Dakota Beacon

It has always seemed to me that the argument for American military intervention in other nations rests on shaky ground. Contending that the United States must “police” the world, “build” nations, “spread” democracy, and “fight” for other people’s freedom sounds convincing, even lofty. But sacrificing human and economic treasure to fight for people who’ve shown little willingness to fight for themselves smacks of contrived moral superiority and is logically indefensible.

Progressive high-mindedness has bred the American welfare state. Consequently, trillions must be cut from spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — and Obamacare repealed — if we are to avert a final downslide into a European-style socialist democracy. Yet on the other hand, what about “defense spending”–a grand illusion of linguistic gymnastics? Where will the trillions come from to support the military spending necessitated by a continuation of neocon high-mindedness?

How much is Chancellor Bill Goetz's actions going to cost North Dakota Taxpayers in legal fees and severance pay?

Now the question for the taxpayers is: "How much will Chancellor Bill Goetz's efforts to cover-up the scandal by firing Richard McCallum as quickly as possible cost the taxpayers by way of severance pay and legal fees?"

Today Congress doesn't even bother arguing its authority to enact this or that law. It assumes a limitless power to do as it pleases - on gun control, tobacco, "a patients' bill of rights," and such entitlements as Social Security and Medicare. So we now live under the "consolidated" government the Constitution was designed to prevent.

The pity is that even conservatives and their legal scholars have forgotten the Constitution and allow their enemies to rewrite the political ground rules. The unequivocal text can't be changed by the courts or superseded by case law. Lincoln understood it; today's conservatives don't.

Some interesting inferences may be drawn from the Iowa Straw Poll of 2011, held last weekend.  The first and most obvious, is of course, that Tim Pawlenty’s race is run.  Voters assessed his performance (chiefly against Michele Bachmann) and decided they’d rather have her.  The beleaguered but ever popular Bachmann dealt deftly with the many irrelevant questions handed her by the panel of pundits who clearly wanted to trivialize her candidacy (and failed to do so).  Indeed, when the nation has suffered its first ever bond downgrade, an event in which Bachmann stood out as a leader against the deal that sealed said downgrade, what could they do?  To ask her anything about relevant issues would be to deliver up to her a tacit endorsement. 

I believe it is regarded as a sign of insanity to start quoting oneself, but at the risk of trying your patience I’ll try one more, because it’s the link between America’s downgraded debt and Britain’s downgraded citizenry:

“The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people.”

Big Government means small citizens: it corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically. Within living memory, the city in flames on our TV screens every night governed a fifth of the earth’s surface and a quarter of its population. When you’re imperialists on that scale, there are bound to be a few mishaps along the way. But nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.

Minot was one of the most optimistic small cities, Justice comes slowly in Minot, “his baby mamma was dead”, he cooked the enrollment books, “If financing can be finalized”, state’s best track and field performers ever, Vikings quarterbacks from the past 12 seasons, less publicized cases of overland flooding, Crystal Springs is a 134 acre lake, closed by landslides, a 20,000 mile bicycle trip,

Some estimate that our true unemployed number is in the low 20% range. Is that where some of the deficit is going? To keep an additional 11% of our able-bodied people in idleness?

Why work if the benefits of not working are as good as working? Why get out of the house and brave the elements when the food stamps arrive through the mail in a magnetic stripe card? The heating allowance comes in the mail? The unemployment check comes in the mail? The tax preparer does a free return to the IRS who will send a check in the mail for Earned Income Tax Credit. Medicaid is in place for you. Why work?

Our only grandson (age 6) left us today. He was with us for nine days, and it was  nonstop action. We enjoyed lots of bike rides, motorcycle rides, trampoline, pool, foosball, legos, Sponge Bob Square Pants, and other activities. We played baseball (he is the Cubs, I am the Indians), basketball, and golf. The other day he announced to me that he was not afraid of me. I asked him why that was and he said that I wasn’t the real boss of this house, Gammy (my wife) was. Oh how things have changed (or have they?).

