Posts Tagged → Liberal
See-Saw Reactions Indicate Something is Up
When a political party or a movement politicizes every single thing its opponents do, in the hopes of turning every action taken into a negative, you’ve already got a problem.
It is a problem because nothing positive is being sold. It’s just hate and anger and fake outrage piled on top of more and more hate.
Trying to demonize people has many downsides. It is emotionally unsustainable. And it is politically unsustainable. Just ask Adolf Hitler and his Nazi socialists, who perfected the heaping of hate upon their opponents.
Hitler and the Nazis reaped a whirlwind of backlash.
And the credibility gap grows, because the daily bobbing and weaving in search of an opening leads the accuser to become the blesser and vice versa. It looks nutty because it is nutty.
So we have Obama jetting around the planet to sell his carbon control message. The huge SUV convoys taking Obama from place to place aren’t low on carbon emissions, either.
His TV interviewer asks him why he is against eating meat because he has cooked “thousands of steaks” for Obama. Obama admits he sure likes steak.
In other words, don’t do as I do, do as I say.
Obama’s credibility may remain high with a small group of highly partisan hard leftists, but the rest of us shake our heads at his naked hypocrisy.
This Comey firing business is even worse, if it can be imagined.
For months and months, one American political party was demanding that Comey be fired. They blamed him for the loss of their candidate.
Then he gets fired by the president yesterday, and within an hour the same exact people who hated Comey and demanded his firing are now hating the president for firing him and are saying it is a political act.
This irrational hate isn’t just hypocritical. It is self-damaging, because normal people see it as nearly schizophrenic.
Someone quipped last week that Democrats are now so confused, if Trump came out for gun control, the Democrats would be “outraged” and immediately be against gun control.
Somewhere this acting and fake outrage works on people who are not independent thinkers. I understand that. Enough people anywhere simply follow the lead of someone, anyone, to make a real movement. Might only be five or ten percent of a society, but it is usually enough to raise hell. And that is what is happening here.
Folks, if you are reading this, I hope it is to expand your own thinking and not just to try to find fault. One of the huge challenges the left faces is the constant hatred expressed for people who simply disagree on policy. For decades the Left has been calling opponents haters, bigots, racists, xenophobes, sexists, etc., with no substance to back it up. Just toxic hate.
What our nation loses when these illogical, erratic see-saw reactions and wild hateful accusations lose their sting isn’t just a diminished political party on the left, but the real issues suffer. That is because the political mix and debate is reduced and the normal people somewhere in the middle back away, disgusted by the antics.
Don’t be a hater. Be a thinker. For a long time liberals were open minded, thoughtful, reflective, and analytical. That great tradition is gone. And that is sad, because all Americans are impoverished as a result.
Normal People Must Stop Supporting the lawless Democrat Party
In the past two weeks, a new US president has begun taking control of the executive branch over which he presides, per the US Constitution, and the world has exploded in reaction.
No better proof exists that America has been hemmoraging wealth and accreting parasites than the universal response of the same parasites: We want our free lunch!
How on earth does an illegal alien deserve my Social Security money, which I will not qualify for until I am in my late 60s and which I have been paying for since age 14? How does an illegal alien begin their new life here in America by breaking the law? Damn, the old frontier mentality is alive and well here, and it is unsustainable. Schools, hospitals, police services, public utilities, the costs imposed on all US citizens by illegal aliens is in the hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
The now formal move to create safe spaces for illegal aliens (“sanctuary cities” and even sanctuary campuses) is simply one political party trying to artificially bolster its voter numbers so it can artificially take control of America and impose its radical un-American agenda on the unwilling inhabitants thereof.
Now that California and nearly all Democrats have declared their determination to brazenly disobey federal law, basically an admission of lawless and threatening behavior, the distinction is absolutely clear: The Democrat Party is officially the party of lawlessness.
Oddly, the 1960s protest mentality has now persuaded people that simply because they oppose something, they can break the law, even violently and destructively. This makes no sense to normal Americans, but it is what we are up against. We are facing pure lawlessness, supported by the meddlesome recently departed president. He remains a class-less street organizer til the last, desirous of an ungovernable country filled with citizens at each other’s throats. What a guy.
And what if the town of Sonora, California, (or some town in western Maryland, or Upstate New York) declared itself a sanctuary city for lawful gun owners, who simply want to own otherwise legal guns that the state of California has arbitrarily declared unacceptable? You just know the CA national guard and every California SWAT team would descend upon Sonora, kick the crap out of everyone, arrest the otherwise peaceful gun owners, prosecute them fully, make an example of them, and leave nothing but smoking ashes behind. Hypocrite Liberals tolerate no one breaking their laws.
