Central Planning For Dummies: Don’t Ignore New York

Yesterday, former SEIU President and Obama Administration appointee, Andy Stern, wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal lauding the virtues of the Chinese Communist centrally planned economy. He asserts that  the Communist’s 12th Five-Year plan has set the goal of achieving  low  unemployment, public housing and rural development and with the extraordinary growth of the Chinese economy, central planning  has proven itself to be a superior model to ” the free-market fundamentalist, share holder only model.”

Stern conveniently ignores the fact that the central planning model in China is having problems and that their economy is contracting month by month. As a member of the labor elite he should be concerned with this because one of the major stories of the past week in China is that the contracting economy has been causing labor unrest and out-of-control land grabs in rural areas.  The underpaid factory workers (by most accounts the real engine of China’s extraordinary economic growth) have a history of unrest and their growing demands are usually stifled by the  unions controlled by the Communist government. Ironically, with China’s embrace of markets,  labor conditions and labor rights have also been enhanced, often despite the best efforts at the Communist Party to enforce labor discipline.

Of course, China- envy has been going on for some time now. Andy Stern is not new in his admiration of the authoritarianism of the centralized administrative state. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has long been an advocate of Chinese industrial development, and some American corporate types also like  the known quantities of central planning. Casino magnates like Steve Wynn have praised the Chinese government’s stability. New experiments in this model are being attempted as well. The Congressional budget supercommittee was an attempt to implement a more rational, authoritarian and streamlined form of governance.

However,  I wonder why  American advocates of central planning have to go to a foreign Communist country to find intellectual support for their ideas?  The United States has been experimenting with central planning  for most of the 20th Century. The huge adminstrative apparatus of the federal government is really nothing more than centralized economic decision-making.  And those states we call “welfare states” are really, in fact, experiments in central planning that rest on the basic idea that capitalism is a failure for many.

However, the economic failure of states like New York and California offer up-close and homegrown proof of the failure of central economic planning, and this  is  a very inconvenient truth for the China-envy crowd.

Books have been written on the miserable effects that central planning has had on New York, so we won’t go into all that here. One of the worst examples of  New York  government central planning are its economic development councils, or economic redevelopment agencies. They are fonts of political corruption and cronyism, and they keep the unions happy enough so that they keep electing Democrats.

And we know the results of multi-generational Blue statism: Like all socialist countries and other socialist entities, the people really, really, really want to get out. The 2010 Census shows that over 1 million people left New York between 2000 and 2009. Further data shows that they are leaving for low tax, Republican- controlled states like Florida, Texas, Georgia and other southern states.

We are witnessing the failure of central planning all over the United States. Budgets are bloated and cannot be paid for. The high taxation that results has driven businesses and population away. But faced with this reality, the advocates of central planning choose to ignore the empirical conclusions that can be garnered from their long-gestating experiments. Instead, they are (desperately) trying to convince Americans that a Communist country holds all the answers. To them  and their technocratic allies, it appears that the the Constitutional order, the republican form of government, and American liberty itself, are no longer workable.That is why they think that only dummies can see value in such things.

Obama Merely on Globalist/Internationalist Continuum

What the American elite and ruling class fears more than an end to deficit spending and a return to the gold standard, is  that the United States return to an isolationist foreign policy.

Although the “globalist” precedent-setting and poll boosting that is the underlying purpose of Obama’s Libyan action has been mentioned elsewhere by the likes of Limbaugh and Mark Levin, the legal aspects of his action bear analysis because Obama has said some extraordinary things which suggest he feels he has no need couch the globalist nature of U.S. military action in the language of national defense nor “national interest.”

As he said in a speech given in El Salvador, “we have confidence that we are not going in alone, and it is our military that is being volunteered by others to carry out missions that are important not only to us, but are important internationally. “

But despite the protestations of his conservative critics, the use of the American military for international, United Nations sanctioned warfare has been the law of the land since 1949.  In that year Congress passed the United Nations Participation Act, which grants the President the authority  to send American forces into combat merely in support of  peacemaking missions approved by the United Nations. The UNPA allows the President to do this without obtaining the authority of Congress beforehand.

Section 6 of the UNPA states: “The President shall not be deemed to require the authorization of the Congress to make available to the Security Council on its call in order to take action under article 42 of said Charter (UN Charter).” To date, the courts have upheld this under the dictates of customary treaty law, where treaties supersede domestic law-yes, even the U.S. Constitution.

In light of this  old law and the decades-long globalist orientation of the U.S. military, the question of constitutional war powers appears to be moot. The more important and poignant question should be “When were we asked to make it so?”

Perhaps the answer to that was given by the court historian of the liberal regime, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in a 1995 symposium on American isolationism (for them a chronic problem). Notice in what he says that the isolationists tendencies of the people were suspect, so it is implied the question never would be directly put to the people. It would be engineered out of them. Do you expect anything less my dear readers? He said:

For President Roosevelt the great objective in 1943–1945, besides winning the war, was to tie the United States into a postwar structure of peace. The memory, still so vivid, of the repudiation of the League two short decades before was not encouraging. Isolationism had been the American norm for a century and a half; internationalism was only a two-year Wilsonian aberration. No one could assume that isolationism would simply wither away. It had, Roosevelt felt, to be brought to a definite end by binding American commitments to an international order. And he felt additionally that as many of these commitments as possible should be made while the war was still on, before peace could return the nation to its old isolationist habits. F.D.R. said privately, “Anybody who thinks that isolationism is dead in this country is crazy. As soon as this war is over, it may well be stronger than ever.”

So, while the war was still on, Roosevelt organized international meetings at Bretton Woods, Dumbarton Oaks, San Francisco and elsewhere to involve the United States in the international machinery that would deal with postwar questions. In particular, in the words of the diplomat Charles E. Bohlen, who served as White House liaison to the State Department, F.D.R. saw the United Nations as “the only device that could keep the United States from slipping back into isolationism.” And, as Winston Churchill said on his return from the Yalta Conference, this new international organization must “not shrink from establishing its will against the evildoer or evil planner in good time and by force of arms.” Once again, the ultimate guarantee of peace, the ultimate test of collective security and world law lay in military enforcement.

That the American people do not understand that their military is the spearhead of global governance and the United Nations is nothing new.

That they believe their law is purely derived from the U.S. Constitution and not from international legal institutions is nothing new either.

In a country that continues to celebrate a war  (WW2) that had as its most important outcomes the enslavement of 1/3 of humanity under the iron heel of  International Communism and the establishment of global governance by its “most popular” president, is it any wonder?

When the American people wake up and begin to understand that their corrupt elite  has been using their blood, labor and treasure to subvert America and end its  sovereignty in the name of the New World Order, I certainly hope there will be hell to pay.

I would not expect anything less.

(Hold on, it’s coming. Hold on, it’s almost here.)

Tsunamis and the Mangina

The definition of a tsunami, a.k.a. tidal wave:”a series of water waves caused by the displacement of a large volume of a body of water. Owing to the immense volumes of water and the high energy involved, tsunamis can devastate coastal regions.”

“Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other underwater explosions (including detonations of underwater nuclear devices), landslides and other mass movements, meteorite ocean impacts or similar impact events, and other disturbances above or below water all have the potential to generate a tsunami.”

So, what that all means is that the massive displacement of water in a large body of water is caused by large energy-producing events well beneath the surface of said body. So much water is originally displaced by the event, that when it returns, naturally, it overloads the the boundaries that once held it where it was. The effects, as we have seen in Japan, are devastating to coastal communities.

In recent years, many have been complaining, documenting, lamenting and cheering that in America and Western Civilization in general, traditional forms of masculinity are dead. Instead, they say, what has arisen is a very effeminate, weak, and childish man, especially amongst white (European) males. We have miraculously gone from what was falsely deconstructed as a “male dominant patriarchal society” to one in which women are increasingly becoming the dominant gender in the workplace and in education.

S o, to  answer the question “Where are all the real men?” the tsunami is actually a pretty good analogy. Masculinity has receded simply because it has been displaced by many forces that wanted to see it go. But unless men of all stripes, and especially western men, do not want to be forever emasculated and demoted to second-class citizenship, they must regain their self-respect and dignity and come back to their natural place in society.

Where have all the real men gone then? They sit and watch in silence, waiting for the moment of their return, and when they do, they will bring with them an energy that will overwhelm the boundaries the left had been trying to forge.

Far-Right Marine Le Pen Leads Presidential Polling in France

According to a Harris poll released on March 5, Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front, would come in first if the first round of  Presidential elections were held this year. That puts her ahead of  both President Sarkozy and Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry.

Marine Le Pen is the daughter of controversial founder of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen. She has also taken controversial positions on the European Union, immigration and other social issues.

Here is a video of Le Pen. Notice her startling analysis of the the European Union and the Euro. The comparison of the EU to a “dead star” is classic.

House Votes To De-Fund IPCC!

(From Blaine Luetkemeyer)

House Passes Luetkemeyer Amendment to Halt Taxpayer Financing of UN Climate Panel

02/19/11

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In a major victory for American taxpayers, the House of Representatives today passed a budget amendment offered by U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (MO-9) that would prohibit $13 million in taxpayer dollars from going to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization fraught with waste and engaged in dubious science.

The amendment, which is identical to a separate bill sponsored by Luetkemeyer, was passed in a direct challenge to the president’s request to fund the IPCC, which has provided information that purports to support the administration’s call for job-killing cap-and-tax legislation.  Luetkemeyer’s amendment was one of 19 amendments highlighted this week by the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, the nation’s largest nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.

“The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an entity that is fraught with waste and fraud, and engaged in dubious science, which is the last thing hard-working American taxpayers should be paying for at a time of out-of-control spending and historic debt, which is why I am extremely pleased that my amendment passed,” Luetkemeyer said. “It is time for Washington to combat this year’s record budget deficit and fast-growing national debt. This amendment is part of that effort.”

The IPCC advises governments around the world on climate change, and supporters of cap-and-tax legislation have used questionable findings by the IPCC as reason to support onerous legislation.  Criticism of this science intensified over the last two years when emails publicly released from a university in England showed that leading global scientists intentionally manipulated climate data and suppressed legitimate arguments in peer-reviewed journals.  Researchers were asked to delete and destroy emails so that a small number of climate alarmists could continue to advance their environmental agenda.

More than 700 acclaimed international scientists have challenged the claims made by the IPCC.  These 700-plus dissenting scientists are affiliated with institutions like the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense, the U.S. Air Force and Navy, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Buffalo Tea Party Diffuses Provocateurs at Rally

On April 13, 2010 the Tea Party Express III came to the City of Buffalo, NY and held a two-hour rally on the City’s waterfront. During the rally, according to a number of witnesses, attempts were made by various individuals to infiltrate and disrupt the gathering.

Lloyd Marcus, Victoria Jackson, and Jimmy Labriola

e witnesses at the rally reported that disruptive language and  behavior was mostly attempted by lone individuals  aged between 20-25 yrs old. Some of these individuals came from a crowd of counter-protesters  that had gathered outside the main area of the rally.

