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Today, I inaugurate a new category, “Equality,” deliberately putting the word defining said category in quotation marks.  Not only do we have a gay movement focused on attaining this elusive and ambiguous abstaction, but with the rise of the #Occupy Wall Street movement, “income inequality” has also come to the fore, as Jazz Shaw reports, one “of the hot terms occupying the center ring of the political circus these days“.

It seems that in both cases, the various political movements are demanding increased government regulation of and control over private enterprise in order to achieve their desired equal result.

Recently, I listened to a representative of “Equality California” detailing all the legislation his outfit advocated, asking his interlocutor to eheck the web-site to see the full list of laws they wanted to see enacted.  Driving away, I recalled the first five words of the Bill of Rights, “Congress shall make no law . . .”  (Emphasis added.)

This important addition to our nation’s charter reinforced its initial provisions limiting the things the federal government can do.*  Later, the Fourteenth Amendment applied these limitations to the states.

The Founder and the Framers wanted to limit government’s power in order to protect individual freedom.  And now, equality activists want to expand federal — and state — power to achieve “equality.”  This should help elucidate why conservatives should not rush to embrace this ambiguous abstraction.  And should call into question the motives of those who bury their commitment to an ever larger state under a noble-sounding ideal.

RELATED:  Over at Powerline quoting Steven den Beste, Scott Johnson offers a unified theory of left-wing causes:

Isn’t it interesting that no matter what the current global crisis is, according to leftists, the solution is always the same: a benevolent world dictatorship of the enlightened elite, and mass transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor nations.

*ADDENDUM: Nine of the ten amendments which constitute the Bill of Rights use the words “no”, “nor”, and/or “not”, all preventing the government from depriving individuals of their life, liberty and property.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Lori Heine nails it:

There is only one way that a powerful, external force can make everybody equal — and that is by making them slaves. (more…)

Over at the Corner, Mark Steyn sees the Cain kerfuffle as just another media-generated distraction from the real issues in those (already) overlong campaign:

What ought to make America “uncomfortable” is that it’s broke and it’s heading for collapse. But, judging from the preoccupations of our media, very few Americans are discomforted by that.

Read the whole thing.

Seems there is a strange serendipity between the Decmocrats’ desire to keep the focus on the Republican candidates’ purported pecadilloes and the the media’s coverage of the said candidates, photoshopping a picture of one, turning over a rock on the property another leased, pulling out the smelling salts when the spokesman for yet another puffs on a cigarette.

This is not to say there are not real problems with the plans put forward by the candidates in question — or to belittle the flaws in their approach or the stands they have taken, but to wonder at the coverage of this campaign.

The nation has a sour economy, our federal government is running massive deficits, administration scandals go unreported, energy developers can’t access our nation’s abundant resources while bureaucrats impose rules on entrepreneurs making it more difficult for them to remain in business, much less create new jobs and those covering the campaign act like they’re envious of reality-show producers.

In an environment like this, it’s no wonder charismatic candidates without records rise to to the top.

Jim Treacher picks up a detail in the Politico report on Herman Cain, “The story has four credited reporters, but the lead is Jonathan Martin.”  (Via Instapundit.)

Four credited reporters?

Four credited reporters and they couldn’t provide specifics about the allegations?  It takes the conservative media to do that.

Tongues are waging in the media — and across the blogosphere — about two women who, in the 1990s, accused Republicans presidential candidate Herman Cain of “inappropriate behavior.”

When we talk about these things, it seems the inappropriateness of the the behavior depends on the political affiliation of the accused.  A Republican who jokes about pubic hairs on soda cans (even when this story has not been corroborated) acts inappropriately and should be universally condemned, but a Democrat who rapes a woman, well, that’s just not news.

Look, I don’t know the truth to these allegations and will wait for the women to come forward before judging the candidate (about whom I already have some serious concerns and whom I do not intend to support in the California primary).  Perhaps when the hype dies down, the facts will come out.

Color me cynical, but given the eagerness of our friends in the mainstream media to destroy any charismatic Republican, well, I think there’s more smoke than substance to this story.   As we learned in the 1990s when the media tried to bury the story of a corroborated accusation of rape against a sitting Democratic president, our media have become fascinated by the story of a Republican farting inappropriately during a business meeting, yet disinterested in a Democratic candidate carrying on an affair while professing to be a loyal husband to a wife dying of cancer.

