Click here and see if it doesn’t make you want to send some academic types to the work camps your own self. The only words I have for this are the sort of words I’m trying to avoid using. At least, here on the front page. Dennis the Peasant found out my filters aren’t quite so strong in the comment section.

Hat tips to Dennis the Peasant and Ace.

For those who are not aware, it came out that Rahm Emanual called a number of Democrat Party supporters ‘fuckin’ retards’ over a plan to target moderate Democrat office holders.  Rahm is the Chief of Staff for President Obama and is one verbal tough-guy.  Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin called him out on that, using her facebook page.  She called for his resignation for insulting those who have mental problems and mental challenges.

Rahm apologized, but had a bit of work to get his apology to be accepted.  Rush Limbaugh used this on his show and used the word ‘retarded’ several times.  Mrs. Palin has said that this is also ‘crude and demeaning’.  (There goes the hypocrisy charge – she also called out Rush.  Who will likely apologize, because he knows it will keep the issue up for one more day.)

For someone who is an ignorant chillbilly, a resigned failure, and utterly irrelevant (as I have read elsewhere), Mrs. Palin has an uncanny ability to get inside the heads of other politicians, to make them react to her.  She has thrown the Obama Administration of its stride before through facebook; she has now made Rahm Emanual apologize, at least twice, for the same thing.  She is inside their OODA loop.  I do not often make predictions, but I am going to guess that the White House is going to place her in their considerations when they make pronouncements or propose policy.

Not bad at all; not bad at all.  Someone ought to let Katie Couric know that it seems Mrs. Palin has done some readings that are politically relevant.

Hey, Galvin: we won, jerk.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to…provide for the common defence…do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”–the Pre-Ramble to the Constitution

The Undie-Bomber is singing like an American Idol contestant being chased by mob loansharks. Allegedly.

Which is odd; we were told he had already provided every scrap of information that could possibly be of use. Byron York:

Robert Gibbs said that “FBI interrogators believe they got valuable intelligence and were able to get all that they could out of him.” When host Chris Wallace asked, “All they could?” Gibbs answered, “Yeah.”

On January 31, top White House adviser David Axelrod told Meet the Press that Abdulmutallab “has given very valuable information to the government about activities in Yemen and some of his experiences there.” To emphasize the point, Axelrod said, “We have not lost anything as a result of how his case has been handled.”

So just a few days ago the Obama administration claimed that Abdulmutallab had given up everything he knows. Now, they claim he is giving them fresh, useful intelligence.

Obviously his father cares for him, trying to prevent his suicide terrorism. So someone got the bright idea to bring his family here and have them convince him to co-operate. Good work–but it doesn’t change the fact that he should not have been Mirandized to begin with.

Allahpundit:

Remember when Cheney first started coming after The One last year on national security and 60 Minutes asked him to respond? March 23, 2009:

“Well, there is no doubt that we [i.e. "Bush"] have not done a particularly effective job in sorting through who are truly dangerous individuals that we’ve got to make sure are not a threat to us, who are folks that we just swept up.”

The few detainees who were pure little Innocents Abroad, “swept up” by the vacuous vaccum of the Bush/Cheney/Hoover junta were released long ago. This is pure liberal hug-a-thug-ism.

“The whole premise of Guantanamo promoted by Vice President Cheney was that somehow the American system of justice was not up to the task of dealing with these terrorists. I fundamentally disagree with that.”

You fundamentally disagree with your own strawman argument? Good.

“Now, do these folks deserve Miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not,” Obama said.”

Sounds like you’ve been disagreeing with yourself.

Obama will say anything to win an argument, but in their heart of hearts, he and his bomber-coddling terror pals believe the Constitution was written to extend rights to foreign enemies.

However, the plain words of the Preamble tell us we wrote the Constitution to protect our lives and our rights.

All men brothers? Maybe–but they’re not all Americans.

“The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be defined, after the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.”–G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

Jonah Goldberg:

“I am not an ideologue,” President Obama insisted at his truly refreshing confab with the Republican caucus in Baltimore last Friday. When he heard some incredulous murmurs and chuckles from the audience in response to the idea that the most sincerely ideological president in a generation is no ideologue, he added a somewhat plaintive, “I’m not.”

“But Bill Ayers is. He’s the bomb-thrower. And Wright. Me, I’m right here in the middle.”

Of course Obama is an ideologue. The important question is whether he is sufficiently self-aware to recognize the truth.

I for one would be horrified to learn that the president is working from the assumption that ideological biases are something only other people have. That is the surest route to hubris and groupthink (which might explain Obama’s political predicament).