Tea Partiers Enjoy the Rally

After the counter-demonstration  ended, some Tea Party attendees noticed that some  of the counter-protesters  wandered into the Tea Party crowd and proceeded to heckle its speakers. They provoked no incident and left shortly after their attempts at disruption failed.

"Monochromatic" (all-white) Tea Party Counter-Protesters. Does their lack of diversity make them racists?

However, there was an effort by anti-Tea Party provocateurs that successfully disrupted the Buffalo rally.

About 45 minutes into the Buffalo Tea Party Rally, a group of young men approached the crowd wearing the uniform of  colonial British soldiers, waving the Union Jack. As they wound their way through the Tea Party crowd, they began to heckle the speakers in British accents.

Although the “Reds” heckling  appeared humorous because they were ostensibly mocking “colonial yankees” and were playing along with the imagery evoked by the Tea Party, their antics managed to disrupt the rally for a few minutes, at least.

Leftists Dressed as British Redcoats Disrupt Tea Party Rally

Shortly after they began their heckling, the leaders of the Tea Party asked the “Reds” to leave. Outraged by this request, the “Reds” made their way to the Tea Party organizers, where, according to some witnesses, they complained that their freedom of speech was being violated.

Shortly after they started complaining, however, some witnesses observed  a wire hanging out of the coat pocket of one of the “Reds.”  reportedly, a Tea Partier (in the photo below)  grabbed the wire which revealed a tape recorder or some other audio recording device. Immediately, the “Red” began screaming that he was being violated and the Tea Partier backed away.

"They're Recording!"

Eventually, the Tea Party organizers quelled the situation, and asked the “Reds” to desist and they eventually left. Debbie Lee, the mother of the first Navy SEAL to be killed in Iraq, Marc Allan Lee, was instrumental in talking the “Reds” out of their disruptive intent.

Debbie Lee Puts "Reds" Straight

It is important that Tea Partiers be on the look out for this kind of tactic. While at first it may seem funny and not all that threatening, be aware that tape recorders will be playing.

The Constitution and Health Care

The Federalist Blog explains the politics behind judicial decisions that have allowed the unconstitutional expansion of the Federal government in the United States.

What Constitution?

If you think fighting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a matter solely devoted to filing lawsuits you are deeply mistaken. The reason lawsuits will have little effect is because the entire judicial system is a house of cards built upon a foundation of fiction and lies the court is willing to jealousy defend even if they must continue with deceit. Justices on the court are no longer concerned with defined limited powers or original meaning behind enumerated powers anymore then they are interested in why States refused to surrender domestic concerns over to the general government.

The court has increasingly grown in modern times to concern itself only in declaring what it feels the Constitution ought to have said instead of what it was approved by the people of the States to have said.

Lawsuits against Obamacare is by no means frivolous, but because the court in the end will always choose not to disturb the great centralization of power that has been judicially created by deferring to Congress. Example: When the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was challenged, the court held that “The Civil Rights Act of 1964, as here applied, we find to be plainly appropriate in the resolution of what the Congress found to be a national commercial problem of the first magnitude.”

In other words, since a majority in Congress had decided discrimination was something they ought to regulate within State limits the court was not going to entertain any serious factual analysis to whether the regulation of commerce ever had anything remotely to do with intrastate discrimination. This act of judicial restraint has become a valuable defensive tool the court employs to protect the centralization of federal power within State limits.

Likewise, members of Congress will avoid the question all together by pointing to the courts past deference when the court would uphold the power of Congress to “regulate many aspects of American life” through the Commerce Clause. This deferring back-and-forth assures questions of limited powers and original meaning will go ignored by both branches.

Neither the court nor many members of Congress have any desire to defend their self-created powers publically over anything having to do with buying and selling because they know they cannot defend such powers in any open, honest public forum where facts can be presented to dispute the courts numerous instances of ignoring historical facts.

The court would consider it a nightmare to have to defend such positions as “the power to regulate commerce includes the power to regulate the prices at which commodities in that commerce are dealt in and practices affecting such prices” in the face of overwhelming evidence such nonsense was never part of the practice of regulating commerce. Price control never remotely had anything to do with the regulating the exchange of trade for that was something strictly left to the exclusive legislative powers in making rules for buying and selling – something Congress does not possess intrastate. The fact is the regulation of commerce was solely to protect or encourage domestic manufactures through imposts and duties on importable articles of trade insures the court will avoid any evidentiary analysis of its meaning and constitutional purpose. (See here for a historical analysis of the regulation of commerce.)

The court will almost assuredly resort to the great defense shield of denial known as “stare decisis” as a clever way of protecting the courts own judicial malpractice from scrutiny while at the same time leaving its vast centralization of power in Congress intact. Therefore, all the lawsuits in the world challenging Congress or the courts own erroneous interpretations of the past will fail.

A better way to attack Obamacare than with lawsuits will be to confront justices of the court and members of Congress indirectly with the truth. Wouldn’t take long before the media starts questioning why they court is not responding to questions of how their stated precedent could be so wrong.

An example for an indirect question for the court is a half-page Ad in the WSJ that asks the court and Congress how did the States and other Nations regulate their commerce with each other before and after the adoption of the Constitution? Answer: The Levying of imposts and duties on “goods, wares, and merchandizes” imported.

Billboards could quote James Madison on the purpose behind the power to regulate commerce among the States as growing “out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government.”

Alternatively, how about quoting Madison on the understood meaning of regulating commerce: “The power (regulation of commerce) has been understood and used, by all commercial and manufacturing nations, as embracing the object of encouraging manufactures. It is believed that not a single exception can be named.”

As these two quotes show (find more here), the regulation of commerce was never understood to embrace laws on buying or selling. If it had meant that you could bet none of the original 13 States would had ever consented to adopting the Constitution.

While such tactics might not change anything over night, it could ultimately prove to influence the court enough to realize their bogus constitutional revisionism lacks critical factual analysis, and thus, makes them nothing less than a judicial accessory to despotism by continuing with their game of constitutional deceit.

Why Three Crazy Attacks Were Blamed on the Right

In the last post on this blog I included links to the website of Patrick Bedell. Because of the name of his blog, “Rothbardix,” and the content contained within, I concluded that Bedell’s politics were based on the libertarian philosophy of Murray Rothbard, a prominent thinker in the Austrian School of economics; a wing of the classical school of economics that has produced the essential conservative thinkers Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrick Hayek.

When I first conveyed the information about Bedell, I did so knowing that given the evidence about the sources of his political philosophy and the information contained on his website, that the Left would seize on this information in order to blame the Right and conservatives somehow for Bedell’s attack on the Pentagon. I did not think that there was any reason to defend Rothbard’s theories or to show whether Bedell had misinterpreted them or not. The fact that someone who was reportedly mentally ill decided to attack police officers at the Pentagon should speak for itself.

When I post such information my intent is to be as objective as possible, while I wait to see how far the Left will go in concocting their horror stories even before all the information is out. In the case of Bedell, the Left’s response was no different nor any more deliberative than the knee-jerk attacks blaming “right-wing” extremism for the death of census worker Bill Sparkman 2009 and the “falling down kamikaze” attacks committed by Joe Stack a few weeks ago. Without getting into a long list of examples, let this article by the Christian Science Monitor suffice to show the typical pre-fab template that is endemic to the liberal mind when it contemplates such events.

However, as has been proven here, Bedell was actually a registered Democrat.

Now, while it  is tempting to rub their faces in it with this new information, much like I did in this post on the Sparkman case, like most conservatives, I am reluctant to play the blame game and infer by some massive stretch of credulity, that Bedell’s conspiracy theories and his registration with the Democratic Party proves that all such people and their philospohies are intrinsically violent and suggest they are a clear and present danger to the Republic.

Nevertheless, one must point out that the Left’s reactionary response to these three attacks and the fact they repeatedly followed the pre-fab template blaming “right wing extremism” without the evidence to prove it, suggests that there is something quite disturbed or disturbing about their world view. I think it has gotten to the point where we can see the results of  living out the intellectual life on the squalls of theory, and it just may be that …dare I say… it has driven the Left a little crazy.

Is there any better explanation for those who continue to rely on an unproven invective and who, by doing so, are creating a very poisonous atmosphere for political debate in the country?

The Other McCain has written an article about this, and in it he suggests that in fact, the Left (yes, the entire Left) believes that their opposition is suffering from political psychosis. He writes:

Very little knowledge of Bedell’s personal story was necessary, however, for some people to construe his Pentagon attack as politically important. They had their explanations ready-made, thanks to an army of “experts” who had been warning since last year that political opposition to the Obama administration was inherently dangerous, rooted in irrational malevolence with an extraordinary potential for violence.

McCain then links back to an earlier article he published in the American Spectator where he discussed the origin of this belief amongst leftists. In December, Congressman Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island gave one of the most remarkable speeches in recent memory concerning health care reform. In that speech, Whitehouse relied on the theories contained in The Conspiratorial Style of American Politics by Richard Hofstadter written in 1965. He even read from the book while on the floor.

Ever since Obama was elected, the ideas contained in this book have been the preferred approach by the Left to attack conservative opposition to their agenda. There have been any number of left-wing pundits who have directly quoted from the book in attempts to explain the tea party and any number of others who clearly accept the book’s main premise. So much so, that it is clear that progressives use clinical psychology as a tool in their attacks against conservatives.  For instance, here is one of the more..ahem.. extremist quotes from Whithouse’s floor speech:

Why all this discord and discourtesy, all this unprecedented destructive action? All to break the momentum of our young president. They are desperate to break this president. They have ardent supporters who are nearly hysterical at the very election of President Barack Obama. The ‘birthers,’ the fanatics, the people running around in right-wing militias and Aryan support groups, it is unbearable to them that President Obama should exist.

As McCain points out in his AmSpec article, Hofstadter based the theories contained in The Conspiratorial Style on the ideas of Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School. Adorno, a committed Marxist and leading light in the doctrine of Critical Theory, developed the convenient concept hat all political opposition to left-liberalism was rooted in psychological maladjustment; in effect that conservatism was pathological. In fact, Adorno’s most influential work, “the altarpeice” of the Frankfurt School, was his book The Authoritarian Personality, where he developed a subjective scale through which he claimed to be able to rate how those with middle class, conservative, or Christian values would support a racist and a pre- fascist politics.

The obvious subjectivity of Adorno’s theory has always posed a problem for empiricists. Many have questioned whether “authoritarianism” is a personality trait that can be measured scientifically at all.  But others have challenged the theory on other levels. Shortly after The Authoritarian Personality was published, researchers in psychology recognized that the Frankfurt School failed to recognize authoritarian tendencies on the Left. This led to a whole range of studies-not necessarily rooted in psycho-analysis- that attempted to analyze political ideologies, some of which showed that adherents to  left-wing ideologies  displayed a higher tendency or degree of authoritarianism than the right-wing.

