Listen to it. Pray about it.

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

Neil Postman, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”

We live in an entertainment culture. The lives of many in this country revolve around the consumption of media and entertainment. Sports is almost an object of worship to some, and events such as the BCS Championship and the Super Bowl are virtually national holidays, surrounded by endless attention in the news/sports media and other popular culture outlets. Given that media consumption is now so ubiquitous, with flat-screen digital TVs, smartphones, satellite TV, streaming video, iPads and other multimedia sources, is it any wonder that politics has now taken on a similar flavor? 2012 is an election year and along with it, politics as entertainment has come to the fore. Even Entertainment Weekly has a “Politics As Entertainment” page! But the biggest proof point for this is the seemingly endless series of debates between GOP candidates. This may make for good entertainment, but does it make for good politics?

We could see this coming long before the primary season began. As Politico noted on Sunday, GOP Chairman Reince Priebus made an attempt to put some controls around the debate schedule.

In words that were one part prescient, one part naive, Priebus in April warned at a media breakfast: “The idea of twenty different forums and twenty different groups is a little much. We need to have some order in our debate process.”

Priebus’s effort to have a Republican National Committee commission take control of the process quickly got answers from presidential campaigns and sponsoring news organizations: nice try. And fat chance.

I believe there are two key reasons that the campaigns and the news organizations have fed this debate overload. First, the campaigns, specifically of the lower-tiered candidates, saw debates as a means to get exposure for their (wo)man. Candidates such as Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman would likely have never had the slightest chance of success without the debates to give them a hearing. But the debates have only delayed what most would consider to be the inevitable end to the lower-tiered campaigns. From the Politico:

The dynamic has shaped the GOP race at every turn. Candidates like Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich went, at least briefly, from the margins to center stage based on debate performances. Candidates who looked formidable by traditional yard sticks, like Rick Perry and Tim Pawlenty, crashed based on lackluster debate skills. Meanwhile, keeping candidates like Michigan Rep. Thad McCotter and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson off stage so deprived them of oxygen that it contributed to their departures from the GOP race.

“If they keep you out of the debates, you are out of the conversation, and you can’t run,” McCotter told The Detroit News when he dropped out in September. “It was sort of death by media.”

Romney solidified his standing as national front-runner with strong early performances in the debates. But his advisers, leery about exposing their candidate to so many tests, maneuvered behind the scenes to control the process.

“Second-tier candidates will take every debate they can take,” said Tom Rath, a top Romney adviser in New Hampshire. “The people who are in the upper tier don’t want to run the risk of being arrogant to the people in the second tier, so they show up. So it becomes a who’s going to blink first?”

However, the support from the news outlets is more intriguing. This second motivation for more debates stems from the “reality TV” aspects of presidential debates. It gives the media outlets free content, much like an episode of “Cops” or “America’s Funniest Home Videos”.

This weekend produced the unprecedented attraction of two nationally televised debates separated by just twelve hours, with a Saturday evening debate at St. Anselm College in Goffstown on ABC News and another one Sunday morning on NBC News as part of a special edition of “Meet the Press.”

The weekend highlighted an intriguing paradox of this year’s contest. One of the rare beliefs that Republicans have in common with President Barack Obama is disdain for the 24-hour mainstream media culture, with its emphasis on process and tendency to view politics through the prisms of entertainment and sports. Yet a media-wary party this year is in the midst of a nominating contest in which media — most especially cable news networks — have had more power than the national party, early-state activists or anyone else in setting the agenda.

Rep. Frank Guinta (R-N.H.), who laments how debates have “nationalized the race,” hopes both parties get control next time. He thinks voters ask better questions than debate moderators.

If they can use debates to make the news themselves, why would the media be motivated to limit the number of debates? Virtually every major media outlet: CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, Bloomberg, C-SPAN – have all sponsored and/or co-sponsored a GOP debate this season. And with each has come over-dramatized commentary, play-by-play, live blogging (like here at Redstate), “post-game analysis” and endless TV and print news stories and blog postings in response. Political junkies watch these events as if they were the Sunday afternoon NFL Game of the Week. If there was a baseball-style scorecard to keep, we’d be keeping it. We count the number of gaffes, one-liners and figurative body blows as if we were tracking a pitcher’s ERA or a goaltender’s GAA.

But is this a good thing?

As RS co-contributor Aaron Gardner points out in his diary, “Unfortunately, it appears we have decided that we can forgive bad policy records easier than we can forgive poor debate performances.” The “stats” from the debates have become the issue, rather than the issues themselves. The consistently poor debate moderation has not helped matters. Almost universally, left-leaning news mavens have “moderated” these debates and have been more like shark fishermen chumming bait and waiting for the water to fill with blood, rather than acting as moderators facilitating the interactions between candidates. This week, George Stephanopoulos was widely panned for his hyperpartisan performance as “moderator” in the New Hampshire debate. According to the Daily Caller,

ABC News commentator George Stephanopoulos directed pointed, hard-edged questions to Republican presidential candidates during Saturday night’s New Hampshire debate, often attacking without providing evidence to justify his broadsides.

