States are running out of money. If there was a bankruptcy process for States, many would be going through it. Naturally, this means lawmakers are looking for things to cut and places to save money. An obvious target is the generous subsidies they force taxpayers to give to public universities so little Johnny can sit around playing beer-pong in his Birkenstocks.
And now Johnny is pissed off that the gravy train is slowing down. So what’s a Berkley Progressive to do? Destroy some property, of course!
See how a Berkley student representative defends this leftwing tantrum
Petulant, entitlement-minded tantrums aside, are students right to be upset? No.
They have no right to taxpayer money for their education. Moreover, part of the reason tuition is so high is because government continues to subsidize it, which encourages overconsumption.
Maybe students should target their ire at universities which waste money on silly moonbat courses.
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Mitchell Blatt put this compilation together (via GayPatriot):
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Some lefty in Philly has terrible advice for Obama that I really hope he listens to:
This may come as a surprise to some people, but the U.S. Constitution does not specify the size of the Supreme Court.
The original Judiciary Act of 1789 set the number of justices at six. It shrank to five in 1801. It expanded to seven in 1807. It grew to nine in 1837 and 10 in 1863. It fell back to seven in 1866. It returned to nine in 1869 and has remained at that number since.
Political issues accounted for the changes. The Federalists reduced the number to five, hoping to deprive Thomas Jefferson of an appointment. The incoming Democrats repealed that measure, raising the number to seven. It went to nine in 1837 to give Andrew Jackson two more seats. Civil War issues led to more fluctuations before the court settled at nine under President Ulysses Grant.
So if nine justices is not writ in stone, the embattled President Obama should deal with this hostile conservative/reactionary court by adding three members.
I can think of few things better to cement public opposition to an already unpopular President, and all but assure his defeat in the next election, than to engage in such a naked power grab. I can say with complete confidence that there is no way this makes it through Congress, so there is no down side to hoping he tries.
Go for it, Barack! Yes, you can!
Hat-tip: HotAir
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A lot of phrases are being thrown about in the midst of the current health care debate. Perhaps the most common is the sentiment that we need to control the costs of health care.
Both right and left agree that it is desirable to have health care cost less. But controlling costs? That implies centralized authority, that someone will wrangle greedy health providers and force them to lower costs. It’s a decidedly statist vision. Yet even those offering free market solutions often adopt such language. This is a mistake. While it might seem acceptable in the proper context to say that “competition would control costs,” it subtly cedes moral ground to the statists.
Such totalitarian language is common in America. It’s routinely asserted that our presidents are elected to rule the country or manage the economy. Both of these assertions are absurd, or ought to be, if taken literally.
There are probably many other great examples. What other totalitarian terms or phrases have infiltrated and proliferated throughout our vernacular?
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Frank Rich writes a lot of nonsense. His latest column can only be described as deranged, as he flails about trying to tar the entire conservative and tea party movements as unhinged. In order to do so, he must play fast and loose with the facts. One such lie involves the man who flew a plan into an IRS building:
Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner.
He’s not a card-carrying member, but there are disturbing “overlaps.” You see how he does that? Very sneaky.
Yet the picture he paints of Stack as a right-wing nut is entirely dishonest, though he is not the first to try do so.
Left out of Rich’s characterization of Stack are the many aspects of his manifesto which overlap mainstream leftwing thought, including that of Frank Rich. He attacks drug and insurance companies. He complains about corporate profits. He swipes at organized religion. He calls George W. Bush a “puppet.” And then he finally ends by mocking capitalism.
But Frank Rich sees overlaps with the Tea Party.
The truth is that Joseph Stack will not fit into any tidy ideological box. His rant runs the ideological spectrum, making it easy to find a sentence here or there to hang around the neck of whomever one seeks to target for guilt by association of thought. The only real theme that unifies it all is that he saw our government as broken. It seems most Americans, from left and right, are guilty of agreeing.
