Obama’s State of the Union Address, Minimum Wage, Marco Rubio, Immigration, Gun Control, oh my! REALLY?!
I could opine on conservative thought 3 times a day. I definitely should opine more than 3 times a year. If I have anything in life it is a surfeit (noun, an excessive amount of something) of opinions.
I often feel browbeaten (browbeat |ˈbrouˌbēt| verb: intimidate (someone), typically into doing something, with stern or abusive words) by the endless stream of liberal rhetoric (rhetoric, noun: the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing,) from Obama, Democrats, and the Dominant Liberal Establishment Mass Media (D-LEMMs, thank you Mike Rosen).
(Mike’s conservative talk radio show was exceptionally good on 12 and 13 Feb. Massad Ayoob was outstanding on gun control and gun use.)
I don’t intend to define every word I use but I want to reach out (how’s that for bi-partisan political correctness) to the low-information voters who we conservatives do not seem to be getting to. (Oops. Ended a sentence with a preposition. Sorry. They are so hard to avoid. Is that a myth?) Unfortunately I don’t think there is a single low-information person, voter or non-, global visitor type, that has yet visited my blog. My bad.
How about some useful information interspersed with my ramblings.
In addition to Mike Rosen’s analysis of Obama’s State of the Union address (linked above) I found an excellent video from the CATO Institute. It has numerous brief video clips from SOTU with a brief video rebuttal from a CATO member. I highly recommend it:
CATO response to State of the Union: 12 min. video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nCH1E29jjw
Yaron Brook and Don Watson from the Ayn Rand Institute also had an excellent response to SOTU. It was a live webinar which should be posted to the ARI website as a video ‘soon’. Yaron starts with a rather stiffly-presented (unusual for Yaron) version of what his own SOTU would espouse. It’s outstanding. Don follows with the basics of what to deal with when discussing with liberals. A Q&A is after that. I recommend segments 1 and 2. Keep checking here for ‘a free market response’ to SOTU.
The WSJ has an in-depth interactive analysis of SOTU for those of you who just can’t get enough. (I admire you for that.) You may need a WSJ subscription to access.
The following link is good for 7 days from 14 Feb:
WSJ.com – The State of the Union |
The CATO is the best brief analysis of all of them IMO. (In My Opinion.)
What about Marco Rubio’s rebuttal to the SOTU? As Damagodiva.com notes he is a rising star: WSJ: Rubio Gains GOP Influence. I agree, but as we’ve seen the D-LEMM (see reference above) is only noting his extended reach for a bottle of water. That is the height and depth of liberal reporting. I think if you subtract liberal depth from liberal height the result is the level of their stupidity, but I digress and stoop to their level in doing so.
I heard it reported that Rubio’s rebuttal included COMPROMISE and GREEN ENERGY. I have not heard Rand Paul’s tea party rebuttal yet. We must get back to PRINCIPLES. Compromise is killing this country and the constitutional republic at least a few of us thought we lived in.
Is a Rand Paul/Marco Rubio ticket in 2016 out of the question? Certainly not.
Bear with me, I’m almost finished, lest both your eyes and mine glaze over.
Obama and SOTU mentioned raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00 by 2015. That’s a 24% increase in 24 months. I would have loved to have received anything remotely close to that at any time in my working career. Regardless, we are talking PRINCIPLES people. There should be NO MINIMUM WAGE. Read ANY economics primer by ANY THINKING ECONOMIST. In a free country the government should not dictate what a business owner must pay his employees. Higher wages mean LESS EMPLOYMENT. Businesses will layoff people and make the fewer remaining work harder, or they’ll be forced to go out of business. Look at how Obamacare alone is forcing businesses to put more workers into part-time rather than full-time employment. It is these fundamental disconnects with reality that are rapidly bringing socialism and government control to this formerly free country.
Now where did I leave that blood-pressure medicine? I must opine again soon. So much to say. I didn’t even get to discussing conservatism vs. ‘liberty-minded’, ‘liberty movement’, and ‘pro-liberty perspective’ as used in Reason Magazine article Congress After Ron Paul.
I see Reason online has an article about Rand Paul and Rubio’s rebuttals:
State of the Union: Rand Paul Brings Libertarianism to the GOP
(So much good reading to be done. We must persevere and not be browbeaten.)
In closing I highly, highly recommend, by Yaron Brook and Don Watson,
Yet another book you must read: FREE MARKET REVOLUTION
I’ve read it twice and must do a more extensive review in the future. Not everyone will like everything in this book but it outlines the basic principles we must get back to if we really stand for individual rights, self-responsibility, and rational self-interest.
Finally, I ran across this totally unrelated tidbit of information last year and share it with you now:
3/17/12 US Death rate plummets:
Why hasn’t this item been emphasized in the Dominant Liberal Establishment Mass Media (D-LEMMs) (thank you Mike Rosen), or even on Fair and Balanced Fox News?
U.S. Death Rate Plummets 60 percent in 75 years
No news is good news, as they say, but is good news no news? The item caught my eye because I can never forget Barney Frank’s retort to Leslie Stahl during an interview about the housing crisis and loose lending practices that precipitated it: “Do you want people to starve?”