109 responses to “A Meditation for the Fourth”

1. 

   Michael Anderson

   04 July 2012

   I’d just like to point out that one man’s moral busybody can be another man’s Martin Luther King.
   Happy Fourth, everyone!

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2. 

   THEMIKEYMCD

   04 July 2012

   Progressives must hate the 4th of July like an atheist hates Christmas/Easter. A progressive ideology requires the use of force by a (tyrannical) government body and the sacrifice of personal liberty; which is so diametric to the values of this holiday.
   God Bless and Happy 4th of July!
   p.s. I have seen the above quote attributed to Ayn Rand, though I actually think it is more powerful without her name ‘attached’ to it 🙂

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3. 

   George Rebane

   04 July 2012

   MichaelA 816am – Ah yes, and there’s the rub. How can we live together in liberty without being busybodies in each other’s lives? (I’m sure in your connecting MLK with this observation, you did not mean to impugn him as a tyrant or fomenting tyranny, which is the conditional point made in reference to ‘busybody’.)

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4. 

   Michael Anderson

   04 July 2012

   George asked, “How can we live together in liberty without being busybodies in each other’s lives?”
   Great question for today. The Mad King started messin’ with some people’s liberties who were just trying to have a little offshore fun and look where that got him.
   I’m afraid history has shown us that in the great struggle to find out where ends the reach of one side’s fist and the surface of another’s face, too often the boundaries are crossed.
   I suppose the good news for today is that we are still going at that struggle hammer and tong, and neither side has yet to give up. I take that as a good thing.

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5. 

   Todd Juvinall

   04 July 2012

   To compare MLK and his quest for justice with a busybody is frightening. He was asking simply for the enforcement and protection of the law and in a non-violent manner. Since MA loves the news intrusion into his body and it’s functions by Reid/Pelosi?Obama, I would suggest he is a lost cause on the reason America is celebrating today.

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6. 

   Steven Frisch

   04 July 2012

   Actually, MLK was asking for a change in the established laws of the land; the overthrow of Plessy v. Fergeson; a redefinition of states rights as interpreted by the SCOTUS; and expansion of the definition of rights under status quo interpretation of the 14th amendment that had set in between Reconstruction and the 1950’s, and its due process, equal protection, and the citizen clauses in the Constitution; and enforcement of the voting rights defined in the 15th amendment.
   To pretend that such a call for reform was not seen as a tyranny of the federal government over the rights of the states in its day shows an even more frightening lack of historical knowledge and context.

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7. 

