Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Goldberg Slams MSM

FNC’s Goldberg Slams MSM for Double Standard Connecting Violent Acts to Conservatives

by Brad Wilmouth - February 23rd, 2010 - New busters

On Monday’s The O’Reilly Factor on FNC, host Bill O’Reilly brought aboard FNC analyst Bernard Goldberg to discuss the mainstream media double standard in linking violence by individuals who express right-wing sentiments to conservatives while ignoring the political sentiments of left-wing individuals who commit violence.

[Snip]

And the other thing that the few media that picked up on this theme left out is what about all the things that this kamikazi pilot believed that are opposite of what the Tea Party believes? He’s anti-capitalism – they’re not. He’s anti-organized religion – they’re not. And on health care, he says insurance companies are corrupt and are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans. That’s left-wing rhetoric. Why didn’t they connect the dots between left-wing rhetoric and the kamikazi pilot?

So our MSM are arguing: Except for the fact that the kamikaze pilot is on the OPPOSITE side of every major issue the TEA Party movement believes in, he is JUST LIKE those crazies in the TEA Parties.

When someone makes an argument this bizarre, can't we denigrate their intelligence? Please? When do we get to insult those on the left the way they insult people on the right? Especially when their arguments are so ignorant and so wrong!


Monday, February 22, 2010

George Washington

The man, the myth, the legend.

by Joseph C. Smith Jr. and Tara Ross - February 22nd, 2010 - The Weekly Standard

He is the most easily recognized member of America’s founding generation. His involvement in founding events was so pervasive that one of his biographers described him as the “central feature in every major event of the revolutionary era.” He was celebrated as a legend, even in his own time.

Yet few really knew him, despite his fame. He was a very private man when it came to personal matters. And his reputation sometimes seems to be built as much on myth as reality.

I wonder if this is as true as some want it to seem. The background of the man is not that hard to sum up.

Though he came from a very wealthy family, he was the third son by a second wife and was raised in a world where older brothers were to inherit the wealth while George got nothing, as was common in that day.

He worked as an apprentice surveyor until he acquired sufficient knowledge to become a member of that technical profession. In that day apprentice was a subservient position and not likely to attract anyone who thought off himself as superior.

Though in the Ohio campaigns he had demonstrated bravery and leadership in battle, he also could not get a commission in the British Army during the conflict of 1740 and had to serve as an aide-de-camp to a general, also not a position that a proud man would accept.

Numerous other positions in life indicated he never had the arrogance of those who presumed they were superior. It is that ability to identify with the common man that made him such a magnificent leader of our forces during the revolutionary war.

He also quietly built up a huge fortune during his life, without creating enemies in the process due to his humility and courtesy.

However as much as he was humble, few doubted his ability and he inspired trust. That dichotomy is rare in men.

This article is one more attempt to answer what may not even be the most important question about George Washington. Why is he misunderstood may not be as important as why can't he be accepted for simply being a rare man of exceptional talent who repeatedly excelled at everything he did?


Sunday, February 21, 2010

Tea Party Movement
Lights Fuse For Right

by David Barstow - February 16th, 2010 - The New York Times

The ebbs and flows of the Tea Party ferment are hardly uniform. It is an amorphous, factionalized uprising with no clear leadership and no centralized structure. Not everyone flocking to the Tea Party movement is worried about dictatorship. Some have a basic aversion to big government, or Mr. Obama, or progressives in general. What’s more, some Tea Party groups are essentially appendages of the local Republican Party.

Awakened by the recession
But most are not. They are frequently led by political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession. Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.

That is often the point when Tea Party supporters say they began listening to Glenn Beck. With his guidance, they explored the Federalist Papers, exposés on the Federal Reserve, the work of Ayn Rand and George Orwell. Some went to constitutional seminars.

