in a piece comparing responses to the riots in London and Los Angeles, Joy McCain gets at the essence of liberal support of gun control:

The left is right to fear firearms, since exercise of that particular freedom and experience of that self-sufficiency (however limited it is in scope) can be a “gateway drug” to other forms of independent thought and action.

It’s all about wresting control from individuals and delivering power to the state, an entity which, they believe, will run by those better and brighter than the common man (or woman) and so better able to tell such commonfolk how to run their lives.

Perhaps that is also why gay leaders refuse to embrace policies (e.g., concealed carry) which would give gay individuals another tool to protect ourselves.

Guess it’s part of that equality notion for the gay community rather than that freedom ideal for gay individuals.  To have equality, they contend, you must needs have a stronger state.

When I recently commented to a liberal Facebook friend’s status update mocking the GOP, one of her ideological confrères (well technically a consoeur) quipped that the GOP was “The Grand Obstructionist Party, creating nothing but mayhem.”  Does seem this notion of the GOP as obstructionist is gaining traction on the left.

In a July 13 segment on Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist and his no-new-taxes pledge, CNN’s Lisa Sylvester included this critique of the libertarian and his pledge from Michael Ettlinger of the Center for American Progress (CAP (tbg*)):

Grover Norquist is a big problem, but I think the people whose feet he’s holding to the fire are getting tired of it.

You know, we’re getting to the point where we need serious people to sit down and make serious decisions, and drawing really hard lines in the sand the way Grover does is hurting the country.

Ettlinger didn’t quite call Grover an obstructionist, but did fault him from preventing “serious people” (i.e., those who don’t want to rein in the federal government) from making decisions he deems serious (find federal solutions to all manner of societal ills.)  The pledge isn’t quite hurting the country as it is hurting Mr. Ettlinger’s plans — and those of the president — to expand the size of the federal government and the scope of its power.

Folks like Grover who draw a line in the sand when it comes to higher taxes seek to obstruct those plans.  So, if that’s what obstructionism is, I’m all for it.

* (more…)

Perhaps, I should de-clutter my apartment more often.  When I do so, I keep coming across fodder for blog posts.

Last night, when tidying an old “roll-top” desk I inherited from my grandmother, I came across a passage on liberal arrogance I had printed out from James Taranto’s Best of the Web:

Liberals can be suckered precisely because they think they are the only intelligent people in America. This smug confidence insulates them from having to pay attention to what anybody else is saying. The conventional wisdom among liberals is that people disagree with them only because they are stupid, uneducated, or have been bought off by the sinister forces of American capitalism. . . .

You cannot find a liberal intellectual anywhere who can give you an honest, objective accounting of conservative positions on major issues. All they know is that conservatives are “stupid,” racist” and “scary”–boilerplate terms but unfortunately the exact words employed by [NPR executive Richard] Schiller on the tape. . . .

By assuming they are smarter than everybody else, liberals leave themselves utterly vulnerable to anyone who plays on their sense of superiority.

Feeling so superior maybe they just assume that their policies will work. And when they don’t, they seem unable to figure out why, so they start blaming conservatives.

But, if they’re so smart, wouldn’t they learn from their mistakes?

…if that’s what you call this nightmare we are living in. The following stats are provided by Investors Business Daily, but they are courtesy of the Obama Regime:

There are 2 million fewer private-sector jobs now than when Obama was sworn in, and the unemployment rate is 1.5 percentage points higher.

• There are now more long-term unemployed than at any time since the government started keeping records.

• The U.S. dollar is more than 12% weaker.

• The number of Americans on food stamps has climbed 37%.

• The Misery Index (unemployment plus inflation) is up 62%.

• And the national debt is about 40% higher than it was in January 2009.

In fact, reporters who bother to look will discover that Obama has managed to produce the worst recovery on record.

Hope and Change continues to ruin our nation…

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

In his address last Thursday to the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russia’s President Dmitri Medvedev charted a new for the largest republic of the former Soviet Union, choosing to scrap the “excessive government role in the economy and the excessive centralization of power are the taxes on the future”.

Yet, as the Russians move away from centralized government, John Hinderaker finds American Democrats digging in their heels and defending policies which have failed, thwarting entrepreneurial innovation and stymying economic growth:

Here in the U.S., Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid must realize that they are fighting a rear-guard action on behalf of an ideology that already has been consigned to history’s trash can. But they and their colleagues are like the dog that can whistle, but only knows one tune. They have no other ideas to offer, and will ride their discredited theories all the way to ruin, if the voters let them.

