Romney, the son of a politician, has been running for office, holding office or thinking about running for office for more than two decades. “Just level with the American people,” Gingrich growled. “You’ve been running … at least since the 1990s.”

For some reason, Romney can’t do that. Or at least it seems like he can’t. His authentic inauthenticity problem isn’t going away. And it’s sapping enthusiasm from the rank and file.

Goldberg is right, but the underlying theme that voters need to be reminded of is that during so many important debates fromhealthcare, jobs, Wall Street Reform, confirmations, recess appointments, to taxes the culprits to invoke cloture or side with the Democrats typically are the same:  Senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe,  and Scott Brown–the trifecta of RINOs. All from the northeast, too.  See where I’m going with this?

Frankly, Romney, who the mainstream liberal media would like to see win the nomination, has yet to unite the GOP base.  His used car salesman pitch simply rubs people the wrong way.  We’ve seen this over and over again–even John McCain pointed this out and won in 2007′s primary–and now supports him–that should speak volumes to my point.  Romney has always been dogged by this and this is why we have such a large ‘Not Romney’ camp on the right side of the aisle.

The GOP is also paying the bitter price for not having anyone in line to succeed GW Bush.  The party’s internal tug of war will be an historical teachable moment and prepare the party for future elections.  The one saving grace is that, while the Democrats have Hillary, they have no one to succeed her at this point in time.  I say Hillary because she seems to be the only power broker left untarnished by Obama–even though she is an Alinsky kinda girl.

Additionally, the GOP presidential candidate will have a two-pronged mission as the nominee:  to beat the MSM and Obama.  However, enlightened voters now know for sure the media is mostly state-controlled, Obama was never vetted, and that his radical leftist ideology drives his policies, appointments, and regulations out of the mainstream.

Furthermore, the MSM needs Romney to offset Obama.  The formula is quite simple:  RomneyCare is to ObamaCare as Obama’s rhetoric is to Romney’s rhetoric all of which cancel each other out according to how the media sees it.

I’m not buying the media hype over who can beat Obama.  The primary is the primary and the game changes in the general.  Voters are more inclined to vote with their wallets.  We have gas prices averaging at almost $4 per gallon across the country, skyrocketing food prices, record foreclosures, record number of people on food stamps, high unemployment, ObamaCare, crippling regulations, and much more.  So if the MSM thinks that the historic 2010 midterm GOP wave was a whim, think again.  The Right accomplished its key mission of splitting the Congress so that Obama’s agenda could not be rammed through anymore.  Would we have liked the Senate, sure, but in 2012, the job will be finished.  My point is that who do we really want in the Oval Office?  A northeastern Republican who disavows the GOP or not.  We already have someone who does not have the consent of the governed.  Are we really going to take that risk again?

Finally, Romney has always touted RomneyCare as a great model for all the states to implement, but the reality is, the only person who implemented RomneyCare was Obama and now we have ObamaCare.  No thanks.

Perhaps the next edition can provide kids with a full accounting of the Occupy-related illnesses, vandalism, rapes, deaths, and other criminal violations — and a related pop quiz on John Nolte’s Occupy arrest rap sheet.

The kids deserve the whole truth. The teachers unions’ Alinsky brigade won’t give it to them.

However, while Scholastic continues its love affair with OWS, it also has a hypocrisy problem (yes, go figure).  Seems Scholastic senior editor, Natalie Smith, who wrote this OWS puff piece dated well after this gem of a photo, conveniently forgot that her company is a $1.9 Billion publicly-traded company on the NASDAQ exchange.  Smith writes:

The Occupy protesters argue that large companies like those on Wall Street are making too much money while millions of Americans are struggling just to put food on the table. The protesters say they want average Americans to have more job opportunities and share in companies’ prosperity. They want their voices to be heard.  (emphasis mine)

What Smith fails to report is that Scholastic is in quite good shape financially:

In fiscal 2011 operating income was $100.7 million on revenue of $1,906.1 million, primarily reflecting lower sales of educational technology relative to a year ago, when the Company benefited significantly from the federal stimulus program, as well as increased strategic spending on digital initiatives in the children’s book business. Free cash flow was $120.5 million, which exceeded net income, compared to $171.6 million a year ago, which reflected that year’s strong educational technology sales. The Company also returned $176.4 million to shareholders in the form of share buybacks and dividends in fiscal 2011.

Last year we celebrated the 90th Anniversary of the founding of Scholastic. From the launch of a single classroom magazine in 1920, Scholastic has grown to become the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books and a leader in educational technology and children’s media.

Ah, yes, the sweetness of a capitalistic economic system, vision, ingenuity, and success.  Scholastic has been able to grow due to the very capitalistic system OWS condemns.  It’s mind-boggling, to say the least, how Scholastic can support a movement that validates and teaches children class warfare, lawlessness, and lewd behavior.  But then again…

*Catch the next episode at 8pm EST on radio stations across America or by way of podcast:
20111012KMC – Radio Podcast
20111012KMCVid – Video Podcast

*Find The Kevin McCullough Show on our newest affiliate of the month:
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(including the ciities of: Paducah, KY., Cape Girardeau, MO., Paris, TN., Carbondale, IL.)

ON THE KEVIN McCULLOUGH SHOW:

1. THE HEADLINE ITEMS:
The “Occupy” movement steps forward the next level. In demonstrations on Tuesday going so far as to claim that violence was necessary for genuine economic help to come about. ALSO: The latest excuse for a debate was held by Bloomberg last night, yikes. The swords were out for Cain, we’ll hear from Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. kmcradio@gmail.com

2. THE PRACTICAL DILEMMA:
A piece in the Atlanta predicts the “End of Men.” A female friend from Washington DC pointed this article out to me yesterday and today we begin a very important discussion of what the essence of this column would end up looking like. Sick of men? Think everybody else is? Your replies: kmcradio@gmail.com.

3. THE GOD THOUGHT:
“There is no second blessing or spiritual experience that can magically propel us to a state where we no longer struggle with sin. That won’t happen until we finally get to heaven. Between now and then we walk the hard road to glory.” CONTINUE: “God Thought” on facebook!

Also able to be heard via a snappy smart phone listening app for the AFR Radio Network at that same time each night 8pm EST. Download Apple’s iTunes AFR’s app here. Android and other smart phones may download here.

There was much riding on the debut of Gov. Rick Perry in the conversation of the GOP race. A race he came to dominate in less time than any other candidate on the floor.

On display would be not only the aggressive, misleading, and flat out dishonest gamesmanship of Brian Williams of NBC and John Harris of Politico, but the attempts by the other candidates to present Perry as somehow not the guy equipped to run the country.

Couple this with the heart-wrenching circumstances he faces in he and Ron Paul’s home state with wildfires that have devoured more than 1000 homes, and Rick Perry was a man tonight besieged from every angle. The heart, the mind, the friend, the foe… all gunning for him, testing him, and seeing how he would fare.

What the nation saw was a man who thought before he spoke, chose words wisely, and in whatever moment he found himself in, someone who wasn’t merely able to be conversant about the issue, but penetrate the tone, spirit, and focus of the discussion that caused everyone else on the stage to respond… to him!

This would’ve been a win for Rick Perry just on the mathematical equation of judging debates. But considering the increased odds he was up against, the smoothness with which he won, translates into massive points of confidence of those already supporting him, and for those yet decided, his plain speak common sense drew them in.

Odds were this debate could’ve set up a huge battle between Romney and Perry kicking off with Romney landing damaging blows. That picture never happened.

Romney was basically defeated for the night when the discussion turned to Romneycare. His refusal to address the issue, and to pretend to change the subject to giving all fifty states waivers to Obamacare was deflated the moment Bachmann (who touted another strong performance) hit back with “overturn” not “waivers” is the only true solution.

Huntsman–who was given an ungodly amount of time to yammer on about essentially nothing, should be relegated to the ash-heap of 2011, as more or less Cain should be as well.

Just not enough substance, just not enough focus. And with the lightest resumes on the stage both should be sitting down.

WHAT ASTOUNDS ME about this GOP field is the articulate nature that everyone besides Huntsman and to a lesser degree Paul are able to exhibit. I believe Obama, on merits would lose a debate to any of the following: Santorum, Gingrich, Bachmann, Romney, and Perry.

That’s a very deep bench with this level of communication skill. And my only hope is that Gingrich was telling the truth tonight when he proclaimed that the entire stage wants so bad to see Obama beaten, that they would all immediately go to work for the eventual winner.

Whoever the nominee is to be, He/She will NEED that kind of support from such an articulate supporting cast. At the end of the day, Perry won–he won big, and is likely to add to those huge polling leads he has gained in recent days.

But perhaps you disagree–I’d love to know your response and perhaps read it on my nationally syndicated show tomorrow. Drop me an email to weigh in.

Kevin McCullough is a nationally syndicated talk radio host, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR, and best selling author of three books. His most recent being: “No He Can’t: How Barack Obama is dismantling Hope and Change.”

Stephen and Kevin CARE about your health!

As I was beginning to write my new best-selling book, “No He Can’t: How Barack Obama is dismantling Hope and Change” my heart grew increasingly sad. As I watched the entire health care debate in 2009, the tea-party revolt and the repeal push in 2010, and the reality of where we are now–I grew even MORE sad.

And this is why…

In all of the discussion about repeal, replace, Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, it just felt like the voice of common sense had completely died.

In my book I advocate a serious engagement by the reader into the debate of the day and the “rolling up of the sleeves” to take the process of finding solutions to problems into their own hands and to begin to leverage their abilities of thoughts, behavior, and impact to implement solutions that they find distasteful in the public arena.

It was over a year ago that Stephen and I founded XtremeCharity and through it we have been able to raise awareness and dollars for things like feeding those who were hungry, housing those who are homeless, and getting other resources to people in need.

But we didn’t have any solutions for the challenges of how people were forced to deal with their own health care. The maintenance of costs associated with staying well, or getting well, much less access to doctors that were in the least bit reasonable.

Our frustrations led us on a mission to uncover methods that could be discovered, put into place, and begin to genuinely change the look and process of taking control of one’s health. That mission culminated this morning with the announcement on national television and radio of “The Cares Project 2011.”

Combining free market principles with former top minds in the health care industry, and formulating innovative approaches with health maintenance and control of costs we are significantly reducing the expense of the process, increasing the access to medical resources, and exposing the corruption of outdated systems all at the same time.

Let me give you an example.

Even if you HAVE health insurance drug coverage, even government assistance for drug coverage, did you know that the drug manufacturers, in conjunction with pharmacies, have worked together with lawmakers to rig the prescription drug game? Even if you have a co-pay on your drug benefit–you are likely getting cheated. Here’s how:

Pharmacies are legally allowed to charge you the maximum co-pay on your policy every time you go for drugs. $25, $30, $45 – whatever your co-pay is they are legally allowed (and will) charge you that amount at almost every possible chance. Yet with the emergence of generics and the mass quantities drugs are produced at today some prescriptions will not cost the pharmacy more than $6-$12 to fill.

Well if you have a $45 co-pay and the drug is $6 – the pharmacy is allowed to pocket $39.

So step one of the CaresProject 2011 we wanted to immediately bring down the cost of your out-of-pocket cash, and with the help of a tremendous consortium of talent we have created the CaresCard. AND WE MADE IT AVAILABLE FOR FREE!

When you click and create one, take it with you to your pharmacy. It is honored at 60,000 pharmacies across the nation. There are only 62,000 or so pharmacies (not counting the 3,000 operated in prisons.)

No matter what type of feedback they give you, (positive, inquisitive, or negative) you instruct them to enter the CaresCard2011 into your prescription file into their system. The card, once entered, will automatically provide a trip wire so that if your drug is LESS than your co-pay you will never be charged the higher cost. And if you have no insurance at all it will also automatically discount generics as much as 55% and name brand drugs as much as 15-23%.

Bottom line is, you will IMMEDIATELY begin to save on every prescription you fill. And you IMMEDIATELY begin to put more money directly back into your own pocket. THIS is free market innovation, over turning the apple cart of Big Pharm, Big Government, and Big Brother.

Tomorrow on the show I will roll out the 2nd part of the CaresProject2011 and it will include a feature that will give you access to a U.S. Board Certified American doctor 24 hours a day, 365 days a year — UNLIMITED — for the entire year, for less than the cost of a single office visit.

But for now, please accept our CaresCard2011 as a personal gift from XtremeCharity and let a little hope fill your heart, that no matter how tough these times get, it will be our innovation, our determination to solve the problem, and our incredible charity towards one another as Americans that will ultimately solve the problem.

I’m Kevin McCullough, and that’s how I “Binge Think!”
I’ve been called a “MuscleHead”
And many say I’m full of “Hot Air”

Now that New York State has approved same-sex marriage — rather, now that the New York State legislature has done so, probably over the objections of a strong majority of its own citizen constituents — we need a battleplan to hold the line against this becoming the norm.

Why? So what if the federal circus courts begin striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in this and that circuit, forcing states that oppose SSM nevertheless to have it de facto anyway. What’s the big deal?

The “big deal” is that once same-sex marriage (SSM) has become nearly universal around the country, then we’re going to see the same terrible effects on our society that we already see in Europe: diminished interest in marriage (it’s no longer special), more domestic violence, even quicker divorces, a marked drop in the fertility rate, massive importation of fecund immigrants who have no loyalty whatsoever to the United States… and of course ever greater pressure to also allow polygamy and polyandry, group marriage, and so forth.

Pro-SSM people (like Patterico) are fond of making the argument that somebody else’s SSM doesn’t affect his own marriage; his marriage is still just as strong! Just as strong, perhaps; but not just as special as it used to be, not when any random association between two or more people of any gender can also be called a “marriage.”

It’s like counterfeiting money: If I print my own twenty-dollar bills, that doesn’t physically change the real bills you have in your wallet at this moment; they don’t magically change into newspaper, the ink doesn’t turn a different color, Andy Jackson doesn’t morph into George Soros. In that sense, my counterfeits don’t directly affect your sawbucks… but my counterfeits indirectly devalue your real bills, creating uncertainty about which currency is real and which is fake, how much is out there, which is truly legal tender and which an ersatz copy that, if discovered, is worthless.

My counterfeit currency spreads fear, uncertainty, doubt. Private counterfeiting is as bad as rampant money-creation via the Federal Reserve; worse in the sense that at least the Fed must report on its activities from time to time.

By this analogy, traditional marriage is the currency backed by some form of specie, that which gives the institution of marriage itself the very cache and social benefit that same-sex couples want to claim for their own. Contrariwise, any other form of union that is legally called marriage is the fiat or counterfeit currency; it piggy-backs on the real institution of marriage, hoping some of the moral, emotional, and sacred virtue rubs off.

