The boy, Frankie Girard, had drawn the picture in art class but then found that his teacher didn’t share his patriotism. Says his father, John, “He was denied hanging the flag up. And he asked if he could just even hang it on his desk, and he was told no. He could take the picture that he drew and take it home and be proud of it there.”

I guess patriotism has joined piety as a “private matter.” (Leftists tend to confuse closets with shelves. Everything that should be in the former, they display; everything that should be on the latter, they hide.)

There is a bit of a back story here, too. It is claimed that this incident followed an altercation in which the offended one struck Frankie after Frankie asked him why he didn’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

As for the accusation leveled against the teacher, it’s denied by the school superintendent, Dr. Paul Burnim. He refused to go on camera, but, reports WWLP.com’s Matt Caron, he “told 22News over the phone that nobody ever told Franklin the drawing was offensive, and said the only reason it wasn’t hung was because Franklin was supposed to be doing other work; [sic] not drawing a picture.”

Nose growing much, doctor?

The reason why I don’t believe this man for a second is this: What eleven-year-old is going to concoct a story that his teacher said his flag drawing was “offensive”? Oh, I understand that kids can lie almost as well as educators, but such a fabrication would require a level of cultural knowledge and sophistication beyond the grammar-school set. No, what we have here is a guilty teacher and a superintendent doing damage control and hiding under his desk.

As to this, Frankie’s father, John — who has contacted the ACLU (which makes me wonder about his cultural knowledge) and gotten a lot of press — said that Dr. Burnim asked him if this would “go away” if his son were allowed to hang the flag now. Obviously, this educator is worried about being hanged himself. Doctor, the time for that is past.

And you are a coward.

If you were any kind of man, you would have been offended that a teacher would look askance upon the flag. If you were any kind of a man, you would have leapt into action without hesitation. If you were any kind of man, you would have defended our culture. But you’re something other than a man.

It’s called a leftist.

And this is typical of leftists. They persecute traditionalist students in thousands of schools and universities nationwide (see Campus-Watch.org), and, when they are occasionally caught with their hands in the commie jar, they don’t even have the guts to come on camera and defend their “beliefs.”

This is because they operate based on popularity, not principle. They are pack animals, fawners over the fashionable. In 1936 Germany, they would have been doing the goosestep, and in 1917 Russia, they would have sported the hammer and sickle. This malleability isn’t surprising, either. “Left,” like “right,” is a relative term. Left of what? In the case of these folks, the only constant is that they’re left of sanity.

Now, in the comments section under Caron’s article, someone in the community accused Frankie of being a bully. But this is irrelevant. It would be a mistake to conflate a defense of the flag with a defense of a flag-waver. If the boy misbehaved, punish him, but you don’t prohibit the flag’s display because it’s “offensive.” You hang the flag — and then “hang” the child if necessary.

Speaking of which, was the little offended offender punished for striking Frankie? Or is that allowed now when someone has the temerity to express patriotic sentiments?

And who is offended by the flag, anyway? Is this classmate a budding al-Qaeda member? A La Raza Reconquista type? Is his last name Chavez? (Actually, Frankie’s sister claims he’s a Jehovah’s Witness.) Whatever the case, if the American flag offends him, I suggest that he’s in the wrong country.

The thing I find most irritating about this story is the ridiculous idea that “offensiveness” should be a guide for anything. And it not only shouldn’t be…

…but it cannot be.

This is because offensiveness is completely relative and subjective: most everything offends someone and most everyone is offended by something. Yet we won’t prohibit everything. Would we kowtow to a child who was offended by sitting next to a black classmate? In short, we have to discriminate among people’s feelings. And what will be the yardstick that we use to judge? Unless it is the “feelings” of the given authority figure — in which case the judgments are completely arbitrary — the standard of right and wrong must be applied.

Once you recognize this, the offensiveness argument goes out the window. It passes muster only in a relativistic universe in which, without a conception of Truth as a yardstick for making decisions, people use the only thing they have left: emotion. Yet this reduces society to the law of the jungle: we fight, using fists, votes, or words (maybe lies), and those who prevail see their will done. And that higher one, and civilization, are casualties.

The truth is that when people take offense, it’s usually just a ploy. They’re not really offended.

They just don’t happen to like what you’re saying.

But if they were honest and said just that, they’d seem intolerant. So they try to seize the moral high ground by putting the onus on you and claiming you’re “offensive.” Yet they usually have neither the high ground nor anything moral. If they had the latter, they’d likely be able to mount an argument as to why you’re wrong in a real, absolute sense. Instead, all they’re saying, properly translated, is that they don’t like how you taste. If they looked to Truth, however, they might find that the problem actually lies with their palate.

Something else that can exist only in a relativistic universe is the spiritual disease that today wears the label “liberalism.” Get people to believe in Truth, and this disease will die as surely as will a fungus exposed to the light.

HT: American Thinker

The nauseating comments by the leftists overlords of NPR about the Tea Party show how much these leftists hate and fear us. The indecent firing of Juan Williams was more evidence of the willingness of the intolerant left to fight without scruple against anyone who does not slavishly follow the party line — even those who still sincerely believe some bits and pieces of leftist mythology. The scurrying Democrats from the Wisconsin Senate show contempt not just for Republicans, but also for the voters who elect them. The thuggish behavior of Wisconsin schoolteachers shows that we cannot assume that these hirelings are honorable.

Do we really need more evidence of just how bad the left is? The blatant appeal to hatred, the naked pursuit of power, the wholly unsavory smell of deceit — the absence of the tiniest fig leaf of respectability — are apparent in everything the left does these days. Its bullying can be met only two ways: with surrender or with resistance. The wise course, resistance, cannot be done halfheartedly. All those who stand in the way of leftists face the same gallows in the end. President Reagan, noting the foolishness of timidity in fighting the left, put it well: “What are they going to do? Hang us from a higher tree?” (Recall that this same great American summed up his Cold War strategy thus: “How about this? We win. They lose.”)

This is the long heritage of defiant courage in the face of oppression. It is William Wallace at Stirling Bridge reminding Scots that they will die but that they need not die as slaves. It is Patrick Henry in the House of Burgesses telling his fellow Virginians that “[t]he gentlemen cry ‘Peace, peace,’ but there is no peace: the war has already begun.” It is Churchill’s pugnacity after France fell, telling Hitler and Britons that “[w]e shall never surrender.” It is Solzhenitsyn, alone and threatened in the maw of Marxist tyranny, using his pen to embolden the world against the Evil Empire.

Those who lie, those who lust for power, and those with whom no honorable compromise is possible — these enemies of liberty — must simply be defeated. What does Rush tell his listeners every day? “My goal is to defeat liberalism.” His defiance is like General Jackson in the Civil War at Manassas: fleeing Confederates stopped, looked, and turned around. One of them, famously, told us why: “There stands Jackson like a stone wall.” Courage in war — and we are very much in a war — is contagious (and so is cowardice). There is no substitute for victory in our war. Those lions who stand up in the face of wickedness inspire others, while those mice who try to do business with the hopelessly corrupt fall within the malign spell of the left or end up, as Reagan reminds us, hung from a lower branch.

