The Vast Gulf between Reason and Gibberish

Nichloas Kristof really hates rich people. Instead of showing the great divide between the rich and the poor, Kristof merely shows that vast gulf between sober thoughtfulness and wild-eyed radicalism; between logic and gibberish.

A Hedge Fund Republic?

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Earlier this month, I offended a number of readers

We weren’t offended, Nick. We were laughing at you.

with a column suggesting

It was more like a verbal bludgeoning.

that if you want to see rapacious income inequality,

And really, why wouldn’t you be looking for rapacious income inequality? What a warped world view.

you no longer need to visit a banana republic.

But I’ve had my vacation to California planned since August!

You can just look around.

My point was that the wealthiest plutocrats now actually control a greater share of the pie

Plutocrats have invested heavily in the pie industry in recent years due to widespread declines in pumpkin prices. Warren Buffet says that it’s a wise investment.

in the United States than in historically unstable countries like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

I’m just spit-balling here, but that would seem to indicate that income equality is a feature of instability.

But readers protested that this was glib and unfair, and after reviewing the evidence I regretfully confess that they have a point.

A concession! How magnanimous! Should I start a slow-clap?

That’s right: I may have wronged the banana republics.

Read: “I hate America now more than ever!”

You see, some Latin Americans were indignant at what they saw as an invidious and hurtful comparison. The truth is that Latin America has matured

Economically and politically, no, they haven’t matured. Narco-terrorism is spreading from South to Central America. The failed ideology of Communism is on the rise in the region and Brazil just elected a former militant guerilla. What’s more, in a period marked by the rise in China and India, Latin America, with a wealth of cheap labor, has seen only modest growth. In short, Latin America has the maturity of an election for sixth grade treasurer.

and become more equal in recent decades, even as the distribution in the United States has become steadily more unequal.

The best data series I could find is for Argentina.

FYI, That link has absolutely nothing to do, specifically, with Argentina. Indeed the graphica trends (because I can’t be bothered to actually read this nonsense) are remarkably mundane. There isn’t a clear trend anywhere.

In the 1940s, the top 1 percent there controlled more than 20 percent of incomes.

In the 1940’s, Argentina was also a prosperous nation.

That was roughly double the share at that time in the United States.

Since then, we’ve reversed places.

America has continued growing to unprecedented historical prosperity while Argentina has whimpered its way through hyperinflation and political instability to become the peer of economic powerhouses like Greece, Iran, and Thailand.

The share controlled by the top 1 percent in Argentina has fallen to a bit more than 15 percent. Meanwhile, inequality in the United States has soared to levels comparable to those in Argentina six decades ago — with 1 percent controlling 24 percent of American income in 2007.

And yet, the top 1 percent of Americans pay roughly a third of income taxes.

At a time of such stunning inequality, should Congress put priority on spending $700 billion on extending the Bush tax cuts to those with incomes above $250,000 a year?

Yes.

Or should it extend unemployment benefits for Americans who otherwise will lose them beginning next month?

God, no.

One way to examine that decision is to put aside all ethical considerations and simply look at where tax dollars will do more to stimulate the economy.

I can’t imagine anything more economically inefficient than paying people not to work.

There the conclusion is clear: You get much more bang for the buck putting money in the hands of unemployed people because they will promptly spend it.

Except consumption does not drive growth; production drives growth.

In contrast, tax cuts for the wealthy are partly saved — that’s both basic economic theory and recent history — so they are much less effective in creating jobs. For example, Republicans would give the richest 0.1 percent of Americans an average tax cut of $370,000.

Those evil Republicans want to give $370,000 of rich people’s money to those same rich people! It’s almost like…freedom.

Does anybody really think that those taxpayers are going to rush out and buy Porsches and yachts, start new businesses, and hire more groundskeepers and chauffeurs?

More to the point, does anybody think that the government should redistribute wealth based solely on the criterion of who will spend it most quickly?

In contrast, a study commissioned by the Labor Department during the Bush administration makes clear the job-creation power of unemployment benefits because that money is immediately spent.

Yet more evidence that, despite popular belief, Bush was a markedly moderate conservative.

The study suggested that the current recession would have been 18 percent worse without unemployment insurance and that this spending preserved 1.6 million jobs in each quarter.

