With respect to the just concluded recall success of Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, this is either blinders, or willful stupidity, or outright dishonesty. Can anyone else think of a reason for this display?
The video is just under four minutes, but it illuminates years.
h/t Power Line for the pointer to the video.
We already need a photo ID for nearly anything we do: board a commercial airplane, drive our car, check into a shooting range (oh, wait—we’re not supposed to be allowed to do that, either, according to some), get into a federal building; the list goes on and on.
Oh, and get into a Big Do involving the President or First Lady.
A PHOTO ID [WAS] BE REQUIRED TO ENTER THE MASSMUTUAL CENTER [for last May’s Massachusetts Democratic Party Convention, emphasis in the original]
A photo ID will be required to enter the 2012 Democratic National Convention this September in Charlotte.
On Friday, June 8th, those wishing to attend [Mrs Obama’s book signing] must…submit their social security number and show an official photo ID (driver’s license, passport) to a Secret Service agent
No Jim Crow here. No siree.
Yet the Progressives demand that anyone should be allowed to vote—residents, the dead, cartoon characters, illegal aliens, non-citizens; it’s all the same to them. They’re suing states for insisting on photo IDs in order to get a ballot.
The Wall Street Journal asks whether, with the EU and the euro zone falling deeper into their pit, Germany will act.
Germany, the only euro-zone nation with the economic heft to do so, has done the minimum necessary to keep vulnerable countries afloat…
they say, and
[T]he German government must decide whether saving the euro is worth putting the country’s own prosperity at risk.
But Germany has been acting, and for the most part quite appropriately—that “minimum” being too much intervention.
No one can save us from ourselves, or the Greeks from themselves. We—and the Greeks—are the only ones who can do this. Indeed, “salvation” imposed from outside can only make the inevitable conflagration that much worse. It does so, in part, by not allowing the natural forces, of a free market in this case, to clear away the dead brush as it accumulates, so that when an otherwise lesser recession succeeds in igniting that inflammable detritus in several areas, they all explode into an out of control disaster—the current EU debt crisis.
The imposed “salvation” also acts, in part, to create a moral hazard that anaesthetizes its victims against the pain of acting on one’s own obligations and suffering the consequences of choosing unwisely or unfortunately (and those of choosing wisely or fortunately) without eliminating the critical need. And this results, in the other nations “needing” the same bailout, which series threatens to bankrupt the benefactors as well as the beneficiaries. The beneficiaries of this “aid” will be bankrupted by it; have no doubt of this. The recipients of the loans being forced can never hope to repay them, and this can only cost the taxpayers of the lending nations—taxpayers who have the wherewithal explicitly because they, and their nations, have been acting responsibility.
Germany, which the rest of Europe and especially the Greeks, sees as their piggy bank, recognizes this risk, at least sub rosa, as demonstrated by their reluctance to fork over the cash. It’s time for the rest of Europe to man up, also.
As the WSJ notes,
At a conference in Brussels last week, Thomas Steffen, state secretary at the German finance ministry, responded to criticism that Germany had been too slow to help its neighbors by making reference to the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. The ant, he noted, works through the summer to store up food for the winter while the grasshopper wastes the warm months singing.
Some in the audience took the analogy as a call on southern Europe to take their fate into their own hands.
Mr. Steffen didn’t tell audience members how the fable ends: When winter comes, the starving grasshopper begs the ant for food. Rebuking the grasshopper for his idleness, the ant turns his back and crawls away.
Those in the audience took the analogy correctly—knowing the outcome of the fable. It’s time for the Greeces of the EU, in particular, take their fate into their own hands; it’s late summer, and the fall approaches.
The growth policies they need to emplace must not be the currently proposed—or forced from outside—policies of government growth through higher taxes (if with proclaimed spending cuts). Rather, the growth policies must be policies of shrinking governments, greatly reduced government spending, and greatly reduced taxes. And in the cases of some countries, actually collecting those taxes that are levied. The social practice of not paying the taxes is a social practice of stealing from one’s neighbors. If the tax is disliked so much, then the people of that polity must elect a government that will rescind that tax.