What does this mean in practice today? Republicans should push “right to work” everywhere as hard as their political muscle will let them. Labor unions, as much a dinosaur as Marxism, are the enemy of the working man, the enemy of government economy, the enemy of jobs, and the mortal enemy of every Republican. Fight also that horror called “public education,” which is a slave to leftist dogma and a vast hole in every state budget: privatize the instruction of our future. Tackle entitlements not meekly with an eye to the latest poll data, but as if these interconnected Ponzi schemes — public employee pensions, Medicare, Social Security, and the rest — are vast frauds which will leave us all poor and afraid. The stench of corruption in ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and sibling monsters must be recorded, exposed, and pressed relentlessly.

Each apology for doing what is right is simple surrender. All vain efforts to peel off “moderate” Democrats blur those distinctions which we want to be crystal-clear. Every poll-driven statement by Republican leaders to capture the imaginary center shows that these Republicans are in fact not “leaders,” but dupes. If our ends are honorable and good, then sheepishness about pursuing those ends is not just immoral, but vastly unwise. We are fighting for our country, for all the good that it is and that it can be, and for all the heroes before us who gave us this land. Like them, we must be bold.

HT: American Thinker

Amid all the turmoil, he discusses an apparently world historical issue of school bullying; honors the 2009-10 Stanley Cup Champion Chicago Blackhawks; delivers a radio address on another all-important subject, “Women’s History Month;” attends a fund-raiser; goes golfing (that darned weather: it was just too nice for the President to resist the temptation of hitting the links — for the 61st time in his two plus years in office); yuks it up with the Washington press corps (pronounced “k-o-r”, not “k-o-r-p-s,” try to remember this, Mr. President) at the annual Gridiron Dinner. And to top it all off, the crowning event in Barack Obama’s busy schedule — drum roll, please! — videotaping his NCAA tournament bracket picks. (Think about it: Obama discusses basketball with authority, which means that he must be spending a lot of time watching the games and listening to sports commentators. Exactly what he was elected for, wasn’t he?) While Rome burned, Nero fiddled. While the world burns, Obama ponders the outcome of a college basketball tournament.

Faced with this blatant display of indolence and indomitable refusal to fulfill the duties of his office, Obama’s supporters are puzzled: What happened to the giant who bestrode the world during the election campaign? Where have all the flowers gone? Something is definitely amiss. But what? Muses NYT putative conservative David Brooks, he of the creased pant leg fame, “All in all, President Obama is an astoundingly complicated person. During the 2008 presidential campaign, and during the first two years of his term, I would have said that his troubling flaw was hubris — his attempts to do everything at once. But he seems to have an amazing capacity to self-observe and adjust. Now I’d say his worrying flaw is passivity.” Maybe he is saving his extraordinary talents for a really monumental task deserving his undivided attention — perhaps making bracket picks come NBA playoff time?

The multiverse theory that postulates the existence of numerous parallel universes, each governed by its own laws of nature, is currently gaining traction in scientific circles. I have no idea if the theory is true in cosmogony, but in the socio-political realm the elites definitely exist in a universe separate from the rest of country, divorced from the unwashed masses and common sense. It is ruled by its own peculiar laws which its denizens are required to obey unquestioningly on pain of being cast into the outer darkness of fly-over America. In that universe, a reduction in the rate of growth of social spending, say, from nine to seven percent, is a “devastating cut”; a budget reduction of about five-thousandths of one percent is tantamount to the Apocalypse; increasing spending is a sure-fire way of shrinking the budget deficit; raising taxes is a recipe for prosperity; Sarah Palin is an idiot; Michelle Obama is the most beautiful woman with the most exquisite taste in clothes since Helen of Troy; and — the ultimate eternal verity — Barack Obama is a colossus of superhuman intellectual gifts and powers.

The smart set living in an echo-chamber that reinforces their conventional wisdom have eagerly embraced this article of faith because in their world to question Obama’s ability is to commit the deadly sin of racism. And don’t think they are cynics who merely parrot the party line and go along to get along. So deeply are they invested in the Obama myth that they summon all their intellectual resources to its defense. Utterly terrified of committing thought crime, they have internalized their beliefs and with religious fervor keep faith with their creed. To let any doubt creep into their minds is tantamount to aligning themselves with the “Obama-haters” — all those “yahoos” and “knuckle-draggers” of the far right. Their greatest fear is to break ranks with the true believers and invite ostracism — a prospect too horrible to behold.

And so they explain to one another that Obama’s defiant detachment must have some reason too complex for mere mortals to discern; his powerful mind is too intricate and resourceful for anyone to understand or pass judgment on his actions (or inaction, as the case may be). Thus one of the theories gaining favor in their circles: Obama is focused on lofty objectives way beyond the capacity of our meager intelligence to grasp; he sees the deeper truth; he soars to such heights that our earth-bound concerns dwindle into total insignificance.

Once upon a time there lived an emperor. One day two crafty weavers turned up at the palace and offered to make a new suit of clothes for the ruler — clothes so marvelous that they would be invisible to those unfit for their positions, stupid or incompetent. And so when the emperor stepped out to show off his brand-new attire, the courtiers, fearful of being found out and ridiculed, would not admit to themselves the truth of what their eyes were telling them. Until an innocent child in the crowd of onlookers cried out, “He isn’t wearing anything at all!”, and the spell was broken.

Hans Christian Andersen did not indicate whether the weavers’ names were David Axelrod and David Plouffe, but the similarity is striking. The two Davids brilliantly succeeded in packaging and selling to the country an unknown tyro from Chicago without a past or any visible qualifications other than imposing looks, a resonant voice and an ability to use the teleprompter. Like the weavers in the great Danish writer’s fairy-tale, the Obama handlers insulated their candidate against criticism by preemptively warning that any doubt as to his fitness for office was proof positive of mean-spiritedness and racism. And the liberal crowd swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker.

The famous Occam’s razor principle states that the simplest explanation is the most plausible one. Applying it to dispel the fog of propaganda, it becomes glaringly obvious that Obama is an accidental president, a lazy and indecisive incompetent devoid of any ability or desire to perform the job to which he was elected by a gullible majority, who loves the perks but hates the duties of his office; who loves to play but hates to work. Have a good look at the man occupying the White House: what you see is what you get. The Emperor has no clothes.

HT: American Thinker

Faced with stifling debt, bloated pensions and intractable government unions, liberal Midwestern legislators have fled those states — paralyzing Republican fiscal reform efforts. Like Monty Python’s Brave Sir Robin and his band of quivering knights, these elected officials have only one plan when confronted with political hardship or economic peril: Run away, run away, run away.

Scores of Fleebagger Democrats are now in hiding in neighboring Illinois, the nation’s sanctuary for political crooks and corruptocrats. Soon, area hotels will be announcing a special discount rate for card-carrying FleePAC winter convention registrants. Question: Will the White House count the economic stimulus from the mass Democratic exodus to Illinois as jobs “saved” or “created”? More important question: How much are taxpayers being charged for these obstructionist vacations?

Voters have spoken: In Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and across the heartland, they put Republican adults in charge of cleaning up profligate Democrat-engineered messes. Instead of defending their same old tax-hiking, union-protecting, spending-addicted ways, Democrats are crossing their state borders into big government sanctuary zones — screaming “la, la, la, we can’t hear you” all the way.

