And, of course, you gloss right over the unbelievably idiotic statement right above your post by that Democrat. Another inconvenient truth you just can't handle.
[This message has been edited by fierobear (edited 04-02-2010).]
I've never been big on holidays. Growing up Jewish, my family didn't celebrate Christmas or Easter. And being secular, we didn't do much for the Jewish holidays, either. Since arriving in Berkeley decades ago, one of the few holidays I've enjoyed is May Day, also known as International Workers' Day.
As you can imagine, IWD is a popular day around these parts. In fact, it's an official city holiday. Along with Malcolm X's Birthday, Indigenous People's Day, and International Women's Day, the school kiddies and the city rank-and-file get the day off. Even some popular places, like Berkeley's Cheese Board Collective, close in observance.
I considered it a great honor to celebrate May Day, which represents all things Marxist. My deep and exhaustive knowledge of Communism was limited to the movies -- for instance, The Motorcycle Diaries and Reds. Warren Beattie and Diane Keaton appeared so courageous and passionate in Reds, and the guy playing Che was hecka hot. Anyway, Hollywood wouldn't mislead us, would they?
Consequently, I was deeply disturbed when the Soviets failed and the former Republics embraced the big and bad capitalism. Luckily, I could still wax rhapsodic about Cuba and dream of someday visiting that utopia. Since I'm playing True Confessions here: I even drove my car out of my way to fill up with Citgo, the gasoline from Venezuela.
What can I say? I was an idiot.
Locally, I did my part for all oppressed workers by being a union activist. When I worked at a large hospital chain, I was pivotal in starting a six-hundred-plus-member union.
Yes, it was SEIU.
I didn't know, wasn't told(, and didn't take the time to find out) that Marxism was a very bad thing -- that, in fact, hundreds of millions died thanks to it. The first time I heard of this was weeks into recovery from liberalism.
Having heard something vaguely about conservative Talk Radio, I happened upon Michael Savage's radio show. I was stopped dead in my tracks when he described the Gulags, forced shock treatment, mass starvation, and other horrors of the Soviet Union.
And then I actually started reading and educating myself. My beloved Cuba and Venezuela were run by thugs who oppressed people a zillion times more than any capitalist country. The workers weren't living in paradise, enjoying long siestas. Marxism, in fact, created serf-like conditions, with the very few, and the government, stealing the nation's wealth.
Of course, had I actually been paying attention all these years, I would have seen all the cracks in the Left's ideology. Earth to Robin: Why would all these people be getting into dangerous, shark-infested waters to come to the U.S. if something wasn't rotten in Havana?
I also denied what I saw around me when I worked for the government. For instance, at one agency in which I worked, managers were hogtied from ever disciplining or firing bad workers.
And when I say bad, I don't mean the person who runs late or gets a little edgy. I'm talking about the secretary who had a three-martini lunch and, upon return, punched a coworker. She was just transferred somewhere else, with her new department kept in the dark like we were.
Or the social worker who would get families more money than they deserved and then pocket the rest. While a manager made a valiant attempt to get rid of him, the last I heard, she was gone, and the dude still working there. I could go on and on...but you know the deal. You've been to the DMV or the Post Office or your local Social Security office.
Which brings me to today's May Day celebration -- a unique one, because the Left is now showcasing illegal aliens. While at one point I would have vehemently defended their "right" to be here, no more. Now I wonder why we should be welcoming with open arms people who are doing something illegal. Don't we have enough deceitful people in this country without importing more?
The Left plans to use the day to demonstrate the worth and value of illegals. To do this, both illegals and legals have threatened violent protests. There's nothing like ransacking stores and setting cars on fire to win over the country's hearts and minds!
I know what I'll be doing on International Workers' Day. First, I'm going to stay the heck away from Berkeley. Then I'm going to relax after a busy week of work. inally, I'm going to raise a glass to that most endangered of species: the taxpaying, working stiff who breaks his or her butt each day to bring home the bacon. This day is for you.
And my celebration won't even require riots in the streets.
Progressivism is all the rage nowadays, with liberals having jettisoned the "liberal" label for the less maligned tag of "progressive." In truth, "progressive" is a better name, more accurately describing the movement and its extremely broad, precariously unpredictable direction.
Here is the essence of the problem with progressives and their movement, which is a gigantic problem for all of America: One of the only things we really know about progressives, and that they know about themselves and their ideology, is that they favor constant "change," "reform," an ever-shifting, ongoing "evolution," or, yes, progression. And therein lies an inherent, significant difficulty: Progressivism offers no clear, definable end. The goal post is always moving, forever pushed farther away. Ends are never ends; they always "progress" with culture and society -- all along relying on the ludicrous assumption that the changes are always (or largely) good.
For the rest of us, this ambiguity is troubling -- bordering on maddening -- as we can't, by the very nature of progressivism, get an answer from progressives as to where, exactly, they intend to stop or take the country.
Such lack of clarity can be disastrous for any group, from a non-profit organization to a company and its shareholders. For a political movement, however -- one that endeavors to run a nation (if not a world) and exact policies that increasingly regulate and control individuals and their lives and property -- it is terribly alarming. In fact, it ought to give contemporary "liberals" pause.
Consider what else we know about progressives, evident from a track record of roughly one hundred years: They consistently advocate more and more centralization of power through collectivism and wealth redistribution. Inescapably, this leads to a progressively powerful state, one composed of widening regulations and agencies and departments -- launched mainly under the presidencies of Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Carter, and now Obama -- fueled by a (literal) progressive federal income tax that in less than thirty years skyrocketed from 1% (1913) to over 90% (1940s). It is a one-way expansion of power sliding almost entirely toward the national government.
Needless to say, this is, as a matter of plain fact, fundamentally antithetical to America itself -- that is, our republic as conceived by its founders. The American system is based on limited government, on eschewing a single federal Leviathan, on limited taxation, and on circumscribed control over the citizenry. Of course, to the progressive, this means that the Constitution itself is unsuitable, as it too must always evolve; the Constitution is always a work in progress, never good enough, and certainly not etched in stone. (It's exasperating when progressive presidents like Obama and FDR wrap themselves in a publicly professed love for the Constitution. This is rhetorical pabulum -- mere cynical public relations.)
As for those of us who are conservatives, who basically define ourselves by a shared vision with the American founders as expressed in sacred political documents like the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and, among others, the Federalist Papers, progressivism is a political nightmare. For conservatives, the public knows more or less where our goalpost sits: it was erected circa 1776. We believe that America got the framework right long ago.
As one of our few truly conservative presidents, Calvin Coolidge, put it in an extraordinary speech flagged by my colleague John Van Til, we seek "to reaffirm and reestablish those old theories and principles which time and the unerring logic of events have demonstrated to be sound." We believe that the ideals of 1776 must be maintained. That year included not only America's Declaration, which spoke to the ages when it invoked the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but also the essential wisdom of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Going back farther still, conservatives ground their philosophy in the Biblical superstructure of moral absolutes, as did the founders.
Can't our progressive friends likewise give us some semblance of guidelines? Alas, they cannot, by their very definition. And their aversion to absolutes is made far worse by the reality that modern progressives, unlike their forebears at the start of the last century, are shockingly secular. (Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, for instance, were devoutly religious.)
Now, with that said, here's where the confusion has the potential to become downright lethal: It's bad enough when progressives get their hands on the federal government. There, their penchant for increased centralization ultimately bankrupts a nation. Yet, think about the consequences of their philosophy when applied to the very life and culture of America. Consider the progression by progressives on Culture of Life issues.
Take the example of Planned Parenthood, dear to the progressive heart. It took off in the 1920s and 1930s under Margaret Sanger, initially as the American Birth Control League. At first, Sanger and friends wanted birth control. They also advocated eugenics. Sanger was a racial eugenicist. She had hideous views, not only toward the poor ("human weeds," she called them), to the mentally disabled ("imbeciles" and "morons"), but, among others, to black Americans. On these last, progressives today dare not raise the grim specter of Sanger's "Negro Project" or infamous 1926 speech to a KKK rally in New Jersey.
But what about abortion? That gets to my general point in this article: The Planned Parenthood progressives weren't there yet. They had to warm up to the annihilation of the unborn.
Indeed, it will shock pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike to hear this, but Margaret Sanger initially denounced abortion. "It [abortion] is an alternative that I cannot too strongly condemn," wrote Sanger in the January 27, 1932 edition of The Nation (page 103). "[T]he practice of it merely for limitation of offspring is dangerous and vicious. ... [S]ome ill-informed persons have the notion that when we speak of birth control we include abortion as a method. We certainly do not."
