I've been away for a while due to the holidays and then working my day job, and I'm trying to build up a series of posts to publish.  I plan to start posting one a day.  Keep checking back!

I watched this interview last night on Fox News, and after picking myself up off the floor, I couldn’t believe that no-one has called this out….

“I’m a free market guy, but I’m not going to let this economy crater in order to preserve the free market system.” - President George Bush, Fox News interview.

 

Huh? If you aren’t willing to let the economy take its lumps in order to correct itself, doesn’t that ultimately mean that you’re against the free market system? I mean, all economies have to undergo corrections due to inefficiencies that crop up in the system over time. The difference between the free market system and other economic systems is that free markets correct themselves, whereas other systems are never allowed to self correct.

This runs totally counter to what Reagan said in a 1975 radio speech (does anyone have some links to those BTW?), where he explained that continuing to try to “save” the economy by government spending does nothing but create inflation and leads to economic stagnation (he said this before Carter became president and we had the stagflation during his administration). When Reagan became president, he re-engaged the process of free market capitalism, and lo and behold, it worked! Why don’t we just do that again!

Having watched Obama for some time now, I've come to the conclusion that he's not a leader; rather, he's a follower and puppet, through and through.

All this leads me to believe that he's a puppet or figurehead for some of the most corrupt political elements of the Democrat party.  I think these people needed someone clean, pure, and ignorant, to put in front of the American people while they run the show behind the scenes, and they found that in Obama. 

The result of Obama's limitations will be that he he'll defer to others in his administration to tell him what to do when making the decisions and policies of the presidency.  To be sure, he has surrounded himself with some very sharp people.  However, the problem is that the brightest people often have the biggest egos.  And it takes an even stronger ego to keep them focused on the ball.  Obama doesn't have that leadership capability, so I predict that his administration will end up devolving into infighting and backstabbing. We already see the signs of this with some tensions between Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton. 

The end result of this will be an indecisive, unresponsive, and incompetent administration at a time when America can ill afford it.

Now that we've suffered such serious setbacks in the elections of '06 and '08, the question is, what do we conservatives do now?  I think that the current situation represents a great opportunity for conservatives to take back this country, if we play our cards right.  So I'll describe what I think we can do over the course of a series of posts.  

First, I think we have an opportunity to take over the media and entertainment industries.  Right now newspapers around the country are going bankrupt.  The new media is surging.  I think Hollywood will also suffer from this economic downturn.  So some really good buying opportunities may exist or soon exist for conservatives to take over these industries for pennies on the dollar. 

The media industry and Hollywood have destroyed millions of young minds over the years with their socialist propaganda.  I really believe that we won't get a long-term conservative majority until we take control of and/or eliminate the political propaganda arm of the socialists.  There's no reason for young people to be socialist minded when their parents aren't.  You've heard it said that when you're young you're liberal and you get conservative as you get older and get out into the real world.  Well, I for one don't believe that this has to be true.  If we stop the socialists from pumping our children full of their garbage, I believe the result will be a much more responsible youthful population that doesn't have to relearn the mistakes of their elders.

Think about the benefits of eliminating the “drive-by” media as Rush calls them. No longer would the socialists get free campaign advertising in the form of “objective reporting”. No longer would all of the special interest groups like PETA, and Code Pink, and the environmental movement get unquestioning coverage and promotion. The light truth will cause these socialist organizations to wither on the vine. 

It should also be noted that an important part of this process is not to take over the old media for the purposes of running it as is with a conservative point of view, rather, the old media's format will have to go away in favor of the new, internet based, media. The new media is where it’s at, but it lacks some of the resources of the old media. 

What we need to do is buy the old media, move it into a new media format, but utilize their substantial investigative resources with people who share our common values of what's right and just.  In doing this, we might have a chance of slowly educating people away from this disastrous experiment of socialism that the left has been taking us down for decades.

To paraphrase Senator Everett Dirksen…A trillion here and a trillion there – soon we’ll be talking about real money.

So far, we've pushed 6-10 trillion dollars towards bailing out (or, actually, buying) companies and stimulating the economy. So far, the economy shows no signs of being very “stimulated”. 

