Once again dear friends

Unto the breach we go:

Spain's Socialist government is considering an increase in capital-gains tax as a result of the economic crisis but will not raise tax rates on earned income, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, prime minister, said on Monday.

Mr Zapatero and his cabinet have overseen a yawning budget deficit expected to reach 10 per cent of gross domestic product this year. They are now struggling to prepare a budget for 2010 in the face of falling revenues, higher state spending and resistance from the smaller political parties they need to pass laws in parliament.

Cuts in spending are never mentioned, contemplated or fathomed, even in the medium/long term. Of course, there is a bit of levity:

Mr Zapatero, who inherited a booming economy driven by construction and property development when he took office in 2004, has repeatedly told Spaniards that his governments have reduced the overall tax burden on the country and has said any increases will be "moderate and temporary".

Morons Compete to have their Concession Nationalized

South America’s “hope and change” affiliate, a man with a pea brain, no historical memory, and a taste for despotism, can’t even keep his lunacy under control as he suckers in some new tenderers.

Whose a Fundie now?

Rare that one agrees with the thrust of a New York Times editorial. From 2001:

Few would dispute the proposition by President Bush yesterday that religious groups can effectively provide social services for the poor. But Mr. Bush's ambitious proposal to channel federal funds to ''faith-based'' groups to serve social needs is a potentially dangerous erosion of the constitutionally shielded boundary between church and state. As the Supreme Court has observed, that boundary not only protects Americans from improper government support for religion. It guards religion itself from government encroachment and regulation.

Of course, the NYT editorial was undoubtedly propelled just as equally by anti-Bush sentiments as the separation of church and state argument (for the record, opposition in this corner relates to the religion not being tainted/infected by governmentalism route). One wonders if the NYT will be commenting on the latest advents related to officaldoms faith-based initiatives of today:

Six months after its rollout, Obama's office has dramatically shifted gears from the one that Bush started from scratch in 2001. Bush's office sought to "level the playing field" for faith-based and community groups seeking federal grants to deliver social services, like counseling drug addicts and mentoring at-risk youth. Obama, by contrast, has tasked his office with four broad policy goals: bringing faith groups into the recovery and fighting poverty, reducing demand for abortion, promoting responsible fatherhood, and facilitating global interfaith dialogue. "We're moving from a sole focus on leveling the playing field," says Joshua DuBois, the office's executive director, "to forming partnerships with faith-based and community groups to help solve specific policy challenges."

Yet some of the biggest questions surrounding Obama's office when it launched remain unanswered. The administration has not decided whether to allow religious groups to hire only fellow believers with federal funds, a hugely controversial issue. The outside faith advisory council, which will formulate proposals for achieving the office's policy goals—and for combating climate change and reforming the office itself—won't formalize its recommendations until next year. And the office is still devising metrics by which to measure its effectiveness, a subject of much debate during the Bush years.

Reinforcing its new policy role, Obama has brought his office under the purview of his Domestic Policy Council, delighting many faith leaders, particularly on the left. "The Bush office was totally disconnected from policy," says Wallis. "That White House was doing social policy that made poor people poorer, and the faith-based office would try to clean up the mess." The faith advisory council will submit first drafts of policy recommendations in October. "The council has access to experts, policymakers, and administrators [in the White House] at the levels we've asked for," says David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism, who sits on the council.

Such access has upset some on the left, who say religious leaders shouldn't be shaping government policy, and some on the right, who say the work amounts to politically inspired religious outreach. "We would have gotten killed for doing that," says Jim Towey, who directed Bush's faith-based office and notes that religious outreach in the previous administration was handled by the White House Office of Public Liaison, which reported to Karl Rove. "It looks like a political office now."

The rare happening of the Left being onto something, yet their principles wilt in the face of an administration which is their own. Of course, coming from the ever-relativistic nature of the Left, this is not exactly a surprise. The only joy might be had from watching the hypocrisy stick in the old throats of the Left, take 'em where you find 'em. The faith of governmentalism must indeed be strong to allow competing faiths and fundies a place at the tax-payer trough.

As it relates to David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism, we can't wait to see the first draft of policy recommendations which might be offered up on the subject of health care. Other than this banner found plastered on the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism website, it is rather hard to distinguish their political bent on the topic, mmmmhmmmm:

The Obama Doctrine: Abandoning our allies, emboldening our enemies, and diminishing our country

Yes, indeed, there is an Obama Doctrine, and it is clear to the naked eye what it is in the eyes of the Apologizer-in-Chief.

