I never got Frank Zappa, but...

Frank Zappa has some interesting takes on how the music business suffered from allowing hippies to be in charge, and then some advice on the entrepreneurial spirit. I never got Zappa's music despite the insistent attempts from my younger brother (we were around after Zappa's heyday).  But I now appreciate his business sense.

Warning on the first video - he gets a little out there towards the end when talking about de-programming kids and then a little vulgar about safe sex (it's bleeped out) but the first two-thirds are pretty much great, and the second video is pure gold.

President Tries To Divide the GOP using the GOP

Continuing the policy of trying to divide and conquer your political opposition, the president chose a Republican to steer the Department of Defense - a department he cares very little for.  But in doing so, he has managed to choose a Republican who has some shaky positions on foreign affairs that happen to align with the president, and ones that will not rest well with those in his own party.

By selecting Chuck Hagel the president is daring Republican to reject his nominee.  They either give him an ally on Israel and let him look bi-partisan or they reject him in look intransigent and stubbornly, blindly opposed to all that is Obama-driven to the point of being unreasonable and self-destructive in the eyes of the media, and therefore casual observers.

Well played, albeit cynical and destructive, Mr. President.

Saturday Learning Series - The Road To Serfdom

Many people on the right know who Friedrich Hayek is and have heard of his seminal book, The Road To Serfdom.  But far fewer have likely read it.  Knowing today's pace of society and work and family obligations by so many of us, reading can be difficult.  So here's an attempt to make Hayek's work more accessible.  In the spirit of books on tape, below is a reading, in four parts of that book, that everyone, conservative, libertarian, liberal, socialist, communist or whatever, should hear.  It's not the actual entire book on tape but the subsequent forward to the 1956 edition.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Site Updates

I mentioned back in December that I was going to be making some changes to the design of this blog. As of today I have added some quick links to my Twitter Google+ and Facebook accounts as well as subscribing to my Site Feed and Youtube Account. I have also added an ARCHIVE page today to free up some space on the main page.

The archive only includes the last 500 or so posts, which means only about a year's worth of posting there. Adding more causes the page to load too slowly.

I've also changed my links into categories and have some more editing to do there.

Needless to say it's all a work in progress and more changes are coming.

Stay tuned for more.

We need minions!

The most important activity for conservatives right now is not putting pressure on Republicans to do the right thing.  It's not identifying candidates for 2014 or 2016.  It's much more grassroots than that.  Conservatives need to get organized at the grass roots level.  The various factions of the Tea Party have had at best, mixed results.  Not to denigrate the Tea Party factions, but they have varying agendas and operational effectiveness despite their common goals.  That does not imply that we need a centralized control of a movement that is founded on the notion that over-centralization is a bad thing.

But it does mean that efforts need to be smarter.  Some Tea Party groups have had greater success and their efforts and methods should be emulated wherever possible.  The problem with that is obvious.  Since the movement is so decentralized and so disparate, it's just hard to know whom should be emulated.    In that respect, we almost need a roll call of groups - Tea Party or not - of those we can number as allies. We need minions and we need a place to share that common knowledge.  We need a group of people to start aggregating and quantifying these things.  We can't leave it to the likes of Karl Rove.  He got a lot of stuff wrong on election night and whether he had good intelligence or not the use of it was clearly not effective.

Fiscal Cliff Deal Sucks. But Don't Blame Congress.

Happy New Year.  Welcome to the era of soak-the-rich, tax-and-spend out-of-control-debt liberalism.  Enjoy.

As a conservative, I view the deal reached and passed by the Senate and then Congress is abysmal in terms of how it approaches the deficit problem.  It focuses on tax increases instead of the real problem - overspending.  It doesn't go far enough towards solving the problem and it smacks of Democrat win.  But the bill that originated in the Senate and was just passed by Congress and will surely get president Obama's signature while folly, is not the fault of Republicans, it's the fault of conservatives.

Yep - it's our fault.  The public sent more Democrats to Congress, and kept the balance of power in the Senate and returned president Unemployment to the White House.  Voters are responsible for the elected representatives making these abysmal decisions.  It's the fault of voters.

But with four years of Obama, conservatives had every opportunity to come up with a viable alternative.  Don't blame Republicans for the host of ersatz candidates.  We lost momentum and we paid the price with a lackluster cast of players.  And as far as an ill-informed electorate, we are to blame.  Yest the media has gone over-the-top in it's biased support of the president and the liberal agenda.  But that makes it incumbent upon us not to insulate ourselves from liberals and become an echo chamber of thoughts and ideas only to ourselves.  We need, will need and have always need to reach out to reachable voters and convince them of the soundness of our positions and the weakness of the liberal positions.  We didn't do that or to be more fair, we didn't do it nearly enough.

As I said immediately after the 2008 election, there's a lot of work to be done, and we've no time to lose in getting them done.