I call bullshit. Without unemployment insurance, people would have taken inferior jobs. Businesses would have benefitted from superior labor for less and swung to profitability more quickly. By subsidizing unemployment, the government has effectively dampened the downward market forces on labor that would have spurred the jump in profitability that markets so desperately need. This is how markets course-correct.

But there is also a larger question: What kind of a country do we aspire to be? Would we really want to be the kind of plutocracy where the richest 1 percent possesses more net worth than the bottom 90 percent?

We want to be the country where anyone can aspire to wealth beyond their wildest dreams, and where only their own failings prevent them from achieving it. This—poor, (and I mean that figuratively, because I’m sure Kristof makes five times what I make) pitiable fellow—is freedom.

Oops! That’s already us. The top 1 percent of Americans owns 34 percent of America’s private net worth, according to figures compiled by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. The bottom 90 percent owns just 29 percent.

Fantastic! My fellow 90-percenters have something to aspire towards.

That also means that the top 10 percent controls more than 70 percent of Americans’ total net worth.

Thanks for running through the arithmetic for me, champ. 100-29=?

Emmanuel Saez,

Who wrote the article linked to above about Argentina. (The only link in this entire article.) If you’re only going to use one source, why not just get Professor Saez to write this nonsense?

 an economist at the University of California at Berkeley

Known for its sober, fair-minded worldview.

who is one of the world’s leading experts on inequality,

What the fuck does one do to become an expert in inequality?

notes that for most of American history, income distribution was significantly more equal than today. And other capitalist countries do not suffer disparities as great as ours.

“There has been an increase in inequality in most industrialized countries, but not as extreme as in the U.S.,” Professor Saez said.

Until recently, wealth was seen as a mark of good character. In a country without an enforced aristocracy or caste system, it has to be.

One of America’s greatest features has been its economic mobility, in contrast to Europe’s class system. This mobility may explain why many working-class Americans oppose inheritance taxes and high marginal tax rates.

Also, because Americans have a built-in compass that always points towards freedom.

But researchers

All researchers?

find that today

After a twenty-year lurch to the left, including the massive expansion of government in private life.

this rags-to-riches intergenerational mobility is no more common in America than in Europe — and possibly less common.

How can freedom function when government chokes off risk-takers? How can entrepreneurship function when the government entrenches the market shares of the major players with bailouts, tax breaks, and legal exemptions (read: Obamacare)? How can businesses grow when we cap the collective wealth of the rich? How can we become rich beyond our wildest dreams if we are propagandized to despise the fat cats?

I’m appalled by our growing wealth gaps because in my travels I see what happens in dysfunctional countries where the rich just don’t care about those below the decks.

That’s not why they’re dysfunctional. They’re dysfunctional because the society fails to acknowledge that wealth must correlate with merit.

The result is nations without a social fabric or sense of national unity.

Chicken and the egg. Most historians and anthropologists would say that unsuccessful nations don’t have cohesion because the national boundaries in the postcolonial era were drawn along arbitrary lines. The social discord predated the income inequality.

Huge concentrations of wealth corrode the soul of any nation.

Since you’ve already made the argument that America is now, and has been for a while, more prone to concentrations of wealth, you must also argue that the “soul” of the country is corroding faster. Yet riots are happening in France and Britain, not here. Mexicans have given up on their government. Not here. Here, we just want the government to have more faith in us. We just want to be free.

And then I see members of Congress in my own country who argue that it would be financially reckless to extend unemployment benefits during a terrible recession,

It would. Unemployment insurance destroys the market forces that get people back to work faster.

yet they insist on granting $370,000 tax breaks to the richest Americans.

Granting? Fuck that. I make my own money. The government doesn’t GRANT that I can keep any portion of it. I elect a representative to decide how much of it they can confiscate, that doesn’t mean that any portion of my post-tax income is a magnanimous grant from the government. That’s mine, and I earned it.

I don’t know if that makes us a banana republic or a hedge fund republic,

Hedge funds are a way of engaging in risky investments that are, through other investment vehicles, discouraged or prohibited by government regulation. Hedge funds are the last vestige of freedom left on Wall Street. If you want to impugn that by reducing them to icons of wealth, then so be it. You’ve already shown yourself to be without worth.

but it’s not healthy in any republic.

A Return to California Territory

California is a negligent deadbeat. It’s time to treat it like one.

