In the 6 Apr 09 issue of National Review, print edition, Jonah Goldberg explains how both the gubmint and business, at the highest echelons, tell themselves lies about what they’re about:

Visit any college campus, any Georgetown salon, any sweaty left-wing netroots comment section, or any space sufficiently accursed to have both Nancy Pelosi and a microphone in it, and you will be informed that the Democratic party stands up to corporate fat cats. …

Then there’s big business. The story corporate America tells itself is that it’s the living embodiment of the American Dream. They’re for free markets and competition and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps individualism. They stand opposed, on high principle if nothing else, to government intrusions into the marketplace. If they get involved in the filthy business of lobbying government, it’s to protect themselves from the Fabian succubi of the Leviathan state, which is always desperate to drain the lifeblood of entrepreneurialism from the American Way. …

The problem with both stories is that they are exactly that — stories, self-esteem boosters that businessmen and liberals repeat not so much so they can respect each other, but so they can respect themselves in the morning. It defies all the data. As National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson recently noted (“Losing Gordon Gekko,” March 9), in the last two election cycles, big Wall Street firms gave more to Democrats than to Republicans. Democrats also led in most other big-business sectors.  …

This tendency goes far beyond campaign contributions. Leaf through various editions of Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy and you’ll find that corporations have always given overwhelmingly to left-leaning non-profits that agitate for anti-business policies. “There are few phenomena so remarkable today,” William Simon wrote in one such report in 1988, “as the seemingly relentless determination of America’s largest business corporations to set aside a portion of their earnings for the benefit of their enemies.”  …

What big business likes about big government is that it clears the field of those pesky smaller, more nimble and entrepreneurial competitors — you know, the actual free marketeers. Government meddling takes much of the guesswork out of business. Think of big utilities. In exchange for letting the government set their rates, they never have to worry about rivals. Profit margins are guaranteed and predictable. History records no instance where the CEO of an electrical utility missed a tee time because a competitor suddenly unveiled an exciting new product.

Likewise, what big government likes about big business is that it’s easier to deal with. When the economy is run by a few giant firms, you always know whom to get on the phone. If you’ve got a social or economic policy to implement — affirmative action, employer-provided healthcare, the Americans with Disabilities Act — it’s much easier to work with giant companies that can afford to pass the costs of compliance on to their customers. It’s particularly easy if you’re on a first-name basis with the CEOs because you’ve sat on panels with them — and Bono and George Clooney — in Davos and Aspen every winter and summer. Remember when Hillary Clinton was warned that her health-care plan would destroy countless smaller businesses and she responded with a shrug: “I can’t go out and save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America”? Why should she bother? It’s not like those people go to Renaissance Weekend.

Make no mistake: the urge to acquire massive amounts of power is found in both big government and big business.  Bill Gates did not aspire to create the best software company in the world but the only software company in the world. The former I could respect — Microsoft is the biggest because it’s the best — but the latter? Not for a minute.

The unfettered desire to exercise that much power over others — and the willingness to engage in ethically and legally questionable practices to get that power — is always morally wrong and is always what destroys a nation from within.  Jonah rightly identifies big business as the antithesis of free-market capitalism. These businesses may have been born from the free-market system, but when they get big enough to crush their competition by using the levers of governmental power, they do just that.

It’s corporatism that we must fight against: not just big gubmint. These two giant entities are in a whorish relationship just as surely as the lowliest john and hooker on the street, and it’s just as disgusting.

There’s those what believe that people ought to be controlled and there’s those what don’t. Which are you?

General Ne Win was the Burmese leader of the failed “Burmese Way to Socialism”; a pogrom that drove Burma to disaster. Yes, he went about nationalizing industries. Yes, he developed a ‘police force’ (don’t know if he called it ACORN or COI, the new term they’re hiding behind nowadays). No word on whether or not he’s rounded up 9 mistresses, but who could blame him if he did? COItus for the POTUS; Americans, line up, here come the truncheons.

A New Way, a CHANGE! to our way of life. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

As seen here.

Right-wing Christian keyboard warriors.  They’ll be the death of us all.  You want proof?  The Romans used to feed Christians to the lions.  Nowadays lions are all but extinct and right-wing Christians are everywhere, mostly keyboard warrioring.  And reading what follows a right-wing Christian after they’ve keyboard warriored is to witness the passing of a kidney stone, the moaning and groaning during the tortured dribble of right-wing rage onto a page.  I’ve had enough!  

As I was saying to BMoe before he went all pissed-off Christian on me, and just after Darleen went pissed-off Christian on me, is that the third world is where the real action is.  No Fab-Crete shopping malls with parking lots full of right-wingers and SUVs in the bloody ends of the third world.   There are some right-wing Christians in the outer limits, sure, but not the kind you meet here on PW, not the ones whose bookshelves contain nothing but the Bible, Ayn Rand and Tom Clancy, just the quiet missionary types who’ve seen too much of God’s hoary backhand.

My bloody third world hero of the day comes from Burma, where there’s more human kooks than water rats.  Back in the great imperial days, circa late 19^th century, the Brits had taken over Burma.  Eventually the Japs didn’t dig the Brits having all the fun with the Burmese women and so around 1940 they jumped in on the Burmese action.  What eventually resulted was Ne Win, Socialist champion and all-around psychotic hero of the people.

Now for those Russophiles out there you’re probably snickering for the same reason I did when I first caught Ne Win’s name.   In airport Russian Ne Win would mean No Win, but he won, and won big.   Win first seized power in 1962 and like every left-wing military dictator he was initially celebrated by the people.  Shortly after, right according to script, he went mad loonbat. 