Should the United States indeed go that route [appeasement of Vladimir Putin's Russia], it will make plain to all the emerging "Obama Doctrine" with its three ominous characteristics

says Frank Gaffney:

abandoning our allies, emboldening our enemies and diminishing our country.

And then these Strange, Syphilitic Beings Showed Up

The Europeans have always sold their approach to “peacekeeping” (i.e. the part of war that comes after most of the risk is taken), and reconstruction, to be a sort of hallmark of their beneficence, characterized by enlightened and broad-ranging re-establishment of civility.

So one must wonder what it is that the government of Kosovo is thinking, in its’ unwillingness to honor the EU’s self-image, when the Kosovars objected to the idea of granting the Serbs a means by which to gather intelligence inside Kosovo and rig up reprisals under the supervision of the barely-there EULEX operation.

"We want the Republic of Kosovo to join the EU. But what we need are economic experts, doctors, scientists to help us develop. Not EU policemen to rule over us in a completely unaccountable way," Vetevendosja leader Albin Kurti told EUobserver.

Staffed in large part by non-EU hires, EULEX turned out to be little more than a rebranding operation, something largely concluded that the EU could present as a success of their eternally nascent state. The only problem is that Kosovo declared itself an independent state before the EULEXians arrived from planet EULAEXia, bringing with them their pedantry and title-mania: what they would have foamed on about needing support as a UN-branded operation named UNMIK which presented their lack of leadership, now has the prospect of scaring people because they are leading it.

Bjorn Lomborg puts the ball in the back of the net, again

Instead of France's "Stay'n'Play", Could American Paramedics' "Scoop'n'Run" Have Saved Princess Diana's Life?

Conspiracy theories, all unsubstantiated, abounded [12 years ago]. Had [Princess Diana] been assassinated by the royal family so her estranged husband, Prince Charles, could marry his longtime love Camilla Parker-Bowles? Did the British Secret Intelligence Service bump her off because she was pregnant with Egyptian Fayed's Muslim child?

But the most baffling question,

insists Susan Donaldson James (merci à Duncan), the most baffling question,

was whether doctors could have done more to prevent Diana, 36, from dying.

The horrific accident illustrated the difference between the French and U.S. approaches to emergency care — a relatively small piece of the French medical system, but deemed by some people to be the best in the world and often cited as a model for U.S. health care overhaul.

When rescue workers arrived, Diana was conscious, uttering, "My God" and "Leave me alone" to the swarming paparazzi. Although she had suffered internal injuries, she did not arrive at the Parisian hospital for 110 minutes — too late for the surgery that some speculated could have saved her life.

Diana's last hour — in cardiac arrest and bleeding to death — was spent in a mobile medical unit parked a few hundred yards from Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where an emergency team followed French protocol and administered treatment at the scene of the accident and en route to the hospital.

At the time, many people surmised that had a U.S. ambulance responded, Diana would have been rushed to the nearest emergency room, where a full set of professionals and diagnostic equipment might have revived her.

Colloquially known as "scoop and run," the U.S. system is grounded in studies that show a trauma victim's best chance for survival is reaching the operating room within 10 minutes.

Under the French system, "stay and play," a fully equipped medical ambulance with a doctor stabilizes the patient and then directs him or her to a specialized hospital, even if it is miles away.

Car Crash Victims Served 24/7

"When a patient rolls into the American system, they have a level-one trauma center that runs 24/7, with every specialty and myriad resources for a patient in a car crash," said Dr. Preeti Jois-Bilowich, emergency room doctor at the University of Florida's Shands Hospital.…

Diana Delayed 110 Minutes Before Death

Diana didn't arrive until after 2 a.m. — 1 hour and 45 minutes after the crash — and underwent an emergency thoracotomy. Coroners pronounced her dead from hemorrhaging that resulted from major chest trauma and deceleration that caused a rupture of the left pulmonary vein.

Later, surgeons said that her heart had been displaced from the left to the right side of her chest.

In the 1998 book, "Death of a Princess," Time magazine reporters Thomas Sancton and Scott MacLeod were critical of the French system, arguing that Diana could have been saved in a hospital operating room. SAMU was so upset with the indictment, according to the authors, that they threatened to sue.

