Never mind.

The 'Climate of Hate' was all the rage when the Tea Parties were protesting.  It seemed like every establishment scribbler/yammerer banged on it almost daily.  Well check out what's happening in Wisconsin:  the unions are shrieking "Hitler", "Nazi" about their duly elected Governor because he has the temerity, nay the effrontery to implement the policies that he campaigned on and that the electors voted for.

Remember the massive media coverage and the constant handwringing by progressives over the alleged prevalence of extremist rhetoric at Tea Party rallies? Last summer, theWashington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote that “accusations that once were beyond the pale — not just talk of Nazis and Marxists but intimations of tyranny, revolution and bloodshed — are now routine.”

As Pete noted, it will be interesting to see if the same liberal pundits also condemn the signs waved by left-wing activists at a protest against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s budget proposal.

Yid with Lid has photos of demonstrators holding signs with messages like “Hitler Outlawed Unions, Too!” “Hosni + Hitler = Dictator Scott Walker” and an image of Walker with a Hitler mustache and a swastika.

Many of the protest signs also compared Gov. Walker to Mubarak. “One down, one to go” read several, which were decorated with photos of the ousted Egyptian leader and the Wisconsin governor. This sudden hatred of Mubarak from the left also makes one wonder where these people were when President Bush was pushing his freedom agenda in the Middle East.

Yid with Lid also notes that the anti-Walker protesters were bused in for the demonstration by the DNC arm Organizing for America. There were many attempts to tie the Republican Party to some of the offensive rhetoric used by a few unsavory individuals who attended Tea Party protests. But as far as anyone knows, the RNC had no hand in organizing Tea Party rallies. Will the Democratic Party, clearly much more involved in this Wisconsin demonstration, have to answer to the same charges?

Our friends on the left believe that civility is a one way game.  When they smear their opponents obscene ad hominems suddenly morph into 'truth telling'.

It would be sad if it weren't so typical.  But as the Bard of Avon was wont to say:   'murder will out'.

Meanwhile the educational pirates continue to rape and pillage

The education industry:  where the Fakegalitarians roam free.  Hat tip Carpe Diem

Service inflation is extremely low.

This is either because wages are falling and most of services costs are wages or productivity is soaring due to the bust accelerating the replacement of people with productivity enhancing technology.

It's probably a bit of both.  But services are ripe for a productivity revolution.  Particularly in the government and government subsidized sectors.  Faster please.  Hat tip Carpe Diem.

Ag subsidies help family farmers. Right. Whatever.

Hat tip Carpe Diem

Riiigghhht.

Hat tip Instapundit 

WISCONSIN LEGISLATORS reported hiding out in Chicago now. How appropriate.

What ever happened to the dignity of the office? Staying above the fray? Leader of all of us?

Obama mobilizes his machine to shill for union bosses.  Mr. President, precisely what is your role in state budget disputes?  I mean other than to further damage your reputation?  Instatip

MATT WELCH: Is This How A President Should Act? “Just think–there once was a time (for more than a century, actually), when the president of the United States thought it too imperious to deliver the State of the Union via a speech to a joint session of Congress, since that would smack of telling a co-equal branch of government what to do. Now we have a president not just taking rhetorical sides in a state issue, but actively mobilizing his political organization to affect the outcome(s), even though (to my knowledge) nothing that Gov. Walker or any other belated statehouse cost-cutter is doing has a damned thing to do with federal law. . . . We are witnessing the logical conclusion of the Democratic Party’s philosophy, and it is this: Your tax dollars exist to make public sector unions happy.”

How about showing up for work

Democrat lawmakers in Wisconsin, not liking the election results have hit upon a novel strategy to shut down their state government:  just don't show up for work.  Actually, let's take it.  Government funding will run out and we can fire all of the Union creeps.  Then they can apply to get their jobs back.  But you see, the wages, benefits and level of effort will all have changed.  And I'm afraid that very few unionistas know how to work that hard.  Incidentally, Texas Democrats tried the same thing a few years ago, fleeing to Oklahoma.  How did it work for them?  Well they haven't won a statewide election or controlled any part of state government since then.

