VB has been away in a kind of seclusion, struggling with a follow-up piece on his April essay on manhood. He said in order to fight the Left and socialism, you have to have a unified theory as why people still cling to it. He said he felt this was the missing  piece of the puzzle in Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny, an investigation into why Statists are the way they are.
   I read a draft and it really hits home.

   In that vein, he asked me to come up with some words on the two major known Alphas in the Republican establishment; Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin.
    I write this as a reminder of something Vassar often writes, that you should never get mad at jackals for being jackals. With regard to both Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney, they (the media, the Democrat party and other stooges) behave the way do because it is in their nature to. They could no more help it than Bill Clinton could a reach-around if he came up on an intern's blind side.
    VB wrote about "manning up" in April, and writes eloquently in his upcoming piece about the "acquired" aspects of Alphaism (as opposed to the genetic).
    But both Sarah and Dick just ooze the in-born, natural scent of Alpha femininity and masculinity.
    Surely you can understand why that would drive the Katie Couric's and Matt Lauer's of the world absolutely batty.
    They can't hep it (per Ann Richards).
BC

    This not our case, but the case, and a book we recommend you get and read.
    By Fred Henderson, written around 1911 in England, it was printed by the American Socialist Party all during the FDR years, and sent out through their affiliates all over America.
    Why it's important is that it predates the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, so carries no baggage. All the world's socialists were brothers then. Easy to read, my own copy from the 1930s, so the first chapter-foreward had been amended to include comments about American political parties.
     What is also interesting is that, even in light of history as it had evolved by 1932, let alone today, so much of the theory of socialist had been disproved, i.e, socialism's tolerance for private property and liberty in general. In fact, many of the things Henderson accused capitalists of being in 1911 are now part and parcel of the Democrat Party, even proudly so.
     Still, the basic tenets, as laid out in 1911 are unchanged, at least as far at the rhetoric is concerned.
     I had though maybe we would commission a line-by-line analysis, but, hey, you do it. It's one of those books you want to buy, read, underline and tab, and keep on the bookshelf for reference. Just 140 pgs.
     Easily available on Amazon.com for around $10. Just search, "Henderson, The Case for Socialism>"
     A must read.

Bernard Chumm


    
   

    Sixty fives years ago, young men from a free England, free Canada, and free United States poured ashore onto Normandy beaches to free a France under the grip of socialist tyranny.
    Today, on the beach of a free France, socialist leaders from Canada, England and the United States gathered together to celebrate that event and commemorate the sacrifice of those thousands and thousands of young men.
    Something is very, very wrong with this picture.

Bernard Chumm

      Bill Clinton must be seething, to be out double-speaked, and so easily by Barack Obama.
      So who was the master of the forked tongue (Change we can all believe in...and like it or else?) speaking to when he apologized to American behavior? Shiites? Sunnis. Wahhabi Sunnis? (They're the snake-handling branch of Sunni Islam?) Anti-Wahhabi Sunnis? Arabs? Non-Arabs?
      And why did he meet with the same people who were friends with President Bush. Why apologize there? King Abdullah is a modernist and pro-Western, and a friend of the Bushes. If her were apologize why did he also kowtow. Kings know the kowtow and the handshake, and know that one comes from pretenders or lessers while the other comes form equals. Why did Obama come to him like a supplicant?
      And who did Obama apologize to over Iraq? The Iraqi people? The now-free Iraqi people? Of course not. But he could have been apologizing to the anti-democracy branch of Islam (predominantly Arab), who indeed believe in despots and that men should be brought before God with a whip or a razor at their neck.
      Was he apologizing to Louis Farrakhan? After all, their new Black Panthers just beat the rap in Philadelphia.
      It is clear Obama was not apologizing to pre-democracy Muslims...unless...
      ....he was really speaking about the one thread that connects all Muslims, of every nationality, region, and sect.
      Israel.
      Was Obama really apologizing for the Bush family (among othjers) professed friendship for the Jews.
      Seems like.
Bernard Chumm

      Could it be that Ms Myers suddenly is beginning to look like a true legal scholar?