Due to the left-wing bias in American academia, many students have heard about Adorno, the Frankfurt School and Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style. However, many have never been exposed to the field of psychological research that has shown left-wing  ideology produces a  high degree of authoritarianism. For instance, one of the most prominent studies was conducted in the 1950s by H.J. Eysneck. In his book The Psychology of Politics, Eysenck showed that the most  authoritarian of the political groups studied were Communists. In other groundbreaking works, like The Uses and Abuses of Psychology and Sense and Nonsense, Eysenck showed how the application of psycho-analysis to social psychology was flawed. Eventually, Eysenck declared that Freudian psycho-analysis was a pseudo-science, and in light of the evidence, it should be dismissed as such. His 1992 book, Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire, details this idea.

Even though Eysenck’s findings should have called into question the theoretical foundations of books like The Paranoid Style long ago, other objective studies of political ideology should have also challenged the Left’s obduracy on this subject. For instance, a study conducted by Rokeach in 1960 developed a scale for dogmatism, a characteristic he found was possessed by those from all political ideologies. In another study, Balik and Kubat showed how left wing authoritarianism could be defined. Characteristics of left-wing authoritarianism feature:

1. A high degree of submission to authorities which attempt to subvert the authorities currently ruling in the given society.

2. Generalized aggression towards the established elites or those who support them.

3. A high degree of dedication to the norms accepted by the revolutionary authorities. Left-wing authoritarians are also dogmatic and ethnocentric. Chiefly,  left-wing authoritarianism correlates with its right-wing counterpart.

So, even though I have a huge problem with the application of science, or as Eysenck would have it “pseudo-science,” to determining the nature of political belief and using it to predict political behavior, in light of the research, it is obvious that the idea of the authoritarian personality cannot be isolated to analyze only the political Right. That is  intellectual dishonesty and politicized science writ large.

The Left has been using The Paranoid Style ad nauseum in order to bludgeon conservative criticism of Obama’s radical social agenda, and it is clear that their tendency towards dismissing the tea parties and other opponents as “crazy” and “dangerous” comes directly from the Marxist perspective bred in the laboratories of the Frankfurt School of Social Research. It is ironic that when leftist supporters of Obama bash conservatives for  labeling him a socialist, they do this through an ideological prism developed by German Marxists.

As The Other McCain has shown, it is this ideological prism which is the source of the Left’s reactionary impulse to blame conservatives for any violence that appears political. However, as I have shown, there are many violent incidents that go unreported and are impliedly acceptable or considered “understandable” by the Left as violence is indeed, an aspect of its strategy.

It remains a mystery why conservatives haven’t acquainted themselves with the research on the authoritarian personality that has developed since The Frankfurt School’s original. In light of the development of the theory conservatives can  use it to show how much the radical, violent and totalitarian modern Left is the really dangerous political movement in our times.

Because it extends beyond the mere ironic, conservatives should be making the case that the Left’s obduracy in repeatedly blaming conservatism for the recent attacks despite the evidence, is itself, a characteristic of the authoritarian personality discovered by social psychology. Instead of always being on the receiving end of high theory, conservatives could also use these discoveries to point out the authoritarian, violent, paranoid, and dangerous tendencies of various Marxist and leftist groups in history.

Need an example? How about this:

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Just As We Predicted: “Fringe” Conservatives-As Determined By Rachel Maddow and The Daily Kos-No Longer Welcome In the Conservative Movement

Just as we recognized in this post, the  conservative establishment is finally admitting that they are pursuing a plan to purge those they consider “fringe” elements from THEIR movement. And, just as we have been documenting, this will go beyond the usual suspects including the likes of the truthers, the birthers, and the John Birchers. It will most likely extend to Ron Paul and his Campaign for Liberty as well as to the tenthers, those who believe that states have the right to nullify federal law under the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In time, it will probably also include those who oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants or any further controls on immigration. And, perhaps others.

According to this article from Politico, some main players from the moderate wing of the Republican Party like Michael Gerson, have been planning to discredit and exile elements of the tea party movement they believe are “crazy.”

Why? Because Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsos, and left wing MSNBC newsreader Rachel Maddow, say they should.

Think I’m kidding?

Here are some quotes from the Politico artcle:

So it was that liberals have demanded to know where Republicans stood on Obama’s citizenship, or that last week found left and right debating which side had more in common with Andrew Joseph Stack III, the software developer who crashed his plane into the IRS offices in Austin, Texas.

The left seized on a comment by hard-line conservative Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), reportedly expressing his empathy for the pilot’s anti-tax views.

Much as conservatives have sought to link Democrats to environmental extremism or socialism… it’s an obvious countermove for the left to try to link Republicans with the more extreme elements that have gained traction around — and sometimes within — the tea partiers.

After filming a brief segment at the conference, liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, a leading tea party antagonist, concluded on her show that “the conservative movement right now is really not afraid to let its freak flag fly. … They‘re happy to show off the ‘we want another revolutionary war,’ ‘we think the black president is arrogant,’ ‘we think the apocalypse is nice’ side of themselves.”

A blogger on the liberal site Daily Kos asserted Tancredo’s speech revealed the “REAL reason” tea partiers are upset: “A black man is President and their White Privelege [sic] is fading.”

Tancredo’s speech was not widely condemned by conservative intellectuals or media, but immediately after Farah delivered his, he was confronted in a hallway outside the convention hall by conservative media entrepreneur and fellow convention speaker Andrew Breitbart, who said it was a disservice to the tea party movement to infer its activists are “all obsessed with the birth certificate, when it’s not a winning issue.”

And it goes on.

Which makes me wonder: If  Rachel Maddow and Markos Moulitsos are now the de facto sources for conservative legitimacy, what other sections of the conservative movement will become eligible for the axe?

Will it also include those who believe that the push for global governance is real? Or how about  global warming “deniers?” I am sure that Maddow and Moulitsos still consider these two ideas absolutely crazy and only pushed by conservative “wing-nuts” and “conspiracy theorists.” Is that why there was very little commentary on John Bolton’s speech at CPAC, where he openly warned conservatives about the impending threat to American sovereignty from global governance?

I am sure that if you ask Rachel and Markos, along with Gerson and John McCain, they’ll all agree that such talk is crazy talk. Eeks. John Bolton should burn all references to global governance so that the national Republican Party will gain the approval of its new leadership. Just as a reminder, here is what Bolton wrote in Commentary Magazine in January (that we posted here):

Barack Obama’s blueprint for the United States spells trouble for American autonomy, self-governance, and defense, all key elements of national sovereignty. His undisguised indifference to repeated diminutions of that sovereignty is entirely consistent with the views of his European admirers, who, at their level, would like to see their nation-states dissolve into the European Union. (I believe Europen states have already de facto been dissolved in the EU already.)

Crazy. Paranoid. Conspiracy theory!

What a joke all of this talk about democracy and respect for the people has been.

The Tea Party should have been onto it once politicians and the conservative media elite started blowing smoke up their asses, and the conservative media  started declaring who the tea party leadership was.

This is why it is so difficult to be a conservative activist in America. You are never allowed the freedom to participate and hash out ideas as long as you tie your fortunes to the Republican Party. It is, unfortunately, run by a cadre of interests who are the ultimate gatekeepers and watchdogs for the establishment.

I live in New York and this has been a truism to me for a long time. That is why the New York Tea Party, as well as the coalition of government reform conservative groups in the state, have had very little to do with the Republican Party. In fact, they recognize it as so bad, that all their efforts have been outside the political parties altogether.

That’s a real Tea Party and the only path to lasting reform.

Primary Challenge

Political Class Dismissed

Tea New York

Carl Paladino for New York Governor

It Was Nice While It Lasted: Self-Appointed Conservative Gatekeepers Begin Their Purge

It remains to be seen just how populist the Tea Party Movement really is. Will it survive as an independent movement that brings together diverse Americans in order to fight the expansion of government and make sure that American political leaders take practical steps to limit government, cut spending, and preserve constitutional principles when in power? Or will it just become a faux rebellion, which is eventually co-opted by the Republican Party and the conservative intellectual elite, who will geld it and use it merely to win a few elections?

This is an important question to ask, for this past week, the conservative elite and their fellow gatekeepers in the conservative media have begun the long-expected crackdown on Tea Party democracy and freedom of speech and thought that is at the heart of the movement. More specifically, the subjects of the purge are elements associated with the Tea Party Movement that Republican and conservative opinion-makers are uncomfortable with. The  “Birthers”, Ron Paul and Rand Paul supporters, insurgent Tea Party candidates who have threatened establishment Republican candidates for elected office, Sarah Palin, and even the Family Research Council have all been subject to a recent flurry of attacks from the mainstream conservative movement. And surprisingly, the attacks have been executed utilizing the typical ad hominem smear preferred by the Trotkyist Left when it attempts to discredit anyone who opposes them.

The attacks are having their effect. Although it has went largely unreported, this Rasmussen Poll, taken a day after the first Tea Party Convention ended in Nashville, shows that the popularity of the Tea Party is on the wane. Where just a few months ago the Tea Party candidate beat the Republican in the same generic poll, it now comes in third. Also,the poll shows that many unaffiliated voters are moving away from the Tea Party, while others are beginning to file back into the Republican Party.

The poll shows that while in December, 33% of unaffiliated voters supported the Tea Party, only 23% do now. It also shows that while 33% of GOP voters supported a Tea Party candidate in December, only 23% do now.   I have no doubt that the conflict over the “birther” issue, attacks on Tom Tancredo, Sarah Palin, and Joseph Farah-the most important speakers at the Tea Party Convention- are having their effect.

People who have been around the conservative movement for a while know that purges have always been a part of it. Perhaps the most famous of the conservative purges was the one conducted by William F. Buckley against the John Birch Society  in the early 1960s. As Buckley admitted in this column, the marginalization of the anti-Communist JBS was a planned and coordinated strategy that would leave the popular group ravaged by consistent ad hominem smears targeting its leader, Robert Welch.

The plan was intended to give Barry Goldwater the ability to separate himself from some of the “wild” ideas of the  JBS, without necessarily separating himself from the JBS altogether. Goldwater needed to do this because he understood that most of his financial support came directly from JBS members in Arizona, and for him to be part of a purge eliminating the  group from mainstream conservative politics would most likely have been the end of his political career and his as yet unannounced run for the presidency in 1964.

In an amazing meeting that took place in Palm Beach, Florida in 1962, a small group of conservative intellectuals and opinion-makers got together to frame the plot. As Buckley recounts, the meeting that included himself, Goldwater, writer Russell Kirk, National Review’s Washington editor Brent Bozell (whose son now runs the invaluable Media Research Center), and head of the American Enterprise Institute William Baroody, would use the credibility of the National Review to expose Welch’s “operative fallacy” which was that recent losses to world Communism meant that Communists controlled a significant part of the U.S. government. Or, as put more simply by Russell Kirk:  “Me? I’ll just say, if anybody gets around to asking me, that the guy is loony and should be put away.”

