A Note from Jill Biden

Dear America

Please excuse Joey from the election today. He wanted to come, he really did, but he became grossly incompetent and strange overnight. We had no warning. He didn’t even have a chance to tell you in person so he asked me to write this note. That’s so sad.

Joey sends his best wishes to whoever (is it whomever?) decides to run for… 

(“What was it, Jill? Class president? Well, that’s no big deal. There’s always someone else, usually some babe or jock. I was never a jock, but let me tell you, me and Corn Pop, he was a bad dude… “)

(“I know dear, I know. Calm down. Let me get your special juice.”)

But back to this note.

Bibi Whatshisname is supposed to come by this week. He’s from somewhere, maybe Greece or Argentina. Joey wonders why. Can someone please explain it to him in small words and tell him what he’s supposed to say? And then tell me? Understanding things makes Joey very tired. Sometimes he has to call a lid before lunchtime. That’s sad, too, because Joey loves his lunches.

Joey misses his friends, although no one stops by anymore. Where are all those MSNBC people and their cameras? They always say the nicest things about Joey and they make him feel good and important. Sometimes they even leave money.

Joey loves it when people salute him. Do you suppose you could get a bunch of people to come over and just salute? Saluters, maybe? And maybe some applauders, too? Yes, I suppose a sound track might do. He really wouldn’t know the difference. Ask Spielberg. But I don’t think you can do that with saluters. Well, maybe with Disney but I don’t think there’s enough time today.

Where is that Kamala person these days? 

Joey misses his German Shepherds, too, the ones he had to send to the American Home for Mad Dogs. Could someone from the Secret Service bring some of them by for a play visit one of these days? It would really cheer Joey up to see them run.

Well, gotta go. They’re standing Joey up for photos now and he just smiled. I have to think of smart things to say.

“All the way in 2020!”

Jill Biden (Joey’s wife)

 

Existential Threatism

    

    The informed idiots who have preached (and I use that word advisedly) Trump's existential threatism have reaped the hell they have sown. Politicians, labor leaders, Silicon Valley tyrants, preachers, community organizers, you name it. Trump survived this time. One family was destroyed and we're waiting on the results of two others. They, and we, are cautiously hopeful.

    Those same informed idiots motivated some deluded boy to do what they would not or could not do, take matters is his own hands and change the course of America. God forbid that there should be a free and fair election where they might lose. This is what they secretly hoped for in their political wet dreams, Trump gone and their hands ostensibly clean. But their hands aren't clean, are they?

    We've heard, ad infinitum, "Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy." Even, and especially, from the president's own mouth. It is a talking point that seems to need no substantiation. If he says it, who would dare challenge it? Like Nixon, if the president did it, ipso facto, it must be legal. In this case, ipso facto, it must be true. But, as with Nixon, it's not true.

    Merriam-Webster tells us that adding -ism to a noun defines an act, practice or process. Good enough for me. Thus, existential threatism. If you preach existential threatism enough times to enough people, especially in schools where no one is strong enough or knows enough to say otherwise, someone will be foolish enough to act on that threat. That's what we do when we're faced with a threat. That's what fight or flight is all about.

    Now a twenty-year-old kid, two years from his high school graduation, has attempted a major political assassination. Failed, and most of America thanks God for that, but still murdered another man and critically injured two more. He was twenty, for God's sake, yet he had heard enough about the Bad Orange Man to make him want to kill him and damn the collateral damages.

    Murdered for what? Some kid's provoked imagination gone haywire? Who provoked him? Teachers? Hmmm. Church? Maybe, but unlikely unless you subscribe to Pastor Jeremiah Wright's doctrine of "The chickens have come home to roost." Scouting? Sports? Even less likely. Gangs? We know so far that he acted alone. Was he deranged or drugged? No history of that to date.

    Do you suppose he was provoked by the non-stop political vilification of Donald Trump? Yes, I think we're onto something now. Donald Trump's Existential Threatism.

    Shades of Gavrilo Princip and Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 and the latter's threat to Serbian independence and Princip's unforeseen consequence of WWI. Damn the chaos. The shooter wanted to make a point in both cases and did his best. 

This time the leader survived. Will we?

 

In Response to Andrew Piontek - Medium, June 14, 2024

In “How Supporting Ukraine Makes America Great Again,” Andrew Piontek says “some people say Ukraine is just as corrupt as Russia. Those that state this go on to say the Ukraine is not fighting for democracy but for a corrupt government.”

