Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Swimming in LEB tears.
|
|
SUAP screamed
HERE IS A THOUGHT -- HOW ABOUT WE DON'T DIVIDE THIS COUNTRY UP BY LEVELS OF INCOME, AND WE TREAT PEOPLE EQUALLY? I.E., A FLAT TAX.
NOOOOOOO, YOU SEE TREATING PEOPLE EQUALLY MEANS LIBERALS WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO DEMONIZE THE PEOPLE WHO CREATE THE WEALTH IN THIS COUNTRY.
If you actually want to treat people equally than your socialist "flat tax" is bunch of crap. There is only One True Flat Tax and that is the Truly Flat Tax. Divide up the budget (and the debt) equally and send everyone an equal bill. Your bullshit "flat tax" would tax the people who create wealth in this country MORE than other people. How is that equality? Leave it to a perverted mind like yourself to think that charging some people MORE than other people for the same rights as an American is "equality."
Fight socialism and people who type in all caps: Support the Truly Flat Tax today!
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
headline today:
REPORT: Large-scale exodus of whites from Democratic Party...
Those racists!!!
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
Remember the "fierce urgency" of closing Gitmo?
Hmmmmm.
PROMISE BROKEN: President Barack Obama, in a setback to hopes for the quick closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison, reluctantly signed a bill on Friday barring suspects held there from being brought to the United States for trial.
HOPEY CHANGEY!
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
NOW: After Dems lose their ass in the election, Obama complains about lack of civility.
THEN: BARACK OBAMA: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”
HOPEY CHANGEY!
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
NEWSWEEK’S EVAN THOMAS: “The health care bill is a disaster.”
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
NATIONAL JOURNAL: DEMOCRATIC PARTY FACING white flight? “The voters who went with Obama in 2008 did not know what they were going to get with that vote. Now that they’ve seen the health care bill, the stimulus bill, the bailout, the cap-and-trade proposal—issue after issue, they don’t like what they see.”
|
|
HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Swimming in LEB tears.
|
|
TGT- Ever try reading something that actually challenged the view of reality that you want to have?
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
FROM HOT AIR THIS MORNING.
I WONDER WHY THE LIBERALS DIDNT WANT THE CONSTITUTION READ?
posted at 5:00 pm on January 8, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
The New York Times is having an utter hissy fit over the decision by leaders of the House of Representatives to recite aloud the Constitution to formally convene the 112th Congress. The left-leaning paper has run two editorials, the first condemning the act on the grounds that the Constitution—contrary to what Republicans believe—is a living document subject to reinterpretation and that doing a selective reading at a specific point in time is therefore an exercise in futility.
The second editorial, which is of a piece with the first, criticizes the GOP for reading the amended, rather than the “original,” Constitution.
Far from the empty gesture the Times ascribes to it, the act of reading the Constitution in its entirety may well be a first for many of the legislators whose job is to uphold the law of the land. Certainly, it should prove instructive for Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA), who at a 2010 town hall meeting famously declared that health care is a right and that “the Federal Government can do most anything in this country.”
The Times editorialists could use a refresher course in the Constitution as well. In the first of the two editorials, which appeared on Wednesday, the writers declared that it is a presumptuous and self-righteous act, suggesting that they [the Republican leadership] alone understand the true meaning of a text that the founders wisely left open to generations of reinterpretation. Certainly the Republican leadership is not trying to suggest that African-Americans still be counted as three-fifths of a person.
But as James Taranto points out:
African-Americans were never counted as three-fifths of a person. Slaves were… The three-fifths provision has been a nullity since 1865, when the 13th Amendment was ratified. But the Times either is using “African-Americans” as a euphemism for “slaves” or is simply ignorant about what the Constitution says.
But the failure of the Times editorial staff and many other liberals to understand the Constitution and what it stands for harks back to that “living document” canard. The only aspect of the Constitution that is remotely “alive” is its capacity to be amended, a feature that the founding fathers had the sagacity to build into the original document. This process—which entails two steps, proposal and ratification—was deliberately made difficult, again thanks to the foresight of the founders, who saw the prudence of forestalling frivolous changes to the law. That explains why since 1789, the Constitution has been amended only 27 times, despite the introduction in Congress of over 10,000 proposed amendments.
Thus the Times’ objection to reading the “amended,” or more correctly put “current,” draft of the Constitution is grounded more in their general antipathy toward the document than in their love of it. They would prefer that if the Speaker of the House is to read the Constitution aloud that he read it with all its unamended language intact to show how poorly it serves the needs of contemporary Americans.
That antipathy toward the Constitution is as far-reaching among liberals as their ignorance of what is in the document. Consider the following comments made by no less than a one-time instructor in Constitutional law:
[J]ustice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook; it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives, whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation. I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.
