Posts Tagged → control
My take on tonight’s Corbett – Wolf Debate, and Tom Brokaw’s Plea for Control of Our Lives
Like a few thousand other attendees at the Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce dinner tonight, I sat in the audience and watched Governor Tom Corbett and Democrat nominee Tom Wolf debate each other, with reporter Dennis Owens moderating. Dennis was outstanding. I also stayed for the Tom Brokaw speech afterwards.
Here are the highlights as I see them:
1) Corbett beat Wolf hands-down, in substance, poise, accuracy, and humility. And damned if I am not still surprised. Given how insipid the Corbett campaign has been to date, I expected the worst performance from him tonight. That did not materialize.
2) While overall the debate was Dull vs Duller, and neither man was exciting or inspiring, the amazing fact is that Tom Corbett found his voice tonight. Tom Wolf talked in circles, kept stating that he is a businessman (six, seven times), mis-spoke (“the vast majority of married Pennsylvanians file separate tax reports”), spoke in vague generalities bordering on fluffy clouds and flying unicorns, and addressed none of the substantive issues pegged by moderator Dennis Owens or by Corbett.
3) Wolf seemed to play it safe, venturing nothing new, nothing specific. He did not even respond the to the Delaware Loophole questions posed to him. He simply ignored them. If he persists in this evasiveness, Corbett can catch up and beat him. Voters can now see it, and it ain’t pretty. Corbett may be The Most Boring Man in the World, but Wolf looked completely unprepared to be governor.
4) Wolf’s “I’ll-know-it-when-I-see-it” response to policy and finance questions is not acceptable for a candidate to run a state government.
5) Corbett actually ate some humble pie, admitting that he is not a good communicator. Understatement, yes, but he is not a guy who likes to admit he’s wrong. So that was big. Again, expectations for Corbett were super low, and he started out looking and sounding defeated. But even he recognized that he was beating Wolf, and his performance picked up as the debate went on.
Brokaw:
1) Ancient establishment reporter Tom Brokaw has a great voice, and lots of stage presence. He’s good looking for a guy that old. He wrote a book about The Greatest Generation, so he must be a pretty great guy. That is the marketing, anyhow. His ideas run the gamut from standard liberal to downright contradictory and mutually-exclusive confused, to pathetic control freak.
2) Although Brokaw started talking about the Tea Party, and he complimented its members for getting involved in the political process (which he said is necessary), he never said or recognized the American Constitution as core to tea party’s goals, values, principles, or guiding role. So although he talked about it, it didn’t seem evident that he understands or has thought about the Tea Party much.
3) Brokaw said “I leave it to you determine if the Tea Party is good for America. I’m just a reporter, I just report the facts. You have to come to your own conclusions.” As if he was not passing judgment on the Tea Party. Yet, he asked the question and obviously thinks the Tea Party is bad for America; that is his hint. Given that Brokaw is a liberal at war with America, this is a big cue to conservative activists: Keep it up, the liberal media establishment is scared of you.
4) He called for “filtration” and a “filter” of the internet, and talked about the “simple people” who manage his Montana ranch and get news from the Internet, which he disavowed and sees as unworthy. This is the kind of intellectual region where Brokaw makes no sense. On the one hand, the big establishment media is all over the Internet, so if people get their news from the Internet, and not TV chatterheads or fishwrap newspapers, then there’s no real problem with the Internet as a news source. What Brokaw seemed to be challenged by is the fact that Breitbart and citizen reporters (think Watchdogwire, or my own blog) are circumventing the establishment media. He does not understand or care that the ‘simple’ masses are hungry for unfiltered news, for real news, for facts and not liberal agenda. How his imagined filters jibe, square, or conflict with the First Amendment was not mentioned; I am unsure it even occurred to Brokaw that purposefully filtering information is censorship. But he is a guy who believes in sixty years of past liberal censorship, so I guess he has to stay consistent today.
5) Brokaw implied that the establishment media are the source of accurate information and “big ideas,” and that alternative news and opinion sources are not. He said he doesn’t believe what he reads on the internet. He is clearly bothered there’s now no difference between establishment media and bloggers and citizen reporters in terms of equal accessibility. He’s having a tough time letting go of controlling the message Americans receive, which is really his objection: Liberal media elites are losing the propaganda war because they no longer have a choke hold on the information flow; ergo, the Internet is full of bad information.
An indication of just how undeveloped his thinking is: Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon…for Liberals, Nixon was the High Priest of Done Bad in Government. It does not seem to occur to Brokaw that Nixon’s crimes pale in comparison to the lawless tyranny Obama has inflicted upon American citizens. E.g. NSA spying and IRS crushing of political dissent.
