Ethel, MO Community Center

My local 9-12 group is talking about this, and a "mentalist" in the group is going to put on a show... bending silverware with his mind, amazing card tricks, etc -- to benefit (100% of proceeds) -- Ethel, MO's community center.

He did a few of those tricks in front of us at the last meeting. Un-freakin'-believable. I mean, I don't buy into magic or mentalism, but I have no explanation for what I saw.

Why am I putting this out here?

Principle. As in, these people are trying to live the principles we Libertarians have. They're building this thing themselves, with no government assistance. No lobbying their congresscritters.

Check it out.

They've gotten a long way on it.  Here's their blog.

I will be floating down the Jack's Fork River that day, but I can certainly donate.

V-O-L-U-N-T-A-R-I-L-Y

They Call Me the Thinker

They call me The Thinker
I've been thinkin' low and high
It's my job to keep on thinkin'
Til the day I die

Good article pointing to an even better article telling us what Obama thinks his job is.

My job right now is just to make sure that everybody in the Gulf understands this is what I wake up to in the morning and this is what I go to bed at night thinking about: the spill.

I went to a party last night where a well-quaffed Miami Vice lookin' dude basically said the same thing; that he lays awake at night thinking about the spill. I don't. There's nothing I can do about it, and the people who can do something about it are laying awake at night, and working through the night -- to figure it out.

Me, yeah, I hate the spill, and I'm stunned that this has gone on this long. But the real deal is, the mistakes were made before, not after the spill started. The biggest mistake was not being prepared for a total catastrophe like this.  Clenched jaws after the fact might make a great photo op ... but they don't "plug the damn hole", nor do they increase the motivation of those responsible to plug the damn hole.  Believe me, they want the damn hole plugged at least as badly as anyone else does.

Of course, if any good comes out of this it will be that everyone has been made fully aware that deep water oil wells with lots of pressure behind them are really hard to plug when they break -- so let's have a plan and the equipment available when it does happen. Because it's gonna happen. It just shouldn't go on for 40 days. Or more.

On the Oil Leak

When the oil rig first blew up and I heard there was oil spewing, I was much more distressed about the 11 people who died.  Not that I was unconcerned about the oil leak itself, but in my worldview there are tradeoffs -- and if you're going to drill for oil in the ocean, or transport it across the ocean in tankers, occasionally we're going to have probelms like this; not that we shouldn't try our darndest to avoid them without completely shutting the whole industry down and going back to burning cow feces for fuel.

I'll be honest, I didn't expect the oil to leak for more than a week or 10 days, max.  Not good, but ... if you had told me it'd take almost 40 days before they actually made any attempt to plug it up, I wouldn't have believed you.  And yet here we are.

A friend recently posted,

"If you're not prepared to fail, how will you ever create anything original?" —Sir Ken Robinson

Now this is from a creative person, and the scope here is for the creator.  It's a sub-set of "it is better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all".   Which is also true 99% of the time.

And it is true for offshore and deep-well offshore drilling as well.   We've gotten a relatively infinite amount of good out of oil than we've had to pay in the "bad" tradeoffs.  And believe it or not, the earth will heal.   Not saying the oil spills are cool and I'm fine with them.  I'm saying if we want the good the oil brings, we're going to see and have to deal with the occasional disaster like this. 

Now if we go back to the quote my friend posted and inspect it a little closer, "if you're not prepared to fail".   Were "we", (and by "we" I mean BP) prepared for failure -- that is, did they have a contingency plan in the event that something like this happened?

It appears not.  And that's bad.   We should all learn from this.

But the lesson shouldn't be to stop offshore drilling or even deep-well offshore drilling.   The lesson should be -- if your safety devices fail, you'd better have a thought-out plan ... dare I even say a creatively thought-out plan -- to stop it.  And it would be good if you'd rehearsed it and done some testing as well.

Charles Krauthammer's take on it was pretty good.  You might go give it a read.

David Warren gives a sober assessment of real-world foreign policy

Seriously, excellent article.  Tell me where he's wrong.

What He Said vs What They Said He Said

So I'm watching the news this morning and I hear about an Arizona law that says that to teach English you have to speak English fluently.

