Humor, Common Sense and Liberal Politicians

"If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government,then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools." Plato

What US Conservatives Can Learn From Canadians

[From article]
The CBC is a cultural Marxist production that never met a Conservative policy it liked. It sees its mandate as constantly attacking every Conservative idea or piece of legislation while propagandizing on behalf of multiculturalism; Islam as a religion of peace; anti-Zionism; and radical movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Idle No More, and #BlackLivesMatter.
[. . .]
Afraid of giving its foes something to be offended by, the Conservative government funded its own demise.
No less catastrophic, the Conservatives failed to pass legislation to radically protect free speech across the country – legislation that would outrank our provincial kangaroo courts, known as Human Rights Commissions, whose mandate has been to prosecute individual citizens and groups on the flimsy grounds of "hate speech."
[. . .]
this signal failure guarantees that open discussions essential to Canada's future as a robust democracy – especially conversations about mass immigration, Islamic terrorism, and the relation between the two – will continue to be curtailed by the left-leaning proponents of censorship in the name of social "harmony."
[. . .]
Perhaps most damagingly, the Conservatives attempted to fight the election chiefly on the basis of fact and logical argument rather than engaging the passions and patriotic sentiments of the electorate. They were unable to rebut progressivist attacks portraying them as hateful, bigoted, backward, divisive, and exclusionary. They had no vision of Canada to offer that was not simply a less enthusiastic version of the feminist, multicultural, and "diverse" image championed by the other parties.
[. . .]
Canada's Conservatives lost the election in part because they shrank from being truly conservative. Similarly, should the Republicans lose in November 2016, it will be because they failed to be truly republican.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/02/a_lesson_to_republicans_in_canadas_conservative_party_defeat.html

February 7, 2016
A Lesson to Republicans in Canada's Conservative Party Defeat
By David Solway and Janice Fiamengo

Three Books About History of Liberalism

CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM, USA / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
John C. Calhoun was regarded by some as a liberal because of his defense of individual liberty—albeit for the rights of whites to own slaves.

[From article]
In a famous incident at a political banquet in 1830, President Andrew Jackson offered a toast to “Our federal Union, it must be preserved”—to which Calhoun, his vice president, pointedly responded with a toast to “the Union, next to our liberty, the most dear.” The liberty he meant was, of course, the freedom of Southern whites to own slaves; and he was devoted to this liberty to the point of advocating secession if it were threatened by the federal government. If liberalism is the political philosophy that takes liberty as its primary value, doesn’t that mean that Calhoun was a liberal par excellence?
[. . .]
two recent books [. . .] are otherwise diametrically opposed in their ideological and methodological approaches. Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, by the distinguished British journalist Edmund Fawcett, is an accessible account of major liberal politicians and thinkers of the last two centuries, written from a position of unillusioned but profound solidarity with the liberal tradition. On the other hand, as its title suggests, Liberalism: A Counter-History, by the Italian political theorist Domenico Losurdo, takes a debunking approach to that tradition. Losurdo argues that liberalism has never been interested in true, universal liberation but was instead an ideology by which privileged elites justified and celebrated their domination over workers, slaves, and conquered native peoples.
[. . .]
if an out-and-out white supremacist and celebrator of slavery like Calhoun was a liberal in good standing, the name “liberal” can hardly function as an honorific. That is precisely the conclusion reached by Losurdo, who writes that in Calhoun, “we are dealing with one of the major authors and great minds in the liberal tradition and pantheon.” And if that is so, “we can no longer maintain the traditional (and edifying) image of liberalism as the thought and volition of liberty.”
[. . .]