I grant that Ukraine is fighting because it has no choice, in the face of invasion. He ignores that the U.S. and Ukraine are responsible for the invasion and, when given a chance to prevent or end it, declined.

Ukraine is a fundamentally and thoroughly corrupt country that oppresses its citizens, clergy and industry, such of the last that remains. It is dominated by Nazi organizations from the trenches to the generals to the highest in government. Not just kinda-like-Nazis but real Hitler-was-right Nazis. Anyone who believes otherwise simply doesn’t understand the situation.

It is foolish to compare America’s War of Independence to the situation in Ukraine. They are not remotely the same. The former was an assembly of states fighting to gain independence from England and grant freedom to all its citizens. The latter is a grossly corrupt and incompetently led fascist country fighting to maintain that status against another oppressor. How are they the same?

As I wrote previously, “there are no good guys in Ukraine.” Yes, there are many innocent people who are dying because of the incompetence of both sides, aided by the U.S. and others. You conflate the conflict with the suffering of innocents. The fact that you’ve “had dinner with Ukrainian families” does not support your essay. The combined corruption of Russia and Ukraine is the source of the killing and suffering.

I don’t know how this war will or should end. I simply doubt that the resolution lies in supplying more arms to Ukraine with the ability to reach deeper and deeper into Russia.That’s not “poking the bear.” That is stabbing the bear with a small knife. Do not expect the Russian reaction to be proportionate. Proportionate reaction is not in the Russian military playbook and never has been.

D-Day 2024

I last posted my respects to the men - and women, as Bob Welch reminded us in American Nightingale - of D-Day 1944 on June 6, 2013, calling it Back Page News.

 

Not much on TV today. Biden did a fly-in, drive-in, at The Beach. He couldn’t figure out whether he was supposed to stand or sit when Gen. Milley was introduced. That will salve his conscience, such as he may still have, and give him some cover in his desire to castrate the American military and still get them to vote for him. Good luck with that. What a comment on our national conscience.  

To us in America, raised on US-centric WW II history, this was the critical event of WW II in Europe. The beginning of the end, and maybe it was. But that gives short shrift to the Soviet Union's sacrifices. We don't like them anymore but back in the day they killed 9 out of 10 German soldiers lost in the war. Russia and its contemporaries remember them and honor them. Us, not so much.

We saw Nancy Reagan placing flowers on the grave of Gen. Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., (TRJr) in 1994 while President Reagan looked on. There is no more talk of major WWII celebrations in Normandy, or elsewhere, ever again. Their time has passed, although there are living survivors. Today, the living and dead veterans get little more than a nod. Anywhere. From anyone. 

 

TRJr deserves a special mention here.  Gassed and wounded at Soissons in 1918, he had to overcome strenuous resistance to be in the invasion at all. His commanding officer reluctantly OK'd it but thought he was sending him to his death. Oldest man in the invasion, second man off the lead boat in the first wave (give that some thought), only general to land with the first wave, only man to serve with his son on D-Day. Medal of Honor for his actions on D-Day, one of only two sets of fathers and sons to win the Medal of Honor, along with Arthur and Douglas MacArthur.  

 

As successive waves came ashore, he walked around under fire encouraging troops to move inland, and he personally led assaults against German positions, just as he did when he first came ashore. He was admirably portrayed by Henry Fonda in the movie The Longest Day. He is a man well worth remembering.

 

Here is his Medal of Honor citation:

 

For gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty on 6 June 1944, in France. 

 

After 2 verbal requests to accompany the leading assault elements in the Normandy invasion had been denied, Brig. Gen. Roosevelt's written request for this mission was approved and he landed with the first wave of the forces assaulting the enemy-held beaches. 

 

He repeatedly led groups from the beach, over the seawall and established them inland. His valor, courage, and presence in the very front of the attack and his complete unconcern at being under heavy fire inspired the troops to heights of enthusiasm and self-sacrifice. 

 

Although the enemy had the beach under constant direct fire, Brig. Gen. Roosevelt moved from one locality to another, rallying men around him, directed and personally led them against the enemy. 

 

Under his seasoned, precise, calm, and unfaltering leadership, assault troops reduced beach strong points and rapidly moved inland with minimum casualties. 

 

He thus contributed substantially to the successful establishment of the beachhead in France.

 

Only three other men won the Medal of Honor on D-Day, and one on June 7.  Four of the five were awarded posthumously, including TRJr who died of a heart attack on July 12, 1944, the same day he was promoted to major general.