…The French emergency care reflects the overall health attitudes of that nation — delivering basic primary care and health education to everyone will mean fewer expensive emergency room visits and hospitalizations later on.

Amid the health care debate here, some Americans are taking notice.

The French, at 10.7 percent of the gross domestic product, spend less than Americans do on health care at 16 percent of their GDP, according to 2009 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development health data. …

French Health Care Tops World

The World Health Organization recently rated the French system as the best in the world. By comparison, the United States rated 37th. The average life expectancy in France is 79.4 years, two years fewer than in the United States.

…In France, everyone is covered, regardless of their ability to pay, with an emphasis on primary care to prevent long-term illness.

"What we do is quite different," Rodwin said. "We take care of people, but not everyone, and we do it once they get very sick. We take diabetics with flare-ups and asthmatics in the emergency room, but we don't do primary care or health education as well for the poor.

"Our population is much sicker compared to France," according to Rodwin, whose research finds that Americans have the highest rates of avoidable hospitalizations — two and a half times higher than the French — for treatable conditions like pneumonia, asthma, diabetes and congestive heart failure.

That's according to a 2008 study from the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment. "The French have a term — solidarity," Rodwin said. "Since World War II, the system is grounded in the philosophy that everyone should have access to health care. That doesn't mean everyone is treated equally. There are those who are more educated or higher socio-economic groups that use more specialty care and probably have access to better quality care, but everyone has access to the minimum."

Mary, a freelance writer who did not want to use her last name, lives in Paris and is a "big booster of the French system." …

U.S. Emergency Rooms 'Tangle of Forms'

"I find the emergency room responses the most dramatic change from the U.S.," Mary said. "I've always had excellent health insurance in the U.S. and I've found every American emergency room visit a tangle as I fill out form after form and sign over my first born before anyone will even look at an injured or sick kid.

"Here, because everyone is insured, there's never any questions in hospitals that people will be treated, and treated quickly, because there's no worry someone's going to be stiffed with the bill."

Jois-Bilowich agreed that the French system is more cost-effective and that most people admitted to U.S. emergency rooms are treated and then released. But, she argues, the U.S. system of trauma care is superior.

There is no free lunch

Literally:

People are far more likely to go hungry in an NHS hospital than in a prison, researchers from Bournemouth University said.

Russians have forgotten that the Soviet Union in 1939 was "a totalitarian state characterized by repression, deportation, and massive executions"

…If they ever knew it…

While condemning the Hitler-Stalin pact in connection with the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II, writes Le Monde, Vladimir Putin says that France and Britain are mainly to blame (with their "Munich plot") and tells the Poles to let bygones be bygones.

Furthermore, Le Monde's Piotr Smolar brings into the discussion foreign elements to browbeat the Poles with, such as the fact that not all Poles participated in the resistance (the French should be experts in that matter) and — typically — the fact that certain Poles did participate in the murder of Jews…

La Pologne, toutefois, a ses propres dénis historiographiques : la majorité des Polonais était loin de la résistance active ; les massacres de juifs n'ont pas été que le fait des Allemands sur le territoire.

…while the (few) French readers who react tend — again (remember the dozens and dozens of them coming out to defend Russia in its more recent war with another tiny state) — to be "neutral" and to give the big brother and big bully the benefit of the doubt. But a couple of them have some choice words:

les géorgiens doivent etre rassuré de savoir que Staline est un ange de sagesse sans la nouvelle éthique russe!

Honte à Merkel, Sarkozy, Obama etc ...

In Russia, furthermore, we learn (from Marie Jégo's report from Moscow) that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a stroke of genius; that Stalin's invasion of Poland from the East was to defend the Polish populations; that the Russian envoy to monitor human rights in France is a vocal admirer of Stalin; and that Russians seem to have forgotten that the Soviet Union in 1939 was "a totalitarian state characterized by repression, deportation, and massive executions" (if they ever knew it: 61% of Russians in a recent poll were not aware that the Kremlin invaded Poland a few weeks after the signing of the pact).

Soixante-dix ans après sa signature, le pacte germano-soviétique est en voie d'être réhabilité en Russie. Ces derniers mois, les médias officiels et les historiens proches du Kremlin se sont lancés dans une véritable croisade pour sa défense. Le pacte est décrit comme un "coup de génie" de Staline, l'artisan des purges, dont il est de bon ton désormais d'encenser la politique.

