Assumed Incompetence?

Investors.com - Bare Warning

A chilling spectacle just took place before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Panel Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked, "What is the likelihood of another terrorist-attempted attack on the U.S. homeland in the next three to six months, high or low?"

And one by one, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, CIA Director Leon Panetta and FBI Director Robert Mueller all agreed an attack was "certain."

Seems like that would get a little more notice from somebody? is everyone in the MSM so certain of the incompetence of the BO administration that they discount a 100% prediction of an attack by the heads of every one of our intelligence agencies?

Clear and Present Danger, NEA

This is copied off the NEA recommended reading web site. This is the same guy that did "Rules for Radicals". While in '07, Democrats were pretty much evenly split on 9-11 being an "inside job". A position that makes "birthers" seem downright rational. Our kids are being taught by a union that thinks this avowed radical, founder of the now known criminal organization ACORN,  is "Recommended Reading".Welcome to BO's America!

Society has good reason to fear the Radical. Every shaking advance of mankind toward equality and justice has come from the Radical. He hits, he hurts, he is dangerous. Conservative interests know that while Liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, Radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of Conservatives. 

Given that the left thinks this is the right way to teach our children, can anyone doubt the need for defensive Assault Weapons? A few 45 round mags of .223 can provide an educational opportunity for even the most recalcitrant of radical groups on the difference between rhetoric and reality should they be bent  to "break some conservative necks".  We have been warned.

The  2nd Amendment  MUST be defended to the death  because Alinsky, ACORN, the NEA, and who knows what others have declared war on the Constitution and America as we know it.

Wake up people, radicalism has smelled a little blood in the water and they are ready to rumble!

Recommended Reading: Saul Alinsky, The American Organizer

Reveille for Radicals
by Saul Alinsky
Vintage; Reissue edition (October 23, 1989)
Buy It
Rules for Radicals
by Saul Alinsky
Vintage; Reissue edition (October 23, 1989)
Buy It
An inspiration to anyone contemplating action in their community! And to every organizer!
Saul Alinsky wrote the book on American radicalism - two books, in fact: a 1945 best-seller, "Reveille for Radicals" and "Rules for Radicals" in 1971. The "Reveille" title page quotes Thomas Paine... "Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul."
Saul Alinsky, who was a labor and civil-rights activist from the 1910's until he died in 1972, has written here a guidebook for those who are out to change things. He sets down what the goal is: a society where people are free to live, and also aren't starving in the streets. A society where there is legal and economic justice. Then he sets out to say how to get there.
Alinsky spends a lot of time critiquing the idea that "The end does not justify the means." What end? What means? He feels that there are circumstances where one can and should use means that in other circumstances would be unethical. I am not sure I agree, but Alinsky certainly speaks with the voice of experience.
Alinsky's goal seems to be to encourage positive social change by equipping activists with a realistic view of the world, a kind of preemptive disillusionment. If a person already knows what evil the world is capable of, then perhaps the surprise factor can be eliminated, making the person a more effective activist. Alinsky further seems to be encouraging the budding activist not to worry to much about getting his or her hands dirty. It's all a part of the job, he seems to say.
Alinsky, the master political agitator, tactical planner and social organizer didn't mince words...
"Liberals in their meetings utter bold words; they strut, grimace belligerently, and then issue a weasel-worded statement 'which has tremendous implications, if read between the lines.' They sit calmly, dispassionately, studying the issue; judging both sides; they sit and still sit.
"The Radical does not sit frozen by cold objectivity. He sees injustice and strikes at it with hot passion. He is a man of decision and action. There is a saying that the Liberal is one who walks out of the room when the argument turns into a fight.
"Society has good reason to fear the Radical. Every shaking advance of mankind toward equality and justice has come from the Radical. He hits, he hurts, he is dangerous. Conservative interests know that while Liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, Radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of Conservatives.
"Radicals precipitate the social crisis by action - by using power. Liberals may then timidly follow along or else, as in most cases, be swept forward along the course set by Radicals, but all because of forces unloosed by Radical action. They are forced to positive action only in spite of their desires ...