The speaker of those words is the current president of the United States. The view was expressed in the context of filling a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court, the highest court in the land. If Obama doesn’t get it, why should anyone expect better from the New York Times?
comment -- the "living constitution" theory is a direct attack on our Constitution and our way of life. A "living constitution" is no constitution. Just think -- I want a "living mortgage" where I can rewrite or reinterpret the terms of this contract to suit my needs - i.e., my pocketbook. Even liberals would laugh at that one, yet they say that the Supreme law of the land is a "living" contract? What?
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
GEORGE WILL TODAY. EXCELLENT.
Fred Upton, Rust Belt revolutionary
By George F. Will
Sunday, January 9, 2011;
Consensus is scarce but almost everyone agrees with this: The government is dysfunctional and the Internet is splendid. But last month, the Democratic-controlled Federal Communications Commission, on a partisan 3-2 vote, did what a federal court says it has no power to do: It decided to regulate the Internet in the name of "net neutrality." The next morning, a man who can discipline the FCC said: Well, we'll just see about that. "We are going to be a dog to the Frisbee on this issue."
Rep. Fred Upton, 57, who represents southwestern Michigan, is now chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He notes that last summer the Progressive Change Campaign Committee got 95 Democratic congressional candidates to pledge support for federal regulation of the Internet. In November, all 95 lost. Upton will try to stymie the FCC's impertinence by using the Congressional Review Act, under which a measure to reverse a regulation gets expedited consideration and cannot be filibustered in the Senate.
The capacious jurisdiction of Upton's committee will allow him, if he so desires, to issue the biblical command "Let there be light" by pushing repeal of the 2007 law that, in 2014, effectively bans sales of incandescent light bulbs. This law, which creates a captive market for those annoying, twisty, flickering fluorescent bulbs, is protectionism disguised as environmentalism: It is corporate welfare for U.S. bulb makers afraid of competition from imported incandescents.
But Upton has a bigger repeal in mind. He thinks enough Democrats will join all 242 House Republicans in voting to repeal Obamacare, and that repeal will come within 25 or so votes of the 290 necessary to override a presidential veto. This will intensify pressure on other Democratic members - imagine their town-hall meetings - who could provide the veto-proof margin.
Upton thinks opposition to Obamacare is intensifying as people realize the reality behind Barack Obama's slippery promise that if you like your present health care plan, you can keep it. The new law will not directly take it away, but its requirement that businesses either provide expensive government-approved insurance or pay a fine is designed to prompt businesses to drop their insurance, pay the fine and dump employees into Medicaid. Upton favors deregulating Medicaid by giving governors block grants and latitude: "Cut the strings and let the states figure it out."
He majored in journalism at the University of Michigan and was a sports editor of the student newspaper, thinking he might eventually cover the Chicago Cubs. He avoided that misery by coming to Washington in 1977 to work for the freshman congressman from his district, David Stockman, who in 1981 took Upton with him to the White House when he became President Reagan's budget director.
Upton was elected in 1986 and has begun his 13th term. His state has more than its share of problems: The automobile industry is a shadow of its former self, the unemployment rate is 12.4 percent, 68 municipalities are on the state's fiscal watch list (38 are rated worse than Hamtramck, which is seeking permission to file for bankruptcy), the 2010 Census will cost the state a House seat, and, worst of all, Michigan has lost seven consecutive football games to Ohio State.
Michigan's power is waxing in Washington, with Upton's boon companion Dave Camp, chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. They are part of a Midwestern ascendancy in the House, which also includes Ohio's John Boehner (speaker), Michigan's Mike Rogers (chairman of the intelligence committee), Wisconsin's Paul Ryan (chairman of budget), Minnesota's John Kline (chairman of education and the workforce), and Missouri's Sam Graves (chairman of small business).
The Midwest has much to lose from Obama's agenda, particularly his animus against coal, which generates 60 percent of the region's electricity - 90 percent in Ohio and Indiana. Officials of a steel tank manufacturer in Niles, Mich., recently told Upton that cap-and-trade carbon regulation would have meant an instant 20 percent increase in electricity costs, which would have forced the company to operate only at night in order to take advantage of off-peak rates.
Such mundane matters may be intensely boring to Obama administration officials, to whom the private sector is as foreign as Mongolia. But the next presidential election probably will be won in the Midwest. Soon House Republicans from there will begin conducting a two-year tutorial on the reasons the region should continue to recoil from this administration.
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
JEFF JACOBY TODAY. EXCELLENT ALSO.
Fighting Public Sector Unions.
Boston Globe.
AS RESISTANCE to public-sector unionism has intensified, many of the noisiest confrontations have been on the coasts.