Wisconsin Democrats warned that their delinquent members — evading state troopers and literally phoning it in — could be gone “for weeks” to prevent a quorum on GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s modest plan to increase public union workers’ health insurance and pension contributions, end the compulsory union dues racket and rein in collective bargaining powers run amok.

Big Labor insists its intransigence isn’t about money, but about “rights.” But the dispute is about nothing but money and power — the union’s power to dictate and limit its members’ health insurance choices to a lucrative union-run plan, for example, which adds nearly $70 million in unnecessary taxpayer costs.

On Tuesday, only three of 40 House Democrats in Indiana showed up for legislative debate on a similar bill to end forced unionism and join 22 other “right to work” states. Hoosier media reported that some of the fugitive pols may be headed to Kentucky in addition to President Obama’s old political stomping grounds.

The White House and Beltway Democrats have paved the way for subverting deliberative democracy, of course. If only Republicans in Wisconsin and Indiana had followed the Obama/Pelosi/Reid model and rammed their behind-closed-doors-crafted legislative agenda through in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend, the Fleebaggers wouldn’t be on the lam today. But GOP legislators just don’t roll that way. It’s Democrats who cut and run — abroad in wartime and at home in crisis.

Almost eight years ago, more than 50 Texas Democratic state lawmakers holed up in Oklahoma and New Mexico for weeks to stymie a vote on Republican-sponsored redistricting plans they opposed. Over the past week, it was thousands of public school teachers in Wisconsin who faked illness and boycotted their classrooms. And it’s union henchmen calling out loud for statewide strikes to bring Republican reformers to their knees.

The Party of Truancy has become a laughingstock — and Americans aren’t waiting for left-wing late-night comedians to bring down the hammer of well-earned mockery. The Internet has lit up over the past week with “Wanted” posters and all-points-bulletin alerts for missing Democrats.

Blogger John Hayward of the conservative Human Events newspaper joked that “the next issue of National Geographic will track the migratory patterns of fugitive Democrats across the great plains.” Seton Motley of the Washington, D.C.-based Media Research Center weighed in: “First, Wisconsin. Now, Indiana. When we said ‘runaway government,’ it was a complaint — not a suggestion.” Comedian Stephen Kruiser snickered that OFA — the Democrats’ political organizing arm, Organizing for America — now stands for “Organizing Fleeing Americans.”

Note: Many of the loudest Washington and Hollywood critics of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s decision to resign from office in 2009 are themselves now AWOL on the Wisconsin and Indiana AWOL-ians. Who’s all for mocking “quitters” now? Anyone?

One mortified Wisconsin taxpayer speaks for many. “As the daughter of former Wisconsin Senate Minority Floor Leader William R. Moser (D-Milwaukee, Dist. 6),” Mary Magdalen Moser told me, she’s humiliated by the “flee-bagging” politicians. “I am ashamed of the actions taken by the minority party to subvert our system of government by boycotting its legitimate processes. Anarchy is undemocratic, and I know that my Dad is spinning in his grave right now. … I do not support refusing to participate, because that will not solve any of the issues facing our state.”

Remember the 2008 Democratic Party chant: “Fired up! Ready to go!” Well, there’s a new Democratic Party motto in town: “Ready to go? OK, then, let’s blow this pop stand!” It’s difficult to see how Obama and his absconder allies can “win the future” when they’re stampeding over each other to escape the present.

HT: Townhall.com

Al Gore’s Church of Climatology has been abandoned by world leaders in their quest to maintain power and political position.

Lawrence Solomon recently reported that G20 leaders in Toronto tried to avoid the fate of colleagues felled by warming advocacy by turning their backs on global warming legislation.

Will the “mainstream” media in the U.S. report these findings? Not likely!

Last week’s G8 and G20 meetings in Toronto and its environs confirmed that the world’s leaders accept the demise of global-warming alarmism.

One year ago, the G8 talked tough about cutting global temperatures by two degrees. In Toronto, they neutered that tough talk, replacing it with a nebulous commitment to do their best on climate change.

Not trying to outdo each other, the global-warming commitments of the G20, which now carries more clout than the G8, went from nebulous to non-existent: The G20’s draft promise going into the meetings of investing in green technologies faded into a mere commitment to “a green economy and to sustainable global growth.”

These leaders’ collective decisions in Toronto reflect their individual experiences at home, and a desire to avoid the fate that met their true-believing colleagues, all of whom have been hurt by the economic and political consequences of their global-warming advocacy.

Kevin Rudd, Australia’s gung-ho global-warming prime minister, lost his job the day before he was set to fly to the G20 meetings; just months earlier Australia’s conservative opposition leader, also a major proponent of global warming legislation, lost his job in an anti-global-warming backbencher revolt.

The Church of The Church of Climatology’s choir director, on global warming Gordon Brown, of the U.K. likewise lost his job.

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had vowed to “save the human race” from climate change by introducing a carbon tax by the time of the G8 and G20, was a changed man by the time the meetings occurred. He cancelled his carbon tax in March, two days after a crushing defeat in regional elections that saw his Gaullist party lose just about every region of France. He got the message: Two-thirds of the French public opposed carbon taxes.

Spain? Days before the G20 meetings, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, his popularity and that of global warming in tatters, decided to gut his country’s renewable industry by unilaterally rescinding the government guarantees enshrined in legislation, knowing the rescinding would put most of his country’s 600 photovoltaic manufacturers out of business.

Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi similarly scrapped government guarantees for its solar and wind companies prior to the G8 and G20, putting them into default, too.

The U.K may be making the biggest global-warming cuts of all, with an emergency budget that came down the week of the G20 meetings. The two government departments responsible for climate-change policies, previously immune to cuts, must now contract by an extraordinary 25%.

Other U.K. departments are also ditching climate-change programs, the casualties include manufacturers of electric cars, the Low Carbon Buildings Program, and, as the minister in charge put it, “every commitment made by the last government on renewable energy is under review.“

Some areas of U.K.’s economy not only survived but expanded, though: The government announced record offshore oil development in the North Sea, when it granted a record 356 exploration licenses in its most recent round.

Support for global-warming programs is also in tatters in the U.S., where polls show as in Europe, that the vast majority of Americans reject the global-warming agenda. Americans resent repeated attempts to pass cap and trade legislation over their objections, contributing to the fall in popularity of President Barack Obama and Congress.

Will progressive ideologues in the U.S. Congress change their tune quickly to save their jobs? Not likely, ignorance and stubbornness are frequently a fatal combination. In anticipation that cap and trade legislation would be stalled in the senate, the current administration tasked the Environmental Protection Agency with capping carbon emissions.

Public opinion surveys now predict that this November’s elections will see sweeping change in the United States, with legislators who have signed on to the global warming hypothesis being replaced by those who don’t buy it.

One country, Canada and one leader, Prime Minister Stephen Harper have stood out for avoiding the worst excesses associated with climate change. Called the Colossal Fossil three years running by some 500 environmental groups around the world, Canada and Stephen Harper are reviled among climate-change campaigners for failing to fall into line.

Not coincidentally, Canada has also stood out for having best withstood the financial crisis that beset the world. Fittingly, Canada and its leader played host to the meetings.

