A Tale of Two Sittings (Rome/Obama)

For what I saw as a Humorous (in a cynical way) was Obama’s (40%ish popularity) take on his meeting with the Pope (85% popularity) yesterday. The Vatican posted its take on the meeting also. One wonders if they actually in the same room??? Supposedly they were because, unlike Mooch, the Press was invited to take pictures. Frankly, I’ll take the Vatican’s version.

Only God knows for sure: Obama, pope differ on accounts of ‘social schisms’ talk

(midway through the article)
The Vatican, however, issued a statement after the meeting saying the president’s discussions with Francis and two other top Vatican officials focused “on questions of particular relevance for the [Catholic] Church in [the United States], such as the exercise of the rights to religious freedom, life and conscientious objection” — issues that have fueled divisions between Mr. Obama and the church.

Although Mr. Obama wanted to highlight his bond with Francis over questions of economic inequality and helping the poor, Obamacare’s mandate for employers to pay for birth control gained more attention. (Sounds like CROSS-Talk, so to speak)

The president clearly wanted to benefit from the global popularity of the pope. Their meeting was a highlight of Mr. Obama’s foreign trip that ends Friday in Saudi Arabia, but it was at an awkward time for the president.

Read it all here: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/27/obama-meets-pope-francis-vatican/#ixzz2xHMNmYnx

Gay-O-L: Huffington’s Suffocating Social Affirmation Hell

 

The assault on classical liberal values by the postmodern values nihilists, that is to say by those who make up that political sub-population of solidarity pimps whom we generally identify as collectivist, takes various forms.

Just the other day we witnessed a judge in Michigan frantically sawing at his We-Are-The-World violin as he endorsed the idea of saddling society (that’s all of you) with the responsibility of recognizing (legally as jurors) and implicitly affirming (socially) what is essentially an exercise in nonsense.

At least judge Friedman felt some necessity of providing himself with constitutional cover, or at least constitutional allusions and “bases”, which would seem plausible enough to the morons most likely to take his Kumbayist exercise in Talmudic constitutional subterfuge seriously. He could not be too blatant. After all he was purportedly talking about “the law” even though he was pretty much making it up to suit as he went along on the one hand, while striking down actual exercises in popular self-government, on the other.

In the case of AOL however, we witness a different kind of approach entirely. This method expresses itself as a completely unapologetic take over of a system in a way that is much more open. It pretends to no real justification other than an expression of progressive will or taste; i.e. a raw assertion that it will be “the way we want it to be because that is the way we want it to be”

In the latter AOL case, it resolves much more clearly and immediately to a mere matter of competing tastes and wills. And those who own AOL feel free, and in fact legally are free, to impose their wills and tastes on their site as normative; no matter how objectively repugnant those views and “values” may be to non-nihilists.

It therefore boils down to a simple matter of those who do not like the ideological and cultural line AOL is nowadays peddling, being invited to shut up or go elsewhere; as the Huff-Po’s recent news story commentary rules make plain. It’s “Vote yes here, or vote yes there.” or be damned.  And as the service costs nothing to users, I suppose it is fully worth what is paid by them.

Fair enough then it seems.  It is a private enterprise.

Well almost fair enough, since it does not seem to be the belief of so-called progressives in general that the reciprocal of a contrary policy in some other venue would be equally “fair”, be that venue private or not.

Progressives, in their intolerance, almost appear to be assuming that certain objective and universal standards do in fact exist, and ought to be in universal operation because they are right in some cosmic sense. But by now we all know better than that, and that to imagine so  would be to mistake the sound of progressive polling booth rhetoric for the reality of  progressive aims, progressive world-shaping efforts and progressive schemes of programmatic domination.

As Richard Rorty admitted, what they want is, in the final analysis, just an expression of what they want and “value”; and as such they feel no obligation to grant to those whom they do not respect, who do not fit, or refuse to fit, as part of their progressive social circle of taste and urges, the same rights of political free speech, debate, and presumptive intellectual respect which were granted to them;  and which thereby allowed them in the first place to work their way into the positions of social and political influence they presently enjoy.

 

Again, as political progressive and “ironist” philosopher Richard Rorty stated:

“The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire “American liberal establishment” is engaged in a conspiracy. Had they read Habermas, these people would say that the typical communication situation in American college classrooms is no more herrschaftsfrei [domination free] than that in the Hitler Youth camps.

These parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students….When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual ….