When questioning former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Stephanopoulos, a former senior advisor in the administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton, premised some inquiries on the assertion — offered without supporting facts — that Romney’s job-creation statistics were inaccurate.

“Now, there have been questions about that calculation of 100,000 jobs. So if you could explain it a little more,” Stephanopoulos asked Romney of the former governor’s claims about jobs created by companies he has helmed. “I’ve read some analysts who look at it and say that you’re counting the jobs that were created but not counting the jobs that were taken away. Is that accurate?”

“No, it’s not accurate,” Romney bluntly responded. “It includes the net of both. I’m a good enough numbers guy to make sure I got both sides of that.”

Stephanopoulos did not cite any analysts by name.

This was not the first occurrence of this media-figure-turned-leftist-talking-point-o-matic syndrome. A similarly biased moderation effort came from Brian Williams back in September and from Diane Sawyer in December. Perhaps this can be written off as poor grades in Speech 101, but given the left-wing bias in the mainstream media, I would place my bets on an intentional effort to poison the GOP candidate field. As some here at Redstate have pointed out, we appear to have allowed the media to select our candidates for us via their debate skills, rather than we Republicans/conservatives assessing their policy positions and their ability to be the President of the United States.

The debates are not all bad. There is obviously value in demonstrating the ability for a candidate to respond to adversaries in a stress-filled environment. As the Politico article points out,

The ability to project a strong, crisp message under the glare of TV lights and a national audience is not necessarily the worst way to test presidential readiness — any more than the ability to make a good impression while shaking hands at a Des Moines, Iowa, or Manchester diner.

Iowa GOP Chairman Matt Strawn said he welcomed having a large number of debates, several of which were in Iowa. He noted that the televised encounters gave a platform to underfunded candidates, like Rick Santorum, to command attention. “Any question that you’re going to get asked in a primary debate better prepare you for a general election debate,” Strawn said. “They make the nominee a stronger general election candidate.”

However, there is a limit to the usefulness of this format, especially given the conditions fostered by hostile “moderators” and the grueling schedule that the dozens of debates add to the “normal” grind of a campaign.

What can be done about this? The news outlets are free to hold whatever events they so choose, and the candidates are free to participate in any event they so choose. Can the parties do anything about this? Should they? Some here at Redstate derisively speak of “the establishment” picking our candidates. In a way, the debates have circumvented that.

Former Iowa GOP Chairman Steve Grubbs, who ran Cain’s Iowa campaign this year, thinks it’s good for voters to hear a diversity of views — not just ones vetted by insiders.

“Whatever was powerful before — parties, machine politics or simply years of building a national organization — has been almost completely usurped by the power of the political debate,” said Grubbs. “And I think that’s a good thing.”

But where does it end? At what point do the debates become an almost nightly event, akin to endless reruns of “M*A*S*H”? How do we prevent the mainstream press from selecting our candidate, rather than some nebulous “party machine?” Karl Rove wrote about this in a WSJ op-ed back in December:

For the most part, the debates have been helpful. Before them, the “generic Republican” never led President Barack Obama in any Gallup survey. Since early July, the generic GOPer has often been leading Mr. Obama. The debates likely contributed to this shift.

Still, there can be too much of a good thing. Debates have nearly crippled campaigns, chewing into the precious time each candidate has to organize, raise money, set themes, roll out policy and campaign.

Each debate kills at least three days: one day (and sometimes two) to prepare, the day of the debate, and the day after, spent dealing with the fallout from the night before. This late in the process—there are 19 days until Iowa and 26 days until New Hampshire, with the Christmas and New Year’s holidays eliminating crucial campaign days—many candidates might want to chart their own schedules and set their own message priorities. But the debates won’t allow for that.

This also needs to be said: What we’re watching are not really debates. They are seven- or eight-person news conferences. Their choppy nature makes cogent argument difficult and thoughtful policy discussion almost nonexistent. There’s a premium placed on memorable sound bites and snappy comebacks. Those are the clips that are endlessly replayed.

Debates transfer power to the media, draining it from the campaigns. Moderators and their news organizations—through questions they frame or select—have more impact than candidates on what’s covered and discussed. Because each debate is a lavish feast of comments and confrontations, the media also decide what aspects are most worthy of post-debate coverage.

Rove’s last point (highlighted) is key: we have allowed a transfer of power to the media. And given the political leanings of the media in this country, that is a very bad thing.

But hey, this is a boon to the revenues of the media outlets! But it is far worse for our political process and our culture. Again, from Neil Postman:

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

In some ways, the endless stream of debates have reduced politics to “a form of baby-talk” where policy is secondary and sound bites and slams are the goal.

The concern this election season is not the death of culture, it’s the death of our nation. Permitting an overdose of entertainment-drenched debates media events to determine the course of the election is, in some odd ways useful in candidate vetting, but in others, it is unwise and dangerous.