Nonetheless, for these progressives, what began as birth control and eugenics -- aimed at stopping life at conception -- needed only a few decades to snuff out life after conception, to the point where Sanger's organization is now the world's largest provider of abortion. Sanger's progressive progeny picked up her torch and set the barn ablaze.
As with nearly everything progressives do, where they started wasn't enough. Birth control and eugenics couldn't satiate the lust, which became a bloodlust for "abortion rights." Planned Parenthood's progressives blindly bowed to the next level, beckoned by what Pope Benedict XVI calls "the anonymous power of changing moods and current fashion." (Such power, notes Benedict, crucifies truth.)
And, naturally, once legalized abortion came along, it, too, was not enough, which brings us to where we are now. Today, the progressives running the asylum are telling us that abortion ought to be funded by taxpayers. Here's a new nadir in their evolutionary chain, one poised to poison the very soul of America.
Abortion, likewise, will not be enough; no single issue ever is. So what's next in the progressives' progression in the Death Culture? Euthanasia? That's where their European brethren have arrived. Death panels?
Where does the train stop? Where does the march that advances the Culture of Death finally cease?
It serves us all -- including unborn future generations -- to want answers to some hard questions as far as ultimate objectives are concerned. I beg progressives for some kind of contours, a guess at a vague estimate: Could you please, this time around -- where human life is concerned -- establish some boundaries, set an end-goal or two, offer an inkling of predictability, a modicum of reasonable expectation, some flicker of a suggestion as to where you want to go?
Unfortunately, they can't, as such is the crux of their philosophy. It looks like progressivism is nothing more than another manifestation of the left's rot of moral relativism, changing terms, definitions, and, indeed, truth itself -- on matters like life itself -- as the march merrily moves along.
This is very disconcerting stuff, voted into office by millions of oblivious Americans who mindlessly voted for "change." Well, it is progressive change that they'll now get.
The next one to head for the door is rumored to be Barbara Mikulski. Expect a lot more of this in the next few months.
Well, *so far* I was wrong about "Babs", but since I made this post back in February, lets see how Democrats in the 111th Congress have fared thus far:
RETIRED Brian Baird (D-Wash.), 54, 6 terms Marion Berry (D-Ark.), 67, 7 terms Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.), 68, 7 terms Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), 61, 13 terms Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.), 42, 8 terms Vic Snyder (D-Ark.), 62, 7 terms Dennis Moore (D-Kan.), 64, 6 terms Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), 58, 9 terms John Tanner (D-Tenn.), 65, 11 terms Diane Watson (D-Calif.), 76, 5 terms Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), 54, 2 terms Roland Burris (D-Ill.), 72, 1 term Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), 65, 5 terms Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), 67, 3 terms Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), 71, 1 term
RESIGNED Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), 50, 3 terms Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), 71, 10 terms Hilda Solis (D-Calif.), 52, 5 terms Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), 58, 7 terms Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), 49, 7 terms Joseph Biden (D-Del.), 67, 7 terms Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), 62, 2 terms Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), 55, 1 term
DIED Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), 77, 9 terms John Murtha (D-Pa.), 77, 19 terms
"RUNNING FOR OTHER OFFICE" Artur Davis (D-Ala.), 42, 4 terms
[This message has been edited by randye (edited 05-02-2010).]
The only member of my family who doesn't look at me like I'm crazy when I express my utter contempt for Walter Cronkite is my wife; and convincing her that the kindly, avuncular, old Walter was a traitor in my eyes took the first several years of our marriage. She could better understand why John Kerry and Jane Fonda were in my Triumvirate of Traitors but Uncle Walter was more of a leap.
Maybe this latest revelation, that Cronkite wasn't just reporting slanted news on the war but was in the business of manufacturing news critical of the war. Yes I know that if you read through the entire article there is a disclaimer by his son where he discounts the veracity of FBI informers but what else is he going to say, "Yeah, daddy was an unprincipled, jerk who used his powerful podium to sell out our brave troops all because he was a closet liberal?"
In fact, before his death, Cronkite did confess his well known liberal persuasion and in fact seemed quite proud of it. I wonder if the old useful idiot, lying on his deathbed, gave any thought to the damage he helped to inflict on his nation, and if so, was he still so proud of it?
For those of you too young to understand the still-simmering anger of old Vietnam War vets to, the so-called, "Most trusted man in America," perhaps a few of paragraphs from David Horowitz' Discover the Networks website will make things a bit clearer for you.
In April 1962 Cronkite succeeded veteran Douglas Edwards as Anchor and Managing Editor of the CBS Evening News, a position Cronkite would keep until his retirement in 1981.
From the outset, critics accused Cronkite of politically slanting the news to the left. This bias, they said, was evidenced not so much by Cronkite's words as by his choice of what stories CBS covered, and by his habit of raising his eyebrows and scowling to show his disapproval of statements made by conservatives and Republicans. In 1964, amid accusations of such bias, CBS replaced Cronkite as anchor at the political conventions with Robert Trout and Roger Mudd.
Cronkite strongly influenced the politics and outcome of the Vietnam War. In 1968 the Communist forces in South Vietnam, facing defeat, staged massive kamikaze attacks on U.S. positions in Saigon and elsewhere during the Chinese New Year celebration called Tet. This suicidal "Tet Offensive" was a military disaster that cost the lives of 100 Communist fighters for every American killed. But as a top Communist general said years later on the Public Broadcasting Service documentary series Vietnam, those on the left in the American press turned this Marxist military defeat into a political victory for the Communist side.
"It seems now more certain than ever," Walter Cronkite told his audience in a de facto editorial, "that the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate" and that the war was "unwinnable." Cronkite's statement and call for U.S. withdrawal helped turn public opinion against the war. It also demoralized American troops and Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have declared that losing Cronkite's support meant he had lost the backing of Middle America.
When Republican President Richard Nixon refused to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam, the Democrats used the Watergate scandal to topple his presidency. Cronkite played a key role in the political process that ousted Nixon -- chiefly by broadcasting a news story every night on the CBS Evening News under the banner "Watergate." At the time, Cronkite insisted that he was non-partisan, objective and fair. After his retirement, however, he acknowledged his liberal political views.
"Everybody knows that there's a liberal, that there's a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents," said Cronkite in 1996, speaking to his colleagues at the Radio and TV Correspondents Association dinner.
I never cease to marvel at the political brilliance of the Hollywood crowd. The greatest beneficiaries of free market capitalism seem to have an unnatural attraction to leftist dictators. Jean-Bertrand Aristide (even in exile) can always count on his dear comrade Danny Glover, Hugo Chavez can rely on the propaganda efforts of his amigo Sean Penn (recently sentenced to Anger Management therapy) and there have been a plethora of Hollywood's fellow travelers in the embrace of Fidel Castro over the years.
Not to be outdone in the category of audacious hopes for dictatorial governance, Woody Allen has shared his political fantasy with us. Our friends at Fox, report that.
In an interview published by Spanish language newspaper La Vanguardia (that we translated), Allen says "I am pleased with Obama. I think he's brilliant. The Republican Party should get out of his way and stop trying to hurt him."
But wait-there's more.
The director said "it would be good...if he could be dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly."
This is the sort of brilliant political insight that one would expect from a man who.
...took nude photos of his lover Mia Farrow's teen-age adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, and then ended up marrying her after separating from Farrow.
Gee if only Obama could be dictator, would he have a place for Woody in his regime? Perhaps as "safe schools czar." And if only Woody Allen had studied history, then he would have learned what sort of things a dictator usually does quickly.
Some people have the vocabulary to sum up things in a way you can understand them. This quote came from the Czech Republic. Someone over there has it figured out. We have a lot of work to do. “The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president."
"The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince.
The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president.”
A Pew Research Center poll in April found that public confidence in government was at one of the lowest points in a half century. And earlier primaries indicated that voters are willing to oust Washington incumbents — regardless of party.
Maybe we will finally get the change we wanted this November.
[This message has been edited by avengador1 (edited 06-08-2010).]
It seems neither party candidates are safe. Democrats, Republicans face angry electorate http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id...itics-decision_2010/ Maybe we will finally get the change we wanted this November.
Good. Maybe the new Republicans will get the message.
They doubted him during the health care debate. They second-guessed his Afghanistan policy. They’ve fretted over his coziness with Wall Street and his comfort with executive power.
But now is the summer of their discontent. From MSNBC to “The Daily Show,” from The Huffington Post to the halls of Congress, movement liberals have had just about enough of Barack Obama.