THE BOWES MUSEUM, BARNARD CASTLE, COUNTY DURHAM, UK / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
For political theorist Larry Siedentop, liberalism’s roots go all the way back to Saint Paul’s emphasis on individual conscience.

it is possible to be devoted to liberty but not to be a liberal—indeed, to be antiliberal. If so, then liberalism, despite its name, is not exactly a philosophy of liberty after all. It is, rather, what Fawcett considers it: a practice of politics, a way of responding to the challenges of capitalist modernity, a pursuit of a set of values that are often difficult to reconcile.
[. . .]
By liberalism, Fawcett and Losurdo—and Larry Siedentop, in his important 2014 study Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism—mean rather different things; but none is talking about the left wing of the Democratic Party. That position in twenty-first-century American politics is just one on the broad historical spectrum of liberalism, and, depending on which of these writers you listen to, the spectrum becomes broad indeed.
By liberalism, Fawcett and Losurdo—and Larry Siedentop, in his important 2014 study Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism—mean rather different things; but none is talking about the left wing of the Democratic Party. That position in twenty-first-century American politics is just one on the broad historical spectrum of liberalism, and, depending on which of these writers you listen to, the spectrum becomes broad indeed.
[. . .]
Locke figures in any textbook of political philosophy as one of the founders of liberal thought
[. . .]
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were also the height of the Atlantic slave trade and the expropriation of the American Indians; and in Losurdo’s view, these crimes were absolutely integral to the development of liberalism. “The rise of the two liberal countries either side of the Atlantic,” he writes, “involved a process of systematic expropriation and practical genocide.”
[. . .]
If freedom, individualism, and equality are at the heart of liberalism, Siedentop believes, all these things were not so much modern inventions as Christian inheritances.
[. . .]
Is there a common thread running through all the varied uses of the name “liberal,” or would it be better for the word to be retired, in favor of more relevant distinctions?
[. . .]
It may be hard to define because it is the air we all breathe and the lens through which we see all political issues.
Indeed, the great story of the modern world is the triumph of liberalism—defined loosely as the politics whose primary value is individual freedom—over challenges from all its competitors. First, in the nineteenth century, liberalism overthrew monarchy, feudal privilege, and chattel slavery. In the twentieth, it fought a great war against fascism and a long cold war against Communism, winning both.
[. . .]
in its traditional heartland of Western Europe and America—the countries Fawcett writes about—liberalism remains predominant, though not unchallenged.
[. . .]
the politics known in America [. . .] —that is, between “left” and “right”—both sides appeal to identical liberal values of freedom and fairness.
[. . .]
no American politician advocates antiliberal principles such as hierarchies based on birth, or the abolition of private property, or the power of race and blood. We are happily constrained by the Constitution to frame all our political debates in liberal terms, as a matter of ensuring the rights of individuals.
[Is this guy paying attention to what is going on in the United States?]
[. . .]
One of the defining achievements of nineteenth-century English liberalism, for instance, was to end the legal disabilities for Catholics, Dissenters, Jews, and others who did not take communion in the Church of England. For their part, religious institutions recognized this threat—none more so than the Catholic Church, which waged a long battle against liberal modernity. The gallery of liberal heroes includes many, from Galileo to Darwin, who stood up against supernatural claims to authority in the name of reason and science.
[. . .]
the paradox that the same men who created the United States as a haven of freedom and democracy, who gave the world its most inspiring defense of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” were also slaveholders. Thomas Jefferson,George Washington, James Madison—all participated in that world-historical crime. And these same leaders, and later arch-democrats like Andrew Jackson, were also responsible for the conquest of North America and the expulsion or elimination of its aboriginal inhabitants.
[. . .]
Locke was a shareholder in the slave-trading Royal African Company. Tocqueville was a cheerleader for the French conquest of Algeria and endorsed genocidal measures against the indigenous Arabs.
[. . .]
American historians reserve the term “liberal” or “progressive” for Lincoln’s Republican Party, which fought and won the Civil War.
[. . .]
Much of the globe still lacks the freedom that the West takes for granted; and it is precisely at moments of discouragement that liberalism itself is most vulnerable to attacks from more confident and simplistic ideologies.

http://www.city-journal.org/2016/26_1_melancholy-liberalism.html

ADAM KIRSCH
Melancholy Liberalism
Has a beleaguered intellectual tradition lost its optimism?
Winter 2016