   A Facebook User

   04 July 2012

   Mickey,
   My wife and I chose July 4th to get married on because we both know despite all its warts is still an amazing nation. The Declaration of Independence is one of the most incredible political documents ever written. I attached a piece I am sure you will love to hate but I challenge you to actually try to answer the questions honestly. Consider it a critical thinking exercise.
   B. Emery
   July 4, 2009
   Howard Zinn
   Untold Truths About the American Revolution
   There are things that happen in the world that are bad, and you want to do something about them. You have a just cause. But our culture is so war prone that we immediately jump from, “This is a good cause” to “This deserves a war.”
   You need to be very, very comfortable in making that jump.
   The American Revolution—independence from England—was a just cause. Why should the colonists here be occupied by and oppressed by England? But therefore, did we have to go to the Revolutionary War?
   How many people died in the Revolutionary War?
   Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it’s likely that 25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. So let’s take the lower figure—25,000 people died out of a population of three million. That would be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England off our backs.
   You might consider that worth it, or you might not.
   Canada is independent of England, isn’t it? I think so. Not a bad society. Canadians have good health care. They have a lot of things we don’t have. They didn’t fight a bloody revolutionary war. Why do we assume that we had to fight a bloody revolutionary war to get rid of England?
   In the year before those famous shots were fired, farmers in Western Massachusetts had driven the British government out without firing a single shot. They had assembled by the thousands and thousands around courthouses and colonial offices and they had just taken over and they said goodbye to the British officials. It was a nonviolent revolution that took place. But then came Lexington and Concord, and the revolution became violent, and it was run not by the farmers but by the Founding Fathers. The farmers were rather poor; the Founding Fathers were rather rich.
   Who actually gained from that victory over England? It’s very important to ask about any policy, and especially about war: Who gained what? And it’s very important to notice differences among the various parts of the population. That’s one thing were not accustomed to in this country because we don’t think in class terms. We think, “Oh, we all have the same interests.” For instance, we think that we all had the same interests in independence from England. We did not have all the same interests.
   Do you think the Indians cared about independence from England? No, in fact, the Indians were unhappy that we won independence from England, because England had set a line—in the Proclamation of 1763—that said you couldn’t go westward into Indian territory. They didn’t do it because they loved the Indians. They didn’t want trouble. When Britain was defeated in the Revolutionary War, that line was eliminated, and now the way was open for the colonists to move westward across the continent, which they did for the next 100 years, committing massacres and making sure that they destroyed Indian civilization.
   So when you look at the American Revolution, there’s a fact that you have to take into consideration. Indians—no, they didn’t benefit.
   Did blacks benefit from the American Revolution?
   Slavery was there before. Slavery was there after. Not only that, we wrote slavery into the Constitution. We legitimized it.
   What about class divisions?
   Did ordinary white farmers have the same interest in the revolution as a John Hancock or Morris or Madison or Jefferson or the slaveholders or the bondholders? Not really.
   It was not all the common people getting together to fight against England. They had a very hard time assembling an army. They took poor guys and promised them land. They browbeat people and, oh yes, they inspired people with the Declaration of Independence. It’s always good, if you want people to go to war, to give them a good document and have good words: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, when they wrote the Constitution, they were more concerned with property than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You should take notice of these little things.
   There were class divisions. When you assess and evaluate a war, when you assess and evaluate any policy, you have to ask: Who gets what?
   We were a class society from the beginning. America started off as a society of rich and poor, people with enormous grants of land and people with no land. And there were riots, there were bread riots in Boston, and riots and rebellions all over the colonies, of poor against rich, of tenants breaking into jails to release people who were in prison for nonpayment of debt. There was class conflict. We try to pretend in this country that we’re all one happy family. We’re not.
   And so when you look at the American Revolution, you have to look at it in terms of class.
   Do you know that there were mutinies in the American Revolutionary Army by the privates against the officers? The officers were getting fine clothes and good food and high pay and the privates had no shoes and bad clothes and they weren’t getting paid. They mutinied. Thousands of them. So many in the Pennsylvania line that George Washington got worried, so he made compromises with them. But later when there was a smaller mutiny in the New Jersey line, not with thousands but with hundreds, Washington said execute the leaders, and they were executed by fellow mutineers on the order of their officers.
   The American Revolution was not a simple affair of all of us against all of them. And not everyone thought they would benefit from the Revolution.
   We’ve got to rethink this question of war and come to the conclusion that war cannot be accepted, no matter what the reasons given, or the excuse: liberty, democracy; this, that. War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate.
   Once a historical event has taken place, it becomes very hard to imagine that you could have achieved a result some other way. When something is happening in history it takes on a certain air of inevitability: This is the only way it could have happened. No.
   We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.

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8. 

   Todd Juvinall

   04 July 2012

   Golly SteveF, I guess my living through all that busybody crap (per MA) of MLK just doesn’t count with know it all liberals. You and BenE crack me up. You just are so full of yourselves you passed us by. No wonder the country is in trouble.
   Oh and I bet you read somewhere and left it out about what MLK’s favorite food was. Why did you do that?

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9. 

