The Liberals Have Really Stepped in it This Time…

Leo Pusateri58 Comments

Judge finds NC ‘Choose Life’ plates unconstitutional

myfox8.com

RALEIGH, N.C. – A federal judge has ruled it is unconstitutional for North Carolina to issue pro-life license plates unless…

 

Here is the takeaway line…
“This is a great victory for the free speech rights of all North Carolinians, regardless of their point of view on reproductive freedom,” said Chris Brook, legal director of the ACLU-NCLF.

Brook said the government cannot create an avenue to express one side of a political issue while denying an equal opportunity to citizens with an opposing view.”

This is quite interesting… and at once damning to all the government-sanctioned intellectual monopolies held by the Left.

Given the Federal Court’s decision, for instance,

Should the taxpayers support Darwinism exclusively being taught in schools, while at the same time denying equal opportunity and access for those who espouse Intelligent Design theory?”

Given the Federal Court’s decision, why should the taxpayers be forced to support Planned Parenthood, and at the same time not be forced to support Pro-Life organizations?

In their zeal to utilize the courts to push their agenda, it appears that ‘progressives’ have really stuck it to themselves this time.

We Conservatives Are So Stupid

Mark Noonan41 Comments

At least, that is the allegation of a new “study” – from Pajamas Media:

…The results of a 4 year study show that Americans who obtain their news from Fox News channel have an average IQ of 80, which represents a 20 point deficit when compared to the U.S. national average of 100. IQ, or intelligence quotient, is the international standard of assessing intelligence.

Researchers at The Intelligence Institute, a conservative non-profit group, tested 5,000 people using a series of tests that measure everything from cognitive aptitude to common sense and found that people who identified themselves as Fox News viewers and ‘conservative’ had, on average, significantly lower intelligent quotients. Fox Viewers represented 2,650 members of the test group…

The study, itself, is bogus – as is the allegation that it came from some sort of conservative group (you can read the linked article to see just how laughably fake the whole “study” actually is).  But, fake as it is, that is the way liberals view us – we’re conservatives because we’re just too stupid to be smart liberals.

To be sure, we are politically stupid – that I grant.  The reason for this is that we don’t live and breath politics:  we don’t hold it as the be-all and end-all of existence as liberals do.  Only a liberal, for instance, could have thought up political correctness, which is nothing more than a demand that whatever is politically fashionable at the moment among the elite become obligatory among everyone.  You can only think  up something like that if you hold that what is political trumps what is personal.  But while political correctness is idiotic, in practical, living terms it is highly effective in purely political terms:  it allows you to control the debate by either insisting that everyone affirm some particular view or, more often, condemn some idea…with what is being condemned always being something that is traditionally held by the broad majority of the American people.  We’re stupid in the sense that we let them get away with it.

But in terms of actual living, I wouldn’t trust a liberal with a burnt out match.  These are people, after all, who think you can craft a national health care system for a nation of more than 300 million people, spread across four time zones and having places as completely different in demographics, economics and philosophy as, say, San Francisco, California and Birmingham, Alabama.  They also think that incurring debt creates economic growth and that spending is more important than saving (we might get some liberal denials on that, but the whole of liberal, Keynesian economics is based upon the laughable fallacy that spending is better than saving).

Preening themselves on their credentials, secure in well-paid Big Government and/or Big Corporation jobs, liberals look out upon us and see a great, unwashed mass of ignorant bigots, bitterly clinging to guns and the Bible…meanwhile, their Great and Glorious Leader presides over a bankrupt nation and their solution is to raise taxes on “the rich” which will pay for 8 days of spending…brilliant!

UPDATE:  76% favor cutting spending across the board.  In a very real sense, we’ve won the argument…we’ve just failed to craft a plan which gets us back in to the White House with full control of Congress.  We figure that out over the next four years and we’ll be unstoppable.

In My Opinion

Cluster67 Comments

America not only has an economy problem, we have an economic educational problem that compounds the issue and our ability to resolve it. Most of our younger generation have been victims of educational malpractice as a result of liberalism and political correctness that infiltrated our educational system going back a few decades, and it will take a concerted effort, and a few more decades to overcome it. The curricula emphasis on diversity and political correctness took the place of history and economics and has produced a generation of ill informed, over emotional people with a distorted understanding of our Constitution and capitalism. One of our resident liberal teachers here has said on many occasion that the Constitution is racist and misogynistic, and even a liberal Supreme Court justice has said that if she were beginning a new country, she would not look towards the US Constitution as a foundational document, preferring instead to look towards other countries philosophy of governance. Unbelievable as that is, it’s true. The US Constitution is inarguably the greatest governing document ever written, and needs to be taught as such. The US Constitution is responsible for this country becoming the most powerful economy in the world, offering the most civil rights and liberties than any other country hands down.

