GNP: Grand New Party: Stupid is as Stupid does

After Watergate the Republican party of Minnesota changed it's name. It became the Independent Republican Party. The party needed to separate itself from the brand that brought you Nixon. Whether this went on in other states around the country I do not know. The IR party was decidedly more moderate across the board than the national party. Not surprising really - it was Minnesota after all. This lasted until after Reagan and then the party feeling cleansed changed it's name back.

During that period the party had some success. There were several US senators and a number of congressmen that were well respected in DC. Those days are gone. Still, even to this day the state is fairly close to being 50/50 overall when votes are tallied. In recent years we've had a number of recounts and spectacularly close contests, but the likelihood of today's Republican party holding a major office or controlling anything in the near term is dicey at best. The last election saw a clean sweep of all statewide offices for the DFL.

The point is the Republican brand is toast in Minnesota and probably the rest of the country too. Most of it is of their own doing, but of course the major media is glad to pile on. Re-branding is not likely to happen for a host of reasons, not the least of which is the complete arrogance of the entrenched party system. There are plenty of conservatives and constitutionalists who have a brand name they often like to use - the Stupid Party. It's an apt name. As Michael Walsh has said "any party that can't sell liberty and freedom doesn't deserve to be in power". He's right! To say the party has a communication problem is an understatement.

To rise above the berm of the media wall and reframe the policies the New York Times, Time magazine and all the alphabet TV networks mischaracterize for the benefit of the Democrats is fundamental, but a seemingly insurmountable task for the Stupid Party. While Democrats literally sell dependency and envy they are treated as serious, caring intellectuals, whereas the Republicans who peddle silly things like lower taxes and personal responsibility are treated in the media as imbecilic and of course that old standby pejorative mean-spirited.

Five years ago along comes a movement that came to be called the Tea Party. It is not nor was it ever a political party. It was movement that felt more at home in the Republican Party than with the Democrats. I was there when it started here in Minnesota. It was a call to return government, the Federal government back to it's constitutional mandates. It was not anything like what the major media came to portray it in the subsequent five years. Still, the tar and feathers stuck in the minds of the unwashed masses, therefore I doubt it will sustain. Not that the Republican Party - the establishment party - embraced it anyway. I feel it could have been a winning strategy had the party took it up and refused to let the left turn it into a code word for racist.

The establishment party known as the GOP is in deed if not word a "lite" version of the Democratic party. Both party's are responsible for the state the country is in. Both are tied lock, stock and barrel to the crony capitalism of the DC lobbying establishment for the benefit of corporations, foreign trade and, of course, above all else themselves. I have concluded a long ago that the Democrats are a lost cause for actual positive change, and believe them to be the Dangerous Party. The Stupid Party has a slim, microscopically thin chance of redemption. Will it happen? Not likely.

It seems a shame that right now we have a whole generation of young people raised on the bunk the liberals have been selling that are now stepping into the grown-up world with such dim prospects. They watched their own parents struggle to achieve or remain in the middle class and can't even see themselves with a life as good as that. They do all the right things, but find that only a few of them ever crawl out from under a mountain of college debt to find their own success - while their still young. There is no indication that things are going to get better for them anytime soon.

There is hope. I like what I hear from Rand Paul and a few other Republicans. In a recent speech he takes a shot at the notion that the Republicans should cede anything to the Democrats particularly when the they are failing their "constituents" so miserably...

Paul suggested that Republicans should decide if they are going to “go bold” on fiscal issues or become “Democrat light.”

“We need to talk about how when you borrow and spend money, you steal the value of the dollar. Who does it hurt? Not the wealthy. It hurts the working class,” Paul said at the event, hosted by political commentator Erick Erickson.

“These are issues that we shouldn’t give up and say, ‘oh, issues of poverty, Democrats care more.’ Not only do they not care more, their policies don’t work and aren’t working so we shouldn’t give them the high moral ground,” Paul added.

Paul recalled a letter that he wrote to President Obama when sequestration started to take effect.

“Why don’t we look for the $100 billion that is missing – we don’t know where $100 billion is. It was spent, but every year within a $3.8 trillion budget there’s $100 billion not accounted for, a little more than $100 billion,” Paul said he wrote in the letter. “Why don’t we look for it?”

One hundred billion dollars lost every year. Lost? That's larger than the annual budgets of 48 states. It's just pocket change to the Federal government, apparently it's not even worth looking in the Federal couch cushions. Let's say $20 billion is the military's famous "black budget" that's still $80 billion lost. It boggles the mind. I'm getting sidetracked...