   billy T

   04 July 2012

   Mr. Ben Emery, you make a good point. Canada is a good country. Besides, who can criticize a country that deported Amy Goodman? Glad we don’t have debtors prisons anymore, but renegading on one’s promise to pay does harkened back to an era were a man had to be as good as his word. Wonder why we haven’t prosecuted those that filled out liars loans or overstated their income to get a home. Prosecute the liars and then watch Amy Goodman go bonkers. I would pay to see that. Yep, the Canadians are not without blood on their hands. The Canooks and Canook mercenaries were the ones that burned the Presidential Residence during the War of 1812, so I guess you can say the British did not light the match. Good ole Andy Jackson kicked their butt in the Battle of New Orleans when the war actually over. Darn snail mail. We don’t even know Andy’s age at the time. Talk about poor record keeping. Yes, our country was so poor and disorganized that they did not have enough money to repaint the Presidential Residence after the Canooks torched it so we used cheap whitewash, thus the name “the White House”. True, we had Sunshine Patriots back then as we do today. The policy of appeasement has historically failed. Our nation was full of crude, rude, and tattooed unwashed rowdy masses that shocked the sophisticated European visitor. I suppose those bruts could have sat down with the British Governors with a nice spot of tea and settled everything. Who knows. We might even have the image of the Queen on our nickles and dimes today, just like Canada. The colonists were such beasts and wrote words in funny ways. Not well mannered. Sort of like the Aussies.

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10. 

    billy T

    04 July 2012

    Lest I forget, Happy Fourth of July to all, great and small. The Stars and Stripes flies proudly from the South Pole to the Moon. Our founders had many grievances with the King of Great Britain, including this sentence from The Declaration of Independence: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.”

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11. 

    George Rebane

    04 July 2012

    Howard Zinn (BenE 932am), a man of guile and collectivist purpose, argues against war in general and the American Revolution in particular. What his histrionic historical recollections of miscalculating classes omit is that our Revolution left us a nation that for over 200 years has been the world’s beacon of hope and pot of honey drawing to itself all classes of people, especially the poor and oppressed.
    My family and I were in those huddled masses that made their way to these shores with nothing but what we could carry in our hands. For their message to land on receptive minds, class warriors like Zinn count on more than intellectual laziness in their audiences.

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12. 

    THEMIKEYMCD

    04 July 2012

    George, did you announce a prize for the longest comment and I missed it (Posted by: A Facebook User | 04 July 2012 at 09:32 AM)? BenE, I am aware of such questions and I pray that any politician asking men/women to die for a cause meditate long and hard about their decision. I would love to believe that we could have ‘defeated’ the Redcoats ‘peacefully’ AND assembled documents such as the DOI and Constitution without a Revolutionary War, but such delusions would be fantasy.
    I believe that every class of American is better off for the bled shed in the Revolutionary War. The Civil War is an entirely different story.
    Thanks for the mental exercise.I will return the favor and suggest that you read some Mises, Bastiat, Rothbard and/or Hazlitt on the topics of labor and (moral) economics.

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13. 

    David King

    04 July 2012

    To our friends from the left:
    Happy Dependance Day 🙂

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14. 

    Todd Juvinall

    04 July 2012

    Mikey, that BenE comment certainly was long. Since BenE is a politician, having run for high office and being trounced, I can now see why. When a paragraph would suffice, he does a novel. It appears the left is so enamored of the written word, well at least the number of them, that they can’t resist so many. I learned brevity is best from a politician, that is why I only put my foot into my mouth a few times a month while they do it in every post.

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15. 

    George Rebane

    04 July 2012

    Administrivia – Gentlemen, while I appreciate your enthusiasm in joining the debate, I did unpublish the last little series of repartees for reasons you will understand.

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16. 

    Todd Juvinall

    04 July 2012

    Here is Congressman Allen West’s view of the Roberts fiasco.
    http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2012/07/03/allen_west_everyone_should_buy_a_9mm

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17. 

    billy T

    04 July 2012

    Darn it, Dr. Rebane, its the 4th of July and you removed the fireworks before I had a see them. Oh well. I must say I seriously loved the above quote and have chewed on it all day. I could write a long sermon on the quote, but I chose to take a cue from the Mr. Juvinill and keep it short and simple. Heard once that the difference between a alcoholic and a rageaholic is that the alcoholic eventually passes out. Not to offend anyone on the left. I know you never rage.

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18. 

    billy T

    04 July 2012

    Two more grievances against the King of Great Briton as reasons for dissolving our allegiance and subjugation to the Throne: For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
    For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. Happy Birthday Declaration of Independence.

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19. 