Obama routinely insinuates that all of the facts are on his side. He invokes a confabulated consensus of experts to suggest that there is no legitimate reason for anyone to disagree with his agenda. After all, with the eggheads and “facts” in his corner, only the other side’s ideological blinders — or stupidity — could account for any dissent. …

What I really don’t understand is what’s so great about allegedly value-free pragmatism and so bad about supposedly unthinking ideology? The truth is that the vast majority of the time, pragmatism isn’t value-free and ideology isn’t unthinking. …

The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in 1909 that if everyone becomes a pragmatist, then “ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.” Russell’s point was that there’s nothing within pragmatism to delineate the proper and just limits of pragmatism. We must look outside pragmatism for that.

Our values, customs, traditions and principles provide the insulation against the corrosive acid of undiluted pragmatism. When you bundle these things together, it’s often called an ideology, and there’s no reason to apologize for having one.

Here’s how You-Know-Who put it (even though we’re told by “experts” that his ideas are hopelessly dated, irrelevant and have nothing to teach us today):

I have always been puzzled by the inability of some political and media types to understand exactly what is meant by adherence to political principle. All too often in the press and the television evening news it is treated as a call for “ideological purity.” Whatever ideology may mean — and it seems to mean a variety of things, depending upon who is using it — it always conjures up in my mind a picture of a rigid, irrational clinging to abstract theory in the face of reality. We have to recognize that in this country “ideology” is a scare word. And for good reason. Marxist-Leninism is, to give but one example, an ideology. All the facts of the real world have to be fitted to the Procrustean bed of Marx and Lenin. If the facts don’t happen to fit the ideology, the facts are chopped off and discarded.

I consider this to be the complete opposite to principled conservatism. If there is any political viewpoint in this world which is free from slavish adherence to abstraction, it is American conservatism.

When a conservative states that the free market is the best mechanism ever devised by the mind of man to meet material needs, he is merely stating what a careful examination of the real world has told him is the truth.

When a conservative says that totalitarian Communism is an absolute enemy of human freedom he is not theorizing — he is reporting the ugly reality captured so unforgettably in the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

When a conservative says it is bad for the government to spend more than it takes in, he is simply showing the same common sense that tells him to come in out of the rain.

When a conservative says that busing does not work, he is not appealing to some theory of education — he is merely reporting what he has seen down at the local school.

When a conservative quotes Jefferson that government that is closest to the people is best, it is because he knows that Jefferson risked his life, his fortune and his sacred honor to make certain that what he and his fellow patriots learned from experience was not crushed by an ideology of empire.

Conservatism is the antithesis of the kind of ideological fanaticism that has brought so much horror and destruction to the world. The common sense and common decency of ordinary men and women, working out their own lives in their own way — this is the heart of American conservatism today. Conservative wisdom and principles are derived from willingness to learn, not just from what is going on now, but from what has happened before.

The principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered through experience in not just one generation or a dozen, but in all the combined experience of mankind. When we conservatives say that we know something about political affairs, and that we know can be stated as principles, we are saying that the principles we hold dear are those that have been found, through experience, to be ultimately beneficial for individuals, for families, for communities and for nations — found through the often bitter testing of pain, or sacrifice and sorrow.

One thing that must be made clear in post-Watergate is this: The American new conservative majority we represent is not based on abstract theorizing of the kind that turns off the American people, but on common sense, intelligence, reason, hard work, faith in God, and the guts to say: “Yes, there are things we do strongly believe in, that we are willing to live for, and yes, if necessary, to die for.” That is not “ideological purity.” It is simply what built this country and kept it great.

Let us lay to rest, once and for all, the myth of a small group of ideological purists trying to capture a majority. Replace it with the reality of a majority trying to assert its rights against the tyranny of powerful academics, fashionable left-revolutionaries, some economic illiterates who happen to hold elective office and the social engineers who dominate the dialogue and set the format in political and social affairs. If there is any ideological fanaticism in American political life, it is to be found among the enemies of freedom on the left or right — those who would sacrifice principle to theory, those who worship only the god of political, social and economic abstractions, ignoring the realities of everyday life. They are not conservatives.

Our first job is to get this message across to those who share most of our principles. If we allow ourselves to be portrayed as ideological shock troops without correcting this error we are doing ourselves and our cause a disservice. Wherever and whenever we can, we should gently but firmly correct our political and media friends who have been perpetuating the myth of conservatism as a narrow ideology. Whatever the word may have meant in the past, today conservatism means principles evolving from experience and a belief in change when necessary, but not just for the sake of change.