HT: Santa Ana Statehouse Examiner

World Leaders Turn on Al Gore Hoax of Global Warming

We are no more addicted to oil than we are addicted to oxygen. This extraordinary mineral is a part of every aspect of our lives; used to create plastic, used in pharmaceuticals, used for the asphalt that pave our highways, and used as the fuel for our cars, trucks, and for countless other applications.

Oil is not “finite” as the president suggested. There is no end of oil.

There are, however, tremendous challenges and costs to find it, drill for it, transport it, and refine it. It is an industry that requires huge amounts of money to discover new reservoirs of oil and even more to acquire it. It involves tremendous risk as well. Oil companies that hit too many dry wells are no longer in business.

The president cited China as a nation pursuing “clean energy”, but the president said nothing of the new coal-fired plants to generate electricity that China has been opening every week in recent years and will continue to do in the years ahead. The president did not mention that China is literally drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Cuba. Like every modern nation, China needs oil.

The president is lying. There is no “clean energy future” when he talks of solar and wind energy

America needs oil, but the policies of previous administrations from the 1970s onward have stymied production, shut down existing wells, driven oil companies to seek it anywhere but here!

Instead, he devoted the thrust of his address to tell Americans they must “embrace a clean energy future”, must “transition away” from so-called fossil fuels, and that the nation must, in fact, “accelerate” that effort.

The president is lying. There is no “clean energy future” when he talks of solar and wind energy.

Neither solar or wind can begin to compete with oil, coal and natural gas. If they were viable, the government would not have to plunder the national treasury to provide them with subsidies, requiring that they be included as a source by utilities.

Together, after many years of propaganda, they only provide about three percent of the nation’s energy requirements. They will never provide enough because the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine. Every wind and solar farm must be backed up by a traditional plant, be it coal-fired, nuclear, natural gas or hydroelectric.

Instead, this administration has declared war on the most abundant source of energy we have in America, coal. We are the Saudi Arabia of coal.

Coal provides fifty percent of our electricity and it could provide even more; a source that could last for centuries, except that the Obama administration is doing everything it can to thwart the building of new coal-fired plants, to shut down coal mining operations.

If Americans continue to believe this president’s lies, if we continue to believe decades of lies by environmental organizations, many of whom have been the happy recipients of oil industry largess and support, and if we abandon the very sources of energy on which our entire economy and way of life depends, this president will have led America off the cliff.

President Obama is asking America to commit suicide.

HT: CanadaFreePress

I can’t count the number of emails I received in my thirty years at University of Virginia where this faculty member or that administrator urged me to support some piece of legislation. But the latest email kerfluffle, involving Phil Mote, director of the Oregaon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University, goes a bit further.

Mote was upset that Art Robinson, a physician from Cave Junction, Oregon, won the Republican primary for Oregon’s fourth congressional district.

That’s because Robinson was behind the “Oregon Petition Project,” in which over 31,000 people, largely science professionals (including over 9,000 with doctorates), signed on to a document stating that there was “no scientific evidence” that greenhouse gas emissions could cause “catastrophic heating” in the foreseeable future.

Robinson did not harp on this issue in the campaign. Instead he ran against the general politics of 12-term incumbent Pete deFazio, including his March vote for President Obama’s health care bill. With that one, deFazio probably voted himself out of Congress.

In response to Robinson’s Republican primary win, Mote wrote to his colleagues at Oregon State University emphasizing that Robinson was the force behind the Petition Project and that, if he were elected, OSU would be put in the “tragic ranks of our climate colleagues at University of Oklahoma…and University of Alaska,” where elected officials have the temerity to disagree with Mote about global warming. He signed his missive as “Director, Oregon Climate Change Research Institute and Oregon Climate Services.” Eventually he emailed his colleagues, calling his initial message a “mistake.”

Hardly. Consider the shady track record of climatology in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere.

Mote’s previous position was Washington State Climatologist at the University of Washington, where he repeatedly pointed to a 50% decline in mountain snows between 1950 and the mid-1990s. But there are data available after 1995 and before 1950, and when all the data are taken together — thanks in part to the fact that it has snowed plenty there in the last 15 years—the strong decline is erased.

Mote’s then Associate State Climatologist, Mark Albright, emailed this information to several people. When he refused to stop telling the whole truth, Mote terminated his position.

Across the Columbia River at Oregon State University, the previous head of the Oregon Climate Services, George Taylor, put all of the Cascade snowfall data online for anyone to see. The long-term records clearly showed no decline at all. Ted Kulongoski, Oregon’s “green” governor, told Taylor he could no longer refer to himself as Oregon State Climatologist. Oregon State University showed little support, too (although Taylor was twice elected as President of the American Association of State Climatologists). Taylor quit rather than continue in such an environment.

George Taylor got into trouble for simply for telling the truth about the lack of a big decline in mountain snowfall, and his university seemed to not care. Mark Albright lost his position for the exact same offense. Phil Mote, who terminated Albright, replaced George Taylor.

Two things are very disturbing. Where was the hue and cry over “academic freedom” over the Albright and Taylor incidents? And how could Mote originally think it was just perfectly fine to use his official position concerning a local race for Congress?

Intolerance appears to be endemic in academic climatology. In Climategate, the University of East Anglia found nothing wrong with a culture of climate bullies blatantly attempting to bend the canon of knowledge, which is the peer reviewed scientific literature. Penn State did the same in its investigation of Michael Mann’s vituperative emails found in the East Anglia package.

The overarching issue is that political correctness has so infected the academy that academic freedom with regard to global warming is now a figment, while electioneering on the public’s dime results in no punishment whatsoever.

HT: Townhall.com

Google Home Page - Memorial Day 2010

5/31/2010 – Chris Banescu -

Google once again fails to commemorate Memorial Day with a special logo. Google has ignored this special day every year since 1999, when it first began using customized logos on its main page to mark particular holidays. The only reminder of this important day on Google’s home page is a tiny graphic of a yellow ribbon superimposed on a small American flag. Apparently, the sacrifices made by millions of American soldiers through the ages in defense of freedom and preservation of our liberties and the lives of hundreds of millions of other people around the world is not worthy of recognition.

Google has created hundreds of different special logos called Google Doodles to commemorate all sorts of lesser holidays and special days throughout the year. This year Google took the time to create special logos to celebrate such “memorable” days and “momentous” events as PAC-MAN’s 30th Anniversary, Earth Day, and April Fool’s Day.

The company began this tradition back in 1999 in order to “celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous artists and scientists.” Google takes great pride in its Doodles tradition as a “fun way for the company to recognize events and notable people, it also illustrates the creative and innovative personality of the company itself.” It seems important events like Memorial Day and “notable people” like the millions of American soldiers who have been killed, injured, and maimed in protecting this country, rescuing the world from the evils of fascist, communist, and Islamic tyranny, and maintaining peace through strength for many countries around the world are not worthy of proper recognition by Google.

Google’s explanation for choosing not to commemorate Memorial Day is absurd:

If we were to commemorate this holiday, we’d want to express reverence; however, as Google’s special logos tend to be lighthearted in nature, this would be a particularly challenging design. We wouldn’t want to create a graphic that could be interpreted as disrespectful in any way.