History repeats itself, and for anyone who observes the conservative blogosphere consistently could have ascertained a few weeks ago, the purge of the Tea Party Movement was coming. The first evidence of it was visible when on February 2 David Horowitz’ Newsreal blog, ran a piece attacking Sarah Palin and suggesting in another that her political career may be over.  Apparently,  they were infuriated that  Gov. Palin endorsed Rand Paul in the Republican primary for Kentucky U.S. Senate. Writers at Newsreal seemed primarily upset that Palin endorsed Paul because they believe he may not be a strong supporter of Israel.

Echoing the outrage and smears that have been spread by Daniel Greenfield and Debbie Schlussel, Newsreal writer Janet Levy wrote in a  point/counterpoint article on the topic that:

Rand Paul has expressed opposition to the Patriot Act, has supported the cutting of military spending, has endorsed the shutting down of GITMO and has called for the banning of harsh interrogation of Muslim terrorists. His father (“the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” theory), Ron Paul, wants to end all foreign aid to Israel and see the United States sever its alliance with Israel.  He has gone so far as to denounce the pro-Israel lobby on Capitol Hill, but NOT the Saudi lobby.  The elder Paul is a staunch critic of military action against Iran.

Palin has just cast her political star in a potentially career-killing direction. I was never a big fan but now I’m definitely no fan at all.

While this appears to be an attack against Palin, it is really an aggressive attempt to co-opt the Tea Party Movement into mainstream conservatism and eventually alienate Ron Paul libertarians from having any political influence in the future. This is a somewhat cynical move by the Neo-Cons because the Tea Parties originated with Ron Paul in 2007, and many local factions of the Tea Party Movement are controlled by Ron Paul libertarians who generally do not have a friendly relationship with  established local Republican Parties. The origins of the Tea Party was discussed on Fox News.com’s Freedoms Watch about a week ago:

Unrelated to the politics of the Tea Party, but also at Newsreal, there has been a growing campaign to discredit and  marginalize the premiere  research and advocacy group for social conservatism: The Family Research Council. In this article,  Newsreal believes that the the FRC should be condemned and forever exiled from serious conservative circles because one of its spokesmen, Peter Sprigg, admitted to Chris Matthews, on his MSNBC show Hardball, that he thinks “there would be a place for criminal sanctions against homosexual behavior. ” One of Newsreal’s bloggers, Calvin Freiberger, flew off the handle at this and wrote:

I have already expressed why Sprigg’s remarks are morally indefensible.  But apparently more needs to be said about the tremendous damage his remarks—and subsequent silence from the Right—will do both to the conservative movement and to the cause of traditional marriage.

First, Sprigg has all-but destroyed the credibility of the Family Research Council, which has until now been one of social conservatives’ most valuable allies, providing sharp analysis, research and commentary on the right to life, civil marriage, religious liberty, the judiciary, education, and more.  I have used and promoted FRC material for years, and I’m certainly not the only one.

From now on, every FRC press release, study, and media appearance will be labeled as coming from “that group who wants to throw gays in jail,” and dismissed as the biased work of bigots. Everybody who continues to rely on FRC material will face similar attacks.  And unlike the Left’s usual slander routine, this one will be rooted in truth—FRC’s Senior Fellow for Policy Studies really said it, and FRC has done nothing to distance themselves from him or his sentiments.

Of course, it’s not just those with discernible ties to FRC that have been endangered.  Indeed, anybody who expresses legitimate concerns over same-sex marriage and other societal issues pertaining to homosexuality should expect to be tarred as a fellow traveler of Sprigg’s sooner or later.

It is interesting that Freiberger believes himself the arbiter of conservative legitimacy. So much so, that he feels it necessary to proclaim the death of the FRC, a group that has been around since 1983 and one of the only research/policy organizations dedicated primarily to social (as opposed to political or economic) conservatism in the country. Now, I am not saying that Newsreal Blog has a John Birch Society-like attack plan for the Tea Parties or FRC, but it is a blog that seems to devote a larger proportion of its time to pronouncing the acceptable “party line” for conservatives, who is in and who is out, than most other blogs. It was Newsreal, for instance, that was first amongst conservatives to come out against the “Birthers” even while a number of congressmen were trying to move an eligibility bill through Congress.

Newsreal is not the only self-appointed arbiter of acceptable conservative opinion. Many people have been upset that Glenn Beck single-handedly destroyed the candidacy of the preferred Tea Party candidate for the Governor of Texas, Debra Medina, last week. For those who haven’t heard the story, Glenn Beck was interviewing Debra Medina, a candidate for Texas Governor, who had recently been surging in the polls, pulling even with Kay Bailey Hutchison. Near the end of the interview, Beck asked Medina whether she believed that “the government had anything to do with 9/11.” Medina answered that she was not taking a position on the issue, but felt that most people have not been given all the information on the issue.

When this story came to light,  Medina was universally calumniated in the mainstream conservative blogosphere and her candidacy written off. However, what is significant, is the number of comments and other conservative blogs that defended Medina, while not necessarily embracing  the 9/11 Truth question.

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey explained that if conservatives wanted Van Jones to resign from his job atb the White House because he was a 9/11 Truther, it would be hypocritical for conservatives to support Medina. However,  many of the commenters to that post (in what was one of the most commented on posts at Hot Air this month) responded in this way:

Is this the Republican Purity Test Now?

How utterly ludicrous. The GOP is a joke. Trying to smear Medina based on this will backfire, fools. The American people are as sick of Republicans as they are of Democrats. It’s about trust in government, not “trutherism.” Medina should have restated Beck’s pathetic line of questioning as an issue of “trust in government” writ large; she didn’t, that was her mistake.

But, to make Beck’s questioning the test of purity for “conservatives” ONLY TRIVIALIZES CONSERVATIVES.

We have serious problems in this country, but what do conservatives do? Smear a candidate based their 9/11 “purity test.” It’s is the most PATHETIC, base and ill-advised smear tactic evah!

This also seems to be the response of many Texans who support Medina:

It is also interesting to note the immediate response of callers to Glenn Beck’s own radio show, many who  expressed their belief that Beck was intentionally trying to hijack her campaign:

Along with the attacks on most of the main speakers of the Tea Party Convention last week in Nashville, I hope that I provided enough evidence here in order to prove that the mainstream conservative movement is attempting to hijack and define the not only the Tea Party Movement itself, but conservative opinion altogether. They are doing this, unfortunately, under the auspices of the Neo-Cons in order to end the debate on foreign intervention, auditing the Federal Reserve, Obama’s birth certificate, and a number of other legitimate and reasonable issues expressed by the Tea Party crowd.

The litmus test is coming. Those who do not want the resistance to Obama to be hijacked by the Republicans or even the mainstream conservative movement, must realize that if they resist they will continue to be slandered and smeared by those they once trusted and believed in: like Glenn Beck.

The point isn’t that Beck is wrong; the point is that a real social movement must be left to sort  itself out in order to to be effective. Once it is taken over by the establishment and its core values are determined by the self-anointed whose agendas are not transparent, it will become a servant of a master it does not really know. And that way lies distrust, disunion, and eventually, the end of the movement.

Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

A lot was made about the pro-life ad that ran during the Superbowl sponsored by Focus on the Family and featuring college QB Tim Tebow and his mother. Feminist and pro-choice groups came out against the ad and a lot of ink was spilled in an attempt to counter what some groups said was its “dangerous” message.

Of course, the message wasn’t “dangerous” at all, it was simply pro-life.

But, I was personally struck by the imagery of the ad. Why was it necessary to show Tebow tackling his mother?

Not that I was offended by the ad and I certainly understood that the intent was supposed to show the “toughness” of his mother, but why was it necessary that the ad show him taking her down in a full tackle? I don’t get it?

If you ask me, the ad failed on its own, because without the outside controversy, I wouldn’t have really known what it was about. In the context of the ad, I would have been forced to ask, “Does Tebow have a form of Turet’s Syndrome where he compulsively tackles his mother without warning from time to time?” Remember, in the text of the ad, she does say “I still worry about his health” just before he rams into her.

But, worse, the ad was one of many that were overtly violent, and dare I say, one of a number that were openly misogynist. I know, as conservatives we’re not supposed to get all uptight about such things lest we wander into the land of political correctness, but  my concerns are not what you think; I am concerned here about the state of the culture.

Now, I know that Super Bowl ads do not make up the whole of the cultural output of contemporary Western civilization. I am constantly reassured that there is plenty of great art being produced today, and any “end is nigh” hysteria about the state of cultural production does not take into account the quantities of what is being produced these days.

However, I personally believe that these commercials are saying something and that something is an ominous sign of a failing civilization. With all due respect to “A Clockwork Orange”, when  “ultra-violence”provides us with humor and fun, and open hostility to women is tolerated within a culture, something wicked this way comes.

Someone has put together a montage of the violent ads in the Super Bowl and it is below.

This video led Joe Carter at First Thoughts to comment:

Apparently, advertisers get their ideas about how to market to us from watching the Ain’t-It-Funny-When-Someone-Gets-Hurt clips on America’s Funniest Home Videos.

Which got me to thinking about the movie the Idiocracy. Released in 2006, to a very limited run in movie theatres, Idiocracy is a not-so-concealed commentary on contemporary American culture. Despite it being set in the “distant” future, the director, Mike Judge, was no doubt aiming his sights on a dumbed-down, overly consumeristic American culture, which he obviously believes (using poetic license and not a little hyperbole to make the point) is producing a population that within the span of a few generations will become so incompetent that even the most basic knowledge necessary for survival will be lost to it. In the movie, for instance, the fact that water, and not Gatorade, is needed to grow crops is high science even to the country’s political leaders.

In this idiotic America of the future, the most popular television program is a show called “Ow, My Balls!”It features  a guy who finds various ways to abuse his own testicles and films the self-injury in real time.

So, I wonder: Are we there yet? I mean, if this kind of stuff is being used to sell products and TV shows and movies now (think Jackass), where will the culture be in a few years? And what does it mean for society and politics in general? I think history shows that societies in such a state of decline are neither predisposed nor capable of self-governance. But, we’ll leave that discussion for a a later post.

Along with the violence exhibited in this year’s Super Bowl ads, most of it aimed at men, there was a concomitant and equally disturbing theme running through some of the ads during the game: There seemed to be a hint of hostility towards women. The best ad that exemplifies this is below:

This one too:

Both ads express an appeal to power for men, and sort of frustration with women and domestic life.If marketers have determined that this is the experience of a good number of men in modern society, and they can use the experience in order to sell more stuff, what is it saying about the state of male/female relationships and the traditional family altogether? What does it mean for the American dream-at least for men?

The answer to that question may take a lot more posts, but in brief, it is my opinion that these ads express a kind of pre-Fascist consciousness. According to historian Edward Veith, Fascism arose out of a cultural milieu of Europe which included an alienation from the 19th century positivistic and materialist worldview. The reaction to this alienation bred a form of romanticism or, a sort  modern pantheistic paganism that reasserted the value of the natural world and insisted that it be experienced not through reason, but through experience and emotion.