Win’s favorite number was 9.  Great for a game of craps but Win took it a step further by having the Burmese currency issued in denominations of 9, meaning you had 45-bills and 90-bills, etc… 

Burmese chicks are skinny and grow up fast, that’s why Win loved them by the hundreds.  He had so many royal concubines that he consulted his witch doctor for methods to keep his wood strong enough to satisfy his undulating horde.  And thus began Ne Win’s legendary medicinal baths in pure dolphin blood.  I’m no Burmese medicine man but I have a hunch why fresh tuna was ruled out.

Win’s famous response to the first student riots: “”if these disturbances were made to challenge us, I have to declare that we will fight sword with sword and spear with spear.”  Now that’s laying down the law with brevity. 

Win’s best day was putting down the Karen tribe uprising, the only Christians in Burma.  The Naga and the Shan tribes were also brutally put down when they started menstruating too heavily but Win ran the Christian Karen tribe into Thailand, burnt their Bibles and re-educated the prettiest of the Karen girls.  Any tribe with the same name as a California Girl Scout is going to get its ass kicked in the third world, but it also brings out the best in Asian slave-catchers, and Ne Win was a Marx and Lenin-loving sex-slave catcher of the first order.   

Ne Win finally resigned in 1988.  The hippies and students started rioting out of pure ecstasy and because they thought things were finally going to get better.  Win’s successors proceeded to kill 10,000 rioting students in an effort to clear up the misunderstanding.  

Ne Win - almost nobody did it better.   He drove Burma into poverty and impregnated all he could catch.

PA Republican Senator Arlen Spector votes for the Stimulus bill.

Spector subsequently learns that he is running 16-20 percentage points behind conservative Pat Toomey in the upcoming Republican Senatorial primary.

Spector announces his switch to the Democratic Party, stating that he “will not be held hostage by Republican Primary Voters.”

Spector then learns that, despite promises from Majority Leader Harry Reid, he will not retain any of his seniority in his new party of choice.

Spector becomes almost invisible in his new party but looks forward to an easy primary for his nomination as a candidate for the Senate, especially after his highest profile opponent leaves the race “for the good of the people of Pa.”

Rep. Joe Sestak ,  retired Admiral and only the second Democrat ever to win election from Delaware County, PA. in the last 50 years, announces that he will enter the Democratic Senatorial primary race to face Spector.

One early poll gives Sestak up to a 15 point lead over Spector in the race.

When the going around comes around, it’s yummy.

I mean, how often do you really get to say

I for one welcome our new insect overlords!

I can’t really single out any parts of this for quotes, just read the whole thing and be amazed at its quite possibly perfect wrongness.

Don’t try to eat or drink until you are finished.

The President decides on your lightbulbs.

By what authority?

Heard anything about this on the news yet?  Anything from the Duke faculty?

Frank Lombard is the associate director of Duke’s Center for Health Policy. The university administrator was recently arrested by the FBI and charged with offering up his adopted 5-year-old son for sex.

…

University administrator Lombard is accused of logging on to a chat room online and describing himself as a “perv dad for fun.” The detective who wisely looked into the suspicious screen name says that Lombard admitted to molesting his own adopted son. All this was before allegedly inviting a stranger to travel to North Carolina from another state to statutorily rape his already-molested adopted son.

Well, okay, maybe it was just the racial component that caused so much furor over the lacrosse case you are thinking.  This would probably be getting more attention if the victims were black.

You would be wrong.

According to a confidential source (CS) a man using the user name “cooper2” or “cooperse” logged onto an internet-based video chat room. CS saw him perform oral sex on an African-American child under the age of ten. He also performed other acts on the child, which are too obscene to be described in this column.

The user name “cooper2” has now been linked to Frank Lombard, the associate director Duke University’s Center for Health Policy. A second source has now alleged that “cooper2” has confessed to being “into incest” and that he has adopted two African American children.

Update- The commentors  at HuffPo don’t seem to think it is fair to lump all gay men as pedophiles, just because Lombard was gay.  I agree with them,  as illustrated by this quote from the story,

The only good news coming out of this story is about Frank Lombard’s live-in homosexual partner. The affidavit in support of Lombard’s arrest warrant shows that he made special arrangements when molesting the child – sometimes even by drugging the child – to make sure his partner did not find out.

Lombard’s own partner was quite obviously not a pedophile, or tolerant of such behavior.  What I wonder is how many of these same commentors had  no second thoughts at all about branding all rich white boys as rapists?

…tiny, shriveled, and with absolutely no use or value.

And that other’s thinger.

The Senate (that wonderfully deliberative body, (Now! with Al Freakin’ Franken!) will consider this criminally insane bill next.

Call ‘em, if you care. Or not. This, by Sgt. Mom…

After the great Fall, the horizons contracted, drew in, cities in the west shriveled and the great Roman works and roads crumbled through lack of maintenance. Constantinople survived and carried on with many mutated Roman traditions until it fell to a new tribe of conquerors, but in the West, the children of empire lived among crumbling remnants, and forgot the trades and skills of their ancestors, skills that were no longer applicable or useful in the brute struggle for simple survival. Gone the baths, gone the centrally-heated villas, gone the trade, the artistry and the law, and the knowledge of how these great works were even constructed, save in a few tiny enclaves, and among a pitiful few. …

Read it & worry.