TRJr is seldom remembered any more, just like the rest of our D-Day and WW II veterans. But today is a good day to remember and thank him and them.

"If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten."
-- Rudyard Kipling

 

Achievements, not deaths, are the legacy of Normandy but it is death that dominates our thoughts of them today.  For each recorded act of heroism and sacrifice and death there were hundreds more that went unobserved or are forgotten. Each of them died to keep us free. It is our shame that they appear to our children as roles in video games instead of stories of heroism and sacrifice that we teach them. Gentlemen and ladies of D-Day, thank you for giving my family and me our freedom and our future.

"We’ll start the war from right here!"
Teddy Roosevelt, Jr, upon learning that his unit had landed a mile from their designated beach on D-Day.

The anniversary of the invasion of Normandy was still a big event back in 1994, on the 50th. I remember the allied leaders meeting on the beaches, saluting the vets, promising everlasting gratitude for their sacrifices. Everlasting doesn't mean much these days. What's left to say and who is there to say it? Joe Biden?  

Here's what they saw when the ramps dropped:

 

My friend Ray, gone now, went ashore on Omaha Beach the night before. He left a submarine in the English Channel, then he and his men rowed their rubber rafts ashore. He was a combat engineer, a lieutenant, and his mission was to clear assault paths between the maze of obstacles that the Germans had placed on the beaches in anticipation of the invasion. It wasn't his first time on Omaha Beach. He'd been there before, gathering sand samples.  

Granted, it was too little and too late to do much but they did their best. When they were done, they dug in at the base of the cliffs of Pont du Hoc and waited, first for the shelling, then for the invasion. While he was at the base of the cliffs, he could look directly at the surf, and he could help men struggling ashore.

Then up the cliffs he went, becoming an infantry platoon leader for the next few weeks until he re-joined an engineer unit. He survived the invasion and the next 11 months of war but many of his men didn't. Here's a detail from a bronze at the National D-Day Memorial. It's what he did when he climbed the cliff. Take a good look. He's doing it for you.

When you look back at Omaha Beach from the Normandy American Cemetery, you get a glimpse of the task that the invading armies faced:

 

Looking another direction, you can see the price they paid:

 

Say something to someone about Normandy today.  If you can find a D-Day vet, by all means thank him.  They're hard to find, though, and they don't often make known what they did.  But say something, to a neighbor maybe, or a friend.  Make sure your kids know about it, about them, about worlds that ended and worlds that opened up that day.  It's the least you can do.  We can never repay what we owe them but we can tell their story, the story that my newspaper failed to tell.

They're eroding away, as all cliffs must, and the effort being made to restore them. The real story, of course, is of eroding memories, those of the participants and our own. When we stop remembering events of such colossal world import, who will restore us?

I can’t forget to mention Charles Schultz's immortal D-Day tribute, showing a photo of Ike exhorting his 101st Airborne troops on the afternoon of the 5th. They would jump, and die, in just a few hours. Snoopy is there, too, as everyman and representing all of us, geared up and looking at Ike. The simple caption:

 

June 6, 1944 - To Remember - 

 

Thank you, Ray. Thank you to all who served and fought and suffered for me. I remember who gave my children their freedom. 

* * * * * 

 

Teach Your Children

by Graham Nash

 

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.

Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

And you, of tender years,
Can't know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.

[Counter Melody To Above Verse:
Can you hear and do you care and 
Cant you see we must be free to
Teach your children what you believe in.
Make a world that we can live in.]

Teach your parents well,
Their children's hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.   

 

I remember the first time I heard that song, in 1970 in Vietnam.  It still affects me the same way. Click on it and listen.

 

 

HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY

A COMRADE IN ARMS

KNOWN BUT TO GOD 

 

Chagrin and Trump and Katharine Valentino

Chagrin and Trump and Katharine Valentino

Merriam-Webster says that chagrin is “disquietude or distress of mind caused by humiliation, disappointment, or failure.” That is a reasonable description of how I feel after the Trump verdict. Thirty-four felony convictions. Holy shit! Really? What does that mean for me? For America?

I am a casual student of Russian history. American, too. Don’t ask me why, it’s an involved story. At any rate, the Trump trial has many similarities to Stalin’s show trials of The Terror during the late 1930s: 

1 an out-of-favor politician defendant, 
2 novel legal theories created just to persecute him, 
3 important witnesses barred from testifying,
4 a prosecutor who was (s)elected on his promise to “get” Trump, 
5 a judge with a potential political bias, 
6 a jury pool where 90% of the voters voted against Trump in the last election.