There is hope, right? Can the Republican party finally stand up proudly, re-frame itself and articulate a message in a way that those aligned against them in the major media can't easily nullify? Can anyone on the center/right crush the notion that government dependency is the hope and change we need. That's what the other guys are selling and America is lapping it up. How sad.


Ugh

Occupy Wall Street/Tea Party:Two sides of the same coin?

Occupy Wall Street hasn't been in the news lately, but I've been thinking about it a lot lately. The meeting of the ultra rich and powerful in Davos Switzerland last week brought it to the top of mind again. I am convinced Occupy Wall Street was motivated by the same underlying substrate that motivated it's nemesis the Tea Party. Hear me out on this.

The Tea Party set it's sights squarely on government, specifically the unconstitutional overreach of the Federal government. Occupy Wall Street rallied against the 1% - the rich few they believe controls the world just to hold the rest of us down. I'm increasingly convinced they are one in the same, since nothing else explains how the events of the past 60 or 70 years could have played out as they did.

[ To be perfectly clear being rich is not a crime, when talking about the 1% we're really talking about 1/100th of 1%. Essentially the super rich that play with 100 of millions like it was Monopoly money. ]

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) are the sons and daughters of the middle class facing dimming prospects for a future as bright as the one their parents had. The Tea Party is made up of mostly their middle class parents who are watching the country they knew (and loved) morph into something unrecognizable. Both of these movements are purely reactionary. There is a deep sense in the western world that there is an unrecoverable erosion taking place. Both sides see remedies in polar opposite extremes based on where they are in life. The mostly young of the OWS tend toward the utopian idealism of a more communist system, while the older more seasoned in the Tea Party see the solution in going back toward the original intent of America's constitutional framers. Both cant be right...

Some say that the Soviet Union was the inevitable result of communism, a system that lasted barely 70 years. It was clearly a failed system that caused untold suffering and doomed many generations to a dreary life even to this day. Others will say that the U.S. is the inevitable result of a capitalist free market system. Exploitative and unfair. Of this I'm not so sure. There is a perversion of the system that is denuding the middle class and weakening the core of the most successful social and economic system the world has ever known. The answer can be found by determining who is benefiting the most from the turmoil. Is it the 1%? Clearly it is.

I've written before on these pages as to why I believe the middle class in America is slowly being destroyed. By the 1960's and 70's the middle class had become too powerful a force. It was a collective force, powerful indeed, but with no head thus easier to defeat. Rallied by radical journalism in the 1960's it brought it's power to bear on the war machine and forced Washington to abandon the South Vietnamese. Whether this was right or not, or spurred by socialist/communist elements I'm not speculating, I'm just saying the power of the vast middle was evident in these events.

This had to be stopped. There has been, in my mind, a concerted multi-decade domestic and international effort to squelch the middle class dominating all the Western nations.

Who has benefited the most from moving a vast portion of American manufacturing to Asia? Who has benefited the most from NAFTA and free trade in general? Who has benefited the most from the Fed's quantitative easing program? Certainly not the middle class. Could it be the 1%? Of course it is. Arguments can be made that capital will always chase the cheapest labor and that free trade is ultimately good for consumers and cheap interest rates and easy money helps build equity. True, but it doesn't erase the fact that the American middle class is shrinking and these costs are outweighing the benefits across the board for the 99%.

The corporatization of the major media and the stranglehold the corporate political parties have on the levers of government ensure that the cronies in the 1% class (regardless of nationality) get what they need. With the Roman paradigm of Bread and Circuses alive and well in America and the West the 1% have little fear from the what's left of the middle class. Liberal platitudes and outright lies serve to ingratiate big government solutions to the destruction of the American dream among a large portion of the population who can't pull themselves away from American Idol, Facebook or their smart phones long enough to realize the pot is boiling. The conservatives unfortunately can't speak with enough articulation to wrestle themselves out of a wet paper bag. What difference, in the end they are as beholden to the 1% as the other guys.

There is an element lurking around the Internet known as reactionaries that have taken to calling this cabal the "Cathedral". The Cathedral is essentially untouchable. If any politician or any other entity steps out of line they are soon scandalized or marginalized, discredited or ruined. That said it's no surprise there is no fealty to any political party or their ideologies among the reactionaries. It goes without saying there is certainly no trust for the mainstream media. While I tend to agree with this assessment in truth the reactionary movement is tiny and toothless.