Hawkins on the button:

2) Liberals believe we can talk everything out with our enemies. One of the weirder quirks of liberalism is their belief that many of our bitterest enemies have rational reasons for disliking us and that can easily be talked away if they realize we’re good people. Hence, the common liberal refrain of, “Why do they hate us?” The reason this is a particularly odd belief is that liberals don’t even believe this about conservatives in the United States. The average liberal thinks that if we’re nice enough, we can reach an understanding with Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck can’t be reasoned with.

Good, astute stuff here, and you’re gonna want to read all of it.

And yeah, I did go pretty far out of my way to get that half-assed Star Trek cop in the title in, didn’t I?

DID YOU SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER TODAY?

Yoani did:

“Don’t even think about going to 23rd Street Yoani, because the Union of Young Communists is having an event,” shouted some men who got out of the Chinese-made Geely, which reminded me of a sharp pain in my lumbar zone. I lived through something similar already last November and today I would not allow them to put me head first into another car, with my son. A huge man got out of the vehicle and started to repeat his threats, “What is your name?” was Reinaldo’s question which the man never bothered to respond to. From Teo’s lanky body rose the ironic phrase, “He doesn’t say his name because he is a coward.” Worse still, Teo, worse still, he doesn’t say his name because he is not recognized as an individual, but rather simply as a voice for others much higher up. A professional camera was filming our every move, waiting for an aggressive pose, a vulgar phrase, an excess of anger. The injection of terror was brief, the birthday found us bitter. …

I will not stop writing, or Twittering; I have no plans to close my blog, nor abandon the practice of thinking with my own mind and – above all – I am not going to stop believing that they are much more frightened than I am.

(Via Babalu)

AND SOMETIMES YOU JUST DON’T KNOW

…but you still gotta try.

Our guy Andrzejewski lost in a crowded gubernatorial primary that split conservative votes. The likely winner Bill Brady seems like a decent conservative and leads Kirk Dillard, who had supported Obama.

Brady will likely go up against incumbent governor Pat Quinn.

For the “Obama” senate seat, moderate U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk, a Naval Reserve intelligence officer who supported the war and tax cuts, will run against Alexi Giannoulias, who was Obama’s personal banker in the Rezko deal. hmmm…

(Via Cassy Fiano and Stacy McCain)

First, a golden oldie via Insty and McCardle: “We need to stand up to the special interests, bring Republicans and Democrats together, and pass this bill favoring special interests immediately.”

Okay, that’s not quite what he said. But it’s exactly what he meant.

Moving on to another SHOCKING (yawn) story, the great big pile o’ lies from pResident Pinocchio’s Sermon on the Hill continues to stack up high, wide, and deep. Jacob Sullum wields the mighty Shovel of Inconvenient Truth here, here, and here.

Never have we had a more brazen, shameless, and incompetent liar as pResident than this putz. Even Nixon was more convincingly sincere than this guy. With Obama, it’s as if he doesn’t care a whit whether we believe his horseshit or not.

Until the socialists are kicked to the curb. An e-mail to Stephen Spruill from a Corner reader:

As the owner of a 16 year old wholesale computer parts company with about 50 total employees here and in England, I can tell you it’s not about easy loans and tax credits for hiring.

As you say, it is risk aversion. It is the knowledge that my taxes are going to go up and also we just don’t see other businesses willing to take inventory positions right now.

$5000 tax credit to hire someone? That really sounds like a proposal from someone who has never hired a single person in the private sector.

Small business will start to hire when one big thing happens.

Sales Growth. End of story.

It is amazing to me that they don’t get that if they did one thing, cut the corporate tax rate, business growth would happen almost immediately.

Spruill nails it again in his response; rather, his colleague Kevin Williamson does, from the subscriber side of the NR house:

The good news is that, when it comes to reshaping the U.S. mortgage market [any market for that matter — ed.], the Obama administration’s top guns are bringing to bear all of the brisk, rough-’n’-ready entrepreneurial know-how they picked up in their previous careers as university professors, nonprofit activists, and holders of political sinecures.

The witless “experts” of the “educated class” are much more interested in keeping the proles in their proper place — under their thumbs –than in truly fixing anything they’ve broken. And their only fix is the usual one: more of the same, until we give up, stop complaining, and recognize that they’re smarter than we are, and know more about running a business than people who actually, y’know, run businesses.

IF YOU GO CARRYING PICTURES OF CHAIRMAN MAO

…you can get a job with the administration!

From Charles Krauthammer’s brilliant essay:

Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice. Two decades into the unipolar world that came about with the fall of the Soviet Union, America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance. Decline–or continued ascendancy–is in our hands. …

In a word, it is a foreign policy designed to produce American decline–to make America essentially one nation among many. And for that purpose, its domestic policies are perfectly complementary.