Mob Rule Ascending In The United States

[From article]
But the flag should remain -- especially right now.
This is precisely the opposite of the fashionable view, of course. It holds that especially right now, in this time of pain, sorrow and efforts at reconciliation (by some), it’s an ideal time to dispense with the flag. I say otherwise, but not mainly because the flag is viewed by millions as a symbol of Southern heritage, of state’s rights or of defiance against an increasingly despotic federal government. The real reason is simple. Is removing the flag really a good idea?
If so, it’ll also be a good idea a year from now.
What currently exists is an emotionally charged environment, and, as a rule, that’s the worst possible time to make decisions. A fit of emotion caused the ancient Athenians to condemn philosopher Socrates and force him to drink the hemlock; they regretted the decision almost immediately afterwards and erected a statue in his honor. But that’s the way of the mob — it’s an emotional entity whose feelings change with the wind
[. . .]
“conservatives” side with Barack Obama, who said that the flag “belongs in a museum.” This is hardly convincing from a man who also apparently believes the American Constitution belongs in a museum.
It’s not that the mob is always wrong, mind you. It’s that, governed not by reason but emotion, its verdicts are hit-or-miss propositions. This is why we eschew mob justice in our legal system and have trials commencing well after a crime’s commission;
[. . .]
What’s wrought by lying and convincing blacks they’re under assault (when most interracial crime is black-on-white)?
[. . .]
Roof himself, I’d be willing to bet, was raised by liberals. How do I know? It’s simple profiling: traditionalists don’t generally give their kids non-traditional names, such as “Dylann” (was there a two-for-one deal on n’s that day?) or “Storm,” Roof’s middle name. They’re also not going to be a pot-bellied 52-year-old man with multiple tattoos and nipple rings, like Roof’s father. The clincher is that we haven’t heard a peep about the Roof family’s political leanings, even though you can bet the media have investigated. You can also bet that if the Roofs were conservatives, we would have heard about it -- ad nauseam.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/06/keep_the_confederate_flag_flying.html 

June 24, 2015
Keep the Confederate Flag Flying
By Selwyn Duke

Liberal Journalist Attacks On Women

Liberal Journalist Attacks On Women



Uploaded on Mar 9, 2010
Sex, Violence and Hate: The Top 10 Most Disgusting Attacks on Conservative Women






Published on Mar 5, 2012
In light of the Rush Limbaugh 'slut' controversy, its important to take a look at the widespread misogyny talk of major left figures. Ed Shultz, Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher.

Public Sector Unions Force Members to Pay Dues, Use Taxpayer Funds for Political Purposes

[From article]
America’s four largest labor unions spent more than $179 million last year promoting big government, and did so using taxpayer money.
Public-sector unions were crucial to the passage of Obamacare, and in 2014 they helped push progressive priorities including minimum-wage hikes and amnesty for illegal immigrants.
It’s widely known the National Education Association, Service Employees International Union, American Federation of Teachers and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees are among the country’s top campaign donors.
Not content to fund politicians who will advance their agenda, NEA, SEIU, AFT and AFSCME also bankroll dozens of think tanks and activist groups fighting for bigger government in the name of “social justice.”
[. . .]
F. Vincent Vernuccio, labor policy director at the free-market Mackinac Center for Public Policy, [. . ] said public-sector union funding of politicians and advocacy groups yields more taxpayer money for public-sector unions to spend on politicians and advocacy groups.
“This cycle goes on and on, and everyone is happy … everyone except for the taxpayer, who at the end of the day is stuck footing the bill,” he said.
Public-sector unions’ political spending is a disservice to the 40 percent of union members who vote Republican, Vernuccio said.
[. . .]
Combined, the four unions take dues from the paychecks of roughly 7 million teachers and government workers. Through payroll dues deduction, public agencies redirect public funds to NEA, SEIU, AFT and AFSCME at taxpayer expense.
In 21 states, teachers and other public employees who decline union membership can be forced to pay union “agency fees” in order to have a job.
Based on the unions’ annual reports to the U.S. Department of Labor, last year AFSCME spent $65 million on campaign contributions, lobbying and political advocacy ,while SEIU spent $52 million, NEA spent $35 million and AFT spent $27 million.

