As planned, President Obama gave his speech to schoolchildren nationwide, on September 8th.

And as was widely reported, many parent’s (and conservative pundits) across the country expressed concern for the event.

And, as I expected, many people, liberal and conservative alike, are now gleefully reporting that President Obama’s speech was all about education and nothing about indoctrinating our children into Socialism (e.g., here and here).

Of course, these writers completely miss the point!

No one in their right mind would ever have considered pledging to serve Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush, the two other presidents, we’ve been reminded, who also gave speeches to schoolchildren across the nation. Yet, since last year, we have had to wallow through incessant hero worshiping genuflections to the one who brings his historic presidency to fruition, embarking upon a worldwide tour, delivering orations worthy of all the grandeur of our long lost savior returned, at last, to unite our land, our people, our globe. This cult of Obama is just that, sending tingling chills up people’s legs and causing others to liken him to “god”. Shouldn’t such adoration bestowed upon an elected leader at least give one, especially the Christian, cause for concern?

Others of us, the blind ones, have missed it completely, not unlike Aunt Eunice, who never gets the jokes at the family get-togethers. We could only see a pro-abortion Senator, with barely a measurable amount of negligible service, unpublished in the legal journals, who had previously organized… communities.

But I venture towards reality.

Needless to say, since his inauguration, we have watched Obama attempt to make good on his promise to “spread the wealth around”, what with his trillion dollar economic extravaganza and plans for government run healthcare, expanding the federal government’s reach into the private sector.

The man is socialist through and through, and desires to increase the role of government in our lives.

So when he decides to speak to the children of America, I’m not expecting him to try and win the war; but I am on alert, and wary of each battle.

Christians: pray for President Obama

I’ve been reading Rod Dreher, the Crunchy Conservative, for a few years now. While I’ve enjoyed most of his writing I’ve been taken aback, in the near past, with his increasing propensity to drift into some other-world region neither Right nor Left nor Libertarian nor… Crunchy. While such a position is not, in and of itself, reason to pull ranks, and while I can put up with most of his doom and gloom prognoses on issues such as the economy, a recent post of his, regarding the uproar pertaining to President Obama’s planned speech to schoolchildren nationwide is the last straw.

From Dreher,

A teacher in a Dallas suburban district just phoned the colleague of mine who works in the office next to mine. She’s a personal friend of his. He says she phoned from the break room at school, close to tears. She told him, “This is getting out of control. Parents are calling up the school and yelling at the principals. The principals are freaking out.”

All because the president of the United States is going to give an address on education to students.

Meanwhile, it took no time for a commenter on the Dallas Morning News editorial board blog to compare the president to Charles Manson. Which was followed by this:

This all sounds very familiar. Oh yea, Hitler was well liked by children. He could speak to them very well, and won them over. Hitler organized the youth as an army, complete with regiments. A boy could rise from the simple rank of just a boy to lead a squad, platoon, company, even a battalion. A girl could rise to become a leader. Even lead them into community organizers. Don’t drink any more of Obama’s Kool Aid. Wake up people.

Obama would be smart to release the text of his planned address to defuse the crazybomb on the Right. I doubt that will be enough. A Texas Republican friend this morning told me two things: a) not all conservatives agree with these people; and b) that said, this is the last straw for him, that he doesn’t want to be associated in any way with the GOP, which in his view has lost its collective mind.

No, Mr. Dreher, the furor is not because the President of the United States is going to give an address on education to students. It’s because people were sold a bill of goods when they naively thought hope and change was coming to our land (albeit, the globe) via the White House. Instead, we’ve seen a concerted effort to “spread the wealth around” with a decidedly socialist agenda. Citizens of the United States do not want government intruding into their lives and they especially do not want to let THEIR children become a captive audience to such culturally socialist mantras.

Consider this video that was shown to school children at an elementary school in Utah.

Our children should be taught about patriotism, responsibility, human rights, civic duty, and our rich history. They should not be expected to “pledge service to Barack Obama” (3:17 into the video above), or any other human, be they Democrat or Republican. Granted, the video above was not shown nationwide and is not part of the President’s planned presentation, yet one has to wonder why such a blatantly political video would be considered as acceptable to broadcast to public school children in the first place?