Marriage is quite a special social institution; that’s why it’s the one to which we entrust child rearing. But to paraphrase Dash in the Incredibles, when everything is “special,” then nothing is special.

So what to do, what to do? With the third largest state in the U.S. falling, I fear that train has left the station. Even if there is a later referendum in New York and the people reverse that decision, already hundreds of thousands of people across the nation will have flown to the Bug Apple and gotten legally married. And as we’re finding out in California, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle again, even if it was let out in despite of the voters.

You can’t fight something with nothing; we need something positive to fight for, not just something negative to fight against; we can’t allow ourselves to be put on the defensive by the Left and by libertarians who oppose legal marriage altogether. I believe there is only one answer: The Covenant marriage movement must become a popular front, just as the Tea Party movement already has.

Covenant marriage (CM) as a distinct legal institution arose comparatively recently, in response to the jump in the divorce rate in the 1980s. It differs significantly from normal legal marriage in ways that make it vastly more exclusive an institution:

• In a CM, couples must first undergo pre-nuptial counseling before they can marry.
• They agree to limit the grounds for divorce from the standard normal around the country — if either party wants a divorce, that’s grounds for divorce — to a much narrower set of grounds, usually spousal or child abuse, felony conviction, or adultery. (If a state allows a CM couple to negotiate its own covenant, there can of course be more or fewer grounds for divorce.)
• Any CM passed by citizen demand would, by its enabling legislation, be restricted to the traditional definition of marriage — one man, one woman. Creating a new form of marriage to exclude non-traditional groups of people being married is the only reason that CM legislation is likely to be passed in most states.
• CM is non-denominational and can be performed by civil authorities as well as religious; there’s no religiosity requirement.

But how could CM become “the savior of marriage?” It’s clear that the law cannot confer any greater legal status upon a couple married under CM than normal marriage confers upon the two, three, n-number of males and/or females who “marry” under that regime.

Yet that very point should make it harder for the courts to subvert CM: Same-sex couples (and later, groups of people larger than two) cannot argue that they’re excluded from legal marriage, up to and including the name “marriage.” They have the same legal rights and status, insofar as the secular law is concerned. Therefore, they have no legal ground to demand that Covenant marriage be forced to allow same-sex, polyamorous, group, incestuous, or under-aged marriages. The only difference between normal and Covenant marriage is that the latter has a number of restrictions not found in the former.

True, CM confers no more legal rights than normal marriage; but extra legal rights were never really the source of the specialness of marriage — except perhaps the legal right for spouses not to testity against each other. (That last will certainly have to be revisioned when polyamorous marriages are allowed, unless we want entire Mafia families and street gangs to “marry” each other, so that nobody can squeal.)

No, the specialness of marriage has always flowed from its exclusivity and its permanence… which is why the Left has persistently attacked both those qualities by (a) twisting the definition of marriage towards making any association of any number of people a “marriage,” and (b) making it easier and easier to walk away from a marriage upon the slightest pretext, provocation, or whim.

By restoring exclusivity and strengthening permanence, CM becomes the “real” marriage, and ordinary legal marriage just a trendy domestic partnership. And if that is how people begin to see it, we’ll see more and more traditional couples getting married under Covenant, so they can demonstrate to the world their commitment to, and determination to work at, the union.

Ordinary legal marriage will persist, and will still confer the same legal status and rights; but it will probably fall into greater and greater disrepute among the majority: “Oh, you won’t marry me with a Covenenant marriage? What, you want a back door out whenever you get bored with me? Drop dead, you creep!”

Women especially will have good reason to demand a CM or nothing: They know better than most men how vital is an intact family, with a male father and a female mother, when raising children.

A few caveats, none of which changes the basic equation:

• It’s very unlikely that Congress will pass a federal version of CM. Nor should it. We have an enviable system of federalism; let it work! Each state can decide what exact kind of Covenant marriage to allow, if any, in its enabling legislation.
• Even if your state enacts a strong version of CM, it cannot make it illegal for one of the partners to move to another state, establish residency, and then get divorced under that state’s no-fault divorce law that doesn’t recognize the covenant. That’s the price of liberty.

• There will never come a time when normal marriage is abolished altogether; because if it did vanish from a state, then the Left could once again raise the spector of “unequal treatment.” Specious though it is — gays and straights alike are constrained in who they can marry; neither can marry a sibling, for example — the judiciary has signalled that it is ready to cram SSM down our throats, and to hell with voters.

  But that’s a feature, not a bug; when state citizens must actually make a choice which type of marriage to enter into, they necessarily will have to think longer and harder about it that with a normal legal marriage. (As of course we all should, and do, if we believe it to be a solemn vow.)

Just as tea parties have swept the nation in a “popular front“ — and I believe I was the first person to so desribe them, back in February, 2010 — I see Covenant marriage doing the same (with a vast overlap, most likely). And that means those of us who support traditional marriage no longer need wage a defensive war, trying to protect every state, city, village, and farm from the contagion of the “love bug,” the untenable and cockamamie meme that “love is all you need” for marriage.

That bit of wrongthinking leads directly to our present discontent, the conclusion that any two or more people who “love” each other should be allowed to marry… men, women, siblings, fathers with their daughters, forty year olds with fourteen year olds, one man with eight women.

Instead, we can revert to the traditional American strategy of opening our own offensive. Rather than try to defend the status quo ante, we fight to implement a new form of marriage that is more exclusive and more permanent, bucking the leftist trend towards inclusion and impermanence. We slap both kinds of marriage on the table, then let the people choose. I predict that after an astonishingly brief time, “normal” marriage, with its unspecial universality and unserious provisional nature, will sink into desuetude, the last step before moribundity.

Americans may be many things, but not generally a mob: When the Left forces mob-rule upon us — or more accurately, when they gin-up mobs to force tyranny upon the rest of us, with themselves as smug, self-satisfied tyrants — we the people have a glorious history of rising up against them. This is true whether it’s the tyranny of socialism, the tyranny of “diversity,” or the tyranny of perversity.

As SSM spreads and infects more and more states, CM will grow alongside and surpass it in every venue. Soon the Obamunists will be fighting the defensive war, clinging to their “inclusive” definition of marriage. We achieve victory within the culture, despite — even because of — the Left’s victory in the courts and legislatures. As an institution that is far more societal than legal, a solid victory within the culture is of much greater moment and future value than merely winning legal and legislative battles on the ground.

As the pushback becomes a wave, then a tsunami, and more and more states enact some version of Covenant marriage, then we’ll once again have an exclusive and durable form of union to offer in preference to the liberals’ and leftists marriage-lite. I sense that people, most especially young adults, have grown tired of weak tea and tolerance of everything, including intolerance itself. They crave something permanent, solid, bigger than themselves.

Give us Americans the choice, and I believe we will once again lead the rest of the world out of its moral morass.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

From: Mitch Berg, Cheesed-Off Conservative

Re: Get off the can, get on the stick.

Senators,

I get the need for compromise.

I get the fact that the Democrats still control the Senate, and they’re not going to get their way for the asking.

I get that.

What I do not get is how none of you establishment Republicans ever seems to learn from history.    It was six  years ago when you had a majority, and a sitting President, and you – many of you occupying space in the Senate right now – blinked, and gave the Democrat minority everything they wanted – a legislative Manhattan, in exchange for some meaningless procedural trinkets.

And you’re doing it again, cutting a “deal” with the President to pass a continuing resolution in exchange for a vote on a Constitutional Balanced Budget Amendment.

A vote.

Erick Erickson (with emphasis added by me):

The GOP is not telling the Democrats they actually want the Balanced Budget Amendment, just a vote. This is wholly unacceptable. If Barack Obama wants to increase the debt ceiling, the GOP should go all or nothing — they must have their Balanced Budget Amendment in exchange for it. A vote is utter nonsense without a commitment from the Democrats to pass it by a two-thirds vote from both Houses.

But it gets more insane from there. Everything we feared, everything we knew would happen, is coming to fruition.

Why?

Because you, the “Senate GOP Leadership”, the ones who’ve been there forever, fear another government shutdown.  You remember – and have created a mid-level “leadership” that remembers – how badly the last shutdown cost you at the polls.

But that was in the cha-cha nineties, when things were generally awesome and the greatest crisis facing this nation was a lothario President, when the stock market was booming and people were generally fat ‘n happy, and the media was only too happy to tell them so.

But – I’ll emphasize this – it’s 2011 now.  The Obama Recession is underway.  A vast movement of Americans has had enough.  They reversed the Obamascenscion and put your – our – party back in power twenty years earlier than anyone thought it would be possible in 2009.  Because we are that pissed off!  There is a blogosphere, and talk radio, and Fox News; the mainstream media don’t have the stage all to themselves.  We can control our own narrative this time - if you are bold enough to seize the opportunity.

You, the “leadership”, apparently don’t get that.  Erickson (again, emphasis added):

Why? Because the GOP is finally being forced by the base to push for actual, substantive spending cuts instead of the death by a thousand paper cuts strategy of the leadership…Luckily for us, conservatives made such a stink about the last short term CR being, in fact, the last short term CR, the GOP is now forced to be a leader. The leaders are, however, reluctant.

Look, it is very simple — demand passage of a balanced budget amendment, defund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood, and if the Democrats balk, shut the government down.

Unfortunately for you and me, the GOP leadership is scared to death of and hell bent on avoiding a government shutdown. They may have no choice, so they better get ready.

Look – here’s the deal; we sent you there to kick ass, and kick Ass.  We sent you there to repeal Obamacare, to slash spending, to roll back tax hikes.

And we – the people who sent you to Washington in the greatest electoral turnaround in decades – are hungry for exactly that.

And if you don’t have the cojones to do the job, we will send someone to DC that does.

Cut the budget.  Shut down the government if you need to.  We’ll be there if you do.  The situation is different than in the nineties;  the media that covered the Democrats’ behinds back then doesn’t have a complete stranglehold now.  So do it.  Do what we sent you there to do.

And if you don’t?  You can join your constituents on the unemployment line.  Soon.

Do it.

That is all.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

Not so fast.  The post-election tea party has now evolved into the watchdogs of the state and federal politicians that they gave victories to.  The tea party now expects this new breed of politicians to adhere to their campaign promises (yes, I know) as well as tackle the real problems and actually do something about them.  Actions indeed speak louder than words, and in this case they directly affect our nation’s fiscal future–among other things.

Watch.  And listen.  H/T Caleb Howe

“They cannot agree with themselves,” said Hoyer. He called for Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to distance himself from Tea Party conservatives and forge a compromise between centrist Republicans and Democrats.

Hoyer said Boehner should abandon the additional cuts conservatives muscled into the bill introduced by GOP leaders that would have cut $35 billion in spending this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. After an uproar from conservatives, GOP leaders rallied around a bill that would cut spending by $61 billion. 

Of course he would say that.

This is not 1995 though and the game has changed, and frankly so have the rules.  The differences between 1995 and now is the fact that President Clinton used his veto power coupled with spot-on messaging:

On November 13, 1995, President Clinton vetoed a continuing resolution that would have kept the government running amid a budget impasse. The result was a partial shutdown. A few days later, he signed another continuing resolution providing funds for the government until mid-December. After that measure expired, he vetoed three appropriations bills, and another partial shutdown ensued. This one lasted until early January 1996.

Yes, Clinton called the GOP’s bluff and triggered a government shut down.  The blame supposedly fell at the Republican’s feet.  However, the GOP remained the majority party in the 1998 elections only losing five seats in the House, largely due to the fact that the GOP-led Congress passed popular legislation approval ratings remained consistent.  Furthermore, President Obama is signing the CRs–he has no option–as the Democrats control the Senate.  He couldn’t possibly risk the blame to lie with his party.

The Democrat’s political strategy, setup, and sting on the Republicans is as directed at the tea party as it is to fragmenting and alienating the GOP leadership with the freshmen members.  This attempt to weaken Boehner as a leader and cause voters to become disenfranchised with the GOP sets up the 2012 election.  

The GOP must remember that every time a Republican has the fortitude to stand up and call out the Democrats and the left, the people are behind them.  They crave someone with that leadership quality and fearlessness.  And this is why there is no front-runner in the GOP race to the White House.

Speaker Boehner must lead and unify the Republicans, stay on message, and obey the will of the American people.  If he doesn’t, the GOP will suffer serious consequences and the mantra of “not only conservative, but Republican” will vanish–setting up third party races in 2012, GOP incumbent losses, and Democrat wins.  However, if Boehner stands firm there will be no way the MSM machine will be able to beat back the sentiments and will of the American people for the results will be self-evident.

Crossposted at TMR

Hintz touches on so many topics in his 3-minute rant–from transparency, public debate, having to read a piddly 144-page bill, to the 35,000 people outside clammoring to have their voices heard.

Really?

Where was he when the more than one million Americans gathered at the Capitol and were ignored by the Democrats?  Was Hintz outraged when Republicans said they needed time to read the 2,000+ page Obamacare bill?  Where was his outrage when Harry Reid slipped in his manager’s amendment replacing the entire Obamacare bill and then voted on it?  Was he outraged when Nancy Pelosi met with Obama and other Democrat leaders behind closed doors locking out Republicans during the so-called ‘conference’?  Was he outraged when debate was cut off on Obamacare by the Democrats in Congress?  I could go on and on (and wrote extensively about it) as this type “professionalism” was on display for two years with Pelosi and Reid at the helm.

But, at least Hintz gets why the Democrats are in the minority…and in Wisconsin.

For the record, this video was extremely difficult to find as it has continually been scrubbed by the compliant lefty media.

Senate Rule 23
   Senate Rule 23. Committee not to be absent. Members of a committee, except a conference committee, may not be absent by reason of their appointment during the sitting of the senate, without special leave.
[am. 2001 S.Res. 2] emphasis mine

I’m a literal type of gal, and “may not” means you absolutely, positively cannot be absent–without taking special leave (maybe they could get a doctor’s note).  Here are the past and future committee schedules for February and March 2011.

Will tone-deaf, taxpayer-betraying Democrats Tim Carpenter, Spencer Coggs, Tomothy Cullen, Jon Erpenbach, Dave Hansen, Jim Holperin, Robert Jauch, Chris Larson, Julie Lassa, Mark Miller, Fred Risser, Lena Taylor, Kathleen Vinehout, and Robert Wirch abide by the Senate rules that they adopted in January 2011.  Or will they continue to hold their positions in contempt and be cowards?

Will the Wisconsin Republicans hold the Democrat fleebaggers to the Wisconsin Constitution and flex their majority authority…kinda like the Democrats in the US House did with Rep. Joe Wilson?

