The Savage Republican

To our Readers and Friends

Nine months ago, I was invited (by my friend Savage Republican) to embark on an adventure that I happily accepted. That adventure was to join him here at Savage Republican blog.

I would like to take the time to give my thanks to all of you: to Savage Republican and Amendment X for asking me to join you on this adventure. To Duane at Radio Blogger, a big thank you for the opportunity (via the Blog of the Week competition) to gain new friends and readers. To our readers, thank you for making us part of your lives and thank you for the votes to make Savage Republican co-Blog of the Week (with our new friend Andy at Residual Forces). To our friends in the Armed Forces, I thank you for your service and sacrifice and I pray for your safety and swift return home. To my friends in Louisiana and Mississippi, I pray that next year is much quieter (from a storm standpoint) and I pray for your swift recovery from the storms this year.

To all of I you, I wish the happiest of holidays. Merry Christmas, Happy Channukah and Happy New Year to all. 2006 is going to be a busy year, with the mid-term elections on the wing. I wish you all health, happiness and much joy (and maybe even a new Republican Senator for us in Minnesota?) for 2006.

Has the American Press become "Baghdad" Rose?

Mark Simone, of WABC radio, covered something interesting on his show yesterday. He was talking about the broadcasts of "Tokyo Rose". Tokyo Rose (for those who are products of the public school system) is an amalgam of 5 female broadcasters (on Japanese Radio) whose propaganda broadcasts were specifically designed to demoralize the Allied forces in the Asian Theater. Mr. Simone (according to a friend of mine who listened to the broadcast) mentioned that the writers of these broadcasts did studies (on POW's?) designed to determine what would have the most adverse effect on our troops. Their top 3???

1. The president lied to get the US into the war
2. The real reason the president took the US to war was to profit large corporations
3. The war is not winnable [for the US]

Does any of this sound familiar dear readers?????

No Virginia, there is no Santa Clause...

This is exactly what most parents have against the "teaching establishment"! A substitute teacher in the Lickdale (PA) public schools decided that it was her duty to tell her class of first graders that Santa Clause didn't exist.

Theresa Farrisi stood in for (Jamey) Schaeffer’s regular music teacher one day last week. One of her assignments was to read Clement C. Moore’s famous poem, “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” to a first-grade class at Lickdale Elementary School.
“The poem has great literary value, but it goes against my conscience to teach something which I know to be false to children, who are impressionable,” said Farrisi, 43, of Myerstown. “It’s a story. I taught it as a story. There’s no real person called Santa Claus living at the North Pole.”

Well you'd better get out of teaching now, Ms. Farrisi. If you have such a problem teaching this "false" story to children, there will come a time in your teaching career, when you will have to teach on such fictional works as Aesop's Fables, The Brothers Grimm, Romeo and Juliette, The Odessy and the Illiad. Part of teaching is teaching children about fictional stories (like A Visit from St. Nicholas) and teaching them about real people (like our Presidents and other news makers).

Schaeffer got off the school bus later that day, dragging her backpack in the mud, tears in her angry little eyes.
“She yelled at me, ‘Why did you lie?’” recalled Jamey’s mother, Elizabeth. “‘Why didn’t you tell me Santa Claus died?’”
Elizabeth Schaeffer said she was appalled by Farrisi’s bluntness.

I hope you are happy Ms. Farrisi....you're actions interfered in this parent's relationship with her child. Pray that no one ever does this to you and your children (should you have any).

What's worse is that now, Ms. Farrisi is trying to cover her tracks - she knows she was wrong!

“I did not tell the students Santa Claus was dead,” she explained. “I said there was a man named Nickolas of Myrna who died in 343 A.D., upon whom the Santa Claus myth (is based).”

However the kids in the class tell a different story...

“The teacher stopped reading and told us no one comes down the chimney,” Jamey said, curling into a ball on the couch, bracing her chin on her knees, her voice shrinking away like melting ice cream. “She said our parents buy the presents, not Santa.”

Here is a news flash for all of you teachers out there! Your role (in the parent/teacher/child triumverate) is to partner with, not usurp, the parents authority. You are to teach my child reading, writing, science and math! If my child believes in Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Buddah, Allah Jesus Christ or whomever - it is not your job to interject YOUR VALUE SYSTEM into the way I am raising my child! It is not your business to tell my child that his/her beliefs are "a myth".