*yet still championed by President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Reporting that Russ Feingold, voted out of office last fall by the voters of Wisconsin, said, “Russ Feingold says “The game’s not over until we win”, Glenn Reynolds quipped, “By any means necessary, apparently.”

Given that Mr. Feingold voted for Obamacare, even as the American people (and apparently also those in his home state) were rejecting it, it seems he and his ilk are bound and determined to impose their agenda on America, no matter what the voters say.

ADDENDUM:  Can you imagine the media reaction if a Republican had made a comment similar to Feingold’s?

Almost two weeks ago, I derided film snobs for telling us what kind of movies we should and shouldn’t like.  Yesterday, the fetching Stephen Green (sorry, fellas, he’s straight; sorry, gals, he’s married) took one to task for doing the same sort of thing, lamenting the enduring appeal of one of the greatest films of the 1980s, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

And this flick is more than just an entertaining one.  It endures because it presents Ferris as a man whose attitude was worthy of emulation.  As Green puts it:

Ferris, in other words, had plenty of adversity. He just handled his with the aplomb the rest of us wish we had. Everybody at school loved him for that. And why shouldn’t they? After all — we love him for it, too.

Not only do we love him for it, but this attitude has a very real effect in the life of his uptight best  friend, with Bueller serving as “the catalyst for the deep changes which Cameron [that friend] undergoes.”

As Glenn, who alerts us to the post, might say, “Read the whole thing.”

No longer Bush’s Fault(tm), our man-boy President now blames…. wait for it….. technology instead of his economic policies for our stagnant economy.

President Obama explained to NBC News that the reason companies aren’t hiring is not because of his policies, it’s because the economy is so automated. … “There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”

Oh brother.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

UPDATE (from Dan):  Is it just me, or did Obama sound whiny when he blamed ATMs.  And wasn’t he supposed to be the hip politician who embraced new technology?  Don’t think this will play well with most Americans, may make him look as out of touch as some president who at least according to an inaccurate report in the New York Times was unfamiliar with a grocery store checkout scanner.

UP-UPDATE (from Bruce):  An ATM has responded to this scurrilous attack from Obama.

I didn’t do it.

President Obama says I’m to blame for high unemployment – part of the “structural” problems with the economy. Yes, he actually said my electronic brethren and I – who dispense cash and make lines move a little more quickly at the airport – are part of the reason 1.5 million fewer Americans have jobs than when the “stimulus” was enacted.

But before the president fingered us as responsible for job losses, he sought to take credit for the sluggish economy.

And even DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) said this morning that Democrats own the economy. I don’t. I’m just an ATM. I don’t own anything.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about certain movie critics, particularly those on the cultural left, is their manner of lecturing us on what types of movies we should enjoy and not enjoy. I’ll try to track down the review I read in the early 2000s where the critic acknowledged that he had enjoyed watching the film, which held his attention through the entirety of the screening, but gave it a lousy write-up because it didn’t meet his pre-set criteria for what a good “film” should be.

Look, sometimes we enjoy movies which are objectively “bad” where the flaws in the script as so patent that a clever actor can’t even disguise how out-of-character a line is for her part. Or where the story, when you start to think about it, just doesn’t make sense, yet when you were watching the movie you were, well, riveted.  Some movies are just meant to entertain.  If you enjoy a flick, you shouldn’t try to rationalize that pleasure away, just acknowledge that you enjoyed even if it seemed silly.  Heck, it’s a movie.  Not all movies need to be On the Waterfront.  Or Fanny and Alexander.  Or The Godfather.

Heck, two of my favorite romantic comedies are incredibly cheesy and seriously flawed, but that doesn’t stop me from recommending Maid in Manhattan or Two Weeks Notice to friends.  Or, for that matter, going out of my way to see Ruthless People on the big screen.

This rant came to mind this morning when, in my in-box, I read one of the most self-righteous, arrogant headlines to a movie review I’d read in years:  ”Audiences and Critics Are Wrong,” David Thomson writes in the New Republic, “Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’ Isn’t Good. It’s Dismal.”  Look, in terms of taste, audiences can’t be wrong.  If people enjoyed the flick, they enjoyed the flick.  This may not please those who believe we should prefer Jules & Jim to Star Wars, but, well, so what?

It is interesting to ponder why certain film snobs need to dismiss popular preference for a certain movie as “wrong.”