These fleebagging Democrats not only took an oath to uphold the Wisconsin Constitution, but also the United States Constitution and could, if they really had serious moxie, enforce what is stated in both Constitutions:

Article IV, §7 (of WI document)
   Organization of legislature; quorum; compulsory attendance. Section 7. Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members; and a majority of each shall constitute a quorum to do business, but a smaller number may adjourn from day to day, and may compel the attendance of absent members in such manner and under such penalties as each house may provide. (emphasis mine)

It would be a great day for Wisconsin taxpayers if that “may compel” became a “did compel,” because as I have stated before “working families” is code for “union families” and what have the Democrats done for private-sector families, except regulate and tax their businesses it into oblivion.

Yes, indeed, elections have consequences.  And the GOP is only getting started; it’s only been two months.

• Violent rhetoric? Check. Double check.
• Unhinged political analogies? Check.
• Hilter signs? Check.
• Crosshairs on politicians. Check.
• Anger and cursing? Check.
• Shoving? Check.
• Majority white crowds? Check. (This was always the dumbest of liberal attacks, but there it is.)
• Racial overtones? Check.
• Astroturfing by national organizations? Check.

Some of the signs have made it on air at the networks, albeit without comment; but the media feeding frenzy that attended these issues when the Tea Party was on the receiving end has vanished. Just how bad is the media bias here? So bad that even MSNBC can see it.

The activist described a Friday rally in Charleston, W.Va., where the three main speakers were Republican Senate candidate John Raese, FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Raese “was like, ‘I’m with you guys’” — meaning the Tea Party movement — the activist said, and even an establishment figure like McConnell was giving voice to the  populist themes of the grassroots conservative insurgency. “What we can fairly conclude, even before the votes are counted on November 2, is that America is not interested in becoming France,” McConnell said.

The success of the Tea Party has clearly made Republican leaders aware that their constituents are tired of status quo politics in Washington. McConnell’s Kentucky protege Trey Grayson was one of the first scalps claimed by the grassroots uprising, when he lost a May primary to Rand Paul. Despite establishment concerns and a barrage of attacks, Paul continues to lead his Democratic opponent Jack Conway with 10 days to go until Election Day. As veteran political analyst Michael Barone noted this week, Tea Party candidates have done far better than many pundits expected, demonstrating the political viability of the movement.

One Republican who seems to have gotten the grassroots message is Arizona Sen. John McCain. My sources with the campaign of Ruth McClung, the Tea Party-backed GOP candidate in Arizona’s 7th District, say that Senator McCain has been McClung’s staunchest supporter in her underdog campaign against Democrat Rep. Raul Grijalva. As I reported two weeks ago at The American Spectator, “Arizona’s two Republican senators, John McCain and John Kyl, have reportedly started directing campaign donations and other resources toward the 7th District campaign. Within the next week, McClung’s candidacy is expected to gain $100,000 worth of Republican support, in addition to a steadily increasing stream of online small-donor contributions from grassroots conservatives eager to defeat Grijalva, who is co-chairman of the Progressive Caucus.” 

That combination of grassroots and establishment of support has helped the GOP challenger put Grijalva on the defensive, with new TV ads and offices all over the district. “The very fact that a district like Arizona’s 7th has become competitive is a testament to just how far the wave of anti-incumbent, anti-Democrat sentiment has spread,” as Joshua Miller of ABC News reported this week.

Similar trends are being reported all over the country, as in Massachusetts’ 4th District, where Sean Bielat has Barney Frank pinned down on the defensive, and Maryland’s 5th District, where Charles Lollar is giving Steny Hoyer the fight of his career.

Examiner columnist Peter Ingemi recently visited five congressional districts in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia where grassroots enthusiasm is helping fuel “the Big Red Wave” for Nov. 2. Analysis by Nate Silver of the New York Times indicates the Republicans will gain at least 50 House seats on Election Day. Winning a Senate majority is a much steeper hill to climb, but Silver’s analysis shows the GOP favored to add six or seven seats, upping their numbers to 47 or 48.

Of course, as Professor Glenn Reynolds keeps reminding us, “Don’t get cocky,” but if Republicans do win big on Nov. 2, party leaders will know that this could not have been accomplished without the many thousands of Tea Party activists who contributed to candidates, manned the phone banks, distributed yard signs and canvassed precincts.

Ten more days until Nov. 2, when the Democrats get the message: Not just no, but hell, no!

And starting Nov. 3, we’ll see if the Republicans have gotten the message, too.

5. Because he destroys the extremist myth: West and the 37 other black Republicans running for national office destroy the liberal myth that the Tea Party movement is somehow racist and extremist. Hint: it’s neither.

4. Because he kicks liberal ass (metaphorically speaking, of course). Like challenging Barack Obama to a debate.

3. Because he’s a Constitutionalist: “The Constitution says ‘promote the general welfare’, not provide welfare!”

2. Because he knows the stakes: “…when you listen to that fife and drum, it hearkens me back to how this country got started. When you think about how patriots got together in taverns, when patriots got together in houses along rivers and creeks, when you think how the U.S. Marine Corps got started in a place called Tun Tavern, this is where we are right now in our country. We need to meet… and talk about restoring our liberty and fighting back against a tyrannical government.”

1. Because he’s got presidential mettle. He’s a leader. A war hero. A Constitutionalist. He’s the vanguard of a new conservative black Republican movement, possibly the first since Reconstruction. But now he needs to win his Congressional election.

Help him out. The fife and drum are sounding in the distance. You don’t have to go to war, you just have to muster your support and your vote.

 
 
Cross-posted at: Doug Ross @ Journal.

Jim Geraghty over at NRO describes the following video this way:

But all of this arrogant, out-of-control government triggered the creation of an idea: a broad-based popular movement that vehemently and overwhelmingly pushes back in the opposite direction. You might call an… Inception.

At least that’s the thought I had as I listened to this excellent short video over at RedState.

I can’t say it better than Jim did. And the video, The Last Best Hope, created and produced by Ben Howe, speaks for itself. Please watch – and expect goose bumps:

—————-

Cross-posted from NewsReal

Follow Lori on Twitter

We are children in his eyes:

Actually, [Rove] is a former high-level policy aid to the president of the United States and the primary author of two presidential victories. This does not make him always right. But it means he has had responsibilities bigger than running a Web site. This is an advantage for a commentator, not a drawback.

In Tea Party theory, inexperience is itself seen as a kind of qualification. People like O’Donnell are actually preferable to people like Rove, because they haven’t been tainted by public trust or actual achievement. This is the attitude of the adolescent — the belief that the world began on their thirteenth birthday. It is also a sign of childish political thought.

Childish political thought, as in ignorantly voting for a certain candidate because it’s become the cool thing to do? No, he’s not talking about the brainless army of drones that got Obama elected.

He’s talking about recalcitrant voters who think they know best how to live their own lives. The GOP establishment sees us just as liberals do, as incompetents in need of babysitting. And when the people make it clear they’ve had enough of the status quo, Gerson and company call them “childish.”

Is repeatedly getting the shaft from our elected representatives, year after year and decade after decade, and coming back for more, a sign of maturity? Au contraire: it’s dysfunctional, irresponsible, and profoundly immature behavior. Thanks to “childish political thought,” we’ve enabled governmental abuse to grow wildly out of control, to the point that our arrogant representatives laugh at us and our quaint notions that they ought to abide by the Constitution and read their monster bills before shoving them down our throats.

Tea Party voters are informed, engaged, and ready to act in their own and their country’s best interests. That’s nothing if not mature. The 2010 election may signal the coming of age of the conservative voter.

If Gerson had been trying to crystallize the insider, GOP establishment attitude the Tea Party so distrusts, and is so eager to upset and uproot, he couldn’t have done much better. His criticism, and Rove’s, are likely stoking the Tea Party fire.

Michelle Malkin responds scathingly, and with examples: Rove aide: Kneel before The Architect, you puny website operators & Tea Party ingrates:

It is not his “presidential victories” and his “experience of actually winning” races that have earned Rove the rightful scorn of Tea Party activists and the venom of any limited government advocate worth his/her salt. It is the way he and his boss squandered those victories and sacrificed core conservative principles at the altar of “compassionate conservatism.”

And that ain’t all. Read the rest.

Michelle also brings us this news, which demonstrates that the Dems, like the GOP establishment, are so wholly out of touch with the mood of the country they can’t feel the earth rumbling beneath their feet:

President Obama’s political advisers, looking for ways to help Democrats and alter the course of the midterm elections in the final weeks, are considering a range of ideas, including national advertisements, to cast the Republican Party as all but taken over by Tea Party extremists, people involved in the discussion said.

If you’re looking to make a donation to further the cause of conservatism this fall, consider one targeted to make such an ad possible. These geniuses are begging for more rope.

Cross-posted at P&P.

2010 is clearly no exception… for the Libertarian nominee in the Alaska U.S. Senate race, David Haase, has offered to “step down” and allow Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK, 68%) to take his place on the ballot as the “Libertarian” candidate — if she will verbally embrace his plan to abolish the income tax and a couple of other things, which Haase dubs, with no hint that he understands the irony, the “People’s Bailout“:

Although Libertarian Party officials were dismissing the idea, Senate nominee David Haase said Monday that he would give Mrs. Murkowski his line on the ballot if the Republican senator would hoist his banner on behalf of nationalizing the Federal Reserve System, paying off the entire national debt with non-interest-bearing notes and abolishing the individual income tax.

“Would I step down for her? The right question is, first, will she take up my ‘People’s Bailout’?” Mr. Haase said, referring to a policy paper he has been circulating on how “to return to the banking system our Founders gave us.”

“If she came out for my ‘Peoples Bailout’ plan, it would influence me a lot because the mission is more important than becoming a U.S. senator,” he added.

I’m sure it is; but his comments beg the question, what exactly is the mission?

• First, there is virtually no possibility that Murkowski could possibly be elected running as a Libertarian in a race with both a Democrat and a Republican; she would come in a distant and humiliating third.
• Second, Haase must know that even if Murkowski mouthed the words, and even were she elected, she would never seriously push such a plan; she is not now and never has been a radical anti-income-taxer.
• Too, even if she did, there is no possibility it would pass either House or Senate.
• Fourth, even if it did pass by some deus ex machina, we would end up with a grotesque value-added tax (VAT) and a national sales tax… yet we would still have the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: You just can’t get two-thirds of each chamber of Congress plus thirty-eight states to ratify a repeal of the amendment that allows an income tax. All of which means that in a couple of years time, we would have a VAT, a national sales tax, plus a brand new income tax as well!

Since I doubt that David “Schleppenwolf” Haase is an utter fool, he knows that getting Lisa Murkowski to “come out” for his “People’s Bailout” would do nothing at all to implement it. Ergo, he has an ulterior motive, which I believe is threefold; in order of urgency:

1. Gaining notoriety for himself;
2. Positioning the Libertarian Party to receive a big batch of fundraising;
3. Splitting the Republican vote between Murkowski and “Average” Joe Miller, thus ensuring that Democratic nominee Scott McAdams wins the election.

When it comes down to it, most libertarians (and probably nearly all capital-L Libertarians) only pay lip service to free markets; in reality, they tend to be moochers who never grow up, live with their parents until they become fifty year old “orphans,” and never really get past the “oral stage” of psychological development; they smoke too much tea and eat themselves into planetoid obesity.

They are really not libertarians at all; they are libertines. Their signature issue is far more likely to be legalizing marijuana than allowing us to succeed or fail by our own efforts (i.e., liberty). In fact, when the parental units finally kick the b., many self-described libertarians find a way to live on welfare! They substitute the Invisible Teat of Big Government for the nipple they never really let out of their mouths while Mommy still lived.

In the last election, vast numbers of these “libertinarians” voted for Barack H. Obama — then concocted some Rube-Goldbergian verbal machination to explain why Obama was the most “free market” candidate running.

There are of course mature, adult libertarians worthy of the name — think William F. Buckley, jr. or Milton and Rose Friedman — who make their own way, support themselves and their families, interact in a mature way with real markets, and are less interested in oral fixations like dope smoking than they are in actual liberty issues. However, adult libertarians tend to vote Republican these days.

But back to the Final Frontier, the pending election of a Tea Partier as United States senator from Alaska.

Mind, this is the same election to which the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent its chief counsel, Sean Cairncross, to counsel Lisa Murkowski how to discover or manufacture sufficient votes in the absentee ballots to reverse her primary loss — presumably by challenging as many Miller votes as possible, especially those from members of the military. Now the putative “Libertarian” candidate schemes to nullify the Republican vote by cleaving it in twain, hoping to install the minority Democrat in that seat. Democrats and establishment Republicans have merged, and their joint rebel yell is, “Anybody but ‘Average’ Joe Miller!”

More predictions:

• Miller will win the Republican nomination.
• Murkowski will not run as the Libertarian, nor the Independent (à la Charlie Crist in Florida), nor the write-in joke candidate.
• Scott McAdams will remain the Democratic nominee.
• Joe Miller will win the general election by at least ten points.

Remember Hugh Hewitt’s aphorism: “If it’s not close, they can’t cheat.” The Miller-Murkowski battle is close, but not close enough. And the subsequent general election won’t even be close enough to tempt.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

[Bob Inglis] cited a claim made famous by Palin that the Democratic health care bill would create “death panels” to decide whether elderly or sick people should get care.

“There were no death panels in the bill … and to encourage that kind of fear is just the lowest form of political leadership. It’s not leadership. It’s demagoguery,” said Inglis…

“I think we have a lot of leaders that are following those (television and talk radio) personalities and not leading,” he said. “What it takes to lead is to say, ‘You know, that’s just not right.’”

As it happens that’s exactly what South Carolina voters said to Inglis when they voted more than 2-1 against him last month. Instead of praising them as leaders, though, he whipped out the race cards and whipped them around like he was dealing the world’s fastest poker hand.

Inglis said he was shocked during the health care votes as he watched protesters jeering Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who was beaten as a leading civil rights activist in the 1960s.

Inglis said he was too far away during the jeering incident to hear whether the protesters shouted racial epithets, as Lewis and other black lawmakers have claimed. But Inglis said the behavior was threatening and abusive.

“I caught him at the door and said, ‘John, I guess you’ve been here before,’” Inglis said.

Inglis, 50, who calls himself a Jack Kemp disciple because he has emphasized outreach to minorities as the late Republican congressman did, thinks racism is a part of the vitriol directed at President Barack Obama.

“I love the South. I’m a Southerner. But I can feel it,” he said.

I am about sick to death of these whiny Republicans who, when ejected from office like a tomato from a catapult by voters who have had enough of their spend-happy ways, turn around and cry like a bunch of babies with soggy diapers. Like those soggy-diapered babies (and doesn’t “Soggy-Diaper Republican” have a nice ring to it?), Inglis wants everyone to cater to his whims. In his world, he gets to tell us how it’s going to be and we meekly sit back and take it. That worldview has no place at all in the Republican Party. Heck, it doesn’t have a place in America.