Bernard Chumm

     One of the first things Vassar Bushmills told me the first time we talked was about the AIDS rate in Russia, which he first visited in 1991. He said that 80% of the AIDS cases in the old USSR at the time of the Fall was due to dirty needles...in hospitals!
     He went on to say that this is the ultimate price one pays for indifference, which is the ultimate reward of a bureaucratically-run society.
 
     With all due respect, there may be more to VB's assessment than mere indifference, for it seems, as England's health care system is proving, the standard of care also diminishes because the actual standards they teach in medical school, and later during internship, also tend to diminish when there is no longer any financial incentive for the brightest to aspire to become doctors. England may be nearing the point, if not already there, where they can no longer offer certain medical treatments because they have fewer and fewer doctors actually able to diagnose the ailments.
     If this happens in America, before you blame socialism, blame the law schools, for that is where the first leg of rigorous standards and training "succame" (Isaiah Thomas) to feminism and political correctness.
     But don't look to the University of Iowa Law School or Case Western. Look first to Harvard (oops, I mean Yale, but hey, Harvard has sent its own troop of poseur-legal minds out on the public as well)...and look to the academic career of Sonia Sotomayor.
     Eventually things may look just as bleak on the medical front, too.
     Worse, as Vassar pointed out awhile back, it may not be long before they let "engineers" who can't do a simple logarithm build our bridges.
     It's a slippery slope indeed, and it started with the law schools.
Bernard Chumm

      Like most conservatives and constitutionalists, we're in favor of taking the Sonia Sotomayor nomination to the mat.
      But once confirmed, we think she could be a win-win for the People.
      Forget her ethnicity, her sex (gender is properly used only in grammar), forget even her limited scholarship (so saith constitutional scholars). Her temperament, judicial and otherwise, trumps all those things, for once in, we will have a genyooine she-b**ch commie babe sitting up there on the bench. With an attitude! Her stupidity, if it's true, will only make Obama and his agenda look worse.
      That's a plus for us, and it will be for all to see after the Court's first session.
 
      But I find her background  interesting, for if ever there was a by-the-bootstraps, rags-to-riches, God-bless-America rise to stardom to match Clarence Thomas, it's that of Sonia Sotomayor. Could she be a David Souter in reverse, a sleeper conservative, once she no longer has to look over her shoulder?
      We doubt it.
      But no one I know has ever been able to define the hidden pathology that turns someone who made to the top the hard way, over impediments that would break a person even from far more affluent middle class starting points, into an ungrateful shrew, giving the finger to every thing that enabled her to rise. Talk about peeing on the shoulders you stand on.
      We call it the Whoopi Goldberg Effect, for it does seem to apply to women far more than men. Men tend to become grateful and become conservatives, like Thomas. But Whoopi, Roseanne Barr, Rosie O'Donnell, all who rose by the hardest route imaginable, once they made it seemed to have decided it isn't fair that other people should be allowed to take the same meritorious road to success.
      Our only guess is that maybe some women are more selfish in their achievements, not wanting anyone else to be able to succeed in the same manner. It displays a kind of competitiveness unknown to men...although we note, it is common among small males.
      It's not time to try to dissect this cardinal failing in the female race, but it is worth noting in the context of this coming Supreme Court justice.
Bernard Chumm

