Clint Eastwood: Heartbreak Ridge (1986)

Source:The New Democrat

Heartbreak Ridge is my favorite Clint Eastwood movie and that is saying something because there might be ten of his movies that I love, including Magnum Force, Dirty Harry, The Enforcer, The Gauntlet, Pink Cadillac, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and a few others.  All of these movies have a few things in common: great stories, great writing, great casts and great quick-witted humor, all at times when you might think, "How could someone joke about that?"

Heartbreak Ridge was made in 1986 but takes place in 1983, about the time of the bombing of the marine barracks in Lebanon. Its about these lazy recon marines who are in the Marines to chill and have a good time.  They are basically still in boot camp, as far as their level of training goes, and are seen by the officers at their base in North Carolina as screw ups, which is putting it mildly.  Assholes would be more accurate.

Sergeant Tom Highway (Eastwood), a thirty year veteran of the Marine Corps who served in both the Korean and Vietnam wars, a distinguished member of the silent generation in this movie and in real life, is brought to this unit to get these assholes in shape and turn them into real marines.  The problem is that Sergeant Highway's superior officer, Major Powers, (Everett McGill) is an old school, by the book, tight ass who wants things done his way or no way.  Highway is not in the Marines to play by anyone else's book, so they clash.

Highway has to make these very young men, late twenties at the oldest, into marines with this tight ass major on his back the whole time and do it without losing his job.  He takes his unit into battle in Granada to rescue some Americans.  There are over two hours of this in the full version of the movie along with a lot of great humor from Eastwood and his crew.  Teenage boys, maturity wise, become good U.S. Marines

AEI: James Pethokoukis: The New Marxism

Source:The New Democrat

Winston Churchill famously said, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the rest." This logical form can be applied to other systems as well.

It works fairly well in economics, e.g., "Capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the rest."  Capitalism has many forms.  In one, Laisssez-Faire economics, government has no role in the economy and all capital is controlled by the private sector with no rules on how to operate. Whatever government exists is funded by trade tariffs.  This form was found seriously wanting and discarded at the end of the 19th century.

The beauty of capitalism, in whatever form, is that individuals are not guaranteed wealth.  They have to earn it.  This incentivizes them to get a good education and be productive in life so that they don't need public assistance to take care of them.  In a good capitalist economic system, as many people as possible are able to get the skills needed to be productive and successful in life.  Liberals, Conservatives, Progressives and Socialists have been arguing about this at least since the New Deal.

Even Socialists in Europe and in America now acknowledge that capitalism and private enterprise are here to stay.  The Marxists have lost, so the question now is what type of capitalist economic system should we have. I went into this on my blog yesterday but as a Liberal I believe in liberal capitalism or liberal economics.  Some on the far-left would call this "Neo-Liberalism" (because it is not Socialism). But it is is an economic system where, ideally, everyone has an opportunity to attain the  education needed to succeed in life. 

In such a system, the role of government is to protect workers and consumers not from themselves but from predators who would hurt them and to help people who fall though the floor of the system.  The  safety net exists to give them temporary financial relief and a hand up.  This is the outline of liberal capitalism. 

The Federalist: David Corbin & Matt Parks: Publius & The Progressives

Source:The New Democrat

I see two dominant political factions in the Democratic Party today.  The first is the FDR/LBJ progressives, who are not Socialists but real Democratic progressives in the best sense of the word. They believe that we should have an essentially free market economy that works for everyone and that there should be social insurance for people who fall through the cracks of the capitalist private enterprise system.  They believe in a big centralized government and tend not to trust the states but they also believe that there are limits to what government can do well for people.

The second is the JFK/WJC or Bill Clinton Liberals who are called New Democrats.  They believe that the safety net should just be there for the people who really need it.  They like the idea of states being able to run their own social insurance programs  and that these programs should primarily empower people to take care of themselves. These are the economic philosophies of the two factions.  They have been the dominant factions in the Democratic Party for over eighty years and the basis of the party's dominance over that period of time.

The people who are called Liberals and Progressives in America would probably be Conservatives in Canada or Britain and their center-left parties would look like our far-left parties, which brings me to my next point.  The Democratic Party changed in the mid and late 1960s as more baby boomers came of age and became Democrats.   The New-Left in America, today, is made up a lot of boomers and their kids.  They staffed the Occupy Wall Street movement. This far-left movement combines both socialist and anarchist (when they see certain laws as unjust) leanings.  They want a government large enough to see that no one is rich or poor, that we are all the same even if some of us are more productive and skilled than the rest.

The MSNBC talk lineup (is there anything else on MSNBC these days?) gets labeled as "progressive talk or progressive voices" when they are not ( and they sure as hell ain't liberal either!).  In actuality, they (except for Ed Schultz and to a certain extent Larry O'Donnell) speak for the Occupy Movement and the New-Left in America.   The rest of them, Rachel Maddow, Chris Hays, and Melissa Harris-Perry are, I'm sure, fine decent people but they are whacked out New-Leftists.  There are no limits to what they believe the government, especially the Federal government, can do for people.  They essentially believe that Americans should want to (and consider it an honor to)  pay Uncle Sam as much in taxes as necessary to take care of all us.

Hoover Institution: Uncommon Knowledge With Peter Robinson- Richard Epstein: 'Crisis & The Law'

Source:Hoover Institution- fellow Richard Epstein, on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, in 2009.