In an article ridiculing the TEA Party movement, The New York Times seems to reserve its greatest ridicule for the idea that Glen Beck is an appropriate source for anyone to get their information. Beck is artfully denigrated as just one more kook - advocating going into the woods and stocking up on guns and food to survive the collapse of society.

That Beck mocks the idea these tactics are effective or appropriate seems unworthy of mention by the liberal smear mongers of The New York Times.


Friday, February 19, 2010

The Day Everything Changed

by Publius - February 19th, 2010 - Big Government

Today, in 2009, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli gave voice to the frustrations and anger of millions of Americans. Movements need countless variables. But, most importantly, they need a spark.

To Mr. Santelli we say, “Happy Anniversary!”

Absolutely! Click on the link to see the rant even if you have seen it before. It is a great reminder of why we must take our nation back.


Wednesday, February 17, 2010

The Center Does Not Hold

by Maggie Gallagher - February 16th, 2010 - Townhall.com

Evan Bayh is tired of being the middle patch of ground in a culture war that never seems to end, never seems to get anywhere.

Culture war is not a term we hear that often anymore because, well, the crucial center of American politics is sick and tired of the very idea of culture war.

But author and professor James Davison Hunter's concept still best explains where we are today in American politics, where the vast center of America is stuck in a tug-of-war between two deeply competing visions of reality.

Very interesting article. I have long thought that part of the problem with the concept of the "center" in American politics is how rarely it represents a middle ground between the two dominant ideologies. Progressives (actually statists of various flavors from socialist to fascist) war constantly against conservatives (an amalgamation of capitalists and cultural stabilists). Ironically populists, communists, anarchists and libertarians have never found a long term home in the two parties these progressives and conservatives have dominated.

I have a little difficulty with the premise of the article since I am not sure that the independents (often referred to as moderates) who are being fought over really constitute a "middle" most of the time. Certainly libertarians and anarchists are to the right of conservatives - and communists are to the left of progressives. Populists are frequently in the middle but not always.

Perhaps this has much to do with the fact that the "center does not hold" since the center has little consistency that would allow it to retain any long term stability. As such it will always be drawn in to the battle between the two largest factions... drawn in against their will but drawn in nevertheless.


Sunday, February 14, 2010

Under Obama,
Crony Capitalism
Again Rules The Day

by Michael Barone - February 14th, 2010 - Washington Examiner

Lobbyists, reports the Center for Responsive Politics, had a record 2009 in Barack Obama's Washington. Despite candidate Obama's promises to shun them, they raked in $3,470,000,000. [For those not quick with numbers that is three and one half BILLION DOLLARS] Somewhere up there, Tommy Corcoran is chuckling

You have to read the article to understand who Tommy Corcoran was, but the short story is - he was a lobbyist who helped industrialist Henry J. Kaiser get the contracts to help build war material that significantly aided winning World War II.

What is ironic is that the American form of government, has at key times in our history, had to rely on the ability of government leaders to pick industrialists who were most effective to help us fight our wars. No better example exists than World War II and Henry J. Kaiser. You have to wonder if Corcoran had not introduced Kaiser to Roosevelt if Kaiser, along with numerous other industrialists who were conscientious in building the machines that won that war, would have been allowed to help. The key to this process being good or bad is whether they pay bribes to get the contract purely for profits or conversely pay for access to argue their case to help the nation. Lobbyists can be effective for either motivation.

Few Democrats can tell the difference between these motivations because they would never consider that some of our best industrialists are as patriotic as anyone you will find.

That is the problem with Obama. He does not appear to pick those he rewards based on what they can do for our nation (if he can even tell what that is), but on what they are doing for the Democrat Party. It is the Chicago way.


Saturday, February 13, 2010

The New Fascists:

Part 1 – A Political Primer

by James Hudnall - February 11th, 2010 - Big Journalism

There is no left or right. Communist, Socialist, Liberal, Conservative, Progressive, Democrat, Republican, those are all meaningless terms. They are used to confuse people so they miss the point. The most important point about politics there is. There are only two schools of political thought and they have predictable results. All the names and labels for them are just smoke and mirrors.