     It's been over twenty five years now, so I'm sure they are no longer among us, but for awhile I got to sit in a wonderful place called "Bachelor's Corner" and smiled, laughed, sang and prayed among the most congenial class of men one could ever hope to know.
     It was in an old Christian Church in Kentucky, but it wasn't really a corner, for the church is a rotunda, and our four pews were just center-back behind the pillars, underneath a single stained glass window that shed light enough to read the hymnals.
     And they weren't bachelors, either, at least the voluntary sort...except me.
     Every Sunday I would arrive thirty minutes early just to sit and listen to them spin jolly yarns about the "wahr". I'd hear about ol' Bud, and his first trip to an Italian barber in the British zone, or Slim's unfailing ability to lose his pay in a single weekend, always drawing to an inside straight. With the telling of each story, they'd all chuckle, then peer off into space with a wistful smile as the Sunday School classes would filter into the sanctuary one by one.
     It was like this every Sunday, except that one last Sunday in May, every May, when our minister, a little younger than myself, but also a son of a veteran, would simply turn the program to music. There was no sermon, no passing of the plate, just a short opening prayer, at which time, with the simple nod of his head, he'd sit down while other veterans, sitting among their families in the front, would slowly rise and move to our little "corner" as the organist began "America the Beautiful".
     The songs progressed and the congregation sang...or tried. They sang them all; "Battle Hymn of the Republic", "My Country Tis of Thee" , the old Crusader hymn "Fairest Lord Jesus", which as God is my witness, I have yet to get past the first line.
     This one Sunday, all these old friends, everyone at least twenty five years my senior, sat and sobbed in memory of ol' Bud, or Dutch or Slim, and in their grief you knew their old pards never saw America's shores again. But only they knew the rest of those stories. And I would think of my own father. It was this one Sunday those men remembered the lost friends of their youth, maybe their youth itself, and God knows who, or what else...for they had seen much to be so young.
      But I was always taken by those veterans with families, some as old as my friends themselves, but others from another era, who would bring their sons, and even grandsons, back to this assemblage, just to make sure the circle was not broken, as if to prove that this too is a part of manhood, watching one's elders cry...and knowing the why of it.

      That was then, and this is now. They're almost all gone but those pews are beginning to fill once again. I remember writing about that scene after I'd moved to Cincinnati in 1991, and noting the absence of fathers in so many congregations, and a reluctance among mothers to have their children share in the deeper understandings of this very special last Sunday in May, I tried to remind mothers then to send their children back among the walking fallen, to know what it was like to sit among men. I asked people to take this most sacred Sunday and postpone that three day holiday, the beach, the state park, the beer, the grill and visit church this one Sunday, if for nothing more than to say "Thanks" to those old fellows on the back benches.

      There is a new generation beginning to move into Bachelor Corner now. Mine. In a very short time, those pews will fill once gain...then just as suddenly begin to empty, just as they did once before...when in another fifty years, after they seem to be almost empty yet one more time they will begin to fill all over again. It's a grief we must all observe and endure...and be ever so grateful for, lest we forget.
      So, Mothers, please send your children back among the men on that last Sunday in May.
Vassar
     
    

   Vassar Bushmills just sent me a draft of a piece he'll post in a couple of days about real manhood, and how real men are being tethered, shackled and led around by dog callers by the mousiest sort of people.
   We're no fan of organized labor here at Sands, but this is directed at their leadership, who, more and more seem to be wearing skirts and heels. There's a reason for this, but I'll let VB explain in detail later on.
   Rank and file union members are men, and that's the problem. How could they allow such geldings, in both the union and management at GM, lead them around?
   Imagine how nice, how so very nice it would be if just one man stood up at GM, and spoke his mind.
   Bernard Chumm