http://watchdog.org/210506/taxpayer-big-labor/

Taxpayer money fuels big labor’s political machine
By Jason Hart

April 8, 2015 /

Unintended Consequences Of Social Justice

[From article]
And today, a primarily black community is suffering a very real negative consequence of the most recent social justice project these black “leaders” and sympathetic white liberal and socialist activists took upon themselves. Fusion.net has posted an article reporting that home values in Ferguson, Missouri have dropped drastically since the demonstrations and rioting that occurred last summer following the police shooting death of Michael Brown.
An article entitled “Ferguson home values are plummeting, and residents are feeling the pain” reports that prior to Brown’s death, the average 2014 selling price of a home was $66,764. For the last quarter of the same year, that average selling price dropped 46% to $36,168. And the trend downward is even more dramatic so far in 2015, where the average selling price is now down to $22,951. Consider the impact such a dramatic reduction in the value of your home would have on your life.
[. . .]
That is a real estate disaster, folks, and it is directly attributable to the fact that so-called black leaders including Eric Holder, and Barack Obama, decided to insert themselves into a tragic but fairly routine black community shooting death and turn it into a national incident by claiming that it was both unjustified and racially motivated. As we all now know, both of those claims have since been disproved and the police exonerated.
[. . .]
How do you suppose those homeowners in Ferguson who had no part in the demonstrations may feel about social justice at this moment? Like most Americans, their homes are the bedrock of their personal wealth.
[. . .]
There’s an old saying that you should never foul your own nest. Critics of black rioting have pointed out the truth of that old folk wisdom for years. Sadly, too many black communities like Ferguson have learned that the hard way. I suspect that the so-called black leaders and the liberal socialist do-gooders know it quite well.
They just don’t give a damn, because it’s not their nest.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/03/those_unintended_liberal_consequences_continue.html

March 17, 2015
Those unintended liberal consequences continue...
By Russ Vaughn

Liberals Driven By Revenge

[From article]
The left’s entanglement with vengeance is easily understood -- it has nothing else. Their messiah has failed to lead them into Eden -- his policies, both domestic and foreign, have failed catastrophically one after another, leaving him nothing to show for six years as president and a nightmare gauntlet for the remainder of his term. His response -- and the response of the left as a whole -- amounts to little more than disjointed and incoherent actions. In the past six years, every last hope and dream of the left has been exposed -- there is nothing left.
So what does the left have but vengeance? It got them this far -- it will have to maintain them through the rest of Obama’s tenure, and beyond.
So it follows that we will see more of it over the coming two years.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/01/the_lefts_base_motive_vengeance.html

January 2, 2015
The Left's Base Motive: Vengeance
By J.R. Dunn

Obama: It's Never My Fault

[From article]
The interview was pure Barack Obama, and it revealed him for what he is — an intellectually agile partisan fantasist. According to Mr. Obama, there really haven’t been that many problems, but those we may be experiencing are the fault not of his policies or leadership, but of the fact that he continues to have to contend with dysfunctional, partisan opposition.
According to the president, he’s done a great job both at home and abroad. We’ve got the international balance about right, he suggests, neglecting to mention the glitches we’ve encountered in Ukraine, the Middle East or the South China Sea, and his domestic initiatives have proven remarkably successful. The economy is doing better than anyone might have expected, given the mess he inherited and everyone should be happy except perhaps corporate types, who consider complaining about overregulation and the like part of their jobs.
He brags about the “52 consecutive months of job creation” ushered in by his election, takes credit for the energy boom and suggests to his interviewers that “I think you’d have to say that we’ve managed the economy pretty well.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/aug/4/keene-a-confident-and-clueless-president/

A confident and clueless president
With Obama, choosing the left path is always right
By David Keene
The Washington Times
Monday, August 4, 2014

