Recta Ratio

In what could best be described as a popular uprising against the entrenched power of liberal Democrats both here in Massachusetts and nationwide, the people of Massachusetts won back their US Senate seat. For more than 40 years, the seat has been in bondage to the Kennedy family and its minions.

In real terms, it makes a difference only at the margin. The Democrats had 61 votes at their disposal. When Brown takes his seat, they will have only 60. This isn't enough to stop more liberal judges and Supreme Court justices being appointed. This won't stop planned tax increases. And it is far short of reversing Row v. Wade.

But sometimes marginal differences can have a big impact. The situation is that the Democrats cobbled together a coalition to get 61 votes (enough to prevent a Republican filibuster and push through whatever version of healthcare "reform" the
Democrat leadership wanted) through all sorts of corrupt deals. Now that the people of the Bluest of Blue States have rebelled and tossed a seat to the Republicans, those deals may fall apart. The coalition members will begin to jump ship, or increase their demands. Or both.

Moreover, this is a mid-term election year, and two incumbent Democrat senators have already announced that they will step down. More will follow, and there will be an even bigger impact in the House. Brown's victory last night sets the stage for what should be a good Republican comeback year, which may very well result in one or both houses of Congress ending up back under Republican control.

And that means big trouble for Obama and his cult members, both in getting their poisonous agenda passed, and in getting re-elected in 2 years. Now is the time for Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, and Tim Pawlenty to step up, and start making themselves better candidates.

On a personal level, I have not been so pleased with any electoral development in Massachusetts since 1990. So this morning, I am in a good mood. I celebrated by putting a little extra cocoa in my coffee. I'm celebrating now, because Lent is coming soon enough.

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Brown campaigning yesterday
Photo courtesy of Mark Sullivan at his new group blog, The Jury Box

Today Massachusetts' voters go to the polls to fill the open US Senate seat. Though the local media are veiling late poll numbers in obscurity, Drudge is running as his top headline that the latest poll shows Scott Brown up by 9%.

If fervor and enthusiasm, and not the corrupt calculation of the big-city machines, determine who will win, it will be Scott Brown. It seems nearly everyone who doesn't live at the public trough is not just for Brown, but eager to see him win. I see it every day on the streets of Boston: eager, often young, Brown supporters walking by carrying signs. I see very little enthusiasm for Coakley.

Being the Democrat nominee conveys a tremendous advantage. The public sector is huge, and has been aggressive in registering voters who depend on government in one way or another. Public workers routinely get election days off, so that they can not just vote themselves, but also make sure they drive a few like-minded folks to the polls. Being the Democrat nominee means that there will be 200% turnout from every graveyard in the city, and they will all be voting for you. The unions, the "street priests," the neighborhood activists will all be out in force dragging Coakley voters to the polls.

And yet.

I can sense that there is very little enthusiasm for Marcia Coakley, as Patrick Kennedy calls her. People see the prospect of this being a "doube-dip" recession, see the government trying to take over 1/6th of the US economy, the health care system, see rampant incompetence in national security policy, see massive government spending that will leave an enormous legacy of debt and high taxes, and want to change course. Coakley is the candidate of standing pat with old liberal Democrat ideas. And I don't think people want that. Or her.

Scott Brown offers hope. Maybe we can deflect this take-over of the health care system before it is too late. Brown's election provides the margin for a filibuster, and that will bring the 5-8 Democrat votes produced only by arm-twisting and payoffs out of the pro-takeover fold.

Perhaps more imporantly, electing Scott Brown, a pretty moderate Republican with some good conservative notions would send a message to the country that even the most liberal of states is not willing to continue to put up with the direction Obama has set out. And that could turn this year's mid-term elections into a Republican steamroller likely to end with at least one house of Congress back in Republican hands and the other closer to it.

GO SCOTT GO!!!

WIN!!!

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Polls released this morning show that Republican Scott Brown has gained a slight lead in the race against Democrat Martha Coakley for the US Senate seat being filled in Tuesday's special election. This is nearly unheard of here.