When contacted back in 2007 about this glaring omission the company issued this official explanation:

Thank you for your note. We appreciate your interest in seeing a Memorial Day Google logo. If we were to commemorate this holiday, we’d want to express reverence; however, as Google’s special logos tend to be lighthearted in nature, this would be a particularly challenging design. We wouldn’t want to create a graphic that could be interpreted as disrespectful in any way.

We have a long list of holidays that we’d like to celebrate in the future. We have to balance this rotating calendar with the need to maintain the consistency of the Google homepage. We really value your feedback regarding the Google logo, and please be assured that we’re actively pursuing ways in which we can acknowledge Memorial Day and other such occasions in the future.

Regards,
The Google Team

This ridiculous excuse from Google was a repeat of similarly ludicrous comments back in 2005 regarding the missing Memorial Day special logo in its home page:

We have to balance this rotating calendar with the need to maintain the consistency of the Google homepage.

Furthermore, Google’s special logos tend to be lighthearted in nature. If we were to commemorate Memorial Day, we would want to express reverence, rather than mirth. This would be a particularly challenging design. We would not want to, in any way, create a graphic that could be interpreted as disrespectful. In light of the mail we have received about this, we are actively considering designs we could display on this day next year. We welcome any suggestions you may have.

To prove Google wrong and highlight the absurdity the claim that it would be too “challenging” to come up with a design and hard to not be “disrespectful in any way”, the zombietime website issues a challenge to its readers to come up with Memorial Day special logos to honor the day and be respectful of the military.

Perhaps we can show Google that it’s not so hard by simply making some Memorial Day Google logos of our own.

Everybody: fire up your graphics software, and start making your proposed design for Google’s Memorial Day-themed logo. [...]

The goal is to create a logo that is respectful, tactful, and reflecting the spirit of Memorial Day. For inspiration, go to this page and click on “More Holiday Logos” at the upper right to see all the previous special holiday logos that Google has ever used. This page explains the meaning and history of Memorial Day : “This holiday commemorates U.S. men and women who have died in military service to their country.”

Here are the winning entries below:

The logos speak for themselves! Any one of them would have been more than appropriate and considerate of this important and special day. Shame on Google for purposely failing to honor Memorial Day and coming up with such an absurd excuse for its cowardly stance.

5/18/2010 – B. Chrysostom -

It appears that the California Penal Code (Section 834b) includes legal status verification language that is quite similar to Arizona’s recently passed SB1070 law.

Looking at the exact language of the California Penal Code under “CHAPTER 5. ARREST, BY WHOM AND HOW MADE ……. 833-851.90″ under Section 834b one can find this language: “The verification process may include, but shall not be limited to, questioning the person regarding his or her date and place of birth, and entry into the United States, and demanding documentation to indicate his or her legal status.”

Here is the full California Penal Code (Section 834b) language for reference:

834b.
(a) Every law enforcement agency in California shall fully cooperate with the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service regarding any person who is arrested if he or she is suspected of being present in the United States in violation of federal immigration laws.

(b) With respect to any such person who is arrested, and suspected of being present in the United States in violation of federal immigration laws, every law enforcement agency shall do the following:
(1) Attempt to verify the legal status of such person as a citizen of the United States, an alien lawfully admitted as a permanent resident, an alien lawfully admitted for a temporary period of time or as an alien who is present in the United States in violation of immigration laws. The verification process may include, but shall not be limited to, questioning the person regarding his or her date and place of birth, and entry into the United States, and demanding documentation to indicate his or her legal status.
(2) Notify the person of his or her apparent status as an alien who is present in the United States in violation of federal immigration laws and inform him or her that, apart from any criminal justice proceedings, he or she must either obtain legal status or leave the United States.
(3) Notify the Attorney General of California and the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service of the apparent illegal status and provide any additional information that may be requested by any other public entity.

(c) Any legislative, administrative, or other action by a city, county, or other legally authorized local governmental entity with jurisdictional boundaries, or by a law enforcement agency, to prevent or limit the cooperation required by subdivision (a) is expressly prohibited.

Clearly many of the California lawmakers, various racist agitators, illegal-immigrant rights groups, the mayor of Los Angeles, and the Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles City Councils who have issued boycotts or called for boycotts of Arizona have no idea what the California state laws actually cover. One wonders if these hypocrites are now going to boycott their own cities and the entire state in order to stay true to their own policies?

In protest all the mayors and city councils of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego should resign effective immediately. That will indicate how serious these city “leaders” really are about their beliefs and how ready to stand behind their convictions.

For comparison, here is the relevant language in Arizona’s SB1070 law:

ARTICLE 8. ENFORCEMENT OF IMMIGRATION LAWS
11-1051. Cooperation and assistance in enforcement of immigration laws; indemnification

A. NO OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE MAY ADOPT A POLICY THAT LIMITS OR RESTRICTS THE ENFORCEMENT OF FEDERAL IMMIGRATION LAWS TO LESS THAN THE FULL EXTENT PERMITTED BY FEDERAL LAW.

B. FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE WHERE REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, A REASONABLE ATTEMPT SHALL BE MADE, WHEN PRACTICABLE, TO DETERMINE THE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF THE PERSON. THE PERSON’S IMMIGRATION STATUS SHALL BE VERIFIED WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PURSUANT TO 8 UNITED STATES CODE SECTION 1373(c).

C. IF AN ALIEN WHO IS UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES IS CONVICTED OF A VIOLATION OF STATE OR LOCAL LAW, ON DISCHARGE FROM IMPRISONMENT OR ASSESSMENT OF ANY FINE THAT IS IMPOSED, THE ALIEN SHALL BE TRANSFERRED IMMEDIATELY TO THE CUSTODY OF THE UNITED STATES IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT OR THE UNITED STATES CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION.

D. NOTWITHSTANDING ANY OTHER LAW, A LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY MAY SECURELY TRANSPORT AN ALIEN WHO IS UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES AND WHO IS IN THE AGENCY’S CUSTODY TO A FEDERAL FACILITY IN THIS STATE OR TO ANY OTHER POINT OF TRANSFER INTO FEDERAL CUSTODY THAT IS OUTSIDE THE JURISDICTION OF THE LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has accused Arizona of opening the door “to intolerance, hate, discrimination and abuse in law enforcement.” But Arizona has nothing on Mexico when it comes to cracking down on illegal aliens. While open-borders activists decry new enforcement measures signed into law in “Nazi-zona” last week, they remain deaf, dumb or willfully blind to the unapologetically restrictionist policies of our neighbors to the south.

The Arizona law bans sanctuary cities that refuse to enforce immigration laws, stiffens penalties against illegal alien day laborers and their employers, makes it a misdemeanor for immigrants to fail to complete and carry an alien registration document, and allows the police to arrest immigrants unable to show documents proving they are in the U.S. legally. If those rules constitute the racist, fascist, xenophobic, inhumane regime that the National Council of La Raza, Al Sharpton, Catholic bishops and their grievance-mongering followers claim, then what about these regulations and restrictions imposed on foreigners?

— The Mexican government will bar foreigners if they upset “the equilibrium of the national demographics.” How’s that for racial and ethnic profiling?