Let’s come at this from another angle: felons are not permitted the same cache of rights as the lay citizen. The human rights enshrined in the Constitution apply to all persons—citizens and non-citizens—on the basis that these rights are derived from natural law (or if you prefer, God) and therefore cannot be withheld by the institutions of man. Yet there is a class of political rights that are withheld from felons because they have reneged on the social contract. Because of felonious dereliction of the obligations of citizenship, we withhold certain rights, including the right to vote, from felons. Somewhat uniquely in American politics, this is a virtually controversy-free law. It is a point of cohesion within the body politic with which all reasonable participants can agree.

When citizens break the social contract, they forfeit certain rights. What of governmental entities that are equally negligent in their obligations under the social contract?

Through colossal mismanagement, the state of California is in financial crisis, and is on the brink of a death spiral. The state has neglected to take affirmative steps to remedy the budget crisis. In 2003, the state elected Arnold Schwarzenegger in an election-turned-circus. Earlier this month, they elected Jerry Brown, a career politician who has held virtually every state-wide post in the state. It was a resounding victory for the status quo. Dennis Pager noted that the state elected Democrats to every state-wide office except one (which was still too close to call). With Brown’s obvious shortcomings, the mountains of cash the Whitman camp poured into the race, and Carly Fiorina’s failings in the campaign for Senate, California has shown us that there is nothing that can upend the one-party hegemony that is driving the state’s credit rating into junk-bond status and tacking billions onto the state’s deficit.

California is hardly alone. Illinois is a budgetary disaster, but the political situation is significantly friendlier to moderate conservatives. New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut are dangerously indebted and have shown an equal inability to introduce policy reforms. Amongst red states, Arizona is also in trouble, although a significant part of that problem is related to problems with a porous border. Still, California has a little bit of everything, and remains, to this day, the worst of the bunch.

As the budget situation worsens, new companies are reluctant to move to California. Many are looking for excuses to get out.  The impending exodus could deprive California of the tax base it sorely needs to even continue along its current trajectory. The result is what insurers call a death spiral. When relatively safe policies leave an insurance pool, the actuarial tables increase the price on the remaining policyholders, thereby encouraging even more policies to leave the pool. The result is an insurance pool with only the most risky policies. Similarly, when companies and wealthy individuals stop calling California home, the revenue shortfalls are likely to widen. The seriousness of the budget situation coupled with the ideological leanings of the one-party rule will inevitably lead to increased state tax rates. The natural reaction, of course, will be a further exodus of the upper-middle class. The middle class will follow. This is the political equivalent of the death spiral. The state of California will be asking for federal support before long, and the feds will give it to them. The problem is that California’s economy is roughly six times that of Greece, which is dragging down the EU as we speak.

In this regard, California’s fiscal irresponsibility is not only a dereliction of its duty to its own citizens—how can a state with massive debt, no credit, and no means of increasing revenue afford to protect its citizens?—but also a breach of the state’s contract with the other 49. I see no reason why a state which has deliberately refused to acknowledge its own dire straits should be allowed to impose itself on the federal government. Should the federal government agree to back California’s debts, then California should be forced to relinquish statehood, and return to the status of a United States Territory until such a time as their debts have been repaid.

This means that California’s elected representatives will be stripped of their rights to vote in the legislature and the federal government will retain the authority to impose austerity measures.  The alternatives are exceedingly dangerous; by allowing California to utilize the backing of the federal government without repercussions, we have, in essence, enshrined a public policy of moral hazard.

Statehood is a privilege, and no member of this confederation has the right to impose its own failure on the others. California has shown itself lacking the requisite sobriety to effectively function as a state. Who’s going to start redesigning the flag?

Gail Collins. Again. (I Hate Myself)

I feel like I should apologize. I don't mean to pick on Gail Collins any more than the other imbeciles at the New York Times. But MoDo punted this week, letting her brother write her column for her. Friedman keeps the globetrotting act up, forgetting that no one over here cares enough about Myanmar--or is it Burma?--to read his attempts to milk the last dregs out of The World is Flat. Paul "The Bearded Wonder" Krugman has been a broken record warning off deflation and condemning austerity measures for months. It takes Gail Collins' brand of idiocy to break through the intellectual malaise over there.

What Everything Means

Alternate title: “The Meaning of Life in 811 Words.” I have found my new spiritual guide in Gail Collins.

By GAIL COLLINS

I can’t stop thinking about the elections.