Re: economics, too many people are financially illiterate as to capitalism, the private sector, and the role of government. Let me begin by simply saying that wealth is not a zero sum game, capitalism is the best economic platform hands down as “a rising tide lifts all boats” (think: JFK), and the role of government is simply that of a referee. Free markets are the foundation of the capitalist platform, and the Federal Governments role is to see that the rules are abided by, and the Federal Government has failed at this core responsibility so to think that they can perform any other function properly defies common sense. There should have been investigations, indictments, prosecutions and convictions stemming from the 2008 housing crash, but those investigations would have revealed some very uncomfortable truths for some very well politically connected people so the fact that those investigations never took place, should be disturbing to us all. The fact is, that more people can be lifted from poverty and the lower class via a healthy private sector, than any government program could ever accomplish, and the more money that the government extracts from the private sector, the less ability that private sector has to turn that money, creating wealth, jobs and ….. wait for it …… tax revenue. It’s all about the turns and any retailer, wholesaler and manufacturer can attest to that. The more you turn your inventory, the more income is produced, the more profit is produced, the more jobs are produced, which exposes more dollars to taxation. It’s better to tax a dollar that is turned 5x at 20%, than it is to tax that same dollar turned 1x at 40%, and any liberal that desires more revenue to the federal government needs to understand this basic economic fact. Sadly, this is not taught often enough in our primary and secondary educational levels.

As a country we owe our children an honest education, and there are certainly people who do take advantage of our capitalist system, as the very nature of the system can invite corruption, but if our federal government was more focused on it’s proper role, those instances would be few. Our children need to understand how the blend of our Constitution and our capitalist economy has created the most powerful, free country in the world unequaled by any other. As it is now, the misunderstanding of those two foundational components of our country has resulted in our current slide into malaise and mediocrity.

Thelma & Louise Cont. – The Enabler Version

Cluster119 Comments

I am enjoying this conversation on the direction of the GOP and where we go from here. Many of you know my position and some disagree so let me come at this from a different angle. In my opinion, the GOP is nothing more than an  enabler at this point. We are enabling Obama to have someone to blame for his failures, and the liberal media is lapping it up. Everyday we try and save liberals from themselves, is another day that Obama can blame us for “obstructing” his wise and benevolent policies, and that perception will not change anytime soon, so why do we continue to do the same thing expecting different results? That is the definition of insanity.

What I think we should do, is clearly state for the record that we vigorously disagree with the policies prescribed by the Democrats and Obama, but that we do realize that elections have consequences so we will stand aside and allow Obama to implement his policies unchallenged. We all know these policies will fail, in fact they already have, so why are we standing in the way? The people who will be hurt the worst are the people who voted for Obama, so let the pain begin. This is also the only way that we can then clearly lay the blame at the feet of the Democrats and the media won’t even be able to cover for them and that just might help usher in a decade of conservative rule.

Count and Rat Haven have suggested that we simply need to control the message, and that another Reagan is what is needed. I somewhat disagree. While I would love to see another Reagan emerge, I believe our problems are deeper this time around. Our problems are not just the economy as they were with Reagan in 1980, our problem is the demonization of wealth and capitalism that is now ingrained in too many people. It’s the economic illiteracy that we must overcome in addition to selling the virtues of a smaller government, and back in 1980, wealth and success were not seen as the evils as they are today. So it is imperative in my opinion that this younger generation, and the growing minority constituency who all voted for the Obama plan, feel the pain of it first hand.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan:

Seriously, we have entirely blown it on getting information to people…and Democrats have done the Big Lie better than ever.

Thelma & Louise – Open Thread

Cluster109 Comments

Reminiscent of Thelma & Louise’s movie ending flight over the cliff to destruction – that is exactly what I suggest conservatives allow to happen. In fact, going further, I believe that the GOP should rubber stamp everything Obama and the Democrats want to do for the next year, including military spending cuts, and little if no curtailment on entitlement increases. There is no question that the policies prescribed by Obama are doomed to fail, and in fact have so far, and there will be no other way to crystallize that in the minds of voters and the media, but to allow it to happen in full bloom. Every Republican needs to stand center stage and say unequivocally that while they disagree with the Administrations agenda, elections do have consequences and they will not stand in the way of the policies Obama endorses. Then, the GOP needs to remind the voters on a weekly basis, the results of those policies as they relate to unemployment, the debt, interest rates and the cost of living. As Count d’Harcots accurately pointed out to me earlier, the messaging is the main obstacle conservatives need to overcome, and it should become quite difficult for the Democrats to continue to sell their message of compassion, misguided as it is, when the economy is in shambles, poverty is rampant, and unemployment is persistently high, and the American voter is actually living the nightmare and being reminded of it everyday.

