Pat Buchanan talks sense when, and only when, it doesn’t hurt his party

Come Home, America—and Republicans

That’s more often than nearly anybody, but still.

And even his history is both tendentious and mendacious.

Why, after all, didn’t Eisenhower do it himself instead of telling JFK to get out of Europe?

Talk is cheap, they say.

And it’s really easy.

And what are we to think of PB’s citing MacArthur, the man who wanted to invade China and whom Truman could not control or trust and so had to fire, as a dove to JFK’s hawk?

Really, now.

A dime for a dollar? No way, says Republican governor of Pennsylvania

Corbett rejects Medicaid expansion

Different reports cite different numbers, but it is commonly said Corbett refused some $40 billion in federal Medicaid money over ten years because, according to him, it would cost Pennsylvania taxpayers some $4 billion over the same period.

Pennsylvania voters not only put him in office but gave control of the state legislature to Republicans, too.

And make no mistake.

The days when Pennsylvania Republicans were a different breed from those of the American South and West, a more moderate and even liberal breed, are long gone.

This is the age of Limbaugh and KDKA talk radio conservatism.

This is the age of the Tea Party.

This is the age when Pat Toomey drove out Arlen Specter.

Pennsylvania voters knowingly chose these guys.

Democracy doesn’t always work out the way one might hope.

A glimmer of hope

'No one who works full-time should have to live in poverty,' but at $7.25, they do

President Obama in his recent state of the union address proposed raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00.

Republicans have, of course, flat refused and taken the opportunity to declaim against the Marxist, socialist, communist, anti-American, and un-American idea that there should even be such a thing.

Making it all the nicer that Democrats and liberals can remember the working class, once in a while, without yelling about race.

But have you noticed that when liberals address a class war issue without yelling about race they don’t yell, at all?

You can barely hear them.

They almost whisper.

Laura Clawson writes,

A minimum wage of $9.00 an hour still represents minimum-wage workers falling behind by many measures.

Depending how you calculate it, if the minimum wage had kept pace with average wages, it might have been close to $10.50 today.

If it had kept pace with productivity, it might have been more than $18.50.

And if it had kept pace with the growth of wages to the top one percent?

Forget about it—when union members in skilled professions make that much these days, they get attacked as greedy.

And she makes a crucial point.

It's time to stop keeping people working hard to support themselves and their families stuck below the poverty level.

And, with the last increase to the minimum wage having come in 2009, it's important to tie the minimum wage to inflation so that workers don't have to wait years for their next raise.

Getting ready to slash at federal payroll taxes

The classe politique is starting to convince itself cuts to the federal income tax have gone about as far as possible and the next place to cut - and there always has to be another place to cut - will have to be payroll taxes.

Those are the taxes that fund Social Security, Medicare, and (in some usages of the phrase) unemployment insurance.

Cuts to them are direct attacks on the blood supply of American social democracy, earned benefits, so-called (by their enemies and lukewarm friends) “entitlements.”

Brace yourselves.

The apolitical anti-socialist

Modern workers – recall Nietzsche wrote in the second half of the 19^th Century, roughly from the time of our Reconstruction Era – are admitted by all to be worse off than slaves, he says.

They live under worse conditions and work longer and harder.

Human, All Too Human, aphorism 457, Slaves and workers

Some historians have said as much.

But we have far too many racial skeletons in our national closets for that to be a common view, here in America.

The connoisseur of morals

For Nietzsche, the German morality of commands and obedience ranks below the Greek morality of virtue and distinction.

The Dawn, aphorism 207, The German attitude to morality

The morality of willing self-immolation ranks below the morality of self-control, severity, and obedience.

Living for others ranks below living for self.

The Dawn, aphorism 215, Morality of sacrificial beasts; aphorism 151, Fashions in morality

The morality of the pagans/masters ranks above the morality of the Christians/slaves.

But even among slaves there are exceptions.

The Dawn, aphorism 546, Slave and idealist

Never-ending appeal to philosophical rabble.

What Friedrich Nietzsche Did to America

Can’t wait to read it.

But it's the Europeans who made him a star specifically among philosophers.

Later American philosophers only followed their dubious example.

And far too many middle-class middle-brows who preface their borrowed banalities with herd reassurances that would have made Nietzsche wild, such as "we today know," or "as we today understand."

Nietzsche to the workers of Europe: Run away!

Nietzsche's post-World War Two apologists, perhaps starting with Walter Kaufmann who found him guilty all the same of sexism, insist up to our own day that he is no anti-Semite, no German nationalist, no ethnic nationalist in any sense, he is a man without politics, and certainly no racist.

That is what they say.

You should be your own judge.

Here, he declaims against the condition of the working masses of Europe as a dreadful slavery.

But socialism, he says, would be another kind of slavery.

"Don't rebel," he says. "Run away!"

He urges the flight of 25% (his exact percentage) of the European population to the colonies, where he looks forward to seeing how European colonial societies might develop as glorious examples for old Europe!

Meanwhile, if Europe wished to replace the lost labor it ought to import "Chinamen" (the translator's English for what, exactly, in the German, I wonder) who, in his eyes more suited to such a social fate, Nietzsche says would give Europe the stability it now lacks and much needs.

Nietzsche, aphorism 206, The Dawn, The impossible class

He often in his books comments on the Asiatic stability of Chinese civilization.

But not with admiration.

Maybe not an anti-Semite, but certainly weird about the Jews

Nietzsche, aphorism 205, the Dawn, Of the people of Israel

Go west? Are you nuts?

60 million in path of winter storm

Generally speaking, the weather seems to be more awful the further west you go from the Appalachians toward the plains and the eastern portions of the Rockies.

The west coast is OK, but that long stretch before you get that far is weather hell, winter and summer, what with arctic temperatures, snow measured in the feet, and flocks of tornadoes in the summer.

The gulf coast and much of the east coast get hurricanes, of course.

Much of the USA seems uninhabitable, when you think of it.