According to Veith and other historians, this renewal of paganism led to a very open hostility to the established order which expressed itself primarily by violence and ugliness through art. And as eith has written, the aesthetic of pre-Fascist and Fascist art is visible in the culture today:

In the 1930s, avant-garde artists shocked the bourgeoisie with their aesthetic theories that glorified violence and the release of primitive emotions. Today, if you like examples of early fascist aesthetics, simply go to the latest Hollywood blockbuster, turn on MTV, or go to a Heavy Metal concert.

Here you will see realized the fascists’ artistic ideals: pleasure from violence; the thrill of moral rebellion; the cult of the Aryan body. The grisly blood-letting of a slasher movie; the body-builder who takes the law into his own hands by machine-gunning his enemies; the masses of teenagers slam-dancing as Metallica sings `Scream, as I’m killing you!’–such art is the quintessence of the fascist aesthetic.

Well, I could go on. But it is also important to mention that culture and politics are inexorably intertwined. If our culture exhibits the “quintessence of the fascist aesthetic” I think we need to truly examine that culture and the state of our political life as it relates to human liberty. And I believe that phenomena like the personality cult that surrounds Barack Obama, is a part of something that is very wrong with Western civilization, but let’s leave that for future posts.

As for the culture, conservative philosopher and writer Roger Scruton has the cure:

“I think we are losing beauty, and there’s a danger that with it, we will lose the meaning of life!”

I just wonder if we aren’t too far gone for Beauty ever to have meaning in our lives again.

Poisoned Fruit and Political Entrapment: “Birthers”and the Persistent Power of the Socialist Smear

“All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Second it is opposed. Third it is accepted as being self evident.” -Arthur Schopenhauer

They must be laughing over at the leftist online website the DC Independent, other progressive circles, and in the liberal advocacy media (LAME).

Why?

Because one of their own, Dave Weigel, managed to cleverly plant the poisonous fruit of the “birther” controversy smack-dab in the middle of the Tea Party Convention in Nashville.

Yup.

Right in the midst of a conservative uprising and popular movement that is primarily dedicated to defeating the Left, excoriating progressives, and confronting the LAME, a clever little journalist just happened to come across evidence that THE narrative-the “birther” controversy- that the Left has already floated as the fatal wound that will inevitably fall the Tea Party Movement (and conservative resistance to Obama’s agenda), is beginning to do just that.

Weigel, a reporter for the Washington Independent, got lucky and apparently was able to instigate what turned into a somewhat heated exchange between two of the invited (and best) speakers at the Tea Party Convention; Joseph Farah, the founder of World Net Daily, and Andrew Breitbart, the founder of Big Hollywood and Breitbart TV. As Weigel tells it, he overhead Andrew Breitbart criticizing Joseph Farah for dedicating a significant amount of his Friday night keynote speech to the issue of President Obama’s birth certificate. Weigel reports that Breitbart was being interviewed by World Net Daily’s Chelsea Schilling who asked him if Obama’s birth certificate was a legitimate issue. Weigel reported that the exchange went like this:

“It’s self-indulgent, it’s narcissistic, it’s a losing issue,” Breitbart told Schilling. “It’s a losing situation. If you don’t have the frigging evidence — raising the question? You can do that to Republicans all day long. You have to disprove that you’re a racist! Forcing them to disprove something is a nightmare.”

“Wouldn’t you say,” asked Schilling, “in this case, that Farah is asking Obama to prove something rather than his disprove it?”

Breitbart rejected the premise. “When has a president ever been asked to prove his citizenship?”

According to Weigel, he was the one that initially engaged Farah when he asked him if his speech was approved by the organizers of the convention. Farah explained to him that no one told him what to say and that’s when Weigel, referring to Breitbart’s criticism, informed Farah that his speech “was getting negative attention already.”  This surprised Farah a bit and he then walked over to Breitbart in an effort to debunk the criticism.

That’s when the exchange on the question of the birth certificate took place. (For audio click here.)For the sake of brevity I will not repost the entire exchange here. If you want to read the entire thing, I suggest you go to the Washington Independent story I linked above, or listen to it on the audio I provided.

The actual exchange is worth analyzing a bit because there was more to it than just the question of the birth certificate issue. First, it is interesting to note that Farah’s original concern with Breitbart was not the “birther” critique, but the fact that he would openly criticize Farah and his speech to a reporter from the Washington Independent.

“Andrew is my friend,” Farah said.  “He has the right to disagree, and he has the right to say anything to a socialist newspaper that he wants. And if he wants to criticize his friend to you, and he’s dumb enough to do that…”

Upon hearing this, Breitbart turned to Farah and then asked: “I’m dumb to do what?”

“Criticize your friend to this socialist newspaper.”

But Breitbart then had to correct Farah and pointed out that he was talking to Chelsea Schilling, a World Net Daily reporter (whose articles prove she believes the “birther” argument to be legitimate). After Farah then repeatedly tried to point out to Breitbart that they were in the presence of a hostile reporter, implying he should reserve his criticism,  Breitbart finally said:

“I was talking to her..She was asking me if I thought it was wise to bring it up, and I said, no. We have a lot of strong arguments to be making, and that is a primary argument. That is an argument for the primaries that did not take hold. The arguments that these people right here are making are substantive arguments. The elections in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts were all won not on birther, but on substance. And to apply to this group of people the concept that they’re all obsessed with the birth certificate, when it’s not a winning issue–”

I think that this reveals something interesting and is one of the reasons that I said that the Left is laughing at this. Of course, in his main contention, Breitbart is correct. The elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts were not won by the “birther” argument. I don’t even think that it came up at all in any of those races. Republicans won because Americans have rejected, en masse, the leftist agenda of Obama and the Democrats.

However, I think that by Breitbart taking issue with the “birther” controversy publicly and criticizing one of the keynote speakers of the Tea Party Convention, he has unwittingly given some ground to the Left. The “birther” issue was intentionally poisoned by the Left in order for them to be able to use it as a form of political entrapment. I suppose that this technique of the” poisoned fruit” is easy to see from the sidelines, but difficult to fight in the midst of battle.

According to C. Edmund Wright at the American Thinker, the Left’s control of the “birther” issue (and others) is “naked political psych warfare.” The whole idea of the “poisoned fruit” (my term) is to “hitch a scarlet letter of craziness and extremism to the Tea Party and conservative movements” which will “keep the GOP apparatus scared of and embarrassed of their own base voter.” Eventually, this will drive a wedge between the party and its voters as it will become plain  to ” the suits inside the Beltway that the party must not get too cozy with these crazies — or they will never win another election.”

I think Breitbart took the bait when he criticized Joseph Farah, which is all the more ironic, because Breitbart gave one of the most rousing speeches against the media, the Left, and their diminishing monopoly on political information that has ever been heard. (“It’s not your business model that sucks; It’s you that suck!”) It was also surprising, because many of the writers on his own site, Big Hollywood, either defend the “birther”" argument as legitimate, or are outright “birthers” themselves.

So, I think that at this point, it is not only disingenuous for the Tea Party or people like Breitbart to distance itself from the “birther” argument (I don’t even know if there is actually a “birther” movement per se) but it is wholly unnecessary.

Why?

Because, as I indicated in a previous post, concerns about Obama’s birth certificate and whether he meets the constitutional requirements as a natural born citizen to be eligible for the presidency, are perfectly legitimate and reasonable. And, as I also maintained in that post, the “birther”issue is only one issue amongst many (like it was in Farah’s speech). It is now running its course through the courts and the only rulings against it have been on standing alone. Obama’s citizenship and eligibility have not been decided on in a court of law and probably never will be. But the only thing that can be done on a policy level about it now, is to wait and see what happens. That’s it.

I have no problem with individual citizens putting up billboards asking the president to show the country his birth certificate and assuring it that he is an eligible constitutional officer.The legitimacy of the issue should be-er, should have been self-evident by now a long time ago, as none of the cases pending in court have been dismissed as frivolous, and Obama has spent nearly $2 million in an attempt to get the various cases dismissed or to prevent release of the documents that prove his eligibility.

But every conservative should recognize that it was the Left that first poisoned the “birther” issue and every time a conservative backs down from defending its reasonableness, they are acceding ground to authoritarian minds. When accused of being wacky for believing reasonable things, can there be any other interpretation of what is happening in the realm of politics?

As many know, the Daily Kos recently commissioned a poll in order to prove that Republican voters are wacky. They found that a minority percentage of Republicans, 36 percent, felt that Obama was not born inside the United States. In the same poll, the Daily Kos also found that 63 percent of Republicans believe that Obama is a socialist. In other findings from the same poll,  a significantly smaller minority of Republican voters felt Obama was a racist (32 percent), the he “wants the terrorists to win” (24 percent), and believe that ACORN stole the 2008 election (23 percent).

These quite unremarkable findings prompted Daily Kos founder Markos Malitsas to write:

This is why it’s becoming impossible for elected Republicans to work with Democrats to improve our country. They are a party beholden to conspiracy theorists who don’t even believe Obama was born in the United States, and already want to impeach him despite a glaring lack of scandal or wrongdoing. They think Obama is racist against white people and the second coming of Lenin. And if any of them stray and decide to do the right thing and try to work in a bipartisan fashion, they suffer primaries and attacks. Given what their base demands — and this poll illustrates them perfectly — it’s no wonder the GOP is the party of no.

Why hasn’t anyone called him out on his wacky interpretations of that poll? Has anyone asked Malitsas why  having legitimate questions about the president, despite the information firewall that has been put up around Obama by people like him and the LAME, all-of-sudden makes one a “conspiracy theorist”? And how can anyone, especially those who are major figures on the Left, like Malitsas, continue to deny Obama’s Marxist influences with a straight face?

Just look at his associations- and I’m not even talking about the typical rogue’s gallery of those inside his administration who have publicly declared their affinity for Marxist ideas and Marxist historical figures. Why don’t they talk about people like Dr. Quentin Young, the founder of Physicians for a National Health Care Program, who is a longtime friend of Barack Obama according to Democracy Now!. Dr. Young  who has been a Marxist all of his life, remains a major influence of Barck Obama’s thinking on health care reform, and this is freely and openly admitted.It is intellectually dishonest, pure and simple, to deny this and do deny it repeatedly, which the Left has done.

But if this little known, but important influence on Obama’s policy thinking isn’t convincing enough, how about taking the word of someone who went to Occidental College with him in the 1980s? Dr. John Drew has been writing in his blog about discussions he had with Obama when he knew him in college, where they were both radicals and participated in the Anti-Apartheid Movement together. According to him, Obama understood Marxism from a pretty simplistic perspective, which did not change much over time. Don’t believe me? Dr. Drew himself has begun to publicly explain what he knew of Obama and his ideology in college: (Click here for his video.)

Anyway, there are worse things about Obama out there, but you don’t see any of his opponents using that information against him. For instance, Larry Sinclair, a former homosexual prostitute, claims to have witnessed Barack Obama smoking crack cocaine in the back of a limousine in Chicago in 1999. At the same time, Sinclair claims, Barack Obama was receiving oral sex from him, because, he claims, that Obama is a bi-sexual.

