamented that the worsening economy isn’t his fault because of things like ATM machines and airport kiosks. He said:

There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.

The modern day Democratic Party does not support or favor any sort of structural changes in America- they don't want America to progress in any sort of way, and this statement says just that- Obama is upset that the vision that he has of the past when he was growing up, a vision of no ATM's and bank tellers patiently waiting in the bank and long lines at the airport waiting for agents to help customers, is no longer the reality of the present and will not be the reality of the future.

Rather than embracing this change, Obama and the modern day Democrats fight against it. They think that they see these changes leading to lost jobs (even though the evidence is that there are more bank tellers than there were in the past), but what they fail to see how this progress has made the People better. By by replacing expensive bank tellers and customer service agents with cheaper automated efficient ATMS and kiosks, banks can now charge lower fees and even have free checking, and airports can lower prices for airline tickets and continue to provide quality service. The People benefit, notably the poor, by these advances in technology and innovation. It is real change, the kind that we all hoped for when Obama was elected, the kind of change and progress that defined a nation that grew from rural settlements clinging to the east coast to a superpower.

But the modern day Democratic Party doesn't like this change- they want to lock in the classes, structures, jobs, technology, and modes of travel that they know and understand and think that they can control.

In my post Nuclear Power and Manned Space Flight: Victims of Democrat's Progress Backwards? I started to advance this meme when I wrote:

America instead is collapsing on the weight of promises made to generations past, ruled over by elitist politicians who seek only to control us, and everyday our nation moves farther away from living a prosperous life in the stars in freedom and liberty, however preposterous or unlikely that future may have been.

The current leadership of our nation speaks of 'progress,' but they are abandoning nuclear power and manned spaceflight in favor of providing healthcare insurance to people who are encouraged not to purchase it and spending money they don't have to support railroads and electric motor carriages and windmills. The future that Obama, Democrats, liberals, and Republicans that go along with them is not a future full of cheap safe energy and man roaming freely in the stars- it is a future with man going backward, remembering that once, long ago, before I was born and before my students were born, man built generators that were powered by the atom splitting and man walked on the moon.

Man once walked on the moon! Nuclear power plants were once built! Say it- and then realize that these are events of the past- that the new normal and likely new future of America and the world is a long, slow slide backwards into tyranny, injustice, and confiscation of property by elites.

The modern day Democratic Party, including my Congressman Gary Peters and my Senators Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin and my President Barack Obama, push through legislation, appointments, and executive orders energy policies that attempt to lock in the 1970's. Excessive regulations and cancelling of the Yucca Mountain project ensure that our nation will have the same number of nuclear power plants as the 1970's. Through regulations and taxes and fees they have prevented or delayed or made more expensive the building new refineries, drilling for oil, or developing new natural resources.

Modern day Democrats talk about putting in place policies that push us to walk or travel by bus or train- methods of transportation that have long since been surpassed by automobiles and airplanes, although because automobiles travel on government-built roads and because air travel is increasingly regulated by the government, both of these modes of transportation are less dynamic and innovative and efficient than they could be if Americans were as free as they could be.

None of this should be a surprise to voters, and yet it seems to be. When Obama gave a major speech on energy when he was running for President in 2008, I wrote:

As I listened to Obama talk about his energy visions for the future, I imagined what it would be like to live in a world that is cured of it's oil addiction- a world where there is no power generated by fossil fuels, and instead water and wind power the world. Ahh, indeed- the change we need... windmill from ancient Rhodes, waterwheel from Roman Spain...

Democrats are about locking in the class system that we currently had and are all about fighting any change to it. That's why they bail out banks and automotive companies- it has little to do with saving jobs and everything to do with saving jobs from people who they are friends with and who donate money to them. Democrats are all about taxing the rich, because they know that the super rich will be able to hide their money in offshore accounts or deduct it through hidden tax code provisions, but yet the upper middle class won't be able to dodge these taxes and will be forced to pay them and will sink into the lower classes which are so dependent on government help. Democrats are all about regulations and licensing and provisions and rules, all of which by their costs and difficulty in implementing help existing firms and companies, especially those large ones that are able to lobby government for waivers, but yet hurt new firms and businesses, especially small ones, who are not able to get past the barriers that the government erects to challenge the existing businesses and by so doing change our nation for the better.

While Obama might talk about how ATMs and kiosks are costing jobs, what he really is lamenting is that his vision of the past is being destroyed by advances that he didn't see coming and doesn't fully understand how to control- he is upset that his vision of the past is no longer the present now that we have had real progress in spite of Democrats efforts.

Humanity is amazing, and can remake the world in amazing ways when unleashed and freed from the bonds of government and the state through limited government, rule of law, protection of property, low taxes, low regulation, and conservative principles.

But modern day Democrats have betrayed the ideas of 'progress' and instead are now only interested in putting place policies that lock in the past.