The catalyst was last week’s lackluster Oval Office address, but the real complaints run deeper. Many liberals look at this White House and see a presidency adrift — unable to respond effectively to the crisis in the gulf, incapable of rallying the country to great tasks like the quest for clean energy, and unwilling to do what it takes to jump-start the economy.
American liberalism has always had a reputation for fractiousness and frantic self-critique. But even by those standards, the current bout of anguish over the Obama presidency seems bizarrely disproportionate.
This is the same Barack Obama, after all, who shepherded universal health care, the dream of liberals since the days of Harry Truman (if not Thomas Paine), through several near-death experiences and finally into law. It’s the same Obama who staked the fate of the American economy on a $787 billion exercise in Keynesian pump-priming. It’s the same Obama who has done more to advance liberal priorities than any president since Lyndon Johnson.
Yet many on the left are talking as if he’s no better for liberalism than Bill Clinton circa 1996 — another compromiser, another triangulator and another disappointment.
At work in this liberal panic are two intellectual vices, and one legitimate fear. The first vice is the worship of presidential power: the belief that any problem, any crisis, can be swiftly solved by a strong government, and particularly a strong executive. A gushing oil well, a recalcitrant Congress, a public that’s grown weary of grand ambitions — all of these challenges could be mastered, Obama’s leftward critics seem to imagine, if only he were bolder or angrier, or maybe just more determined.
This vice isn’t confined to liberals: you can see it at work when foreign policy hawks suggest that mere presidential “toughness” is the key to undoing Iran’s clerical regime, or disarming North Korea. But it runs deepest among progressives. When Rachel Maddow fantasized last week about how Obama should simply dictate energy legislation to a submissive Congress, she was unconsciously echoing midcentury liberal theoreticians of the presidency like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who often wrote as if a Franklin Roosevelt or a John F. Kennedy could run the country by fiat. (They couldn’t.)
The second vice is an overweening faith in theory. It’s now conventional wisdom among Obama’s liberal critics that the White House has been insufficiently ambitious about deficit spending. The economy is stuck in neutral, they argue, because Obama didn’t push last year’s recovery act up over a trillion dollars, and hasn’t pressed hard enough for a second major stimulus.
Technically, they could be right — but only in the same way that it’s possible that the Iraq War would have been a ringing success if only we’d invaded with a million extra soldiers. The theory is unfalsifiable because the policy course is imaginary. Maybe in some parallel universe there’s a Congress that would be willing to borrow and spend trillions in stimulus dollars, despite record deficits, if that’s what liberal economists said the situation required. But not in this one.
Yet the liberal drumbeat continues. As Tyler Cowen wrote last week: “advocates of fiscal stimulus make it sound as simple as solving an undergraduate homework problem and ... sometimes genuinely do not realize how much the rest of the world, including politicians, views them as simply being very convinced by their own theory.” Nor do they acknowledge how much risk those same politicians have already taken on (with the first stimulus, the health care bill, and much else besides) in the name of theoretical propositions, while reaping little for their efforts save an ever-grimmer fiscal picture.
But it’s here, with the looming fiscal crisis, that the more legitimate liberal fear comes in. Liberals had hoped that Obama’s election marked the beginning of a long progressive era — a new New Deal, a greater Great Society. Instead, from the West Coast to Western Europe, the welfare state is in crisis everywhere they look. The future suddenly seems to belong to austerity and retrenchment — and even, perhaps, to conservatism.
In this environment, the rage against Obama for not doing more, now, faster, becomes at least somewhat understandable. It’s not that he hasn’t done a great deal for liberals during his 18 months in office. It’s that liberalism itself may be running out of time.
The slippery bastard liberals plan to wait until the lame-duck session, after they get voted out but before the new members of Congress are sworn in, to pass all the over-the-top crap they know will cost them their jobs:
Union 'card-check,' cap and trade, and so much more.
By JOHN FUND
Democratic House members are so worried about the fall elections they're leaving Washington on July 30, a full week earlier than normal—and they won't return until mid-September. Members gulped when National Journal's Charlie Cook, the Beltway's leading political handicapper, predicted last month "the House is gone," meaning a GOP takeover. He thinks Democrats will hold the Senate, but with a significantly reduced majority.
The rush to recess gives Democrats little time to pass any major laws. That's why there have been signs in recent weeks that party leaders are planning an ambitious, lame-duck session to muscle through bills in December they don't want to defend before November. Retiring or defeated members of Congress would then be able to vote for sweeping legislation without any fear of voter retaliation.
"I've got lots of things I want to do" in a lame duck, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W. Va.) told reporters in mid June. North Dakota's Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, wants a lame-duck session to act on the recommendations of President Obama's deficit commission, which is due to report on Dec. 1. "It could be a huge deal," he told Roll Call last month. "We could get the country on a sound long-term fiscal path." By which he undoubtedly means new taxes in exchange for extending some, but not all, of the Bush-era tax reductions that will expire at the end of the year.
In the House, Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters last month that for bills like "card check"—the measure to curb secret-ballot union elections—"the lame duck would be the last chance, quite honestly, for the foreseeable future."
Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, chair of the Senate committee overseeing labor issues, told the Bill Press radio show in June that "to those who think [card check] is dead, I say think again." He told Mr. Press "we're still trying to maneuver" a way to pass some parts of the bill before the next Congress is sworn in.
Other lame-duck possibilities? Senate ratification of the New Start nuclear treaty, a federally mandated universal voter registration system to override state laws, and a budget resolution to lock in increased agency spending.
Then there is pork. A Senate aide told me that "some of the biggest porkers on both sides of the aisle are leaving office this year, and a lame-duck session would be their last hurrah for spending." Likely suspects include key members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Congress's "favor factory," such as Pennsylvania Democrat Arlen Specter and Utah Republican Bob Bennett.
Conservative groups such as FreedomWorks are alarmed at the potential damage, and they are demanding that everyone in Congress pledge not to take up substantive legislation in a post-election session. "Members of Congress are supposed to represent their constituents, not override them like sore losers in a lame-duck session," Rep. Tom Price, head of the Republican Study Committee, told me.
It's been almost 30 years since anything remotely contentious was handled in a lame-duck session, but that doesn't faze Democrats who have jammed through ObamaCare and are determined to bring the financial system under greater federal control.
Mike Allen of Politico.com reports one reason President Obama failed to mention climate change legislation during his recent, Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil spill was that he wants to pass a modest energy bill this summer, then add carbon taxes or regulations in a conference committee with the House, most likely during a lame-duck session. The result would be a climate bill vastly more ambitious, and costly for American consumers and taxpayers, than moderate "Blue Dogs" in the House would support on the campaign trail. "We have a lot of wiggle room in conference," a House Democratic aide told the trade publication Environment & Energy Daily last month.
Many Democrats insist there will be no dramatic lame-duck agenda. But a few months ago they also insisted the extraordinary maneuvers used to pass health care wouldn't be used. Desperate times may be seen as calling for desperate measures, and this November the election results may well make Democrats desperate.
Really? After you've gotten some sleep, why not say what you think is "pitiful"?
Back in your box Bear, how dare you not bow to the almighty, all knowing left. Once we all think alike, the heavens will open and BO will ascend upon us with out-stretched hands. Asking for your paycheck no doubt.
In general, low self-esteem and a lack of self-love are the basis for the ideology of liberals.
Liberals are those who would use government to reduce the freedoms of some people to provide benefits for others. Liberals argue for fairness and equality for all people, but neither is possible. Other than identical twins, all people are genetically different, and without exception, each has unique life experiences that are interpreted differently. We are necessarily and naturally unequal in a worldly sense. (If "all men are created equal" in a Godly sense, nothing more needs to be done to ensure it.) Liberals, progressives, socialists, fascists, communists, and statists seek similar means to the same end. They want control of an expansive, intrusive government using taxation, regulation, and takeover of private property and businesses to achieve an earthly equality -- an equality that is unnatural, unhealthy, and unattainable. This irrational political ideology is rooted in psychological shortcomings.
The U.S. Constitution correctly identifies the purpose of government as protecting the freedoms of its people. Being free is the natural state of all lifeforms. Soldiers risk their lives and die fighting for freedom...not equality. The Statue of Liberty welcomes those "yearning to breathe free."
Having an internalized sense of being less than others drives a desire for equality. The liberal's internal motivation is: "If we are all the same, I can't be less." From a practical perspective, making people or situations equal involves punishing the successful; which can be a welcome expression of jealous anger for those with low self-esteem.