• "The American Radical will fight privilege and power whether it be inherited or acquired by any small group, whether it be political or financial or organized creed.
• "He curses a caste system which he recognizes despite all patriotic denials.
• "He will fight conservatives whether they are business or labor leaders.
• "He will fight any concentration of power hostile to a broad, popular democracy, whether he finds it in financial circles or in politics.
• "The Radical recognizes that constant dissension and conflict is and has been the fire under the boiler of democracy. He firmly believes in that brave saying of a brave people, "Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!"
• "The Radical may resort to the sword but when he does he is not filled with hatred against those individuals whom he attacks. He hates these individuals not as persons but as symbols representing ideas or interests which he believes to be inimical to the welfare of the people.
• "That is the reason why Radicals, although frequently embarking upon revolutions, have rarely resorted to personal terrorism."

Alinsky practiced what he preached. He said, "Tactics means doing what you can with what you have ... tactics is the art of how to take and how to give."
He uses eyes, ears and nose for examples...
Eyes"If you have a vast organization, parade it before the enemy, openly show your power."
Ears
"If your organization is small, do what Gideon did: conceal the members in the dark but raise a clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more that it does."
Nose
"If your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place."
Alinsky devised and proved thirteen tactical rules for use against opponents vastly superior in power and wealth.
   1. "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
   2. "Never go outside the experience of your people.
   3. "Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.
   4. "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
   5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
   6. "A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
   7. "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
   8. "Keep the pressure on.
   9. "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
  10. "Major premise for tactics is development of operations that will maintain constant pressure upon the opposition.
  11. "If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
  12. "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
  13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
"The real action is in the enemy's reaction. The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength. Tactics, like life, require that you move with the action."
Alinsky was hated and defamed by powerful enemies, proof that his tactics worked. His simple formula for success...
"Agitate + Aggravate + Educate + Organize"

Michele Bachmann Town Hall

Saw US Reps Michele Bachmann and Michael Burgess today at a fund raiser followed by a Town Hall, all for Allan Quist. Burgess is a Dr from TX and had a real handle on health care, Congress and a whole lot of everything. Michele is vivacious and obviously passionate about her family, MN, and the country. While a less organized speaker, she has "sizzle".

Interesting to note she has raised 5 kids of her own plus helped to care for 23 foster children. Had lunch with a banker at our table, and unlike what the MSM or BO might tell you, neither he nor Michelle displayed either horns nor a tail. The banker said that he disguised his tail as a belt ;-)

Conservative Inconsistency on Court

RealClearPolitics - Thin-Skinned Supreme Court

EJ thinks Republicans are being inconsistent by claiming that BO ought not to have made the statements that he made in his SOTU. Let me try to help:

1. It makes a difference where you raise your issue. Reagan wrote an article, Nixon made the court an issue in a campaign.  BO attacked the court when he was on the podium and they were sitting in front of him and prohibited from responding. That is the difference.
   
2. If you want to make statements against a co-equal branch of government, especially if you are a constitutional scholar, it might be nice to have some semblance correctness in what you say. 

• Neither the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights declare any rights. They restrict the government's rights.
• Congress can't pass laws to circumvent Court rulings. To propose that shows a lack of understanding of the basic operation of the Constitution and Government which BO is pledged to defend, or something far more sinister. It is hard to believe that a Harvard Constitutional scholar
  
• The legislation this ruling was focused on is McCain / Feingold, passed in 2002, not "100 years ago".

Note, conservatives are NOT "always consistent", to be so is humanly impossible. To have a liberal like Dionne talk of the issue though is like having Slick Willie talk of martial fidelity!

Americans Get Stupid Again

Moody Blues - WSJ.com

If one listens to the left, the average intelligence and maturity of the American voter can swing quite wildly. Just a year ago, US voters had a ton of intelligence and maturity, but in barely a 12 month period, they have lost all semblance if intellectual capacity and has been reduced to a bunch of pouting and stomping 2-year olds, even in a formerly brilliant and wise blue state haven like Massachusetts.


Taranto does a good job of covering some specific examples of our leftward punditry heaping praise on the decision 14 months ago, and disdain on the blue state of MA voters now. Clearly "stopping an unpopular healthcare bill" is far more vacuous than "hope and change".