The same guy, Larry Sinclair, also claims that Obama is somehow implicated in the death of Donald Young, the Choir Conductor for Trinity United Church, Obama’s former church in Chicago. Young was murdered in his Chicago apartment in 2007. His murder remains unsolved.

So, if this stuff is out there, why aren’t Obama’s opponents using it? I mean if the “birther” issue has been so discredited and is such “poisonous fruit” to the Tea Party and conservatives, and they still see fit to have a major proponent of it speak at their first convention, what is preventing them from using the Larry Sinclair story against Obama? If their intent is just to bring Obama down regardless of whether the charges are baseless or not, why not use the story of Larry Sinclair and Donald Young?

Perhaps the answer is integrity. And that is something the Left did not show to George W. Bush at all when he was the President. They should be grateful, for the resistance to Obama will continue to grow and the chickens of the Left are only  now just starting to come home to roost.

Andrew Breitbart Declares Jihad on the Liberal Advocacy Media (LAME) at Tea Party Convention

…Well that’s not his quote, but I can’t wait to see if people pick up my post to try to discredit him.
I have been watching the Tea Party Convention on Pajamas TV, and Andrew just completed the best speech of the convention thus far.

OK, I’m really stupid because I didn’t take notes, but I watched the entire thing and it was not only inspiring, but a call to arms to the Tea Party Nation. In the speech, Breitbart described how the LAME distorts the news through an ideological agenda. He explained how the LAME intentionally looked the other way at the ACORN story that was broken by his colleagues, James O’keefe and Hannah Giles, and how they further rushed in to distort O’Keefe’s recent arrest in Louisiana, publishing a number of false stories before O’Keefe himself was even given an attorney.

Breitbart’s speech was a frontal asssault on the LAME’s posturing and its elitism. Because I don’t have exact quotes, let me paraphrase and say that  Breitbart’s speech was filled with references to the LAME’s mischaracterization of the Tea Party Movement and the condescension it has shown for it. He also repeatedly referred to their skewed world-view and the type of perspective that makes them see the world the way they do.

For instance, Breitbart said that the media has two templates that are wearing thin on the American people: racism and Watergate.

Near the end of his speech, Breitbart threatened (half-jokingly) that if the New York-based media  continued to discredit the Tea Party and conservative ideas in general, he will lead a protest that will so snarl Manhattan traffic, that it will deprive them of “their weekend in the Hamptons.”

I have no doubt that Breitbart will be attacked by the LAME for this speech. He will probably be met with charges that he exhibits what the Left calls the politics of “ressentiment,” the fancy philosophical concept originated by Kirkegaard and modified by Nietzsche, that they now use to explain the resistance of “faux” (conservative) intellectuals to Marxism, leftist reform, and global governance.

But they never actually credit conservative intellectuals or political figures for creating a viable politcal movement based on intelligent criticism and organized resistance to the Left. Rather, they prefer to to see the rebellion of non-leftist elements of society as some irrational, amorphous uprising of people, misdirected by opportunistic agitators or shadowy cabals of powerful interests. In an essay by Daniel Yankelovich from 1975,the main themes of this approach to conservative resistance to leftist politics is explained. He wrote:

The seriousness of the rising tide of disaffection in America suggests as a point of reference the concept of ressentiment as derived from Max Scheler. In Scheler’s usage, ressentiment refers not only to an intensity of negative feelings in relationship to authority but—and this is of the essence—feelings that are bottled up, suppressed, prevented from overt expression. It is precisely this latter characteristic that makes ressentiment a dangerous political emotion.

The individual possessed by ressentiment silently nurses his grievances against authority, building up in himself an evermounting intensity of rage and resentment that serves as fodder for the demagogue. According to Scheler, ressentiment is never reformist in any constructive sense. An explosion of ressentiment will maim or destroy institutions without creating fundamental ideological changes.

In contrast to reform, rebellion, or revolution, ressentiment does not create new values or directions for the society. Because it is generated by frustration and resentment, it merely signals waste and destructive rage. European experience teaches us that social instability is most often caused by defeat in war, by the presence of some insoluble problem such as severe and continuing inflation, or by scandals that challenge institutional legitimacy—or by some combination of all three. In the United States in the mid-seventies, we find elements of all these precipitating factors of instability,plus a decline in public support of institutions unprecedented in its scope.

So, there you go. If they manage to define the Tea Party Movement and conservative resistance to Obama’s “reform” as ressentiment, then they have an intellectual template that allows them to discredit and ignore them  altogther. According to the Left, conservative resistance is neither reform or even revolution- events of popular violence which somehow lead to positive historical outcomes (“the right side of history “)- it is irrational rage that will only “maim or destroy” institutions. Thus, the logic goes, it is the LAME’s job to suppress such a phenomenon and target the dangerous  “demagogues” that lead it for destruction.

So, Breitbart, you have been warned. In this template you are the “demagogue,” and have no doubt, you now have a target on your back.

However, I have no doubt that Breitbart’s speech will resonate as a call to arms for conservatives and the Tea Party Movement. If you haven’t seen it, hopefully it will be put up on one of his sites, like Big Journalism.com and eventually make its way to you tube.

And speaking of You Tube, here is a classic exposition of the logic we’re all up against-it’s really funny:

This is a Big Deal Folks! Scientist from IPCC Admits Faulty Glacier Data was Used “Purely to put Pressure on Political Leaders.”

As CPN  reported in this article way back in early December, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 Fourth Assessment  report (the report), which won the Nobel Prize along with Al Gore, contained a glaring mistake about the “catastrophic melting” of Himalayan glaciers. The report declared that there was a high probability that  all Himalayan  glaciers would disappear  by 2035, and would drastically decrease the water supply for hundreds of millions of people.

Last week, the IPCC was finally forced to withdraw this assessment as it has been admitted it was based solely  on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.

Dr. Murari Lal, the coordinating lead author for the report’s Asia section, said that they depended on these recycled interviews and did not conduct any peer-review of the science before it was put into final report.

In an interview with the UK Daily Mail today, Dr. Lal has also admitted that the information was put into the report for purely political reasons. The faulty and alarmist prediction about the melting glaciers was put in, he said, because “it related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action. It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.”

The reason is clear. Far from being just a simple scientific mistake in a large report, the Himalayan glaciers have long been a central icon in global warming campaigners’ propoganda. Everything that polar bears have been to western environmental campaigners, the Himalayas has been to eastern and Asian advocates of limits of greenhouse gases. The loss of  water resources for millions of people in Central Asia has been a central  alarmist narrative. Thus, it is obvious that it became very important for the true believers to concoct an extremist narrative about the Himalayan glaciers and put it inside the IPCC Fourth Assessment, despite evidence to the contrary.

Because of these revelations, which are a violation of the IPCC’s supposedly stringent scientific procedural rules,  there have been increasing calls for the head of the IPCC, Dr. Rajenda Pachauri, to resign. Pachauri has acknowledged that the section on glaciers is faulty and has admitted that there are probably more errors in that section of the IPCC’s 2007 report.

This is a drastic and embarrassing reversal for Dr. Pachauri, who was drawn into a personal row with the Indian government when their leading climate scientists released a report questioning the IPCC’s Himalayan glacier results last November. At the time, Pachouri dismissed India’s report and referred to it as “voodoo science” and “school-boy science.”  Pachauri and the IPCC subsequently slammed the report by geologist V.K. Raina that concluded glaciers were not retreating abnormally. Raina has asked for an apology and has said that the IPCC should dump their report.

(An interesting side note: CPN reported on this story over one month ago, as there was an article in the BBC about it. Dr. Pachauri, the head of the IPCC,  has claimed he first heard about the errors 10 days ago. See what enlightening reading CPN can be!)

Besides that, the scientist who was the original source of the glacier data,  Syed Hasnain, was also mute about the error, even though he recognized the error in 2008 after he read the entire Nobel Prize-winning report. Hasnain was employed at the The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi at the time,  a company  also headed by Dr. Pachauri of the IPCC. Some have speculated that Hasnain’s silence was attributable to his employment with TERI:

Hasnain has denied this and claims he was working on his own projects at TERI. He said:

I was keeping quiet as I was working here. My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?

Yea, how about those scientists? Maybe the acknowledged “might” of the IPCC had something to do with their silence-they wouldn’t want to be smeared as “deniers” now, would they? They could have lost their  grants and could have had their professional integrity brought into question, eh?

Pursuing this further, Christopher Booker of the London Telegraph has been documenting the rapidly expanding global business ties that Dr. Pachauri, “the world’s leading climate official,” has been establishing since becoming the head of the IPCC in 2002. Booker has revealed not only the windfall in grants and carbon credits that is heading to TERI, but he has also documented the score of positions that Pachauri holds with institutions that are positioned to benefit from the vast worldwide industry based on measures to halt climate change. Booker says that given Pachauri’s initially virulent renunciations of India’s report and his later apology:

Even more damaging now, however, will be the revelation that the source of that offending prediction was the man whom Dr Pachauri himself has been employing for two years as the head of his glaciology unit at TERI – and that TERI has won a share in two major research contracts based on a scare over the melting of Himalayan glaciers prominently promoted by the IPCC, using words drawn directly from Dr Hasnain.

As critics of global warming have been saying for years now, the advocates of climate change and strict restrictions on carbon production are politicians more than they are scientists. With these new revelations and  those of the released e-mails from the CRU last year, this is, at last, pretty clear. But, have no doubt, the climate politicians will go on arguing for their cause, and outside of the blogosphere you can rest assured that the LAME  will keep it under raps as long as they can.

Complaint Filed With ICC Against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Rice, Gonzales for Crimes Against Humanity

A law professor at the Illinois College of Law has filed a formal complaint with the International Criminal Court against members of the Bush Administration for Crimes against Humanity with the International Criminal Court.

His complaint asserts that the practice of ” extraordinary rendition” which continues to be a policy in the Obama Adminstration, is a ” criminal policy and practice which  are both ‘widespread’ and ‘systematic’ within the meaning of Rome Statute article 7(1). Therefore the Accused have committed numerous ‘Crimes against Humanity’ in flagrant and repeated and longstanding violation of Rome Statute articles 5(1)(b), 7(1)(a), 7(1)(e), 7(1)(f), 7(1)(g), 7(1)(h), 7(1)(i), and 7(1)(k). Furthermore, the Accused’s Rome Statute Crimes Against Humanity of enforced disappearances of persons constitutes ongoing criminal activity that continues even as of today.”

The complaint also asserts that even though the U.S. has not ratified the Rome Statute establishing the ICC, the acts committed by Bush et. al. were committed within states who are members and thus, within the jurisdiction of the ICC.

And, may I add, that if an investigation is done and an arrest warrant is issued, Bush et. al. will not be immune from arrest. They will be subject to arrest by any state that has the guts to do so based on universal jurisdiction. Universal jurisdiction is a principle in international law whereby states claim criminal jurisdiction over persons whose alleged crimes were committed outside the boundaries of the prosecuting state, regardless of nationality, country of residence, or any other relation with the prosecuting country. The state backs its claim on the grounds that the crime committed is considered a crime against all, which any state is authorized to punish, as it is too serious to tolerate jurisdictional arbitrage.