…Alors que Moscou cherche la réaffirmation du rôle-clé joué par l'Union soviétique dans la défaite du nazisme, la lente réhabilitation sur la scène intérieure de Staline et de sa politique interroge sur la volonté russe d'ouverture vers l'Europe. Nourries d'un tel terreau, les relations de la Russie avec ses voisins de l'Union européenne, la Pologne et les pays baltes (Lituanie, Lettonie, Estonie) risquent de s'envenimer davantage.

…la Russie de Poutine n'est pas celle de Gorbatchev. Désormais, l'intelligentsia "patriote", qui a pignon sur rue, défend le pacte.

…Plus inquiétant, la défense du pacte a donné lieu à une offensive verbale contre la Pologne. "La Pologne aurait pu éviter l'agression hitlérienne en acceptant de donner le corridor de Dantzig, en concluant un pacte de sécurité collective avec la France, la Grande-Bretagne et l'URSS", estime le jeune historien Pavel Daniline. L'entrée de l'armée soviétique dans ce pays, le 17 septembre 1939 "n'était pas une agression". "Il s'agissait de défendre la population d'un Etat qui avait cessé d'exister", conclut-il.

L'annexion soviétique est abondamment justifiée. "Les territoires situés dans la sphère d'influence de l'URSS faisaient partie de la Russie impériale", a déclaré, à la chaîne publique RTR, Natalia Narotchitskaïa, historienne, fervente admiratrice de Staline, envoyée par le Kremlin à Paris pour assurer le suivi du respect des droits de l'homme en France.

…Le débat en cours, souligne [Nikita Petrov, historien à l'ONG russe Memorial], laisse de côté un élément majeur : "Impossible de ne pas prendre en compte la physionomie de l'Union soviétique de 1939 : un Etat totalitaire caractérisé par les répressions, les déportations, les exécutions massives." C'est précisément ce que les Russes semblent avoir oublié.

Ont-ils jamais su ? "Les gens continuent à croire, comme à l'époque soviétique, que l'armée soviétique est entrée en Pologne en 1939 pour protéger les Polonais. La même chose est dite aujourd'hui de l'Abkhazie et de l'Ossétie du Sud (régions séparatistes de Géorgie, enjeu d'une guerre entre Moscou et Tbilissi en août 2008). Selon le discours officiel, l'armée russe est intervenue pour protéger les populations", affirme cet historien, spécialiste de la période stalinienne.

Selon un sondage récent du centre d'études de l'opinion Iouri Levada, 61 % des sondés ne sont pas au courant que les troupes soviétiques ont envahi la Pologne le 17 septembre 1939, quelques semaines après la signature du pacte.

Chicken S**ts of the Sea

Perhaps it is a matter of being dense or just missing the memo, but all radar continue to be up as one British better parrots yet another British better regarding that oil-for-fools programme bubbling up out of the Scottish moors:

Today Straw was forced back into the debate after the Sunday Times claimed Megrahi had been "set free for oil" – a reference to BP's £500m exploratory agreement with the Libyan regime shortly after the PTA. Echoing Lord Mandelson's complaint that the charge was implausible and offensive, Straw called it an "absurd confection". What is not in dispute is that London had been keen to normalise relations with Tripoli after Gaddafi's renunciation of nuclear ambitions in 2003 and that Salmond had opposed including Megrahi in the 2007 PTA.

One notes that nobody in UK officialdom has actually categorically denied any involvement what-so-ever on the part of the UK government. This bit turns it up a notch even further:

Labour officials in Edinburgh, from where cross-border correspondence appears to have been leaked, poured scorn on the idea of any deal over Megrahi's release.

"How could Tony Blair or Gordon Brown offer a deal to Gaddafi which would depend on getting Alex Salmond to do something?" an official said.

Ahhh, the old answering a question with a question bit, a sure sign that subterfuge is afoot. Keep in mind, for better or worse there could be legitimate geo-strat reasons for releasing such a prisoner, as foul as the idea/deed actually is to most individuals. However, given the lack of comment, the lack of categorical denial and the subterfuge surrounding this situation, it is readily apparent that what lies at the heart of this matter is a truth which reeks of some short-term, small-minded oil-grubbing deal. If this is not the case, why is there no great statesman coming to the fore to explain the great matters of state involved?

