Who'd'a Thunk?

Remember Robin?

Well Emporer Misha of Anti-Idiotarian fame ... apparently has about the same story. As my local academic friend does. And there are lots of others.

Most casual readers of the Rottweiler would likely be taken by surprise by this, as I was. But good on you, Misha.

Free Range Kids

Heard this lady on the radio at lunch yesterday. I'm not a regular Dr. Laura listener, but she was on, and I am all about what this lady has to say.

Free Range Kids

Aren't you glad...

We have this brilliant man for a Veep instead of that "airhead" Palin?

Yeah, thanks American Media. Great job.

The Nanny State

This is just too good not to pass on. Shamelessly heisted from Morgan's blog.

Hate™ Revisited

Let me make one thing clear first....

I find the Westborough Baptist Church's behavior disgusting. Abhorrent. Idiotic.

But to my knowledge they have not killed anyone nor advocated, as a matter of Church Policy, killing anyone.

That all being said, they were apparently here protesting a domestic partnership registry recently approved in Columbia. (As an aside, I'm ok with that although I still don't think the government should be involved in such things).

And I was watching the news last night, and the anchor started the report out by saying that a "Hate Group™" was here in town to protest it. That was the story headline, and that was the term used throughout the story referring to them.

Now ... I don't really have a huge problem with calling them a group that "hates", as you can see "God Hates You" on their protest signs and all... so saying they "hate" is really not my issue.

Again, it's the double-standard. They were here to protest. They did nothing illegal. They were exercising their rights to assemble and associate and speak freely.

The media won't call terrorists terrorists, but they can call an obnoxious church group a "Hate Group™".

And the ™ I put there for a reason. It signifies that the term is being used as more than an adjective, more than a label, even -- almost a brand name -- and it's a brand being bestowed upon things by self-appointed branders, like the FDA of culture. For that same label is used on every commentator on Fox News, as well as Glenn Beck (well I guess he is a Fox News commentator now), Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Charles Krauthamer, Mark Steyn, etc, etc, etc. It's Newspeak. You aren't supposed to think about, or even listen to what they have to say to form your own opinion. They're just ungood, and that's all you need to know. Just be faithful to Big Brother and ignore them.

As a matter of fact, since I have actually listened to and read quite a bit from these people (Beck, Steyn et al, not Westborough), I know immediately anyone who labels them as Haters™ is either deliberately misleading or they have never actually listened to anything more than soundbites taken out of context if they have heard or read anything at all by any of them. The Hate Labelers™ are merely instructing you what to believe.

Journalists say they are impartial, just reporting the facts. No judgements. That's what the "we can't call them terrorists" meme is about.

Well here's the facts. Westborough Baptist Church. Where they're from. Who they are. Here's what they've done. Here's why they say they're here. Here's pictures of them and their signs. This is what happened. We report. You decide. That's the way it's supposed to work.

You do that, report some of the tactics they've used, and you'll find that most of us will decide they're disgusting idiots.

But if you can call them a Hate Group™, why can't you call someone who purposely targets civilians with the intent of inflicting fear on other civilians to pressure them into supporting their political goals .... a terrorist?

Update: Last night's headline covering a "peaceful alternative" protest to Westborough's protest. Only it really wasn't an alternative protest, it was an opposing protest. An alternative is a different way to accomplish the same thing.

The headline? "Fighting Hate With Peace"

IMHO, the best way to fight groups like Westborough is to ignore them.

"Intellectual"

Mark Steyn on Dominique Devillipan:

Here's this byronic French poet with big hair, lost in a tangle of abstract nouns and this is what passes for "intellectual" to the casual observer.

Hmmm.... sound like anyone else getting lots of glowing headlines over the last year and a half or so? Brilliant. I don't know anything about Dominique, but the phrasing describes so many people, actually -- to a "T".

What The Tea Parties Were About III

We see in today's George Will column:

In February, California's Democratic-controlled Legislature, faced with a $42 billion budget deficit, trimmed $74 million (1.4 percent) from one of the state's fastest growing programs, which provides care for low-income and incapacitated elderly and cost the state $5.42 billion last year. The Los Angeles Times reports that "loose oversight and bureaucratic inertia have allowed fraud to fester."