– If outsiders do not enhance the country’s “economic or national interests” or are “not found to be physically or mentally healthy,” they are not welcome. Neither are those who show “contempt against national sovereignty or security.” They must not be economic burdens on society and must have clean criminal histories. Those seeking to obtain Mexican citizenship must show a birth certificate, provide a bank statement proving economic independence, pass an exam and prove they can provide their own health care.

– Illegal entry into the country is equivalent to a felony punishable by two years’ imprisonment. Document fraud is subject to fine and imprisonment; so is alien marriage fraud. Evading deportation is a serious crime; illegal re-entry after deportation is punishable by ten years’ imprisonment. Foreigners may be kicked out of the country without due process and the endless bites at the litigation apple that illegal aliens are afforded in our country (see, for example, President Obama’s illegal alien aunt — a fugitive from deportation for eight years who is awaiting a second decision on her previously rejected asylum claim).

– Law enforcement officials at all levels — by national mandate — must cooperate to enforce immigration laws, including illegal alien arrests and deportations. The Mexican military is also required to assist in immigration enforcement operations. Native-born Mexicans are empowered to make citizens’ arrests of illegal aliens and turn them in to authorities.

– Ready to show your papers? Mexico’s National Catalog of Foreigners tracks all outside tourists and foreign nationals. A National Population Registry tracks and verifies the identity of every member of the population, who must carry a citizens’ identity card. Visitors who do not possess proper documents and identification are subject to arrest as illegal aliens.

All of these provisions are enshrined in Mexico’s Ley General de Población (General Law of the Population) and were spotlighted in a 2006 research paper published by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy. There’s been no public clamor for “comprehensive immigration reform” in Mexico, however, because pro-illegal alien speech by outsiders is prohibited.

Consider: Open-borders protesters marched freely at the Capitol building in Arizona, comparing GOP Gov. Jan Brewer to Hitler, waving Mexican flags, advocating that demonstrators “Smash the State,” and holding signs that proclaimed “No human is illegal” and “We have rights.”

But under the Mexican constitution, such political speech by foreigners is banned. Noncitizens cannot “in any way participate in the political affairs of the country.” In fact, a plethora of Mexican statutes enacted by its congress limit the participation of foreign nationals and companies in everything from investment, education, mining and civil aviation to electric energy and firearms. Foreigners have severely limited private property and employment rights (if any).

As for abuse, the Mexican government is notorious for its abuse of Central American illegal aliens who attempt to violate Mexico’s southern border. The Red Cross has protested rampant Mexican police corruption, intimidation and bribery schemes targeting illegal aliens there for years. Mexico didn’t respond by granting mass amnesty to illegal aliens, as it is demanding that we do. It clamped down on its borders even further. In late 2008, the Mexican government launched an aggressive deportation plan to curtain illegal Cuban immigration and human trafficking through Cancun.

Meanwhile, Mexican consular offices in the United States have coordinated with left-wing social justice groups and the Catholic Church leadership to demand a moratorium on all deportations and a freeze on all employment raids across America.

Mexico is doing the job Arizona is now doing — a job the U.S. government has failed miserably to do: putting its people first. Here’s the proper rejoinder to all the hysterical demagogues in Mexico (and their sympathizers here on American soil) now calling for boycotts and invoking Jim Crow laws, apartheid and the Holocaust because Arizona has taken its sovereignty into its own hands:

Hipócritas.

HT: Townhall

Dennis Prager

by Dennis Prager | 4/27/2010

Opponents of the popular expression of conservative opposition to big government, the tea party, regularly note that tea partiers are overwhelmingly white. This is intended to disqualify the tea parties from serious moral consideration.

But there are two other facts that are far more troubling: The first is the observation itself. The fact that the Left believes that the preponderance of whites among tea partiers invalidates the tea party movement tells us much more about the Left than it does about the tea partiers.

It confirms that the Left really does see the world through the prism of race, gender and class rather than through the moral prism of right and wrong.

One of the more dangerous features of the Left has been its replacement of moral categories of right and wrong, and good and evil with three other categories: black and white (race), male and female (gender) and rich and poor (class).

Therefore the Left pays attention to the skin color — and gender (not just “whites” but “white males”) — of the tea partiers rather than to their ideas.

One would hope that all people would assess ideas by their moral rightness or wrongness, not by the race, gender or class of those who hold them. But in the world of the Left, people are taught not to assess ideas but to identify the race, class and gender of those who espouse those ideas. This helps explain the widespread use of ad hominem attacks by the Left: Rather than argue against their opponents’ ideas, the Left usually dismisses those making the argument disagreed with as “racist,” “intolerant,” “bigoted,” “sexist,” “homophobic” and/or “xenophobic.”

You’re against race-based affirmative action? No need to argue the issue because you’re a racist. You’re a tea partier against ever-expanding government? No need to argue the issue because you’re a racist.

As a Leftist rule of thumb — once again rendering intellectual debate unnecessary and impossible — white is wrong or bad, and non-white is right and good; male is wrong and bad, and female is right and good; and the rich are wrong and bad, and the poor right and good. For the record, there is one additional division on the Left — strong and weak — to which the same rule applies: The strong are wrong and bad, and the weak are right and good. That is a major reason for Leftist support of the Palestinians (weak) against the Israelis (strong), for example.

This is why, to cite another example, men are dismissed when they oppose abortion. The idea is far less significant than the sex of the advocate. As for women who oppose abortion on demand, they are either not authentically female or simply traitors to their sex. Just as the Left depicts blacks who oppose race-based affirmative action as not authentic blacks or are traitors to their race.

In this morally inverted world, the virtual absence of blacks from tea party rallies cannot possibly reflect anything negative on the black and minority absence, only on the white tea partiers.

But in a more rational and morally clear world, where people judge ideas by their legitimacy rather than by the race of those who held them, people would be as likely to ask why blacks and ethnic minorities are virtually absent at tea parties just as they now ask why whites predominate. They would want to know if this racial imbalance said anything about black and minority views or necessarily reflected negatively on the whites attending those rallies.

And if they did ask such un-PC questions, they might draw rather different conclusions than the Left’s. First, they would know that the near-absence of blacks and Hispanics no more implied racism on the part of tea partiers than the near-absence of blacks and Hispanics in the New York Philharmonic implies racism on the art of that orchestra.

Second, they might even, Heaven forbid, conclude that it does not reflect well on the political outlook of blacks and Hispanics that they so overwhelmingly identify with ever-larger government. Leftist big-government policies have been disastrous for black America just as they were in the countries that most Hispanics emigrated from. But like the gambling addict who keeps gambling the more he loses, those addicted to government entitlements keep increasing the size of the government even as their situation worsens.

Finally, if one eschews the “racism” explanation and asks real questions, one might also conclude that America generally, and conservatives specifically, have failed to communicate America’s distinct values — E Pluribus Unum, In God We Trust, and Liberty (which includes small government) — to blacks and Hispanics.

Unfortunately, however, no real exploration of almost any important issue in American life is possible as long as the Left focuses on the race, gender and class of those who hold differing positions. And that will not happen. For when the Left stops attacking people and starts arguing positions, we will see what the Left most fears: blacks and Hispanics at tea parties.