Parents are concerned because time has shown that increased government intrusion in the lives of its citizens results in less freedoms for said citizens. This is a president that has clearly demonstrated his desire to increase the federal government’s role in the private sector. That alone should be cause for concern when this administration expresses a desire to speak to the nation’s children – correction – the parent’s children.

Unfortunately, Dreher fails in his attempt to illustrate the utter craziness of the crazybomb Right with a blatantly disengenous comparison of his friend’s tearfully compassionate teacher with that of an anonymous foul-mouthed internet troll who compares Obama to Hitler.

So, adios Crunchy.

Commenter JA recently offered that “anyone who compares Social Security (SS) to Bernie Madoff shouldn’t be taken seriously.” Now Bernie Madoff is the latest in a list of various enterprises employing a Ponzi scheme for raising money. The comparison to Mr Madoff is not to suggest that the motives behind the SS program is the same as Mr Madoff’s, but that the SS program has a number of features which classify it as very similar to a classic Ponzi scheme. This BW article is instructive.

Superficially, these critics have a point, and there is a parallel between Social Security and a Ponzi scheme. But on a fundamental level, they are very wrong, and it’s worth explaining why.First, the parallel. Social Security taxes current workers to pay Social Security benefits for current retirees. In other words, the new entrants into the Social Security system, the young workers, pay off the previous entrants, the older workers. And despite the fact you have a Social Security “account”, there is no necessary link between what you paid into the system in taxes, and what you receive.

That’s very similar to the structure of a Ponzi scheme, where new investors pay off the original investors. As long as enough new ‘victims’ are brought into the scheme, it keeps growing and growing. But when the new investors runs out, the Ponzi collapses. Analogously, the slowdown in population growth puts pressure on Social Security finances.

But there is one enormous difference between Social Security and a Ponzi scheme: Technological change. Over the past century, new technologies have enabled the output of the country to grow much faster than its population. To be more precise, the U.S. population has more than tripled since the early 1900s, while the U.S. economic output has gone up by more than 20 times.

So SS is in fact a Ponzi scheme with the modification that unlike a standard Ponzi scheme which depends on infinite population size (victim pool) to continue, the SS program depends economic growth to outstrip any demographic changes.

It is curious to me why the left so aggressively defends this program. Time and time again you will find the left defending progressive taxation as opposed to a flat or other non-progressive tax scheme. Yet, here is SS a blatantly non-progressive tax, which they defend conveniently ignoring its very non-progressive nature.

The criticisms of this program from the right center on its size, a 13% tax, and its very poor rate of return (which calculation assuredly uses the wrong figure for the tax amount, i.e., 7.5%). The answer to that from the left, as far as I can see, is to try to buy into the accounting fiction that the 13% is really 7.5%. I think the reply to the second is, “meh”.

From the right’s point of view, the insistence by the left that this program aids the poor and indigent (yet provides universal coverage) seems myopic at best. Nobody on the right would insist that we fail to provide for the retired people without means, yet when one asks why this enormous tax is paying retirement benefits to those who are well off has no answer.

It seems to me a political feasible solution would be the following:

1. No change to the coverage of currently retired people would be made. SS made promises and should therefore make good on those.
2. Currently working people, starting “now” (now = when this change is put in place) would be informed that any new benefits (figured in the fictional accrued that comprises SS) will only be means tested in order for that payment to take place. That is to say, it would be as if you stopped working right “now” and your benefit would be frozen at that point. If you need benefits in excess of that amount, means testing will be required before you will receive money.

The effect of this is that over the next generation (or two) the tax would return to the 3% level at which it began. People will plan for their retirement independently, realizing that SS would be a safety net for retirement. When the “SS” generation expecting “a rate of return” sort of benefit payment are no longer in the working force, the SS tax could be removed from its special tax/payment status and tax and receive its funding from standard mechanisms.

I should point out this is not exactly the proposal I would really prefer, although it might be a stepping stone to the same.