Now that one political party has openly declared itself at war with the basic tenets of democracy and law, the choice is clear for every normal American out there. Stop supporting the Democrat Party until it returns to the Earth’s orbit.
I know a lot of Democrats. There’s a bunch I hunt with, and a lot of neighbors and friends. These are all normal people. None of these Democrats I know want violence and destruction, or street conflicts. They stand distinctly against that behavior. Nor do they want to win at the ballot box by cheating. So, their time to step up has arrived, and their choice is clear. They must stop supporting the Democrat Party. Only they can pressure the Democrat Party to return to acting like Americans, and stop acting like an attacking seditious force trying to use illegal alien invaders as mercenaries and human shields to help them wrest control of American government.
Did Liberals become Lawless by Nature? Or Habit?
Part of the 1960s counter-culture and protest fuel was a strong sense that ossified American culture and morality were “just, because.” To counter-culture activists, the war in Vietnam was perhaps the best example of this inconsiderate mindlessness. It became a galvanizing centerpiece in the display of Everything That Is Wrong With America.
So both bras and draft cards alike were burned as acts of moral or legal defiance became part and parcel of the movement.
Fast forward fifty years, and the liberal culture is deeply rooted in brazen acts of defiance and protest. Sit-ins, occupations of offices, “die-ins,” stormy public protests are all regular scenes as liberals make their point public.
Somewhere underlying the actions is that old sense that ‘because these things I oppose are immoral, I can engage in immoral and illegal acts of protest’.
Or said another way, ‘I vote the right way, so my actions are infallible’.
Half a step away from this thinking is the idea that whatever politically correct issue du jour is up next, illegal and violent acts are a necessity or at least justified. Heck, people even argue they are the cause. Could be the candidacy and then election of Donald Trump “causing” demonstrators to destroy private and public property, assault fellow Americans, bully co-workers, and accuse anyone who disagrees with them of being violent, hateful, etc.
And here is where a lot of Americans are lost and confused, including me.
Protesting is understandable. Violent protests are not (think of the many recent cry-bully protests against displeasing electoral outcomes).
Strongly disagreeing with someone’s politics is understandable. Assaulting someone over it is not (especially when the assailant claims to be “for love” and “against hate”) (think of the mass violence by liberals committed against Trump supporters for the past year).
Writing a letter to the editor, like Bob Quarteroni did a few weeks ago here in the Patriot News is all-American. Go for it. But trespassing, vandalizing and stealing private property, and threatening landowners with physical harm to make a vague political point, as Mr. Quarteroni gleefully admitted to in his letter, is not OK.
Asking a young lady yesterday to please stop at the stop sign in our neighborhood, and not barrel through it as she did, because two small kids play at that intersection, netted my son and I this response: “I did stop at the stop sign”
“No, you did not, we watched you drive right through.”
“I’ll bet you voted for Trump,” said the dashing young lady, who then gave us the finger and marched on in to the Wells Fargo bank to get her money. Apparently Trump made her drive recklessly.
And then there is the sanctuary city thing, a naked play for votes by one political party that seems to always need a permanently angry underclass. Illegal aliens will do for them, never mind that the rest of America wants them to follow the law.
If a bunch of gun owners decided to ignore gun laws in one of these sanctuary cities, because they believe the gun laws are unconstitutional, punitive, unfair, backwards, and causing crime rather than limiting it, you just know what the city fathers would do: Lock ’em up!
It is interesting, isn’t it, that neither Barack Hussein Obama nor Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders asked their rampaging supporters to stop…. The liberal political leaders actually encouraged the illegal and violent behavior. And in fact, in state houses and the US Congress there is one political party whose elected members continue to hold illegal “sit-ins” and other forms of partisan protest in public, taxpayer-owned places.
So what happened here?
When did liberals go from staking out some intellectual or moral high ground, to destructive, illegal, and criminal acts as a matter of daily behavior?
Somewhere, that old sense of just cause got blurred. All of the burned draft cards and other little illegal acts of defiance morphed into a culture of perpetual violence, destruction, and openly flouting the law (when it suits them).
I know a lot of liberals. How could I not, having graduated from America’s flagship Quaker school? Our high school class grew up together and we are like a big family, so we stay in touch. And of course I continue to maintain relationships with as many liberals as will have me as their friend (apparently not easy for PC people, a subject for another essay).