Domestic policy, of course, is not designed to curb our power abroad. But what it lacks in intent, it makes up in effect. Decline will be an unintended, but powerful, side effect of the New Liberalism’s ambition of moving America from its traditional dynamic individualism to the more equitable but static model of European social democracy.

This affects the ability to project power. Growth provides the sinews of dominance–the ability to maintain a large military establishment capable of projecting power to all corners of the earth. … This shift in resources is not hypothetical. It has already begun. …

Nor are these the only trade-offs. Primacy in space–a galvanizing symbol of American greatness, so deeply understood and openly championed by John Kennedy–is gradually being relinquished. In the current reconsideration of all things Bush, the idea of returning to the moon in the next decade is being jettisoned. After next September, the space shuttle will never fly again, and its replacement is being reconsidered and delayed. That will leave the United States totally incapable of returning even to near-Earth orbit, let alone to the moon. Instead, for years to come, we shall be entirely dependent on the Russians, or perhaps eventually even the Chinese.

We have cancelled the F-22. We’ve slashed missile defense funding, standing down systems in the East (Europe) and the West (Alaska). A newly aggressive China has demanded Obama not meet with the Dalai Lama and that we not sell arms to Taiwan.

Bill Gertz:

The White House National Security Council recently directed U.S. spy agencies to lower the priority placed on intelligence collection for China, amid opposition to the policy change from senior intelligence leaders who feared it would hamper efforts to obtain secrets about Beijing’s military and its cyber-attacks.

The downgrading of intelligence gathering on China was challenged by Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair and CIA Director Leon E. Panetta after it was first proposed in interagency memorandums in October, current and former intelligence officials said.

China is thought to want to place killer satellites in orbit–and we just gutted our space program. Was that also a Chinese demand?

Krauthammer again:

Because, while globalization has produced in some the illusion that human nature has changed, it has not. The international arena remains a Hobbesian state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power. If we voluntarily renounce much of ours, others will not follow suit. They will fill the vacuum. Inevitably, an inversion of power relations will occur.

Do we really want to live under unknown, untested, shifting multipolarity? Or even worse, under the gauzy internationalism of the New Liberalism with its magically self-enforcing norms? This is sometimes passed off as “realism.” In fact, it is the worst of utopianisms, a fiction that can lead only to chaos. Indeed, in an age on the threshold of hyper-proliferation, it is a prescription for catastrophe.

Heavy are the burdens of the hegemon. After the blood and treasure expended in the post-9/11 wars, America is quite ready to ease its burden with a gentle descent into abdication and decline.

Decline is a choice. More than a choice, a temptation. How to resist it?

Read it all.

PRIMARY COLOR COMMENTARY

First a little history. You may remember this post from Frank Salvato from before the election. Mr. Salvato tried to warn us, and has been proven right and vindicated 100%:

I live in Illinois, just outside of Chicago…this puts me in a unique position to afford you a glimpse of things to come for our nation should Barack Obama attain the Oval Office, and especially if Democrats maintain or increase their control in Congress.

Under Blagojevich, the state’s unfunded pension debt is the largest in the United States. In 2005 that amounted to $35 billion. But that didn’t stop Blagojevich from raiding the State University Pension System to the tune of $1.2 billion in order to “balance the budget,” something that still eludes the governor. Additionally, Blagojevich raised licensing fees on auto dealers almost 20-fold, required small businesses to print all of their own forms when filing state paperwork and proposed raising the fee for the Illinois Firearm Owners Identification Card from $50 to $500. He said the increased FOID fee, “…was necessary so people would think twice about wanting to own a gun.”…

We here is Illinois understand the pitfalls of a one party, Progressive-Left, socialist system of government. In a state where the largest urban locale accepts as unavoidable the notion that dead men can vote, sometimes twice, the art of committing voter fraud and eliminating opposition candidates – sometimes of the same party – is handed down from generation to generation in a quest to maintain a stranglehold on power for “the machine.”… Should the voters of America foolishly opt to discard liberty, opportunity and self-reliance in a self-centered quest for unearned wealth and a fraudulently engineered societal equality, we will come to rue the rhetoric of “hope and change,“ just as we will all soon be weeping for the freedoms we so imprudently cast aside.

Sweetness & Light:

Known for its corrupt politics — Blago’s predecessor, Republican George Ryan, is still in jail on corruption charges — Illinois is also suffering an economic meltdown, the kind that creates a perfect storm for political upsets.

