Virginia and New Jersey Herb Stein

View 797 Wednesday, November 06, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

 

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

 

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.

Barrack Obama, famously, 2012 Presidential Campaign.

Obama Officials In 2010: 93 Million Americans Will Be Unable To Keep Their Health Plans Under Obamacare

Federal Register

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2010-06-17/pdf/2010-14488.pdf

Generals

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/11/05/does-the-military-have-too-many-generals/military-should-trim-the-top-like-most-innovative-organizations

There are some amazingly soundly presented comments as well…

I, for one, believe that Field Grade officers (at that pay) can do the job of 50% of the flag rank (as they used to do!).

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

That would be my experience as well, but of course I spent most of my time with the military as a civilian analyst in force structure and procurement. Some generals were absolutely vital: Benny Schriever is a great example. Whether the recent purges in the top ranks are for efficiency or as part of a political strategy is not quite as clear. I note that one of the comments on this is horror at the thought that diversity may suffer.

If one considers longer time periods, it is clear that at some point in the not terribly distant future it will not be possible to simultaneously service the national debt, pay the military, pay the civilian police, pay the unions, pay the entitlement portions of Social Security (disability payments to those who have never paid into Social Security), pay veterans benefits, pay the retirement obligations of federal and state government workers, and pay the entitlements of Food Stamps: that is, will no longer be able to service the debt, provide bread and circuses , and pay the soldiers. Choices will have to be made. At that point the question of whom the Army obeys will be rather critical, as many South American republics with constitutions modeled almost word for word on the Philadelphia Constitution of 1787 have discovered. The Wikipedia discourse on the suspension of habeas corpus and how it was “enacted” by the Congress may be instructive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_Corpus_Suspension_Act_1863

Note that this is not precisely ancient history.

On Oct. 17, 2006, President Bush signed a law suspending the right of habeas corpus to persons "determined by the United States" to be an "enemy combatant" in the Global War on Terror. President Bush’s action drew severe criticism, mainly for the law’s failure to specifically designate who in the United States will determine who is and who is not an "enemy combatant." http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/rightsandfreedoms/a/habeuscorpus.htm

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop, Herb Stein told Nixon. It should be self evident that we cannot afford to service the debt, pay the soldiers, and provide increasingly expensive bread and circuses forever. At some point we will have to decide whom to pay.

The Republican establishment decided that Virginia should not be a maximum effort mission, while the labor unions and the Democrat National Committee decided it should be. The result was a preview of what is likely to happen two years from now. The RNC did not allocate much money to the Virginia campaign; this is either such gross incompetence that they no longer deserve a penny in donations, or else it is a malicious treason of the clerks as Rush Limbaugh suggests. Either way, the result is the same.

The RNC would rather stay in control of a party in “opposition” than share control while in power. We saw that in the time of Newt Gingrich when the US had actual budgetary surpluses, we saw it when they ran the only man Clinton could beat in his re-election, and we have seen it ever since.

The Libertarians decided to run a candidate as spoiler, and allowed him to be financed by false flag Democratic PACs who were pleased to have a few percent of the vote go to anti-Democrat voters. They can now be proud of having elected a Democratic operative and fund raiser as governor of a key state. They can feel proud of having accomplished the only possible outcome of their actions and we can count on them to duplicate their efforts in 2014.

If you have not read much about the lives and times of Caesar and Pompey and the end of the Roman Republic, you might find some of it interesting.

On the elections:

Jerry,

The Country Club crowd is already loudly drawing a suicidally wrong lesson from yesterday’s elections in New Jersey and Virginia. A lesson momentarily advantageous for them, but probably fatal for the party’s chances in 2016, and thus quite possibly fatal for this country’s chances of ever again being the kind of place it was founded to be.

They’re gleefully saying Chris Christie’s convincing win was because he’s a moderate, inclusive, country-club kind of a Republican, while Ken Cuccinelli’s point-and-a-half loss was because he’s a wild-eyed social conservative and thus inherently vulnerable to a patented Dem "War On Women" attack campaign. (The lesson as to who should top the ticket in

2016 is left as an exercise for us peasants.)

But the Dems DID NOT WAGE SUCH AN ATTACK on Christie. Oh, the losing candidate tried, but she never got the national Dem money or support to pay for the saturation ad barrage to make it stick. Christie cut his various deals to fend off the national Dem attack machine (embracing the President post-Sandy right before the 2012 election, splitting off the NJ Senate election so Booker and he each got their clear runs) and it worked.

Anyone who thinks he (or any Republican candidate) will get the same courtesy from the Dems in 2016 is massively deluded and riding for another Romneyesque fall. Christie’s easy win yesterday might even be viewed as a deliberate attempt to set up a Romneyfail repeat in ’16, by a sufficiently suspicious old curmudgeon. (I don’t know where we’d find someone like that.)

The truly interesting thing here is that Cucinelli campaigned hard on the ACA then damn near won. This despite the all-out Dem attack machine assault, and despite essentially being hung out to dry by the national Country Club establishment. He ended up outspent by two-to-one overall, and had no cash left for ads in the metro DC area for the final weeks of the campaign. The national Dems meanwhile were saturating the DC market with attack ads. The northern Virginia DC suburbs – suburbs that the previous Republican governor, with national party help, won – duly gave McAuliffe his narrow winning margin.

Yet Cucinelli closed from double-digits down to within a point and a half by yesterday, going from 24 points down with women statewide to 9 points down, and winning independents overall. Given a little more money, a couple more days, he probably would have won.

The lesson on the Dems’ growing vulnerability over the ACA is clear.

It’s every bad thing they do in a nutshell, and Cuccinelli’s surge started when he began explicitly campaigning on it. And the ACA issue is only going to get more powerful as millions of policies dropped or doubled becomes tens of millions in the coming year.

Less obviously, I’d say that if a "War On Women" attack campaign with a

2-to-1 funding advantage (AND an apparently Dem-sponsored Libertarian

spoiler) only produced a point-and-a-half win, the Dems may have gone to the well too often with that one. It is hard to say just how much repetition is weakening that, versus how much the emergence as a barefaced lie of "You can keep it, period" is trumping it.

Regardless, we’re due for a dose of smug advice from our self-appointed betters. I advise patience. The crucial trick will be to figure out how to avoid taking the bad advice without them once again sitting out future fights in a huff.

Porkypine

Minor correction: Cuccinelli’s loss is now by 2.45%, according to the unofficial total at http://electionresults.virginia.gov/resultsSW.aspx?type=SWR&map=CTY. I think my conclusions stand.

The point is that it is a picture of the future.

The paladins of Genghis Khan were empowered to kill tyrannical local officials out of hand.  They would be pardoned the death penalty nine times (renewable if their crimes were justified).

 

‘Eckert was sent a $6,000 bill for the medical procedures he involuntarily underwent, his lawyer says.’

<http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/11/05/man-seeks-millions-after-nm-police-force-colonoscopy-in-drug-search_print.html>

——

Police forced New Mexico scrap metal tradesman David Eckert to undergo two digital anal probes, three enema insertions and ultimately a colonoscopy after officers incorrectly assumed he was concealing drugs, according to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court on his behalf.

No drugs were found by police or doctors at the Gila Regional Medical Center in Silver City, N.M. The exhaustive search began when Eckert allegedly rolled through a stop sign in Deming, N.M., on Jan. 2, 2013.

Roland Dobbins

 

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.