      FDD = FDB
     That should be the new Tea Party bumper sticker. That should also be a new Republican rally banner.
     The old saw about "Big Government" is stale. "Tax and Spend" has meant less and less every year since the GOP and conservatives first began using it in the 60's. They have become vain repetitions.
     Just as the Left was able to do with Enron and AIG, those tired, old valid phrases need a face.
     Case in point: From 1.3 to 1.8 million jobs have been lost since the stimulus package was enacted...in the private sector!, i.e, jobs that produce things that produce income, that create money.
     So, did the stimulus work? Well, duh. Every state in the union except three have recorded budget shortfalls up to 35%, but all those shortfalls would have been double their size without the federal stimulus. Tens of thousands of jobs, bureaucratic jobs, were saved by the stimulus. No matter where you live, you can remember the local radio or television news that this school district, that county government or that state project was saved because of the stimulus. And they went on to say those were all blue collar front line jobs.
     Although no one has been able to count the new jobs created in the federal government they are hiring like crazy. The average federal job for this new hiring pays around $75,000, so it's safe to say they are not truck drivers and guys handling weed whackers. They are front office paper pushers and lawyers. So when Obama says "new jobs have been created", he is speaking of the public sector, where , by the way, nothing is produced, and money only disappears down a large black hole.
     Now, compare the private sector he are told to hate, and the public sector we are "advised" to revere; while President Obama has warned off private jets for corporations, his cabinet and staff have a fleet of them. He warned them corporations away from Las Vegas, but will be there soon...on his private jet. Nancy Pelosi has one just for weekend runs to the left coast. The new CAFE standards and resulting down-sizing of American automobiles over the next few years will not apply to the upper echelons of the political class, who are "authorized" big SUV's for security reasons. (Who will make these after Detroit and CAFE ends them in America? Will we be sending contract off-shore? Where's the unions?) Cabinet members are building even bigger and better homes, while  mine has lost 30% in the past year, and is unmarketable....yet has been appraised higher for tax purposes.
     As Bernard Chumm wrote last week, the differences between the Political class and the Drone class are becoming more and more stark every day.
     The problem the political class has is found the states, as expressed in California only yesterday. Even after the stimulus, there still isn't enough money. They need more. Much more. (By the way, that pit is bottomless.)
     Because the states have not yet found a way to simply barge into your home and grab you by ankles and shake all your remaining change out of your pockets, the People still have extraordinary power at the state level...and that is where the restoration has to begin.
     What the people need to do is put a face on that anti-tax rebellion at the state level. Go after the bureaucracy.
     We see the country being split generally into two camps, those 1) states that hope to deal with financial shortfalls honestly and responsibly, without becoming out-and-out step-children to Washington, and 2) states like California, Massachusetts, New York, who will move mountains to find some way to sneak into your home and take your money. If this means closing the border (state line)  so that you cannot move out of the state to avoid these tax increases, (New York has plans on the table for this already), so be it, as far as they are concerned. The federal government can provide a sort of shield for all these things to happen.
     So, it's not surreal at all  to hear rumors of secession from one camp or rumors of "armed takings" from the other. While both seem far-fetched, they really aren't, for both are imminently do-able.  Remember, had the south seceded in 1960 instead of 1860 it would never, could never, have been forced to rejoin the Union by military force. Any re-union would most likely have been along the lines laid out by MacKinley Kantor in his 1960 "If the South Had Won the Civil War."

