How did the Lame Dem Duck cross the road?

Deaf elephants refused to lock the grid

If the din of acts of civil  American Drive In obedience in January doesn’t penetrate the big ears of Congressional elephants, we will have no choice but to finally resort to conservative MLK-like civil disobedience against the Dumbo in the White House, aka President Barack Hussein Obama, and those Republicans and dog-eared Dems on Capitol Hill that are still deaf to the message sent by We the tea-drinking and voting People last Election Day.

The first act of the first session of Congress after the great conservative wave election was a 73-25 vote for SB 510 and the “modernization” of food safety which means a food dictatorship that puts federal government minders in charge of vegetable gardens, much like they have been put in charge of “free” private health insurance-killing medical services:


And they didn’t even need a crisis to not waste since so many Republicans tired of drinking tea not only refused to filibuster the latest executive branch power grab but also actually voted affirmatively to let government bureaucrats keep Big Food’s competitors down:

It is a dangerously broad regulatory bill giving extensive discretionary power to the FDA over the entire food supply chain without proper checks and balances to avoid abuse of power;

It would impose one-size-fits-all-regulations on thousands of small and mid-sized farmers, small-scale local farms and food producers,  and would drastically burden, to extinction,  basic natural and organic food suppliers, thus endangering the lives of Americans who depend on local wholesome foods;
It does not reflect a well-thought-out solution, or address the real causes of food safety issues stemming from the industrialized food supply chain; and
It attempts to limit the authority of our own domestic U.S. laws when it includes language ensuring that our US law will not disturb other international agreements that we have made.  It states: “Nothing in this Act shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization or any other treaty or international agreement to which the U.S. is a party.”

Before this vote, this rooster, cognizant of the GOP betrayal of the last conservative wave in 1994, had already decided to support a minimum-speed attention-getting, D.C. welcoming committee in January when the new Republican-majority House gavels into session. I was helped in reaching the conclusion to prospectively endorse gridlock with Senate Democrats and a veto pen-wielding Chief Executive, despite the need for some relief for recession-savaged lower income Americans when I heard Mitch McConnell’s begrudging surrender on earmarks. The mere 30+ Republican votes today on banning earmarks shows that too many in the GOP still wish to play God with pork and still don’t know that the ears on the sides of their heads are for listening to their bosses, i.e. the voters.

So by all means, let the rooster crow in favor of rogue gridlock politics on K Street and every other street in The District:

Time and again we have been promised rescue from this bloated and corrupt government. This time we will not be denied, we will not walk away.

On November 2 American voters elected a hostage rescue team. We are the hostages…

If we assume half of the Republicans in the House really want to do the right thing we must assume also the other half will need to be beaten and whipped and driven to it…

The 1994 Republican revolution was a failure. It failed because no great effort was made to hold Republicans accountable until AFTER the compromises and the capitulations had occurred.

The 2010 Republican revolution will also be a failure if we are not considerably more proactive in holding the newly elected Republicans responsible if they sell us out and BEFORE they sell us out.

So what comes on January 5, 2011?


A rolling protest to send a clear message to the Republicans in the House, in particular, that we are not going away and we will hold them accountable.

I’m not sure that such civil obedience will work, even if conducted every day of the session. I have long thought that Americans would have to resort to civil disobedience in the streets to save the Liberty and this nation, given my assumption that it would take at least three GOP wave election cycles to seize the requisite legislative majorities and the executive branch to repeal ObamaDem legislation. The latest actions of tea-powered Republicans during the Lame Duck makes me think that even winning three such elections may not be enough. But the back-off of TSA from unreasonable searches over the Thanksgiving holiday, at the mere threat of mild civil disobedience, gives me hope that We the People can eventually take back the country from our Washington rulers.

Pre-American Drive-In gridlock vs. Bush Tax Cut-extension stimuli

More votes are yet to come by the not-so-lame donkeys with elephant ducks in a row.