Political ideology is designed by elites to trick the masses into doing what they want. Each side tells you something designed to get your emotions going so they can play you. They get you to agree to give them more power, money and control over your lives by telling you some kind of story.

We need to put that vicious cycle to an end. It’s time to understand what their real goals are. But to free your mind, you need to be educated first. Only by seeing the road ahead can you avoid tripping on stones or falling off cliffs.

There are only two real political choices to make. And it has nothing to do with parties. It has to do with core beliefs. You are for one side or another. These sides are diametrically opposed. The best way I can describe the two choices is, freedom or slavery. That is what it boils down to. And the slave in question is you.

Great article. Though the premise is simply one way to look at the issue in question, the issue is so important that any coverage is a fantastic step forward. The key point is that freedom versus slavery is as accurate a way to describe the choice as any that anyone else has ever invented. Everyone with a political ideology to sell makes up convoluted reasons you should believe, yet in the final analysis that can be summed as systems for government to control you (slavery) or systems for you to control your own actions (freedom).

Pick one and then follow the logic of any political ideology to its logical conclusion and you will know whether it is acceptable to you or not. However do not expect that the logical conclusion of an ideology will be easy to follow. The proponents of slavery have learned much about making the process of deceiving you difficult to perceive.


Friday, February 12, 2010

The Rise And Fall
Of Frank Church:

A Lesson for Conservatives

by Larrey Anderson - February 11th, 2010 - American Thinker

...when I a teenager, I thought Frank Church walked on water.

By accident -- or maybe it was fate -- my opinion of the senator from the great state of Idaho, and of his politics, started to change. I heard Frank Church deliver two speeches in two different parts of Idaho. (This would have been in the summer of 1974... )

Senator Church's first speech was given early in the day at a college in liberal northern Idaho. He banged on the podium and, in his stentorian voice, promised the (mostly progressive) audience that he would do whatever it took to protect the newly granted woman's right to choose under Roe v. Wade. The crowd (mostly young college students and their professors) went wild.

The second speech was presented in conservative (and mostly Mormon) eastern Idaho. Instead of banging on a podium, Church clutched the edges of the dais. Tears swelled in his eyes as he told the audience how precious were the lives of the unborn. The audience was emotionally enthralled by his oration.
There was a reporter who attended both speeches with me. He was a liberal friend and confidant of mine. The reporter seemed unperturbed...

This was 30 years ago. Yet Republicans still allow Liberals to get away with this hypocrisy. We still allow reporters to ignore the corruption of progressives. This article goes in to great depth of the evils practiced by Church in subverting the CIA, including allusions to the number of foreign allies who were killed as a direct result of this evil man's indifference to the costs of progressive corruption. The co-option into progressive corruption by the NRA is noted prominently in the article, with their on-going endorsement of progressives who pretend to be conservative by paying lip service to the idea of second amendment rights as their only conservative position. They quietly aid in the subversion of even these citizen rights where they can.

This article is an important lesson in the consequences of pretending that progressives are good people. They are not. They are evil and duplicitous and the consequences of their actions always harm our nation.


Thursday, February 11, 2010

The Closing Of The Liberal Mind

by David Horowitz - February 11th, 2010 - Front Page Magazine

The current issue of The New Republic contains a vapid, mean-spirited, and indefensible attack on one of the most important intellectual figures of our time. Alan Wolfe’s review of Thomas Sowell’s new book, Intellectuals and Society , is not even a review. Not a single idea presented in the book is addressed in Wolfe’s text, which is simply a lengthy ad hominem attack on Sowell that displays astounding ignorance of both Sowell and his important intellectual oeuvre.