HT: Townhall.com

NYPD Removing Bikes for Obama's Earth Day Visit

Happy Earth Day from Obama to all those New York bike riders!

Obama has no idea what he just got himself into. Someone sent this photo to the blog This Is FYF, which reports that “citing security concerns that bikes might be secret pipe bombs, NYPD officers clipped the locks of hundreds of bikes along Houston Street this morning in preparation for President Obama’s speech at Cooper Union.

The bikes were unceremoniously put in the back of the truck. Onlookers were not given information as to what would become of the bikes. Happy Earth Day!”

Oh boy, this is going to cause quite a stir in NYC!

We’re trying to get information on this from the NYPD, and will let you know if they respond. Until then, we can only assume Obama hates cyclists and wants all bike lanes permanently painted over.

UPDATE: Below, further photographic evidence of the bike seizure. And one Twitter user says, “If your bike’s lock got cut for obama’s ride. They’re on Delancey btwn Pitt &ridge. They said they won’t be here long.” We have no confirmation that that is actually true, and we’re still waiting for the NYPD to respond to our questions. But for historical perspective, in 2004 cyclists associated with Critical Mass sued the city after the NYPD sawed through bike locks and seized bikes in Union Square.

More chickens coming home to ROOST for Obama and his pathetic and hypocritical administration!

HT: FYF

Back in 1976, when Gerald Ford was President, Ben Stein, then a consultant on Washington and conservatism for the Normal Lear show All’s Fair, sent this memorandum to its creators:

What I don’t like is the way rich liberals, who have made their money through the operations of the capitalist system and who would be miserable bureaucratic cogs in a socialist system, are nevertheless socialists. I suspect that a large part of their motivation is a style of asceticism which has been fashionable among the rich since the time of the Pharisees. Another motivation for the rich liberals to dislike the capitalist system is that they have already gotten theirs and they don’t want to be challenged by other people coming along and getting theirs.

I don’t like the way liberals of any income group assume that they have a monopoly on morality and that the only conscionable position on issues is their position. A sanctimoniousness runs in the liberal mind which is a direct descendant of the Calvinist assuredness of moral superiority. Liberals assume that any challenge to their position comes from impure motives, often motivations having to do with “profit and loss” instead of the “human” factors that liberals allegedly consider. I resent the assumption of liberals that only they truly understand human needs and suffering.

I especially resent the claims of white liberals that they know best about how to solve the problems of the poor and the black. There is hardly any evidence that liberal programs to help the poor and the black have done much good. The ordinary operations of the capitalist system, however, have made enormous gains economically for the poor and the black. Liberals don’t seem to understand that if they take a dollar from one person and give it to another, there is rarely any benefit. If the economic system produces new dollars for everyone, everyone benefits.

Liberals who send their children to private schools while advocating busing are particularly distasteful. The liberals who plead for integration of someone else’s children are particularly blind to their hypocrisy.

I resent the notion that everything that corporations do is wrong and everything that “people” do is right. Liberals don’t understand that corporations are people. They are the people who work for the corporation, buy its products, and own its stock. There is no mechanical person who is benefited if corporations make a good profit. Real people benefit, just as real people lose when corporations lose money.

I don’t like it particularly when liberals say that more money for this or that project can come out of profits. Most people don’t realize that profits are small parts of total earnings for most companies and that without the profits, people, even liberals, wouldn’t invest their money. And there is nothing wrong with big profits. It’s a sign of good management and creativity, which are rewarded in the artistic sphere as they should be in the management area. And the stockholders who get the dividends for those profits are often widows and orphans and most often of all, pension funds. The liberals’ idea that profits all go into buying Balmain gowns is just dangerous nonsense.

I resent the influence that liberals have gotten over our educational system. Even in those schools which are other than jungles of fear, students don’t learn anything. Liberal parents and teachers who have seized control of the schools teach “Sensitivity” and ”Interpersonal Relations” to children who barely know how to read and write because the basics have been so badly neglected. Students will have more in life if they know how to read and write than if they have had “peer group effectiveness” training. Children who are without financial resources are not being done any favors if they are not taught how to perform the basic skills with which to earn a living.

I resent the idea that labor unions are the workingman’s best friend. Unions too often just represent the organized few and raise their wages so high that the unorganized many cannot find work. Unions are just monopolies by another name. They control the wages and place them at a level where employers can only hire a relative few. When the others who are unable to find work want a friend, they cannot even get into the union.

Similarly, I get mad especially about the minimum wage. The minimum wage is just a device guaranteeing that those people whose labor is not worth the minimum wage will remain unemployed. It does not raise any one’s real wage because if an employee were worth the minimum wage, he would have been paid it already. For example, every time the minimum wage is raised or its coverage broadened, the number of unemployed black teenagers rises dramatically. They are people who are largely unskilled and if they are to be hired at all it will have to be at low wages. But the minimum wage law does not allow employers to hire them at the wage they’re worth, so they are not hired at all. Liberals should ask black people in the ghetto what they think of the minimum wage.

I am annoyed at the condescending way liberals look at religion and patriotism. Both of those are forces which make a people work and sacrifice for others and are genuine altruistic forces. Yet liberals scoff at them. Liberals should try to think whether this country could have been built without a sense of mission greater than the love of government money. In fact, liberals ought to think whether or not their own feelings do not constitute a religion of sorts before they make fun of others’ religious practices. They might consider whether or not they have a double standard for people who think like they do as compared to people who have different thoughts. This problem of double standards runs through the liberal mind, in fact. The liberals think nothing of lavishing praise on China, which has put millions to death for political reasons and runs the tightest thought control in history. But they scream bloody murder if a government allied with us, with a thriving and open political system, closes a newspaper for a week. This double standard can also apply closer to home. There are too many liberals who care deeply and sincerely for the disadvantaged across the seas, while they cannot bring themselves to say a kind word to a secretary or to some unfortunate staff person who works under them.

Other examples of the liberals’ double standard are their attitude towards criminals. Their hearts bleed without limit for the poor misguided youth who has just killed or raped or beaten a perfectly innocent person but they don’t care a damn about the victims of the crime. If you look carefully at our cities today, the worst thing about them is that they have become unlivable because people are terrified of street crime. A major reason for that is that liberal attitudes towards punishing crime simply return criminals to the streets because of trifling technicalities or mischievous schemes that place the happiness of the prisoner above the safety of the public.

The liberal attitude about welfare is also worth getting furious about. They are tender and sympathetic towards the mother of ten illegitimate children who is being supported by the taxpayers through Aid to Families of Dependent Children. Who said that that woman should be allowed to make so many mistakes and then have the state make up her losses? The liberal doesn’t care about the working poor who might want to have another child but don’t because they can’t pay for the child. But for the irresponsible people who live off welfare, there is endless sympathy.

That is yet another aspect of the double standard, and there are more. The liberal wants to make a state in which people who have worked hard and abided by the rules are taxed to death to pay for those who do not work at anything except reproducing themselves. The liberal wants a state in which the lower- and middle-middle classes bear the brunt of all social change, while the liberals sit back with their union pay, or university pay, or inherited pay, or money they have gotten from the system they hate, and watch the action.