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Who are the most conservative and liberal members in Congress? Every year National Journal scores the votes of all members to answer that question. For 2009:
The 10 Most Liberal Senators
- Sherrod Brown (tied 1st)
- Roland Burris (tied 1st)
- Ben Cardin (tied 1st)
- Jack Reed (tied 1st)
- Sheldon Whitehouse (tied 1st)
- John Kerry
- Frank Lautenberg
- Barbara Mikulski
- Chris Dodd
- Dick Durbin
The 10 Most Conservative Senators
- James Inhofe
- Jim DeMint
- Jim Bunning
- Tom Coburn
- James Risch
- John Thune
- John Ensign
- Mitch McConnell
- Richard Burr
- Jeff Sessions
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Rubio is a coconut! That racist slur comes courtesy of MSNBC contributor Donny Deutsch.
Conservative minorities will not be tolerated by the identity politics adherents on the left. Watch, this vicious attack machine is only getting started. They will target him for personal destruction the way the left targets all minorities who wander off the reservation of government dependency and adherence to the Democratic Party.
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To close out my coverage of CPAC 2010, I’ll finally give you my thoughts on Glenn Beck’s keynote address.
The speech was quite enjoyable. Beck takes a lot of criticism, some of it deserved, for his seemingly erratic behavior. But it only serves to enhance his sincerity, which really comes across. It is clear that he believes passionately in what he is saying. He’s certainly not doing it just to win votes, since he isn’t running for anything. Neither does one get the impression that he is doing it to sell books and boost his ratings. He just believes it.
I was very happy to see him target Progressivism as the source of America’s ills. The Progressive Era, which continues to influence left-wing thought today, is too little understood. What turn of the century Progressives promoted was essentially fascism. They cheered European fascists like Hitler and Mussolini, only turning on the former when he betrayed their other buddies in the USSR. Like other fascist movements, they believed in the perfectibility of man through social policy, which lead to disasters like Prohibition. The redistributive income tax was a Progressive reform brought about under Wilson. The Progressive Era also essentially rewrote our Constitution.
Photo by The Patriot Room
With this understanding, I was simply delighted to see such an intellectual challenge to the source of today’s problems from a speaker like Beck. It would have been so easy for him to just claim that it’s all Barack Obama, but he didn’t do that. Kudos to him.
Since the speech he has taken criticism from some, such as Bill Bennett and Rush Limbaugh, for giving Republicans little, if any, more credit than Democrats. While I agree with Rush on the point that it’s tiring to hear people say “there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats,” I didn’t quite get that from Beck’s speech. Nor do I think the speech itself promoted a third party just because it criticized Republicans. Criticizing Republicans from the right is what will ultimately keep them in line!
So yes, he criticized Republicans. Yes, he doesn’t think they are sufficiently apologetic for their past mistakes. That’s a valid criticism. As John Hawkins pointed out in reply to Bennett, Republicans like Mike Pence and Jim DeMint who do get it are the exception that prove the rule. They got it before when the rest of the party was spending big, so it’s not enough just for them to get it now. If anything is going to be different should Republicans retake Congress, the party establishment needs to get it, too.
I also agree with RS McCain that some of the criticisms of Beck stink of professional jealousy. How dare this upstart get a keynote, when so many other hard working conservatives have been paying their dues for much longer? Of course, these same conservatives balked at such logic when it promoted John McCain as the GOP nominee. I don’t ultimately know if that’s the motivation behind some of these criticisms, but it would explain the odd tirades of Mark Levin.
At the end of the day, I doubt much of the criticism matters. Beck was very well received by those who were there, and reached out to the Tea Parties and showed them that their voice is being heard in the broader conservative movement. That’s a good thing. That isn’t promoting a third party. In fact, it makes one less likely. Now let us all stop bickering and return to our united opposition to Obama’s radical agenda.
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What happens when Andrew Breitbart runs into O’Keefe smearing, racist-calling liar Max Blumenthal? Fireworks!
(via Big Journalism)
Breitbart was also ambushed by an obnoxious, professional agitator from Philly:
Midnight Blue Says has more footage of Breitbart with the Philly fanatic.
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Moonbattery points out that the usual suspects are taking advantage of the attention generated by the Winter Olympics to do their typical song and dance.
Calling themselves the “Anti Poverty Committee,” moonbats dressed in black “assaulted police officers, spray-painted cars and buses, smashed windows, and terrorized passers-by.”
They seem quite confused. How is it they think that destroying wealth will help fight poverty?
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science, but please don't hold that against me.