So in reality the Tea Party and the OWS movements are battling the same enemy. Ultimately they have demonstrated they both are toothless as well. The OWS has some allies in government carrying their rally cry of income disparity, but the movement itself is seen as a disorganized and smelly public spectacle. The Tea Party having had some success early on challenging some squishy Republicans have also been targeted and marginalized by the power of the Cathedral.

You begin to wonder where this will all end. The U.S. government can't continue to print money forever and there has to come a time when the destruction of the middle class starts to affect the hangers on of the 1%. What then?



Ugh  

Ugly is in the eye of the beholder

(I just don't want to see it)

I could never be a cop, especially a big city cop. Sure cops do extraordinary work at times, important work, work that needs to be done. Unfortunately they have to see the ugly side of humanity everyday, often the ugliest side. All too often cops see people on the worst day of their lives. I would become so depressed. I don't like ugly.

I don't like discordant music or poetry that doesn't rhyme. I don't like abstract art or so-called high fashion. I don't like (nearly all) public sculptures or 1960's architecture. I don't like ugly.

What is ugly? I'm not sure I can even describe it, but I know it when I see it. It can be something as inane as your favorite sports car with a hideous neon green paint job, to the full blown filth of urban decay. Like all things in this world everything has it's counterpart, with beauty you get ugly too.

Human beings can be ugly on the outside, that's just a fact. It's not that they're ugly that bothers me, it's when other people insist on trying to convince them they're not - they know they're ugly!!! However, it's the people who are ugly on the inside that you have to worry about, am I right?

I would make the world's worst movie producer. I happen to like happy endings, but I also like happy beginnings and happy middles too. Conflict can be so ugly. I realize that even schmaltzy romantic comedies need conflict. There is literally no entertainment value in movies that have no highs with the lows or conflict with the harmony. Good thing I'm not a movie producer.

I have a hard time with some TV shows too. Cable shows like Dirty Jobs where Mike Row engages in a series of jobs that are so down right ugly it is impossible for me to watch. Same for a show called Life After People which depicts the world after all humans are gone. It chronicles the pace at which nature consumes mankind's footprint. It's not that humans left an ugly world - it's that an unmaintained civilization turns ugly. While I rather enjoy those post-apocalyptic movies I just wish someone would take some time to clean things up a little, the apocalypse can be so untidy. Those various "picker" shows make me think I'd just as soon light a match to those disgusting sheds and barns as I would enter them and start picking stuff up. It's not just the quasi reality shows or disaster movies that are ugly to me. I thought the doctor show called House had as it's main character just about the ugliest human being I've ever witnessed.

Then there's music, the very essence of mathematical beauty and melodious harmony. It can be perverted into something grotesque and down right evil. I get that some people like devil metal - or whatever it's called - but it is ugly, ugly music. Same goes for hard core rap, it's ugly and harsh, rather unpleasant to listen to. While extreme jazz and long-haired classical music may not be my thing I can appreciate the beauty in it. Even country music and hip hop have elemental beauty to them. Years ago I couldn't figure out why whenever my teenage daughter was in my car I was so irritated... Now I realize it wasn't her - it was that ugly music that was blaring out of the radio.

The place where ugly is truly detrimental is in relationships and human interaction. We've all have ugly relations with people in our lives. Some people thrive on it. Some people like to fight. I'm not one of them. I'd rather everyone be happy, or at least for God's sake pretend they are happy. We can't escape ugly behavior, it's part of life. I think just about the ugliest thing I've ever seen was a man (if you want to call him that) who purposely picked at his wife in such a derogatory way that no matter what she said or did it was cause for getting smacked. That piece of %$@# thrived on ugly. To see this beautiful young woman so deeply humiliated and depreciated (and physically hurt) was more than I could take. I was too much a mouse to do anything about it. It was 30 years ago but I have never forgotten it. Wife beaters in my book are the second lowest form of life right after child abusers.

I used to like watching boxing matches, not any more. Mike Tyson made it a classless and ugly sport. Today boxing has all but been replaced by, get this, something so much more civilized, ultimate fighting. This is where two men get thrown into a cage and literally beat the snot out of each other. I'm not sure what is uglier, the modern day gladiators in the ring or the bloodthirsty audience cheering them on. It's disgusting in my book, pure ugly.