If Inglis really thought that “death panels” was an extreme characterization of what lay inside Obamacare, he could have fought it vigorously in the arena of ideas. He didn’t because he was too busy pushing for his very own bill that, like Obamacare, would have forced you to buy health insurance whether you wanted to or not. Inglis claimed to be “shocked” by the anger that faced at town halls but he conveniently left out the part where he stoked the anger by accusing people who disagree with him as Glenn Beck-watching drones incapable of thinking for themselves.

We’re better off being rid of Bob Inglis and his petty, sniveling sense of entitlement. Maybe he can have a little lie-down in a pastel-colored, daisy-printed room to settle his jangled nerves.

(Read this post and more from Jimmie at his blog The Sundries Shack or listen to his weekly political and pop-culture podcast, The Delivery)

I definitely felt going in that a lot of other people felt the same way I did but they really would just love to have someone with somewhat of a megaphone if you will as far as saying what needs to be said. … I know there are a lot more like me who are concerned about radical Islam and wish more were being done.

Another candidate who has been equally direct is Florida’s Lt. Col. Allen West. In this video, after every other man waffled and one even joked about taking the 5th, West provided a concise history of Islamic war on the west and concluded with

“…until we get principled leadership in the United States that is willing to say that, we will continue to chase our tail because we will never clearly define who this enemy is and then understand their goals and objectives which is on any jihadist website and then come up with the right and proper goals and objectives to not only secure our republic but to secure western civilization.”

Barber’s response:

I love Mr. West. He’s dead on when he identifies and says we can’t look at this as in the same context as other religions. This is a totalitarian and an authoritarian ideology that is out there. It’s not subject to one nation, it’s not necessarily one people; it’s an ideology we’re combating. And if we don’t recognize it for what it is [...] we’re going to be taken over. Look what’s happening in France.

We don’t project strength as a nation anymore. And if we don’t start doing that again, we’re constantly going to be vulnerable. Ronald Reagan has one of the best quotes, “We were never brought into war because we were deemed to be too strong; only when we were deemed to be too weak.” And that’s exactly what the administration is doing now. We are not being strong with the conflicts that we’re in.

On the recent South Park/Comedy Central/EDMD brouhaha he said,

There’s an absolute double standard in the media and anywhere else. That’s going to be another thing I would address in Washington. The biggest thing a Congressman has is a megaphone – he has access to be heard. And that’s what our leaders today aren’t capitalizing on.

I asked Barber why he is the superior GOP candidate for his district. After all, like Dede Scozzafava, Martha Roby received the NRCC endorsement.

She’s definitely the establishment candidate; she’s got a long pedigree in her family. Her father’s a federal judge, her uncle’s the probate judge in Montgomery, so you’ve got all those contacts which give her the advantage to raise money, no doubt about it. The reason I chose to run, because running for public office of any kind just wasn’t on my roadmap initially was the fact that, as a business owner, someone who hires people all the time, and Congress being a job; that you’re applying for a job for what you’re doing, you try to match the skill set for the job. And when you look at what’s going on in Washington today, out of control spending, big deficits, we’re getting into programs we shouldn’t be doing, we’re not holding people accountable – all those things – those are all issues that business owners face every day.

We have to be fiscally responsible. We have to control our budget. We have to hold people accountable for their decisions. As business owners, it’s our money we’re investing so we’re invested in every single decision we make, so I really wanted to see someone there with real world business experience. There’s nothing else that would help rein in some of these out of control decisions that we’re making because the people who are down here living in the world they’re creating up there are crying foul. And it’s harder every day to stay in business because they’re taking the incentive out of being a business owner every day.

And the second thing was the military experience – in my district we have two major military installations. We have got 200,000 veterans, and in Washington we have less than 25% of our leaders who have ever served in the armed forces. I think that’s where that disconnect happens when you talk about national security, when you talk about being strong on immigration. And so my platform is on quit hiring political experience, because there’s plenty of that in Washington, and let’s start hiring some real-world experience and start focusing on what accomplishments that they achieved in life, and put those kind of skill sets in Washington and I think you’ll find a change in the decisions that are being made.

One last blast from his megaphone:

I’m a huge FAIR Tax supporter; it’s one of the things that got me involved in the tea party, I think tax reform is the #1 way we can fix our government. Corruption is rampant because the #1 tool that is used is the tax code today. So if we really want to address corruption, the best solution I have found for that is the FAIR tax. And I think that’s something if we had more people in Washington really educating people on, that it would become a campaign issue for most people in the United States. They would start asking people, “Do you support HR 25?” and if you don’t they probably would not even consider voting for you.

I’m tired of waffling politicians who try to take all sides of an issue. Barber’s directness and willingness to support something not fully poll-tested is really refreshing; that’s why I’ve donated to his campaign. He’s willing to get out there and use his megaphone to try to sell conservative ideas, something I think the GOP has done a very poor job of in the last decade. As to whether a GOP Tea Party candidate can defeat the GOP establishment candidate… well, it wouldn’t be the first time, even when the Tea Party candidate enjoys less funding. As Glenn Reynolds put it,

…in many ways Tea Party activism is the substitute for cash that is to say you don’t have to pay people to go out and do yourself because Tea Party people will do it for free. I read over 6000 people traveled in from out of state to work as volunteers for Scott Brown and you know, and so that’s as good as money and indeed a lot of the publicity, a lot of the support of the Tea Party people produce is far more valuable than paid political ads.

Recommended: Stacy McCain talked Tea Parties, Pool Halls and Blue Dogs with Rick Barber back in February.

Instalanche, and thanks for the link!

Edited: I added a few links I originally forgot to include and clarified that the controversial ad was about the WTC mosque.

The mother of a 48 year old California nutburger arrested for threatening Nancy Pelosi is blaming Fox News for her son’s outburst:

His mother, Eleanor Giusti, told reporters that “she does not think he would be capable of carrying out the threat; he has never owned a gun, and she blames Fox News for getting her son worked up.” Asked what could have influenced her son, she told the reporters: “I say Fox News, or all of those that are really radical.”

And with one sentence, the left has a new idiot to exploit. Mom sounds like a real genius — no wonder Junior ended up so stable.

The “Fox News” claim is of course being linked to the Tea Parties, and that’s all the Democrats and the media will need to get a night of lead stories about how Tea Parties are getting dangerous.

But looking at the facts puts to rest the “Fox News/Tea Partier” theory:

Gregory Giusti was convicted in 2004 of criminal threats: The San Mateo District Attorney’s office says he was trying to evade the fare on a local commuter train; when the conductor ordered him to get off the train, Giusti began yelling and threatening the conductor’s life. As a result, Giusti was sentenced to one year in county jail and three years supervised probation, according to ABC News, which adds that he was also ordered to undergo mental health counseling, and that “a lawsuit filed in February by Hamilton Square Baptist Church in San Francisco … says Giusti has engaged in and continues to engage in a campaign of harassment against people at the church.”

Giusti has a record of dodging public-transit fares and causing disruptions. He was sued by the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in 1996. According to ABC News, he also has two convictions in San Francisco for welfare fraud and petty theft from 1992.

So we’re to believe that somebody who wanted public services for free, harassed Christians, thought it was okay to steal from others and give to himself, didn’t believe in owning a gun and enjoyed the welfare scene was a big Fox News fan and, ergo, probably a “Teabagger”? That’s a stretch so big that the story will have to be written on bungee cord.

If anything, this guy could be the poster-boy for what the Tea Partiers and average Fox News viewers oppose.

If this spiral-eyed kook was indeed angry with Pelosi for the health care bill, as has been reported, it was because he was getting impatient waiting for his free health care to kick in, as many are.

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

[T]his bill’s purported goal of providing affordable health insurance to every American is seen by Obama and his backers as not only just but also inevitable, much the same way they think of the “New Deal” legislation passed by Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” They are convinced that [...]ObamaCare will soon be seen not as a massive expansion of government power but as yet another chapter in America’s inexorable journey to social justice…

Tobin goes on to argue that the real job for conservatives must go beyond a critique of ObamaCare, to an “attack on the liberal narrative.”  In the process he employs a bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu:

Rather than a progressive innovation, ObamaCare is a retrograde move that seeks to drag American politics and the economy back to the mistaken emphasis on government power of the mid-20th century. Like so much of the welfare economics and failed liberal policies of that era, ObamaCare has the potential to do far more harm than good.

This mode of analysis, which should be familiar to some readers here, defines our political moment as progressivism in self-eclipse, the moment when further progress along the path of leftwing statism requires retreat on every other, and when everything else that political progressivism originally stood for – cleaner politics, responsiveness to the popular will, efficient and up-to-date public administration, simple fairness – must be sought elsewhere.  It could be a moment of profound opportunity to re-shape American politics, but only if conservatives are prepared to seize it.

Today, Republicans are proposing to make “repeal and reform” – repeal of ObamaCare, reform of health care insurance – a centerpiece of their political and electoral strategy, but the former aim is something that some vocal conservatives have been declaring impossible for months.  Without accepting that claim, which will now mostly be advanced by Democrats, we can recognize that repeal will be far from easy.

As for the second aim, in addition to being desirable on its own merits, reform/replace reduces the political burden in one respect – providing a “give” to go with the “take” of repeal – but conservative credibility on reform remains suspect.  When Democrats claimed throughout the Obamacare debate that their opponents had no alternatives, Republicans reacted as though unfairly attacked, the victims of a political-media conspiracy, but in concrete terms they were more guilty than innocent.  The Republicans had had two presidential terms and an extended period of control of Congress without ever making health care overhaul a priority, even in the form of an incremental process of major reform.  In 2008, John McCain did offer an excellent set of proposals, but it was offered defensively, at best, never in a concerted effort to lead on the issue.  Merely pointing to some number of hopeless bills and invisible amendments, as in the recent congressional debate, is not the same thing as having proved your commitment, and this applies to other issues as well.  As the first President Bush learned when campaigning unsuccessfully for re-election in 1992, if you have to plead with people to believe you’re engaged – reading “Message:  I care” off a cue card – then it’s too late.

The ever ready conservative fallbacks – “Don’t spend so much money!” and “Don’t make a bad situation worse!” – may be wise words, but they’re not motivational ones.  Some recent comments by Ross Douthat on Bart Stupak, the pro-life “Blue Dog” who may have put Obamacare over the top, discussed this problem with a view to socially conservative swing voters – potentially the most critical swing constituency in any national election:

[T]here are still pro-life Democrats for a reason: Because many abortion opponents can’t reconcile their views on social justice with the harder-edged, “any redistribution equals socialism” tendencies in the Republican Party. Some of these pro-lifers are older Catholic Democrats like Stupak; some of them are younger Americans who are hostile to abortion but don’t vote on the issue because they can’t imagine themselves being represented by the party of Limbaugh and Beck. A successful pro-life politics desperately needs these constituencies to find representation — and if there’s no place for anti-abortion sentiment among the Democrats, then pro-lifers need the Republican Party to feel hospitable to voters whose impulses on social policy tend in a more communitarian direction.

Douthat might have added certain non-white and immigrant constituencies to the groups that ought to be in play, and he might have noted parallel “impulses” animating many less religious voters.  For our purposes, however, the key point may be the following:

There are conservative and market-oriented proposals on health care reform that are consonant, I think, with Catholic teaching on a just society. But the Republican Party’s leadership wasn’t interested in talking about them, and conservative pro-lifers didn’t seem particularly concerned about this lacuna in the debate.

That these observations will remain difficult for some conservatives to absorb tends to support Douthat’s point, though if you think about someone whom you know, someone who ought to fit within the religious right – Catholic, evangelical, Jewish, or other – but who voted for Obama in 2008, it may be easier for you to understand.  Attacking “social justice” – “Message:  We don’t care” – is as likely to repel these voters as to shake sense into them.  They feel commanded by faith to care for the unborn, but they also feel commanded to care for the poor and vulnerable, to build a community whose commitments reflect their values.  At a time when there are “conservative and market-oriented proposals” that promise better results especially from the perspective of social justice than anything in the discredited “New Deal”/”Great Society”/”New Foundation” playbook, to act afraid of a moral reckoning is self-destructive.

As on other issues historically identified with the left, a reflexive rejection of progressive premises tends to impair any simultaneous argument for alternative solutions.  This contradiction underlies tension between “Reformlicans” and “Repealicans” that will likely worsen over time. Most of us realize that “Repeal + Reform” is a much larger coalition than Repeal or Reform separately, but concessions that seem obviously rational to some, as validating aspects of the just-passed bill initially seemed to Senator John Cornyn, may leave others nonplussed.  Conversely, forms of direct opposition – such as unstinting criticism of Stupak, support for constitutional challenges, disputing the concept of health care as a “right” – carry some risk of re-casting Republicans as “enemies of health care.”  Even the persuasive argument that ObamaCare will overwhelm the system with new demand implies that millions of Americans are presently under-served on a matter of life and death, and calls into question the critic’s commitment to their welfare.

The logic goes like this:  “Enemies of health care insurance reform” -> “Enemies of health care insurance” -> “Enemies of health care” -> “Enemies of health” -> “Enemies.”  Any attack on O-care that overemphasizes “repeal,” and under-emphasizes “replace,” will therefore reinforce counterattacks like this one, from the President on Thursday in Iowa City:

If these Congressmen in Washington want to come here to Iowa and tell small business owners that they plan to take away their tax credits and essentially raise their taxes, be my guest. If they want to look Lauren Gallagher in the eye and tell her they plan to take away her father’s health insurance, that’s their right. If they want to make Darlyne Neff pay more money for her check-ups and her mammograms, they can run on that platform. If they want to have that fight, I welcome that fight.

If it seems these days that all eyes are turning to Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, it’s in part because he is one Republican whose interest in and commitment to matters that affect Lauren, Darlyne, and the other cast members in the moving Democrat reality show, are undoubted, but Ryanism will also be attacked as hostile to programs and commitments beloved by potential new members of the Republican coalition. Consolidating the latter group’s support amidst a Democrat onslaught will require more than a link to a web-site and Ryan’s personal appearances in the mass media:  It will take an earnest, collective labor of years.

Even under today’s unhappy but politically promising circumstances, a conservatism that aims for more than a temporary right-center electoral coalition must demand, and seek, full accountability.  In this regard, a successful assault on the liberal narrative may not be the primary task after all.  Conservatives believe that Obama-Pelosi-Reid-care is as abominably ill-conceived as it was oversold (Yuval Levin’s cover story in the current Weekly Standard provides a comprehensive critical framework).  As external fiscal pressures and internal irrationality pull the contraption apart, the counter-narrative should write itself in broken promises, spiraling costs, bureaucratic chaos, and general economic underperformance – or worse.