If the story continues to have legs we may get to witness a personal favourite in the denial game, some washed out pol thundering that "these allegations are false!" The routine being an allegation of X, Y and Z happening on a Tuesday, when in reality X, Y and Z actually did occur, but on a Wednesday.

Then again, when it comes to our govermental betters ..... you know the routine.

We've just weakened America's standing in a critical region of the world and let our allies down

It would appear that the White House

has decided against building a missile shield to protect Poland and the Czech Republic

writes Investor's Business Daily, concerning the Jimmy Carter admi — sorry, concerning the Barack Obama administration's latest brilliant move.

The reason? Russian opposition.

Now, perhaps it becomes more clear why the Apologizer-in-Chief has sent no current U.S. officials to Warsaw for the ceremony of the start of World War II…

Now, if we want to build a defense system for friends in Europe, we'll have to place it in the Balkans, Israel or somewhere else. That is, if Russia approves.

This is a stark reversal of past policy and reneges on promises made by the current administration. Worse, it shows weakness. We got into a staredown with the Russian bear and we blinked.

…As for promises to our allies, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just this month said the U.S. would offer our allies a "defense umbrella" against threats from a possible Iranian nuclear weapon.

Now, all that high-sounding defense rhetoric is out the window.

…We've just weakened America's standing in a critical region of the world — Eastern Europe — and let our allies down. We've made them vulnerable, in ways that only we could, to Russia's growing military menace. Polish and Czech friends who had relied on us to stand firm and keep our word no doubt feel betrayed.

This diminishes our global influence. What smallish country will now take our word at face value when we promise to protect them?

In a parallel editorial, Investor's Business Daily heads halfway around the world to make the same stunning assessment of Jimmy Car— sorry, of Barack Obama's policies:

the U.S. acts as if good relations with Chavez is a high priority, but ties with allies Honduras and Colombia aren't.

What does all this tell us about the three characteristics of the Obama Doctrine?

Now That George W Bush Is Gone, America Is Finally Showing More Respect Towards Its Friends and Allies

The Apologizer-in-Chief's White House found nobody better to send to Warsaw for the seventieth anniversary of World War II, quips Hotair, than a man who last served as an American official 12 years ago (Dziękuję to Valerie)…

How Is That New Respect for Our Friends'n'Allies Working for You, Barack?

Now that the Apologizer-in-Chief has made tolerance and compassion his hallmark while reserving America's official criticism and principled opposition for none but America's true enemies — i.e., the internal ones, aka America's conservatives — a "compassionate" government minister in Scotland shows how much he enjoys the newfound open-mindedness…



And how about the being-nice-to-terrorists track, Barack, including giving the "war on terrorism" some new-fangled (and utterly forgettable) name? How is that working?!



Or, to quote the colorful language of 5ezpzez,

Moamar Yourdaffy was real quick to get in line and play nice when Bush started getting medevial on SoDamn Insane's ass. Now that Mr.Apology (obama) is the leader(ha ha) of the free(ha ha ha) world, Gadaffy obviously feels safe again to thumb his nose at the US & the rest of the World, including Scotland & the rest of the UK. MacAskill---the Neville Chamberlain of our time, is a National Shame to most right thinking Scots

Kind of a test

This from the Guardian on being snarky:

The sixth principle of snark: the hobbyhorse principle. Reduce all human complexity to caricature. Then repeat the caricature. Genuine seriousness, when it turns up (say, in a man like Al Gore), disgusts snarky writers - they refashion it into stiffness or pretension. The mystery of personality bores them into silence.

Is this post considered a snark by merely repeating the above?

Call it the grass-is-greener syndrome: the French have their own problems that show there's no such thing as a free lunch — or a free doctor's visit

Health care in France is often held up as a model the U.S. might follow

writes Investor's Business Daily.

Yet the French have their own problems that show there's no such thing as a free lunch — or a free doctor's visit.

The IBD (which also features editorials on the demonization of drugmakers — "members of Congress … think they can impose whatever costs they want on an industry, with no real-world impact" — and on Ted Kennedy's death) goes on to quote Guy Sorman's City Journal story. (Be sure to also check out Bojidar Marinov's "checkup"…)

Call it the grass-is-greener syndrome. Advocates of national health care, acknowledging the flaws in ObamaCare yet despising the current U.S. system that has the best medicines, the best medical equipment and the shortest waiting lists, have turned their eyes lovingly to places like France.