Misguided Liberals, Two Book Reviews

[From review]
“Liberalism,” Fawcett argues, “is about improving people’s lives while treating them alike and shielding them from undue power.” But Fawcett’s assertions don’t apply to liberalism’s contemporary incarnations. Take his point about treating people alike: the faculty senate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, long one of the flagships of American liberalism, has, with barely a dissent, proposed a new plan for increasing diversity on campus by distributing grades on an ethnic and racial basis. As John Leo has reported, the plan calls for “proportional participation of historically underrepresented racial-ethnic groups at all levels of an institution, including high status special programs, high-demand majors, and in the distribution of grades.”
As for improving people’s lives, the “billionaire boys club” of radical environmentalists central to the Democratic Party’s finances is dedicated to a stratified America, in which the masses are kept in their properly subordinate place. Opponents of economic growth—billionaires such as Tom Steyer and George Soros, as well as the Rockefeller and Page Foundations—seek to curtail the expansion of the natural gas industry in the name of climate change. On both sides of the Atlantic, a liberalism dedicated to heading off the supposedly imminent threat of environmental catastrophe has scant concern for the declining middle class.
[. . .] In de facto one-party “blue” states, like New York and California, issues such as the imminent danger of climate change are deemed “settled” by leading liberals. Rather than distrusting power, Obama liberals, assuming they have a permanent lock on the presidency, have been happy to expand their power through a neo-imperial presidency and a Senate shorn of the rules that curbed majority abuses. The discovery of vast new sources of natural gas, which liberals once might have seen as progress, is denounced by today’s “progressives,”who decry carbon-based energy. They’re willing to block energy exploration, even at the cost of increasing poverty. Finally, public figures holding traditional views on, say, gay marriage have been excoriated and their companies threatened with boycotts. So much for respecting people, “whatever they think.” Fawcett misses all this because he tunes out liberalism’s intolerant tendencies, which first took hold on campuses and are now spreading to the broader culture. [. . .] plutocrats such as Steyer, Soros, and the Rockefellers have formed a top-bottom political alliance with entities like the Service Workers International Union, which organizes janitors, fast-food workers, and, through what was once known as Acorn, the unemployed. This alliance is central to the Obama administration’s goal of making low-wage workers and the poor comfortable in their relative poverty.

[. . .] Obama liberals, concludes Rubin [. . .] are “motivated by something that blends deliberate suicide with incompetence . . . and they will never get better because they are uninterested in learning what works.”

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/bc0808fs.html

FRED SIEGEL
Liberalism on the Rocks
Two recent books appraise the contemporary Left, with varying results.
8 August 2014

Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, by Edmund Fawcett (Princeton University Press, 468 pp., $35)

Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance, by Barry Rubin (Broadside Books, 332 pp., $25.99)

Obama, Hamas, Hillary Clinton Reveal What They Want To Do

[From article]
The Hamas Charter is, in effect, the book that many are now reading and quoting. It’s all there in the book. They’ve told us who they are. The destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jews is one of their main objectives. They write about the worldwide caliphate and the conversion or elimination of the infidels. It is the explanation of what is happening and what will happen in the future, unless they are stopped by a greater force.
There are many examples of the author writing down exactly who he is. In the community organizer Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals he writes about targeting your enemy, isolating them, and publicly ridiculing them to break them down. He believes that the ends always justify the means, regardless. t’s all there in the book. Alinsky followers have adopted his beliefs. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will tell you in their books who they are what they believe, and what they’ll do given the opportunity. It’s all there in the books. They told us who they are.