The resultant spectacle may virtually by itself lead to electoral victories that in turn restore some balance to national policy-making, but formally or effectively repealing ObamaCare would be something much more ambitious.  “Repeal and reform” recognizes that a sensible, coherent, and conservative replacement program will be critical in that effort, and provides for another major task.  Finally, embracing both objectives implies – indeed, it presumes – the establishment of a new narrative that can withstand fierce opposition and broad skepticism, answer the people’s expectations and demands, and re-align American politics.  Nothing else will do.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Ultimately, however, the best explanation of Columbine came from comedian Chris Rock: “Whatever happened to crazy?”

“What, you can’t be crazy no more? Did we eliminate ‘crazy’ from the dictionary? . . . When l was a kid, they used to separate the crazy kids from everybody. When l was a kid, the crazy kids went to school in a little-a– bus. They had a class at the end of the school . . . Just in case they went crazy, they would only hurt other crazy kids. And we was all safe.”

Chris Rock’s analysis came to mind Friday as I watched this YouTube video in which Pentagon shooter J. Patrick Bedell explained his idea of “information currency”:

We could analyze Bedell’s “invention,” or we could analyze Bedell’s behavior — his geeky mannerisms, etc. — but no such analysis would suffice to explain why Bedell decided to show up Thursday at the Pentagon with a pair of 9-mm pistols and multiple ammunition clips. In the end, it’s hard to look at Bedell’s sad little video without thinking of Chris Rock’s question: “Whatever happened to crazy?”

In fact, a family friend told the Los Angeles Times, Bedell had been mentally ill for more than a decade:

San Benito County Supervisor Reb Monaco said he had been a close friend of the Bedell family for 35 years. . . .
Patrick, he said, had suffered from mental illness for at least 15 years.
“He probably was mentally ill for that period of time,” said Monaco, a retired schoolteacher. “He seemed rather paranoid. He was a heavy marijuana user and tended to self-medicate with marijuana. . . .”

The San Francisco Chronicle similarly reports:

A portrait emerged of 36-year-old John Patrick Bedell as a man who appeared to deteriorate mentally in recent years as he ran up a record of minor crimes and posted conspiracy theories about the government on the Internet. . . .
Bedell lived off and on with his parents in his native Hollister and had himself admitted to mental health centers four times in recent years . . .

By all accounts, Bedell was very intelligent and did well in school, but in real life — outside the classroom — he appears to have been a failure, a misfit, the stereotypical loner:

Students knew him as someone who was dedicated to his work but did not socialize much.
“I used to see him study a lot,” said Miguel Munguia, an electrical engineering undergraduate. “Nobody really knew him personally. I think he kept to himself.”

This is the man whom many are now trying to portray as a “right-wing extremist,” a symbol of the Tea Party movement or libertarianism or “lone wolf” terrorism. But whatever happened to crazy?

Failure and Scapegoating

Several pundits seeking to view Bedell’s final act of suicidal violence through the prism of contemporary politics have compared him to Joseph Stack III, whose kamikaze dive into an Internal Revenue Service office in Texas stirred New York Times columnist Frank Rich to new heights of ridiculousness.

The comparison of Stack and Bedell is apt, however, in that both of them were failures who ended their lives with attacks on scapegoats. As was clear from Stack’s suicide note, he blamed not only the IRS, but also his accountants, President Bush and “the monsters of organized religion” for his failures. Bedell’s own scapegoating of the Pentagon was even crazier, involving his claim that the suicide of a Marine in 1991 was related to a U.S. government conspiracy in the 9/11 attacks.

Scapegoating represents the externalization of blame, and we see this pattern clearly in Stack’s case. Tens of millions of Americans deal with the IRS every year without having their lives ruined by the experience. Was it really true, as Stack claimed, that his accountants, the IRS and others were exclusively responsible for his tax problems? Or – far more likely — was Stack blaming others because he was unable to accept responsibility for his own failures?

Compared to Stack, whose tax grievances were specific and personal, Bedell’s scapegoating was more elaborate and grandiose. Why? Because Bedell’s failure was so complete and so chronic.

Whereas Stack had a job, a home and a wife — he even played bass in a country-rock band – Bedell appears to have spent most of his adulthood living with his parents. So far, no reporter has even suggested that Bedell had a career or romantic interests. His only hobbies seem to have been computers and marijuana.

Victimhood and the Blameless Self

“[T]herapeutic morality encourages a permanent suspension of the moral sense. There is a close connection, in turn, between the erosion of moral responsibility and the waning capacity for self-help . . . between the elimination of culpability and the elimination of competence.”
– Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979)

Lasch’s insight about the connection between culpability and competence, and the way in which “therapeutic morality” undermines self-sufficiency by negating personal responsibility, is essential to understanding the impact of a culture that fosters narcissistic personality traits.

Good mental health is characterized by optimism and a sense of agency — that is to say, the belief that we are ultimately in control of our own lives. The sense of agency is critical to success and happiness in every area of life, in large part because it is necessary to self-improvement and problem-solving.

Everyone encounters failure and disappointment, but a person who believes that his life is within his own control will respond to such setbacks in a positive, constructive way — analyzing the cause of the failure, seeking ways to improve, determing to work harder to overcome disadvantages and remedy personal deficiencies. A psychologically healthy person therefore must accept responsibility for his failures and shortcomings just as willingly as he accepts reward for his successes and abilities.

While it is true that other people sometimes contribute to our failures by undermining our efforts, it is also true that our successes generally require the assistance of others. Factors which are genuinely beyond our control tend to even out over time. In a free and prosperous society, few people are so disastrously disadvantaged as to have no hope whatsoever of improving their lot in life.

 Thus, it is psychologically unhealthy to blame others whenever things go wrong in our lives, but this is exactly what “therapeutic morality” encourages.

Attempting to comfort people by flattering their sense of blamelessness — “It’s not your fault” — therapeutic morality ultimately undermines the vital sense of agency, in effect telling people that they are neither culpable nor competent. It promotes the notion of innocent victimhood, the blameless self, and encourages people to avoid responsibility for their failures by wallowing in self-pitying rationalizations.

The Politics of Envy

Self-pity and envy are closely associated emotions. If we are not to blame for our own failures, then others deserve no credit for their success. And here the conservative reader recognizes the basic content of a main theme of modern liberalism, namely class warfare.

Liberalism tells us that rich people are rich because they have some advantage that is fundamentally unfair, and that poor people are victims of an unjust system that is rigged against them. Mocking this attitude in 1964 — at the very height of liberalism’s prestige during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson — Ronald Reagan famously quipped: “We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.”

What does all this have to do with J. Patrick Bedell? Consider his evident aimlessness, his retreat into a marijuana-induced fog, and his fantasy of marketing “information currency” software when he couldn’t even find and keep a meaningful job. Now consider his appetite for conspiracy theories, his rantings against powerful forces that secretly control the world – paranoia.

Paranoia is rooted in the narcissist’s need to rationalize failure, to find scapegoats for his own shortcomings. Bedell had been mired in hopeless failure for years, and his scapegoats had to be large enough to psychologically compensate that failure. Rather than comparing Bedell to Joseph Stack, then, we might more profitably compare the Pentagon shooter to John Hinckley, who succumbed to the psychotic delusion that he could win the affection of Jodie Foster by assassinating Ronald Reagan.

Much like Hinckley, Bedell seems to have believed that his act of violence would lend significance to his otherwise meaningless existence. And though both Hinckley and Bedell attacked politically symbolic targets, their attacks were not ultimately political acts. They were both just crazy.

Political Psychosis

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.

In December, a Democrat delivered one of the most remarkable Senate speeches in recent memory:

Even before the Senate voted on cloture, the Democrats’ health-care legislation was already delivering benefits in the form of a free mental-health screening delivered by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse: If you oppose this bill, you’re a dangerous nut.
Such was the essence of Sunday’s floor speech in which the junior senator from Rhode Island quoted at length from Richard Hofstadter’s 1965 classic, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and offered it as a diagnosis of the health bill’s opponents.
Whitehouse paraphrased Hofstadter’s thesis, warning of “the dangers of an aggrieved right-wing minority with the power to create what [Hofstadter] called a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”

For decades, liberals have cherished the Hofstadter theory that, because no one could rationally oppose liberal policies, therefore opponents must be suffering from mass psychosis. This belief in the irrationality of their opponents means that liberals don’t actually have to debate policy on its merits, they need merely point out that conservatives are scary kooks.

So it was that every liberal journalist and blogger was eager to be the first to declare that J. Patrick Bedell was the smoking-gun proof of conservative kookery. Never mind the evidence that Bedell was just plain crazy, and that his particular brand of craziness didn’t match squarely with the Left’s pre-fab motif of Deranged Tea Party Terrorist. Heedless of these contradictions, liberals engaged in a laughably predictable rush to judgment. It deserved to be mocked, and often, and by someone who knows how:

• Send the Body to Keith Olbermann
• Quit Smoking Dope or You’ll Go on a Psycho Rampage, You Libertarian Freaks
• One Bong Hit Away From Murder: Warning Signs of Psycho-Libertarianism

Maybe an “Irony Alert” would have been helpful. A Twitter buddy asked, “Dude, what have you got against libertarians?” Nothing at all, actually. I was merely mocking a certain blogger’s declaration that Bedell was “an extreme right wing libertarian” and “an anti-government right wing extremist of the Ron Paulian persuasion.”

This raises the question of agency, you see. Who was really responsible for the Pentagon attack: Patrick Bedell or Ron Paul? Was Bedell’s violence endorsed or praised by Campaign for Liberty? Are there other “extreme right wing libertarian” killers lurking out there?

No, Bedell was just a crazy dopehead loser. And whatever happened to crazy?

Allen told the story of his short, unhappy life in politics to Politico readers:

From the outset, I felt like I was a reporter just masquerading as a political operative.

Now, as I leave my job at [Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's] political action committee to make the transition back to journalism at Politico, there will be some who wonder whether I am a political operative just masquerading as a reporter.

It’s a fair question for the Republicans who may now view me with a skeptical eye, for the 300-plus congressional Democrats for whom I did not work and, above all, for Politico’s readers.

As a conservative who, like Allen, left journalism for political activism after a disillusioning layoff, I empathized with Allen’s predicament, yet my first instinct was to scoff at both his career flip-flopping and at Politico’s outside-the-media-box decision to rehire him.

Will Republicans ever answer a question from Allen without thinking twice about how he might use their answers? Will Democrats demand fluff because he is one of them? And what of Politico? Would John Harris, Jim VandeHei and company have given a second thought to rehiring a conservative under the same circumstances — or would they hire any openly conservative journalist, for that matter?

The timing of Allen’s return also was ironic in light of the stink that VandeHei and other journalists made earlier this month when Bill Sammon of Fox News dared to state the obvious — that “the mainstream media hates the tea party movement.” VandeHei had the chutzpah to go on Fox News to scold Sammon but then hired a Democratic operative as a reporter.

Those were my first thoughts. Then I remembered the unconventional approach to political journalism I have advocated since my college days in the 1980s: Media companies should force political journalists to reveal their philosophical leanings; to the extent possible, they should assign them to cover “the other side” because journalists are at their best when they are skeptical; and then readers can decide, in a transparent environment, whether the political news they are consuming is reliable and fair.

In Allen’s case, that is precisely what happened. Allen told Politico readers who he is, how he votes and how he approaches his job. “I should lay my cards on the table,” he wrote — and he did, including the disclosure that he donated money to a sitting senator in a tight re-election race, Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark.

Editor-in-chief Harris also explained his decision to rehire Allen and described the internal debate that ensued when Allen came calling after his brief political stint.

“In the end,” Harris said, “those of us with misgivings either overcame or swallowed them. In my case, it came down to what we noticed during Allen’s first week last fall: He is a great and fair reporter who was made to work at this place. I care more about reality than perception.”

As a reader, so do I. And because both Allen and Harris broached the subject openly, I am in a much better position now to judge the fairness of Allen’s journalism than I was when he was a secretly Democratic-leaning reporter working at Politico last fall.

Back then, I could only guess at Allen’s political bent based on how he covered the news or assume that he, like most journalists, leans left. Now I will be able to study his coverage with a more critical eye for bias. His editors will be able to do the same and slash any slanted copy.

The next step is for Harris and his entire team — and all political journalists — to be honest about their political leanings with their audiences. We journalists (yes, I still am one, though now outed as a conservative) rightly preach transparency to the political world; it’s time we start practicing what we preach.

Then and only then will Americans be able to judge the objectivity of our work.

The rest of this post is my attempt to analyze my mini-revelation, explain it, and justify it.

The Left is terrified because, more than any other political group, they know a growing popular front when they see one; and they’re seeing one now.

A popular front is an extremely broad-based coalition of political forces that normally oppose each other. In rare moments, the stars align, and so do the groups; what results is a mass movement that can wash away the status quo like a burst dam. The movement doesn’t have to include all or even a majority of the citizenry; but it is large enough to push aside any countervailing coalition — which means whatever the front wants, it gets.

Lefties understand the unstoppable raw power of a popular front; that’s why their own strategy for seizing control of a country and “communizing” it invariably includes creating a popular front of dissent and protest against the established government, local or colonial. But a popular front needn’t be based on leftist ideology; there are several examples in recent history:

• The Khomeinist revolution in Iran depended upon a religious popular front that rose up against Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979.
• The Communist revolution in post-WWII Vietnam was driven by a popular front against colonial France.
• The Communist revolutions in WWI-era Czarist Russia and post-WWII Nationalist China both depended upon international socialist popular fronts that turned into a general uprising against the established State.
• The National Socialist takeover in 1920s-1930s Germany included a popular front against Communism and for German monocultural nationalism and Fascism.
• The French Revolution required a popular front that arose against the jaw-dropping financial and dictatorial excesses of the Bourbon kings.
• And the American Revolution critically depended upon a popular front revolting against the loss of home rule and the attempted subjugation by Mother England, thousands of miles away.

In each case, political groups forged alliances with hereditary enemies that more often fought each other hammer and tooth — for example, American aristocrats like Washington and Jefferson allying with lawyers and tradesmen (John Adams, Patrick Henry) against British rule. That kind of widespread movement is what defines a popular front.

The Tea Party front is the worst nightmare of the hard-core Left — a patriotic, small-government, capitalist popular front. While Tea Partiers are not specifically Republican, leftists realize that GOP leaders (Sarah Palin) and candidates (Scott Brown) are far better positioned to appeal to Tea Partiers than are Democrats: All Republicans must do is match their words with deeds; but Democrats would have to (a) repudiate everything they have said and voted for in the past four decades, then (b) convince Tea Partiers that this time they’re sincere!

The Scott Brown election is a perfect example of the relentless power of a popular front; I mean the timeline of the election itself, not its consequences. On November 4-8, a Suffolk University poll had Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, the Democrat, ahead of state Sen. Scott Brown by 31% (58-27); in early January, the Boston Globe had her still ahead by 15% (50-35), while even Rasmussen had her 9% ahead (50-41).

