Progressive Paradise Lost

It’s a progressive paradise.
Public employees get 30 vacation days a year. Anyone who works over eight hours in a day gets paid time-and-a-half. Employees have strong rights.
The minimum wage is high: 77 percent of the median wage.Environmental regulations are settled beyond the pressure of local economic interests. The forests and mountains are pristine destinations for ecotourism.


Read more at The Daily Signal Read More......

Progressives Tug-of-War Fuels Dems' Identity Crisis

Dana Haswell Corbin had no idea she was bucking conventional political wisdom when she wore her pale blue “Bernie for President” T-shirt months before a primary vote in any state, let alone her native Pennsylvania.
Conventional wisdom dictates she is supposed to like Hillary Clinton's “unique and historic candidacy” as a woman on the cusp of walking away with the Democrats' nomination. But Corbin says she likes Bernie Sanders, Vermont's “democratic socialist” U.S. senator, because of what she describes as his frank talk and his authentic voice on progressive issues.


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The Big Idea: California Is So Over

California has met the future, and it really doesn’t work. As the mounting panic surrounding the drought suggests, the Golden State, once renowned for meeting human and geographic challenges, is losing its ability to cope with crises. As a result, the great American land of opportunity is devolving into something that resembles feudalism, a society dominated by rich and poor, with little opportunity for upward mobility for the state’s middle- and working classes.


Read more at the Daily Beast Read More......

Townhall: The Left is Killing King’s Dream

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963 | AP Photo

By Michael Schaus - The spectacle of the pro-Obama rally yesterday, disguised insufficiently as a tribute to one of America’s civil rights heroes, was rife with an undercurrent of unintentional irony. After all, it was the Democrat Party that led the Confederacy in the Civil War, opposed the civil rights legislation throughout the 20th Century, and used the federal government to intimidate would-be civil rights activists. The event, however, did awaken a renewed interest in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. for many Americans. One line, above all else, from his 1963 Address at the Lincoln Memorial speaks today as a testament to Liberalism’s callous, and repeated, failings in the black community.

Read more at Townhall.com... Read More......

Schadenfreude, Michigan, and Mitt's Big Fumble

In all honesty, I am having a hard time not feeling a touch of schadenfreude as the abject disaster of the once great city of Detroit becomes obvious. I'm not defending that response -- and I do have other emotions as well -- I'm just being honest. You probably feel it too. After all, we both know that people in the Motor City, and the state of Michigan in fact, have brought this doom on themselves with their very liberal ballot habits of the past 60 years. Conservatives have warned them about it for at least several decades, to no avail. Hell, even a casual viewing of Gran Torino or the show Hardcore Pawn tells the story's inevitable end. This is a colossal "we told you so" moment -- and something Biblical about reaping and sowing comes to mind.

Read more at the American Thinker Read More......

The Downfall of Detroit

It took only six decades of “progressive” policies to bring a great city to its knees.  By the time Detroit declared bankruptcy, Americans were so inured to the throbbing dirge of Motown’s Greatest Hits — 40 percent of its streetlamps don’t work; 210 of its 317 public parks have been permanently closed; it takes an hour for police to respond to a 9-1-1 call; only a third of its ambulances are driveable; one-third of the city has been abandoned; the local realtor offers houses on sale for a buck and still finds no takers; etc., etc. — Americans were so inured that the formal confirmation of a great city’s downfall was greeted with little more than a fatalistic shrug.  But it shouldn’t be. To achieve this level of devastation, you usually have to be invaded by a foreign power. In the War of 1812, when Detroit was taken by a remarkably small number of British troops without a shot being fired, Michigan’s Governor Hull was said to have been panicked into surrender after drinking heavily. Two centuries later, after an almighty 50-year bender, the city surrendered to itself.