So spread your wings everyone and let’s take flight!

A HAT TIP TO DBSCHMIDT AS WELL FOR THIS PLAN TO ALLOW THE IMPLOSION OF LIBERALISM UNIMPEDED.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan:  Just wanted to point out that which ever party can successfully mobilize white, middle class voters in 2014 and beyond will win huge.

Nader: Obama Worse Than Bush

Mark Noonan92 Comments

Breitbart has the video of Nader discussing Obama.  Nader does have some major blind spots – first off in saying that Obama is failing because he knows the law and yet he violates it.  This, to me, is a failure on the part of Nader to understand that people like Obama don’t even know what a law is.  But Nader is also pretty upset with Obama on the way Obama has been running the war – essentially calling Obama a worse war criminal than Bush.

First off, I’d like to say that I deprecate the whole concept of “war crime”.  There are, of course, laws of war – things which have been held to be right and proper for ages.  Such things as not going on a rampage of rape, looting and murder.  Things like accepting an honorable surrender and treating the captive decently.  But these are things for honorable soldiers with proper morality – when dealing with people who have deliberately set themselves outside of all morality, then it becomes a bit different.  The honorable soldier will still refrain from senseless brutality, but he isn’t bound to treat an inhuman adversary as if he were humane.  The biggest example of war crimes, of course, were in Nazi Germany – but it was absurd of us to put the captured Nazis on trial as if judging them by our standards in a court would some how make right what was done.  How can one exact justice against someone who organized the mass murder of millions?  Who deliberately broke the peace simply to grab wealth from others?  You can’t – once the millionth person was done to death in a Nazi death camp then no amount of judicial sentence could ever balance the scales of justice.  We should, instead of bothering with all that (and especially without putting on the bench Soviet judges which represented a regime just as hideously anti-human as the Nazi regime on trial), just taken out whichever Nazis we felt were most responsible and shot them one, fine morning.  It wouldn’t have been a matter of justice – it couldn’t be a matter of justice; it was a matter of disposing of people who had outlawed themselves in the fullest sense of the word (but Mark, you’re a Christian – what about mercy?  Indeed, and people with a sense of honor would have tried to discern whom among the captive Nazis should get that mercy…and be let go; by trying to be “legal” about it we ended up hanging someone as trivial as Ribbentrop while letting off someone as crucial to Nazi power and cruelty as Alfried Krupp).

It is, then, impossible for us to commit a war crime against the Islamists we fight against – these are people who will murder a Christian for nothing (and rape his daughter and burn his church, in to the bargain).  These are people who will strap a bomb on a kid and send him off to commit mass murder in a shopping mall.  These are people who have outlawed themselves from human society.  The only reason to take them prisoner, at all, is to obtain information from them.  Outside of that, how is justice served if we were to, say, give a man a 20 year sentence because he organized a campaign of suicide bombings in Afghanistan?  So, when Nader says we are committing war crimes when we drone-attack a jihadist, I disagree with the notion – even when, at times, such attacks end up killing the innocent.  It isn’t our fault that our enemies deliberately hide among non-combatants for the sole purpose of ensuring that innocent people are killed so they can score propaganda points against us.  We still have to fight these people – though a bit of wisdom at this point would lead us to withdraw completely or steel ourselves to going after the ultimate sources of the trouble:  the money-bags in the oil States and the government of Iran.  Be that as it may, we are at this point fighting them, and it not only isn’t a crime to do so, it is impossible for it to ever be a crime.

Nader reflects a certain, hard-left disappointment with Obama – a feeling, correct in a lot of ways, that Obama has not been what he promised to be.  Schooled his whole life to believe that the left is in favor of peace, prosperity and freedom, someone like Nader just doesn’t know what to do with an Obama who doesn’t make peace, doesn’t create prosperity and is clearly uninterested in individual freedom for average folks.  Part of this comes from a failure to understand that the left has an inherent problem in getting to any of these desired results.  Nader, honest as he is, simply does not understand that a large government setting out to, for instance, create prosperity is in an impossible situation:  the thing can’t be done.  Even the most benevolent government, grown large, can only get in the way.  But, still, you can see his point:  clearly Obama is not carrying out the programs and policies which leftists believe will bring peace, prosperity and freedom.