In New Jersey, freshman Governor Chris Christie has been locked in a battle royale with his state’s powerful teachers unions. In California, Oakland’s new mayor began her first full day in office by demanding that unionized police officers, who pay nothing toward their pensions, be required to contribute 9 percent of their salaries. In New York, federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into whether Sanitation Department workers purposely paralyzed the city with a work slowdown during last month’s blizzard. In Massachusetts, Governor Deval Patrick infuriated public-safety unions by replacing costly police details with civilian flaggers at many construction and repair sites.
Now the Midwest is poised to become a major theater in the war against insatiable government unions.
Within days of taking office in 2005, two Republican governors — Mitch Daniels in Indiana and Matt Blunt in Missouri — issued executive orders rolling back collective-bargaining rights for state workers. Because public-sector unions in those states had been granted the right to bargain collectively through executive orders in the first place, Daniels and Blunt had only to rescind their predecessors’ actions.
In most states, however, public-employee unions are authorized by statute to negotiate wages, pensions, and health care. Any effort to weaken or repeal those laws is guaranteed to face bitter resistance from the unions and their legislative allies.
Two newly elected Republican governors say they’re ready for that fight.
Even before he was sworn in last week, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker had fired a shot across the bow of his state’s public-sector unions. Speaking to the Milwaukee Press Club, he said he would consider using “every legal means’’ to weaken those unions — from decertifying their exclusive right to bargain on behalf of state employees to modifying state law.
“You are not going to hear me degrade state and local employees in the public sector,’’ Walker said. “But we can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and the taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots.’’ More than 50 years ago, Wisconsin was the first state to enact a public-sector collective-bargaining law, and killing it outright might be too tall an order even for a governor whose party controls both houses of the legislature. But Walker and like-minded lawmakers may well succeed in excluding from collective bargaining the most highly-abused benefit categories, such as pensions and health insurance.
In Ohio, meanwhile, incoming Governor John Kasich has long made ending public-sector collective bargaining a priority. In 2009 he said he wanted to “break the back of organized labor in the schools,’’ and last month he underscored his conviction that government workers who go on strike should be fired.
“I really don’t favor the right to strike by any public employee,’’ Kasich said. “They’ve got good jobs, they’ve got high pay, they get good benefits, a great retirement. What are they striking for?’’ He is just as hostile to binding arbitration, which many states require when strikes are illegal, and government managers and public-sector unions are at an impasse. “Binding arbitration,’’ Kasich says bluntly, “is not acceptable.’’ (What’s wrong with binding arbitration is the subject of Wednesday’s column.)
It was Calvin Coolidge who, as governor of Massachusetts during a police strike in 1919, famously declared: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone, anywhere, any time.’’ Coolidge’s assertion made him a rising star in national Republican circles, but opposition to public-sector unionism has an honorable Democratic pedigree as well. “The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,’’ President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote in 1937. He recognized that government can never be just another employer, and that empowering labor unions to negotiate wages and benefits with public officials would inevitably result in abuse.
Today, evidence of that abuse is everywhere. Private employees find themselves working longer and being taxed more heavily so that government employees can enjoy outlandish pay and perks. “Public-sector unions have become the exploiters,’’ Minnesota’s outgoing Governor Tim Pawlenty argued last month, “and working families once again need someone to stand up for them.’’ In the heartland as on the coasts, that challenge is being taken up.
Comment: But you see, the Dems heavily rely on public sector unions for campaign cash, which is why you see Dems defending the unions and their outlandish perks, and civil service "you cant fire me" protections. Its all about the money, back and forth. The unions supply the campaign cash - the Dems provide the protection and the sweet contracts. Corrupt as hell. And what about the taxpayer? He gets screwed two ways: 1) he gets half-assed service since public employees have no incentive to do a great job since it is nearly impossible to fire em, and 2) the taxpayer gets to pay higher taxes to support the perks that the private sector employee could only dream of.
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
Gotta love the libs blaming the shooting on "right wing rhetoric":
Lets see -- the nut was described by a classmate as a "pothead" -- noooo, not a "pothead" -- I thought they are so mellow and pot is now just "medicine" (another big fat lie).
She described him as a "leftwing radical" -- nooooo, you mean these leftwingers can get guns too?
Lets see -- when Fort Hood was shot up by a radical out-in-the-open Muslim, all the liberals said -- "Shhhhhh, we don't want to talk about that Muslim part. We cannot talk about that! We shall describe him as .... lets see, how bout we call him a white male with a receding hairline!"
Its amazing -- when actual liberals commit mass murder, the right is to blame. And when actual radical Muslims commit mass murder, the right is to blame. Convenient, heh?