It has long amused me that the magnificent writer and intellectual, Thomas Sowell, has been repeatedly smeared by those on the left with the enthusiasm they usually reserve for Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush or Sarah Palin. David Horowitz notes here in this report that once again, their attack is a second rate farce and contains no intelligent criticism of Mr. Sowell. It is simply a smear.

Since my enthusiasm for Thomas Sowell is well known, I am sure I will have to deal with some liberal acquaintances trying to rub it in that Dr. Sowell has been smeared, again. Their criticisms are weak but it never seems to bother them.

How can these progressives feel such hate for a man with Dr. Sowell's record of civility and intelligence?



Wednesday, February 10, 2010

ACORN Slated To
Get Nearly $4 Billion

... in Obama's fiscal 2011 budget

by Anathhartmann - February 10th, 2010 - Washington Times


To add to the list of outrageous earmarks in Obama's fiscal 2011 budget, ACORN, the embezzlement-prone, voter-registration-fraud-plagued, leftist community organizing group, is slated to receive nearly $4 billion from a taxpayer-funded slush fund.

The money will come from the Community Development Block Grant, one of the Department of Housing and Urban Development's longest-running programs. The HUD Web site cryptically defines the grant's purpose as providing "communities with resources to address a wide range of unique community development needs," not a reassuring description given the group's recent past history of aiding the community through gratuitous missappropriation of funds.

Despite congressional attempts to cut off funding to this notoriously corrupt organization, ACORN always seems to find new ways to feed at the government trough. Barack Obama helped to train ACCORN in their use of Saul Alinsky techniques to extort money from the taxpayers and he continues to have a soft spot for their "community organizing" efforts.


Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Partisanship, Then and Now

by Victor Davis Hanson - February 8th, 2010 - National Review Online

One of the stranger behaviors of the ever-stranger Obama administration is its sudden adoption of the "wounded fawn" posture.

No opposition was more stridently critical of a sitting president than was the anti-Bush Left. Barack Obama, as candidate and president, could not start a speech without saying "Bush did it." And have we forgotten the 2006–08 canonization of Michael Moore, the silence about the Nazi slurs, the award-winning assassination docudramas, the Knopf novel about killing George Bush, the "General Betray Us" ad, Al Gore's vein-bulging "brownshirts"outburst, and on and on?

But suddenly, pundits and politicians have embraced a new gospel about conciliation and the need to restrain harsh discourse — which is fine, but many of these advocates for a gentler, kinder dialogue were bomb-throwers just a few years ago.

One of the most articulate of the current group of outstanding writers is Victor Davis Hanson. I love to read a man who can accurately quote useful knowledge provided by geniuses of 2500 years ago, as he does with Thucydides in this article.


While America Slept

by Andrew Roberts - February 2010 (publication date) - The American Spectator

What we are witnessing today is nothing less than the fourth great assault on the primacy of the English-speaking peoples from aggressive totalitarian belief systems. The methods might be different each time, but the mindset hasn’t changed. Yet what I fear might have changed is a growing unwillingness of the elites of the English-speaking peoples to continue paying the price for their liberty. The sunset clause President Obama put on his latest surge at his West Point speech is the latest example of this unwillingness.

If the United States does not provide the kind of leadership in our risky world that was provided by Churchill, the two Roosevelts, Truman, JFK, Reagan, and Thatcher, and which one day—especially in the field of homeland security—will be accorded to President Bush and Tony Blair, then we must tremble for the future. For America to listen to the siren voices of isolationism and to withdraw into herself— perhaps citing Washington’s Farewell Address as she does so—would be utterly disastrous for our planet in the 21st century. Power abhors a vacuum, and America’s withdrawal would soon be followed by the emergence of another nation that would not exhibit a fraction of America’s decency, fairness, and veneration for the popular will.

Many Americans have lost confidence in our nation and its heritage because of attacks that are insincere and false. Three huge attacks are currently occuring.

