Another Democrat Believes in Bringing Back Legal Sedition

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/12/22/grayson-wants-critic-jailed-claiming-constituent/

Is this really what the Democratic Party stands for? Several months ago they wanted citizens to report on their friends, family, and neighbors if they heard peopel criticize the health care deform plans. Others favored passing regulations that would destroy conservative talk radio shows. Now an elected member of Congress wants to attack the free speech of a Florida citizen who dared to parody his website.

Is this really the party that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison founded? First they trample the rights of the states, then the citizens. Some of them have no concern for the Bill of Rights, nor do they believe in natural rights' legal ideals. People like this gentleman want your money, the power to control you, and for you to kindly shut up while they are doing it. Of course he wants a citizen put in jail for five years for making a parody of his website, all the while calling female professionals whores and comparing Republicans to Nazis.

Most people understand that Republicans labor under a double standard in politics and the media. I would hope that no Republican would want to jail another citizen for such a trivial thing, or even consider it a crime.

When satire becomes a crime, thousands of actors and commedians may have to find somewhere else to live.

Climategate: Not a Victimless Crime

As time passes, details trickle instead of flood out about Climategate. We saw for ourselves how global warming skeptics risked denunciation as heretics by the "faithful," forced to confess their sins of non progressivism or face purification by the fire of not getting important grants. We now know that a conspiracy evolved that tried to suppress publication of competing ideas while blocking access to the raw data they themselves relied on for their claims. The University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit disposed of its raw data rather than provide it to researchers skeptical of global warming. Now we find out that a Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar had to go to the extreme of filing a Freedom of Information Act request for NASA's data. They have fought that request for over two years. When I was a kid, I requested information from NASA for a science project. They replied within six to eight weeks and I did not need to file an FOIA. Last year NASA said that just because the ice caps on Mars melted quickly during the warm season in the same years as Earth and during a period of intense sunspot activity, that doesn't mean anything. Right.

All this reeks of a conspiracy to hide what most of us figured out on our own. Not only is the earth not warming anymore (other researchers say the temperature plateaued and may have started to cool) but no proof exists that mankind has any hand in raising or lowering global temperatures.

However many countries, including now our own, have started basing economic policy on this idea that now has no supporting data that anyone can or will produce. West Virginia's union miners are among the victims of this disastrous policy. Eighty mine permits have now been revoked because of Obama's War on Coal. Coal is evil according to the Left, and it must be stopped at all costs. Never mind that union miners, the backbone of Democratic strength in West Virginia since the New Deal, will be thrown out of work. Never mind that West Virginia's Democratic governor has worked hard to keep the Mountain State above water during the economic crisis now sees his knees cut out from under him. Families are suffering and now the state will not be able to meet the ever increasing demands of federal mandates. West Virginia, like other states, will face collapse if this continues.

West Virginia has been dealt a savage blow by the advocates of a failed theory. Obama's henchmen shut down our mines and tossed our hard working neighbors out of work because of something they cannot even back up scientifically. His administration sold out traditional Democrats and union members in doing so. Climategate's victims need to stand up in 2010 and 2012 and tell us "which side are you on, boy, which side are you on?" Are you on the side of elite left wing ivy league academic frauds who want to keep West Virginia from prospering, or on you on the side of those that want to expand employment opportunities up and down the line in West Virginia and around the country?

Health Care Debate Gets Uglier For Democrats

The Democratic Party is nearly as old at the Republic and occasionally it has split. Before the Civil War it divided over the slavery issue; about ninety years later on Communism and segregation. As we approach the election year of 2010 another fundamental issue, again based on freedom, threatens to split the Democrats.

The debate over socialized health care, including provisions that will criminally pursue individuals that choose to not purchase insurance, has split that party between those that believe in traditional liberalism and European style left wing socialism. Traditional liberals belive in capitalism, freedom, and rights. Left wingers want to fundamentally change this country into something alien.

Even in West Virginia, those that have supported Pelosi find themselves in trouble. Not only have strong Republicans emerged to challenge for the first and third districts, but also formidible Democratic challengers. They agree that supporting Pelosi and her anti West Virginia, anti freedom agenda has made the incumbents weak. Unlike 2008, they will have a much harder time defending their seats than Shelley Moore Capito who has consistently stood for freedom. Certainly she and the governor have been united in their opposition to Obama's War on Coal.