“Unemployment is nearing 11%, the state deficit could top $11 billion, and more residents are moving out than in. Voters are also angry about the governor’s proposal for a 50% increase in state income taxes, and his budget-cutting early release of 1,700 state inmates, some of whom have already been re-arrested.

“Democrats are starting to realize that every single Democrat in the country is vulnerable now,” said Jerry Morrison, political director of the state Service Employees International Union. “It’s a very angry electorate, a very volatile electorate.”"

Cassy Fiano reports here.

Candidate interviews and election reporting at the Sun-Times.

Several posts at Campaign Spot, where Jim Geraghty quips:

I suspect television announcers everywhere would be relieved if Adam Andrzejewski officially changed his name to “the Polish kid.”

Because if life has taught us anything, it’s that you’re just not going to rise very far in politics if you’re a young, skinny Illinois politician with an unusual name.

UPDATE: And, of course, RSM is still on the beat:

9:50 p.m. — Strange: Nearly two hours afte the polls closed, zero precincts reporting in St. Clair County, a St. Louis suburb that should be strong for Andrzejewski, who has 40% of the vote in neighboring Madison County, which has already reported 70% of its precints.

Ann Althousehas a post up on a poll commissioned from Daily Kos about Republican beliefs.  I will link to Althouse and her commenters because (a) she does a good job of stirring the pot, (b) her commenters are entertaining, and (c) I won’t link to Kos (I mean – why bother?).

A few years ago I did a post on public polling, linking to the National Council on Public Polls, a polling industry organization.  Their website is good – the NCPP continues to call for transparency and high standards in polling and is well worth reading.  So read the NCPP site – especially its article on 20 Questions a Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results.   And read Althouse on this.

(BTW – I figured out that to get all the toolbar I had to begin a post, save, and then go into the post and edit.  Funny – but that seems to work.)

It all comes down to this:

In 2008, government spent 38% of everything produced in the U.S. (gross domestic product) and last year the figure shot above 40%, perhaps as high as 43% though the numbers are still being crunched.

When government spends so much, less is left for people to spend as they choose. Only once before in American history did government spending cross that 40% threshold — to wage World War II. Nothing today justifies a similar confiscation of nearly half of people’s resources.

Amazingly, though the 40% mark is being crossed, politicians continue to propose costly programs that you will have to pay for with the fruits of your labor. No matter who your employer is, you’re actually toiling for the politicians. They’re not public servants. They’re making you a servant. How much more freedom are you willing to give up?

I bet no member of Congress has ever asked you: “Would you rather buy something for your family or re-cover your sofa instead of funding National Public Radio? Would you rather make your own car payments instead of bailing out the auto industry or expanding aid to Africa?

Washington politicians don’t want to hear your answer.

Of course they don’t. McCaughey answers her own question — all of her questions, and ours — later in the piece:

The level of public spending is one indication of the power of government and the loss of individual freedom.

And there you have it: our masters are for the one and against the other. Which is why these questions will continue to go unasked…and unanswered.

Shameless, groveling, miserable disgrace to everything they supposedly stand for:

The news service Reuters withdrew a story last night titled “Backdoor taxes to hit middle class” after the White House reached out and pointed out “errors of fact.”

The story, which claimed the White House’s deficit reduction plan relies on raising taxes against the middle class by allowing tax cuts to expire, was withdrawn at about 8 p.m. Monday, according to Yahoo timestamps. The original story ran at 4 p.m. The withdrawal promises a replacement story later this week.

“The story went out, and it shouldn’t have gone out,” said Courtney Dolan, a spokeswoman for Reuters. “It had significant errors of fact.”

Yeah, right. The only “error” was that it actually contained facts. And that, the Obama junta cannot and will not stand still for.

Don’t for a minute kid yourself that it’s dead, that we finally “won,” or that Democrat Socialists have given up. They haven’t, they won’t, and they never, ever will. Count on it. Karl gets the main point right, and the lesser one wrong:

The only safe conclusion is that the Democrats are, at some level, still trying to pass ObamaCare, including the politically risky step returning it to the front burner closer to the election…

The lesson here is that time is the enemy of ObamaCare. Then again, time has always been the enemy of ObamaCare.

Time is not the enemy for these lying sneak-thieves. Their true enemy — their only enemy — is the staunch, passionate, and unwavering resistance of freedom-loving people to the grasp of the ever-multiplying tentacles of the Leviathan State.

