Our Long National Nightmare Is Over

Today we witnessed history being made as Barack Hussein Obama was sworn-in as the 44th President of the United States of America.

After taking the oath of office, he addressed the nation:

This Is Your Land

A revival of the American Spirit was evident on The Mall in Washington, D.C. today as tens of thousands gathered for a concert celebrating the upcoming inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th President of the United States. Legendary folk singer Pete Seeger led the crowd in a spirited rendition of "This Is Your Land".

California Leads The Way

The Golden State of California is proving once again to be a trendsetter, which we've long come to expect from the nation's most populous state which also features what's usually touted as the world's fifth-largest economy.

From the San Jose Mercury News:

Cash Drying Up, California Is About To Delay Tax Refunds, Slash Aid To The Needy

By Mike Zapler
Mercury News

SACRAMENTO — California's budget meltdown is about to hit home for millions of taxpayers awaiting their refunds and people who depend on the social safety net to survive, a top state finance official warned Friday.

Controller John Chiang, who is responsible for managing the state's cash flow, plans to delay $3.7 billion in payments starting next month in response to lawmakers' failure to fix a projected $40 billion deficit through mid-2010.

Among those who won't get paid on time: taxpayers who file their returns early and are awaiting refunds; families who depend on welfare and aid for the aged, blind and disabled; and programs that serve developmentally disabled and mentally ill patients.

"Delaying payments will hurt real families, many of whom are just hanging on in these very, very tight and difficult times," Chiang said. "Taxpayers who expected to use their refunds to purchase a car, to make food payments, to pay off their credit card bills, will have to wait. That is something we should not be doing."

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Sadly, the state that gave us Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan also led the way in converting our nation to a culture of deadbeats and thugs. No one wants to pay for anything (Proposition 13), "three strikes and you're out" (Proposition 184), and civil rights are stripped (Proposition 8), are all examples of how California's vaunted liberalism is bogus.

Its public education system is failing, its healthcare system a travesty, its economy favors the wealthy and has long exploited poor immigrants and minorities, and even its law enforcement institutions have long been recognized as brutal.

Celebrating the Bush Legacy

A Party Of Whiners

New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman does a great job of dissecting the GOP and offering a diagnosis for its recovery in a column that appears in today's Times.

As the new Democratic majority prepares to take power, Republicans have become, as Phil Gramm might put it, a party of whiners.

Some of the whining almost defies belief. Did Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general, really say, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror”? Did Rush Limbaugh really suggest that the financial crisis was the result of a conspiracy, masterminded by that evil genius Chuck Schumer?

Krugman traces the ills of the Republican Party to its "Southern Strategy", which has left it with nothing more than a strong, but limited base in the "Old Confederacy." And he parses no words in identifying the strategy as being race based.

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

Serving such a narrow constituency, the Republican Party, Krugman asserts, lacks the power to effectively obstruct the Obama administration's initiatives. He concludes:

Mr. Obama therefore has room to be bold. If Republicans try a 1993-style strategy of attacking him for promoting big government, they’ll learn two things: not only has the financial crisis discredited their economic theories, the racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to.

Will the Republicans eventually stage a comeback? Yes, of course. But barring some huge missteps by Mr. Obama, that will not happen until they stop whining and look at what really went wrong. And when they do, they will discover that they need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy.

As We Begin The New Year, Let's Be Joyous

After eight long years of the Bush administration, marked by failure, incompetence, and corruption, we're finally poised to steer the nation in a new direction.

As we proceed, let us not forget the broken promises and outright lies that defined the two terms Bush served in office.