For a hundred years socialists have constantly attacked America and its freedom based economic system of capitalism. This has accelerated dramatically with the total politicizing of our school systems under John Dewey and his disciples. Traditional America is constantly compared unfavorably with an idyllic utopia that has never existed. Quite the contrary, every attempt to inflict socialism on any nation under its various iterations has proved to be an economic and national disaster - Russia, Germany, Argentina, China, North Korea, Cambodia. In nation after nation socialism has led to murder of its own people and tyranny rarely matched in history since the mongols, and they inflicted it on other people, not their own.

We have also been attacked by the Hispanic dominated cultures of Central and South America due to their hatred and envy of American success. The ongoing corruption of their political systems have made repeated interference by America and its investor class a source of resentment. Especially for Mexico, the wealth of our nation is a source of embarrassment. Mexico is the richest land in the Americas. Their continued poverty when compared with America grates on all classes within their nation. Yet today they consider America corrupt and weak. A group called La Raza leads a culture war with certainty that they can destroy America and get their revenge for previous insults.

Another renewed source of external aggression aimed at our nation comes from the Islamic cultures now enriched by petroleum wealth. The dream of re-establishing their dominance is based on the brief history of Islam conquering from Northern Africa to India, including sections of Asia and extending into the Iberian peninsula. The constant internal squabbles and warfare that followed leading to a collapse of Islam's dominance are ignored by these modern day Muslims. The dream is to recreate the period when the first 4 Caliphates experienced unbroken expansion and victory. This dream drives their hatred for America and what they see as our nation's cultural corruption.

Much of our nation's own elite have chosen to accept this hatred as justified. These three aggressors are conceded to be right in their hatred for us. Our press is dominated by left wing believers in the evils of America. They believe in the redistribution of wealth that socialism preaches. They defend the idea that anyone should have the right to invade our nation and participate in our country's economic success, no matter how much that destroys the wealth of our own citizens. This includes immediately participating upon arrival in welfare that takes away from our own poor. They even accept that Islam is the future power of the world and preach a cowering acceptance of our ultimate destruction to mitigate the external attacks during the process of our demise.


America is looking for leadership that understands all these powerful forces arrayed against us... and which does not fear them. We are looking for someone who can re inspire our belief in our ability to win. That search does not denote a single individual though. I believe it starts with a demand that everyone who wants to regain the pride that used to course through our veins, become again the kind of individual who will follow the kind of leader we seek. Ultimately, no leader can lead if there are no willing followers who already accept the culture of warrior for the cause of freedom.


The Fallacy Of "Fairness"

by Thomas Sowell - February 9th, 2010 - Townhall.com

Some years ago, for example, there was a big outcry that various mental tests used for college admissions or for employment were biased and "unfair" to many individuals or groups. Fortunately there was one voice of sanity-- David Riesman, I believe-- who said: "The tests are not unfair. LIFE is unfair and the tests measure the results."

This is a magnificent explanation of the problems with the "fairness doctrine" of the progressive movement. Yet as intelligent as this analysis is, only those who already understand the point will accept it. Far too many people in life want to believe that if they don't get what they want it is not fair. They cling to that belief in direct opposition to all evidence that no one has committed some evil act to deny them their just place in the universe. That is called delusion. What is not delusion is the hate they feel for the scapegoats they find to blame for their problems.


Monday, February 08, 2010

The New Dating Game

by Charlotte Allen - February 15th, 2010 (Publication date) - The Weekly Standard

Welcome to the New Paleolithic, where tens of thousands of years of human mating practices have swirled into oblivion like shampoo down the shower drain and Cro-Magnons once again drag women by the hair into their caves—and the women love every minute of it. Louts who might as well be clad in bearskins and wielding spears trample over every nicety developed over millennia to mark out a ritual of courtship as a prelude to sex: Not just marriage (that went years ago with the sexual revolution and the mass-marketing of the birth-control pill) or formal dating (the hookup culture finished that)—but amorous preliminaries and other civilities once regarded as elementary, at least among the college-educated classes.