One little story I found amusing: apparently, voters in the city of Los Angeles will be asked to vote on whether porn stars should be using condoms. To be blunt, I don’t know why I’d care if porn stars give each other diseases that would undoubtedly prevent them from “plying their trade”…seems to me we’d be better off that way.

I suspect Ron Paul would disagree with me.

Open thread

Victor Davis Hanson discusses Obama The Myth in his column “When the Legend Becomes Fact, Print the Legend”. Throughout the 2008 Presidential campaign, the façade that is Barack Obama was prominent. The media was in love with this god-like persona (“He’s sort of a god…he’s going to bring all different sides together”). He caused some media figures to practically swoon in adoration (“a thrill going up my leg“) But what does reality tell us?

Hanson documents the reality of the Obama myths.

Consider. Did Obama achieve a B+ average at Columbia? Who knows? (Who will ever know?) But even today’s inflated version of yesteryear’s gentleman Cs would not normally warrant admission to Harvard Law. And once there, did the Law Review editor publish at least one seminal article? Why not?
…
At Chicago, did lecturer Obama write a path-breaking legal article or a book on jurisprudence that warranted the rare tenure offer to a part-time lecturer? (Has that offer ever been extended to others of like stature?) In the Illinois legislature or U.S. Senate, was Obama known as a deeply learned man of the Patrick Moynihan variety? Whether as an undergraduate, law student, lawyer, professor, legislator or senator, Obama was given numerous opportunities to reveal his intellectual weight. Did he ever really? On what basis did Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan regret that Obama could not be lured to a top billet at Harvard?

Where did this aura of brilliance originate? Padded resume, perhaps?

Hanson distills the problem:

In short, the myth of Obama’s brilliance was based on his teleprompted eloquence, the sort of fable that says we should listen to a clueless Sean Penn or Matt Damon on politics because they can sometimes act well. Read Plato’s Ion on the difference between gifted rhapsody and wisdom — and Socrates’ warning about easily conflating the two. It need not have been so. At any point in a long career, Obama the rhapsode could have shunned the easy way, stuck his head in a book, and earned rather than charmed those (for whom he had contempt) for his rewards. Clinton was a browser with a near photographic memory who had pretensions of deeply-read wonkery; but he nonetheless browsed. Obama seems never to have done that. He liked the vague idea of Obamacare, outsourced the details to the Democratic Congress, applied his Chicago protocols to getting it passed, and worried little what was actually in the bill. We were to think that the obsessions with the NBA, the NCAA final four, the golfing tics, etc., were all respites from exhausting labors of the mind rather than in fact the presidency respites from all the former.

Conclusion? Obama is a heck of an actor who knows how to erect a wonderful façade and illusion of competence.

Hanson proceeds to dismantle the myths of Obama The Healer, Obama The Reformer and Obama The Magnanimous One. Obama was to be the one who would heal the nation of racism (but who has brought more racial polarization than ever, primarily through the racists who he surrounded himself with, such as Eric Holder and and Van Jones). He was to be the one who was to reverse the ills of the Bush administration, but in fact has turned back few Bush policies and instead has introduced “the Chicago/Illinois system of Tony Rezko, Blago, and the Daleys” to DC and has brought new flavors of corruption with episodes such as Jon Corzine & the missing billion, GE’s Immelt tax dodging, Solyndra, Fast & Furious, etc. He was to roll back Bush foreign policy, yet has failed to shut down Gitmo, has attacked U.S. allies (Pakistan) and continues to intervene in countries like Libya. And who’s surprised at what has already happened in Iraq, after Obama (finally) fulfilled his promise to pull the troops out?

Hanson points out:

We went in a blink from the surge that failed and made things worse and all troops must be out by March 2008 to Iraq was a shining example of American idealism and commitment. It was as if the touch-and-go, life-and-death gamble between February 2007 and January 2009 in Iraq never had existed. Bombing Libya was not warlike, and those who sued Bush on Iraq and Guantanamo now filed briefs to prove that we were not at war killing Libyan thugs. We hear only of reset; never that Obama has now simply abandoned all his “Bush-did-it” policies and is quietly going back to the Bush consensus on Russia, Iran, Syria, and the Middle East in general. We will not only never see Guantanamo closed or KSM tried in a civilian court, but never hear why not. Are we to applaud the hypocrisy as at least better than continued ignorance?

And it would be funny if it wasn’t so sad that Obama actually believes his own mythology.

The ego is amazing – it reminds me of an old song by Mac Davis:

Oh Lord it’s hard to be humble
when you’re perfect in every way.

I can’t wait to look in the mirror
’cause I get better looking each day

To know me is to love me
I must be a hell of a man.

O Lord it’s hard to be humble
but I’m doing the best that I can.

With Barack Obama, it’s all a façade. Behind the pompousness and self-inflated ego, behind the false front of an alleged healer and reformer lies an underachieving leftist ideologue who has accomplished little more than digging the nation into a far deeper hole than when he began Occupy White House 2008. As I have contended all along, Barack Obama’s problem isn’t that he lacked executive experience – the problem is his leftist ideology and inherent incompetence.