Fun exercise: Read this article with "elections" changed to "Justin Bieber" and it actually starts sounding like it was written by a tween. 

I worry that I'll never be able
to respect this generation.

Also, you've got to replace "Congress" with "Degrassi: The Next Generation," and "Republicans" with any interchangeable member of the cast of Jersey Shore. (Two Jersey Shore references in one week? That's right. I'm about 6 months behind the pop-culture curve.)

Last weekend I saw “127 Hours,” and all I could think about was that this was a metaphor for the lame-duck session of Congress.

She’s so up on her pop culture. And how about that James Franco kid!

 “127 Hours” is the hot new movie

Is it just me or does this sound like that crazy aunt telling you in 1998 that the Neo-Geo was some “hot” newfangled gizmo. 

Thank God I came of age on the Sega Genesis.
The bosses looked much less like penises.

Granted, this may be because I’m already bored with 127 hours and it just came out.

about Aron Ralston, a real-life hiker who 

went on the grand adventure of selling the movie rights to his story...I'm getting ahead of myself.

went for a jaunt

Yes, the movie has the upbeat and jovial tone befitting a jaunt.

through the Utah wilderness and fell into a hole, where his arm was pinned under an 800-pound boulder for, um, 127 hours.

…Backstory backstory backstory…

Then he sawed off his arm with a really, really dull knife,

It's her fluency with words that keeps me coming back.

rappelled 60 feet to the canyon floor and walked several miles in the midday desert sun before being found by a family of Dutch tourists, who gave him water and two Oreo cookies.

Excellent nutshelling, but I’ll just watch Open Water 2. It's much cheaper. And has sharks, or something.

Float harder!

So I just sat there free-associating about politics.

The red lights in my head just went off. This is going to be disastrous.

The boulder was the deficit,

I’m with you so far.

and the arm was the Bush tax cut for the wealthy.

There it is.

While he was trapped, Ralston was tortured by a lot of buzzing, stinging and biting insects, all of whom resembled Mitch McConnell.

Please excuse me while I purging my consciousness of profanities and slightly darker thoughts.

If you get obsessive enough, everything you hear carries a postelection message.

Okay I’m back and I feel much better. One can not, in deference to intellectual honesty, claim that repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy (a colossally misguided distinction in and of itself) will simultaneously be a panacea for the debt crisis and have no measurable drag on the overall economy. If the cuts don’t amount to much, they can’t impact the debt; if they amount to a lot, then pulling this money out of the economy must be a draining force. What Collins and her woefully misguided ilk misunderstand is that tax cuts have the added benefit of growing the economy and the tax base for years to come. If it sounds like a good idea to hamper that growth for insignificant immediate revenues, then you might be a liberal.

The Carnival Cruise ship is adrift! And isn’t America exactly like a boat full of vacationers who thought they were on a luxury trip to the Mexican Riviera?

Again, I’m with her so far.

Then, all of a sudden, they’re standing in line for Spam and hoping somebody will tow them back to San Diego.

Recessionproofing

Only Mexicans try to go to San Diego. The rest of the country migrates away from that municipality-train wreck.

No wonder Ohio turned red.

As an expatriate son of the Buckeye State, I couldn't be prouder. It’s one more thing that separates the great state of Ohio from the great armpit of Michigan. (That and Ohio actually has a good football team.)

The moral of the George W. Bush TV interview this week with Matt Lauer involves the fact that it got terrible ratings.

That’s not even close to a moral. It may not even qualify as a piece of trivia. Factoid is more apt.

This could mean that the public wants to forget all about the first eight years of the 21st century and just blame Barack Obama for wrecking the economy. Or that while the country is divided in so many ways, we’re still one big family when it comes to our national exhaustion with the previous president.

Alternately: conservatives have long since learned that NBC is a wasteland of liberal bias and listened to the Bush interviews on both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity (and probably other conservative outlets). I, for one, was astounded at how emotional I got when I heard President Bush recount the events of 9/11 on the Sean Hannity Show. It was an exceptional interview.

Although if people had known he was going to tell that story about how his mother put the miscarried fetus in a jar and made him look at it, perhaps more viewers would have tuned in.

Missed that one, but I guess that's the point.

Or maybe not.

Yeah, I don’t want to hear about that.

The whole interview was confusing. When the first George Bush was president, the White House seemed to go out of its way to drop hints that Barbara Bush was pro-choice.