Conservative Democrats are not Republicans and they will be the first to tell you that. It is more likely that they will either simply vote GOP or form a splinter group to demonstrate their unhappiness with the national leadership. Either way, the next two elections will reflect a lot of anger against left wingers.

GOP Storms to Victory in Two of Three Key Races

Yesterday New Jersey and Virginia held their gubernatorial races.

Both states saw Obama post major victories in 2008 and had liberal tax and spend governors. Obama put a great deal of face time into both races towards the end, staking his personal popularity. At the end of the day the voters spoke.

Virginia saw all elected state officials go into Republican hands by very large margins. That is not unexpected in a time where people have growing anxieties about the cost, size and scope of government. Virginia typically votes Republican in presidential races, but went blue last time.

New Jersey represented the biggest win for the GOP. It has an overwhelmingly Democratic population of registered voters, but still returned a five point victory for a Republican candidate against a Democratic incumbent. Even more significant was the fact that a conservative third party candidate got 5% of the vote. Much of that would have ended up in the GOP column otherwise.

This should put the brakes on the health care deform and cap and trade legislation not so secretly meandering through the House and Senate. At a time when the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid faces disastrous poll numbers leading up to his own re-election effort next year, moderates and conservative Democrats should feel strong in resisting his efforts to strongarm them. Nancy Pelosi increasingly represents political poison to many Democratic incumbents.

New York's 23rd congressional district special election provoked a great deal of interest. In the days before the vote, a liberal Republican nominee withdrew and cast her support for the Democrat as opposed to the third party Conservative candidate who was belatedly backed by the Republican National Committee. The Democrat squeaked by. Yahoo headlines trumpeted a Democratic victory in a GOP majority district, but anyone with a brain that paid attention knows that almost losing to the nominee of a party almost no one has ever heard of should not make Democratic congressional incumbents feel warm and safe.

Fact is that voters understand that left wing Democrats only promise higher energy bills, more taxes, and doubtful delivery of more government services. Cash for clunkers turned out to have benefited American auto manufacturers only slightly. If the government cannot run something like that properly, what chance does it have to run health care? Americans know that you cannot keep spending when you lack the money. The Democrats will either learn the same lesson or find themselves in the private sector within a year or so.

The Great Myth of the Capitalist Rape of West Virginia

The Democratic Party has gotten a great deal of mileage out of a myth.

West Virginians have a predisposition, due to their brand of Democratic thinking dating back to Andrew Jackson, to mistrust both Big Government and Big Business. They generally vote for whichever ideology seems least threatening to their liberties at the time. Republican opposition to Big Government makes sense nationally while Democratic opposition to Big Business helps Democrats locally.

Democrats in West Virginia look back to history to build their case against those that support capitalism. They cite corporate manipulations of law and culture to purchase millions of acres of land for timber, railroads, and coal, leaving the people with a pittance as a result. THIS, they say, proves the evil of capitalism!

Not so fast. All capitalists are businessmen, but not all businessmen are capitalists. Ronald Lewis, former West Virginia University professor and dean of regional economic historians, wrote in Transforming the Appalachian Countryside that many businessmen involved in industrial and extractive industries sought out the prestide of state sanction for their operations. In the 1870s and 80s Democratic party leaders such as Henry Gassaway Davis and Johnson Camden dominated the business and political affairs of the state.

A famous economist wrote harshly about the business monopolies assisted by the state, talking about "the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind." Was this Karl Marx? No. Frederick Engels? No. Some other vile Communist? No. This was Adam Smith, the first articulator of capitalism, who warned against the alliance of business and government.

Once again we have met the enemy and it is government. All West Virginians have to do is look back in their history, read Wealth of Nations and understand that the problems that occured had nothing to do with the capitalism that Democrats and Michael Moore attack. It has to do with lurking mercantilism, the alliance of some businessmen with the power of government. Build the same kind of wall between capital and business that the ACLU wants between church and state. That would have prevented so many of the economic ills faced now and a hundred years ago.