There was one article that caught my eye today that subtly links the world of politics with Christmas. CNN.com published an article titled “When Bedford Falls Becomes Pottersville“. It is a superb article that uses “It’s A Wonderful Life” as a metaphor for an America without Jesus. I would post some quotes here, but I would wind up just blockquoting the entire article.

As you read it, think about what this nation would be like without a savior. There would be no hope. While politics and the presidential race are certainly relevant and important in our lives, nothing is more important than what we are celebrating tonight: the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Our hope should be in him and him alone…not in some politician whose promises will inevitably be broken. The promises of God will never be broken, just as this one was not:

In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.”

(Luke 1:26-37)

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Now I’m not all that convinced that it’s OWS that they’re going after – I don’t see any stringy hair or torn clothes…but they may be smelly (can’t tell here…)

 
As the good folk at MRC point out, the Left is none too happy to see their allies getting blown up. If the OWS kids really are the target of this game’s ridicule, it’s really too bad the creators weren’t even MORE explicit about it. After all, the Left didn’t seem all that broken up when another game creator decided that “Tea Party Zombies Must Die”. I suppose the lesson here is that I can look at that example of liberal silliness and chuckle about it, whereas the Left, as usual, is indignant about one of their causes being mocked.

So – for anyone except maybe Ron Paul fans (who might be reminded too much of the Great Satan going after Iran), this one should be on your short list for next Christmas!

“With God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly”

(You can watch the entire episode on Hulu)

Happy Thanksgiving, my friends. Enjoy the day, and give thanks to God today for the many blessings in your lives.

(Oh, and this is an open thread. Talk amongst yourselves…)

I shouldn’t pick exclusively on the Occupy Wall Street folks. This piece really describes the whole entitlement mentality/culture that has festered in this nation for decades. As the writer says “nobody has to give a damn – we’ve all been subsidized”

So – enjoy. (Oh, and please consider this your open thread of the day)

So at what point does anecdotal evidence indicate a trend and show that this is not “fringe” behavior?  When do hundreds of incidents of mass lawbreaking, violence, rape and murder demonstrate that this anti-social behavior is standard procedure from these crowds and not the exception?  BigGovernment.com is maintaining a running total of the violations rung up by the Occupy crew.  Just a sampling of the Occupiers’ stunts:

1. NY: 10/1/2011 — Police Arrest More Than 700 Protesters on Brooklyn Bridge
2. Madison, WI: 10-27-2011 — Madison Occupiers Lose Permit Due to Public Masturbation
3. Phoenix: 10/28/2011 — Flier at Occupy Phoenix Asks, “When Should You Shoot a Cop?”
4. NY: 10/18/2011 — Thieves Preying on Fellow Protesters
5. NY: 10/9/2011 — Stinking up Wall Street: Protesters Accused of Living in Filth as Shocking Pictures Show One Demonstrator Defecating on a POLICE CAR
6. NY: 10/7/2011 — Occupiers Rush Police … More
7. Cleveland: 10/18/2011 —  ‘Occupy Cleveland’ Protester Alleges She Was Raped
8. NY: 10/10/2011 — ‘Increasingly Debauched’: Are Sex, Drugs & Poor Sanitation Eclipsing Occupy Wall Street?
9. Seattle: 10/18/2011 — Man Accused of Exposing Self to Children Arrested
10. 10/12/2011 — Iran Supports ‘Occupy Wall Street’
11. Portland: 10/16/2011 – #OccupyPortland Protester Desecrates Memorial To U.S. War Dead
12. Portland: 10/15/2011 — #OccupyPortland Protesters Sing “F*** The USA”

There are a couple hundred more and undoubtedly far more that have not seen the light of day, considering the Occupy folks’ tendency to hide the violations.

Yet despite the hundreds of incidents that have occurred across the nation, local law enforcement and governmental authorities have been hesitant to enforce the laws and jail the violators.  Given that many of these “protests” are occurring in large cities that are dominated by left-wing politicians, I suppose there’s not a lot of surprise there.  What is interesting, however, is the double standard between the Occupy groups and the Tea Party groups, which the mainstream media and the Vice President are fond of comparing to the Occupy criminals.  Dana Loesch documented the disparity between how St. Louis city leaders and law enforcement officials treated Tea Party protests versus the Occupiers.

• Tea Party:  permits and fees.
• Occupy: no permits, no fees, used city power and property to live for days/weeks, and only kicked them out when it was time to hang Christmas lights in Kiener Plaza.

But of course the Occupy groups never had any desire to follow laws, get permits, etc.  They are lawless.  This is their brand.  That there is rampant violence and other violations in the so-called “fringe” of the Occupy crowd should surprise no one.  They came to break the law and they did.  In the USA Today article about “the fringe”, the author comes perilously close to addressing the issue:

Violence undercuts public sympathy for the protesters’ cause, says Terry Madonna, a polling expert at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. He wonders whether Occupy, a movement that has no publicly identified leaders or hierarchy, can stop such violence within or outside its ranks.