    Scott Obermuller

    04 July 2012

    “It’s always good, if you want people to go to war, to give them a good document and have good words: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
    Yep – it’s just a bunch of words. I think, George, we have discovered the very razor’s edge of the great divide. We can point to that sentence and ask: “which side of the line are you on?” From there it all runs to 2 completely separate watersheds that will never meet.
    A very happy 4th to all who value liberty and freedom above all else!
    And a huge THANK YOU to all who gave their lives for that liberty and freedom!

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20. 

    JBCroul

    05 July 2012

    Mikey, any excuse for a parade is fine by me. I especially liked the NU marching band.

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21. 

    George Rebane

    05 July 2012

    ScottO 1032pm – Naifs and scoundrels are always telling us that ‘wars never settle anything’. In doing so the naifs invite wars, and scoundrels prepare wars to spring on the unwary. Winston Churchill wrote ‘The History of English-Speaking Peoples’, a four-volume magnum opus which is essentially the story of princes (aka national leaders) and the wars they fought. The wars demarked changes in national leadership, direction, and opportunities. They gave rise to succeeding periods/epochs of prosperity, plunder, or lassitude not only for the peoples involved in the wars, but also those who were affected by the subsequently established new regional and world orders. If ever there was a kind of human enterprise that ‘settled’ things – organized and directed people’s lives – it has been the punctuation that wars provide in the course of human events. Wars are a necessary resolution when intellect fails or is misused to solve problems of resources or politics.
    I think that your observation of the attitude toward wars being at the headwaters of two watersheds is accurate. Zinn impugns wars, as do all good socialists, and seems to rest easily with the fact that collectivist nations kill more of their own by far during times of ‘peace’ than have been taken by all wars. This most certainly was true during the most horrific wars fought in the last century.

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22. 

    Dixon Cruickshank

    05 July 2012

    That made them think of MLK and not the EPA, really? and Frisch has to go into some detailed expalnation of the bizare reach for reality??
    Yes our world is lost I guess
    George very well used

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23. 

    Douglas Keachie

    05 July 2012

    George asked, “How can we live together in liberty without being busybodies in each other’s lives?”
    Certainly got Trayvon dead, and Zimmerman in a heap of trouble, this for being a busybody.

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24. 

    THEMIKEYMCD

    06 July 2012

    I was against the 2009 Stimulus BEFORE it was cool and before the media/politicians were SURPRISED by its failure.
    “back in 2009, Team Obama predicted that if Congress passed its $800 billion stimulus plan, the unemployment rate would be around 5.6% today [unemployment TODAY is north of 8.2%]. #EPICMISS #bullshit #central planners = evil
    http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/07/june-jobs-swoon-americas-labor-market-depression-continues/

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25. 

    Russ Steele

    06 July 2012

    Here are the facts:
    The nation lost nearly 8.8 million jobs between January 2008 and February 2010. Since then, it’s regained more than 3.8 million — less than 44 percent.
    The economy has added just 137,000 jobs a month since employment hit bottom. At that pace, it would take three more years for employment to return to where it was in January 2008.
    And that’s without accounting for the fact that it takes about 125,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth! To really get back to pre-recession levels, we’d need to add 260,000 jobs a month for three years.
    We can do, it has been done before, from National Review Online:
    Monthly job creation bounced around during the Bush years (when the unemployment rate ranged between 4 and 6 percent), but there were some nice monthly pops in the mix. March 2004 saw 337,000 jobs created, April 2005 saw 360,000 jobs created, November 2005 saw 334,000 jobs created, February 2006 saw 316,000 jobs created, January 2007 saw 236,000 jobs created.
    As CNN noted, “In April 1984, the economy added 363,000 jobs . . . And the Reagan recovery sustained its momentum through the election, averaging 300,000 new jobs a month from May to October.”
    In the booming 1990s, with a smaller total population, the country created more than 400,000 jobs in a single month several times: 462,000 jobs in March 1994; 434,000 jobs in February 1996, 404,000 jobs in February 1999; 405,000 jobs in October 1999. The economy created an astounding 507,000 jobs in October 1997.
    It take more than blaming Bush, it lakes leadership that our current President cannot muster. Time for a change in leadership!

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26. 

    Paul Emery

    06 July 2012

    So Russ, how would Romney’s economic policies be different than Bush’s?

