Redstate

in who wrote "HR 5150 Reverse the Raid on Student Aid"

Jesse Jackson? Johnny Cochran?

No. No no no no no no no no no no!

I can't be allowed to happen.

The democrats may take back the House, but their chances of taking back the Senate are minimal. My guess is that if they are elected to the House either

(a) Pelosi will be challenged for her position of Speaker and there will be infighting and nothing will get accomplished because everyone will be too focused on the 2008 Elections; or

(b) Nothing Special--business as usual in Congress where nothing gets accomplished.

Raise the minimum wage

When the Republicans already have...

Sheesh, are we really going commie here?

All that righteous anger over legislative betrayals will come to nothing as everything is taken from the states and given to the feds, and eventually to the NAU, and eventually to the UN or its replacement, run, out of fairness, by China.

We've already fallen.  We merely sleepwalk our way into oblivion.

...of an inability to recognize that we are IN danger (as opposed to NEAR it) and the corresponding inability to DO something, anything about correcting it.

The Commies are coming!

It was nice of you guys to triple their web traffic for the day...

blushes

My sock puppet got away for a second there...

If this happens, God forbid, I would be happy to help fund GWB's the ink and stamps for his veto.

Erick, I thought this was a really interesting piece. The one thing that Joelle Fishman keep coming back to like a mantra is the theme of justice, and you hear that a lot from the Kossacks (when you filter out the noise and the chest-thumping), and I also hear it constantly from the small number of people I know who are in passionate sympathy with this point of view.

You don't have to be an avowed CP member to buy this line, and I think it's attractive to a great many people. Both Republicans and conservatives have a general tendency to blow off the justice argument, believing that when it comes to actual elections, most people will be economically rational. But I still believe this is a dangerous and seductive argument that we should seek to counter.

You notice how everything is blamed on corporations? Well, it's a funny thing, but businesses are run on top of capital, and capital is a uniquely single-minded thing. It will always and immediately flow to the highest available risk-adjusted return, even if the difference is measured in single basis points. Note the word "available" in the previous sentence: if you constrain the ability of capital to find a higher return through government behavior, it will still near-instantly find the highest return among the lesser alternatives.

So what does that mean in practice? A lower aggregate level of productivity and wealth in the economy. In short, less is produced, so less may be consumed.

And I think this is entirely fine with people who are sympathetic to the Communist and Democratic Party lines. Because their goal is justice, not prosperity. To them our biggest problem  is that rapacious "corporations" are stealing every last dollar and giving it to... whom, exactly? Well, again, what does capital seek? The highest rate of return. And who are the owners of the capital that is seeking the return? Most of it is owned by pension funds, mutual funds and other investment pools that are operated for the benefit of American retirees. So in a sense, the Communists' enemy is their own parents.

The great genius of a free capitalistic system, though, is that is produces abundance, not necessarily equal distribution. You can see a qualitative improvement in general health and well-being among Americans compared with no more than 40 years ago, when we had real poverty, in the sense of starvation and lack of warm clothing and housing. This is because our economy, by far the most productive in the world, generates enough consumable wealth that even those with relatively little have enough. The benefit of this in human terms is really incalculable. Lyndon Johnson may have declared war on poverty, but capitalism won the war.

But the people who seek justice are now looking for universal health care, much higher wages for unionized manufacturing labor, and essentially "free" higher education. It's going to take a big increment in productivity from here to achieve these goals, but it can be done, provided business and capital remain comparatively free to do the job.

And yet if the Communists and Democrats get their way, and enact just a fraction of the program in the Fishman piece, we'll start to retrogress back to real poverty. Capital will either vanish overseas at a mind-bending rate of speed, or (after a Democratic Congress enacts capital-flight controls), it will simply die sitting in the bank, for lack of opportunity. And the hell of all this is that we won't eliminate rich people that way either. It's truly self-defeating on every level.

One of the most incomprehensible fantasies that I hear over and over is that if we only killed all the CEOs and the guys who run the investment companies, and impoverished everyone with above-average wealth, then everyone else would benefit because of all the money that would be released. What a fallacy! Money is nothing more than information, and it represents a tradable expression of past productivity. It's not something you get more of if you just keep people from piling it up. People use capital to create jobs, not to take them away from others. This is the most persistent and pernicious misconception by the hard-Left. There was a line in the Fishman piece about how a bunch of Delphi workers in Michigan are "fighting for their lives." Guess what, their bosses are fighting for their lives too.

It's a hard reality in the US that traditional manufacturing labor no longer creates enough value to enable a middle-class lifestyle. This has the Communists and the Democrats fit to be tied, but there simply is no escaping it. But most of the rest of the economy is so productive that the general level of personal well-being remains high. America needs to continue to transform our economy to play to our unique strengths and cede ground where our global competitors are strong. This is a process that is ongoing, and is enabled every day by the independent decisions of capital owners seeking the highest return. Even so, it's a transformation of the US economy that is just as far-reaching as the movement from farm to city more than a century ago. And it's being misread by nearly every big-picture analysis I've ever heard.

so unless they were up to 5150 by then it must have been Je$$e.

... Bush sucks!

(So there!)

The NY Times did an editorial on Castro/Cuba and post Castro policy.  Unsurprisingly they suggest we help modernize Cuba, filling a role once played by the USSR, and work with his clique if [if ?] they remain in power.  This means Raoul Castro who has sharpened his managerial skills by running the police forces, as well as the country.

     You could call this reverse Neo Conservatism, drop the silly idea of democracy and prop up socialist strangleholds on total power.

      "No enemies to the Left", true in the past, the present, and it seems inevitable, the future.

The American left calls this "normalization", draw your own conclusions from the use of the word.

Unsurprisingly they [NYT] suggest we help modernize Cuba...

I thought it was the other way around, such as our needing to learn how to implement their progressive health care system.

It's not as though they support our modernization of Iraq or Afghanistan or anything.

I really did expect to see Jesse Jackson Jr.'s name somewhere there, but he's not even a cosponsor of HR 5150.

system, all of which our media reminded us of when our government was breaking down doors in the middle of the night in order to follow Fidel's commands on Elian.

       The Times said it, I didn't.  Maybe they feel the people need new bicycles to replace the rusty ones they have now.  More likely, and hinted at in my post, they just want us to prop up a communist regime and take the place of the USSR.

     If you're a closet red it's nice to have something to point to.

They'd agree with the Senate Immigration Bill...