Grover Norquist: Second Tea Party Wave Coming

I know a lot of folk both left and right have bought the lie that "The Tea Party is Dead" ... we don't believe it for a moment, and we're in pretty good company on this:

7 Reasons To Be Optimistic

Lately there's been a lot of doom and gloom out there. Here at The Iron Lady Blog we're going to try to post more positive stories. We won't ignore the ugly truths out there, but let's not dwell on them and let's not assume that there is only bad and no good.

What follows is an article posted on Doug Giles' Clash Daily Blog.

7 Reasons To Be Optimistic About America’s Future

By Clash Daily / 27 November 2012

1) The reelection of Barack Obama has the potential to be a turning point. Despite Barack Obama being a mean-spirited, habitually dishonest socialist who was presiding over a terrible economy and a record of incompetence unprecedented in America’s history, he was reelected anyway. This should be a wake-up call for the Republican Party. The GOP’s messaging, choice of candidates, fidelity to its principles and most importantly, minority outreach just isn’t good enough. The same goes for results the deep pocketed donors in the party are getting for their contributions. Their money isn’t being used wisely. The grassroots have now been alerted that just showing up at a Tea Party isn’t good enough either. Social conservatives and the Christian church should be shocked out of their complacency as well. Although Obama seems likely to make a mess of things in his second term, that will give the American people more insight into the wages of liberalism while the Republican majority in the House and the three conservatives and two right leaning moderates on the Supreme Court will hopefully keep Obama from doing too much damage. God willing, as terrible as Barack Obama’s election seems to be for the country today, it will turn out to be a positive turning point.

2) Technology and resource acquisition may advance faster than we anticipate. Did you know the United States is the Saudi Arabia of shale oil? We have the potential not just to become almost self-sufficient, but to become a net exporter of oil. Granted, that probably won’t happen under the liberal Luddites in the White House today, but it’s just a matter of time until this nation’s energy potential is unlocked. We could also conceivably pass Russia in natural gas production as early as 2015. When you couple that with technological advances right out of science fiction in 3D printing, algae based fuel, nearly cost-free medical diagnostics, vertical farming and robotics, we may have the ability to do better than most people expect over the next few decades.

3) We’re in a stronger position than many people realize. America still has the world’s largest economy and the most powerful military. The dollar is the world’s reserve currency; we’re still the single most attractive destination for immigrants and we have the world’s best customer base for other nations to target. We have more soft power and cultural influence than any other nation in the world and we’re still the planet’s only Super Power. Weaknesses? We have plenty, but we shouldn’t disregard our nation’s truly massive strengths.

4) We may move slowly, but we will eventually adjust. What Winston Churchill said about Americans is all too often true, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities.” As a nation, we have a terrible habit of waiting until a crisis strikes before we take decisive, albeit poorly-thought-out action to deal with it. Then over time, we get around to dealing with the devils in the details. In other words, we tend to take a lot of damage that could have been prevented with quicker action, but history shows that we do eventually address our problems.

5) There’s no other nation ready to take our place as a Super Power. Japan’s population has gotten very old, very fast. Western Europe has larger problems with big government, economic productivity, demographics and debt than we do. China is still growing, but the country looks increasingly unstable and seems highly unlikely to continue its rapid growth over the next few decades. Additionally, Russia and India seem likely to remain as regional powers for the foreseeable future. In other words, this isn’t the Cold War where our loss would mean that another great power would be waiting to step in and shove us aside. Losing our Super Power status would be far from ideal, but it would still be preferable to living in a world dominated by Russia, China or Europe.

6) We’ve been through bad times before and we’re still here. This country has survived a Revolutionary War against the world’s most powerful nation that was fought in our own territory, another fight against the Brits during the War of 1812 in which they burned the White House and came close to capturing the American northeast, a Civil War that pitted the northern and southern halves of the country against each other, not just one, but two world wars, a decade long Great Depression and a Cold War against the Soviet Union in which we had enough nuclear weapons pointed at each other to wipe out life on earth. After all that, we’re still standing strong. A debt driven crisis could make things very tough for us over the next few decades, but our history says we’ll pull ourselves up by our bootstraps when it’s over.

7) The wheels of history turn awfully slowly. Since history is such a long period of time and we human beings live such comparatively short lives, we often overestimate the speed with which a problem will overtake us. As to great nations, they can splutter on for an extraordinarily lengthy time before finally falling to pieces. Just to name the most famous example of this, Rome was founded in the 8th Century BC, became a republic in the 6th Century BC, ceased to be a republic in the 1st Century BC, and split into two halves in the 3rd Century AD. The Western half of the Roman Empire was overrun in the 5th Century AD, the last Roman emperor visited Rome in the 7th Century AD, and the Eastern Roman Empire finally fell to the Turks in the 15th Century AD. Does that mean the United States should be fine for another thousand years or so? No, but it means that devastating problems we spot today that look immediately threatening may sometimes take decades or even centuries longer than we expect to flower into devastation.

John Hawkins is a professional blogger who runs Right Wing News

Ok, enough with the doom and gloom.

Excellent read over on Frontpage Magazine by Daniel Greenfield.

The Art of Being a Happy Warrior

The Art of Being a Happy Warrior

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On November 15, 2012 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage

When we celebrate Thanksgiving in a little over a week, after being thankful for family and friends, for health and comfort, for food and shelter, it may be time to be thankful for the left.