Jay Nordlinger has more at National Review Online.

Randy Hopper is a state senator in Wisconsin. A Republican. He is now holed up with his colleagues — his Republican colleagues — in the capitol. The Democratic senators have apparently fled the state. Hopper says, “None of my colleagues from the minority party decided to come to work today.”

The Democrats are denying the Republicans the quorum necessary to vote on key fiscal legislation.
Hopper says, “I spent two years in the minority, and I came to work every day, even when I didn’t like the bills the majority was passing. I thought it was my job.” The Democrats, he says, “have relinquished their duties. The people sent them here to do a job, and they are refusing to do it. They’re in hiding. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

Hopper has received threatening phone calls and e-mails. These are threats of a physical nature. “We are working with law enforcement in my district. They are watching my home and my business.” Other Republicans have had their homes and businesses threatened, too. The unionists have demonstrated outside those homes and businesses.

A menacing old phrase comes to mind (and has been used by others, in talking about events in Wisconsin): We know where you live.

Hopper says, “I’ve always said that they can threaten me all they want, but it’s not going to stop me from doing what the people elected me to do.” And he says more than once, “We’re still here.” The Republicans have not run anywhere.

They have been pushed around (literally), screamed at, etc. The capitol is surrounded. The signs carried by the protesters are “vicious,” says Hopper. There are comparisons of Gov. Scott Walkerto Hitler, of course. And there are other signs “I won’t describe to you.”
Hopper says, “I can’t tell you how much respect I have for my colleagues,” operating in an extremely hostile atmosphere.

I ask whether he is going home tonight, to sleep. He says, “We’re not disclosing that. My colleagues and I are not talking about that. We’re working with law enforcement” on the matter.
But “I can tell you that I’ll be here tomorrow. We will do our jobs. I said, at the beginning of this session, that what will determine the course of events here is political courage.”

Why Multiculturalism is so destructive - the example of England

MEP Daniel Hannan in Newsweek:

Even worse is the way multiculturalism has radicalized second-generation immigrants. British-born boys have been rounded up on the battlefields of Afghanistan. Two traveled to Gaza as suicide bombers. Others have been involved in terrorist attempts at home. Pundits, observing that many of these young men have been supported by the British welfare state, wonder why they are biting the hand that feeds them. Yet it is precisely their interactions with the state that taught them to despise it. If they learned any British history at all in school, it will have been presented to them as a hateful chronicle of racism and exploitation. For four decades, Britain’s elites have derided the concept of patriotism, insisting that the nation-state ought to be dissolved into a wider European polity. Finding Britishness scorned, many people are groping back toward older identities as English or Scottish. But where does this leave the children of settlers? What is there for them to be part of?

The problem of course is that our government and particularly our education institutions are filled with people that make their livings sustaining fragmentation and teaching contempt for our nation. More Hannan:

As Upton Sinclair once remarked, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends upon not understanding it.”

We have a lot of work to do, don't we?

Wisconsin "Public Servants" riot against the duly elected government

 I say "Gig 'em Walky".  My only beef:  the 'public safety' (you know, cops, hipos and firemen) are exempted from the cuts.  Sorry, but they are no more on our side than the teachers or sewer workers are.  This is a political and economic blunder.  And for people are in it for themselves.  The bureaucrats with guns do not deserve more regard.  Larry Kudlow of National Review has the tale:

The Democratic/government-union days of rage in Madison, Wis., are a disgrace. Paul Ryan calls it Cairo coming to Madison. But the protesters in Egypt were pro-Democracy. The government-union protesters in Madison are anti-democracy. In fact, Democratic legislators are fleeing the state so as not to vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s budget cuts.