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27. 

    THEMIKEYMCD

    06 July 2012

    Paul, your ? nails it. So far Romney appears to use more common sense than his Keynesian predecessor (Bush or Obama) regarding monetary policy. Romney has been very critical of the Federal Reserve…. though not a feisty as Ron Paul :). For me the drastic difference between Bush and Romney is monetary policy (Bush sided with the banks, Romney appears to be siding with liberty).

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28. 

    Douglas Keachie

    06 July 2012

    Russ, “between January 2008 and February 2010,” is an interesting selection of time block. Obama did not take office until Jan 20, 2009, so your block includes nearly 1/2 of its time on Bush’s watch. Why is that? What are the numbers without Bush’s watch included?

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29. 

    George Rebane

    06 July 2012

    Re RussS 1015am – Numbers to cogitate on. US pop = 314M, Growth rate = 0.90%/yr or 2.83M/yr, US death rate = 0.84%/yr or 2.64M/yr. Since US emigration is negligible, the birth plus immigration rate is 1.74%/yr or 5.46M/yr. About 4.3M/yr leave (not necessarily graduate from) the US educational system. The US civilian workforce = 154.7M.
    Through growth alone, we need to create a maximum of 2.83M/12 = 236,000 jobs per month if all growth becomes employed (actually all growth does not go into the workforce). Another measure for approximating needed job growth is to assume that the 4.3M leaving schools need to enter the workforce. This puts the minimum requirement for monthly job creation at (4.3M – 2.64M)/12 = 138,000 assuming the death rate ends the pipeline of the maximum number of people leaving jobs. Again, actually all people dying did were not former members of the workforce, therefore the minimum number of jobs required per month is above 138,000.
    In conclusion, we see that just to keep up with the demographic dynamics, the economy needs to generate somewhere between, say, 150,000 to 200,000 jobs per month. If it does this, the unemployment rate remains essentially unchanged. Recall that these job numbers will increase even with the quoted rates staying constant.

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30. 

    Russ Steele

    06 July 2012

    Paul@10:18
    Bush is not running. The question is will Romney’s economic policy be different from Obama’s economic policy. Romney’s jobs plan include approving the XL Pipeline, drilling on Federal lands and off shore to insure we are free from foreign oil. He will have a Republican House and Senate and will be in a position to reign in the EPA and create some sanity in the regulation of greenhouse gases. Romney will fire the 43 Czars which have created an unelected shadow government. Those are some starters on how Romney’s policies will be different from Obama!

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31. 

    Paul Emery

    06 July 2012

    Russ
    Yes, Bush is not running but Romney is backed by the same Republican establishment that supported W so it stands to reason they will support the same policies that led us into this mess. The Repubs had the opportunity to back a true agent for change but instead went to the heir apparent rather than take a risk. He’s going to lose anyway so this conversation has limited shelf life. He’s the jello mold man with no real conviction on anything. He was a mediocre governor at best and he’s running against his only accomplishment which is really weird.

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32. 

    Russ Steele

    06 July 2012

    Paul,
    Can you provide more details on the exact policies that led to this economic mess, so we can check them against Romney’s policy statements. If I recall it was Congress that demanded bank make questionable loans that Fanny and Freddie would cover, not Bush.
    While you are at it let’s hear your version of the Obama policies that are leading us out of this mess. Obama has had three years for his policies to work and we have had 41 months of bad job numbers. When are his policies going to kick in?
    Check out the graphics on this post and then get back to us. Why is the Obama recover the longest on record?
    http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/07/another-bad-jobs-report.php?

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33. 

    Gregory

    06 July 2012

    Just wondering… why doesn’t Pelosi, the Speaker of the House for the last Bush years, and Harry Reid, the Senate Majority leader for the last Bush years, and such long time luminaries of Congressional banking committees as Barney Frank (D-Fanny Mae) and Chris Dodd (D-Countrywide) share the blame?
    Bush II inherited a recession from Clinton, and got hit with the 9/11 attacks just as the economy was beginning to grow again. Had the Democratic Party not nominated perhaps the two worst presidential prospects in my lifetime to run against W, they might have had a better chance to be the ones to look bad instead of Bush.

