Got that? If I may translate the proper quote into modern English: “Your life will be a shitstorm if you put materialism ahead of righteousness.” It does not condemn money or posessions as inherently evil in any way – it simply warns you not to sacrifice righteous behaviour in the service of protecting posessions. So don’t feel guilty if you have achieved financial success, especially if you strive to live a righteous life. A righteous life should indeed be rewarded – and  a religious person would tell you, if a righteous person is not rewarded in this life, he/she will be in the hereafter.

More here.

To that point, this 25-minute short film, “When Mitt Romney Came To Town”, is an intriguing case in what may be one of the most sophisticated Presidential campaign “black-ops” we have ever seen. The film tells the story of a few examples of Romney’s “creative destruction” at Bain Capital, through the eyes of blue-collar workers whose jobs were eliminated due to the ”corporate raiding” of Mitt’s firm.  Watch for yourself, and you’ll see this takes a decidedly left-wing tone: it says, essentially, “Romney destroyed the lives of thousands of poor helpless blue-collar workers”. It’s a tone that, while dramatic, does not really resonate with the Republican base, which generally accepts the thesis that bankruptcy and “creative destruction” are a legitimate part of the free market. So the question is: why would Newt Gingrich be so foolish as to use this film to try to rally the conservative base against Romney? 

While countless conservative commentators have rightly chastised Gingrich and Rick Perry for promoting the left-wing populist angle used in this film to attack Romney (conservatives do not want their candidates to be seen as attacking capitalism), most have gone a step further and given Mitt Romney the ultimate weapon in securing the Republican nomination: they’ve told conservative voters to LAY OFF BAIN! Only Sarah Palin, in her numerous Fox News appearances in recent days, has refused to declare Bain “off-limits”, and has advised voters to take a close look at Mitt’s record – in particular, his claims of job creation, and his possible use of his corporate takeovers to attract government subsidies and bailouts. In fact, last night on Sean Hannity’s program, she used the key word that I think explains what’s going on here: inoculation.

Which gets me to my theory: this film was subversively created by the Romney campaign itself, in order to achieve this desired result of inoculation on Bain. The reason he needs to create the meme out there that “an attack on Bain is an attack on capitalism”, is because of the aforementioned Governor Palin, and her rallying the Republican base around the cause of Crony Capitalism. The Tea Party base of the party is now wise to the concept of statism, cronyism, corporatism, and corruption coming from the big-business side of the economy. The type of capitalism Romney engaged in with Bain is a problem with the Tea Party base not because he put people out of work (many types of capitalism involve the elimination of jobs), but because the businesses and jobs themselves were not a factor at all in the business decisions of Bain, just collateral damage that, on the aggregate, has been extremely harmful to America. Jobs, and the businesses themselves, were irrelevant to the partners at Bain. What Bain and other corporate raiders actually do is not “turn around failing companies. It’s the search for opportunities on balance sheets, stock prices, and regulatory environments, to exploit through political connections and complex financial instruments, to create paper profits, and damn the consequences.

It’s a complex discussion that can take volumes to fully explain. But what Romney’s campaign has discovered it needs to hide is the fact that the profits at Bain usually could not occur without the exploitation of political contacts, regulatory loopholes, and questionable complex financial tactics. So while Newt and Perry were foolish enough to take the bait on this film’s apparent attack on capitalism itself, Palin will continue to try to drag them back from the edge of self-destruction by rescuing the narrative. Romney’s problem is a Crony Capitalism problem, and he knows it. That’s why it’s no coincidence, this film was produced by Jason Killian Meath, a former business associate and 2008 campaign leader for Mitt Romney himself. Romney’s team, consisting undoubtedly of many brilliant and experienced tactical political operators, is loving the effect this film is having. Mission accomplished? We’ll see how successful the savviest political minds, including Governor Palin, are at rescuing the narrative.

Globe: Meet the 20-year-old aiming to be the next Liberal policy chief

UPDATE: Click here to listen to Tammy Bruce discuss this column on her nightly podcast (5:45 clip).

A Guest Post by Canadian TAM Flaggman

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing these past few days among Palinistas over the former V-P candidate’s apparent defense of Donald Trump’s machinations and Ron Paul’s fanatical followers. These two positions are clearly harmful to the Republican Party, which makes it clear to me: Sarah Palin sees the GOP itself as the problem, not the solution, in this election cycle. When she warns the GOP against isolating Trump and the Paulites, she’s not endorsing a Trump independent run or a Paul presidency per se. What she is doing is firing a shot across the bow on behalf of the Tea Party, saying to the establishment: don’t you dare go dismissing constituency groups within the Republican Party. If it’s Trump and Paul now, it’s the Tea Party next, and that is simply not acceptable. This gives us pause to reflect on a little Canadian political history to see what can happen when the grassroots of a what is supposed to be a conservative party are ignored, humiliated, and isolated.