I look at these otherwise great people about whom I care a great deal, and I wonder, did they willingly and consciously allow their nature to become corrupted and lawless? Did they get here by habit?
Are their goals so pure that any means are justified, no matter the unfair high cost, the immorality, the injustice, the personal loss by innocents? That was a Lenin and Stalin thing. Not that American liberals would ever follow in those paths….nahhh.
I cannot answer this question, and I wish liberals would.
A question and a wish
First the question. Is there a reasonable explanation for Brooklyn lawyer Dan Goldstein’s aggressive harassment of Donald Trump’s daughter yesterday?
After all, the young mother was sitting in a plane with her three kids, minding her own business. Bystanders credited her with being cool under fire, while Goldstein and his partner were escorted off the plane for their disruptive behavior
Goldstein’s partner, Matt Lasner, joked about it on Twitter, then deleted his Twitter account altogether.
What is it about two gay Jewish guys from New York that they have missed out on the meaning of life, the meaning of the holidays, and the joy that comes with treating people nicely?
These two guys are a minority of a minority of a minority. You’d think they would be the most sensitive to not bullying other people. They’re highly educated (which actually probably explains some of this event, given the low quality of most PC academia). They’re financially secure. Where did they leave their manners?
I have a theory: So many urban elites are so completely cut off from the rest of the populace that they really cannot relate, and their disdain simply pours out when they do make contact. After decades of indoctrination by academia and liberal activist media, these folks are so filled with acid hatred for others that they cannot control themselves. In short, they are bigots.
If you want evidence that liberalism is failing, this is a good example. If your beliefs cause you to behave in inhumane ways toward innocent people, then you have bad beliefs.
Dan Goldstein and Matt Lasner are most likely atheists, so it’s tough to say what their core beliefs are or could be. But they make their aggressive liberalism clear to everyone, and that includes being vile and disrespectful to moms with kids minding their own business.
Gentlemen, Daniel and Matthew, if I may be bold enough to call you gentlemen, maybe you can take a hint here for how to treat everyone you meet over the next week, if not your lifetime: Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, and have a wonderful New Year!
Why I am Suing Mayor Papenfuse
The following op-ed was published at www.pennlive.com, which is the new digital version of the former Patriot News newspaper. What I submitted was edited a bit by the staff there, and they mis-spelled attorney Josh Prince’s name, among other mistakes or omissions. If you are interested in seeing the difference of thinking between liberals and conservatives, you are encouraged to read the comments section following the letter. The conservatives keep on repeating the same basic, accurate facts, the same simple logic, and the liberals keep talking about their feelings, going off-topic, mocking and commenting on physical appearance. This is one of those moments where taxpayers can get a glimpse of the failure of America’s educational system, where critical thinking has been thrown overboard in favor of teaching students to be politically correct on issues, like government overreach on gun ownership.
http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2015/04/heres_why_im_suing_to_stop_pap.html#incart_2box_opinion
Hillary Clinton: Public Threat #1
Had any Republican of note engaged in the same email account shenanigans as Hillary Clinton while she was employed by the American taxpayer to represent us abroad in the US State Department, his or her career would be over in seconds.
World-wide condemnation of her ham-handed use of unsecured, hackable email accounts to conduct secret official diplomatic business in a very competitive worldwide environment would have destroyed any Republican.
Never mind that Clinton’s secret, private email accounts were designed to avoid public scrutiny of transparent public email accounts. Public scrutiny of her emails might reveal the deep, dark corruption behind Clinton’s private sales of public influence through her role at the the US State Department to the Clinton Foundation.
The liberal mainstream media has given liberal Hillary Clinton multiple public opportunities to explain away her dangerous games that have cost Americans their personal security. But now even the mainstream press corps might have limits. Yesterday was apparently the end of the media coddling the Clintons have grown up with, because even liberal outposts like the Washington Post are now criticizing Hillary Clinton’s poor performance at her press event.
Would it not be rewarding to see Democrats subject more often to the same rules the media establishment apply to conservatives and Republicans? We might actually get some good government as a result. Or at least we won’t have an obvious, avowed public threat being considered for the most important, most influential public office on the planet.
The day after
The day after Netanyahu’s historic speech before the US Congress, people who care about real things, for good or for bad, are doing 180-degree analyses of its impact, the merits of the policy he advocated, the audiences he addressed, the politics behind, surrounding, and in front of him, and implications of a nuclear Iran for America.