Another instance of the liberals’ lack of concern with real compassion is their attitude about environmental issues. No one doubts that there are important environmental problems. But there are also people whose jobs depend on taking a close look at environmental issues and not running off half-cocked whenever a cockroach is threatened. Trees may have rights, but they don’t have as many rights as people.

I resent the liberals’ looking the other way whenever there is a threat to decency or peace from the Communist nations and refusing to take seriously threats to our security from countries and movements which openly plan to destroy us. It is the most pious and dangerous nonsense to think that the Soviets are deterred from dominating the entire world by anything but force. Moral suasion has never accomplished a thing against the Communists, yet that is all liberals want us to have in our arsenal. They would have a disarmed and vulnerable America, trusting to the goodwill of people who have no goodwill.

Liberals, seemingly, will spend money on anything except what is absolutely essential for the entire system to continue — a strong defense. Their blindness to that need is something I actually marvel at. There is seemingly no lesson which will teach liberals that a strong America is a free America except actual domination by the Soviets, and that may be happening.

In a similar vein, I resent the way liberals condescend to people in the military as mentally inferior warmongers and brutes. In fact, the military has plenty of decent, concerned people. They have to suffer the most if there is war, so they are most sober about the need to deter it.

I resent also a kind of cultural imperialism which dominates liberal thought. Liberals tend to put down any cultural force, such as television, which has not been anointed by some kind of special holy water which can only be conferred by the elites of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Manhattan. Rock is lowlife and fascistic, but tennis elbow from playing in a court that cost $40 an hour in Manhattan is deeply “in.” Television is beneath discussing in serious terms according to your really important liberals, but ballet and the opera, which can only be seen by the rich few and which the great mass of people find boring, are immensely significant.

I resent the liberals’ belief that all American greatness began with JFK and ended with him.

I resent the liberals’ idea that the average American is a savage.

I resent the constant liberal putdown of what is American and praise of what is foreign.

I resent the liberals’ idea that great ideas always come from the big cities and that small towns are only suitable for summer homes, that the countryside is peopled by dolts looking to shoot every person with long hair that they see.…

HT: American Spectator

Kathy Sullivan, Democrat

by Shawn Millerick | 4/14/2010

New Hampshire Democrats are engaged in a statewide search for liberal activists willing to attend so-called tea parties on Thursday and carry signs expressing racist or fringe sentiments, a Democratic source with knowledge of the effort tells NowHampshire.com.

According to the source, who sought anonymity for fear of reprisals, the Dems’ last minute scramble reflects a growing obsession among party leaders that they need to discredit the tea party movement soon or it will overwhelm them come the November election.

Former Democratic State Party Chairman Kathy Sullivan is heading up the search, the source said. Sullivan has been calling and e-mailing liberal activists trying to get them to attend tea parties in different parts of the state and hold signs denying the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate and make racially disparaging comments to reporters.

“This is Kathy’s [Sullivan] project,” the source told NowHampshire.com. “She is absolutely obsessed with painting the tea party people as racists.”

Similar “crash the tea party” efforts are taking place throughout the country on Tax Day.

If she pulls it off, this won’t be the first time Sullivan has endeavored to manufacture a racist controversy regarding the tea party movement. Last month Sullivan and other Democratic leaders attempted to portray a “white pride” rally in Concord held by a Massachusetts-based white supremacist organization as a tea party. Sullivan was forced to retract her bogus accusation.

Nor would this maneuver be a radical departure from other stunts the party has engaged in recently. Around Easter the Democrats sent someone dressed in a bunny costume to the Republican State Committee headquarters. The stunt was widely panned, though thinly covered, and some internet wags speculated Sullivan herself was inside the suit (see below and judge for yourself.)

Sullivan has also been making herself a bit of a nuisance in Manchester. She has been attending meetings of the Board of Mayor and Aldermen to glower at Mayor Ted Gatsas.

HT: Now Hamshire and Chris Banescu

For as long as the political fight took over the past year, the abbreviated review process on the health care legislation currently pending on President Obama’s desk is unquestionably going to result in some surprises — as happens with any piece of mashed-up legislation — both for the congressmen who voted for it and for the American people.

One such surprise is found on page 158 of the legislation, which appears to create a carveout for senior staff members in the leadership offices and on congressional committees, essentially exempting those senior Democrat staffers who wrote the bill from being forced to purchase health care plans in the same way as other Americans.

A major story during the course of the health care debate was whether members of Congress would commit to placing themselves in the same health care exchanges as average citizens, or whether they would hang on to their government plans — that’s why leadership chose to add this portion to the bill, serving as a guarantee that members would participate in the same health plans as the people. Here’s the relevant text:

(D) MEMBERS OF CONGRESS IN THE EXCHANGE-

(i) REQUIREMENT- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, after the effective date of this subtitle, the only health plans that the Federal Government may make available to Members of Congress and congressional staff with respect to their service as a Member of Congress or congressional staff shall be health plans that are–

(I) created under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act); or

(II) offered through an Exchange established under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act).

But as with a lot of legislative matters, the devil is in the details — or in this case, the definitions. As anyone who’s worked on Capitol Hill knows, the personal office staff for a member is governed by different rules than those who work on committees and in the leadership offices. It appears from the way this language is written that those staffers NOT in personal offices, such as those working and paid under the committee structure (such as those working for Chairman Henry Waxman) or those working on leadership staff (such as those working for Speaker Nancy Pelosi) would be exempt from these requirements (emphasis added).

(ii) DEFINITIONS- In this section:

(I) MEMBER OF CONGRESS- The term `Member of Congress’ means any member of the House of Representatives or the Senate.

(II) CONGRESSIONAL STAFF- The term `congressional staff’ means all full-time and part-time employees employed by the official office of a Member of Congress, whether in Washington, DC or outside of Washington, DC.

Update: Grassley is renewing his push. Here’s a release from yesterday:

“It’s pretty unbelievable that the President and his closest advisors remain untouched by the reforms they pushed for the rest of the country. In other words, President Obama’s health care reform won’t apply to President Obama,” Grassley said. “Last December, the effort to apply any new law to administration political leaders was rejected by the Senate Majority Leader. But there’s no justification for the double standard, and I’ll continue to work to establish fairness.”

The Senate legislation passed last night by the House of Representatives includes an amendment Grassley sponsored and got adopted by the Finance Committee last fall to have members of Congress and their staffs get their health insurance through the same health insurance exchanges where health plans for the general public would be available. During the closed-door negotiations on the bill late last year, the Senate Majority Leader carved out Senate committee and leadership staff from this requirement.

Subsequently, Grassley and Senator Tom Coburn attempted to offer another amendment to restore the requirement during Senate debate on the health care bill, but the Senate Majority Leader would not let their amendment to fix this loophole even come up for a vote. In addition to Senate committee and leadership staff, the amendment Grassley and Coburn filed during the Senate debate would have made the President, the Vice President, top White House staff and cabinet members all get their health insurance through the newly created exchanges. It would not have applied to federal employees in the civil service.

Grassley said, “It’s only fair and logical that top administration officials, who fought so hard for passage of this overhaul of America’s health care system, experience it themselves. If it’s as good as promised, they’ll know it first-hand. If there are problems, they’ll be able to really understand them, as they should.”

HT: New Ledger