Why would they do that? Laura Bush legitimately is pro-choice. That reminds me that I haven't read Mark Morford in a while. Should be good for a laugh.

Did they know about the fetus jar story?

Also, didn’t it seem as if George W. was way more upset about Kanye West calling him a racist during Katrina than the fact that he invaded the wrong country?

Which would be relevant, unless (WATCH OUT FOR DOUBLE-NEGATIVES!) President Bush didn’t invade the wrong country.

And did you notice that Bush kept calling Kanye “Conway?”

No.

But I digress.

You can't digress if you don't actually have a point.

To be honest, the interview did not get bad ratings because of the national malaise. It got bad ratings because it was up against “Dancing With the Stars.”

Also, conservatives tuned in through their own news outlets.

In which Bristol Palin has made it to the final four. Once again, traditional Republicans were run over by the grizzly contingent.

What happened to taking back momma grizzly?

Bristol is not very good as a performer, but, as her mother put it, “She’s never danced before, and here she’s learning the steps really quickly.”

Really, where is this going. You just acknowledged your digression, and now you wander into the wilderness of incoherence with the elegance of a blindfolded toddler on an obstacle course.

Bristol is up against Jennifer Grey of “Dirty Dancing” fame,

Fame might be an overstatement. I simply remember her in fragments from my “Crazy for Swayze” phase. Also, she was an original Charlie Sheen groupie in Ferris Bueler’s Day Off. God bless you, John Hughes.

Now there's a guy who knows his hookers.

who’s been doing great even though she’s 50 with a bad knee and a plate and four screws in her neck.

Still, she learned from the best. Some would construe that as a distinct advantage.

Yes, he will roundhouse kick you.

If Bristol wins I think we can take the whole thing as a metaphor for Russ Feingold’s Senate race in Wisconsin.

So…the inevitable beat-down of a tired old hag who has lost all connection with his/her constituency? Actually that kind of works.

Finally, when popular culture can’t explain what’s befallen us, there’s always historic reference.

I’m going to need to walk away from the computer pretty soon. I’m just warning you ahead of time.

David Kennedy of Stanford University theorized in a postelection Op-Ed in The Times that we’re reliving the late 19th-century Gilded Age,

No way! This guy just happens to be a historical expert from the late-19^th to early 20^th centuries and he sees parallels? Eerie.

when all the presidents proved to be hapless, Congress switched back and forth madly as voters threw the bums out over and over again,

You'll notice that Republicans had congressional control for 12 years before the moderate policies of President Bush led to a four year relegation. That bears repeating: it took only four years of Democratic control of congress, and two years of Democrats running the country for the American people to recoil in horror.

and the country experienced a raft of critical problems and impending crises, combined with “abject political paralysis.”

This was also the age when Progressivism was introduced into the American political scene. And by Progressivism, I am of course using a euphemism for "the cause of all of our political problems."

The Gilded Age also happened to be the time when the media was wildly fragmented,

Jesus, she’s coming back around to a disdain for those damned newfangled interblags, isn’t she?

with thousands of small, underfinanced local newspapers all yapping frantically to try to make an impression.

It must’ve been hell to have free expression that rampant. The marketplace of ideas can be brutal. Good thing Collins and the Times did everything they could to coalesce power and introduce barriers to entry for the marketplace. That is, until the internet and all those interblags (I’m going to keep using that term as a shout-out to Collins’ tech-savvy) came along and ruined EVERYTHING.

This produced a climate of semihysterical sensationalism, along with some of my all-time favorite headlines. One about Gov. Oliver Morton read: “A Few of the Hellish Liaisons of, and Attempted Seductions by, Indiana’s Favorite Stud-Horse.”

*Crickets*

This sounds so familiar that I am pretty sure Professor Kennedy is right.

End of discussion. We are now officially in 1896, Who’s up for invading Cuba?

I wrote my first research paper on how the Spanish-American War permanently  realigned the geopolitics of the Western Hemisphere and remained the United States' only foray into imperialism. This simultaneously established the United States as a world power and weakened the Monroe Doctrine's role in American foreign policy...Holy crap, I'm recreating the paper in a caption.

So the message is that we should hunker down and wait for the next Teddy Roosevelt to come to our rescue.

Jesus, she really thinks Teddy Roosevelt was a political rescuer? You do know that he was a Republican, right?