Alas, not literally. But this is almost as good:

Olbermann does not like women, especially attractive and/or accomplished women. Nor is he particularly fond of men. He is forever the awkward, angry teenager of his high school days who mystified psychologists, the überdork whose cruel taunts of the athletes he covered as a sports broadcaster were legendary, even as he yearned to be thought of as the stud that covers studs. Give it up, a Philadelphia Inquirer sports columnist suggested after watching Olbermann ridicule the appearance of an overweight athlete. He noted that the hefty lefty is “so bloated he looks as if he swallowed Dan Patrick [his ESPN co-anchor] back in 1997.”

And with that, the guy’s just getting warmed up. Enjoy.

Obama’s Purpleshirt goon squads are taking the offensive in his War on America:

Organized labor may be putting their dollars behind an online effort to take down Tea Party groups and their “radical ideas.”
 
A new Web site, TheTeaPartyIsOver.org, has connections to unions, including the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
 
The American Public Policy Committee pays for the site, whose self-declared mission is to “prevent the Tea Party’s dangerous ideas from gaining legislative traction.”

So look for the beatings to continue, I guess. And be ready to swing back at Il Douche’s jackbooted commie thugs — hard.

CHICAGO VOTES…AND VOTES AND VOTES AND VOTES

…so make sure you vote, too!

Geraghty on taking the “Blago Seat” (…and maybe the “Obama Seat”, too–if you can call it that since he was only there a few weeks).

Red State:

This guy is an American success story. He’s the type of guy we always say we want in politics, but then ignore once he enters the arena. Except this time people are not ignoring him.

Stacy McCain:

Considered how much other people have sacrificed for the Andrzejewski campaign — including his wife and three young daughters — I guess I can swallow my pride and aggregate all this morning’s news from all the people who don’t give me any credit.

Credited, sir.

McCain at the Spectator:

Andrzejewski says he was inspired by Friday’s remarks from the Cold War hero who led Poland’s defiance of the Soviet Union. “Walesa said that it was impossible to defeat the tanks, the airplanes and the guns of the communists. Solidarity prevailed because their principles and values were stronger.” …

“The Chicago Tribune didn’t even send a reporter to cover the Lech Walesa endorsement,” Andrzejewski said Sunday. “They took seven sentences, 113 words, off the Associated Press wire.… They’re doing everything they can to ignore our campaign.”

Adam Andrzejewski will check the Democrat legislature, open up the Secret Budget and conduct a deep audit, saving billions for the Illinois citizens who still care about honest government.

Vote Today!

As lots of folks have said, when the US finally nationalizes it, where will the world’s elites go for health care?

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams is set to undergo heart surgery this week in the United States.

CBC News confirmed Monday that Williams, 60, left the province earlier in the day and will have surgery later in the week.

The premier’s office provided few details, beyond confirming that he would have heart surgery and saying that it was not necessarily a routine procedure.

Government health care: good enough for you wretched pee-ons. But not for your benevolent rulers.

Enemy of the State Darleen nails it. No excerpt necessary; just go check it out.

Update! Obama owns these monstrous deficits — lock, stock, barrel, title, and deed:

In June 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama declared that President Bush had run “the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history.” At the time Obama made that statement, the highest deficit run up by the Bush administration was $412.7 billion. Today, President Obama released his administration’s new 10-year budget outlook and it never shows an annual deficit lower than $739 billion.

To be clear, this isn’t meant as a defense of the Bush administration’s fiscal record, which I view as completely atrocious.  The point is that as horrendous as the Bush administration’s record is, the Obama administration is far worse, even if you give Obama some leeway.

And let’s not forget, either, that not one dime of those deficits Obama is so fond of blaming on “the previous administration” did the duplicitous son of a bitch either vote against or veto. The despicable liar may not be wholly responsible, but his fingerprints are all over every penny of it. Period.

We couldn’t:

Our federal government, once limited to certain core functions, now dominates virtually every area of American life. Its authority is all but unquestioned, seemingly restricted only by expediency and the occasional budget constraint.

Congress passes massive pieces of legislation with little serious deliberation, bills that are written in secret and generally unread before the vote. The national legislature is increasingly a supervisory body overseeing a vast array of administrative policymakers and rulemaking agencies. Although the Constitution vests legislative powers in Congress, the majority of “laws” are promulgated in the guise of “regulations” by bureaucrats who are mostly unaccountable and invisible to the public.

Americans are wrapped in an intricate web of government policies and procedures. States, localities, and private institutions are submerged by national programs. The states, which increasingly administer policies emanating from Washington, act like supplicants seeking relief from the federal government. Growing streams of money flow from Washington to every congressional district and municipality, as well as to businesses, organizations, and individuals that are subject to escalating federal regulations.

