Paxety Pages

On Karl Marx’s birthday, Barack Obama kicks off his campaign for reelection, using as his slogan the title of one of Marx’s books.

Here’s what the logo should look like.

Obama's 2012 campaign

Popularity: 2% [?]

The Iowa caucuses finished with Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum in a virtual tie. Michelle Bachman, who identified herself closely with the Tea Party, finished last. Most Tea Party folks seem to think of Romney as a big government moderate and Santorum as too much of a Washington insider. So, did the Tea Party fail?

Or, did the Tea Party succeed in infusing its smaller government, lower spending, balance the budget ideas on the Republican candidates? Both Romney and Santorum are talking about those issues.

Don Surber has a post on Santorum’s rise – and concludes with this:

Conservatives have a great AA team. Unfortunately, we’re in the big leagues. But we have a lot of prospects for 2016, which is better than where conservatives were in 2008.

It will be interesting to see how it works out.

Popularity: 12% [?]

The MSM reporters are proving, once again, that they are idiots. They are reporting that no one saw the rise of Rick Santorum. It wasn’t hard to see if you shut up, got out of the beltway, and watched.

Iowa is a retail politics state and Santorum is the only candidate who made it a point to visit each of the state’s counties early on.

Popularity: 12% [?]

To hear the liberal media talk, you’d think the only reason we went into Iraq was because of weapons of mass destruction.  No so.  One of the several reasons was Iraq’s repeated violations of UN resolutions.   In fact, the fuss in 2002/2003 was how many UN resolutions Iraq had violated.  I researched the issue, and here’s my original post.  (It contained links, but those links have long since rotted.)

I’ve been annoyed by the media reports calling the newest UN Security Council resolution on Iraq a second resolution. Donald Rumsfeld calls it the 18th. I questioned a CNN producer by e-mail, asking why they don’t accurately report the number of resolutions. He challenged me to name and attribute the resolutions. Here are 18 that I have found – making the one currently under debate the 19th:

Resolution 660 – (August 2, 1990) condemns Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and calls for unconditional withdrawal.

Resolution 661 – (August 6, 1990) Imposes economic sanctions on Iraq.

Resolution 678 – (September 29, 1990) Demands compliance with resolution 660

Resolution 686 – (March 2, 1991) Demands Iraq’s compliance with 12 previous resolutions condemning it’s invasion of Kuwait (Resolution 660 and 11 others that slightly amend or amplify 660 -it appears the UN doesn’t count them as separate resolutions)

Resolution 687 – (April 3, 1991) Cease-fire and mandate of UNSCOM

Resolution 688 – (April 5, 1991) Condemns Iraqi attacks on Kurds and Shiites

Resolution 699 – (June 17, 1991) Iraq liable for costs associated with UNSCOM

Resolution 707 – (August 15, 1991) Iraq’s compliance, inspection flights, Iraq’s disclosures

Resolution 715 – (October 11, 1991) Approval of ongoing monitoring and verification plan

Resolution 1051 – (March 27, 1996) Approval of export/import monitoring mechanism

Resolution 1060 – (June 12, 1996) Condemnation of Iraq’s refusal to grant inspection access

Resolution 1115 – (June 21, 1997) Condemnation of Iraq’s refusal to grant inspections and interviews

Resolution 1134 – (October 23, 1997) Condemnation of Iraq’s behavior, further sanctions threatened

Resolution 1137 – (November 12, 1997) Condemnation of Iraq’s behavior, imposition of travel ban

Resolution 1154 – (March 2, 1998) Endorsement of the MOU on access to Presidential sites

Resolution 1194 – (September 9, 1998) Condemnation of Iraq’s decision to stop all UNSCOM work

Resolution 1205 – (November 5, 1998) Condemnation of Iraq’s decision to halt monitoring

Resolution 1441 – (November 7, 2002) Demands disarmament and inspections

Today, in 2011, folks are asking if the war was worth the effort.  I think one should take these resolutions into account when deciding.

Popularity: 15% [?]

The federal government has just shut down several of the largest on-line poker sites in the world! Was this to ensure the moral purity of the American public? Was it to protect the innocent, poor and uneducated from falling prey to hopeless schemes where they have little chance of winning. Well, since government sponsors various lotteries where the odds of winning are astronomical, and as random as a lightning strike, this seems improbable.

It’s the money. All those billions in poker money. The politicians want their share. This is Obama’s Fort Sumpter, the first shot fired in a war to seize the internet. Will freedom minded liberals and conservatives join together and rise up to save the last bastion of free thought and free enterprise on the planet?

The federal government is full of power-mad politicians who will stop at nothing to seize our resources so they can convert them into power for themselves. (If you want to see your money at work, take a tour of abandoned homes in your neighborhood, courtesy of the federal government, or stand in line and at the grocery store and watch shoppers with shopping baskets full of ribs, steaks and other expensive items, pay with a food stamp card, then deliver the items to the trunk of a shiny Mercedes.) The federal manta is: if it moves, tax it; if it keeps moving, regulate it; if it stops moving, subsidize it. They tax everything now, even the weather. The federal government has four basic personality types controlling our lives: thieves, liars, tyrants and incompetents; and they each have the force of arms behind them to ensure compliance, through imprisonment or death, from anyone who refuses to follow their benevolent dictums – and be sure you don’t forget about all those new hi-tech shotguns the IRS purchased recently.

I’m particularly ashamed of the part the Republican party has played in the anti-online poker war. If anything, poker is the American symbol of the individual and for capitalism, where an individual uses his skill to mitigate the ebb and flow of random statistical events and turn a profit using his intelligence. There is no reward without some risk. And free individuals should have the right to risk their resources in any manner they choose. If they eventually lose those resources playing poker, it’s still better than having the blood-hungry politicians of America confiscate them to dispense to their electorate. Given that, the Republicans should stick to fiscal issues (such as keeping the dollar sound), protecting the boarders and ensuring that the country has a strong defense, and leave the social/moral issues to the will of the public. These are the issues that won their house victory. There is no mandate for a the conservative wing of American politics to provide a moral premise for the public anymore than there is a mandate for the liberal wing to provide itself as a surrogate husband to the increasing number of fatherless families. It would be nice, and completely unexpected, if our federal government, acting through their sea of bureaucrats, loosened its hands from our wallets and removed its intrusive nostrils from our collective anuses. But don’t hold your breath.

Federal has become a byword for thievery, waste, and incompetence. Excepting the case of war (at least in the first half of the last century), there is nothing the federal bureaucracy can do as well as private industry. As a retirement age baby boomer, this is how I see the federal government: My enemy. We revolted against King George for confiscatory polices that were a lot less heinous than our current government’s, and we were perhaps less divided on issues during the Civil War. I fear that another rebellion is the only way to save the remnants of our constitutional republic.

Popularity: 29% [?]