This, of course, brought out the predictable calls of RAAAAAAAAAACIST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We go out, and looked at this story, for instance, and find that the headline is that teachers with an accent cannot teach English.   Even CNN spun it as a crackdown on "accents".  Only once again, this is not what the man said.  He said that if you mispronounce words to the point that they sound like other words, then you couldn't teach English.  And the law actually doesn't specify English, it says that teachers must be proficient in the language they are teaching.

I mean, imagine you sent your child to a private teacher to learn Spanish.  You're paying your own hard-earned money for it.  And you find out that the teacher you're sending your child to to learn Spanish isn't pronouncing Spanish words correctly.  Would you be upset or concerned at all?

How did we get here, to a point where someone can make an argument that someone who cannot speak English properly must be allowed to teach English or else some sort of dirty racist, even ethnic cleansing (seriously, people???) games are being played -- and expect to be taken seriously?

Jeffmon told me the other day that he believes the leftist side of this culture war is being fought and mostly won by a pretty small minority of Americans.  I believe on this issue, especially, that would have to be correct.  I can't imagine too many Americans would buck this law (which has been on the books since 2001, I believe).

It's all about painting Arizona as racist, shaming them into repealing their law and/or drumming up public support in the rest of the country to have it overturned by the Supreme Court -- so that the Leftists can continue with their culturally divisive, American culturally-eroding, multi-cultural, hyphenated-American agenda aimed at getting multiple sub-groups of Americans to demand that government intervene on their behalf, which the government is more than willing to do.  This is how the Leftists win, and this is how they'll tape together a coalition that will allow the socialist transformation.

Unless We the People drop our hyphenations and band together and say "No you Won't!"

What She Said vs What "They" Said She Said

The Media and it's pundits put a lot of words in Sarah Palin's mouth that didn't actually come out of it.   So this morning when I heard that she suggested that the Obama Administration was "in bed" with BP and that's why the response to the oil disaster in the Gulf was so sluggish ... again, I was skeptical -- especially after I heard the blurbs from her interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.

I was going to post on just that, but I decided that maybe there was more context to support the assertion that she was saying the administration was in bed with BP.

So I went out to Hulu and watched the entire segment from yesterday.

What she did say was why isn't the press asking the question?   She stated that the Obama Campaign got more money from BP than any other candidate (which nobody's disputing), and she followed up by saying that if this had happened under George W. Bush ... especially if he'd gotten any campaign money AT ALL from BP (and probably even if he hadn't) ... you can bet the MSM would have been all over that "connection".

What she was doing, once again, was pointing out the double-standard.  She wasn't accusing the Obama Administration of anything but being let off the hook by the fawning media.

That's a lotta nothin'

Heard this morning about the West Point graduation speech Teh One gave over the weekend, and a lot of talk about a line that was removed from the speech:

"that's a lot of cheering".

Seriously, that was on the teleprompter????  He's that programmed???? Even I was skeptical about that.

I'm a source kinda guy especially when I have any skepticism at all, so I traced it back to a Drudge Report story.

Had to search through the archives and found two links to archived Drudge front pages with the headline.

Neither link gets you anywhere.  One leads to a bad link on drudgereport.com to a folder or document named "xx" ... so you get an error.  The other leads to a link to a page on drudgereportarchives.com with the date and timestamp in the path and filename of the alleged report, but alas, you get a 404 error.

Now, I don't wanna go all Alex Jones here (trust me, I don't), but ... "Coincidence?"

I can think of two possibilities.  Drudge found out the report was wrong and retracted deleted it.  Or he was pressured to retract delete it.

All of the other archive links I tried worked just fine.

Eleventy Thousand kinds of Awesomeness

Tom McClintock responds to Calderon and the Democrats who cheered him.

Rand Paul

 Update:  I just read from Allahpundit, who I consider a pretty reliable source, that Rand Paul is chummy with Alex Jones.  An anyone who knows me knows that Alex Jones does not sit well with me on a lot of levels.  I find this dismaying.  It could lead to a Democrat getting that seat.  I still think I'd rather have Dr. Paul in that seat than any Democrat, but I'm leery of what might come out of his mouth.  Still ... his dad keeps getting elected.  And then there's that guy who thinks Guam might capsize.  He's in office.  Rand should get out of the national spotlight while (if) he can and concentrate on Kentucky.