This article is not primarily about dating. You cannot write off a generation of a culture without writing off the culture. White women in America today are primarily not having children, as the article makes clear. That guarantees a trend for our nation that will merely accelerate over time. Whites, and their culture, will rapidly become a minority in this nation. The current culture of blacks, hispanics and muslims is to scapegoat whites and blame them for everything that happens to them. This will just get worse when whites are a minority. Our children will see much worse times than most can currently conceive.

What depresses me is that I can see nothing that will change this direction. The focus of Republican politics right now does not even begin to address the long term culture damage that has been jammed down our throats by the liberal teachers in our schools. They have successfully denigrated white culture and capitalism so well that there is no chance of reversing the damage. We are barely hanging on enough to slow down our cultural destruction. Reversing the damage is not on anyone's agenda.


Sunday, February 07, 2010

'It's Not Your Business Model That Sucks, It's You That Sucks!'

... Breitbart to Media at Tea Party Convention

by
Noel Sheppard - February 6th, 2010 - News Busters

Conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart had some harsh words for media members Saturday saying, "It's not your business model that sucks, it's you that sucks."

Addressing the National Tea Party convention in Nashville, Tennessee, Breitbart accused the press of "contempt for the American people."

"In order to create the perception that the minority is the majority and the majority is not just the minority, but bad, racist, homophobic, all those buzzwords that they learned in the freshman orientation class at Wesleyan, are used as weapons to try to destroy you and intimidate you to not speak up and to speak your mind," said Breitbart...


Andrew Brietbart has worked with Matt Drudge and has established some profitable new media outlets of his own, which indicates he knows a thing or two about business models. His contention that it is not the newspaper business model that is going bankrupt all over America, but that it is the newspaper business model run by liberal anti American owners who have nothing but contempt for their readers makes for some interesting contemplation.

What if Breitbart is right? What if all these newspaper owners that are laying off staff every other day and bleeding money at a prodigious rate are simply destroying their own companies because they refuse to acknowledge that they are out of step with their customers? Is there anything dumber than that?


Friday, February 05, 2010

Struck Down

Feds refuse to explain how agent injured Daily Caller writer

by
Tucker Carlson and Jon Ward - February 4th, 2010 - Daily Caller

The State Department has refused to answer basic questions about an accident that took place in Washington on Wednesday night, in which a U.S. Diplomatic Security Service vehicle struck Daily Caller employee Sean Medlock as he was crossing the street.

An agent in the vehicle, Mike McGuinn, did not identify himself to Medlock at the scene, or apologize for running him down. Indeed, Washington, D.C., police drove to a local emergency room to serve Medlock with a jaywalking citation as he lay prostrate in a hospital bed, while a man who identified himself as “special agent” stood by watching and taking notes.

The arrogant actions of Barack Obama as President has led to the same kind of attitude permeating the day to day actions of our government employees. This attitude of arrogance by goverrnment goons is a key reason socialism always leads to tyranny. The idea that government rights, such as money entitlements and legal powers, flows from the government to the people rather than being Constitutionally restricted, always leads to the abuse of power by government goons at all levels.

How ironic that in this case the alleged victim is a member of another arrogant group in our nation, the fourth estate.

Someone is obviously lying here.

We have, on either side of this incident, an individual who is convinced of their right to bend the truth based on a privilege they claim comes from a Constitution that does not grant them the rights they assume. Instead it limits rights against the people, something they seem never to admit.

I wonder if we will ever know the truth of what happened?


Thursday, February 04, 2010

Poof:
Another 800,000
Jobs Disappear

by Chris Isidore - Februaru 4th, 2010 - CNNMoney.com

The problem is that BLS models appear to have grossly overestimated the number of new businesses that opened during the recession.

The payroll number is created through a monthly survey of employers, but that survey misses employers who start a business during the course of the year, as well as those who have gone out of business.