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Borg Queen. She is coming for your children

It is a rare thing when human events run ahead of science-fiction predictions. Usually, we’re years behind: According to George Orwell, we should have been living under the boot heel of a high-tech fascist panopticon state since the Reagan administration, while Philip K. Dick had cyborgs digging away as extraplanetary miners during the first Clinton term. But we are running well ahead of Star Trek: According to canonical sources, we were not supposed to encounter the Borg until sometime in the ’60s — the 2360s — but here is Melissa Harris-Perry of Tulane University and MSNBC, some 350 years or so ahead of schedule, announcing that we will be assimilated — and that resistance is indeed futile. In April, Professor Harris-Perry declared herself at war with the “private notion of children,” in favor of a “collective notion” of child-rearing. “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities,” she declared. Once the private notion of family has been abolished, then every child is “everybody’s responsibility,” and objections to the progressive political agenda inevitably evaporate. The reaction on the right was electric, but she remained fixed in her ideology. When critics pointed out that she was in effect calling for the political abolition of the family and its replacement with the state, she reiterated her point in classically progressive language, harkening back to Rousseau: “We as a society, expressing our collective will through our public institutions, including our government, have a right to impinge on individual freedoms in order to advance a common good.” In other words: Prepare to be assimilated.

Read more at National Review Read More......

A Conservative finds clues from a Liberal to fight Liberalism

This 2009 article from blogger, A Goy and his Blog, with video and graphs is interesting. Essentially, the conservative's job is education not compromise. Find out why (fairly long piece but valuable).  He starts with this question, "Why do leftist ideologues persist with each new decade in clinging to a perennially discredited Utopian fantasy?"

Compromising with Moral Adolescence: A Losing Strategy Read More......

Deindustrialization Of America

BUSINESS INSIDER, 9/27/2010 (Hat tip: Glenn Beck) - 19 Facts About The Deindustrialization Of America That Will Make You Weep Read More......

WSJ: The Death of Conservatism Was Greatly Exaggerated

WALL STREET JOURNAL/OPINION by Peter Berkowitz - In 2008 liberals proclaimed the collapse of Reaganism. Two years later the idea of limited government is back in vogue. Last August left little doubt that a conservative revival was underway. Constituents packed town-hall meetings across the country to confront Democratic House members and senators ill-prepared to explain why, in the teeth of a historic economic downturn and nearly 10% employment, President Obama and his party were pressing ahead with costly health-care legislation instead of reining in spending, cutting the deficit and spurring economic growth.

Still, whether that revival would have staying power was very much open to question. A year later—and notwithstanding the Democrats' steadily declining poll numbers and the mounting electoral momentum that could well produce a Republican majority in the House and a substantial swing in the Senate—it still is.

Sustaining the revival depends on the ability of GOP leaders, office-holders and candidates to harness the extraordinary upsurge of popular opposition to Mr. Obama's aggressive progressivism. Our constitutional tradition provides enduring principles that should guide them. Read more at WSJ...

Keep up the good work conservatives! --bc Read More......

Calvin Coolidge Speech, 1926

In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge gave a speech of ‘unsurpassed clarity’ on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence when the ‘progressive attack on America’s principles’ was still in its initial phase.¹ Excerpt:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can NOT be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can NOT lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

¹Reference to speech: We Still Hold These Truths by Matthew Spalding, pg. 120.
Read the full speech at TeachingAmeicanHistory.org. Read More......

Progressives vs. Founders

RENEWING AMERICAN LEADERSHIP Progressives vs. Founders by Matthew Spalding - “Are you serious?” ∴ That’s how a visibly annoyed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied when a reporter dared ask where the Constitution grants Congress authority to require individuals to buy health insurance. ∴ This vexed response from the House’s top Democrat last fall reveals the extent to which the intellectual, cultural and political elites have blithely abandoned the principles of America’s founding as outdated, defective and of little relevance to modern governance. ∴ How—and why—did this come to be? Read more at ReAL...

"Progressives insist the modern world is so complex and problematic that we need an activist government to manage political life and human affairs."

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Roots of Liberalism

FORBES.COM by Peter Robinson - The movement may be 100 years old, but conservative ideas are even more deeply rooted in America's history. ∴ A near quadrupling of the federal deficit in 2009 alone. The nationalization of the Detroit automakers. The reduction of the biggest banks in the country to mere factotums. Plans to force legislation through Congress this very summer that would amount to a government takeover of health care, which makes up one-seventh of the entire economy. ∴ May I ask a question? Where does President Barack Obama's agenda come from? Read Robinson's answer at Forbes... Read More......