Plus, of course ... Obama was more than chummy with Jeremiah Wright.  And he got elected President.  So maybe there's hope.   Kind of a twisted route to hope, though, eh?
--------------------------------------

An old progressive friend asked me if I caught Rand Paul's interview on Rachel Maddow.

This would be like asking Thomas Sowell if he caught Rand Paul's interview with David Duke.  I avoid Rachel Maddow because she has a quasi-religious agenda she would like to see foisted on America.  The religion of the left.

But I did go check it out on YouTube.  It was horrible.  But not for the reasons Maddow and Joe Klein think.

Rand's position on private property rights and freedom of association are right on, but Maddow was interested only in getting him to say at the very least that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which was passed with majority Republican support and with a minority of Democratic support, incidentally) went too far. She wanted to get a soundbyte saying either that he wouldn't have voted for it, or that he doesn't fully support it. That's all the progressive advocacy media needs. Rachel was not interested in finding what Rand Paul's views are on the issue of race. She wanted this:

"AGAINST CIVIL RIGHTS!!!! THIS PROVES THE TEA PARTY IS RACIST LIKE WE SAID ALL ALONG!!!!!" This is what they want. And Paul figured it out, too late. He wasn't prepared for the interview. Too bad.

Of course, this may be one reason many people voted for him. He's not a career politician and he sucks at the dance. So instead of trying to dance, he should have just stated his philosophical position and told her that how he would have voted in 1964 is a hypothetical question as it is now 2010.   Rand couldn't have been more than a year old when the Civil Rights Act was passed.

If she were interested in an honest, intellectual discussion of the merits and demerits of that act, it would have been a different story, but that wasn't the case. That's never the case with Ms. Maddow.

The Civil Rights Act, with all of its merits and flaws, is a sacred cow to the Left today, and to say it was flawed in any way is blasphemy.  That is the way it will be presented in the media.

The distinction between public and private is important, and people have lost sight of it. Freedom ain't free.

No matter how abhorrent we may find it, JUST AS we must allow Westborough Baptist "Church" people to do and say the things they do and say, we must also allow racists to be racists until the racists impinge on the life, liberty, or property of another.

We can (and people like Martin Luther King, Jr. have done it successfully in the past using Ghandi's methods) apply social and financial pressure on such businesses and people to get them to change their minds, but again, it's their building, their business. If they don't want white people in there, I won't go in. If they allow smoking and I don't want to experience smoke, I won't go in. If they don't let black people in, and I don't like THAT, I won't go in.

Just as I get to decide who I let in my own private home on whatever criteria I choose, private businesses should be able to decide who they let in to their businesses, and even who they hire.

Hooters should be able to hire only female waitresses if that's the image they want to project, and if they want all waitresses to have a c-cup or larger, that is Hooters' business. Customers can vote with their feet. If an employer wants to hire only black men, or only Pakastani women, if a Chinese restaurant wants to hire only Chinese people, or even to SERVE only Chinese people -- a private company should be able to do what they like. That's Liberty, like it or not.

Rachel wanted Rand Paul to say "I am against the 1964 Civil Rights Act" so they have a soundbite to beat him and the Tea Party over the head with in the coming election, that is all.

In the comments, someone translated the subtext in a humorous, but all too truthful manner:

I watched that interview live last night.. This was my take on the whole interview:

Rachel: Are you a racist?
Rand: No.
Rachel: So you admit to being a racist?
Rand: No.
Rachel: You're defending being a racist?
Rand: No.
Rachel: Does your mother know you're a racist?
Rand: I'm not a racist.
Rachel: Sir, just yes or no. Does your fat, racist mother know you are a racist?
Rand: No, no, that's all wrong.
Rachel: So you never admitted to your racist whore of a mother that you're a vile, disgusting racist?
Rand: Wait...
Rachel: Sorry for inturrupting, go ahead and admit to being a racist.
Rand: No.
Rachel: Thanks, Dr. Rand Paul, for coming on and having a civil discussion about what a racist you are.
Rand: Uhh... Thanks?