6) On the other hand, he’s into high tech and the future of technology. Very impressed by Google staff and all of the “big minds” gathered at tech conventions. Brokaw doesn’t reconcile his adulation with his view of information flow on the net. I am guessing here that he’d be OK if Google ran all the news on the Internet, because Google is made of liberals who share his political agenda. “Good” liberals and “bad” conservatives is what he is after.
7) Annoyingly, Brokaw dropped names all over the place, as if to impress us with how important he is: Jon Stewart, the NFL commissioner, et al. “I was emailing with ____ _____, and he says ‘Tom..’.” “My books.” “I’m on the board of…..” This seemed self-conscious and actually undermined his standing, because truly great people never look at themselves this way. They simply Are Great.
8) Finally, he called for a new form of foreign service corps, some hybrid of the Peace Corps, Americorps, and the military. It was terribly confused, but it was also the kind of Big Idea he admires others for having, so evidently he must have one, too, even of it makes no practical sense.
Chautauqua’s shame
Chautauqua Institution was once an intellectual’s dream destination: Opera company, symphony orchestra, book stores, authors and noted speakers every day for the summer. Gated and safe. Nice people. Beautiful homes next to quaint Victorian gingerbread boxes, all adhering to a commonly held design ideal. Chautauqua Lake, at 32,000 acres a real big body of water to fish, swim, boat, and otherwise enjoy.
Chautauqua was also a unique symbol of community building, and education. The institution spawned The Chautauqua Movement, which was big from the 1890s through the 1930s, with places like Mount Gretna in Central Pennsylvania dedicated to comfy living, higher entertainment, tolerance, and learning.
Now, Chautauqua Institution is the antithesis of its founding ideals and original mission. Overthrown, captured, and jealously guarded by political extremists, its summer programming is now carefully groomed to exclude dissent and include well known jihadists. It’s pretty much extreme political indoctrination 24/7 there.
And yes, you read that above correctly. Chautauqua Instituion is now so tolerant of intolerance, the place regularly hosts pro-Jihad, pro-Sharia Law advocates (think of the people behind Jim Foley and Steve Sotloff having their heads sawn off while on their knees), who lie lie lie to adoring audiences, who in turn shout down questioners asking the right questions for the liars during the appointed Q&A periods.
I myself have been nastily hissed at and yelled at there, for clapping in support of a speaker or statement I like, while the endless sea of extremists in the audience uproariously cheered on their favored speaker.
The place is now ruthlessly run by intolerant, close-minded control freaks, serving up anti-Americanism by the bucketful, pro-Jihad by the boatload, and dissent-crushing manipulation by the truckload.
How sad. How utterly shameful.
Farewell, fair maiden of Chautauqua Lake’s shores. We once knew ye.
How the Left did once and would again gain control of a nation
Plenty of conservatives have a bit o’ swagger, because they have the guns and the liberals do not.
True enough.
In a fight for America, our side has the civilian firepower, no question.
But what if the liberals gained enough control of enough of the military and local police to gain control of enough American territory that they could do as they needed with their enemies (to borrow a word from Barack Hussein Obama)?
Don’t they have that kind of infrastructure, already, if we imagine what a civil war in America looked like once, and could look like again; how certain regions and states would be drawn up?
And it’s not like conservatives have a standing army. We are individuals, living in homes, separated from a concentration of power. Few of us belong to militias, much less shooting clubs or hunting clubs.
As individuals, we are sitting ducks. It is easy for even a weak government to take, capture, and whisk away individuals, to control individuals, to disappear individuals. Only together, acting as groups, can conservatives and patriots represent any formidable force to be reckoned with.
If you want to see how a country can be lost, because good men, good people, good individuals, have a sense of honor and duty to their nation that is stronger than their will to survive with a new identity, an identity detached from the nation they once knew, then watch this movie, below. The last 15 minutes spell out the kind of official coercive force that Liberals have always used and still covet today, because they are so “right.”
This movie below is a true story about how the Soviet Russians murdered the cream of Polish society, leaving the Polish people rudderless, leaderless, and easier to rule with a Liberal iron fist. The Soviets were the liberals of their day; you know, doing great things for everyone: Free cars, free houses, free food, free healthcare. They had it all! Soviet Russia was a real paradise…<sarcasm>… You know, the kind of “paradise” that Obama is building here in America, with the help of his coercive IRS and various federal agencies.
Watch “Katyn.”
UPDATE: No doubt that some readers will outright dismiss these concerns. If you want to see a real-life, current example of how each patriot or conservative activist could be ‘taken out of circulation” by a lawless government using federal, state, and local law enforcement people, read this article about how in the middle of the day a military helicopter, a dozen cars, and swarms of SWAT officers descended on a school soccer field in a town of 850 people in rural Illinois. Their goal: One house, three miles away. Overkill, anyone?