It's often said beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that's true, but then so is ugly. Sometimes people are just being polite or they are deluding themselves when it comes to things beautiful and ugly. Not every baby is beautiful, sorry moms. And little dogs with bulging eyes are not cute, they're ugly. A Siberian Husky with sky blue eyes, now that's a beautiful dog.

No one person has the final say on what's ugly and what's beautiful, but people should be honest with themselves, I'm just sayin'.



Ugh

A new Jesus?

A while back I was talking with my brother, someone I respect enormously, about religion and so forth. Something he said really got me thinking and I've been ruminating on it ever since. My brother is no fan of religion to say the least. Me, I am a Christian, or rather a follower of Jesus (the label Christian has a few connotations that showcase hypocrisy, wickedness, inspiration and righteousness all at the same time). My brother advocates for a humanist approach to the question of ultimate morality, citing the need for mankind to adhere to the concept of true respect and genuine human rights for all people everywhere, no exceptions. I said something to effect that it's all right there in the Gospels of Jesus Christ. To that he declared that the world needs a new Jesus.

I was at a loss to even respond and we left it at that.

Now that I've had time to consider what he said I declare no, the world doesn't need a new Jesus what the world needs is new Christians. It isn't Jesus who has steered us so wrong. There is nothing in the Gospels that justifies the way many Christians act or some of the things they believe. Christianity is polluted and it began over 1500 years ago and is only now at the very beginning of clearing the air.

There was a time when Christians were indistinguishable from the modern radical Muslims of today. Again, nowhere in Gospels does Jesus ever ask for vengeance or encourage violence in any way. Quite the contrary, what we get from the New Testament is the real "New Deal", a deal free from an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth of the Old Testament.

Jesus said: You have heard it said an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other cheek also. 

And behold, one of those who were with Jesus reached and drew out his sword, and struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his ear. Then Jesus said to him, "Put your sword back into its place; for all those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword.

This is what Jesus taught us: violence and vengeance in kind is not the answer to violence and vengeance. If only Christians through the centuries had actually practiced what Jesus taught, what a different world this would be. This is the truth of Jesus, that if we actually lived like Jesus lived and loved like Jesus loved then the world would see mankind living with true respect and genuine human rights for all people everywhere. Jesus is the ultimate humanist!

I have learned at lot in the past two years having left the Catholic Church for a bible-based "teaching" church. This modern mega-church is headed by the most passionate Jesus follower I have ever known. For the first time I understand that the Holy Bible is a family story that culminates with Jesus Christ. Much of it is awful, cringe worthy, but it is a story with a beautiful ending. This story is told in the traditions of first century Jews and was never meant to be taken literally. It is not a reference book where you can pull a passage out of anywhere in the text and declare it truth, it's a novel where the order of things has relevance. You can't just jump over Jesus and cite the violence of the Old Testament as a definitive view of God. Jesus came to offer a new covenant, based on self sacrificial love and forgiveness, not the vengeful law of the Old Testament.

My brother is wise and instinctively right about a lot of things. He is right about religion in general, it is a problem and quite possibly even a cancer for mankind. There are good people practicing "religion" and this not to impune them. To be a follower of Jesus one must practice faith not just declare it. Faith is a verb. One practices it by living like Jesus lived and loving like Jesus loved. There is no litmus test for faith, having the right beliefs or jumping through the right hoops like the Catholics do cannot buy salvation. Living your faith and accepting the grace of God will lead you to good works, not the other way around.

The pastor of this mega-church is an influential American theologian who has written over 18 books, including a best seller popular in the secular world. He has written a book that he often cites on Sundays called "Repenting of Religion". He is Gregory A. Boyd. Another book that was published in 2013 by Bruxy Cavey called "The End of Religion" echos some of what Boyd says in his book.

Christendom, which is the melding of Church and State, was brought forth when the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century. He then declared the whole Roman Empire to be Christian.This in essence Romanized the Church. This unholy pairing of Church and State became drunk with power and started on a course of that can only be described of as evil. Jesus stopped being about love and forgiveness, and became a Warrior God - or He was shoved aside altogether.

Through the fall of the Roman Empire and the Protestant reformation the Church/State ruled for centuries by cultivating the fear of God rather than the love of Christ. Every ugly picture of Christianity can be traced to Christendom. It still rules the Church today in many ways, but it is slowly becoming extinct. This is exactly what these two books are about - the end of Christendom and the return of a Jesus-centered faith - and it is a beautiful thing.