It was also pointed out in the comments to the gloaters (who desperately want this to be Rand Paul's "Katie Couric" interview)   that his father has very similar views and that he's been elected to Congress several times.

"Racist!"

That again?

Yawn.

Nicely put, Mona

Mona Charen, on meeting in the middle:

Recent liberal laments about the increasing "polarization" of American political life are as predictable as the seasons. But pleas for centrism ring pretty hollow in light of recent history.


The Washington Post editorial board, after noting Sen. Robert Bennett's loss in Utah and Sen. Blanche Lincoln's primary challenge, asked: "Is there a way to push back against the movement toward partisanship and paralysis -- to carve out some space for those who strive to work across party lines in the national interest? We can think of no more important question ... "


Really? How about the question as to whether the trajectory of government spending will drag the United States into insolvency? How about the problem of a governing class unmoored from the Constitution?
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But the greater weakness in the liberal cant about meeting somewhere in the middle is this: The great domestic question of our time is whether we can restrain and even reverse the catastrophic expansion of government debt before it is too late. And until just yesterday, Republicans were AWOL. Or, to put it another way, they were just where the great conciliators of the Washington Post claim they should be. They had abandoned limited government and were reconciled to tinkering with huge federal entitlements to make them slightly less bankrupting than they otherwise would be.

Cause and Effect

Saw a story on NBC this morning in the waiting room at the doctor's office.  It was about a study which "shows a connection" between kids who eat a lot of fruits and vegetables having traces of pesticides in their urine and displaying symptoms of "ADHD".

Now their chief medical correspondent who was being interviewed on the show was very careful to avoid saying it was a cause-effect relationship, but focused on the "connection" and brought up the "concern".  She said, of course, that we should not stop feeding our kids fruits and vegetables.

But her recommendations were the same as one might expect from anti-corporate activists.  Buy locally, buy organic, family farms didn't use pesticides (really???), and the interesting quasi-religious idea that if it's out of season, maybe you shouldn't be eating it.

Nancy Snyderman (the correspondent) didn't do the study.   I looked her up to see if she was connected with one of these fronts for activist groups and found nothing (except that she went to High School with my wife!  But I never take anything for granted from the media anymore.  I know about press releases and journalists.) Seems to me that she's a physician turned physician/journalist.  The study, it appears, came from a Maryse Bouchard (Harvard/University of Quebec) who specializes in the study of environmental epidemiology of neurobehavioral disorders.

Now maybe Maryse is right about the connection.  But I have an academic background and I know a few things about scientific language and statistical studies.  And of course, what is being said here is that there appears to be a relationship and not that there is a cause/effect relationship.  But that's not the way it's being spun by our messianic media.

First note that apparently, we don't know what causes ADHD (disclosure: IMHO, it is caused by "diagnosis").

So I wonder if the study took this variable into account?

What else does it correlate with?  What is the nature of the parenting of a child whose parents are hyper-reactive to the latest health and safety studies on what you should feed your child to provide optimum health?  Are parents who feed their kids a lot of Healthy™ fruits and vegetables (now remember, I'm a big fan of fruits and vegetables myself) more likely to be the kind who fuss over every little thing? Might that "cause" ADHD? In other words, could the residual pesticide in fact be perfectly harmless to humans and the fact that kids who are fed more stuff that has these pesticides on them correlate with they type of parenting they are receiving, and is ADHD in fact a behavioral disorder brought about by sociological forces in homes that tend toward ... for lack of a better term, overparenting"?

Just a question.  But I think a legitimate one.

Miller Time

Dennis Miller on the drop in Obama's popularity:

"People used to faint for him, now they're merely nodding off as he speaks for the 'ad infinitumth' time."

Hope

If I have distressing apprehensions, that I shall not be able to justify the too exalted expectations of my countrymen, I am supported by a confidence that the most gracious Being, who has hitherto watched over the interests and averted the perils of the United States, will never suffer so fair an inheritance to become a prey to anarchy, despotism, or any other species of oppression.   -- George Washington

Stossel's excellent rant

This was John Stossel's closing monologue at the end of last night's program on government bullying.