Of course they can’t stop the violence, and it has nothing to do with whether there are leaders or a hierarchy.  Lawlessness leads to lawlessness.  Unless they adopt a lawful approach to making their point (and I fully support their right to protest – within the bounds of the law) there will be no end to the escalation of their violent behavior, especially when the authorities stand idly by and allow it to happen.  The union-cowed, left-leaning politicians and law enforcement agencies that have permitted these “Occupiers” – fringe or not – to flagrantly break the law are complicit in each and every one of these violations and should be held accountable for their (in)actions.

And I forgot to take a vacation day today.

So, here’s an open thread for you to mull over what you should be doing on this, your last day on Earth.  I have some work to do this morning, then I’ll be watching Top Gear this evening.  But in the meantime, I’ll be thinking on Matthew 24:36, and I hope Harold is doing the same.

Discuss.

NOTE: As member CincoSolas_del_Bronx mentions in the comments, I typo’d the title.  It wasn’t intentional, but considering how Mr. Camping has apparently neglected to pay attention to the basics of Matt 24, I’ll just leave it that way.  The title was INTENDED to refer to this:

But the issue here not the flaws of the latest flavor of the month.  The problem in the the GOP race is/are the many flaws of Mitt Romney.  The GOP base is in search of Not Romney.  Romney is a mediocre candidate and about 75% of the GOP seems to know it.  But no one has been able to put him away.  Romney is a smooth communicator.  He does well in debates.  He’s articulate and looks like a President.  But almost no one wants him to actually BE one.  It appeared that another flavor of the month might emerge in Gov. Chris Christie or (heh) Sarah Palin.  This week’s events put those rumors to bed.  And it really didn’t matter – they would have gone the same way as the prior contenders.  The only question now is if Herman Cain can buck the trend and demonstrate to the GOP base that HE will lead the nation out of it’s mess better than Mitt.

But rather than having ME try to make the case about Romney, why don’t we let Jon Stewart tell us about him? (h/t AoSHQ)

Rick Perry tried to paint Romney as a flip-flopper during the last debate, but Stewart does a far, far better job of it than Perry.  And this doesn’t even begin to address my personal concern about Romney – Romneycare.

At this point, it does remain likely that Romney will become the GOP nominee.  Just as John McCain did in 2008, he appears to be taking the “outlast ‘em all” strategy, and until now, it has worked…at least in the polls.  The proof will come when voters actually get their say.  And if Mitt Romney winds up as the GOP nominee, let’s hope there are no more flip flops and he remains in current form as Good Mitt rather than Evil Liberal Mitt.

Those times are past.

Today public opinion of labor unions sits at a historic low, despite having a very union-friendly President in the Oval Office.  According to Gallup

While Americans’ views of labor unions have held steady since last year, with more approving than disapproving, Americans remain less approving than in the past. Further, there is a greater divergence this year in Republican and Democratic approval of unions.

On Friday, Rasmussen Reports released polling data indicating similar results – about half of Americans “see no further need for labor unions”, with 30 percent in disagreement.  And they’re not exactly knocking down doors to unionize.  Rasmussen states that “Among working Americans who do not belong to a union, just 13% would like to join a labor union where they work.”

It’s fairly surprising that the approval of labor unions has dropped to its lowest point during the Obama presidency.  But why?  My suspicion is that Democrat control of the White House and both sides of Capitol Hill has given us an unprecedented view of the reality of organized labor.  It’s not that Obama and his party have necessarily strengthened the unions, although events such as the NLRB interference in Boeing’s business has given some hope to unions, but the Democrats seem to have given the unions license to show their colors.  Union thuggery has become an everyday event, and videos and stories of the disgusting behavior of union members are rampant.

So, let’s look at this new, true face of organized labor.

The most recent incident was that of the f-bombing longshoreman in Washington state.  (Video is definitely NSFW):

Lovely. Thankfully this darling person was arrested for several felonies after his assault-laced tirade.  But wait, there’s more!

It’s not just the rank and file – Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa gets into the act:

“Let’s take those (Tea Party) SOBs out”.  And what did our President say?  He’s “proud” of Hoffa.

Let’s not forget AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s tribute politicization of the 10th anniversary of 9/11

Wealthy CEOs, anti-government extremist front groups and frothing talk show hosts—from the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks to the Koch brothers, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads group, Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and the American Legislative Exchange Council—also pushed open the door to hate.

Make no mistake—setting workers against workers is a highly profitable endeavor. How many times during the vilest state attacks on public workers did we hear the question: “Other people don’t have pensions. Why should he?” Prompting that question required twisting the American psyche—which, by its founding nature, seeks to lift the common good. The appropriate question should have been, “Why doesn’t everybody have a pension?” followed by collective action for retirement security.