In the run-up to the Wisconsin recall election, we got the Democrats’ attempt to smear Governor Walker with a carefully timed, just before the voting, dishonest claim of having fathered a child out of wedlock as a college kid. We also got the Progressives’ preview of one of their core beliefs, that of a surveillance state, with a mailer they sent to all potential voters in the state:
We’re sending this mailing to you and your neighbors to publicise who does and does not vote.
… The chart shows the names of some of your neighbors, showing which have voted in the past.
After the June 5th election, public records will tell everyone who voted and who didn’t.
Ann Althouse has posted an image of the letter she received. As Dr Althouse says, “This…is truly despicable.”
Now, post-election, Walker is the target—literally—of Democrats’ death threats. Here are some of the…saner…threats. And lest a reader thinks these are just angered BS, the Milwaukee Police Department and the Wisconsin Department of Justice think they’re real enough to investigate.
I wanna kill scott walker so fucking baddd!!!!! & the racist dumb assholes that voted for him
Please somebody kill Scott Walker.—
Scott walker will die within the next week ive already payed for the hit—
Oh Yeah, Somebody Gone Shoot Scott Walker White Ass.—
Scott Walker needs to die—
NBS I Know What School Scott Walker Son Go To—
As backdrop, we have this from last February by Congressman Michael Capuano (D, MA) about the Wisconsin recall election:
Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary.
It’s been interesting to see the denunciation by the Democratic Party leadership and by the NLMSM of these Progressive examples of civil discourse.
Here they are from President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, David Axelrod, Jim Messina, Debbie Wasserman Schulz, and Valerie Jarrett:
Here they are from the NYT, LAT, WaPo, CNN, and MSNBC:
MSNBC had this on the 6th, the day after the elections and the day the threats began appearing. And WaPo had this piece on the 6th, which though is more along the lines of mine. Since then, it’s been
for all of them.
Pair this with the Democrats’ atrocious attacks on the very fabric of our democracy 15 months ago when they ran from the state of Wisconsin (and Indiana) in order to block the democratically elected government from being able to function at all, solely because those Democrats were unable to impose their views on the majority.
The Progressives’ view of democracy and of individual liberty is not something we can afford four more years of. Or ever again.
It’s good to see that American stock analysts/prognosticators aren’t the only ones who are no good at the task. This is no knock on the Spiegel Online journalist, because no one is. Nevertheless, it’s instructive to see his remarks.
In the last 10 days, the DAX, Germany’s blue-chip stock index, has fallen by 16 percent. On Monday it fell below the 6,000 point benchmark for the first time since January and has continued its plunge on Tuesday. Has the crisis, which for so long seemed to leave Germany untouched, finally reached Europe’s largest economy?
…last summer, when the DAX lost 30 percent within just a few weeks, sparking a wave of politicking. The widespread belief in Germany was that only the financial markets were acting up.
That is probably the biggest problem the Germans have in the now two-year-old euro crisis. In a sea of misery, Germany was an island of bliss.
But now, though, even its most stubborn adherents have begun realizing that this concept cannot work.
Here’s a chart similar to what this writer is looking at for the DAX, courtesy of Yahoo!Finance. It looks at the DAX over the five days ending 5 Jun 12 (not the ten that the writer describes; however, if you follow the link, select the one month view, and look back those ten days, you’ll see the preceding five days are generally flat, so little is lost to the point).
Pretty damning, isn’t it? Nobody likes the German government’s euro, euro zone, or EU moves, and they’re trashing the German stock market over them. Chancellor Merkel and Finance Minister Schaeuble must change their policies.
But here’s that same chart put into some sort of perspective, also courtesy of Yahoo!Finance. This one looks at the DAX over the last five years. 
That five day period is the tiny, little down-tick on the far right end, where you almost can’t see it against the five-year backdrop. Indeed, the whole period from the Aug-Sep 2011 period to the end is little different from the period from October-ish 2010 and that Aug-Sep 2011 other than speed of occurrence. And both periods are trivial compared to the period surrounding the onset of the Unpleasantness of late 1999-early 2000, which had a wholly different set of “causes.”
This time it’s different, though. Yeah. Sure it is.