There are only two ways to do things in life: voluntary, or forced.

Voluntary's best, and it's most of life. It's how we pick our friends, our religion, career, hobbies, and so on. It gives individuals freedom and flexibility. It leads to constant improvement because when your choices are voluntary, if you want people to attend your school, or baseball game or fly your airline you have to please your customers.

But government doesn't have to please anybody. Government gets to use force. OK, they have to please us because we can make some changes every four or eight years when we vote, but they're usually minor changes. The permanent bureaucracy doesn't change. It. Just. Grows, and exerts more force.

Now - we need some force, we need government to keep the peace; keep people from killing us. Or stealing from us. But why do they get to decide what the rules of baseball should be?

It's telling that Senator McCain had trouble making [the point that it's part of the business of Congress to regulate baseball rules concerning steroid use] ... there's no good reason Congress should be involved. They're just sanctimonious and they want to get their faces on TV. And the public and media encouraged them. America's constant refrain that "there oughta be a law" invites politicians to bully their way into parts of life where they have no business.

Government shouldn't dictate to airlines what they can charge, and why should government tell students [..] that you MAY NOT work as an intern for me? You're not slaves. If you don't like working for free, quit. Do something else. Why do the politicians arrogantly assume they have the right to interfere with our right to make a contract?

And it's not like the government's bullying has such a great track record. The Interstate Commerce Commission used to control all of the airline prices. And the system was awful. Thank goodness Jimmy Carter got rid of it.

Now the government orders you to send your child to this or that school. But then they do a lousy job teaching them.

In fact, I can't think of anything government does better than the private sector. Can you? Can you name one thing that Government does more efficiently than private companies?

I'll give you $100 if you can.

The military and things that Government, only government does, don't count. I'm talking about anything where there's competition. Are government bullies ever better? I don't think so. I've never had to pay this bet. I've offered it for many years.

Who do these politicians think they are? They fail and fail, make life worse and run up horrible debt and then they say they want more power? What hubris!

[..]

Remember, only two ways to do things.  Voluntary, or forced.  Voluntary's better.  The Founders understood that, and that's why here in the Declaration and the Constitution they write so much about limiting government's power.    They understood the danger of big government and the bullies it breeds.

It's time to say "politicians, you've gone too far.  Let us lead our own lives.  That's the freedom we deserve."

- John Stossel

Government Bullies

I started recording Stossel to watch.  Took me a while since the early show comes on at the same time something else we record is on ... and the later re-run that night ... well Dish Network doesn't have their schedule right.  But I got it figured out.  And I recorded my first one.

Which was on "Government Bullies"  (incidentally, you can catch programs older than a week or two on Hulu.com)

Village Voice writer Anya Kamenetz he had on to defend the latest labor bill’s mandate that interns must be paid – when she basically called for the government to interfere in a business deal between consenting adults.

Anya comes out of the gate defending the "Fair Labor Standards Act" (how much do you want to bet communist Andy Stern was behind that one?) with her defense of it saying

"This activity of internship has grown up in the shadows without there being much government oversight or regulation."

As if it is self-evidently true that no government oversight or regulation is inherently a bad thing. This is the core of progressive thought. Experts must oversee everything anyone does anywhere to make sure it's being done .... well ... "right". It's obvious to them. Anyone who doesn't want this must be trying to get away with something nefarious.

Next she suggests that a possible solution for interns not getting paid would be for colleges to pay them (of course, colleges are often already "paying" them in college credit, which they bestow on them for work completed). John Stossel responds "yeah, but they won't".

And this is her very, very telling response:

"Well, they will if the law is enforced."

Think about the weight of what's being said and done here. Internships (once called apprenticeships) are excellent ways one can gain experience in the field of one's choice. It's a practical education. And people pay for education. But what we're really seeing here is labor unions seeing a slice of pie they're not getting. And they want to see it stopped. In their eyes, apprenticeships take away Union jobs.

