Check out their website.  It’s good.

https://fee.org/

My Trump theory: Obama built that.

For eight long years, average, non-elite, working Americans have suffered through anemic economic growth, a massive expansion of an increasingly politicized regulatory state, a massive expansion of the welfare/entitlement state, a massive expansion of the national debt, and a relentless attack on traditional values. They have been bullied and belittled from the Bully Pulpit. They are told they are stupid, racist, and out of step with the times.

For eight years the Administration neglected and mismanaged the core functions of government (national security, international affairs, command of our troops abroad, the domestic economy, protecting personal and economic liberty, rule of law, etc.). Instead, the Administration has focused on the expansion of domestic government power for its own sake and in areas where it doesn’t belong. The Obama Administration has attacked individual civil rights like free speech, religious liberty, and the second amendment; attacked free markets like the Internet; attacked small business; and solidified political power through venal (but effective) class and identity politics.

Those of us who just want government to stay out of our lives and stop quashing our economic opportunity have been unrepresented for a long time. We watch from the sidelines as our money and rights are redistributed to corporations and the ultra rich through regulatory capture and crony capitalism, and to special interest minority groups through programs, welfare, public employee union deals, and legal favoritism.

We feel like we are getting screwed by an arrogant, elite ruling class that uses us and turns us against each other to preserve their own power and privilege. The Republicans who we have elected over the last 16 years seem no better than the Democrats. In fact, they seem worse in a sense because they get elected by paying lip service to smaller government and conservative principles, but are every bit as guilty of big government excess and service to entrenched special interests as the Democrats.

We want to blow it up. All of it. We want to set a bull loose in the china shop. We want someone who we perceive to be genuinely outside of it and therefore free of original political sin.

That’s why I think Trump is winning. It doesn’t matter that he is uneducated in matters of domestic and international policy. It doesn’t matter that many things he says are out of step with core conservative political principles. It doesn’t matter that he seems ignorant of fundamental economic and philosophical principles that we hold dear. History has proven that those who talk a good game in these matters betray us upon entering office anyway.

This is what happens when an arrogant left wing ideologue is allowed to occupy the Oval Office for eight long years. Obama has been the most destructive president in America’s history in my opinion. He wanted to transform America. He vehemently hates American imperialism and wanted to weaken her ability to exercise international power. He wanted to irreparably damage the opposition party, and thereby disrupt the ability of contrary ideologies from taking hold and gaining political traction.

Mission accomplished.

Because

Nazi gear though, no problem!  Hell, it’s even available with free 2-day shipping on Prime.

But putting this aside, it is really quite concerning that an item like the confederate flag, which is both historically significant and symbolic of a certain point of view, should be taken out of circulation in commerce in the name of political correctness. Orwell’s 1984 comes immediately to mind.

There was a time in this country when grown-ups wore big-boy pants and could handle controversial topics of conversation, offensive viewpoints, and the existence of historical facts without needing or wanting to be shielded from such things by the government or anybody else.

Suck it up, pansies.

The terrorist attacks on the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists Stéphane Charbonnier, Georges Wolinski and Jean Cabut, their colleagues and visitors, and the police has shocked and horrified civilized people around the world.  The goal of these radical Islamic savages is to intimidate free and civilized people from speaking out against them.  Free speech must not be chilled.  The response to such atrocity must be to overwhelm these savages with speech, not to cower in silence.  The following headline from AllahPundit sums it up:  Mark Steyn: Charlie Hebdo was a target only because the rest of the media wouldn’t share the risk.

liberalism doesn’t depend on everyone offending everyone else all the time, and it’s okay to prefer a society where offense for its own sake is limited rather than pervasive. But when offenses are policed by murder, that’s when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.

So in that spirit, “piss be upon him”:

Zeke Emanuel, the father of Obama Care, was recently quoted as saying that he wants to die at 75 because living past 75 renders us disabled, faltering and declining, robbed of creativity, feeble, ineffectual, and pathetic.  As a key player in the creation of Obama Care, Emanuel has done an enormous disservice to this country.  He knows that this monstrosity of law was passed by loathsome legislative procedural gamesmanship, and that it remains deeply unpopular to this day.  Only a progressive true believer from the Washington Post could view Emanuel’s comments with anything other than cynicism.  But the personal impact of such a one-size-fits-all bureaucratic approach is devastating.

My father recently turned 80.  He is healthy, active, self-sufficient, intellectual, and very much enjoys his life on the Northern California coast, where he enjoys watching the Blue Heron skilfully hunting the gophers in his yard, drives his Corvette on twisty mountain roads, flies his private plane, and develops his own photographs in his custom dark room the old-fashioned way–using photo paper and chemicals.

I can assure you that my father would not have wanted to die five years ago, and he doesn’t want to die now.  But he was recently informed by his physician that he was no longer eligible for any kind of preventive care that could save or extend his life.  Why?  Because under the Obama Care mandates written by Zeke Emanuel, old folks aren’t eligible for the kind of medical care they have previously enjoyed.  Zeke has decided that everybody should want to die at the age of 75, just like him, and that we shouldn’t waste precious medical care on the elderly.  And as a good progressive technocrat, he thinks it’s just fine to forcibly impose his views on the rest of us.

So my dad has to die sooner for lack of medical care because Zeke Emanuel, Barack Obama, and the Democrats in the House and Senate, have decided that they have the right to control what medical care my dad is allowed to have–whether he pays for it himself or not.

But the damaging impact of Obama Care is far greater than just the rationing and deprivation of care by government bureaucrats.  It is driving medical innovation out of the country.  This piece from the Wall Street Journal has the numbers.  It is inevitable that as more and more people personally experience the negative impact of Obama Care, and witness the decline in quality and access, there will be backlash.  But by the time Obama is out of office, Obama Care will probably have developed such a large constituency that it will be impossible to repeal.

This is a great piece from the Wall Street Journal discussing the insane “new math” being taught under the Common Core standards.  We are not doing ourselves or our children any favors by dumbing down the math curriculum and requiring our kids to draw pictures for five minutes as a means of solving a 30-second math problem.  As a parent who helps his kids with their Common Core math homework, I speak from personal experience.

WSJ–Marina Ratner:  Making Math Education Even Worse