Ms Farrisi, you stepped way over the line here. It is not your place to override the parents of these children! You owe the parents of these students a big apology.

I hope you are happy, Ms. Farrisi. You ruined this Christmas for these children. I hope you sleep with a clean conscience tonight!

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, the King has no clothes...oh, and you're broke!

I came across this article reading from World Net Daily Devvy Kidd's column . Kidd makes the point that I've made for years that taking money from you to give to them is sinful, wrong , evil and immoral. That if the Feds (and states) left us alone, the American people, the most generous people in history, would give to the Salvation Armies of the world that do a FAR better and moral job of caring for the poor than the Feds or states haver ever or could ever accomplish. EVER! Another article about private vs. government charity here and especially here , which is real vs. false, destructive charity.
But, the article I refer to is one that Dr. Walter E. Williams has also written about in this article . The real deficit is not $8,000,000,000,000 . It's so large that estimates run from a low of $37,000,000,000,000 to a high of $75,000,000,000,000. And Social Security is a mere percentage. Medicare and Medicaid are the monsters that will sink us all.And the new Medicare Prescription Drug Act will add another $5-7,000,000,000,000 to that during my lifetime.
All Congressmen (Reps and Senators), all have access to this information. There will be no surprise. It's coming for sure. We've had a few opportunities to stop this. We may, repeat MAY have just one more.
We do have a few lessons from history. After the French Revolution there was an currency (economic) crisis. There was at least one currency exchange. It didn't work. There came a man who promised to end this crisis. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte.
After WWI the huge war reparations were crushing Germany. The government solution? Print more deutsche marks. Inflate their way out of the debt. And inflation reigned down on all the citizens. One incident I read was that a man in Germany had saved enough to send his son to the university. Four full years. When the inflation hit, all his son's college fund could buy was just one meal when he was ready to go to college.
And government is not the solution.That's like asking Ted Bundy to run a dating service.
If you think for a moment that governemnt is the answer, see how the Feds took a recession in 1929 and turned it into a depression here . Oh, and by the way, the same article shows how the Feds brought about the original market correction (called Black Monday, 28 October, 1929). It's a complete read, but well worth the time to set history straight.

And the reason I buy malts is...(or The Republic morphs into a democracy)

I've mentioned Dr. Walter E. Williams many times before (The E. being quite important). He is an economics professor at George Mason University. He has a talent to take complex economic principles and make them fairly simple and understandable.
In his recent article (The consumer rip-off ) he started me thinking about a conversation I had with my deeply committed socialist buddy (his answer to the disaster and economic tsunami called Social Security? An estate tax at 100%. He hasn't come up with a solution to its dwarfing counterpart Medicare...and now its bastard brother the Prescription Drug Act). Anyhow, Dr. Williams talks about the economic concept of large but narrowly defined benefits vs. small but largely dispersed costs. He uses sugar and dairy interests to show that a few people (sugar beet growers and dairy farmers) get huge benefits from price controls and tariffs but we, the consumers, pay more for the products, but not enough for us to organize and change the law. But read the article. He does a much better job.
So, here we have two special interest groups. Groups that work against the interests of you and me. We have to counter with a group that will look out for our interests that will counter these specific assemblages.Which brings me back to my socialist friend.
Painting the walls in his garage a few years ago, we started talking about the Constitution. His take, of course,is that the Constitution is a living document. That the Founders could never have predicted or seen an economy like this, or whatever. I said that the Constitution was never about economics but was about the hearts of men. It was meant to counter the evil tendency of men to accumulate and concentrate power.
We talked about the most infamous tyrants of history (He was shocked when I told him that Stalin killed more people than Hitler. And that 8,000,000 Ukrainians starved to death thanks to the failure of central planning (read concentrated power) under Stalin. And Mao Tse Tung killed more then Stalin and Hitler together, including starving to death 20,000,000 Chinese in the failed Great Leap Forward-central planning). I then asked what did Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Mohmar Khadafi have in common? Centralized, concentrated power. And he had to agree. I then pointed out that he made the comment that we had to get corporations out of government. I said that was simple...get government out of corporations so they don't have to try to protect their interests.