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34. 

    Russ Steele

    07 July 2012

    Paul,
    One of the major differences between Obama and Romney are energy policy. Obama listens to the environmental wackos demand that we reduce CO2 emission by creating green energy, ignoring the US’s huge fossil fuel resources. Romney is more willing to create an energy policy that exploits those resources. Energy use and economic development are linked.
    Production from the Alberta oil sands are changing the petroleum industry . . . but that resource is dwarfed by the potential of oil shale.  The US has more energy available in its oil shale alone than the entire global reserves of conventional oil.  This is on top of the trillion cubic feet of natural gas and the world’s largest reserves of coal. Details HERE. Check out the chart.

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35. 

    Douglas Keachie

    07 July 2012

    Russ, I see you ignored, along with the rest, the question about why you included Bush’s watch and then assigned blame only to Obama. As for the difference between Obama and Romney, I think this cartoon about sums it up:
    

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36. 

    Douglas Keachie

    07 July 2012

    And Russ, what is the cost per gallon of the finished gasoline from oil shale?
    And everyone who loves to eat osyters may wish to pay attention to what burning fossil fuels is doing to the oceans: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2018496037_oysters22m.html You might ask yourself what percentage of food comes from the oceans, and how bad the smell might be if things got really bad.

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37. 

    George Rebane

    07 July 2012

    DougK 741am – a possible reason for Russ’ argument is that, even if you ignore Congress’ role in creating the crisis, Obama has now continued almost four years of doing the dumbest things possible to borrow more, stimulate nothing, grow government, pass costly and stultifying laws, and pile on regulatory impediments to prevent the economy from recovery. On top of that, the man promises to double down on the whole approach once his re-election gives him more “flexibility”. Other than that, he’s just great.

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38. 

    A Facebook User

    07 July 2012

    I guess the title and acknowledgement didn’t require a conspiracy map so it threw everybody off.
    The piece was from Howard Zinn from 2009. Just throwing out another way of looking at the American Revolution. Doesn’t mean I totally agree with it but it means there are many ways at looking at historical events.
    July 4, 2009
    Howard Zinn
    Untold Truths About the American Revolution

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39. 

    George Rebane

    07 July 2012

    Facebook BenE 1250pm – Apparently it wasn’t clear from my 1054am, but the cited Zinn piece would not ‘throw off’ any RR reader with whom I am familiar. Carefully fashioned historical perspectives are the important bulwarks of all ideologies. Since history is chronicles interpreted and integrated in the larger context of ages, intents (politics), economics, and conflicts, it might be better if we just read reliable chroniclers and fashioned our own histories. Now where did we put those reliable chroniclers?

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40. 

    Douglas Keachie

    07 July 2012

    If I were on your side I would have come up with, “You don’t know Jack, BenE,” ages ago. 😉

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41. 

    A Facebook User

    07 July 2012

    George,
    Are you saying Zinn isn’t a credible historian? Also Zinn was part of the US military in the European Theater during WWII, maybe you should show him some respect of his perspective on the affects of war.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ehc3V1g5pm0

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42. 

    George Rebane

    07 July 2012

    Facebook BenE 408pm – I have already defined the boundary of his credibility; he is a leftwing historian with lifelong active social agenda.
    You confuse Zinn’s commentary on the “affects(sic) of war” with his beliefs about the utility of war, specifically the American Revolution. His comments about being a bombardier and bombing European cities are more than a little removed from reality. He intellectualizes about the effects of war, and does it poorly.
    As one of his terrified targets for many a day and night, and as a survivor I have a more visceral understanding of war than he, but that is also tempered with a far more realistic understanding of the utility of war which seems to have totally escaped him and his fellow ideologues.

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43. 