Google, Facebook, COSTCO – each trying to suppress your free speech
If you think that social media sources like Google and Facebook treat everyone equally, you are wrong.
If you think that COSTCO treats everyone equally, you are wrong.
All three have been documented in recent days to be in an aggressive war against your free speech opportunities, and against your ability to access information that the owners (of Google, Facebook, and COSTCO) do not like.
The owners of all three institutions are liberals.
Liberalism went from a demand for fairness to an overarching totalitarianism in a few short decades. While many people say now and said back then that the socialist and communist roots of liberalism indicated that liberals were never interested in fairness, being open-minded, or tolerant, I grew up surrounded by liberals, and it was not until the last decade that I witnessed what looked to me like a transformation. They went from representing opposing views to crushing opposing views, terminating dissent, as soon as they had the opportunity.
For example, the gentle “peace”-loving pacifists <ahem> were on the war path at Chautauqua Institution, a place long known for providing a platform for different ideas and views. Suddenly authors like Andrew Bostom were shut out of week-long discussions where Islamic terrorists had the stage, as though they could not possibly be balanced by another opposing view. And it then dawned on me and many others that liberalism is just one more tyrannical, evil, cruel, divisive, phony movement designed to create winners and losers by any artificial means necessary.
Like all totalitarian movements, liberalism must be opposed in the name of freedom. Let people make up their own minds.
If you want to see how liberals have been shutting down your free speech opportunities this past week, visit these links:
http://www.dineshdsouza.com/news/wnd-costco-removing-dsouzas-america-shelves/
And simply use BING to search for examples of how Facebook has artificially shut down and hindered conservative Facebook pages, including our own Josh First for PA Senate.
UPDATE: How could we forget to mention that Google removed the Gates of Vienna blog without any notice to the owners, thereby violating the very terms of service that Google themselves had required. The Gates of Vienna blog is a well-known source for history and updates from around the world. But the Left, ah, the Left, they cannot tolerate dissent. So, Google, run by liberals, tried to destroy the blog. But it survived. Use BING to look up the story.
Is it time to recall PA AG Kane?
In 2012, Pennsylvania’s Attorney General Kathleen Kane campaigned on being fresh, new, unconnected to party politics. She challenged the ultimate Republican insider, and crushed him by a good 15%. Kane became Pennsylvania’s first Democrat AG only because so many Republican voters defected from the GOP and voted for Kane.
Within six months into her four-year tenure, signs were evident that she was not this politically dispassionate, politically disconnected professional and fair-minded arbiter she represented herself to be.
Rather, it became clear that she was politically correct (dogmatically liberal) and willing to use the AG office to score partisan political points, going so far as to choose not to enforce or defend state laws with which she personally disagrees. That right there is pretty much the end of democratic government, when elected officials stop enforcing laws they personally disagree with. Democracy only works if everyone agrees that whatever the law is, it is, and it is the law of the land until it is changed.
Kane’s icing on the cake was to cold-stop an investigation of four Democrat elected officials in the Philadelphia area. Kane does not deny that the four had been caught on tape or video taking bribes. One of the officials can be heard saying “Well, happy birthday to [me]!” as he pockets a wad of illegal cash.
In what stinks of political favoritism, Kane simply made up a lame excuse and stopped the ongoing investigation of obvious official corruption.
When Kane was called out about it by the Philadelphia Inquirer, a newspaper unused to criticizing Democrats, she showed up to a meeting with the paper’s board with her libel lawyer in tow. A subsequent show of legal force and more open threats of a lawsuit against her critics, by Kane, has only made things worse for her. But she is not backing down. Mind you, the Inquirer merely reported the facts; the paper did not ascribe motive or allege that Kane herself was part of the cash scandal. So it is hard to see what kind of libel suit this elected official thought she was going to actually win. Intimidation was her first and last approach, however, which tells you all you need to know about her very low quality as an elected official.
Additionally, Philadelphia City DA Seth Williams, a Democrat, has criticized Kane for ending the investigation. Seth and I were close friends while students at Penn State, and yes, he is an active Democrat, and he is also a straight shooter.
Now, Kane says she supports another newspaper’s open records effort to get the documents about the terminated investigation. Well, actually, after opposing it, Kane only now supports releasing “certain” documents; you know, the documents that support her position. The investigation’s documents that will cast her political activism in a bad light, well, they should remain sealed, she says.
Governor Tom Corbett may well be a one-term governor, which presently it appears is his sad destiny, if the polling data is even close to accurate. Well, folks, let’s make this Kathleen Kane a half-term AG. She is incompetent, she is politicizing Pennsylvania’s established laws, and she is using blunt force legal intimidation to blunt honest criticism of her official job performance. Let’s start a recall of AG Kane, and get someone in that office who is a plain vanilla enforcer of The Law, as that role is supposed to be.