As Glenn Reynolds wrote earlier today quoting Roger Simon:

Politico And Cain: The Return Of The High-Tech Lynching. “It took the mainstream media nearly a year to catch up with the John Edwards Affair, but only weeks into Herman Cain’s narrow frontrunner status for the GOP nomination, the goodfellas at Politico are letting the uppity black conservative have it.” Ouch. But let’s correct the record: They weren’t slow to cover the John Edwards story. They covered up the John Edwards story. Keep rockin’!

Can you imagine the headlines we would have read in 2007 had the legacy media devoted the same amount of scrutiny to Barack Obama then they are offering to Cain now (and recently offered to Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry)?

UPDATE:  Reminding us that the article contains “a fair amount of unsourced innuendo,” Simon asks if there’s “any way we can ever know the truth of this? Probably not since the parties are said to have agreed to remain silent for a five-figure payment, a paltry amount in this day and age.”

FROM THE COMMENTS:  SoCalRobert tells us that through the 1990s, he was instructed “that this sort of thing is irrelevant. Only right wing religious fanatics pried into the personal lives of politicians.”  Wonder why they didn’t say that at the outset of the 1990s when the entire liberal punditocracy not to mention a majority of Democratic Senators went apoplectic over allegations that a female employee claimed her conservative Republican boss told her about some pubic hairs he found on a can of coke.

Despite the president’s campaign contention to be a new kind of politician, one who would rise above ideological divisions to unite the nation, he — and his team — have a very poor understanding of why Republicans oppose his policies.  They can’t seem to understand that most conservatives just don’t believe his “stimulus” would stimulate growth or that his jobs bill would create jobs.

Instead, as Greg Sargent reports, White House political advisor David Axelrod is telling CNN’s Candy Crowley that Republicans might be sabotaging the economy on purpose:

They don’t want to cooperate. They don’t want to help. Even on measures to help the economy that they traditionally have supported before, like a payroll tax cut, like infrastructure, rebuilding our roads and bridges and surface transport. These — so you have to ask a question, are they willing to tear down the economy in order to tear down the president or are they going to cooperate?

Emphasis in original.  Axelrod was, as Sargent reports, “pushing back on . . . Crowley’s suggestion that Obama bears some of the blame for Congress’s failure to act on the economy”.

Remember, this is the White House that crafted its jobs bill in secret without input from Republicans (throwing in ideas that they contended Republicans, as Axelrod put it, “traditionally have supported before”) and then demanded that Congress “pass this bill.”

Not just that, after all the concerns expressed about our burgeoning federal debt, the White House throws out a bill that increases federal spending.  And then blames Republicans.

Why isn’t this administration — and its party — able to acknowledge the opposition’s legitimate policy concerns?  Perhaps, they should find that politician who was “trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.“”

It seems that in order to win reelection despite middling poll numbers and a lackluster economic recovery, the president has torn a page from the playbook of perhaps the most successful electoral comeback in American history, Harry S Truman’s “Give ‘Em Hell” campaign in 1948.  I mean, heck, the Democrats are already borrowing one of the Missourian’s key expressions from that fall, dubbing the current Republican Congress a “do-nothing” institution.

Only problem is that unlike his accomplished partisan predecessor (and at odds with administration talking points), the incumbent Democrat doesn’t face a Republican Congress.  The opposition controls only one chamber of the federal legislature.  His party controls the other chamber and it’s the real do-nothing body, not having based a budget in 914 days.

Another thing which distinguishes the “give ‘em hell” campaign of 1948 from Obama’s efforts is when the respective incumbents began their attacks.  Truman, as my preliminary research indicates, didn’t start going on the warpath until his party’s nominating convention in July 1948.  Obama began his attacks in earnest about the time he launched his reelection campaign in April 2011, a full fifteen months ahead in the 2012 cycle of Truman’s starting point in the 1948 cycle.

Wonder if any of the other post-World War II presidents running for reelection began their partisan attacks so far ahead of the presidential election campaign.  Bill Clinton, the most recent Democrat to occupy the Oval Office, had the good sense to run TV ads (outside major media markets) in 1995, linking the then-likely Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole to the then-increasingly unpopular House Speaker Newt Gingrich.  He, as I recall, kept his personal attacks to a minimum.