Let us hope that this continues and that when the results are in tuesday night, he is still ahead!

Go Scott!!!

WIN!!!

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I think it was 1976 Democrat candidate for president Senator Mo Udall who coined the phrase when, at one point early on, he seemed to have the momentum in the race for the Democrat nomination (of course, in the end, the Goveror of Georgia got it, and the presidency).

Today, the Big Mo is on the side of Scott Brown in his race against Democrat Martha Coakley for the Massachusetts US Senate seat. Polls now show the race a dead heat among likely voters. Brown has the backing of an outrageous 71% of unenrolled voters. Problem is, this is the most pinko of blue states (I am still upset that red is the Republican color, and blue the Democrat, it should be the other way around, as the Democrats are the socialists), and just about everybody is dependent upon government for a check, whether a payroll check or some sort of benefit. And then there are the union allies of the Democrats. So many people who will vote are in the back pocket of the big government coalition that there is just too small a group of voters who are independant of government to put Brown over the top. He needs the big Democrat machines to snooze through this election, and fail to get out their vote. And that is unlikely.

But nearly everyone who isn't a red-diaper/doper baby moonbat leftist, or feeding at the public trough in one form or another thinks Brown would be a better choice for US Senator from Massachusetts. If he loses, it will only be because the entrenched left-wing special interests were too organized, too powerful, and too clever.

GO SCOTT!!!

WIN!!!

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With the electoral disasters of the last 4 years, I have grown more distant from the political process in a nation that seems intent of fulfilling Fisher Ames' and Orestes Brownson's most dire predictions.

The death of Ted Kennedy presents an opening, and perhaps a spark of hope. Two months ago, I would have written off the election to fill Kennedy's seat as hopeless. Whoever won the Democrat nomination would win the seat. That may still be the case, but Republican state Senator Scott Brown is giving Martha Coakley, the stidently pro-abortion Democrat Attorney General, something of a challenge. It may be more a case of Coakley's failures as a candidate than any brilliance on the Republican's part.

Scott Brown isn't everything I would like to see in a Republlican US Senator from Massachusetts (I was hoping Curt Schilling would have run), and there hasn't been a Republican contender for anything in Massachusetts who won my whole-hearted approval since the late Ray Shamie tried to prevent John Kerry from making the other Senate seat his personal property.

But you have to look at the alternatives. Forget about the libertarian guy. As always, just a distraction who will pull free-enterprise votes from the Republicans. Martha Coakley will win, or Scott Brown will win. Martha Coakley is an assured vote for any Obama moonbat leftist appointee to the Supreme Court, a sure vote for nationalized health care, for a national right to gay "marriage," for higher taxes and more government regulation of the economy, and on critical national security issues would be what the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick called, "the trumpet that always sounds retreat."

Scott Brown would not necessarily be any of those things.

So this election next week doesn't call for much in the way of Occam-like perspicacity.

Go, Scott!!!

Win!!!

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Odd, if she wants to run for president in 2012. Everyone knows that an incumbent governor has more fundraising clout than a former governor.

Oh well. I still like Bobby Jindal, but he is going to have to get his act together as a public performer.

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My reaction was utterly unprintable. And it remains so. May all his vital organs painfully rot away. May he be cursed in his every undertaking. May his seed fail. Let his name be heard no more. Let another Republican take his office.

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Justice David souter, the most disappointing Republican appointment to the Supreme Court since Eisenhower's appointment of William Brennan, is retiring, so that ultra-leftist President Obama can appoint his successor. At least there will be no change in the voting patterns of the court, since Souter ended up being just as liberal as any of Obama's appointees would be anyway.

We have to pray that Justices Kennedy, Alito, Scalia, Thomas and chief Justice Roberts can all cling to their seats until Obama and any other Democrats are out of office, and the Senate has enough Republicans to get a decent conservative through. Or a whole batch of them.