There are many countries, even within Europe, that would want to bring Bush et. al. up on charges for Crimes Against Humanity. All the people named in the complaint will have to watch where they travel if arrest warrants are eventually issued by the ICC.

I have no doubt that Obama and the American Left will not defend against these charges. So, what will happen? It remains to be seen, but if arrest warrants are issued, a decision must be made somewhere down the line whether to attack the charges lest they hang out there in perpetuity.

There is evidence that Bush et. al. could beat these charges, as recently, in Lithuania, a controversy has erupted over whether the CIA prisons actually held prisoners or not. This is the kind of evidence that would make it possible to exonerate the U.S. on its “rendition” policy in court.

I wonder how this would play out if Condoleeza Rice became the next President of the United States?

She would be my pick as of now, anyway.

Obama Will Be Forced to Resign If He is Forced to Renege on KSM Trial in NYC

First, I’d like to wish everyone a happy Guantanamo Bay Closure Day!

Sec. 3. Closure of Detention Facilities at Guantánamo. The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order. …

BARACK OBAMA

THE WHITE HOUSE,

January 22, 2009.

Now, although some may think the heading for this post is overblown, it must be recognized that there is a crisis brewing in Washington over Obama’s treatment of the Christmas Day underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and there are signals that his decision to hold the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York City is in peril.

If the crisis over treating the Detroit terrorist Abdulmutallab as a criminal continues to brew, and the Congress is able to sideline the New York trial of KSM, I predict that credible calls for Obama to resign the presidency will begin to be heard.

These two missteps, if widely disseminated, should be the final straws that break Obama and from which he will never be able to recover politically. No matter which direction Obama pivots after the devastating election in Massachusetts, these two national security missteps show that he has become an ineffective and incompetent leader. And with his incompetence fully exposed- especially on foreign policy and national security issues- he has become a dangerous liability not only for the Democratic Party, but more importantly, for the country as well. This should be unacceptable to a country trying to recover from economic crisis, that is in a war with extremists, and which is being challenged internationally on a every level.

The crisis over giving Abdulmutallab civilian legal rights was exacerbated Wednesday by the congressional testimony of Dennis Blair, the  Director of National Intelligence. In that testimony, Blair said that it was a mistake that Abdulmutallah was not held for interrogation by the High Value Interrogation Group, of HIG, an agency created for the express purpose of making decisions about terrorist interrogations. Blair  explained  that even though the FBI was able to question Abdulmutallah briefly before his surgery on Christmas Day and that it revealed a “a treasure trove of intelligence,” shortly after his surgery, Abdulmutallah was read his Miranda rights and clammed up.

It was also revealed at the same hearing that Blair,  FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael E. Leiter, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano-the four most important counter-terrorism officials in the country- were not consulted about the charging decision. Essentially the decision to treat Abdulmutallah as a civilian with full legal rights  was made on the ground, and many questions have been raised about the Administration’s preparedness on domestic terrorism.

Also, in a Newsweek blog, Michael Isikoff reveals that there is growing consensus in Congress that locating the trial in New York City was a really, really bad idea. Isikoff reports that Republican Senator Lindsay Graham will soon force another vote on his previously failed amendment to strip funding for the trial. Isikoff reports that there is renewed support for the measure in Congress:

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham says he will force another vote on his amendment to stop the trial (which was defeated 54-45 in November) once Congress reconvenes. “With Detroit and everything else going on, we’ve got a pretty good chance of winning this thing,” says Graham, adding that he’s privately heard from a number of Democrats, saying “they’re with me.” GOP Rep. Frank Wolf says he plans a similar move in the House. “I’m afraid it’s probably going to pass,” says Democratic Rep. Jim Moran, who has strongly backed the administration on the issue.

These are epic failures by Obama and his Administration. Add this to his clearly inept handling of Iran, his admitted failure on Middle East peace, and not to mention his falling popularity and stalled domestic agenda, and it is very conceivable that even people within his own party will begin calling for his resignation.

No matter which direction Obama pivots now, I think it is almost impossible for him to reclaim any political ground. If he moves to the center, he loses the far-Left. Why would they support this move before he gets health care? Why should they put their issues on hold in an attempt to save Obama’s presdency and a possible second term? They have the political clout now and can’t get things done.

No, unless they believe him blindly, the Left must  demand that Obama moves to the left now, and if he pivots to the center, they will move against him and start clamoring for a third party or support a more progressive candidate in 2012.

Consequently, if Obama moves to the Left, there is a good chance he will be finished altogther. While this may inspire his far-left base to get out in the streets again, it will alienate the moderates and resurgent conservatives even more. They will not give him the cover he sorely needs on his foreign policy and national security incompetence, and he will then appear to be  flailing and ineffective on that front.

So, his best move is probably going to the center. Once there, he must hope that his administration’s repeated attacks on Bush and conservatives in order to decimate them are forgotten. He must hope the Tea Party Movement goes away (and it isn’t), and that the electorate forgets his massive failures and lies to date. If “moderates” and conservatives are unwilling to support  Obama’s move to the center and he simultaneously loses the far-left, what will be the point of him serving out the next four years? (He is already in danger of losing the far-left anyway, given that he has not repealed some of the most hated of Bush’s anti-terror policies. Discarding the radical domestic agenda now, I think, will put them over the edge.) He will then be unable to garner support for anything he does, and the country will enter a protracted stage of political crisis as its leader will be powerless. And political crises are consistently resolved throughout the world by the main perpetrators of the crisis being forced to step down. Here and now, that would be Barack Obama.

_____

Incidentally, I found a video that sends chills down my spine. And in accordance with my series on the crisis in Honduras, I made a connection that is very unpleasant.

Watch the video below, especially the first 2:20 (especially 1:50-2:18) minutes and you’ll see what I mean. See if you make the same connection I do. Don’t believe you are just paranoid if you do, this documentary was produced by the CBC in the 1980s, and was not funded by the Birchers or any anti-Communist group in America.

Perhaps protracted political crisis in the United States is what Obama wants. If it is, we’re in for a bumpy ride in the coming year.

“Listen, Little Man! The Only Thing Standing Between You and Republican Fascist Hell: The Democratic Party and Martha Coakley!”-Boston Globe / K. Olbermann

Now, shouldn’t some of the stuff coming from the liberal advocacy media (LAME) because they fear a potential victory by Republican  Scott Brown in today’s Massachusett’s U.S. Senate race, disqualify them from ever claiming they are objective reporters again? I mean, really… It is so blatant and obvious that I am only one of probably thousands of blogs pointing it out.

The best comes from Keith Olbermann, admittedly a partisan, but if anyone takes this seriously, well, I would be in favor of taking away the right to vote for people with IQs of 60 or lower. His keen analysis:

In Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against women.

Who falls for that stuff anymore? Who are the fear-mongers now?  When they’re desperate, Democratic hacks show what world-class  demagogues they can be. The emperor is bare nekkid today.

And here at CPN in this post 10 days ago we noticed something about the campaign reporting coming from the  Boston Globe. We noticed that while some polls had Brown closing on Coakley, the Globe still had him down by 15 points. The Globe also refused to notice the race was competitive until Saturday, when they could only bring themselves to admit that the race was a “dead heat”, despite most polls showing otherwise.

This was the same line they used yesterday as well, despite the polling data. In a blog post at Real Clear Politics, Boston Globe Puts Thumb on Scale- Again, Tom Bevan makes the point:

Let me see if I have this right: there have been six polls of the Massachusetts Senate race released in the last 24 hours, five of which show Scott Brown with leads of 5 points, 7 points, 9 points, 10 points and 10 points, respectively. Only one poll shows the race tied. None of the polls show Martha Coakley with a lead.

How then, you might ask, can the Boston Globe justify characterizing the race as a “dead heat?”

I suppose if you were disingenuous enough to downplay and/or ignore the five polls showing Scott Brown with fairly sizable leads, then that headline wouldn’t be false. Massively biased and misleading, yes, but technically accurate. And wouldn’t you know, that’s exactly what the author of the story does…

But today, the nekkid emperor has started throwing all the bombs in his arsenal. Yep, our good friends at the Boston Globe have put up numerous reports about how Brown supporters have been “intimidating” those nice, little Democrats and “suppressing” their vote.

The Sweetness and Light blog has a good breakdown of one of these articles:

Brown supporters trying to suppress vote by bullying

By Joan Vennochi, Globe Columnist  |  January 18, 2010

____

But wait, apparently the Boston Globe planted an “interactive map”  in their paper today that showed Coakley winning the election at about 1:00 in the afternoon. They claim it was a mistake!

You old nekkid thing you.

Constitutional strict constructionism: What a pain the a#&!

Appeal set to go to the United States Supreme Court on Hillary Clinton’s constitutional eligibility  to serve as Secretary of State.

Judicial Watch has announced on their website that they have filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court in their lawsuit on behalf of Foreign Service Officer David C. Rodearmel, which challenges the constitutional eligibility of Hillary Clinton to serve as Secretary of State.

The original lawsuit was dismissed by the U.S. District Court in October 2009 after a three-judge panel ruled that Rodearmel did not have proper standing to bring the case. The appeal seeks a review of the ruling on standing and reasserts the original question concerning Hillary Clinton’s eligibility.

The original lawsuit was brought by Rodearmel because he maintained that  as a Foreign Service Officer and employee of the State Department, he would be violating the oath he took in 1991 to “support and defend” and “bear true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution of the United States.

Rodearmel has asserted that Hillary Clinton’s appointment to the office of Secretary of State violates the “Ineligibility Clause” contained in Article I, Section 6 of the U.S. Constitution which strictly prohibits Senators and Representatives from  being appointed to any office in the Federal government that had its salary increased while they were serving in either House. The exact clause is:

Article I Section 6.

(clause 2)

No Senator or Representative shall, during the time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil office under the authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time: and no person holding any office under the United States, shall be a member of either House during his continuance in office.

The lawsuit reminds the Court that the salary of the U.S. Secretary of State was increased at least three times during Clinton’s most recent  term as U.S. Senator, which began January 4, 2007 and does not end until 2013. The Congress attempted to skirt the constitutional issue by passing what is known as a “Saxbe Fix” in December 2008, legislation that reduces the salary of the Secretary of State to the level it was at on January 1, 2007. The so-called “fix” has been done before, but the Supreme Court  has never clarified the issue.

Judicial Watch maintains that a “Saxbe Fix” is an insufficient remedy because the “Ineligibility Clause” is an absolute prohibition which is violated upon appointment, regardless of the enactment of a salary modification.

A discussion of the case is included in the video below:

.

Obama’s Power Elite

A very good article about Obama’s real power base. Notice how this constituency, which includes financial services, academia, and public employee unions, has been the most important beneficiary of government largesse in the past year. I have never understood why there has never been a comprehensive and popular analysis of the “power elite” of the Democratic Party. It makes a mockery out of the idea that they are the party of “the little guy,” which somehow remains a fairly popular stereotype in American politics.