The teachers union is going on strike in Milwaukee and elsewhere. They ought to be fired. Think Reagan PATCO in 1981. Think Calvin Coolidge police strike in 1919.
Governor Walker is facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit, and he wants state workers to pay one-half of their pension costs and 12.6 percent of their health benefits. Currently, most state employees pay nothing for their pensions and virtually nothing for their health insurance. That’s an outrage.
Nationwide, state and local government unions have a 45 percent total-compensation advantage over their private-sector counterpart. With high-pay compensation and virtually no benefits co-pay, the politically arrogant unions are bankrupting America — which by some estimates is suffering from $3 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
Exempting police, fire, and state troopers, Governor Walker would end collective bargaining for the rest. Unions could still represent workers, but could not get pay increases above the CPI. Nor could they force employees to pay dues. And in exchange for this, Walker promises no furloughs for layoffs.
So, having lost badly in the last election, the government-union Democrats have taken to the streets. This is a European-style revolt, like those seen in Greece, France, and elsewhere. So it becomes greater than just a fiscal issue. It is becoming a law-and-order issue.
President Obama, who keeps telling us he’s a budget cutter, has taken the side of the public unions. John Boehner correctly rapped Obama’s knuckles for this. If the state of Wisconsin voters elected a Chris Christie-type governor with a Republican legislature, then it is a local states’ rights issue.
Obama should stay out. And Governor Walker should stand tall and stick to his principles. Otherwise, a nationwide revolt of state-government unions will destroy the country as well as itsfinances.

Cameron, Merkel, Sarkozy, Berlusconi and Aznar agree: "Multiculturalism has failed"

But how to get rid of it?  Without changing the incredibly anti-western way that history is taught in schools and in the media it will be impossible says R. Emmett Tyrell.  When you tell everyone that your culture sucks and is evil and has done nothing but screw over the rest of the world for 400  years, it's a little hard to reverse course and say 'never mind'.

The wages of leftist multi-culti political correctness are civilizational death.  Here's the full text of what he said:

WASHINGTON -- Now the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has joined the chorus. The other day he said, "My answer is clearly yes, it is a failure."  The "it" was multiculturalism, and he was on French national television. In pronouncing multiculturalism defunct, the French president joins German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Australia's ex-prime minister John Howard, Spain's ex-premier Jose Maria Aznar, and, most recently, British Prime Minister David Cameron in heaving a failed policy into history's dustbin. The question is, what will replace it? Or actually another question: how did multiculturalism ever become a policy of these European countries anyway?

"If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France," explained Sarkozy. "Of course," he explained, "we must all respect differences, but we do not want…a society where communities coexist side by side." Actually they have not existed side by side in recent years. Certain cultures were deferred to by the Europeans, namely Islam. Others were not. If your culture entertained cannibalism, you could not sit down to a nice leg of neighbor. Yet if your culture was Muslim, and you wanted to arrange a marriage for your daughter, authorities looked the other way. If you were the village atheist, you could not say God is a monstrosity and Allah is an impossibility. That would be a "hate crime," and you would be in hot water. On the other hand, you could say "Allah akbar," and no one was offended other than the village atheist.

Now the European leaders are giving this sort of tolerance of intolerance a second look. Prime Minister Cameron has called for a "more active, more muscular liberalism," one that requires the active promotion of democratic values, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and equal rights. In a recent speech in Munich he argued that, "under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream." The result is alienation and occasionally jihadism.

So how did the Europeans end up with multiculturalism, a multiculturalism that seems to favor Islam over other cultures? The Germans have outlawed Nazi culture. The Italians are not particularly hospitable to fascism, and as I have already pointed out the French are appalled at cannibalism and do not even have a good word for McDonald's  or Kentucky Fried Chicken. I think it started with the way they teach their history. Militarism, colonialism, and racism are all prominent ingredients of European history books, particularly British history. For that matter, American history stresses these ingredients also. I have been reading American college history texts and they present an alarmingly ugly view of the Western past.