But what is happening in real life is people who want experience are being matched up with people who need help and are willing to give a newbie a chance to learn and to prove him/herself ... and a willing exchange is made. Their work for their real-world experience gained and perhaps access to your knowledge to enhance that experience. No one forces you to take an internship. You do it, or you don't. You can quit at any time. After all, you're clearly not relying on the money for a living, now, are you?

So the "experts" ... (the Unions, in this case) step in and say, "Hey. We can't have that. It's not 'fair'". Now they're saying it's not fair to the intern. But if it weren't fair to the intern, the intern wouldn't take the position. What the real driving force is ... they think it's not "fair" to their members.

Andy Stern, former SEIU president and most frequent visitor to the White House for the first 15 months of the Obama Administration.... Unions, Saul Alinsky -- the father of Community Organizing ... they were his first projects back in the 1930's ... how's this quote from him? "Workers of the World Unite? It's not just a slogan anymore!" Workers of the World Unite... where have I heard that before? [insert hammer and sickle here] ... and how about this quote from him? "We're trying to use the power of persuasion. And if that doesn't work we're going to use the persuasion of power."

Well it'll work if the law is enforced.

We have a special interest group using the coercive power of the government to enforce their rules on voluntary business deals made between consenting adults. If you don't want to do it the way Andy Stern thinks you should ... the goverment will force you to do it his way.

This is why Socialism always evolves into some form of Fascism ... the state IS the religion, and you WILL follow it.

See, actually, government isn't the enemy. Government is the tool of choice FOR the enemy(ies).

Government is the only entity that is allowed to legally use force outside of self defense (and there are those who would like to remove that caveat as well! Badly!) So when government essentially becomes a whore to special interests and disregards the constraints placed upon it by our founders, it becomes THE tool of choice for special interests to foist their wills upon us in perpetuity. Because once government passes the requisite laws and creates or expands the government agencies to enforce those laws, we typically have a self-perpetuating special interest group INSIDE the government fighting to keep itself going. Rarely are these things repealed. 250 additional "wage and hour investigators" are being hired as a result of the Fair Labor Standards Act". Long after Andy Stern is dead ... the agencies employing those investigators will continue to justify their existence.

One if his  former interns, "Ann" ... said she worked two jobs... one paying PLUS her internship, just so she could take the internship with John Stossel.

John, playing devil's advocate said yeah, but that just shows that only rich people can afford to take internships. Ann said not at all, she chose to work that second, paying job so she could afford to do the internship.

The freaking commie replied:

"Yeah, but not everybody has that choice."

True. Not everybody has any particular choice. And no matter how hard the government tries, it can't fix that, and trying to fix it will only make things less "fair".

Life's not fair.  And Government will never make it fair.

Outdated Bigotry

Amongst the self-appointed elite there seemed to be a prayer (if they were in to that sort of thing) going up that the Times Square Bomber was not an Islamist, but a Timothy McVeigh they could tie to the Tea Party movement.   The adminsitration and the media (but I repeat myself) has been priming the public (well, the ~ half that isn't sympathetic to the Tea Party in the first place) for an outbreak of violence coming from our quarters so that a) they can use it as further ammunition to discredit us, and b) they can have an excuse to physically crack down on us without raising as many eyebrows.

Mayor Bloomberg didn't tiptoe too much, but boy, Contessa Brewer really did.

"There was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country. There are a lot of people who want to use terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry."

As opposed, of course, to the hip new bigotry against anyone not in a protected ethnic groups "clinging" to God and Guns and the Constitution.   You know, the one the Regime Administration is doing its best to Fundamentally Transform.

I think there are a lot of people who like to pretend they are better than other people by pretending that there are a lot more people than there actually are that are "worse" than them.

I think there are a lot of people who want to use terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a different way ... you know, like perhaps believe in limited government, or come from certain sized towns ... small ones, or rural areas, and whose skin color tends toward the light end of the scale. 

But unfortunately, they can't.  Because as I told a friend of mine the other day, there are thousands of examples of Islamist-centric terrorism.  And all they have is Timothy McVeigh to point to.  Even they know that's worn a bit thin.

I have a Muslim co-worker whose teenage daughter once told her, "Mom, I know not all Muslims are terrorists, but it sure seems like most terrorists are Muslims".  