I then asked him a cogent question: Why did people and organizations contribute money to Congressional and Presidential candidates? His answer was that they were trying to buy influence. I asked why were these people and groups trying to buy influence. He responded that they wanted certain things or wanted to change or keep certain programs, and so on and so forth.

I said no, that's not the reason. The reason that these people and groups were trying to buy influence was that there was influence to be bought. That the 10th Amendment was there to make sure that there was NO influence to be bought. That a Congressman could only say to a potential influence buyer "Well, I'll take your campaign contribution, but of course you know that my Oath of Office ONLY allows me to do what's outlined in Article 1, section 8. No dairy price fixing, no sugar tariffs, no honey subsidy, no agriculture subsidies, no welfare payments of any kind, personal or corporate. No corporate regulations, no EEOC, no OSHA, no FDIC, no FICA. So, thank you, with that understanding!" Yah, like that will ever happen. Except with Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas. Read about him here and his columns here ). Dr. Paul is the ONLY Congressman who filters all bills through two layers: Is it Constitutional (meaning he honors his oath of office) and then does it conform to my campaign promises to my constituents?

And so, we now have competing interests that reflect the will of the majority, a democracy, with no Constitutional control. Where the 2nd Amendment is quite clear, I need to ask the government for permission to defend myself. Where the Constitution is quite clear that all taxes are to be apportioned, we have an unConstitutional Karl Marx tax scheme (and read about a REAL shocker concerning the Federal Income Tax read here ( go down to "The Theory" and click on the link "Read the news article..."!). Private property is not private. Their bills and our counter bills and their guys change that bill...and it all becomes jury-rigged in a functional democracy where we constructed to be a constitutional republic.

So, why do I buy malts? Because there are malts to buy because there is a free market for malt suppliers and buyers. And I like them.

However, I buy these malts legally...at least for now.

Separation of Church and State Redux

I received an interesting email today that dovetails into post here regarding the ACLU's perpetual lawsuits against the 10 Commandments. Did you know that each state constitution acknowledges God? That's right....every single state constitution makes some reference to God, thanking God for His blessings and His grace and His mercy....Don't believe me? Try this....

California 1879, Preamble. We, the People of the State of California, grateful to Almighty God for our freedom...

Connecticut 1818, Preamble. The People of Connecticut, acknowledging with gratitude the good Providence of God in permitting them to enjoy...

Illinois 1870, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Illinois, grateful to Almighty God for the civil, political and religious liberty which He hath so long permitted us to enjoy and looking to Him for a blessing on our endeavors...

Maryland 1776, Preamble. We, the people of the state of Maryland, grateful to Almighty God for our civil and religious liberty...

New York 1846, Preamble. We, the people of the State of New York, grateful to Almighty God for our freedom,in order to secure its blessings...

Pennsylvania 1776, Preamble. We, the people of Pennsylvania, grateful to Almighty God for the blessings of civil and religious liberty, and humbly invoking His guidance.

and finally our very own Minnesota, 1857, Preamble. We, the people of theState of Minnesota, grateful to God for our civil and religious liberty, and desiring to perpetuate its blessings...

Notice a pattern? All of the states I listed as examples are some of the BLUEST of the blue states and some have been around since the beginning of the country! This, along with the writings of our founding fathers tell us what the ACLU and their supporters choose to ignore...that this country was indeed founded on a Judeo/Christian faith. One thing is abundantly clear to me after reading this. We, the people, in order to maintain this perfect union, need to make sure that we do not allow the ACLU to write God out of our history!