But the Service Employees International Union collects nearly $5 million a month from 223,000 caregivers who are members. And the Obama administration has told California that unless the $74 million in cuts are rescinded, it will deny the state $6.8 billion in stimulus money.

Federal aid --> Dependency --> Coersion

Like a drug dealer handing out free samples.

We have come far from the Founders' vision.

Update: Just listening to yesterday's Dennis Miller Show and his interview with Mark Steyn, and Steyn nutshells another reason pretty nicely as well:

The short version of what has happened in the entire western world western governments have out-spent this generation. So now the question is can they out-spend the children and grandchildren who haven't yet been born?

But it's all ok. Susan Roesgen says our $400 tax breaks will make up for it all.

Mr. Whittle

Haven't paid too much attention to Bill Whittle in the last several months. He had us trained not to expect updates often.

But he's been busy out at Pajamas Media, and doing good things. I wouldn't expect anything else from him.

His whole blog at http://www.ejectejecteject.com/ has been moved over to Pajamas Media, but his important, excellent essays seem to have lost their index. I had them indexed on my blog, but those pointers now just get re-directed to his home PJMedia page.

A very minor complaint I have. But then again, I have bought three copies of his book. One to give to my step son when he went to Iraq. One to lend out. And the other is mine.

Of particular interest to me are two videos he has out there. Bill's a video editor out in California, so he knows a thing or two about putting one together. It's simple. Mainly him as a commentator. Well done.

One is The Truth about the Atomic Bombs. The other is What Media Bias Really Costs the Republic.

Patriotic

Bill Maher Tells Us What's What

Bill Maher is so smart, don'tcha think?

For God's sake, tell people to read a newspaper. Not just to save the newspaper industry - though Lord knows I'd miss my Daily Jumble - but because having a public that actually knows something is our best defense against ever again electing a President who knows nothing.

Read: tell people to get their news through Progressive Outlets so that never again will they elect a president who disagrees with the Progressive worldview.

There's a name for people who do the right thing for their country, even if it involves sacrifice. And no, it's not "socialists." It's "patriots." We all know the modern definition of a patriot: It's the person who pays the least taxes and listens to the most A.M. radio. But that wasn't what it always meant.

The country isn't the government. The Constitution put limits on Federal Government power that has been ignored for decades. A very large portion of that abuse has been by people with socialist ideals, slowly but surely making more and more people more and more reliant on government and less and less reliant on themselves and their immediate communities. If the people who pay the least taxes and listen to the most A.M. radio happen to be against this trend and for a return to limited government, then they are patriots -- not because of the former two traits but because of the latter two.

Patriots want their fellow citizens to be able to go to the hospital. They want to make sure no one sells them bread made out of Chinese skulls. They want a country where the deer and the antelope can still play - and not just so Sarah Palin can shoot them from a helicopter. Patriots want to burn less coal and buy less oil.

The country isn't your neighbor, either. The country isn't your Nanny. The Country was outlined in the Constitution. It's an ideal, and it says nothing about hospitals, skull bread, or wildlife management practices uninformed people may find distasteful.

During the campaign, Obama suggested that one simple thing Americans could do to help with fuel-efficiency was check their car's tire pressure. And Republicans freaked, because to them, every suggestion for the common good is a direct attack on their personal liberty, and it's unpatriotic to interfere with anyone's God-given right to be big, dumb and selfish.

Maher is convienently forgetting making up the context here. But that's what these people do. Re-state the "facts" so that they suit them. Obama was dismissing the effectiveness of drilling offshore by saying hey, all we have to do is inflate our tires and we save as much as we'd get by doing that. Republicans didn't freak or even talk about personal liberty. They just said "you're wrong." Wrong to dismiss our position with fictional numbers for trivial actions. And you know, we could import less oil if we used more of our own. Funny, that.

When the President suggests things that will help the greater good, that's not a slight against your fragile manhood. I know, you're a rugged individualist. But you're not - you're just a schmuck.

Ah, on to the belittling. And name-calling. You know, things you need to do to attempt to make it sound like you have an argument when you really don't. And history shows that every time someone goes on about government forcing people to do things for "the greater good" or "the common good" it seems to end up in tyranny and leaving massive numbers of dead people in its wake. So pardon us for flinching when that term gets used.