Of course, to change this perception, Muslims could work hard to squelch this tendency among their ranks.   That would be a better route than hoping white Christians would adopt it as a modus operandi.  Or drawing strained moral equivalences between western culture and Islamic extremism.

Unrelated (or barely related -- regarding "Fundamental Transformation")  Beck brought up something the other day that has crossed my mind before.  Try this on your wife/girlfriend. 

"Honey, you know I love you.  I love you more than anything.  That's why I want you to get a new hairstyle, completly change your wardrobe, like different food, read different books, talk with a different accent and go to finishing school.  You start tomorrow."

Yep, it's prob'ly them dirty "teabaggers"

So after Janet Napolitano went out of her way to not refer to the attempted Times Square bombing as an act of "terrorism" (can't use that word, hmmm-mmm) ... Mayor Bloomberg had no problem suggesting it could've been someone upset with the Health Care bill ... you know, one of those "violent" "teabaggers". The people many on the left have no problem using the word "terrorist" to describe ... with nothing to back it up.



There's a long history of Muslim extremist terrorists bombing public places all over the world.  Nah, there's no ongoing attempt to smear and discredit the Tea Party movement at every turn.  Hmmm-mmm.

But ... not surprisingly Mr. Bloomberg's specultative smear turned out to be wrong.

Violent Anti-Government Protestors

Where are the leftist columnists decrying this?

A large group of protesters demonstrating at a May Day rally for worker's and immigrant rights downtown broke off into a riot vandalizing about a dozen businesses around 10:30 p.m. Saturday, police said.
[..]
The violence was initiated from a group holding a rally at the town clock for May Day. Windows at Jamba Juice and Velvet Underground were left shattered and graffiti including anarchy signs were tagged onto buildings.

At what Tea Party event has anyone seen anything approaching it?

Blaming the Citizen

Ralph Peters writes on the Arizona illegal immigration law scuffle:

Polls reveal that two-thirds to three-quarters of [Arizona] citizens approve of the new enforce-the-law law. Yet only 58 percent of Arizonans are non-Hispanic whites. Over 30 percent are Hispanic. Another 5 percent are Native Americans, 4 percent black and 2 percent mixed race. According to the left's logic, every non-Hispanic white must be "anti-immigrant." Blacks and Indians must be piling on, too.


Of course, that's nonsense. Left-leaning whites don't support the legislation. Which means some Hispanics must favor it. Many do. Hispanic Americans have the same concerns as all other citizens. They don't unanimously support human trafficking, the narcotics trade and criminal gangs. They want safe neighborhoods, too. Assuming that all citizens who happen to be Hispanic automatically back illegal immigration is just the left's selective racism.

I went to school at a University known for it's Journalism school.  I had a several friends who were there to major in journalism.  And one thing they tended to agree on.... one reason they picked journalism is that it required the least math.

Tolerance

Here's some tolerance for ya.

The guy who started our local 9/12 Tea Party group?  Kicked out of his appartment after his landlord saw the front-page story on the first meeting in March.   Another man who was mentioned in the story lost his job after the story came out.

Of course... I'm sure it was completely coincidental.   Especially since the land lord explicitly mentioned the story.

Fortunately, another 9/12-er has hooked him up with another place to rent.

But the guy who lost his job... that one's not so easy.

Attention

Morgan's been thinkin'.   Thinkin' about a T-Shirt.

Here's my submission for a design (need to clean up the anti-aliasing around the edges, but...)

I thought maybe the "O's" should be more ... ubiquitous.

Imagine

Imagine the Tea Party were black?, progressive activist Tim Wise asks us.

I saw this article cut out in someone's living room this weekend.  Actually, the headline on the op-ed in this particular newspaper (I imagine it popped up all over the country) was "Imagine the same antics from non-white characters".

After a quick read of the article I wanted to respond "let's first imagine some of these antics from white characters, because I sure haven't seen them".

Right off the bat, Tim muses:

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington, D.C., and northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns and ammunition.

I would first have to imagine hundreds of white protestors descending upon Washington DC armed with AK-47's and assorted handguns and ammunition, because it didn't happen.  I do remember a report from last year's protests where there was actually a man at one of the protests with an AK-47.  Not in Washington DC.  In Arizona.  Ill-advised?  Yes.  Legal?  Yes.  The cops came and checked him out.  He was perfectly within his rights.