The 1970s and early 1980s in Canada were run, essentially, by Barack Obama, in the person of the America-hating incompetent-socialist demagogue leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. When he finally got tired and walked away in 1984, he left the country pining for a conservative renaissance, and Brian Mulroney rode that sentiment to leadership victory in the Progressive Conservative Party, and a landslide in the polls later that year. Despite running as a conservative warrior, Mulroney was the ultimate insider, foisted on the party membership from the Toronto-Montreal legal establishment, and rather than peeling back the Trudeau experiment, he expanded upon it by further nationalizing the health care system, adding a 7% tax-on-everything, and leaving us with crushing deficits that led Canada to the edge of credit rating downgrade. In the 1993 election, with the Conservative-in-name-only Mulroney abandoning ship, and the socialist Liberal Party running on a platform to the right of the Progressive Conservatives, the results came in: the PC Party, the purported conservative side of what was essentially a two-party system, was destroyed. It held on to just two seats in Parliament, and never recovered. Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in Canada today is a result of the gutting and scuttling of that party by small-c conservatives in the ensuing years, forming it eventually into today’s ruling Conservative Party of Canada.

How does this relate to Palin’s comments on Trump and Paul? The key is what happened from 1984, when our McCain-Romney figure (Mulroney) took over, until 1993, when his party essentially disappeared. On two fronts, Mulroney ignored his base. In Quebec, Canada’s second-largest province, the big-government federalist encroachment so enraged the French-majority voters that they left to start their own separatist party that nearly ripped the country apart via referendum in 1995. In Alberta, Canada’s energy-producing behemoth, the big-government encroachment so enraged the rugged individualists of the West that they founded a new party, the Reform Party of Canada, which was essentially our Tea Party movement of the 1990s. (Not coincidentally, Stephen Harper was a founding member of the Reform Party after abandoning Mulroney’s PC’s.)

The splintering of the PC party, a direct result of the establishment placing a higher priority on centralizing federal power than on promoting the will of the grassroots, led to 13 years of corrupt and aimless Liberal Party rule, while the grassroots worked tirelessly to organize and establish itself as a viable national alternative under Harper. But now that a principled conservative party is in charge (not that it doesn’t have its share of RINOs, but that’s for another day), we have a principled government in Canada that, with the majority mandate earned in the 2011 election, is finally beginning to peel back the layers of federalist socialist intrusion into the lives of Canadian citizens.

So don’t dismiss Palin’s apparent defense of Trump and Paul-bots as nonsensical rantings or bitterness. The splintering of the Republican voting base could open up the danger of another decade in the wilderness, and Palin knows this. It’s not so much the loss of Trump-ites (of which there are few) or Paulites (of which there are a few more) she is concerned about. It’s the attitude of dismissiveness by the establishment that could ultimately result in the loss of the Tea Party constituency – and that would be a disaster for the Republicans. And the implication is this: if the Republican establishment tries to force an American Brian Mulroney on the grassroots, the Republican party will be be no more. And the rebuilding under a different name could begin at any time.

-Neil Flagg is a Toronto-based businessman, blogger, Conservative Party of Canada member, and TAM. You can follow him on Twitter @NeilFlagg

NDP Election Signs at OPSEU Headquarters - #1

Here’s the people’s candidate, Dr. Bob Hilliard!

NDP Election Signs at OPSEU Headquarters - #2

I started this blog in February 2007, and many of my initial posts centered around the mountains of evidence emerging that the whole Global Warming/Climate Change movement was a complete fraud. In fact, the talk of March 2007 around the ‘net was UK Channel 4′s “The Great Global Warming Swindle” documentary, which exposed the faulty science behind the political watermelon movement. There was an attempt in 2006 to start a “Crunchy Con” movement, but that was a non-starter that fooled no one.

Fast-forward to May 2011, and we have a character named Tim Pawlenty, pretending to be the small-c conservative standard bearer for the Republicans in the 2012 Presidential Election campaign. Yet where was he in April 2007, when we already knew that the Global Warming emperor had no clothes? He was addressing the Minnesota Climate Change Advisory Group (MCCAG) in Minneapolis, with this brief speech. Here is the full text of his remarks to the organization, found also in the .pdf minutes of the MCCAG found here.

Thank you everyone. You’re all busy and you’ve taken time to help us form a better environmental program for the state.

As Peter Drucker taught us, “The practices that got us here, won’t get us to the future. The best way to think about future is to go out and invent it.”

It looks like we should have listened to President Carter. He called us to action, and we should have listened. So we now have ourselves in a bit of a pickle. As is often the case, the people are way ahead of the politicians. We’re benefiting from their tailwind.

Other visionaries deserve credit too, many who may have been dismissed as goofy. They were right, not goofy. Energy and climate issues are intertwined. Climate change is real. Human behavior is partly and may be a lot responsible. Those who don’t think so are simply not right. We should not spend time on voices that say it’s not real. Please don’t let these voices discourage or distract you from your mission.