BO Picks Up Budget Hatchet

BO Ridicules McCain on budget freeze.

Be interesting to see if the MSM has any memory. BO thought McCain was completely wrong to call for a freeze. McCain has now supported the BO call for a freeze. BO said it was a "hatchet rather than a scalpel". Suppose it is racist to point out what he said in the past.

Didin't BO used to be some sort of a great leader and political genius?

The Lesson of Slick

William McGurn: Bill Clinton's Revenge - WSJ.com

In the process, he learned one thing: In a nation where roughly 20% describe themselves as liberal, 40% as conservative, and 40% as moderate, there's not a high price for shutting out the left. As for history, Mr. Clinton went on to become the only Democrat since FDR to win and serve two full terms as president.

Exactly! Of course, there never has and we pray never will be anyone as disingenuous as Slick Willy in the WH, but he did understand that key fact that the MSM works night and day to hide! Hopefully BO will stick to his guns and do "what he thinks is right", and the American people will assign this sorry chapter to a one year leftward sprint, a 3 year stall, and finally move on to start to deal with reality!

Even CNN Understanding Pelosi?

 CNN used to be "Clinton News Network". Apparently Queen Nancy is pushing things a bit too far for even them!

FInal Word On Corporate Free Speech

THOMAS MITCHELL: An irrefutable right correctly restored - Opinion - ReviewJournal.com

This one covers the ruling and the key arguments. It is short, just read it.

Airial Refuel Over Iraq

Extremely cool!

The Base

RealClearPolitics - Rock on the Health Care Road

al Qaeda is loosely translated as "The Base". Christ is my "base", but close to next in scale of import is the principle of "unalienable rights". That some rights come from God (or transcendence if you really must persist in atheism), NOT from "the people". America is NOT a "democracy", it is a constitutional republic. The MSM and the left in this country want to tear that down so they can more rapidly accelerate our decent into some form of collectivist socialist "utoptia" where the the ability of the "majority" to impose whatever their whim de jour on individuals is unfettered. A utopia very likely to resemble hell.

Read the whole thing. Will does a good job of pointing out the sinister way in which the forces of the left seek to entice us to their supposed eden. I've pulled a couple highlights:

Would it be constitutional for the government to legislate compulsory calisthenics for all Americans? If not, why not? If it would be, in what sense does the nation still have constitutional, meaning limited, government?

Opponents of the mandate say: Unless the Commerce Clause is infinitely elastic -- in which case, Congress can do anything -- it does not authorize Congress to forbid the inactivity of not making a commercial transaction, of not purchasing a product (health insurance) from a private provider.

If the Senate health care bill is constitutional, then Congress can do anything. That is absolutely true, and it ought to srike enough fear into the hearts of anyone with a shred of understanding of the peril of mob rule into opposition of this bill.

The mendacious and the unaware are the only supporters this bill can have.

The following puts it very well. The primary purpose of the government is to protect the pre-existing rights of the individual.

More truly conservative conservatives take their bearings from the proposition that government's primary purpose is not to organize the fulfillment of majority preferences but to protect pre-existing rights of the individual -- basically, liberty. These conservatives favor judicial activism understood as unflinching performance of the courts' role in that protection.

New Yorker On BO Year 1

One Year: Beware of Sudden Downdrafts: Hendrik Hertzberg : The New Yorker

 Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Today's internet affords us an excellent opportunity to read the words of those to whom think in the exact opposite terms, to understand what is on their minds. What is on the minds of this New Yorker columnist is the destruction of the constitution and the the creation of a European style parliamentary system that would allow our quicker decent into socialism and the loss of "American exceptionalism",  a noxious term for those of the left. He is pretty direct about his desire to somehow dispense with the horror of "Republicans", we can be thankful he has spared us the gory details of just how.

Thanks to my longstanding obsession with the obsolescence of our eighteenth-century political and electoral hydraulics (such as the separation of powers and the lack of a single government accountable to a national electorate) and this sclerotic system’s sadomasochistic twentieth-century refinements (such as the institutionalization of the filibuster), I am not astonished that Obama has had trouble “getting things done.” Absent only the filibuster—even while leaving untouched all the other monkey wrenches (committee chairs, corrupt campaign money, safe districts, Republicans, etc.)—Obama by now would have signed landmark bills addressing health care, global warming, and financial regulation, and a larger, better-designed stimulus package, too.

