Paul Ryan: Saving the American Idea

Subtitle is "Rejecting Fear, Envy and the Politics of Division".



He is right on, my man Paul.

The Benefactor Factor

Dennis Prager writes about how government entitlement programs and increasing dependency of the populace on them don't destroy only the economy, but also the virtue of gratitude. Excerpt:

What entitlements do, and what the transformation of entitlements into rights does, is create a citizenry that increasingly lacks the most important character trait -- gratitude. Of all the characteristics needed for both a happy and morally decent life, none surpasses gratitude. Grateful people are happier, and grateful people are more morally decent. That is why we teach our children to say "thank you." But the welfare state undoes that. One does not express thanks for a right. So, instead of "thank you," the citizen of the welfare state is taught to say, "What more can I get?"

Yet, while producing increasingly selfish people, the mantra of the left, and therefore of the universities and the media, has been for generations that capitalism and the free market, not the welfare state, produces selfish people.

All too true.

In my opinion, another thing which sheds light on the dearth in gratitude among recipients is the impersonal nature of government assistance. At a soup kitchen you may see a smiling face presenting you with the gift of food, with many other volunteers scurrying about in the background to prepare the gift. But often the monetary assistance delivered to those being helped by Uncle Sam is in the form of mass-produced debit cards and checks chunked out by 3rd party processing centers. Some of these don't even say where they are from. They don't even have an official seal or an American flag on them. It's easy to see how this tends to engender an entitlement mentality. Actions speak louder than words, even Obama's applause lines.

But speaking of Obama's words, all this legislation he brags on seems to be moving entitlements to a new level of abstraction. Forcing insurance companies to cover "kids" up to 26 years old—and these companies will merely shrug and raise premiums—is an ingenious way to hide the entitlement and thus hide the fact that it is a gift from either parental guardians or taxpayers. Is as if liberal bureaucrats are saying "Don't thank us, just re-elect us and pay more taxes. We'll keep rigging the system for you."

Do you really need your 4.0?

This is choice. Hat tip to American Catholic.

C'est l'éruption de la fin!!

It's the final struggle, baby.

Please don't tell me you don't find this tremedously funny. This reminds me of reading all those old Zombietime photo diaries of nutzoid Frisco rallies, etc. It's a bit more sanitized, but no more sane, and just as socialist.

At first I thought AFP should have used the Internationale as the soundtrack since it's more over the top. But this works fine; you can almost smell the Vodka on the singers' breath.

Radical-in-Chief

It's his dream, it's his nightmare. Stanley Kurtz has been watching the snail crawling along the edge of a straight razor for some time, and now he has announced his new book, Radical-in-Chief. Here's the text from the press release.

Part biography, part history, part detective story, RADICAL-IN-CHIEF reveals the carefully hidden tale of Barack Obama’s political past. Stanley Kurtz, who’s research helped inject the Bill Ayers and ACORN issues into the 2008 presidential campaign, presents the results of more than two years of digging into President Obama’s radical political world. The book is filled with previously unknown information about the president’s past, tied together by a bold argument about what Obama’s deepest political convictions really are.

RADICAL-IN-CHIEF marshals a wide array of never-before-seen evidence to establish that the president of the United States is indeed a socialist. Tracing an unbroken thread of socialist activities and political partnerships, from Obama’s youth through his community organizing days and beyond, the book confirms that the president’s harshest critics have been right about his socialism all along.

RADICAL-IN-CHIEF also exposes the truth about community organizers–the socialist beliefs they hold and hide, and how they trained and groomed a president. Obama’s community organizer colleagues had a strategy for slowly and stealthily turning the United States into a socialist nation. The Obama administration is carrying out that strategy today.

This book will forever change our national debate about who Barack Obama is.

One look at this, and we know it's gonna be hot! Click to pre-order on Amazon.

A short explanation of why any Catholic should be against Obamacare

Phil Lawler's piece is a summary, but it lays out all you really need to know about what is wrong with Obamacare from a Catholic perspective, even without abortion coverage. Excerpt:

And not only unnecessary but unjust, according to the best traditions of Catholic social thought. In Quadregesimo Anno (79), Pope Pius XI explained:

As history abundantly proves, it is true that on account of changed conditions many things which were done by small associations in former times cannot be done now save by large associations. Still, that most weighty principle, which cannot be set aside or changed, remains fixed and unshaken in social philosophy: Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.

By those standards, set forth in one of the main magisterial texts of Catholic social teaching, the health-care reform legislation now pending before Congress could be judged an “injustice” and a “disturbance of right order.” But Pope Pius XI used still stronger language. Such a program, he said, would be “a grave evil.”

Of course, the automated response to this from the social justice robots would be that the "lesser and subordinate organizations" can't do the job. They are obviously wrong; the facts demonstrate this easily. And it's good to know that Pope Pius XI is on our side here.

Glenn Beck discusses the groups who authored the Obamacare bill

Source.

Congress, beyond not reading these bills, is not even writing these bills. They are being written by a vast network that is not conspiratorial — it is completely out and wide open — yet the media refuses to report on them.

Organizations that are filled with socialists, communists, revolutionaries. Organizations that pull their members from legitimate businesses, politicians and from groups that most Americans have never heard of, like Movement for a Democratic Society — a group started by members of the Communist Party USA, other radicals and Socialists of America.

I have demonstrated these radicals are not only instrumental in shaping legislation that's being jammed through, but are also -- by invitation -- personally advising the president of the United States.

And again the media remains silent.

As the man says, "Speak without fear."