It still astounds me that Obama managed to win a second term:  the only people actually benefiting from Obama policies are those who are getting a rake-off via government contracts and grants.  For 90% of Americans, Obama’s Administration has been a net loss.  I can see why dyed-in-the-wool Democrats voted for Obama, but they only make up about 35% of the electorate (at best) and Obama got over 50% of the vote…which means a very large number of people who aren’t just mindlessly Democrat and/or personally profiting off of Obama voted to re-elect this man who has not a single policy success to his name.  The fact that Nader – and some other hard left people – are taking Obama to task just makes it more remarkable that we’ve got Obama for four more years.

Nader is right about this:  Obama is far worse than Bush.  Far worse than anyone we’ve ever had in the White House.  I’d welcome back a combination Carter and Nixon and figure we’re coming out ahead of the game, right about now.  The combination of dishonesty, insensitivity, lack of patriotism, old-school Chicago graft and a general sense that Obama is happy to see us decline at times makes me sick at heart for our country.  I can only imagine how much worse it must be for a true blue leftist:  here was a man (and a black man!) who had dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s of true-blue leftism and yet he manages to get elected…and then he goes about messing up so badly that when he is replaced, the whole concept of leftism will be in disgrace for a generation.  Just as after Carter left office no one would call themselves a “liberal” for more than a decade, so it will be after Obama leaves…people will be ashamed to be thought of as being in any way like Obama.  And for someone like Nader, that is tragic because his whole life has been a sincere (if muddleheaded) quest for a leftist settlement in the United States.

It is to be hoped that there will be an awakening from this – as I hope my fellow conservatives will awaken to the fact that Big Corporation is a bane, so I hope that honest leftists like Nader will awaken to the fact that Big Government is also a bane…and a worse bane than Big Corporation.  You can, if you want, be a leftist and be against government – the only fundamental change is to understand that whatever social changes you want will have to be done via education and at the local level, not by the heavy club of government because such clubs are always eventually wielded by someone like Obama.

 

 

If Liberals Acted Upon Their Convictions

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Then stories like this would be true:

Johnstown, PA (GlossyNews) – Local and state police scoured the hills outside rural Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after reports of three animal rights activists going missing after attempting to protest the wearing of leather at a large motorcycle gang rally this weekend. Two others, previously reported missing, were discovered by fast food workers “duct taped inside fast food restaurant dumpsters,” according to police officials.

“Something just went wrong,” said a still visibly shaken organizer of the protest. “Something just went horribly, horribly, wrong.”The organizer said a group of concerned animal rights activists, “growing tired of throwing fake blood and shouting profanities at older women wearing leather or fur coats,” decided to protest the annual motorcycle club event “in a hope to show them our outrage at their wanton use of leather in their clothing and motor bike seats.” “In fact,” said the organizer, “motorcycle gangs are one of the biggest abusers of wearing leather, and we decided it was high time that we let them know that we disagree with them using it, ergo, they should stop.”

According to witnesses, protesters arrived at the event in a vintage 1960′s era Volkswagen van and began to pelt the gang members with balloons filled with red colored water, simulating blood, and shouting “you’re murderers” to passersby. This, evidently, is when the brouhaha began.

“They peed on me!!!” charged one activist. “They grabbed me, said I looked like I was French, started calling me ‘La Trene’ and duct taped me to a tree so they could pee on me all day!”

Still others claimed they were forced to eat hamburgers and hot dogs under duress. Those who resisted were allegedly held down while several bikers “farted on their heads.”…

 

So That ______?

Leo Pusateri63 Comments

I just figured out the insidiousness connected with what passes for policymaking in Washington D.C. and elsewhere:

There aren’t enough”so thats” 

A long time ago I had a wise supervisor (in education, of all things) who said, “For everything you do in your job, as well as for every change you make in your procedure, you need to have a “so that” attached to it. In other words, I do this, so that________.” If you don’t have a good “so that,” then you have no good reason to keep on doing what you’re doing, or for implementing the change you’ve been contemplating. 

Prime example: “We will raise taxes on the wealthy so that_____.”

So that what? So that we can decrease the deficit? 

By all accounts, the tax hike currently being contemplated by the Democrats will produce enough extra income to run the government for a grand total of EIGHT MORE DAYS. And that is a liberal estimate. With the concomitant economic slowdown, more like FOUR extra days. 