http://americanthinker.com/blog/2014/08/its_all_in_the_book.html

August 9, 2014
It's all in the Book
By Terry Donlon

Media Bias, Israel's Threat To Liberalism

[From article]
There is much discussion these days of why the Media and liberals in general are so anti-Israel. It should be obvious to any casual but attentive observer that the media has a bias in favor of the Muslims and in opposition to Israel. Stories about the Gaza war have headlines like “Israel Resumes Gaza Strikes After Cease-Fire Lull - ABC News” or BBC News - Gaza conflict: UN accuses Israel over Jabaliya attack. In fact, a scan of the headlines suggest that Israel was and is the aggressor, while Hamas was minding its own business and only defending itself.
This, of course, has the whole conflict completely backwards;
[. . .]
Why does the Left hate Israel so much? Why is anti-Semitism rising across Europe? Why are the Jews so hated?
There are a number of answers to this question. For one thing, the Jews represent a European-type peoples who “invaded” the “peaceful” Islamic culture of Palestine, in the ignorant view of the Left. They represent a new type of Crusader class, only instead of bringing Christianity they are bringing a kind of Judeo-Western commercial culture that liberals believe is at the root of all Western evil. This is nothing new; modern liberals, indoctrinated to hate capitalism in all its forms, see the Israelis as the prime representatives of this supposedly Western idea.
[. . .]
The very existence of Israel is a stench in the nostrils of most liberals, and for good reason; it argues more eloquently for the existence of God and the truth of the Bible than any philosopher or theologian.
Liberalism was and is a competing religion to Christianity and Judaism. Liberalism is a Christian heresy, a secular worldview that parasites off Judeo-Christian beliefs and imagery.
[. . .]
Israel is a great rebuke to the Liberal worldview, because Israel’s miraculous existence suggests that the Jews and Christians are right, that there is a transcendent God who is actively working on their behalf (or rather that they are working on His). Throughout the great Diaspora the Jews never lost faith, and many Christians believed they would eventually be restored to their land - against all human reason. Israel’s seemingly miraculous rise from the grave and her continued existence, in spite of endless hostility on the part of the Islamic world and indeed even in Europe, justifies the faith of Jews and Christians and undercuts the belief of liberals.
[. . .]
The fool says in his heart there is no God.
And the bigger fools sees direct evidence and rages against it.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/65174

Israel shows the world the bankruptcy of Leftist beliefs
Why the Liberals Hate Israel

By Timothy Birdnow August 9, 2014

Liberal Policies Harm Black Americans

[From article]
Good intentions aside, which efforts have facilitated black advancement, and which efforts have impeded it?
Many liberals today don’t seem particularly interested in asking this question, even though 50 years into the war on poverty the picture isn’t pretty.
[. . .]
Obama was doing exactly what liberals have been conditioning blacks to do since the 1960s, which is to blame black pathology on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws. And the president is conditioning the next generation of blacks to do the same.
[. . .]
Meanwhile, the civil-rights movement of King has become an industry that does little more than monetize white guilt.
[. . .]
Liberalism has also succeeded, tragically, in convincing blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims.
[. . .]
And black liberals are all too happy to hustle guilty whites. The result, manifest in everything from black studies programs to black media to black politics, is an obsession with racial slights real or imagined.

http://nypost.com/2014/06/28/how-liberals-make-it-harder-for-blacks-to-succeed/

Why liberals should stop trying to ‘help’ black Americans
By Jason L. Riley
New York Post
June 28, 2014 | 12:52pm

High Cost of Liberalism Three Parts

[From article]
Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.
[. . .]
In this part of California, liberalism reigns supreme and "open space" is virtually a religion. What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell042314.php3#.U2bvu90--yN

Jewish World Review

April 23, 2014 /23 Nissan, 5774
The High Cost of Liberalism
By Thomas Sowell

* * *

[From article]
Liberals can be disarming. In fact, they are for disarming anybody who can be disarmed, whether domestically or internationally.
Unfortunately, the people who are the easiest to disarm are the ones who are the most peaceful — and disarming them makes them vulnerable to those who are the least peaceful.
We are currently getting a painful demonstration of that in Ukraine. When Ukraine became an independent nation, it gave up all the nuclear missiles that were on its territory from the days when it had been part of the Soviet Union.
At that time, Ukraine had the third largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. Do you think Putin would have attacked Ukraine if it still had those nuclear weapons? Or do you think it is just a coincidence that nations with nuclear weapons don't get invaded?
[. . .]
As with so many things that liberals do, the disarmament crusade is judged by its good intentions, not by its actual consequences.
[. . .]
If in fact tighter gun control laws reduced the murder rate, that would be the liberals' ace of trumps. Why then do the liberals not play their ace of trumps, by showing us such hard facts? Because they don't have any such hard facts. So they give us lofty rhetoric and outraged indignation instead.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell042414.php3#.U2bxwd0--yN