Shocking was the news blackout by the major TV networks and NPR/PBS.
While Netanyahu was speaking, I dialed into WITF, the local NPR affiliate here in Harrisburg. Instead of listening to Netanyahu speak, as any listener would normally expect if any other head of state were addressing Congress, I was treated to a sarcastic discussion about health care by advocates for ObamaCare.
NPR is already an especially egregious mis-use of taxpayer money, and this one latest example serves to illustrate how corrupt and intellectually bankrupt NPR, PBS, and their affiliate stations are, despite couching themselves as sources of real debate and substance.
NPR’s news blackout of Netanyahu is done for one reason: To serve the interests of the Obama Administration, which itself not only did not attend the speech, but also issued empty, juvenile statements immediately after Netanyahu finished.
If you are NPR and you are blacking out Netanyahu’s speech, then you are not a real news organization. Rather, you are a political activist, an advocate, far from some kind of fair-minded arbiter of plain fact that you represent yourself to be.
Likewise, here in Harrisburg, the staff of the Patriot News has fallen all over themselves to protect Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse from the legal fallout of his decision to hold onto illegal anti-gun ordinances.
I am a plaintiff in a suit against the city over these illegal ordinances. Yesterday our attorney Josh Prince scored a default judgment against Harrisburg City.
When people like Mayor Papenfuse engage in official lawless behavior, it’s not some sort of hip civil disobedience, it’s tyranny. Government must absolutely live by its laws. Papenfuse believes he is above the law, and that deserves a broadside by newspapers everywhere. But like NPR and the mainstream media’s blackout treatment of Netanyahu, the Patriot News serves a different master – liberals at war with the foundations of Western Civilization. So Papenfuse gets away with legal murder. Iran readies to commit nuclear genocide.
That is a hell of a thing to confront first thing in the day.
A Severance Tax, now?
Talk about an addiction to spending other people’s money.
Yesterday in southeast PA, far away from the communities where this issue is most important and the citizens might not be so welcoming, Governor Tom Wolf staked out his position on creating a new 5% “severance tax” on natural gas from the Marcellus shale feature.
Right now, natural gas is selling at historic low prices, especially here in Pennsylvania. The financial incentive to drill more or spend more money to get more gas is very low, and drill rigs have been disappearing from across the region for a year.
The Saudis began dumping oil months ago, in an effort to punish competing oil producers Iran and Russia, with the secondary effect of dropping gasoline prices so low that the natural gas industry got hit from that side, too.
So now is not only a bad time for the gas industry, it is also a time of greatly diminished returns on investment and on royalties received. Scalping 5% off the top of that is punishing to everyone, including gas consumers, who will see their rates increase proportionally.
Here’s the biggest problem with a severance tax: Pennsylvania already has a 3% impact fee on Marcellus gas, and a Corporate Net Income Tax of 9.99% (let’s call it ten percent, OK?). Most of the other gas and oil producing states have no such additional taxes; their severance taxes are the one and only tax their oil and gas producers pay, not the multiple high taxes and fees drillers in PA pay.
Pennsylvania government is therefore already reaping much higher revenue from the gas industry than other gas producing states. That means that the companies doing business here are already burdened much more than elsewhere.
So adding a severance tax now, at this economically bad time, without commensurately lowering other taxes, or the existing Impact Fee, makes no sense. Unless the people promoting this have an infantile view of how America and business work.
And that right there is the problem. Way too many advocates for tax-and-spend policies like an additional severance tax have a Marxist view of business; essentially, to them, business exists to pour money into liberal schemes.
And speaking of spending, who believes that spending more and more and more taxpayer dollars on public schools, public teachers unions, and public teachers’ pensions, actually equates with better education?
So many studies disprove that (see the Mercatus Center), but it is a liberal mantra that taxpayers must spend ever more of their money to support public unions that support political liberals. And both parents of students and taxpayers alike now correctly see that system for what it is – simple, legalized political graft to fund one political party.
Public schools are mostly a disaster, yet teacher’s unions and their political buddies continue to pound on the table for more and more money. Homeowners are essentially now renting their houses from the teacher’s unions, and proposed laws like Act 76 seek to fix that unfair situation by removing the vampire fangs from homeowners and letting the larger society pay for its expenditure.
Going door-to-door for political races year after year, property tax has been the number one issue I have encountered among elderly homeowners. So many of them can no longer afford to pay the taxes on their houses, that they must sell them and move, despite a lifetime of investing in them. This is patently un-American and unfair.