      I am sure many of you wonder, well why can't states just cut back 30% like the rest of us?
      First answer, is "They can".
      But the real answer is one word: Bureaucracy, that's why.
      In fact, it would be easy to cut 30% from any state budget and still hold onto the basic services and functions of government. Just don't ask them to decide which 30%. That's the problem with current anti-Tax Tea Party slogans. They are far too broad. If you don't put a face on it, the government will and that face will be carrying out some necessary service the taxpayer relies on, i.e, the taxpayer will be punished. After the famous Prop 13-Jarvis Amendment in California that cut the legislature's access to property taxes, the state just turned around and cut essential services, especially in public safety (cops, fire fighting). That'll teach 'em.
      And if they can't beat you with pain, they will with guilt, i.e., a cut in services to those who do not pay taxes, i.e, the poor or unemployed. That is a lie too, as there is not a single program at the state of federal level that does not take from 45%-70% of tax dollars to pay for bureaucratic overhead...most of which is waste. So 50% of 50% (25%) minimum of every welfare program can be cut without disrupting services. The guilt trip is a canard.
      If you're going to put a face on it, put an unpleasant, repugnant face. Hell, you see them everyday. Every central post office has a bucket full of them. So do most state school boards. Or go to Sacramento or Lincoln or Salem and get a state directory and just visit the actual office of some of the more obscure departments and divisions. Go inside and ask for a mission statement. "Whattaya'll do here?" Peep inside the inner offices, if the doors are open. Note the decor. Get a name. Go to the parking lot and find the reserved parking sign. Note the car...usually a Beamer or Volvo, but lately Lexus. (Don't bother looking for an ice-pick, you are being watched.)
      You also can pick this person out of crowd in nearby restaurants and shops...usually doing office hours. It's easy to pick out a (UB) useless bureaucrat, for they are almost always overdressed in clothes no one who actually works for a living would ever try to work in, and have a carriage of false distinction that always reminded me just a little of the first time my sister tried to walk in high heels. The further you move down the line, from federal GS-16's to state to state school boards, the more they remind you of reformed whores...or pimps....or somebody's wife's cousin.
       As I said, they are everywhere, making up at least 10% of government workforces, top to bottom.
       But they are immune unless you (we, the people) put a target on their backs....for the only time they actually get off their couch and go to work is when there is a budget- or force-reduction in the works. That is when you can hear "unfairness", "prejudice" "sexism", "homophobia", or "racism" echoing up and down the hallways and the phones start ringing to Channel 6 of the local "Thunderstorm".
       In the end, either the proposed cutbacks are derailed or detoured, or some poor schlub emptying bed pans at the state mental facility loses his job. It's always Front Office versus Front Lines.
       Note to Tea Parties:
       If you want to squeeze these pimples the government has put on your backs, if you want to clean them and apply a preventative ointment (which always ends with the elected officials), you must point to them yourself. "This one, no not that one, this one!"
       We believe every state should have to debate every year a bill to reduce the state workforce (not budget, but workforce) by 25%, and insist on a commission in which a majority are elected by the citizens from their districts. No lawyers allowed.
       We also are working on an amendment to the Constitution that prohibits the federal government to count things, any things, except as provided for in the Constitution (the census) and a few legislatively mandated (super-majority) areas (we're making a list). This would include barring the government from hiring others, such as universities, unions or Acorn to do their counting for them.
       This will cut every department in government, all the way down to county health offices, byt about 15%.
       (If this works, we may move onto baning measuring stuff next.)
       Note to the GOP:
       If you want to raise a flag around which, even by 2010, 50% of all democrats who are not otherwise employed by the government will rush to your high ground, just put a face and name, and a bulls-eye, on the bureaucracy.
       But don't tarry. By 2016 the bureaucrats and their clients may very well outnumber you.
Robert Hightower
Bureaucracy Buster for the Sands Institute
   

    

     Joe did it again, only this time, it could be a crime. An impeachable event.
     So, what does Chief White Halfoat do?
     First, I'm sure, wherever that bunker is, Joe ain't getting in. The next attack, he'll be rushed away to an undisclosed Burger King.
     1) They can take away his clearance, which, for vice-presidents, will be a first.
     2) They can impeach him, which also will be a first.
     3) Or, he can resign, which will only be a second.

      But you see, that pushes the Chief's other problem to the front burner, for the last thing OB-1 wants is for Nancy Pelosi to move up a notch.
      As long there will be chicken dinners, there will be a dais for Joe to stick his foot in once again, so it's just a matter of time...so we assume the clock is surely ticking on Miss Queen Bee.
     30 days, tops. Every day past that hurts the Chief.
   Blakely

     A regular commenter to this site put me in mind of the fact that Nancy Pelosi cannot survive. Where's the political cartoonist, with Obama posed a Cheyenne chief, and her scalp on his lodgepole? 
     Vassar Bushmills called this one, back in November, in his "Life Under Socialism" series, when he wrote that there would be clashes between the hot-tub socialists and the socialists with an edge, and "the edge" would win.
     There are several benefits to this outcome for Obama. First, it removes an ugly pimple that could easily become a festering cyst. The Queen Bee was never team player as "The Edge" defined it. Second, it sends a message to other Congressional leaders just how easy taking scalps really is...when it is the scalp you're actually looking for. (Too bad the GOP never learned this.) Third, and maybe most importantly, the Fair Nancy's demise can serve as yet another feint, for she is genunely disliked in a big way in both conservative circles and most of Christendom. While we dance on her ashes, they will continue to do what they do best under the cover of jubilation.
    Outside a few tax breaks in Samoa, nothing really will change, except now it will be done much less clumsily, with no more arrogance aforethought.
    We will never come to miss that old broad. We'll all be glad that Nancy Pelosi finally got hers, but after that, quickly, I hope, some deep reflection about what is still to be done.
Bernard Chumm