Source:The New Democrat

"Considered one if the most influential legal thinkers of modern times, Richard Epstein brings his libertarian views to bear on the current financial crisis --government incentives were perverse, so the actions of the private parties were perverse-- and rates the performances of George Bush and Barack Obama in their responses to the crisis.  He speaks to the importance of contracts and the constitutionality of the expo facto taxation on AIG executives and the Employee Free Choice Act embraced by President Obama.  Finally he speaks of his personal and professional dealings with Barack Obama when they were law school faculty mates at the University of Chicago."

From the Hoover Institution

I guess because of the way I look at the United States Constitution, I would be described as a Liberal Constitutionalist, who looks at the entire Constitution and doesn't pick out parts that I like and rail against the parts that I do not like, which is common among both the Far-Left and far right in America.  Both the left and the right pick and choose the parts of the Constitution they favor and then claim they are upholding the Constitution, but see things they do not favor and support amending the Constitution for the good of the country, however they would phrase that.

I like the Constitution as a whole and am not interested in eliminating any of the amendments, but I might add an official Right to Vote to it as well as update the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which would throw out most of these so-called Voter ID laws that are really voter prevention laws. 

But there are parts of the U.S. Constitution that are my favorites, which is the real point of this post.  I'm going to concentrate on these because they protect our individual freedom and make us a liberal democracy.

What I really love most about the U.S. Constitution are the First Amendment, which guarantees our right to speech and assembly; the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees our right to privacy and protects our property rights, because it means that government can't come into our homes and businesses without what is called "probable cause" and cannot search our properties without a search warrant issued by a judge; and the Fifth Amendment, which again protects our property rights because government cannot take our property without  probable cause.

These rights allow Americans to live their own lives and associate with whom they choose just as long as they aren't hurting innocent people, and allows government to protect us from criminals and invaders but not to protect us from ourselves. As long as we aren't declaring war on the government or illegally leaking classified information, these rights give us autonomy over our own lives.  We should always remember this and not take them for granted. 

Mundane Matt: Is Fred Phelps Dying?

Source:The New Democrat

I'm not going to say that I hope that Fred Phelps is dying (at least not in public).  That would simply not be the polite thing to do.  It is not consistent with our social mores to wish people to die.   You might think the world would be a better place if a certain person were dead, and Fred Phelps is the perfect example of such a person, but anyone who considers themselves civilized cannot publicly wish such a person to die.

But Fred Phelps dying.  If his organization goes out of business as a result, that would definitely be a great thing, not just for homosexuals or homosexual military personal but for the military in general and for anyone who hates bigots and bigotry.  It is indisputable that without Fred Phelps and his group, the world will be a better place.  Modern Christianity is against hate and hating people for having different lifestyles.  Christ said, "Love thy neighbor as thyself."

National Review: Interview with Ralph Reed at CPAC 2014

Source:The New Democrat

The face of the GOP is really the religious right, the "get big government into our personal lives wing of the Republican Party." I wonder what the Conservative Libertarian wing of the GOP led by Rand Paul, Senator Mike Lee, Senator Jeff Flake, Senator Ron Johnson, Representative Justin Amash, and others think about that.  They have been working on getting big government out of our lives completely and not making the case that some big government is good.   

The Federalist: Fred Cole: Sometimes We Have to Question This Whole Freedom Thing

Source:The New Democrat

I read both sides of the political spectrum, all the way from the far left to the libertarian right to the far right, and of course the center left, where I am, as well as the center right and anything else I might not have mentioned, so please do not get dizzy from reading this.  I'm sure people who read my blogs probably do not like that and perhaps wish I only read articles on the Left and probably wish I was a hell of a lot more partisan as a Democrat as well. I do this because I like to know what people are thinking, especially those who disagree with me, but it also helps me as a blogger to see what the rest of the political world is thinking about.

I mention this for a couple of reasons.  I am very liberal and do not want government controlling people's lives, and based on that, I see plenty of articles from the far left and far right about new ideas and proposals to control people. This year alone, I read three posts about Thom Hartmann wanting to repeal the Second Amendment, an article in the far left magazine Salon about nationalizing the news media because of the success of FOX News, and an article from the far right blog The American Thinker proposing to outlaw tobacco.  I am sure alcohol is not that far away either.

In 2012 alone, there were proposals from the Mike Bloombergs of the world (former mayor of New York City) arguing in favor of outlawing junk food and soft drinks.  The notion behind these proposals is that government (or a select few and elitist individuals) knows best how Americans should live, even Americans they've never met or heard of and know nothing about. These elitists know best because they are attended school in the Northeast or West Coast or Ivy League, and anyway, Americans are basically dumb and can't make these decisions for themselves.

Left or Right big government is too much government because it is government trying to control people and protect them from themselves, whether by prohibition of alcohol, food, and tobacco on the far left or outlawing pornography, premarital sex, adultery, abortion, and homosexuality on the far right. Being human is the ability to live, and part of that is about making mistakes, because, of course, none of us is perfect.  By then learning from those mistakes, we can do better the next time and not repeat them.

Personal freedom and responsibility as well as opportunity are what my politics and ideology are based on, and that means individuals have the freedom to control their own lives.  That means that property rights extend to people's own bodies and that we have the final say in what we do in life as adults as long as what we are doing is not hurting others. We are then held personally responsible, for good or bad, for our own decisions.