Two weeks later, Brown beat Coakley by nearly 5%, 52-47. That represents a swing of 36% in just two months; and there is really nothing else to account for such movement other than a popular front. No terrible scandal engulfed Ms. Coakley, no state of emergency, no powerful or charismatic Republican leader turned the election into a referendum upon him- or herself; in fact, the closest analogy to that last is that Barack H. Obama personally went to Massachusetts two days before the election and campaigned with Coakley.

Tea Parties will likely have only a small (but significant) impact in 2010; what terrifies the prescient Left is the next election. Given another couple of years to build, and assuming nothing happens to destroy it, the popular front could produce a Noachian cataclysm on presidential and congressional elections then… as well as on state and local elections across America, which could lead to generational capitalist hegemony.

If the Tea Parties turn into a full-blown, patriotic-American popular front, which I think likely, Democrats, liberals, and lefties could go from winning it all in 2008 — to being inundated and immolated by the tsunami of 2012.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

“The tea party is about the anger over Washington’s excesses that began under a Republican administration and Congress. Republicans have been guilty of expanding government,” Mr. Rubio told The Washington Times in an interview. “But in the last 12 months, government has expanded at an even more alarming pace.”

“And that expansion is what propels the massive pushback, which has become known as the tea party movement,” said Mr. Rubio. [. . .]

” ‘Tea party’ is basically a catchall phrase for what’s going on in America,” Mr. Rubio said. “The tea party is not some formal organization, although some have tried to organize it.”

That’s exactly right. It’s the definition of a grassroots movement. And that’s why “the tea party” as such is not co-optable.

You’ll find the full text of Rubio’s keynote speech here. A few highlights:

They think that we need a guardian class in American government to protect us from ourselves. They think that the free-enterprise system is unfair, that a few people make a lot of money, and the rest of us get left behind. They believe that the only way business can make its money is by exploiting its workers and its customers. And they think that America’s enemies exist because of something America did to earn their enmity.

Now, the problem is that in 2008 leaders with this worldview won elections. And now they know that the American people will never support their vision of America. So, instead, over the last 12 months they have used a severe economic downturn, a severe recession as an excuse to implement the statist policies that they have longed for all this time. In essence, they are using this downturn as cover not to fix America, but to try to change America to fundamentally redefine the role of government in our lives and the role of America in the world. [. . .]

From tea parties to the election in Massachusetts, we are witnessing the single greatest political pushback in American history. Now, the political class tries to make sense of all of this, but they can’t, because never has the political class or the mainstream media that covers them been more out of touch with the American people than they are today. You see, 2010 is not just a choice between Republicans and Democrats. It’s not just a choice between liberals and conservatives. 2010 is a referendum on the very identity of our nation. [. . .]

And the reason is simple because people get it, because they understand that if we get this wrong, there may be no turning back for America. That’s why the second thing leaders want — the second thing that people want are leaders that will come here to Washington, D.C. and stand up to this big government agenda, not be co-opted by it. [. . .]

The final verdict on our generation will be written by Americans who haven’t even been born yet. Let us make sure they write that we made the right choice, that in the early years of this century, faced with troubling and uncertain times, there were those who believed that the great American story had run its course. But we did not agree. Fear did not lead us to abandon our liberty. Uncertainty did not lead us to abandon the entrepreneurial spirit. We fought for and held on to those things that made us exceptional. And because we did, there was still one place in the world where the individual was more important than the state. Because we did, there was still at least one place in the world where who you come from does not determine where you get to go.

If you can spare 26 minutes, watch the entire speech. It may inspire real hope for change. But electing Rubio to the US Senate won’t be enough. Our current elected representatives need to get it, too. Rep. John Boehner, in his speech to CPAC yesterday, talked the talk:

Ladies and gentlemen, if you help elect a Republican Congress this November, and I’m fortunate enough to be elected Speaker of the House, I pledge to you right here and now: we’re going to run the House differently.

And I don’t just mean differently than the way Democrats are running it now. I mean differently than it’s been run in the past under Democrats OR Republicans. . . .

If I’m the Speaker next year, we’re going to get the reform movement started again.

One of my first orders of business will be to post every bill online for at least three days before a vote.

We will require our committees to quickly post all bills and votes online, and will outlaw “phantom amendments.”

We will put cameras in the Rules Committee hearing room so Americans can see how decisions are made about what bills come to a vote.

We’ll ban the practice of “airdropping” earmarks into bills at the last possible minute to dodge public scrutiny.

We’ll outlaw “monuments to me,” where legislators use your tax money to build projects named after themselves.

Sounds lovely. But we’ve heard much of that before. This time they’d better be serious. Too many Americans are paying attention now.

Visit some of these CPAC bloggers:

Atlas
McCain and Other
Fausta
Obi’s Sister
DaTechGuy
Little Miss Attila
and of course, Hot Air

Cross posted here.

We’ll come back to that. 

I’ve told this story many, many times.  I think it’s still illustrative.  Back in the nineties and early naughties, you could predict a few things about GOP gatherings.

• At precinct caucuses, you could be assured that there would be an avalanche of pro-life/anti-stem cell/anti-gay-marriage resolutions.  In the former two cases, they would be largely redundant with what was already in the platform.  No matter; they had to be debated and voted up or down, one at a time. 
• At legislative district (“BPOU”, in the MNGOP’s curious parlance) conventions, there’d be two big clusters of people in the room.  To stage right, there’d be a group of pro-lifers.  To stage left, there’d be everyone else.  And if one was running for a district office, one could expect a series of questions about one’s commitment to life.  “Are you pro-life?”  “How pro-life are you?”  “Please describe exactly how pro-life you are?”  “If your pro-life-ness were a mountain, which mountain would it be – Denali, K-2 or the Matterhorn?” 

And pro-lifers weren’t the only single-issue voters.  During the nineties, after the nadir of the Clinton crime bill and Alan Spears’ various attempts to ratchet up gun control in Minnesota, the shooters came out.  And it could lead to comical results; pro-lifers would occasionally express revulsion at rolling back gun controls, while some of the shooters were visibly bored at the pro-life talk.  They came for their issues, and their issues alone.

That was then.

Now, we have the Tea Parties.  And while the left and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) likes to try to portray the Tea Parties like Nick Coleman once referred to “peasants beating on the observatory door” with pitchforks and torches, they are actually a whole lot more complex – John Kerry’s word was “nuanced” than that.  You see a lot of people at these rallies who, two years ago, didn’t care about politics, who a year into the Obama administration have taken it upon themselves to educate themselves.

And there are many roads to education; there are as many stories at the Tea Parties are there are participants.  Some reacquainted themselves with Reagan.  Many others in Minnesota arrived via (Minnesota-based syndicated talk show host) Jason Lewis’ long-running Tax Rallies, and Lewis’ heady introduction to the Federalists and Limited Government; Lewis, with his MA in Political Science, gives a pretty compete education in Federalist history.  Others come via other media figures – Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt – to a new appreciation iof what limited government means, and how far off from that ideal we currently are.  Another contingent were brought to politics by the Ron Paul campaign.  And you can find others who filtered into the movement from immigration reform, pro-life and other groups, including a few from groups that we can tactfully call “the fringe”. 

All of them – the good, the weird and the rhetorically ugly – come together for one reason; they want to put government back in its place.

Which, compared with the anything-goes, single-issue-bound GOP of 2000 and 2004, is pretty exciting stuff.

And as with anything that excites conservatives, the left and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) must spin it as some sort of potential depravity or another.

Commenter “Master Of None” drew my attention to NYTimes piece on the Tea Party movement yesterday.   I read it.

At first read, it was almost encouraging; it seemed at first blush to pay some service to the most important facet of the Tea Parties; that represents a wave of self-education, an “awakening” if you will, on the part of an awful lot of people.   It almost seemed like the NYTimes might start portraying Tea Partiers as people; actual individuals with their own motivations, each as unique as they are.

I said almost.

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.

I chewed on that last clause for a bit.  A phrase like “bracing for tyranny” has two different meanings in our society.  To a big chunk of “Red” America, it means “being aware that unlimited government can not end well”, with a twist of “so let’s not let it get out of control” on top. 

But to an NPR-listening, Times-reading, down-the-nose-at-the-hoi-polloi-looking putative “elite”, it’s a code phrase, for something the “fearful, Jebus-clinging, John Birch-reading gun freaks” do.

In other words, it’s something foreign.  Un-American.  Worthy of fear and, inevitably, fear’s eldest child, hatred.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

“Militia groups”.  It’s another media code word; the unwashed, insane, depraved, usually racist undercurrent that Blue America sees hiding under every rock between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre. 

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

“Shadowy international networks”.

You see some of that at the Tea Parties.  Again, it’s the fringe; the people with the beards and camouflage and the huge potbellies and the pamphlets that gather around the fringe of  the Tea Party rallies, mixing uneasily with the vast majority; the people in dockers and polos, or work boots and embroidered shop jackets, who make up the vast majority of people at the Parties.  People like you and me and, someone tell the Times, your typical Times reader as well. 

Oh, the Times gets parts right – enough to make the whole thing worth a read:

The Tea Party movement defies easy definition, largely because there is no single Tea Party.

Defiance of easy definition notwithstanding, the Times wants you to accept their facile definition anyway. 

And those facile definitions are always based on fear of the great unwashed unknown:

At the grass-roots level, it consists of hundreds of autonomous Tea Party groups, widely varying in size and priorities, each influenced by the peculiarities of local history.

“Ah”, I thought.  “This could be good!”.   The rural west is a fascinating sociological hodgepodge; my own hometown in North Dakota jumbled college professors with their urbane, sometimes far-left beliefs, together with engineers (from a few local manufacturers) and business people (mostly fiscal conservatives) and agribusiness types (conservatives who loved farm subsidies)  to a few drastically-misplaced hippies, and always, always the farmers – including a few who’d been driven to radical populism by the hard times.

Who do you suppose the Times would be focusing on today?

In the inland Northwest, the Tea Party movement has been shaped by the growing popularity in eastern Washington of Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas, and by a legacy of anti-government activism in northern Idaho. Outside Sandpoint, federal agents laid siege to Randy Weaver’s compound on Ruby Ridge in 1992, resulting in the deaths of a marshal and Mr. Weaver’s wife and son. To the south, Richard Butler, leader of the Aryan Nations, preached white separatism from a compound near Coeur d’Alene until he was shut down.

Of all the “local peculiarities” to pick, what do you suppose the odds were? 

The piece focuses, throughout, on the Tea Parties’ most paranoid lunatic fringe – almost as if to say “pay no attention to the populist awakening behind the curtain, Boston and New York and San Francisco!  They are unclean!  These are the bitter, gun-clinging Jesus freaks we warned you about!”

If they can’t beat the Tea Party on the facts, it’s logical that the next step will be fearmongering.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

Monday’s conference was also covered by the White Plains Journal-News:

NANUET — Organizers estimated more than 450 people attended the Blueprint for Change conference today sponsored by the newly-formed Rally for America at the Comfort Inn. . . .
While some who attended said they were concerned about America and its direction under President Obama, several said it was the overall actions of government, on the local, state and federal levels, that attracted them to the conference. They cited overspending, overtaxing and a government that had grown far too large as the main issues concerning them. . . .

You may have noticed that the TV news video reported that the conference organizers were collecting petition signatures to qualify an independent Tea Party for the ballot, an angle also covered by the Los Angeles Times today in a story that  misrepresents the NY23 campaign by Doug Hoffman in last year’s special election:

Many Republican Party leaders have welcomed [Tea Party involvement in local GOP organizations], particularly because they worried that the energy driving the tea party movement might create a third party that would split the conservative vote.
That scenario played out in New York’s 23rd Congressional District in a special election last year, a cautionary tale in Republican circles because it led to a Democrat capturing a longtime GOP House seat.

That’s bass-ackward. As has been extensively chronicled (see Michael Patrick Leahy’s TCOT reports here and here), the national and New York state GOP officials were warned before they handpicked Dede Scozzafava that the ACORN-backed RINO would not be endorsed by the state’s Conservative Party. In any close election in New York, support from the Conservative Party is essential to Republican candidates, as the Conservative line usually adds 5% or more in the multi-party balloting. Without the Conservative endorsement, Scozzafava was doomed to defeat from the day she was picked by GOP insiders.

Furthermore, the Hoffman campaign strategy was based on winning a plurality in a three-way contest, and polls showed them well on their way to that goal until Scozzafava dropped out the Saturday before Election Day and endorsed the Democrat, Bill Owens. This startling betrayal by the GOP candidate was the only reason Hoffman fell about 3,000 votes short of winning. From start to finish of the NY23 campaign, then, the Republican Party was exclusively responsible for electing the Democrat.

Any attempt to foist blame for the Democratic victory in NY23 onto Hoffman and his supporters is a willful perversion of the actual history of that campaign.

Too many people let themselves be sucked into this bogus storyline of third-party conservative candidates helping elect Democrats, an irrational fear promoted with equal fervor by GOP operatives and the MSM. So long as the Republican Party nominates conservative candidates and promotes conservative policies, the third-party threat is irrelevant.

The failures of George H.W. Bush, not Ross Perot, were responsible for the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, and Clinton certainly would have beaten the hapless Bob Dole in ’96 even without Perot on the ballot. As in all such instances, scapegoating the third-party candidate (and third-party voters) serves mainly to exculpate the GOP for its own policy and political failures.

If you look at what happened in the Massachusetts Senate special election, Republican primary voters wisely picked Scott Brown, a candidate who — while relatively moderate on some issues — was solidly conservative on the issues that mattered most, particularly his opposition to ObamaCare. This is far different than what happened in NY23, or what the National Republican Senatorial Committee has tried to do by prematurely endorsing Charlie Crist in Florida.

The real danger is when the GOP establishment plays favorites amd tries to circumvent the party’s rank-and-file by picking well-connected “insider” candidates. The establishment-insider pick is almost invariably less conservative than other Republican candidates for the nomination. This tendency is indicative of the timid, defensive attitudes (“Oh, we can’t take a chance with a right-winger“)  that have prevailed in the upper echelons of the GOP for more than a half-century.

At some point, Republican leaders must stop fearing their own party’s conservative grassroots and stop blaming third-party scapegoats every time the GOP establishment botches a winnable election.

The by-word is “unsustainable,” though even those who use it most frequently, from the President to Senator Judd Gregg, seem to have a hard time explaining what it means in concrete terms. Maybe it’s because no one really knows. Maybe that should make it scarier.