Supposedly, the “need” for the post-election session is to pass a continuing resolution, lest Big Brother shut down. Given the federal government’s starring role in shutting down all but Goldman Sachs and GM’s UAW union over the past two years, this gamecock would welcome the company of laid-off government employees in job application lines at Wal-Mart and elsewhere.

But since we have the session of losers, I had been hopeful of preventing a Democrat-imposed sun-set law tax hike with an extension of the Bush tax cuts for all Americans for at least two years.

I had been on the fence with respect to whether Republicans should, in the final analysis, reject any Democratic Party tax bill that did not extend them all indefinitely. Given my life-long (even as a Democrat from birth through A.D. 2000) support for any tax cut I could get, I even endorsed Herman Cain’s suggestion that we maintain that position in the Lame Duck.

But can conservatives have any hope that a GOP that would vote FOR the further socialization of America, even down to the level of a backyard vegetable garden, would have any spine strong enough to face down class warfare accusations about tax cuts for the rich? No.

The GOP I see in D.C. just now, is about the business of waging class warfare on behalf of Big Business in lock step with ObamaDems. We had hoped that one of the priorities of the new GOP majority would be to rein in executive branch regulatory powers, even thru pre-emption.

Yet, today, only 17 Republican Senators refused to grant new, broad executive regulatory powers over the very food we eat.

Another year of the Chicken, hold the (too expensive) Le Sueur peas

I would have no problem with yet another extension of the already 99 weeks of unemployment benefits that total more than non-war defense budgets in the 1990s if we could get a three year extension of the tax cuts before 2011. This jobs recession with under-employment at 1930s levels has Americans on their knees choosing between store brand peas and Le Sueur peas so they have enough gas money to get the soon-to-be-more-regulated-and-thus-more-expensive groceries home.

God knows we need a REAL stimulus, unlike the $800B “government growthulus” named Stimulus that Jeffrey Miron outlines as:

A few weeks after President Obama’s victory in the 2008 election, adviser Rahm Emanuel quipped that “[y]ou never want a serious crisis to go to waste . . . [because it] provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”

Emanuel was correct:
The situation in which the new Administration found itself constituted an unusual political dynamic that, properly used, would have allowed the Obama Administration both to stimulate the economy and make it more productive over the long haul.
The Administration should have endorsed a stimulus package based on a repeal of the corporate income tax and reductions in employment taxes. This policy would have accomplished its stated goals, and the budgetary implications would have been less negative than those of the package ultimately adopted because this alternative plan would have enhanced rather than detracted from economic efficiency. This approach would also have been difficult for Republicans to oppose.

Amen Dr. Miron. It should have been easy for Republicans, even in a Lame Duck session as a minority, and especially given the tea partier message that even some incumbent Democrats got, to oppose food czars for every household with a tomato plant and to support a moratorium on oil drilling. The nearly 20 Republicans so voting, got nothing in return for that Big Brother-growing vote. I can only assume that they still insist on being our masters rather than our servant, as the Constitution envisions via consent of the governed.

Given the above, how much hope can conservatives have for a Miron-like supply-side stimulus? How about the lifting of regulations that continue ade facto oil drilling ban? Can we even dream of repealing ObamaCare? I doubt it, and even wonder if Republicans will so fear being accused of anti-Hispanic bigotry that they will vote for the abominable DREAM Act.

Atlas shrugged at ObamaDem congressional policies over the past four years. Many Atlases walked to Brazil when Obama used the oil spill crisis to waste American lives along the Gulf of Mexico. Wall Street Atlases have bid up hope in anticipation of the GOP wave election victory.

I fear the GOP healing of a hoped-for Lame Duck will send Atlas on a slow boat to China and so simply must endorse civilly obedient gridlock as our only hope to avoid  uncivil disobedience before too long as more and more Americans slip through the cracks and crack up over food, much less jobs and oil.

As a Christian, I am thankful for the bounty of the flesh from the American cornucopia and will praise Emmanuel everyday, including Christmas Day 2010. But I weep for my country given the Big Deafness of too many pairs of GOP elephant ears.

Mike DeVine


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