Jewish World Review

April 24, 2014 /24 Nissan, 5774
The High Cost of Liberalism: Part II
By Thomas Sowell

* * *

[From article]
Most Americans living in "poverty" have air conditioning, a motor vehicle and other amenities, including more living space than the average person in Europe — not the average poor person in Europe, the average person.
"Poverty" is in the eye of the statisticians — more specifically, the government statisticians who define what constitutes "poverty," and who are unlikely to define it in ways that might jeopardize the massive welfare state that they are part of.
[. . .]
Yet liberals often act as if this is an injustice to those who don't work, rather than an injustice to those who do work, and whose taxes support those who don't.
[. . .]
If increasing your income by $10,000 a year would cause you to lose $15,000 worth of government benefits, would you do it? That is more than the equivalent of a 100 percent tax rate on income. Even millionaires and billionaires don't pay that high a tax rate.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell042514.php3#.U2b0i90--yN

Jewish World Review

April 25, 2014 /25 Nissan, 5774
The High Cost of Liberalism: Part III
By Thomas Sowell

David Horowitz Explains Why He Writes Ten Volumes

[From article]
Five years into the Obama administration, most conservatives have little idea of the depth of its malignancy, or the fact that it is the product of decades of development that has transformed the Democratic party and created, as is rapidly becoming apparent, not only America’s nightmare but the world’s as well.
[. . .]
The nature of these conflicts as part of an ongoing war was, in my view, scarcely recognized by conservatives at the time, and has still not fully sunk in.
[. . .]
It is first of all a narrative map of the battles fought over the last 40 years and — it must be said – lost, almost every one. The Black Book contains a record as complete as any likely to be written of the struggle to resist a Communist-inspired Left that was not defeated in the Cold War but took advantage of the Soviet defeat to enter the American mainstream and conquer it, until today its members occupy the White House.
[. . .]
Communist Left marched off the streets and into the Democratic party, and over the next decades took commanding positions in the party’s congressional apparatus, and eventually its national leadership. As it acquired power, it gradually shifted its self-identification from “liberal” to the bolder “progressive,” a designation shared by most leaders of the Democratic party today.
[. . .]
the sabotage of the war on terror, the traducing of the civil-rights movement and its transformation into a mob led by the racial extortionists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (the latter now the president’s chief adviser on race), the subversion of the modern research university and the conversion of its liberal-arts divisions into doctrinal institutes for training American youth in the radical party line known as political correctness, the rise of a campus fascism aligned with Islamic Jew haters and genocidal terrorists,
[. . .]
the movement now in motion to dismantle the American system, and bring this country to its knees, is no overnight phenomenon and is not the result of misguided idealisms or misunderstandings that can be easily repaired. The adversary cannot be dissuaded, because what drives him is a religious mission on which his identity and quest for a meaningful life depend. He can be stopped only by a political counterforce that is determined and organized, and — most importantly — that understands the gravity of the threat it faces.
[. . .]
What bothered me was how profoundly the senator misread Obama, how he failed to understand the malice behind either his mendacity or his systematic efforts to dismantle America’s constitutional system and disarm us before our enemies. “He has good intentions,” Coburn assured the exasperated Lamb.
[. . .]
Obama and Castro are socialist missionaries. For that very reason, the evil they do far exceeds anything achievable by tinhorn tyrants. They are advocates of a cause that turns a blind eye toward the millions of corpses and the wrecked continents of the recent past while attacking the democratic foundations of what remains of a free-market, free-world community of nations, beginning with Israel and the United States.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/376423/who-are-our-adversaries-david-horowitz

APRIL 28, 2014 4:00 AM
Who Are Our Adversaries? 
Conservatives must wake up to the true nature of the people many still call “liberals.”
By David Horowitz

National Review

Liberals Work To Eliminate Free Expression

[From article]

A corrupt government has some direct ways of undermining our rights. It can bring vexatious lawsuits, knowingly enact unconstitutional laws, or sign international agreements transparently intended to erode constitutional liberties. Theoretically, we can fight these tactics in the courts and by lobbying our lethargic lawmakers; as a practical matter, though, it takes years of anxiety at prohibitive expense. Few will be up to the task.