Left unspoken but strongly implied in Samuelson’s response is that political paralysis is making that worst case scenario seem more and more like the most likely scenario. It’s hard to interpret his harsh critique of the Democrats’ reaction to Ryan in any other way:

Ryan is trying to start a conversation on the desirable role and limits of government. He’s trying to make it possible to talk about sensitive issues — mainly Social Security and Medicare — without being vilified. President Obama recognized that when he called Ryan’s plan a “serious proposal.” But since then, Democrats have resorted to ritualistic denunciations of him as pillaging Social Security and Medicare. Legitimate debate becomes impossible. If Democrats don’t like Ryan’s vision, the proper response is to design and defend their own plan. The fact that they don’t have one is a national embarrassment.

Samuelson doesn’t spell things out, but the implications of that paragraph are stark.  Since the Democrats remain in power, if not exactly in “control,” an inability to engage in a “legitimate debate” seems rather worse than embarrassing.  It would suggest that no coherent and meaningful response to looming national bankruptcy will be possible anytime soon.  It further suggests that, at best, we’ll continue to get posturing, positioning, empty talk, and tinkering around the edges – until the day (the weeks, the months, the years) that financial chaos forces us to act in desperation.

Kim Strassel is even more critical of the Democrats for how they’ve responded to Ryan, but she stresses that other Republicans can’t afford to stand aside, figuratively holding his coat:

Should Republicans take back the House this year, or the White House in 2012, they will own giant deficits and runaway entitlements. Reality will force choices. They will either have to embrace politically tough ideas like those included in Mr. Ryan’s plan, or flail through, doing nothing or succumbing to bigger government.

The longer the GOP hides or runs from those reforms, the harder it will be to embrace them later. Instead of spending so much time telling the press that Mr. Ryan’s road map is not the “official” GOP plan, the party would be better off asking themselves why it isn’t. If Mr. Obama is so eager for a debate about who is more serious about the country’s future, they should give it to him.

If only they were ready to do so.

Samuelson believes that the solution will eventually require both sides to give on the positions that have defined them for a generation or more.  “Any sound proposal,” he asserts, “would include greater tax increases than conservatives like and greater spending cuts than liberals like.”  It’s of course no coincidence that the two positions also define the dysfunctional consensus that many believe has brought us to this point:  More services and ever-rising disbursements, but relatively low taxes, hence structural deficits, alongside a hope that economic growth or clever financing (or clever financing made to look like economic growth) can make up the difference – ’til kingdom come.

If Samuelson, Strassel, and all of the other unsustainable-ists are right, then kingdom’s just about here.  Yet conservatives seem set to resist any “taxes for cuts” compromise.  As long as they perceive themselves already on the way back to power, they have little political reason to accept the Samuelson alternative.  Even Ryan’s audacity – not just touching the famous “Third Rail” of American politics but hopping up and down on it – doesn’t extend to any open embrace of revenue enhancements except very quietly through the backdoor – via a radically simpler and presumably less loophole-ridden tax code.

Many conservatives will continue to insist that there is a classic “supply side” exit ramp from fiscal crisis (lower taxes and restored high growth quickly leading to higher revenues). I’m not here to declare that position wrong, but perhaps we can acknowledge that Samuelson might still be right about the politically easiest and, on current terms, most likely path: A typical high level, bipartisan, commission-adjudicated compromise that merely requires cooperation from the left, rather than total victory.  This path of least resistance is probably what waiting for a worsening crisis or banking on business-as-usual implies (which isn’t to say that it will work very well). On the other hand, if conservatives reject this middle way, yet also expect to re-gain and hold credibility on debt and deficits – or, if worse comes to worst, cope with ahead-of-schedule financial collapse – then the alternatives to Ryan’s Roadmap generally consist of even more radical measures, leaving even less excuse to be afraid of the discussion.

If the rise of the Tea Party – whose key national advocate Sarah Palin has been unrestrained in her praise of Ryan – is any indication, the people may be a lot readier to think and act anew than most of our politicians, in either party. The perceived failure of the Democrats to lead may be handing the Republicans an epochal opportunity not just to win elections, but to change the terms of our national discussion. In that sense, making it possible to look at Ryan’s Roadmap in the political light of day, to face its implications squarely and even think beyond them, might be a greater and more important accomplishment than taking back congress and even the White House.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Richard Hofstetter, an entomology professor at Northern Arizona University who worked on the project, told Discovery News that “the most annoying sound” his colleague, Reagan McGuire, “could think of was Rush Limbaugh or rock music.”

McGuire started to pump the sounds of Limbaugh into portions of infested tree trunks brought into their lab, but Hofstetter said McGuire “could not bear listening to Limbaugh, so he ended up playing Rush backwards, which still kept the voice and intonation the same, but the words were meaningless.”
[...]
He and his colleagues found that while Limbaugh and the heavy metal initially bothered the beetles, the insects mostly ignored the sounds after a while.

I tried the same method to scare liberals out of my wallet, but it didn’t work.

In the end though, blasting Rush Limbaugh into trees not only didn’t make the beetles stop destroying the trees — but now they also want Obama to fail. Way to go, guys.

Hopefully Rush finds out about this and figures out a way to say something so when the entomologists later play it backwards, they hear something like “Joe Biden is the devil!” That’d freak them clear out of their Birkenstocks.

(h/t Newsbusters)

DougPowers.com

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

The tea-party movement takes its name from the mob of angry people in Boston who, in 1773, committed a zany criminal stunt as a protest against taxes and the distant, out-of-touch government that imposed them. Two years later, the revolution was under way and—voilà!—democracy was born out of a wild moment of populist insurrection.

Except not, because in 1787 several dozen coolheaded members of the American Establishment had to meet and debate and horse-trade for four months to do the real work of creating an apparatus to make self-government practicable—that is, to write the Constitution. And what those thoughtful, educated, well-off, well-regarded gentlemen did was invent a democracy sufficiently undemocratic to function and endure. They wanted a government run by an American elite like themselves, as James Madison wrote, “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” They wanted to make sure the mass of ordinary citizens, too easily “stimulated by some irregular passion … or misled by the artful misrepresentations” and thus prone to hysteria—like, say, the rabble who’d run amok in Boston Harbor—be kept in check. That’s why they created a Senate and a Supreme Court and didn’t allow voters to elect senators or presidents directly. By the people and for the people, definitely; of the people, not so much.

So much for progressivist thinking, which used to be all for the little guy versus the elite. What about that “speaking truth to power” thing? Apparently, that only works when there is a Republican in power. When a Democrat is in power, it’s all about how the American public is just too stupid and angry to understand what’s good for them.

As for that “rabble who’d run amok in Boston Harbor”—not so much. Even Wikipedia acknowledges it was not an angry mob. Angry mobs don’t stop to disguise themselves as Indians.

While Samuel Adams tried to reassert control of the meeting, people poured out of the Old South Meeting House and headed to Boston Harbor. That evening, a group of 30 to 130 men, some of them thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the three vessels and, over the course of three hours, dumped all 342 chests of tea into the water.[58] The precise location of the Griffin’s Wharf site of the Tea Party has been subject to prolonged uncertainty; a comprehensive study[59] places it near the foot of Hutchinson Street (today’s Pearl Street).

But here’s a better source. It’s an eyewitness account from a Boston newspaper:

Previous to the dissolution, a number of Persons, supposed to be the Aboriginal Natives from their complection, approaching near the door of the assembly, gave the War Whoop, which was answered by a few in the galleries of the house where the assembly was convened; silence was commanded, and prudent and peaceable deportment again enjoined. The Savages repaired to the ships which entertained the pestilential Teas, and had began their ravage previous to the dissolution of the meeting–they apply themselves to the destruction of the commodity in earnest, and in the space of about two hours broke up 342 chests and discharged their contents into the sea.

A watch, as I am informed, was stationed to prevent embezzlement and not a single ounce of Teas was suffered to be purloined by the populace. One or two persons being detected in endeavouring to pocket a small quantity were stripped of their acquisitions and very roughly handled. It is worthy remark that, although a considerable quantity of goods of different kinds were still remaining on board the vessels, no injury was sustained; such attention to private property was observed that a small padlock belonging to the Captain of one of the ships being broke another was procured and sent to

There is also this partial list of the Boston Tea Party “angry mob”. Paul Revere was a member of that “mob.” You may remember him as one of the men who warned of the pending British movement. The phrase “One if by land, two if by sea” is probably how you were taught the story. Funny how the names of the “angry mob” have come down through the centuries to be enshrined in American historical societies, and yet, no one else is calling them an angry mob.

Finally, this statement by Anderson is incomplete:

Two years later, the revolution was under way and—voilà!—democracy was born out of a wild moment of populist insurrection.

Except not, because in 1787 several dozen coolheaded members of the American Establishment had to meet and debate and horse-trade for four months to do the real work of creating an apparatus to make self-government practicable—that is, to write the Constitution.

Democracy was not born out of the Constitutional Convention alone. It was also born out of the arms, the blood, and the sacrifice of the patriots who fought in the Revolutionay War, most of them—the overwhelming majority, one would have to say—not “coolheaded members of the American Establishment.” But it’s always that way: Wars are not fought by the elite. That’s numerically impossible. They’re fought by the “angry mobs.” Except they’re not so angry, and they’re not mobs.

The Constitution that the Founders created starts with the words “We the People”—not “We the elite.” People like Anderson seem to have a real problem with that.

I don’t.

Cross-posted.

By the way, describing Barber as a ”pool-hall owner” may be somewhat misleading about his business background. After his service as a sergeant in the Marine Corps, Barber launched a computer technology firm that grew to $1 million in annual revenue before he sold it in 2005.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Politics and Mardi Gras Beads in ‘Bama: Rick Barber Campaigns in Millbrook

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain)

Glancing at the title of an Andrew Sullivan post – “One Last Word” – linked at Memeorandum Saturday night, I knew it had to be about Sarah Palin’s Tea Party Nation keynote speech.

My guess was that he’d gotten busy yesterday, summoning his personal Palin demons and holding a tea party of his own with them. Considering the infernal depths of his Palin obsession, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was his 10th post of the day on her. Nor would I have been surprised if it had been even more foully offensive, deluded, and craven than the most recent previous piece of his I happened to see excerpted, one in which he went on as usual about things he doesn’t understand and that only he and said demons take seriously regarding Palin and her infant son Trig.

I confess, however, that the title made me hope, just a little, that Sullivan had finally done the right thing: Take an extended, indefinite leave of absence, possibly involving intensive psychotherapy and spiritual counseling – leaving “One Last Word” as his farewell – but, no, as expected, the post turned out to be about Palin. Oddly enough, however, it was something that a Palin supporter might actually enjoy – assuming an ability to read between the lines of Sullivan’s obscene melodrama and paranoid bigotry.

Promising to assess Palin as a potential presidential candidate, Sullivan first stretches for familiar “conservatives = Nazis” tropes of the sort that the invocation of “Godwin’s Law” was once meant to banish from web conversation, among other things equating Palin’s criticism of Obama as commander-in-chief with the Hitlerian “stab in the back” attack on the post-World War I German left: Hitler accusing the German left of treason and losing the Great War = raising questions about Obama Administration detainee treatment policy. Put simply: In the Sulliverse, any criticism of the great and wonderful Ø’s war leadership = Nazism.

Sullivan then turns to the good stuff: an at least somewhat grounded analysis of Palin as potential presidential candidate:

…there is a huge constituency out there (rightly) outraged by Washington corruption and she now has the critical mantle of the rogue outsider; she can channel Christianism and fuse it with the slogans of phony “fiscal conservatism”; she will blame every lost job on Obama; and she will accuse him of betraying the troops and befriending America’s enemies. Behind her are the Cheneyites.

Above all, she is capable of generating a personality cult – much, much more so than Obama, because she can harness Christianism to her divine destiny. The power of this kind of appeal – of a charismatic, beautiful woman, an icon of the pro-life cause, persecuted by the evil elites, demonized by libruls, and commanding the biggest military on earth – should not in my view be under-estimated.

Know fear.

It might almost be worth translating the above paragraphs into sane, but I suspect that anyone who has read this far can play that game at home. Conservatives, and sufficiently numerous members of the American electorate for conservatives to win elections, have become rather adept at exegesis of this type. This ain’t complicated. These aren’t the historico-political allegories embedded in The Lord of the Rings or Revelation, and conservatives can fall back on nearly 50 years of practice, since “libruls” have been reflexively painting conservatives as “extremists,” and shouting “The end is near!” at least since the anti-Goldwater campaign of 1964 – when a single famous line of Goldwater’s, and the liberals’ own epochal political success, helped to fuse the terms “conservative” and “extremist” together in the liberal mind and Democrat playbook.

Sullivan’s fear-mongering, literal fear-mongering, itself seems a bit frightening in the larger context of politicized Palin hatred – it only takes a Sullivan with a gun to make this psychosis real – but too little he says in general makes enough sense for anything he says in particular to be taken very seriously. For the same reason, it may be too much to attribute balanced judgment to Sullivan regarding Palin’s political potential. Still, I think he’s right that Palinism has immense potential. But anyone can see that now.

We’re left to pray, perhaps to our “Christianist” God – why not? – that Sullivan and his followers keep to themselves with their pathetic emotionalism. It would be a shame if they hurt anyone, even themselves. Otherwise, people so wounded in spirit and intellect have little to offer and are not themselves much to be afraid of.

They don’t count for much, but their collective fear does smell a bit like victory for the taking…

* * *

One last note: “One Last Word” wasn’t a last word, at all, naturally. Today, Sullivan is “talking to the hand,” along with a circle of like-minded bloggers (if “minded” can ever be the right word with these people) about notes that Palin may have inked into her palm for the Q&A session at Tea Party Nation last night. I hope that the nutroots continue to push this absurdly and indicatively trivial line of attack, since it makes Palin look like just what she is – refreshingly human and informal, determined to get the job done – and incidentally reminds everyone about which leading politician (if “leading” can be used in this context) is truly reliant on external devices to express himself, word by wearisome word.

Furthermore, you can’t bring up this event without bringing up those three main points, on all of which Palin, the Tea Party, and conservatives have much more popular positions than the HuffPo and ThinkProgress and Daily Dish left. It’s free publicity for the Palin program every virtual second it’s discussed and re-transmitted.

If the pseudo-scandal becomes widely enough known, we may someday see crowds of everyday Americans inking such useful reminders – “energy,” “taxes,” “lift America’s spirits” – into their hands, and proudly waving them at Palin rallies, or photographing and t-shirting them. The first example I’ve seen of such spin-offs was linked at HotAir by commenter Emperor Norton, and is shown at the top of this post.

Like Sullivan’s frightwig of a commentary, what this micro-controversy says to me is that she’s got them in the palm of her hand, she’s crushing them, and there’s not much they seem able to do about it. They can’t help it. The more they struggle, the worse it is for them. You almost have to wonder if they like it that way…

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Fox News will broadcast Sarah Palin’s keynote address to the National Tea Party Convention live on Saturday night, allowing millions of viewers to see the main attraction of a gathering that was once criticized for barring the press.