We’ve seen the costs of hatred in ill-thought wars, in shameful attacks on immigrants and our LGBT neighbors. We saw it in the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. We saw it in the racism that has found overt and covert expression since Barack Obama began his run for office—from outright declarations of people who said out loud they would never vote for a black man to the ridiculously persistent obsession with our president’s birth certificate.

And what about this lovely picketer from Verizon who drops a string of F-bombs in front of his daughter and uses her as a tool/roadblock? (another NSFW one here)

Remember the beating that Kenneth Gladney took at the hands of SEIU thugs at a Russ Carnahan “Town Hall” back in 2009?

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Last, but certainly not least, witness the CWA thug who assaulted RedState friend Tabitha Hale

Certainly there are upstanding citizens who are part of labor unions – I have several wonderful people in my family who are or were union members. But the thugs and goons in these videos are today’s face of organized labor, and it’s more than just a face – this is what organized labor is about in Obama’s America. Assault. Intimidation. Threats. F-bombs. It’s all captured for the world to see. And thanks to YouTube and other social media sources, it’s no longer hidden from view by the leftist mainstream media. So now the public can see the this repulsive face of labor unions….one that is now causing voters to reject unions and the Democrat politicians who are in their back pockets. Jack Kelly, writing for RealClear Politics, says it well:

Labor’s problems stem from our massive debt and dismal economy. They are exacerbated by thuggish behavior, and by the unwillingness of unions to tighten their belts as other Americans must.

President Obama is polling in Jimmy Carter territory. Unions are less popular now than in many decades. Mutual weakness will draw Democrats and unions closer, despite labor’s discontents. But the closer to each other they get, the more swing voters will recoil from both.

And recoiling they are. In droves.

That…is a powerful story.

As people learn what’s actually in the bill, that six months from now, by election time, this is going to be a plus because the parade of horribles, particularly the worry that the average middle class person has that this is going to affect them negatively, will have vanished and they’ll see that it’ll affect them positively in many ways…”

NY Sen. Chuck Schumer, on “Meet The Press”, March 28, 2010

Most of us thought Chuck Schumer was full of it in March, 2010 (among other times/places/etc.), and…we were right.

Today, Rasmussen Reports released their latest poll on Obamacare.  For the second week in a row, Rasmussen showed that 57% of registered voters would like to see Obamacare repealed (36% oppose repeal).   Rasmussen says:

A majority of voters have favored repeal every week but one since March 2010, with support for repeal running as high as 63%.

There was only one week since March, 2010 that Americans have had some semblance of support for O-care.   One. week.  Rasmussen’s tracking of the issue shows that opposition to Obamacare has remained in the  50-60% range since the legislation passed.

President Obama is planning to deliver a big “jobs speech” this week.  I doubt we’ll see this happen, but one of the most effective job growth measures that Obama could announce would be a repeal of Obamacare.  In January, 2011, Speaker of the House Boehner, Rep. Paul Ryan, Rep. Eric Cantor and several other House members delivered a paper outlining how Obamacare was a “budget-busting, job-killing” disaster.

Independent analyses have determined that the health care law will cause significant job losses for the U.S. economy: the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has determined that the law will reduce the “amount of labor used in the economy by … roughly half a percent…,” an estimate that adds up to roughly 650,000 jobs lost.  A study by the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), the nation’s largest small business association, found that an employer mandate alone could lead to the elimination of 1.6 million jobs, with 66 percent of those coming from small businesses.  By comparison, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) stated that “in its life,” the health care law would “create 4 million jobs – 400,000 jobs almost immediately.”

The Democrats would never admit that Obama’s only significant legislative victory is one of the most negative developments on the economic/jobs front since he took office.  And we can be sure that the President will never back down on this bill…such a move would cement a GOP victory in 2012.  But if he is truly serious about saving/creating jobs, this is precisely the kind of damaging governmental intrusion that he should stop.

As I’ve written here previously, the GOP must not lose sight of Obamacare as a defining issue in the 2012 election.  We must continue to wave the Obamacare repeal flag in front of the American electorate and remind them of what a mess the Obama administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress have wrought upon this country.

57% of Americans have figured out that they’ve had an economic disaster shoved down their throats.  Let’s make that number grow.

The piece is rife with silliness such as this:

The pro-earth policies of President Gore would have made a substantial dent in pollution and taken the offensive against climate change. Gore would have still won and deserved the Nobel Prize, as a world leader of nations.

Torture would never have happened under an American president.

The Supreme Court would never have decided Citizens United as it did. Special interests would not have as much power to buy our elections and democracy had Gore been inaugurated in 2001.

The basic mistake that Budowsky makes here is that of virtually every politician and pundit on the Left:  the Law of Unintended Consequences.  The Left never considers the side-effects of their policies.  So what would the economic impacts have been had Algore had his way and the U.S. had been saddled with economy-choking cap-and-trade, or worse, legislation?   How much worse would the terrorism problem had been if Algore had continued the terrorism “policy” (if one could call it that) of President Clinton?