Having low self-esteem makes freedom something to fear. Freedom means being free to succeed or fail. For those with a low sense of self, the expectation is that one's failure is inevitable. Freedom is not desirable under those conditions.
Liberals' personal problems become a societal problem when liberals try to address them by requiring changes to the lives of others. They seek a government with extensive power and reach that can limit freedoms and penalize success so that we seem to be more equal. It's as if I were to address a problem of poor posture by requiring everyone else to slouch. The adequacy of self-love or self-esteem one has is not determined by comparison to others. It is not measured by net worth, which government can adjust. Whether one has healthy levels of self-love and self-esteem is determined by personal physiology and psychology. No matter how much government can disrupt the lives of its citizens, it cannot make anyone love or esteem themselves more or make anyone happy.
What liberals really need -- greater self-esteem and self-love -- government is completely powerless to provide.
Given their motivations, statements, and actions, liberal politicians and their supporters can be understood through awareness of the common characteristics of those with a low sense of self.
Low Sense of Self Characteristics
Feelings About Self
Has a general sense of unhappiness, depression, unease, malaise Feels a victim, largely powerless Fears looking foolish and is unable to laugh at self Afraid of forming own opinion and having it challenged Takes disagreements as personal affronts, seeks revenge Prone to rapid and sudden anger or sadness Seeks to suppress "bad" emotions; afraid they may become all-consuming
Thoughts about Self
Tends towards negative attitude and pessimism Lacks confidence in self Rigid Blind to unpleasant realities, delusional Over-dependence on people or things Inability to accept criticism
Presenting Self to Others
Secretive Exaggerates, pretends, and lies to conceal insecurity Arrogant and boastful (intended to appear self-confident) or extremely shy (to avoid inspection) Cool, detached, aloof (intended to appear "in control") Uses language for its emotive value to persuade others Seeks first for others to connect with him/her emotionally Denies mistakes and blames others when things for which he/she is responsible go badly Takes credit for others' achievements Irrational (psychology trumps philosophy) Breaks agreements, violates professed standards, hypocritical Performs poorly in pressure situations
Perception of Others
Projects own inadequacies and motives onto others Sees others as impotent victims Jealous and envious of others, especially those perceived as having a high sense of self Fear of or hostility towards others, blaming others for own inner state
Relationships with Others
Drawn to others with a low sense of self Has difficulty loving others Seeks control and power over others Outwardly aggressive or passively aggressive Discards people when they become a personal liability
Efforts at Self-Improvement
Does not seek self-improvement, as it requires acknowledging one is currently lacking Lacks self-discipline Closed-minded, unwilling to accept new ideas Tends to have addictions -- they serve as personal distractions
Our sense of self-value is rooted in our childhood, nurtured by the love and affirmation we received from our parental figures. Consider the nation's leading liberal, President Barack Obama, and how he embodies nearly all the characteristics of a person with a low sense of self. Barack Obama's teenage mom became pregnant out of wedlock, had two failed marriages, and apparently was a socialist. His dad was -- or became -- an alcoholic, physically abusive polygamist and communist. The likelihood of such needy and damaged people being healthy, nurturing parents is nil.
Obama's childhood included an early abandonment by his father; abandonment by his stepfather; abandonment by his mother; frequent moves so he could not develop long-term childhood friendships; being teased by peers for being neither black nor white, for having big ears, and for being skinny; and he had an elderly childhood mentor (Frank Marshall Davis) who was a communist and pedophile. (A poem written by 19-year-old Barack Obama suggests he may have been violated by Davis.) Obama predictably turned to illegal drugs (marijuana and cocaine) in his youth and remains addicted to nicotine. With this background, he could not escape being seriously psychologically damaged. From his behaviors and relationships, it is clear that he has not successfully addressed his inner deprivations.
The liberals' emotional neediness leads them to identify and experience a bonding with others who also have low self-esteem and low self-love. Collectively, they long for a greater sense of self and strive to attain it by achieving equality among people using the power of an ever-growing government and irrational arguments (for equality and against freedom) that they find emotionally compelling.
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) -- Protesters have been rallying outside Target Corp. or its stores almost daily since the retailer angered gay rights supporters and progressives by giving money to help a conservative Republican gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota. Liberal groups are pushing to make an example of the company, hoping its woes will deter other businesses from putting their corporate funds into elections.
A national gay rights group is negotiating with Target officials, demanding that the firm balance the scale by making comparable donations to benefit candidates it favors. Meanwhile, the controversy is threatening to complicate Target's business plans in other urban markets. Several city officials in San Francisco, one of the cities where Target hopes to expand, have begun criticizing the company.
"Target is receiving criticism and frustration from their customers because they are doing something wrong, and that should serve absolutely as an example for other companies," said Ilyse Hogue, director of political advocacy for the liberal group MoveOn.org, which is pressing Target to formally renounce involvement in election campaigns.
But conservative organizations are likely to react harshly if Target makes significant concessions to the left-leaning groups.
The flap has revealed new implications of a recent Supreme Court ruling that appeared to benefit corporations by clearing the way for them to spend company funds directly in elections. Companies taking sides in political campaigns risk alienating customers who back other candidates.
Target's $150,000 donation to a business-oriented group supporting Republican Tom Emmer, an outspoken opponent of gay marriage, was one of the first big corporate contributions to become known after the U.S. Supreme Court threw out prohibitions on corporate spending in elections earlier this year.
The Minneapolis-based chain has gone from defending the donation as a business decision to apologizing and saying it would carefully review its future giving. But the protests have continued.
Demonstrators gathered near Target's Minneapolis headquarters on Thursday, and two Facebook groups focused on gay rights are organizing protests at Target stores nationwide this weekend. Immigrant rights supporters have joined the protests, citing Emmer's tough stance on illegal immigration.
The company is in talks with the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights organization that wants Target and electronics retailer Best Buy Co., which gave $100,000 to the same group backing Emmer, to match their donations with equal amounts to help gay-friendly candidates.
Fred Sainz, the group's vice president for communications, said he is optimistic both companies will respond to the demand. Target has long cultivated a good relationship with the gay community in Minneapolis, and its gay employees have protested the donation.
"The repair has to be consistent with the harm that was done," Sainz said.
MoveOn, which had feared a heavy flow of corporate donations to groups that help conservative candidates after the Supreme Court decision, protested outside Target headquarters last week.
On the other side, conservatives have begun to rally to support Target, but in smaller numbers. A Facebook page urging "Boycott Target Until They Cease Funding Anti-Gay Politics" has more than 54,000 fans. A page declaring "I will NOT Boycott Target for supporting a Conservative candidate" has a little more than 400 fans.
A Target spokeswoman said the company had nothing to add to chief executive Gregg Steinhafel's statement of apology last week. At Richfield Minn.-based Best Buy, a spokeswoman said the company is reviewing its process for political donations and intended the Minnesota contribution to focus "solely on jobs and an improved economy."
Emmer has said he views the Target giving as an exercise in free speech and wants to keep his campaign focused on economic issues.
Target and rival Wal-Mart Stores Inc. have been trying to expand into urban markets after years of saturating the suburbs. Just last month, Target opened its first store in Manhattan, in East Harlem.
The company has 1,700 stores in the U.S. but only 150 stores in cities, and 50 more in cities with more than 100,000 people nearby.
In San Francisco, Target got a warm reception when it originally outlined plans to open two stores. That's shifted since the Minnesota controversy erupted.
"It just illustrates their disconnect, I think, from a city that they would want to establish a successful business in," said Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi. Target stores would be serving "the epicenter of the LGBT rights movement."
Target and BestBuy's donations went to MN Forward, a business-focused group that has run ads supporting Emmer and his lower-taxes message. The group is staffed by former insiders from Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty's administration and has also backed a few Democratic legislators.
MN Forward has continued to collect corporate money after the backlash against Target, bringing in $110,000 through Tuesday from businesses including Holiday Cos. gas stations and Graco Inc., a maker of pumps and fluid handling equipment.
Is the American Dream getting smaller? Are we defining down the tools of opportunity and the pleasures of prosperity?
President Obama's flippant dismissal of American exceptionalism last year stirred a lot of criticism because it suggested he did not believe the United States held a special place in the world. It also suggested America's unique history is, to the president, no big deal.
Now, with fellow travelers exercising power at all levels of government, progressives can do more than just belittle the idea of American exceptionalism. They can enact policies to make America unexceptional -- diminishing our quality of life and dampening opportunities for the next generation. Of course, progressives claim their vision is better and argue, with exquisite preening, that such changes are needed for our own good.