The racist or fundamentalist parents of our students say that in a truly democratic society the students should not be forced to read books by such people—black people, Jewish people, homosexual people. They will protest that these books are being jammed down their children’s throats. I cannot see how to reply to this charge without saying something like “There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we liberals have been making more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. You have to be educated in order to be a citizen of our society, a participant in our conversation, someone with whom we can envisage merging our horizons. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.” Emphasis added

(Hadn’t fully realized this quote was available on Edward Feser’s website even though I have become a semi-regular reader in the last two years. The Internet cite I previously used in earlier references to this quote  has since disappeared from the Rorty’s Wikipedia  entry, )

 

This then is what progressivism is about, and why progressives must seek to ever narrow the realm of the private. For the views and ideas they wish to eradicate, the metaphysical questions they wish to rule out of bounds or obsolete, the troublesome concepts of objective truth and reality they wish to eliminate, they wish to eradicate not just from public institutions but from “society” at large.
 
Just as “democracy” in communism comes to stand for “economic democracy”, which breaks down to the common ownership of all means of production; so too “democratic society” in progressive-speak comes to mean the complete progressive domination of all intellectual activity: Progressive totalitarianism; the social solidarity state, that is to say progressive fascism.
 
Now this posting probably constitutes at least the third time I have quoted this son-of-a-bitch Rorty on this passage, on this site. I have done so repeatedly because he, and it, epitomize what the traditional American who falls within the classical liberal tradition, is facing when he confronts the modern liberal organism, aka the politically progressive solidarity pimp. More Americans than ever before do of course recognize the fascist and totalitarian core to the progressive sociopolitical project.
 
Nonetheless, Rorty’s quote should probably be permanently emblazoned as a warning over every site where people who have some interest in genuine human political freedom gather.
 

 

Another totalitarian judicial intervention

Judge Bernard Friedman

Mother Knows Best

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And no that is not a Simpson’s cartoon

It seems the crack-brained judiciary of this country is falling all over itself in a rush to re-engineer our lives. One moronic judge after another frantically competes for the privilege of destroying the principles of self-government and constitutional restraint.

The latest instance comes from Michigan, wherein judge Bernard Friedman “struck down” part of the Michigan Constitution on the supposed basis that it contravened the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

“IT IS HEREBY DECLARED that Article I, § 25 of the Michigan Constitution and its implementing statutes are unconstitutional because they violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.“

Along the way he engaged in the usual brainless expostulations typical of this class of jurist, comparing Loving v. Virginia, a miscegenation case involving members of the opposite sex, with a case involving two persons of the same sex. But of course when modern jurists start with their sweet mystery of life songs of love and emotional fulfillment, nothing like a restrained reading of the Federal Constitution much less a syllogism or logical coherence is likely to stand in the way of their herding us into a brave new world of judicially imposed social obligations and interpersonal affirmation.

It appears on the surface that nothing short of breaking social relations with persons of this kind will do if one is to somehow avoid being dragged down into their entropic hell-hole where social, and resultantly, personal energies, are squandered in affirming and expressing a government mandated solidarity with the morally dysfunctional as they celebrate their dysfunction. Which of course is – that is to say, the self-protective breaking of relations and distancing of one’s self –  precisely what the kind wishes to prevent you from doing in the first place. So, that tactic of withdrawing into the private is not likely to succeed without a fight either.

We’ve reached a peculiar point in this country; one where absurdities such as Anthony Kennedy’s pronouncements in Lawrence v. Texas substitute not only for careful reasoning, but for any semblance of rationality at all. And the legal establishment, and indeed most of the people, seem resigned to it.

Stare decisis is overthrown; tradition and custom assigned to the trash heap; “compelling state interests” are defined at judicial will; Constitutional limits on the coercive power of the Federal Government are trampled, and the very right of the people to legislate for themselves is ruled out of order in deference to so-called sociological jurisprudence. Place aside for one moment Kennedy’s infamous self-citation from Casey, in Lawrence, and consider what has really become the crux of the matter from the point of view of the modern legislating jurist:

“Equality of treatment and the due process right to demand respect for conduct protected by the substantive guarantee of liberty are linked in important respects, and a decision on the latter point advances both interests”

Recall that Kennedy is talking of buggery here; an absurd act committed by two worthless and probably morally deranged simps. Note carefully too, that what is being written into law is a demand of social respect for certain behaviors which Kumbaya trilling judges like Kennedy and Friedman deem shall henceforth be legal, and therefore mutatis mutandis socially acceptable. In this vein, Friedman quotes and writes:

“In attempting to define this case as a challenge to “the will of the people,” Tr. 2/25/14 p. 40, state defendants lost sight of what this case is truly about: people. No court record of this proceeding could ever fully convey the personal sacrifice of these two plaintiffs who seek to ensure that the state may no longer impair the rights of their children and the thousands of others now being raised by same-sex couples. It is the Court’s fervent hope that these children will grow up “to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives.” Windsor , 133 S. Ct. at 2694. Today’s decision is a step in that direction, and affirms the enduring principle that regardless of whoever finds favor in the eyes of the most recent majority, the guarantee of equal protection must prevail.”