Through it all, it’s been difficult to understand how a president who ran as a conservative could engage in such blatantly unsound monetary policy.

Well, I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and I may have an answer.

Basically, one of the greatest long term threats our country faces, is the slow march towards socialism that we’ve been on for decades. Even when we have a Republican Congress, at best we get a one step forward, two steps back conservatism.   The problem is made worse by the fact that our education and media institutions are solidly anti-conservative, and even the elites in business and the clergy have shown a remarkable degree of deference towards self destructive socialist ideas such as global warming policy.

So how do we get real conservatism to become rooted within the institutions and elites of this country?

Perhaps, a different approach than the one we’ve been doing, would be better.

Let’s consider what the consequences of throwing all this money around is going to do to our government. Right now we’ve thrown trillions at the banking industry and are jacking up our immediate public debt obligations into the 10s of trillions of dollars. We are looking deficit spending that will exceed that which occurred in WWII, but none of the spending is going towards productive uses. It’s just going to the banks to help keep them solvent. 

At the same time, the economy is tanking and the money available for taxes is shrinking rapidly. No tax increase in the world is going to even begin to raise enough money to pay off these bills. It’s quite likely, that the result will be a bankrupt federal government. Bottom line: the government will have not choice but to radically trim it’s size and cut spending - something we conservatives have been praying for since the beginning of time.

Do you really think that an Obama administration is going to be able to rollout a trillion dollar economic stimulus program and provide health care for all? How can that be done when all of the available money is going go towards paying off trillions of dollars in debt?

So in other words, Bush, and certain Republicans in power may be thinking that the best way to kill socialism is to push it full-bore rather than continuing a futile fight against the gradual increase in social programs we’ve seen over the past 70 years or so. This way, socialism will kill the economy before people can get used to it, and thereby cause people to reject it, suddenly and utterly. 

Of course, it’s a risky proposition, in that it could create an environment that seriously hurts the people and causes them to embrace even more dangerous and radical ideas. So, we’ll have to see how this plays out (and do a LOT of praying to God).

My suspicion is that an Obama administration will actually be forced to be more conservative that any administration since before the New Deal. Obama will be forced to cut the size of government, but he won’t be willing to go all the way and provide the necessary, brutal (on the government) tax cuts and deregulation that will truly stimulate a dead economy. So he’ll have to govern from the right, and get blamed for it by liberals, as well as get blamed for the consequences of not being conservative enough. In the meantime we the people get to actually see some real reduction in the size of government. 

This will at least provide us conservatives with some relief in what may otherwise be some very difficult and unhappy times.   However, at the end of the day, I think this is a very dangerous game to play, and I think that if this scenerio is true, it's all the more important for us conservatives to be more active than ever in promoting our values of fiscal responsiblity and limited goverment.

Many of you may have seen or heard about the situation in Chicago where workers are taking over a factory that had to be shutdown suddenly because the company couldn’t afford to pay the bills.

At least this is the current news story. (I always recommend waiting two weeks before forming an opinion on the news because it takes a while for all the facts to come out. More on that idea in a future post.)

Regardless of the details surrounding the causes of this situation, my gut tells me that what we are seeing here is just the very beginning of a massive tsunami of sudden shutdowns of companies and businesses due to the credit crunch and economic slowdown. 

I hope I’m wrong, but I have a feeling that we’d better get ready….it’s going to be a very, very, bumpy ride….

I was in India on business in the recent past, and several of us went out to eat one evening.  A brief conversation regarding guns came up (I think it was related to all of the guards at our business who had guns). One of the comments that was made by one of our Indian friends was something like “I don’t see why anyone would feel the need to own a gun, they just cause trouble”. At the time, conversation quickly moved on to something else before I could respond. But should this topic come up in the future, my response would be, “Imagine how many lives would have been saved in Mumbai if citizens were allowed to carry concealed weapons and had been able to use them to defend themselves.”