By presenting the West as repugnant and the other civilizations as our prey, particularly during colonial days but also in modern times, we encourage such social pathologies as jihadism. President Sarkozy says he is not going to tolerate the kind of fundamentalism in France that leads ultimately to jihadism. How is he going to achieve this without calling for a fundamental reform in how French history is taught?

Then there is another matter. All the aforementioned statesmen and women are democrats and espouse democratic values, but there are fashions of thought in the West that do not like democratic values. For want of a better term, they are fashions of thought that follow political correctness. The politically correct do not like free speech. For that matter, the adherents to political correctness do not like many of the values of the West. What are Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Cameron going to do about them? They are going to be even trickier to deal with than the practitioners of jihad.

The last guy to tell her that ended up dead.

"Top NJ Court to Killer Trenton Hooker: You Have No Appeal"

This is absolutely freaking huge if anywhere near true

Morgan Stanley is predicting that Tablets will massively transcend the penetration history of laptop or cellphones as a net device.  Indeed, if they are right, the tablet will rapidly become the true web appliance.  Oh, and they will make Apple richer than Google and Microsoft combined....Food for thought.

Who is killing progressivism in California?

The 'public servant' unions, that's who.  Tim Cavenaugh of Reason explains.

The Democratic Party has folded Sacramento into one of the tightest one-party grips in contemporary American politics. In November, bucking the national trend, Democrats in California won not just the governorship but 51 Assembly seats to Republicans’ 29, 24 state Senateseats to Republicans’ 14, and every statewide office. With the passage of a referendum lowering the number of legislative votes required to approve a state budget (from a two-thirds majority to a simple majority), California is that rarest of land masses for the 2011 Democratic Party: conquered territory. State Democrats have freedom to rule virtually unchallenged by the scattered, rusticated Republicans.

As 72-year-old Jerry Brown enters his second governorship, he has an agenda to match that power, with visions even greater than those that haunted his two-term administration of the 1970s and ’80s: building 20,000 megawatts of renewable power, laying a new high-speed rail network that will connect the state’s major cities, forging a statewide infrastructure for alternative energy, hiring thousands of green employees. The new governor’s environmental agenda is ambitious, untenably expensive, and indelibly popular with voters and lawmakers.

 Yet when Brown looks out on Democrat-controlled California, he seems less like Caesar at the Rubicon than Wojciech Jaruzelski at the Gdansk Shipyard. Brown is champion of a workers’ party with monopoly control, yet all his plans are being derailed by a labor movement nobody can harness.

At press time, California was being governed under a state of economic “emergency” declared by Brown’s predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in light of a staggering $28 billion budget shortfall expected in the next 18 months. 

It gets worse. Medium-term unfunded liabilities for government employee pensions are pegged by the Legislative Analyst’s Office at $136 billion—and that’s a lowball figure. Legislative analyst Mac Taylor acknowledges in his current fiscal outlook report that the estimate leaves out billions in funding shortfalls at the pension funds for public school teachers and University of California employees. In the next 10 years, taxpayers will most likely be on the hook for somewhere between $325 billion and $500 billion. (Over the past five years, state revenues averaged $94.5 billion per year.)

It's ironic.  By giving so much power and money to the state the progressives have done nothing but facilitated the fleecing of the public fisc by people far more focused, disciplined and selfish than them.  A bit like how the Mensheviks were rolled by the more disciplined and brutal Bolsheviks.  Thus it always is with state power - once it is gathered, the most ruthless always end up with it.  Just ask Obama's Chicago Machine.

California demonstrates that  given enough time and state power the people with the most to gain eventually turn 'Good Government Liberalism' into an oxymoron.

Incentives: It's what makes things happen

Corporations would like to bring a trillion dollars home and give it to Americans....but they won't pay 350bb in corporate taxes to do so, so they're asking for a tax holiday - pay 50 to the Treasury and give the nation a shot in the arm.  Odds of the Obami doing something rational?  Nil.  Hat tip PJ Tatler

Apple has joined a consortium of companies including Cisco, Duke Energy, Oracle, and Pfizer to lobby the US government for a tax holiday that would allow corporations to bring home an estimated $1 trillion now parked in overseas accounts.