What in fact is the primary function of the Office of the President?  From where does it get the power?  Power to do what?  From where does the vision of what WE the people want come? 35,000 innocent Mexicans have been slaughtered in Mexico by murdering squads of drug cartels since their President cracked down on the drug traffic. When will Obama order troops down there?  Why has he not done it already, since he is interfering everywhere else in the name of “birthing democracies”?  Study a little history, my friends, while you still have the time and the FREEDOM to do so.  Like Orwell said in Animal farm, ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL---which after the “utopian change” became mysteriously changed, in fact one might even say miraculously changed, to:  BUT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS!”

There are many legislators that have long stuck their necks out in attempts to fix the problems at North Dakota's University System.  They have been shouted down at every turn, and attacked for being too old fashioned. 

Hopefully this latest situation reinforces their zeal to fix these problems.

Neither pack of professional politicians is sincere about reducing spending or debt.  Arguments on left and right continue to go in one ear and out the other.  Both sides cling doggedly to their damned ideological agendas.  And Americans have grown sick of the cesspool government created by all the doggedness, gamesmanship, and dishonesty.  We are stupendously disgusted at coming out on the losing end of immoral deals struck by immoral lawmakers to solve problems which those lawmakers created in the first place. 

Starting over is starting to look like our best option.

Bernanke’s repeated attempts to patch over the nation’s economic weakness, rottenness, and dead wood with newly created dollars remind me of the ‘Potemkin village’ ruse. The Soviet communists duped foreign visitors into thinking that communism was a viable and prosperous system by steering them to sham factories, stores, villages, etc. that appeared productive, bustling, and attractive. In reality, Potemkin villages were like movie sets, built to disguise the widespread poverty and backwardness that characterized life in the ‘workers’ paradise.’

“The United States debt, foreign and domestic, was the price of liberty.”

But in the early 21st century foreign and domestic debt is a threat to liberty. As the Brokest Nation in History drowns in its profligacy, its commissars will grow ever more rapacious and desperate. If you think Obama’s dreary attempt to blame America’s woes on corporate-jet owners is unbecoming to the chief of state, wait till he’s reduced to complaining about two-car families. By the way, if you’re reading this out on the runway at O’Hare, what’s the difference between a corporate jet landing and Obama flying in?

With Air Force One, even when they switch the engines off, all you can hear is the whining.  

Shame on the Republican Party if it allows airheaded commentators spouting hackneyed bromides to mindlessly bash Bachmann and hijack our choices.  We can’t afford to overlook the substantial talents, good sense, experience and ability that this woman brings to the debate.  It is frivolous to suggest that we can: frivolous and potentially fatal to the Republican Party and to the nation to accede to this old-hat political humbug.

Whistling past the graveyard, A tale of a reluctant immigrant, boom times in Williston are not necessarily good times, It’s a very grim picture out wes, can’t find good cowboy monks, oil impact funds, The jury deliberated only four hours, Minot’s five unsolved murders, ND excelled in almost every category, the Buffalo Commons prophec, impact of the recession on Indian reservations, Does this sound like the start of a success story?

In simple terms, big government imposed by progressives: good. Big government imposed by conservatives: bad. The swagger is disgusting. No more acidic than the swagger practiced by any other progressive, but still disgusting.

Mr. Stewart does indeed seem to be a progressive. No clear thinker would put forth the notion that anointed bureaucrats should set the criteria for fairness, squareness, and propriety in people’s lives. Such nonsense could only spring from the mind of a silly liberal.

The current debt crisis could force drastic cuts in the Department of Defense budget, perhaps as high as 50 percent…. Cutting such a force by a quarter, much less half, would invite aggression by nations like Iran and North Korea. Keeping the current force at the status quo would be expensive and also leave the nation vulnerable to current threats and unable to cope with a rapidly growing Chinese threat. The U.S. military needs massive restructuring. Drastically cutting the DoD right now is like starting a weight reduction with a frontal lobotomy and removing a few fingers.