Will this strategy work? (more…)

With President Obama calling Nancy Pelosi ”one of the best Speakers of the House this country ever had,” when, Americans,”rated her one of the worst (Gallup),” the Democrat, blogress Susan Duclos contends, “shows a glaring disconnect .  . . from the American public as a whole.”

During Mrs. Pelosi’s tenure as “the nation’s 60th Speaker,” Doug Powers reminds us, “the national debt shot up approximately $5 trillion — more than the first 57 Speakers combined“.

Wonder if our friends in the MSM will start talking about the Obama bubble as they once talked about the bubble in which his predecessor found himself.

I think we now know who Nancy Obama is.

(H/t Memeorandum.)

Yahoo! is leading this morning (PST) with tales of a global warming skeptic suddenly seeing the light — and embracing the gospel of climate change.

Interesting they should choose to feature this “skeptic” on a day like today (at least for those of you on the east coast):

Only there’s a problem with this, um, well, former “skeptic.” Problem is, as Don Surber found with just a few key strokes and mouse clicks. that the

. . . “skeptic” in question — physicist Richard Muller of Berkeley — embraced the theory of man-made global warming 30 years ago. An online search easily disproved his claim of skepticism. He co-authored a book, “Physics For Future Presidents,” that explained climate change among other things. Now he has re-branded himself a former skeptic — the better to sell global warming.

(Last link via Instapundit.)  Guess we just can’t let facts get in the way of liberal shibboleths.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Sonicfrog who follows this stuff from closely than I encourages me to link “this article as an addendum to your post. One of the main scientists working on the BEST project is calling Muller to task for his recent publicity seeking actions. Here is a nice quote to show how vacuous the reporters claim of Mullers certainty really is:” (more…)

It seems the president set the tone for the second half of his first term, his first experience as chief executive with a Republican House (but Democratic talking points notwithstanding, not a “Republican Congress” as his party still controls the Senate) on April 13 when he delivered a speech at George Washington University on the budget.

Supposedly he was going to unveil a new budget plan (he still hasn’t). The president invited House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan whose budget had won a lot of acclaim in conservative circles (and even some praise in liberal ones), but had largely been lambasted on the left.*  Instead of releasing his own plan, he spent the better part of his time attacking Republicans.

The House would pass Ryan’s budget two days later. The Democratic Senate hasn’t passed a budget in 913 days.

In his speech, the president would fault policies of the his predecessor for creating the federal spending problem, telling his audience that “we lost our way in the decade that followed” the 1990s.  But, after crediting Republicans for presenting and championing one vision, he went on to excoriate the plan:

But the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known certainly in my lifetime.  In fact, I think it would be fundamentally different than what we’ve known throughout our history.

I believe it paints a vision of our future that is deeply pessimistic.  It’s a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them. . . .

It’s a vision that says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors. . . .

This vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.

Even the Washington Post reported that the budget speech had a “partisan tone.”  Finding that the president “spent much of the afternoon speech at George Washington University criticizing [Ryan's] deficit-reduction plan, called ‘Path to Prosperity,’” the analysts at the Annenberg Center found that the Democrat’s “critique strayed at times from the facts.”

Seems the imperative was not telling the truth, but instead savaging the opposition.  On his various job tours in swing states, the president has attacked Republicans, mixed his partisan rhetoric with backward-looking class-warfare rhetoric (last link via Instapundit).

Which brings me to the title question:  Can the president make the case of his economic policies without demonizing the opposition and raising the specter of class warfare?

* (more…)

Just caught this in a post at one of my favorite blogs:

While I appreciate Herman Cain’s charisma and his Reaganesque ability to articulate the small government/personal freedom message that has animated our party at least for the last thirty years, I have several concerns about the personable businessman and do not back him for the White House nor do I share my co-blogger’s enthusiasm for the candidate.

In many ways, I see his appeal on the right in the 2012 cycle as similar to Barack Obama’s appeal to the left in 2008 cycle.  Both are charismatic men, running as outsiders to the political establishment.

Only Cain has made clear his commitment to conservative principles in his campaign while Obama obscured his advocacy of big-government notions in his.  And Cain has a record of accomplishment in the private sector — with the concomitant executive experience.  Oh, and the media has scrutinized the Republican’s record with a fine-toothed comb while paying little, if any, attention to Obama’s.