Sunday, while riding, I had an entrepreneurial idea which I’m also almost certain occurred in abundance in the cash-for-clunkers boondogle.  This enterprise would most likely be best employed by a car dealer, perhaps one who put his bottom line ahead of his “patriotic duty.” Imagine a car dealer has a potential customer who wants to buy a new car, yet has no clunker to turn in. Here is a way in which that most of that $4.5k windfall could aid that person in buying a new car. He follows the following steps:

1. The initial ingredient is a person (person A), willing to buy a car with the help of $3.5k cash-for-clunker money in the absence of said clunker.
2. First, locate a person (B) who owns a qualifying “clunker”, i.e., not-so-good gas mileage and has owned it for two years.
3. Offer that person an exchange/upgrade car + $1000, which of might be used toward the purchase of said “upgraded” clunker.
4. That same said person is “lent” the money is then (on the books at least) used purchase the new car that the person A wants and is purchasing.
5. Person B then “sells” car A (for a song and as agreed) to person A.
6. Person A drives off with his car, which cost $3.5k less than negotiated originally.
7. Person B drives off with a “new” used car. His original “clunker” is then turned to sand.
8. The car dealer makes his commission on two cars (one used and one new).

If you don’t think this occurred with some frequency over the summer, you haven’t noticed that this is America … the land ruled by enterprising hucksters. The $1k/$3.5k split of course is illustrative and would vary in proportion as the market dictated. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to defend this practice … or suggest how/why it is not possible given the current law. While it certainly violates the spirit of the law, I’m pretty sure a half-way competent lawyer could see a way to making it fit the letter of the law.

The Cash-for-clunkers hornswoggle has educated Americans in a practical lesson in Bastiat’s Parable of the Broken Window. This paradox/parable is one which the Keynsian’s would like to whitewash with talk of multipliers and other such nonsense, but the essential argument is largely untouched by that rhetoric, i.e., for the multiplier to be considered it is essential that the hidden costs implicit in their multiplier be ignored. The parable as recounted in the wiki piece above, excerpted is:

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact, that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation—”It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?”Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.

Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier’s trade—that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs—I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.

But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented

This is the problem with the clunker. The taxed money which will be extracted from the public will not be able to be used for the various purposes to which they would have used those monies for, instead it is taken and used in this way. Very often that same said clunker gets just a few mpg more than the car it replaced, which then is scrapped … and the energy costs of production will take many years to recoup … so the net energy/pollution equation is likely for almost a decade … a loss in many if not most cases. Furthermore today, in the wake of cash-for-clunkers, we hear that the used car market is not difficult right now. The price of used cars is up and the availability of cars is down. There are few cars available … due to so many having been having silicate added to their engines. One might ask which whether the used car vs new car consumer is better or worse off financially relatively speaking in order to review who has been helped and who has been harmed by this policy.

Ever since former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin made her “death panel” remarks on Facebook, President Obama has repeated as often as he can that the government in the proposed health care reform plan would not “pull the plug on granny”.

However, there is one agency responsible for healthcare of a certain segment of the population  whose actions directly contradict the President’s rhetoric (Hat tip: The Corner):

If President Obama wants to better understand why America’s discomfort with end-of-life discussions threatens to derail his health-care reform, he might begin with his own Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). He will quickly discover how government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care.

Last year, bureaucrats at the VA’s National Center for Ethics in Health Care advocated a 52-page end-of-life planning document, “Your Life, Your Choices.” It was first published in 1997 and later promoted as the VA’s preferred living will throughout its vast network of hospitals and nursing homes. After the Bush White House took a look at how this document was treating complex health and moral issues, the VA suspended its use. Unfortunately, under President Obama, the VA has now resuscitated “Your Life, Your Choices.”

Who is the primary author of this workbook? Dr. Robert Pearlman, chief of ethics evaluation for the center, a man who in 1996 advocated for physician-assisted suicide in Vacco v. Quill before the U.S. Supreme Court and is known for his support of health-care rationing.

“Your Life, Your Choices” presents end-of-life choices in a way aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions, much like a political “push poll.” For example, a worksheet on page 21 lists various scenarios and asks users to then decide whether their own life would be “not worth living.”