Vice President Biden summarized the views of the elitists by accusing the "fringe" of putting "guns to their heads" and forcing the responsible members of congress to negotiate with terrorists.

The old guard Republican leaders' role was to pretend they really were going to make the beltway bandits tighten their belts. The Democrats' role was to convince the working class in America that it would be heartless to reduce the gravy train of the dependent class they represent by even a single penny.

While the statement is true in the framework of how Washington, D.C. works, in the real world, in North Dakota, the average person would consider that to be completely false in the context of reality.

Senator John Hoeven uses the same flimsy language by saying "but I believe the framework passed today is an important first step in beginning to find real savings and control our spending."

Again, this deal does not cut any spending, only the projected rate of growth for spending.

Ronald Reagan was a remarkable negotiator, both incredibly patient and principled. Negotiating was one of Reagan’s greatest but most unappreciated attributes, to the point where I’ve many times considered doing a book strictly on Reagan as a negotiator.

I’m not privy to the records on all of President Obama’s negotiations with House Republicans like Eric Cantor and John Boehner. From what I’m reading, however, we’re seeing a very different kind of chief executive. Barack Obama is not only no Ronald Reagan on economic policy. He’s also no Reagan when it comes to negotiating skills. Obama doesn’t understand Reagan at all, and that’s a loss for this nation.

All politicians are not created equal. The House Republican freshmen represent the real heroes in this debt debacle. Their constituents elected them, many of them Tea Party supporters, to stop the inside-the-beltway spending insanity. These freshmen do not care whether they are re-elected or receive plumb committee assignments. Their vote is not for sale. They were sent on a mission and are holding true to their constituents and their principles. These freshmen cannot be bought or cajoled or arm-twisted. This is what a term limited congress might look like -- more substance and less posturing.

High taxation suffocates prosperity.  Progressives’ religious zeal stifles economic growth.  The progressive worldview darkens the human story.

From the unlikeliest place comes a most fitting condemnation of the progressive worldview.  In Emile, his treatise on education, eighteenth-century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau — a father of progressivism — declared, “Whatever you do, your actual authority can never extend beyond your own powers.”¹  But today’s ideologically fixated progressives refuse to give up the pursuit of superhuman dominance.  Progressive politicians seek control over others using government force.  These hopelessly misguided creatures will always need more and more of other people’s money to fund a quest for relevance in their own lives.

The general acquiescence of Americans in authoritarian government would astonish our ancestors. We no longer ask by what authority the government does what it does; we may obey or evade its dictates, but we don't question its authority to issue them. We don't even insist that it observe its constitutional limitations. We don't presume to tell it what the Constitution means; instead, it tells us!

And yet we continue to pretend we live in a constitutional democracy. To borrow the language of psychobabble, we are trapped in an abusive relationship with our own government, but we are in deep denial about it.

For dominant powers in decline, it starts with the money, for Washington as for London and Rome before it. But it never stops there. The horizons shrivel. Two-bit provocateurs across the map pick off remnants of the old order with ever greater ease.

America has had two roles in a so-called “globalized” world: America’s government was the guarantor of global order; America’s economy was the engine of global prosperity. Right now, both roles are up for grabs. And there are no takers for the former. Pace Nancy Pelosi, “life on this planet as we know it today” is going to change, and very fast.

The Rep. Alan West - Debbie Wasserman Schultz incident illustrates a great deal about nearly every political conflict between Republicans and Democrats. Certainly it’s the case that our political parties represent opposing principles of politics: Republicans more generally stand for principles of limited government, while Democrats espouse views that reflect the statist ideology of European social democracies. But as the West v. Wasserman Schultz controversy demonstrates, the differences between the parties really go beyond this rather facile distinction.