“The court’s fervent hope” he says …

This perfervid jibber jabber is not a respectable account of law. It is contemptible emotionalism masquerading as meaning. It is an effluvial snuffling and mewing of a kind that poisons the life of anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot or arm’s reach. But when nothing is considered to have an intrinsic meaning, there is nothing left for the legislating holder of that view than a descent into the realm of subjective emotional satisfactions and feelings of “inclusion”.

We are clearly not only in a post teleological era philosophically, we are as a result in a post Constitutional era politically; an era where the “judicial revolution” or or better, that legislative usurpation which began in the 1930s, has fully taken hold.

They will mold you as they will, because they believe that there is no reason for them to refrain from doing so. It’s their religion, and they are willing to kill and die for it.

Given that, I am not sure anything other than an extreme reaction by the people and their elected representatives on their behalf, will preserve our traditional rights of self-government. Assuming anyone is still interested …

Rat fight! Ted Rall and the Daily Kos

Rall v. Kos

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes a rat fight can be rather amusing. Just try not to let them know you’re watching, much less laughing.

Now I admit that I’ve inadvertently ruffled rat fur in the past.  I did it on another blog by making – years after the fact – what were by any rational standards temperate and measured remarks about the object lessons available from that infamous Greensboro, North Carolina gunfight which took place between Neo-Nazi’s looking for revenge and self-professed Maoist revolutionary types trolling for a second-round public confrontation with them.

There were those among that blog’s readers who were especially outraged that I looked askance at the speechifying activities of one of the ideology drunk Maoist participants; as her husband lay on the ground with the top of his head shot off.

Quivering with indignation they fumed – or pretended to fume – that I was dancing in the blood of fellow Americans.  That’s “fellow” and “Americans” in quotes of course, since we are talking here about Nazi-types on the one hand, and totalitarian disciples of a mass murdering Marxist dictator on the other. Listening to self-described leftists wave the American flag over the bodies of its enemies while hysterically shouting about human decency was pretty much worth the price of admission alone.

Anyway, those who are unfamiliar with that particular historical  event – the gunfight not the years later blog eruption – can research it all for themselves, or make a beginning by clicking on this link.

However the rat fight I have in mind here, is not between two species of rat, but a more all in the lefty-family type of brawl. And thus far there have been no known fatalities, though there has been the usual obscene speechifying.

Will rat blood be shed by rat? I doubt it. We can probably rest easy on that point.

Ted Rall versus the Daily Kos.

Gee … what more can one reasonably say?

 

A Canary In The Mine In York Co., PA Special Election – Harbinger of Things to Come?

In the PA Legislature our local Senator in the 28th District resigned for personal reasons. The Dems thought they could pull a fast one and push a RINO and far out Lib were going to run in a Special Election yesterday. We do have a Primary in two months which would have worked fine to hold this election. But the rush was on to get the career politician into this seat. One the machine knew he would vote for higher taxes. Well, a ringer Conservative joined the race as a Write-In vote. Now, write-ins usually have a snowball’s chance in hell to make it. However, a miracle happened yesterday, the Write-In candidate WON. Not only WON, but won big time. The Write-In Scott Wagner almost had 11K write-in votes. The RINO and Lib Dem TOGETHER had about 12K votes. So, the wonderment is this, did the dirty campaign have an effect, was this the Obama Effect, was it the anti-incumbent effect, or all of the above? But the article has the vote numbers.

Scott Wagner the presumed winner in 28th Senate

CHRISTINA KAUFFMAN / The York Dispatch

In what appears to be an unexpected victory for a conservative businessman who has made a point of bucking his own party, Republican Scott Wagner is presumed to have won a write-in campaign to defeat party nominee Ron Miller for an open seat in the state Senate.

The closely watched, hotly contested face-off ended in disappointment for the Republican mainstay and a first major victory for the tea party in York County.

With 100 percent of precincts reporting Tuesday night, write-in votes totaled 10,595, or 47.7 percent, to Miller’s 5,920, or 26.6 percent. Democrat Linda Small of New Freedom nearly edged out Miller with 5,704 votes, for 25.7 percent.If all or most of the write-in votes are, as expected, for Wagner, he will have won the race by a healthy margin.

http://www.yorkdispatch.com/ci_25365621/york-county-polling-sites-report-low-turnout-28th

My New Babies

I just recently added three new babies to my family.