So, I leave this exercise to you, dear readers:  What is your alternate history of an Algore presidency?

This is your open thread for the day – answer that question, or pose others.

Discuss.

The euphemism du jour has been established today by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).  Apparently FEMA has discovered that Americans really do think “government” has become a bad word.  In an attempt to produce a kinder, gentler “government”, FEMA and Boss Barack have decided that they are part of a big, happy “federal family.  Now I come from a pretty big extended family (my mom had > 12 brothers and sisters, which means I have a LOT of aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.)…but I’m not all that fond of a big “federal family”.

As the Palm Beach Post points out, this isn’t the first time the term has been used.  It appears to have originally surfaced during the Clinton administration, courtesy of our old friend, Al Gore.

During the Clinton administration, Vice President Al Gore responded to 1999 flooding in Iowa by pledging that “the federal family is committed to providing the necessary resources to comfort every person and family devastated by this disaster and to help them return to their normal way of living as fast as possible.”

A Google search shows the phrase appearing 10 times on FEMA’s website during the Bush years. Since Obama took office, “federal family” has turned up 118 times on fema.gov, including 50 Irene-related references.

The Post also notes:

“’Government’ is such a dirty word right now,” says Florida State University communication professor Davis Houck. “Part of what the federal government does and any elected official does is change the terms of the language game into terms that are favorable to them.”

I think Obama and FEMA are simply misreading the public and are fundamentally mistaken here.  ”Government” isn’t a dirty word – too much government and the wrong kind of government is the problem.  Conservatives are not anarchists – we don’t unilaterally oppose government, although we do believe it should be no larger than what the U.S. Constitution dictates.  We also believe government does have its place, and there are right and appropriate places for government to act.  For example, with respect to Hurricane Irene, the National Weather Service (NOAA) provided an invaluable resource in forecasting the path of the hurricane and giving residents in the path ample warning to seek shelter and high ground to escape the impact of the storm.  As a resident of Tornado Alley, every year I personally am thankful for NOAA Weather Radio and the warning services they provide.

What has angered Americans about “the federal family” isn’t that it’s “government – the problem is the insatiable appetite for our tax money by “the Family”.

The problem here is that the Left doesn’t want us to understand their agenda, so they hide behind pretty words.  They’re Euphocrats.

UPDATE:  One of my favorite authors/bloggers, Gene Edward Veith, touched upon this topic this morning.  In his piece, he refers to an essay by George Orwell, titled “Politics and the English Language“.  In it, Orwell states:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

“While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer…

That “gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims” is precisely what we are dealing with regarding the Euphocrats and the hiding of their agenda.  While I don’t completely share Orwell’s cynicism about politics as “…itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly hatred and schizophrenia”, there certainly is plenty of that going on when it comes to Obama’s “federal family”.

Video streaming by Ustream

The first Redstate Gathering was in Atlanta in 2009, and now we’re on our third one. No matter what GOP candidate you support for the nomination, this 2011 Gathering is one for the history books. Thanks to Governor Perry, Governor Haley, Senator DeMint and all of the others who are there making the event the best ever!

(Updated with full video of Perry’s speech – bs)

“What should the President say on Monday?” “I apologize. I apologize because i did not lead this country to success”

If only that could fix the disaster that Barack Obama and his minions have foisted off on this nation.

(Consider this an open thread)

Of course we know the outcome:

Let’s fast-forward to today.  Today, Harry Reid released his inner Mondale:

“[Republicans] have to understand today, right now, the day that we passed the bill, that they will have no legislation coming out of that committee unless revenues are a part of the mix. It’s a fact of life,” Reid said on NPR’s “All Things Considered” radio program.

“In my private conversations with the Speaker [John Boehner] and with the Minority Leader [Mitch McConnell] over here, they assume and the legislation allows revenue will be part of the mix,” Reid said.

Surprisingly, Reid continued the use of the euphemistic ”revenues” rather than “tax increases.”  What I find baffling is this new-found belief that somehow the citizens of the United States want higher taxes.  Ever since the debt limit “crisis” (and I use that term sarcastically) began, the Leftist meme machine has been trying to peddle this idea that we are all chomping at the bit to give the government more of our money.  They have quoted polls and droned on with the poll-tested “balanced approach”.  Investors Business Daily points out:

In fact, a quick look at the polling data referenced by the president shows this isn’t true. Not even close.

Gallup itself breaks it out: Those who say they want the deficit reduced “only/mostly with spending cuts” total 50% of those polled. Those who say they’d like it done “only/mostly with tax increases” total 11%. That’s not 80%.

Exactly.  Like usual, the Obama/Reid crowd try to paint a picture that simply isn’t sane.

Reid and his posse are still smarting from last December, when Obama signed on to an extension of the tax reductions from the George W Bush administration.  They hate this.  They won’t give up.  Soak-the-rich class warfare is burned into their DNA.  Fortunately, the electorate is smarter than that.  Even leftists like Kevin Drum realize this.  They know that public opinion is against them.