(from The Daily Beast)

By Joel Kotkin

Looking back at President Obama’s first year in office, this much is clear: Obama first enraged the right wing by seeming to veer far left, then turned off the left by seeming to abandon them. Even as Fox News fundamentalists rail against “socialism,” self-styled progressives like Naomi Klein scream about a “blown” opportunity to lead the nation from the swamp of darkest capitalism.

Both right- and left-wing critics fail to consider the fundamental nature of the Obama regime. This presidency represents not a traditional ideology but a new politics that mirrors the rise of a new, and potentially hegemonic class, one for which Obama is a near-perfect representative.

Every president and political movement, of course, brings to power an often-hoary group of grasping interest groups. Under the conservatives and George W. Bush, the favored classes included standbys like the fossil-fuel energy companies, Big Agriculture, suburban homebuilders, and the defense industry.

Rather than the “good old boys,” Obama’s core group hails from what may be best described as the “creative class” – the cognitive elite, or, to borrow from Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Postindustrial Society, the “hierophants of the new society.” They come not from traditional productive industry, but the self-conscious “knowledge” sectors – such as financial services, the software industry, and academia.

From early on, Barack Obama attracted big-money people like George Soros, Warren Buffett, and JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon far more effectively than his opponents in either party. As The New York Times’ Andrew Sorkin put it back in April, “Mr. Obama might be struggling with the blue-collar vote in Pennsylvania, but he has nailed the hedge-fund vote.”

Other bastions of support could be found in Silicon Valley, where Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and venture capitalist John Doerr were all early backers. Obama, the former law school professor, also did exceedingly well with academics, and many of his pivotal wins in the Midwest rested heavily on both votes and volunteers from college constituencies.

Finally Obama gained the early support of public-sector unions, now arguably the dominant power within the Democratic Party. Together, these groups now enjoy the lion’s share of influence inside the administration.

In contrast, the representatives of traditional Democratic sectors such as industrial labor unions, Latinos, or even many African Americans were slow to join the Obama bandwagon. Even after they joined his electoral coalition, they have received little in the way of succor from the president and the administration.

Indeed, for most of these voters, the past year has been an awful one. Unemployment for Latinos, blacks, and blue-collar workers has skyrocketed, particularly among males. For them, Obama’s economic plan has done very little – unsurprising given its primary focus on sustaining public-sector employment and large financial institutions.

In contrast, the core Obama constituencies appear to have ridden out the recession in fine shape. Mega-patron George Soros, for example, has boasted openly about how he was having “a very good crisis.” Much the same can be said of the largely pro-Obama hedge funds and investment bankers, for whom Paulson to Bernanke to Geithner has provided a double-play combination for the ages.

Academia has also emerged as a big winner. This administration is crammed with professors from Science Adviser John Holdren and Energy Secretary Steven Chu to former Harvard President Larry Summers, the director of the National Economic Council. More broadly, academics have reaped massive windfalls from the stimulus, both in terms of direct support for universities and funding for research projects.

One place where the priorities and class interests of the cognitive elite coalesce most has been on “climate change.” In contrast to manufacturers, farmers, or fossil-fuel firms, investment bankers, software companies, and university professors have little to fear from the rash of “green” policy initiatives.

In fact, for these groups, “climate change” often means a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza. Wall Street sees the administration’s “cap and trade” proposals as opening a whole new frontier to enjoy yet more profit. University researchers – particularly those with the right spin on the climate issue – have been big winners in the tens of billions of dollars being handed out by the Chu-led Energy Department and other federal agencies.

Overall, subsidized “alternative energy” – largely excluding both nuclear power and natural gas – also provides Silicon Valley with federal backing for ventures in everything from luxury electric cars and dodgy geothermal developments to “smart” energy grids. And, of course, all this increased federal spending also plays into the public-sector unions, for whom an ever-expanding government represents the ultimate growth industry.

In the short term, Obama’s loyalties have gained him political credit even in hard times. Support from Wall Street and Silicon Valley assures access to big-money sources and influences the upper echelons of the establishment press, particularly in New York. Meanwhile, the academy and the public bureaucracy provide a cadre of political shock troops who may be needed to rouse an increasingly disaffected Democratic base in the 2010 elections.

But Obama’s class strategy also poses considerable longer-term risks. The cognitive elites – clustered in places like Washington, New York, Boston, or Silicon Valley – tend to only talk to and listen to each other. This often makes them slow to recognize shifts in grassroots opinion on such issues as the health plan or global warming.

That risks continued erosion of support from many hard-pressed middle-class voters around the country more concerned with economic growth and holding onto their home than saving the planet. These are precisely the voters, not the tea party activists or their leftist analogues, who likely will determine the political winners in 2010 and beyond.

Proofs of a conspiracy? Or how did the high-minded and international Progressives get Honduras so wrong?

 

Original Comment by Conservative Policy News: Part 1

Supporters of ousted Honduran president Zelaya prepare for resistance

The more research I do on the Crisis in Honduras, the more complicated the story becomes. What follows is a multi-part comment that will provide not only a basic historical outline of the crisis , but also important links to reports and other reference materials that will help the interested reader confirm the truth of events and the perspective taken here. Hopefully, it will also  provide the impetus for others to do their own research into the deep history of this important political event which has ramifications, not only for the future of Latin America, but also for rest of the world.

Unfortunately, the entire fascinating story of crisis in Honduras  has been under-reported or  misreported by the liberal advocacy media (LAME) in the United States and throughout the world. This biased reporting  has served to further undermine the efforts of the  Honduran people at  restoring democracy and the rule of law in their country. At the same time, it has given aid and comfort to those  groups inside Honduras who continue to benefit from unrest, disorder and conflict.

When one looks at the crisis in Honduras (which remains unresolved), there comes into view the outlines of an international Marxist plan at work. Obviously, most people will be skeptical of that idea because it would be very difficult to prove that diverse figures such as Miguel D’Escoto, President of the United Nations General Assembly; Jose Miguel Insulza, Secretary General of the Organization of American States; and Harold Koh,  chief legal counsel for the US State Department;  coordinated their efforts to some degree in an attempt to intimidate Honduras to retain Manuel Zelaya as President, even though that would have clearly violated Honduran law and interfered with the sovereign laegal process of every institution in the Honduran government.

However, those individuals, along with many others, played key roles from outside the country in what I believe was  an effort to subvert Honduran democracy and to further integrate Honduras into the so-called “Bolivarian Revolution,” the Marxist movement in Latin America that has been fomented by the quasi-secretive Sao Paulo Forum, is led by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and planned by Fidel Castro, and which has authoritarian regimes like Cuba as members and pariah countries like Iran and Zimbabawe as its allies.

The Honduran government has withstood the attack for now, and was able to hold  scheduled elections in November. Nevertheless, the same international Marxist and Progressive forces (with the exception of the US State Dept.-which changed its position reluctantly) continue to pressure Honduras in the name of getting Zelaya back into the presidency, even though the new president, Porofirio “Pepe” Lobos, takes office on January 27, 2010. The international political community, international human rights activists, and  the LAME continue to work to keep the crisis going and unresolved; a crisis that benefits no one except the “Bolivarian Revolution” and the fanatical Marxist forces inside Honduras.

Pro-Zelaya, Marxist protesters gather at Tegucigalpa Airport July 6, 2009.

It is easy to be skeptical because to say a “conspiracy” devised and maintained the crisis in Honduras and continues to, one would have to be able to prove the existence of a plan, which has definite ends, and that the means taken during the crisis have been verifiably taken to support the conspiratorial plan. I do not have a smoking gun that proves there was something drawn up and put on paper in Havana or Caracas and later put into motion by Zelaya according to instruction.

But, once the entire history of the crisis in Honduras is exposed, I feel it would be very hard to deny that the international left strategically located in international organizations, in the “human rights community,” in the press, and even in U.S. State Department and the U.S. Senate, showed their disregard for the law, social order, truth and democracy in order to subvert a national government and bring it in line with a socialist political scheme that was rejected by a majority of the Honduran people as well as both conservative and leftist parties within the Honduran  government.

Consequently, the report that follows will examine the actions of all these forces during the Honduran crisis, and will show that an international but quasi-secretive movement of Marxists, ignored by the mainstream press in Latin America, the United States, and the rest of the world, has been the main engine of the prolonged crisis in Honduras since it began. And, it will expose the technique of constitutional subversion that has been the model for instituting the program of the “Bolivarian Revolution” in countries that have repeatedly and democratically rejected it.

Bolivarian Puppets

A Manufactured Crisis

The ongoing crisis in Honduras began on June 28, 2009 when President Jose Manuel Zelaya Rosales was arrested for trying to run a rogue and illegal nationwide plebiscite ostensibly to gauge popular approval for a National Constituent Assembly (NCA) that would have initiated the rewriting of the Honduran Constitution. A warrant had been issued for Zelaya’s arrest by the Supreme Court the day before, and Zelaya was then arrested by the Armed Forces of Honduras and transported out of the country to Costa Rica.

It was first reported to most of the world that the arrest of Zelaya had been brazenly conducted by a “military-backed coup” that kidnapped the President in his sleep (pajamas included) and was supported by “reactionary” and  right-wing forces within the Honduran government and the United States. The imagery that was used by the press harkened back to an era when Central America was a very hot front in the Cold War, its democracies were fragile, and political crises often ended with the rule of the  military or strong man dictators.

The histrionic response to the crisis in Honduras was not only concentrated in the international press; the reaction by the international community and leaders from around the world was almost uniform in condemning Zelaya’s arrest and in demanding his return to the presidency. In one of the stronger and more important responses to the crisis, the Secretary-General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Miguel Insulza, not only condemned the “coup being carried out by a group within the military,” but also called on “the Honduran people, the nations of the Americas, and the international community to join forces against this grave disturbance of the democratic process…in Honduras.”

For the most part, this version of events has remained the one touted by leftists from all over the world. With very few exceptions, the record of the crisis in Honduras continues to be partial to Zelaya and his claims that he was acting legally through his executive authority, while it continues to cast the actions taken by the Honduran government and interim president, Roberto Micheletti, in the most negative light possible.

Yet, even though this is the popular version of the crisis in Honduras, it is false.

The evidence shows that not only did Zelaya repeatedly violate Honduran law, he also openly shunned the legal authority of the nation’s legal institutions, including numerous rulings by the Honduras Supreme Court and the National Congress. Moreover, for months leading up to the crisis, Zelaya was leading a very public and defiant campaign against the government and intentionally stoking the flames of popular insurrection amongst various Marxist groups within the country- essentially preparing them for the “revolutionary moment” he was working to generate.  And, further, as events during the summer of 2009 have proven, Zelaya was acting on behalf of- and with the assistance of-  Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries of the “Bolivarian Revolution” which have been spreading their tentacles throughout Latin America for a decade, and were the most obvious beneficiaries of a discredited constitution, a weakened rule of law, and a watered-down sovereignty within the traditionally conservative,  pro-American Honduras.

Next: Part 2, The Single Spark