I can see my friend Katharine Valentino rubbing her hands together in glee and giggling (cackling?), “The witch is dead. That proves I’ve been right all along. We got the monster.”

But that stimulant bounce (for me it was alcohol, cocaine for others) will wear off. The dawn will break. The question will be, “What have we done?” Then, “How can we make this right?”

In the Soviet Union, making it right took place as the “rehabilitation” of improperly punished individuals. Those individuals were, sadly, dead by then, having received their own personal “9mm salute” as the result of their convictions. After rehabilitation, officially and permanently, they had done no wrong. Inter alia, their families could get jobs and buy food now. Go and sin no more.

Enter Trump. I think his convictions were improper. I’m not a lawyer but I can see, hear and read. If it was, the appeals courts will sort it out in due time. But the result will remain, “convicted felon.” Opprobrium was always the desired result. Trump’s Scarlet Letter. Whatever punishment he may receive is just frosting on the devil’s-food cake.

Trump’s opposition will ask, “Is that really who you want in the White House? A felon?” It’s already happening. I saw a report this morning that the Biden campaign has raised nearly fifty million dollars just off this conviction. But the Trump campaign has already raised more than a hundred fifty million with more coming in too fast to count.

The dawn will break in November and it will likely find Trump as our president with some appeals still pending, all of which will reverse his convictions. We will wake up in a disheveled bed in a cheap hotel room and ask “What have I done” and “Who was that?” and “Why was I attracted to him?” and “Did I really do all that just for the money?”

Katharine Valentino hyperventilates as her emotions dictate: “Everything Trump has been saying during the trial has been a lie.” Well, no. Trump didn’t testify during the trial and his gag order prevented him from speaking his mind outside the courtroom. That’s what gag orders are for, though he spoke right outside the courtroom more than once, and paid for each violation.

She takes great issue with Trump’s dalliance with Stormy Daniels, if such there was. The story is not a secret. It has been, if anything, over-exploited by the media for years. It has been denied by both parties, then admitted by Stormy, then denied again. WTF?

There was a payment of a hundred thirty grand that can’t be denied. She cashed the check that someone else wrote. If anything, it proves that hot young women are attracted to rich old men, and vice versa. I already knew that.

Will Katharine write as passionately later about the wrongs that were done in the name of “Get the monster?” Perhaps so, but I doubt it. She is an excellent writer but she may not have the grace to say "I was wrong" should events turn out that way. She doesn't need to say that today, I grant you, but tomorrow, when the appeals are upheld at some level or the other? I hope so, for her soul.

Or will she become a member of a dismal opposition whose purpose will ever remain the same: “Get Trump.” Disregard the will of the American people, disregard the crises facing America, just punish the bastard. Just get him. Get him. Get him. Get him.

 

Anguish in Tbilisi - Re-Annexation?

Disclaimer: I am not an unbiased reporter regarding Georgia. I devoted 3-1/2 years of my life in the first decade of this century to bringing part of Georgian law into the twenty-first century. I am a proud winner of the Georgian Medal of Honor. My closest colleague said I am half-American and half-Georgian. I have many close friends there.

__________________

Georgia is an occupied nation. Has been since Russia invaded and stayed in 2008, something I've writen about before. There has to have been a reason for the continued occupation, right? You knew it had to come.

It became obvious in 2023, when Parliament passed the odious "foreign agents" law. That law, inter alia, gives the government sweeping new powers to repress dissent and will "marginalize and discredit opposition voices and have a chilling effect on free speech," according to Fox News. 

That law was revoked after strong opposition but passed again recently, with the same result: Massive violent protests in the streets of Tbilisi and in and around Parliament. They're going on right now, as you read this, May 15, 2024.

"The law will allow them to start a witch hunt against all who do not share their position and oligarchic way of governance," former Georgia Minister of Defense Tinatin Khidasheli told Fox News Digital. [Thank you, Fox News, May 15, 2024.]

Vladimir Putin has a Tsarist view of Russia, one in which he is the tsar and he will conquer lands like Ukraine and Georgia and, to come, Moldova and others. He won't stop. He has to be stopped.

The comparison to Nazism is tiresome, but let me suggest a new view. Nazism, like communism, is a world view, not just a local problem. When leaders adopt this world view they, almost by definition, commit their nations to aggressive world building. That is, "I like it so much that I'm going to force other nations to accept us, 'no matter what.'"