The circumstances listed include ones common among the elderly and disabled: living in a nursing home, being in a wheelchair and not being able to “shake the blues.” There is a section which provocatively asks, “Have you ever heard anyone say, ‘If I’m a vegetable, pull the plug’?” There also are guilt-inducing scenarios such as “I can no longer contribute to my family’s well being,” “I am a severe financial burden on my family” and that the vet’s situation “causes severe emotional burden for my family.”

When the government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living, who needs a death panel?

This just goes to show in judging where the President stands on different aspects of health care reform that it might be better to pay more attention to his actions than his words.

During the primaries and the general election campaign last year, the most potent argument made for not supporting Barack Obama was his lack of experience. He had never managed anything. He did not have any leadership experience. And with only two years in the U. S. Senate, he lacked sufficient knowledge of how the legislative process worked in Washington. In other words, he didn’t know how to lead or to govern. Although the debate over Obamacare is far from over, this fatal weakness has been laid open for all to see in the debacle over how health care reform has been handled so far.

President Obama’s first mistake was that he did not lay out a vision for what health care reform should look like. He relied on the same nonspecific campaign rhetoric that led to victory last November in the election when talking about health care reform. He had convinced the public something needed to be done about health care but he hadn’t made the case for specific steps that needed to be taken. Even his New York Times op-ed doesn’t contain a single tangible proposal on how he will achieve the reform goals he wants to meet. By contrast, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey laid out a very sensible proposal for reform in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week. The President could have taken a cue from someone like Mr. Mackey by providing specific proposals of what to accomplish with reform legislation.

The President’s second mistake was not practicing what he preached when it came to bipartisanship. At the beginning of this debate, President Obama made it clear he wanted support for healthcare reform to be bipartisan. But instead of bringing Republicans into the process of drafting the reform legislation, he outsourced the writing of the bill to Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic caucus. As a result, he got a bill that was chock full of goodies for their liberal supporters and controversial proposals that no one in their right mind could defend. The President then squandered precious political capital having to play defense on issues such as “death panels” and single-payer programs and flip-flops on the public option.

Now the President finds himself in a bind. His approval ratings are plummeting. The public is growing skeptical about whether they can trust him on this issue. Getting Republicans to come to the table at this point seems unlikely. Despite having supermajorities in both houses of Congress, he probably won’t be able to get anything passed anytime soon as he can’t keep his own party in line.

So what does the President do? Is it time to hit the reset button as some have suggested? You can’t erase the past but you can move forward, can’t you?

The first step for the President will be the most difficult. He has to come out and publicly admit that he has made mistakes in how he has handled health care reform. He then has to tell Congress to start over from scratch. He should bring leaders from both parties together and lay out a plan of what he wants to accomplish and be willing to listen to and incorporate ideas from both parties. There are an abundance of proposals being tossed about. The President needs to be willing to cull through them and working with Congress incorporate the best of them.

President Obama has a difficult task ahead. If health care reform is to be enacted it’s going to require him to do something he hasn’t had to do nor has the experience to do: be a leader. The chances of reform being enacted are directly tied to his ability to demonstrate leadership. If the President’s plan does fail he has no one to blame but himself.

One of the rising mini-blog storms in the right (and responses on the left) that arose today is about the silence on the left regarding the troops and low level conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan (and perhaps Pakistan). The default notion that arises here is that this lack of response that this reflects how much that the left was anti-Bush and the conflict was just a proxy for that animus. There may be some truth to this accusation, however I think that is not the whole or even the larger part of it. For while it is true that the anti-war propaganda and general energy/excitement that is present now has pretty much vanished, it is also true that the small government, e.g., tea party, sentiments that have and had been strong on the right vanished during much of the Bush tenure.

