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This speech and the Eugene Debs incident are helpful in understanding the current Democrat party. It is part of their DNA.

Woodrow Wilson, Peace Without Victory Speech:

They imply, first of all, that it must be a peace without victory. It is not pleasant to say this. I beg that I may be permitted to put my own interpretation upon it and that it may be understood that no other interpretation was in my thought. I am seeking only to face realities and to face them without soft concealments. Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last. Only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit. The right state of mind, the right feeling between nations, is as necessary for a lasting peace as is the just settlement of vexed questions of territory or of racial and national allegiance.

The equality of nations upon which peace must be founded if it is to last must be an equality of rights; the guarantees exchanged must neither recognize nor imply a difference between big nations and small, between those that are powerful and those that are weak. Right must be based upon the common strength, not upon the individual strength, of the nations upon whose concert peace will depend. Equality of territory or of resources there of course cannot be; nor any other sort of equality not gained in the ordinary peaceful and legitimate development of the peoples themselves. But no one asks or expects anything more than an equality of rights. Mankind is looking now for freedom of life, not for equipoises of power.

Apparently,Wilson’s views on peace did not apply to political opponents. Remember Eugene Debs?

Once the United States entered the war, Debs was arrested for violating the Espionage Act after making what the district attorney of Canton, Ohio called an anti-war speech in 1918. Debs in fact only mentioned the war once, but under this repressive new law, was sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary. Nominated for a fifth time as the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate in 1920, Debs campaigned from his jail cell and garnered over a million votes. Despite repeated pleas from Debs’ supporters, President Wilson refused to release Debs from prison.

****a post I rescued from the great Google cache *****

More evidence that socialism only works until you run out of other peoples money.

George Will writes about how liberalism and socialist ideas are dragging California to the verge of collapse. Via the DetNews:

It took years for liberalism’s redistributive itch to create an income tax so steeply progressive that it prompts the flight from the state of wealth-creators: “Between 1990 and 2007,” Voegeli writes, “some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state.”

And the state’s income tax — liberalism codified — intensifies the effects of business cycles on the state’s revenue stream: During booms, the stream surges and stimulates government spending; during contractions, revenues dwindle but the new government spending continues. Voegeli says that if California’s spending had grown no faster than population growth and inflation from 1992 to 2006, it would have been $65 billion less in 2006, and per capita government outlays then would have equaled not those of Somalia or Mississippi but of Oregon, which is hardly “a hellish paradigm of Social Darwinism.”

It took years for liberalism’s mania for micromanaging life with entangling regulations to make California’s once-creative economy resemble Gulliver immobilized by the Lilliputians’ many threads. The state, which between 1990 and 2007 lost 26 percent of its factory jobs and 35 percent of its high-tech manufacturing jobs, ranks behind only New York, another of liberalism’s laboratories, in the number of outward-bound moving vans. (emphasis added)

This is something that we understand in Michigan as well. One thing that we, as a nation, need to wrap our heads around is the fact that we need to be a nation that makes things. We need to build cars, refrigerators, washing machines. We also need to be a nation willing to use our natural resources (in sensible ways).

On the other hand, Russia is using their resources as well. They are using them as a hammer. Via Reuters:

Russian oil continues to flow to Belarus and via Belarus to the European Union despite a failure by Moscow and Minsk to clinch a new oil supply deal at talks on Saturday, a Russian Energy Ministry spokeswoman said on Sunday.

“Belarus is holding back the negotiation process. Russia has made unprecedented and very comfortable proposals about duty-free oil supplies…But Belarus is demanding more,” spokeswoman Irina Yesipova told Reuters.

She said she didn’t know if talks would resume on Sunday or next week.

On Saturday, Belarus’ delegation left Moscow, and Minsk accused Russia of ignoring its arguments in a development that will revive fears of supply cuts to Europe, which have already pushed oil prices up.

Russia is working to regain it’s dominance on the world stage and they are more than willing to use oil to do this. They are also working to provide China with large amounts of oil as well.

Russia is also working on gaining power in military affairs as well:

While Russia is using its natural resources for economic growth and power, in the United States, government is using its power against the use of natural resources for economic growth.

New environmental laws being enacted in California are hindering the drilling for oil their state. Via Bakersfield.com:

What worries him most is how much money he (and eventually, the 34-year-old daughter he’s still training) might have to spend to comply with a new law intended to contain and prevent oil spills.

“What they’re going to ask us to do is going to be very difficult financially for a lot of guys. I mean, draining your tanks, electronically surveying them. That’s downtime. That’s a lot of expense. I don’t know,” said McAdams, who owns about 70 oil wells in the state, many of them just north of Bakersfield.

“This I can see could put some people out of business.”

That sentiment is spreading fast among local oil producers, especially the small independents with the least amount of money to spend on facility upgrades.

I thought Liberals were always looking out for the small businessman.

As a side note, if you think “who cares, there is no more oil in the United States, what’s the big deal”:

Giant Oil Discovery In Gulf Of Mexico

A Modest Oil Rush in California

3 to 4.3 Billion Barrels of Technically Recoverable Oil Assessed in North Dakota and Montana’s Bakken Formation—25 Times More Than 1995 Estimate