While cap-and-trade grabs the most attention, equally threatening is the euphemistically clever "Livable Communities Act." Masked with feel-good rhetoric and lofty concepts like "smart growth" and "sustainable development," the Livable Communities Act is top-down central planning aimed at changing where we live and work and how we travel. It will be overseen by bureaucrats in the Environmental Protection Agency, Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Transportation and implemented through local governments.
The Livable Communities Act exemplifies the progressive idea of strategic diminishment -- success is measured by the reduction of certain outcomes from today's standard. This is different from reducing outputs such as carbon emissions and pollutants, which are already declining and can be better addressed with affordable technologies rather than social engineering.
But social engineering is at the heart of the Livable Communities Act, where federal planners hope to reduce personal mobility as measured in vehicle miles traveled and shift housing patterns from single-family homes in the suburbs to small apartments in cramped central cities.
In a country as large and diverse as ours, some people will prefer the live-work-travel arrangements prescribed for in the Livable Communities Act, which is based on the Smart Growth planning doctrine. However, the vast majority of Americans in red and blue states alike have long aspired to live in suburban homes with a car in the garage.
This quintessentially middle-class version of the American Dream has long been derided by elites and environmentalists, who recast suburbs as a wasteful sprawl and liken automobile use to a destructive addiction. They want to delegitimize this land use pattern, restrict automobile use, and make suburban housing less affordable. The Livable Communities Act is thus a hammer in the progressive toolbox.
Absent from their advocacy is any acknowledgment that cars and suburbia are not just expressions of freedom, but indispensable contributors to our prosperity. For example, automobiles enable us to access more goods and services, forcing businesses to compete by offering higher quality and lower costs.
If you've ever driven past one establishment to get a better deal at another, you've personally benefited from mobility. When tens of thousands of people do this within a metropolitan area, they are fueling the creativity and innovation necessary in a market economy.
Automobiles also empower job-seekers to expand their employment range or widen the pool of potential employees for those willing to hire, both of which contribute to better wages and productivity.
Because the average citizen changes jobs more than ten times between the ages of 18 and 42, cars expand one's opportunity circle well beyond the range that can be achieved by foot, bike, or transit.
Economic prosperity is only one measure in which cars provide a superior service over the Livable Community Act's preferred alternatives. Every car trip results in a transaction that is important to the user, and those transactions can be recreational, educational, cultural, social, political, financial, or religious. People often accomplish multiple tasks on trips in ways that central planners simply cannot anticipate, much less accommodate with fixed routes and scheduling.
For those seeking spiritual fulfillment, how many limit their choices to the nearest church or synagogue? How many people routinely cross towns to participate in civic organizations like the Rotary or Kiwanis clubs? How many prefer working out at the all-night gym at odd hours?
Even if these examples are not important to you, these are examples of how other people pursue happiness. In a free society, only arrogant bureaucrats and progressive reformers would seek to diminish these choices.
These and similar trips -- individualized and uncoordinated -- make up the vehicle miles we travel each year. Americans drove 11 billion fewer miles between 2008 and 2009 due to the recession and a spike in oil prices, and today, VMT is down to 2005 levels. Few would argue that our quality of life has improved as a result.
Not surprisingly, those in the lowest socioeconomic status travel significantly less than middle-class drivers. The poor have what Smart Growth advocates call transportation choice, meaning they are dependent on someone else's schedule or limited to what is available within walking range of a transit hub.
Auto-mobility, by contrast, provides independence by empowering users to go where they want when they want. Walking, bicycling, and public transportation offer mobility, but only at lower levels compared to automobiles.
It is unrealistic to think central planners can retrofit cities around transit lines and bike paths to bring within range all that can be reached by automobiles, and the trade-off is diminished opportunities along with extremely high densities in crowded, stacked central cities.
Stating what we take for granted does not make one an uncritical apologist for the automobile, which still pollutes too much and results in too many fatalities each year. Yet new technologies are reducing emissions, improving performance, and increasing safety. Indeed, the future of automobiles is very promising.
Cars are mobility machines designed for decision-making at the individual and family level. They are the finest expression of personal mobility yet devised and are still evolving for even greater utility.
The threat to our mobility is but one aspect of the Livable Communities Act that deserves resistance. Property rights, private enterprise, and affordable homeownership are also threatened under this command-and-control legislation, despite the clever catchphrases that soften its message.
Defending the right of every citizen to maximize his potential and pursue happiness on his own terms makes opposition to the Livable Communities Act necessary. Our country is exceptional for the simple reason that her people do not accept diminishing returns on the American Dream.
Author: Liberals are ruining lives Chris Woodward - OneNewsNow - 8/21/2010 4:15:00 AM A conservative author believes liberals are ruining America, and his new book explains seven ways to prove his theory.
Terence Jeffrey, author of Control Freaks: 7 Ways Liberals Plan to Ruin Your Life, shares that as he recently found himself observing the direction the country is headed, it struck him "very hard that there is a real possibility that freedom could go away in this generation of Americans."
He points out that freedom in America is not a guarantee, so it is "up to each and every generation of Americans to make sure we maintain those principles -- both of government and morality -- that have kept us free for more than 200 years."
Jeffrey, who is also editor-in-chief of CNSNews, explains that the seven ways liberals are ruining lives involve freedom of movement, control of retirement income and social security, healthcare, private property, freedom of speech, and "most importantly, our freedom of conscience."
The conservative author recently discussed his book on the Focal Point program on American Family Radio. (See earlier story with Jeffrey: Liberals = 'control freaks')
Liberals = 'control freaks' Chad Groening - OneNewsNow - 8/20/2010 6:00:00 AM An author and editor hopes his new book will shed light on how liberals are trying to put government in control of many aspects of everyday life -- or have already succeeded in doing so.
Terence Jeffrey, editor-in-chief of CNSNews.com and editor-at-large of Human Events, says his book, Control Freaks: 7 Ways Liberals Plan to Ruin Your Life, illustrates how the liberal establishment believes it has the right to make personal decisions for all Americans and how it thinks empowering an ever-growing federal bureaucracy is the only way to ensure that kind of control.
"I think if you look around into almost every aspect of American life today, liberals in government office have either already put in place a program that puts government in control or gives it inordinate influence in what we're doing, or they have a program they want to put in place that will do it," he observes. "And I think this is a serious erosion of American freedom."
Jeffrey points out that liberals want to shirk the constitutional responsibility that the federal government does have -- providing national security.
"What we have now is a government that doesn't want to do its core constitutional functions like secure the border and enforce the immigration laws, which they were expressly chartered to do," he laments. "But they do want to do all kinds of things like force us to buy health insurance that they dictate, [which] they don't have the constitutional authority to do."
The author concludes that America is at a tipping point where pioneering, self-reliant citizens must resist the federal government as it attempts to turn the country into what he calls "a welfare-driven nanny state."
Being so much more life experienced and smarter he sometimes thinks so fast he misses stuff.
That's funny, since the same can be said about you. Let me 'splain Lucy, I said "Didn't we have a revolution against the British for less than what we are being subjected to now?". A normal intelligence American person would have realized that I was referring to the American Revolution. You replied "No. We Didn't. Those people had balls." which implies that the American Revolution did not happen, so which people had balls then if it didn't happen? You weren't very clear in your reply and it seems to contradict itself, as usual. Are you bi-polar or is replying to me so upsetting for you that you get too confused to form a logical statement? Next time proof read what you say before you hit the submit button junior.
[This message has been edited by avengador1 (edited 08-27-2010).]
Soros and the foundation left have launched a website designed to go after the growing Tea Party movement. Teapartytracker.org will post video interviews and blog entries gathered by folks on the false left who never grow weary of demonstrating their outrage over the very idea of a grassroots political effort overthrowing establishment Democrats and Republicans in the district of corporate criminals.
Teapartytracker.org will be sponsored by the NAACP, Think Progress, New Left Media and Media Matters for America. Think Progress is a George Soros operation connected to John Podesta’s Center for American Progress. Podesta is Clinton’s former chief of staff. Media Matters for America is the brainchild of a MoveOn consultant and Podesta’s Center for American Progress. Soros is a major supporter of MoveOn.
On July 13, the NAACP unanimously passed a resolution repudiating the Tea Party for alleged racism. The resolution followed accusations that the Tea Party had accosted members the Congressional Black Caucus as they traipsed the district of criminals mall on their way to vote for Obamacare, a grand larceny scam cooked up by large corporations. “Civil rights icon John Lewis was spit on, while Congressman Emanuel Cleaver was called the ‘N’ word and openly gay Congressman Barney Frank was called an ugly anti-gay slur,” a press released issued by the NAACP claims.