So raising taxes so that to decrease the deficit doesn’t wash. 

So tell me, my Democrat friends- what is the “so that” connected to this grand scheme??

Our Liberal Future: a Vision

Mark Noonan45 Comments

Here’s what life will be like for, say, me in 2041:

I’ll have died at the age of 77 of an easily treatable disease which I could not get care for because the National Health Service didn’t have sufficient resources to treat me before the disease went too far.

I’ll have been living from the age of 67 forward in a one-room, government-supplied retirement home which I was forced in to because given the way the economy developed I was never able to secure enough wealth to replace the home I lost in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.

My 401k had been destroyed years previously.  First by a government program to start taxing it, secondly by the massive inflation which was necessary to get our annual deficit to become 15% of GDP. 

While I officially retired at the age of 67 and started to collect my Social Security (worth about 50% less than it is today because during that bout of inflation the government kept insisting, in spite of rising food and fuel prices, that inflation was non-existent and thus SS payments remained constant in dollar amounts while going down in actual value), I actually quit work at the age of 60 because I found out that by a varied combination of government benefits, I could actually get more income by sitting on my duff than by working 40 hours a week.  At that point, it stopped bothering me so much that a cheeseburger costs $12 because Uncle Sam was picking up the tab.  Until, that is, they banned the purchase of cheeseburgers in the interests of cutting National Health Service costs.

I did get some exercise from the age of about 57 on because the government mandates on fuel efficiency priced me out of automobile ownership.  This resulted in a great deal of walking on my part as the inefficient bus system provided by government didn’t get me to where I needed to be when I needed to be there.  I moved out of the suburbs and in to the city center because at least there were stores closer to home:  on the other hand, I had to pay higher prices for the basics because government policy was to forbid “big box” stores in the area because they provided “unfair” competition to the small shops.

I found as I entered my 50’s that food was harder to obtain – the price kept rising and there kept being less of it.  Various agricultural policies were taking more farm land out of production while various taxes were making the production and consumption of things like beef out of the question.  I was given Supplementary Food Insurance which allowed me to buy whole grain bread, government cheese and all the potatoes I could eat.

I got a boost to my health as I gave up cigarette smoking when the banned it outdoors, where I did most of my smoking.  Also, even buying generic smokes at the Indian reservation was running me $80 a carton.  On the other hand, I found out that ‘Capulco Gold Lights were an admirable substitute, though they did make things a bit hazy; on the plus side, I was permitted to fire up a joint even indoors at work!

It is where we’re heading, people, if things go well.  In other words, if the government manages to avoid complete fiscal collapse, this is how it will be.  Unless you are already quite rich or you manage to get juiced in with a high level, government job, this is what life will be like.  We can still avoid this, but only if we crush the left in 2014 and 2016.  If they win in both those years, then get ready for your government-rationed health care, food and housing…as people eke out a miserable, impoverished existence while liberals (living in guarded enclaves) endlessly tell us how great they are making things for us.

 

The Texas Education Miracle

Mark Noonan87 Comments

From The American Interest:

The Department of Education has just released its first state-by-state comparison of education statistics, and the report has a few surprises. Texas performed extremely well, tying five other states for the third-best graduation rate in the country, at 86 percent.
And Texas isn’t the only high-performing red state: Indiana, Nebraska, North Dakota and Tennessee all place within the top ten as well. Meanwhile, New York, Rhode Island, and California, all of which take a traditional, high-spending, blue model approach to education, are closer to the middle of the pack , with graduation rates in the mid-70s.
This is convincing evidence against the popular notion that we can fix the public education system if only we are willing to spend more money. Not only does Texas do a better job of graduating its students than its blue state competition; it does so at a fraction of the cost per student.

More and more of that and then go out and explain to the American people – especially poor and middle class Americans who live in areas which usually vote Democrat – that we have a better plan and that their current education problems are the deliberate and malicious result of Democrat education policies. Pull no punches – tell them (again and again and again) that liberal Democrats want lousy education because badly educated kids become government dependents.  Don’t let them off the hook by saying nonsensical, idiotic statements like “all of us want excellent education for our kids” because Democrats – by their actions – prove they don’t want it.  They want bloated education budgets.  Well paid union workers.  Graft and kickbacks.  But not education.  We bring this to the American people and we’ll start to do the main thing needed:  prove that we are on their side while Democrats are not.

Fight the long fight and never give the left an inch.  That is the path not just to victory, but a reformed America.