McCarthy says, "the First Amendment applies only against the government — indeed, only against the federal government as originally understood. The constitutional free-speech guarantee is literally irrelevant against private actors," Massachusetts (of all places) has a state civil rights statute (Mass Gen. Laws Chap. 265, Sec 37) which makes it a felony to intimidate a person in the free exercise of a constitutionally guaranteed right. Problem in Mass, inconvenient laws are optional, imitating what Obama does in the White House.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367132/coercing-conformity-andrew-c-mccarthy

DECEMBER 28, 2013 4:00 AM
Coercing Conformity
A government that creates the climate for bullying is the worst of the bullies.
By Andrew C. McCarthy

Network Does Not Punish TV Host For Personal Attacks on Palin

[From article]
“However, if Mr. Bashir or anybody else in this media elite bubble that they put themselves in were to attack someone who is defenseless, like a vulnerable child, who does not have that podium, that microphone that God has blessed me to be able to express my opinion … well, if you want to see a mama grizzly get riled up and slap that person down, then you come after a vulnerable child,” she said.

http://nypost.com/2013/11/24/sarah-palin-slams-msnbc-for-allowing-martin-bashirs-insult/

Sarah Palin slams MSNBC for allowing Martin Bashir’s insult
By S.A. Miller
November 24, 2013 | 3:11pm
New York Post

Misguided Liberal Priorities

[From article]
The last thing the political left needs, or can even afford, are self-reliant individuals. If such people became the norm, that would destroy not only the agenda and the careers of those on the left, but even their flattering image of themselves as saviors of the less fortunate.
Victimhood is where it's at. If there are not enough real victims, then fictitious victims must be created — as with the claim that there is "a war on women." Why anyone would have an incentive or a motivation to create a war on women in the first place is just one of the questions that should be asked of those who promote this political slogan, obviously designed for the gullible.
[. . .]
What would happen if Americans in general, or blacks in particular, started celebrating people like this armless young man, instead of trying to make heroes out of hoodlums? Many of us would find that promising and inspiring. But it would be a political disaster for the left — which is why it is not likely to happen.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell111813.php3#.UpJsvN00i6Y

Jewish World Review
Nov. 19 2013/ 16 Kislev, 5774
The War Against Achievement
By Thomas Sowell

Obama Destroying Liberalism

[From article]
Now, if you can picture the Titanic, packed with black plague victims, exploding over Lakewood, NJ, you have a reasonable picture of the enormity and impact of ObamaCare, a fiasco that will cause more damage than any other government-sponsored operation since the heyday of the Marxist dictatorships in the mid-20th century.
[. . .]
That's the pattern, one that could not have established itself without a complete lack of honesty, historical knowledge, common sense, or professional pride among anyone concerned
[. . .]
One of the great desires of the liberal elite of our time is perfect communion with radical Muslims. This yearning for oneness with butchers is in no way a new trait.
[. . .]
In Syria, the United States has found itself supporting "rebels" who tear out living hearts and eat them.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/11/obama_vs_liberalism.html

November 20, 2013
Obama vs. Liberalism
By J.R. Dunn
American Thinker

Misguided Liberals Abuse Those They Claim to Represent

[From article]
Black unemployment is twice that of whites.  Yet not only do liberals refuse to try to improve the black inner-city schools so that blacks have a fighting chance of using their talents to support themselves, but they actually work to ensure that public education stays bad. 

Obama ended a school choice program that disproportionately helped blacks in D.C., and Obama's administration is suing Louisiana to end a school voucher program that is primarily helping poor blacks.  Any competition would result in the public schools having to improve, but if they do, then there will be fewer dependent people, and that is bad for Obama.  Obama proves he cares more about power than about the poor when he works to ensure that the public schools in poor areas remain horrible.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/10/what_democrats_really_care_about.html

October 6, 2013
What Democrats Really Care About
By Tom Trinko