If there is no resistance in the new lands, I give you Sudetentland as an example, the world view expands into the new land. There is a new normal. I suggest that Georgia is the new Sudetenland, where Putinism is becoming the new normal. 

Given his experience in Sudetenland, Hitler thought, "Might as well try for more if no one is going to stop me." Enter Poland. But Poland wasn't quite the pushover that Hitler imagined. They fought back, hard, but were overmatched because Hitler had violated the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and built a modern, strong army and air force. Poland hadn't. France would be next.

Replace Poland with Ukraine and the similarities are striking. After an unresisted occupation of Georgia, Ukraine was the next victim for Putin. But it hasn't been the pushover conquest that Putin imagined. History repeats. See France, then England.

Georgia has been a small, strong ally since the fall of the Soviet Union. You may remember Bush the Younger dancing in a Tbilisi street with young Georgians in 2004. It was a time of heady independence.

I was in Tbilisi during the Rose Revolution. I saw the column of limosines slink away when President Eduard Shevardnadze abandoned his country. He passed right in front of me and looked at me. The same man who had presented me the Medal of Honor four months before.

I fear that the ruling pro-Moscow Georgian Dream party will do everything but re-annex Georgia to the Russian Federation. Back to the Sudetenland metaphor. Who will stop it? Is it already a fait accompli? 

Russian tanks and infantry are only thirty minutes from Tbilisi. A heavily funded pro-Moscow party is in charge in Tbilisi.  Has Georgia already been re-annexed and no one will say the words? Will Georgian citizens be told, "Don't worry. It's only a name change?" Watch this space.

Student Loans Again

Yes, this is a re-run, but with all the student loan rage, I thought it might be a good time to run it again.

#

The guy behind a cardboard box lets you bet that you can’t follow the pea he has hidden under one of the three paper cups on top of his box when he shuffles them around. You bet, you lose, next sucker.

I’ve been following the student loan not-a-crisis for a long time and I’ve written about it at length, although not recently. It all seems so hopeless, so useless to see.

If I, an admittedly limited and undereducated observer, could have seen this coming, why didn’t they?

The answer must be, of course, that they did see it coming and it was their intent all along. Like the southern border, they are doing these things for personal financial and personal political gain, with political party gain a side benefit. Might I suggest where the new 70,000 IRS employees could be employed? “Come here, kid.”

__________

Student Loans and the IRS

3–30–10

There’s nothing complicated about student loans. You already knew that, didn’t you? If you want to go to college or any number of other schools, you can save, borrow, get a scholarship or subsidy or go to work to pay the institution that grants you admission. Simple.

The health care bill eliminated banks from the student lending industry and the costs and fees they charged student borrowers. The gummint is taking over the industry, changing some of the repayment rules (to its own detriment, one should note, but that could change) and keeping the profits to pay the costs of its health care legislation. If there are any, that is, after the gummint eschews those fees and charges.

Think about it. The gummint decided to take over a (gummint-funded) private industry, renounced certain of its profit centers and intends for any remaining profits to be used to pay for its health care bill.

This requires a profound suspension of disbelief:

· First, that the gummint should supplant any private industry in a non-national security field.

· Second, that the gummint can run the industry better than the people who were already running it at a profit that could be taxed, keeping in mind that the parts that generated profits no longer exist.

· Third, that it is in the best interest of the American citizenry that gummint should compete in the private sector.

· Fourth, that the gummint won’t use its lending authority to control which students will be allowed to go to which schools.

What vital national programs has the gummint run well and within budget? Medicare, Social Security, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Chrysler? Well, no. Then why should we accept that they can run student lending (or health care or anything else) better than the people who are already running it?

When someone neglects to repay a student loan, who’s going to collect the unpaid debt? The Health Care Bill, of which the Education Bill is a part, already provides for the IRS to enforce its provisions and it allows the disclosure of previously confidential tax information to health care administrators.

May I suggest that the IRS might be well-suited and amply staffed, with its new enforcement employees, to collect delinquent student loans? There are precedents. The collection of delinquent child support payments is just one. (Oh, you didn’t know about that one?)

The problem is that the IRS is very often incompetent and chronically bumbling. There were very good reasons that Congress devoted much of 1998 to investigating its massive internal failures and incompetencies.