So Tom Wolf is moving in exactly the opposite direction we need on this subject, and instead of trying to fix the tax situation, he seeks to make it worse. To be fair, Wolf campaigned on raising taxes. He just needs to remember that he did not get elected by voters who want higher taxes, they wanted to fire former governor Tom Corbett.
What is in a political “party”?
The Communist Party.
The Democrat Party.
The Republican Party.
What is the difference between these three and many other active political parties?
Their party agenda is what defines them.
Their cause, their unifying principles, their policies and political platforms, these are the things that separate political parties from one another.
All political parties have their own structure, their functionaries, their own bureaucracies, lawyers, and bosses. All have become self-interested organisms, influenced by a constellation of special interest groups. At a certain point, the party exists simply for its own benefit.
But what happens when these parties begin to bleed into one another, when they begin to blend across their boundaries and blur their boundaries? When they lose their distinctive appeal?
When political parties lose their way, do they lose their reason for being?
Although my own Republican Party has pledged overall to serve the taxpayers, plenty of fellow Republicans hold personal and official positions contrary to the interests of taxpayers, voters, and citizens. Their positions are subtle, often only visible in the important background decisions they make.
Many times in recent history, the Republican Party has been used as a weapon to silence voices of political activists who sought to return the brand to its more basic principles and its more elementary purpose, which would naturally be defined as the cause of liberty.
It is my own hope and the hope of many other dedicated citizens that the Republican Party, also known as the establishment, will stay out of any upcoming elections around Central Pennsylvania.
It is one thing for a candidate to ask, say, State Rep. Ron Marsico for his individual support, or to ask individual party committee members for their support. It is entirely another thing for the Dauphin County Republican Committee to endorse a candidate so that the Pennsylvania Republican Party can spend money to challenge a Republican candidate’s nomination ballots, because he (or she) is too independent-minded. Or too “conservative.” Or not enough in the pocket of some party boss.
My experience tells me that this controlling, anti-freedom behavior has happened so often that many political activists are inclined to become political Independents, which means that the Republican base, the most passionate Republican voters, become driven away from the party and become less interested in its success. We saw this with the past election, where former governor Tom Corbett had little street game. The people with the most passion were not going to do door-to-door for Corbett.
Even more worrisome is if the one-time Republican becomes an Independent candidate, or mounts a write-in campaign. Sure, these efforts may hurt the Republican Party’s nominee, but if the party didn’t want that independent-minded candidate in the first place, what right does anyone have to expect him to stay loyal to them?
Put another way, if some political boss doesn’t want a certain candidate to get elected, then what expectation does that political boss have of earning the support of the candidate he opposed?
Put another way, if you don’t want John to get elected, then why would John want you or your ally to get elected?
Do the Democrats have this problem? Sure. But that political party has become overrun with foreign policy extremism and anti-capitalism. Wealth redistribution is completely contrary to American founding principles, but it is nevertheless now a core of the Democrat Party.
That is sad, because at one time, the Democrats just wanted more opportunity for everyone. Now they want to take from one person and give to another person, which is theft.
But I am not a Democrat, so this is not my political problem.
My problem is with so-called Republicans who actually share a lot in common with liberal Democrats, but who stay in the Republican Party.
There are different ways a Republican can share values with a liberal. For example, a Republican staffer who believes in the supremacy of bureaucracy….despite bureaucracy being the enemy of freedom and individual liberty. Working from within the party, these functionaries stamp their own flavor on policy and principle alike, often softening edges and blurring lines, giving the voters fewer choices, more government intervention, and ultimately less liberty.
The same could be said for certain “Republican” lobbyists, whose connections to money, political funding, cause them to promote bad policies such as Common Core, which strikes deep at the heart of liberty. They would rather ally with liberals than support a conservative Republican candidate. People like this have great influence in the Republican Party. They influence its agenda, and the kind of decisions the apparatus supports.
If you stand for everything, you stand for nothing. I myself will stand for liberty, freedom, and opportunity for everyone. If that puts me and others like me at odds with some political party, then that says everything a voter needs to know about that party: It does not have your interests at heart.
I am a Republican because I hold old-fashioned, traditional American values, the kind of values that created America and kept her great for so long. I will vote for and support only those candidates who hold similar values. Regardless of what a party spokeswoman may say, a Republican Party that has no conservativism in it isn’t really a Republican Party any longer, is it?