Going back to Reagan, all of our leaders have predictably and reliably told us that government is always the problem, never you my precious, perfect American citizen. You are always perfect just the way you are, like a precious little snowflake. A beautiful, precious, 350-pound, pig-ignorant snowflake.

And they told us why and gave examples with data to back it up rather than calling us more names or ridiculing our choices because you know better, Mr. Maher. Liberty is about choices. And people reap the rewards of their good ones, and suffer the consequences of their bad ones. It's not that we think all Americans are perfect and should never change. We just don't presume to tell them that we know they aren't and try to dictate how and when they will change.

M-heh!

Update. If you're a reader, you'll know why I love this one.

Unim-PRESS-ed

There was a recent local incident where I work in which someone, in a non-threatening manner, brought something to the workplace that was against policy and what he brought alarmed some people.

Now I work in the main building for our department, but we have another building about a mile away that houses a signigicant portion of our employees. It was that other building where he worked, and that other building where he entered with the item(s) in question.

In the newspaper story, they had the guy bringing it into THIS building, though. It was an assumption, I'm sure, as this is where the Director for the department works. The main office is here. Since our department is listed as being in this building, the reporter likely assumed that this is where the incident took place. But the reporter reported, but obviously didn't ask.

The reporter also got at least one other fact wrong, but that fact probably came from a question the reporter presumably asked.

Now we talk about "I read it somewhere", or "I read in the news", and we hear newspeople say their reporting isn't biased. Not that this story wasn't reported fairly, and that second fact wasn't corrected the next day. However, reading the paper the first "fact", that this building was the location ... that will probably be left.

The whole point of this post is this. We all have biases. Biases can lead to assumptions, and assumptions aren't facts. If 80% of the people in the press are progressives, which direction do you suppose most of the assumptions that slip through as facts ... tend to go?

Yeah, this is real

Driving back from our vacation we stayed in Paducah, KY overninght... right across the river from Metropolis, IL. Home of Superman. Famous statue there. Yada yada.

There was a free regional tourism promoting magazine in the motel lobby. I had to pick this one up.

It sums up soooooo much.

What the Tea Parties were about

The media decided itself what the Tea Party protests were about and have instructed the country to believe what they decided. Coverage was antagonistic, especially if you contrast it with coverage of anti-war and other leftist protests.

Thomas Sowell, while not talking about the tea parties at all, still makes a nice summary here about why those of us who went to them, went to them. This really does sum up what they were all about. And they weren't about Obama himself, they were about the leftist vision. The big-government vision, which goes way beyond Big Government's current head champion.

Barack Obama's vision of America is one in which a President of the United States can fire the head of General Motors, tell banks how to bank, control the medical system and take charge of all sorts of other activities for which neither he nor other politicians have any expertise or experience.

The Constitution of the United States gives no president, nor the entire federal government, the authority to do such things. But spending trillions of dollars to bail out all sorts of companies buys the power to tell them how to operate.

Appointing judges to the federal courts-- including the Supreme Court-- who believe in expanding the powers of the federal government to make arbitrary decisions, choosing who will be winners and losers in the economy and in the society, is perfectly consistent with a vision of the world where self-confident and self-righteous elites rule according to their own notions, instead of merely governing under the restraints of the Constitution.

Condescending and snide comments in the media about odd sexual practices aside, the Media made the point that the original Boston Tea Party was about "Taxation Without Representation", and since today's Tea Partiers have representation (well, we are allowed to vote in elections anyway) -- they must be ignorant of history. No attempt was made to understand -- from the Tea Party Protester's point of view -- why they were there. A few frustrated ignorant redneck racists. Nothing to see here. And aren't they funny? They don't even know about "tea bagging". [snicker ... aren't we smart?? ... tee hee! ]

The Purveyors of Nuance™ never stopped to draw any other possible parallel with the original Boston Tea Party. The main rallying issue was indeed taxation without representation, but it was really about being fed up with an overbearing, tyrannical government and abuses of power -- taxation without representation being a glaring example.

Our founding fathers went to great lengths in the Constitution to curb and restrain government power. Democrats and Republicans alike have abused these restraints over the years -- clearly Democrats far more than Republicans, to be sure. But both are guilty, and both were admonished at the tea parties. To hear the media talk, these were organized by Republicans for Republicans.