For the 5^th Christmas in a row, Target stores continues its ban on Salvation Army ringers. Never mind that Target does give a substantial sum of money to the SA. The whole point of the ringers is to motivate us shoppers to freely give our OWN spare change to the poor and needy as we so choose. I like the ringers because they help spread a little bit of the Christmas spirit of giving, not just to each other, but to those who are truly needy. We’ve even got a tradition here in Northern Colorado where someone always puts a Gold coin in one of the buckets each year in secret, and the news media was always trying to figure out who it was.

But Target Stores banned the ringers in 2004 because they felt that if they allowed one group to solicit at their stores, they’d have to allow other groups as well. Never mind the fact that they are a private business and should have the right to decide who can solicit and who can’t for any reason they choose. The bottom line is that they are too spineless to fight for what’s right and stand up for what has become an American tradition. So, they just decided to banish solicitations altogether.

I’m tired of the spinelessness of corporate America. Why couldn’t Target just stand up and say that “the Salvation Army ringers are an American tradition, and we fully support the assistance they lend to the needy by allowing them the unique and sole privilege of soliciting donations at our stores.” 

So, as a result of their cowardly actions, I avoid shopping at Target if at all possible. I’ve only been to Target a couple of times over the past 5 years, and at this point, I don’t think there’s anything I would want, that Target has, that I couldn’t get from another store.

It’s up to you as to where you want to shop, but I prefer to grace Wal-Mart stores. They’re have affordable goods and services, and they have products that are just as good as Target’s, for a reasonable price. And they’ve at least had enough spine to allow the Salvation Army ringers at their doors, to spread a little sense of giving and take a little of the raw commercialism out of the Christmas. 

I heard an explanation for the government’s failure to address the illegal immigration issue on yesterday’s Glenn Beck show. I’ve heard this idea stated in the past from various other sources as well.

The idea is that our open borders policy is a quid quo pro relationship between our government and various elements of Mexican society. Basically, the Mexican government and drug cartels (and perhaps other powerful corporate interests in Mexico), keep terrorists from entering the U.S. in return for our government turning a blind eye to illegal border crossings and doing certain favors for these interests such as prosecuting two border guards who were doing their duty to protect this country, among other things.

I certainly think that this is a probably reason why our government doesn’t do anything about illegal border activity. After all, our government has done this sort of thing in the past. For example, during WWII, the government allowed criminal elements at our seaports to get away with illegal activity in exchange for making sure that no German spies were allowed to infiltrate the country.

Now, when I first heard of the Mexican-US quid pro quo idea, my thought was that if we’d just dedicate resources to shutting down illegal boarder traffic and controlling our borders, this relationship would be unnecessary. 

But one of the things I try to do is put myself in the decision makers’ shoes in Washington to understand their reasoning. I don’t believe the automatic cynical assumption that all leaders are corrupt or stupid. And so I have to ask myself that if the real reason for our border policy is this relationship, then there must be a belief within the powers that be that control of our borders to the extent that we are able to stop all terrorist traffic, may not be a viable option.

If we consider human nature, and the challenges associated with running an organization of the size needed to control the borders, it seems quite likely, that within the thousands of border patrol agents needed for such an endeavor, one or more of them could be corrupted by Mexican elements. 

Furthermore, if our government did shut down illegal border traffic, the impact to these nefarious elements would be highly destructive, such that they would have nothing to lose by making an example, and thereby help a terrorist element sneak into the US, via a weak point on the border and some help from the inside.

So the bottom line is that this does seem like a logical reason for our border policy.

But if this is the real reason for our border policy, it does nothing to address the fact that this continued illegal border activity is exerting a substantial negative influence on our society. It leads to massive amounts of illegal drugs and other illegal activity coming into the United States as well as threatening our sovereignty and our American culture.

While Mexicans and Latin Americans bring entrepreneurial spirit and a socially conservative culture, they also bring a tendency towards socialism and corruption born out of desperation within the societies they’ve left (notice how they tend to vote Democrat in overwhelming numbers). 

So all this leads me to some questions that I think we need to consider: 

What’s the solution to this threat of corrupt socialism from the south?

Is terrorism a greater threat than cultural corruption?

And, is any policy for the greater good worth the injustice of what's happened to innocent border guards who were just doing their jobs?