Boston Tea Party

Scott Brown Beats Martha Coakley - WSJ.com

Massachusetts passed a prototype of the Obama plan in 2006, and residents have since watched as their insurance premiums have risen to the highest in the nation, budget costs have soared, and bureaucrats are planning far more draconian regulation of medical practice. Mr. Brown accurately said the national sequel would be too expensive and reduce the quality of care, and that it would be a "raw deal" forcing Massachusetts taxpayers to subsidize all other states.

Why do I need to read this buried in an article only AFTER the special election? I've certainly been aware of what the MA plan has caused because I'm the kind of idiot that wastes my time running off and finding such things. What I just don't get is why ANY news outlet that actually cares about outcomes for the country would NOT want to look into what has been wrought by a plan that even far lefties have identified as being "very much like the moderate Senate bill". (See Paul Krugman)

The fact is that the Senate bill is a centrist document, which moderate Republicans should find entirely acceptable. In fact, it’s very similar to the plan Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts just a few years ago.

The voters of a state that PASSED something very equivalent to the MOST CONSERVATIVE version of what is being shoved down our throats now have resoundingly spoken on what they think of essentially the health care bill that they now have EXPERIENCE with going national, and NOBODY CARES? Having STATES pass new laws that are controversial and then observing the outcomes is exactly what the US was supposed to be about. Our Founding Fathers unerstood the principles of "Agile Development" over 200 years before it became the rage in software.

How can we possibly govern ourselves if we are not reality and outcome based?

NYT Officially Against Free Speech

Editorial - The Court’s Blow to Democracy - NYTimes.com

I wonder what status quo the NYT thinks ought to be protected?  Try this. In 2008, one has to get to the 39th group on the list before one hits a group that is "strongly Republican" (Club for Growth). Number 23 (National Car Dealers) "leans Republican". Out of the top 100, 3 lean R, 2 are solid R, and 1 is "strongly" R.

How about D? 3 are "Solid", including #1, ActBlue, a PAC that hides god knows what shenanigans and contributed $24 Million, over 3x #2, which is Goldman Sachs, "strongly D". 30 are "Strongly D", and 10 "lean D". The current advantage in this list alone is many 10s of millions, and we know in the last cycle, BO alone had an advantage approaching $500 Million.

Is it any wonder the NYT wants this state of affairs protected? We well know how campaign finance laws are enforced. Republicans are scrutinized and prosecuted if they or their contributors step out of line. Democrats are rarely looked at, and even if they are -- as in Slick and the Goracle in the '90s when they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar on all sorts of campaign irregularities, including taking foreign funds, the answer is "well, we had to do it because it looked like the Republicans might win". That is always a good enough emergency to justify ANYTHING to the MSM.

As the NYT understands, in a big country where media costs money, freedom of speech means freedom to raise money to speak. While the NYT will defend anyone's right to agree with them (as will all good liberals), they aren't so sure that those that DISagree with them ought to be able to raise money, so we have a HUGE crisis here from their POV.

In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the ruling not only threatens democracy but “will, I fear, do damage to this institution.” History is, indeed, likely to look harshly not only on the decision but the court that delivered it. The Citizens United ruling is likely to be viewed as a shameful bookend to Bush v. Gore. With one 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president. Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.

In the interest of "even handedness", the NYT didn't find a google search to point to who has the advantage today to be worth a couple minutes of their time. They apparently found Democrats skirting the law on every front and coming up with 100s of millions in advantage in the last election cycle to be completely  unthreatening to democracy. While we listened to them prattle constantly post '94 of the "dangers" of the Republicans having control of ANY branch of government, the 2008 election and talk about the "end of the Republican party" was a sign that America had finally "woke up". One party rule is apparently "democratic" as long as it is the party that you agree with!

Freedom of speech for Republicans. The end of Democracy!

Let Them Sleep

RealClearPolitics - The Meaning of Brown

A particularly cogent one from Charles. Hopefully the Democrats will find some delusions that allow them to continue to sleep peacefully.