I read yesterday that “Elizabeth Warren, President Obama’s controversial choice to head the new consumer financial regulatory agency, skipped out of a House Oversight hearing before answering questions from two members of the committee, claiming that she had reached an agreement allowing her to leave at that time.”

I had considered posting on the topic, asking if she worked for a government agency which in our republic is subject to congressional oversight.  This morning, as I was reading the various right-of-center blogs found, as is often the case, that Ed Morrissey expressed the thoughts similar to my own–and better than I could:

What meeting might Warren have that would be more important than a Congressional hearing into the activities of her agency?  Maybe she needed to take a call from her stockbroker.

I’m sorry Ms. Warren feels inconvenienced, but perhaps she might want to take a civics course to understand the separation of powers and checks and balances in the federal system.  Congress gets to hold hearings on operations in the executive branch, and they’re not required to put a time limit on their inquiries, especially a one-hour limit that barely gets by the opening remarks in most committee hearings.  If Warren doesn’t like being held accountable to the legislature and to the people, well … she’s in the right administration, apparently.

Read the whole thing.

So writes Ed Morrissey on commenting on Jimmy Carter’s recent self-assessment:

Former President Jimmy Carter isn’t letting modesty stand in the way of his assessment of his post-presidential life.

“I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents,” Mr. Carter said in an interview with NBC News.

Morrissey details why the former peanut farmer has failed as an ex-president:

Carter actually started off his post-presidential era well, working with Habitat for Humanity to build homes for the poor. Unfortunately, he rapidly became one of the most destructive former presidents this country has ever had by interfering with American foreign policy long after the voters of this country explicitly told him they didn’t want him conducting it any more. His interference stopped Bill Clinton from dealing more decisively with North Korea, which gave Kim Jong-Il the time he needed to construct nuclear weapons. He has muddied up the Israeli-Palestinian peace process by cheering Hamas, a group that has earned its place on the US list of terrorist organizations.

Read the whole thing.

Back when I was living in Paris, trying to write a novel, I supported myself by teaching English to young French professionals.  Working late one evening, I decided to share some pastries I had bought with my fellow teachers and staff members at the language school.  When I offered some to the janitorial staff, then cleaning the classrooms, they looked at me as if I had come from Mars.  My offer was unexpected.  They didn’t know how to respond.  They turned away and continued cleaning.

One of my fellow teachers, an American woman who had lived in France far longer than I had, explained that French professionals and intellectuals treat workers with disdain, seeing the class difference as a barrier to interaction.  The attitudes of the French aristocrats which precipitated the Revolution of 1789 persist today among the educated élite.

I contrasted this Gallic class consciousness with something I observed one summer in high school when my father gave me a job working at one of the apartment complexes he owned.  I swept parking lots, trimmed bushes, transported building supplies and hauled trash.  My c0-workers, none of whom had gone to college, treated me as an equal, once even chastised me for slacking off.  One of them who later distinguished himself by grasping the ins and outs of building management later would rise to manage first that complex, then another before taking a job in my father’s front office.

In the middle of that summer, when we needed to strengthen the upper floor of a parking garage, my father helped out on the day we hauled and poured the concrete, a somewhat daunting task because the engineers didn’t think the ramp could support the weight of the cement mixer.  During the day, not only did he push wheelbarrows full of cement, but he also joked with his employees and asked them about their families.  Some called him by his first name.  One who did so, a World War II veteran who had fought on D-Day, knew all of his kids by our first names, always asking us about our lives and shared our stories whenever we toured a construction site with our father.

These stories came to mind when I read this post yesterday on Instapundit about why Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the recently resigned managing director of the International Monetary Fund, thought he could have his way with a hotel maid: (more…)

Here’s the thing… I read this article and thought — “Duh, no kidding.”

But then it dawned on me that many lib/progressive drones will never accept these facts. Because they are so blinded by their anti-military views and too infected with Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. special operations forces is a major success in our country’s war against al-Qaeda. As a result of the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program and the intelligence gained from detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a major fraction of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership has been captured or killed since 2001.

This conclusion was inadvertently reinforced recently by WikiLeaks’ illegal disclosure of more than 700 classified Defense Department files on Guantanamo Bay detainees. Their publication has harmed our security and cemented the impression among allies that America is incapable of keeping secrets. But the material also provides compelling evidence of the effectiveness of Bush administration anti-terror policies after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The illegally released files, in addition to a host of declassified documents on U.S. detention policies posted at www.rumsfeld.com, record complex decisions and excruciating trade-offs that President Bush and national security officials had to make. They document the deadly techniques and intentions of hundreds of Guantanamo detainees who still desire to return to the fight, and the labors of analysts and interrogators who enabled us to stop additional attacks.