The rise of non-denominational mega-churches (churches with thousands and thousands of congregants) all over the world are purposely separating themselves from the churches of Christendom. They focus on teaching and interpreting the Bible rather than dithering on rote traditions. The old line churches look down on these institutions as scripturally deficient and inauthentic. In my eyes the sermons in the mega-churches are actually sermons whereas the sermons in the traditional churches are more often than not pitches for money. These churches may not have the Magisterium of the Church, but they also don't have the baggage. They are fresh and exciting and people love being a part of it. Contrast a mega-church (this can be done just by looking at the parking lot on Sundays) to a Catholic parish or a Lutheran congregation where the young leave the church at 16 never to return. The pews are half-full the old who truly love their church, but they will never renew it. The Jesus-centered mega-churches have people of all ages and backgrounds and the 16 years-olds drive themselves to the service every Sunday - because they want to be there.

They are learning to reject violence and grotesque consumerism. They are learning that every person they meet - friendly or not - has unsurpassable worth and is precious enough for Jesus to have died for on Calvary two thousand years ago. They are learning that everyone is welcome in the Kingdom, sinners and saints, blacks and whites, gays and straights. They are learning to live within their means and to be generous with their extras. They are learning that living like Jesus lived and loving like Jesus loved leads to better world here and now and to the glory of the Kingdom to come.

These are the new Christians.




Ugh

All things being equal

All things being equal income in the U.S. is not one of them. That being said things are never exactly as they seem. Take the chart above that I quickly put together as a visual aid. As a matter of clarity the green line actually goes far higher, but the point is made. Clearly there is something behind this 1% thing the Occupy Wall Street movement rallies against.

The actual number of one percenters is a tiny fraction, there just aren't that many of them. In that number along with Wall Street, corporate and industrial chieftains are your athletes, actors and rockstars. They get paid so much as a percentage of what the rest of us are paid because they presumably deliver commiserate value to their organizations. There are a few sports fans who might dispute that notion. The value of a good CEO, however, is undeniable and the value they bring potentially enriches thousands, even millions. For the sake of this article I don't want to focus on the rarefied air of the one percenters, they are an outlier to this argument.

For the rest of us who bring in less than $300,000 a year (most of us far, far less) the traditional way income is calculated is misleading at best. When Census Bureau data is used to define income which excludes transfer payments like Medicaid, Medicare, nutrition assistance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and even employee benefits such as health insurance the real picture is skewed. When someone who brings in $100,000 a year is taxed and deducted his real spendable income is far less. On the the other hand someone earning $20,000 and takes advantage of all the "aid" available (and no Federal taxes deducted) the gap in real spendable income narrows considerably.

The higher earner may have advantages like the ability to obtain credit and leverage future earnings to improve his lot. But he also pays more taxes, interest and fees on those obligations further eroding his spendable monthly income. While he might get a health plan from his work, he still pays a considerable premium with co-pays and deductibles. The person with public assistance pays no property taxes, little in maintenance and fees and a pittance for his premiums and co-pays on public health assistance. The fact of the matter is the data commonly used to measure income inequality routinely ignores our highly progressive income tax system and the plethora of benefits and transfer payments. When the effect of taxes and transfer payments is taken into account, according to recent studies at Columbia University inequality actually declined 1.8% during the 16-year period between 1993 and 2009.

When the President and the hard core liberals complain about this raw number inequality there are not only dishonest with the numbers they are dishonest about the remedy. They want pay caps on corporate executive income and corporate income (actors and athletes not so much) and also wealth transfers which, of course, would be filtered through the government. The data they choose to ignore is that economic growth is the best remedy for all - particularly the middle class. This has been demonstrated time and time again. The problem the liberals have with that is two-fold. One, the wealthy will get wealthier, and two the poor will need less government - both unacceptable.

Nearly all of what the current government has tried is either a lie or misguided. The 800 billion dollar stimulus package (pure debt) signed in 2009 saw 7/8 of it go to transfer payments like food stamps, Medicaid expanded unemployment and of course to bogus "green" initiatives. None of it generated any tax revenue or stimulus. Worse, these transfer payments "steal" money from real investments and real research that would actually improve economic prospects. Add in the fiasco and unfunded liability of the Affordable Care Act and the nation is poised to take another economic hit. Private companies that have a cumulative trillion or more to invest sit on the sidelines because of the track record of the current government and the tax implications of repatriating overseas earnings. It can only be one of two things - total incompetence or it is a plan.