In an ideal world, party affiliation should not matter in the AG office. I myself am partial to the potential AG candidacy of Ed Marsico, Dauphin County’s present District Attorney. Marsico is an honest guy, a hard working guy, and has shown few partisan inclinations in his day to day work of making Dauphin County a safe place to live and work. Marsico would be a big enough improvement over Kane to warrant a recall effort against her. Surely there are other professional-grade DAs out there, too, who also would qualify to fill out the remainder Kane’s term.
Let’s get that recall effort started and Pennsylvania’s law enforcement back on track.
UPDATE: How on earth could I forget? Kane is having some difficulty investigating the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, where cash gifts and other toxic ethics violations have occurred recently. Now….why would Kane have such a tough time bringing to bear her full weight on such obviously corrupt violations of Pennsylvania laws? Why, it would not perhaps happen to be the presence of KANE TRUCKING contracts with the PLCB, right? The KANE TRUCKING contracts with the PLCB are worth millions of dollars to Kathleen Kane, personally. Got it. Fox guarding the henhouse here. Good old fashioned corruption, at least on the face of it. Time to end this sick experiment, and send Mrs. Moneybags Kane home.
A day that will live in infamy? We will live through it
Seeing US Senator Pat Toomey cave in on gun control is a painful thing indeed. The man was elected to lead on tough issues and bring the Constitution to bear on policy and legislation. He is obviously failing on this most important count.
With his Democrat co-sponsored bill promoting universal background checks and hugely increased roles for doctors, and reportedly teachers, in unilaterally determining if a citizen is sufficiently mentally competent to enjoy their Constitutional freedoms, Toomey has entered a freak zone that no one could have imagined.
However, we have been here before. Last year it was US Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts who allowed ObamaCare to stand on the most bizarre reasoning possible. Recall that, like Toomey, Roberts was supposed to be a conservative.
If you go back far enough in other places, you’ll find similar hard left turns, like when Israel Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave up the Sinai Peninsula for a worthless scrap of paper from Egypt, or when Israel Prime Minster Yitzchak Rabin entered into the disastrous Oslo Accords, or when Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally disengaged from the Gaza Strip, this time not for a worthless piece of paper, but for a never-ending rain of missiles.
FDR dropped the ball at the Yalta Conference, giving Stalin free rein to run amok, setting the stage for decades of nuclear stand-off that could have been averted had FDR been a strong man.
Such is the mindset of humans, that desire to be liked, to be thought well of. Especially when momentous events are upon them, so many in leadership roles are called upon to compromise as a sign of their maturity and clear thinking.
Yet, few but the strongest can resist this siren’s call. Lincoln comes to mind. Thus he earned the best monument on the National Mall. Principled all the way. Admiration from all corners.
Seeing Senator Pat Toomey’s face in the news associated with this big flop of a bill hurts. Hearing Toomey say that background checks and all of the government database that does with them isn’t gun control is like entering some weird, surreal deep-sleep dreaming phase.
And yet, Toomey has revealed himself as a mere mortal, not some great man who had the principles and the strength of character to stand tall when needed.
He is not a bad guy, but Toomey is a failure on this one count alone, and he is not the first nor the last. The Second Amendment is the greatest right of all the Constitutional rights granted to American citizens, and seeing it so badly eroded by one person who should know better is a painful reminder that we cannot stop working.
Yes, the Tea Party folks will probably primary Toomey, and he may well lose that race on the basis of this vote alone. And yes, that could possibly lead to a Democrat filling his seat, which I would not be happy about. But it will be a lesson to other Republicans: Stand with us, or quit calling yourself a Republican.
The ugly face of “gun control”
The ugly face of “gun control”…
NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg is the ugly face of “gun control.”
“Gun control” has zero to do with crime control. Rather, it is about controlling the citizenry and making government their master.
Bloomberg wants to lock away infant formula in hospitals to force new mothers to nurse their newborn infants, he wants to deprive free citizens of the soda size of their choice, he wants to outlaw a certain circumcision procedure, limit salt in food, etc. And, he wants to take away your guns or make them so difficult to get that, in effect, you really cannot have them at all. Yesterday Bloomberg said that the government “can infringe on your rights because we sometimes do know better.” This tyrannical attitude towards governance is exactly what America was designed to defy and stop. Power to the people, Mike!
Will CeaseFirePA Join the Militia, Please?
“When the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually…. I ask, who are the militia. They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers. But I cannot say who will be the militia of the future day. If that paper on the table [the Constitution] gets no alteration, the militia of the future day may not consist of all classes, high and low, and rich and poor….”
–George Mason, Founder of America, 1788