I Just Realized Something…

When someone says “I just realized something,” it’s invariably an intro to say something nobody is particularly interested in hearing.

“Just thought you’d like to know.”

Harry Reid’s Koch-Addled Asininity Debunked Here — 21 Months Ago

That’s right, folks. Harry Reid’s Koch-addled asininity was debunked here, a full 21 months before his rectological rectory on the Senate Floor.

Let me give you a chart from those 21 months ago:

With Unions pushing that much money around, Dingy Harry has the gall to claim the Koch Brothers (who are Libertarians and not Conservatives) are the biggest danger and biggest source of outside money? He could’ve just come to my site and done a little research before looking stupid. But then again, he’s too stupid to actually, you know, do any research.

Want more information on where Unions stand in political spending, such as rankings?

From 21 months ago:

3. Public Employee Union
5. Public Employee Union
7. Public Employee Union
9. Union
10. Public Employee Union
11. Union
12. Union (that I was a forced member of, twice)
13. Union
14. union
17. Union
18. Union
20. Union
29. Union
30. group of Unions

14 of the top 30 biggest political spenders are all Unions, and yet, Unions represent less than 12 percent of the workforce. But the Union spending doesn’t stop there.

40. Union (that I was a forced member of for nearly 9 years)
43. Union
44. Union
49. Union
52. Union
57. Union
58. Union
59. Union
65. Union
75. Union
85. Union
117. Union
119. Union
128. Union
133. Union

Oh, and I had information on the Koch Brothers back then, too.

Again, since 1989, Unions have spent 667.3 million (over 2/3 of a billion) dollars on politics. How much has the Left’s bogeyman, the Koch brothers, spent? A paltry 12.7 million dollars. So, next time some radical Leftist complains about the Koch brothers, remind that person that Unions are outspending the Koch brothers nearly 55 to 1. And while you’re at it, remind them that Unions are outspending their representative proportion more than 2 to 1.

By the way, those evil Koch Brothers tried to influence me once. One of the political type organizations they’re tied to sent me an email talking about the successful recovery of a community that rejected Federal aid and the floundering of another community that took the aid. I didn’t write about it because I was too lazy to do so, not because the Koch’s are evil (which they clearly are not).

So, the continued hate-filled attacks on Libertarians Who Provide Jobs To The Middle Class are all the Socialist, Fascist, Statist Democrats have to try to scare people into a serf-state.

It didn’t take gobs of research to destroy Hairy Reed’s demagoguery which took place this week on the Senate Floor. All it took was looking up an article I wrote 21 months before the Hairy logorrhea.

You’re welcome.

State of the Union

 

 

In congress assembled …

 

All Please rise for the President of the United States

Rip Van Washington Post Awakens From FIVE Year SLUMBER

The far Left Rip Van Washington Post, at least for today, broke itself away from the BO love fest, after a LOOOOOONNNNNGGGGG Five Year Slumber to wake up and smell the DEAD ROSES. This is a REAL We told you so. We on the Right have been screaming from the rooftops that BO is just a lousy inexperianced President. From DAY 1 the country has gone DOWNHILL. The MSM’s Love Affair was the strangest thing to watch since they backed every mistake with Excuses. Well, it looks like today, and it may only last one day until the Post resumes its slobbering Love Affair with all things BO.

Washington Post: ‘Obama’s Foreign Policy Is Based on Fantasy’
Amy Payne

March 3, 2014 at 11:28 am

President Obama has lost The Washington Post’s editorial board with his disastrous foreign policy. (DUH)

In a hard-hitting editorial today, the Post’s editors declared Obama’s outlook a “fantasy” and said that “For five years, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality.”

They described Obama’s fantasy world:
It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past.

This is exactly what Heritage’s James Carafano and Kim Holmes warned about early in the Obama presidency.

“The tenets of the Obama Doctrine… do not reflect history or the threats we face,” said Carafano, the E. W. Richardson Fellow, and Holmes, author of Liberty’s Best Hope: American Leadership for the 21st Century. “They will serve to undermine America’s strengths and make it more difficult for friends and allies to figure out where we stand or how we might act in critical times.”

Moron The Washington Post Here:
http://blog.heritage.org/2014/03/03/washington-post-obamas-foreign-policy-based-fantasy/?utm_source=heritagefoundation&utm_medium=email&utm_content=130303&utm_campaign=DailyDigest_630

If The Census Only Counted American Citizens

How much more Conservative would Congress become?

 

Something to think about.