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Letter to Jefferson biographer Henry S. Randall, 1859:

"I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must sooner or later destroy liberty or civilization, or both. You may think that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils. I will frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion. Your fate I believe to be settled, though it is deferred by a physical cause. As long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land, your laboring population will be far more at ease than is the laboring population of the old world, and while that is the case the Jefferson politics may continue to exist without any fatal calamity. But the time will come when wages will be as low and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and your Birminghams, and in these Manchesters and Birminghams hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be out of work. Then your institutions will be brought to the test. Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented, and incline him to listen to agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million while another cannot get a full meal.

"I have seen England pass through three or four such critical seasons as I have described; through such seasons the United States will have to pass in the course of the next century, if not of this. How will you pass through them? I heartily wish you a good deliverance. But my reason and my wishes are at war, and 1 cannot help forboding the worst.

"The day will come when in the State of New York, a multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a legislature. On one side is a statesman teaching patience, respect for the vested rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue, ranting at the tyranny of capitalists and usurists, and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and ride in a carriage while thousands of honest people are in want of necessities. Which of these candidates is likely to be preferred by a working-man who hears his children cry for bread?

"I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such season of adversity as I have described, do things which will prevent prosperity from returning. There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh spoliation. There is nothing to stop you. Your constitution is all sail and no anchor.

"As I said before, when society has entered on this downward progress, either civilisation or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, and your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid to waste by the barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth, with the difference that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman empire came from without; and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions."

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“A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry desolation in their way.”
Fisher Ames

Your constitution is all sail and no anchor. As I said before, when a society has entered on this downward progress, either civilisation or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand; or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth Century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth;—with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

God help the Republic. We have no one to blame but ourselves that things have come to this state of affairs.

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But my score of a perfect 40 on this quiz puts me right there with Ronaldus Magnus.

Tip of the silver-laced cocked hat to Mark at Irish Elk.

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The end of the American ideal of ordered republican liberty? Probably not, but bleak times are ahead.

It has been an axiom of the democratical creed that the people are always right. That is utter nonsense. Were the people right when they elected Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton? Of course not. The American people sometimes display a foolish fecklessness and instability of temper at the polls. They are dissatisfied at problems, and make them worse, as they did in electing Franklin Roosevelt. And I suspect that last night the mood of the country (not nation, we are not a nation, only a country) was to have a temper tantrum over the market correction and the war. Nevermind the eternal wisdom that recessions are due every 3-7 years no matter what you do for economic policy, or that the war, at least the Iraq campaign of this war, was won a very long time ago. The American people would not be pleased, and decided to throw out the party holding the White House.

This year has seen many shades of 1996, when inevitable Democrat victory was made worse by an over-age GOP standard-bearer who had "earned his chance." Like Dole, conservative Republicans never liked McCain. Why would they? He has spent the last 20 years cramping the collective asses of the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

The good news is that he will have little say in shaping the Republican Party that emerges from this debacle. And with good fortune, a more cohesive and conservative GOP will emerge in the next 2-4 years, one that will regain control of the federal government and be able to make enormous progress on the conservative agenda.

But for now, we will have to live with the Obamination. I think the only people really looking forward to the next 4 years, other than the brain-dead voting masses that elected it, are Rush, Ann Coulter, and Michael Savage. I suspect they will do very well indeed making a living critiquing the Obamination.

For all the filth thrown at the Bush Administration, especially over the last couple of years, one very important thing has been overlooked. It has been a remarkably clean and scandal-free 8 years (as were the 4 years of George H.W. Bush). I doubt that we will be saying the same thing about the Obama Administration. In fact, I look forward to the most gross corruption becoming known sooner rather than later. Just give them a few months to get their hands on the controls of the federal government, and the scandals will start to emerge. Of course, the media will try to cover it up. But the days of an item not being news until the New York Times deems it appropriate to cover it are long over.

And in fact, though I doubt it played a decisive role in this election, the scandals over Acorn and the rampant voting fraud it created are due to start coming front and center.