Large government-writ small

Tip O'Neill (former Speaker of the House, now deceased) once said "All politics are local." Oh, how true!
One of my friends is heavily involved in politics in Prior Lake. In the run-up to the last election he and others organized a citizens group that was deeply concerned that the local politicos seemed to have forgotten that they were elected to govern with and for the people, not rule over them. A city hall with a lunch room costing nearly $500,000- an edifice to the magnificance of the reigning elected was one item that stood out to me. The huge run-up in tax revenues (that the locals blame on anything, everyone else save them). It sounded SO much like what happens in St. Paul and Wash.D.C.
My friend told me that when property values exploded (as they are want to do in Scott County) the then city council and mayor just reduced the mil rate so that even with an increase in property values the tax payer didn't pay any more in taxes as the tax rate was cut. Now, that's MY idea of governing wisely. Does anyone remember the huge state surpluses (aka overtaxed) in the late 90's? And Jason Lewis warned us that the state would create new programs to soak up all that extra money. And it was so.And the citizens would then be doubly taxed as they didn't get their money back and would now have to pay to keep ALL those extra programs up and running as we know that programs are never cut nor ever eliminated. And we then had the recent deficits. We have never, ever had a tax problem locally, state-wide or nationally. We have always had a spending problem. We have never, ever, nor will we ever be undertaxed. Ever. Unless you're a left wing weenie. And then everyone else, especially the "rich", are all certainly undertaxed! And then all tax cuts are too large and never warranted and no tax is ever big enough.
And so it will be with all these increased revenues from higher property values. My Mom lives in Hennepin County. And I calculated that she will pay ANOTHER $1,000 in property taxes. She's a widow, in her late 70's. All of her children have been out of government schools for 35 years. And her city built a new city hall reffered to as "The Taj Mahal".
Plus, her city council also passed a smoking ban...and restaurants have been laying off employess ever since. The local school district once had a parking place where I started to park, but it was reserved for the the "Diversity Coordinator".
And do you think, for a moment, that my Mom's city council, or any other city council, will not take the chance to grab more of their citizens' money? Does Dracula ever pass up an exposed neck?
Large government, writ small.
Oh, and by the way, the Taj Mahal is NOT a palace or a residence. It's a tomb. A mausoleum.
Rather fitting, I'd say.

Wile E. Coyote:Genius. And counsleor to Howard Dean and Sen. Reid

I'm a huge Warner Bros. cartoon fan (1956 and earlier only).
So, when I got the following from the WSJ, I read it with great amusement:

Blogger John Hinderaker likened the Dems to Wile E. Coyote, the hapless vulpine Looney Tune whose elaborate schemes to catch the Road Runner always blow up in his face. As the Looney Tunes Web site notes, "Wile E.'s ineptitude, possibly a by-product of his distracted obsession with catching Road Runner, is compounded only by the Acme company's products--which may work for other customers, but seem never to work for Wile E., who repeatedly risks life and limb counting on their effectiveness."

Hinderaker's observation brought a fascinating response from reader Stephen Fossati:

For the better part of ten years I had the privilege of working closely with Wile's creator Chuck Jones and in fact produced and co-wrote Chuck's final Roadrunner cartoon in 1994, so I would humbly offer that I am a fair authority on said erstwhile coyote.

Having spoken with Chuck about Wile more times than I can count, I can say with great conviction that your suggestion that the Murtha, Dean, Kerry, Boxer et al, position with regards to the GWOT and the war in Iraq, is appropriately analogous to Wile and to his inumerable [sic], ill-considered and near fatally-flawed plans to catch the Roadrunner--a good many of which resulted in him falling off of a cliff.

Chuck defined Wile in the words of George Santayana who said: "A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim." Assuming that the Dems' aims are to regain control of the House, the Senate and the White House and based upon their seemingly fevered attempts to discredit President Bush by mis-representing the success of the war, advocating for our withdrawal/surrender, and purposefully undermining our efforts/abilities to wage war on an enemy unlike any we have faced before, I think it's fair to say that the Democrats clearly meet Santayana's definition of a fanatic. And since it is Santayana's definition of a fanatic with which Wile's own creator described him, I would conclude that your comparison of our luckless, over-zealous and too-clever-by-half coyote to the leaders of the Democratic party, is not only correct but painfully (for the Dems), astute.

Hinderaker adds: "Remember how Wile viewed even his misadventures as evidence of his superior intellect?" He reproduces a picture of the not-so-wily Wile E. holding a sign identifying himself as a GENIUS. It reminds us of a DemocraticUnderground post we quoted in 2003:

I would dare to assume that most of us here are in the upper 1%-20% of the population intelligence-wise. We must come to the realization that the majority of the population is in the lower 80% to 99% percent of the bell-curve. WE are not the norm. The Republicans understand that the average American is not very bright. They cater and pander to the masses. The Democratic Party tries to appeal to the population about "issues" that these people just don't understand.