And then it will almost be time for Prohibition.

I was kidding about the Cuba thing.

On the other hand, the Gilded Age had Mark Twain

With you so far…

and Eugene Debs

Pining for a socialist union leader isn’t helping your case…

and Lillian Russell, who exemplified a beauty standard that extolled fleshy women.

Maybe with a change in those damnable standards for beauty Gail can finally wrangle herself a husband. Yes, I know Gail Collins is married, but seriously…this effete imbecile looks like he gets flop-sweat when girl scouts aggressively peddle Thin Mints.

A Virginia City man writing to a friend about a tightrope walker named Ella LaRue said admiringly: “Great ‘shape’ — more of it than I ever saw in any female. Immense across the hips — huge thighs.”

Is this even approximately related to anything other than Gail Collins' crippling insecurities?

Maybe it won’t be so bad after all.

Yes, it was a time where a writer could make outlandish statements in quick succession without even bothering to link the two together with any semblance of coherent thought. Writers called it Shangri-La.

Thank you, Gail Collins, as always, for your unique brand of bat-shit crazy. 

Crazy Grizzly Lady

Gail Collins, affectionately known here as the "Crazy Cat Lady" is EtD's Golden Goose at the New York Times. I wonder sometimes if this woman has ever written anything that wasn't demonstrably absurd.

Either way, Crazy Cat Lady tries to take on Sarah Palin this time around and fails miserably. I am no Palin zealot. I like the woman, but I far prefer others to lead the Republican ticket in 2012. (Chris Christie, for example, is a political mancrush that has me doodling little hearts in my trapper-keeper). Still, it's worth noting that Palin's limited electorate-wide popularity is tempered by extremely limited support from women. Collins takes another stab at the feminist blasphemer for the sake of the sisterhood. It's astounding how callow the criticisms of Palin are. 

The Last Gasp of the GOP

I didn’t vote in 2008. As much as I disdain the far-left policies of President Obama, I don’t regret my decision. The Republican Party had lost its way. John McCain was a disastrous nominee, even if he’s since put in a respectable application for the reinstatement of his conservative credentials.  At 22, bright-eyed and idealistic, I didn’t vote for McCain because I couldn’t bring myself to that sort of compromise. He was so moderate, he appeared without principle. The only solution, I recall thinking at the time, came through third party. I may be two years older today, but I’m still just as stubborn and demanding. On the cusp of a Republican electoral landslide, with conservative ascendancy in sight, my warning to the Republican Party is simple: this is your last chance.

My vote is not one of anger. I rolled out of bed this morning with a smile on my face. I reached the polling place while it was still dark outside, and was downright giddy as I cast the morning’s 4^th ballot. I played OAR’s “Take This Town” on repeat and whistled as the chorus pounded out "Come on y'all, let's take this town." When the exuberance wanes, and my pensive side sets in, my thoughts drift to men and women who have died in the defense of this country, for whom this opportunity of self-governance was the most precious treasure to be had. The profound responsibility of carrying that torch is the joy of being an American. It is in these moments that my chest swells and the exuberance returns.

My morning was both mundane and revolutionary. Millions of other voters were doing the exact same thing at the exact same time, and yet, these opportunities are precious and rare. This is the Republic in action. This is the affirmation of American Exceptionalism and the joyful praise of individual liberty. 

It is precisely because I hold this civic responsibility as sacred that my non-vote in 2008 was so disheartening. That year, I was a spectator as the future was mapped out. The men and women elected this time around will have the unique honor of serving the American people as sentinels of the Republic. If these privileged few stand firm with their principles—deference to the Constitution, an insistence on limited government, and an affirmation of individual liberty—then I will, in turn, to lend my indefinite support.

Republicans have not earned my faith, however. These values have been usurped in the past—not only by opponents, but also by allies. I worry that I am the political equivalent of a battered spouse coming back to an abusive and destructive relationship one more time. Stand firm with these principles, Republicans, because if you don’t, I won’t stand for you. You have not yet governed in a way that has assured me that a third party is an ill-conceived extravagance. If you fall back into the pattern of the last ten years; if you go along to get along; if you compromise; if you defer your judgment to another’s; I will abandon you and never come back.

So yes, on a day that has been filled with so much joy for me as a citizen, I feel compelled to issue an ultimatum to Republicans: govern as conservatives, or you will never win me back.