Gathering intelligence is a painstaking process. Some information comes in an immediately actionable form. More often, the significance of particular data, whether provided by senior or lower-ranking operatives, does not become apparent for months or years, as happened with the years-long effort to patch together information that led our forces to bin Laden.

The classified files from Guantanamo Bay, particularly those on senior operative Abu Faraj al-Libi, contain clues about al-Qaeda’s courier network and even mention Abbottabad. Had bin Laden closely followed WikiLeaks’ release of these documents April 25, it is unlikely he would have been there when U.S. Navy SEALs descended into his compound days later.

The primary documents are the best public evidence yet of our systematic efforts to ascertain detainees’ links to terrorism and to weigh the dangers of their potential release or repatriation. In a war in which our nation’s terrorist enemies hide among civilians and do not carry their arms openly, the question is not whether some unfortunate detention mistakes are made but whether there are appropriate protections to detect errors and correct them when discovered.

Read the whole thing — it is chock full of FACTS.

I can only hope that the most important lib/progressive sees the error of his previous anti-Bush, anti-American world view. He lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

I am not holding my breath.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Can you imagine the reaction if a Republican leader said a Latino Democrat shouldn’t forget who he is, lecturing him that “he has to understand who he is and who he represents” and then expressing the hope that he’ll “do a better job than he has been.”  Well, here we’ve got the Senate Democratic leader, a man who just won reelection not with an uplifting message , but instead by trashing his opponent, lecturing Marco Rubio, a man who won election with a much more upbeat appeal, on how to do his job:

Meanwhile Marco Rubio enjoys stellar ratings among, as Harry Reid might put it, the people he represents:

Marco Rubio is the more popular of Florida’s two Senators less than three months into his first term in office. Senator Rubio’s job approval rating stands at 61%, with only 30% of likely voters giving him a negative review. Just 48% of Democrats said they disapproved of the Republican Senator Rubio, while 83% of Republicans graded Rubio favorably.

At the same time, 25% of the American people have a favorable rating of Reid, with more than twice that number, 51%, having an unfavorable view.  That is, more Americans have an unfavorable view of Harry Reid than Florida Democrats disapprove of Marco Rubio.

Just got this in the e-mail from my brother and thought it quite clever.  Methinks the author chose the name Winston to honor the protagonist from another story of a dystopian future.  I have done a few google searches to try to identify that individual, but seems that the others who posted this piece, like me, received it in their e-mail:

Wednesday, November 24, 2022

“Winston, come into the dining room, it’s time to eat,” Julia yelled to her husband. “In a minute, honey, it’s a tie score,” he answered. Actually Winston wasn’t very interested in the traditional holiday football game between Detroit and Washington.

Ever since the government passed the Civility in Sports Statute of 2017, outlawing tackle football for its “unseemly violence” and the “bad example it sets for the rest of the world,” Winston was far less of a football fan than he used to be. Two-hand touch wasn’t nearly as exciting.

Yet it wasn’t the game that Winston was uninterested in. It was more the thought of eating another TofuTurkey. Even though it was the best type of VeggieMeat available after the government revised the American Anti-Obesity Act of 2018, adding fowl to the list of federally-forbidden foods, (which already included potatoes, cranberry sauce and mince-meat pie), it wasn’t anything like real turkey. And ever since the government officially changed the name of “Thanksgiving Day” to “A National Day of Atonement” in 2020 to officially acknowledge the Pilgrims’ historically brutal treatment of Native Americans, the holiday had lost a lot of its luster.

Eating in the dining room was also a bit daunting. The unearthly gleam of government-mandated fluorescent light bulbs made the TofuTurkey look even weirder than it actually was, and the room was always cold. Ever since Congress passed the Power Conservation Act of 2016, mandating all thermostats-which were monitored and controlled by the electric company-be kept at 68 degrees, every room on the north side of the house was barely tolerable throughout the entire winter. (more…)

Perhaps the most amusing thing about the whole spectacle of Donald Trump’s media tour is not the businessman’s pretensions for the presidency but the manner in which he has manipulated the mainstream media. Just look at how he stands up to former Bill Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos:

Which one dominates the discussion?   How many other political candidates — or potential ones — stand up to such journalists, challenging their interrogators’ bsessions. Or their bias.