So every month BLS uses what is known as a birth-death adjustment to estimate the number of jobs created or lost from that turnover in business.

During the April 2008-March 2009 period, that adjustment added jobs to the overall payroll number in 11 of the 12 months, resulting in a net gain of 717,000 jobs [when the actual number should have been a loss of close to 100,000].

"When the numbers were coming out, the idea that we had a significant number of businesses being created didn't make sense," said Baker.

There is a concern that this problem didn't end in March of 2009. In fact, the adjustment added even more jobs -- 990,000 -- in the nine months reported since then.

So another big revision in the payroll numbers could be looming a year from now. That means this Friday's report should give pause to anyone who is depending on the official numbers to signal real improvement in the economy.

If you think the recession is showing signs it is over you are deluded. A year from now it is likely that another million fictitious jobs well be deleted from our government numbers and the actual unemployment will be raised by a couple of percentage points.

Unemployment is currently growing faster than the government can adjust through fictitious estimated jobs. That should create serious doubt about the Obama regime's current published lies.


Big Government -- STOP!

Editorial - January 21st, 2010 - The Economist

America’s most vibrant political force at the moment is the anti-tax tea-party movement. Even in leftish Massachusetts people are worried that Mr Obama’s spending splurge, notably his still-unpassed health-care bill, will send the deficit soaring. In Britain, where elections are usually spending competitions, the contest this year will be fought about where to cut. Even in regions as historically statist as Scandinavia and southern Europe debates are beginning to emerge about the size and effectiveness of government.

There are good reasons, as well as bad ones, why the state is growing; but the trend must be reversed. Doing so will prove exceedingly hard—not least because the bigger and more powerful the state gets, the more it tends to grow. But electorates, as in Massachusetts, eventually revolt; and such expressions of voters’ fury are likely to shape politics in the years to come.

This is an interesting hypothesis, that "big government is about to be reduced." Certainly there are large segments of the population who are furious about the stifling society that big government creates. Freedom is not dead yet... still the portion of society that values freedom more than a government handout is growing smaller.

There is also a large segment of society that understands the economic disaster that socialist programs create, including sustained high unemployment and emasculation of the work ethic. Both weaken a nation. The problem is the segment that understands this is usually much smaller than the segment that votes for a free ride.

With the admiration for the evil of democracy that has been fostered by otherwise intelligent people, the desire for free programs from government, and the growing lack of insistence on freedom, the hypothesis to resist the usual course of democracy's corruption into tyranny looks pretty shaky to me. Yet I cannot deny that the Miracle in Massachusetts occurred.

I think this November's election day is going to be a truly interesting event in the world's history. I believe no matter what the result will be better than I would have hoped last year. The question is whether all of the conflicting forces now embroiling our nation will truly provide momentum to reduce government or whether the forces merely slow the race to tyranny.


Monday, February 01, 2010

Free James O'Keefe

by Ben Stein - February 1st, 2010 - American Spectator

During the last Presidential election, a gang of men calling themselves Black Panthers showed up at a polling place in Michigan. They threatened any voter who did not vote for Barack Obama. This was witnessed and documented.

[snip]

A few days ago, four young conservatives posed as telephone repairmen and entered the branch office of Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana in New Orleans. Their goal was to check to see if the phone system in the office was working. The men, under the leadership of a young media impresario named James O'Keefe, were querying why constituents of Sen. Landrieu had been unable to register negative feelings about Obamacare on the Senator's phone line. They had been told that perhaps the phones were out of order.

Two cases, one covered up and not prosecuted by Obama and one in which the full powers of the federal government are being used to persecute the political opponents of the President.

This is what America has become today. There was a time when even Democrats would rise up in outrage if our government acted as it has acted in these two cases. Yet today, the people of America, both left and right, seem to have become tolerant of government abuse.

Stein end's his article with the belief that "We are not afraid. And we're not going away." I wish I was certain that the majority of our nation still felt that way.