Ronald Reagan, I think, coined the “11th commandment: thou shalt not speak ill of your own party”, which is largely at play here. A corollary of this commandment is that while one does not speak ill of the doings by those in your party that you disagree with … one’s defense of the same is usually tepid or absent as well. For example, on my part, while I did not really soundly thrash Mr Bush for expanding Medicare entitlements … I did not defend it one bit either. I was silent. Likewise, we see the left, while they are silent as Mr Obama expands operations in Afghanistan (and likely delays withdrawal in Northern Iraq) neither will they, I suspect, leap to his defense against those who would speak against this. Likewise on Medicare and now the two COIN operations, criticism does largely not arise from the other party, which is in general agreement with those moves (even if they might criticize implementation details). The criticism arises more from non-party aligned people further to the right or left (or in the case of Medicare … the Libertarian fringe movement).

That was then.

Remember the anti-war movement? Not too long ago, the Democratic party’s most loyal voters passionately opposed the war in Iraq. Democratic presidential candidates argued over who would withdraw American troops the quickest. Netroots activists regularly denounced President George W. Bush, and sometimes the U.S. military ("General Betray Us"). Cindy Sheehan, the woman whose soldier son was killed in Iraq, became a heroine when she led protests at Bush’s Texas ranch.

This is now.

The news that emerged is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have virtually fallen off the liberal radar screen. Kossacks (as fans of DailyKos like to call themselves) who were consumed by the Iraq war when George W. Bush was president are now, with Barack Obama in the White House, not so consumed, either with Iraq or with Obama’s escalation of the conflict in Afghanistan. In fact, they barely seem to care.

As part of a straw poll done at the convention, the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg presented participants with a list of policy priorities like health care and the environment. He asked people to list the two priorities they believed "progressive activists should be focusing their attention and efforts on the most." The winner, by far, was "passing comprehensive health care reform." In second place was enacting "green energy policies that address environmental concerns."

And what about "working to end our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan"? It was way down the list, in eighth place.

Perhaps more tellingly, Greenberg asked activists to name the issue that "you, personally, spend the most time advancing currently." The winner, again, was health care reform. Next came "working to elect progressive candidates in the 2010 elections." Then came a bunch of other issues. At the very bottom — last place, named by just one percent of participants — came working to end U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The only principle it seems that the vast majority of the Left stood for was partisan politics.  Their righteous indignation was so much veneer for their simple hatred of Dubya. 

The White House released a statement this evening to try to squash the controversy that erupted Thursday over unsolicted e-mails they had been sending:

The White House for the first time Sunday seemed to acknowledge that people across the country received unsolicited e-mails from the administration last week about health care reform, suggesting the problem is with third-party groups that placed the recipients’ names on the distribution list.

In a written statement released exclusively to FOX News, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said the White House hopes those who received the e-mails without signing up for them were not “inconvenienced” by the messages.

“The White House e-mail list is made up of e-mail addresses obtained solely through the White House Web site. The White House doesn’t purchase, upload or merge from any other list, again, all e-mails come from the White House Web site as we have no interest in e-mailing anyone who does not want to receive an e-mail,” the statement said. “If an individual received the e-mail because someone else or a group signed them up or forwarded the e-mail, we hope they were not too inconvenienced.”

This is a classic non-apology apology and doesn’t answer the main question which is how they managed to obtain e-mail addresses of people who did not access the White House website nor they signed up for any e-mail updates.

Since my e-mail address suddenly ended up on the White House distribution list and I hadn’t signed up for anything I would still like to know how they got my e-mail address. Could they reveal which groups had submitted lists from which they got the addresses?

For an administration that promised to be transparent, it seems to be acting a lot like Big Brother to me.

Things got a little testy at today’s White House press briefing when Fox News’ correspondent Major Garrett asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about unsolicited e-mails being sent to people who about healthcare reform:

The e-mail itself is not problematic. The White House is using this means of communication to get its message out to concerned voters. But the problem is somehow the White House is getting a hold of people’s e-mail addresses. I don’t have any idea how David Axelrod got my e-mail address. I don’t publish the address anywhere on purpose. I don’t want just anybody to have access to my e-mail address. I’ve never e-mailed the White House or sent anything to their flag@whitehouse.gov address because I don’t want to give that information to them. But it appears they managed to get it somehow anyway.