Recently the Sacramento IRS office sent two employees to visit a local car wash because of unpaid tax of two cents (yes, $0.02) and accrued penalties and interest of a couple hundred bucks. These are the folks you want to enforce health care premiums and collect student loans?

Or have you heard differently?

Quis custodiet ipso custodes.

Juvenal

__________

Student Loans … Changing the Change

8–24–13

Students (as of that writing) had borrowed nearly a trillion dollars from you and they don’t want to pay it back. Why is that a problem?

We previously looked at the reformed and inferior Federal Student Loan Program on March 30, 2010, at Student Loans and the IRS. See above. Student loan reform was a bad idea then and has been implemented poorly since.

How do we know it was a bad idea? The prez told us so. He was speechifying about student loans last week. In preparation, The White House announced:

“We have to fundamentally rethink how higher education is paid for in this country.” (Thank you, The Atlantic)

But that’s what was supposed to happen in 2010. The prez was mighty proud of his student loan reform back then, part of his Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), Obamacare to most:

“With this bill, and other steps we’ve pursued over the last year, we are finally undertaking meaningful reform in our higher education system," Barack Obama on March 30, 2010

Mr. Obama called it “one of the most significant investments in higher education since the GI Bill.” (Thank you, Christian Science Monitor)

The prez promised us $60Bil in program savings that would be used partly fund Obamacare, part to be spent on community colleges, part for Pell Grants, part to ease stringent repayment requirements and on and on. Wow, who wouldn’t be on board with something as cool as that?

But if that had been true, why would we want to fundamentally rethink the president’s own reforms from which he promised us such miraculous results? Answer: It wasn’t true.

Here are two more answers:

1) The education reform issue was advanced to give the prez a political wedge issue;

2) It provided for the federal government to take over a profitable private sector (although admittedly publicly funded) business activity. You know, like ObamaCare usurped the health care industry.

The wedge issue is a dandy and conservatives have wilted under it.

“Hey kids, want some student loan money (stubux?)? Let me help you out there. Interest rates too high? Let’s cut them in half for a while by borrowing from Social Security. Yeah, I told you it’s bankrupt but what the hey, let’s do it anyway. (Oh, you didn’t know that?) And don’t forget, VOTE DEMOCRAT!”

Rates will go up again, of course. It’s a part of the plan that he doesn’t bother to mention.

Then comes the reason behind the reason: When the built-in failure happens, he’ll blame the Republicans and lead a crusade to “fundamentally rethink how higher education is paid for in this country.” (See above.) He’s doing it right now.

“Changing the change” might actually work if he can get enough of us to forget that the original plan was his, not the Republicans’. “Hope and Change” and all.

Reason #3: Central planning is all the vogue again. The gummint knows better than we do about everything. Therefore, we should do things the gummint way because, you know, it’s a matter of smarter people taking better care of us than we can care for ourselves. Personal responsibility morphs into “it takes a village.” Why should the private sector make a profit?

The gummint has taken over major industries on the grounds that Washington can, and therefore should, run them better than the private sector. The gummint took control of crop production during the Great Depression. Wiki notes of a Woody Guthrie song:

*In addition to being a lament for the braceros killed in the crash, the opening lines of “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)”:

“The crops are all in and the peaches are rott’ning, The oranges piled in their creosote dumps,” is another protest by Guthrie. At the time, government policies paid farmers to destroy their crops in order to keep farm production and prices high. Guthrie felt that it was wrong to render food inedible by poisoning it in a world where hungry people lived.

A popular refrain is “Government, stay out of my bedroom.” True that, and the exact same sentiment applies to everything else in our lives — including crop production — except for the powers and duties conferred on the federal government by the Constitution. “Stay out of my doctor’s office,” works, too.

Our Founders feared that a powerful federal government would threaten the freedom of Americans. The Constitution tells us what the government can do, but that wasn’t enough.

The Bill of Rights tells us what we can do. Nowhere is there a mention of gummint doing anything just because it feels like it. Hello, Obamacare. Oh, that’s right, it’s a tax. Who knew?

Cars, banking, health care, student loans, crony capitalism loans to politically connected fat cats for solar panels and batteries that never worked or were never competitive or never existed. Choose your industry. Which one is working better than before gummint took it over?

Next up: Gummint rates schools and directs students to the ones it thinks are best by increasing the amounts of individual student loans for them. No, really. (Thank you, BusinessWeek.)

* * * * *

“The bottom line is we’re not broke, there’s plenty of money out there, it’s just that the government doesn’t have it.”

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN)

July 25, 2013