Oh, and did I mention he was black?

Now I think I saw a similar report about a man at a rally in Austin with a non-loaded AK-47.  The police also checked him out and let him continue.  No word on that guy's race.

But noplace, anywhere in the country did "hundreds of white protestors" decend to anyplace "armed with AK-47's" and "assorted handguns and ammunition".  But it doesn't matter to Tim Wise (or MSNBC, for that matter, who edited the video of the man in Arizona so his race was indiscernible, and then talked about angry white people with guns using the video as evidence). 

A few people, and yes it was arguably ill-advised, have shown up at these things with guns to exercise their first amendment rights to speak out about their second amendment rights.   Over 99% of the crowd did no such thing.   There was also a guy arrested -- the headlines read because he had a gun -- at a town hall meeting where Obama was going to speak.  Only he was stopped at the venue because he had a pocket knife.  Not a gun.  They used that as probable cause to search his car in a parking lot where they found a gun.  He did not bring a gun with him to the town hall.

There is a narrative the progressives and the MSM (but I repeat myself) are married to, and that is that the Tea Partiers are unruly, dangerous racists whites who hate Barack Obama because he's black.

Tim's next musing was this:

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry, screaming, black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired.

Talk about spin.  Those protesters, who were indeed mostly white, had been there for quite some time protesting legislation that Congress was about to vote on -- not to spew hatred at minorities.   The didn't suddenly show up and surround black Congressmen.  Congressmen routinely use a private tunnel to get to the Capitol -- but not today.  The protestors were there first, and members of the black caucus intentionally made a show out of walking directly through the protesting crowd with the intent of provoking a pressworthy reaction to use against those protesting.   

Only they didn't get what they wanted.  All they could do was allege that the n-word was shouted (15 times!) and that somebody spit on one black congressman from Missouri (Emanuel Cleaver).   Only the alleged spitting was videotaped, and the video tape showed no such thing.  The capitol police investigated and found nothing.  And the congressman backed off of his claim of spitting after that, calling the alleged "spitter" "the man who allowed his saliva to hit my face".  Now he won't even talk about it.

See, Tea Partiers know what's going on here, and they come armed not with guns but with video cameras.  Lots of them.   And news reporters come armed with video cameras (with sound!) whenever Congressmen come and make a showy March through an opposition crowd to vote on highly controversial legislation.

Andrew Breitbart offered $100,000 to the first person to come forward with any evidence at all that anybody shouted the n-word at the event.

It's been weeks.  Nobody has stepped forward.

A while later, Pelosi made another show-march through the crowd carrying a giang gavel and holding her nose high in the air in another attempt to provoke an inappropriate reaction.

That march failed as well.

They've failed so miserably that they're encouraging agitators (such as the SEIU thugs who beat up black tea partier Kenneth Gladney at a St. Louis event) ... to "crashtheteaparty".

About the rest of the things in the story, I can only say this.  What would happen if black people did the things some of these white individuals have done?

Nothing.

It is not 1960 anymore.  It is 2010.  And believe it or not, things have changed in this arena.   And this is a good thing.

I've been to two tea parties.  My brother and sister-in-law have been to others.  We've seen none of the behavior described here.  I've been to a couple of meetings of our local Tea Party group.  They're decent people who would love to be minding their own business, and up until last year, most of them were.   But we can't anymore.

We love America, and because of that we don't want to see it "Fundamentally Transformed".   We've been on the road to this transformation for about the last 100 years now.  We have a group in power in Washington that is eager to finish the job.   This really is a dire moment in American History.

Our founders ideals are being purged and replaced with socialist ideals by the usual group of people who think they know what's best for everyone and want to force everyone to oblige their vision.  And yes, we're angry.  We're angry at the people who are driving this, and we are angry at ourselves for letting it get this far.

But we're not violent-angry. The only violence at these events has come from counter-protestors.  We are, as I heard progressives put it in the earlier part of the last decade, engaging in what I believe they called "the highest form of Patriotism".