Hugh Hewitt sums it up:

Herman Cain is fun, and he’s generally right.  He has enormous energy and a sense of humor.  He may not be ready to be president, but he was certainly ready to run for president, just like then Senator Obama in 2007. The big difference is that in 2007 MSM supported Obama’s ambitions and that in 2011 MSM pushes back against Cain’s, reflecting the media elite’s valuing of Obama’s Harvard Law/University of Chicago credentials, time in the Illinois State Senate and cup-of-coffee years in the U.S. Senate much more than Cain’s decades in the private sector. (more…)

Remember how when just one protester at a Tea Party rally hoists a sign with a comment that appears racist or a handful call out a mean-spirited epithet or one boor behaves rudely at a Republican debate, the media (and even leading Democrats) in the highest of dudgeon remind us of the racism, bigoted and hateful attitudes on the right, demanding that Republicans, “differentiate themselves” from such language lest it define them.

Heck, even an organizer of OccupyLA refused to say whether the “occupation movement” (at 3:20 in video linked) disavowed a protester’s anti-Semitic rant.  The violence that was supposedly an integral part of the Tea Parties appears to become increasingly manifest in the #OWS movement, with one protester threatening to stab a Fox reporter as a nervous police union warned “the Occupiers in Zuccotti Park that any assaults on police officers — or at least sergeants — will result in lawsuits.”

The police wouldn’t be issuing such warnings if they weren’t worried.  Now, you could saw that that threat isn’t legitimate as the police union is issuing the warning, but a flier at OccupyPhoenix asked, “When Should You Shoot A Cop?”  Alerting us to this flier, Ed Morrissey is

. . . curious to see how the media in Arizona and the rest of the nation approach this development.  They went into convulsions retroactive to the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that killed six other people because Sarah Palin used crosshairs on a map once (as had Democrats on a number of occasions), which the media used to paint the Tea Party and conservatives as somehow responsible for the massacre conducted by a madman with no discernibly rational political posture.  Will they hold the Occupy movement to the same ridiculous standard?  I’m betting …. no.

So the question of the day is, if Democrats fail, to borrow the expression of one of their number, to “differentiate themselves” from the violent threats at these rallies, does this mean they favor assaults on members of the press and law enforcement?  (Particularly when said Democrats have explicitly endorsed — or otherwise praised — the gatherings.)

The president and his team often whine about the bad set of circumstances the Democrat has had to deal with, you know all those problems they “inherited” (as if their was the first administration to face problems left unresolved by the previous president.)  The Democrat’s chief of staff put it recently, “Considering the debacle that he came in with, the tough choices he’s made and how there have been few, if any breaks, he says it himself all the time. . . .”

President Obama, as Jim Geraghty (who linked the quote above) reminds us:

. . . has been using the “run of bad luck” line on the stump, too. He cites the Arab Spring as an economic headwind, but let’s face it, Egypt or Libya or Syria or one of the Gulf states could have completely collapsed from internal uprisings. He mentions the tsunami in Japan, which as we all recall was so traumatic to the president he could only cope by going over his March Madness picks with ESPN. Yet obviously that could have been much worse, spreading much more serious radioactivity over more-densely populated areas of Japan. He cites the European debt crises, and again, it’s not hard to imagine that circumstance turning out much worse – such as a collapse of the Euro or serious social unrest in Greece and elsewhere.

Nothing is ever the fault of Obama and the team around him. It’s just that the universe seems to enjoy disappointing him, I guess.

Emphasis added.  Maybe the president wouldn’t be as upset with the universe if he took the advice of that politician who told Jay Leno that “one of the things” he was “trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.“

The president recently told a crowd of supporters that he had kept a majority of the promises he had made in the 2008 campaign:

“We’re through about 60 percent of [the list], which isn’t bad for three years,” Mr. Obama told a crowd at a fundraiser in Denver on Tuesday night. “So we know change is possible. But here’s the thing. There are a lot of people who are still hurting, and there’s still a lot more work to do. And so that other 40 percent that is not done, I’m going to need you because I need five more years. I need five more years to get it done.”

Politifact says that in fact he has kept only 151.  And how, pray tell, with a likely Republican Congress in 2013 (which we, alas, do not, Democratic talking points notwithstanding, enjoy today), will he ever get any of his big-government initiatives through?

Now, what about one promise that candidate Barack Obama himself claimed he’d been talking about “throughout” the 2008 campaign, you know, proposing a “net spending cut”?

He hasn’t put that in any of the budgets he’s proposed; indeed, every proposal he’s authored to “jump start” the economy has a included a net spending increase, oftentimes a pretty substantial such increase.