There is a reason the number of people who identify themselves as conservative outnumber the people who identify themselves as Republicans. The reason is that most people who are conservatives (a label that gets applied these days to Classical Liberals such as the founding fathers... that's why I tend to use the word "Progressive" these days over "Liberal". It doesn't mean what it used to mean, but Progressives want it both ways. I don't want to give it to them) ... anyway, the reason is that more conservatives tend to consider themselves independents. Their allegiance is to the Constitution, not to a political party. They tend to vote Republican, but swear no fealty to the party and may punish it by voting independent or not at all if the party doesn't offer up someone who represents their ideals well enough.

This is what I mean by Republicans needing to deepen their base rather than broaden it.

The other nuance that the progressive media miss is that printing up trillions of dollars in new, un-backed money amounts to a huge tax, no matter what you call it. You either devalue the dollar to give the government the authority to spend this new money ... amounting to a transfer of wealth from the people to the Government, or you put the burden of paying that "borrowed" money on future generations. Just because you don't call it a tax doesn't mean it doesn't amount to the same thing.

When most people are against it, but most legislators vote for it... isn't that taxation without representation? They may have been elected, but they ain't representin'.

The "reporter" who got in the face of one protester about Obama's big tax "cut" was laughable. And the argument that the Bush Administration pushed through a big bailout package isn't an argument -- the people at these protests were against that, too. It goes back to that party allegiance thing. Democrats assume that Conservatives blindly support Republicans. In most cases, they reluctantly support Republicans because the only viable alternative is far worse.

Just In Case it Ever Comes Up

8 U.S.C. 1325

Puts the "Illegal" in Illegal Immigration

Tweet

What the hell is "Twitter"?

Or should I ask... what the hell is "Twitter"?

Either way, I want to know what the hell it is. Because I apparently don't get it.

Sowell on Judges

Really good (as usual)

Appoint enough Supreme Court justices with "empathy" for particular groups and you would have, for all practical purposes, repealed the 14th Amendment, which guarantees "equal protection of the laws" for all Americans.

Stop an Echo

So I'm sitting around with family, and one conservative member mentions something he saw on Fox News.

A progressive member starts in with the passive-aggressive giggle of dismissal, and then the condescending "you mean you watch Fox News?"

And the conservative member says "Yup. Fair and balanced."

More giggles. "Oh, gosh! Do you know how many lies they tell?"

Now normally when this progressive member disparages Fox News (this is certainly not the first time) I keep my mouth shut in the name of family harmony. Which I think, unfortunately, only re-enforces the idea in such people's minds that their assertion is correct.

But I decided I needed to chime in this time. The giggles are one thing. The condescension I usually gloss over. But the "lies" thing. I wasn't going to let that drop.

"No. I don't know. Tell me a lie Fox News has told."

Giggles. "Well I don't watch it."

"So you don't watch it, but you know they tell lies? How do you know they tell lies?"

"Well I read somewhere..."

"You read somewhere? How do you know that wasn't a lie?"

"Well I don't. They all do it, that's what I'm saying."

"Then why single out Fox?"

"Well I read somewhere that they were the worst."

"And you believe what you read?"

"Well let's not get into anything political. Why can't people just talk about things anymore?"

Why not indeed. Who brought it up? Who got nasty about it?

Fortunately, I suppose, the phone rang. It was for the progressive.

So I'm sitting here thinking ... "Fox News lies, but you don't have any examples and you don't watch it. They all lie, but you know Fox is 'the worst' because you read something one of the other liars wrote?"

The problem is, they're used to people either politely keeping quiet, backing down, or patting them on the head for echoing what they've been instructed to believe and many others have accepted ... typically the people they hang out with.

Don't let it happen anymore. When anyone tries to espouse how "hateful" conservative-friendly networks and show hosts are, make them back it up. Watch them back down. Stop an echo.

Monty Python Torture

If you haven't read Ann Coulter's skewering of the Torture Memo flap.... you need to.

"Hate™", of course. That's what progressives label anything they disagree with but really don't have a substantial argument against.

A Revelation

I was over reading in "The House" and I ran across the line "Republicans don't need to broaden their base..."

and I thought to myself....

No.... they need to deepen it.