As City Journal contributing editor Guy Sorman notes, the French would also love to have the low-cost, high-service system some Americans gush about. Unfortunately, they don't. France's system isn't that cheap and is financed by high taxes on labor that have heavy economic consequences.

… Regardless of the cost, does the French system produce better outcomes? Not always. Infant mortality rates are often cited as a reason socialized medicine and single-payer systems are better than what we have here. But according to Dr. Linda Halderman, a policy adviser in the California State Senate, these comparisons are bogus.

…[Furthermore] France reimburses its doctors at a far lower rate than U.S. physicians would accept.

As David Gratzer, a physician and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote in the summer 2007 issue of City Journal: "In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave — when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity — 15,000 elderly citizens died."

After the tragedy, the French parliament released a harshly worded report blaming the deaths on a complex health system, widespread failure among agencies and health services to coordinate efforts, and chronically insufficient care for the elderly.

It's hard to imagine that happening here, where hospitals have enough air-conditioned beds and doctors that aren't on vacation.

Fact is, most Americans like their health care. There are ways to provide expanded coverage at lower cost, such as pushing individually owned health savings accounts, malpractice reform and allowing insurance to be bought across state lines.

We needn't be forced to sacrifice quality for cost. Nor do we need to look to the French for a better solution. They don't have one.

What the American enamored with French health care doesn’t realize is that the French, too, would love to have such a perfect health system

Recently in the New York Times, mystery writer Sara Paretsky published “Le Treatment,” the story of how she took her husband, suffering from chest pains during their vacation in France, to a local hospital, where he was treated without delay. … Paretsky expresses one minor reservation about what she sees as a nearly perfect health-care system: the hospital staff’s behavior was more bureaucratic than cheerful. She concludes, however, that this is a small price to pay for excellent health care at an unbeatable price: “I might put up with a lot of ugly bureaucrats for that.”

Thus writes Frenchman Guy Sorman (merci à Pat Patterson) who was subsequently interviewed by Radio America's Greg Corombos.

What she doesn’t realize is that the French, too, would love to have such a system. Paretsky’s adventure is a parable based on a false assumption: that health care can be public, reliable, and free. It may indeed seem free, or close to free, for an American tourist receiving treatment in an emergency; as a French taxpayer, however, I paid a heavy price for Paretsky’s husband’s treatment. And you, my American reader, did too.

Read why "French national health insurance is also subsidized by American patients."

…In the end, who paid for Paretsky’s husband’s nearly free ride in a French hospital? French workers and taxpayers; American patients; and the young, unqualified, and out-of-work French unable to find jobs because of the unemployment that national health insurance engenders. There is no such thing, anywhere, as a perfect health-insurance system. It’s always a trade-off among competing goods, and the choices to be made are ultimately political ones. Americans commenting on health-care reform should try to make the costs and consequences of these choices transparent, rather than resorting to misleading morality plays.

Update — Four years later (!), Fausta writes:

And, what a lot of Americans who require medical treatment while traveling in Europe don't realize is that the US group insurance companies get billed through the nose for that treatment. 

I know because I had to authorize those payments back when I worked in insurance.

Peace Out!

They just don't like it up 'em

The surest path to baffling the statists and governmentalists among us is to simply tell them, "I am really not interested in your help":

Incompetence and Disorganization have never been this Dull Either

Remember the adulation that leftist had just a few months back, upon winning the White House that the “Republican Party was disappearing”? Ever in love with the vanquishment, if not torture and mass slaughter of anyone who disagrees with them, they took a great pleasure in the idea of living on a planet of people who nodded their heads to every thought they had, including their ideas about nature-defying “aspirational economic calculations,” or some other specious crap that has never works.

Well, they were wrong. Conservatives did not disappear at all. All it took was to have lefties open their mouths and aspirate to make this happen – even before they successfully legislate anything or manage to prop up an ideologically compliant potential dictator.

Now Taking Place in the U.S.: Mass Arrests, Mass Incarcerations Without Trial, Forced Confessions, Forced Separation of Children From Their Parents…

On August 11, 2009, Stephen Baskerville spoke in Amsterdam at the 5th World Congress of Families.

Carle Zimmerman emphasized an inverse relationship between the strength of the family and the strength of the state. In other words, he argued that as the state increases in power, the family weakens; and as the state loses power — when the state becomes weak, for whatever reason — the family becomes stronger…