I have seen far too much despair and defeatism, too many comments that suggest there is no hope for America and the only thing left to do is pour a glass of wine and watch the sun go down. I understand the place of despair and pain that such words come from. But they also testify to how sheltered Americans are from the cold winds outside.

Eight years of Obama is bad, no doubt. But try sixty-nine years of Communism on for size. That’s what generations of Russians had to live through. Ask some of the conservative activists in Europe who have never had any of the freedoms that we still take for granted whether they’ve given up hope. Ask people from countries where criticism of Islam can mean a jail sentence and homeschooling is illegal whether they’ve given up hope.

There are countless tales of courage over the last century of men and women who did not stop fighting and did not stop teaching their children so that they would not stop resisting. And those stories have not ended. They are taking place today in Europe. They are taking place in South America. And those people would envy the conditions under which we fight without being shot or sent to prison. Where we are, compared to 100 percent of the rest of the world, still free.

We face a hard fight, not only for our freedom, but the freedom of the world. The international left has made America its special project. It knows that if it can extinguish the hope of liberty in this land then it will drive the rest of those who hope for freedom across the ocean deeper into despair. And it wants your despair. It wants you to give up so that the rest of the world gives up too and bows under its chains.

And yet this fight is a glorious one. This fight is our birthright. And we should be thankful for the fight.

It would be more pleasant if there were no Obama or Axelord. If Alinsky had never been born and Marx had never been whelped. It would be nice if we lived in a world where red were just a color and the Democratic Party were a rural movement suspicious of the federal government and dreaming of an agrarian utopia. But then so would never having to work for a living or getting up out of bed.

Life is challenge and we face all kinds of different challenges. We get up early out of bed in the morning and drive to work. We rise in the middle of the night when the baby cries and we go to the hospital when our loved ones need us there. And we do these things not only because they are our duty, but because these challenges make us who we are.

Besides these prosaic challenges, the daily routines and the occasional tragedies, there are uncommon challenges that we face when the foe comes to our gate and demands that we bow and become slaves. This is the challenge that we face as a society, a nation and a people. It calls to more of us and in that it also ennobles us. It makes us a great people and a great nation, rather than only another people who seek to live in comfort with no thought for anything else.

Good emerges in response to evil. We need our enemies to remind us of who we are and what we can do when our backs are against the wall. We need evil to remind us of the good that we are capable of. As a whetstone sharpens a sword, so evil sharpens us into a weapon against it. It makes us morally stronger and teaches us the stark truths that we cannot take refuge from evil; we must confront it.

If there were no left, would there be nearly as much patriotism among true Americans as there is now? And if there were no left, how many of us would really contemplate the core principles of freedom and free enterprise? If there were no left, how many of us would ponder what we truly believe and what compromises we are willing and unwilling to make? If there were no left, would we be the same people that we are today?

Would we value freedom as much if we did not have to defend it? Would we hold it as dear if we did not fear that it would be taken away? Would we even be aware of what freedom is and what a free people must be if not for the dark hand of those who wish to strip us of those freedoms?

It is the left’s opposition that has added urgency to a hundred issues, from the national debt to the War on Terror to freedom of speech and of religion. It has made us think about those issues, it has caused us to take them out of the back of our minds and hold them up to the light as a reminder of how important they are and what must be done about them.

War is the great teacher and this is a political war, short on bodies and heavy on minds, it is a war in which casualties are not taken in the chest or the arm, but in the mind, in reason and emotion, and against these weaknesses, we can and will prevail.

As we fight the left, we become stronger, more dedicated and more purposeful. We become the men and women that we were meant to be.

As you sit around your tables, thinking of all that you have gained and lost this year, remember and be thankful for the left, for though the winter ice gives way to the summer sun and bitter defeat gives way to sweet victory, it is defeat and hardship that teaches better than comfort and ease. We can learn more from our defeats than we ever could from our victories. Our defeats teach us endurance and fortitude, they teach us that defeat can be borne and that its sting can be turned into the weapon that unseats the foe. And our foes make us who we are.

Their evil teaches us to find the good within ourselves. Their strength teaches us to find our own strength. And their plots against what we have teach us how many treasures we have, not least of these being the full value of our freedom and our happiness that they wish to take from us. Their war on America is teaching us to be better Americans.

We should be thankful for the left, its assaults on us are teaching us how to fight and its plots against our freedom are teaching us how to be free.

An applicable oft used quote.

Attributed to Alexander Tytler (Scottish lawyer and political writer in the late 1700s):

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

• From bondage to spiritual faith;
• From spiritual faith to great courage;
• From courage to liberty;
• From liberty to abundance;
• From abundance to selfishness;
• From selfishness to complacency;
• From complacency to apathy;
• From apathy to dependence;
• From dependence back into bondage.  

It will be interesting to see what stage in the cycle we're in (I suspect we're moving from the 7th to the 8th) and whether we can get back to liberty without having to go through the bondage stage. Keep in mind that three million Republicans sat on their backsides Tuesday.

Hopefully God is giving the Democrats everything they want so they can finally destroy themselves (hopefully without destroying all of us). 

All that is left is to pray. 

Requiescat in pace

The Republic is officially dead.

:(

Are Entitlements Corrupting America?