This bureaucracy has become so overwhelming that it’s not clear how modern presidents can fulfill their constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” President Obama, like his recent predecessors, has appointed a swarm of policy “czars” — über-bureaucrats operating outside the cabinet structure and perhaps the Constitution — to promote political objectives in an administration supposedly under executive control.

Is this the outcome of the greatest experiment in self-government mankind ever has attempted?

So it would seem, tragically enough. Read it all; it provides an excellent overview of how far we’ve strayed from Constitutional government, and why and how that’s happened. Perhaps the fall was inevitable, perhaps not, but it damned sure looks irreversible.

I heard a bit of Mark Levin’s radio show last night, wherein he wondered if, since the Left has effectively nullified the Constitution with their insidious “living document” subterfuge, there are ANY limits to federal power they would recognize? This is answered clearly enough by an influential progressivist thinker and advisor to Hoover, FDR, and Truman:

It is not admitted that there are no limits to the action of the state, but on the other hand it is fully conceded that there are no ‘natural rights’ which bar the way.

This is not only an unsavory, dangerous idea, but a downright evil one. “It is not admitted” — for the sake of political expediency. But it ain’t as if there’s any use in denying it, either.

Like I said, read all of this one. He’s actually a lot more hopeful about the long-term prospects of restoring our liberty than I am.

Apparently, Bill Watterson still has it:

Readers became friends with your characters, so understandably, they grieved — and are still grieving — when the strip ended. What would you like to tell them?

This isn’t as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I’d said pretty much everything I had come there to say.

It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason “Calvin and Hobbes” still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I’ve never regretted stopping when I did.

How soon after the U.S. Postal Service issues the Calvin stamp will you send a letter with one on the envelope?

Immediately. I’m going to get in my horse and buggy and snail-mail a check for my newspaper subscription.

Heh. I know people who named their kids Calvin for…well, the obvious reason. And here’s a classic:

I’ve had occasion many times over the years to mention that when Reynolds decides to turn on the snark machine, hold onto your hats, because he’s as good as anybody at it, and better than most; he just keeps it a little more in check than some of us more, umm, fiery types do. But there’s no denying that when he does decide to unload on somebody, it’s always a joy to behold.

So some mouthbreathing Ozombie flings this garbage at him, which we’ve all seen plenty of: “And how many times did you take to the streets to protest the deficit during the Bush presidency? I’m guessing zero.” Glenn’s response is just another perfect example of his ability to float like a butterfly and sting like a big fuckin’ hammer upside an empty block head:

You see this kind of thing pop up in comments a lot, and sometimes even out of the mouth of the less-honest variety of pundit. Which means, of course, that once again it’s time to roll out this graphic:

Notice anything? Like maybe how Bush’s deficits are dwarfed by Obama’s? And maybe how the deficit was falling throughout Bush’s second term? Until the very end, when TARP — hardly popular with the Tea Party crowd — rolled out. The “Bush was as big a spender as Obama” line is just a flat-out lie, which the apologists for the powers that be hope you’ll buy because…well, because a lie is pretty much all they’ve got at this point.

It’s all they ever had. It’s all they ever will have, given the monumental failure of their socialist ideas every single time they’ve been tried.

Beautiful pwnage, Glenn. The only way they get by with their lying bullshit is if we let them, by failing to call them out on it.

SAME AS THE OLD SOLIDARITY?

“Noticing the drabness with which people are dressed, Galbraith remarks that it “may be the problem of socialism. Planners can provide for everything but color, and they cannot allow for that because so much of it is associated with idiocy great and small. In any case, the people of Poland have more liberty than variety.” One of the great advantages of Galbraith-style planning is the elimination of “idiocy great and small,” of the kind that people are apt to embrace when they have the choice. The solution: eliminate choice. You can have any color you like, so long as it’s chosen by the philosopher-king.”–Theodore Dalrymple, “The Galbraith Revival”

Via Freedom Eden, Ronald Reagan on Christmas, 1981:

Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders are imprisoned, their fate unknown. Factories, mines, universities, and homes have been assaulted.

The Polish government has trampled underfoot solemn commitments to the UN Charter and the Helsinki accords. It has even broken the Gdansk agreement of August 1980, by which the Polish government recognized the basic right of its people to form free trade unions and to strike.

The tragic events now occurring in Poland, almost two years to the day after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, have been precipitated by public and secret pressure from the Soviet Union. It is no coincidence that Soviet Marshal Kulikov, chief of the Warsaw Pact forces, and other senior Red Army officers were in Poland while these outrages were being initiated. And it is no coincidence that the martial law proclamations imposed in December by the Polish government were being printed in the Soviet Union in September.