As we noted then, these guys think it an impressive act of cognition to "come to the realization" that the majority of Americans are below the 80th percentile. We like the way that rolls out: Wile (D.) Coyote, Super Genius!

Merry Christmas ALCU!

Well Scrooge visited the ACLU today, in the form of a ruling from the 6th US Court of Appeals. The court was ruling on a case that the ACLU had brought against Mercer County KY. The ruling (reported here) was a complete repudiation of the ACLU and the supposed "separation of church and state". In writing for the 3-0 majority, Judge Richard Suhrheinrich said the ACLU's "repeated reference 'to the separation of church and state' ... has grown tiresome. The First Amendment does not demand a wall of separation between church and state." Judge Suhrheinrich also wrote that a reasonable person would appreciate the role that religion played as appropriate and that "The ACLU, an organization whose mission is 'to ensure that ... the government [is kept] out of the religion business,' does not embody the reasonable person."

The display in question, featured a copy of the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and other historical documents, along with the 10 Commandments. Displays such as this have long been considered "acceptable" displays in a government setting.

Kudos to American Center for Law and Justice and their attorneys for fighting for the civil rights of a group of Americans that the ACLU would just as soon strip of their rights. While I have no doubt that this will go before the Supreme Court (2 Appeals Courts have now ruled in favor of this kind of display while one has ruled against it), it is nice to see someone fighting the good fight!

How important is local politics?

Most blogs seem to cover national and maybe state wide politics, but the insanity that pervades national politics can be found even down to the city level. Case in point....

The City Council of Prior Lake Minnesota has been, for the last year or so, embroiled in controversy after controversy. It was so bad, that in the last city wide election, all incumbants running for re-election were defeated at the polls. The newest controversy centers around a decision to back the local indian tribe putting several hundred acres of land into "trust" meaning the land is taken off of the public tax rolls. This led to some rather heated discussions in the letters to the editor section of the local paper (which is where yours truly heard about the brouhaha). The letters lead one city council member to write in to try to defend their vote. Now the letter was your standard "we felt our actions were in the best interests of the city", but what struck me as out of line was when the council member said that the disagreement was serving as a "thin veil of the real underlying problem of racism and socio-economic bias"! WHOA!!!! Well, that has set the local population abuzz anew and I have to agree. Since when does a disagreement over property taxes become a "racial" issue?

This is still playing out and probably will continue to do so until the new city council is seated next month. Meanwhile, you have to ask yourself, how are we ever going to become a "colorblind" society if politicians on all levels continue to play the "race card"every time there is a policy disagreement!

Less than 2.1 means you die...

Though I don't always agree with Pat Buchanan, he wrote a well thought out book "The Death of the West" where he shows that what is happening in Europe is now on our shores.
For a population to maintain itself at stasis it must have a birthrate of 2.1 children. Europe is far below that which means the population is shrinking. And therefore, to maintain all the government entitlement programs Europe has allowed immigrant workers from Muslim countries. These immigrants have not been assimilated, they have kept their own culture, language,identity. And as such you have riots in Paris. This is the end result of multi-culturalism. Human Events has a short but on point article on European multiculturalist tendencies. And the last two paragraphs point out that we are Europe in 40 years.
Victor Davis Hanson is one of my favorite columnists, authors. He is an expert on warfare. He had a three hour interview with Hugh Hewitt on the history of warfare starting with the ancients. He emphasized that the death of the Roman Republic started from within. That the Republic endured because there was common thought,beliefs, culture, language and willingness throughout the Republic. That the common thought,beliefs and culture also was willing to shed blood for the Republic, to fight the enemies of the Republic "over there".That the Republic started to die when the Republic started to allow multiculturalism and the fracturing of commonly held beliefs within and about the Republic.
And I see the same here in America. A soccer game at the Los Angeles Colesium has Mexican flags throughout and the Mexican national anthem is sung. The Star Bangled Banner is booed. When I'm an election judge I see voting signs in at least five different languages.
And the American birth rate in 2003, for the first time in 30 years, was finally at the breakeven level.
And all this is fruit from the left wing tree.

This just in: "New Study Shows Sun Rises in East!"

And I'm supposed to be surprised to read this?
I'm reminded of the quote from a Washington D.C. reporter" How did Reagan win? I don't know anyone who voted for him!"

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Saturday, December 24, 2005