It seems so obvious to me and many others that government policy (pushed by huge corporate interests) have conspired to ruin the most exceptional thing about America - a powerful middle class. When the industrial revolution brought people in from the countryside an entirely new phenomenon, unseen in world history emerged to dominate the western world. The middle class was fostered by people like Henry Ford and even some of the so-called robber barons at the turn of the 20th century. Obviously inequality existed - as if ever didn't exist - but more people were pulled out of poverty than ever could have been imagined.

Today it seems that mega-corporate and government interests are not so secretly conspiring to create a two tiered society - namely the serfs and the elites - which is precisely where we started centuries before. In this scenario the middle class is the problem.

With high tech innovation and automation deleting good paying middle class jobs there is, of course, the continued globalization of manufacturing in low wage nations. Aided by government policy to support the transfer of labor from middle class nations to Asia it is clearly is a prime strategy of corporate and government elites. Using income disparity an it's transfer payments from the earners and producers to the lower class is another. Neither of these hurt the elites and the politicians who benefit from them. Both political parties in the U.S. regardless of what the pretend to claim for themselves practice this most destructive form of crony capitalism. The rest of the people can see this and hate both parties for it. The individual politicians are powerless to resist either through the seduction of power and money or palpable fear.

I am sensing thoughtful people are sick of it. The people on the center/right are completely disgusted with the Republican party. Not because they aren't conservative enough, but because they offer nothing to the middle class that we can cling to and seemingly stand for nothing - in the very least they have a major communication problem. The people on the center/left can see the train coming off the tracks and can't or won't believe it's their guys that are steering us wrong, but they are sick of it as well. The Democrats at least use their rhetoric to pretend the care, even if it is all bullshit.

The right wingers, morons though they might be, have got to be better at slowing the destruction the left wingers are currently foisting on us, am I right?




Ugh

Mustang Run

My newest painting:

"Mustang Run"

24 X 36 acrylic

by Craig Willms

Here's something a little different for me... It's my first attempt at impressionism. It was quite difficult for me not go into extreme detail. I was almost like forcing myself to be a little sloppy. Despite my reticence to call it done I was really happy with the way this came out. It is a gift for my sister, a horse owner. 

Be sure to see my other paintings at: http://www.static-art.blogspot.com/



Ugh

ACA: Schadenfreude

schadenfreude
scha·den·freu·de
noun:
1. pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune.




It's an awful sentiment this schadenfreude, but it's part of mankind's fallen nature. I mean who doesn't love a little slapstick or vaudevillian humor? Even my children laugh at their father when I step on the business end of a rake and the handle comes up to whack me in the face. Imagine how the NYC creative class felt when they received their health insurance cancellation notices recently. After all they were shocked to find out that what was good for thee was not good for we. Me, I smiled. Schadenfreude.




In his column on PJMedia's Unexamined Premises site Michael Walsh describes a classic schadenfreude moment. We all know that the artists, actors and cultural elites in NYC are all big supporters of liberal causes and of course their messiah Barack Obama, and by all means the Affordable Care Act. They were all happy with the health insurance coverage they obtained through their professional associations at far better rates than the individual insurance market. Imagine the fear and rage they experienced when they opened the cancellation notices. You see their plans didn't meet Obamacare criteria and had to be discontinued. The schadenfreude comes from the pitiless attitude you know they had when they heard stories of the rubes in flyover country losing their insurance by the millions. Boom!

Eventually leftism eats it's own. Every time it happens throughout history the presumably untouchable are shocked. When they find out that their agenda boomerangs on them it's a shock that those in the ivory tower see them as part of the unwashed masses too.

By and large the average politically liberal voter has solid personal principles and just wants to do good. A few are malevolent, but most of them just don't think things all the way through. The unintended consequences of principled "policies" are often far worse than any good that comes of them. They refuse to factor in human nature. I mean why would young people forgo buying affordable health care instead of paying a fine? Why would rich people who can easily afford higher taxes move business or expensive purchases overseas rather than pay a little more in taxes? It's human nature. They do it themselves after doing gyro-dance of rationalization.

Put the shoe on the other foot. Why would these cultural elites not be happy to pay higher premiums if it meant that the insurance pool for the poor and less advantaged was increased? Because they don't want to or can't actually afford higher premiums.

Personally, I'm OK for another year having an employer sponsored health plan. My out of pocket costs are shy high now, so I am not not unaffected mind you. This can all change next year. I, however, won't be shocked.




Ugh