The target of this repression is the Solidarity Movement, but in attacking Solidarity its enemies attack an entire people. Ten million of Poland’s 36 million citizens are members of Solidarity. Taken together with their families, they account for the overwhelming majority of the Polish nation. By persecuting Solidarity, the Polish government wages war against its own people.

I urge the Polish government and its allies to consider the consequences of their actions. How can they possibly justify using naked force to crush a people who ask for nothing more than the right to lead their own lives in freedom and dignity? Brute force may intimidate, but it cannot form the basis of an enduring society, and the ailing Polish economy cannot be rebuilt with terror tactics. …

I want emphatically to state tonight that if the outrages in Poland do not cease, we cannot and will not conduct “business as usual” with the perpetrators and those who aid and abet them. Make no mistake, their crime will cost them dearly in their future dealings with America and free peoples everywhere. I do not make this statement lightly or without serious reflection. …

When 19th century Polish patriots rose against foreign oppressors, their rallying cry was, “For our freedom and yours.” Well, that motto still rings true in our time. There is a spirit of solidarity abroad in the world tonight that no physical force can crush. It crosses national boundaries and enters into the hearts of men and women everywhere. In factories, farms, and schools, in cities and towns around the globe, we the people of the Free World stand as one with our Polish brothers and sisters. Their cause is ours, and our prayers and hopes go out to them this Christmas.

Lech Walesa in the WSJ, upon Reagan’s death in 2004:

GDANSK, Poland–When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can’t be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989.

Poles fought for their freedom for so many years that they hold in special esteem those who backed them in their struggle. Support was the test of friendship. President Reagan was such a friend. His policy of aiding democratic movements in Central and Eastern Europe in the dark days of the Cold War meant a lot to us. We knew he believed in a few simple principles such as human rights, democracy and civil society. He was someone who was convinced that the citizen is not for the state, but vice-versa, and that freedom is an innate right.

I often wondered why Ronald Reagan did this, taking the risks he did, in supporting us at Solidarity, as well as dissident movements in other countries behind the Iron Curtain, while pushing a defense buildup that pushed the Soviet economy over the brink. Let’s remember that it was a time of recession in the U.S. and a time when the American public was more interested in their own domestic affairs. It took a leader with a vision to convince them that there are greater things worth fighting for. Did he seek any profit in such a policy? Though our freedom movements were in line with the foreign policy of the United States, I doubt it.

I distinguish between two kinds of politicians. There are those who view politics as a tactical game, a game in which they do not reveal any individuality, in which they lose their own face. There are, however, leaders for whom politics is a means of defending and furthering values. For them, it is a moral pursuit. They do so because the values they cherish are endangered. They’re convinced that there are values worth living for, and even values worth dying for. Otherwise they would consider their life and work pointless. Only such politicians are great politicians and Ronald Reagan was one of them. …

Every time I met President Reagan, at his private estate in California or at the Lenin shipyard here in Gdansk, I was amazed by his modesty and even temper. He didn’t fit the stereotype of the world leader that he was. Privately, we were like opposite sides of a magnet: He was always composed; I was a raging tower of emotions eager to act. We were so different yet we never had a problem with understanding one another. I respected his honesty and good humor. It gave me confidence in his policies and his resolve. He supported my struggle, but what unified us, unmistakably, were our similar values and shared goals. …

As I say repeatedly, we owe so much to all those who supported us. Perhaps in the early years, we didn’t express enough gratitude. We were so busy introducing all the necessary economic and political reforms in our reborn country. Yet President Ronald Reagan must have realized what remarkable changes he brought to Poland, and indeed the rest of the world. And I hope he felt gratified. He should have.

Pres. Walesa today:

“The world has no leadership. The United States was always the last resort and hope for all other nations. There was the hope that whenever something was going wrong one could count on the United States. Today we lost that hope. But today we have hope in Mr. Andrzejewski and his generation to put in one more time the proper values.”

“I admire Adam Andrzejewski because I see in him a young Ronald Reagan, my great friend, who helped free Poland from the tyranny of Communism and gave us a road map for economic success. Mr. Andrzejewski has a vision, and more importantly, a worakable plan to bring economic growth to Illinois.”

Part of the energetic young Andrzejewski’s plan is to use all the transparency Obama promised but isn’t using and conduct a deep audit of Illinois, which should be like finding, oh, $3 billion on the sidewalk.

When Lech Walesa and his nation were held hostage by Communism, Ronald Reagan and America stood by them.

And now that America is plagued by “Socialism-Lite”, Walesa is returning the favor and standing by us.

That is a true friend.

Solidarity Yesterday, Today…and Forever!