Our hope is at the end of your deliberations, you will have given us a plan for action. I’m proud of Minnesota’s longstanding attention to environmental issues, but here we need to raise the bar as others catch up. We want to be bold, dynamic. But we have to fashion steps. Our actions on climate can’t unravel the political consensus or the Minnesota economy. It must be done in a rational way.

Sometimes success has led to complacency. Sadly we have been complacent in thinking about energy and environment. But we’re reaching a tipping point, and we have to deal with it now. I’ll do my best to lead and advocate for your recommendations.

In summary: ‘Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech was right-on. Listen to the visionaries like him and Al Gore, and ignore those deniers who stand in the way of  big-government solutions to climate change. I believe the climate is at a tipping-point, and I’ll act as governor to do whatever you zealots recommend.’

T-Paw has tried to distance himself from enviro-pimping ways of the past. But his “mistake” wasn’t in, say, 1997, when he could have claimed to not have known any better. This was 2007, when the debunking was publicly available, and the red agenda of the green movement was well known. He was already Governor of a state, and was actively encouraging the greens to provide him a plan to implement! Later in 2007, he actually signed a state bill requiring a Minnesota task force to come up with recommendations on how to implement a cap-and-trade system. There’s no way to write this one off as a youthful indiscretion.

So the question is: Is Tim Pawlenty a naive fool, or another two-faced RINO? Either way: I cannot take his candidacy seriously. If you were pushing that stuff just four years ago, you have no business pretending to be a conservative.

2) How did homo sapiens gain self-awareness?

With love,

-Flaggman-

“We cannot have a health system where the stories that land on the front page of the paper determine our health-care policy. It would be unfair to those who do not get their stories on the front page if we were to give priority to those who do.”

With these 49 words, Deb Matthews exposes what Palin was so presciently warning about: that nationalized health care ends up becoming about turf-protection, central control, dehumanization of individuals, and a monopoly on health service rationing to a clique of “masters of the universe” who end up thinking their number-crunching degrees in epidemiology give them moral license to determine who deserves to live and die.

Not convinced? Want to give Matthews benefit of the doubt, or deny the truth of what she said? OK, don’t take her word for it. Let’s go straight to the words of Diane McArthur, Assistant Deputy Minister and executive officer, Ontario Public Drug Programs, Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, as published in her own words as a letter to the editor in today’s National Post:

“I would like to clarify the Ontario Public Drug Program review process in response to Matt Gurney’s recent article. The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s process for evaluating new and expensive cancer drugs is based on the best scientific evidence. The Ontario Public Drug Program relies on a thorough assessment of scientific data and clinical evidence by its expert advisory committee, the Committee to Evaluate Drugs (CED) and the CED/Cancer Care Ontario sub-committee, which includes cancer experts, to develop funding recommendations for all cancer drugs.
As a result, the Ontario Public Drug program is one of the most generous drug benefit programs in Canada.
Ontario’s Compassionate Access Program component of the Exceptional Access Program provides an opportunity for me, as the executive officer of the Ontario Public Drug Program, to consider requests for drugs or indications where the Committee to Evaluate Drugs has not reviewed a drug or where there are rare clinical circumstances in immediately life-, limb-or organ-threatening conditions. This program is not a mechanism to provide an exemption from the evidencebased criteria. The Exceptional Access Program Compassionate Review Policy is available on the Ministry’s website.
The ministry will continue to make funding decisions on drug products based on the advice of experts. We regularly review our criteria as new evidence is brought forward and/or standards of practice change. It is our responsibility to ensure that in addition to providing the best coverage we can, all funding decisions are made on the best available clinical and scientific evidence.”

Trying to put a positive spin on the government monopoly on drug rationing, MacArthur confirms what Palin, and the Health Minister herself, made clear:

1) Initial decisions on drug coverage are made by an “expert advisory committee”. 

2) Ontario’s committee is a smiley-happy-face-committee that is most generous to the little peoples!!!

3) If you’re not satisfied that Ontario’s committee is smiley and happy and generous to the little peoples, you can apply to another smiley happy committee – the committee of ME!!! DIANE MACARTHUR!!! BEARER OF GOVERNMENT GIFTS!!! And my SUPERPOWERS as head of the EXCEPTIONAL ACCESS PROGRAM!!!!

4) But if I, DIANE MARCARTHUR, BEARER OF GOVERNMENT GIFTS decide to quell the PR nightmare my administration is experiencing by granting you, suffering nameless victim who doesn’t fit into the expert panel’s number-crunching criteria yet insists on advocating for your own life, the drug that you want, I’ll find a way to cover my ass with another expert report (commissioned by me to give me the answer I need to provide cover to make it look like our system consists of something other than the government exercising a monopoly on the arbitrary rationing of health care services.)

Put it in your pipe and smoke it, Palin-haters of the right and left! (And you too, brainwashed Canucks…)

UPDATE: The bureaucrats announce, to no one’s surprise, that they will fund the patient’s treatment after all. The death panel comes through for Ms. Anzarut, and the minister announces what a wonderful world it is!