But Reid and Obama press on.  They insist that tax increases are the answer.  But pining for the days of Mondale won’t work.  As Cato illustrates, the soak-the-rich tax rates from the pre-Reagan era didn’t work either:

It is not as though we have never tried high tax rates before. From 1951 to 1963, the lowest tax rate was 20% to 22% and the highest was 91% to 92%. The top capital gains tax rate approached 40% in 1976-77. Aside from cyclical swings, however, the ratio of individual income tax receipts to GDP has always remained about 8% of GDP.

The individual income tax brought in 7.8% of GDP from 1952 to 1979 when the top tax rate ranged from 70% to 92%, 8% of GDP from 1993 to 1996 when the top tax rate was 39.6%, and 8.1% from 1988 to 1990 when the highest individual income tax rate was 28%. Mr. Obama’s hope that raising only the highest tax rates could keep individual tax receipts well above 9% of GDP has been repeatedly tested for more than six decades. It has always failed.

But, Democrats wail, high taxes WORKED!!11!!1! when Clinton was president!  Cato unravels this argument as well:

The situation of 1997-2000 was unique. Individual income tax revenues reached an unprecedented 9.6% of GDP from 1997 to 2000 for reasons quite unlikely to be repeated. An astonishing quintupling of Nasdaq stock prices coincided with an extraordinary proliferation of stock options, which the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances found were granted to 11% of U.S. families by 2001, and with a reduction in the capital gains tax to 20% from 28%, which encouraged much greater realization of taxable gains through stock sales. Revenues from the capital gains tax rose to 10.8% of all individual income tax receipts in 1997 and 13% by 2000. The unexpected revenue windfalls in President Bill Clinton’s second term were largely a consequence of lower tax rates on capital gains.

Interesting.  Windfalls due to reduced capital gains taxes.  Where have we heard about that before?  Oh, here:

The big 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts won a two-year extension in the Obama-Republican deal of December 2010 and are now set to expire at the end of 2012. Also expiring: a two year cut in the estate tax as well as  tax cuts that were originally part of the 2009 stimulus, including Obama’s prized $2,500 American Opportunity college tax credit.  If these tax provisions expire, the top tax rate on ordinary income such as salary will go from 35% to 39.6% (or 40.5%, when the Medicare surtax is included) and the top rate on long term capital gains will go from 15% to 20% (or 23.8%, when the surtax is included). Meanwhile, the current $5 million exemption from estate and gift tax would drop to $1 million, and the 35% tax rate would rise to 55%.

So one of the most beneficial tax policies of the Clinton years – the timeframe that the Democrats love to quote to back their claims for higher taxes – will be reversed and made worse if the Bush tax rates are rolled back.  Marvelous.

But hey, Harry DID tell us – he WANTS higher taxes.  The Democrats think we all WANT higher taxes.  They’re telling us so.

The Democrats tried to peddle this story back in 1984 and it didn’t work.  Considering Reid’s comments, I found this 1984 Ronald Reagan re-election ad to be quite relevant:

ReidObamanomics = Mondalenomics.

Mondalenomics didn’t sell with the electorate. ReidObamanomics won’t either.

Yesterday the journal Psychological Science published a paper (abstract here, original here*) that demonstrates:

the mere sight of the American flag can subtly shift their political views… towards Republicanism.  It’s an effect that holds in both Democrats and Republicans, it affects actual votes, and it lasts for at least 8 months.

This is a fascinating finding in and of itself, but even more so considering the other recent study that showed

that July 4th parades energize only Republicans, turn kids into Republicans, and help to boost the GOP turnout of adults on Election Day.

So apparently, patriotism is a Republican thing.  (Go ahead now, lefties, get all frothed up).

The flag study is particularly interesting because of the duration of the effect – the influence upon the flag “viewer” can last up to eight months.

From the study:

In contrast to people’s beliefs, we report two experiments showing that the American flag introduces a bias toward the Republican Party over the Democratic Party.  A single exposure to a small American flag while participants were deliberating about their voting intentions prior to a general election led to significant and robust changes in participants’ voting intentions, voting behavior, and political attitudes, all in the politically conservative direction.  In a separate experiment, we replicated these patterns over a year into a Democratic presidential administration.

We also tested the longevity of this priming effect on judgment and attitudes.  Flag priming effects may be especially potent if they occur while a person is consciously deliberating about politics and voting intentions.  We exposed people to the American flag once during such an arguably critical psychological window, and found that the effects from this single exposure lasted up to 8 months later.  This represents one of the most durable priming effects in the cognitive sciences literature, and shows that contextual effects can not only impact important political decisions, but can also have a robust and long-lasting influence.

This pretty much explains the whole flag-burning thing on the part of the Left.  There must be some sort of deep-seated hatred for a symbol that reminds them that their beliefs are just wrong.

My next-door neighbor is a hard-core lefty.  I’ll be putting out my flag today.

____

* – By the way, if you have trouble accessing the original paper, Aaron Swartz can probably help you find it…