On April 1, Infowars.com provided evidence that protesters in fact did not spit on Missouri Democrat Emanuel Cleaver or did they hurl racial epithets at members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Cleaver later said a Tea Party protester did not spit on him intentionally. “All I’m saying is we all have to defuse it, and I think it is not in my best interest or in the best interest of this nation to stoke it,” he said on March 30 during a Fox News interview.
The NAACP and the Soros-funded anti-Tea Party operation, however, do not share Cleaver’s desire to defuse the situation. Instead, they plan to extract as much political mileage from the fictitious incident as possible.
In July, Soros’ Think Progress stitched together a video purporting to show that the Tea Party is chock full of racists.
Recall “Crash the Tea Party,” an effort exposed earlier this year, designed to portray the Tea Party as racists and reactionary throwbacks. Tea Party hating liberals “couldn’t sell the transparently nonsensical idea that Tea Partiers are just a bunch of racists, homophobes and morons, so the Crash the Party agents on the Left are infiltrating the Tea Party in order to pose as a bunch of racists, homophobes and morons,” Mark Tapscott wrote for the Washington Examiner on April 11, 2010. In addition to so-called liberals attempting to discredit the Tea Party movement, a gaggle of anarchists also announced an effort to disrupt rallies in April. According to Infoshop News, an anarchist website and forum, the Tea Party movement is “a coalition of conservatives, anti-Semites, fascists, libertarians, racists, constitutionalists, militia men, gun freaks, homophobes, Ron Paul supporters, Alex Jones conspiracy types and American flag wavers,” and because of this mischaracterization they should have their right to protest against the government disrupted.
Considering the above, how do we know Soros’ operatives will not infiltrate Tea Party rallies and demonstrations with actors pretending to be racists and closet KKK members and then pass this off as evidence that the movement is rife with white supremacists?
Of course, we have no way of knowing for sure, not that we shouldn’t expect Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann over at MSNBC — a network that owes its very existence to the eugenicist Bill Gates and the death merchant General Electric – to show journalistic objectivity and not feature whatever cobbled together and staged propaganda produced by the well-paid minions of George Soros.
Many conservatives look at their first chance to defeat the left in six years when nervous Democrats try to explain away Obama's disastrous leftward lurch. Not only is the left looking at a big defeat in America in two months, but it has been getting slobber-knocked all over the modern industrialized world.
Five months ago, in the British General Election, the Labour Party, which had been in power since the early 1990s, suffered a devastating defeat, losing 91 seats in the House of Commons. Although David Cameron's Conservative Party had to form a coalition with the yuppie-ish Liberal Party, Conservatives are still the senior party in this government, and Cameron resonates well with British voters.
Last September, Angela Merkel's Christian Democrat Party soundly trounced the Social Democrats, and the Christian Democrats' traditional coalition ally, the Free Democrats, gained enough support so that Merkel could end the "grand coalition" of her center-right party with the socialist SDP and form a more natural governing alliance with the Free Democrats.
In October 2008, shortly before Obama would win the White House, the Conservative Party in Canada substantially increased its strength in the Canadian Parliament. Stephen Harper almost gained enough votes to govern outright with no support from any of the other major parties. The "Grits," or Liberal Party, his principal ideological opponents, suffered massive losses (that party went from almost equality with the Conservative Party to having barely half as many seats as the Conservatives).
The Italian general elections in May 2008 produced a smashing defeat for the left. The coalition of parties on the right, led by Silvio Berlusconi, won a strong majority in the Chamber of Deputies and also a majority in the Senate. What was striking about this election was that Walter Veltroni, the atheist leader of the Democratic Party in Italy, was being openly touted as Europe's Barack Obama.
In May of 2007, Nicholas Sarkozy defeated the Socialist Royale handily, putting the most pro-American and least leftist president that France has had, maybe in the history of the Fourth Republic. National legislative elections (less important in France than in other nations) also produced a solid defeat of the left in France.
General elections over the last four years -- except for in America -- have been a long ragged retreat for parties of the left in Germany, France, Italy, and Canada. Now it seems like Australia may join that company of nations. Political party names in other democracies sometimes do not convey what the parties would represent in America. The Liberal Party in Australia, for example, would be our Republican Party.
Julia Gillard, the current Prime Minister of Australia, led her left-of-center Labor Party in the August 21, 2010 general election. Gillard led it, to be more exact, into one of the lowest points in its 119-year history. As of this moment, we do not know if Gillard will be able to cobble together out of a handful of independent members of the House of Representatives -- the three independents have announced that they will make their position known by September 6 -- but her minority government, if she pulls it off, will be one of the weakest in Australian political history. The three independents are fairly conservative and used to belong to the major conservative party. Gillard's Labor Party not only did worse than in prior elections, but they did worse than polls had predicted.
The left, it seems, is everywhere finding itself very unpopular. The leaders of the left seem tired and uninspiring. If Walter Veltroni, Gordon Brown, and Julia Gillard are the best that the left has to offer voters in major democracies, then the left is in big trouble. But that does not mean that conservatives are winning. It is also vital to remember that "right" and "left" in other countries should all be shifted a little portside in our frame of reference: a strong conservative in Australia or Italy would be a RINO in America.
But the de-legitimization of the left and its separation from governance are one half of a vital victory for freedom, and that half of the war is being won. What conservatives need now is a resonant message that inspires confidence and brings hope to a global electorate increasingly frustrated with politics as usual. The other half of victory -- conservative leaders like Reagan and Thatcher and armies of conservative foot soldiers who will follow those leaders -- is still unfinished business.
The collapse of the left makes November 2010 doubly important for conservatives. If Marco Rubio wins in Florida, can he lead us to complete victory in two years? How about Michele Bachmann, who wins elections in the same state which elected Al Franken? Eric Cantor, an articulate and conservative Orthodox Jew, might carry our banner in two years. Or perhaps Senator Fiorina, if she can beat Ms. Boxer in big left California, can carry our ideals to the White House.
No one, much, believes in the tall tales of the left anymore. We do not need to convince them that monstrosities like ObamaCare are a bad idea. We need to enter the political battles with something worth fighting for and worth winning for America. That is our challenge, and we better not fail.
Absolutely incredible. The left is like a football team with ONE offensive play. All they have is throwing insults. That's it. ONE play. And they keep doing it, even though it's not working. What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. NOW who is really insane?
NEW YORK (AP) — A California consumer-advocacy group has launched an ad on a Times Square video screen aimed at rallying the left before the November elections and labeling the tea party movement as “insane.”
The 30-second spot by Consumer Watchdog flashes phrases such as “home foreclosures” and “Wall Street greed” across a 520-square-foot screen as flames burn in the background.
It asks viewers, “Are you mad as hell but think the tea party is insane?”
Jamie Court, president of the Santa Monica-based group, says the nonprofit wants to provide voters with an alternative to the tea party and help channel their frustration in productive ways.
Calls and e-mails to a leading national tea party figure in California were not immediately returned.
Consumer Watchdog is best known for its lawsuits against the insurance industry.