The network, which pays Palin as a political analyst and is considered the favored network of conservatives, will carry Palin’s speech during Geraldo at Large in the 9 p.m. hour, a network spokeswoman told POLITICO.

Palin will also be making her first “Sunday show” appearance the next morning, also on Fox. As a separate media moment, the interview should be interesting on its own terms, just to see how Chris Wallace and company treat her on what amounts to her home turf, but the appearance is conditioned by and in effect part of the Tea Party foray, which Matthew Continetti at The Weekly Standard sees as part of Palin’s attempt to turn herself into the movement’s de facto leader:

Sarah Palin is clearly mounting a bid to lead the Tea Party. Last year, she endorsed Bill Hoffman’s Tea Party campaign against liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava and Democrat Bill Owens. This week, she endorsed Tea Party favorite Rand Paul in the Republican Senate primary in Kentucky. She will address a Tea Party convention in Nashville on Saturday; Fox News Channel will broadcast her speech live. In a USA Today column, Palin announces she will also appear at Tea Party functions in Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, Nevada (March), and Boston (April).

Continetti has been highly sympathetic to Palin – not least as the author of The Persecution of Sarah Palin - but he goes on to argue that this move “carries dangers,” and he questions whether a too fervent embrace of the Tea Partiers will increase Palin’s chances of combining the “pro-life, anti-big-government vote” with the “moderate suburbanites who voted Democratic in 2006 and 2008 but began to return to the GOP in 2009.”

Continetti leaves out the possibility that the project he thinks Palin is pursuing could fail or be seen to fail, and he also leaves out the upside of having a solid base of motivated supporters, whether for winning presidential primaries or for exercising critical influence.  It’s also worth noting that Palin’s other recent moves – accepting her regular Fox gig, promising to campaign for John McCain – show her risking some movement “cred” in favor of establishing a more familiar, one might say normalized presence:  less of a lightning rod, less easily painted as an extremist.  We can still acknowledge that future coalition-building may remain a concern, especially since Palin still has a long way to go if she hopes to recover the voters who seemed to welcome her in September of 2008, yet who had deserted the McCain-Palin ticket by November, but this seems like a worry for a normal year and a normal candidacy.  Any safe and traditional path to the presidency was ended for Palin soon after she accepted McCain’s offer.

Palin might not make sense as a GOP 2012 nominee except in the context of an abnormal election year – on the order of 1980, but even more so.  Because, however, there’s a more than negligible chance that 2012 will be such a year, it would be a mistake to count Palin out, at all, or for that matter to presume that the Tea Party movement or some successor won’t be seen as fairly mainstream by 2012, a classic and timely radicalism of the center.  If that’s the case, then, just as Democrats and others in 1980 didn’t finally turn to Reagan because they temporarily confused him with Rockefeller, those suburbanites won’t presumably be voting on whims and fleeting sentiments, or for a merely “moderate” change of course.

cross-adapted from Zombie Contentions

AP’s mission is to be the essential global news network, providing distinctive news services of the highest quality, reliability and objectivity with reports that are accurate, balanced and informed.

And yet, in today’s news analysis about the Democrats bad week, Charles Babington wrote, and his editor let stand, this insult to the Tea Party movement that has swept America:

Also, it’s not clear that Republicans can tame and harness the volatile “tea bagger” activists. The fiercely independent conservatives helped Brown win in Massachusetts, but they triggered a damaging right-wing split in a special House race in New York last year.

The fact that they put the epithet in quotes indicates that they know full well that “teabagger” is a vulgar term. I never knew it existed before the so-called objective media types (we mean you, Anderson Cooper) were calling Tea Party activists “teabaggers.” It is a deliberate insult. It is not the way an objective news organization should describe the millions of Americans from all walks of life who attended rallies and town halls to protest the expansion of government by this administration and congress.

The AP owes the Tea Party movement a retraction and an apology. And I really think that the people who don’t like the Tea Partiers (see, that wasn’t too hard to call them, was it?) should stop mainstreaming “teabagger.” It’s childish and reflects more poorly on those that use the word rather than on those they are insulting.

Act like an objective news organization, AP. Don’t mainstream “teabagger.”

Cross-posted.

But it’s not just Massachusetts, it’s everywhere nowadays. People are tired of the “insider consensus.” They’re tired of experts and intellectuals and politicians who don’t seem to understand that “We The People” want meaningful input into the process of governance. . . .
My buddy Chris Cassone — the “Take Our Country Back” singer — was talking to one of his liberal musician friends. When Chris said he was performing at a Tea Party rally, the friend said dismissively, “Did those people ever figure out what they’re so angry about?”
Of course, if you actually listen to Tea Party protesters, they’re quite specific about their grievances, especially the out-of-control deficit spending that is heaping debt on the heads of their children and grandchildren. . . .

Please read the whole thing. It’s not just economic issues where liberals are out of touch with blue-collar voters. Martha Coakley’s adamant insistence on federally funded abortion — including partial-birth abortion — alienated lots of blue-collar Catholics I talked to last Sunday at St. Anthony of Padua Church in Fitchburg, Mass. And now, as Da Tech Guy reports, his hometown has become the frontline of a battle against federally-funded abortion provider Planned Parenthood:

Six members of the City Council voted Thursday to draft a resolution urging the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts to abandon its plan to locate in Fitchburg, after the organization announced plans to open an office on Main Street earlier this week. . . .
State Rep. Stephen DiNatale signed on to the late-filed petition calling for a resolution, and said he planned to sit down with Planned Parenthood officials and explain to them why Fitchburg is not the right community for them to come to. . . .
“We do not need them on Main Street,” DiNatale said.

There’s more background on that story, and keep in mind that Rep. DiNatale is a Democrat. People are feeling empowered to speak out against this kind of abuse of taxpayers that has become so commonplace during the Obama Age. Pundette notes how liberals are desperately trying to spin away the meaning of this election:

• The election of Brown had nothing to do with nationalizing healthcare, or anything at all to do with the Obama agenda. (NYT)
• Brown was elected to help Obama bring about Change (Donna Brazile on Nightline)
• A vote for Brown was a vote against stubborn Republican opposition to Change (Steny Hoyer)
• The people of Massachusetts wanted more Change! (Howard Dean)
• People are angry at Washington or something, but not at Obama (Gibbs & Axelrod)
• Coakley was the victim of residual but still incredibly potent anger at Bush (Barack Obama)

This spin is just so much whistling past the graveyard. Adding the Massachusetts Senate campaign to the gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey, Democrats have now lost three consecutive statewide elections. There is a broad-based populist wave rolling through America, and Brown’s stunning victory in Massachusetts highlights the potential of this movement:

Like the 2004 Boston Red Sox who broke an eight-decade curse by winning the World Series, Brown’s victorious surge has inspired Republicans in Massachusetts and nationwide to believe that anything is possible. . . .
For weeks, Brown had described his quest to win this Senate seat — occupied by Ted Kennedy for more than four decades — as a battle against “the machine.” Tuesday night, he turned that phrase around, telling his supporters: “Tonight we have shown everyone — you are the machine!” . . .

This machine — a grassroots coalition broad enough to encompass even union rank-and-file and elected Democratic officials — has been disparaged by liberals and derided by the media as “angry mobs,” “right-wing extremists” and “teabaggers.” In fact, it is the same powerful force describeed by the Founders in 1787 as “We The People.”

(Cross-posted at Right Wing News.)

As we arrived in front of the Paul Revere monument, Brown joked about the media herd which nearly trampled a golden retriever en route to the park:

Now, Brown speaks about bringing common sense to Washington and criticized Martha Coakley’s negative ad campaign:

Giuliani speaks about the election as a way to “send a signal” about how to deal with terrorism:

Reporters interview Giuliani after the rally:

My interview with a Marine veteran who is supporting Scott Brown:

As he says, “This will be the Scott heard ’round the world.” Right now, I’ve got to run over to Worcester Polytechnic Institute where Bill Clinton will be campaigning for Martha Coakley.

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so…

The educated class supports abortion rights, so…

The educated class supports gun control, so…

The educated class is internationalist, so…

The educated class believes in multilateral action, so…

…so the great unwashed is against those policies.  Just because David Brooks and the rest of the, um, “educated class” is for them.  There is absolutely no other reason to oppose those policies except a national temper tantrum against our rightful overlords.  Just admit it, folks, and let’s go sit in the corner for our time out.

Hey, it was about time for another “poor, uneducated and easy to command” moment from our educated class arrogant, elitist jackass class.  David Brooks probably thinks that song is about him, too.

Crossposted.

First, I have to say — it always floors me how liberals will so easily try to act as if its conservatives who run around screaming “NAZI!!” over and over again. After eight years of “Bushitler” and liberals smearing George Bush and Republicans as fascists and Nazis, it seems more than a little hypocritical to me for them to then act as if it is the favorite catchphrase of tea-partiers. It’s liberals who like to call people Nazis, not conservatives. And, by the way, NPR — calling someone a socialist is not a paranoid insult if it’s true.

Anyway, the video is absolutely devoid of any kind of intelligence or creativity. It’s not even funny. The most ludicrous part is that the entire Tea Party movement started well before Obamacare was even a big issue. Tea parties started springing up around the nation because of the stimulus package and overspending by the Obama administration and Congress. Yet, according to this video, the entire movement is concerned only with stopping government run health care. It ordinarily wouldn’t be the kind of video that people get all riled up over, except… NPR is taxpayer funded. They are using your money to insult you. And of course, like a typical liberal, they have to slide in a snide sexual undertone to everything associated with the tea parties. Doesn’t that really say more about liberals than it does about tea partiers? (One might think that the only people obsessed with sex are the ones who… well… are perhaps a tad deprived.) You expect this kind of thing from Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, but… well, I guess I can’t say that I’m completely surprised that NPR did this, either. But all the same, a taxpayer funded organization should perhaps not be insulting the very people who are keeping that organization alive. Without our money, NPR would have long since ceased to exist by now.

NPR is gleefully making a ridiculously idiotic video featuring an insult worthy of a seventh-grader, all to insult a large portion of the American public. Rather than listen to what these Americans are saying and perhaps offer a thoughtful criticism, they’re just insulting them — with taxpayer money. Perhaps its time to let them die a quick death, Air America style.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

It comes in two forms. The first, reported last week, is higher salaries for federal workers:

The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

The second manifestation of bureaucratic welfare, reported yesterday (via Instapundit), is tax scofflaws who hide in plain sight, working for Uncle Sam but refusing to give him their due share of the salaries he pays:

At a time when the White House is projecting the largest deficit in the nation’s history, Uncle Sam is trying to recover billions of dollars in unpaid taxes from its own employees.

Federal workers owe more than $3 billion in income taxes they failed to pay in 2008. According to Internal Revenue Service documents, 276,300 federal employees and retirees owe $3,042,200,000.

So to recap: We taxpayers are footing a much larger bill to pay the salaries of people whose job is to tax, spend and regulate us into economic ruin. But they aren’t paying their share of the taxes that will be needed to fund the Big Government they are building.

It’s time for the tea partiers to start screaming about bureaucratic welfare.

UPDATE (also via Instapundit): The problem exists in a third form, this time at the local level. The Washington Examiner reported yesterday: “The economy has been in the dumps for years, but the good times keep on rolling for some favored D.C. employees. City officials have doled out nearly $15 million in bonuses and awards since Mayor Adrian Fenty took office in January 2007.”

[Cross-posted at The Enlightened Redneck]

How much influence does New Orleans’ mayor have on Senatorial elections?  Well, Mayor Marc Morial and his LIFE organization won it for her the first time she ran.  She may well be relying on that happening again.

This is Mitch’s 3rd try at City Hall.  In 1994, he was beaten by Marc Morial.  In 2006 he was beaten by Ray Nagin.  In context, this was not a bad thing: keep in mind that Nagin was actually the reform candidate.  People forgave Nagin his Katrina behavior because after the runoff, it was down to him and Mitch Landrieu.  Voters asked themselves who they trusted to be in charge of millions of recovery dollars, and they picked Nagin.  Landrieu had recently spent nearly a million taxpayer dollars redecorating his Lt. Governor office, and had ties to Marc Morial, corrupt former mayor and like Mitch, son of a former New Orleans mayor.  In spite of travesties like this, I still think that was the right decision. Bad as Nagin has been, I believe Landrieu would have been worse.

The Landrieus are deeply entrenched in Louisiana politics.  At 27 years old, Mitch was a shoe-in for family La. House seat his father and Mary previously occupied and has been in politics ever since.  Mitch and Mary’s sister, Madeleine, is a Civil District Court Judge who, like most CDC judges, ran unopposed last election.

While nothing illegal has ever been proved, Mary Landrieu more or less stole her Senate seat using ACORN approved methods of getting out the zombie vote, paying people to vote early and often, and holding back precincts so any necessary adjustments could be made.  Woody Jenkins, discouraged by Louisiana election code which requires trials to begin no later 15 days after the election, tried to take his case to the Senate instead.  He did a lousy job proving it, and now as an incumbent, she’s entrenched.

One organization Mary relied on heavily to get her into the Senate was LIFE (Louisiana Independent Federation of Electors).  LIFE was closely associated with Marc Morial, sometime mayor of New Orleans, and like Mary and Mitch, son of a New Orleans Mayor.  Marc’s dad (Dutch Morial) succeeded Mitch’s dad (Moon Landrieu) as mayor.  Like his father, Marc Morial tried – and failed – to amend the city charter so they could run for a 3rd term.

During Mitch’s most recent run for mayor, Nagin rightly made a campaign issue of Landrieu’s ties to Marc Morial.  Pre-Katrina investigations led to a thirty-seven-page indictment that

alleged that Morial cronies skimmed money from an $81 million city contract; an ex-cop was charged with pocketing $800,000; and two city officials were accused of receiving $100,000 each. Meanwhile, Morial’s uncle was accused of skimming more than $500,000 from the city transit authority, and Morial’s aunt was convicted on federal charges of paying kickbacks to a school official.

Morial’s brother Jacque eventually pled guilty to failing to file taxes.  Pampy Barre, a close associate of both Dutch and Marc Morial eventually went to jail – after turning government snitch and taking New Orleans City Council President Oliver Thomas – another Morial/Landrieu crony – down with him.

Although it’s a long time until Mary Landrieu is up for re-election, a big part of successfully ditching her involves keeping her brother out of City Hall where he would have the opportunity – like Marc Morial before him – to influence her election.  Here’s his competition.  Mitch’s classlessness at hijacking a charity’s groundbreaking event (at which he was scheduled to be one of 14 speakers) to make his announcement is a good illustration of his character.

The Baton Rouge Tea Party is doing a great job keeping the heat on Mary because of her willingness to be bought, but the first step in preventing her 2016 re-election is keeping Mitch out of New Orleans’ City Hall.

Cross-posted.