The biggest losers here are the unborn. We were so close. We have been within 1 Supreme Court vote of overturning Roe v. Wade, and sending the issue of abortion back to the states. For years, the hopes of the pro-life movement have hung on the death or retirement of John Paul Stevens. Now, with a liberal president-elect who owes everything to NOW and Planned Parenthood, he only has to keep breathing until January 21st, and submit his resignation, knowing that there is a 100% chance that Obama will pick an even more liberal Justice to replace him. And the other liberals, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, can help the cause by submitting their resignations and being replaced by younger liberals. Now it is we conservatives who must pray that none of our older justices step down or become disabled or die. We must pray that Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Roberts and Alito can all hold out at least 4 years, maybe 8.

Catholic voters took their eyes off the prize. Electing McCain would have made more likely, though not 100% certain, the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But decisive numbers of Catholics pulled the lever for Democrats, as they did in the mid-terms 2 years ago, and in doing so, they have imperiled their own souls, and condemned many millions more babies to be murdered before they are born.

They have also proven themselves enormously ungrateful to the GOP which has been their loyal servant in the effort to reverse Roe and curtail or end abortion. They are just as foolish and feckless as the rest of the American electorate.

What next? That will depend on Obama and how he handles power. If he uses it responsibly to make reforms here and there at the margin, all will get along, and we will have fun at the expense of the leftists he appoints to power, and the odd things they say and believe, as we did with the Clintons. And then we will be rid of him and the horrific party of abortion he now presides over, in the next election.

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If you have any regard for the lives of the yet-to-be-born, vote for McCain/Palin. There is no other alternative. The Obamination promises a Freedom of Choice Act and very liberal judges and Supreme Court Justices. There is no alternative.

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Then Massachusetts went all the way. Then California. Now Connecticut falls into line on the slippery slope to Hell.

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So much for our common cultural heritage. We should be more like Belgium, where the language difference between Flemings and Walloons threatens to tear that nation into two countries. Or Canada. Or the former Yugoslavia.

Come on, people, wake up. This guy as president would be a disaster far greater than any in this nation's history.

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Here is an insight that I have not seen elsewhere, but seems likely, based on my understanding of how the financial markets work, which is derived from 25 years of following the dynamics of the markets closely and understanding what motivates movements in the market.

Maybe not all of this sell-off in the US and global markets is because of the latest banking crisis.

Maybe investors are freaked out at the increasingly likely prospect of an Obama Presidency. Maybe they are selling anything they can because they know the policies this fellow perpetrates, with a Democrat Congress to help him enact legislation, will not be one bit good for investors, business, the private sector, or the economy in general.

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Again, it seems that the American people are about to engage in a spate of extreme and irresponsible fecklessness, and elect Barack Obama President. The polls seem to be moving in that direction.

Let all those who want to see the "federal constitutional right" to abortion ended by a conservative Supreme Court pray with redoubled fervor that Senator McCain and Governor Palin can pull it out. And vote.

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Come on. It is time to stop kidding ourselves. We can't be seriously contemplating making this fellow President of the United States, can we?

For Heaven's sake, this is not Calvin Coolidge wearing an Indian head-dress for a 1920s photo-op. This is this schmuck on a voyage of discovery finding out who he really is. He was born a Moslem, and raised a Moslem, and the Koran says if you are born a Moslem, and raised a Moslem, you will always be a Moslem.

Come on now. I know the Democrats could nominate Joseph Stalin, and still get 49% of the vote, so entrenched is the group of people with their hands out for government largesse in one form or another. But I think we are letting our imaginations get the better of us if we are so close to betraying what this country is as to elect this man.

Yes, we are at war, and the economy is having a hard time. But is there any reason to think that handing over the national administration to someone who hasn't a clue who he really is (or does, and that persona would be so odious to average Americans that he dares not truly reveal it) will help those problems in any way?

Come on. The election is a month away. It is time to get serious. And anyone who thinks this supporter of abortion on a truly monstrous scale should be elected president ought to take more of the drugs he or she is on, and pass out rather than stagger into the voting booth to pull the lever for his guy.

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That is what the "Bristol Palin Is Pregnant" crisis amounts to. It is a family matter, and the only thing we need to know about it is that, consistent with the values of the Palin family, she will give birth to a live baby, and raise it. God bless mother, child, and family.

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