It's a landmark event for Beatledom. John Lennon, dead these thirty years, would have turned seventy years old today. For many '60s survivors who grew up in thrall of the Fab Four, the idea that such an important symbol of the youth culture has arrived at the threshold of old age (if such a category still exists in our teen-obsessed culture) must be profoundly unsettling. It is as if that entire generation had finally found itself washed up on the very doorstep of senility. There can be no doubt that Lennon, in his partnership with the brilliant tunesmith Paul McCartney, did craft some of the most memorable pop tunes of the 20th century. That might be reason enough to celebrate his life. But Lennon's failure to complete his life's journey has frozen his memory in perpetual mid-life. There he presides as the guru of peace and love, an unfazed and unrepentant hippie whose vision for world peace remains unfettered by reality or subsequent historical events. Forgotten, or perhaps conveniently overlooked, is that Lennon's solo work in his ten post-Beatles years was far inferior to anything he did as a member of the group. It was weak even by comparison to the output of his fellow Beatles (and yes, I include Ringo Starr in that assessment). His coda, the cloying and maudlin "Double Fantasy" (1980) was an embarrassment for such a great talent, and perhaps evidence that his muse had permanently fled. Part of this can be attributed to Lennon's early '70s determination to make political statements rather than music. Moving permanently to New York City in 1970, he and his wife Yoko Ono became lightening rods for radicals and far-left causes. Feminists, Black Panthers, Yippies, and peace movement activists all pitched their tents under the Lennon/Ono carapace to propagate their liberation politics. The recorded product of this eclectic jamboree, Sometime In New York City (1972), is a rather tuneless and bleak attempt to capture the radical zeitgeist. It bombed and is regarded universally as one of the worst post-breakup efforts by any of the Beatles. While Lennon's post-Beatles recordings, save for the very early ones, can be largely dismissed, what can't be dismissed is his cultural influence. Lennon stands today as the most revered icon in the pantheon of the peace movement -- a figure of such sainted majesty that he has been practically beatified by secular humanists. This reputation balances precariously on the foundation of just one song -- the anthemic "Imagine." "Imagine" dredged up some half-baked Romantic notions and presented a vision of a world free of conflict. Attached to an ethereal melody, it seems to float in a sea of mysticism, painting a picture of a utopia that most Communist leaders in the 1970s would have recognized. Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people Sharing all the world... Would Lennon have matured intellectually as he aged, ultimately recognizing that this formula for world peace -- written in a swishy mansion in the English countryside, far from the Communist despots and authoritarians who at that time imprisoned nearly half of humanity -- could not work? Would he have understood that there was something a little skewed about attempting to denude the world of religion, governments, sovereignty, and wealth? Would he have finally understood that his adopted home, the United States, actually stood as the last best chance for humanity to preserve the liberty that had allowed him to pen such masterpieces such as "Across the Universe" and "A Day In the Life..."? Probably not. Naïveté is one of the great privileges of the rich and famous. Insulated from the hard realities of life, our pop icons are safe and free to make ignorant guesses about the world and pose solutions that suggest more, not less, misery for its human population. Once having made such a statement of principle, it is highly unlikely that Lennon would ever have retired his "Imagine" philosophy. Unlike McCartney, who has revealed himself to be comparatively sensible on a number of important security issues, Lennon, socially alienated as a child and conditioned to reject convention, likely would have continued to find some gratification in oppositional politics and ideologies. It is doubtful he could ever have written a song such as "Freedom," which McCartney penned in outrage following the attacks of 9/11. But his legacy remains, and his "Imagine" vision continues to inspire the contemporary antiwar movement, a fact of which he would doubtless have been proud. Yet as the threat of a nuclear Iran grows and Islamic terrorism sets Western society in a state of constant alert, the notion that we can embrace those sworn to our destruction in a "brotherhood of man" presents as nothing more than an irresponsible failure of imagination.
Liberal loser goes on a shooting rampage...the same kind of person who likes to accuse the Tea Party and the right of such action (which doesn't happen):
Clay Duke, the man who opened fire on a Florida school board Tuesday, posted a “last testament” on Facebook decrying the wealthy and linking to a slew of progressive sites including theprogressivemind.info and MediaMatters.org.
The chilling Facebook statement, posted under the “About Clay” section, talks about being born poor and how the rich “take turns fleecing us”:
My Testament: Some people (the government sponsored media) will say I was evil, a monster (V)… no… I was just born poor in a country where the Wealthy manipulate, use, abuse, and economically enslave 95% of the population. Rich Republicans, Rich Democrats… same-same… rich… they take turns fleecing us… our few dollars… pyramiding the wealth for themselves. The 95%… the us, in US of A, are the neo slaves of the Global South. Our Masters, the Wealthy, do, as they like to us… In addition to the note, Duke also includes a reference to class warfare:
“There’s class warfare, all right, but its my class, the rich class that’s making war and we’re winning” - Warren Buffet
And then issues a call to rise up, which seems to be from a poem titled “The Mask of Anarchy”:
Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number. Shake your chains to earth like dew. Which in sleep has fallen on you. Ye are many – they are few.
Besides the writings, Duke also includes an exhaustive list of links under the quote “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” The page includes a link dedicated to Wikileaks, another to a progressive 9/11 truther site, and even Media Matters:
Liberal pundits have awakened from the euphoria of nearly two years of successful Democratic initiatives, and they are fuming. Barack Obama decided to side with Republicans on the issue of extending Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans in exchange for the extension of unemployment benefits in a deal consummated Thursday night.
It could have been expected that this wouldn't sit well with his base. Disproportionately taxing the wealthy is a critical plank in the ideology of the left, and the reason for that is simple. When liberals think of George Bush, they think of big business destroying society. When they think of big business destroying society, they think of rich, corporate fat cats. And as much as they would love to, they are unable to send George Bush to the poor house, so settling the score with the rich, corporate fat cats is the next best thing.
That's what it is all about: retribution. But the left can't just be forthright and say, "We want to steal rich people's money to get back at them." So they use rhetorical sleight-of-hand to conceal the fact that tax increases for the rich are about vengeance.
They generally position it as a moral issue or an issue of charity. But while they spend all their time talking about how it is only "right" for the wealthy to pay more in taxes, they completely ignore that a handful of people in Washington deciding on a whim to take more property from a specific group is wrong.
Perhaps that is why when liberals are out pitching upper-class tax hikes, they have usually been compelled to preface their arguments with an unsolicited disclosure that it's not to punish success. Take Chuck Schumer's recent declaration: "It's not that we want to punish wealthy people. We want to praise them."
Democrats want to "praise" successful individuals by disproportionately confiscating much more of their property? When a group of people is "praised" for success, they are generally given a reward, or perhaps applauded. They are not singled out, further stripped of their property, and demonized in an effort to use their possessions to provide for their anonymous neighbors' well-being.
When the left defends a tax increase for the wealthy as anything other than punishment, it sounds less like the truth and more like an unintended confession of a guilty conscience. And that's probably because deep down, buried beneath their ideological disillusionment about the ends of wealth redistribution justifying the means, liberals know well that seizing an increased amount of property from individuals in one specific social class equates to discrimination and injustice.
But the collectivists who support Barack Obama overlook that logic and are furious that he compromised by endorsing the tax extensions. To them, extending unemployment benefits at the cost of letting the wealthy off without increased tax liability can be nothing more than a Pyrrhic victory. Obama's obligation to enforce the doctrine of "social justice" has always been twofold. Yes, one aspect is to assure the livelihood of those dependent upon the government, but the "justice" comes from the exacted revenge upon the rich people who have long held those dependents down.
Obama has done such an excellent job convincing his flock that rich Americans need to provide the capital for "social justice" that it seems to be liberals' top priority. Think about the fact that within two years of office, Obama has fulfilled the long-held dream of the left to pass government-run health care. In that time frame, he has also increased the government's scope of influence beyond what many Americans thought possible and has assured more massive funding to expand social welfare programs. And he did all of this in the face of staunch popular opposition and at the expense of his own approval rating.
But because Obama was unable to stick it to Bush's buddies who avoided paying their fair share for the past ten years, Democrats suddenly find that he lacks the political backbone to do what must be done. So now, he is being crucified by his own for betraying his sworn beliefs.
But thankfully for conservatives, with a turned tide in the House and an increasingly unpopular president, it looks like we will get to enjoy watching the left continue to angrily hold their breath while waiting for the reckoning they crave.
Oh, the unbelievable hypocrisy of the left. And perhaps stupidity? Oprah is a loyal supporter of liberal Democrats, *has* to know full well that they've been talking about raising taxes on the rich for a couple of years now, doesn't like how much she has to pay *now*, with the lower rates...and STILL supports Democrats.
Looks like Oprah just had a Republican moment.
Hey...Oprah...how about you wake the f*** up and smell the coffee?
The media queen admitted to Piers Morgan on Monday night that she laments having to pay such high taxes every year — in the form of large checks to the IRS — and the event has even become a depressing “ceremony” complete with alcoholic drinks.
The admission came after Oprah told Morgan during an interview that she signs every check for her business over $100,000. Morgan then asked, “Does it hurt you? Do you feel pain, physical pain?”
She responded: “The most pain I feel is ‑‑ and my accountants will tell you this. Every time I write a check to the IRS, it’s a ceremony. They come in ‑‑ for years they came in with wine. Now they come in with tequila”:
On Tuesday, Glenn Beck responded to Oprah’s comments. On his radio show, he said it was ironic that Oprah laments high taxes but yet campaigned for Barack Obama — the man who has talked about redistributing wealth and recently tried to raise taxes on those making over $250,000.
“If you really believed that social justice was achieved through the IRS, you wouldn’t come in with wine or tequila,” Beck said. “You would come in with champagne. Congratulations. Do you know how much social justice you have just provided? Congratulations. You would view it as a celebration. It would not be painful”:
Since Jared Lee Loughner went on his rampage in Tucson, we've been treated to perfectly ridiculous liberal howling about "violent rhetoric." The reason it's "perfectly ridiculous" is that “liberals being liberals," they've tackled the whole debate in such a politically correct manner that it makes the debate laughable.