That said, much as I admire Trump for his defiance of the media, I am concerned that his current turn on the public stage is more about showmanship than leadership.  He has garnered a lot of attention, but he hasn’t even begun to the move the debate on the critical issues facing our country and its leaders.

That said, for daring to stand up to the media — or perhaps for asking questions about the president they would ask if said politician had an (R) after his name, he has earned their skepticism and their scorn.  Looking up from the elliptical trainer on Friday, I chanced upon yet another episode of CNN’s Continuing Investigation into Donald Trump.

And I began to wonder:  had that network, nigh on four years ago,  initiated such inquiries into the presidential aspirations of a certain junior Senator from Illinois as they have this month launched into a self-promoting, media savvy real estate mogul with larger ambitions?

Is anyone really surprised?  I mean, REALLY? (h/t - Instapundit)

You’ve got to wonder at our mainstream media, eager to report the shenanigans of a crackpot preacher with a congregation of about 50 families.  Had the media not made an international celebrity out of Terry Jones, few people outside of the neighborhood surrounding his “Dove World Outreach Center” in Gainesville, Florida would have known this publicity-hungry former hotel manager was going to burn a Koran.

And now that he has carried out this juvenile stunt, we’ve seen murder and mayhem in Afghanistan:

Stirred up by a trio of angry mullahs who urged them to avenge the burning of a Koran at Florida church [sic], thousands of protesters overran the compound of the United Nations in this northern Afghan city, killing at least 12 people, Afghan and United Nations officials said…

Unable to find Americans on whom to vent their anger, the mob turned instead on the next-best symbol of Western intrusion — the nearby United Nations headquarters. “Some of our colleagues were just hunted down,” said a spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Kieran Dwyer, confirming that the attack.

Via Daily Caller via Instapundit.)  And “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)” has told “CBS’s Bob Schieffer . . . that some members of Congress were considering some kind of action in response to the Florida Quran burning that  sparked a murderous riot at a United Nations complex in Afghanistan and other mayhem.”

“People,” Doug Powers quips, “were murdered in Afghanistan and members of Congress are pondering how to clamp down on somebody who burned a book in Florida. Now that’sproblem solving, DC-style.”

What is it about our political and cultural “elite” that they have to pin the blame for a murderous rampage on the antics of self-promoting Christian rogue. It’s as if, they believe, that the worlds ills stem from the actions and attitudes of white Christian males, the very aspects of their culture rejected by the politically correct.

American Christians must be to blame; the foreign other is always blameless. (more…)

Yesterday, while at the gym doing my cardio, I looked up at one of the TV monitors to see the smug mug of Bill Maher on Eliot Spitzer’s solo CNN show, In the Arena.  My first thought was why a program ostensibly offering commentary on the news would turn to such an ill-informed partisan self-styled comic as a kind of expert.  He seemed the latest in the string of left-wingers on the former Democratic politician’s show.  My second thought was, well, CNN does have the freedom to bring on whatever guests it wishes and to have ratings roughly one-quarter of those of FoxNews’s program in the same time slot.

In the interview, Maher demonstrated both his arrogance and his ignorance.  He claimed to understand better the economic interests of Tea Party protesters than they do themselves:

The Tea Party is a party named after a tax revolt that does not know very much about taxes. It’s very hard to get effective policy in place if the people are voting against their own economic interests. . . . I mean, if your agenda is the same as a billionaire, you’re not really a populist movement, and if they’re supposed to be all about taxes and deficits and debt, most of the money, most of the deficit money, the debt money, was from under Bush. These are facts that they don’t care about.

Yeah, Bill, they have the same salary as you do, so they can easily bear the burdens of high taxes — and the increased cost of commodities (due, in large part to government regulation).

So, according to Mr. Maher, any movements backed by George Soros by definition cannot be populist.  And then the unfunny comic goes on to argue that most of the deficit was under Bush.  Um, Bill, have you read the constitution?  It gives the power of the purse to Congress, controlled by Democrats since from 2007 until this January.  And it was the budget passed the Democratic Congress elected in 2006, that saw deficits, declining before their eleciton, began to grow — as the rate of increase of federal spending accelerated.

He then faulted the president for failing to blame Republicans: “He never blames the Republicans for anything. He’s their best friend. He always helps them with their narrative.”  This statement so shocked our reader Sonicfrog that he wonders if he had a memory lapse: (more…)