     As Moses Sands often said (he's been quoted almost as much as Aquinas on this subject), when someone says something that is palpably, provably false, it could be due to one of three reasons. Lying is only one.
     In the Prom-Date-From-Hell's defense, she may not ever have understood what she was seeing and hearing at those CIA briefings (Stupidity), or as is the case even with me that one Sunday a year when my minister has to preach on stewardship, she simply was bored to tears (Incompetence), and found herself drifting off into daydreams about landing a 2-pound rainbow on a Royal Coachman with a 1-pound tippet. This sort of incompetence is malfeasance as she has betrayed both her constituents and her party, and is abetted by a kind of narcissism where one does spend a lot of time preening in front of an imaginary mirror, when the mind i not otherwise occupied with anything interesting. Simply put, she'd rather have been somewhere else.
    It's not for me to say which of the three is the actual case. I just don't think we should go around damning the poor lady for being a liar, when she could be very, very much worse.
Bernard Chumm

      In several earlier posts we've mentioned that elected officials need to fear the people or they will never keep their oaths and promises.
      But what about the un-elected bureaucrats and other paper-hangers and factotums for the political class? They don't answer to the people...really.
      Well, in a way they do, and there is plenty of precedence for just how this little known fact is proved.
      Ostensibly, under our constitutional framework, public bureaucrats work for The People, the taxpayers who pay their salaries, but in truth, everyone knows they don't. In a perfectly managed government structure there is supposed to be a trickle-down fear, since the people frighten the elected representatives, who in turn frighten the bureaucrats, who get their money and their missions through them.
      But that hasn't been the case in most of America since the Great Society. It never was in Cleveland.
      Under socialism, as we are about to find out, even the pretense of working for or serving The People is no more. The charade is over, bureaucrats work for the State, which, under socialism is a completely different, and much higher, organism than it ever was under democracy.
      If you think this is a big weight off the shoulders of bureaucrats, being able to shed the hypocrisy of pretending to give a damn about The People...it is. But therein lies a danger, for that safety net works only so long as the socialists stay in power.
      What we learned inside the old Soviet bloc is that bureaucracy will grow even more quickly and become more intimate in the daily lives of The People once in total control. While every communist office and workplace had photos of the national and state leadership hanging on wall, or on billboards, or on buses, who people feared (and hated), only in an indirect sort of a way, and everyone whispered in hushed tones assuming secret police, the Stasi, or their snitches, were everywhere listening in...the face of socialism they knew most intimately, and hated most were those little weasels-of-people assigned to run their neighborhoods and apartment complexes, or running every little local office for every state department every citizen had to visit once or twice a year to get a signature here, or a stamp there for no discernible reason, other than to keep count...of something. It was always "bring these papers, or those papers", and it was usually two, maybe three trips, before you brought the right papers the first time. Like Caesar Augustus, they were always counting something.
       When communism fell in the early 90's a few leaders (Ceausescu of Romania) were hauled out and shot, a few more were tried and imprisoned. Some were exiled. Almost all were shunned and ostracized.
       But thousands upon thousands of those petty up-close-and-personal bureaucrats who had made life miserable for the millions of their drones simply disappeared. Some were found hanged, or shot, but most simply disappeared. When I first visited the Balkans in the mid-90s, families were still looking for lost members. It was much worse in Russia, where nameless people learned how to make people become a mere "statistic" many years before.
       A lot of scores had been settled. But there was no lament.
       Yes, Virginia, even in America, bureaucrats have much to fear...if they behave as bureaucrats without a tether.

Vassar Bushmills
     
 

   Under communism there were only two classes, the political class and the masses. The political class was further broken down into Leadership and Nomenklatura.
   But the coming class structure in America will be four:
   1) The Political class, delineated pretty much as described above;
   2) A License class, i.e., businesses that have been hand-selected by the Political class to carry on business in the marketplace on behalf of the Political class;
   3) The Drone class, namely, the masses who work, and feed the ruling political class, approximately 60% of population;
   4) and finally, the Client class, who do no work, but live off the largesse of the state, approximately 20% of the population

   This structure is remarkably similar to a fascist, not communist, class structure, except for the last category.
   Expect to see that one disappear first.
Bernard Chumm