As many of you already know,a “Virginia tea party group is demanding a refund of about $8,000 from the city of Richmond, claiming it was unfairly charged for rallies while Occupy protesters have used the same space for several weeks for free.”  Love it when a right-of-center group calls out the double standards under which our liberal friends live — and often thrive.

Let’s hope tea party groups in other cities, who have had to pay to use public space, do the same.

Allahpundit elaborates on the double standard:

And so it came to be that the “angry mob” lost eight grand by playing by the rules while America’s Sweethearts get to build their own communes on public land with no interference from the police, even with crime happening right in front of them. Good times. I ask this in all seriousness: Has there been any more egregious double standard towards the right over the last five years than the commentariat’s treatment of OWS versus the tea party? They spent late 2009 and the entirety of 2010 treating conservative protests as a form of domestic terrorism, punctuated by the horrible right-wing attack on Gabby Giffords that wasn’t a right-wing attack at all. And now suddenly their own side is in the streets and behaving vastly worse, yet somehow they’re the last, best hope of the middle class. See Treacher’s post here for just one example of what I mean. Honestly — any worse double standard?

Emphasis added.

*(and which one gets better treatment in the MSM?)

NB: Tweaked this to indicate that I added emphasis to one passage in the quotation above.  Apologies for neglecting to indicate this earlier.

Yesterday, Michael Barone reported that the Baltimore Sun’s television critic David Zurawik lambasted the White House for excluding “local press from the pool coverage of Obama’s recent San Francisco fundraiser [and] Obama for appearing on Jay Leno’s program.”

Zurawik asks us to “check out” the “scripted video exchange about GOP challengers between Obama and his NBC straight man, Leno“:

I used to be merely annoyed by the way some of my colleagues in the press who were so savvy on so many other political matters fell for such phony TV scripted interplay designed to let the president score political points and reach a mass audience free and clear with his message.

But, you know what, with all the pain that so many millions of Americans are experiencing these days, it is way past annoying. It’s outrageous for our president to be playing these calculated, dippy, little TV games when so many of us are in such need of real leadership.

Yes, we are in need of real leadership and the president has failed to provide it.  And sometimes, alas, it seems that none of the candidates for the Republican nomination has demonstrated the intestinal fortitude and seriousness of purpose to lead at a time of economic uncertainty at home and increasing turmoil abroad.

“This country,” John Podhoretz reminds us, “is in terrible shape“:

The GOP electorate and the American people . . . know it. You know it. They want solutions. You’re providing comedy.

This is a serious time. It requires serious leaders. Where’s the gravity?

The reason that many on the Right have spent the year hunting somewhere, anywhere, for better candidates to challenge President Obama is becoming ever more plain with each passing day.

Thirty-six years ago, when Republicans were smarting from the shellacking they suffering in the 1974 mid-terms, the man who would later become the greatest domestic policy president of the century encouraged conservatives to be bold and forward-looking:

Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people? (more…)

Amtrak, “a government agency“ is, according to Karl Bode on dslreports.com, “utilizing a web filter system on their train Wi-Fi trial that oddly blocks news stories about the gay, lesbian and transgendered communities.”

On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee approved a measure which would give gay Americans a tool to help us defend ourselves against gay bashers:

The legislation, which would allow for conceal-and-carry weapon reciprocity across states lines, cleared the panel on a 19-11 vote.

All but one committee Republican, Rep. Dan Lungren (Calif.), supported the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act, which is sponsored by Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.); Democrats united in opposition to the bill. Lungren and other Republicans have raised concerns about the legislation’s effect on the rights of states.

It’s unfortunate that Democrats, to paraphrase Joe Biden, have no notion what it’s like for a gay man or lesbian to be on the other side of a thug intent on beating him up — with no means to defend himself.  Let’s hope that organizations concerned with the welfare of gay Americans, like the Human Rights Campaign, will denounce House Democrats for their insensitivity to gay bashing.

To be sure, this measure would allow all Americans to better defend themselves.

(Via David Hardy via Glenn Reynolds.)

Jim Geraghty thinks so:

Obama’s relentless fundraising schedule is not, in fact, about the money. It is about something else — increasingly, the sense that this is one of the few venues where Obama gets to feel the relentless admiration and euphoric adoration that he experienced throughout 2007 and 2008.

Read the whole thing.