The irony here is that if David Axelrod paid any attention to anything I’ve read so far about healthcare reform he would quickly figure out that I am opposed to the President’s proposals.

So the question remains: how is the White House getting folks e-mail addresses and is the privacy of individuals being violated? Just how much information does the White House have and, more importantly, what are they going to do with it?

Shouting at congressional leaders is getting the Left all upset.  "This is not an appropriate form of protest!", they insist.  Fine, then.  Let’s use a form that the Left was all in favor of; throwing shoes at them.  (I’m sure a demonstration of this sort would be lauded as "patriotic", eh?"

(Hat tip: NRO)

Former President George W. Bush walked a fine line between science and morality/ethics when he decided that existing embryonic stem cell lines, at the time, would be the only ones available for Federal grants.  Federal money would not be available to any new lines.

Contrary to some misinformed, partisan critics, he did not ban embryonic stem cell research.  Companies using private money were not restricted in any way.   Bush simply said that Federal money would be given out in what he believed was as moral and ethical a way as could be done at the time. 

The LA Times reported this week that a Stanford University study was done to determine the extent of this restriction.  The results show that the loudly-complaining scientists have put even tighter restrictions on themselves, making their protests disingenuous.

Read the rest of this entry

According to President Obama’s top counterterrorism official, we should no longer use the term "war on terror" to describe the struggle against jihadis.  Oops, sorry, John Brennan also said we’re not at war with jihadis either, since "jihad" is, "a legitimate term, ‘jihad,’ meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal".  No, this should just be called a "war with al Qaeda", because after all, they’re really the only jihadi terrorists that hate us. 

Oh, and World War II is to be renamed in all future textbooks as the "War Against Adolf Hitler, Personally".  Otherwise, it would sound like it took place everywhere and was against the whole country of Germany.  Well, and Italy, but the "War Against Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Personally" doesn’t roll off the tongue as nicely.

And it’s not a global war either, says Johnny.  Just because al Qaeda operates in the Middle East and Africa, and attacked the US on its home soil, we don’t want to risk making it sound like they really are all over the place.  It’s an image thing, you know.  Control the message.

So my question is this; if this counterterrorism official says we’re not fighting terrorists, what does that say about his position as a … counterterrorism official?  Perhaps he’d just rather put up a sign over his door saying, "Mission Accomplished" and hit the golf course.

Billy Hollis, writing at the Q&O blog, has a breakdown of Obama’s successes and failures in his first 6 months in office.  He comes away very unimpressed.  No President should be ultimately judged on his first 6 months only, but given how big a bite Obama has taken and the promises he led his supporters to believe, the trend is not looking good for him at all.

If you have said, "Obama is doing a great job", or substituted "good" or even "OK" instead of "great", you owe it to yourself to read this.

Scott Ott, of ScrappleFace blog fame and occasional CNN guest, is running for Executive of Lehigh county in Pennsylvania.  Tuesday night, he went strolling around Allentown, looking to strike up conversations, maybe hand out a few campaign bookmarks; no real agenda in mind.

Turns out that when he enters a store and starts talking to the guys there, a chance to really discuss the issues crops up and he has what he called "an intensely practical, intelligent discussion about political ideology and freedom".  The conversation begins:

"What will you do for me if I vote for you?" the shop owner said. "Will you get me a grant for my store?"

I’m a bad politician.

I said (paraphrasing from memory), "The first thing I’ll do for you is put an end to the idea that public servants should hand out special favors to people who support them."

I told him that the next thing I could "do for him" was to abolish the idea that government is going to save you from your troubles, and to exchange that for the idea that you are responsible and free, and that no one cares more about your children, your business, your home and your neighborhood than you do. In addition, no one is better equipped to deal with the challenges of your neighborhood than you and your neighbors. But it won’t happen until you stop thinking that someone else is to blame, or that some outside agency is going to intervene to fix things.

He looked at me and said, "You’re a Republican."

I was delighted that he associates freedom and responsibility with my party.

His thoughts on that discussion, what the aims are (or should be) of the Republican party, and a sense of community that’s been lost elsewhere can be found here.