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
The real lesson of this tragedy is that it is better to be armed and ready than a sitting duck. I wonder how many folks in the audience had guns on them? Many attempted mass murders have been stopped because an armed citizen takes quick action and kills the lunatic before he can do more damage.
But of course, to liberals, that 2nd Amendment -- you know, the one right after the 1st Amendment (hmmm, I wonder why the Founders did that?) -- is an inconvenience. for decades they argued that the 2nd Amendment was a group right, not an individual right. 9 justices kicked that argument to the curb.
Arm yourself -- protect yourself and your family. Don't buy the left-wing fascist BS about how "guns kill people" --- nooooo, you idiots -- people kill people. Have you ever noticed that almost all totalitarian governments first take away your guns? Just asking ...
|
|
Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
|
|
|
|
Jingy
climber
Somewhere out there
|
|
What if a bunch of good minded Americans (you can define who that might be) were to be put on a plane and sent to another country (you can define which country that might be) to fend for themselves as best they can.
There are certain members of the American public who I think might be a little put off by the whole event, and others who may find themselves in no real hot water.
I suggest that the right wing of American politics be sent out of the country to be evaluated by other cultures around the world... along with the left wing of American politic.
Who do you think would fair better?
|
|
Chaz
Trad climber
greater Boss Angeles area
|
|
You a big supporter of Israel, too?
Lots of Jewish people there.
|
|
Jingy
climber
Somewhere out there
|
|
He might have wanted to make some money and tell all....
then the dushes got wind of it and put a stop to it...
f*#kin weasels
|
|
bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
|
|
|
Jan 10, 2011 - 07:02am PT
|
the shooter is a 9/11 truther...most truthers are liberals...most liberals are democrats...therefore, most democrats condone the attempted assassination of congresswoman giffords
the shooter's favorite book is mein kampf...most people who love mein kampf hate israel...most liberals hate israel...most liberals are democrats...therefore, most democrats condone the attempted assassination of congresswoman giffords
The Arizona Tragedy and the Politics of Blood Libel
Those who purport to care about the tenor of political discourse don't help civil debate when they seize on any pretext to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.
By GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS
Shortly after November's electoral defeat for the Democrats, pollster Mark Penn appeared on Chris Matthews's TV show and remarked that what President Obama needed to reconnect with the American people was another Oklahoma City bombing. To judge from the reaction to Saturday's tragic shootings in Arizona, many on the left (and in the press) agree, and for a while hoped that Jared Lee Loughner's killing spree might fill the bill.
With only the barest outline of events available, pundits and reporters seemed to agree that the massacre had to be the fault of the tea party movement in general, and of Sarah Palin in particular. Why? Because they had created, in New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's words, a "climate of hate."
The critics were a bit short on particulars as to what that meant. Mrs. Palin has used some martial metaphors—"lock and load"—and talked about "targeting" opponents. But as media writer Howard Kurtz noted in The Daily Beast, such metaphors are common in politics. Palin critic Markos Moulitsas, on his Daily Kos blog, had even included Rep. Gabrielle Giffords's district on a list of congressional districts "bullseyed" for primary challenges. When Democrats use language like this—or even harsher language like Mr. Obama's famous remark, in Philadelphia during the 2008 campaign, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun"—it's just evidence of high spirits, apparently. But if Republicans do it, it somehow creates a climate of hate.
There's a climate of hate out there, all right, but it doesn't derive from the innocuous use of political clichés. And former Gov. Palin and the tea party movement are more the targets than the source.
View Full Image
Associated Press
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords
American journalists know how to be exquisitely sensitive when they want to be. As the Washington Examiner's Byron York pointed out on Sunday, after Major Nidal Hasan shot up Fort Hood while shouting "Allahu Akhbar!" the press was full of cautions about not drawing premature conclusions about a connection to Islamist terrorism. "Where," asked Mr. York, "was that caution after the shootings in Arizona?"
Set aside as inconvenient, apparently. There was no waiting for the facts on Saturday. Likewise, last May New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and CBS anchor Katie Couric speculated, without any evidence, that the Times Square bomber might be a tea partier upset with the ObamaCare bill.
So as the usual talking heads begin their "have you no decency?" routine aimed at talk radio and Republican politicians, perhaps we should turn the question around. Where is the decency in blood libel?
To paraphrase Justice Cardozo ("proof of negligence in the air, so to speak, will not do"), there is no such thing as responsibility in the air. Those who try to connect Sarah Palin and other political figures with whom they disagree to the shootings in Arizona use attacks on "rhetoric" and a "climate of hate" to obscure their own dishonesty in trying to imply responsibility where none exists. But the dishonesty remains.
To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the "rhetoric" of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the "rhetoric" and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?
I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America's political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.
Where is the decency in that?
Mr. Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee. He hosts "InstaVision" on PJTV.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!