According to liberals, what words supposedly incite violence? Words like "targeting," "locked and loaded," "crossfire," "job killing," "double barrel," etc. In other words, it's not people actually calling for violence; it's commonly used phrases -- that have long been used to describe politics -- that cause bloodshed by lathering up maniacs. Of course, only a complete moron could believe this – and, yes, if you believe this, I mean you personally are a moron.
Of course, even most liberals aren't this stupid. So, they've latched on to this theory for two reasons. The first is sheer opportunism. They're going to ignore the countless times their side has used words like "job killing" and "targeted" and they're going to pretend that only conservatives do this. This shows they're hypocritical and have no intellectual honesty. But, that's just par for the course for the professional Left.
However, the other reason is more sinister: Liberals commonly say things that, if they really believe the words that are coming out of their mouths, would lead to political violence. Let's talk about just a few examples.
BushHitler: Calling George Bush "Hitler" and Republicans "Nazis" became such a regular occurrence that it became jejune during the Bush years. Whether it was
Sandra Bernhard saying, "The real terrorist threats are George W. Bush and his band of brown-shirted thugs" or
Michael Moore,"The Patriot Act is the first step. "Mein Kampf" -- "Mein Kampf" was written long before Hitler came to power. And if the people of Germany had done something early on to stop these early signs, when the right-wing, when the extremists such as yourself, decide that this is the way to go, if people don't speak up against this, you end up with something like they had in Germany. I don't want to get to that point."
If you could go back in time, before Hitler came to power, would it be immoral to kill him? People like Michael Moore, Sandra Bernhard and the rest of the professional Left were hoping someone would say "no" all during the Bush years.
The population of earth is "unsustainable:" At a minimum, you could go all the way back to Malthus on this argument, but liberals have become much more insistent about this crackpot argument in recent years. Just to name one example, Ted Turner has declared the species can't survive without reducing the population,
"If we’re going to be here [as a species] 5,000 years from now, we’re not going to do it with seven billion people."
So, how do we terminate billions of people to make life on the planet "sustainable?" The left-wing support for abortion and cutting off DDT have certainly eliminated millions, but that doesn't seem to be getting the job done. Is it going to take a Twelve Monkeys style virus? Would you trust one of the environmentalist left-wingers who thinks life on this planet is unsustainable -- with one of the many extremely lethal bioweapons that are out there? Would you trust Ted Turner with one? After all, if life is “unsustainable” with the current population, billions of people have to die.
Bush invaded Iraq to get revenge for his daddy / enrich Halliburton / get their oil / lied us into war: It wasn't enough to oppose the war in Iraq. No, liberals had to accuse Bush of causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of U.S. soldiers for the most frivolous reasons imaginable.
Remember what Michael Moore said?
"I want him [Bush] paraded in handcuffs outside a police house as a common criminal because I don't know if there's a greater crime than taking people to war based on a lie. I've never seen anything like Bush and his people. They truly hate our constitution, our rights and liberties. They have no shame in fighting for their corporate sponsors."
"Let the people see what war is like. This isn’t an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush’s folly. That said, I feel nothing over the death of mercenaries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them." --Markos Moulitsas Zúniga on the four Americans who were murdered by terrorists and then had their corpses desecrated in Fallujah, Iraq.
"(George Bush) betrayed this country! He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place!" --Al Gore
Very few of these people actually believe what they were saying: the anti-war protests evaporated the moment there was a Democrat in office. But, what were these liberals really hoping to accomplish with their rhetoric? Were they hoping that a father who lost a son in Iraq or a soldier who saw his friends die, would pick up a sniper rifle and kill Bush for sending people to die for nothing? What would you do if a man sent your 18 year old son to die so he could make a few bucks for his friends?
The only way to save the planet is by decimating the world economy to fight global warming: So, if global warming is going to kill us all, along with the hapless polar bears, unless we do something, then what do we do? Some liberals have already suggested the next step: Criminalizing dissent. Here's
David Roberts from Grisoft,
"When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these b*stards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg."
Here's Greenpeace on their blog this year,
The proper channels have failed. It's time for mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and skepticism.
If you're one of those who believe that this is not just necessary but also possible, speak to us. Let's talk about what that mass civil disobedience is going to look like.
If you're one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this:
We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.
And we be many, but you be few.
So, if you doubt global warming, they want you either jailed or killed as a war criminal -- if they bother to get that far. They may just save time by showing up where you live or work, presumably with a gun, like Jared Lee Loughner.
George Bush and 9/11: He LIHOP or MIHOP: During the Bush years, we heard prominent liberal after liberal claim that the Bush Administration let 9/11 happen on purpose or made it happen on purpose. This was and still is a mainstream view on the Left. Everyone from Rosie "it's the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel" O'Donnell to Van "(Bush may have) deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen" Jones believes it.
We're hunting and killing Al-Qaeda across the globe because they're responsible for 9/11. So, if the Bush Administration were really responsible for 9/11, what should we be doing to them? Yet, liberals are very comfortable with making this assertion. What's more likely to really lead to violence? Saying you're targeting someone to be defeated in an election or falsely accusing someone of murdering nearly 3,000 Americans? Which is really worse?
I really don’t have words any more to describe what goes on in Washington and how it’s reported (or not reported) by the media. There was big news yesterday as the House of Representatives voted to repeal Barack Obama’s health care law. There were also the comments by Democrat Rep. Steve Cohen who compared Republican remarks on health care to the Nazi propaganda machine. Both should be major news, but on this morning’s home pages of the major news outlets, nary a mention is made of either.
First, the vote
By a count of 245-189, the new Republican majority voted to repeal Obama’s health care legislation. As reported by Fox News, three Democrats also voted for repeal.
The Congress can do better in terms of replacing Obamacare with common-sense reforms that will bring down the cost of health insurance and expand access for more Americans,” House Speaker John Boehner said Wednesday.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor took aim at Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has said he won’t even take up the repeal measure in his chamber.
“I’ve got a problem with the assumption here that somehow the Senate can be a place for a legislation to go into a cul-de-sac or a dead end,” he said. “The American people deserve a full hearing. They deserve to see this legislation go to the Senate for a full vote.”
The vote marked a turning point for Congress in that it actually did something the American people wanted. At the time of its original passage, there was not a single poll in the country that showed a majority of Americans wanting the health care bill. Yet the Democrats had the numbers (and their left wing agenda), and they pushed it through anyway.
For some background as to the current mood of the American people, in the latest Rasmussen Reports poll, 55% of likely voters “favor repeal of the health care law.” Sixty percent of those surveyed “say the legislation will likely increase the federal deficit, while just 17% say it will reduce the deficit.”
Second, the comment
Remember all the comments by the media and left wingers about how heated rhetoric leads to violence? They were in an uproar about the root causes of the Tucson shootings, even without knowing any of the facts. So, given everything they said about “vitriol” and the consequences for certain statements, what do you think they think of Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), who on Wednesday compared the GOP to Nazis. Cohen went on to say to compare GOP rhetoric with the propaganda that led to the Holocaust. This is absolutely outrageous! For those of you who don’t know, as Fox News reminds readers that “blood libel” is “a historically and false anti-Semitic charge that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals.” Sarah Palin mentioned it in her speech last week and was criticized by the media. Now Cohen does the same thing, but goes way overboard in comparing this debate to the Holocaust.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) condemned Cohen’s remarks.
“No matter how strong one’s objections to any policy or to the tactics of political opponents, invoking the Holocaust and the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jewish people is offensive and has no place in a civil political discourse,” ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman said in a statement.
At least someone is stepping forward to say something!
Third, the “coverage”
As you can see, there was big news in Washington on Wednesday, right? Apparently not. The so-called main stream media doesn’t see it that way. This morning, as of the writing of this column, only Fox News had the health care vote as the lead story. CBS, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, and the New York Times all had other items to focus on.
Just click an item to see an image of that site’s home page:
ABC News CBS News CNN MSNBC New York Times
What a collection of lead stories. Unfortunately, none of the sites actually focused on what was really happening in this country. Surprising? No. Disappointing? Yes. The good news is that the American people are awake. They are paying attention. They want accountable, responsible government, regardless of what the media and the left want to give them.
I wonder what excuse Reid will come up to say they don't have to vote on the repeal. If we are a true democracy they do need to vote on it. Are they afraid the voters will remember who voted against the repeal? I'm sure the voters will remember no matter what they do.