Without the tax holiday, the companies say they won’t spend their overseas earnings in the US, given that they face a 35% tax on their profits generated outside the country. Their plan asks for a temporary break that would enable them repatriate their foreign cash by paying only 5% in taxes, during a one year period.

Can you imagine this President giving up $300 billion in taxes from evil greedy corporation? Me, neither — which is why he probably won’t collect any of it. Those trillion dollars will stay parked overseas.

For America, decline is a choice

For some places like Japan and Russia, decline is inevitable.  They are spent civilizations with nowhere to go but down.  This is not true for America.  While we are struggling, we remain by far the freest, most dynamic, most creative civilization the world has ever seen.  We have let power hungry sophists persuade us to trade our birthright for a mess of pottage but like the Prodigal, all we need to return to our upward path is to turn around, admit our mistakes and return to our Father who even now is running down the road to greet us.

VDH on our ability to choose:

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Decline Is In The Mind. Indeed. Plus this: “In America’s case, these are choices, not fate. The Constitution is still here should we wish to follow it. Our ancestors left us freeways, airports and universities and a rich infrastructure. Napa Valley, Silicon Valley, and Central Valley agriculture here in bankrupt California are still sources of amazing ingenuity and enormous wealth creation. Even with 9.6% unemployment, millions rise at 6AM to go to work; millions work the night shift. So to nullify that dynamism, well, that takes work. It requires constant sloganeering about inequality. It demands massive social engineering to create huge public work forces to administer redistributive entitlements. It must entice a new privileged elite to go over to the side of crony capitalism and insider favoritism of the GE sort. . . . If we speak ‘truth’ to power and ignore the incoming salvos of ‘mean, greedy, selfish, privileged, racist, nativist, sexist, homophobe, Tea-bagger, and yokel’, decline can stop. It really is a state of mind—the choice not to brush off opportunistic rust from hard steel after a very brief rain.”

Hat tip Instapundit

Happy Stimulus Day

Two years ago the largest stimulus (about 30 times larger than the largest previous one) package in American history was passed.  It was followed by the largest capital strike since the Great Depression which pretty much cancelled out any positive effect it's admittedly venal and government focused largesse could have had.

It's a pity that the trillion dollars of debt we incurred to do the waste can't be cancelled.

Hope and Change indeed.

One would assume from his comments that Thomas Menino owned Boston, rather than being its Mayor

But of course for our fascist elite own and 'lead' is a distinction without a difference.  Boston is getting what it voted for.  Hat tip Carpe Diem.

“Wal-Mart does not suit the clientele we have in the city of Boston. I don’t need employers like that in our city.”  Boston Mayor Thomas Menino

Hope and Change

Hat tip Instapundit

AND REMEMBER, THIS IS THE ROSY SCENARIO: Washington Post: Obama Budget Plan Shows Interest Owed On National Debt Quadrupling In Next Decade. Honestly, the past couple of years have shown a degree of criminal irresponsibility on the part of our political class — and particularly of this administration and its Congressional allies — that I wouldn’t have thought possible even a few years ago, cynical as I am. It’s been a perfect storm of greed, shortsightedness, and arrogance.

.

Very good advice for all of us

"In short, he needs to start seeing people as people and not abstract representations of good and bad political figures."


A good reminder for all of us.  Hat tip Jim Geraghty

On the other, other hand, the collapse of the family has resulted in that increased output not being reflected in family prosperity

Or at least not as much.  Sigh.  Oops, I misread the chart.  Household incomes have done much worse.  This is median household income per household member, which actually doesn't look too bad, except since the late nineties, which haven't followed the historical trend of bust, new high, bust.  Once again, sigh.