    A Facebook User

    07 July 2012

    Todd,
    Thanks for the soapbox opportunity with your comment of “Mikey, that BenE comment certainly was long. Since BenE is a politician, having run for high office and being trounced, I can now see why. When a paragraph would suffice, he does a novel.”
    First, my comment was long due to it was an entire published piece from Howard Zinn on July 4, 2009. You had no opinion on the content of the piece and you didn’t realize it was written by someone else despite the posting of the date, author, and title- those are some sweet critical thinking and observation skills.
    Second, about losing in the 2010 US Congressional 4th District.
    Out of 665 third party nationwide candidates we received the second highest vote total, top ten percentage and fundraising. Our campaign spent roughly $13,000 and incumbent McClintock spent $1,800,000 and didn’t show up to a single public forum (nice representative). It has very little to do with issues but almost everything to do with party affiliation. I refuse to be associated with either of the duopoly and wasn’t running for a political party but running for the average citizen to have a choice and possibly a representative in congress. No Tea Party congressional candidate that ran outside of the republican party were elected or received higher vote totals than our campaign.
    2010 US Congressional 4th District registration numbers were
    48% republican
    31% democratic
    19% DTS
    0.8% Green

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44. 

    Todd Juvinall

    07 July 2012

    Let’s see. BenE got how many votes? I think I may have received more in Nevada County as a candidate in a non-partisan office, Assessor, than BenE got in the whole Congressional District. But I digress. If you want to make excuses for losing that is your business. You “third party” types never win because you really don’t want to. Why not admit you have intention of winning only whining about the “duopoly” whatever the hell that is. If you want to make a difference on the planet in politics you must either join a winning party or go organize one. Third party whining just doesn’t cut it anymore, not with the mess that needs fixing.

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45. 

    Russ Steele

    07 July 2012

    Douglas,
    I agree some of the job losses were during the Bush administration who was attempting to deal with a Democratic Congress. The voters decided they want a change in leadership who promised to fix the problem. Now we know after three plus years of trying that Obama was not up to the task. His actions, or lack of action, have made the problem worse for millions of the nations workers who cannot find a job.
    As for the China jobs issues, you appear to be reading the Democrat Talking Points again. Undeterred by independent fact checkers that have debunked the thrust of their China claims, the Obama campaign is redoubling their attacks on Mitt Romney as an “outsourcer”. I would say that all those green companies buying solar panels, windmill towers, and CA buying a bay bridge in China created more jobs off shore than anything that Romney did.
    I see you are doing your part to dispense Obama’s distortion of the facts. Lovely!

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46. 

    Douglas Keachie

    08 July 2012

    “CA buying a bay bridge in China created more jobs off shore than anything that Romney did.”
    And how many moons has it been since you complained about California spending its way into the poorhouse? The problem is millions of millionaires not creating jobs. The combined net worth of the planet’s millionaires and higher as been set at about 48 trillion dollars.

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47. 

    Douglas Keachie

    08 July 2012

    Bush created two wars and not much in the way of professional jobs. BTW, once again, how much is the finished gas from oil shale going to cost per gallon?

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48. 

    billy T

    08 July 2012

    There is plenty of blame to go around. George Bush for sure. Then the tsunami in Japan, the housing crisis, the European crisis, the China slowdown, the banks hording cash and building up prudent reserves and capital after making stupid loans (wished Citizen’s Bank did that), businesses not hiring due to uncertainty, consumers not spending due to lack of confidence, education system falling apart, evil oil companies gouging the poor people, The Arab Spring, the repulsive 1%ers and a bunch more. Yep, plenty of blame and Obama blames each and every one of them. Don’t recall Reagen spending his entire first term blaming his predecessor.

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49. 

    Douglas Keachie

    08 July 2012

    Don’t recall Jimmy Carter setting Reagan up for such an economic catastrophe either. Reagan only did wars he could win, in a couple of weeks, max.

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50. 

    billy T

    08 July 2012

    Mr. Keachie, its not all about wars. Reagen inherited an economy with higher unemployment, runaway inflation, massive layoffs and our standing in the world greatly diminished. Remember 14% mortgages rates plus points? Yes, it took him 6 years to turn it around and consumer confidence soared. Even had one month when 900,000 jobs added. People were pessimistic about the future as they are now and Old Glory had been trampled on. He was leader, not a blamer. Love him or hate him, he shone forth hope and change as a beacon on the hill. Had a Democrat Congress and no excuses. How is your hope and change working for you? Later fellow Night Owl.

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